Enlightenment Man: An Academic-Superhero Action-Adventure Thriller

SEASON 1, PART I: “The Deth Ray”

The city is in a state of frenzy; wild enthusiasm spreads from one block to the next.  Cheering crowds fill the streets whenever Enlightenment Man appears. The city shuts down and people come out of their apartments, speak to neighbors they’d ignored for years.  They understand each other; they tolerate each other, they like each other; they are good to each other.  The hum and buzz of human kindness fills the neighborhoods. Old and young philosophize in the city parks about the democratic form of government, the future of technology, sexual diversity, climate change, capitalist monopolies and the destiny of the human race. They deplore racism, poverty, ignorance and war. They seek peaceful means of resolving conflicts, they hunger for unity and mutual understanding.   

Here are some of the stories from local headlines that followed on EMan’s most recent rendez-vous-with-wrongs:

  • Medicare abusers, Doctors and HMO administrators line up at the federal building to return their overcharges; 
  • Embezzling CEO turns ill-gotten gains over to charity, tutors disadvantaged high school youths in service to society.
  • The notorious “Red Sharks” gang continue their repair work on Ballard Grammar School.
  • Anti-tax initiative signers relent; advocate full state support for K-12 and public universities.  

He’s a one-man solution to the ills of society, he’s a walking-talking Age-of-Reason, he’s Enlightenment Man!  Some strange force that beams from him creates unity, peace, kindness and consideration, ends incivility, brings on maturity, cleans up bad language and exposes irrationality.  Misers become benefactors; fascists become Quakers.

EMan’s weekly reading group has had to move from the modest venue at the public library to the Seahawks’ Safeco Field, recently renamed Human Rights Stadium.  20,000 attended the meeting last week, where Enlightenment Man read from Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man,” a prelude to a week of dignity, self-confidence and optimism in the people of Seattle.  

Police have observed a steep decline in criminal activity in the weeks after public readings. EMan’s reading assignments are proving an effective means of rehabilitating hardened felons.  The criminal justice system took note when notorious gangsta rapper and hip-hop artist B.H. (Bad Habits) Flash decried a serious chivalry deficit in his preferred art form upon reading The Princess of Clèves, the classic tale of noble love and self-sacrificing courtesy by Madame de Lafayette.  B.H.’s so-called “Princess Working Groups” (PWGs) now have chapters in 40 states. Mistreatment of women and domestic violence virtually disappear where the PWGs are active. Participation in a PWG is now part of the mandatory sentencing for rapists and perpetrators of domestic violence. 

Morris Penningworth’s law practice specialized in funnelling the money of rich widows into shell charities to fund construction of his multi-million-dollar mansion in Aruba. The cutthroat counselor was so taken by Plato’s Republic, that he gave up law in favor of philosophy.  Penningworth’s book on Plato’s idea of justice and goodness won the Parker J. Finlay prize for engaged philosophical inquiry and is now required reading in the Wharton School of Business.  His correspondence with celebrity humanist Martha Nussbaum is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.   He has donated his mansion built on ill-gotten gains to the Franciscan Order of Poor Clares.

With the recent election of Myron Tulkingham as first philosopher-mayor, the city seemed on track for a final stage of a utopian, humanitarian dream-city-state.  But then, as if drawn by this flood tide of beneficence and good will, Dr. Deth appeared on the scene.  He brought with him the Deth Ray, which has the power to counteract all EMan’s influence.  In the path of the deth ray good turns to evil, kindness to malice, generosity to greed, love to hate, decorum to vulgarity. This terrifying weapon casts a purple and black ray and can compass up to four city blocks in a single blast. Its oil-slick ooze quickly hardens into a tacky scum, death to vegetation and lethal to traffic. Its ear-splitting and mind-rattling sound blasts surpass in decibels all that is currently known to the entertainment and heavy metal industries. 

There’s no need to retell in any detail the story of Dr. Deth’s dramatic emergence as a counter force to EMan, since all the news media discussed little else for days after the event: briefly, while Maestro Gerard Schwarz conducted an unforgettable performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute, buoyant and enchanting, the orchestra slipped, seemingly with no cue from the conductor into the minor key in the love duet of Tamino and Pamina; its tempo sped madly out of control, the magic flute made way as the terrifying shriek of a demonic flute filled the hall, while the sound intensified until sensitive patrons clapped hands to ears and collapsed, and the Chehuli chandelier shattered, sending shards of glass down on the audience. Panic ensued, helped along by high-decibel blasts of Wagner and Max Bruch. The hideous laughter of Dr. Deth echoed through the hall and the nearby streets. He had stolen Gerard Schwarz’s tuxedo and smuggled himself onto the director’s podium while the maestro struggled with his bonds in the performers’ locker room dressed only in his underwear. 

Meanwhile in the performance hall, the Deth Ray shot from Dr. Deth’s extended finger tips, while the audience burst through the exit doors in a panicked rout. [The movie script, “Deth Squad,” now in production at Lionsgate Studios, at this point inserted a spectacular sequence of the chaotic evacuation of Benaroya Hall: speeding cars flying into the air, turning flips and crashing on crowds, huge gasoline explosions, freeway overpasses collapsing, buildings toppling, random senseless gunfire.]

Now our story switches to the apartment of modest and unassuming University of Washington professor of English Literature, Peter Millstein.  Nothing about his appearance or his apartment reveals the true character of the man who lives here, for Peter Millstein leads a secret life as– Enlightenment Man. As we look in on him, his valet, butler and private secretary, Clyde, is cleaning Peter’s pipe and replenishing its tobacco, having just delivered materials for Peter’s upcoming lecture on Emmanuel Kant’s idea of the inevitability of an eternal middle-class city-state.  The German philosopher had proven with iron logic that a democracy on the model of the American constitution must develop into a permanent, unchanging form of just government dedicated to the welfare of all citizens. 

Peter had just lit his pipe and settled in to write, when a knock at the door interrupted his work. Enter his colleague Minerva Chouette, professor of ancient philosophy, who leads a double life as Owl Woman, Enlightenment Man’s loyal side-kick.    

“Hey Minnie, What’s up?”

“I just had a talk with President Walcott. He and the football and basketball coaches and six deans have requested reductions in their salaries to balance the university budget.” 

“Awesome,” says Peter. 

“Makes sense,” says Minerva.  “They recognized that the humanities courses couldn’t accommodate the huge numbers of students crowding in.  The dean of the business school resisted, but they forced the issue. Enrollment has sunk so low in business administration that there was no alternative. the money saved will finance about twenty tenure-track professorships university-wide. They’ve also made big savings because faculty conflict virtually stopped and sexual harassment is a thing of the past. Those huge defense funds are now freed up for other purposes..”

“Clyde, bring us some sherry, will you. We want to celebrate. Say, Minnie, are you free tomorrow evening? Dinner and the ancient Greek read-aloud study group?”

“No can do, Peter. I’ve got tickets for Finnegan’s Wake.”

“The hip-hop musical?!! You’re kidding. How did you get them? I’m on a two-year waiting list.”

“Connections.”

“How about lunch tomorrow?”

“Fraid not. I’m meeting with the CEOs of Nordstrom and Saks 5th Ave.”

“Reading levels of hourly workers?”

“Yup. Yesterday it was Walmart and Target. Walmart’s up to $18 per hour for Hemingway and Emily Dickinson. Then Target outbid them with Tom Sawyer and E. E. Cummings for $20 per hour.”

“Can they really get their workers to read at that level?”

“Sure.  Higher wages – more reading time.  More reading—higher wages. Better educated sales staff – more customers and more sales.”

“What’s the agenda for Nordstrom and Saks?” Peter asked.

“Nordstrom’s talking Dickens and T.S. Eliot @ $22 per hour, and—get this—Saks is adding Marcel Proust: vol. 1-  $25 per hour. Then a two dollar rise for each later volume.  Read all seven, and you’re pulling in a cool $40 per at Saks.”

“What snobs. They would go for Proust.”

“Snobs? May be, but the fact is, job applications doubled after the Proust announcement.”

“That was a great idea of yours: index the Wage scale of workers to literary accomplishment …”  

Suddenly Minerva gasped, seemed to lose her balance and had to steady herself at Millstein’s reading podium.  

“What’s the matter?  Are you okay?” asked Peter. “What is it.”

“I just felt a great disturbance in the eco-system.  I fear something terrible has happened.”

“Better check into it,” says Peter.  

Before his very eyes, Minerva transformed into a large snowy owl and flew out the window. An hour later she flew back with a report: the Deth Ray had stopped all traffic and devastated all flowering trees and bushes in the city, and now it’s headed north. 

“But what could have happened?” Peter exclaimed. “Didn’t we seed the area with Thoreau’s Walden and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring?”

Restored to woman-shape, Minerva answered, “Wake up and hear the birdies sing, Peter, It’s Dr. Deth.”

“My God you’re right.”

“And you  know what’s up there north of town? Thousands of acres of tulips. Stretch from Marysville to Mt. Vernon. In full blossom right now.”

“Great heavens!, an immense black and purple killer wave field threatening the entire northwest tulip crop.”

“Sounds like a job for Enlightenment Man. What’ll we do?”

“Start by deploying an emergency humanities rapid-response team.  Maybe it’s not too late to save the tulips.”

“I’ll get on it EMan.”

The crop was saved. The famous Force-Field-Five set up a high-energy interference vector field that stopped the Deth Ray’s progress.  Physics Professor Herbert Soloveitchik sent a sample of Deth ray goo to his lab for analysis.  The results were mind-boggling.

Find out the chemical composition of the Deth Ray and of Dr. Deth’s brain, in 

PART II, “Deth’s Dark Secret”

And stay tuned for 

Part III: “Enlightenment Man vs. the Demon Algorithm”: the epic combat between the forces of Deth and Enlightenment Man in the Seattle Public Library.

Endnotes

1 Clyde Hickman is the reformed grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, west coast chapter. His popular poetry slams are credited with the disappearance of the white supremacist movement in Washington State. He is a winner of the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

What’s So Good About ….?

“Whats so good etc” (containing Thomas Man’s Joseph in Egypt, a Love Story–and other essays to follow)

What’s so good about Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers?

Thomas Mann’s Joseph in Egypt: A Love Story

Suppose I told you that one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century wrote a vast four-volume novel that next to no one reads; suppose I told you that it is one of his best, in fact one of the most remarkable novels ever written; suppose I added that its third volume tells a story of adulterous love that makes Madame Bovary look trivial and Anna Karenina ordinary and conventional? Well you wouldn’t believe me, but you might wait for an explanation, anticipating hype. You would probably want to know, what’s so good about it?

Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers has never been much read. What prospects did a long novel based on Jewish history have, appearing in the German language between 1933 and 1943? It had neither publisher nor readers in Germany. It was published in Sweden. It had some distribution in the US, translated in one-year delayed step off Mann’s production 1934 to 1944 by Helen Lowe-Porter (great grandmother of Boris Johnson). It was warmly received by Jewish communities. I believe that it was some kind of book-of-the-month choice. I first became aware of it in the 60s because it was on my grandmother’s shelf, a present from one of her daughters. My grandmother was religious, but not literary. It remained unread on her, and I imagine, many other bookshelves of owners more interested in piety than myth and literature. The Lowe-Porter translation is another reason why this work went virtually unread in America. Lowe-Porter made it Biblical, King-Jamesian. A new translation by John E. Woods from 2005 has made it much more accessible to a modern American reader, and has had a good shot at what Lowe-Porter missed: the astonishing, miraculous deftness, wit, profundity, playfulness, of Mann’s original. I quote from Wood’s translation in the following.

So, what is so good about Joseph and his Brothers? A lot is good about the four novels that make up the whole work. But the one I want to tell you about is the third, Joseph in Egypt (=J in E). Some of the things that are good:

The character of Joseph, a kind of spiritual adventurer, God-favored confidence- man, charismatic as can be, supported by the “blessing” that passed from his father Jacob to Joseph, but undercut by his vanity. He knows how pretty he is, how smart, how prophetic, how different from ordinary humans like his brothers. He assumes that everyone agrees with him, that “everyone loves him more than themselves.” His blindness to others got him thrown into the pit by his brothers. The “show-off” couldn’t resist showing off his coat of many colors, flaunting his favor with Jacob and flying in the face of his ten half-brothers, even though he is next to last among the twelve. Sold into slavery in Egypt, he makes his way from slavery up the social and political hierarchy to end as Pharaoh’s right-hand man and the “Provider” in a time of famine.

The two dwarfs, Dudu and Se’enkh-Wen-nofre-Neteruhotpe-em-per-Amun, aka Bes-em-heb: both are courtiers of Potiphar and showpiece curiosities to give color to the court. The former, keeper of Potiphar’s jewels, is ambitious to be a “full-size” man for which he qualifies only by his oversized penis, the envy of many a normal-sized full-grown man, a court intriguer, helper of the conservative, fascist God Amun and his high priest Beknechons, poisonous enemy of Joseph, panderer.

The latter, Bes for short, an amiable twerp with prophetic vision, who sees at once Joseph’s aura of religious election and arranges his purchase from the slave market. Bes hides behind curtains and hears everything going on at court, useful, amiable and ridiculous. Think of him as a relative of Yoda. The shouting matches between the two are a hoot.

The two aged parents of Potiphar, brother and sister/husband and wife, Huji and Tuji: cackling, lizzardy old creatures from the swamp period of Egyptian culture when incest was a divine prerogative. They had lived their life together, brother and sister—twins in fact—husband and wife, and they had a child. But religious fashions changed. The new god, Atum-Re, imposed strict morality, disapproved of incest and promiscuity, and now they had reason to fear his anger. And so to appease this god they pre-empted his anger; they made an offering: the sacrifice was the sex of their baby; they castrated him.

Potiphar, accordingly, is a eunuch, the victim of the “false theological speculation” his parents had made. His life is sumptuous, but like his body, sterile. Being a high court officer of Potiphar, he leads a purely formal, ceremonial existence. He is married to a young, very beautiful Egyptian woman of high aristocracy. But the marriage is of course conjugal in name only. He is a courtier, second in rank of Pharaoh’s courtiers. He is Pharao’s fan-bearer; he has the title and the regalia of office, but none of the duties; some full-bodied person much lower in status carries out the duties. He hunts the crocodile and hippopotamus, but really servants take the risks while Potiphar supervises. He is a titular courtier and a titular man. Joseph learns his secret by overhearing a conversation between Huji and Tuji, and uses his knowledge of Potiphar’s terrible secret for his own advancement. But he does it wisely: he shelters Potiphar from his psychological vulnerabilities, treats him with humane considerateness, and finds favor. That is, Joseph behaves as a flattering, wheedling courtier, in which there can also be traces of humanity.

Potiphar’s wife, Mut-em-Enet is probably the most impressive character Thomas Mann ever created and one of the only two he ever dedicated a full-length love story to (the other being Gustav Aschenbach, hero of Death in Venice.). Egyptian high society, born into an old princely family, given at a tender age to be the wife of Potiphar, an arrangement which gave her family a great advantage in the struggle for power and advancement at Pharaoh’s court. And what could it matter to a girl too young to understand what was sacrificed in this particular parental investment? But the arrangement creates a dire fatedness for both the ceremonial husband and his ceremonial wife:

The claims of her sex, which were thus ignored—claims symbolized by the earth drenched black with water and by the moon-egg, the origin of the very stuff of life—still slumbered mute and embryonic within her, without her even realizing it or raising the softest objection to her parents’ loving but life-denying decision. She was light, merry, untroubled, free. She was like a lotus blossom floating on the water’s surface, kissed by the smiling sun, untouched by the knowledge that its long stem is rooted deep in dark mire. (819).    

The big difference between the spouses is that long stem. In Potiphar it’s cut off at the flower.

Mut is anything but a shameless woman. She accepts her condition and the terms of her marriage with girlish naiveté. There is no contempt for her husband, no mockery, no secret resentment, but plenty of respect and a sense of living a highly moral and respectable life, free of the burden of sensuality. She becomes one of the participants in the great role imposed on the household by the special character of Potiphar—to support its master, to comfort him, to nurture the illusions necessary to prop up his castrated ego.

            Thomas Mann is really unhappy with the way the Bible treated this remarkable woman. Here is the whole story as told in Genesis 39. 6-7: “Now Joseph was handsome and good-looking, and after a while his master’s wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, ‘Lie with me.’” That’s it! That’s all She wrote! The author of Genesis compressed into one verse the three years in which Potiphar’s wife loved Joseph with a passion that grew into madness and turned the principled and honor-driven wife of Potiphar into a shameless woman.

Thomas Mann wants to supply all that the Bible story left out; he will retell the events exactly as they happened when the story told itself for the first time, to use Mann’s parlance. He claims the narrator’s gift of second sight, backwards-looking prophetic vision, to know all or most of the details of what really happened, must have happened, to flesh and spirit them out, to reconstruct the psychology of Mut-em-enet and trace the progress of her love from self-preserving resistance to passion to madness. A single line in the Bible turns into about 200 pages of narrative; Mann corrects the misleading impression of a shameless woman.

            The author of Genesis forgot to tell you that the real story of Mut-em-Enet is of the gradual erosion of a powerful moral and cultural resistance to the single act to which the Genesis reduces a complex woman.

            Mut is a woman of the highest Egyptian aristocracy. She is a consecrated nun, a Nun of the Moon in the cult of the conservative-fascist god Amun. This cult relives in a highly moralized and purified version the wild immorality of the primitive religion of Egypt. The moon cult is a woman’s club stylized as a harem of the god, its nuns are the god’s concubines—of course, ceremonial and titular only. But Mut has a special status as the most beautiful and most chaste of them, a status guaranteed by her inauthentic, incomplete marriage. The beauty of her body is a showpiece of the cult, its glory; it outdoes all the women of her class and is put on display through ceremonial garments “woven from air” that only soften the focus and sweeten the physical exquisiteness of the woman, but also heighten her symbolic function: she is the embodied symbol of the primal begetter, the goose that laid the moon-egg of all origins, a glorious virgin, who “in its truly moist depths was the goose of love in the form of a virgin; and nuzzled in her loins was a noble specimen of a swan, flapping its wide-spread wings, a tender, powerful snow-feathered god, performing upon her, to her virtuous amazement, a fluttering work of its love, that she might bear the egg” from which all life is hatched. That’s all cult myth and ritual scenario, but it eases for Mut the turn into the real experience of the erotic, gives her a language to understand the effect that Joseph’s presence has on her and to understand her passion as a religious experience.

            Her duties as a woman of high society were considerable. They demanded an exquisite, pedantic cultivation of external things, like cosmetics. A minor slip in matters of dress and make-up “would have resulted in a whirl of gossip in high society, a malicious scandal at court.”

            By the time Mut recognizes her attraction to Joseph, he is the head of the domestic staff of Potiphar’s court. He serves at table and is present with her daily. She may never have paid much attention to him, except that the malicious dwarf Dudu comes to her to explain why a Hebrew foundling and social-rising slave is an offense to the household. She goes to her husband and insists that Joseph be removed from the household and sent to the fields or stone-quarries. Potiphar half recognizes the deeper cause of her resistance, but is himself half in love with Joseph, and refuses (The conversation between the two is one of a number of great, virtuoso scenes.)

The depth of her arousal becomes evident to her for the first time in a dream. In her dream, the family is assembled for dinner, grandparents, Potiphar, Mut. Deep quiet in the room. She is wearing a dazzlingly white dress. She begins to cut open a pomegranate with a sharp knife, but is distracted by the presence of Joseph, and cuts deep into her hand in just the space between thumb and forefinger. The wound bleeds and drips blood onto her white dress. She feels deep shame, but no one pays any attention. Or rather they pretend not to notice. Mut is outraged at their indifference—“Can’t anyone see what’s happening to me and help me?!” The blood continues to ooze, and she watches it “with indescribable regret. How sorry, how very sorry she felt, deeply, unutterably sorry.” But then she becomes aware of Joseph (Egyptian Name, Osarsiph = reed child, with allusion forward in time to Moses). He comes towards her, “ever nearer, and was now so near that she could feel his nearness.” He took the wounded hand and put it to his mouth so that “the wound rested against his lips. And in her rapture, the flow of blood stopped and was stanched, and she was healed. The “rapture” is the discrete marker of the sexual character of this “healing.” The dream transmutes cunni- into manulingus: “She reemerged from her dream, cold with horror, but turning hot again at once in the rapture of healing—and was now aware that she had been struck with the rod of life.”

Her cultured, civilized, chaste life as a nun of the moon slowly unravels. It takes three years, and Mann tells the story in exquisite detail. Here his summing up of her struggle, set in the frame of much greater cultural dynamics pitting an established “civilized life” against opposing forces:

[The fate of Mut is comprehended in] the idea of visitation by drunken, ruinous and destructive powers  invading a life of composure… It is a tale of achieved and seemingly secure peace and of life laughing as it sweeps away that artificial edifice, a tale of mastery and of being overwhelmed, of the arrival of the strange god…. As for Mut-em-enet, Potiphar’s wife… she, too, was visited and overwhelmed, was a maenadic sacrifice to a strange god, and the artificial edifice of her life was quite nicely overthrown by those powers of the lower world that in her ignorance she believed she could mock—whereas it was they who mocked all her fortifications.

Mut’s close tie to Gustav Aschenbach is evident, Mann’s other story of passionate love overwhelming a carefully organized and protected civilized life.

The 200 some pages Mann devotes to the episode of “the woman smitten” narrate in excruciating detail the erosion of Mut’s precariously structured life. The demise stretches over three years: in the first she resists; in the second, she courts openly, and in the third she resorts to more drastic measures.

 I’ll just point to two highpoints.

By the end of the first year, Mut is losing control, her unspoken desire unsteadies her usual dignified comportment. After a long talk with Joseph about indifferent matters, she stirs through all the stupid things she said, realizes how impossible it is to keep in place the mask of the dignified woman in full control of her life, and holds this remarkable monologue. Actresses are always on the lookout for good women’s monologues for auditions, often supplied by Portia, Rosalind, Blanche Du Bois etc. Here is a seldom noted woman’s monologue to add to the classics:

“Lost, lost, betrayed, betrayed, I am lost, I have betrayed myself to him, he saw it all—the lie in my eyes, my fidgeting feet, my shivers—he saw it all, he despises me, it is over, and I must die. [She reminds herself of the stupid tips she gave him for cultivating corn]. Babble that betrayed me, he laughed at me, how horrible, I will have to kill myself. Was I at least beautiful? If I was beautiful there in the light, it may all be only half so bad, and I won’t have to kill myself. The golden bronze of his shoulders… Oh, Amun in your shrine! ‘Mistress of my head and heart, of my hands and feet’… Oh, Osarsiph! Do not speak to me like that with your lips, making fun of me in your heart, of my stammering and my trembling knees, I hope, I hope…even if all is lost and I must die after this misfortune, yet do I hope and do not despair, for not all is unpromising, there is promise as well, indeed, much promise, for I am your mistress, boy, and you must speak to me as sweetly as when you said ‘Mistress of my head and heart,’ even if it is only hollow courtesy. But words are strong, words are not spoken with impunity, they leave traces in the heart, even if spoken without feeling they speak to the feelings of him who speaks them, though you may lie with them, their magic shapes you according to their meaning, so that what you have said is no longer entirely a lie. That is very favorable and laden with hope, for the words that you must speak to me, your mistress, cultivate your emotions, my little slave, and make them rich and fine soil for the seed of my beauty, If I am lucky enough to appear beautiful to you in the light, and together my beauty and the servility of your words will become salvation and bliss from you to me, and they are the germ of an adoration that awaits only encouragement to become desire, for it is a certainty, my little boy, that adoration encouraged becomes desire… Oh what a depraved woman I am! Shame on me for my serpent’s thoughts! Shame on my head and heart! Osarsiph, forgive me, my young master and savior, morning and evening star of my life! Why did things have to go so wrong today because of my fidgeting feet, so that all seems lost now? But I will not kill myself just yet or send for a poisonous asp to set on my breast, for there is much hope and promise left still. Tomorrow, tomorrow, and each day thereafter. He will remain with us, remain over the house. Potiphar refused my request to have him sold, I shall have to see him, always, and each day will dawn with hope. ‘We shall have to continue this at another time, steward. I will consider the matter and you have my permission to offer your petition again soon.’ That was good, that was taking care of next time. Ah yes, you were at least prudent enough, Eni, despite all your madness, to provide for a sequel. He will have to come again, and if he tarries out of shyness, I shall send Dudu the dwarf to him, to admonish him. And then how I shall improve on everything that went wrong today, and I shall greet him with a calm grace, with feet in total repose, allowing, if I so please, only a little mild encouragement of his adoration to show through. And soon, perhaps this very next time, he may appear less beautiful to me, so that my heart will be cooled toward him and I can smile and jest with a free spirit and enflame his heart for me, while I suffer not at all… No, aah no, Osarsiph, that is not how it will be, those are serpent’s thoughts, and I will gladly suffer for you, my master and my salvation, for your glory is like that of a firstborn bull…”

When Mut recalls her previous life, rigid and sterile, “unblessed by passion,” she feels loathing at the thought of returning to it.

In the second year, Mut begins to talk openly of her love, to servants, to ladies of her social class, to Joseph, indirectly, but her secret becomes public knowledge. But it doesn’t matter. The women in her class have secret lovers and orgies, including her sister Nuns of the Moon, and so her secret is a welcome topic of gossip, but not unheard of. No one is aware of the delicate moral sensibility that Mut has to overcome inwardly to admit her passion. The lasciviousness and hypocrisy of her fellow nuns may even give some encouragement to Joseph to give in to her seduction.

  Two servants become her confidantes, the one an Egyptian woman with no spiritual restraints, who cannot understand why she, queen of the household, cannot simply command this nothing of a Hebrew slave to do her will, to “put their hands and feet together and enjoy themselves.” The other, a black African woman named Tabubu, who advises her to use witchcraft, and offers her own skill and experience in the black arts. Mut rejects both with contempt, at first.

In the third year, her body changes; her breasts, hips and thighs swell, her face, arms and legs grow gaunt. She declares herself to Joseph in increasingly desperate pleas:

“Osarsiph, my beautiful god from far away, my swan and bull, for whom my love is high and eternal, now we can die together and descend into the eternal night of bliss…. Do you love me, Osarsiph, my god in servant’s form, my heavenly falcon, as I love you, have loved you for so long, so long in rapture and torment, and does your blood burn for mine as I burn for you…enthralled as I am by your god-like glance which has changed my body and made my breasts grow to be fruits of love? Sleep—with—me! Give to me, and I will give to you raptures of which you cannot dream. Let us put our heads and feet together, so that we may enjoy ourselves beyond all bounds and we may die, each in the other, for I can no longer bear that we live as two, you there, I here.”

She paints vividly the pleasure that awaits him in her body, a kind of treasure chamber for passion waiting to be put into practice:

“I have never loved, never received a man into my womb, never given up the least treasure of my love and bliss; this entire treasure has been reserved for you instead and it will make you rich beyond all bounds, beyond your every dream. Listen to my whispers: My body has changed and been transformed for you, Osarsiph, and has become a body of love, from top to toe, so that when you lie with me and give to me your youth and glory, you will not believe you are with an earthly woman, but will restore the passion of the gods with mother, spouse, and sister—for behold, I am she! I am the oil that craves your salt so that the lamp may flare up in the feast of night. I am the field that in its thirst cries out for you, O flowing flood of manhood, bull of your mother, that you may swell and burst over it, and wed yourself with me, before leaving me, my beautiful god, and forgetting your crown of lotus still lying in my moistened soil.”

Ignored, she makes a more dire suggestion: it would be easy for the two of them to murder Potiphar. Between her own private pharmacy and the charms of Tabubu, the killing would be a breeze. The death of Potiphar would be no loss at all, and what freedom it would give them! They could rule as lord and lady over the entire household in an erotic Eden.

            Mut is at this point in a phase of desperate passion experienced also by her companion in that state, Gustav Aschenbach. Forging ahead in pursuit of his god, the boy Tadzio, in spite of the plague in Venice, he makes this realization: “What value did culture and morality have compared with the advantages of chaos?” Aschenbach’s own culture offers him no terms and no discourse which glorify an old man’s love for a boy; But Mut’s culture is rich with a mythology of female desire. What for Aschenbach is “chaos” is for Mut-em-enet a transfiguration.

To experience the moistening of her soil by the godlike Osarsiph is to fertilise the primal egg and recreate the universe, a cosmic-religious obligation.

            In a final effort to win him over, she threatens him. She will denounce him to Potiphar for raping her. His back will be shredded with sharp forks. He will be chained to the ground near the crocodile-infested swamp etc.

Ripe now, late into year three, for Tabubu’s love charms, the two women arrange a ceremony to force Joseph to yield. The witch knows which god to call upon for this particular service, and she chooses the dirtiest, most obscene, most loathsome underworld deity. It is a dog goddess, and her name is so appalling that Tabubu doesn’t even dare to speak it. She calls her simply “the bitch.” The rites which will conjure the Bitch are intricate and take careful preparation. It takes some time to gather the necessary material for the rite: the rudder of a wrecked ship, wood from a gallows, rotting meat, various body parts from executed criminals, the corpse of a dog recently dead. Also they have to wait for a full moon. When all is ready, Mut, Tabubu and two servants mount to the roof of the women’s house. Tabubu invokes the goddess with every obscene insult in her rich vocabulary. The bitch answers only to foul language, in which Tabubu is an expert. She knows “how to encircle her nature with words.” She comes only when called by filthy insults. At the end of the ritual the serving girl has fainted with horror at the filth of the ritual, and Mut sees clearly how low she has sunk, and offers a prayer to her “purer spirits” to forgive her abasement:

“Behold how I was forced to sink beneath myself for love, how I had to forgo happiness for lust, in order to have that at least—for if I am not to know the happiness of his eyes, I would know the lust of his mouth. But how grieved and sickened I am by this loss—the daughter of a prince cannot conceal that from you, purer spirits. Leave me some hope in my abasement, good spirits, some innermost secret hope that lust and happiness may not in the end be so separated that happiness may blossom from lust, if only it is deep enough, and that amid my irresistible kisses the dead boy may yet open his eyes to grant me the gaze of his soul.”

            The story proceeds in the direction it had to take. Mut denounces Joseph as a seducer and rapist. In a public speech in which she reverts to the fascism inherent in her religion she rouses sentiments against this Hebrew slave who never should have been entrusted with such a high office. Potiphar sees exactly what happened; he suspected all along what course Mut’s attraction would follow, but suppressed his suspicions so that he would not have to act. A wave of face-saving sweeps through the court. Joseph winds up in prison and, this time, spends several years in “the pit.”

            So, Joseph in Egypt is a love story, a married woman in love with a handsome young man, the husband’s inadequacy driving the wife’s passion for another man. It is a great theme of the European novel in the 19th century. The particular destiny of Mut, wife of Potiphar, is distinguished among unhappy heroines in various ways. It is an earthly-divine comedy of passionate love, as Dante’s is an other-worldly comedy of divine, redemptive love. Mann shows how love filters through the being of a resisting woman, one who understands the danger of the attraction, from the first shallow tingling of a vague sense of disorder and danger, a feeling that from the outset has the reach of that lotus blossom, infecting the organism from its petals to its submerged veins, to its root deep in the primal mud. There may be some sense of the supernatural in her resisting lover, a hint of godlikeness, a magnetism of person, but it mixes magically with those bronze shoulders, the exquisite beauty of his face, and the promise of untellable sexual bliss that she feels radiating from him. For us as readers, Joseph is a great bore as lover. His role in the love story is to make up reasons why he cannot sleep with her.

            The love that infects and takes over Mut’s life is more than a personal experience, though it’s that too. It is also an agon, with competing powers working out their conflicts in her psyche. Mut in her beauty is a creature made and prepared to desire, to love, to attract and receive a man in her body. Her initial indifference, oblivion to that role and her resistance generate an opposite and totally reaction from….? The word Mann uses is “life.” Life insists on its rights, and pushes aside the barriers of personal identity and personal sense of destiny, morality and social role. Blows them aside like a strong wind scatters paper dolls (“she had been struck with the rod of life”). Culture and society have neither strength nor force when opposed by “life.” That greater force has its own  mythology in J in E: she has the moon-egg of origins in her womb and it insists on fertilization, and against this will, Joseph has no power. In fact life is thwarted only because of the other force at work in this fateful agon, the god of Israel and the line of austere patriarchs who watch over Joseph’s progress (carelessly at times), but who step in at the critical moment and drive Joseph, naked, erect and ready to do life’s bidding, out of the house, leaving his clothes in Mut’s hand.

            That overlay of myth does nothing to make the action of the narrative seem false and contrived. On the contrary, it gains momentum from the mythical. Gustav Aschenbach also lived the mythologizing of his love for Tadzio. He saw himself transported into a Socratic world, where philosophical and erotic culture joined forces and fully legitimized, even sacralized, a desire of an older for a younger man.

            Compare this with Emma Bovary, whose illicit loves are generated by a romantic delusion, inspired by cheap fiction.

Or Anna Karenina, driven to adultery by some vague idea that passion has its own rights and privileges, which a strong individual can assert. But the grounding of passion seems to be in Anna’s case ego and no greater psychological, mythical, …forces that might govern a love that overwhelms a woman, are not at work. At least as shallow as the roots of Emma Bovary’s passions are those of the bevy of young women in 19th century novels who, like Anna Karenina, fall in love with cavalry officers: Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy), Julie in A Woman of Thirty Years (Balzac), Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (Austen), Lady Deadlock in Bleak House (Dickens), Natasha in War and Peace (Tolstoy), Effi in Effi Briest (Fontane). Consistently in these novels the moment of falling in love happens via a shallow show of elegance, glint and polish, as in the display of swordsmanship by Sergeant Troy in which he seems both to threaten and save Bathsheba’s life; or Colonel D’Aiglemont’s glimmering gold lace and channeling of Napoleon in Woman of Thirty Years, as a result of which Julie’s “soul passed into the officer’s being.” These are women taken in by charismatic tricks. Their love stories are bourgeois cautionary tales.

            Mut’s love story is myth. Her love develops in the depths of her mind, but comes to the surface in the dream of Joseph kissing the cut on her wounded hand and stanching the flow of her blood. She knows now consciously what is gestating inside her and what her duty to this erotic pregnancy is.

            In each of those 19th century novels of adultery, the psychology of passionate love is condemned and abased. That is the intention of the author in every case, to show how much better off the individual and society would be if women didn’t indulge in shallow egotism and romantic foolishness. By contrast, the effect of Mann’s story is to glorify Mut’s passion and to elevate the character. While the end of J in E leaves Mut an ambiguous figure, a sexual predator accusing her victim, a face-saving liar and bigot, Mann issues a final judgment. He judges her as a woman taken by an irresistible force outside herself. That she was not able to gratify the aims of that force doesn’t lower the distinction or darken the psychological transfiguration that all by itself that role confers. The betrayal of her lover was strategy to rescue the moment. She returns to her sterile and honorary life with Potiphar; she does the dance of the moon nuns, now a model of devotion to “a narrow, rigid, patriotic piety,” at peace with herself, her life, and the man who had resisted the onslaught of seduction:

She did not curse the man she loved because of the suffering he had caused her, or that she had caused herself. The pains of love are special pains that no one has ever repented having endured. “You have made my life rich—it blossoms!” Those were the words of Eni’s prayer in the midst of her anguish. When, clad in the clinging garb of Hathor, she shook her rattle before Amun and joined the chorus of the noble concubines to dance in measured step and to lead them in singing (though from a flat chest now) with a voice beloved by all, she celebrated sacred constancy, the eternal balance of the scales, the stony stare of endurance. And yet at the bottom of her soul lay a treasure in which she secretly took greater pride than in all her spiritual and worldly honors, and which whether she admitted it or not, she would not have surrendered for anything in the world. A sunken treasure in the depths—but it still silently sent its light up into the murky days of her renunciation. And however much it represented her defeat it also lent to her spiritual and worldly pride an indispensable element of essential humanity—a pride in life. It was a memory—not so much of him, whom she had heard had now become lord over Egypt; he was merely an instrument, just as she, Mut-em-enet, had been an instrument. But rather—almost independently of him—it was a recognition of her justification, the awareness that she had blossomed and burned, had loved and suffered.

What an affirmation of suffering in love! Love happiness is trivial compared with the “blessings” of love suffering. In spite of the strong sensual/sexual element, the full experience, even, or especially, unfulfilled, gives Mut a special aura: heroism in passion. Where could this pride in life and this “essential humanity” come from? I don’t think any other modern work, any love story, from the 18th to the 21st century finds those benefits in a destructive romantic passion. Not even Tristan and Isolde (Wagner), which props up an adulterous and destructive love on the vague idea of fulfillment in eternity. Mut’s love is not eternal; it burns bright for three years, then burns itself out and sends its vessel back to ordinariness.

            Mut’s love is grounded in myth, not the ordinary kind being played out in religious ceremony, but a myth of primal things and drives, primal origins, “the mothers,” or “the gods.”  a myth of some blind will of life itself to take over, ravish, use, and throw away humans or throw them back into everyday uses. The essential story at work is that of the best, or greatest, or most beautiful, or the wisest of humans suffering to self-destruction. Authentic humanity is what’s left at the end of horrendous suffering. It strips you of humanity. Then the deepest suffering becomes a form of distinction.

Romantic love has its own form of tragedy. Mut is a close relative of Heloise, and a distant relative of Oedipus and King Lear. They were—or felt they were—used by higher forces as showpieces of divine power. Used and thrown away, they become sacred objects. That is Mut’s “treasure.” She has served “life” and it justifies her existence. Normal life is hollow show.  

James McBride, Deacon King Kong

James McBride, Deacon King Kong (2020) is the best American novel I’ve read in years. What’s so good about it? The characters, the language, the wit, the strong sense of place, the original take on drug-infested ghetto life, the humanizing effect of the story.

(If this is too much to read for a Facebook post, you can also read it at Magicmountainblog.org)

THE CHARACTERS: The story begins when the main character, Deacon Cuffy Jasper Lambkin, aka Sportcoat, blows the ear off of the biggest drug dealer in the Cause Projects of Brooklyn. He meant to kill him, but was stumbling drunk and distracted at the critical moment. There was no malice. Sportcoat had been this kid’s mentor and baseball coach and expected great things of him. The reason for this blind act is one of the mysteries of the story. Lots of things beneath the surface of the story move events, esp. in the lives of Sportcoat and his mysteriously deceased wife, Hattie.

While McBride declares Sportcoat a “dead man walking” from the moment he shot Deems Clemens, he knows he is not a dead man, because he knows that Sportcoat cannot be killed. His track record for limited immortality goes back a long way. (See ch. 2, “A Dead Man”). Things don’t look good from the moment of his birth. Just as the new-born Sportcoat was “slapped to life,” a bird flew in through an open window and hovered for a moment over the head of the baby. An evil omen, says the midwife. “He’s gonna be an idiot.” Saints and heros always have portents at birth, but they usually prove true and glorify rather than reduce the hero. Here it’s an ill omen for the midwife, one of many effects of a Barbados/Caribbean superstitious religiosity current at Sportcoat’s birth in South Carolina-and still in Brooklyn. Baby Sportcoat, then still called Cuffy, gets every childhood disease available and suffers every accident ever to befall kids by the age of three. At age 5 he spits at his image in a mirror, “a call sign to the devil,” says a medicine woman helping his mother to understand this difficult child. As a result he did not grow any teeth until age 9. His mother, in despair tries weird folk medicine remedies. She gets the prophecy from a medicine woman that he’ll grow “more teeth than an alligator.” The prophecy proves true in excess. His many extra teeth are extracted for free by white students at a dental college in North Carolina.

Those are some of the prodigies of his youth. In his teen years the onslaught of killing continues, always turned back: blood poisoning, measles, scarlet fever, hematoid illness, viral infection, pulmonary embolism, lupus. The diseases were attracted to Sportcoat because “they smelled the red meat of a sucker marked for death.” The list continues for several pages: a series of strokes, an addiction to alcohol that would kill anyone not protected by magical invulnerability, a magic that stays with him into his seventies. Apart from natural calamities, he is also saved from three murder attempts by hired hit-persons, his inborn magic combining with slapstick good luck to rescue him. Sportcoat may be marked by death, but he’s not taken. Suffering may be written into his DNA, but he does not crumple.

These are not the miracles of saints, though some have that coloring. Rather they are the onslaught of African-American misfortunes heaped in a great pile, disguised as sickness and bad luck, and crammed into the destiny of one man. Sportcoat is a weird scapegoat of American negro suffering, lifelong tragedy in all its forms showered, blow by blow insistently from birth to death, on a single man.

And yet he survives, has talent and strength, love and goodness, and lives a life that is all the more charmed for thriving in the midst of hellish calamity. He has a good, loving marriage to an exceptional woman, until she walks into the East River one night and drowns herself (another of the mysteries). His life with her continues post-mortem. They talk with each other.

Remove the undercurrents , the mysteries of character and destsiny, and Sportcoat and his best friend Hot Sausage, seem very much like the amiable jokesters and bumbling neer-do-wells of the barber shop and the neighborhood bar, senior citizen boozers-in-the-hood. The book works on the level of two amiable old drunks trading quips and insults: ”Two dumb-ass, old-time, donkey-ass idiots,” the drug lord declares them. But Sportcoat is a lot more. He also has a quirky man-for-all-seasons quality. He is “plant man.” He knows plants, many, all kinds; and he makes them grow, many. (As his dead wife puts it in a visitation, “You gived life to things.”) He fixes anything and is on call in the projects to repair the many minor mishaps; Sunday school teacher, baseball coach, projects’ league organizer, umpire.

But he is also the would-be assassin, executioner of local master drug-dealer Deems Clemens. He shot Deems unaware of what he was doing. Okay, if you listen to the gab in flagpole plaza, he was unaware because he was dead drunk. But that doesn’t motivate a man to kill a 19-year-old whom he had liked, coached, tutored and cultivated as a major league pitcher. Sportcoat’s motives are seated outside of his consciousness in a kind of collective resentment:

For the destruction of the good life in the projects by drugs.

For the unspoken anger at Deems for embodying that shift.

For the role that that shift played in driving his wife to suicide.

The shooting continues his superman role, because having tried to kill Deems, he later rescues him heroically when he is shot by the professional hit-woman hired by Deems’s drug lord to kill Sportcoat. She shoots two wrong men, Sausage and Deems, and misses Sportcoat (can’t be killed). Deems, shot in the left arm (What luck! he pitches right-handed), falls into the East River, and Sportcoat jumps in, drags him out and saves him. Deems recovers, steadies his life, and eventually is a triple-A league pitcher headed for the majors.

The old super-hero drunk comes to a turning point and conversion after the Deems experience. A conversation with his deceased wife wakens a lost part of his character. He talks with Hettie all the time, seemingly crazy drunken mutterings. She drives him like an engine. She knows where the box with the church Christmas Club fund is hidden, but won’t tell Sportcoat. It was worth about $4000, placed in Hettie’s care, lost at her death. Sportcoat is pestered, suspected and blamed for its loss, and he is constantly after her to reveal it. That quest eventually drives him to a bigger treasure hidden in the church, a discovery that floats all boats in Five Ends Baptist.

After the rescue of Deems Sportcoat has a dream where Hettie appears to him as she was when young. This is one of several virtuoso passages in the book that opens up the plot, turns it around, and reveals ideas on which the story turns. Hettie takes him back to his youth in Possum Point, South Carolina. In his dream she is young, beautiful, ambitious. Both lived their New York life homesick for the life left behind. Here’s Hettie’s take on New York:

“Isn’t it something, what New York really is? We come here to be free and find life’s worse here than back home. The white folks here just color it different. They don’t mind you sitting next to ‘em on the subway, or riding the bus in the front seat, but if you asks for the same pay, or wants to live next door, or get so beat down you don’t wanna stand up and sing about how great America is, they‘ll bust down on you so hard pus’ll come out your ears.”

The dream also reveals the cause of Hettie’s suicide, despair at seeing Sportcoat degenerate. Hettie pulls him back into their youth, evokes the man he was. It changes him:

Within his old self, the person he once was, the young man of physical strength with a wide-eyed thirst for wisdom and knowledge, had suddenly sat up, opened his eyes, and gazed around the room. For the first time in his life, Sportcoat felt something inside him breaking up.

Sister Gee, the pastor’s wife, has the gift of second sight, i.e. seeing through the sham of the outer into the inner nature of people:

Why she saw the man (Officer Potts) inside and others could not, she was not sure. They were both spoken for in matters of love. But that indefinable spirit, that special thing, that special song had not been heard by either of them.

She is very aware of her own identity as something that develops out of the “unreal” self. She gradually becomes authentic: “The older I get, the more I become what I really am.”

The idea of the negro’s second self is clearly a moving force in McBride’s writing. The two selves of Henry Shackleford aka Onion in Good Lord Bird: “Onion” is man and woman at the same time, the woman part a convenient lie or disguise concealing the endangered hidden part. But more deeply buried, the life of the negro under slavery as itself a fabricated outer shell, a form of lying:

Being a negro’s a lie, anyway. Nobody sees the real you. Nobody knows. Who you are inside. You just judged on what you are on the outside whatever your color.

Onion’s conversation with Annie on the porch at sunset in the earlier book is the counterpart of the dream of Hettie in Deacon KK: moments of self-discovery and conversion. Annie recalls Onion to a concealed, almost forgotten inner self, Henry Shackleford as a man with a serious talent for music, no longer just a fabrication of white mens’ expectations (GLB, p. 349). No authentic existence is possible, no success is reachable, without self-knowledge. That is the wisdom of Onion:

I wanted to tell her, I was gonna turn ‘bout, turn over a new leaf, be a new person, be the man that I really was. But I couldn’t, for it weren’t in me to be a man. I was but a coward, living a lie. But when you thunk on it, it weren’t a bad lie. Being a Negro means showing your best face to the white man every day.

But concealing the inner self means self-sentencing to a useless life:

A body can’t prosper if a person don’t know who they are. That makes you poor as a pea, not knowing who you are inside. (GLB,p 377).

So in Ch. 20, “Plant Man,” Deacon KK becomes a coming of age novel. It may be a late coming, but the old man finally finds his lost inner self, “becomes what he really is.” It is a rebirth and a religious conversion. He never touches King Kong or any alcohol again and he becomes a good husband to his dead wife.

Now, while we’re still on the mysteries of Sportcoat’s life, the final one is his death. No one knows the cause of death. No one sees Sportcoat for over a year after the last shooting incident. Everyone assumes he fears the police and is holed up with a supply of King Kong. In the last pages, Sausage tells Sister Gee how it happened. He died by self-drowning. He walked off Vitali pier into the East River, as Hettie had done, holding up a bottle of King Kong, of which he had not drunk a drop, an self-control, and maybe a parody of the nearby statue of Liberty, standing in the same harbor in which Sportcoat died, raising her torch, as Sportcoat raised his liquor bottle, a sign of triumph, a final one after the other triumphs of his final year: he had arranged the refurbishing of the church. He had the neglected church garden planted and tended. As soon as the garden was finished, Hettie disappeared, “gone to glory,” and he became “born again to the Word.”

OTHER CHARACTERS

When the story opens the good in the people living in the projects has gone to rust and ruin, eaten away by the usual evils: poverty, drugs, greed, fear; but it wakens again. There is a kind, conciliatory spirit at work in this novel. The projects are not the devilishly evil place they are in Spike Lee’s film Clockers, which I believe influenced McBride. Drugs are a curable, at least a manageable evil. The character of the tough cop with a good heart (Harvey Keitel) who rescues the main character and his family in Clockers, has filtered through a number of characters in Deacon KK, including the white Irish cop, Potts. The goodness in people (McBride’s term, repeated often) manifests for one thing in the interracial, counter-ethnic-isolation embodied in characters like Potts and Sister Gee:

· Sister Gee ends her stale marriage with Pastor Gee to cleave unto Potts. The friendship between these two is sweet, charming, uncolored by the violence and racism endemic in the projects.

· A friendship struck in prison years before the action of the plot between an Irishman and an Italian eventually leads to the rise in fortunes of the people and the institution of Five Ends Baptist.

· The son of that Italian, Tony Elephante, a second-generation small-time black-marketeer, saves Five Ends Baptist Church from ruin, marries a nice Irish girl with whom he finds the happiness his life as a wheeler-dealer had robbed him of, retires, and runs a bagel factory.

· Deems straightens out and is a rising star in professional baseball.

Sister Gee ends a powerful monologue savaging life in the projects with the declaration that “God is forever generous with his gifts: hope, love, truth, and the belief in the indestructibility of the good in all people.” (p. 268). The two diseases of the neighborhood (drugs and greed) seem cured for the moment at least; the decline of the church is reversed. Starting with Sportcoat, in other words, there is a series of emergences from cocoons of neglect, crime, despair, prejudice, alcoholism, a shedding of false lives and negro-second-selves, and a return to authentic lives.

LANGUAGE AND STYLE

The style of the first two chapters sizzles, pops, seethes with surprises and outrages, with wit and craziness. The dialogue throughout is rich with African-American urban patois. Even when the story settles into plain narrative prose, there are passages of force comparable to the best of Balzac. I have no idea if McBride has read Balzac, but in compelling descriptions of a massive, malicious city, they are on the same level. For example:

· Read Ch. 7 (“The March of the Ants”), pp. 74-77: a virtuoso description of New York City, its vitality, its malice, its weirdness. The passage has a throbbing heart beat that leaves you breathless—literally. I recently read the whole passage out loud to friends. We had to stop to draw breath, laugh, exclaim.

· Sister Gee on life in the projects (266-68).

· Sportcoat’s last dream of Hettie (pp. 280-88).

Sleaze and malice of place are no hindrance to lyricism and soaring emotion. Officer Potts leaving a flirtatious visit with Sister Gee:

Potts, without a word, placed his NYPD cap on his head and stepped out into the dark evening, the smell of the dirty wharf drifting into his nose and consciousness with the ease of lilacs and moonbeams, fluttering around his awakened heart like butterflies. (p. 117)

There is laugh-out-loud humor in the people, the situations, the language. He hits the reader regularly with one-liners that stop the flow of steady reading:

· Sportcoat in conversation with the deceased Hettie: “Ain’t got time for you, woman. Not today I don’t! You’re not yourself today anyway. And that’s an improvement!”

· Sausage declaring Sportcoat crazy: “Your cheese done slid off your cracker.”

· On early negro baseball players: “Rube Foster hit a ball so far in Texas it had to take the train back home from Alabama!”

· Feckless hit-man Earl Morris: “That idiot’s so dumb he lights up a room by leaving it.”

· Hettie: “Jesus could baptize shit into sugar!”

And descriptions of characters that bundle life into a dependent clause or two:

· “He’s gonna be an idiot” [said the midwife birthing Sportcoat] handed him to his mother, and vanished, moving to Washington, DC, where she married a plumber and never delivered another baby again.

· “The pastor [blessing the three year old Cuffy] announced, ‘He’s got the devil’s understanding,’ and departed for Chicago, where he quit the gospel and became a blues singer named Tampa Red and recorded the monster hit song, ‘Devil’s Understanding,’ before dying in anonymity flat broke and crawling into history, immortalized in music studies and rock-and-roll college courses the world over, idolized by white writers and music intellectuals for his classic blues hit that was the bedrock of the forty-million-dollar Gospel Stam Music Publishing empire, from which neither he nor Sportcoat ever received a dime.”

· [Seeing his teeth come in three years late, Sportcoat’s mother] “sought out the medicine woman excitedly, who came over, examined Cuffy’s mouth, and said, “He’s gonna have more teeth than an alligator,” whereupon the mother happily patted the boy on the head, lay down for a nap, and expired.”

JESUS

The final pages urge the reader to go back and see to what extent the mysterious destiny of Sportcoat was a religious destiny. Alongside the screwball religiosity of the Barbados, is another, more potent. He experiences a moral regeneration and causes one (in Deems). The figure of Jesus, never present physically, but ever-present in his working, plays a role too extensive to detail here (follow the motif of Jesus’s cheese). His image is present and has a major role to play in the story. Jesus is painted on the outer wall of the church with outstretched arms. The picture is modelled on Giotto’s Last Judgment–of course, the artists were Italian, friends of the older Elephante. The inscription, “May God hold you in the palm of His hand,” is the key to finding the treasure hidden in the church.

Deems, a gunshot in the shoulder, sinking in the river and drowning, calls, “Help me now, God, and if I don’t drown…God, help me please.” Sportcoat is God’s agent in this case, and the rescue gives life and reality to what is unspoken in those three elision dots.

Sister Gee ends her tirade against life in New York with this declaration:

In her heart it [her and Sportcoat’s work in the projects, curing, healing, teaching] was proof that God was forever generous with His gifts: hope, love, truth and the belief in the indestructability of the good in all people. If she could have, she would have stood on top of Building 17 with a bullhorn and shouted that truth for the whole projects to hear.

I don’t know anything about McBride’s personal relation to religion, but it’s a major part of his work as a writer. It shows also in his second book, Miracle at Santa Anna, movie version directed by Spike Lee (2008).

Deacon King Kong ends with a brief dedication, or rather acknowledgment, after the final page: “Thanks to the humble redeemer who gives us the rain, the snow, and all things in between.”

John Patrick Shanley, Wild Mountain Thyme (review)

We watched “Wild Mountain Thyme” twice this weekend. It’s such a good movie,—and getting beat up so badly in reviews—I want to sing its praises.

You’ll want to watch the lead-in to the titles repeatedly: camera sailing over Irish coastline, god-carved cliffs, mild surf, turns in to green fields, a long narrow road to a farm, voice over by Christopher Walken: “I’m Tony Reilly. I’m dead”; introduces the Muldoon farm and the Reilly farms; shows us a fateful moment in the youth of the two heirs, young Tony Reilly, rebuffed by his 12 year old love Fiona, and Rosemary Muldoon ten years old, besotted with love for Tony but ignored. Their self-esteem set low, Tony pleads to the stars: “Mother nature, why have you made me?”; and Rosemary to her dad: “I have no purpose. I’m just a girl. The world is full of girls.” No, her father tells her, “You, for better or for worse, are the white swan.” Sweet and tender. Rosemary rushes outside and does a slice of Swan Lake ballet in thick wool sweater and yellow galoshes while Swan Lake music plays. Mounts her horse. From one frame to the next she’s 18 years old, stunningly beautiful (Emily Blount), and gallops off on her black horse, Blister. The landscape changes, no longer Emerald Isles, but Cuchullainesque and Ossianic, black sky, Rosemary a silhouette on a bare horizon, past leafless tree with ghostly arms and fingers, lightning flashes across black sky, camera soars, climactic moment in Swan Lake music, titles start: “Wild Mountain Thyme.” What barren hill and wild sky visualize is, swan-woman Rosemary Muldoon, landscape colored with the dark poetry of stifled Irish love.

So the curse of Odette (Swan Lake) is on Rosemary: her cursed state is hard-headed, proud Irishwoman. She will always love Tony, but who can love a cursed swan? Who can bring her dormant/repressed love to life? Neighbor Tony? Fraid not. He’s shy, introverted, his soul also aligns with a totem animal, the bee. We first see him (pre-titles) sticking his nose into a flower and coming out with pollen on it. Further bee moments bear this out.

Rosemary sends off signals of her love repeatedly over the years, all wasted on Tony. The curse can only be broken by a bold lover. Tony isn’t up to it. “Everything is difficult for the Irish,” says distant cousin Adam (John Hamm) wealthy New York banker, for whom everything is easy. He sweeps in on Rosemary and the farm, to marry the one and buy the other. Driven by this outsider, she takes desperate measures to break through Tony Reilly’s resistance.

There are exquisite moments;

– old Tony Reilly (Walken) sitting in a pub while Rosemary sings “Wild Mountain Thyme,” the favorite song of old Tony’s deceased wife. His face seems to lengthen, his eyes to reposition, pulled down by sorrow, tears held back, out of breath.

– Shut-up and repressed for all their lives, old Anthony realizes he’s dying and opens up his heart to Tony.

– Some nature mysticism that holds the people bound to the land. Tony doesn’t leave Ireland because “There’s these green fields, and the animals living off them, and over that there’s us, living off the animals, and over that there’s that which tends to us, lives off us maybe. Whatever that is, it holds me here.”

– Emily Blount’s acting as Rosemary.

John Patrick Shanley wrote and directed. The movie shares elements with his earlier Moonstruck. The love-rivalry of two brothers (cousins in this case); the alliance of the lover’s identity with an animal (swan and bee; Cher to Cage: “You’re a wolf…a wolf who had the courage to bite off his hand to avoid the mistake of the wrong love.”) Both tagged with a big musical theme: “Swan Lake”; “La Bohème”; a rough-edged, obsessive kind of love hardened by long denial/resentment. (N. Cage in the snow outside his apartment: “Love isn’t like they tell you in the books. It’s not here to make you happy. It’s here to make you fall in love with the wrong people, destroy yourself and die!”).

Rosemary breaks his and her resistance in one of the craziest love scenes ever written. She plies Tony with a sandwich, a Guiness, and a threat to blow a hole in him with her father’s shotgun if he walks away from her. In the end he confesses his secret: “I believe that I am a honey bee.” She drives the car into a tree.

Much of this would be sentimental if the characters were not so hard to penetrate emotionally. They are walls. And they burst open and spill out all they’ve been repressing out of shyness, orneriness or pride. It’s catharsis, not sentiment.

Never mind that it scored 29% on Rotten Tomatoes, or that Robert Ebert gave it two stars. It’s a very good film.

Steven Soderbergh, Contagion (2011)

Brilliant story-telling/editing, big-time stars in virtually every speaking role, a story about various wrenching and very ugly deaths by a contagious disease, also about the social chaos produced by fear of the novel virus that dispatches millions world-wide in less time than it takes to apply for and get unemployment compensation—but also about the mustering of opposition. There are three plot lines: The Spread, The Disaster, The Cure. The first two are the flashy, noisy parts of the story. The third is at lower volume. What I admire most about this film is the way that humanity, kindness, concern to prevent suffering and save life, are woven into its shrill, sensational disaster story. The movie makes big statements softly. You have to listen closely to hear them.

The Spread

The first thirty minutes or so of the film are a lesson in “touch.”

Scene 1: no titles. Screen is black; movie opens with sound only, a cough on the soundtrack. A title: Day 2 ( we skip Day 1, but we’ll get back to it): Beth Emhoff, exec of AIMM Alderson Engineering, Mining and Manufacturing (Gwyneth Paltrow) in a bar in a Chicago airport, phones with her lover, whom she’s visited on the long layover in Chicago (the sex was good, but both will be dead on Day 3), touches her face, her phone, eats peanuts (close-up of peanuts), she doesn’t look good, no make-up, coughs, hands over her credit card, waitress takes it, touching Emhoff’s fingers, camera close on the moment of exchange; waitress swipes card, touches screen, camera close on the swipe and the touch of screen.

Scene 2: Waiter in the Hong Kong casino where Emhoff dined and gambled is sick. He’s on the ferry to Kowloon, sweating, staggering, grabs a railing, grabs another (close-up, hand on railing), takes the bus, grips a pole—close-up of hand on pole.

Scene 3: Unidentified Ukranian woman arrives in London, puts down a portfolio significantly; close-up as it slaps the table surface; she takes a taxi, sweating, fainting; dies in the bathroom of her hotel.

Scene 4: Emhoff arrives home, Minneapolis, gives her ten year old son a big, loving hug. Happy reunion with her husband (Matt Damon). Two of the plot lines meet in this family, the spread: Paltrow the carrier, the “index patient,” point of origin of the pandemic; and the disaster movie line: Damon, survivor, observer of death, disorder and chaos.

Scene 5: Chinese business man exits airplane toilet, closes door (close-up, hand on door knob), takes his seat, panting, suffering, breathing hard, drinks water, close-up of hand on glass, sets the glass down next to documents with letter head AIMM Alderson; same man in train, holding overhead grip (close-up); sweating, can’t breathe, collapses, dies.

Scene 6: aforementioned waiter leaves his apartment, staggering, sweating, presses elevator call button (close-up), gets into elevator crowded with a family, staggers out into an open-air market, lots of raw fish, chickens, people; he’s barely conscious, losing vision; staggers into a busy street, hit and killed by a van.

You get the idea. It’s touch. A murderous virus changes hands everytime someone touches something or someone. Suddenly you’re alerted to touch, touching, the danger of things tangible and tangent. To communicate means communicable (as in disease; contiguous things and people mean contagious, contagious means infection, to touch is to infect, touching means contagion.

The opening of the movie stamps contagion-by-touch on our awareness, no comments, just visual clues. Later when WHO rep Dr. Lorena Orantes (Marion Cotillard) scans the surveillance video in the Hong Kong casino, we get lots more moments of infectious contact, highlighted in freeze-frames. Touch is made contiguous with miserable suffering. The repeated close-up of ordinary things in lingering shots is a powerful device to charge an object with meaning visually: Ingrid Bergman’s teacup in Hitchcock’s Notorious: it’s just a teacup! For all its ordinariness it vibrates with high tension (it’s poisoned; she’s being killed gradually, one cup of tea at a time); the ceiling fan in Twin Peaks: It’s just a plain old ceiling fan! But its incessant turning spews a sense of an unspeakable crime, a terrible hidden secret.

Every act of touching in Contagion is made portentous; the viewer gets injected with a shuddering sensitivity to the everyday act of touching. Dr. Mears of the CDC (Kate Winslet) makes it explicit: stop touching your face, she tells a group from the Minneapolis Health Department “The average person touches his face 2000 – 3000 times each day.” She interviews Emhoff’s colleagues and friends—at the corporate headquarters of AIMM Alderson Engineering, Mining and Manufacturing, the company that sent Emhoff to Hong Kong. She later shouts into her phone at Emhoff’s chauffeur, now headed home on a city bus, staggering, sweating, near death, “Get off the bus. DON’T TOUCH ANYBODY AND DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!” He staggers out, touching grips, touching railings, touching seats, touching people—of course. How else do you move around in a bus, esp. if you’re dying?

Contact is murderous. So much so that Dr. Ally Hexter of CDC (Jennifer Ehle), who observes the virus cells in action under a microscope says, “we can’t grow it in a laboratory (hence can’t get a vaccine) because till now it kills every cell it comes in contact with.”

The close-ups of those seemingly random moments have some of that same poison in them; they are killing acts viewed up close, fingers, credit cards, portfolios, peanuts, glasses, cocktails, bats, pigs, chickens, and humans, all they touch turn to “fomites,” the kindling which ignites the killing power of the virus.

Breathing is murderous too, coughing. Watch this movie’s visual lesson on touch and breath, and then think of the U.S. citizens declaring their contempt for the corona virus, rejecting masks, distancing, and caution—as an act of brave self-assertion: They won’t allow the government to take away their personal freedom! as if anyone who limits their ability to infect themselves and others were depriving them of their individual rights. It is like insisting on their god-given right to commit suicide and take others with them.

The Disaster

By day 12, thirteen million people are dead worldwide. There is panic. Long lines for banks, ATM machines, food, drugs. Services stop. Garbage in the streets. Long shots of empty building interiors, gyms with no one exercising, huge airport halls without anyone in them. Drug stores are broken into for hidden supplies of the non-existent vaccine being withheld from the public according to conspiracy theories.

“Prescient” has been the going term of praise for the technical aspects of the story as told by Soderbergh. It speaks the language of disease control which we know by now. But “prescient” isn’t really adequate for the blazingly prophetic quality of the blogger, scammer, peddler of conspiracy theories and fake cures Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law). The German roots of his name evoke “crooked path,” a good choice, quietly embedded. Alan’s business is booming. He jumps on the pandemic story immediately; can’t sell it to the SF Chronicle, tries to get the “truth” from Dr. Ian Sussman (Eliot Gould), researcher at UCSF, the only man able to reproduce the virus in the laboratory, the necessary first step to finding a cure. The truth is, Krumwiede tells the doctor, that the virus came from the military. How do you know? says the doctor. Krumwiede: “It says so in the blogosphere.” Sussman hits him with a memorable quip: “You’re not a writer, you’re a blogger. Blogging isn’t writing; it’s graffiti with punctuation.” But Krumwiede knows that for a blogger it’s easy to make the truth, easy to override stuffy scientific integrity with scary conspiracy theories. Contagious disease? No problem. It takes minimal imagination and no skill at all to find a cure. Krumwiede has got one, and he knows its value: millions if not billions. He puts out the word that the government is trying to hide the cure from the public, but he has it. Forsythia, homeopathic herb supplement, readily available. We next see him meeting with a hedge fund manager willing to pay millions to learn—not what cures the virus, but what Krumwiede plans to announce as a cure. Fraud or not, it’s sure to sell to millions of blog readers, internet and TV news. And that means, huge potential profits. We see Krumwiede on national TV. He announces that he is sick with the disease, in the last stages. He drinks a glass of the miracle cure, Forsythia, on live camera. If he appears on the show the next day, he says, the public will know that Forsythia works. He appears; he’s cured! A mad, panicked rush to buy Forsythia is on. Of course, he faked it all. He makes millions.

It’s an early take on Donald Trump peddling hydroxochloroquine with a slightly different angle: “I take it; can’t hurt to try; maybe it works.” Thanks to that short-lived scam, the US government is now the proud owner of 6 million doses of Oxychloriquine. But in the mad rush for the “cure,” someone made a lot of money. Alan and the hedge fund guy know, There’s a fortune to be made from a pandemic; the trick is to control the news.

On the grim and tragic side, we watch Beth Emhoff die from the disease in the arms of her husband, (Matt Damon). Her lover in Chicago dies the same day, and her ten-year old son dies a few days later—we see a terrifying close-up of his corpse, wide-eyed in horror, skin blue, lips parched. We also get to see part of the autopsy on Paltrow, the part where two doctors saw off and remove the top of her head. Nothing prepared me for that.

Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), front-person for the CDC, traces Emhoff’s contacts, makes large-scale arrangements for quarantine and sickbeds, sickens and dies miserably.

The Cure

Dr. Sussman (Gould) is ordered by Hexter and the head of CDC, to stop trying to reproduce the virus in lab samples. It’s too dangerous. The cells “kill whatever they come in contact with.” He goes to a café and watches customers and a barrista coughing, his mind churning with thoughts of millions of infections. He returns to the lab and continues his work, defying the order to stop, i.e. risking his own death.

Dr. Hexter discovers what looks like a viable vaccine against what’s now called MEV-1 (Day 130 or so), but testing it kills monkeys. It looks like a long process of testing and developing. Meanwhile the virus is wiping out a measurable percentage of the world population. Hexter decides to shorten the testing process. She injects herself with the untested vaccine, then infects herself. Here’s how. She goes to the hospital room of her father. He is a retired doctor who returned to his practice to serve virus patients, and caught it. He is in the final stages of the sickness, at his last gasp. Hexter takes off her mask. No protective gear. He pulls back, warns her off. They negotiate this completely outrageous method of testing: take vaccine, self-infect, recover or die; the lead scientist is also the lab animal. Very complex emotional confusion. Her father recognizes what she’s doing, breaks down crying—out of pride, love and fear. He reminds her of another scientist who did the same thing to cure another disease—and won the nobel prize. She hugs and kisses him, sweaty and coughing though he is. The scene is very moving, though completely unsentimental. She recovers; the vaccine works. Millions of lives are saved.

The movie has a big heart. Mears (Winslet) lies dying in a huge sports stadium with hundreds of occupied beds. The man next to her asks the nurse for a blanket; he’s shaking from a chill. Sorry, no blankets left. Mears pulls off her own blanket and gives it to the man.

The point-woman for WHO, Dr. Orantes (Cotillard), is sent to Hong Kong to find the origin of the virus. Two of her Chinese co-workers kidnap her and hold her as a hostage. Their village is being devastated by the virus, and Orantes is a bargaining chip to get them first crack at a vaccine. She spends months in the village. When the vaccine is ready, she is exchanged. The WHO chief brings a chest full of vaccine; the kidnapers return Orantes. A brief shot establishes that she has taken the village and its children to heart. (Some reminiscences of Kitty Fane in Mei-Tan-Fu (Painted Veil). She tells her boss in Hong Kong airport on the way home that she’s glad the village will be saved; her kidnap was worth it. The boss explains that they are not saved; the chest contained placebos, not vaccine; it was a ruse to discourage extortion. She frowns, gets up and stalks off without any explanation, clearly headed for the village where she was held captive. There’s no dramatizing of her gesture, no explanation that she’s headed back to the doomed village, possibly to leverage real vaccine, unfazed by the thought that she might be giving her life to make good on the promise extorted by her kidnapping.

Though courage, self-sacrifice and the commitment to save lives is at work at every moment in the search for a cure, it is understated. On first viewing, you might imagine that the cure is the result of modern public health facilities, great technical sophistication. Look close and you see that it’s the result of humanity and commitment of doctors, researchers, nurses. It overrides self-interest, since, as Krumwiede reminds us, there are fortunes to be made in a pandemic.

Humanity is shown, also movingly but understated, in Dr. Ellis Cheever (Lawrence Fishburne), head of the CDC. We’ve seen what a scrupulous, ethical character he is, but Krumwiede gets on TV and accuses him of profiteering, along with lots of other people involved in developing the vaccine. In fact Cheever had illegally used advanced insider knowledge to warn his wife to get out of Chicago just before the city is closed down. He’s criminally liable. He restores his self-esteem personally, not publicly. He owes a moral debt to the janitor in his building. As soon as he gets two doses of the vaccine for himself and his wife, he gives his own to the janitor’s son. No tears, minimal thanks. The small boy offers the gigantic Fishburne his hand to shake. They shake. Cheever explains the meaning of the handshake to him: in earlier times you offered your empty right hand to show that you meant no harm. The gesture releases the world of the movie from the tabu on touch.

The origin

A big loose end is tied up in the last sequence. We don’t have an explanation of the cause of the virus. Hexter knew it generally. She tells Cheever, “Somewhere in the world, the wrong pig met up with the wrong bat.” We’re treated to a front-row view of that meeting.

Final sequence: We’re in some primal jungle. A large tractor appears and moves through the dense foliage, the ID plate fully visible: AIMM Alderson Engineering, Mining and Manufacturing. Two tall palm trees fall like bowling pins. Close up of a bunch of bananas. A bat settles in, bites on some object (a nut? a seed of some kind?) and flies away with its dinner. It lands on a railing just under the ceiling of a pork factory outside of Hong Kong. The bat drops the nut, one of the disadvantages of hanging upside down for dinner. A hungry piggy picks it up. He heads for market. He’s carried to the kitchen of a big swanky casino. The head chef, bare-handed, is stuffing the (dead) pig with herbs, when he’s called away to meet an important guest of the casino. He wipes his hands casually on his apron, and comes out to meet Beth Emhoff (Paltrow), executive of AIMM Alderson and patient nr. 1. Chef gives her a big smile and a big double handed hand-shake, still imbued with essence of bat-infected pig. They pose for a photo. Freeze frame. Title shows Day 1.

So that fatal meeting of pig and bat was not without a cause: a big international corporation was clearing ground for development. The movie doesn’t state outright that American imperialist capitalism is the cause of a horrendous disease which reduces the population of the earth by 12 %. We’re a long way from Avatar (2009). But there was no need for all those portfolios, documents, buildings, and that tractor displaying AIMM Alderson logos, unless the director wanted to plant a suggestion of that line of culpability. Nature took revenge on the big destructive corporation.

Contagion was made shortly after Avatar (2009). Big rapacious corporations made a good target after the financial crisis of 2008. It couldn’t have occurred to Soderbergh that the president of the United States might have found it in his interest to downplay or ignore the disease and let people die.

Watching Rear Window during the Pandemic

Watching Rear Window during the Covid pandemic and the Trump reign of terror helps understand what the movie is about. It’s a political allegory, among other things.

The little society of Rear Window (1954) consists of seven different apartment windows that look out onto a rectangular courtyard from the four bordering apartment buildings; each is a screen on which the stories of the occupants play, like TV dramas. There is a common feature linking the community of the spied upon: All are leading stifled, unhappy, isolated, frustrated lives:

· L. B. Jefferies (James Stewart) is a press photographer who craves action and adventure, the kind that got him imprisoned in a plaster cast: he stood in the path of two formula-1 race cars breaking up in mid-crash; a severed wheel coming at him at high speed smashed his leg and his camera. But he got a fabulous photograph. He pleads with his editor to give him an assignment, cast or no cast: “Six weeks sitting in a two-room apartment with nothing to do but look at the neighbors. I’ve been in this cocoon for six weeks. You’ve gotta get me out of here or I’ll do something drastic.” To add to his troubles, he’s pestered by a beautiful, young, wealthy high society woman, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), who wants to marry him, calm his life, and elevate it to her level. Her love for him has turned vampiristic. You don’t think having Grace Kelly beg you to marry her is exactly a vampire attack? Hold on. I’ll explain it later. This is Hitchcock. Anyway, Jefferies isn’t interested. All he’s interested in is watching the TV dramas broadcast from the windows of the neighbors. His window is a panopticon opening onto the others. He tunes in to their stories now and then. Remarkably, no one ever looks back at him (until the end).

· Lars Thorwald, travelling salesman, is tired of waiting on his sickly, complaining wife, so he does her in, dismembers her, and sends her parts, by train, truck and taxi, elsewhere. Some wind up in the East River; one is buried in the garden of the courtyard.

· Miss Lonelyhearts (Jefferies’s nickname for her); a lady of a delicate age, so tortured by loneliness that she sets her table for a romantic dinner with an imaginary suitor and holds conversations with him. Later she brings a man home from a bar, who tries to assault, if not rape her. She throws him out and breaks down in despair. She is about to commit suicide when she hears the music from the next apartment. It is like a life-line. The music pulls her back into life.

· The musician, a “song-writer” composed the music that rescued Miss Lonelyhearts. He is struggling to finish a song, the unfinished fragments of which play like background music throughout. He’s at a dead end: no energy, no inspiration. He is slumping into middle age. We first see him shaving, the radio plays an ad: “Men, are you over forty? When you wake up in the morning, do you feel tired; do you have that listless feeling?” He’s at a dead end in his composition: he plays the same phrase over and over. He drinks too much. (Alfred Hitchcock is his butler). He comes home stumbling drunk one night and takes a vicious swat at his pile of music sheets, sending them flying; he collapses into a chair.

· Miss Torso, a good-looking young dancer who dresses, exercises and dances in full view of the neighbors. She’s pestered by rich, well-dressed “wolves,” whom she “juggles.” She doesn’t want their attentions, and makes it clear.

· An elderly couple who sleep on their balcony have only one pleasure in their life (at least the only one with a role in the TV show of their Rear Window life): their small dog, which they lower onto the courtyard and bring back in a basket. Later, the dog is strangled by the murderer for digging too close to where he has buried his wife’s arm.

· A newly married couple moves into their first apartment and spends the whole elapsed time of the movie—or most of it—behind closed curtains. AT least one happy family. Nope. After the first day and night, the curtain goes up, the bride-groom leans out the window looking tired. His wife calls in a pestering voice, “Haaary!” and his reaction shows little enthusiasm.

Jefferies does something drastic. He detects the murder across the courtyard and brings the murderer to justice. By clues so slim that his detective friend (Wendell Cory) laughs at them, he pieces together the murder of Mrs. Thorwald. At the start Jeff’s suspicion looks like he’s losing his mind. The detective work develops slowly with manipulative moves to entrap Thorwald. The immobile Jefferies is eventually aided by his lover (Kelly), whose daring and pursuit of danger makes her in the end attractive to Jefferies.

The individual stories (Jefferies’s included) are a spectacle of frustration, unhappiness, despair. It’s mid-summer in New York, hot (95 degrees in the first scene). The atmosphere is claustrophobic, stagnant; people are isolated and entrapped in their own individual forms of misery. The potential for community is strangled—by the nature of apartment dwelling in a big city, sure, but also by an obligation to privacy. To be selective in private relations is city life. No one goes to his neighbor to say, “Can we talk. I’ve got problems.” There is a tendency in the fabric of life to suspicion; nastiness comes easily, as when Thorwald, gardening, gets some friendly advice from a neighbor and responds with “Oh, why don’t you shut up.”

The core idea of the film is community, its loss, its recovery. The lady with the dog is the voice of this theme. Towards the end of the detective story, her dog is found dead, strangled near the courtyard garden. She hoists his body in her basket, cries out to the neighbors, who for the first time have come out of their apartments, and rails at them: “You don’t know the meaning of the word neighbor. Neighbors like each other, speak to each other, care if anybody lives or dies. But none of you do… [My dog is] the only thing in this neighborhood who likes anybody.” A party guest: “Come on, let’s go inside. It’s only a dog.”

Jefferies has penetrated into their secret, walled-off worlds with binoculars and telescopic lens, but without any particular empathy; he’s mildly amused at the foibles of these small, lonely characters—until he’s gripped by the possibility of a crime. He wins over Lisa and Stella (his private nurse, Thelma Ritter), who become his private investigators. They ensnare Thorwald, who is arrested in a dramatic scene where his crime is exposed to the whole community; the police arrive and rescue Jefferies from Thorwald’s attack, and for the second time in the movie, everyone comes out of their apartments to see what’s happening.

The surface of social life favors isolation and alienation, but also concealment and crime; In Hitchcock it takes some gross violation of surface restraint to break through: Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) stands up in the middle of a music hall performance and shouts, “What are the thirty-nine steps?” Doris Day screams at the top of her voice in mid-concert at Albert Hall to prevent an assassination (The Man Who Knew Too Much); Cary Grant causes chaos at an auction to thwart his own assassination (North by Northwest). In all those cases, the two worlds, the normal and the criminal, collide, and the crime, submerged and hiding in normality, is force to the surface

Jefferies’s (illegal) search and manipulation of Thorwald brings his crime into the open. It always takes some transgressive act of exposure by some heroic figure, often himself the prime suspect, to solve the crimes in Hitchcock films. The police are never of any use except to lead away the perpetrator.

Jefferies’s detective work restores community. The capture, the exposure of the crime, transform the place into a happy utopia. It seems the walls of isolation are penetrated; there is a miraculous release of all tensions (or most), and a solution to all problems. The final shot, no edits, one long shot packed with narrative (like the opening shot):

· We see Miss Lonelyhearts in the song-writer’s apartment, listening admiringly to his song, now recorded. She tells him: “I can’t tell you what your music has meant to me.” We know that what she means is “it saved my life.” They are clearly a thing.

· Miss Torso is surprised and delighted by the return home of the love of her life, a nerdy-looking GI, about three inches shorter than she. She hugs and kisses him. He rushes to the refrigerator for a ham sandwich. Bliss.

· The elderly couple has a new dog. The lady is training him to travel in the basket in a voice all sugary with love and happiness.

· There’s trouble only with the newlyweds. He has quit his job, and she’s wondering if they should have got married at all.

· Grace Kelley is happily ensconced in Jefferies’s apartment, in (for her) sporty dress, ready to share the adventurer’s life. He is now encased in two casts, having broken both legs in the fall from his window.

· The murderer’s apartment is getting a fresh coat of paint.

A string of humane events and kind actions follows magically on the main event, the murderer’s exposure and arrest. Tension, frustration and hostility are dissolved; they all have left with Thorwald. The community seems transformed in mind and action. (It’s only changed for the worse with the newlyweds, though given the attitude of this film towards marriage, divorce might well be a welcome release, maybe an alternative to murder.) Otherwise the whole society breathes easy. There is a feeling of community restored; humanity redeemed. The climate, i.e. weather, itself is part of this transformation; the air is clear; the thermometer reads 72 degrees. The “song-writer’s” song plays; it’s called “Lisa,” a sign of the way the world of the individual apartment dwellers blends into the life of the others. The composer presumably didn’t know Lisa Fremont or that she had early on stopped in her tracks at hearing the music and commented how beautiful it was. Realism or no realism, there is a magical connectedness linking the members of this community. The song plays with sung lyrics, while Lisa basks on Jeff’s couch reading Beyond the High Himalayas but secreting a copy of Harper’s Bazaar from the view of the sleeping Jeff.

The movie is an allegory of a stagnating society, turned inward, self-seeking, individuals living as in quarantine, having lost sight of the benefits of community. There is some crime at its heart, some flaw or failure that governs the stagnation, that pollutes and infects the atmosphere. The release from that infectious influence produces the happy-ending world of the conclusion.

A tyrannical, narcissistic central figure commits a horrendous crime. It pollutes the place, just as the crime of Oedipus causes a plague in Thebes, the only cure of which is the elimination of Oedipus. Thorwald’s world has poisoned the community. The poison is in the air like germs. He is the self-seeking autocrat acting for his own good, against the law, allowing himself even murder, which is favored by the divisions and isolations of the neighbors. He draws the whole society into the miasma of inhumanity that surrounds him.

The USA knows that effect, the society infected by the faults of its leader. Whatever else the Corona epidemic is, it is a symbol of the poisonous influence of Donald Trump.

L. B. Jefferies is the free press. Where the law and the police cannot touch the criminal, it is left to the press to trouble the waters and expose the cause of infection. This same logic is at work in the present pandemic: it is not the experts of the CDC and the NIH, not the gentle-spoken excuse-making Republican senators and government employees fearful of their jobs, who call out the governing criminal: It is Maggie Haberman and Savannah Guthrie, CNN and the New York Times, who investigate and expose his crimes. One of the most troubling facts of our political climate is the passive acceptance of a criminal president.

Thorwald, a murderer, represents Trump? Really? Come on. Well, How many people would not have died if Trump had acted responsibly, how many immigrant children would not have lost their parents, how many Trump supporters would not have driven their cars into crowds of protesters, how many policemen would not have shot unarmed black people?

The string of happy endings in Rear Window works better as allegory than as realistic narrative. The arrest of the villain breaks the spell that held the community in the condition of a wasteland and leaves in its place a humanized society. Community and humanity are reunited.

If you think that’s an improbable interpretation, consider the circumstances: it was written during a pandemic: confinement, no movies, no museums, no libraries, no restaurants, no guests for dinner, just TV and Zoom to make contact with the outer world. What grounds of empathy with Jefferies! What else is there to do but sit at the computer, look out at the neighbors and occasionally type something?

By an interesting coincidence, a book by the sociologist Robert Putnam just appeared, The Upswing: How America came together and how we can do it again (2020). The fragmented world of greed and excess that was the “gilded age,” transforms into a society based on a sense of unity and national obligation during and after WW II. This is what he calls an “I” society moving into a “we” society. It is the same arc that the plot of Rear Window follows. So you might also see the ending of that movie as a reflection the Upswing of America. Of course, it swings down once more after the 60s. The good news is that a society is practically, not magically, able to rescue a development into fragmentation, division, hatred and self-interest.

SOME MARGINAL NOTES

THE VAMPIRE

Hitchcock played a trick on Grace Kelly and the audience in the shot which introduces Lisa. And he characterized her pursuit of Jefferies with the same visual joke. At first we dont see her at all, just her shadow. The scene opens with Jeff asleep in his wheel chair, his head leaning to the right, his neck invitingly exposed. Suddenly a dark shadow appears and advances slowly up his chest and neck. The viewer has no idea what or who it is. At neck-high, cut to a counter-shot: the stunning Lisa, full close-up. As she moves in on him, the shadow darkens his face; his features are barely visible. Back to Lisa very slowly closing in. She kisses him, both faces now fully in the shadow.

This is a private joke of Hitchcock in remembrance of his journeyman days at the UFA Babelsberg studio in Berlin. That was 1924. In 1922 W. F. Murnau had released the vampire horror film, Nosferatu, which Hitchcock admired. Jonathan Harker is the guest of the weird Count Dracula. The vampire enters his room at night, and moves slowly towards the sleeper. The shadow of the monster moves slowly up Harker’s body, up the wall, claw-like hands raised in horror-story gesture of “here comes the monster!”; then the shadow descends slowly onto Harker as the vampire heads for his victim’s throat. Finally covers him in darkness.

The later scene is based on the earlier; the vampiristic assailant, shown in Nosferatu in terrifying detail, is suggested by the much more elegant Lisa Fremont, whose vampirism has been toned down to the pursuit of a man who doesn’t want her. Hitchcock must have taken a malicious pleasure in putting the irresistibly seductive actress in the cinematographic frame of the terrifying vampire.

You can compare the two scenes:

Nosferatu at 30:45 / Rear Window at 16:00

THE MARRIAGE GROUP

Let’s look at the stories of the ‘marriage group’. They’re all bad–or they go bad. We’ve seen the salesman’s tale of woe in broad strokes. Next comes the young married couple. Things start well. They move into their apartment, he carries her across the threshold, they embrace passionately, close the curtains and are not seen for a while. Morning, two days later, the curtain rises and the bridegroom leans out the window in his pyjamas, yawns, still foggy from sleep and marital exertions. His wife calls to him in a pleading, pestering voice, “Haaarry!” His response shows that the edge is off his bliss.

But the serious marriage story is that of Jeffries himself. We know from the outset that he considers marriage a trap for a freedom-loving adventurer like himself. We learn that he has a lover. Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) is rich, high society and beautiful. She is after him. But he doesn’t want to marry, and he doesn’t want her. He’s bored with her, despises her values. She leads a life he couldn’t possibly share. She promises him a fashion photography business, wealthy customers, blue suits and ties. He doesn’t want any of it. She won’t let loose, even swallows some harsh put-downs. Telling her about the musician, he says, “He lives alone. Probably had a very unhappy marriage.” Lisa: “It’s enchanting. [the song] It’s almost as if he were writing it for us.” Jeff: “That’s probably why he’s having so much trouble with it.” Once she is drawn into the murder story, things change. She becomes his assistant, helps dig up the garden, breaks into Thorwald’s apartment, faces him down when he returns unexpectedly. Jeff is suddenly full of admiration for her pluck and daring. The last scene suggests they’re reconciled. Crime-solving has brought them together. (Woody Allen picked up this plot turn for Manhattan Murder Mystery. A wobbly marriage rescued by husband-wife crime-solving.) She reads a travel-adventure book but once Jeff falls asleep, out comes Harper’s Bazaar. So the source of trouble in their first round is still there. It’s a gesture like the final scene of To Catch a Thief, where Grace Kelly is also the repelled agressor courting the desirable male, Cary Grant. Hardly has he asked her to marry him on the veranda of his Villa above Nice, when she comments–last line of the film– “Mother will love it up here.” There goes his lone wolf existence.

Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal (1957)

Plagues and pandemics concentrate the mind. Imagine that you have a week or a month before you die rather than the ten, twenty, or fifty years you have been vaguely counting on. Practically speaking your planning gets urgent. But at another level, philosophy comes crashing in on you, and you ask, what have you accomplished? What was your life worth? Did it have any meaning? Is it too late for some last, redemptive act? Can I still leave behind “something that will endure”? Those were the words that pointed the abbess of Mei-Tan-Fu to her future as a plague nurse (“I do not think that you will die without having done something that will endure”—Maugham, The Painted Veil).

The Seventh Seal begins when Death (in person) comes to claim the knight Antonius Block and carry him away to the dark lands. He has returned from a ten-year pilgrimage to find the land ravaged by a plague that threatens to wipe out everyone. The knight puts Death off by challenging him to a game of chess. Death agrees. As long as the game lasts, he can live; if he wins, Death gives up his claim on him.

In a later scene we learn what is driving Block. He is opening his heart in a confessional. Unbeknownst to him, the confessor is not a priest, but rather Death. He tells him proudly that he is playing chess with Death and does so to gain time. Why do you want to do that, asks Death/the priest: “My life has been a futile pursuit, a wandering… without meaning… I will use my reprieve for one meaningful deed.”

He has his chance near the end of the film. He is about to lose the game; he is down to one or two moves. Death gives him the bad news and promises to take him and his travelling companions the next time they meet. The knight gains a little time by knocking over the chess pieces. While Death resets the board, the knight looks on while a family travelling with the knight sees the danger, and escapes. Block rescued them by his desperate gesture; this is his “one meaningful deed,” the redemptive act, performed in the face of death, that gives meaning to his otherwise senseless existence. Now he can give in to Death, who meets the travellers at the knight’s castle, and takes all of them.

The family whose escape he covers is a family of actors, Jof, Mia, and their baby Michael. Jof is not only an actor and juggler, but also a visionary. When we first meet him, early in the morning, the others asleep in their wagon which doubles as a travelling stage, he wanders into a meadow, suddenly his eyes widen, he is riveted by a vision. He looks entranced at a scene across the meadow: a young woman dressed like a queen with a crown, guides her baby through what must be his first steps. Music plays, angelic voices sing, a celestial choir. He looks away briefly, wipes the tears from his eyes, and when he opens them the vision is gone. He rushes to the wagon, wakes his wife:

Jof: Mia, wake up! I’ve just seen something!

Mia: What did you see?

Jof: The Virgin Mary.

Mia takes it with gentle irony. She’s used to his invented visions.

Jof: I can’t help it if voices speak to me, if the Holy Virgin appears before me and angels and devils like my company.

His visions come in handy in the end. Jof sees the knight playing chess with death (no one else does) and understands that their number is up. His vision is advanced warning, and they can make a getaway. They escape while Death rearranges the chess pieces. The knight watches them leave. Now he has his “one meaningful deed.” He has cheated Death and saved the life of the family.

The movie ends with another of Jof’s visions. They escaped in a desperate, terrified race through the storm-torn forest. They wake in the morning. They check to make sure they’re still alive. Jof looks at a distant hill and sees the knight and his company dancing along its rim “against the dark, stormy sky.” Death leads the dance carrying his scythe and hourglass:

Jof: “They dance away toward the dark lands, while the rain washes their faces and cleans the salt tears from their cheeks.”

Mia: “You and your visions.”

Jof shakes it off, and they go on their way. The day is bright, the road open, and the angelic choir sings, sweet harmony, major key. An upbeat ending.

So death wins, as always, but his main victim saves a family. Who is it he has saved, actually? Jof is short for Joseph; Mia for Mary. So Joseph, Mary and the baby survive because Block outwits Death. He has unwittingly saved the holy family, or a least a recasting of that family.

The Seventh Seal plays in two realities. The one is the real world, existence trying to save itself without any higher intention than to live on. This is the reality of the knight’s squire. The other is a transcendent reality, supernatural, with angels, devils, God and Jesus. (Jof: “my visions are of another kind of reality, not the one you see every day”). Antonius Block has a problem that none of the others have: he is suspended between the two. He is tortured by his inability to know whether or not God exists. He cannot maintain faith without proof, but his skepticism is not strong enough to root out the image of God:

Knight: What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe but aren’t able to? And what is to become of those who neither want to nor are capable of believing?… I want knowledge, not faith, not suppositions, but knowledge. I want God to stretch out his hand toward me, reveal himself and speak to me.

Death: but he remains silent.

Knight: I call out to him in the dark but no one seems to be there.

Death: Perhaps no one is there.

Knight: Then life is an outrageous horror. No one can live in the face of death, knowing that all is nothingness.

Death: Most people never reflect about either death or the futility of life.

He cannot live without a belief in God. But his quest for proof only turns up tantalizing suggestions that God exists: “Why can I never grasp God with the senses? Why should he hide himself in a mist of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles?” The reality of Bergman’s film is porous. It leaks hints of a higher reality that may or may not surround the one we live in.

The “holy” family of Jof, Mia and Michael is one of those glimmerings of another world and of a God revealed, well, hinted at, in this world. Jof’s visions of angels and devils show his credentials as a prophet of that other world, but he is ridiculous and easily dismissed. Those hints may be deceptive. They never harden into proof of the existence of God, but they are there holding would-be-believers in a state of uncertainty. Death is no help. He ought to know where he is leading the newly dead. But evidently not. Block has this exchange with Death at the end of the chess game:

Death: When we meet again, you and your companions’ time will be up.

Knight: And you will divulge your secrets.

Death: I have no secrets.

So, there’s nothing out there beyond death—no angels or devils, no afterlife, nothing to rescue the idea that human life is about something—at least as far as Death himself knows. But maybe Death doesn’t know everything. Some elusive hope always remains that life is not, in the way Block puts it, futile.

That is the existential crisis of this depressive, despairing character, the knight. Is God real? Or a product of the imagination? If he could give up God, he would be free, like his squire, to make a life in a reality without God. But without God life is intolerable for Block. Nothing will satisfy him other than seeing face-to-face. But he can only see “through a glass darkly.” A life based on unwavering faith would heal this crisis. But no one in the Seventh Seal (or in any of Bergman’s films) has that kind of faith.

That other world of Jesus, God and redemption, keeps sending out obscure, ambiguous signals that it exists. One last tantalizing reminder comes at the end of the film when Death enters the castle. The group gathers, and they hand themselves over passively. A mysterious girl, whom the knight’s squire rescued from a rapist-murderer-corpse-robber, has been with them for the entire pilgrimage, but has never spoken. As she sits at the knight’s table and listens to the exchange with death, she looks up behind her, at a tunnel-like circular window, which slowly fills with light as she watches. She is ecstatic at the sight; tears stream down her face; and finally says the only words she speaks in the film: “It is finished.” The miraculous light and the last words of Jesus on the cross in the mouth of a mute—final glimmerings of a universe that conceals God and only lets him shine through in brief moments? Or further tricks of a mindset that makes natural events into false proofs of a non-existent God?

Which is it? It’s enough to make an existentialist of the viewer. In one way, the world of Camus’s The Plague is more stable. Give up hope, and you can establish, on the basis of good acts, a life that now and then is good, as did Dr. Rieux. But the existentialist’s goodness and happiness are as contingent as the plague itself.

Antonius Block is too skeptical to believe. What he has to justify his life is “one meaningful deed,” an act of mercy and humanity. That will have to supply some meaning in the face of death, accomplish for Block what the abbess in Painted Veil accomplished, “something that will endure”: he rescues Mary, Joseph and the baby.

Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil (1925)

Another plague book. This one has taken me by surprise. It’s an excellent novel, one of the best by Maugham. In earlier years I read him a lot, but not Painted Veil until now. There is a movie version from 2006 starring Naomi Watts and Robert Norton. Well worth seeing. Watts is superb. The 1934 version with Greta Garbo is a complete bust.

The core of the story is set in a Chinese city, Mei-Tan-Fu (imaginary), about 500 miles from Hong Kong. Cholera is raging, “killing them like flies.” The bodies of the dead cannot be buried fast enough. Some lie in the streets. Death is “taking lives like a gardner digging up potatoes.” An English doctor and microbiologist is posted to the city by the colonial government. He is the city’s best hope for aiding the sick and ending the disease. A convent of French nuns cares for plague-stricken and orphans. The previous doctor/missionary died of the disease. The new doctor’s wife is forced to come along by circumstances. Her husband caught her in a love affair and her lover dumped her. The chances that both will die of cholera are high.

The doctor, Walter Fane, married Kitty Garstin after a short courtship. He is hopelessly in love with her and in a hurry, a bad combination. He is a researcher for the colonial government in Hong Kong and has come to London to find a wife. Kitty marries him though she doesn’t love or like him and finds him boring. Beautiful and charming but unmarried at 25 (and that means for an Englishwoman with social ambitions, desperate), Kitty accepts. A few weeks into her married life in Hong Kong, she falls in love with Charlie Townsend, a high government official. Two years into their marriage Walter discovers them in bed together.

He offers Kitty this deal: they stay married and she comes with him to Mei-Tan-Fu. She can come as his wife. Alternatively he will give her a quiet divorce on condition that Townsend write a letter promising to leave his wife and to marry Kitty. At first glance she’s delighted and opts for a new life with her lover. But Walter knows Townsend. He also knows that Kitty is foolish, shallow, trivial, clueless. Sure enough, Charlie cleaves, or continues to cleave, unto his wife, and leaves Kitty at the mercy of one of two unforgiving forces: society or her husband. Cholera being preferable to the social position of a dumped women, Kitty agrees to go with Walter. Given the dangers, it’s not clear to her whether this is a grudging acceptance of his wayward wife, or a suicide pact.

So, here is the set-up for the plague to intervene, show its face and work its effects on people placed in its force field—upturn their values, create character, illuminations, conversions, while the most probable possibility looms constantly: that the plague will settle their marital dilemma by killing one or the other or both. Walter seems indifferent to those options; one is as welcome to him as the other. He shows only contempt for Kitty and allows her to believe that he wants her dead and has brought her along for that purpose.

It’s different from Camus’s plague, which sets in like a season of the year and stays until it’s finished. Walter seeks out this plague, injects himself into it and drags his wife along. It becomes an instrument to settle his marital problems.

Some of the development is predictable: Walter, dull and ordinary in Kitty’s eyes, now shows a side she had not suspected before: strength, courage, character. He is positioned to save lives and even end the plague (which he does in the 2006 movie, but not in the novel). He has success caring for the sick; he improves conditions; his cholera research flourishes. He is admired by the townspeople and respected by the convent of French nuns in the city. Kitty is isolated and despised by her husband. She comes up against the emptiness of her character. Desperate to fill that vacuum, she visits the nuns, whose duty is to care for the sick and orphans.

The characters are impressive, complex (as opposed to Camus’s The Plague, where the characters are attitudes wearing clothes, being moved around like figures on some planning table in a war room). Maugham is much more interested in psychology, motivation, emotion.

Two memorable characters: Waddington, the government rep. in the city. At first impression, a comic little man, short and ugly, his life in a small remote colony made bearable by whiskey, opium and a Manchurian princess, who is unaccountably devoted to him, shares his life, had no other. (Kitty: “What does she do when you’re not here?” Waddington: “Nothing.” K: “What does she think about?” W: “Nothing.”) Waddington is the kind of man Kitty’s mother “would never have invited to dinner,” but he turns into a close friend to Kitty, a much more serious and wise character than at first glance.

The most impressive character is the French Abbess of the monastery, which is hospital, orphan shelter and ground zero of the epidemic. The mother superior “belongs to one of the greatest families in France”. In the 2006 film, the abbess is played by Diana Rigg—a brilliant bit of casting. Even in a nun’s habit she has aura and charisma: luminous eyes, wisdom and shrewdness in her expression, even a reminder of the young woman’s sensuality. The actress brings to life in a few brief shots this description by the novel’s narrator: “It was the eyes which gave her face its intense and tragic character. They were very large, black, and though not exactly cold, by their calm steadiness strangely compelling. But the most striking thing about her was the air she had of authority tempered by Christian charity; you felt in her the habit of command. She had a native dignity that inspired awe.” A comment of the abbess that stuck with me: she reminisces on a conversation years before when she told her mother of her plans to become a nun. Her mother says, “I do not think that you will die without having done something that will endure.” It wasn’t said in the context of facing a plague, but that’s where it resonates: the time separating you from the universal human death sentence is drastically shortened; you don’t endure, and your chance of doing something that does is running out. (It’s an issue in The Seventh Seal, my next plague story.) Kitty asks if she regrets giving up her worldly life. The abbess: “Never. I have exchanged a life that was trivial and worthless for one of sacrifice and prayer.”

Kitty has her secrets, and feels that the abbess sees right through her. The abbess refuses her offer to serve and help in the orphanage. Kitty insists. She fastens on to the monastery like a would-be convert nun turned away who won’t leave and prostrates herself at the door to the monastery. It is the place where she’ll find purpose and redemption. “She felt shut out not only from that poor little convent, but from some mysterious garden of the spirit after which with all her soul she hankered.” Kitty senses that service is the way to a new life. The convent becomes her lifeline. And so the plague turns into the staging ground of her maturing. This dangerous, self-sacrificing service for the orphans transforms her life into something it had never been: authentic, grounded in real human affection, in “compassion and charity.” The orphans love her in a way no one ever had and vice versa.

They love Walter too. Kitty, still spurned and put down by her husband, marvels at the affection he brings to his work and how he wins the love of those who benefit. “She knew now how immense was his capacity for loving.” He was showing the sick and dying what he no longer showed to her. She despised him earlier but now sees in him “a strange and unattractive greatness.” So the positive energies of marriage get projected on both sides onto the plague sufferers and the plague-threatened, while their marriage is poisoned and dying—except that she’s pregnant (the child is probably Charlie’s).

In the 2006 movie she wins back her husband’s affection. Not so in the novel. The movie has them reconcile; the book doesn’t. Walter dies of the plague, a hero and martyr to the city. Kitty wants to stay on, but the abbess sends her away with these words of wisdom: “The only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.”

The scenes in Mei-Tan-Fu amount to a kind of reverse Shangri-La, the utopian setting of the 1937 film, Lost Horizon turned diabolic and murderous. But the plague city of Mei-tan-fu, like Shangri-La, has a transformative power over the people who live in its holocaust: the one is celestial; the other terrifying. The result of both is rediscovery of a lost or hidden sense of human worth.

Maugham’s language and voice change in the plague scenes. In many passages he slips into a lyrical mode that is very unusual for Maugham, whose voice is generally ironic and detached. The landscape descriptions, the monument at the entry to the cemetery (an arch to “a virtuous widow”) create a sense of mystery and buddhistic other-world without being clichéd (“the mysterious East”). Some will find the lush language overdone (I don’t).

Also unusual, in fact I believe unique, for Maugham is the role of the Christian ethos of the community of nuns. It is what Kitty gains from the experience. It remains with her as a grounding force in her life.

Kitty returns to Hong Kong, where she implausibly accepts an invitation from Charlie Townsend’s wife to stay with them. Where is the newly grounded, self-aware woman, who ought to feel how grotesque it would be to stay with her former lover’s family? Sure enough, after a couple days, Charlie shows up, first romances her, then rapes her. She gives in after resisting. Worth reading it for its ambiguity and the psychology of her motives (chapter 75).

But the rape also sobers her up. The next day she reviles Charlie (too bad the movie didn’t include this scene. I’d love to see Naomi Watts play it) and leaves for England. The rest is far more complex and interesting than the short-circuit that ends the 2006 movie. But the lasting effect of her transformation/education during the plague is her plan to raise her child: “I’m going to bring up my daughter so that she’s free and can stand on her own feet. I’m not going to bring a child into the world, and love her, and bring her up, just so that some man may want to sleep with her so much that he’s willing to provide her with board and lodging for the rest of her life.” She will live the life of “compassion and charity” that she learned from the nuns. The last lines of the book: “Perhaps her faults and follies, the unhappiness she had suffered, were not entirely vain if she could follow the path that now she dimly discerned before her, not the path that kind funny old Waddington had spoken of that led nowhere [the “Tao”], but the path those dear nuns at the convent followed so humbly, the path that led to peace.”

Camus, The Plague

I’m reading plague fiction at the moment. If you wonder why anyone would read plague literature in the middle of a huge pandemic, you have lots of company. But I imagine also others see value in aligning your reading with your experience, even if it’s really bad experience. Here are some thoughts on The Plague by Albert Camus (1947).The Plague is currently ranked # 143 on the Amazon Best Sellers rank. That’s very high. So I think others find the kind of consolation that I do in reading of tragic/catastrophic events while they’re happening in reality. Read it and compare Camus’s plague with our pandemic.

It’s a harsh, ruthless story. It doesn’t spare you any of the physical suffering, fear, terror, despair, loss, grief that a major pandemic causes. It is unsentimental. It has no explanation to offer for the plague. The sickness appears without any reason, just a blind, deadly force, and it leaves without any explanation. Mysterious and terrifying. That’s probably one reason why Camus conceived the plague the way he did: it had no meaning. It was not God-sent; not caused by humans; it was completely irrational, illogical, absurd. That means that the characters had to peal away any and all conceptions, convictions, illusions that humans might invoke to explain it: religion, history, politics (some say, it’s an anti-Fascist book, where the plague stands for the Nazi occupation of France). The plague makes human life seem pointless and absurd.The characters are challenged to find some justification for existence. The usual ideas exalting human life don’t work. This book asks, why are you alive, anyway, and why should you help others stay alive? Camus’s thoughts on the justification of life in a world that has gone absurd make the book worthwhile, even have some affirming force in our present situation.

A cholera epidemic hits the city of Oran, Algeria, lasts the better part of a year, and reduces the population (250,000 at the time) by about 1/3. Everything gets closed, the city, the stores, the schools etc. Social distancing evidently wasn’t discoered yet. The story is seen through the eyes of a doctor, Bernard Rieux, who has no heroic vision of his work during the plague. He’s just a doctor, doing his duty, not a hero or a martyr. He spends the entire plague time tending to the sick and dying. Rieux: “There’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency… The only means of fighting a plague is common decency.” Rieux works 20-hour days, experiences the worst: family members begging him to save their loved ones, then reviling him when they die; patients “refusing to die,” then promptly dying; friends and relatives disappearing from one day to the next.

He’s never infected himself. He sees people stricken and dying without any selection: young and old, the good, kind, loving, hateful. The plague acts without any sense of intention, without reason, logic, without a good and loving God working out purposes that humans can’t understand.

Rieux forms teams of volunteers to help with the grim, dangerous job of managing the consequences of the plague. Many volunteer. That’s the form in which conversion happens in the plague-stricken world. Helping the sick becomes one of the moving forces in the novel. Everything the story affirms is in the efforts to save life and minimize the effects of the plague.

The author might have had it in for a religious view of the causes of the plague. A young priest, Father Paneloux, preaches a sermon. Its theme, “The plague has hit you. You deserve it! It’s punishment for sinfulness.” But as the disease spreads and completely discredits his idea that it’s aimed at evil people, Paneloux joins Rieux’s volunteers. He works at the quarantine station where the sick are isolated from the healthy, an especially nasty posting (tents set up in the city football stadium; ghastly, but not the worst of the jobs for which volunteers are needed).

Panelous is present at the death of a child, the son of a city official. The boy has cholera. It’s far along, but is still at the point where it could be stopped. A local doctor has developed a serum from antibodies taken from the recovered sick. There’s hope it could end the plague. Rieux decides to try it out on the young boy. He’s injected. It’s an excruciating scene, lots at stake: the life of the boy, the value of the serum, victory over the disease. Rieux and his associates are present, so is the priest Paneloux, and the boy’s father. The scene lasts for hours; they watch hopefully for every change in the boy’s condition. At the moment of the worst suffering, Paneloux falls on his knees, and prays, “My God, spare this child.” The boy dies. The serum doesn’t work. Instead of curing, it prolongs the suffering. Rieux mocks the priest for his belief. Paneloux, deeply shaken, says that he now understands what Grace is, a mystifying comment. He throws himself into the work of caring for the sick. In his last sermon he tells the story of a monastery in a plague. All the monks either flee or die. Only one stays behind to help the dying and bury the dead. “Bringing down his fist on the edge of the pulpit, Paneloux cried in a ringing voice: ‘My brothers, each of us must be the one who stays’.” Paneloux dies soon after this. The dead boy’s father, a high city official, becomes a regular volunteer at the stadium.

Another convert is Rambert. He’s a journalist who got caught inside when the city gates were closed and no one allowed in or out. All he wants is to get out. He has a wife waiting for him in Paris. He has arranged an escape by bribing two of the guards at the gate. But when he watches the boy die, he changes his mind; decides to stay and help Rieux. He says he’d always be ashamed of himself if he left.

So all the sources of self-worth are cut off, except fighting against the plague, helping the sick. It seems that the only life well-lived is one without any illusions, without any hope, just motivated by unquestioning, self-sacrificing opposition to the plague and support of the living. Rieux and his friends have one thing they’re certain of: “They had to fight and not give in in any way. The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying. There was only one course of action: to fight the plague.”

It turns out that that course of action calls up a special strength and courage in the citizens that was not there before the plague. It also calls up a special, intense form of love. A married couple, living together for many years, grown indifferent to each other, “realize that they can’t live without one another, and in the sudden glow of this discovery the risk of plague seemed insignificant.”

“Sons who had lived beside their mothers hardly giving them a glance fell to picturing with poignant regret each wrinkle in the absent face .”

Tarrou (Rieux’s closest friend and co-worker): “What interests me is learning to be a saint.” Rieux: “To become a saint, you need to live. So fight away!” Tarrou dies of plague while fighting it. Rieux has seen the worst, but comes away with an affirmation of life he hadn’t felt before: “On the whole, men are more good than bad.”

A scene when the plague has ended seems to summarize the : Rieux walks through the streets, crowded with people celebrating, couples who had been separated over a year, eating drinking, celebrating, hugging, kissing, making love. He wonders about the meaning of the disease: “He was thinking it has no importance whether such things have or have not a meaning; all we need to consider is the answer given to men’s hope. Now for some time they would be happy. They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, it is human love.”

The end of the novel sums up: “Dr. Rieux resolved to write this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in people than to despise.”

It’s not a very satisfying ending, but what do you want? It’s existentialism. Life is absurd, but you have to live it with courage and love. Living is like the punishment of Sisyphus: just keep rolling the rock, and smile occasionally when you get to the top.

Now I’m on to Somerset Maugham’s novel, The Painted Veil (also cholera). Stay tuned. There’s an excellent recent movie version starring Robert Norton and Naomi Watts (2006).