[Via Golden Age Comic Book Stories]
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Login
Month Archive
This Month
Search
|
Wednesday, August 11
A PULP COVER FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 11 Aug 2010 12:38 AM PDT
Thursday, July 8
HIS TOWN
by
Lloydville
on Thu 08 Jul 2010 06:51 AM PDT
 In Part One of this report, Paul Zahl, in pilgrimage mode, located, briefly viewed and photographed the former home of the late novelist James Gould Cozzens at the bottom of a hill outside Lambertville, New Jesrsey. Then he decided to go back up the hill in search of a man he'd been told might have some information about Cozzens during his time of residency in the area. Paul had been directed to this "man on the hill", no fool as it turned out, quite by chance, by a woman he'd met who was out walking on the road that ran past the old Cozzens house. Here, in the pilgrim's own words, is a report of what ensued: "A VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUYNHNMS" — Part Two He was there in his house on the hill, and became a fund of information. We sat in his gazebo -- you couldn't help thinking of Marjorie Penrose and the scene in the summer house, recreated well by John Sturges in the 1961 Hollywood version of By Love Possessed -- and he told me quite a bit. It turns out Cozzens was a recluse, and kept completely to himself, though he was sometimes spotted in town doing the shopping with a "short dark woman". That was Bernice Baumgarten, his wife, known in Cozzens's journals as "S". My new and welcoming acquaintance told me more, mainly about the subsequent history of the house, and also the history of some well known neighbors. On the basis of "Bingo!", I decided to drive down in to Lambertville itself and take a look around. That turned out to be a good decision. This is because Lambertville leaps, simply leaps, out of the Cozzens novels. It is a smaller "Brocton" (By Love Possessed), a quieter "Childersburg" (The Just and the Unjust).  I parked on a side street during a garden club tour of the old houses. You can see the town "square", presided over by a memorial to Civil War dead, a bandstand, and an old mill. The Lambertville City Hall (being nicely restored) [see the photograph at the head of this piece] is across the street, together with a spacious private house that could stand in beautifully for "Brocton's" "Union League Club":  The Episcopal church is one block up the street, a little Gothic gem that could use some exterior work:  There was a sadness incipient to this old church building, a feeling shared by the stone cherub weeping on the ground, just to the right of the main entrance to the church, the entrance from which, as it were, Judge Lowe and Arthur Winner, Jr. in a scene from By Love Possessed, who were ushering that Sunday morning, spied Colonel Minton rushing over to the church to give them a piece of very bad news.  On the way out of town, I photographed a large and archetypal Victorian mansion, now a retirement home, that is exactly the kind of house that Cozzens describes on Greenwood Avenue in the same novel. It is just such a building that becomes Arthur Winner's destination for his famous -- I think, epic -- walk from the Detweiler house to his mother's, during the final hour of Cozzens's sublime story:  About a mile further along, now beginning to approach "Carrs Farm" again -- Cozzens's old house, which I had found, Jumping Jehosaphat! and to which I was returning for a last look -- the road suddenly turned into "Roylan". "Roylan" is the section of homes outside "Brocton" where the doctors and lawyers of the town in By Love Possessed have built their newer residences. "Roylan" is envisaged well in Hollywood's version of the novel and is embodied today right outside Lambertville:  Then it was back down the hill to non-welcoming "Carrs Farm". I photographed the "Keep Out" signs, as well as a contrasting entrance shingle to the farm across the road. Two final notes concerning a successful pilgrimage. I didn't used to believe in "karma", and am still a little hesitant to use the term. (This is for religious and even cultural sensibilities that are my own.) But "karma" does express a little of what I felt reflecting on those stark unmistakable "No Trespassing" signs. James Gould Cozzens was a marvelous writer, and a greater thinker. He tells it like it is, like it still is, like it always has been, and like it's going to be be as long as human beings walk the earth. But he didn't like them, human beings, and it showed in his life -- a little less in his work.  Whatever's going on at the end of Goat Hill Road -- and that's no business of mine, or probably anybody else's -- the signal is unchanged. The inspired "hermit of Lambertville" wasn't the only one who wanted his privacy and solitude. The old place has not broken its spell. On the other hand -- and this I owe to my "walker" friend -- another detail came out. I told her that James Gould Cozzens was an avid gardener, a serious student of roses. Who doesn't like a gardener? She replied: "Well, that's interesting. Every year about this time I always see a rose of uncommon beauty blooming along the fence in front of Carrs Farm. It's not like any other rose I have ever seen. I say to myself, why don't you pick it? After all, it comes back year after year and is covered with vines and overgrowth anyway. Why don't you pick it? (I never do.) But," she continued, "I always wonder, where did that rose come from?"  [Above, the shingle across the road from the perpetually "posted" property of Carrs Farm.] I made a left off of Goat Hill Road, under a huge electric pylon, by the way, which would have caused Cozzens and his wife to move away in exactly five minutes. They did, as it turned out, in 1958, after the writer was done near to death by the "New York critics", as he saw it. But I turned homeward happy, happy that I had found Carrs Farm, and "Brocton", and the story of Cozzens rambling rose. Tuesday, June 22
OCCULT DETECTION
by
Lloydville
on Tue 22 Jun 2010 12:35 AM PDT
 Paul Zahl remembers Dr. Jules de Grandin, occult detective, and his creator Seabury Quinn: IN MEMORIAM: Jules de Grandin The homage to the Weird Tales illustrator Virgil Finlay (1914-1971) which has appeared on the Golden Age Comic Book Stories website (June 16, 2010) is evocative and beautiful, not to mention haunting. Square in the middle of the illustrations presented are two old portraits, from the late 1920s, of "Dr. de Grandin" and "Dr. Trowbridge". These were great men of the magazine Weird Tales; and I would like to give a short eulogy to one of them. He is Jules de Grandin, occult detective extraordinaire. Jules de Grandin was a French-born private investigator who lived in the fictive town of Harrisonville, New Jersey, outside of New York City. He was the creation of the writer Seabury Quinn (1889-1969), who directed funerals by day and wrote horror stories by night. Quinn had a fine eye for the macabre detail, and an imagination that created unusual supernatural situations that were rarely disgusting but often eye-catching. They lurked in the memory. The occult detective was usually accompanied by his medical friend Dr. Trowbridge [below], a fairly sceptical "liberal", if occasionally moralistic. They lived and worked in Harrisonville, which, incidentally, was pure James-Gould-Cozzens country. That is, the old established families were Episcopalian; the professional ones, Presbyterian or Methodist; the immigrants, mostly Italian and Central European, Catholic; the blacks and poor-whites, Baptists or non-denominational evangelical. I single out the religious aspect, because most of the Jules de Grandin stories involve occult incursions into real life that are ultimately defeated by some sort of religious talisman.  Jules de Grandin is highly educated, most cosmopolitan, and you can't pull the wool over his eyes, ever! He reminds me a little of Agatha Christie's more mainstream character, Hercule Poirot. But he, unlike Poirot, deals with vampires (in F. Scott Fitzgerald suburbs), werewolves (in Little Italy), or Asian gurus and yogis (in Scarsdale). Beautiful "Society" girls get crucified on the ninth hole of the Harrisonville Golf Club. Evil non-sectarian clergymen cause young people to commit suicide. International satanic 'combines' kidnap young women at wedding rehearsals in Episcopal churches.  That particular kidnapping, by the way, is one of Seabury Quinn's great set-pieces. It takes place in the 1932 novella entitled The Devil's Bride; and in it the heroine is abducted right under the nose of Doctor Bentley, the Rector of St. Chrysostom's, during the Friday afternoon rehearsal for her wedding the following day. Quinn, like his much more mainstream contemporary James Gould Cozzens, 'gets' the situation he is describing. When I came across that particular story, I was simply stunned. Had Seabury Quinn been sitting in the back of the church during the every-Friday-afternoon-at-five rehearsal that is still a characteristic of church life in this country? Two great stories involving Jules de Grandin -- both available in paperback anthologies of Quinn's work published in the mid-1970s -- are the 1928 "Restless Souls" and the 1930 "The Brain Thief". In "Restless Souls" de Grandin administers a mercy-killing to a young woman who has become a vampire and who is actually and really in (human) love with a predatory vampire. Our hero makes it possible for the woman to bring her love for this (creep) to fruition, simply out of compassion for her obsessive state. Then he takes a further step of compassion, and it is unaffectedly touching. It is also unexpected.  In "The Brain Thief" an Asian mentalist succeeds in hypnotizing two young marrieds in Harrisonville into deserting their respective (good) spouses,;carrying on an outrageous public affair, scandalizing the whole town; and then marrying one another, and having children by one another -- only to be malignantly snapped out of it by the mentalist, thereby triggering their suicides from guilt and shame. For the period in which it was written, "The Brain Thief" is shocking. Even for now, it is upsetting. Although the villain is taken care of, the story ends on a note of inevitable tragedy that can sear itself into you. If you like horror fiction of any voltage, from Baring-Gould (low voltage) to Clive Barker (high voltage), you will like the Jules de Grandin stories of Seabury Quinn. You will also like the illustrations of Virgil Finlay, who illustrated quite a few of them. You may also appreciate the broadly tolerant WASP context of many of the stories, as well the diverse undersides of that world, which are constantly surfacing, as in "The Brain Thief", and causing carnage.  Finally, can I say a word about Jules de Grandin's religion? It figures in the stories. You can't escape it. And it is fairly wonderful, and . . . contemporary. In a gruesome little tale from 1927 entitled "The Curse of Everard Maundy", the named villain is a non-sectarian revivalist, a thorough squid as it turns out. When Jules de Grandin informs Dr. Trowbridge that they will be attending one of Maundy's services, Dr. Trowbridge comments, "But aren't you a Catholic, de Grandin?" This is the great one's reply: "Who can say? My father was a Huguenot of the Huguenots; a several times great-grand-sire of his cut his way to freedom through the Paris streets on the fateful night of August 24, 1572. My mother was convent-bred, and as pious as anyone with a sense of humor and the gift of thinking for herself could well be. One of my uncles -- he for whom I was named -- was like a blood brother to Darwin the magnificent, and Huxley the scarcely less magnificent, also. "Me, I am" -- he elevated his eyebrows and shoulders at once and pursed his lips comically -- "what should a man with such a heritage be, my friend?" Now that is just simply too good. Evocations of John Calvin, Audrey Hepburn, and Aldous Huxley: for what more could you ask? Here is to Jules de Grandin, and to his great creator, and to his excellent illustrator. Requiescent in pace. Sunday, June 13
BY LOVE POSSESSED — PART ONE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 13 Jun 2010 12:10 AM PDT
 The first part of a remarkable two-part essay by Paul Zahl on the James Gould Cozzens novel By Love Possessed and its screen adaptation by John Sturges. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (Part One): The once extremely popular novel of the year 1957 entitled By Love Possessed, written by James Gould Cozzens, was made into a Hollywood movie in 1960 and released the following year. The novel tells the story of Arthur Winner, Jr., a very sane and prudent attorney living in a small town in mid-Atlantic America, as his life unravels over a period of 49 hours. Arthur Winner, who is always referred to in the novel as "Arthur Winner", navigates defending a pretty indefensible young man, for whom Arthur Winner feels personally responsible, from a charge of rape; as well as helping a legion of citizens of Brocton, their small town, with their unending personal, legal, and financial problems. Somewhat priggish -- that is what the many hostile critics of By Love Possessed called Arthur Winner -- but also unflappably calm, Arthur Winner succeeds in holding the wolf of anxiety at the door, until . . . Because I hope this post may succeed in making you want to read the book, I won't give away what becomes of the limits of Arthur Winner's ability to keep it together. I will say that the brilliant and wise hero is, credibly, reduced to a humbled condition, almost a desperate condition. And, partly through the aid of his friend and law partner Julius Penrose, Arthur Winner finds the hidden door, the still small voice of an answer, through the box canyon of his shattering humiliations and disappointments. The novel's resolution is noble, lyrical, and possibly true . . . to life. Because By Love Possessed was a number one best-seller for many months -- something close to a national sensation in the fall of 1957 -- it was filmed as an "A" production in 1960 by an independent production company releasing through United Artists. The movie version starred Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. as Arthur Winner, Jason Robards, Jr. as Julius Penrose, and Lana Turner as Marjorie Penrose, the extra-marital love interest of the Man of Reason, Arthur Winner. Other familiar actors played supporting roles, such as George Hamilton, Thomas Mitchell, Susan Kohner, and Barbara Bel Geddes. By Love Possessed was directed by John Sturges, who also directed The Magnificent Seven, released in 1960. John Dennis wrote the screenplay, which was a big challenge, as the novel is actually an epic, with many interlocking characters and a lot of talk and a lot of ideas. The music, which is wonderful in a kind of 1950s soap-opera manner, was composed by Elmer Bernstein.  I want to say something about movies and books in relation to a comparison of the two versions we have of By Love Possessed. But first, two additional facts about it: This novel became the object of a famous attack in print by Dwight MacDonald, in the January 1958 issue of Commentary magazine. Because Cozzens refused to take the trouble to check the copy for a Time magazine cover story about him and By Love Possessed, several extremely damaging statements, which he claimed later were not his words at all but the words of the two hostile writers who interviewed him, had appeared in print, for the country to see. They made Cozzens sound like a social snob, who was also bigoted toward African-Americans and Jews. Although he was a snob -- more a "meritocracy"-type snob than a WASP snob -- he was not a racist. His 1949 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Guard of Honor had exposed racial segregation in the Air Force, taking the lid off a subject that many people did not like to talk about then. Cozzens was also not anti-Semitic. His only real friend, for he was a hermit in effect, a little like J. D. Salinger in that way, was his wife. And his wife was Jewish, a well known literary agent in Manhattan and a liberal Democrat. Nevertheless, certain attitudes of some of the characters in By Love Possessed are intolerant. So Dwight MacDonald, stoning the book and its reclusive author, believed he was taking on "Eisenhower-era" intolerance and complacency.  James Gould Cozzens' career never recovered from MacDonald's attack, which was widely accepted as being true and accurate. The January 1958 attack on Cozzens was his Nightmare on Elm Street. He had written incisively and even shatteringly, I believe, about "Ivy League" characters in a small mid-Atlantic town, a town full of Water Streets, and Market Streets, and Elm Streets; and then paid a nightmarish price for it. You can read about the personal effects and "after birth" of the abuse he took from the critics, in the journals he kept from 1960 to 1964 when he was living in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Oh, and Cozzens was also accused of being anti-Catholic. And anti-Catholic he was, no doubt about it. Religiously, the writer saw himself as a "P. E. agnostic" (i.e., Protestant Episcopal agnostic), who regarded most expressions of Christianity as superstitious.  The second fact I need to mention about the book in relation to the movie is that the author saw the Hollywood version twice and wrote down his reactions. This is how James Gould Cozzens reported his first viewing of By Love Possessed in his journals [VII 19-VII 22 (1961)]: By Love Possessed was opening at the Capitol [i.e., in New York City]: and though I thought little of the idea, at loose ends after lunch at the Harvard Club [above] I followed S.'s [i.e., his wife's] suggestion and went up. I must admit I got several surprises. For one thing, the photography was simply and even, sometimes, amazingly, beautiful. For another, the direction gave constant signs of intelligence, especially in small touches, often faithfully taken from the book. When law, for instance, was touched on, the to-be-expected nonsense was carefully not made of it. The simplification, by sometimes telescoping, sometimes eliminating characters obviously necessary if the material was to be got into any actable form, showed evident judgment. Flabbergasted, I can only say that, taken all in all, I found it a good deal better than the critics (who probably missed all the good careful small points) claiming it made a mess of the book, had allowed. Later, on April 21st, 1962, Cozzens saw the movie again, this time with his wife. Then it was showing in Williamstown: S. hadn't seen the By Love Possessed film and when it turned up (second time around) at the Spring St. theatre today insisted on going. Seeing it a second time, I was again impressed by much really beautiful photography, and a number of excellences of small detail and minor casting -- the man, whoever he was, cast as "Dr. Shaw" [i.e., Everett Sloane] in the trifling part allowed him was almost disconcerting, he was so exactly in face and manner what I was seeing as I wrote. But it was as plain as ever that the job they undertook was impossible: the book defeated them at every turn and was indeed specifically intended to. [PZ's Italics.] A play, an acted entertainment by definition, can't be "honest" exhibiting True Experience. Actors act "parts": plays must provide "parts". The whole basis is "Let's Pretend". Anything "real" or "true" will destroy or at any rate vitiate this basis. Life is life, not a play: a play is a play, not life. It seems to follow that an effective play must cut loose from considerations of: is this probable? (or even: is this possible?) and proceed on the principle of, say, Hamlet. Never mind whether this situation makes sense, never mind if it's obviously impossible. Assume it to be the situation: Now, what next? I think this has to be interesting to people who are interested in movies. Here is a deep and dense novel -- even the people who hated it admired its craft and structure, and its verisimilitude to life as lived by people like that -- which was translated into a lavish Hollywood production with a famous star and the most costly energies of studio film-making. And the novel's author, who rarely went to movies and rarely talked to people or even saw them on the street, approved of the full treatment.  Now, with the book in one hand -- my wife's family owned a first-edition with its famous cover of the "Omnia vincit amor" clock [the paperback edition, with the same cover design, is pictured above] -- and a videotape of the movie in the other ("Miss Turner is as fine as a red hot flame!"), I would like to compare the two, looking for similarities and disparities. Since I love the book, admiring absolutely its reportorial and philosophical ambition, I feel a little vulnerable. But here goes . . . Click on the link below for the second part of this essay: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (Part Two)
BY LOVE POSSESSED — PART TWO
by
Lloydville
on Sun 13 Jun 2010 12:07 AM PDT
 Part two of Paul Zahl's essay on the novel By Love Possessed and its screen adaptation: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (Part Two) Arthur Winner's "nightmare on Elm Street" begins when a Roman Catholic lady friend of Marjorie Penrose attempts to convert him to the true church in the setting of a rose garden that bears remorseful memories of his affair with Marjorie, the wife of his law partner. This Mrs. Pratt corners Arthur Winner and very skillfully, and craftily, turns the conversation in the direction of his past sins, which Marjorie has apparently confessed to her. Just when the Man of Reason thinks he is, as usual, in quiet control of things, Mrs. Pratt harpoons him. She spears him straight to the heart: "Thou art the man". Arthur Winner is only saved from complete humiliation by the appearance, in the underbrush, of a snake! From this point on, the humbled hero of By Love Possessed is so fully de-constructed that he has no choice but to take his famous literary walk from the steps of Christ Church (Episcopal), where he has been ushering at the Sunday morning service and where he is to become the next Senior Warden, over to the crucial Detweiler House, then past the Courthouse and the Christ Church again, past his law office, past the Union League Club (moribund and soon to close), past the storefronts of Main Street and beyond, up the street where the old families of Brocton used to live, right up to the entrance of the house in which he was born and where his mother still lives, to make his great and ever remembered (for those who read the book) entrance, calling upstairs to his aunt, his mother, and his wife. This is Arthur's nightmare, a universal dereliction of disillusionment, by which he must catch at hope in a new way. I, for one, find the last five pages of By Love Possessed satisfying, real, and ennobling. They took me by surprise. I think about them every day.  How does the movie version envisage the emotionally overwhelming finish of the book? The answer is, not very well. As Cozzens himself remarked, in his journal entry describing his second viewing of the movie in Williamstown, the script writer had collapsed some characters, and had to diminish the inwardness of the book. So much of this novel is inner dialogue, inner qualifyings, inner voices of contradiction, and association; inner asides, both cruel and kind. Thus the cascading, baroque language of the book is lost in the movie. Of course it is lost. The visual image is not the same as the written word. In its ambitious attempt to put this complicated story in a narrative without flashback, into a linear tale which takes you somewhere, the movie fails. I don't see how anyone would really dissent from that judgment. By Love Possessed The Movie flattens everything out. It has only its story to tell, brick by brick, or step by step. No one has gotten inside the story and then developed it cinematically, either through the composition or the editing. The building and billowing mood of the book, and also the philosophy of resignation that the book embodies: they're not on film. Only in two sections, so far as I can see, do the director and crew get under the story, to what it is really about -- which is the shipwreck of love that attempts to possess, the forms of love that try to possess the loved object. Loving that possesses the lover, and thus is about the lover rather than the beloved -- whether it be the love of a parent for a child, of a husband for a wife, of a high-school girlfriend for her selfish boyfriend, of an old patrician man for his reputation in the town, or, in a case so important to this novel, of a "responsible" older sister for her feckless younger brother -- possessive love makes catastrophes of human relationships. The book is about the victory, in utter failure, of a man who overcomes the possessiveness of love in order to, well, live, and then, counter-intuitively, love. That man is Arthur Winner. What Arthur Winner stumbles on, you might say, is the victory of resignation, the acquiescence of defeat which results in a simple solution of simply taking the next step in good faith. Only in two sections of By Love Possessed The Movie is the deeper interest of this material expressed visually. There's a lot more footage outside of these two sections, but it has an almost indifferent quality of detachment (the wrong kind), which is not philosophical detachment but rather, "I think we'd better film this thing as quickly as possible, grin and bear it, and get our product into theaters while people can still remember reading the book a couple years ago."  The one section of the film that catches some fire is the scene of Marjorie Penrose (Lana Turner) coming on strong to Arthur Winner (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) in the Victorian "wedding cake" summer house behind his home in Roylan, the little enclave just outside Brocton where the professional families live. This is a memorable scene in the book, persuasively underlined by thunder and lightning, the last heat of summer in the autumn leaves, and the very beautiful garden building in which the conversation takes place. The set dressers here, the sound effects and music, the roll of the fallen leaves, the effective and dramatic lighting, and the two performances themselves all come together to evoke the spirit of the book. I guess there is nothing particularly cinematic to see, neither in the camera movements nor in the editing. But the technicolor style, with that swirling music, kind of takes your breath away. For five minutes. I imagine James Gould Cozzens was pleased with this scene. The message of the scene( if it could be put into words?): A nice and ordered Georgian garden with a decorous Victorian summer house, and it's all about to be ruined, by a love that possesses its demoniacs. The second and for my money the only other sequence in By Love Possessed The Movie that works, is the opening credits. They are very good. Why very good? Because they capture, in just a few expertly edited exterior shots and one long pan, the emotional, geographical context of the story, this story of one man's struggle to find the answer to the question of how and also why it can be possible to live in the presence of hope. The camera shows two churches around the town square, one Episcopal, one "mainstream" Protestant; the Court House; the Union League Club, dying home to the old and increasingly few first families of Brocton; and a few old and tired 19th Century mansions still in use. It feels a little like the main square of Columbus, Ohio, tho' smaller; or the main square of Columbus, Georgia, about the same size. Then, at the end of the credits, as "Directed by John Sturges" flickers on, and off, you see Arthur Winner, briskly but not hurriedly, calmly but not unconcerned, striding, or rather, simply walking, across that "Brocton Square". The credits for By Love Possessed The Movie capture the atmosphere the book projects. They are the high point of the film. "Ain't that peculiar? (Peculiar as can be)": The story is fully captured in "second unit" work, with not a word spoken nor any exposition offered. There is a lot you could say about this. We have a book that is possibly great -- its controversy never diminished its claim, not self-made, to gravity. By Love Possessed, I repeat, is a grave and serious book. We also have a movie version that was probably produced simply and almost only to capitalize financially on the popular success of the novel. And so the movie tells its story, the best it can, having to cut the inwardness of the source, the complexity of the plot, several important characters, and certainly the religious concerns of the source. (The Episcopal church in Brocton, together with its young , well educated, and sincere if inexperienced Rector, The Reverend Whitmore Trowbridge, S. T. D., figures importantly in By Love Possessed; and Cozzens's depiction of a Sunday service of Morning Prayer is absolutely the last word in clinical portraits of what they are actually like. I know what they are like.) There is nothing controversial in the movie version -- no anti-Catholicism, no "Uncle Toms", no intolerant remarks about New York lawyers from the failing, unsteady patriarch Noah Tuttle, none of that! Only the references to sex have been kept, but even there, oddly enough, the better sex is in the book and describes a happily married couple making love. Here I close. Let me confess something. I love this movie! It's not very good; it is actually boring; the camera set-ups and pacing are perfunctory; the actors sleep-walk through their parts, with the exception of Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., who does convey the vulnerable actuality of Arthur Winner; and the conclusion is rushed and overly happy. (The ending of the book is hopeful, but not happy.) Yet I love this movie. Why? Because it connects in visual form with some of the constructions my imagination had made on the basis of the words. The town, the lead character, the meeting by night in the summer house, the gushing, oceanic music -- these are there, right up in front of you. If Orson Welles had made this, it would have been a completely different result. It would not have been the book at all. Or it would have really been the book. If John Ford had made it . . . well, John Ford never would have made it. As it is, we have John Sturges's big but little piece of work. Although I will probably keep the novel with me until the day I die, and though I make no claims for the turgid tired movie it spun off, I will probably still keep the movie under my pillow, for the next six months. Monday, May 31
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
by
Lloydville
on Mon 31 May 2010 08:24 AM PDT
 I met a lady in the meads Full beautiful, a faery's child; Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild. I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long; For sideways would she lean, and sing A faery's song. Lines by John Keats, image by Frank Dicksee. Sunday, May 23
AN N. C. WYETH FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sun 23 May 2010 01:25 AM PDT
 A stunningly beautiful illustration for Kidnapped. Saturday, May 15
AN A. E. HOUSMAN POEM FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sat 15 May 2010 12:46 AM PDT
 WHEN I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say, ‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies But keep your fancy free.’ But I was one-and-twenty, No use to talk to me. When I was one-and-twenty I heard him say again, ‘The heart out of the bosom Was never given in vain; ’Tis paid with sighs a plenty And sold for endless rue.’ And I am two-and-twenty, And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true. Sunday, April 25
LUNAR
by
Lloydville
on Sun 25 Apr 2010 05:15 AM PDT
 Percy Bysshe Shelley howls at the moon: Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth, And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no object worth its constancy? [Image by John William Waterhouse.] Friday, April 23
THE SEA
by
Lloydville
on Fri 23 Apr 2010 02:14 AM PDT
 Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. -- Tennyson Thursday, April 22
THE ROSE OF THE WORLD
by
Lloydville
on Thu 22 Apr 2010 12:21 AM PDT
 William Butler Yeats's take on the Eternal Feminine: Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? For those red lips, with all their mournful pride, Mournful that no new wonder may betide, Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam, And Usna's children died. We and the labouring world are passing by: Amid men's souls, that waver and give place Like the pale waters in their wintry race, Under the passing stars, foam of the sky, Lives on this lonely face. Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode: Before you were, or any hearts to beat, Weary and kind one lingered by His seat; He made the world to be a grassy road Before her wandering feet. Saturday, March 27
A WINSOR MCCAY FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sat 27 Mar 2010 12:03 AM PDT
Sunday, March 14
JOAN-GIRL
by
Lloydville
on Sun 14 Mar 2010 11:10 AM PDT
 VISIONS OF THE JOAN-GIRL by Paul Zahl On January 9th, 1951 Jack Kerouac had a vision in St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York City. He wrote the vision down that night and sent it to Neal Cassady. It was published in 1995 in the Selected Letters 1940 - 1956, edited by Ann Charters, and is found on pages 281-293.  The letter hit me with a wallop, because it contradicts the reputation Kerouac has earned for misogyny. The letter is a religious vision concerning women, and also men, which embodies a catharsis of feeling and rue, on the part of the visionary, for the feelings of contempt that governed most of Kerouac's treatments of women in his work. It is made even more worthy of attention by the fact that four months later, in a letter dated May 22nd, Kerouac told Cassady to "pay no attention" to what he had written about women in January. He "regressed", in other words. And he never quite came back to this universal chord. In New Testament scholarship -- to make an abrupt cross-reference -- such textual "taking back" of an earlier testimony suggests the authenticity of the original statement. In other words, if St. James in the New Testament writes that he has concerns about some of the teachings he finds in the letters of St. Paul, this tells the modern scholar that the "odd" assertions from St. Paul concerning grace and law really did issue from the man himself. St. James wouldn't criticize St. Paul, that is, unless there had really been something there for him to criticize. Similarly, if Jesus enunciates something very radical, such as "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" within the context of a work that wants to make him All-Glowing and Tom-Terrific, then the fact that this saying of Jesus has not been deleted means that it was so strong in the memory of witnesses that later interpreters could not have cut it if they tried. Similarly, Kerouac on January 9th, 1951 experienced something very real, for him. The fact that he becomes uncomfortable with it in on May 22nd strengthens its veracity as a real dream, a real "touching of the foundations of his soul" (his words). This letter, which is quite sublime in its writing in my opinion, is worth quoting at length. I will do so with some interstitial personal commentary. A short summing-up, of this loaded, surprising material from the "Beat" pioneer, will follow. There are two further things to mention, before you read Kerouac's letter. It is a vision, his letter. It bursts over and upon him, and he is not expecting it. It is completely accidental, in fact, since he ducked into St. Patrick's only to find a place to take shelter from the busy-ness of Midtown. He did not know he would get caught up in a religious service, or novena. The letter recounts his vision, linked to a statue he sees and studies and thinks about. It is a vision which observes; and in observing one particular woman, seated in a pew in front of him, he begins to think about his wife, and then about his view of women in general, and finally, about men, in general. Secondly, Kerouac's letter is emotional. Everything begins to happen when he starts to cry. He is not able to explain his tears. Yet he moves thereby beyond the "aesthetic" (his word) to the sub-rational. That's when the "work" of the vision takes place. This is to say that the "aesthetic" carries him to the "emotional", and it is an awesome thing. Now, dear Reader, if you are willing and ready, Behold: TO NEAL CASSADY Jan. 9, 1951 (Richmond Hill, N.Y.) Dear Neal, To continue. A new experience has touched the foundation of my soul since I wrote you the last words last night . . . Kerouac sets the scene: I came into the Cathedral not only to get out of the bitter cold, but because, moments before, I had stood in Grand Central Station looking around with a futile sorrow for a place to sit and think. All there was -- marble floor, rushing crowds, dime lockers, bleak seatless spaces and bright vast corners. What a thing men have let themselves in for, in this New York! I hurried out in the cold and cut up 5th Avenue, past the (yes) Yale Club and past Harcourt Brace (yes) and swore and cursed; and cut right by the Doubleday Book store without deigning to go in and see if they had my book [i.e., his first published novel, The Town and the City] on display . . .  As you know, St. Patrick's is a Gothic cathedral, copied after Rheims or Chartres or whichever, with a rectory in the back, and a big department store across the street on 50th street. I . . . ducked . . . into the side entrance of the church. Now our hero must begin to "let go" of his "renegade Catholic" baggage, and also his heavy personal baggage: At first I sneered as all the commonplace "renegade Catholic" thoughts came to me in regimental order but soon I was lost in real sweet contemplation of what was going on . . . I put away all my worries of where to get a job, how to get to California next month, what to do about my poor wife whom I had been torturing in my subtle way lately, and just merely sat thinking in church . . . Kerouac suddenly invokes Dietrich Buxtehude! . . . so that you see . . . my first thoughts were superficial, or let's just say "aesthetic." Then something happens: Frankly, Neal, I don't know when it happened; when it was I began crying . . . It is as if the writer's ears now become opened, together with his eyes. He begins to take in what is actually going on around him. A tall athletic young priest was cutting up to make a sermon; simultaneously I noted how much the crowd had thickened; and before I knew it I was in the middle of a fullblown church service. Since I was in the church utterly given over to pure meditation I obediently kneeled, or stood, or sat at the young priest's behest and followed everyone else in so doing. He made several cryptic remarks evidently having to do with the novena everyone was on, and then began a sermon. Note that Kerouac has the reaction that many visitors to a church service have when the parish "announcements" are being made. He describes them as "cryptic". And so they are! (I have always tried to teach young ministers to make as few announcements as possible in church. Announcements disenfranchise visitors and give the impression of the church membership being a kind of club, with "cryptic" sharings. In most parishes, however, announcements grow, and Grow, and GROW. For my money, they are a sign of fading vision.) The priest now begins to speak. At first Kerouac misunderstands what is being said. He began talking about how "every ambitious woman wants to see her child become successful in industry, in a profession, in some constructive field." I slapped the side of my head in despair; for by this time my meditations had carried me far from this modern competitive world into thought of a simple and medieval character. I almost sneered. Then I noticed he was starting out this way for greater punch, because then he said, "What were the thoughts of the Virgin Mother on that first Christmas night with regard to her little son? For she knew, only poverty, humiliation and suffering could save him and she knew he was come for strange reasons into the world." And from there on this fine young priest made a beautiful sermon about the advantages of humility and piety in the invisible world that will surmount the pride and decadence of the visible. I agreed with him. I almost applauded . . . At this point Kerouac starts to think about the Virgin Mary. His attention is caught by a newly dedicated and consecrated statue in the Cathedral, of the Virgin Mary with her dead son -- the pieta, in other words. And now I must tell you of the Virgin Mary . . . I was just staring at what I think was a brand new statue of the Virgin Mary holding her Son in her arms after the crucifixion . . .  I was amazed to see so many young girls, shopgirls, kneeling around it at the white rail. I couldn't believe my eyes when saw first one, then another, then all of them reach out, touch the statue, touch the red flowers, and bow their heads . . . Kerouac now associates to his wife. He begins to think concretely about his most personal relationship, and his role in it. This is where, in my opinion, the letter gets really interesting. Suddenly I remembered what was wrong between my wife and myself in the past days; she'd said she felt like a "frog" sometimes in the midst of sexual intercourse. I remember it had irritated me . . . Also she never considered herself worth touching when she had a period. Most of all I thought of her -- on the impetus of seeing a girl exactly like her [my emphasis] in the pew in front of me -- with head bowed, kneeling, a shawl over her . . . humble head, and I almost cried to think of it. I saw how all of earthly life, with its gutty sufferings, really passes like a river through the body of a woman while the man, unknowing of these things and "clean", just cuts along arrogant. I saw how it is the woman who gives birth, and suffers, and has afterbirths dragged out of her, and navel cords snipped and knotted, and bleeds -- while the man boasts of his bloody prowesses . . . I had even been annoyed at the poor girl lately because she conducted long secret meditations of her own in the bedroom while I "wrote". "What are you thinking about?" I'd ask slyly. What's going on in her great soul now? I'd ask myself sarcastically. Bah, bah, bah, and all that; as if, and certainly BECAUSE I was a "writer", she, a mere girl, could not possibly have a soul like mine worthy of hours and of deep contemplation. Kerouac is recognizing the validity of someone other than himself.  If I had been a little boy of Galilee, and seen the humble women in shawls kneeling at the temple, what would I have thought of Miss Rheingold [i.e., a sexy woman on a billboard advertising beer] . . .? No, I saw that the girl has a soul . . . For if the burden on earth... could be lifted from one woman, then it may be lifted for another, or to be more precise, the burden is already lifted because the Virgin Mary was [this is a reference to the Assumption of Our Lady]; just as our sins are expiated by the sacrifice of the great Lord Jesus, without any of us having to be crucified on a cross. Kerouac now sums up what he has seen, in the form of the "Joan-girl" in front of him. Joan is the first name of his wife. No, the tall, humble Joan-girl in front of me, kneeling with bowed head, was a woman who dearly and sincerely prayed for the deliverance of her soul. Finally, or almost finally, Kerouac considers "men", and the vain-glory of the male. He writes through the eyes of child, "a little boy of Galilee": I further noticed that there were no young men in the church, only old ones; and I knew they were all out making money or being hoodlums with all their might. If I had been a little boy of Galilee . . . what would I have thought of the go-getter in his Brooks Brothers suit hurling himself through a revolving door with that arrogant scowl? I would have thought he was a scribe, or a pharisee, or a thief. If I had been a little boy of Galilee, and seen the old men praying at the Star, what would I have thought of the be-spatted executive hurrying from a conference. I would have thought he was Caesar. This is our world. A touching word comes out on prayer: I wished that the church was not only a sanctuary but a refuge for the poor, the humiliated, and the suffering; and I would gladly join in prayer . . . everybody kneeled: I gladly joined in; no other power on this earth could make me gladly kneel, or even stand up. Did I ever tell you about the time I was in the Navy madhouse and the Admiral of the Fleet came in? -- I was the only one who didn't stand up, all the other nuts did . . . Kerouac's letter to Neal Cassady dated January 9th, 1951 concludes with a sort of "coda", which I find personally touching, and satisfying. He changed his behavior toward his wife! It didn't last -- as our moments of loving inspiration seldom do -- but the vision "became flesh". For a day, at least, it became flesh. Here is how it went: In the subway everybody was going home to rest, instead of gathering in the Final Church of Eternal Joy, and I felt bad to see it . . . But when I came home I loved my wife, and kissed her tenderly, as she kissed me . . . Goodnight, sweet prince. Jack  From an historical point of view, a "lit-crit" point of view, this letter is significant because it documents a temporary change of attitude on the part of this American legend toward women. Kerouac's attitude toward women is sometimes summed up in his tossed-off remark, "Pretty girls make graves". As a poet immersed later in Buddhism, he was desirous, like Siddhartha, of avoiding re-birth. "Pretty girls", therefore, he regarded as the pathway to birth, the birth of babies who were metaphysically understood to be reluctant reincarnations of earlier, failed lives. Kerouac's view of birth, therefore of sex, and therefore of women, was not different in principle from George Harrison's in his mid-career lyric, "Keep me free from birth". But the result in Kerouac's case was an artist's attraction-repulsion to women that has damaged his critical reception. He is judged harshly for his suspicion of one half of . . . earthkind. Here, however, in this discursive 1951 meditation in church, his thoughts are drawn in a different direction. His observations, through the eye and through the ear, draw him into an association with the "Joan-girl" -- his own specific wife -- and then a judgment on men, as "scribes, pharisees, and thieves", which exist in a different zone. I hope that your reading of the letter has offered a kinder, gentler Kerouac. There is something else, though. Kerouac's vision that day came to him in connection with tears. Something "got through", but it was in connection with tears. I wonder sometimes why people cry in church. Happens all the time. People who are "normally" well- and tightly- put together, "lose it" during the singing of a hymn, or an illustration in a sermon, or something they see out of the corner of their eye. It's as if you go "out of your mind" for a minute, or "come to your senses", or are "touched" in a deep uncovered emotional part of you. As I say, this seems to happen all the time. It happened to me the other night. Just like it happened to Kerouac -- but it was me and not him. I stumbled across something I only dimly remembered. It was on YouTube, and I stumbled over something I only dimly remembered. It was the last two minutes or so of an 'X-Files' episode entitled "The Post-Modern Prometheus". I remembered it as a kind of visual 'send-up' of the James Whale Universal horror movies I loved so much as a child. In "The Post-Modern Prometheus", a "Frankenstein's-Monster" is located, by Mulder and Scully, and saved by them. The ending, however, I had not remembered. It takes place in a crowded nightclub, and Cher takes the stage -- at least a look-alike -- and belts out the song "Walking in Memphis". Not only does the 'Monster', who is seated at a table in the front row, together with Scully and Mulder, jump right up and dance ecstatically to the song -- that EXCELLENT song. But then Mulder beckons to Scully to join him on the floor. Our frosty and usually confused "couple" get the message, of the song and of the place. They dance together, romantically and intimately, and touchingly.  "Frankly, Neal, I began to cry." I began to cry. Really cry. All choked up. Tears of joy, tears of feeling -- feelings actually about my own wife, my own "Joan-Girl". Then I decided to write this piece. Ideas seem to come this way. You don't control them, or muster them up, or command them to appear. They come up through the emotions. But it's often the eye that gets the ball rolling. Friday, February 19
CRIME DOES NOT PAY
by
Lloydville
on Fri 19 Feb 2010 12:25 AM PST
 In the glory days (the 1940s and early 1950s) before the comic book industry began to censor itself, to ward off government censorship, comic books could and would show just about anything of a violent nature. Lurid, gruesome, graphic, they approached Elizabethan drama in their obsession with the bloody and the macabre. I doubt if any of them that came into the hands of young children really rotted the kids' brains or corrupted their morals. Young children know perfectly well, from their intuitions and their dreams, that the human psyche, and thus the real world, is filled with such horror. It is only grownups who try to pretend otherwise. A powerful art form was crippled by the state-induced censorship, though. Only today has the comic book reclaimed its right to range over the whole landscape of human experience, in the process producing some of the best fiction of our time. [Via Golden Age Comic Book Stories, the Internet's wonder site.] Tuesday, February 16
WALKING IN MEMPHIS
by
Lloydville
on Tue 16 Feb 2010 12:03 AM PST
 Some thoughts by Paul Zahl (of The Zahl File) on Jack Kerouac and his connection to Michael Curtiz's costume epic The Egyptian. Huh? Read on: The 1954 Hollywood movie The Egyptian, a big picture, with Jean Simmons and Michael Wilding, among many others, is hard to find -- all but impossible to find, in fact, until the days of Internet magic. (It's available on a Korean DVD.) It was produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and directed by Michael Curtiz. Curtiz had directed several big pictures, including Casablanca and Mildred Pierce, not to mention The Walking Dead and Mystery of the Wax Museum. The Egyptian tells the story of a young doctor in Ancient Egypt -- meaning Thebes, Memphis, and Luxor -- who is ensnared pitifully by a temptress known as the "Woman of Babylon", completely loses his self-respect, together with everything he owns as well as his post as Physician to Pharaoh, and finally recreates himself as a healer wandering throughout the Ancient World. He prospers, only to return home to lose his true and loyal love, played by Jean Simmons, and to become caught up in the failed but sublime One God movement of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. In a touching scene that works dramatically and cinematically, Sinuhe, the doctor, is converted to monotheism. After all his sad experience of life, Sinuhe seeks monastic solitude in the desert, a sadder man but much wiser.  The Egyptian is pretty good. The sets are gorgeous, the camera is fluid and assured, the acting (with the exception of Gene Tierney, who is miscast as Pharaoh's sister) confident if a little wooden, and the matte paintings and miniatures convincing. Personally, I like the religion of the film, with Akhenaten's confession of his universal faith going down well, with pathos, at the end. Some might say that The Egyptian is suffused with '50s-style religion in this country, but that would be unfair. The film is so anchored in the pessimistic views -- i.e., life as an exercise in dreamy futility, with loss -- of the author of the original best-selling book, that Akhenaten's "witness" in the last scene but one, comes off as credible, and for me even hopeful. The novel on which The Egyptian is based, incidentally, was written in the Finnish language by Mika Waltari. In the days of our fathers and mothers, Waltari's novel was an international sensation. Waltari's father, incidentally, was a Finnish Lutheran pastor. It was the Finnish Lutherans, of course, who brought us The Flying Saucer Of Love.  Here's the thing: Jack Kerouac saw The Egyptian in a movie theater when it first came out. He hated it! The vehemence of Kerouac's response to this relatively standard Hollywood production is surprising. I read his armchair review, which occurs in Some of the Dharma (page 124), three years ago and was impressed by his very negative reaction. Here is what he wrote: WITH 'THE EGYPTIAN' Darryl Zanuck has purveyed a teaching of viciousness and cruelty. They present him with a gold cup at banquets for this. The author, Mika Waltari, is also guilty of the same teaching of viciousness and cruelty. You see a scene of a man choking a woman under water. Both these men are rich as a consequence of the world's infatuation with the forbidden murder, --- its daydreams of maniacal revenge by means of killing and Lust. Men kill and women lust for men. Men die and women lust for men. Men, think in solitude; learn how to live off your sowings of seed in the ground. Or work 2 weeks a year and live in the hermitage the rest of the year, procuring your basic foods at markets, and as your your garden grows work less, till you've learned to live off your garden alone. QUIETNESS AND REST THE ONLY ESCAPE. The secret is in the desert. Now, Ain't that Peculiar! The Egyptian tells the story of a man disillusioned by romantic love -- in the first half he loses his whole self, his deepest self, to the wily and nefarious siren of Babylon. The Egyptian envisions his then turning aside from the world, and becoming a kind of medical "gentleman of the road", a Sal Paradise of the ancient Mediterranean. With Kerouacian pessimism, Sinuhe observes the fruitlessness of human endeavor, and does so over and over again. Finally, back home in Thebes -- I love writing those words -- he becomes enlightened by Akhenaten, the Sun (One) worshiper, who reveals to him that God is the whole of Reality, and that Forgiveness, of all things, is at the core of that Reality. There is something like pantheism here, together with absolving Christianity, and the the name "Jesus Christ" is invoked on the end-title. How could Kerouac not have responded positively to this, given his Christo-Buddhism, or Buddhist-Christianity, or however you want to call his personal synthesis?  But he didn't like the film. He focused completely on the Woman of Babylon sequence, with its subtle, slightly-off-frame drowning of the Siren -- she survives -- and the "lust of the eye" and lust of the body which drives the story at that point. Biographers of Jack Kerouac would probably observe in these comments his suspicion of entrapping women and entrapped men, his frequent equation of greed and lust, and his persistent failed efforts to choose celibacy on Buddhist grounds --- "Men . . . learn how to live off your sowings of seed in the ground [my emphasis]." I want to guess that Kerouac got stuck on the performance by Bella Darvi as Nefer, the Woman of Babylon, and did not consider the enduring Treue of Jean Simmons' character, nor the emphatic world-renunciation by Sinuhe, which begins and ends The Egyptian. What his impassioned observations do tell us, and they read as sober and non-Benzedrined, is that Kerouac was touchy about violence. This is the man who would brawl in bars, mad-drunk, and then write remorseful exhortations to the whole world to Be Kind. He was also a man who loved women, but suspected them, and their "designs", through and through, with the exception of Gabrielle, his mother.  Take a look at The Egyptian. It's a good movie. Sure, it's too long. And to be sure, there's not one word of humor. But the liturgical scenes, with their ethereal religious chants praising "Beauty" (I thought I could hear Lionel Ritchie's "You are so Beautiful") -- which work! -- and especially the obeisances, including Jean Simmons's, on the steps of the temple of the One (Sun) God, are sincerely reverent, and affecting. You could compare the scene of Pharaoh's archers breaking into the Temple of Aten with the Roman breach of the Temple in Nicholas Ray's The King of Kings. The latter is bloody and sensationalistic (like the "Civil War" cards little boys loved in the '60s, by the same people who did the "Mars Attacks" cards) -- the former, sympathetic and pitiful. My irony for today is this: Jack Kerouac should have liked The Egyptian. The title character, take away the toga, is the man himself. Maybe he walked out before the end. The editor of this blog taught me never to do that. |
Favorites
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
