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Sunday, August 22
PULL MY DAISY
by
Lloydville
on Sun 22 Aug 2010 10:43 AM PDT
Paul Zahl (of this site's The Zahl File and his own marvelous PZ's Podcast) observes beats and a bishop cavorting on screen in a strange document of the Fifties:
SNAKE-DANCING BISHOP
Pull My Daisy, the 1959 "beatnik" movie by Robert Frank and Alfred
Leslie, with narration by Jack Kerouac and music by David Amram, has
one amazing character in it, unique, I'll bet, in American literature. The character is a Christian
bishop possessing, to put it mildly, wide-ranging interests.
Pull My Daisy is a casual treatment in film of Act Three of Kerouac's
1957 play entitled Beat Generation. The play was not produced. It
concerns some Lower Manhattan beatniks, played by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, and Larry Rivers, who receive a chaotic
visit from "The Bishop", played by Mooney Peebles. During the visit,
the beatniks, especially Allen Ginsberg, try out their ideas on this
religious man, and variously try to tease him.
Here is Kerouac's narration of the Bishop's grilling:
"And Allen is saying, Is ignorance rippling up above the silver ladder
of Sherifian doves?
"(The Bishop) says, Yes yes yes, Sherifian doves, yes . . . In any case
we are not concerned one way or the other about what we're thinking about,
about anything in particular. But perhaps we sit in some kind of quiet
bliss. And he goes on trying to explain it because he really knows
what he's talking about."
Later, the filmmakers, in a high reflective pause, somewhat lengthy,
show The Bishop leading the women and children of the beatniks in
prayer and song, all standing out in front of the Third Avenue loft
building where the visit is taking place. Kerouac voices this over:
"The angel of silence hath flown over all their heads."
Towards the end of Pull My Daisy, The Bishop excuses himself in order
"that I go now and go make my holy offices (laughter): if you know what
I mean."
But Wait! There's more on this Kerouacian Bishop.
We learn in Act One of Beat Generaton, on the third act of which Pull My Daisy is based, that The Bishop's denomination is "the new,
ah, Aramaean church."
We also learn The Bishop is wonderfully weird. He says to the Allen
Ginsberg character, "We cannot expect solutions, or nirvana, eh, if you
wish to call it that, without making some eff-fort in the direction of
God, some movement (AND HE TWISTS)"
IRWIN (Allen Ginsberg): Ooh you twisted just like a snake then . . . Yes
your movement then was exactly like a supernatural illustrated serpent
arching its back to Heaven . . . I mean that was the hippest thing I've
seen you do tonight."
The Bishop also praises the Kerouac character, whose name is "Buck":
"You're making sense and you do drink (LAUGHTER)"
Our "Buck" has the last word on The Bishop:
"Bishop, let me say, you're positively right in everything you say and
you're a very sweet man."
BISHOP: My disciple here!
Behold, then, dear Sisters and Brothers, a hip bishop, snake-dancing
with the beats over on Third Avenue. May his tribe increase.
Saturday, August 7
PZ'S PODCAST
by
Lloydville
on Sat 07 Aug 2010 12:16 AM PDT
If you're one of those who like their spiritual meditations seasoned with the wisdom of popular culture -- Hammer horror films, Thornton Wilder, The Twilight Zone, Jack Kerouac, The Ventures, movies about giant crabs -- PZ's Podcast was made for you. Chatty, eloquent, nutty, and surprisingly emotional at times, this series of talks will entertain you for sure, enlighten you most probably and maybe move you to tears at times.
PZ is of course mardecortesbaja contributor Paul Zahl, The Preacher From the Black Lagoon -- now unleashed and fully prepared to infect your computer with viral love (against which all known anti-virus software is utterly powerless.) Nothing can stop him now!
Check out the podcasts here -- each one fiendishly timed to coincide with the length of the average commute to or from work:
PZ's Podcast
Thursday, August 5
THE AGE OF ANXIETY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 05 Aug 2010 12:22 AM PDT
 Paul Zahl takes a look here at two films instinct with what might be called "atomic-era anxiety". In America, this anxiety produced the classic films noirs, the neurotic suburbias of Sirk and Ray, the mystical flight of the Beats and countless low-budget sci-fi visions of impending apocalypse. Italy and Japan, losers in the war that the atom bomb ended, seem to have confronted the post-war angst more directly. [As Paul notes, one of the films he reports on, Rossellini's Europa '51, will be showing on TCM this Friday -- you have been alerted!] Paul's thoughts on the two films:
TWO FUGITIVES ON THEIR WAY TO THE SAME PLACE
It's always fun to discover something new. In a world I got to know once, the world of academic theology in Europe, you could make your doctoral dissertation in basically one of two ways. Either you could find a new source, some text that nobody knew about
before; or you could mark a new approach (Ansatz) to familiar material.
I was surprised the other night to see, or seem to see, a new approach
to some familiar material. My wife Mary and I were watching the 1955 film by Akira Kurosawa entitled I
Live in Fear, about a Japanese businessman seized by an obsessive fear
of the atom bomb. The man becomes unhinged, insane, you might say; and
his actions make sure he is committed to a psychiatric hospital. The
question of the movie, however, voiced both by a family court mediator
and an attending physician, is whether the hero, hospitalized and
finally very sick, is the insane one; or whether the world around him,
the citizens of which are going about their business, is insane.
Kurosawa leaves it for you to decide.
That made me remember Roberto Rossellini's wonderful film with Ingrid
Bergman entitled Europa '51. In this one, made four years before I
Live in Fear, a young mother of means, living in Rome, suffers a
personal catastrophe that unhinges her completely. Initially, she goes
to work, as part of her recovery, on the shop floor of a great factory.
She tries Communism, you might say, in the aftermath of Fascism's
collapse. The well-intended experiment fails. As the implications of
her loss grow clearer and louder, the Bergman character becomes more
and more withdrawn. Finally, after a brief stay in a psychiatric
hospital, where she finds herself identifying, through surges of
empathy, with the inmates, she begins to get better. But, as Rossellini
spins his tale, she decides to make a firm decision to stay in place.
She decides not to return to the world. The final close-up of Bergman,
gazing out from her hospital cell, portrays her as a saint.
As I compared these two films in my mind -- they are of roughly the
same date and both come from environments of defeat, which you could
spell with capital letters -- they came together. They both point to
heroic "prophets" who renounce and repudiate the values of the world.
Their renunciation is dramatic. In Nakajima's case, the hero of I
Live in Fear (played by Toshiro Mifune [above] in effective old-age makeup),
an act of industrial sabotage becomes the desired route.
In the
Bergman character's case, it is her conscientious refusal to be
discharged from the hospital, a protest that she is able to carry off
insofar as her husband, played by the English actor Alexander Knox,
finally loses patience with her. In both cases, the renunciation of
the world is dramatic.
Europa '51 is scheduled to be shown on TCM this Friday afternoon,
August 6th, at 6 o'clock EST. I caught it early one Friday morning in
2006, taped it, then gave away the tape to a student, who kept it.
Damn! Needless to say, one is living for the sixth of August. I
believe you will like this movie.
Then go out and Netflix I Live in Fear, in its new Criterion
(Eclipse) edition. I think you will be amazed at the parallel. Oh,
and listen to the score of Fear, which is only heard during the
opening and closing credits. It's Godzilla-ish, with a theremin
front and center -- if that's the right expression for a theremin --
and just breathes the . . . Atomic Age.
Endlich can I add a post-it to this post?
There's a line in T. S. Eliot's play The Family Reunion which sums up
these two movies, works of art, I think, just right. It goes like this:
In a world of fugitives, those going in the opposite direction appear to be running away.
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.
Monday, July 5
HERMITAGE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 05 Jul 2010 06:08 AM PDT
Following his passion for the work of novelist James Gould Cozzens, Paul Zahl recently made a pilgrimage to Lambertville, New Jersey, where the reclusive Cozzens lived and worked and hid out from the world. Here is the first part of Paul's report from a country he has named in honor of one of the strange lands visited by Lemuel Gulliver in his travels:
"A VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUYNHNMS" -- Part One
James Gould Cozzens (1903-1978) admired Jonathan Swift beyond almost all other writers. He also agreed with Swift's view of human nature. Like Swift, though not as extreme as he, Cozzens was a misanthrope. [Swift's Gulliver, it will be remembered, preferred the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses, to any of the more human creatures whose lands he visited.] He was also a hermit.
In 1957 a Time magazine cover story called Cozzens "The Hermit of Lambertville".
Because I like Cozzens' novels, among them By Love Possessed, Guard of
Honor, and Men and Brethren, I decided to see if I could locate the
house, outside Lambertville, New Jersey, in which the great one, who
didn't like people, wrote these books.
Because Cozzens' literary reputation took a nose dive in 1958, and has
not risen again, there is little to go on. Matthew J. Bruccoli
published the sole biography of the man in 1983, and in it there is a
photograph of the Lambertville house, known then as "Carrs Farm", in
which Cozzens and his wife lived from 1933-1958. But I could find
nothing more -- no address nor further specifics, of any kind.
Therefore, on June 12, 2010, I took the opportunity of being in
Princeton to borrow a car and drive the 40 minutes or so over to
Lambertville in search of Carrs Farm. I knew it was about three miles
outside of town, on a country lane called Goat Hill Road. Calls to the
Episcopal rector of Lambertville and to the Hunterdon Country
Historical Society had been returned but no one seemed to know anything
about Cozzens nor the 25 years the once famous writer had been living
in their community.
Or almost no one.
Early on a misty Saturday I drove the back roads from Princeton through
Lawrenceville then through more or less soft and hilly country, to the
end of Goat Hill Road. Several large houses, with spacious lawns and
well kept gardens, were hidden from the road. I did carry a photograph
of Carrs Farm, fortunately, taken from the Bruccoli biography:
But everything was too hidden away to see.
Then, behold: a nice lady taking her morning walk. I stopped the car
and asked after my man. She said, well, if you mean the fellow who
wrote a novel about World War II, I've heard he lived somewhere along
this road. I think it's the house at the bottom of the hill, on the
left. Furthermore, a half mile or so the other way, at the top of the hill, you may find a
gentleman at home who has lived here for many years and knows
everything.
And so it was! My walker was right. Right at the bottom of the hill was Carrs Farm.
When I got out of the car, I noticed that "Keep Out" and "No
Trespassing" and "Private Property" signs were pointedly posted at the
entrance to the farm. Was there a regular army of Cozzens-enthusiasts
I didn't know about, who had disturbed the peace of the current owner?
(I later found out there were other reasons for the signs.) But I
slipped in anyway, prepared to be the nice interested clergyman that I
hope I am, if an owner came upon me. The owner didn't, but the owner's
friend did, who did not know about Cozzens but warned me to get out
of there fast. I took the one photograph of the exterior, on the run; and
it sure is the house:
That's for sure. And almost completely unchanged, but for a metal rail
at the steps and the boxwoods cut differently. Cozzens himself would
not have welcomed visitors either, as he apparently lived only to write
and think, albeit happily married to his wife, a literary agent who
commuted Monday through Friday into Manhattan.
Oh, and Cozzens would write in the mornings and garden in the
afternoon. Like his characters Arthur Winner, Jr. and Arthur Winner,
Sr. in By Love Possessed, the man cultivated roses, antique roses, to
be specific, with dedication.
After breathing a sigh of relief, for one had found what one was
looking for, and had not been beaten away with brooms, I decided to walk up in the opposite direction and pay
a call on the man on the hill. He was, as it turned out, no fool.
[Click here for the second part of this report, in which our intrepid pilgrim meets the wise man on the hill, who imparts knowledge, and ventures into Lambertville itself, searching for traces of the small town its famous hermit once knew.]
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.
Wednesday, May 26
PROMISES, PROMISES
by
Lloydville
on Wed 26 May 2010 02:07 AM PDT
My friends Mary and Paul Zahl made a lightning raid on New York City recently (from Florida!) to see the Broadway revival of Promises, Promises. Here is Paul's report on the show:
LITTLE NOT BIG, THEREFORE BIG
I think critics make a mistake when they bring ideology to a production
of the theater. In the case of the new revival of the 1968 musical Promises, Promises
by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, with book by Neil Simon, a lot of
ideology has flowed out on paper. A lot of energy has flown, for
example to the performance of Sean Hayes, the lead actor, and whether
a gay actor can portray a non-gay hero.
Energy has also flown to the attitudes, within the story, concerning
relationships in the work place between men and women, attitudes that
are supposedly typical of the 1950s and early 1960s and no longer of
today. (The musical was written and first performed in 1968, although
it is closely based on Billy Wilder's 1960 film The Apartment, which he co-wrote with I. A. L. Diamond.)
As I say, a lot of present-day ideology has become involved in the
critical reception of this Broadway revival of Promises, Promises. No
matter that, however, Variety reports that Promises, Promises is a
commercial success. The weeknight performance my wife Mary and I
recently attended was sold out, not one empty seat; and the audience
was overwhelmingly appreciative, interrupting the show frequently and
offering the cast a long standing ovation at the end.
For myself, Promises, Promises is a little story, about a "little guy"
who wins the girl -- because he really loves her and doesn't use her --
and therefore a big story. In drama, so goes my notion, when a
personal story is well and compassionately told, that story becomes a
big story. On the other hand, attempting to weight a personal story
with ideology, especially pre-conceived ideology, diminishes the
attempt.
Promises, Promises narrates the disillusionment of a "little guy" at
Consolidated Life, whose crush on a "little" fellow employee turns out
to be a crush on the mistress of his married boss. C. C. Baxter's sweet
and selfless crush on his "angel in the centerfold" ( reluctant
mistress to the unscrupulous Mr. Sheldrake) is crushed in the first
act, and on Christmas Eve! However, when Miss Kubelik tries to commit
suicide out of her own disillusionment with Sheldrake -- after a sorry
tryst in C. C.'s apartment -- things both fall apart and come together.
Baxter shows real love for his true love, who seems hopelessly and all
the time in love with another man. With the merciful intervention of a
kind and honest doctor who lives next door, together with C. C.'s urgent
rising to the occasion of her overdose, Miss Kubelik rises from the
dead, or the near dead.
This love from a real and kind man, C. C.
Baxter, as compared with the cynicism and selfishness of boss
Sheldrake, touches her, and finally wins her heart. The curtain "clinch" is credible, unsentimental, and very, very touching. It is
made even more credible by the reprise, this time with a positive
vibe, of Bacharach and David's famous song "I'll Never Fall in Love
Again".
Why does the audience cry at the end? Why was the applause sustained
and very loud? Why did the people leave moved, and happy? I think
it's because the love of C. C. Baxter and Fran Kubelik is a universal
story enacted within a particular case. C. C. wins Fran. He saves her
life, both physically and emotionally; and at the very moment when her
long, passionate, hopeless affair with Sheldrake is exposed -- at the
very moment! This is a little story about little people. It is
therefore big. Why? Because it's about everybody. Everybody knows
about the little guy. Almost everybody, male and female, is now or has
at some point been the little guy. It comes with being born.
There are a lot of theatrical touches to Promises, Promises that are
worthy of comment. The notorious Christmas Party song entitled "Turkey
Lurkey Time" is a number people seem either to hate or love. Mary and
I happen to love it. I think we could say we LOVE it. "Turkey
Lurkey Time" is just so unusual. Is it about men being turkeys? Mary
thinks so. Is it about the Christmas turkey, soon to lose his head?
Well, yes. Is it a song about the sheer euphoria of Christmas revelry
and drunkenness? Yes, too. Is it a smashing production number with
great ensemble dancing and an unpredictable finish? Yes, that, too.
Anyway, "Turkey Lurkey Time" has to be seen and heard to be believed;
and I, for one, am still singing it. (I made a mistake in the lobby at
the end, as we were leaving the theater. I was too cheap to buy the T-shirt of "Turkey Lurkey Time", with snowflakes against a brown
background. Heaven: and I missed it.)
Then there is the unexpected moment of compassion for the "villain",
J. D. Sheldrake. He sings a song entitled "Wanting Things", about his
compulsion for wanting things he cannot have. The subject of the song
is what theology calls "concupiscence". As he tolls his confession,
shadows of the several women in his life, all in scarlet but
half-hidden by the lighting, approach him, then slowly walk away, and
vanish. The number is haunting, and also even-handed. No person is
completely a villain.
The producers of Promises, Promises have added two songs from the
Bacharach-David repertoire to their revival of the show. One of them,
"A House Is Not a Home", has to be one of the great American pop
songs. Both lead characters, Fran and Chuck (C. C.), sing it in
separate contexts, at different points in the narrative. It is almost
unbearably affecting. The actress Katie Finneran (above) also has a star turn
as Marge MacDougall, the woman Chuck picks up in a bar on Christmas
Eve just after he has learned the truth about Fran's affair with
Sheldrake. Critics of the show who panned it otherwise, mostly for
ideological reasons of one kind or another -- you can adore Mad Men
but you can't say a good word about Promises, Promises -- loved Katie
Finneran's extraordinary scene. You have to agree with the critics
about the scene, and the actress. But it's also true that Sean Hayes,
the lead, reveals a comic brilliance and timing as C. C. Baxter; and
Kristin Chenoweth has a lovely voice and compelling stage presence.
(To me the actress seems a little petite for the role, given the
slightly tough persona she is supposed to have.)
Two other things to mention:
The character of Dr. Dreyfuss is played by Dick Latessa (above, with Chenoweth and Hayes), who puts this
role on the map. Dr. Dreyfuss is the physician/wise man/priest of the
play and even invokes God, sincerely, in a moment of crisis. Also, the
number, "Where Can You Take a Girl?", which is reprised twice by an
enthusiastic quartet of young executives, is comic and even slapstick.
We would wish to believe that the kind of thinking expressed in the
song doesn't take place any more. But it does, whatever one's moral
judgments are. It's just that today the targets are not "secretaries" but "part-time staffers", or "interns", or "campaign workers", of both
sexes. "Where Can You Take a Girl?" is a spoof. Everyone in the
audience laughed, even if they didn't quite want to.
Visually, the play is saturated in early '60s office decor. (Think
kidney-shaped ash trays.) The art direction reminded me of Frank
Tashlin's 1957 Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. But the props don't overwhelm the story and the music. The
choreography is terrific. The dancers and their costumes look right to
the period, and they're not small bodies. Yet there are also not too
many of them. The high points of the dancing occur at the very
beginning of the play and during "Turkey Lurkey Time". (As far as I am
concerned, you could almost rename the show "Turkey Lurkey Time", that
song is so eccentric and memorable.)
Mary and I had a blast. It's rare you do something on an impulse --
like getting on a plane within a few hours of deciding to go, with the
sole purpose of seeing one show you hope you're going to like -- and it
works. Promises, Promises works. It works on almost every level. If
you are going to take offense -- at anything -- on purely ideological
grounds, I guess you could infer something you didn't like. That may
be true of almost any piece of popular art. But I think it would be
doing an injustice, here, to the combined talents of Billy Wilder and
I.A.L. Diamond, of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, of Sean Hayes and
Kristin Chenoweth, Dick Latessa and Katie Finneran; and of Neil Simon.
Together they bring together a story of a little yearning man and a
little beat-down woman (Kerouac's understanding of a "beat-ness"),
whose love affair becomes a big story.
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, March 12
INTO THE MYSTIC
by
Lloydville
on Fri 12 Mar 2010 12:01 AM PST
A few days ago I was driving with my friends Mary and Paul Zahl from Kayenta, Arizona, to Moab, Utah. We were going up to Moab to track down the locations where John Ford shot parts of Wagon Master (and other films.)
On the way, Paul suggested we make a detour to see the fabled Valley Of the Gods, a large basin surrounded by mesas and dotted with odd rock towers. My instinct was to proceed directly to Moab, but Paul's instinct was stronger so we set off on a dirt road into the valley.
It was a good road, of red clay -- or would have been a good road if it hadn't been raining recently. The rain had turned it into glass. My big Navigator, in four-wheel-drive, kept losing traction on it, threatening to slide over the embankments on sharp turns. It was a little scary, but the car handled it all very well.
Then, at the end of the road, we found ourselves driving straight towards the nearly sheer face of a tall mesa. There was, improbably, a road leading up the side of the mesa in a series of hair-raising switchbacks. The maps we had said the road was paved, and it was, but only in parts. The other parts were wet dirt -- something we discovered too late.
I started up the road, which is called the Moki Dugway -- seen above in better weather conditions than we faced -- and we all soon realized that we had made a big mistake. But I also realized that trying to turn the car around on such a road would probably be more dangerous than proceeding up it.
So we proceeded up it, at a snail's pace, with our hearts in our throats. I hugged the side of the mesa on the sharp curves, honking and hoping we wouldn't meet any oncoming traffic. There were no shoulders to speak of for most of the way, only terrifying drop-offs. If the Navigator's tires ever lost traction on the slippery dirt sections, it would have meant a certain flaming fiery death for all of us.
Below is a picture Mary took with her iPhone during the ascent. She took it upside down, as it happened -- the condition of our stomachs at the time.
For a while it seemed as though the road would never end, but it finally did, on top of the mesa, where we were presented with . . . a winter wonderland. An endless plateau covered in snow, dotted with cedars, new snow falling gently on it all.
It was like a vision of peace and grace, granted to us after our ordeal.
I couldn't get this extraordinary experience out of my mind. The next morning I had what felt like a revelation -- I felt we had been led supernaturally to the Moki Dugway, where we reenacted, in a sense, the climactic scenes of Wagon Master, when the Mormons take their wagons up the side of a precipitous cliff, where wagons were not meant to go, in order to reach their promised land.
I became convinced that John Ford himself had been riding with us on our climb up the mesa, having decided that we would not just have a leisurely meander up to Moab to gawk at his sublime locations for Wagon Master, but drive right into the heart of the movie. Mystical as it may sound, I think that's exactly what we did.
Monday, March 1
THE PREACHER FROM THE BLACK LAGOON
by
Lloydville
on Mon 01 Mar 2010 06:09 PM PST
It occurs to me that many people who have been following Paul Zahl's posts for this site (collected in The Zahl File) may not know that he is a world-famous preacher, or have had a chance to hear one of his sermons.
Well, here's your chance:
What Is Love?
This sermon was preached at All Saints Episcopal Church in Chevy Chase, Maryland on a Sunday in 2009. I doubt if you've ever heard a sermon quite like it before. More than a few mainstream Christians have reacted to sermons of Paul's like this the way the human figures are reacting to the Creature in the poster above. They just seem to miss the point.
 1 Attachments
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.
Monday, February 8
SOME OF THE MOONRISE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 08 Feb 2010 12:27 AM PST
Drunk late at night in 1955, Jack Kerouac watched Frank Borzage's Moonrise on TV, and wrote this poem about it, in his notebook of religious meditations eventually published as Some Of the Dharma:
DUMB POEM CALLED "MOONRISE"
A snake in a pond Slithers out of harm Seeking the frond Of the heavenly farm.
Jeb was your Paw Forevermore And this is the law Of love and gore.
The blood of the bear Is soaking in the swamp, Such heavenly air
Overhangs his pomp.
Give yourself up To the sheriffs of truth, Fear no hound pup No karma of tooth
For your sweet smile And meditations desperate
Are wine to the senile And love to degenerate
Face the shroudy kitchen Of the sea of the night And make a pretty kitten Of all this abounding blight
(Written after watching, drunk, Dane Clark on TV in movie MOONRISE) --- Some cloth has that sin rip This doesnt
My friend Paul Zahl (of The Zahl File) drew my attention to this. He writes:
This is Kerouac's little riff on a surprising movie, with its
Prophet of Grace Sheriff and its Recluse of Wisdom Rex Ingram, its
insight about dogs, and its unsensational, unforgettable scene on a
very small ferris wheel.
I think I could preach three sermons arising from stanza four, and another two about the movie's not having "that sin rip". I'm not sure they'd be received all that well -- but maybe on a park bench some day, as in Moonrise.
Kerouac, watching a late night movie on television and
drunk, manages to capture the theme of the film. Does "blood"-destiny have to determine the outcome of a life? Or can other
things, like love (the shaky and vulnerable heroine), a wise man for
father-figure (the Rex Ingram character "Mose", who knows what's really
up before anyone else does, and who gives his hounds the dignity of
being called "Mr. Dog" and means it) . . .
. . . and a philosopher-sheriff, the
likes of whom I have never seen depicted in a movie -- sort of a
small-town "zen-detective" (the phrase is Thornton Wilder's) -- who is
able to convey a concrete quality of grace in unsentimental terms. Can
the "sin rip" (Kerouac's phrase, not the movie's) be mended? Mended in
believable terms, in a way that could actually happen?
Kerouac takes karma, and a dog's bite and faithfulness,
and the cabin kitchen at the end; and the swamp of the beginning and
middle; and comes up with a . . . kitten. All while drunk!
Sunday, November 29
ONE STEP BEYOND — DON'T GO THERE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 29 Nov 2009 12:01 AM PST
Paul Zahl (of The Zahl File) offers another meditation on an extraordinary bit of American culture from days gone by, the T. V. series One Step Beyond. If you don't remember it, or never saw it, Paul suggests that you might do well to keep it that way, just for your own peace of mind:
EXCRUCIATING -- BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE . . .
by Paul F. M. Zahl
Way Out, Roald Dahl's television show, was the ugly one, the ghoulish
one, the cruel one.
Twilight Zone was the high end of these early television gems of the fantastic -- moralistic and righteous, at times redemptive and even hopeful.
Christ got at least two positive mentions in the Rod Serling scripts,
and the team effort showed in the artful results.
But in between, in between the cruelty of Roald Dahl and the justice of
Rod Serling, came the observing eye of . . . John Newland.
Newland is barely remembered today, but in the late 1950s and early
1960s (and even into the 1970s) he produced, directed, and acted in
scores and scores of television shows, mostly in the supernatural or
thriller line. Speaking of Thriller, Newland directed "Pigeons from
Hell" for that great series, scaring us all where it counts -- early
childhood -- and leaving us with that tender scar forever.
Newland's big achievement was hosting three seasons of a series concerning the
paranormal. The series was entitled One Step Beyond. It was created by Merwin Gerard and consisted of
thirty-minute 'docu-dramas' of supposed instances of possession,
ghostly presence, telepathy, and predictions of dreadful futures.
I have been watching One Step Beyond since the day it was birthed, in
1959. Almost all of the shows have been on video since the beginning,
as they were somehow in the public domain. And now -- there is a God
-- Paramount has released the first season of One Step Beyond in
splendid condition. Oh, and the music, especially the theme called
"Fear", written by Harry Lubin, is the ultimate science-fiction/horror
theme. Anyone who is reading this would recognize it instantly. (I
listen to it right before bedtime every night. Mary loves it, too.)
But what has come to me in recent viewings, with an almost stunning
power, is a sort of personal truth about the inner spring of these
tight dramas. It is a truth about the supernatural in general, and it
springs from its source. These stories, with few exceptions that I can
see, are about love lost or love gone wrong. Someone has lost someone,
and is desperate with grief. He or she is completely naked to the
possibility of contact. Or someone has done somebody wrong, and the
guilt is killing them. Or, even, somebody hates somebody else, and the
hate gets objectified, in some kind of paranormal occurrence.
Below are some examples of what I am talking about. ("The Dead Part Of
the House" is available on the official Paramount DVD release (above), the
rest are available for download or viewing through YouTube or related
sites.)
Season One, Episode Nine: "The Dead Part of the House"
A widower hates his nine-year-old daughter because she survived an
accident that killed her mother.
He resents his little girl. And she knows it, and the child is
perishing for love, in front of his eyes.
She develops three ghostly friends, and in a benign move, these
supernatural friends are able to bring her father to his senses.
Phillip Abbott plays the father and conveys an irrational paternal
hatred, based on a love for his wife gone awry, that is painful to
watch, in the extreme. The little girl is entirely sympathetic, and so
completely shaken. Moreover, the child's kind aunt is powerless over
her brother.
It is Tennessee Williams, as far as I am concerned, on a claustrophobic
'50s television set, yet completely unself-conscious.
Season Two, Episode Seven: "The Open Window"
A painter of fashion models -- his current model is played by Louise Fletcher --
observes a woman in an apartment across the way preparing to commit
suicide. She has been rejected romantically and her little
black-and-white four-walled world is killing her. Her disconcerting
monologue and preparations, overheard and observed, have several
antecedents in theater and movies. But the television camera closes in
on her, with dissection. It is impossible to watch. And it's only
1960!
As for the denouement, you'll have to see it yourself. But it's not
really about the genre, it's about human attachment severed and love
torn to shreds. How did Newland, who produced and directed, get this
out at an early hour Friday night? I don't think anybody at the
network or the sponsor must have seen it as serious, because it was
about, uh, ESP. But it was very serious.
Season Two, Episode 20: "Who Are You?"
A little girl wakes up in her bed and doesn't recognize her parents.
Her parents are loving, devoted, and dear. She runs away and finds the people she believes to be her parents. They, for their part, are living in a total darkness of grief, having
lost their own little girl recently.
The little girl we are watching is possessed of the spirit of the
other, dead little girl. And she is horrified by the attentions of her natural parents. And her grief-stricken 'real' parents are horrified by her.
This child is totally lost, but alive and real, a whole self of
yearning.
When "Who Are You?" is over and the implications of the first 20
minutes -- these shows are all 29 minutes long -- begin to sink in, the
situation becomes excruciating.
In short, don't watch this.
Just two more examples, but they can be multiplied by a score of others:
Season Two, Episode 32: "Delia"
Here is a humdinger, which begins so quietly and prosaically that the
middle section takes you completely by surprise.
A vacationing American man is trying to recover from a second lousy
marriage, and is drinking in a bar on a quiet island off Mexico. Another American, a sexy divorcée, at a table nearby, invites him
over. She is beautiful and the kind of woman most men would love to
meet under such circumstances. But he turns her down. He is
impossible.
He takes a self-pitying walk down to the beach, and half way down,
meets an extremely beautiful, refined, and quite un-sexy woman sitting
alone by a tree. She knows all about him, connects with him instantly
-- as he with her -- and they are completely and in a single minute one
in love forever. She is the lost and final love eternal, with eternal
eyes and never-ending smile.
He exits for a moment, comes back -- and she is gone.
He spends the rest of his life searching for her, and ends up back on
the island, where he awaits her return, and drinks himself to death.
I won't give away the ending.
This little parable is the ultimate dream of romance between a man and
a woman. Drink to me only with thine eyes. I will spend my life
awaiting your return. And die in the process.
After you see "Delia" once, it becomes impossible to watch it again.
Get thee behind me. (Get thee to a nunnery)
He should have stayed with the giving brunette. Hélas, he didn't.
Season Two, Episode 33: "The Visitor"
This one is a celebrated episode. It starred Joan Fontaine, with Warren
Beatty, in either his first or second appearance ever.
It concerns a woman in older middle-age who has left her husband,
against his will, for the bottle; and has pulled herself completely
within herself at their cozy mountain get-away. A nice fire is burning
on a snowy night, there's plenty of money, and there's a bar full of
whisky. But a young man knocks at the door, his car having broken down
in the snow, and he is trying to get to the hospital where his young
wife is having a baby. He cannot get there.
Who he is and why he is there and what he has come to do? All is
revealed, neatly and affectingly.
Again, this is about love gone wrong, about malice as the consequence of hurt,
about grief causing people to go mad -- and all on a minuscule set, with one
camera, two actors, and dread, with heart.
Don't see this one either.
I watch these episodes of One Step Beyond and have to tell myself not
to watch any more. They are saturated with grief. They are fistfuls of loss and love that
is separated, by the curtain of death, from fulfillment, even promise.
Yes, there is compassion -- and none whatever of the ghoulish joy in
karma that Way Out featured every time. I would call these instances
of Baby-Boomer television masterpieces of wrecked emotion, and love's
attachment snapped forever.
How come these are so powerful -- if "excruciating" means powerful? I would like to finish this article by trying to say why.
In the first place these are completely uncompromised one-act plays.
The camera prowls around -- I honestly think of Rossellini and the
inquiring camera, maybe even the camera as protagonist, though I fear
that sounds pretentious. (I invoked Tolstoy once in a conversation
with Joe Dante, and he suddenly started to look at me coolly. I sure
wanted to withdraw that particular comment.) Yet it is true that John
Newland's camera moves around a lot, in interior spaces about the size
of a closet most of the time. In addition, his close-ups, which are
numerous, completely fill the screen. These are intimate dramas --
they are about one or two, or at the most three, characters. The
people's faces are tortured. They are anguished. The unflinching
close-ups mostly record grief and separation. What are ghosts
in these stories other than objectified presences of love become
unattainable? Thus the excruciating atmosphere of One Step Beyond.
There is one other thing:
When I was eight and nine years old and saw shows like this, I
definitely connected with the fear and dread. But
I didn't really get the truth. The psychology was completely at the
edges, or rather, out of the question.
I just knew, to my bones and my nerve ends, that something serious was
going on.
Too serious.
Twilight Zone, which saved the day, was more distanced somehow. It
didn't raise the resistance that was raised by One Step Beyond.
Neither could I have appreciated The Glass Menagerie. (Still can't
watch the last act.)
My advice to you, dear reader, is Skip This One. Sit It Out.
It's too close to home. Take away the supernatural part of it, and
there is only human loss.
Oder -- and I truly wish I had done this when I was president of a
theological seminary -- show "Delia'"and "The Dead Part of the House"
to a class for future ministers on . . . pastoral care. In the church,
and in the frayed and hungry world around us, you're going to encounter
quite a few Delias and a whole directory full of The Dead Parts of
Houses.
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