Lady Windermere's Fan

That is the worst of women: they always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, then they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad and leave us quite unattractively good.

There have been three periods of my life in which I read intensely: between the ages of four and eight, thirteen and fifteen, and twenty-one and twenty-three. What I devoured during those hungry times may surprise those who know my tastes now, although I developed an early antipathy to salty sea novels, crunchy westerns, and those bitter books about subjects like drug abuse and fractured families. For the last I have my own blissful childhood to thank; but for what I did appreciate and treasure there was little in common save an overarching sense of what I then may have called fairness, maybe justice, and what I now may term sound moral philosophy. What is sound moral philosophy ("unsound moral philosophy" has the defiant ultramodern ring of faux opposition)? In a nutshell, as well as in the nut itself, the difference between what is right and just and what a clear conscience cannot abide. And, as odd as it may seem, there is no better example of moral purity than the works of this writer of genius, as exemplified by this play.

Our characters are three mainly, a fourth partially, and a handful of hardly distinct cads and fools for whom epigrams have long replaced the normal feelings of a normal human heart. We begin with a triangle: Lady Windermere, a young mother, her husband Lord Windermere, a straight shooter perhaps ten years her senior, and her suitor, the very dashing and very preposterous Lord Darlington – his name says it all – in the same manner that any tale of budding adultery has ever begun, with the faults of one married member and the helplessness of his partner. Not much is made of Lady Windermere's child until a crucial juncture late in our work; yet her gentle comeliness cannot be overlooked by someone like Darlington, who habitually overlooks a woman's personality to scratch a recurrent itch. His approach is always truthful, if truth means doing those things whose pleasures can be quantified:

Do you know I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in the world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. I take the side of the charming, and you, Lady Windermere, can't help belonging to them.

Like almost all of Wilde's heroines, Lady Windermere has an unusually acerbic tongue, but for this proclamation of wantonness she has no reply. What can be said when a station of our intellect understands morals and culpability as our downfall? Why does a stitch of truth line the little black book of every devoted debaucher? Perhaps because we are instinctively drawn to happiness, and just as instinctively to satisfaction, both of which often beget nothing more than a desire for more happiness and more satisfaction. Lady Windermere, however, has long since resigned herself to another fate. After her mother died, she was raised by a paternal aunt with the good values of Puritan etiquette: order, modesty, Godliness, family, and honor. Lord Windermere in his dull ways embodies all these characteristics, yet has enough affluence to secure them in elegant variation. And as the play opens on his wife's birthday, he gives her a fan with her name, Margaret, stenciled across, and leaves her to her thoughts and schedule. Much will occur that day, especially following the visit of the snobbish Duchess of Berwick and her daughter. But our play's name is quite significantly not The Duchess of Berwick.    

What the fan might mean and not mean should not concern us terribly. Film studies likes its McGuffins, and our fan is decidedly a McGuffin; it could just as easily have been a glove or a shawl. Although contemporary ears might detect a pun on an admirer or supporter of a famous team or person, we can rest assured that this could not possibly have been Wilde's intention. Our fan will serve a variety of McGuffinesque roles – weapon, gift, lost object – and one could argue that, apart from ventilation, its primary social function has always resembled that of a screen. But in the hands of a society lady, which for better or worse Lady Windermere has become, the fan allows its holder to concern herself only with herself. Even the wittiest of rakes will hardly slow down her wrists, because that would signify access to something no lady should ever concede. So when the Duchess mentions Lord Windermere in repeated conjunction with a fallen, somewhat older woman by the name of Ms. Erlynne, we understand our triangle is now a trapezoid. What ensues is the tedious unraveling of a plain plot, fettered only by a reader's inability to enjoy the stream of observations while awaiting the revelation – the very definition of a bad reader, but anyway. The best scene occurs when best lines often occur: among drunken, dissatisfied men in the wee hours of the morning. The succinct brilliance of these pages has few peers in literature of any form: "Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong"; "Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality"; "Experience is the name every one gives to his mistakes"; "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing ... and a sentimentalist ... is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of a single thing"; "There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about." No purpose attends this scene other than the promulgation of Wilde's wit, which is reason enough to sit through the most imbecilic of plots, and we need say no more.

It is hard to review a work of Wilde's without quoting him extensively, because he says it so much better than most everyone else. Surely his plays have many characters, but they all speak with the same self-assurance. Namely, that of one who knows, mostly secondhand, the wickedness of his world and yet hopes for its redemption. Why mostly secondhand? Wilde's reputation as a decadent continues to be one of the greatest lies perpetrated by literary critics, because a true decadent would not wish for anything more than more decadence. Drugs usually just make you want more drugs, be those drugs synthetic substances, fleshly pleasures, or the addictive jolt of violent actions. More happiness and more satisfaction, that is all Darlington proposes when he proposes – and men of his caliber always seem to be proposing something – and if that is all one gets from life, then one has had no life to speak of. So many of Wilde's aphorisms, original or modified from classical sources, have entered our vocabulary that we would be hard pressed to pick his finest, although I think it appears in Lady Windermere's Fan as a careless aside. You might remember it. It begins with one tragedy and ends with a second.

Lot No. 249

Why are some of us so attracted to tales of the supernatural? The easy answer is that we are fools. We believe in a world far greater and more profound than what senses may perceive, but are informed by a loud and rather unpleasant faction that there is no rational foundation for such a belief. Mired in delusions as were, it appears, countless generations of our elders, we have proceeded in stupidity through this life with the silly expectation of another life to follow, or at least a chance to break into that shadowy realm. We are told that we suffer from faith; we are told we deny history; and we are told that we should feel relieved that the religions of all states and empires past and present are nothing more than hardly distinct pebbles in a massive mosaic at once utterly fictional and utterly fraudulent. What the allegedly brave and intelligent pundits of such a strategy fail to see is, in considering us mere links on a billion-year chain of death, they bring relief to absolutely no one save the most deranged and masochistic. That is not to say that our world has not been our world for a billion years or more, or that there is no chain of development between the man of yesterday and the man of today (not to mention the ape or amphibian of lost millennia). Simply that there is much more than what meets the scientist's eye beneath his microscope. Which brings us to this seminal tale. 

When we have a protagonist with the plain and solid name of Smith, we must expect someone very bad or very good. And in Abercrombie Smith, a "strong, unimaginative man," we get a decidedly dull if at times brazen and arrogant fellow, which may be as suitable a metaphor for the modern man of science as one may find. His temperament does not lend itself to the arts or even what will confront him, namely the black arts of the occult; it surprises us in no way to learn he is a medical student; thus, to figure in our story in any productive manner, he must be coerced into belief by the foulest enormities:   

With his firm mouth, broad forehead, and clear-cut, somewhat hard-featured face, he was a man who, if he had no brilliant talent, was yet so dogged, so patient, and so strong that he might in the end overtop a more showy genius. A man who can hold his own among Scotchmen and North Germans is not a man to be easily set back. Smith had left a name at Glasgow and at Berlin, and he was bent now upon doing as much at Oxford, if hard work and devotion could accomplish it.

Compounding his reliance on the body's whims, Smith is also one of those hale and hearty males "whose minds and tastes turned naturally to all that was manly and robust." We might swiftly dismiss such a fellow nowadays as a half-witted athlete (Smith is fittingly a competitive oarsman); nonetheless, Smith evinces some Renaissance qualities that grant him our admiration without the palest stripe of envy. His foil is Edward Bellingham and, for reasons that need not be revealed here, the first person mentioned by our narrator. As fat, pasty, and negligent of his physical well-being as he is committed to a life of the mind and the soul, Edward Bellingham knows more about Ancient Egypt "than any man in England." In Bellingham's case, however, his soul may be a movable commodity:

'There's something damnable about him – something reptilian. My gorge always rises at him. I should put him down as a man with secret vices – an evil liver. He's no fool, though. They say that he is one of the best men in his line that they have ever had in the college .... [in] Eastern languages. He's a demon at them. Chillingworth met him somewhere above the second cataract last long, and he told me that he just prattled to the Arabs as if he had been born and nursed and weaned among them. He talked Coptic to the Copts, and Hebrew to the Jews, and Arabic to the Bedouins, and they were all ready to kiss the hem of his frock-coat. There are some old hermit Johnnies up in those parts who sit on rocks and scowl and spit at the casual stranger. Well, when they saw this chap Bellingham, before he had said five words they just lay down on their bellies and wriggled. Chillingworth said that he never saw anything like it. Bellingham seemed to take it as his right, too, and strutted about among them and talked down to them like a Dutch uncle. Pretty good for an undergrad.'

Does it matter who utters this description? Not really; as it were, it leaves the lips of another oarsman and outdoorsman by the name of Hastie, as a warning to Smith that Bellingham, who happens to be Smith's neighbor one floor down, should be subject to sedulous avoidance. Yet in his manly heart Smith feels more than a mild tenderness for the neighbor, "whose lamp threw a golden bar from the old turret even after he had extinguished his own." This "community in lateness," a neologism to which any serious man of literature should possess lifetime membership, forms "a certain silent bond between them." To our well-rounded and academically ambitious Smith it was a "soothing" thought that another person "set as small a value upon his sleep as he did." It has been said by many that no greater friendship can be formed than what may arise between two men sharing the same intellectual and spiritual interests. Unfortunately for Smith, he will soon find out that his and Bellingham's only commonality is a rigorous nocturnal schedule.

We have yet to explain the title, one of Conan Doyle's least elegant, if nevertheless well-chosen. Why should we explain the title? Because, one assumes, titles foreshadow their works' contents and themes, and to this hard and fast rule Lot No. 249 cannot possibly comprise an exception. Take, for example, Bellingham's quarters as Smith first observes them:

He could not but take an amazed glance around him as he crossed the threshold. It was such a chamber as he had never seen before – a museum rather than a study. Walls and ceiling were thickly covered with a thousand strange relics from Egypt and the East. Tall, angular figures bearing burdens or weapons stalked in an uncouth frieze round the apartments. Above were bull-headed, stork-headed, cat-headed, owl-headed statues, with viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs, and strange, beetle-like deities cut out of the blue Egyptian lapis lazuli. Horus and Isis and Osiris peeped down from every niche and shelf, while across the ceiling a true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile, was slung in a double noose.

Given his obsession with all things Pharaonic, Bellingham may be considered just as much of a "true son" of the Old Nile. And didn't Hastie just refer to him as "reptilian"? And what about that double noose? Without giving too much away – and in this age of big search engines that could, this simply means holding the reader's curiosity for a few more seconds – we should say that despite its unfortunate name, Lot No. 249 would launch a trend in supernatural literature and film that has persisted to the present day. We may also come to ask ourselves who but a "bold and confident man" like our Smith would "put a limit to the strange bypaths into which the human spirit may wander." Even if we know there is one path Smith will never walk again.  

The Lair of the White Worm

We cannot realistically expect trifles in a work with such a name. There should be a gigantic worm and a commensurate lair (and here I find myself already echoing a famous review of the novel's loose and dreadful movie adaptation); there should also be victims for that worm – ideally, lured to the lair and left to scream themselves into agonizing death – a simple formula that could easily be botched by too much meddling and melodrama. There is, wonderful to say, only a moderate portion of the latter among pages of sparkling prose in this author's final novel. 

Our protagonist is Adam Salton, a young, roughly hewn Australian of proper upbringing who stands to inherit substantial wealth and territory from his British forebears. His plans for this turn of fortune are no different than those of any callow Victorian hero: survey the lay of the land, see what benefits might exist to abandoning the volatile adventure of youth for a sedentary life as a member of the provincial gentry, gain the trust and succor of the commonalty, and, of course, keep his eyes peeled for a nubile lass with whom his house can be made into a home. Two lovely possibilities immediately appear. Lilla Watford, "as good as she is pretty," and, a less obvious choice, her first cousin Mimi, half-Burmese with "black eyes [that] can glow .... as do the eyes of a bird when her young are threatened." As bright as the prospects for Adam and one of these women remain – being a man of inexperience, he is instinctively more attracted to the blonde Lilla – a long aquiline shadow is cast by the form of Edgar Caswall. I struggle now to recall a literary Edgar who was both gentle and sane, but no matter. The "history of the Caswall family is coeval with that of England," and our Edgar has been generated from like-minded snobs unaccustomed to challenges or laughter. In fact, their only custom seems to have been one of acquist:

Now, it will be well for you to bear in mind the prevailing characteristics of this race. These were well preserved and unchanging; one and all they are the same: cold, selfish, dominant, reckless of consequences in pursuit of their own will. It was not that they did not keep faith, though that was a matter which gave them little concern, but that they took care to think beforehand of what they should do in order to gain their ends. If they should make a mistake someone else should bear the burthen of it. This was so perpetually recurrent that it seemed to be a part of a fixed policy. It was no wonder indeed that whatever changes took place they were always ensured in their own possessions. They were absolutely of cold, hard nature. Not one of them – so far as we have any knowledge – was ever known to be touched by the softer sentiments, to swerve from his purpose, or hold his hand in obedience to the dictates of his heart. Part of this was due to their dominant, masterful nature. The aquiline features which marked them seemed to justify every personal harshness. The pictures and effigies of them all show their adherence to the early Roman type. Their eyes were full; their hair, of raven blackness, grew thick and close and curly. Their figures were massive and typical of strength.

It takes no great effort of our imagination to ponder the "idea that in the race there is some demoniac possession"; indeed, the experienced Gothicist would anticipate nothing less. Caswall will pin his cruel eyes on several characters, and they will squirm in various degrees of mesmerism until a filthy secret of his family's legacy is partially revealed, at which point Caswall assumes in our tale a very different role. But it is the appearance of an even more cunning and wicked character that unbalances our equation, and that being is Lady Arabella March.

Even if the contours of her thoughts are allotted relatively few paragraphs, Lady Arabella is one of literature's vilest creations. No one is surprised that her looks have the baleful sleekness and refinement of nature's most devilish predators, nor that her history with these lands – the ancient pagan Kingdom of Mercia, we are duly informed – seems to stretch as far back as that of dear old Edgar. Lady Arabella develops two mortal foes in the course of her attempts to get the very wealthy Edgar to marry her and forgive the mounting debts of her freshly deceased ex-husband: Oolanga, Caswall's ferocious and calculating African man-at-arms, and Sir Nathaniel de Salis, diplomatist, scholar, and President of the Mercian Archaeological Society. Sir Nathaniel is also necessarily somewhat of an expert on the local occult, making him a dramatic counterpart to this famed doctor. The diplomatist will consult regularly with Adam and smartly keep his distance from Lady Arabella, about whom he weaves theory and odd fact into terrible conclusions, but Oolanga cannot seem to let the woman out of his sight. Perhaps it is owing to her excitement at the portage to and fro of an old family chest said to contain "the secrets of Mesmer" himself; perhaps to the simple intuition that once Lady Arabella has Edgar and his rapidly declining mental health in her power, neither Caswall nor his new wife will have any use for an erstwhile witch doctor. Luck will be pressed, as well as a few triggers (rarely outside of modern noir novels does one find so many references to concealed revolvers), and unfortunately for some, most of the village is quite out of earshot.     

Modern readers will surely be repulsed at some of the characterizations of women, and, especially, of dark-skinned Africans, but the novel does not make our man-at-arms into anything more than a vulgar mercenary, which, if he's supposed to be friendly with Edgar Caswall, is well in keeping with the personalities of both villains. What is more, almost all the deprecations directed at him come from an even more abhorrent source. Lair of the White Worm may never be counted among Stoker's masterpieces, but it contains a fullness and ease that eluded many of his earlier works. Sumptuous lines, sometimes on the most banal of topics, are strewn on every page ("He found Sir Nathaniel in the study having an early cup of tea, amplified to the dimensions of possible breakfast"; "He was on the high road to mental disturbance"; "The rest and sleep in ignorance would help her and make a gap between the horrors"; "I don't believe in a partial liar. This art does not deal in veneer"). The storytelling vacillates at the natural unevenness of oral narrative, and confusion over some of the details forces the careful reader to retreat and verify just as a rapt listener would have asked a speaker to revisit a certain scene. Praise should likewise be accorded for the restraint through which our eponymous reptile crawls, literally and figuratively, to the surface towards all the other players. There is also an almost understated deduction that begins with, "if we followed it out" and ends with "is a snake." Even in books of this subject matter, logic has no true peer. And some islands, we remember, don't have snakes for a reason.

Blok, "Летний вечер"

To Alexandra on her birthday, a work ("Summer evening") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

The final sunset beams now pass
Upon the tawny field of rye.
Embraced by dewy sleep's last sigh,
Like unmown copper sways the grass.

No breeze or birdsong's shriek roams free;  
The moon's red disc surmounts the copse; 
So dies the reaper's melody,
All noise this silent evening stops.

Forget your cares, forsake your woe,
Without direction ride your steed;
Into the fog and distant leas
And toward the night and moon's faint glow!

Cassandra's Dream

We are told by gushing fans in the guise of critics that great artists always reinvent themselves (let us not mention who is included in this pageantry; suffice it to say that with these individuals neither "great" nor "artist" should ever be associated). For actors, reinventing themselves is a euphemism for getting regular work again, and for former screen stars this means a lifeline from the direct-to-video mire. We cannot be so sure, however, of the need for such reinvention for the kingpins behind the camera. After all, even a successful director can lead a relatively anonymous private life and is often encouraged to tackle a variety of different genres. Which may explain the recent travails of the artist responsible for this film.

The plot is a simple one, so matters will be decided by casting and ancillary detail. Sprung from a  nice, normal, if not very upwardly mobile family, Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Farrell) love their parents like good sons do. In another display of filial affection, they shrug off their mother's unabashed preference for her own brother's success as she rants and raves with her sweet spouse sitting at the end of the same dinner table. Yes, her husband is a kind man with a little restaurant and a piece of that bland, bourgeois pie that tastes good when your taste buds haven't really had anything better, but his business speculations have invariably yielded nothing in the way of hope or profit. Thus it is in good old Uncle Howard (a diabolical Tom Wilkinson) that the family should pride itself. Most interesting is that this chiming observation doesn't really offend anyone. The father is a bit peeved of course; but as the statement is true on the base, material level, everyone including him goes along with this assumption. One almost suspects that any diversion of loyalty from her brother to her husband would leave everyone at the dinner table choking on his sprouts. 

In this context we are presented with our lads' Achilles heels: Terry, a mechanic, has a very serious problem with gambling, and Ian, who may or may not be gainfully employed, is that worst kind of businessman who has his mind on the payoff and not the process. The women in their lives also indicate the spectrum whose ends the brothers occupy: while Terry will always have a plain, solid girlfriend in Kate (Sally Hawkins), Ian predictably falls for high-maintenance bombshell Angela Stark (Hayley Atwell). I say "predictably" not because Angela's shapeliness and giggling promiscuity would not attract greater men – they most certainly would – but because Ian could not possibly imagine himself with anything other than a high-maintenance bombshell. That Angela is also an actress of sorts makes the find all the more delicious (when Ian asks whether she would sleep with a director just for a part, she glibly counters that it "depends on the part, and who the director is, and how much I'd had to drink"). At the beginning of these operatics Terry wins big on a greyhound (or perhaps more properly a levrette), convincing the brothers to invest in a modest yacht named after the winning canine – and we finally glimpse a fraternal commonality. The minds of both brothers, however propelled by different stimuli and hopes, reside firmly in a dream world they could not aspire to reach, a world of pounds sterling and lots of it.

Which brings us back to good old Uncle Howard. As much as their poor father might be considered a family embarrassment, it is far more humiliating to have to borrow sports cars from your brother's garage in order to make it with, ahem, high-maintenance bombshell actresses. Even lower on the totem pole of disgrace is the revelation, made ever so casually, that the family moneybags is in grave danger of going to jail. Why would anyone apart from federal prosecutors and those few of us with moral intuition want Uncle Howard incarcerated? Well, we never really get that far. It is Howard himself who begrudgingly confesses his imminent trial, a trial, mind you, dependent upon the testimony of one of Uncle Howard's erstwhile business partners, a certain Martin Burns, immediately no friend of the family. I did say earlier that the brothers know full well that their uncle is a dirty man sullied in crimes and transgressions of likely a very indirect nature, and that is the key point of the story. Terry, a conscientious objector to everything in life except gambling, knows in an unerring Catholic way that whacking some random fellow to help out your Mafioso uncle probably ranks somewhere rather high atop the gables of sin. Ian, a handsome if suggestible jerk, likes to look at things that will result in happiness – again the payoff, not the process – and make his decisions accordingly. 

Between the initial proposal and their fateful choice there is much of what may be termed hemming and hawing, with Ian doing the former and Terry dutifully bound to moaning like some condemned animal. It has been noticed by more than one critic that there obtains a claustrophobic feel to some of the shots, and indeed, something akin to a tightening noose appears to pin the brothers closer together than they probably ever have been. The beauty to such a method would be completely lost if our duo were either stone-hearted killers or idiots, although again Ian could easily be pigeonholed as the former and Terry's childish scruples only seem childish to those adults who, well, don't have any scruples at all. Cassandra's Dream puzzled critics because, I suppose, it is particularly devoid of any sense of humor. Then again, few things are less amusing than watching doomed people trying to get more comfortable in their own pillories. That it has been dismissed time and again as a morality play should tell you more about the reviewer than its contents, and while some morality plays are egregious exercises in pedantry, Allen's film can certainly not be counted among their ranks. A more conventional director would have reversed McGregor and Farrell's roles and made Uncle Howard more sympathetic so that we, the humble viewers, might feel the same sparks of temptation. As it were, Uncle Howard is as revolting a human being as you're likely to find and does not hide his contempt for anyone's existence except his own. The brothers know this, of course, but we are not being asked to ponder the depths of their knowledge. Especially of some very old and unfortunate myths.