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 21^st century, reading Hawthorne’s work from the 19^th, about events that are supposed to have taken place in the 17^th, 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 19^th 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 21^st 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

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.

In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust

How Proust Can Change Your Life

I got into Proust because of Alain de Botton’s delightful book, How Proust Can Change Your Life. This is still one of my favorite books to read, and reread, and I believe it captures the best of Proust.

Where Proust is brilliant, I think, is his passionate interest in phenomenology - pages devoted to describing the process of falling, or almost falling, or just awakening from sleep, the "madeleine" experience of vivid, flashback memory that seems as if the past has temporarily re-inhabited the present moment. A novel is both a strange way to undertake an examination of the experience of consciousness more appropriate to a psychological or philosophical study, but also a particularly well-suited format, since the novel can reveal the subjective experience of its characters.

Proust has an amazing gift, often reminiscent of Jane Austen, of observing the most subtle human interactions, often where one thing is said, but another is felt. And it is worth reading the 7-volumn novel, if only for his utterly unique style and minute attention to such details.

Where Proust is not brilliant - in my opinion, and I realize there is always a degree of arrogance in criticizing a great author - is in his depiction of the relationships of men and women, which forms an enormous part of the novel. When Austen makes an observation about human nature, it tends to ring true for me, but I found I frequently raised an eyebrow at Proust's: he assumes a universality to what seems to me to be a very particular, individual experience of love, if you can call it that. 


The novel is transparently autobiographical in many ways (and part wishfull fulfillment) in others, and at least to me, almost impossible to understand without knowing something of Proust's own life - I took a break in between Vol. 2 and 3 to read William C. Carter's biography, which I recommend highly. Proust suffered from intensely acute sensory nerves (I blame the deprivations of 1870-1 siege of Paris when Proust's mother was pregnant), and bizarrely torturous love-hate relationship with his mother, and semi-closeted homosexuality, all of which make their mark on the novel, as I read it. 

One of the problems with this is that Proust transposes the possessive insanity of his maternal relationship on to his romantic relationships, and then generalizes to all mankind, as well as the difficulties and conflicting emotions of homosexual relations in a time when homosexuality was not socially acceptable and mapping them on to heterosexual relations, and generalizing from it. I am not the first to find Proust's female characters (Gilberte and Albertine in particular) somewhat implausible and certainly not representative of women I know.

Most of all, Proust is missing the compassion that should come with intense insight into human interactions. Austen always treats her characters, even the most egregious, with a gentle humor, but Proust's account of a similar social engagement will be scathing in its depiction of hypocrisy, and the way his characters treat each other is frequently cruel (Mme. Verdurin's "little clan" is particularly horrid) and robs the book of pleasantness it would otherwise have.

It is also unclear to me, particularly in the "Albertine" section, which I found the hardest to read, how self-aware Proust is. There is an intense self-absorption in his feelings, particularly his jealousy, and the ways in which he is cruel and controlling, and I am not at all sure if this is an author (older, wiser) describing the folly of his previous self, or someone reliving (and fantasizing about) what he felt and did, or would have liked to have said and done. His insistence on possessing, controlling, spying on Albertine long after he has admittedly ceased to love or even respect her, becomes masochistic. The surprise is not that Albertine flees, but that she stays so long, but I can't tell whether Proust, the author, understands his own role in perpetuating his, and her, misery.

My other criticism of Proust as an author, although this is a more difficult one to make, is that in many instances he appears to have simply plagiarized from real life, to the degree that people were recognized and recognized themselves when the books were published. Baron de Charlus is indisputably a brilliant, fascinating character, but Proust appears to have almost "lifted" him from the very real Robert de Montesquiou. Of course, Thomas Mann, and many other great novelists, have done the same thing, and one has to say they do make for characters that feel intensely "real", but there is something...distasteful about stealing someone else's private identity and working it for one's own ends. Robert de Montesquiou reportedly was not at all pleased with his depiction.


Each of the volumes just about falls off a cliff: I have never had the same experience of reading the last page and being surprised not to find another. There is only the barest sense of a plot, and because of this things never feel quite finished (in fact, Proust never did completely finish rewriting and inserting new paragraphs into his work. I suspect he would have gone on doing this, regardless of how long he lived). After you read the novel, it is difficult to come away feeling "done", and so I read some of the secondary criticism available. Some, like me, find his analysis of male-female relationships dissatisfying, others seemed to feel they were right on target and spoke to the human condition. I think the best essay I read compared Proust's style to Cubism, and this gave me another window into the novel and its value. Proust will often attribute a motive to a character, or even to his narrator, but then follow it with a series of "or"s - not one or two, but four or five different, motivations, which is very strange. As a reader you want to say, "You're the author, don't you know?", but I found I gradually became accustomed to this and even grew to appreciate his compulsively presenting the same speech or action from many different angles simultaneously: there were so many co-existing possibilities that none of them could be ruled out, even for the "I" of the narrator. And really, how certain are we that our own motives are as singular and easily identifiable as we believe?

Reading a novel like In Search of Lost Time makes strong case, I think, for e-readers. If at any point I had held in my hand the physical reminder of how far I had to go, how much remained (how little had been accomplished in terms of plot), I think I would have been tempted to chuck the whole project, but one keeps hitting the "next page" button until suddenly there is no next page, and then you download the next novel, blissfully ignorant of what a long, dull slog most of it will be ahead. I say "dull" tongue-in-cheek, but the meanderings of Proust's mind, constantly revising itself, do not make for a cliff-hanger, page-turner, who-dunnit of a book. One of the things one can say as a recommendation for reading In Search of Lost Time is that it has an Everest-like quality that puts everything else in perspective. I find it easier to read other long, not-very-gripping, novels (Melville's very strange Pierre springs to mind) because of Proust. It is amazing what you can read when you let go of the need to be interested in every page - that sounds odd, no doubt, but when one ceases to expect to be enthralled at each step, one relaxes and has the liberty of reading something that may have cumulative value.

If you want the "short version" (best of Proust), I recommend, first, Alain de Botton's book, which I have said, draws lessons from Proust's style and work in a fashion that is clever, light, and charming. To read Proust himself, I would recommend the first and last volumes as representative of the whole and containing the best material. There is a quite good film, Time Regained (1999) with Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich (in French!), among others, which deals principally with the events of the last volume. There are time and perspective shifts and symbolic elements, which make the movie initially difficult (I recall it made no sense to me the first time I saw it), but which I felt (after finishing the novel) best captured the flavor and main themes of Proust's work.

***

I've been on a biography reading kick lately, and I find I owe an apology to Proust. I criticized him in my review of In Search of Lost Time for creating a wholly unbelievable mismash of a relationship between the Narrator and Albertine, which dominates the central volumes of the book, but I actually just ran across an almost identical description in Cary Grant's ill-fated seven month marriage to Virginia Cherrill whom he obviously had ceased to love, but whose possible, imaginary, unfaithfulness tormented him. He did, in fact, have her followed, the way Proust describes the Narrator setting spies and asking around after Albertine.