The Talented Mr. Ripley (novel)

Every morning he watched the sun, from his bedroom window, rising through the winter mists, struggling upward over the peaceful-looking city, breaking through finally to give a couple of hours of actual sunshine before noon, and the quiet beginning of each day was like a promise of peace in the future. The days were growing warmer. There was more light, and less rain. Spring was almost here, and one of these mornings, one morning finer than these, he would leave the house and board a ship for Greece.

You may never have considered how you evaluate characters in a work of fiction, but you certainly pass some kind of judgment. For the dreamers among us, there will be a direct correlation between the fictional and real worlds whereby the problems and solutions of one will be transposed into the other. The way in which a character manages his morals should allow you to deselect some of those vapid adventures where "everything is possible" because as one critic noted in a different context, if anything goes then nothing can be funny. How very true. The same can be said of any film or book praised by the irresponsible among us for being "immoral" or "amoral," with some preferring the latter because it seems to involve love. What they are really saying is that they feel repressed by the status quo or normal, good, basic values and this work grants them a fantastic outlet. There is nothing terribly wrong with such a desire provided this outlet is superior to other outlets, which I fear smacks of old-fashioned Victorian dos and don'ts. Good that such simplistic classifications don't really bother the eponymous character of this novel.

Our hero, if that is truly the right word, is first depicted as prey, a role he will come to relish. Whatever we learn of Thomas Ripley in the pages that follow, his innate ability for subterfuge and skulduggery should not be disesteemed. He is tailed into a bar by what turns out to be fortune itself: Herbert Greenleaf, the father of someone he does not know very well has tracked Ripley down as a potential conduit to his self-exiled progeny – if painting and sunbathing in Italy qualify as exile. Words are exchanged that afford the reader far greater insight into Ripley's motives than Greenleaf could ever dream of contemplating and a deal is struck: Ripley is to travel to Europe on Greenleaf's money – the name choice is now painfully clear – to track down Dickie Greenleaf with the aim of homeward persuasion. An odd job for an odd fellow:

A cap was the most versatile of head-gears, he thought, and he wondered why he had never thought of wearing one before? He could look like a country gentleman, a thug, an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a plain American eccentric, depending on how he wore it. Tom amused himself with it in his room in front of the mirror. He had always thought he had the world's dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase. A real conformist's face, he thought. The cap changed all that. It gave him a country air, Greenwich, Connecticut, country. Now he was a young man with a private income, not long out of Princeton, perhaps. He bought a pipe to go with the cap.

No other paragraph in The Talented Mr. Ripley more aptly describes its protagonist. So you will not be overmuch surprised to learn what "the world's dullest face" can do when cornered. And cornered he will be when he comes upon Dickie Greenleaf and the nominal woman in his life, Margaret Sherwood.

Margaret, dite Marge, has all the trappings of a standard issue 1950s American sweetheart. Her only added twist are her two distinct ambitions: publishing her book on photography and marrying Dickie Greenleaf. Dickie is indifferent to both these pursuits, but perhaps because his intellect only allows him to remain on the surface of things, be those things emotions, languages, or human psychology. A nice, unintelligent, conventionally handsome fellow of absolutely no talent; and yet Tom never considers that he would have become much like Dickie Greenleaf had he fed from the same silver spoon. The life of the young couple, apparently not yet lovers in the modern sense of the word, is invaded until Tom makes a fateful decision that involves murdering and replacing an indifferent, third-rate painter whose father is patiently awaiting his return stateside. This is done in a boat in San Remo and will foreshadow another murder involving a car at another Italian location, and the plot has all the petrol it will need for a long and high-speed journey. Tom usurps what he wants of Dickie's existence – primarily, the insouciance and principles of easy living – and does not consider the consequences in their dreadful entirety. He learns Italian by studying it with diligence and interest, and continues relentlessly in his attempts to lead a placid post-War life. But he encounters more than a few obstacles: Marge's inquiries, a porcine boor by the name of Freddie Miles, and a platoon of Italian law enforcement officers who resemble each other just as much as Tom looks like Dickie (Tom is actually interviewed in both identities by the same policeman). These omnipresent coppers come off more than once as disturbingly incompetent, an impression unchanged by Herbert Greenleaf's hiring of an American gumshoe to find his vanished son.   

While refraining from acerbic asides, Highsmith directs her genius to the smallest of details with a precision seldom found in modern belles lettres ("They were interrupted for a minute while Mr. Greenleaf saw that they were all seated"; "He stopped in front of an antique shop window and stared for several minutes at a gloomy oil painting of two bearded saints descending a dark hill in moonlight"; "The Via Appica stretched out before him, grey and ancient in the soft lights of its infrequent lamps"). The result is compelling in the same way that all artistic, thoughtful enterprises are compelling: they modulate our own definition of what art is. Ripley may be a sociopath, but the methods with which he hoodwinks and dispatches nuisances (you will never forget the scene with the shoe) speak of a great mind exercising his cerebral precedence over human mediocrity. The tale has been told in many different formats but almost invariably with an amount of disgust for the peon, the ignorant and the uncultured citizen who would never in a thousand moons be able to figure out the machinations of a certain Thomas Ripley. To her credit Highsmith does not pander to this facile conceit, one that is particularly disdained by oversensitive critics who think the author might have in mind these selfsame critics. We end up rooting for Ripley to succeed, and not only because he is smarter than everyone else. He is an atypical underdog, both sexually and intellectually dangerous, and his knocking off of the rich can easily be interpreted in the Robin Hood language we knew as children, bereft of course of the silly Marxist impositions. The difference is that this Robin Hood wants all of Sherwood Forest to himself. 

The original Ripley differs from the dynamic if altered English-language film mainly owing to the engagement of separate agendas. While the film attends to the glamour of Ripley's new world, perhaps as a function of the medium in which he is portrayed, the novel tries to trace, more or less successfully, his moral architecture. I say more or less because there is only so much one can glean from a psyche that yearns for European culture and nonetheless has committed murder. The film also injects much more ado regarding his boat passages that the novel leaves unexplored; specifically, a hint about the character of Peter Smith-Kingsley is realized on the screen. That Mr. Ripley would like to be anyone except Mr. Ripley is overstating the point; what Mr. Ripley would truly like is the ease and fortune that would allow him to be anyone, including an inflated, idealized version of himself, whenever imitation is to his benefit or amusement – which may be the best definition of an actor ever put forth. As evinced by the quote that begins this review, however, there persists a certain pathos to the financially poor and underadvantaged Ripley, a young man who enjoys wallowing in self-pity as much as using his circumstances as undeniable motivation. Believe it or not, indeed. 

A Month of Sundays

Women are cellos, fellows the bows.

For what is the body but a swamp in which the spirit drowns?  And what is marriage, that supposedly seamless circle, but a deep well up out of which the man and woman stare at the impossible sun, the distant bright disc, of freedom?

                                                                                                                 Tom Marshfield

There is a fine quote from an old film which will be admitted here in paraphrase to ward off the Google hounds: there is a time to frolic, and a time not to frolic, and this is not one of those times. Readers of these pages know there are works that make it here and many, many more that do not, for a variety of criteria, the simplest of which is that they do not induce the back-chilling aesthetic bliss necessary to be memorialized. For reasons that will become abundantly clear, this novel is really neither one of those works, in no small part because it is hardly a novel at all.

We begin – I take that back, we do not really begin anywhere at all. Our narrator, who introduces himself through the generally dishonest tactic of self-deprecation and martyrdom, has been shipped to a rehabilitation clinic somewhere amidst the sands of the American Southwest. He is a wiry, nervous Anglo-Saxon in his early forties (in the opening chapter he declares himself, "41 this April, 5'10", 158 lbs"), apart from his calvity almost feminine in his shape and shadow, a father of two and in principle – in fact, very much in principle – a married man of the cloth. We do not yet know the crimes that precipitated his commitment, but they will be revealed by the man itself with glee bordering on malice.  He looks around his sanitarium, for that is indeed where he is housed, if a nice sanitarium with golf and tennis available to its inmates, that is, its guests, and rightly contemplates what on earth or beyond he could have in common with this pack of rats and their keepers. His description early on affords us a hint or two:

All middle-aged men, we sit each at our table ... suppressing nervous gossip among the silverware. I feel we are a 'batch,' more or less recently arrived. We are pale. We are stolid. We are dazed. The staff, who peek and move about as if preparatory to an ambush, appear part twanging, leathery Caucasians, their blue eyes bleached to match the alkaline sky and the seat of their jeans, and the rest nubile aborigines whose silent tread and stiff black hair uneasily consort with the frilled pistachio uniforms the waitresses perforce wear.

The era, in case it mattered to you, is late Nixon, a time of paranoia and penitence and a convenient excuse for our narrator's tone. Soon it becomes evident that he has been confined for a month owing to an acute case of satyromania, which may conjure up a picture of a man-goat in our beclouded minds, but which could make for some interesting insights on what has led our man of God to become a man of the insatiable flesh. The Reverend Marshfield cannot really tell us why; but at least we may empathize with his diminishing faith in his own convictions (hearing out a sobbing parishioner he deems, "but as an act of fraternity amidst children descended from, if not one Father, then one molecular accident"). He feels enslaved by his chosen path, which at once must have been chosen for him by some Other force and must not have been. His wife Jane, herself the daughter of a clergyman by the name of Chillingworth, his two teenage boys, his weekly sermons, the lonely, broken women who sit through those sermons and gaze unknowingly at a spry, sexually perverse minister and suggest with their bodies' lack of movement the consent Tom seeks with his roving, raving mind, his sporadic visits to his father deep in the throes of dementia – all this conspires to drive our holy man away from both the Holy and mankind for all its flaws and stigmas. His solution, at least for the lower half of his mortal frame, is a wonderland where everything that should not be is, and everything that should be is not. And not surprisingly, the heroine of this land is a single mom by the name of Alicia Crick.

Alicia is also the musical director at Tom's small church, and on Sundays they are united if not in common purpose then in melody. When Jane and Tom were courting, he saw his future wife "walk[ing] a cloistered path to me, [and] it was as if a lone white rose were arriving by telegraph," a Beatrician image for those who believe in beatitudes. Not so much with Alicia, whose "jaw wore a curious, arrogant, cheap, arrested set, as if about to chew gum." Jane is portrayed as equally lithe and fragile as her husband, even if her husband's fragility is only manifest in the cavities of his conscience. Mrs. Crick, however, possessed "small ... smartly tipped breasts," a "comfortably thick" waist, "homely" and "well-used looking" feet, and "active hands, all muscle and bone." Mrs. Crick swiftly turns out to be such a "revelation" in bed – our novel is saturated (Tom might say satyr-ate-it, and be almost funny) with puns and footnotes on puns, and puns on footnotes – that life with the "good wife's administration sex," that "solemn, once-a-week business, ritualized and worrisomely hushed," becomes absolutely unbearable. One evening, the horrible truth descends upon Tom like the rain upon a lost hitchhiker along a lonesome midnight road:  

My porch. My door. My stairs. Again the staircase rose before me, shadow-striped, to suggest the great brown back of a slave; this time the presentiment so forcibly suggested to me my own captivity, within a God I mocked, within a life I abhorred, within a cavernous unnameable sense of misplacement and wrongdoing, that I dragged my body heavy as if wrapped in chains step by step upward.

We will not say much more on the matter except that Alicia, bless her soul, is acquired and discarded early on in our fragmentary flashbacks, and cannot be considered happy about such a reversal of fortune. And so Tom begins his real journey, his journey back to Alicia that merely re-captions his journey back to his lost youth of irresponsibility. This involves prurience to a degree found only in erotic trash, cussing of the kind found only in popular trash, and an apotheosis from both of these hellish straits through the occasional visits to his Alzheimer-ridden father, who alternatively does not remember Tom, or confuses him with his brother, thus erasing Tom's childhood and innocence in one fell swoop. Without first, of course, causing him and us a great deal more grief.

As a stunning exception to the vast majority of his peers, Updike was very public about his religion and religiousness, even if he migrated congregations more than once. Consequently, he was essentially obliged to make any protagonist clergyman a skeptic (what then would be the fun if not?) to avoid the execrable label of zealot. At some point I remember reading that Updike was Hawthorne's literary descendant (the ballad of Tom Marshfield begins what would be known to Updikeans as “The Scarlet Letter Trilogy"). In hindsight this claim seems less far-fetched, although Updike was far more prodigious than any other serious author and Hawthorne was, like so many, rather fussy about his prints. The problem with such productivity is not leaving yourself enough time to reflect and reconsider, and there is also such a thing as leaving yourself too much time. So does a novel like A Month of Sundays get nearly ignored by posterity by virtue of its rambling, pointless beauty – the rambling, pointless beauty of life itself – a novel, admittedly, in binding and bookstore category alone?  There are overwritten and overwrought passages, surely, and sometimes one wishes there were fewer (occasionally they begin to crowd against our sunset), and the book cannot be read in one or two sittings. It is more properly a patch of poems, a purple, thriving, majestic patch, with real genius, a rarity in our era of half-baked hallucination and urban rage. Consider: "From the far end of the house sounded the electric sloshing of television's swill";  "That money, green and golden money which instinctively seeks the light"; "I loved shedding each grade as I ascended through school"; "Children returning from school shout in the acoustic wet street"; and Frankie, one of Tom's conquests, long since rich but undersexed, "lets out ... a giggle even older than the mink" (this same woman would later be "feeding mosquitoes on the nectar in her veins [and] admiring [her husband's] dragonlike skill at igniting brickets," perhaps the novel's most sensational passage). Only the artistically obtuse would complain that there is no plot, structure, or even point to Tom's peregrinations, apart from the very acceptable excuse of wanting to create more purple patches. And maybe like Alicia, we won't mind the hypocrisy, just the unhappiness.

Akhmatova, "Бесшумно ходили по дому"

A work ("So still was each step through the home") by this poet. You can read the original here.

So still was each step through the home,
So pale were the faces in hue;
Despondent, they led me alone
To someone they claimed I once knew.

His first words: “Thank God you are here!”
More pensive, he stopped, then he said:
“So long now has my time drawn near,
For you but I waited instead.

“To frenzy will you then alarm me?
All your words a safe place shall store.
So say now, will you not forgive me?”
And I said: “It’s not like before.”

Blue shades by the walls seemed to hover,
From floorboard to ceiling, each inch.
And on the soft silken bed cover
A hand lay, a dried fruit or finch.

His profile, flung back and so preying,   
Turned suddenly heavy and coarse,
With no hint of what he was saying
From dark lips, so chapped in remorse.

And then came one spasm, his last,
Those blue eyes of his understood:
“You’re smart to have ceded the past,
Not always were you quite this good.”

His face then grew younger in love;
Anew I caught sight of those years.
And I said, “O God, Lord above
Redeem him, your slave, from his fears.”

La doppia ora

Time will win, we are told by pundits of black holes and red giants, which means our choices are few and simple. We can bemoan our fate and live out our days in misery, or perhaps, one grey and fitful evening, abridge them violently; or we may accept our lot as temporary links on a chain of death that extends for billions of years and throw caution, money, and our own souls to the wind in the hope of forgetting our breaths' futility. Everyone, regardless of history and beliefs, will come to think the latter scenario the more palatable. After all, how could anyone reasonable even entertain a third scenario? What great mind would intuit the notion that our actions could be meaningful and that the pain we cause others could cause us more than sporadic remorse? A fair way to digress into the vagaries of this film.

We begin in a hotel room in this Italian city already known for mystical objects. A young, tomboyish woman is watching a culinary program trumpeting the value of honey and bread, and the appurtenances scattered in lusty haste on the floor – including a pair of high heels that would be hard to imagine her wearing – indicate she may have not been alone the previous night. As a chambermaid enters the room, she assures her that they will not get in each other's way. The maid smartly begins with the bathroom then finds the same tomboy at her elbow admiring her in that unique way some women are allowed to stare at other women. "You look better with your hair down," she says with a sad smile that conveys an offer, and the next thing we hear is a loud crash. The camera scurries to the bedroom to find an open window, a balcony, and a few flights below, our anonymous admirer of a moderately attractive, thirtysomething chambermaid sprawled on an expanding pool of blood. Only towards the middle of the film do we receive a hint at the role of this sequence, and even then the provided clarification lugs a few other questions in tow. 

From this oddly dissonant scene we are thrown into the world of speed dating, where our chambermaid Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport) looks on as each suitor devotes his three minutes to sly winks and exhortations to mark him down as a "yes." After a few hopeless sessions, there appears Guido (Filippo Timi). Guido is not particularly handsome for an Italian male, and his thick beard seems like a fortress to a mouth which frowns a little too much. That mouth remains mum until it suddenly insists that Sonia indicate "no" for the fellow who just departed (a quick look at her survey reveals a uniform voting pattern). "I'm the last," he adds wryly, "and I may be the worst of all." There is, however, something remarkably insincere to such a pronouncement. Is he malevolent? Is he someone she already knows? Or is he simply participating as a favor to the bar's manager since there always seem to be "thirty women and twenty men" for these games? As coats and owners are reunited they meet again, walking and talking not so much flirtatiously as sadly cognizant of each other's loneliness (singles bars and cruises can indeed be some of the saddest places on earth). They part company after he makes a throwaway proposal that confident men are supposed to make and confident women are supposed to refuse – but neither one of our protagonists is confident. And as he explains the film's title and punctuates the explanation with the acute cynicism of a victim, we begin to suspect darker paths ahead. 

Guido has his graphic way with another woman from the egg-timer school of romance (presumably they both checked "yes") whom, of course, he promptly throws out of his apartment with the concession that she will be allowed to call him. When she knocks moments later and a rueful but very shut door confesses that it doesn't have his number, he batters it with an angry bottle; the difference between La doppia ora and most giallo films is that we then see him cleaning up the bottle and its mess. Meanwhile back at our hotel a smiling Sonia is told by Margherita, another chambermaid: "You've smiled four times in the month you've been here, and three of them were today." Margherita rightly suspects that Sonia has found a man, and warns her appropriately: "You have to be aware of good-looking men. They drink." If that were the only thing they did. Sonia and Guido will see each other again, of course, and they will stroll around at midnight, chain-smoke, and casually reveal small things about themselves. Guido was a cop; Sonia was abandoned by her father; Guido is a security guard; Sonia liked to wander through the Slovenian woods as a child. Or was it the Italian woods? From her accent (Rappoport is a well-known Russian actress), the viewer may accept that Sonia is not an Italian national; yet if she is truly a Slovene, why is she then so jumpy when one of Guido's cop friends pulls up in his car? And why, with her excellent command of the language, apparent intelligence, and European Union passport, is she relegated to taking a job usually reserved for immigrants with none of those three qualifications? We masticate briefly on these matters just as Guido and Sonia, now perhaps in love, spend a sleepy Sunday afternoon at the art-filled villa whose elaborate security system Guido alone controls. And as they draw closer, shy and yet passionate, into their first on-screen display of affection, they are interrupted by a masked group of armed men who incapacitate them and begin looting the same villa Guido is supposed to be protecting. 

What happens thereafter is both perfectly logical and the stuff of near-supernatural events, and nothing more should be revealed. Nevertheless, the careful viewer should ask himself the following questions: Why is Sonia listening to Spanish instructional tapes (on the day of the attack, her tape says: "Please help me. Today is a very important day for me.")? What do we really know about that photo of Guido and his allegedly deceased wife? Why does Sonia seem to know who Dolores Dominguez is? Why does Guido's cop friend Dante relate to him a long story about his own ex-wife? Why does one of the hotel guests call Sonia a "go-go dancer"? We may ask to what extant La doppia ora has the makings of a great film, whether the subject matter it treats is too slim and, ultimately, too personal to merit such status, questions justified by the film's curt if inevitable conclusion. While these pages have repeatedly championed the personal over the universal, the truly trivial – petty disputes, vendettas, grudges between schoolchildren, as well as anything and everything materialistic – is not fit to print. Sonia's tragedy, if that is the right word, is magnified in our common struggle against the past, against its prejudices and our mistakes, and the cloven structure of the film betrays a deeper divide between what was taken from her and what she took back. Took back? Don't let the poor-immigrant-ignored-daughter rigmarole fool you. Sonia, you see, is a taker, if an occasionally reluctant one. Her father may have thrown her to the wolves, but she had already made their acquaintance and doesn't fear them quite as much as you would think. And maybe we should recall that famous book about another femme fatale and the quote about being borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Rilke, "In einem fremden Park"

A work ("In an unfamiliar park") by this Austrian poet.  You can read the original here.

Two paths exist, but neither ends.
Yet, in your thoughts, one may well lead
On further, as if you misstepped,
If caught within a rondel's cleft,
Alone again, that stone to read: 
The Baroness below subtends
Our Brite Sophie. Now caress
These fingers years long past, long gone:
Why does this pain not evanesce?

Like that first time you won't go on, 
Expectant on this elm-bound square, 
So moist and dark, where no one treads. 

What counter-urge has made you dare, 
To search among the sunny beds, 
As if they named a rosebush bloom?  

What sounds recur as you stand here? 
Why do you see, flickering near,  
The moths now lost where tall phlox loom?