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The news here isn't that Superman and Wonder Woman are going to be having super, wonderful sex, 1. because it's been done and 2. Why not? They're young, they're single, they've got a lot in common.
If you just responded to my Why not? with Why not? Lois Lane is why not! you haven't been following the ongoing reboot of the DC universe. Just about every superhero in the pantheon has been moved back in time to near the beginning of their careers. It’s kind of like what J.J. Abrams has done with Star Trek. All the heroes are younger and still learning how to be the heroes we old timers know them as, which means that their futures are still open questions, and like Abrams, DC has reserved the right to alter those futures or, in the case of the comic books where the clock gets reset every decade or so, the various futures different generations of fans thought were settled. Superman has been patrolling the skies of Metropolis for only a few years. Lois and Clark aren't an item yet, and that's the news or the lead in to the news.
Since DC relaunched its characters and universe nearly a year ago, some of the origins have changed — Wonder Woman is now the daughter of Zeus — and the costumes have, too.
One aspect that did not survive the relaunch: Lois Lane's role as Superman's love. She's still around, but the two have never dated, nor are they likely to.
I don't know if the reporter is assuming this or if he's summarizing something that's been reported. If he's assuming, he's assuming something different than the comic experts in this house who tell me the Lois and Clark and Superman triangle is already in view. But if the plan really is not to bring them together ever then I suspect “ever” just means as long as the crew presently running the show sticks around and that's because they don't intend to let things advance far enough in time. At its farthest point along, the story will always be a year or two or three before Lois and Clark become Lois+Clark.
Which is fine.
In any number of the previous timelines, including the original, the romance was more potential than actual. In the Fleischer cartoons, their future as a couple was treated as such a given there was no point in mentioning it. Besides the action was so compressed and relentless they barely had time to flirt. I think the whole of their courtship was handled in one scene in which Lois perches on Clark's desk and displays some leg while they are talking about doing their jobs as reporters. The result was that Lois was left free to be the heroine she is and not a damsel in permanent distress. Lois frequently needs to be rescued by Superman because she’s heroic. Her courage and resourcefulness and pluck --- and her stubbornness and recklessness---often carry her in over her head, but that usually means she’s in there ahead of the cops and the army and, routinely, Superman himself. This idea of Lois as a heroine in her own right was picked up in the cartoon series in the 90s and it's where things have started in the reboot.
It's even the case in the Silver Age comics of the 50s and 60s in which Superman and Lois are only ever a couple in alternative universe stories. True, Lois' feelings for Superman are more overt---to the point that she's practically his stalker---and she spends an awful lot of time scheming and dreaming of ways to get Superman's romantic attention. But the fact is they aren't a couple...yet. Their "real" future is still an open question.
So, since the very beginning, both Superman and Lois have almost always been free to date other people and have. This is a fact I grew up with and internalized so completely that any timeline in which Lois and Clark are Lois+Clark strikes me as fundamentally wrong. Oddly, this feeling doesn't extend to the TV show Lois and Clark or to Smallville. Go figure.
Now, it is possible that the current crew really plans to fix it so that Lois and Superman can never get together. This would be an incredibly arrogant move. It's a major alteration of the mythology. It'd be as if they said, I know! What if Bruce Wayne's parents weren't murdered? Lois Lane is as essential to Superman’s story as the death of the planet Krypton. You would think no one would dare to make such a drastic change. But it seems that each new generation of artists and writers thinks they now own the myths and have the incontestable right and even the duty to fiddle with them in any way feel inspired to. I suspect this is truer for the gangs at DC than at Marvel where Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko are still revered and everyone has to keep looking over their shoulders to see if Stan Lee's in the room. Still, the Human Torch is dead or he was or he is again or will be and Steve Rogers isn't Captain America anymore or he wasn't or he is and he is and isn't or...why isn't he dead again, again? So I wouldn't be surprised to read someday that from here on out Peter Parker was never bitten by a spider or the X-men aren't mutants they're aliens or androids or figments of Charles Xavier’s imagination. It won't matter for long if Lois marries Lex Luthor or Lana Lang. A few years from now a new crew will take over and put everything back as it was.
Actually, it won't matter even right now because what happens in the comic books is only important to people who read the comic books and, really, only to a certain subset of those readers. For the rest of us superhero fans or onetime fans Superman and Batman exist well outside the comic books. The comic books are just retellings of what really have come to be like myths in popular imagination. And it's not the comic books that did that. It's radio, television, and the movies.
Without getting into how much of what we think of as essential to the Superman story was put in there by the writers of the radio show---and the Fleischer cartoons. You know why Superman flies, right?---the comic books, all the superhero comic books, not just Superman's, were saved by the TV series. Superman was saved again twenty years later by Christopher Reeve, and say what you like about Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, it was Tim Burton's Batman movies and then Bruce Timm's cartoons that saved Batman. And at the moment, the Batman belongs more to Christopher Nolan than he does to DC, although I think Nolan rather graciously offered to hand him back at the end of The Dark Knight Rises.
So...Wonder Woman and Superman? Fine by me. What bothers me is this:
DC Comics co-publisher Jim Lee, who has drawn each issue of "Justice League" since its debut, called the canoodling in Wednesday's issue not a stunt or an alternate reality smooch.
"This has been in the works for some time and we certainly wouldn't have pulled the trigger on without there being great creative benefit to the liaison," he said in an email. "Beyond the joy and sorrows of new love, there are potentially huge ramifications and dramatic ways this single relationship between these iconic characters will change the entire political and interpersonal landscape of the DC Universe."
Great. It's not just a romantic subplot, it's a goddamn soap opera that's going to take over the whole story. What's worse, it's apparently an adolescent soap opera:
Wonder Woman and Superman are an item, locking lips in a passionate embrace as the pair realize that there's no one out there like them.
(Emphasis mine.)
Can't you hear Diana Prince whining to Hippolyta, "Kal-El isn't just any superboy, Mother! He's the only one who truly understands me and loves me for who I am!" while Kal-El is whining something similar to the hologram of Jor-El?
This better not turn into Twilight for fanboys.
Again, I don't know if this is the reporter's assumption or a summarization, but I'm not optimistic it's just the former. There's a lot that's so much better about comic books now than the ones I read as a kid, but one thing that is not better and is in fact something wrong is the way the superheroes have stopped being idealized grownups and have become stand-ins for the arrested adolescent twenty-something men who are among their most obsessive fans, reflecting back their neuroses, insecurities, angers, dreams of self-aggrandizement, power fetishes, revenge fantasies, and sexual hangups in ways that normalize those pathologies.
Oliver Mannion has assigned himself the job of keeping me up to date on the reboots. When we go to Barnes & Noble, he fetches the latest issues of the titles he knows I'm most interested in and makes sure I read them. I have to say I'm really enjoying the new Flash, and not just because it does my old heart good to have Barry Allen back. I like the cartoonishness of the artwork and the wit in the streamlined dialog. And I like the new Superman, which until I read this article I just took for granted was taking for granted Lois and Clark's future as Lois+Clark. So maybe I don't have to worry about what's going on in the Justice League story arc.
But given what they've done with Starfire, I can't help wondering if the whole point is an excuse to draw Wonder Woman naked.
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Warning: The Starfire link will take you to a post that may not be safe for work, which is DC’s doing not the writer’s, as you’ll see.
Top image courtesy of DC.
"The most sublime backside in art." Venus at Her Mirror. Circa 1647-1651. Diego Velazquez. Velazquez's model may have been his muse. Not a metaphorical muse, as in a woman who inspired him. As in an actual, classical, supernatural spirit who took on human form and enraptured him, a frequent occurrence in the history of art, as the painters Lucien Lessard and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec discover when they investigate the murder of their friend Vincent Van Gogh in Christopher Moore's comic fantasy mystery, Sacre Bleu.
Paris. 1890. Lucien Lessard, a talented young painter, mentored by some of the most famous Impressionists and friends with several of the best Post-Impressionists, is beside himself with joy. Juliette, the woman who broke his heart three years ago, has breezed back into his life, more beautiful, more alluring, more insistent and far less inhibited than before. Not only has she enthusiastically agreed to be his mistress, she is willing to pose for him, nude, inspiring him to produce the best painting of his blossoming career.
It's mildly disconcerting that Juliette doesn't look or act quite as Lucien remembered. It's discombobulating when she takes him on a picnic to La Grenouillere, a waterside park outside Paris with a public boathouse and floating cafe immortalized in paintings by Renoir, considering the boathouse burned down years before and was never rebuilt. And it's downright eerie that after they spend a week together in London Lucien returns home to find that no one noticed he was gone.
But none of that matters. What matters is that he and Juliette are happy and his painting of her is on its way to being a masterpiece, although it does seem to be requiring him to use an awful lot of blue.
Meanwhile, Lucien's good friend, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, has reencountered his favorite model, a redheaded laundress named Carmen Gaudin, who to his dismay disappeared three years ago, driven away by his mother who was afraid he'd become dangerously obsessed with the girl. The disconcerting thing for Henri, however, is that Carmen doesn't recall ever posing for him. In fact, she has no memory of him at all. When he tries to jog her memory by describing their times working together as artist and model, she tells him that it couldn't have happened because she'd been desperately ill at the time, bedridden with a fever that she believes must have affected her brain because she doesn't remember anything that happened while she was sick.
Oddly, as they talk, Henri realizes that his his own memory of that time is fuzzy.
Henri felt his face go numb, as if he’d been slapped, but the stinging lingered. She really didn’t know him. “We were very close, mademoiselle.”
“Friends?” she asked. “Were we friends, monsieur?”
“More than friends, Carmen. We spent many evenings, many nights together.”
Her hand went to her mouth, as if she were horrified. “Lovers? We weren’t lovers.”
Henri searched her face for some hint of deception, some glimmer of recognition, of shame, of joy, but he found nothing.
“No, mademoiselle,” he said, the words as painful to him as having a tooth pulled. “We worked together. We were more than friends. An artist’s model is more than a friend.”
"She seemed relieved. “And I was your model?”
“The best I’ve worked with. I could show you the paintings.” But even as he said it, he knew he couldn’t. He could show her a few of the paintings. But he had only three. Yet he remembered, or thought he remembered, painting a dozen. He could see the nude he painted of her, and remember how reluctant she’d been to post for it, but he couldn’t remember selling the painting, and he certainly didn’t have it now..
There are whole months he can’t remember. And along with the paintings he remembers having painting that he doesn’t have, he has paintings he doesn’t remember having painted. It dawns on him that Lucien’s renewed obsession with Juliette is turning into exactly the same sort of obsession he had with Carmen, and what’s more, Carmen and Juliette are connected through a mysterious and malicious maker and vendor of artist’s pigments known only as the Colorman and that this Colorman is almost certainly the character his and Lucien’s friend Vincent Van Gogh warned him to steer clear of in a letter written just before he shot himself.
Supposedly shot himself.
What if, Henri asks himself, Vincent didn’t commit suicide?
What if he was murdered?
The mystery at the heart of Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art
The fantasy arises from the fact that throughout most of history the color blue was a problem for artists. The best blue pigments, the truest, most vivid blue, a blue that would not fade over time, were hard to come by and consequently very expensive. In Sacre Bleu,the most vital blue is literally alive. It's not a mixture of minerals and oils. It's a being. A being the Colorman has enslaved and from whose spirit he makes his sacred blue, using a magical process that ultimately requires a human sacrifice.
The laughs are provided by the screwball dialog, some usually deft but occasionally clumsy slapstick, the more than routine dirty jokes, and the incongruity of it all, the comedy, the fantasy, and the mystery, playing itself out against a realistic and for the most part historically accurate background of Bohemian Paris in the days when the Moulin Rouge was notorious in its own right and not because of its immortalization in the paintings and drawings of its most famous customer.
Moore is a very funny writer but I thought the other books of his I've read---Island of the Sequined Love Nun
Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, James McNeil Whistler, and others are all recognizably themselves or at least come across as passable likenesses of themselves. Moore's version of Paul Gaugin is more of a caricature than a portrait, but a well-drawn and funny caricature, and his Lautrec is something of a cartoon. But that's appropriate for an artist whose paintings and drawings were essentially brilliant cartoon. The world was inclined to look at Lautrec as an amusing grotesque and he returned the compliment, although perhaps with more sympathy.
The plot jumps around in time and space, carrying some of the main characters with it, from France in the late 1800s to Renaissance Italy to prehistoric Spain to present day New York City. The focus though is the Paris art scene from 1870 to 1890. You don't have to have taken any classes or attended any blockbuster exhibitions to follow the plot. It helps but it's not required. Moore doesn't assign homework as he goes. But with what he gives us and a little googling, Sacre Bleu works as a crash course in the history of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Moore even provides visual aids. Sacre Bleu is illustrated with color reproductions of many of the paintings referred to or used as models for settings and characters, making it a very pretty read. It's probably stunning on a kindle fire
Still, Sacre Bleu is in no way a textbook. It's a serious thriller (comedies can be very serious) with a deadly mystery at its center. The first part of that mystery---who killed Van Gogh and why---gets cleared up fairly early in the going. The second part---will they kill again?---remains an open question right up to the end. Henri and Lucien are up against villains who aren't merely human and in the case of one of them not always human. And, as Henri keeps pointing out they're artists and artists being dreamy and idealistic types inclined to self-indulgence and in the habit of stopping in the middle of things to drop what they're doing and reach for a brush or a pencil don't make the most incisive detectives or energetic heroes.
But what I enjoyed most were the characters, and not just the ones drawn (sorry) from real life, the painters and some of the subjects of their paintings like Van Gogh’s Dr Gauchet and Toulouse-Lautrec’s dancers, clowns, and prostitutes. The wonderfully repulsive Colorman, an imp of malice who’s sort of an obscene Rumpelstiltskin offering to spin metaphorical straw into literal gold and every other color, especially blue and demanding the resulting painting in return. Juliette, a most unusual femme fatale, who as adapted to her strange situation with pragmatism, cynicism, and emotional detachment, but also with courage and wit. Lucien’s formidable mother who proves to be a kitchen ninja when it comes to wielding a crepe pan as a weapon in defense of her children. Lucien’s genial, kindly, but secretly broken-hearted father, a prosperous baker who has put aside his own dreams of becoming a painter to provide for his family and has to content himself with being the friend and patron of the struggling artists who are his neighbors and non-paying customers. Lucien.
Moore does such a good job with Lucien, capturing and dramatizing the young artist’s thinking, idealism, work, and background and placing him so convincingly in the historical milieu that I still can’t get over his being invention and not based on a real painter like Moore’s Toulouse-Lautrec.
Speaking of whom…
“I am the painter Toulouse-Lautrec!”
And he is. Or I hope he is. I hope that cartoonish as he sometimes is, he’s also a work of realistic portraiture. If the real Toulouse-Lautrec wasn’t like Henri, he should have been.
Medically speaking, Toulouse-Lautrec’s shortness wasn’t due to dwarfism. He was permanently crippled by a childhood accident. Still, if Sacre Bleu is optioned for a movie, Peter Dinklage is already screen-testing for the part of Henri. Except that he wields a walking stick instead of a sword and sips absinthe instead of quaffing ale, there’s quite a bit of Game of Throne’s Tyrian in Sacre Bleu’s Toulouse-Lautrec.
At that moment, seeing the color in the case, the pentimento that had been rising in Herni’s mind became a clear, vivid image. He had seen them together, one time outside of his studio, Carmen and the Colorman. How had he forgotten? “Actually, I have used your color before. Perhaps you remember?”
The Colorman looked up from his case. “I would remember selling to a dwarf, I think.”
Henri wanted right then to bash the twisted little creature’s brains in with his walking stick, but he calmed himself enough to just snap, “Monsieur, I am not a dwarf. I am fully seven centimeters taller than the requisite for a dwarf, and I resent your implication.”
“So sorry, monsieur, my mistake. Still, I would remember selling to you.”
“Your color was obtained through a girl who modeled for me, a Mademoiselle Carmen Gaudin. Perhaps you remember her.”
“Is she a housemaid? My maid quit yesterday.”
“Your standards were perhaps too demanding for her?”
“Penis,” explained the Colorman with a shrug.
“Ah, I understand,” said Henri. “Mine refuses to do windows…”
________________________
As I said, enjoying Sacre Bleu doesn’t require homework and a quick bit of googling will fill in if at any given point you want to know a little more about the history and the background. But if you want to know a lot more, then Christopher Moore can help you out. He’s put up a website devoted to the book full of more information and more paintings, Christopher Moore’s Sacre Bleu Chapter Guide.
Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d’Art by Christopher Moore, published by William Morrow, is available from Amazon in hardback and for kindle.
Never judge a book by its cover, and I'm not about to.
I'm going to judge a cover by its book.
The cover of The Thing about Thugs
It's old-fashioned, for one thing, too plain and simple and innocent. I can't place it but I'm sure I read a novel in junior high with a cover very much like this in style, color, and stinginess of information. There's mystery here but no threat. And no blood. And no evil. There's no hint of the horror inside. The Thing About Thugs isn't just a mystery. It's a tale of murder, body snatching, and head hunting. Skulls literally pile up.
The gas streetlamp and the cobblestone street announce that The Thing About Thugs is a period piece set in a city but it doesn't tell for certain that the period is Victorian and the city is London, but not necessarily a historical London, more of a literary London, a Dickensian London, Sherlock Holmes' London, Jekyll and Hyde's London. The lone figure walking away from us is obviously East Indian, which is a clue to the novel's central incongruity, which Khair carefully and steadily turns into a given, the presence of a community of immigrants from all over the empire helping to define a London we might think, based on movies and other books, was populated only by colorful Cockneys and top-hatted proper English gents and their pale and ringletted ladies, as long as those other books aren't by Arthur Conan Doyle. And there's no direct references to those books that are. There's no suggestion of the complexity of the narrative, or the eerie beauty of the prose, or the literariness of the whole conceit.
Novels and stories and poems by the likes of Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Jane Austen inform the plot, the themes, the structure, and the writing of The Thing About Thugs. Works like The Body-Snatcher and The Man With The Twisted Lip, The Secret Agent, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood can be read between the lines. Which makes The Thing About Thugs sound like a pastiche or a senior honors thesis. It's not. It is, to sum up, what the cover barely hints at, a literary thriller about murder, body snatchers, head hunting, and the disruptions and disquietudes caused by imperialism set in a London more ethnically and culturally diverse than casual viewers of Masterpiece Theatre might expect.
Amir Ali, a young man from a small village in India, is living in London, brought here on a whim by a well-meaning but naive and gullible British Army officer who's given Amir an unusual employment. His job is to live in the officer's house as a servant with one responsibility, to tell the story of his life as a member of a band of murderers and thieves back home, that is to tell his master and whatever audience the officer puts him in front of him things about thugs.
Amir's employer, Captain Meadows is writing a book. Having inherited a sufficient income to retire from the army and live the life of a gentleman of leisure, he's returned to England to devote himself to his intellectual passion, phrenology.
Meadows is something of a maverick in the field, which he and his fellow phrenologists think of as a science. Meadows believes that you can tell a lot about people by reading the bumps and dents on their skulls but not everything. More heretical, at least in the eyes of his rivals in the phrenological debate, he rejects the idea that biology is destiny. He argues that individuals have a degree of freedom in deciding what kind of person they'll be.
This means he thinks it's possible for a good man to turn evil --- shades of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are invoked but not let loose---but, as a good liberal, he prefers to focus on the corollary, that a bad man can reform.
Amir is his prime example.
Meadows has Amir dictating the story of his career as a thug and his reformation and then repeating it to meetings of the society of phrenologists Meadows hopes to win over to his reformist views. The thing about this reformed thug is that at the same time Amir is telling Meadows this story, he is telling a very different and more innocent, though just as violent, story in letters to the young woman he’s in love with, a hired girl named Jenny who fills in from time to time as a Jill-of-All-Trades in the captain’s house. For a while the narrative jumps back and forth between Meadows’ credulous account of his conversations with Amir and the story is telling Jenny in his letters, a story we can’t help suspecting is a self-serving lie, except that we have good reason to believe he may be lying to Meadows instead or as well.
Meanwhile, there’s a third narrator at work, a seemingly traditional omniscient third person narrator telling us about what’s happening outside the Captain’s house and club, in the streets, alleys, pubs, sewers, and opium dens of London’s demimonde. A trio of murderers is at work collecting skulls.
This narrator reveals himself early on as a youngish Indian scholar writing from the library of his late grandfather’s house, with all the books he’s going to be alluding to on the shelves behind him. The narrator is someone much like Khair and may or may not be Khair. He doesn’t tell us. He doesn’t tell us if he’s a real person or a fiction himself or if the story he’s telling, the one we’re reading, is a fiction or if within the fiction the narrator---if he is a fiction---inhabits it's a true story. All he admits is that he’s having some trouble with the period details and, consequently, there’s much he has to imagine and he’s struggling as he goes with how to handle that and with, essentially, how to tell this story. In short, we’re being told a story that, we’re told, is being made up and revised right before our eyes.
There’s a point here about the nature of stories and the purpose of storytelling that I’ll get to in a bit.
The leader of the murderers is John May, a “resurrection man”, as one of May’s literary precursors styles himself in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities---body snatcher, to use Robert Louis Stevenson’s words---who has been making his living digging up fresh graves and selling the stolen corpses to medical students for study and practice. All of his customers aren’t doctors in training, however; his highest-paying client has been a brutal-minded nobleman who happens to be Meadows’ chief antagonist in the phrenological debates. John May has been providing Lord Batterstone with specimens for his collection. But Batterstone has grown dissatisfied with May’s wares. He’s looking for "things" more interesting and unusual than what Mays has been digging up. When you rob a grave, you have to take what you find. There are unusual specimens to be found all over London but they are riding around on top of still living bodies that don’t show any inclinations of walking into a grave any time soon.
May hits on a plan.
When the murders begin and headless corpses start turning up around London, the respectable citizens---that is, the white citizens---assume that that such horrific crimes could not be the work of any true-born Englishman, no matter how depraved. Of course not only do true-born Englishmen commit such crimes routinely, the Empire is based on even more horrific ones (Lord Batterstone’s collection of specimens ultimately recalls the spiked skulls fencing Kurtz’s compound in Heart of Darkness), but the populace and the police, goaded by the gutter press, look for suspects among the outsiders in their midst. And unfortunately for Amir, Captain Meadows has made him something of a celebrity. People know the story of the reformed thug and they immediately begin to doubt that he’s actually reformed.
Amir becomes the focus of the police’s investigation.
Fortunately for Amir, an unlikely detective appears on the scene and, with the help of her band of “irregulars”, sets out to solve the murders and prove Amir’s innocence.
That’s my word for them, “irregulars,” as in the Baker Street Irregulars and at this point I’m tempted to start making comparisons to The Sign of Four. But I think I’ve already over-emphasized the literary allusiveness of Khair’s novel. As I said, The Thing About Thugs isn’t an amusement for grad students or a pastiche, although Khair rather too helpfully names one of Amir’s friends Gunga and there’s a scene between the chief police inspector and one of his officers that turns into a heavy-handed joke at Arthur Conan Doyle’s expense. Khair acknowledges---or at any rate his narrative alter-ego does—his influences but he doesn’t bring them directly into his story, except in the case of Jane Austen, whom he cites as a source, as if Pride and Prejudice was a history text, for the sections of his book dealing with the social background against which Captain Meadows and his fiancee play out their courtship, which implies that all the other fictions that The Thing About Thugs recalls were for the author---or rather the narrator---sources as well, as if they’re textbooks too and The Thing About Thugs is itself a history, even though the narrator---or Khair---tells us he’s telling a story.
The thing about The Thing About Thugs is that in addition to being a meditation on storytelling and the the role of stories in creating and shaping individual identities, it’s also, I think, a reminder that national and cultural identities are created and shaped by the stories we tell each other. Khair isn’t simply writing a story that is like those other, classic stories. He’s writing a story that’s meant to be part of the larger story those stories are part of. He’s adding what was mostly kept offstage in the works of 19th Century authors, the fact that Victorian London was, because it was the center of an empire, an Asian city as much as a European one. The stories of Kipling and Conrad weren’t post cards from exotic and faraway climes. They were stories from home. We’re meant to see that there were people behind Amir and his friends as real and as British as the young women behind Oliver Twist’s Nancy, whose murder, by the way, is recapitulated in The Thing About Thugs.
There, I’ve overdone it some more.
The Thing About Thugs doesn’t come with a required reading list. You don’t have to have been an English major or do homework first in order to enjoy it.
All that I’ve said about those books that sit alongside and beneath and on top of and within and without The Thing About Thugs is true, but it’s still a story in its own right.
A story of murder, blood, body snatching, ghoulism, thuggery, and…revenge!
The Thing about Thugs
Tonight’s feature for Mannion Family Movie Night is Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Three eccentrics, a sheik, a scientist, and an investment broker (Amr Waked, Ewan McGregor, and Emily Blunt), plan to bring fly-fishing to the desert in Lasse Hallstrom’s not quite Local Hero-ish comedy, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.
Our choices for Friday night's feature for Family Movie Night were Fargo and The Hunt for Red October. The decision depended on whether Oliver Mannion wanted to turn Family Movie Night into homework.
He didn’t.
Sometimes we have themes for Family Movie Night. Couple summers back we watched a string of baseball movies. There was another stretch that was all Cary Grant. Sometimes our choice of features is based on something that came up in a talk around the dinner table. Sometimes it's connected to a family outing. We watched Thirteen Days after visiting the JFK Library. Sometimes it's connected to what the guys are studying in school. We watched Much Ado About Nothing because Oliver's English class had wrapped up their reading of Othello by watching the movie version starring Lawrence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh and Oliver was impressed by Branagh’s Iago. (He liked what Branagh did as Benedick, but Michael Keaton as Dogberry made a mark. He has since memorized one of Dogberry's speeches which he delivers in his best Keaton impression.) That didn’t count as homework though. If we’d ended up watching Hunt for Red October it would have been for an assignment in his history class. They just finished the Cold War and have to watch a movie set during the period and write about how it compares to or makes use of actual history. They were given a list. The Hunt for Red October is on it. So is Red Dawn. Oh well.
Sometimes we'll watch a movie at home to prepare for one we’re going to see in the theater. This might mean that next week we’ll be watching a triple feature of Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America. For the two Family Movie Nights before this past one, we geared up for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which we saw last Sunday, with We Bought a Zoo and then Local Hero.
Judging by the trailer, I thought Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was going to be like them, a quirky character-driven comedy about a community of eccentrics coming together to solve a problem. I like this type of movie and usually find a way to compare them to Northern Exposure, although really Northern Exposure owes everything to Local Hero and the form precedes Bill Forsyth’s classic. Robert Altman specialized in these kinds of films and, going back, so did Preston Sturges, and if we'd had more lead time I probably would've lobbied for Cookie’s Fortune or The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek or both. It turned out though that Salmon Fishing isn't quite in this vein.
It’s quirky, all right, and full of eccentrics. There's a satirical edge and much of the humor derives from the fact that sometimes even the best people can be motivated by pure selfishness and don't always behave very well. There are stretches where seemingly nothing is happening to advance the plot but where the point is to just enjoy watching people going about the business of being themselves. But it's missing something essential to other movies of the ilk.
In these Local Hero-ish, Northern Exposuresque films, the characters are protected by each other’s company. Even in movies as bleak and cynical as Nashville and The Player, there’s comfort in knowing that people are here to look out for each other. To one degree or another, they all subscribe to what Clarence writes in the flyleaf of the book he leaves under the Christmas tree for George Bailey in the quintessential movie of this type, It’s A Wonderful Life: “Dear George, remember, no man is a failure who has friends.”
There’s no community in Salmon Fishing in Yemen and that makes for a sadness at the heart of the movie, despite the comedy, and a lonely coldness almost as chilly as in Altman’s darkest films.
Instead we have several communities that have either failed to come together or that have come apart. A marriage that has not become a family or a partnership. A workplace full of people who don’t work together---it’s a collection of isolates mostly trying to avoid each other and who rub each other the wrong way whenever they are forced to interact. A couple whose romance is torn apart by war. And, on a very large scale, a nation that has turned itself over to be governed by a gang of half-witted narcissists whose only competent member is a merry sociopath who sees all problems as PR opportunities or disasters.
Against all this is a dream.
A Yemeni prince dreams of introducing fly-fishing to his country. Sheikh Muhammad is an Anglophile and an angler-phile. He maintains an estate in Scotland mainly to have brooks and streams to wade into with his rod and reel. Fly-fishing has brought him so much peace and happiness that he has come to believe in it as a civilizing force. He's described as a visionary, but what he is is a missionary.
He's not looking to indulge his hobby. He means to share it. He plans to spread the gospel of fly-fishing as laid out in The Compleat Angler
An oil gazillionaire, he has the money to realize his dream. What he needs is the practical expertise. There are all sorts of technical and scientific problems to solve, not least of which is transporting 10,000 cold water-loving Atlantic Salmon to the desert mountains of Yemen. He hires a London-based investment firm to find him that expertise and they put a young and merry broker named Harriet Chetwolde-Talbot on it.
She sets out to identify the best man for the job, locates him in the Department of Fisheries, Dr Alfred (Fred) Jones, a scientist and fly-tying genius turned bureaucrat, and puts the plan to him. He promptly proves to himself and, he thinks, to her that she's got the right guy by scoffing at the scheme as "plainly ridiculous" and turning her down flat. We immediately suspect he's rejecting her offer because accepting it would interrupt his routines, drag him out of his office, and force him to confront the fact that there are people living and enjoying lives far more interesting and exciting than the one he's stuck in. Harriet, for one. She irritates him by being an attractive and intelligent woman who takes him seriously and insists on liking him.
As Jones, Ewan McGregor starts off as a humorless fusspot with a shrill and tetchy Scots burr that makes him sound like Maggie Smith as Hogwarts’ Professor McGonagall catching Harry and Ron staggering home from Hogsmeade after one too many butterbeers. He’s prissy, priggish, and prickly, seemingly permanently baffled by other people’s expectation that he care about anything other than fish.
He’s also obviously unhappy and tortured by self-doubt and self-loathing.
His job requires his expertise but it doesn’t engage his talents or his skill. He’s a scientist but he doesn’t do science. He evaluates the science done by others. His work keeps him inside and at a desk but if he ever knew this about himself he’s forgotten it: as a fly-fisherman he’s at heart an outdoorsman. And he’s locked in a dull and loveless marriage. But since Fred regards himself as a very boring person, he counts himself lucky to have married someone willing to be bored by him. And he does bore her. That, however, doesn’t seem to be his wife’s complaint with the marriage. Her trouble is that from time to time he forgets that he’s boring and expects her to find him interesting or at least to find what he finds interesting interesting, which is mainly fish and fishing. This is irritating because he interrupts her thinking or her work to talk to her. Worse than that, he sometimes gets interested enough in himself that he attempts to make decisions that serve his purposes and not hers.
Trapped by his own sense that he doesn’t deserve anything better, he’s not just resigned himself to a life without joy or adventure, he’s become addicted to it.
McGregor’s Dr Alfred Jones reminded me of an even more buttoned-down version of Dr David Huxley, Cary Grant’s buttoned-down paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby. One of the beauties of Grant’s performance in that movie was that even as David loosens up under the twin influences of Katharine Hepburn’s zaniness and sex appeal and becomes more dynamic and sexy himself, he retains much of his original fussiness and nerdish awkwardness.
McGregor does something similar here. The difference is that a pair of glasses and a lab coat can't hide the Cary Grant inside David Huxley waiting to burst forth, but a sweater vest and a bad haircut nebbishize the Obi-wan right out of Fred.
To Fred’s surprise and, initially, to his terror, Harriet sees something in him he didn’t know was there and brings it out in him. She isn’t at all bored by him. She finds him immediately interesting. And she’s impressed by him. This isn’t something special she does for him. This is how she is.
As Harriet Emily Blunt has been given the standard Manic Pixie Dream Girl's job of bringing to joyful life a stuffy, repressed, and emotionally deadened male. I don't know if she's the Hollywood prototype, but Katherine Hepburn's Leopard-taming Susan in Bringing Up Baby is the earliest movie version I know of. Blunt's Harriet isn't much like Susan, except in being irrepressibly cheerful and optimistic and able to energize the other characters around her, particularly her leading man. But Harriet is a fully fledged grownup, well-grounded, serious-minded, and competent. She brings out the best in Fred by treating him as what she takes him to be, which turns out to be what he truly is.
She knows he's an expert so she assumes he's good at what he does and everything he does and says confirms her high opinion of him. In trying to explain to her why the project is unworkable, he lists all the technical problems that would have to be solved to make it work, and all she hears is him coming up with ideas on how to solve those problems. It takes him a while, but faced with her adamant refusal to dismiss him as the boring nerd he takes himself to be, he begins to hear himself as he sounds to her. He thinks the timid but realistic bureaucrat is making an irrefutable argument for dropping the whole idea, but it's really the case that the eager and adventurous scientist who's been bottled up inside him has been trying to shout the bureaucrat down.
Blunt is one of the most beautiful actresses working today, but her actually off-beat features are just cartoonish enough that she can fool us into thinking she’s just ordinarily pretty. Harriet is ordinary in a number of ways, but she’s extraordinary in her cheerfulness and that, not her looks, is the source of her beauty. Harriet enjoys being alive and that means, to her at least, enjoying the company of other people and seeing the best in them. In this she is not at all naive or vulnerable. In fact, it’s part of her strength. And Harriet is strong. Even when she’s devastated by news of her soldier boyfriend’s death in Afghanistan we know we don’t have to worry about her. She gives in to her grief the way you give in to the flu. While it’s hard watching her suffer, we know she has it in her to get better on her own. She doesn’t need Fred to save her from her sorrow and despair.
He needs her to need him in order to bring him out of himself and make him learn how to treat another human being as a human being and not a technical problem to be solved.
Harriet, then, despite her troubles, is no damsel in distress. In fairy tale terms, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is the flip side of a retelling of Snow White or Rapunzel---a Frog Prince or Beauty and the Beast. Harriet is the heroine who has to rescue the enchanted nerd from himself.
Harriet and Fred are the romantic leads, but Sheik Muhammad is the movie’s hero and as the Sheik Amr Waked gives Salmon Fishing in the Yemen much of its heart and soul.
We’re not told much about the Sheik. He’s Muslim, obviously, and enough of a traditionalist that he’s unselfconsciously and unapologetically multiply-married. Otherwise he doesn’t appear to be particularly religious. His political and social positions within Yemen are undefined. His authority within his own sheikdom appears to be challengeable, but maybe that’s him. In his dealings with people at home, women as well as men, he comes across as a natural democrat. He’s a prince, that’s all we need to know, and asking after the particulars is like asking the prince in any fairy tale where he stands on the issues of troll emancipation and the export of magic potions.
As a hero-prince, the Sheik’s job is to save the day and Waked makes it feel as if the day is saved every time he enters the frame. He makes the Sheik everything a hero-prince ought to be, intelligent, kindly, compassionate, protective, modest, full of self-effacing good humor, but aware of his strength and not afraid of it, courageous, and quietly but effectively determined to do good. Oh, and handsome, charming, and sexy.
Waked hasn’t been given all the best lines but he makes every line he’s been given sound like the best, infusing his dialog with mild authority and wit.
Among the supporting cast of eccentrics, the most appealing and entertainingly although dangerously eccentric is played by Kristin Scott Thomas.
As Patricia Maxell, the British government’s public relations czarina, who convinces the prime minister to support the salmon fishing project as a way to distract the media from a recent military disaster in Afghanistan, Thomas is, as long as I’m using fairy tales to make points, like a demented fairy godmother with her own agenda granting all the wrong wishes. She charges through the film at full throttle, tossing off killer lines like a cocky carrier delivering newspapers, confident they're landing smack on the doorstep but too intent on getting to the next house to look back to check.
It’s a rollicking, hilarious performance and it’s fun to watch Thomas, a romantic leading lady all her career, freed by a few touches of age to become a a comic character actress. It’s as if Eve Arden had started out as Loretta Young.
At work, Patricia’s single-minded devotion to her job has made her something of a sociopath for whom other people are valuable only to the degree they can be used to tell the “story” she wants the press to swallow. That goes as well for the prime minister whom she appears to think works for her. At home, she is a loving and self-denying, if often distracted, wife and mother. Patricia has solved the problem of a careerist with a family by neatly and cleanly bifurcating her life and her personality. There’s a great scene in which she’s on the phone, simultaneously solving problems for work and for her kids, with both sides of herself functioning at top speed and competence, while neither side cares what the other is doing, if either side notices the other at all.
What both sides have in common is they are tough and good at what they do and they get done what needs to be done. That's good for her family. Questionable for Great Britain since what needs to be done from her point of view isn't policy but PR.
This makes Patricia representative of the one threat to the project Fred didn’t foresee and doesn’t have the expertise to solve and the threat to the Sheik’s dream of building a community that for all his money and his charisma he’s not strong enough to resist. Politics.
Politicians, director Lasse Hallstrom seems to be saying, whether of the liberal, progressive type (Patricia and her gang seem to be Tories or Liberal Dems but liberal and progressive are relative terms), who regard communities as resources to be exploited for votes, or of the authoritarian, totalitarian and reactionary type represented here by Islamic fundamentalists, who prefer tribes to communities because tribes answer to chieftains and their pet shamans while the members of a community answer to each other, are the natural enemies of community.
Since I mentioned it: My review of We Bought a Zoo, Liking the animals, loving the humans.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, directed by Lasse Hallstrom, screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, based on the novel
Read this yet?
Old People, Old Stars: Hollywood's New Hot Demo Is Saving the Box Office
No? Ok. Maybe the Hollywood Reporter’s not at the top of your hit parade. So, short version quick. Hollywood has noticed that even though they’re getting old, Baby Boomers still like going to the movies. Which is good. But the assumption, apparently, is that now that they’re geezers themselves, what they want to see up on the screen is other geezers.
This year, Fox is premiering its Christmas Day comedy Parental Guidance -- starring Billy Crystal, 64, and Bette Midler, 66, as a couple left in charge of their grandchildren -- at the AARP film festival, which runs Sept. 20 to 22 in New Orleans, in advance of the film's Christmas Day opening…
Parental Guidance isn't the only studio picture making a major play for older moviegoers on Dec. 25 -- that same day, Paramount has The Guilt Trip, a road-trip comedy starring Barbra Streisand, 70, and Seth Rogen. The studio has two other films that are designed to woo older audiences: Robert Zemeckis' Flight, a smart thriller starring Washington, opens Nov. 2, and on Dec. 21, Jack Reacher, starring Tom Cruise, who just turned 50.
This get tied in with The Expendables 2 being a big hit and Hope Springs a modest one.
Speaking as a geezer who loves movies: I'd rather see The Avengers again than watch The Expendables 2. I'd rather watch Christian Bale and Anne Hathaway or Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield than Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones. I'd rather see Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr than Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones. I went to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel not to see all those great geezer actors performing but to see that particular collection of geezer characters cavorting in that particular setting. And, no disrespect to Dame Judy Dench, I much preferred Bill Nighy as a romantic lead in Wild Target in which his leading lady was Emily Blunt. I much preferred Emily Blunt, in Wild Target and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen in which her love interest was Ewan McGregor.
I can't wait to see Robot & Frank but I'm going to see Robot and Frank not Susan and Frank Langella. And Trouble With the Curve is on my to see list because it has five things that make a movie great - Clint, baseball, Amy Adams, baseball, and Amy Adams. It also has Jason Timberlake, which makes it problematic, but it isn’t less problematic because it also stars John Goodman.
Are you catching my drift?
I don’t go to movies to relive my lost youth or to kid myself my youth isn’t really lost.
I go to the movies to see good stories well-told though moving images and to see beautiful people doing sexy, exciting, and heartstring-tugging things
I don't go to the movies to see geezers for the geezers ' sakes.
I go to see good actors of any age act.
Other geezers might have different tastes, and I never underestimate Baby Boomers' fascination with themselves. You can't tell us often enough that we aren’t really getting old and that all the things we longed for when we were twenty are still coming our way now that Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are about to take away our Medicare---love, sex, a permanent state of cool and eternal happiness based on love and sex. And, by the way, I’m convinced that Boomer rage at the fact that that's not true is one of the forces driving the Tea Party movement. But I'd still bet that more geezers are looking forward to The Master, The Hobbit, and Les Miserables than are to Taken 2.
Cloud Atlas, Looper, and Flight all star fading boomer heartthrobs - fading male heartthrobs, notice. - but I don’t think those movies are going to be hits just because boomers want to see Tom, Bruce, and Denzel.
Skyfall is its own special case. Daniel Craig isn't a geezer, Judi Dench is, but the attraction isn't either. It's Bond, and every generation of moviegoers since Dr No has made its separate peace with 007.
By the way, if you want to see Tommy Lee Jones playing opposite a fellow boomer, I recommend In The Valley of Elah. Jones plays a grief-stricken father of a soldier trying to solve his son's murder and Susan Sarandon plays his wife. Charlize Theron, though, is his real leading lady (but not, interestingly and thankfully, his love interest) and she delivers a terrific performance as the sheriff who's had this mystery literally dumped in her jurisdiction and reluctantly investigates.
And RED was a fun flick.
Doesn't need a sequel though.
Your turn. What new movies are you looking forward to?
The blonde needed to sleep in this morning so she asked me to go pick up today’s farm share at our CSA. Phillies Bridge Farm. Gardiner, NY. Around ten this morning. Saturday. August 18, 2012.
What do you think? Do you see a Hopper influence? Or is it more Andrew Wyeth?
Marie Tharp, the geologist and cartographer who drew the first detailed maps of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, at work at her desk at Columbia University circa 1959. Tharp is the subject of Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor
One of my prides and joys when I was a kid was my subscription to National Geographic. I cherished each issue and kept them all neatly stacked on my bookshelf and probably took greater care of them than I did my Hardy Boys and Alistair MacLeans. But sometime in high school, my subscription ran out and I didn’t bother to renew. The Secret of the Old Mill and The Guns of Navarone made way on the shelves for other, “grown up” books and with them went the magazines. I wouldn’t say I outgrew National Geographic, the way I’d outgrown the Hardys and MacLean’s boys’ own adventures. How can you outgrow the best magazine in the world? But whatever it was inside me that made each new issue so wonderful and exciting when I was ten and eleven wasn’t there when I hit fourteen and fifteen. The books I packed into boxes to be stored in the attic. I don’t remember what happened to the magazines. I can’t imagine I just threw them out, but I must have or maybe my brothers did when they took over my room when I went away to college. It was many visits home before I noticed they were gone, though, and when I did, I wasn’t too cut up about it.
But I’d have been mad if the maps had gone with them.
More than I loved the magazines themselves I loved the maps inserted into many of the issues. A few I tacked to the wall. Most I kept neatly and obsessively folded and stored away until I needed to study them, which I did, again and again, until it seemed I had the whole world memorized, continent by continent, nation by nation, city by city. It wasn’t that I dreamed of visiting any of the places on those maps. I think I took it for granted that one day I would, the way I took it for granted I would get my driver’s license and play centerfield for the Mets. But when I pored over those maps I felt that I didn’t need to travel there, because I already was there, wherever the there was that I was looking at. And I wasn’t traveling. I was exploring. I don’t know how much I still have memorized. I wouldn’t want to test my geographic knowledge on Jeopardy. But I’m pretty sure that if you dropped me any place on earth and said, Find your way to such and such a city, this or that river, those mountains, these plains, this lake, that desert, that valley, that forest, I’d know right away which direction to turn and have a good idea of how much walking I had ahead of me.
They’re still there, those maps, in my parents’ house in a folder in the bottom drawer of my old desk and next visit I’m going to dig them out to see if I’m remembering right, that one of the maps is a map of the Indian Ocean floor. It was beautiful. I can still picture it, even without having read the description provided by National Geographic in an accompanying article that author Hali Felt quotes in her engaging, informative, and stylish new biography Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor
"Color…gives depth to the map: light green for shallow seas and continental shelves; medium blue for sediment covered plateaus and hills of the mid-depths;dark violet-gray for the abyssal plains; darker still for the great trenches. Towering undersea mountains and plunging slopes of this waterless ocean are highlighted as if at sunrise."
Sounds like a work of art. It was a work of art. Literally. In fact it’s almost inaccurate to call it a map. It’s a painting…of a map.
The painter was Heinrich Berann, an Austrian who preferred to do “serious paintings in the style of Leonardo Da Vinci” but made his daily bread painting Alpine panoramas for tourist traps. His experience painting panoramas and mountains got him a gig with National Geographic doing a panorama of the Himalayas and that led to his being contracted to paint the map of the Indian Ocean. But I wonder if he shared an analytic and scientific bent with his hero Da Vinci and if it was that that made him the right artist for the job:
After getting his detailed drawing approved...Berann began the final version. He sketched basic landforms onto thick paper using pencil, filling in patches from top to bottom. He used..a multimedia approach, employing "air brush and frisket, casein-based paints and oil-based paints in an assorted sequence," working through a hole cut in a sheet of tracing paper that projected the rest of the painting. A light wash of paint went down first, basic shapes filled by watery colors. Then Bernann tackled the features' textures, consulting the physiographic diagram and, if necessary, collecting details in rawer form...
The result, the National Geographic article says...is "a remarkable map painting" that "combines scientific discoveries and an artist's skills."
The scientific discoveries that combined with Bernann’s artist’s skills were made by Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen, whose partnership, professional and romantic---although peculiarly, eccentrically, and possibly purely Platonically romantic---began in the 1950s at Columbia University where Heezen was finishing up his Ph.D. and Tharp was working as a research assistant and lasted until Heezen died of a heart attack while on a research expedition aboard a submarine in 1977. Heezen was an oceanographer. Tharp, the remarkable woman of Felt’s subtitle and the focus of the book, was a geologist by training and a cartographer by happy accident, and it was as a mapmaker she made her reputation, creating the first map of the ocean floor.
No one had mapped it before Tharp because no one had been down there. Not all the way down. For a long time no one was sure there was anything down there to map. For all anyone knew the ocean floor was a drowned desert, flat and featureless, the monotony relieved only by shipwrecks and the bones of whales. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge was discovered in 1872 by scientists looking for a path to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable. Its enormity had only begun to be charted in 1925. When Tharp and Heezen set to work on their first map of the North Atlantic, underwater cameras capable of withstanding the pressures of great depths were rare and expensive and didn’t take very clear pictures, having to shoot through their own protective glass armor and roiled water in total darkness. Submersibles like the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s Alvin that could carry human beings to the bottoms of the deepest seas were still in the development stage. The best way to see what was down there was actually to hear it. Echo soundings. SONAR. You sent a sound down, listened, noted how long it took to bounce up, moved along, sent another sound down, listened again, and if that took longer to bounce back, you knew you were over a downward slope or a hole. If it bounced back quicker you were over a rise or a peak or a fish.
Heezen and other oceanographers went out to sea to make the soundings. What they brought back was a lot of disjointed information. Research vessels weren’t crisscrossing the oceans in grids. There were few such vessels, anyway. The United States had just two. The ships would go out as far as time and funding would allow, cruise about in circles for a bit, and come home along a different course, taking soundings as they went. The next expedition would chart a different course to a new location. The data they brought back was far, far from complete.
Back at the lab, Heezen’s job was to interpret the soundings. Tharp plotted his results and drew what he told her he saw---heard. To turn what they did into their first map, though, required a lot of educated guesswork.
Tharp's insight, based on her training and experience as a geologist and common sense, was that rock underwater behaved pretty much like rock on dry land. Formations implied other formations around them. A ridge, a mountain, a valley, a trench, would likely be surrounded by the features that surrounded ridges, mountains, valleys, and trenches of similar shape and size elsewhere. Her maps were essentially hypotheticals. Suppositions, conjectures, and just plain guesses guided her drawing hand. But the more data that came in, the more of her guesses were proved right. Where she’d guessed wrong, it often turned out that the correction was implicit in her diagrams. If not this, then it must be that was built into the scheme. Rarely did she have to erase a whole undersea neighborhood and start over from scratch. Her maps have been refined and redrawn many times in the decades since, but a lot of that work has been a matter of filling in and working from what she did rather than writing over it.
Her key contribution may not have been the maps themselves but what her first one---of the North Atlantic---showed.
The continents were adrift.
When Marie inked the space below the jagged lines she had drawn, the six transatlantic topographical profiles were complete: six silhouettes of the ocean floor's terrain, inked onto the staff-like graphs. Continental shelves dropped down into continental slopes, continental rises sloped down into those abyssal plains Bruce wanted to find. The island of Bermuda was there, rising above the water's surface. The wide medial ridge that had been surmised by oceanographers since the late nineteenth century was there, and wherever there weren't plains, tiny stalagmite-shaped mountains gave the floor texture. It was an accomplishment: Marie's profiles were the most detailed representations of the ocean floor ever produced. But she wasn't satisfied; she didn't think she'd discovered anything...
...Marie kept studying her profiles...She spent a lot of time looking closely at the ridge whose presence she'd confirmed, a wide bump where the ocean floor gained elevation. It was apparent on all six of the profiles, which meant that it was a range, not just one isolated mountain. And then something happened. "As I looked further at the detail, and tried to unravel it," she said, "I noticed that in each profile there was a deep notch near the crest of the ridge." a deep notch, a rift. This was something new. She kept studying it, checking the sounding records over and over to make sure she hadn't mis-plotted a depth. When she was certain she was right, she called for Bruce.
Their first big fight followed...
The fight was sparked by Heezen’s horror at what he thought he was looking at in Tharp’s map.
The possible end of his career.
If the Mid-Atlantic ridge was as Tharp had mapped it, and Heezen presented their results at a conference or in paper, he’d be going before the community of American scientists and telling them they could no longer deny what they’d been denying for a generation. Continental drift was a fact.
This was a surprise to me. By the time I was in fifth grade and Sister Mary Anthony sat me down in front of a sectionable 3D map of the earth’s crust, drifting continents were being taught as givens, like Darwin’s finches or Mendel’s beans, and I’d have been as dumbfounded to learn that only a little more than a decade ago continental drift---and its proponents---were dismissed the way Felt says they were as I would have been if someone had tried to tell me Newton was all wet and Einstein full of it. But up until Tharp’s map convinced Heezen, who really, really resisted being convinced, American scientists rejected the theory of Continental Drift.
In 1952 the words " continental drift" were fighting words. "At the time," Marie wrote in [an article for Natural History], "Bruce and almost everyone else at Lamont, and in the United States thought continental drift was impossible." Depending on your intellectual confidence, the words continual drift provoked anything from mild anxiety to flat-out horror. Not only did American scientists think continental drift impossible, they also "considered it to be a form of scientific heresy," wrote Marie. "To suggest that someone believed in it was comparable to saying there must be something wrong with him or her."
To put it very simply, continental drift is the explanation for the bumps and grooves in the earth's crust that can't be explained as the work of glaciers, volcanoes, earthquakes, erosion, and meteor strikes. The underlying idea is that the earth's crust isn't a single table of contiguous rock. It's made up of separate, separated, and still separating plates that, floating on a sea of magma, are on the move all the time, colliding with one another, rubbing up against each other, sliding over and under each other, locking together, coming apart, abrading landscapes, pushing up mountains, cracking open valleys and canyons, breaking up large land masses into islands, pushing islands together to make new larger masses of land, shaping and reshaping whole continents. The idea that the continents were moving had been batted around since the 16th Century. A German geophysicist and meteorologist named Alfred Wegener turned the idea into a fully developed theory in 1912 and it was readily accepted by many scientists around the world. On the whole, though, the scientific community was skeptical and for one reason and other, most American scientists weren’t just skeptical, they were actively hostile. Tharp probably studied continental drift in grad school but it was dismissed by textbooks in use at the time. At the time the reluctantly persuaded Heezen presented the map at a conference, most American scientists were in agreement that there were likely a number of explanations for the wrinkles in the earth's surface, but continental drift was definitely not one of them. Presented with the evidence in the map, the reflexive reaction was to insist Tharp and Heezen had gotten it all wrong. The rifts weren't there because...well, because they couldn't be there!
Here's a good place for me to point out that for all the history of the science Tharp and Heezen devoted their lives to, Soundings is not a lesson in the history of that science. It is the intimate biography of a woman who happened to be a scientist. And because so much of her life was tied up with Heezen's, it’s also the story of a partnership between two eccentric people who both happened to be scientists. Felt has us looking at Tharp and Heezen within the context of their personal lives more than their professional ones. Other than Heezen, not many other scientists appear in their own rights as scientists doing science. They show up, with their CVs pinned to them like captions in movies or TV shows quickly indentifying new characters, as witnesses to Tharp’s and Heezen’s activities at this or that point in their lives in order to provide background and to give insight into their characters. Jacques Cousteau makes a guest appearance when he brings back the first photographic proof that Tharp was right about the rifts being there and where they were. But the only other scientist who has more than a cameo is Maurice Ewing, known affectionately in life and referred to by Felt a little too chummily throughout Soundings as Doc, who founded the labs at Columbia that under his guidance grew into the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and who hired Tharp and recruited Heezen and then fell out with both of them, and his part in the book is less a story about science than it is a dispiriting tale of academic politics and friendships gone awry.
That doesn’t mean Felt neglects the science. It’s there, in fine, lyrical, flowing detail. Felt is excellent at describing processes. The process of making the maps. The processes of doing the science that led to Tharp’s maps. The geologic and oceanographic processes the science discovered and explained. But, I think, best of all, the process of Tharp’s scientific education, which began when she was a very young girl being taken out into the field by her father, a soil surveyor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, continued through her becoming the president of her junior high science club, on into her time at Ohio University, where she majored in music and art(!), and her graduate career at the University of Michigan, where she earned her master’s in geology, her work as a geologist for an oil company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, at the University of Tulsa, she picked up another degree, this one in mathematics, and on through her time at Columbia and her partnership with Heezen. Felt makes a persuasive case that an important part of this process was Tharp’s loneliness or, rather, her aloneness. Growing up, Tharp had few friends because the government transferred her father almost annually and no sooner had she begun to settle in at one school than she found herself plucked out and plunked down and ernolled in another. Her closest companion was her mother, who died when Tharp was in high school.
Moving around all the time, changing schools nearly every year, sometimes within the school year, losing her mother and having the responsibility for taking care of her father and their home and herself dropped on her and having to start making her own way in the world at sixteen taught her to be self-reliant, independent, and comfortable being on her own and alone with her thoughts.
These qualities sustained her in her work, which required her to spend long hours alone at her desk and drawing table, and throughout her career in a field in which few women were welcome in any jobs but secretary, file clerk, and human computer, and in her relationship with a man who was frequently away at sea for long stretches of time and who was as independent, solitary-minded, and eccentric as she was, and, possibly, not as devoted or faithful.
I'm not sure how accurate a picture Felt has painted. Sometimes it’s hard to see Tharp because Felt herself keeps getting in the way.
Soundings is an unconventional biography, like Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat, in that, like Hendrickson, Felt puts herself in her story and, like Hendrickson, when stymied by gaps in her source materials, she gives herself permission to make things up, that is, where she doesn’t know, she supposes. But unlike Hendrickson, she isn’t always upfront about it. Usually, she’ll let us know. I think, she’ll write at the beginning of a passage that is full of conjecture, supposition, or just plain guesswork. I imagine. I see. But often she’ll blend what she’s learned with what she’s surmising and then not bother to point out where the former leaves off and the latter picks up. You have to turn to the notes at the end to learn what’s what. And the notes aren’t always helpful.
I still don’t know how to sort out a passage like this:
On the street, Marie buys a hot dog and eats it in three bites as she walks the few blocks to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. She likes feeling lost in its huge nave, the interior buffed and pale; occasionally she takes a long lunch and walks all the way up to The Cloisters just so she can see the miniatures with their delicate faces carved from stone. Her coat is unbuttoned and she walks it flaps around her slender torso. She wears an unstructured skirt, gathered at the waist. Scuffed black chunky shoes. Hair a loose mass of frizz around her face. She does not look like the other women, whose hair is pulled into taut rolls on various parts of their heads. Those women walk with their noses pointed forward, as if to keep their tiny hats balanced, and they wear clothes that nip in at the waist and out at the hips and fit tight round their arms. The women carry magazines, wear shoes that are light and heeled, and skip lunch to shop. Marie is not like them but she is not like the men in the office either. Or, actually, she is like the men of the geophysical lab in one important way: they’re working for their futures, and Marie is working for their futures, too.
Where did all that detail come from? How does Felt know Tharp ate a hot dog in three bites? How does she know she ate a hot dog at all? Is Felt working from one of Tharp’s letters or an interview or a third party’s memory? Is she guessing? All the note says is that the description of what Tharp is wearing is drawn from a photograph of her walking down a New York City street some time not too long after she started working at Columbia in 1948.
Going by the note on a story Felt later tells about a visit Tharp made to Heezen’s boyhood home after he died and her being given a tour of the place by its current owner, I’m thinking that much of the above paragraph is fiction. Tharp, Felt tells us in the note, did make that visit, but there was nobody home when she went and the owner and the tour are Felt’s inventions!
I didn’t feel deceived when I hit upon a passage that turned out to be half fact and half, essentially, fiction or that I suspected was. I was just baffled. Felt warns her readers what’s ahead right at the start. She tells why she took this approach. But I didn’t quite get it and still don’t. It seems to me that Felt was determined to write the same kind of biography she might have written of a poet or a philosopher or a different sort of scientist, one with a more self-reflective, self-questioning nature and the soul of a poet or a philosopher, like Loren Eisley, Albert Einstein, or Carl Sagan. Tharp, at least from what I can tell from where Felt is clearly describing her and not her own imagined version of her, was gregarious and companionable but not confiding. She loved to write letters, giving Felt a lot to draw from, but those letters are---again I’m going by what Felt has included---what you’d expect a scientist’s letters to be like, as long as you know that scientists usually write well and have good senses of humor, observant, objective, analytical, outer-directed, and almost obsessively descriptive rather than reflective, inward-looking, self-revealing, and confessional. Felt seems to have given herself the job of speaking for Tharp on the grounds that at the end of all her researching of Tharp’s life she just felt she knew her well enough to do so.
I don’t like this. My feeling is that if you’re going to novelize, then write a novel. But although I don’t like it as a matter of principle---or prejudice---I liked how Felt did it and what she did with it. I liked the book and I liked Felt’s portrait of Tharp. And it helps to see Soundings as a portrait, that is, as if it’s like a painting. You look at Van Gogh’s portrait of Dr Gachet or Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein and you don’t think, Yep, that’s exactly what those people must have looked like.
I’m not sure I was seeing the real Marie Tharp when I was reading Soundings. But I did feel I was seeing what Felt thought I should see. The portrait may not duplicate the particular person being painted but it’s certainly a person. Felt’s Tharp is very much alive in the pages of her book the way the Gachet and Stein are alive on Van Gogh’s and Picasso’s canvases.
Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor
Top photo courtesy of Columbia University. Image of one of Tharp’s preliminary sketches for her map of the North Atlantic courtesy of the Library of Congress.
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Previously in The Mannionville Daily Gazette’s Review of Books: Caution: Identities Under Deconstruction. Skios, a novel by Michael Frayn.
It’s not enough we’ve got bears roaming everywhere:
GOSHEN — An albino wallaby went on the lam and spent hours hopping around town until he was recaptured early Wednesday morning.
Read Nathan Brown’s story, Escaped wallaby tours goshen, at the Times Herald-Record. Unfortunately, unlike the bear story below, this one doesn’t include any helpful tips on what to do if you find yourself confronting a wallaby in your your yard.
Photo by Steve Borland of the THR.
Haven’t seen hide nor hair of one in our neighborhood…yet.
Headline: Bear invasions on the rise as food goes scarce
WOODSTOCK — A drought-fueled lack of food is largely to blame for the soaring number of black bear invasions in the mid-Hudson, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
"The bears are a little more desperate this year for alternative food because their natural source of food is not so available," said wildlife biologist Matthew Merchant, who is known as DEC's "Bear Guy."
Already this year, the DEC has received 300 inquiries about nuisance bears in this area. In all of last year, it received 390.
Ok, first, I think it would be pretty cool to be known as the Bear Guy.
Second, I’m clipping the helpful tips on dealing with a bear and posting them on our refrigerator, just in case. This one, though, I think we can safely skip:
• Put electric fence around livestock or beehives.
Third, read Pauline Liu’s whole story at the Times Herald-Record.
Photo by Steve Borland of the THR.
Haven’t seen any episodes of Boss yet. DVDs are working their way up my Netflix queue. Seems like my kind of show. And I’m sure Kelsey Grammer’s great in the title role. He’s a brilliant comic actor and Tom Kane sounds like one of those comic monsters that ought to be funny but isn’t because of his real power to hurt people. Comedy and tragedy are reflections of life viewed from different sides of the mirror and the fact you can imagine Kane pretty much unchanged as a character in a comedy and even as the good guy makes him all the more terrifying. So I expect I’ll be wowed by Grammer’s performance. But, like I said, I haven’t seen it yet so I don’t know.
Kelsey Grammer knows.
He knows he’s doing a great job.
He knows he deserved an Emmy nomination for it.
He didn’t get one.
But he knows why he didn’t get one.
Because he’s a Republican.
Out in Hollywood they discriminate against Republicans.
Ask Clint Eastwood.
Man gets no respect.
I guess this means Grammer wasn’t a Republican when he won his other five Emmys.
Ok, looking over the list of nominees for Best Actor in a Drama Series, I can see room for Grammer. I can see room for Timothy Olyphant too. Doesn’t really matter who’s nominated besides Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston. Cranston should win it going away. But I wouldn’t scratch Steve Buscemi from the list. Michael C. Hall? He’s not been phoning it in but it’s been several seasons since he did his best work as Dexter. Similar point with Jon Hamm. It’s not that Hall and Hamm shouldn’t have been nominated. It’s that they didn’t have to be nominated for what they did in their respective just completed seasons. The Downton Abbey guy, though, I can’t help suspecting he’s there as a sop to the Brits or PBS. And I haven’t heard anybody talking about Damian Lewis or Homeland. You can’t go by me, though. Still, I understand why Grammer might have had his hopes up and why he’d look at the list and think “I should be there!”
I think he should have been gracious about it and kept his mouth shut. I think he should have looked at the list and thought, “Hey, can’t nominate everybody and those other guys are really good actors too.”
I think---or I would have thought---he’s smart enough to realize there might be a dozen reasons he was “snubbed” and none of them was his political affiliation. Liberal Hollywood has a long history of not just tolerating but celebrating Republicans and conservatives in its midst. Besides Eastwood, John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Jimmy Stewart, Ginger Rogers, and Bob Hope didn’t suffer much as martyrs to their cause. I haven’t noticed that Robert Duvall, Robert Downey Jr, or Jon Voight have gone without work or recognition. Grammer hasn’t either. His being a Republican isn’t why he wasn’t nominated this year for an Emmy. (Wonder what he’ll say if he’s nominated next year.) But I’m thinking his being a Republican explains why he thinks he was discriminated against because he’s a Republican.
The Republican Party has become the party of white guys the world doesn’t love enough.
That’s one of the factors uniting Tea Party types with Wall Street corporatist types, the sense that they’re owed something THEY are taking from them. THEY being everybody who isn’t themselves.
Republicanism feeds into these feelings of entitlement and grievance. The GOP really has become Richard Nixon’s Party.
But that’s just it. It’s Nixonian in its encouragement of self-pity, sure. But it’s also Nixonian in its providing excuses for personal failings.
As a Republican, the greedy man can congratulate himself on being a generous benefactor of society. As a Republican, the dependent man can pride himself on being a self-reliant hero. The weak man can feel strong and tough. The coward can bravely advocate for war. The racist can complain of being the victim of discrimination. The morally slothful man can boast he’s a paragon of virtue and the sinner can proclaim himself a saint.
Grammer is a terrific actor, but he’s a vain, self-important, self-infatuated human being. Which is to say, he’s an actor. Yuk yuk. He’s something else though. Self-destructive. He’s constantly making a mess of his personal life. From time to time he’s been able to pull himself together, but he just can’t hold it together. It’s not surprising, then, that he’s adopted a particular brand of politics that encourages him to believe he’s things he’s clearly not---strong, reliable, responsible, disciplined, sound of judgment and an exemplar of traditional values and domestic virtues. (Let me stress I’m talking about his personal life. The irony here is that professionally he is, at least as far as I know, reliable, responsible, disciplined, and sound of judgment. If and when Hollywood starts discriminating against him, it’ll be because he’s begun conducting his professional life like his personal life. You can vote any way you want as long as you show up to work on time, know your lines, hit your mark, and make an effort when the camera’s rolling.) For Grammer, being Republican substitutes for being successfully grown-up. It is the Daddy Party, after all, isn’t it?
And that’s the thing, generally. Republicanism has become a substitute virtue, a way to feel successful even when you’re not. And then, when it turns out that at the end of the day, you aren’t a success, when you’re not rich or strong or brave or a hero in the eyes of others and, more importantly, in your own eyes, you’re given the excuse. It’s THEIR fault. THEY resent you. THEY envy you. THEY want to take away all the things you deserve because you are you.
There’s no way Kelsey Grammer wasn’t nominated for an Emmy because those other actors are doing better jobs than he is. It must be because THEY are spitefully refusing to give him what THEY know he deserves. THEY resent him. THEY envy him. THEY are taking it away from him because THEY’RE a bunch of liberal meanies who discriminate against nice Republicans.
Couple of asides before I wrap it up here.
There was a period when Hollywood actively and devastatingly discriminated against people because of their politics, from the late 1940s into the early 1960s.
Those people were not conservatives.
And, speaking of Richard Nixon, take a look at that picture of Grammer up top again.
Somebody’s got to cast him as Nixon and soon!
______________________
Updated as part of back-room deal: Steven Hart, who knows a thing or two about corrupt political bosses
From the Department of Who Doesn’t Love News About Great Cetaceans:
When a University of Washington researcher listened to the audio picked up by a recording device that spent a year in the icy waters off the east coast of Greenland, she was stunned at what she heard: whales singing a remarkable variety of songs nearly constantly for five wintertime months.
Kate Stafford, an oceanographer with UW’s Applied Physics Lab, set out to find if any endangered bowhead whales passed through the Fram Strait, an inhospitable, ice-covered stretch of sea between Greenland and the northern islands of Norway. Only around 40 sightings of bowhead whales, which were hunted almost to extinction, have been reported there since the 1970s.
Stafford and colleagues put two hydrophones, or underwater microphones, on moorings attached to the seafloor in Fram Strait, leaving them there for as long as the batteries would last: nearly a year. Since the population of bowhead whales likely to pass through was thought to number in the tens, they didn’t anticipate much interesting data.
“We hoped to record a few little grunts and moans,” Stafford said. “We were not expecting to get five months of straight singing.”
Not only did they record singing nearly every hour of the day and night, they picked up more than 60 unique songs…
Read the whole article from the University of Washington, Critically Endangered Whales Sing Like Birds; New Recordings Hint at Rebound.
And there’s audio!
Listen to the bowheads repeat their other-worldly song as they cross the Fram Strait.
Photo by Kate Stafford, courtesy of UW.
This curiosity about the “what” of things manifested itself from a young age in sketches and drawings. Tom drew the typical subjects---Indians, trains, and legendary feats, such as Custer’s Last Stand, a favorite topic…
Tom’s very first drawings were of the locomotives he observed entering the Neosho depot. “Engines,” he recalls, “were the most impressive things that came into my childhood…[T]o…see them come in, belching black smoke, with their big headlights shining and their bells ringing and their pistons clanking, give me a feeling of stupendous drama…I scrawled crude representations of them over everything.” Even as a boy Benton thought big: he composed his first mural when he was six or seven. Oak Hill had a large stairway that led from the lower hall to the second floor, and soon after the wall of the stairway had been dressed in a cream-colored wallpaper, he defaced it with a long freight train drawn in charcoal. The mural began at the foot of the stairs with a caboose and ended a the top with an engine “puffing long strings of black smoke.” The reception of this drawing, Benton explains, “was the first intimation I received of the divergency of view on the subject of mural decoration.”
I started reading Thomas Hart Benton: A Life
I used to draw like this. When I was a kid. From third grade up and on into high school. I used to draw constantly, obsessively, conscientiously, and consciously---that is, I was aware of myself as someone who could draw. It was part of my sense of who I was. My usual subjects were knights, football players, and characters from whatever book I was reading. I didn’t draw trains. I drew planes. Mainly World War II era fighters. My battle scenes were the Crusades, dogfights over London and France, and fourth and goal. But I did my share of Little Big Horns. The point is that I drew. A lot. I don’t think I ever used any walls as canvasses. But I could cover the floors with sheet after sheet of paper I’d filled with my drawings. I don't remember aspiring to be an artist. I might have thought about going to work for Marvel or DC. But I didn't draw comic books or mimic their styles. Whatever my ambitions were, I didn’t have the interest in color and composition and form that I think born artists like Benton instinctively have. I just drew because I wanted to see scenes from the stories in my head. I do remember wanting to be good and working at it. I filled sketchpads. I checked books on how to draw out of the library. I studied and I copied drawings and paintings I liked. Those were usually illustrations in books and magazines. It bothered me that I wasn't good. Grown ups told me I had talent. Some of my drawings won prizes. But I knew what I could do and, more to the point, what I couldn't. I couldn't draw hands. I couldn't draw any animals except dogs. And I couldn't draw girls.
I was not the best artist in school or even in my class. Cheryl F. was the best in our grade. In seventh grade the nuns held a school-wide art contest. As my entry, I did a colored pencil drawing of a knight entering an autumn woods. His castle was in the background. He carried his shield and brandished his sword as if he was about to confront the black knight. But he was only at the beginning of his quest. He was on foot and had no retinue. I told anyone who asked it was because he was a poor knight seeking his fortune but it was really because I couldn't draw horses and because I thought it made him look more heroic if he was setting off all alone.
I won second prize for the seventh and eighth grade.
Cheryl F. won first prize.
I was incensed. My picture was so much better! As far as I could tell there was no story in hers. Her background was vague and nearly empty. She hadn't included anything as detailed as my castle or the leaves on my trees. It was just three girls sitting on a porch. I think the girls were supposed to be Cheryl's best friends but I couldn't make out any resemblances. They didn’t look like any girls in our class. They didn’t look like anybody. Not anybody in particular. My knight looked like a hero. (Actually, he looked like one of my GI Joes. I often used them as my models.). For a while, the more I looked at our two pictures, the more I was convinced I 'd been robbed, that it was another case of the nuns favoring the girls over the boys, which we boys were convinced they did all the time. It didn't matter to me that the nuns hadn't judged the contest. Other students had. My knight had been outvoted. But I wasn't in the mood to think fairly. For a while. Then I began to see. Cheryl's painting looked like...life.
Her girls looked like they were living their lives. I’m not sure I put it that way to myself, but that’s how it was. Whatever it was they were supposed to be doing on that porch, they were doing it.
They weren't moving. The were just sitting. But people are never perfectly still. Cheryl had captured this. There was the suggestion of movement in her girls’ seeming stillness. A naturalness in their poses, in the tilts of their heads, in the way they held their arms, placed their legs. You could feel that they had moved into those positions and would move out of them.
My knight was supposed to be walking but he looked as locked in place as if his armor had rusted. He looked like he was posing.
And then there was the lack of detail.
If I’d drawn that scene---as if I would have bothered to draw something that boring---I’d have filled in the background with all kinds of stuff. Toys left on the porch by little brothers and sisters. A cat in the window. If I could have drawn a cat. Maybe a bird on the railing that the cat was watching. Except I couldn’t draw birds either. Furniture in the room behind the cat in the window. Flowers in a pot. Every petal on the flowers. Cracks in the pot. But then I realized. She had left all that stuff out deliberately.
She'd focused on what was important, on what you would have focused on if you'd come across this scene in real life.
There was too much to look at in my drawing.
Her picture wasn't just better than mine. It was much better.
I swallowed my pride.
I went up to Cheryl and congratulated her and told her, sincerely, I thought her picture was good.
Then I told her why it was good.
She didn’t look as though she wanted to hear it. Not from me, at any rate. Probably she didn’t need to hear it. She knew what she’d done.
But here’s where I went too far.
I asked her how to draw girls.
She laughed. It was, I felt, a cruel and derisive laugh. As if I’d asked her how to make a sandwich or tie my shoes.
“I just draw,” she said.
I’d have run away and found a hole to crawl into and died of humiliation, but there happened to be other kids around and it turned out they wanted to know how she did it too. Not how she drew girls, particularly. How she drew so well.
So she got out some paper and showed us.
I can’t say I learned any great lesson on the spot about draftsmanship from watching her. She used the same technique of laying out the basic shapes of her figures with circles and squares and triangles that I’d picked up from my how to draw books. Her touch looked lighter. Her pencil seemed to move more rapidly. I’m not sure what I made of either observation. When she was done, she’d produced another girl who looked pretty much like any of the girls on the porch. But again, the difference between what she’d drawn and what I’d have drawn was the suggestion of movement. The faces in my drawings had distinguishing features. The faces in hers had expressions.
That’s it. That’s the story. As much as there is one. I continued to draw. I continued to work at getting better. I did get better. Somehow, without my knowing how, the girls I drew started to look like girls. And they moved. Or looked as though they could. Faces had expression as well as distinguishing features. Male and female, the figures in my drawings became characters. Like I said, I didn’t have any ambitions to be an artist like Thomas Hart Benton, but I did think I might be one like Jules Feiffer or Garry Trudeau. I was drawing cartoons.
Then I wasn’t.
As time went by I drew less and less. Sometime after I’d left grad school I realized that it had been some time since I’d drawn anything. That realization didn’t spur me to go out and buy a new sketchpad.
Whatever satisfaction I’d been getting out of drawing or whatever psychic itch I was scratching I’d transferred to writing. I worked at describing what I used to work at drawing and I took pride and got pleasure from that. Drawing had been a way of taking notes, I think. And to tell stories I was in too much of a hurry to write down.
There are stories that can be told in a drawing, of course. Thomas Hart Benton was a storyteller, which I’m beginning to sense from Wolff’s book a lot of people thought was a weakness.
Sometimes I think about taking up drawing again.
But how would you tell this story in a drawing?
Image: Holmes and Watson Investigate, by Lance Mannion, Age 12. Courtesy of the artist.
Michael Frayn's Skios
Like many a farce, Skios depends on mistaken identities. The intellectual gamesmanship here is that Frayn, in bringing about the mistake and keeping the deception going while assisting us to suspend our disbelief, explores the malleability of identity.
Who we are is pretty much an agreed upon fiction. We tell people who we think we are or who we want them to think we are and they, usually, take our word for it, without much question. But the pressure flows the other way too. To a great degree we are who other people think we are or want us to be, and once they have decided we are one sort of person, it’s hard to convince them we are another sort. In fact, they will stick with a fiction of their own devising and reject evidence that the fiction is a fiction and reality something quite different than they thought.
This can be terribly frustrating for someone determined to prove he is who he thinks he is. But it’s a golden opportunity for a con artist.
Frayn deftly and engagingly shows his characters' minds at work at this process of self-deception and this way dances us past the fact that his plot depends on its not occurring to any character to sit down at a computer or fire up a smart phone to do a quick Google search.
Oliver Fox, a feckless party boy and professional charmer with irresistible big brown eyes and adorably tousled blond hair, arrives on the Greek island of Skios for a tryst with Georgie, a woman he seduced in record time in a bar while her boyfriend was outside grabbing a smoke. They've arranged to spend a week at a borrowed villa, borrowed, as it happens, from Oliver’s recently ex-ed girlfriend, Annuka Vos, who ex-ed him for stabling a donkey in her apartment. But Georgie missed the flight, and Oliver, through a series of mishaps involving lost luggage, an outburst of academic ego, an aggressively helpful pair of twin brother taxi drivers neither of whom speaks English, and a warm, welcoming smile directed at the wrong person, Oliver finds himself delivered to the Fred Toppler Foundation on the eve of an annual Davos-like conference, where he's mistaken for the guest of honor, Dr Norman Wilfred, a renowned expert in the science of managing science.
Oliver, who seems to have sprung to life fully formed and in mid-misadventure at the bar in PG Wodehouse's Drones Club, and like Wodehouse's reflexive con artists and mischief-makers Psmith and Lord Ickenham can't resist the impulse to go with whatever flow he's blundered into especially if he senses that the flow is about to carry him and the people around him through the rapids and over a waterfall, realizes that's exactly the situation he's gotten himself into and acts decisively. Without thought or hesitation, he steps into the role fate has offered him and becomes Dr Wilfred.
He does this partly for fun, partly for the thrill, but mainly because he's smitten with Nikki Hook, the attractive young blonde who is running the conference.
It helps that Nikki has never met Wilfred. Although she has glanced at his photograph, the image left only a blurry imprint on her memory. What seals it for Oliver is that Nikki, expecting Wilfred to be what the real Wilfred is, seriously middle-aged, somber, somewhat pompous and self-important, and dull, let herself imagine how pleasant it would be if he turned out to surprise her by being someone very different, someone young, good looking, charming, and interested in her. Lo and behold…!
Something similar goes on with the other people at the conference. They accept that Oliver is Dr Wilfred because that's who they're expecting him to be and because Nikki tells them he's the man they've paid a lot of money and traveled great distances to hear lecture. But they believe it not because Oliver makes a plausible Wilfred but because he doesn't. He's much more charming and fun. He offers them a better time. He isn't what they thought they were coming to see. He's what they would have preferred Wilfred to be. And because they know the real Dr Wilfred is brilliant, every nonsensical but charming answer Oliver gives to their questions strikes them as brilliant. He's better than the real thing so they want him to be the real thing.
Oliver, good natured and obliging as he is, doesn’t want to disappoint them, or deny himself some fun.
He swung down the path with long strides. Nikki told him that he was expected to mingle. He was happy to oblige. He was Dr Norman Wilfred. Everyone would be pleases to see him. There might be people who had known him in the days when he was Oliver Fox, or who knew a rival claimant to the title of Dr Norman Wilfred. He didn't care. He would face them down. And when the pretender to his identity turned up, Oliver would face him down, too. This morning he felt himself to be so solidly established as Dr Norman Wilfred that no other Dr Norman Wilfred, however freighted with passports and credit cards, could take the title from him. Somewhere in this shining blue world Nikki was waiting. Together they would laugh over the misunderstandings of the night. And even when things were humiliatingly, flesh-crawlingly wrong, as sooner or later they inevitably would, he would laugh about it, and she would laugh with him.
The easy gradient ushered him eagerly on down into the picture. The world was bright, the world was downhill, the world was downhill again.
Of course the real Dr Wilfred is on the island, having arrived on the same plane as Oliver, and of course the same accidents that deliver Oliver to the conference deliver Wilfred to the villa where Oliver was headed, and of course Wilfred thinks he's at the Toppler’s guest quarters, though he can't understand why no one's there to welcome him, so of course he makes himself at home in what he takes to be his bedroom, and of course no sooner does he crawl into bed naked---his pajamas are in his suitcase which went with Oliver to the conference---and fall asleep than Oliver's tryst mate Georgie, having arrived on Skios on a later plane, shows up at the villa and, of course, thinking the man sleeping in her bed is Oliver, she slips out of her clothes and under the covers and sets to waking up “Oliver” gently at which point...
Screams, naked bodies running this way and that, doors slamming, cell phone calls being made and dropped so that incomplete and misleading information is passed along.
Wilfred and Georgie are trapped at the villa. Since neither knows where they are they have no idea how to get somewhere they'd rather be, which in Georgie's case is anywhere far away from Wilfred. And they can't call for help. Her cell phone battery has died and she forgot to pack an adapter so she cant recharge it, and his cell phone has drowned in the swimming pool.
At the Toppler, Oliver is having such a good time being Dr Wilfred that he starts to think he'll just continue in the new identity for the rest of his life. He even begins to think of himself as Dr Wilfred. The only problem he foresees is that Dr Wilfred is such a stable, respectable, and responsible sort, that in order to be him Oliver will have to be stable, respectable, and responsible and in the past he hasn't had much success being any of those things, mainly because he's gotten bored and when he's bored he has to liven things up usually by self destructing in one way or another.
At the villa, Dr Wilfred begins having trouble holding onto the idea that he is Dr Wilfred. His problem begins with the fact that the Dr Wilfred he’d assumed himself to be was a construct created to fill a public function. Dr Wilfred, famous intellectual, and that identity was based on and held together by audiences willing to be impressed, disciples willing to indulge his ego and vanities, underlings willing to take his orders, and intellectual rivals willing to challenge him and be slapped back into their proper place as his professional inferiors. None of those enablers are at the villa, and without them the construct begins to break down immediately. Dr Wilfred is left alone with his real self whom he discovers he doesn't like very much.
The real him is a boring, middle-aged academic who goes about pretending to be somebody important. Not an identity impressive in its own right, either to himself or to the likes of Georgie, whom Dr Wilfred can't help noticing because he keeps encountering her without her clothes on, is the sort of young woman he would very much like to impress.
But it dawns on him that Georgie doesn't know the real him. He's free to tell her he's whatever sort of him he chooses.
The possibility that he doesn't have to be himself is alluring. His problem is that he doesn't have what Oliver is granted upon arrival, other people willing to accept him as the new person he's decided to be. He's made it harder for himself by deciding to be someone Georgie would fall in love with, which means the first person he needs to convince is Georgie and she's already convinced he's a madman.
Ah, but Georgie, angry at herself for having fallen for Oliver who has, she thinks, deliberately abandoned her to make a fool of her, has begun to wonder if she’d be happier if she was a different type of person, someone mature and serious minded enough to attract a more stable and successful sort of man. Unfortunately, Oliver's ex-girlfriend, Annuka Vos, picks just this moment to show up at the villa and she knows at a glance exactly what sort of person Georgie is. A romantic rival who must be disposed of immediately.
For her part, Georgie thinks Annuka is the cleaning lady.
Meanwhile, back at the Toppler, gangsters are hiding in the bushes, an art theft is being plotted, spies are mingling among the guests, Nikki's rival for a promotion is scheming to humiliate her in front of their boss, Fred Toppler’s widow, a former Las Vegas showgirl whose life is textbook case study of the malleability of identity, one of the real Dr Wilfred’s intellectual rivals is determined to expose “Dr Wilfred”, not as Oliver Fox but as an intellectual fraud, a Russian mobster’s wife is apparently falling in love with Oliver, and Oliver is preparing to deliver Dr Wilfred's lecture. Or make a run for it.
Frayn is an accomplished playwright. Copenhagen won a passel of awards including the Tony for Best Play. But probably his most produced play is the backstage farce Noises Off. Lots of doors opening and closing in that one, with mistaken and assumed identities driving the plot every which way. And it’s easy to imagine Skios turned into a play like that. Easier still to imagine it as a movie.
But Frayn is also the author of ten previous novels, and Skios is very much a novel and not a play script with incredibly detailed stage directions or a waiting-to-be-adapted screenplay. Skios is well and even beautifully written. The imagery is cinematic but as in paintings in motion. And much of the action and the comedy is interior. The characters are types, stock characters that go back to the beginnings of comedy, but Frayn puts us inside their heads and has us seeing things through their eyes. The result isn’t deep psychological insight but more sympathy than is usually granted to the fools running in and out of the doors on stage in your average bedroom farce.
Still, Skios is a farce, and that brings me back to the cover, which is the most erotic part of the book, despite the considerable amount of time Georgie spends without her clothes. And that’s how it should be. That’s the convention. Bedroom farces, particularly British bedroom farces aren’t about people having sex. They’re about people not having sex. They are about thwarted desire.
All those doors opening up on invitations to the wrong bed or revealing characters arising from beds they should never have climbed into are just as often slamming shut on paths to the right beds or at any rate the desired ones.
Nobody gets what they want in a bedroom farce.
Well, almost nobody.
The denouement of Skios depends on Fox being a pun.
Skios
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Previously in the Mannionville Daily Gazette Review of Books: Hemingway’s Boat: Portrait of a writer as an embodied man.
The boys and I gave their mother Wrecking Ball
Her step-father, she told me, though, wasn’t as impressed. “You should have seen him when he was really good,” he’d grumped afterward.
“I have a feeling,” I said, “Your step-father’s remembering what it was like for him to be young more than he’s remembering what Springsteen was like back then.”
“Oh of course he was,” she said with a laugh that mixed affection with exasperation and I suspect summed up her relationship with her step-father.
We nobodies who write critically about somebodies must be forever grateful to Samuel Johnson for permission: "You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables."
Still…I’m making a note to keep in mind that this how I probably sound to many readers when I write about Quentin Tarantino, Jonathan Franzen, or Aaron Sorkin:
DO THESE MEN HAVE ears? The musical decline of Bruce Springsteen has been obvious for decades. The sanctimony, the grandiosity, the utterly formulaic monumentality; the witlessness; the tiresome recycling of those anthemic figures, each time more preposterously distended; the disappearance of intimacy and the rejection of softness. And the sexlessness: Remnick adores Springsteen for his “flagrant exertion,” which he finds deeply sensual, comparing him to James Brown, but Brown’s shocking intensity, his gaudy stamina, his sea of sweat, was about, well, fucking, whereas Springsteen “wants his audience to leave the arena, as he commands them, ‘with your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated!’”, which is how you talk dirty at Whole Foods. Remnick lauds him also for his “exuberance,” which is indeed preternatural. I was twice at The Bottom Line in August 1975 and I have never been in a happier room. But there is nothing daft or insouciant, nothing crazy free, about Springsteen’s exuberance anymore. The joy is programmatic; it is mere uplift, another expression of social responsibility, a further statement of an idealism that borders on illusion. The rising? Not quite yet. We take care of our own? No, we do not. Nothing has damaged Springsteen’s once-magnificent music more than his decision to become a spokesman for America. He is Howard Zinn with a guitar.
Reminds me. Howard Zinn’s another somebody I have to be careful about.
To be fair to Leon Wieseltier, who grumped the above for the New Republic, David Remnick’s New Yorker profile of Springsteen was a tad over-worshipful, about three times too long considering how little new ground it broke, and after a while made me wonder if the Boss had ever been that good.
I got over it. Wieseltier, obviously, didn’t. I get the feeling it’s been a while since he’s seen Springsteen live. Here’s the link to his grouchery, A Saint in the City.
And, if you have the morning to kill, here’s Remnick’s article, We Are Alive.
Photo courtesy of BruceSpringsteen.net.
Didn’t mention in my review of Hemingway’s Boat yesterday Islands in the Stream
On April 16, 1944, the U-550 torpedoed the gasoline tanker SS Pan Pennsylvania, which had lagged behind its protective convoy as it set out with 140,000 barrels of gasoline for Great Britain, according to the U.S. Coast Guard website and research by Mazraani.
The U-boat slipped under the doomed tanker to hide. But one of the tanker's three escorts, the USS Joyce, saw it on sonar and severely damaged it by dropping depth charges.
The Germans, forced to surface, manned their deck guns while another escort vessel, the USS Gandy, returned fire and rammed the U-boat. The third escort, the USS Peterson, then hit the U-boat with two more depth charges. The crew abandoned the submarine, but not before setting off explosions to scuttle it. The submarine hadn't been seen again until Monday.
Read the whole story, Explorers find downed U-Boat off Mass.
Photo courtesy of the U.S. Navy via AP via Yahoo.
“Did Pilar already have her name? One pictures---I do, anyway---a hunter seated by a campfire in a canvas-backed chair, a million stars out, wide-brimmed Stetson safari hat pushed back, bush trousers hiked up, sleeves of his sweat-soaked shirt rolled past his thick forearms. The fire gives his unshaven face a kind of orangy glow. His wife is sleeping under mosquito netting on a canvas cot a few feet away. He sips tin cups of whiskey and soda. Earlier, he’d dined on roast guinea hen. He’s not bent on dominating man or animal. Somewhere in his mind is the greater kudu he might get to steal up on tomorrow at the salt lick. With his weak eyesight, the big-game hunter, who is even more of a big-game fisherman, is poring over fine print in a well-thumbed catalog for a twin-engine cabin cruiser, thirty-eight feet in length, offered by a manufacturer in Brooklyn. He’s studying all the specs, calculating the various price arrangements. ‘If you are looking for a fine roomy cruiser with lots of comforts, and ability for long offshore cruising and fishing trips, we suggest you look this boat over very carefully.’ In the price column: ‘Afloat at the plant. For rail or steamer deliveries add $175 for cradle and cover.’”---from Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost by Paul Hendrickson.
Writers are lousy physical specimens. Why wouldn't they be? They sit at their desks all day, right? But what if they're lousy physical specimens to begin with? What if the reason they're able to be writers is that they have bodies that permit them to sit still at their desks all day? Bodies that don't mind being ignored for hours on end? If they'd been born into bodies that demanded attention, that needed to be put to hard work or vigorous play they probably wouldn't have become writers.
Bodies that define themselves to themselves by their inadequacies---low muscle tone, little upper body strength, poor hand-eye coordination, poor gross motor skills, weak eyes, wobbly knees---might ask to be left alone to sit still at a desk rather than be hauled out into the world to embarrass themselves and the egos they carry around with them by proving their incompetence at sports and manual labor or any art or trade that requires dexterity, strength, and endurance.
But if you lived in a body that was good at doing things, it and, you would expect, you would be happier when you let it spend time and energy doing those things.
A body that was competent, that was strong, that was full of energy, that body would demand attention. That body would need to be in motion. It would need to be put to hard work and hard play. It would put itself to work. It would refuse to sit still. That body would be constantly trying to drag the brain inside it up out of a chair and away from a desk even if the brain was a writer's brain insisting on staying put to write. That brain would need to exert its will to hold the body down and make its restless hands bore themselves at the repetitive and unchallenging task of pushing a pen or tapping a keyboard. And because the strongest will is only so strong, the body is going to keep getting away from the brain and escaping the desk. The brain's best strategy, then, might be to let the body run wild and exhaust itself so that it will need to collapse into a chair to rest and recoup at which point the brain can take over and get down to writing.
This presents new problems. An exhausted body usually contains and an exhausted brain. It's hard to write when you have to fight to keep your eyes open and your mind is too tired to focus.
A strong, dexterous, competent body full of energy and ambitious for motion and challenge could be a writer’s worst enemy.
This isn’t a theory I’m prepared to defend. It’s just something I got to wondering about as I was reading Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson.
The boat is Pilar, a thirty-eight foot cabin cruiser Ernest Hemingway bought in 1934 for deep-sea fishing in the Caribbean and sailed out of first Key West and then Havana for the next twenty-seven years. Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost
Places and events that take up chapters in other books and that have even been the subjects of whole books of their own are cursorily referenced, dealt with in a few paragraphs or sentences here and there or, as I said, not dealt with at all. Sometimes it seems as if World War I, Paris, the Spanish Civil War, the hunting trips to Africa, the affair and marriage with Martha Gellhorn, and the writing of the books associated with them, The Sun Also Rises
People who loom large in other biographies make appearances but usually only when it's connected to the boat. Maxwell Perkins when Hemingway writes to him from Pilar or wherever she's docked, Scott Fitzgerald the same, John Dos Passos and Archibald MacLeish when they sail with Hemingway on Pilar. Martha Gellhorn breezes in and out only to pick out the house in Havana she and Hemingway will move into (but actually spend relatively little time in together) after he leaves his wife Pauline for her and moves Pilar from Key West to her new and final home in Havana Harbor.
Three men, two of whom I'd never heard of and I thought I was pretty well up on my Hemingway lore, have large sections of the book given over to their stories because Hendrickson sees the courses of their lives as defined by the (relatively short) times they spent aboard Pilar when they were young, and the narrative backs away from Hemingway himself for long stretches to see him not as the hero of his own legend but as the antagonist in these three other men's sad biographies.
Antagonist is probably the wrong word.
What is Ahab to Ishmael?
The narrative jumps around in time and it gets personal---Hendrickson doesn't just let himself be seen as the teller of this story, he enters the story, showing himself at work tracking down the story he's telling. Sometimes he's thwarted in his research by gaps in the records, often by Ernest Hemingway himself about whom many lies have been told, Hemingway being the biggest and most prolific liar about Hemingway. And at those points, where it would seem Hendrickson has nowhere to go, rather than throwing up his hands and turning back to pursue another path, Hendrickson will openly guess!
In words to this effect he'll admit to it right there: Here's what I think might have been going on. Here's what I think this person or that might have been feeling.
And he avoids all the usual psychoanalytic tropes or, more precisely, he folds them into what I admit I'm guessing is a trope of his own devising.
Instead of presenting Hemingway as a writing man or a drinking man or a woman-hating womanizing man or a posturing, unhappy, self-hating man who made vices of all his virtues---and he was all those kinds of man---Hendrickson would have us see him as an embodied man, big, strong, energetic (to put it mildly), full of physical intelligence, that is, smart in all his nerves and muscles like an athlete or a craftsman (or a hunter or a fisherman) who chose a career that required him to sit still and use only the smarts in his head.
Ernest Hemingway liked to talk about writing as if it was an athletic act. He bragged about what it took out of him physically as well as psychically. He spoke of memory as if it was a muscle he was working to exhaustion.
It’s rare when he writes about his writing that he reports an aesthetic success. He doesn’t often say things like "I wrote a nice line today." "I got a description perfect." "I like this character." "I had fun with this scene." "I made myself laugh/cry/scream with rage/shout with joy..." It's all counting. Word counts. Page counts. Hours spent working. Joggers aren't as obsessively proud of how completely they wring themselves out.
It used to be fashionable to see this as compensation. Tough talk from a macho bully boy afraid he's taken up a sissy's occupation. Maybe. Maybe that's part of it. But it seems physiological as much as psychological. It's how his body functioned. He could not be at rest. He suffered chronic insomnia from living in a machine that wouldn't shut down. If he'd been built differently and been born into a different era maybe he would have been a runner. Instead he fished.
Mainly for marlin.
When the fish jumped, he “shot upward, stiff as a ramrod, blue on top and silver below, the two colors divided sharply by a line down his body,” Samuelson wrote. The fish came down on its tail and shop up again. It seemed to hang there, a blue vision against a blue horizon with the blue water below.
Sometimes for tuna.
He was fishing with the 14/0 Vom Hofe. The bait itself---a baby tuna---weighed almost eight pounds. His boat was heeling into a southwest breeze, when he saw “a big yellowish brown fish pass alongside the boat travelling with the swells.” He thought it was a marlin. The fish hit the bait and the reel began “to scream in the special high register a man attains when he is dying of lockjaw.” The rod broke off at the tip. The fish was still on the line; they managed to get another rod tip in its place. He worked the fish to the side of the boat. The sun was blinding his vision. It’s a mako shark, he thought. Before they could get the gaff in, the fish pulled the leader free and sounded. In fifteen minutes Hemingway had the fish back up at the surface, belly side up. He saw now it was neither a mako nor a marlin but a tuna, with “a head that seemed made of chromium, a dark blue back, silver sides, was streamlined like a bullet and there were little bright yellow finlets that ran from his anal fin to his tail and still quivered when we got him in the boat.”
It's not exactly a thesis of the book. More of a controlling idea. Aboard Pilar, Hemingway found a degree of contentment he could find almost nowhere else. He wasn't necessarily happiest when he was out at sea in command of his boat or of a fish, but he could expect moments, hours, whole days of bliss. He could relax into himself. The physical intelligence that made him restless and at odds with himself ashore because it didn't have enough outlets, could express itself wholly, sustainedly, and exhaustively on the bridge of Pilar or at the stern with both feet planted on the deck, fishing rod in his hands, a huge, thrashing, angry fish on the end of his line.
The boat and the fishing may have been worse for him as a writer than the drinking because they made his body happy or made him happy in his body and therefore he was too easily lured away from writing.
But life aboard Pilar gave him material to write about. At the end of a grueling and eventful day he could sit down at the typewriter he kept below deck and work at being the kind of writer he might have been happiest being, a journalist and sportswriter and nature writer. Hendrickson quotes enough from the magazine articles that did grow out of Hemingway's adventures and triumphs and mishaps on Pilar---Hemingway once accidentally shot himself in both legs when the pistol bullet he was trying to put into the brain of a hooked shark that wouldn't give up the fight and let itself be gaffed and hauled on board ricocheted off Pilar’s brass rail.---that it makes me wish Hemingway had written at least one whole book of non-fiction about deep sea fishing, although I'm assuming he'd have resisted the temptations to bombast and grandiosity that make his bullfighting books such turgid reading. What's here is lively, informative, fun, and funny.
But because he could be happy on his boat doesn't mean he was. He was still himself, even if he was more at ease within his skin. Hemingway had a habit of trying to control the people around him. On shore that made him a bully. On Pilar he could bully benignly. Ordering friends, family, and guests about, he was just being skipper. But he never knew when to stop. Terrible fights broke out. Scenes fraught with humiliation and embarrassment were routine. Pauline Hemingway appears to have avoided trips on Pilar as often as possible. Maybe she was prone to sea sickness or didn't like to fish. But it seems likely she knew there'd be trouble, that her husband would make trouble. And maybe she never felt truly welcome. If Martha Gellhorn broke up the marriage, Pilar may have already caused an estrangement. Hemingway's friendships with Dos Passos and MacLeish were permanently damaged. All three of his sons suffered one way or another from having him for a father, but it was his youngest son Gregory who, according to Hendrickson going by Gregory's own memoirs, had his life most shaped and misshapen by what father and son shared on Pilar.
Hemingway was a divided character. Jekyll and Hyde divided. He could convince himself his outbursts of nastiness and meanness and acts of malice and spite were acts of virtue, forms of kindness, charitable even. He was being honest, telling truths people needed to hear, and he expected them to thank him for it or when he saw that they weren't likely to he was quick to point out that that was a sign of their bad or weak or vicious character. And he didn’t do it with tact. As Hendrickson says, he could be “so very wicked with words.”
Norman Mailer wrote a preface to Gregory Hemingway's memoir, Papa. In it he praised the son's book by saying that for once you could read about the father "and not have to decide whether you like him or not." This is true of Hemingway's Boat. You don't have to decide if you like him. You don't have to like him, which is good because often it's impossible. But just as often it's hard not to, as when he writes a letter of encouragement to a friend's young son who is in the hospital being treated for the illness that will soon take his life while he himself is in another hospital where he is essentially dying from the breakdowns, mental and physical, that are about to drive him into a hall closet at home with a shotgun or when, in better days, he puts a knife between his teeth and dives into the water of a lagoon to put himself between a young friend, his secretary who was an object of his desire despite her being married to a man who was also a friend, and a circling shark, a corny, self-dramatizing, but still heroic gesture that thrilled the young woman and left her husband smitten in his own way and eternally grateful. So you can see how other people could have liked him. You can see how you might have liked him if you usually caught him on his better days and never on his worst. But he was too often at his worst and any book that covers more than a year---a year? A month.---of his life is going to fill up with nastiness, malice, and petty meannesses.
He was probably bipolar, as was likely his father, and as happened to his father, it got worse as he got older. Ed Hemingway took out his rages on his children. Ernest took them out on his friends and his wives. The father reached for the strap. The son was able to stop with words. The doctor became less and less able to hold himself together. The writer was able to keep himself and his demons in check by writing and fishing. Both men eventually fell apart and killed themselves. Ed Hemingway was dead at fifty-seven. Ernest Hemingway held himself together a few years longer, putting the shotgun to his forehead when he was approaching sixty-two. But it's that holding of self together, the discipline and determination that required, that Hendrickson finds admirable, even heroic, and the pain, psychic and physical---Hemingway was a wreck by the end of World War II---that he means us to sympathize with.
As I said, the idea that Hemingway's Boat is a portrait of the writer as a physical specimen is more something I read into it than it is Hendrickson's explicit thesis. But Hendrickson is explicit in chronicling the breakdown of Hemingway's body and the deleterious effects on the man's mind and spirit and ability to write, and he is horrifically graphic when it comes time to tell the story of the suicide.
Hendrickson is the author of Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy, which won the National Book Critics Circle award for general non-fiction a few years ago,
This is important. Hemingway's Boat is a told book. Again, as I mentioned, when stumped by a gap in the record, Hendrickson doesn't give up and move on to another subject. He fills in the gap with a guess or a series of guesses all drawn from what he knows based on the facts he has on hand but still acts of imagination, which is to say, he makes things up. About what real person a character is based on. About what someone "must have" felt, must have thought, must have done. About what was said in conversations no one recorded or in letters that have been lost. He’s honest about what he’s up to. For example, this is how Hendrickson gets Hemingway to the boatyard where he will plunk down the dough to buy the boat he will christen Pilar:
I have no proof that the boat-owner-to-be, with Gingrich’s wad in his pocket, took the elevator (or maybe the stairs) from Max Perkins’ fifth-floor office down to the street and grabbed the first taxi he saw. Maybe he went to his hotel and changed into different clothes. Maybe he went straight to his bank and deposited the check. Maybe he and Pauline, feeling flush, had an expensive lunch on Esquire. But what I picture (guided by the maps and hunches of the reference assistants at the Brooklyn Public Library) is that some soon-after point a cabbie conveyed husband and wife over the Manhattan Bridge, got onto Flatbush Avenue, negotiated around Prospect Park, connected to Ocean Parkway, and then followed that down through the spine of the borough before turning back west and taking several side streets over to Cropsey and then to Cropsey’s foot.
This isn’t a case of the author making it easier on himself by What if-ing? Hendrickson uses his speculations to highlight, frame, and set off what is known to have been done, said, thought, felt or at least what the people there said was done, said, felt, thought. But it does call attention to Hemingway’s Boat as a written book as opposed to an assembled one. And in calling attention to his writing, Hendrickson calls attention to the fact that this is a story. His story. He owns it by virtue of being the one telling it. He's a storyteller telling the true story of someone else's story. In this he is doing what Hemingway himself did but with more tact, consideration, self-restraint, and conscience or at least a less flexible one. Hemingway's conscience was clear when he turned other people’s stories into his own because he thought of what he was doing, using real people to tell his stories, as honest and honorable. He was true to what he knew if not exact about the truth. He wrote from facts. The way painters paint from life. Three artists paint the same landscape and turn out three different paintings and the best one isn't the one that comes closest to a photograph. In Hemingway’s Boat, Hendrickson is telling the true story about a man who told stories about himself he meant to be true but weren't always. He couldn't help it. He lied. Gertrude Stein said it was because he was a coward. He couldn't face the truth about himself. Hendrickson thinks more highly of him. He thinks Hemingway was actually heroic in his attempts to tell the truth, as he saw it. The question is, What did he see? With the follow ups, What didn't he see? What did he miss? What did he ignore? What did he pretend not to see? When was he mistaken about what he thought he saw? When was he out and out lying?
Trying to answer those questions and by being open about how he’s going about it, Hendrickson inserts himself into the story. One way or another, implicitly and explicitly, he warns us: Here's what I think happened. He's telling the story inside or around the main story of how he came to think what he thinks. He's a character in that second story which makes him a character in the first one. The narrator as witness (if often at a remove of decades) and he sees no point in trying to hide himself. I tracked down this. I talked to so and so. I visited here and there. I saw, I heard, I felt.
Hendrickson introduces his larger chapters with passages that I’m calling chapter-ettes printed in italics meant, I’m pretty sure, to remind us of the short-short stories and prose poems that punctuate In Our Time. But I don’t think the real model is Hemingway. It's Conrad. It’s Lord Jim. In how the narrative circles and then circles back on its protagonist, in its multiple points of view, in the narrator’s frank admission that he is telling a story he isn’t sure he truly understands about a man whose head he finally can’t get inside of, whose heart he can’t read, who remains until the end a puzzle, Hendrickson’s book and its main character reminds me very much of Conrad’s novel and its main character. Hemingway would've liked that. He was a great admirer of Conrad.
Keeping in mind that Lord Jim is the story of a would-be hero who, ultimately, in his own eyes, doesn't measure up.
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Way back, I intended to pair this review with my review of William Kennedy’s novel Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, in which Hemingway is a major character. Didn’t work out. But, thanks to the wonderfulness of the interwebs, you can still read them as a pair if you follow the link to Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shores: All of history summed up in an uncashed check.
Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost is available as of this week in paperback from Vintage. My review is based on the hardcover edition
Photo up top of Pilar on display at the Hemingway Museum in Havana by Natalie Maynor via Wikipedia. Photos of Hemingway at the wheel of Pilar and in his house in Havana courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.
Family Movie Night tonight is more accurately Family Catch Up on Season 4 of One of Our Favorite TV Shows on DVD Night.
Parker behind the wheel of a car. Always good times.
Season 4 along with the first three seasons and the first couple episodes of this season are available to watch instantly at Amazon.
William Gildea: The Longest Fight: In the Ring with Joe Gans, Boxing's First African American Champion
Lance's Review
Joshua M. Glasser: The Eighteen-Day Running Mate: McGovern, Eagleton, and a Campaign in Crisis
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Gary Krist: City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago
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Hali Felt: Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor
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Paul Hendrickson: Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost
Lance's Review
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