Category Archives: Books

TRUE GRIT

Posted on by

Mattie Ross, the protagonist and narrator of Charles Portis's 1968 novel True Grit, originally serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, is one of the great voices in American literature — one that can stand with the voices of Ishmael, Walt Whitman, Huckleberry Finn and Bob Dylan.

Mattie embodies the contradictions and the mystery of the American character as no other figure in our literature does, quite.  How is it that a people so hard-working, tightfisted, materialistic, imbued so deeply with a fun-killing Puritan ethic, nevertheless manages to create characters and legends of such wildness, such free-spirited exuberance, such eccentric moral beauty?  There is no answer to that question, ultimately, no way of resolving the contradictions, explaining the mystery.  All we can do is observe it, as we observe Mattie, and marvel.



Mattie is 14 when her father is murdered and his murderer flees into the ungoverned Indian Territory of Oklahoma.  She hires a hard-bitten U. S. Marshall with a vicious side to go bring the fugitive back, and she determines to go along on the trek to make sure the job gets done.  Mattie is a ruthless bargainer in the negotiation, cold-blooded in her determination to see her father's murderer dead — hung by the law, if possible, but dead one way or the other, by any means necessary.



In this she is driven by the ethos of the Old rather than the New Testament — and she is a dogmatically religious person — but her passion is actually more personal than dogmatic.  She does not seem to mourn her father, or show a lot of sentiment over losing him — but this is a misdirection.  Vengeance is her way of mourning, heroic effort is her way of showing love — and on this unspoken truth the novel turns.  For she has found in the man she hires, Rooster Cogburn, a person exactly like her — a seemingly cold tracker and killer of men who has no other way of expressing his values, his profound if often misdirected decency, than by acting as an agent of the law.



In the miracle of finding each other, however, the cold abstraction of the law is overturned.  Cogburn becomes a surrogate father, one who will not leave Mattie, either by getting killed or by dereliction of duty.  She becomes a surrogate daughter, someone he can love by protecting.  They are both redeemed by their love for each other, and the climax of the novel is not the final confrontation with the murderer, but Cogburn's super-human race to save her life.

They remain tragic figures — redemption is not the same thing as satisfaction, as happiness.  They have met each other by chance in the only situation in this world in which either of them could truly love another person.  But it's enough — more than enough.  On their remarkable adventure, they live intensely enough to last a lifetime.  They create a story together that transcends their own personal limits as human beings, just as it transcends time.  In telling this story, Portis adds another episode of paradoxical grandeur to the American legend.

The novel was of course made into a famous film starring John Wayne, in 1969, which has now been remade by the Coen brothers, who reportedly have stayed more faithful to the book.  The new film will be released on Christmas Day this year.  My guess is that it will be a blessing to our culture, if only by steering people back to a magically profound novel.

THE ZAHL FILE: REPORT FROM THE ROAD — REELFOOT LAKE

Posted on by

Indefatigable pilgrim Paul Zahl recently traveled to the area around Paducah, Kentucky to visit a few places enchanted in his imagination.  Reelfoot Lake has associations with Irvin S. Cobb, a once celebrated American author on whose stories John Ford based two films.  Paul writes of the picture above:

I took this in the early morning — Bald Cypresses standing out
of Reelfoot Lake in western Tennessee near the Kentucky border.  The “umbrella” root-balls are growing on top of the thousands of original
cypresses that were submerged in a single night during one of the “New Madrid” earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 — a series of three massive temblors that probably exceeded 7 points on the Richter Scale.  John James Audubon witnessed one of the quakes, during
which he said the earth “rolled” in waves.

Irvin S. Cobb set his famous horror story
“Fishhead”, which is believed to have influenced H. P. Lovecraft
directly, on Reelfoot Lake, conjecturing a school of human-sized
catfish that drag the two villains to their deaths at the end of the
story.

For more on Irvin S. Cobb, check out Paul's podcast on the writer here.

WILSON

Posted on by

Wilson is a new graphic novel by Daniel Clowes, the author of Ghost World.  Clowes is one of the great fiction artists of our time, and Wilson is his darkest work to date.

It's a sort of existentially bleak version of Winsor McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze, a strip McCay drew in the years before he created the legendary Little Nemo.

In McCay's strip, Sammy finds himself in a new place and situation every week, and as events unfold around him he starts a build-up to a sneeze, which explodes eventually with awesome power, severely disrupting or destroying everything around him.  It's a strange idea for a strip, not really funny but oddly satisfying, in an anarchic way.



Wilson consists of self-contained one-page episodes all featuring a single protagonist, Wilson, a lost soul.  Wilson has insights into life or hopeful encounters with other people all of which explode by the end of the page in an outburst of self-deception or cruel narcissism.  As these emotional dead ends accumulate, Clowes constructs a portrait of genuine and utterly hopeless despair.  Kierkegaard said that “the precise quality of despair is that it is unaware of itself”, and such is Wilson's.



It's not satisfying on any level, but rather heartbreaking, infuriating, sickening.  It sucks us into the black hole of Wilson's psyche and makes us feel that there's no way out of it.  It's slightly terrifying.



A life's narrative emerges from the self-contained episodes, a story of sorts, and they are varied by being done in contrasting styles, usually in Clowes's familiar naturalistic mode, using color panels, but sometimes in black-and-white pages and sometimes in crude comic-book caricature style.  The variations only serve to emphasize the relentless coherence of Wilson's spiritual pathology.

It's a profound meditation on contemporary angst and one of the finest of all graphic novels.

HIS TOWN

Posted on by

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.

OCCULT DETECTION

Posted on by



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.

BY LOVE POSSESSED — PART ONE

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.

AN A. E. HOUSMAN POEM FOR TODAY

Posted on by

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.

LUNAR

Posted on by



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.]

THE SEA

Posted on by

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

JOAN-GIRL

Posted on by



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.