Forging an Art

 ”Clyde had a soul that was not destined to grow up.”

It has been nearly 85 years since Theodore Dreiser’s greatest success was published, but the infantile and selfish motives behind Clyde Griffiths’ behavior have run rampant since the beginning of time, so An American Tragedy will always carry an appeal to those of us interested in psychological drama.  Much like the title character of the author’s rather boring Sister Carrie, Clyde is incapable of considering others within his view of the world.  When his deeds carry harm to those around him, in particular those who trust and care about him, he shrugs and thinks, why should he care?  The young woman he seduces, sweet-talking her into actions she would never consider on her own, is discarded like dirty laundry when he discovers something, or someone better – Sondra, who is like “a bright colored bird.”  Her father’s fortune and the family’s carefree, expensive lifestyle are a large part of the attraction.  Clyde is one of those people who want something, everything, for nothing, and feels a sense of entitlement to it.  Why him and not others?  Who knows. 

Raised by street evangelists, he hates poverty and labor and begrudges the insinuation that he should work for his supper.  An unwanted pregnancy leads him to contemplate the unthinkable – but for Clyde, there is no unthinkable.  He can and does rationalize every sort of behavior in the name of serving his own desires. 

The book, which is long but riveting, is considerably different from the pretty 1951 Hollywood film, A Place in the Sun, directed by George Stevens and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Shelley Winters.   The movie is heavy on the second half of the book, obviously due to time constraints, but there are details that change characters and relationships to an almost unrecognizable extent.  Clyde is not so cold in person, the handsome face of Montgomery Clift not so easily condemned as the Clyde of the vast explication at the hands of Dreiser.  He is immature, but murderous?  It isn’t so clear; and neither is the vapid nature of Sondra, who is called Angela in the film, and carried regally by the glorious Taylor.  Angela visits Clyde in prison, where he awaits his death, while in the book, Sondra and Clyde never see each other again after his arrest.  Angela takes pains to have access to her love and to reassure him of her affections; Sondra never would have compromised herself in such a way. 

There is a disturbing Oedipal situation between Clyde and his mother in the film, while Dresier alludes to nothing of the sort.  If, in my close reading, I have missed it, then it is so carefully hidden as to not attract the attention it does in the film.  Clyde’s mother is strangely nervous during phone conversations, admonishing him to be good, which she does in the book but still seems bizarrely unnatural doing so in the film.  Before Clyde kisses Angela for the first time, Taylor gazes lovingly, obsessively at Clift and croons, “Tell Mama all.”   This brief moment was a huge shift in tone from the book, and what I would assume, Dreiser’s intent.  That aside, it is shocking and strange. 

Winters, who does not have a glamorous part, absolutely steals the show from Taylor and Clift with her fussy, annoying Alice.  Yes, Roberta is a crabby creature in the novel, but understandably so.  Roberta is a girl true to her principles and her family, and her fall from grace and concern for her future lead her to badger Clyde for help and fulfillment of promises made and ignored.  Alice, the Roberta of the film, is dull and whiny, and one can imagine how Clyde could wish her harm, although not necessarily how he could perpetuate murder on the girl and his unborn child.  The camera angled from Clyde’s point of view as she harasses him, focusing on her monotonous, perpetual questions (“You wish I was dead, don’t you?”) is enough to make the audience scream in frustration, but one doesn’t deserve a death sentence for annoying behavior.

Forget Sister Carrie; readers turned off by Miss Meeber will find a meaty scandal in the pages of Tragedy and lustrous color wash of Sun.  Read first, watch second – the details make interesting detective work for discerning readers and viewers.

“They too had something in their hearts that made every thought, every movement, a danger.”

Hugh Walpole had a fan in Henry James, who pointed me toward The Duchess of Wrexe with a kind review published in The Bookman long ago.  Duchess concerns the affects of social and political change, as well as war, on a once and somewhat still powerful family and their circle.  This is psychological drama on a James scale, grand and full and real.  The younger generation, which, for the most part, fears and detests the older, is considered sentimental and shameless to the old.  Even those employed by the Duchess become entangled in the family drama, as the steadfast secretary discovers that she is not as heartless as she once believed:

“The room, dark as pitch before her, was filled now with a red glow – Her hands, clenched, were ice in a world that was all of an overpowering heat.”

Everyone is waiting for the old Duchess to die; of course, she stands for the old world, old ways, and she refuses to leave any sooner than her time.  Feared, revered, emulated – she knows her value and intends to leave her mark. She has tormented those she should have held close, her own grandchildren, holding them in contempt for thinking beyond the world she has drawn for her family.  

Like James’ The Sense of the Past and Besant’s Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, Duchess is infused with the affects of an eerily authentic painting.  There is something to this device during this era, hinting towards Dorian Gray.

Dr. Christopher, trusted family physician, holds his own somewhere between the two classes and insists on the one truth he holds close:

“Simply that I believe in an age when a man’s neighbour will matter to a man more than himself, when it won’t be priggish or weak to help someone in worse plight than yourself, when it will simply be the obvious thing . . . when, above all, there’ll be no jealousy, no getting in a man’s way because he does better than you, no knocking a man down because he sees the world – this world and the next – differently.”  

Some of us are not so removed in time as to disagree with him.

Ted Hughes is terrifying but I can’t stay away from him.  Reading his poetry (including his work for children) and short stories is like swimming in the ocean amidst gently rocking waves that lull me into security before the undertow hits, and listening to his voice as he reads his poetry is captivating.  Difficulties of a Bridegroom represents work created over a thirty-nine year span but it is clear, oh so clear, that the man who shares “O’Kelly’s Angel,” a fable packed with greed and violence, is the same who tells the suspenseful ghost story “The Deadfall.”  Hughes spares no detail, however physical and gory, but does not abuse his talent or our time with gratuitous violence.  It is all necessary and satisfying, although I am moderately disturbed to be satisfied with such horrors.  He captures realities within a haze of fear and uncertainty.  Hughes’s primary focus is man’s struggle with and for harmony with nature and spirituality, however that might be addressed under different circumstances, and survival within those usually violent circumstances.  Hughes included a foreward in which he described his belief that these nine stories “hang together” alongside his poems, and detailed the origins of some of the tales.  He said little, however, of the story situated last in the series, “The Head,” save that it was for Emma Tennant who called for a “fairy story” for her magazine in 1978.  It is the most horrifying of the collection, and perhaps more so because it is the only one to call Sylvia Plath to my mind and only at the very end, like a hard slap that brings tears to the eyes.  And it did.

I adore Carson McCullers.  Her work is stunning and painful, and I trust her judgment regarding craft most of the time.  It stands to reason, then, that I would fall in love with the master storyteller, Isak Dinesen, as McCullers herself had some fifty-odd years ago.  Dinesen, the pseudonym of Danish-born Karen (Dinesen) Blixen, published her first book in 1934; Seven Gothic Tales. These psychological dramas take place in the most fantastic of settings with a variety of circumstances and characters, but all are concerned with deception.  Murder and infidelity, friendship and familial bonds gone awry, and lies at the heart of it all.  I read parts of this collection to my grandparents, in the cemetery, my legs stretched out, wet and frozen in the snow, imagining their contented sighs at the incredible and intense descriptions of a lost landscape, a world of the past, but also of those human frailties that remain timeless and heartless, those qualities that idealistic youth might deny but the old and wise amongst us can attest to very well, and from experience.  I do admit to walking into a wall while reading The Poet, so don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Yes, this is science fiction.  Time travel, or maybe not.  Is Ralph just a bit off, or has he really stepped through time, a trip of ninety years that should be a dream come true for a history scholar?  I have always understood Ralph as a true time traveler and have never questioned his sanity, unlike critics such as J. Hillis Miller, who raises such questions in his latest book, Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James.  Miller even considers that Ralph might be a ghost haunting the Midmores.  I think not.

 
I am rather fond of this unfinished book, which James began in 1900 after the completion of The Turn of the Screw and The Awkward Age and before the works of his major phase.  His concerns about the work are documented in his notes, where his thought processes are revealed and he becomes so much more than the polished gentleman of photos and interviews.  Worry over his characters mimics a parent’s watchful eye over his children, and James, childless, his affection lavished over close friends, family, and his adored dogs, finds his fatherhood here in the care with which he forms the fates of the figures he creates.  Obviously, this does not only apply to this specific work, but the immediacy of these notes makes his presence felt, well, immediately.  Looking at this during the same time that I was re-reading Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, I am struck again by the involvement that paintings of ancestors have on the lives of the characters.  The painting in The Sense of the Past is the vehicle of Ralph’s supernatural adventure and becomes his adversary in his struggle to find his place in time and within the relationships he is attempting to forge in his present, and extract himself from in the past.  And what about the ancestor who has replaced him in his present, what is he up to, and to what changes will Ralph return, if he does return at all?

Destruction and ruin.  Money lending, dance halls, gambling, drinking, and assorted vices unmentionable in 1895 when this entertaining novel was published contribute to the fortune that tempts and destroys generation upon generation of the Burley family.  When Lucien’s dying father reveals the existence of a grandfather rife with immorality and money contaminated by the notorious behavior of his forebears, Lucien cannot hold himself to the deathbed promise he makes to his father, who worries that his only son will be ruined by the temptations of unlimited wealth.  Lucien, of course, has a fiancee who insists he keep his hands clean of the lot, but she is, after all, just a woman, and blindly follows as he stumbles headfirst into disaster.  The portraits of the Burley clan that hang on the walls of the old family mansion torment both husband and wife.  “Those portraits drag you to the house?” the poor girl asks her love, who admits their lure.  She, in contrast, is “weighed down by the sins of all these ancestors.”  He may be destined as a “darling of fortune,” but in the end, he escapes moral ruin through a twist that none of the characters foresaw.  Or so it seems.
What fun it is to be so entertained not just by the story but the writing, which is clever and sarcastic and absolutely hysterical.  This was like crunching Pop Rocks on a summer day back when I was a child, a spark of laughter on every page.  I was sorry to reach the end, and wished I could ring Walter Besant to tell him how happy I am that he wrote this book.

“It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.” – W. Somerset Maugham, 1938
Most scholars and readers alike consider Of Human Bondage Maugham’s masterpiece, but The Razor’s Edge carries the same emotional punch as his earlier work.  Written in 1944, The Razor’s Edge was translated onto the big screen in 1946 and 1984, the later version starring Bill Murray as an unlikely Larry Darrell. Darrell, an American fighter pilot who survives World War I, returns to his friends and family a changed man.  His life becomes a solitary search for meaning and purpose, to the surprise and chagrin of those who care about him. Edge is not a pretty story; but as Maugham usually demonstrates, reality is a tough mirror to face.  Darrell accepts responsibility for his own happiness, but unfortunately, his friends fall into traps that seem all too familiar to life today.  This timelessness makes Maugham’s treatment of the individual and interpersonal relationships worth revisiting.  
Maugham lived a life all too similar socially to his own characters.  Issues with sexuality, marriage, family; his life reads like a painful soap opera.  It was from his own emotional experience that he drew forth characters who, unlike Darrell, find themselves in the midst of troubled relationships and desperate attempts at happiness.  He was a travel writer, journalist, and a British spy whose short stories based on personal experience influenced Fleming’s James Bond series.  Many of his works were mocked and parodied, in spite of the Hollywood success of film versions of novels such as Bondage and The Painted Veil, the latter a brilliant 2006 remake starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts.
There are no happy endings here; this multi-talented member of the Literary Ambulance Drivers reminds us that we have a choice in how we live our lives and how we affect those we care for.  That choice might not always be an easy one, but it is ours to make and a responsibility that we ultimately shoulder alone.

At 1124 pages, Kristin Lavransdatter is quite an investment.  It isn’t an easy creature to lug about, and it doesn’t fit well into a purse or briefcase.  It takes quite a while to wander through the life of this stubborn farmer’s daughter, from childhood to death, her heart open for readers to see and consider.  Set in fourteenth century Norway, Kristin’s journey revolves around the conflict she carries between her duty to her father and youthful passion.  She follows her heart but regrets it, carrying the sin of her behavior with her until she dies.  Her story is romantic at times and realistic always, allowing that hindsight may offer clearer vision, but our actions still follow us and there is nowhere to hide. 

“Her heart was bleeding with sorrow and shame, but she knew that she could not believe in miracles because she was unwilling to give up her inheritance of health and beauty and love.”

Author Sigrid Undset, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928 after publishing the trilogy that would become Kristin Lavransdatter, was the first woman to win the prize, in spite of complaints about the sexual explicitness and blatant moral questions explored in her work. 

“She was so blissfully robbed of all power.  She leaned closer to the man and whispered faintly; she didn’t know herself what she said.  When he placed his hands on her bodice and stroked her breasts, she felt as if he had laid her heart bare and then seized it.”

I stumbled upon Kristin when I was a member of the ALA/YALSA DVDs for Young Adults Committee and watched a fifteen minute animated short called The Danish Poet, which is a charming study of coincidence and possiblity.  The poet, who finds himself unable to write, travels to Norway to meet his favorite writer, Sigrid Undset.  Kristin is mentioned and noted by its size, and my interest began.  When I returned home, I searched the stacks for a copy and lo and behold, there it was.  I walked around with Kristin for several weeks and attracted not a few stares and questions, but was totallly absorbed in a life set in a faraway time in a faraway land but so close to my own.  How many decisions do we carry with us forever, decisions made on a passing feeling, a hunch, a guess, without thought to the next twenty or thirty years?  Kristin walks through life with her baggage of guilt, but she finds fulfillment and happiness in spite of it.  It isn’t easy, but her struggle proves worthwhile and universal. 

Kristin Days

My pick for today is Guard of Honor, a Pulitzer Prize (1949) winning novel by James Gould Cozzens. 

Cozzens served as a liaison between the military and the civilian press in the U.S. Army Air Forces durign World War II .  His experiences in that capacity served as the basis for this clear, concise (yes, even at 631 pages) and sometimes brutal look at the conflict between duty and emotion, the professional and the personal, and often, the huge difference between talking the talk and walking the walk.  Cozzens reminds us that we, as individuals, are most certainly not the center of the universe, and in a society where the acceptance of personal responsibility is the exception rather than the rule, this unromantic view of life is a welcome discourse.  This honesty might be hard to swallow, but Cozzens does not leave us without a rope to grasp.  After all, we are still capable of recognizing what we can do in any given situation, and the key to surviving and possibly succeeding is noting not the best way to handle life as it comes, but what options are available within each situation and choosing from those options.  Beating our heads against the wall over things that cannot be changed is a waste of time and effort, but giving up because the only options we have take time and effort is pathetic.  Cozzens is conservative and sarcastic, and in Guard of Honor offers believable characters in tough situations that are relevant in any day and age.