Category Archives: Books

CRIME DOES NOT PAY

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In the glory days (the 1940s and early 1950s) before the comic book industry began to censor itself, to ward off government censorship, comic books could and would show just about anything of a violent nature.  Lurid, gruesome, graphic, they approached Elizabethan drama in their obsession with the bloody and the macabre.

I doubt if any of them that came into the hands of young children really rotted the kids' brains or corrupted their morals.  Young children know perfectly well, from their intuitions and their dreams, that the human psyche, and thus the real world, is filled with such horror.  It is only grownups who try to pretend otherwise.

A powerful art form was crippled by the state-induced censorship, though.  Only today has the comic book reclaimed its right to range over the whole landscape of human experience, in the process producing some of the best fiction of our time.

[Via Golden Age Comic Book Stories, the Internet's wonder site.]

WALKING IN MEMPHIS

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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.

ME AND JERRY

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When my car got a flat on a country road in Vermont one chilly night back in 1997 my heart sank.  I'd lent my jack to my brother-in-law three weeks before and had forgotten to get it back.  I hadn't worried about it too much, because I had a new set of tires on the car, but I'd apparently picked up a nail on the road somewhere and now I was facing the consequences.

I saw the lights of a house through the trees and really had no choice but to walk up to it and ask to use a phone.  An older man with gray hair, a long face and large ears opened the door, looking at me suspiciously.  I described my predicament and asked if I could use his phone to call a local garage.

“What do you want from me?” he said.  I figured he was hard of hearing and started my explanation over in a louder voice, but he waved me silent.  “I'm not signing your copy of Catcher In the Rye,” he said, almost vehemently.

“I don't have a copy of Catcher In the Rye,” I said.  “I had a copy in high school but I couldn't get through it so I gave it to my sister.”

“What's your angle?” he said.

I started to explain about my flat tire again but again he waved me silent.  “You didn't like the book?” he asked.  “Not much,” I said.  “Why?” he asked.  “Well, I like David Copperfield a lot, for one thing,” I explained.  “I don't think it's crap.”

“I'm not answering any questions!” he shouted at me.

“Not even 'Can I use your phone?'?” I said.  I realized I was dealing with a total hairpin, but he didn't look violent and it was awfully cold outside.

He showed me to the phone, gave me the number of a guy with a tow truck in Cornish, the nearest town, and hovered over me while I made the call.  I asked him if I could wait inside until the tow truck arrived.  “Yes,” he said, “but no photographs!”

“I don't have a camera,” I assured him, which should have been obvious.  He fixed his gaze on me intently.  “So . . .” he said finally, “you're more into the later books.”  “What later books?” I asked.

He seemed totally bewildered.  “You can't write about this night until after I'm dead!” he said.  “If you do, you will hear from my lawyers!”

“You've got yourself a deal,” I said — and it's a deal I stuck to faithfully.

BOB DYLAN'S MICRO FICTION

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In his brilliant and eccentrically revealing memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan talks about a crucial inspiration in his development as a songwriter — the first time he heard “Pirate Jenny”, from Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera.  The lyric is written in the voice of an oppressed young girl, who recounts her fantasy of a pirate ship which will appear in the harbor of her city and bombard it in her name, destroying all her enemies and rescuing her from a life of servitude.

It is thus a surreal fiction set within the slightly less surreal fiction of the opera itself, both modes operating here within a single song.  Dylan says this expanded his notion of what a song could be.  He was of course already familiar with the narrative conventions of folk songs, especially the murder ballads, and he would follow these conventions in many of his own works, telling self-contained fictional or historical tales, usually with a strong social message, but “Pirate Jenny” set him off on another strategy, involving fantastical tales within tales.



In “Bob Dylan's 115th Dream”, from Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan tells a tale in the voice of a crew member of the Mayflower, which is somehow commanded by Melville's Captain Ahab and lands in America for a series of comic anachronistic adventures.  (Among the artifacts surrounding Dylan in the photograph on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home is the Lotte Lenya album on which he first heard “Pirate Jenny”.)



“Desolation Row”, from Highway 61 Revisited, offers a similar bit of jumbled-up, surreal narrative but has become less buffoonish, more poetic.

“Desolation Row” conjures up a vision of a very specific place inhabited by an improbable cast of characters, drawn from every aspect of culture.  The real-life poets Pound and Eliot have a mythical fistfight, The Phantom Of the Opera shares the scene with Ophelia and Cassanova.  It's a vision, on one level, of culture as it's actually experienced in the imagination.  Lon Chaney and Charles Laughton and Victor Hugo are forever linked by The Hunchback of Notre Dame — Desolation Row is that precinct of the mind where all four of them meet up and hang out together.

On the same album, in “Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues”, Dylan presents a variation on this fractured narrative strategy, this time with a series of vignettes and anecdotes about some beat characters hanging out in Mexico.  Each element of the song seems to open onto a whole narrative episode which, however, is only suggested, not recounted.  It's like shards of a Kerouac novel discovered at an archaeological dig and displayed in glass cases, inviting the viewer to reconstruct the whole from them.  (This is, of course, just an extension, or extreme compression, of the fragmented narrative style of Kerouac himself.)

Many Dylan songs can be seen as collages of poetic images, but most are more acutely perceived as collages of story fragments, micro fictions, which suggest great narrative vistas seen fleetingly through a narrow window whose shutters open and close quickly.  His song “Floater”, from Love and Theft, suggests a whole cycle of Faulknerian novels glimpsed in this way.  Ironically, many lines in “Floater” were lifted almost straight from a Japanese as-told-to autobiography called Confessions Of A Yakuza, yet Dylan has used them in the context of a series of interconnected micro fictions about a place and time and characters that seem indigenously, essentially American.

Here are eight lines from “Floater”:

My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes

I had 'em once though, I suppose, to go along
With all the ring dancin' Christmas carols on all of them Christmas Eves
I left all my dreams and hopes
Buried under tobacco leaves

I doubt if any of this reflects actual memories from Dylan's own life, but the lines do seem to sum up the whole life of some particular person, in a kind of generational saga told through lightning flashes of imagery.

The precise details, the dragnets and ropes, the old cloth, the ring dancing, seduce us into emblematic episodes, in somewhat the same way that the brief flashbacks in A Christmas Carol seduce us into emblematic episodes from the happier early years of Scrooge.  And Dylan doesn't just leave his hopes and dreams behind, he leaves them “buried under tobacco leaves”.  Here the detail is more symbolic, more open — did the narrator lose his hopes and dreams in the drudgery of work, or just in wasted hours marked out by the smoke of cigarettes?

The details and episodes evoked in these lines propel the story Dylan is telling into our own imaginations, prompting us to fill in the rest, to travel back in time like Scrooge, to visit the narrator's lost world, to construct our own sense of it, our own dream of it.  And this, of course, is what all good stories do.  What's left out of them is what eventually belongs most securely to us, almost as if they were our own experiences, because we have collaborated in the making of them.

This was one of the secrets of storytelling that Hemingway knew well, and consciously, almost from the very beginning of his career as a writer.  All of his best work uses this “strategic opacity”, as Stephen Greenblatt has called it, referring to Shakespeare's method of storytelling — this uncharted space that the hearer of the tale must fill in for herself.

Dylan is a great singer, a fine tunesmith and poet, but not least among his gifts is the gift of storytelling, in a fragmented, micro-fictional form of his own devising.

AUGUSTUS CAESAR

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Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.

— Gibbon, The Decline and Fall Of the Roman Empire

Corporate America and its servile functionaries on the U. S. Supreme Court have learned the lessons of history well — the American people sink into servitude in their ignorance of them.  (With thanks to Tom Sutpen . . .)

THE REAL DEAL

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After yesterday’s jeremiad about the Pat Robertson brand of Christianity, it was good to be reminded by my friend Paul Zahl of what Charles Dickens found when he looked over the shoulder of one of his characters as she gazed into “the eternal book”:

Harriet complied and read — read the eternal book for all the weary,
and the heavy-laden; for all the wretched, fallen, and neglected of
this earth — read the blessed history, in which the blind, lame,
palsied beggar, the criminal, the woman stained with shame, the shunned
of all our dainty clay, has each a portion, that no human pride,
indifference, or sophistry through all the ages that this world shall
last, can take away, or by the thousandth atom of a grain reduce . . .

— from Dombey and Son

That quote in turn made me think of these lines from Bob Dylan’s “Chimes Of Freedom”, whose rhythm and language are so oddly like those of Dickens, with a Beat twist to them:

Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for-granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute
Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an’ cheated by pursuit
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing . . .

Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Dylan may have had the eternal book in mind when he wrote this, with that “cathedral night” and that climactic image of the “hung-up person”, a bit of Beat lingo which, in this context, puts one in mind of some later lines he wrote:

There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door,
You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done, in the final end he won the war
After losin’ every battle.

A EULOGY FOR EBENEZER SCROOGE

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It's been well over a hundred years since Ebenezer Scrooge died.  No one who knew him is alive today, of course, but he is remembered — not least from this eulogy spoken at his funeral:

This week, we have lost one of our town's finest citizens.  Ebenezer Scrooge passed away five days ago, on Boxing Day, at the age of 82.   At his death, he was surrounded by his loving nephew Fred, Fred’s wife, and their three children.  His faithful house servant, Mrs. Dilber, who nursed him in the last weeks of his life, described him as peaceful and comfortable, and dressed in his best, surrounded by family, and the beautiful bed curtains that she, and the other house servants, made him.

Many of you will remember Scrooge as a brilliant businessman.  His company, Scrooge and Cratchit, gave many jobs in his warehouse to the unemployed throughout the city.  He and his business partener Bob Cratchit helped many young men start up their own businesses, too.


Others of you may remember Scrooge for his good works.  As the director of many of his charities, such as the Christmas Fund, the Hospital for the Poor, and his Soup Kitchen for the Hungry, I can tell you the good this man has done.


His orphanages have been a refuge for many abandoned children.  And his Houses of Learning, which teach my own son and daughters, and which I attended as a young lad, have earned fine reputations.


Some of you may even be old enough to clearly  remember Ebenezer Scrooge in the years before his miraculous transformation.  Some say he was mean spirited, stingy, and liked it.  No one knows exactly what changed him, for he never spoke of it.  But many believe that it was the high spirits of Christmas.


For me, I remember Ebenezer in a different way.  For he saved me.  In a way, we were both crippled when we first met.  I physically, and he emotionally and spiritually.  If it weren’t for Scrooge, I wouldn’t have met my lovely wife, Edith.  If it weren’t for Scrooge, I wouldn’t have had my dear children.  If it weren’t for Scrooge, I would have died sick, as a tiny young boy.   Because of Scrooge, I haven’t even touched my little crutch in nearly twenty years.


I owe Scrooge my life, and I am forever grateful to him.  I think that we can all remember Scrooge not for who he was, but for who he became.  And we can all honor his memory, by celebrating his life on Christmas, his favorite holiday.  Thank you.

[Transcribed by my niece, Nora Rossi, from an old parish register in London]

REPORT FROM PARIS: A MOVEABLE FEAST

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Today, intrepid correspondent Coralie visited the Musée Grévin in Paris, a charming old 19th-Century establishment (founded in 1882) which features wax figures and other curiosities.  She snapped the picture above of a Hemingway figure before heading off to the Brasserie Lipp, on the Boulevard St. Germain, to commune with Papa's spirit by having a meal he famously enjoyed there once (or twice) — filets de hareng pommes de terre a l'huile, suivi du cervelas rémoulade avec une bière blonde Lipp . . . which is to say, herring and potatoes in oil, followed by a dish consisting of a kind of German sausage with a celery root and Dijon mustard concoction on the side, all washed down with a blonde Lipp beer.

Hemingway told two stories about having this meal at Lipp.  In one, he had just cashed the check for the first story he sold to an American magazine, and went off to celebrate by himself at Lipp.  In the other, Sylvia Beach, who ran the famous bookstore Shakespeare & Co., said he was looking too thin and slipped him some money for a decent lunch.  In both stories, he ate cervelas rémoulade at the venerable old brasserie.

It became, in any case, symbolic of his struggling years in Paris, about which he once wrote, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”  Below, the first course of Hemingway's meal, as served to Coralie today:



I was not particularly young when I first went to Paris, nor struggling, but my memories of it follow me around all the same, and my friend Coralie has allowed me to inhabit them again vicariously but vividly, just as I once inhabited Hemingway's Paris vicariously and vividly by eating cervelas rémoulade one afternoon by myself at the Brasserie Lipp.

DAYS OF PIZZA, AND WINE

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Jack Kerouac’s favorite meal — at least back in the early Fifties, when he could rarely afford anything fancier — was pizza, salad and red wine.

Carolyn Cassady, Neal’s wife, seduced Jack for the first time by serving him this meal on a night when Neal was away.  Below, Carolyn with Jack and one of her children:

Eating an artist’s favorite food is a way of making contact with them across the barriers of time — a slice of banana cream pie, in the case of Elvis, for example, or some cervelas remoulade with a big glass of beer, in the case of Papa, who ate this meal at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris after cashing the check for the first story he sold to an American magazine.

I have been reading Kerouac and thinking about him a lot recently, prompted by the enthusiasm of my friend Paul Zahl (The Zahl File).  So last night, I ate his favorite meal, and communed with Jack’s restless spirit.


                                                                                                              [Photo by Allen Ginsberg]

The meal remained a touchstone for Kerouac as well.  When Neal Cassady (above with Timothy Leary on Ken Kesey’s bus) died, towards the end of Jack’s brief life, Jack called Carolyn to reminisce about the old days — “of serious work, railroad, bubble baths, pizza, and wine.”

CARLA AND RAY

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Carla Laemmle recently celebrated her 100th birthday.  She was the
niece of Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures, and she had a
modest career as an actress and dancer in Hollywood.  She appeared
uncredited as a ballet chorine in the silent version of The Phantom Of the Opera and had a
bit part in Dracula, speaking the first words in that film as a
passenger in the coach taking Renfield to his fateful rendezvous at the
Borgo Pass.  (That's her on the left above, wearing glasses.)


She is now the last surviving cast member from those two iconic horror
films, and thus an icon in her own right for horror movie fans.




She interests me for other reasons, because of her life after the
movies.  She became the lifetime companion of Ray Cannon, another
Hollywood professional — actor, writer, director — who left the
business to pursue other ventures.


Cannon became a sports fisherman, supporting himself mainly through
writing about the subject.  He was among the first to explore the
fishing possibilities of Baja California, helping to popularize the
peninsula as a fisherman's paradise and a potential tourist Mecca.  He
fell in love with it in the late 1940s, before the crowds came, spending
much of each year
there on various fishing expeditions, and eventually wrote the text for
a best-selling picture book about the area, The Sea Of Cortez.




A wonderfully-illustrated collection of his other writings about Baja
California, The Unforgettable Sea Of Cortez, was published recently and
it's a fine evocation of the
peninsula in the days before the tourist boom.  Outside the precincts
of Ensenada at the top of it and and Cabo San Lucas at the bottom of
it, Baja California hasn't changed all that much since the time Cannon
discovered it.  Over-fishing by commercial interests has depleted the
Mar de Cortes to an alarming degree, but it's still one of the richest
sports fishing spots on earth, and the gracious old city of La Paz has
yet to be despoiled by the California duppies.


The landscapes and seascapes that Ray and Carla loved are still there
— severe and beautiful and brimming with opportunities for adventure.