Tarjei Vesaas | The Birds / 2016

the profundity of a simple life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tarjei Vesaas The Birds, translated into English by Michael Barnes and Torbjørn Støverud (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2016)

 

This last week, for the third time over the past 40 years, I read the great Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas’ novel The Birds. I can definitively tell you, despite the Columbia Encyclopedia’s egregious entry on Vesaas, it was nothing at all to do with Alfred Hitchcock’s movie of the same name.

       In fact, there is only one bird in the book, a woodcock, which swoops down for two nights upon the small lakeside cottage where the major character, Mattis, and his hard-working sister, Hege live. The shooting of the bird by a local boy is quite devastating for the mentally challenged man. Although he is, as he himself knows, not one of the “clever” ones, he is, nonetheless, very much in touch with the natural world, and the bird’s death is like a terrifying totem for him, as he ceremonially buries it under a rock. That event, along with a lightning strike of one of two trees standing outside their home, trees which the locals have dubbed, just as the nearby inhabitants, Mattis and Hege, troubles the obviously superstitious man.

     Although he cannot think very clearly, Vesaas’ figure thinks, throughout this book, a great deal, attempting to comprehend not only the confusing world around him but the problems he is facing with his own thoughts. The author’s simple poetic Ny Norsk (new Norwegian) phrases, in fact, reveal just how complex such a “simpleton” truly is as human being.  

      By comparison, Hege, who spends most of her day knitting sweaters to support herself and her brother, seems to have no time for thinking, and acts far more compulsively that Mattis. Indeed, it is on a compulsion that she suggests—almost as one my try to imagine an activity for a troublesome child—that he take his boat to the other side of the nearby lake to see if someone might what to be ferried back. She almost immediately regrets it, realizing that no one lives on the other side and that Mattis’ boat badly leaks. Yet he is so eager to “help” that Mattis immediately sets about repairing the boat, having just the previous day encountered two lovely women tourists who, instead of mocking him as do the locals, spoke to him as if he were a normal human being.

     Amazingly, after rowing the distance back and forth several times, he does encounter a logger who wants to be taken to the other side. Indeed the woodsman needs somewhere to stay, and he immediately is taken into their home. Thus begins a series of events wherein Hege and their guest Jørgen gradually fall in love.

      At first, their relationship is covert, but gradually Mattis notices the change that has overcome his sister, hearing her laugh for the first time in years and observing the flushes that cross her face. Over a period of weeks, he ponders the new situation, feeling at once left out of their world but also standing in the way of his sister’s happiness.

      Narrating the book primarily from Mattis’ point-of-view, Vesaas seldom states anything, but shows through actions and simple metaphors what is going on in Mattis’ head. One scene, where the central character becomes terrified in a thunderstorm finally results in a kind showdown between the two men. As the storm comes up, Mattis stops in his ferrying, returning to shore:

 

                Up at the tope he saw Jørgen toing into the house. Had

                he had an accident in the forest? Didn’t look like it.

                Jørgen hadn’t gone to the forest yet, was at home with

                Hege when he should be at work.

                    Things are in a real mess, Mattis thought. Jørgen

                doesn’t feel trees and Hege doesn’t knit sweaters. I’ll

                soon be the only one here who does any work.

 

Terrified by the continual rumbling of the lighting, Mattis would like to return to the house, but realizes that it is best not to. He runs instead to an out building, jamming his fingers into his ears like a terrified child. But soon finds that Jørgen is standing outside the door, demanding that he come out.

 

                  Jørgen shouted: “Do I have to come in and drag you out!

                  Out with you now, Mattis!

                      What was going on? Jørgen was almost unrecognizable.

                  Drag you out, he said, making it impossible to stay. Outside

                  the thunder was crashing so violently that Mattis’ face

                  turned pale and his legs felt limp, but he had to go out now

                  all the same—or there’d be nothing left of him. And all

                  because Jørgen stood there calling.

                        “I’m coming!” he shouted through the door.

                        He undid the hook and his eyes were almost blinded by

                  a flash of lightning as he opened the door, it seemed to get

                  right inside him—but he walked across the threshold and

                  out onto the grass. There was a crash of thunder overhead.

                  The rain had held off so far.

                        He hardly realized where he was—but there was

                  Jørgen, standing right in front of him. His eyes were half-

                  blinded, he saw Jørgen through a mist, and farther away

                  he could just make out Hege standing in the doorway. She

                  was gesticulating and waving to Jørgen, looked as though

                  she was trying to make him stop—wanted Mattis to be  

                  spared this ordeal.

                        “Here I am!” Marris announced simply, and stepped

                  forward. All feeling had gone from his legs. We walked

                  straight toward Jørgen who had stepped back a little. The

                  lightning flashed again.

                       “What is it you want, Jørgen?”

 

     In this short passage, we can see how the author uses basically simply words, repetitions, and nature itself to show a tumultuous change in Mattis’ world, the intrusion of a man who, at moments, treats him even more than Hege, as a child.

     Much of the fiction centers on Mattis’ attempts to behave as a normal adult, although he fails again and again. Now we realize that Mattis will be infantilized even further by the relationship between his sister and the stranger.

     He has no choice, he perceives but to disappear, and purposely scuttles his small boat, a few days later, in the lake, drowning with a cry, Vesaas tells us, like that of a strange bird. The simpleton’s life, so the author shows us, is actually quite profound.

 

Los Angeles, July 1, 2016

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Vol. 21, no. 4, Winter 2016).

Shelagh Delaney | A Taste of Honey / 1959

thieves of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shelagh Delaney A Taste of Honey (New York: Grove Press, 1959)

 
Superficially, Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play, A Taste of Honey, appears to be one with the so-called “kitchen sink” works such as the plays of John Osborne and Arnold Wesker, works that portrayed the poverty-stricken surroundings of their characters upon the British stage.

      Moreover, Delaney came to be associated with the lower, middle-class writers of the so-called “Angry Young Men” of the 1950s.

      Most of this play, indeed, occurs in a cold-water flat in poor area of Manchester, both of the work’s major characters, Jo and her mother, Helen suffering from flu and colds. There is much made of tea-making and the few sweets brought into the flat, surrounded by—as Jo describes it late it the play—a river the color of lead and gangs of filthy children:

 
                           There’s a little boy there and his hair, honestly, it’s
                           walking away. And his ears. Oh! He’s a real
                           mess! He never goes to school. He just sits on
                           that front doorstep all day. I think he’s a bit
                           deficient.

 

     The same might be said for Jo herself, who as the play begins, announces to her mother that she is dropping out of school again, and who, throughout much of the play, passively sits on the couch or takes hot baths. The first paragraph of the script describes Helen as “a semi-whore,” who has just rented the “comfortless flat” without even consulting with her daughter. Throughout much of the play Helen swigs down whiskey. And Jo, herself, describes their quarters as a “pigsty.” It is almost as if Delaney has set up the perfect situation for the drunken declarations and bitter recriminations of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.

      What a wonderful surprise, accordingly, to discover a play that is less a social commentary than a dialogic comedy of survival. Again, what might appear to be vicious anger is, just below the surface, a witty dual between two individuals who desperately desire but are unable to express their love. Both women scold and spar with one another endlessly, disclaiming any concern for each other:

 
       helen: ….Pass me that bottle—it’s in the carrier.
       jo: Why should I run round after you? [Takes whisky bottle from bag.]
       helen: Children owe their parents these little attentions.
       jo: I don’t owe you a thing.

 

      So too, does Helen feel, evidently, little responsibility for her daughter, caring little whether she comes or goes, has food to eat or clothes upon her back. At times she even vaguely threatens violence, usually in memory of her own mother’s behavior. On the surface it appears that a storm is brewing.

      Yet we soon discover that it is all bluff. I have seen only the film version of this play, which seemed to take the characters’ bickering far too seriously. I would direct it as the kind of British dance hall acting that Helen imitates. It is all an act, a way for the two to protect themselves from the surrounding terrors. Both women are, in fact, too passive to actually penetrate each other’s or anyone else’s defenses. And neither is truly aggressive enough to make anything of their lives, let alone affect others.

       You might describe both Helen and Jo as a pair of thieves, each stealing tiny bits of delight, as if—as the title suggests—occasionally dipping into a honeypot. In the very first scene, Jo is determined to replant her flower bulbs, stolen from a park: “The gardener had just planted about two hundred. I didn’t think he’d miss half a dozen.” Later in the play she reads a magazine, borrowed from a neighbor.

      Helen, in turn, “steals” men, having had what appears to have been a one night stand with Jo’s father before marrying her first husband. She has had several “long-time” lovers since, one of whom the young Jo had been overly fond of.

 

       I thought he was the only man I’d ever love in my
       life and then he ran off with that landlady’s daughter.

 

The highpoint of the play for Helen is a marriage proposal from her current boyfriend, Peter, after which Jo temporarily steals his billfold, flirtingly requiring him to reveal the names and relationships of the women in its contents.

      For such a passive woman, it is almost amazing that Jo discovers real, if transitory, love with a black sailor. Although he vows his devotion, he too steals from her, since he is about to ship out, and she is left unmarried, expecting his child. Yet even here, the play does not turn tragic, as she finds—what might again metaphorically be described as stealing—another man’s devotion, Geoffrey, a homosexual art student who is only too ready to take on the job as comforter and wet-nurse. For the first time in the play, Geoffrey’s presence brings some order to the flat, along with real food and assurances that sound almost like love.

      Even this brief “taste of honey” is quickly interrupted with the return of Helen, whose husband has apparently left her—or she him, as she seems determined to help her grandchild into the world. Behind Jo’s back she dismisses the devoted Geoffrey, but upon Jo’s revelation that the child will be Black, abandons the house for the local bar just as Jo bends in the pain of her first contractions. Yet even the possible bleakness of this scene, combined with the racist epithets with which Helen has just let loose, leaves us feeling less depressed than sadly bemused. We are assured that Helen will return, that the baby will not be “drowned” or given away, but will be raised in the squalor of their mostly-empty lives. For these women, taking on the most unconventional and disreputable behavior of the day—open sexuality, prostitution, miscegenation, homosexuality—are hardy survivors who through their dark comedic visions will always find, from time to time, a sweet they might consume.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2013).

Robin Lane Fox | Augustine: Conversions to Confessions / 2015

a very human saint

 

Robin Lane Fox Augustine: Conversions to Confessions (New York: Basic Books, 2015)

 

Robin Lane Fox’s Augustine: Conversions to Confessions is an informative, highly scholarly, and, at 657 pages, voluminous evaluative study of the great Christian thinker of the third century AD. But it is also a history of Augustine’s times, concentrating almost equally on what Fox describes as a “triptych”—like those on “a medieval Christian altar”—Augustine’s younger Greek-speaking contemporary Synesius (a Christian bishop and philosopher) and Libanius, born years earlier, devoted, like Augustine, to oratory, who remained a pagan.

      Both Synesius and Augustine, as Fox makes clear throughout his work, left us versions of the “confessional” genre (Synesius’ confessions far more self-justifying and impenitent), a tradition that perhaps grew out of Petronius’ bawdy Satyricon, while Libanius composed in the form of complex philosophical hymns (which could not match Augustine’s beloved more simple psalms). Yet how their contributions to their chosen genres differed and how their oratorical and philosophical views varied helps to reveal Augustine’s immense importance and explains his continued influence—even if within his own lifetime the holy man did not see that work widely read.

       Fox also permits us to comprehend just how important the North African Christian communities in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and other such countries, before the later Arab conquering of the region, were to the early development of Christianity.

       And, most importantly, the author brilliantly details Augustine’s slow transformative conversion expressed in the Confessions as “what I once was” and “what I am now.”

       Augustine was born in the small town of Thagaste in what is now modern Algeria—where he was baptized by his mother Monnica as a Christian, which would ultimately determine his path of life—and became attracted to the theories of Mani, the Iranian prophet, who argued for a vision of the world as existing in a condition of equally powerful forces for good and evil, symbolized by the light and the dark. Although many of its values shared much with Christianity, even believing that Jesus was the embodiment of the light—Mani, himself, declaring himself to be an apostle of Christ—the Manicheans did not believe in the divine birth, and in their dualities of dark and light gave much more emphasis to the evil in the human soul than did Christianity. Moreover, in the East, in particular, the Manicheans also adopted aspects of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Indian Hindu and other traditions. And its believers rejected, as well, the biblical psalms and the entire Acts of the Apostles (later to become some of the most important texts for Augustine) because of the idea that the “Holy Spirit” had supposedly been bestowed upon Christians at Pentecost.

      The Manichean tradition of personal confession in the traditions of its “hearers” (something, perhaps, more akin to today’s Scientologists auditors) later influence Augustine’s own Confessions—an idea, however, that Fox does not fully explore.

      What Fox does show us is how not only Mani’s beliefs, but Cicero’s writings, and Platonism influenced Augustine’s gradual movement toward Christianity. Perhaps just as importantly was his mother, Monnica’s determination to see her son’s conversion to Catholicism, as well, of course, Augustine’s own struggles against his human lust. The man clearly loved sex and was committed to marriage before, as Fox brilliantly reveals Augustine’s retreat “Into the Garden,” where the former orator determined to “let it be done now,” fell back, and fought with himself and God in giving up sexual acts, finally recognizing that it was Adam’s sin that was behind all human failings: “Grant me chastity and continence,” he prays to God, “but not yet.”

      The words of the apostle Paul—“not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and shamelessness, not in contention and rivalry but, put on the Lord Jesus Christ and no provision for the flesh in its lusts”—finally brought on Augustine’s transformation, which led to his Christian conversion. And it was his celibacy, Fox makes clear, that allowed the later Bishop of Hippo to inform and deepen his thought.

      The rest of the story reads almost like an exciting soap opera, as, Augustine moves from oratory to philosophy and Christian thinking, is influenced by Ambrose and other great churchmen, begins writing, and moves back to North Africa where he is eventually raised into a position as a co-bishop. Enemies claim sexual intrigues, based on his former Manichean beliefs—the utterly flabbergasting tale of the supposedly Manichean activity of engaging in sexual activity on a floor sprinkled over with flour, after which, disengaging from sex at the very last moment, the male masturbates into the flour, later baking it into a bread to be sent off to a would-be female lover, reads like something out of a soft- porno thriller—all help to make the great saint a very human figure who certainly did not live a sheltered or totally sacred life, which is, obviously, why we still read Augustine today.  As history Susanna Elm writes, in this book “Augustine emerges fully as a man of his very own time, the later Roman empire….”

      And finally, of course, Fox’s book excites one, all over again, to read Augustine’s Confessions as one of the great texts of the centuries. It is, after all, a genre that has never quite been conceived the way he did. Yes, his is an autobiography, a memoir of sorts, but it is, as Fox makes clear, also a testimony of the self in abnegation of a sinful past and a kind of prayer for a more perfect future.

     Given my own multi-volume commitment to a far less sacred kind of testimony of the times, how could I not read this book with immense admiration of this important Third-century thinker?

 

Los Angeles, October 14, 2016

Reprinted from Reading with My Lips (September 28, 2024).

Julien Gracq | Le Roi Cophetua (King Cophetua) / 2003

how things are

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julien Gracq Le Roi Cophetua, translated from the French as King Cophetua by Ingeborg M. Kohn (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2003)

 

King Cophetua is one of those wonderful fictions which call up more questions than they answer, a work that so involves the reader that he or she will find it difficult to transform the experience of reading into an easy analysis or summarization of the text. In short, the sensuous pleasure of  reading this work is at one with the meaning of the work, and one feels one could easily return to the text with little diminution of that enjoyment.

     In Gracq’s short work the focus, indeed, is all upon the senses: the appearance of the small, northern French village, Braye-la-Forét, to where the narrator has been lured, its grey-dark and green buildings and surrounding forests, the feeling of the intense wind and storm, the smells of the wet soil and nearby ocean, and the sounds of that storm and distant gun-fire of the war. So evocative are Gracq’s descriptions (not realistic, necessarily, but poetically charged) that I found myself in that blissful situation of willingly reading many pages several times!

      The story is nearly invisible, in fact, is so transparent that it has little substance. A man who has fought and been injured in the “Great” War feels all of the fatigue of the years of battle. Living in wartime Paris, he is invited to the country by a long-time friend, an experimental composer and aviator, Jacques Nueil, to visit his villa. A somewhat dandyish figure who reminds the narrator of a time before the war (of Apollinaire’s poems, of the stories of the gentleman-thief Arsène Lupin, and of images of Mauriace Chevalier with his fashionable sailor hat “set jauntily over one eye”), Nueil, a “voisin” (neighborhood) pilot fighter, has been granted leave and will meet him there on the afternoon of All Saints’ Day.

      As the storm brews, blowing piles of dead leaves across the lawns of the villa, the narrator awaits the arrival of Nueil. As night comes on, the guest, left in Nueil’s studio by the servant girl, begins to hear the far-off sounds of warfare. His emotions—alternating between the excitement stirred up by the sounds and smells of the storm and the despair and terror he feels in the distant flashes of bombs exploding and volleys of cannons—exhausts him as he sits alone in his host’s house, attempting to makes sense of the invitation and events of the day. The mix of sounds of tree branches scraping against the house, the raging storm and the sound of distant gunfire calls up an image of Goya’s La Mala Noche, which seems to parallel his feelings:

 

                   La mala noche…. These words came to mind, opening up

                   a stream of thoughts. In the trembling twilight of the candles,

                   images slipped in and out without resistance; suddenly, the

                   memory of an etching by Goya blotted out all others. Against

                   the dark background of black graphite, two women emerge

                   from a stormy night: one black form, the other white. What is

                   happening on that lonely moor, in the middle of that moonless

                   night: Sabbath—kidnapping—infanticide? All the forbidden,

                   disputed elements of this nocturnal meeting seem to have taken

                   cover underneath the heavy, billowing skirts of the child ravisher’s

                   black silhouette, and in her shadowed face with its Mongolian,

                   impassible traits and slanted, heavy-lidded eyes. But the light

                   of the limestone which sharply outlines the white silhouette

                   against the night, and the furious wind blowing a light-colored

                   petticoat high up on her hips, revealing perfect legs, wind that

                   whips her veil like a flag and outlines the draped contours of a

                   shoulder and a charming head, are entirely the forces of desire.

 

The combination, indeed, of the forces of nature, beauty, terror and desire—all silhouetted, hidden, confused, interfused—become the themes of this novella, as the narrator sinks into the silence of the house and experiences a time apart from the world which he has temporarily escaped.

     He realizes at last that his host will not be returning that night, that he is left alone in this strangely unfurnished, museum-like home with the servant girl, whom it suddenly flashes upon him, perhaps, is a servant-mistress of the master of the house. 

     The girl leads him into the dining room where he is served dinner. As he observes her silent ceremonies of serving the food in a nearby mirror, he begins to feel an excitement in her very presence: “whenever she approached to serve me, even at a distance from the faint yet vital warmth of her bare arm, I instantly felt a burning sensation on the back of my hand.”

     When she momentarily leaves the room, he rises to look more closely at the only image hung upon the walls—the second picture that dominates Gracq’s tale—King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones’ version of which hangs in the Tate Gallery). The image is based on the ancient tales of the African king who, apparently, disdained women (“From natures lawes he did decline, / For sure he was not of my minde, / He cared not for women-kind”) until one day, upon glimpsing a barefoot beggar-girl dressed in grey, he fell suddenly in love with her and asked her to marry him.

      Mentioned in several Shakespeare plays, set to poetry by Lord Alfred Tennyson and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, this story is also sometimes cited as a source for the Pygmalion myth used by George Bernard Shaw, and is even referred to by Agatha Christie in the novel The Body in the Library as the “Cophetua syndrome,” a malady that strikes the upper-class Englishman who becomes infatuated with a working-class girl.

    That is generally what happens in Gracq’s work, for as the evening progresses the narrator becomes more and more agitated, temporarily escaping the house, and returning to the village to discern whether a message has been left in the post office. But after ringing the bell, which no one answers, he is left with no choice but to return to the villa, where he is led silently upstairs by the girl into her bed.

     In Gracq’s version, the girl is, like the figure in the Goya painting, all in silhouette, her long black hair almost indistinguishable from her dress, her face turned away from him, even in their sexual embraces. Only after they fall asleep and he awakens to watch her, does he have the opportunity to look into her face.

     Upon rising in the morning, he escapes the house to a nearby café for coffee, realizing that a “parenthesis had closed, but it left in its wake something tender and burning inside of me that only time could erase.” Even in the last line, “and I thought that today, all day long, it would still be Sunday,” we are unsure whether or not he will return to the house and resume his relationship or perceive it as simply an enlivening episode in an otherwise fatigued life.         

    As I suggested previously, more questions arise than are answered. Had Nueil intended to show up? Has he been killed in battle? The narrator even seems to ponder—quickly dismissing the idea—that perhaps Nueil (as Herminien brought his lover Heide for his friend’s approval in Gracq’s The Castle of Argol) has planned for the encounter between the narrator and servant.

     One thing seems to be clear: despite her near total silence and subservient position throughout, the serving girl apparently is in complete control. Twice, the narrator recognizes in her demeanor an acceptance of things “as they are,” almost imagines her speaking:, “This is how things are.” Even here, however, we wonder, is this a justification for his sexual encounter? Although she seems to have been a willing participant, has she simply acquiesced to an act over which she recognizes she has no control?  In a sense, the story is not at all about the male “conquerors,” in either their wartime battles or their sexual encounters, but concerns the silent woman and the power she holds within which keeps her apart from the would-be conquerors of her heart. As in several of Gracq’s works, there is an unsettling homoerotic element in the heterosexual act; as the narrator observes the sleeping woman, he is overwhelmed not as much by her presence as by Nueil’s:

 

               Suddenly, I visualized quite clearly the loaded airplane flying in

               the midst of its roar high up in the starry night, its course charted

               by readings of the earth down below punctured by fires and lined

               like a map by the criss-cross network of piano strings—the dust-

               encrusted bulk of the pilot, barely awake, wrapped in his shawls

               and furs, the face illuminated from below, not so much by the

               lights of the instrument panel as by the fixed image of that woman,

               appeasing yet cruel, perhaps the only image where she could

               again take shape and live only for him.

 

In Gracq’s mysteriously sensuous world, men seem to enjoy sex most fully only through the eyes of their fellow men. Man, in short, is an eternal outsider to his own sexual appetites, and, accordingly, is never truly at home with the pleasures of life.

     What does that, in turn, say about the very causes of war and the suffering which results? Perhaps if men could find a home within which, like Nueil’s servant, to live peacefully with “how things are,” they would not need to destroy others in their searches and struggles for satisfaction. If the narrator has found, at least, a temporary peace, we recognize that time will eventually erase it and the war resume.

 

 

Los Angeles, December 16, 2006

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (October 2008).