Category Archives: The Zahl File

THE ZAHL FILE: REPORT FROM THE ROAD — EGYPTIAN REVIVAL

Posted on by

On his recent trip to Paducah, Kentucky, Paul Zahl passed through Nashville and made a special trip to see . . . a Presbyterian church done in a very strange style.  He writes:

This photo is a little dark, but was the best I could do given the
available lighting.  Together with the First Presbyterian Church, also known as the Old Whaler's Church, at Sag Harbor, Long Island, this is one of the earliest Egyptian
Revival churches in America.  Now known as the Downtown Presbyterian Church, it was designed by William Strickland in 1849.
 It is directly across, or almost directly across, from the Capitol, in
the center of Nashville.  Because Presbyterian churches are rarely open
during the week, I was doubtful that my friend Ray and I could get in but . . . dashing around the block to the church office, I found the
sexton.  She was just “closing up”.  Fortunately, she opened the
church, and I got in.

It is amazing.  Central pulpit, large organ and organ case, classic
Communion table under the pulpit.  I looked for the Mummy behind
the pulpit, but no dice.  I am believing that Kharis rests directly under the pulpit.  Wonder, too, whether the preaching in this church is
sufficient to waken him.  I hope so . . . or maybe I don't.

I must say that the Egyptian Revival style in early 19th-Century American architecture was more or less off my radar, and the fact that it was used for Presbyterian churches seems delightfully odd.

THE ZAHL FILE: REPORT FROM THE ROAD — SIGN OF ANOTHER TIME

Posted on by

Another of Paul Zahl's discoveries on his recent trip to Paducah, Kentucky:

This shows the ancient, circa 1928, and original neon sign (from which the neon tubing has been removed) advertising
the Irvin S. Cobb Hotel in downtown Paducah.  It is the man himself in
mid-career silhouette.

The Hotel, now apartments, is holding on for
dear life.  It is apparently for sale, has no immediate buyer, yet
preserves a perfect Art-Deco lobby designed by the same firm that
created the famous Peabody Hotel in Memphis.  There are several Art-Deco wood sculptures in the lobby, an amazing original dining room, now
darkened and filled with junk; and a painted ceiling that calls to mind
the St. Regis Hotel in New York.  This was also the tallest building in
Paducah, once upon a time, since Cobb was its most renowned favorite son.  Yet who
reads him today?  And where dwell the ghosts of past guests at this Twilight Zone sort of a place?

I love the sign, and I love the place.

THE ZAHL FILE: REPORT FROM THE ROAD — ON SILENT AVENUE

Posted on by

Another report by Paul Zahl from his recent trip to the area around Paducah, Kentucky:

This is one of the main avenues of the ancient Oak Grove Cemetery in
Paducah.  Here Irvin S. Cobb is buried, here is where John Ford came in
1961, while shooting his section of How the West Was Won nearby, to pay his respects to his old friend, and here is where the prototype for Cobb's (and Ford's) “Judge
Priest” (i.e. Judge William S. Bishop) is buried, right beside Silent Avenue.

This is Cobb's grave in Oak Grove Cemetery:



The inscription
reads, “Back Home”.  A dogwood tree, as per his dying request, shades the
grave.  He wanted only the Twenty-Third Psalm read at the grave,
together with the choir of a local African-American congregation to
sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Deep River”.  Cobb's wishes were
honored.



Mercy Avenue is another of the main axes of Oak Grove Cemetery.  I
got up high on some crumbling steps leading into a mausoleum in order
to get this one.  I think if we could all spend some time on “Silent
Avenue” and then perhaps forever on “Mercy Avenue”, we would be in
excellent shape.

Just a few “blocks” down Silent Ave from Cobb's grave is this one — the grave of John Scopes, the
teacher of evolution in the Tennessee public schools who was prosecuted
in the famous “Monkey Trial” of 1925:



This is the man whom Clarence Darrow (or
Spencer Tracy, for those of you who remember the movie about the trial, Inherit the Wind) defended, and who won, after a fashion.  He was found formally guilty and
fined $100, but the judgment was regarded by everyone at the time as a
victory for free speech, and even evolution itself.  In the film, Frederick March played William Jennings
Bryan (below), who stumbled in attacking this man, and never fully recovered from
the moral defeat which the trial was for him.



What a picture of
Twentieth Century America, in one acre of ground — Cobb, now no longer
famous, with a big grave near the entrance; his prototype for “Judge
Priest” buried nearby, on Mercy Avenue, a man who kept on getting elected
because the Confederate veterans of the county were “Yellow Dog”
Democrats — that is, people who would vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for Republican; and then, after all that, down the way, the simple memorial
to John Scopes,  “A Man of Courage”.

TEN MINUTES OF EXQUISITE AGONY

Posted on by

Paul Zahl's thoughts on the episode of How the West Was Won directed by John Ford (a few spoilers here), with some photographs he took recently of the filming locations:

JOHN FORD'S “CIVIL WAR”


Right after the Intermission in How the West Was Won comes
John Ford's part.  It is his conception of the Civil War, in which Carroll
Baker bids farewell to her son forever as he marches off to war, the Battle of Shiloh rages, during which her husband, the
Jimmy Stewart character, is killed off, then her
character dies (off screen), and George Peppard comes home to find only
his brother still there, lovingly watching over the family farm and
also the family graves.  Peppard's character leaves, again, and his
brother weeps with desolation and resignation.



Above is the exact spot where John Ford filmed the bracketing scenes on the farm.  I photographed it from
the bank of the Cumberland River at Smithland, Kentucky, with Georgian and
early 19th Century houses — inns, churches, warehouses, and one “plantation” house called “Strait” — on both sides of me and behind
me.  Just beyond the trees on the spit of land across the river is
where the farm house of Carroll Baker and George Peppard and his little
brother was constructed.  That area is now farmland.  Also, just
behind the trees, they constructed the log fence along the road down
which Andy Devine rode at the beginning of scene one, and down which
George Peppard walked at the end of scene one, the family dog trying to
follow him, plaintively.

Although the river in front of the spit of land is the
Cumberland, on the other side of it, in the far left background, is
the Tennessee.  Baker and the other actors would be ferried across to
the location each morning, from the spot where this photograph was
taken.  The place is still and wonderfully quiet.


The two scenes on the farm are
distilled emotion in the classic Ford manner.  Carroll Baker carries a
black scarf as she says her dense and underplayed
farewell to Peppard and as she addresses the dead in the family
graveyard.  The second scene on the farm is like a silent movie, with
almost no dialogue, and Peppard plays this particular part — his
discovery that his mother has died — laconically and therefore
movingly.  The director's use of the Cinerama process seems
instinctive, with Ford hiding the screen lines by means of poles and
posts mostly.  I find these two short scenes on the “Rawlings” farm to be
as mighty as any he ever did.



The middle sequence of “The Civil War” represents
the Battle of Shiloh.  It includes a somewhat cynical exchange between
General Grant and General Sherman, and a contrived encounter that
George Peppard, slightly wounded on the Union side, has with Russ
Tamblyn, a Confederate soldier.  They are both quenching their burning
thirst at “Bloody Pond”, until they realize that the water has an odd color . . .



Above is Bloody Pond as it looks today.  It has changed little since the
night of April 6th, 1862, which is the night depicted in the middle section of
Ford's Civil War sequence.  You can't
park anywhere near the place today, due to improvements being made by
the Park Service to the loop road; so you have to approach Bloody Pond
through the woods on the other side of the Pond (from this angle).  You
walk about a third of a mile through woodland, then come right out on
the clearing where the Pond is.  Now it is muddy and yellowish-brown.
 That night it was red.



Ford also depicts the battlefield surgical station, as well as the tiny Shiloh Church — above, as it is today.  This is where the fighting reached its apogee on the first day of the battle.  It is a reconstruction (but on the exact site) of Shiloh
Methodist Church, which was destroyed during the battle.  It is
depicted at the top of the frame at the beginning of the nighttime
section of Ford's Shiloh sequence.



They weren't able to
have church that Sunday morning April 6, 1862 . . . but . . . the day I was
there, a couple of weeks ago, I went into the current United Methodist
Church of Shiloh, which is the active church, located to the right of what you
see in the photograph, and peered through its glass doors.  Behold!: a
dead woman was there.  There had been a “viewing” the night before, and
there, right below the altar, in an open casket surrounded by bouquets
of flowers and waiting for a late morning church service, was a
peaceful person of middle years, lying in death, for all to see.  It
was as if the entire scene were crying, “This is not abstract, what you
are seeing.  It's not re-enactment time.  These things really
happened.  And they still do.”

Ford's Shiloh sequence feels “staged” to me, and I've felt
this ever since the days when Lloyd Fonvielle and I saw this movie in
its first run at the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Avenue, not so many
blocks from the Obama White House.


For me the summit of How the West Was Won is reached during John Ford's “Civil War”.  But it's the home front that moves you, and moves you mightily.

[See my thoughts on the rest of the film here.]

THE ZAHL FILE: REPORT FROM THE ROAD — GRASSY ISLAND

Posted on by

Paul Zahl writes of more mysteries explored on his recent trip to Reelfoot Lake in western Tennessee:

This was taken from the northwest edge of the lake.  I asked my guide Jeff Earp if
this were where the evil deed recounted in Irvin S. Cobb's 1937 mystery entitled
“Judge Priest Turns Detective” was done.  He had not read the story,
but when I told him the mechanism of Cobb's plot, he suggested that it
would have occurred in the one spot on the Lake where the depth is down
to 60 feet, where even now it is possible to drive a boat fast.  Cobb
accepted the 100-year-old local story that in that spot, which Cobb
called “Big Hole”, great prehistoric fish lived at depth and in
tunnels, tunnels by which they could escape into the Tennessee River if
Reelfoot Lake were ever drained.

When the murderer strangled his
victim in “Judge Priest Turns Detective”, the criminal pushed the body
into Big Hole.  The body did not surface for weeks, and by then . . . the
catfish had got it.

THE ZAHL FILE: REPORT FROM THE ROAD — KEEPING WATCH

Posted on by

Paul writes, of his recent trip to the area around Paducah, Kentucky:

Two Bald Eagles surveying the scene over their Winter
flyway and nesting ground, Reelfoot Lake, in northwestern Tennessee.   I saw four Bald Eagles that morning.  They are noble birds — all four of them took flight after this photograph
was taken, slicing through the air.  They circled us and then took up
new sentinel positions to the left, on the shore.

I can't believe how big they look . . .

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.

PULL MY DAISY

Posted on by

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.

PZ'S PODCAST

Posted on by

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

THE AGE OF ANXIETY

Posted on by

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.

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.

HERMITAGE

Posted on by

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.]

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)