Friday, November 7, 2014

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

http://www.broadway.com/shows/mice-and-men/
I got to see Fathom Events' film version of this Broadway stage play of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. This is another classic I read in high school and got nothing out of, except that I remember it turning my stomach. It's a good thing to come back to later in life, because you can't help but respond to a classic differently with more life experience.

I had a keen appreciation this time for what a tightly constructed piece it is, a tragedy akin to Oedipus: once the setting has been established and the main characters introduced, there is an feeling of inevitability. Lennie, pure as his motives often are, is a time bomb, and because George cares about him, he will be dragged down in the tragedy when it happens.

But this time, instead of seeing it essentially as a human tragedy, I was conscious of it as a social tragedy. This is what happens when there is no social "safety" net, no provision for mental health care. And people are perpetually poor, scraping by at a subsistence level with few alternatives. Any infirmity, illness, old age, leads to death, as Candy the aging farm-hand recognizes. Old dogs are shot, runts of the litter are drowned, and people don't fare much better.

The director of the Broadway production, Anna D. Shapiro, talked about the piece during an intermission clip. She emphasized the illusory nature of what I would call the "pioneer" promise: work hard, you'll get ahead, own something of your own and escape poverty and endless work. Steinbeck saw this was a false hope for most, but Shapiro says he offers something in its place: human connection. What makes George and Lennie different, they keep telling themselves, is that they look out for each other in a environment where most men live only for themselves.

I think the key, though, is that they have a plan, even if it is a pie-in-the-sky hope, that gives them something to work for and save towards. The other men they describe as being not like them are solitary, yes, but also seem to be living transitory lives: make money, blow it in a weekend, repeat - always at a subsistence level. I am persuaded by Viktor Frankl's analysis of human experience in Man's Search for Meaning, where he identifies a sense of purpose as being critical to human thriving. It seems to be easier, for some reason I haven't figured out, to care about a future when you have human connections, like George and Lennie, but I don't think human connection is required.

I want to say this delicately, because it is controversial, but I believe the crucial piece is the goal of the farm (or whatever the equivalent is), even if the goal is next to impossible, more than having a human bond. They both reinforce each other, and life without either is certainly less than optimal, but I think purpose takes priority.

This theme of false promises, the carrot in front of the donkey's nose, resonated with me because I think Americans, by in large, buy into an updated version of the same myth: anyone can "succeed" or "get ahead" through hard work. Only it often doesn't work out, and there is an implicit, nasty Puritanical reverse: people who are not "succeeding" must not be working hard enough.



Sunday, November 2, 2014

Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell

Amazon link
I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Gaskell's North & South and Wives & Daughters. I have to admit, Cranford left me nonplused. Gaskell wrote and published these episodes of life among spinsters and widows in an English town as a serial in a magazine, and they do not quite hold together enough to be read together as a short novel.
 
There is some insight, some light comedy (mostly in the beginning and the end when the waggish, good-natured men are about). I think the best I can say, however, is that I give Gaskell credit for taking a character like Miss Matty who would otherwise be sidelined and treating her with the depth and sensitivity usually reserved for a main character. It's a bit like if Austen had written Emma from the perspective of Miss Bates...

Saturday, April 12, 2014

E.M. Forster Short Stories, Aspects of the Novel



Short Stories

I am a huge fan of E.M. Forster’s novels, in particular Howard’s End, which I think is one of the more perfect books I have ever read. I’ve been catching up on his short stories, written (mostly?) early in his career, the most striking of which is his surprising foray into Science Fiction with “The Machine Stops.” You don’t think of the author of A Room with a View as having written Science Fiction, but there it is: Forster’s thought experiment into a future state of humanity where people have isolated themselves in honeycomb cells beneath the surface of the earth where all their needs are met by the press of a button. The inhabitants amuse themselves by giving and listening to lectures. There is a scathing critique of the academic veneration of citing sources, the more the better, as one’s authority:

Those who still wanted to know what the earth was like had after all only to listen to some gramophone, or to look into some cinematophote. And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. "Beware of first- hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. "First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine - the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought LafcadioHearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain…

It is essentially an argument against the tendency of the intellect to prize abstraction over real experience, which comes out in other Forster short stories and his early novels, such as Longest Journey and A Room with a View, although here he handles the same theme with more subtly. Unfortunately D.H. Lawrence was starting to write not long after, and he takes this idea of the primacy of physical experience to a degree that would have appalled Forster’s more refined sensibilities. Stephen in Longest Journey, to me, reads like a prototype sketch for Oliver Mellors in Lady Chatterly’s Lover. The problem I have with it is that I think the premise is essentially flawed, in the same way that I have little patience with Tolstoy’s veneration of the peasant life (contrast this with the peasant woman who has taken on the characteristics of the animals she has tended all her life in Flaubert’s Madam Bovary). I can appreciate that Forster and Lawrence were reacting to a repressed culture they found stultifying, but I don’t believe that living close to the land, sleeping out at night under the stars, or running naked through the woods, make for an ideal, thriving, happy man. It may be vivifying and get the fidgets out if you have spent too much of your life in an English drawing room, but I think the emphasis on bodily experience ought to be balancing, rather than a way of being an end in itself.
Most of Forster’s short stories center around bright young hero/heroines who look like precursors to Ricky Elliot and (more importantly) Lucy Honeychurch for whom there is an in-breaking of some fantastical experience (usually from classical mythology, but it could be a celestial omnibus, or stepping through a hedge into Eden) that is impossible to communicate to their straight-laced, traditional world. The stories are interesting as thought-experiments, but I find them less powerful than his later novels in which contact with others (of a different culture, or class) is the “alien” element that jars the sensitive person out of complacency. In the short stories the protagonists seem unable to reconcile the different worlds and fall back in on themselves, so to speak. In the novels, the protagonists are changed and forced to make new choices that reverberate throughout their social surroundings. 

Aspects of the Novel

I greatly enjoyed reading Forster’s 1927 lectures on English literature, now collected under the heading, Aspects of the Novel. Like most of Forster’s writing, the tone is elegant and witty in a way that makes you go back and read sentences again, and it is a marvelously enjoyable read for this alone. Forster has a unique approach – at least one I haven’t seen before – in which he asks his audience to temporarily forget historicity and imagine all the authors of English literature seated at a round table, writing side-by-side at the same time. He then selects and compares unlikely “pairs” (Samuel Richardson and Henry James, H.G. Wells and Charles Dickens, Lawrence Sterne and Virginia Woolf), quoting a paragraph from each to show similarities that apparently transcend period setting. I found Forster’s discussion of the uses of “flat” and “round” characters and his distinction between “story” and “plot” to be interesting. He is also very good at articulating what it is about certain novelists that one senses by gut: why Jane Austen is brilliant, why Dostoevsky’s writing has more depth than George Eliot’s.
One curious piece is his brief discussion of Proust’s work, the final volume of which had yet to be translated and released at the time of the lectures. He mentions that some people expected it would finally, stunningly, tie up all the loose ends and draw together the themes of the previous books, but Forster (correctly) prognosticates “…it will be surprising if we have to revise our opinion of the whole book. The book [as a whole] is chaotic, ill-constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythms.”

Link to Amazon
Forster’s Biography

I recently finished Wendy Moffat’s biography (2011) of E.M. Forster, which was fascinating. Forster strikes me as such a beautiful person, even though he struggled with his repressive background and emerging homosexual identity. Many other people would have been warped by this, but Forster managed to come out somehow as an exceptional gentle, clear-headed, thoughtful person. He was able to translate his own yearnings for authenticity (what Moffat calls “the tug-of-war between propriety and personal freedom”) into Lucy, and Margaret, and, of course, Maurice. He was passionate about connecting with other people, particularly those of a different class or race. Writing to his Muslim Indian friend Masood about World War I, he said, “All one can do in this world of maniacs is to pick up the poor tortured broken people and try to mend them” (Moffat, A Great Unrecorded Life: A New Life of E.M. Forster, p 125).
One of the most fascinating things to me about Forster is that he wrote practically everything he is known for (except Maurice, which was published posthumously due to its content) by the time he was 30, with Passage to India following 14 years later, but he lived into his early 90s, so most of his biography is not, in fact, about his writing, even though he is best known as a writer, which makes for an interesting story. My own sense is that, as Mr. Beebe says, "If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays [the piano], it will be very exciting both for us and for her” (A Room with a View, Ch. 3), and that Forster found a way to do just that.

Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne



      Inspired by the revelatory sensation of discovering Gatsby again, I went back to another high school American Lit. classic in the hopes that it would resonate with me as an adult in a way that it did not as a teenager: no such luck. Whereas with Gatsby I had remembered only a fuzzy sense of a plot and most colorful characters, I remembered practically everything in Scarlet Letter: the story, all the characters, even many of the chapter titles, and it didn’t ring any new bells for me, except, perhaps, for a more mature (if grudging) empathy with the burden of a bad conscience and trials of parenting.

     I think one of the challenges of Scarlet Letter is that I am here in the 21st century, reading Hawthorne’s work from the 19th, about events that are supposed to have taken place in the 17th, and sexual mores have changed so much between each time period. I have trouble relating to Hawthorne’s sense of justice that the lovers must endlessly suffer in life, and I find Hawthorne’s depiction of his characters, particularly Hester’s positive conviction that God has forgiven her, anachronistic to the Puritan society she inhabits. Simply leaving the New England community that has ostracized her seems like a sensible thing to do, both in the beginning when Hester first contemplates it, and then at the end, when Hester and Arthur make plans to go away, and although Hawthorne gives multiple explanations as to why not in the first case and invents a plot-point in the second, it feels like the author forcing them to stay put for the sake of his story, rather than something integral that comes out of the characters. There is one thread at the end of Hawthorne’s long justification for Hester’s inaction – the suggestion that perhaps she wants to stay close to where her lover is, even though there will be nothing more between them – and I think he might have developed this into something more: a tragic sense of being tied to things we know are not good for us? But it’s only a whiff, and one of the most surprising things to me about Scarlet Letter is how cold the protagonists are (interiorly, to each other), even though Hawthorne drops phrases like “passionate nature”. I suppose this is to make each of them more admirable, but self-control can only be appreciated by an outside observer when it shows signs of cracking. Perhaps Hester and Dimsdale worked for a 19th century reader. I find Hester proud, Dimsdale weak, and both of them masochistic and self-indulgent in their determination to dwell on and shape their lives around one past event, even if it was A Big Sin. But there I am in the 21st century: move on. Think about other people. Get over yourselves.
     Not that Hawthorne will let them, since almost all of the events of the book are centered around the appearance of the letter A. I am not a big fan of motifs, “leit” or heavy, in literature, and this is one of the heaviest… In general, I find the use of recurring images or phrases somewhat lazy: instead of finding multiple ways to circle around the same thought or theme, the author merely plugs in the symbolic element with little variation. What I can appreciate is that Hawthorne is trying to set up a world in which whatever these characters do, they are haunted by their conscience. Even if they wanted to forget, the people around them, even Nature, or Chance, conspire to make this impossible, but it is painfully unsubtle, and at the cost of maintaining genuine interest in the story. The reader is rarely, if ever, driven to ask, “What happens next?” because we are already assured it will be yet another plot-isolated vignette in which little Pearl annoyingly makes or points out the letter A. On the other hand, a really good novel, I think, would have had a strong character-driven plot containing elements of suspense or mystery (who is Roger Chillingsworth? What is he up to?) and the adultery theme could have appeared throughout as a sort of secondary plot-line or recurring image.

     Hawthorne makes a strong (and welcome) case for the role of the “wounded-healer” in Dimsdale and later in Hester, who both seem able to reach people at a deeper level because of their own consciousness of sinfulness. I don’t know how to take the ending suggestion, then, that a future prophetess, without sin, should herald in a new age:

“Women, more especially,—in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion,—or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought,—came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise; moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end!” – Ch. 24
No doubt someone else has a better understand of this than I do; it leaves me mystified, and seems to undercut the sober reality of the book in which no one leads a wholly blameless life and those most conscious of the fact are best able to minister to their neighbors. 

     I did find “The Custom House” prologue interesting (and mildly amusing) this time around. I thought what he had to say about being a writer with a job was interesting: it’s good for a writer to have a job because it exposes you to other people and habits; on the other hand, it’s bad because your brain atrophies. When he goes on to say he only works 3 ½ hours at the custom house, my sympathy wanes severely. There is also a Paul Ryan-esque rant about government jobs making people soft, which reminded me of reading Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” recently and being struck by how “Tea Party” they both sound. The same grievances and arguments (why should a community feel itself obligated to help individuals who should, in theory, be able to help themselves) have been around for a long time in American history.

     I sighed and closed the book on Scarlet Letter wistfully thinking instead of a quote from a novel I would rather have been reading, E.M. Forester’s A Room with a View:

"Leave them alone," Mr. Emerson begged the chaplain, of whom he stood in no awe. "Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?” – Ch. 6

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald


            Sometimes you pick up a classic, and sometimes a classic picks up you. By the throat. And shakes vigorously. I must have read Gatsby at least twice during my school career: definitely in middle school, and then again in high school, and both times, it was completely went over my head. I had later on seen the Robert Redford/Mia Farrow and Toby Stephens/Mina Sorvino movies, and it still didn’t do a lot for me, but I had the vague sense that it was a book I ought to come back to someday.
So I finally made it down my Netflix queue to last year’s Baz Luhrmann Leonardo DiCaprio/Carey Mulligan production, and having some past experience with Luhrmann, I wasn’t expecting much more than some VERY lavish party scenes, so I’m standing in front of the TV on a Saturday afternoon folding laundry, and DiCaprio as Gatsby invades Nick’s house with a truly ridiculous profusion of cascading orchids and is sitting there, looking fidgety and miserable, and I GOT IT.
In the book, Fitzgerald writes:
He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . . Chapter 6
That wish to go back to some earlier point and do things over, that this time, somehow, you could make things turn out better – the idea that the solution could be to recapture the past, as Gatsby insists, instead of finding a way forward in the future because the present has become too tangled and so many regrets lie behind – that’s something no one who has not crossed the midpoint of their life can really relate to. Truly, classics are wasted on the young, which is when, more likely than not, we are exposed to them, and perhaps for the only time.
I started thinking about Gatsby and Ahab, who both have fairly colorless first-person narrators somewhat inexplicably attracted to following them, who both are dominated by an idée fixe so powerful that it leads to their downfall, who both die floating passively in water. I think that last part is not accidental: someone with an obsession strong enough to try to bend life to their individual will is finally left swimming (borne up, but without personal direction or effort) in the unconscious, greater forces that a person in balance knows enough to respect. What I think it really, truly brilliant about Gatsby is that he actually achieves his goal, only to find the many ways in which it is not and never could be what he wanted, and it’s a slow, dismaying process of disillusionment that never quite takes hold because he refuses to let it, but there’s that beautiful line “His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one,” and you sense the defeat contained within the victory. This leaves me to wonder what would have happened to Ahab had he managed to kill the white whale – surely he doesn’t go on to become a happy man (“OK, job well done!”). And I think this is where the Luhrmann version really stands out, because the Stephens (2000) and Redford (1974) movies read too much like a love story, but I think the psychological brilliance of the text is that Daisy is not worth it: she is very pretty, and used to being rich, but ultimately a weak reed, and essentially shallow.

                The other surprise for me on coming back to the book now after so many years was Tom. He is an unlikeable character, but I think Fitzgerald’s depiction of him is absolutely brilliant, and he so easily could have been a stock character. I love his inarticulate appeals to pseudo-science (purity of races and other repulsive nonsense) to bolster himself up. I love his total lack of self-awareness when he begins pontificating about the sanctity of traditional “family life and family institutions…” only to break off, as he usually does, because his ideas are so limited. “Flushed with his impassioned gibberish he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization,” Fitzgerald writes. I love his essential inability to see the similarities between himself and Wilson, although the narrator and reader can. It’s just a brilliant description of a character with a shallow mind and robust, yet shallow, ego, who takes from life without recognizing his common humanity.
                In the Luhrmann movie, Luhrmann and his coauthor, Craig Pierce, take the Chapter 7 climax scene farther, and while it is usually a very iffy idea to try to improve on an original text, they do it: it’s so absolutely on target that it feels as inevitable and satisfying as watching a basketball swish through the net at end of a successful three-point shot. All through the novel, you’ve been building to this head-to-head conflict between Gatsby, the man of subtlety and deception, and Tom, the unconscious, self-righteous brick, and you finally get it in the scene in the hotel, but Fitzgerald leaves it to fizzle out with Tom making vague accusations that Gatsby not only made his fabulous wealth bootlegging, but is associated with shady people and that he’s “got something on now” that is even worse, although we never learn what that is. This apparently blows Gatsby’s cool, and Fitzgerald describes him in a rather cumbersome, bizarre way that finally concludes he looked “as if he had killed a man.” (Guilty? Enraged? I still can’t figure this one out.) Daisy is described as withdrawing further and further into herself, and it is not clear whether this is because she is afraid of what has been revealed, or because Gatsby has lost his polished luster. Possibly both.
In the Luhrmann screenplay the scene keeps going, with Tom sneering at Gatsby for his low birth and his essential inability to ever be like one of them, which builds logically on his quack “master race” theories and you can see it absolutely gets under Gatsby’s skin in a way the mere allusions to his shady dealings would not, because Gatsby has been trying to remake himself into “one of them” and it gets at his creeping sense of failure. He has lied and bought his way into his position and maintains it only at a cost that seems to be taking its toll on him throughout the story. And you see Gatsby finally really lose it: and instead of “looking like he killed a man”, DiCaprio actually punches him in the face, and then you know the jig is up. He has publicly, irretrievably lost his suave detachment (showing that the accusations hit home) and revealed himself as a violent thug, not the Oxford man of Queensbury rules.  It is not just Daisy who turns away, but Nick, and Jordan, and to some extent the audience: the fiction of millionaire, debonair Gatsby can no longer be credibly maintained, even though he tries to patch it back together.
I think the other genius stroke in Luhrmann’s film is the casting of Indian Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan as Meyer Wolfshiem. He is suitably exotic, and creepy, exuding a feeling of mysterious wealth to capture the part, which Fitzgerald wrote as a shameless “stock” Jewish character. The unconscious anti-Semitism embedded in the text reminded me “House of Mirth”, but at least there Wharton was able to rise above it. Minus points for Fitzgerald on this one. I also like the speakeasy setting in which Wolfshiem first appears, with the chorus girls who fascinate Tom, even though he is a racist - what we deny has a way of coming out twisted.

One of the things that continues to puzzle me about Gatsby is why the narrator (and reader) should find him any different than the other people, like Tom and Daisy and Jordan, that the book finally comes to reject:
They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . . Chapter 9.
Gatsby is equally selfish (a user of other people, e.g. his cultivation of Nick as a personal “friend” for his connection to Daisy), but I suppose you might distinguish him by saying at least his selfishness and using people for his own ends has someone else (Daisy) as its goal, and he is willing to sacrifice himself for her, and that, perhaps, make him more admirable. I think a lot of the change in tone – where Gatsby goes from being a rich playboy who throws parties to an almost Christ-like figure (despised, rejected, a man of sorrows, as Messiah goes), is actually due to the deep misanthropy buried in the book. Fitzgerald goes out of his way to describe the selfishness of the party goers and contrasts the crowds who came for the fun with the solitary funeral no one wants to attend. There is another, crueler, better, scene in Chapter 6 in which Tom and two of his acquaintances impose themselves on Gatsby’s hospitality and barely conceal their disinterest in their host. It is a particularly good scene because Gatsby falls for it and is surprised and disappointed when they leave him behind, and this makes him more pathetic and more human than the aloof rich man who doesn’t go to his own parties that we are introduced to in the beginning. Nick, on Gatsby’s behalf, tries to get one, any one, of Gatsby’s previous “friends” to attend the funeral, but he has been abandoned, and this draws Nick, and the reader, I think, closer to him retrospectively. BUT. I also think Fitzgerald leaves a few things out: for instance, Jay’s father does attend (that counts as one person, doesn’t it?), and moreover, this is a man whom Gatsby rejected. He has acted throughout in an obsessive, single-minded way that turned people (Nick, Jordan), into instruments for his own ends. He has built a life based on secrets, which necessitates keeping people at a distance, and engaged in purely mercenary business dealings for the sake of amassing his fortune to win Daisy. I don’t know, with the inclusion of Jay’s father, whether Fitzgerald has any awareness of Gatsby’s own role in creating a loveless, disconnected life for himself, but I tend to read the book as “not”: I think Fitzgerald put too much of his own personal sorrow and contempt for the humanity he associated with and got wrapped up in it. I am reminded, in contrast, by that extraordinary scene in Christmas Carol which always struck me as a child, in which Marley shows Scrooge the ghosts outside his window:
Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a doorstep- The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.
Marley says (a little earlier, but in the same vein):
'Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed… Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness! Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!'

'But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,' faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

 'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'
It is hard to feel too deeply the pathos of Gatsby’s alienation from this perspective. It is, nonetheless, a tremendous book, beautifully written, and worth the read as an adult, if you have not already gone back to pick it up again.