"Spring was moving in the air above"

Saturday was the first day of spring. In honor of the equinox, in lieu of a longer post, and in anticipation of my Wind in the Willows series (which I'm about to commence work on, having re-read the book): an excerpt, a continuation of my vernal greetings one year ago...

"Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged , and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, 'Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

'This is fine!' he said to himself. 'This is better than whitewashing!' The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side."

Summer Hours

[#48 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series counting down the most acclaimed films of the previous decade.]

_________

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

_________

“I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”

_________

“Poor Mole stood alone in the road, his heart torn asunder and a big sob gathering, gathering, gathering, somewhere low down inside him, to leap up to the surface presently, he knew, in passionate escape. … Meanwhile, the wafts from his old home pleaded, whispered, conjured, and finally claimed him imperiously. He dared not tarry longer within their magic circle. With a wrench that tore his very heartstrings, he set his face down the road and followed submissively in the track of the Rat, while faint, thin little smells, still dogging his retreating nose, reproached him…”

. . . . .

Summer Hours, The Decline and Fall of the French Bourgeoisie, Three Generations. Olivier Assayas’ absorbing and poignant film is first an observation of life’s fleeting moments (one might say it’s more observant than the characters who experience these moments, without really appreciating them). It is also a wailing elegy to a France crumbling away in the globalized world, letting its culture and its people dribble from its borders like sand from a smashed hourglass. And finally the movie is a portrait of one family, three generations (old, middle-aged, young) and three siblings in that middle group (brother, sister, brother), who slowly and willingly lose their country home, and with it their fragile communal identity. These two triumvirates, the generations and siblings, are each anchored in the center – chronological in the case of the age group (those in the middle of their life dominate the running time of the film), geographic in the case of the brothers and sisters (the deceased matriarch’s eldest son lives in France and tries to hold the family together, while his sister flees west to New York, and his little brother flees east to China). Alas, as is so often the case, the center does not hold.

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Danses macabres

"Zig, zig, zig, Death in cadence,
Striking a tomb with his heel,
Death at midnight plays a dance-tune,
Zig, zig, zag, on his violin.
The winter wind blows, and the night is dark;
Moans are heard in the linden trees.
White skeletons pass through the gloom,
Running and leaping in their shrouds."

-extract from text for Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre.

THE HANGED MEN DANCE

On old one-arm, black scaffolding,
The hanged men dance;
The devil's skinny advocates,
Dead soldiers' bones.

Beelzebub jerks ropes about the necks
Of small black dolls who squirm against the sky;
With slaps, with whacks and cuffs and kicks
He makes them dance an antique roundelay!

Excited jumping jacks, they join thin arms;
Black organ lofts, their fretwork breasts
That once beat fast at beauteous damsels' charms
Now clack together in a perverse embrace.

Hurrah the jolly dancers, whose guts are gone!
About the narrow planks they jerk and prance!
Beelzebub roars the rasping fiddles' song!
Hop! They cannot tell the battle from the dance!

Hard heels, that never wear out shoes!
They've all put off their overcoat of skin;
What's left beneath is hardly worth excuse -
Their skulls are frail and white beneath the rain.

A crow provides a crest for these cracked heads,
A strip of flesh shakes on a skinny chin;
They swing about in somber skirmishes
Like heroes, stiff, their armor growing thin.

And the breeze blows for the skeletons' ball!
The gibbet groans like an organ of iron;
In violet forests the wolves wail;
The distant sky flames with hell's own fires!

Oh, shake me these dark commanders down!
Who slyly rake through broken fingertips
Love's rosary across their pale ribs:
This is no monastery, you dead men!

And there in the midst of the danse macabre
One wild skeleton leaps in the scarlet clouds,
Stung with madness like a rearing horse
With the rope pulled stiff above his head.

He tightens bony fingers on his cracking knees
With squeals that make a mock of dead men's groans,
And, like a puppet floating in the breeze,
Whirls in the dance to the sound of clacking bones.

On old one-arm, black scaffolding,
The hanged men dance;
The devil's skinny advocates,
Dead soldiers' bones.

-"The Hanged Men Dance," Arthur Rimbaud, very loosely translated by Paul Schmidt




The dance lasts for about a minute and a half, and begins around 55 seconds in:

More "danses macabre" here, here, and here.

Top picture: Remedios Varo,"Les Feuilles Mortes", inspired by its use here.

Echoes of Fitzgerald

Despite the picture, these are not selections from The Great Gatsby (which, upon recently re-reading, launched me on my present Fitzgerald kick) but from "My Lost City", an essay featured originally in The Crack-Up (1945), and which I read for the first time in the slim 1996 volume The Jazz Age. (I had originally planned to include the bittersweet valedictory "Echoes of the Jazz Age," which opens the collection and lent my post its name; but I realized all my favorite quotes were from the next piece in the book.)

When John Updike died last year, I noted how some actors, artists, and writers feel like their "ours" in ways others don't. No writer is more "mine" than Fitzgerald, whose prose is more intoxicating than any other I've read, and whose insights resonate so strongly with me that his pages make me feel like I've "some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if [I] were releated to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away." Or at least as if I'm in the presence of one such genius, one generous enough to pass that "romantic readiness" on to his readers.

Without further ado then, here are bits and pieces of this one extraordinarily fine reminiscence, one which will be perhaps especially evocative for those of us who lived, and perhaps failed, in New York, but universal enough to appeal to all citizens of the globe. Consider these breadcrumbs, leading you (return trip or otherwise) on to that gingerbread skyscraper upon whose ramparts innocence lets loose its last sigh...

"There was first the ferry boat moving softly from the Jersey shore at dawn - the moment crystalized into my first symbol of New York. Five years later when I was fifteen I went into the city from school to see Ina Claire in The Quaker Girl and Gertrude Bryan in Little Boy Blue. Confused by my hopeless and melancholy love for them both, I was unable to choose between them - so they blurred into one lovely entity, the girl. She was my second symbol of New York. The ferry boat stood for triumph, the girl for romance. In time I was to achieve some of both, but there was a third symbol that I have lost somewhere, and lost forever."

"But that night, in Bunny's apartment, life was mellow and safe, a finer distillation of all that I had come to love at Princeton. The gentle playing of an oboe mingled with city noises from the street outside, which penetrated into the room with difficulty through great barricades of books; only the crisp tearing open of invitations by one man was a discordant note. I had found a third symbol of New York and I began wondering about the rent of such apartments and casting about for the appropriate friends to share one with me.
Fat chance - for the next two years I had as much control over my own destiny as a convict over the cut of his clothes."

"And in a haze of anxiety and unhappiness I passed the four most impressionable months of my life.
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn East and North toward them - this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air. As I hovered ghost-like in the Plaza Red Room of a Saturday afternoon, or went to lush and liquid garden parties in the East Sixties or tippled with Princetonians in the Biltmore Bar I was haunted always by my other life - my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama - would it come and what would it say? - my shabby suits, my poverty, and love."

"I wandered through the town of 127th Street, resenting its vibrant life; or else I bought cheap theatre seats at Gray's drugstore and tried to lose myself for a few hours in my old passion for Broadway. I was a failure - mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home...
...Incalculable city. What ensued was only one of a thousand success stories of those gaudy days, but it plays a part in my own movie of New York."

"This is not an account of the city's changes but of the changes in this writer's feeling for he city. From the confusion of the year 1920 I remember riding on top of a taxicab along deserted Fifth Avenue on a hot Sunday night, and a luncheon in the cool Japanese gardens at the Ritz with the wistful Kay Laurel and George Jean Nathan, and writing all night again and again, and paying too much for minute apartments, and buying magnificent but broken-down cars."

"An afternoon alone in our 'apartment' eating olive sandwiches and drinking a quart of Bushmill's whiskey presented by Zoe Atkins, then out into the freshly bewitched city, through strange doors into strange apartments with intermittent swings along in taxis through the soft nights. At last we were one with New York, pulling it after us through every portal."

"And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again."

"It was too late - or too soon. For us the city was inevitably linked up with Bacchic diversions, mild or fantastic. We could organize ourselves only on our return to Long Island and not always there. We had no incentive to meet the city half way."

"It was three years before we saw New York again. As the ship glided up the river, the city burst thunderously upon us in the early dusk - the white glacier of lower New York swooping down like a strand of a bridge to rise into uptown New York, a miracle of foamy light suspended by the stars. A band started to play on deck, but the majesty of the city made the march trivial and tinkling. From that moment I knew that New York, however often I might leave it, was home."

"Whole sections of the city had grown rather poisonous, but invariably I found a moment of utter peace in riding south through Central Park at dark toward where the facade of 59th Street thrusts its lights through the trees. There again was my lost city, wrapped cool in its mystery and promise. But that detachment never last long - as the toiler must live in the city's belly, so I was compelled to live in its disordered mind."

"I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days. We were somewhere in North Africa when we heard a dull distant crash which echoed to the farthest wastes of the desert.
'What was that?'
'Did you hear it?'
'It was nothing.'
'Do you think we ought to go home and see?'
'No - it was nothing.'
In the dark autumn of two years later we saw New York again. We passed through curiously polite customs agents, and then with bowed head and hat in hand I walked reverently through the echoing tomb. Among the ruins a few childish wraiths still played to keep up the pretense that they were alive, betraying by their feverish voices and hectic cheeks the thinness of the masquerade. Cocktail parties, a last hollow survival from the days of carnival, echoed to the plaints of the wounded: 'Shoot me, for the love of God, someone shoot me!', and the graons and wails of the dying: 'Did you see that United States Steel is down three more points?'"

"From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood - everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, it's Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits - from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."

"So perhaps I am destined to return some day and find in the city new experiences that so far I have only read about. For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!

Frankenstein

Close on the heels of Dracula, I re-watched Frankenstein, James Whale's 1931 horror classic which is, if anything, even more iconic than the vampire pic. In many ways, Whale's movie has more to offer - while the vampire myths are fun and can be interpreted any variety of ways, Mary Shelley's gothic-romantic classic is compelling on a different level. The idea of man-created man both fascinates and repels us, and it only grows more relevant with time (evidenced by the countless sci-fi and horror spin-offs of the film, as well as the popularization of the term "he's created a Frankenstein monster"). Yet in some ways, I find Frankenstein less satisfying than Dracula, perhaps because it is more ambitious than the other film, and hence it's more noticeable when it falls short.

That's not to criticize the film too severely - it's quite entertaining, full of rich imagery and compelling ideas, and filled with little moments of black humor and detailed asides which James Whale would fully unleash in the richly comic sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein (which is a bona fide masterpiece). It's a classic that must be seen, even if the story is a little unwieldy at times (the narrative doesn't really develop, as we rush from the monster's escape right into the climax). And, like Dracula, it offers a thrill of recognition at moments of extreme influence: in this case, the mad scientist bringing his creation to life ("It's alive! It's alive!") in his gloomy castle on a dark and stormy night.

That said, I find Shelley's original depiction of this profane "birth" - quiet, unexpected, dreadful - infinitely more chilling:

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

What passage, what story better evokes the horror of the creator, beholding a previously-controlled creation now severed from himself? The horrible realization of culpability in this eternal mystery (which remains, steadfastly, a mystery, whosoever is responsible)? Is this how God felt when he breathed life into Adam? Frankenstein's monster is the ultimate "other": he is an alien being, regarded with dread as a holder of all mankind's dark qualities, the very elements which we fear within ourselves. This explains the paradoxical sympathy may readers and viewers have with the creature. He is at once less human and more human than the fully conscious, rational, "natural" people around him. They think, he feels, and in doing so he reminds us of our own innate helplessness and the raw, confused turmoil of our natural state (such resonance also calls to mind the question I posed a few weeks back, Why are kids' movies sadder?).

But I've saved the best for last. One reason we find ourselves so unexpectedly aligned with the monster, so attuned to his pain and confusion (so much more so then the misplaced comforts and conventional concerns of the "real" people) lies with the film's foremost claim to greatness: "?".

Or so he is listed in the opening credits. In fact, "?" was Boris Karloff. On his first appearance, standing erect in the doorway, glowering in dim perception without understanding, the intensity of his presence motivating Whale's camera to a series of unprecedented cut-ins, Karloff makes such impression that I might have gasped.

This is a great performance, not merely an influential or iconic one, but a truly masterful embodiment of character. It's on a higher plane of reality than all the other performances in the movie (ironic when you think about it), and it's almost impossible while watching to think that Karloff is "acting"; instead he seems to be the creature, inhabiting his skin with a complete lack of pretension. Yes, the makeup (still impressive) helps, but Karloff's pure conviction is contagious. It elevates the film - at least the moments he's in - to the level of greatness. As the beast lumbers towards the fatal lapping waters of the placid lake, hand-in-hand with a doomed little girl, it's hard not to wonder whose innocence is the more terrible. Probably his, since hers will soon be extinguished, while he will soon bear the shock of yet another rude awakening, one of so many in his short, agonized life.

Dickens does Drunk

A brilliant and highly amusing (and, let's be honest, quite accurate) presentation of inebriation from the distinguished author. Excerpted from the chapter "My first dissipation" in David Copperfield:

Somebody was smoking. We were all smoking. I was smoking, and trying to suppress a rising tendency to shudder. Steerforth had made a speech about me, in the course of which I had been affected almost to tears. I returned thanks, and hoped the present company would dine with me tomorrow, and the day after - each day at five o'clock - that we might enjoy the pleasures of conversation and society through a long evening. I felt called upon to propose an individual. I would give them my aunt - Miss Betsey Trotwood, the best of her sex!

Somebody was leaning out of my bedroom window, refreshing his forehead against the cool stone of the parapet, and feeling the air upon his face. It was myself. I was addressing myself as "Copperfield" and saying, "Why did you try to smoke? You might have known you couldn't do it." Now somebody was unsteadily contemplating his features in the looking glass. That was I too. I was very pale in the looking glass; my eyes had a vacant appearance; and my hair - only my hair, nothing else - looked drunk.

Somebody said to me, "Let us go to the theatre, Copperfield!" There was no bedroom before me, but again the jingling table covered with glasses; the lamp; Grainger on my right hand, Markham on my left, and Steerforth opposite - all sitting in a mist, and a long way off. The theatre? To be sure. The very thing. Come along! But they must excuse me if I saw everybody out first, and turned the lamp off - in case of fire.

Owing to some confusion in the dark, the door was gone. I was feeling for it in the window curtains, when Steerforth, laughing, took me by the arm and led me out. We went downstairs, one behind another. Near the bottom, somebody fell, and rolled down. Somebody else said it was Copperfield. I was angry at that false report, until, finding myself on my back in the passage, I began to think there might be some foundation for it.