Three Books I Will Never Buy

On a recommendation from a recent acquaintance, I drove out to Middleburg last Friday. It's very quaint and sweet in the same way Cape Cod and Concord are, but Virginia style, and a little more upscale. There are some real pretty horse farms and vineyards along the way, which I found to be a surprisingly welcome respite from the city. I am so not a city girl. Anyway, although every store in town prices its merchandise far beyond my humble reach, I did enjoy browsing, and just looking at all the pretty things. In the back room of a shop, which mostly sold imported Italian pottery and over-priced table linens, I found some books. I found some very silly books, as a matter of fact -- books I will never buy:

1. $180 leather-bound blank scrap book
2. The Chic Shopper's Guide to Paris
3. A History of Underwear Fashion in Detail

Yikes.

Idols and Ideals in Love

(Spoiler alert: I give away the endings of some of the books I talk about in this post.)

Ah, but I miss her.
All I have is a picture of her.
It was taken years ago,
I was a kid, you know,
Just leanin' up against that El Dorado.

All of you bluegrass folk music fans out there probably recognize these lyrics from Old Crow Medicine Show's "My Good Gal." I was listening to them last week, and realized how well this song seems to fit into what I've been trying to write about. How are we supposed to draw the line between making an ideal out of love and our beloved, and being a cynic about the impossibility of love? Are we supposed to believe all the poems and songs and movies that talk about how powerful it is, how eternal it is, how transforming and beatific it is? Or, if we see other people who believe all that, perhaps we should shake our heads and say, wow, you poor dumb suckers, and walk away as the "sadder but wiser" participants in the game. I suppose I'm not the only one to wonder, as it seems that just about every book I've read during the last month or so seems to have quite a bit to say on the subject. But perhaps I should start further back than that.

The play I directed last year was Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. If you aren't familiar with it, it's about a man whom everyone thought to be outstanding and perfect, intelligent and kind, and who turns out to have a less-than-perfect past. His wife is a woman of high moral character and unyielding principles. When she discovers his history, it almost destroys their marriage. The scene of discovery has some of the most poignant lines of the play, words that choked me up almost every time I heard my students deliver them.

Lady Chiltern: You were to me something apart from common life, a thing pure, noble, honest, without stain. The world seemed to me finer because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived. And now -- oh, when I think that I made of a man like you my ideal! the ideal of my life!

photo courtesy of Maria Cross

Sir Robert Chiltern: There was your mistake. There was your error. The error all women commit. Why can't you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men: but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hand, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us -- else what use is love at all? ... Women think that they are making ideals of men. What they are making of us are false idols merely. You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage to come down, show you my wounds, tell you my weaknesses. I was afraid I might lose your love, as I have lost it now... Let women make no more ideals of men! let them not put them on altars and bow before them, or they may ruin other lives as completely as you -- you whom I have so wildly loved -- have ruined mine! (43-44, Dover Thrift Editions)

Certainly, we can agree with Sir Robert that women make ideals of men. Young women are in love with love, and, when they find an object (and I say object though I am talking about a man, for he is functionally an object in the worst of these cases) which can supposedly carry the weight of all their fairy tales, well, they get used to the idea that this is it. This is "the perfect guy," the one who will "make all their dreams come true". It's natural that every woman should assume that she will be the one to have the perfect life, because really, with any amount of self-respect, we recognize that we are worthy of perfection and so expect that we will have it. That's a good thing, stemming from a sense of our dignity and worth and our privileged place in creation. And when we find that guy who makes the world seem like a better place, a finer world, who makes goodness seem more real merely by the fact of his existence, it's easy to get carried away and decide that yes, here is the perfection for which I was made.

Where I disagree with Sir Robert is that men love women knowing all of their faults. Perhaps in some cases that is true, but certainly not in every case. It's a two-way street; men are not immune from making ideals of the women they love. For instance, the concept of medieval love, which was by no means localized or specific to a certain place or story, was all about the man pedestalizing the woman whom he didn't actually know. Think about Dante and Beatrice, or Arcite and Palamon falling in love with Emily in The Canterbury Tales. (There's an impressive passage in Neville Coghill's introduction to Chaucer that talks about the intensity of this practice -- thanks Joe Swope for the reminder.) And in the Old Crow song up at the top, guess what happens with his "El Dorado"?

And she don't have the courtesy
To shut the door
when she's been playin' whore
Don't wanna see his rags piled on the floor.

My good gal ain't no good to me
And I only wish that she could see
That I miss her...

I drove her out of town,
And I shot her down,
And I left her there in the cold, cold ground.

El Dorado, huh? Bad for her, bad for him. For a little more development on this idea, let's look at Jay Gatsby. Why did he ever fall for a flake like Daisy, anyway? Perhaps I'm being too harsh with her, but given the outcome of the book, I have very little energy to spend on pitying the ignoramus (ignorama?). Perhaps she had been more equal to him in her younger years, but, based on the following passage, I don't think she ever deserved him. Here the narrator recounts the moment that Gatsby first kissed Daisy, shackled himself to a mortal, and limited his godly potential:

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. (112, Scribners, 1953)

Does he have any inkling of what that kiss would later compel him to do? He's completely gone over her, and shapes his whole life, where and how he lives, in order to pursue her and win her back, years after this moment, years after she was married to someone else. She has perishable breath, and he is giving up his incredible potential, for indeed he is a man of great talent and intelligence, to join himself with this perishable white-faced girl. Certainly, she is beautiful. And certainly love requires sacrifice. But he gave up everything for her, remade himself, allowed himself to be incarnated in wedding his "unutterable visions" to her weak offering. He makes himself a slave to a woman unworthy of his great devotion, his star-struck love, and is killed because of it. Meanwhile, she lives without outward consequence for the harm she has done, the evil she has inflicted. Gatsby perhaps begins to realize his mistake as he is trying to convince Daisy to run away with him. In this scene, she is trapped between her husband (Tom) and her lover. She is too weak and torn to make a decision, as both press her, in turn, to stay and to flee. Her cousin, Nick, and her friend, Jordan, watch awkwardly. (I've curtailed the exchange here to the essential bits.)

Gatsby walked over and stood beside her.
"Daisy, that's all over now," he said earnestly. "It doesn't matter anymore. Just tell him the truth -- that you never loved him -- and it's all wiped out forever... You never loved him."
She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, as though she realized at last what she was doing -- and as though she had never, all along, intended doing anything at all.
"I never loved him, " she said, with perceptible reluctance.
"Not at Kapiolani?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Not that day I carried you down from the punch Bowl to keep your shoes dry?" There was a husky tenderness in his tone . . . . "Daisy?"
"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now -- isn't that enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly. "I did love him once -- but I loved you too."
Gatsby's eyes opened and closed.
"You loved me too?" he repeated. (132-133)

Gatsby is perhaps realizing that Daisy is not what he once thought. No wonder she can't stand under the weight of his expectations. She's right -- he does ask too much. Is it such a crime that she once loved her husband, perhaps does still love him? And besides, how many of us have only ever loved one person? I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I think that it's far more likely that most of us fall in love more than once. It would be glorious if each of us could end happily with the first person we fell in love with, and never had the distraction or memory of someone else who might at odd and unexpected times come back to our consciousness. But, realistically, how likely is that? And should we really hold it against someone else if they too have loved someone else before they loved us? Daisy's predicament is slightly worse, of course, because she loved Gatsby "too". I can understand his hurt in that situation. A little healthy jealousy in love is, well, healthy. But Daisy was set up for failure from the start, because she simply is no match for Gatsby. And, really, from the moment of her marriage, Gatsby's destruction is marked. He's charted himself, listening to the tuning of the stars, to pursue a woman who is not for him. Of course it ends in tragedy. He lived in a dream, just as did the speaker of the Old Crow song, and just as Lady Chiltern did.

Clearly, then, at this point we can all agree that making ideals of the man or woman that we love doesn't end well for them, and it doesn't end well for us. Pedestalizing and idolizing mere humans sets them up to fall short of our expectations, that is, sets them up for failure, and also sets us up to blame and perhaps hate them for it when it was really our fault in the first place. But does this mean that we have to throw up our hands and embrace a life of celibacy, because really, why should we put ourselves in a less than ideal situation? Why commit to something we know will only end in imperfection? Let's hold out for that perfect situation, whatever it might be. That's what we're worth, after all. But, hold on. As Charles Ryder puts it in that most brilliantly and subtlely Catholic of all Catholic novels, "To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom." (We could have a long discussion on what he means exactly, and various qualifications about how to understand that and how celibacy fits into it, but let's accept it for now and hash it out later if you're not happy.)

So, if that really is the root of all wisdom, perhaps it's something we should contemplate doing. And if we should contemplate doing it, how on earth can we do it without lowering our self-respect by accepting something less than perfect, without lowering our standards, and without hurting either ourselves or the person we allow ourselves to love? Well, friends, this brings us full circle back to The Moviegoer. At the end of it, incredibly enough, Jack "Binx" Bolling relinquishes his fascination with those big-bottomed sturdy western girls and weds his cousin, Kate (she's not blood-related, in case you're worried). Although Jack has his own issues to sort out, Kate is a mess, too. The following conversation takes place on Jack's 30th birthday. He had promised his aunt that he would visit her that day and tell her his life plan. Kate asks him:

"What do you plan to do?"
I shrug. There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, and for good and selfish reasons. It only remains to decide whether this vocation is best pursued in a service station or --
"Are you going to medical school?"
"If she wants me to."
"Does that mean you can't marry me now?"
"No. You have plenty of money."
"Then let us understand each other."
"All right."
"I don't know whether I can succeed."
"I know you don't."
"It seems the wildest sort of thing to do."
"Yes."
"We had better make it fast."
"All right."
"I am so afraid." (233, Vintage International, 1989)

The "it" of the conversation is marriage, and Kate doesn't know whether she can do it, thinks it the wildest sort of thing to do, and is terribly afraid of it. And Jack doesn't seem to think that life is such a treat either, based on the one thing he thinks he can do. But watch what happens:

"If I could be sure you knew how frightened I am, it would help a great deal."
"You can be sure."
"Not merely of marriage. This afternoon I wanted some cigarettes, but the thought of going to the drugstore turned me to jelly."
I am silent.
"I am frightened when I am alone and I am frightened when I am with people. The only time I'm not frightened is when I'm with you. You'll have to be with me a great deal."
"I will."
"It seems that if we are together a great deal and you tell me the simplest things and not laugh at me -- I beg you for pity's own sake never to laugh at me -- tell me things like: Kate, it is all right for you to go down to the drugstore, and give me a kiss, then I will believe you. Will you do that?"
"Yes, I'll do that."
She has started plucking at her thumb in earnest, tearing away little shreds of flesh. I take her hand and kiss the blood.
"But you must try not to hurt yourself so much."
"I will try! I will!" (234)

Intelligent as she is, Kate can have no misunderstanding about the flaws in Jack's character, about how long he takes to make something of his life, about his lazy dalliances, and his constant attempts to escape from a reality that he is actually terrified of as well. But her weakness, her dependency on him, gives him a reason to step up and do something. He sees her need, and actually decides to be something to help her conquer her fears, to help her be something. Because really, that's what love is. Real human love doesn't mean perfection on earth -- of course we were intended for perfection, and of course we should never abandon that goal, never forget the dignity and the beatification of the perfection that is our birthright. But human love, in its best form, is a perfecting force. Because it is human, it is flawed. Because those participating in it are human, they are flawed. And yet, Jack says, I'll take care of you, but in return, you have to promise to stop hurting yourself. And voila! She promises and is one step closer to perfection. So if you can look at a fellow human squarely and honestly, and, like Robert Chiltern said, love them despite their flaws and their shortcomings and perhaps sometimes because of the peculiarities of character that those flaws lend them -- if you can look at them like that and still decide that they are worth the wedding, worth the incarnation that takes you away from the dreams of deity that are no more than dreams in the sky, then you might, one day, actually achieve that share in divinity. Love is a perfecting force. The best love sees somebody for what they are, and, though content with that, tries to help them to become the most worthy version of themselves. Love sees the actuality and the potential, and is not solely focused on either one.

So, long story short, don't make an ideal of human love or the object of it. Love involves fear, shedding of blood, stripping of flesh, tears, uncertainty, and, as we see with Gatsby, the possibility of failure. But wouldn't it be worse not to have it at all? CS Lewis says something in The Four Loves about the heart of the one who refuses to love being all safe in a nice airtight little box, which then suffocates the heart, dries it up, and leaves its owner with no heart at all. Jack Bolling can't dispel Kate's fear of what surrounds her, and her attachment to him makes her all the more vulnerable to her fear of the outside world. For, once she begins to depend on him, what will happen if all of the sudden he is gone? Then she might really kill herself, as she once almost did. But it's a risk worth taking. There is a peace, a calmness, an easing of all tensions at the end of The Moviegoer. They have an understanding with each other, help each other, are kind to each other, and are able to do what they need to do in this life because of each other. That, if nothing else, seems like a good enough reason to allow ourselves to know and love one other human being. Don't expect perfection, don't expect unmarred bliss, but do expect human happiness, and don't sell yourself short by settling for someone who can't even give you that. I'll leave you with a bit of one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's letters:

"Zelda and I sometimes indulge in terrible four day rows that always start with a drinking party but we're still enormously in love and about the only truly happily married couple I know. The cheerfullest things in life are first Zelda and second the hope that my book has something extraordinary about it. I want to be admired again." source
 


Zelda burned in a hospital fire eight years after Fitzgerald died at the home of his mistress, so perhaps they are not the best example of marital bliss. But this letter, written almost 25 years before her death, does paint a somewhat attractive picture. Perhaps, though, we'd best stick with Binx and Kate.

The Pleasure of Political Pseudo-Alignment

I have a few bigger thoughts on the back burner right now that I'm ruminating on, sketching out, and trying to organize into a somewhat cohesive and comprehensible whole (Spoiler Alert: Idols and Ideals in Love: Gatsby, Brideshead, The Moviegoer, An Ideal Husband). Something about that much-discussed Common Man, too, coming from Coriolanus and, yes, The Moviegoer. But, I don't want to leave you hanging any longer with no new posts, and I know it's been a shamefully long while since I've put up anything new for you, so here's a less thought out, um, thought.

I recently spent a few weeks job hunting in DC, and hopefully will land before long as an editorial assistant in that area (shameless plug: hire me!). Of course, when people heard I was looking for work, they'd politely inquire as to what I'm interested in, and my response would always conclude with "and not politics." A little unusual, I'll grant you, to move to DC with a staunch resolve not to get on the political bandwagon, but we're allowed to have our personal preferences, right? Which is why, though I do have certain political view points, I'm not going to make a job out of them. I will say, though, that I at least hold myself to higher standards of claiming political identity than does Binx Bolling, the hero (?) of Percy's The Moviegoer. It took me a while to get through that book for some reason; I'm not sure why. I love the way he writes. But he is rather bleakly honest and unflinchingly accurate in his descriptions of essential and common human flaws. 

Ernest Hemingway

Virginia Woolf

I've been listening to other 20th century lit during the long hours in the car, and even I, who had an extended and desperate affair with Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, can only take so much of the "life is hopeless, man is lost, love is twisted, and all happiness is staged" viewpoint before my spirit cries out in painful protest. But before I scare you away from Percy, let me assure you that somehow he wrote a good ending, and I was far happier and relieved by it than I had any expectation of being. I've got a lot to share with you from it, and will in my next few posts, but for now, let's look at Binx's ambivalent relationship with politics.

After the lunch conference I run into my cousin Nell Lovell on the steps of the library -- where I go occasionally to read liberal and conservative periodicals. Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.

Hugo Scheiber's "Man Reading a Newspaper"

Down I plunk myself with a liberal weekly at one of the massive tables, read it from cover to cover, nodding to myself whenever the writer scores a point. Damn right, old son, I say, jerking my chair in approval. Pour it on them. Then up and over to the rack for a conservative monthly and down in a fresh cool chair to join the counterattack. Oh ho, say I, and hold fast to the arm chair: that one did it: eviscerated! And then out and away into the sunlight, my neck prickling with satisfaction.

I had to laugh the first few times I read this passage. But gosh, it's sad isn't it? It's a little scary how easy it is to convince people of one view point or another, how quickly they change their "beliefs", and how shiftless they are. His point about "the haters" being the only ones who are alive is, I think, one of those moments where he is uncannily clear in his unhappy portrayal of modern man. No, actually, forget about "modern" man. Man period. And yet there is part of me that is glad of this fact, and approves of it. After all, if everything is really happy and smooth and there's actually no reason to stand in defense of a just cause or a noble ideal, or a vulnerable person, well, then sure, let all those friendly and likable people keep on being friendly and likable. But last time I checked, the world hadn't quite reached Utopia. I hope there are people fighting; once they stop, then you know the causes really will be lost. This is, I suspect, why Binx is such a mess for most of the book. He's a lovable mess, and I'm a little alarmed at how easily I'm able to look past his significant failings and think he's a pretty nice guy (Yes, nice. I said it.). But, lovable or not, he is flawed because he doesn't, when push comes to shove, identify himself with a cause worth fighting for, and goes on being an on-the-surface fairly friendly and happy guy even though he so clearly knows better. He derives temporary satisfaction out of mimicking what is a necessary and primal human need to be not only a part of society, but a participating and well-informed contributor. He mentally throws himself in first with one cause, then another, choosing and switching sides with no real deliberation or reflection, and only for the pleasure it gives him of feeling like he belongs and is justified in getting outraged about... well, something, anyway. Anything. And that prickle on his neck feels good, too.

Starting to sound familiar? Fads and fashions, diet crazes, Occupiers, crocs, skinny jeans, mocking Clinton, mocking Bush, barefoot running... well, hell, let's align ourselves with SOMEthing. Because it would scare the crap out of us, and, let's face it, be just too much work to actually figure out what the real causes are and lay down our lives for them.

The Plight of the Tall Girl

Drusilla wields her pistols.

Don't get me wrong; there are lots of really great things about being tall. I can reach the top shelf, see over heads in a movie theater, even look formidable without the torture of high heels. But there are times that, well, it's not so welcome. I'm finally reading Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, and boy, does he have something to say on the subject! Bear in mind, as you read the following, that I was born in Dallas, and that one of my nicknames in high school was actually "The Amazon". And, lest you think that this is something that has tortured me, a slight from adolescence that has permanently and negatively affected me for a decade, know that I recall it with the same sense of pride I felt when one of my favorite professors told me, "Madame, you are like Faulkner's character Drusilla from The Unvanquished, who carries two pistols, and knows how to use them."

She is magnificent with her split tooth and her Prince Val bangs split on her forehead. Gray eyes and wide black brows, a good arm and a fine swell of calf above her cellophane boot. One of those solitary Amazons one sees on Fifty-seventh Street in New York or in Nieman Marcus in Dallas. Our eyes meet. Am I mistaken or does the corner of her mouth tuck in ever so slightly and the petal of her lower lip curl out ever so richly? She is smiling -- at me! My mind hits upon half a dozen schemes to circumvent the terrible moment of separation. No doubt she is a Texan. They are nearly always bad judges of men, these splendid Amazons. Most men are afraid of them and so they fall victim to the first little Mickey Rooney that comes along. In a better world I should be able to speak to her: come, darling, you can see that I love you. If you are planning to meet some little Mickey, think better of it. What a tragedy it is that I do not know her, will probably never see her again. What good times we could have! This very afternoon we could go spinning along the Gulf Coast. What consideration and tenderness I could show her! If it were a movie, I would have only to wait. The bus would get lost or the city would be bombed and she and I would tend the wounded. As it is, I may as well stop thinking about her... I... forget about the girl. (12-13, Vintage Books)

I'll leave you to your own reflections.

The Word "Entrammeled"

Every summer throws me headlong into a Keats mood. I'm not sure why that is, but I enjoy it very much. Over the last week I’ve been reading the letters he wrote to Fanny Brawne, with whom, judging by these letters, he was very much in love. Being the impractical poet that he was, he gave up the potentially lucrative practice of medicine in which he was trained so that he could devote himself full time to writing. Maybe he would have lived a little longer if he’d stayed in medicine… he died when he was 25, you know? Anyway, there are any number of delightful lines in these letters, though I can certainly see some people among my acquaintance rolling their eyes at how gushy he gets. I find that I don’t mind so much! But poor Fanny. Besides having been cursed with such an unfortunate name (and yes, I know it was quite popular in her day and age, but it isn’t anymore), I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for her to have someone so head over heels in love with her, and then to have him be utterly unable to support a family, marry her, or, more importantly, stay alive. But all of this aside, here’s part of one of his earlier letters to her:

Postmark: Newport, July 3, 1819

                                                                                                  Shanklin, Isle of Wight, Thursday My dearest Lady — I am glad I had not an opportunity of sending off a Letter which I wrote for you on Tuesday night—'twas too much like one out of Rousseau's Heloise. I am more reasonable this morning. The morning is the only proper time for me to write to a beautiful Girl whom I love so much: for at night, when the lonely day has closed, and the lonely, silent, unmusical Chamber is waiting to receive me as into a Sepulchre, then believe me my passion gets entirely the sway, then I would not have you see those Rhapsodies which I once thought it impossible I should ever give way to, and which I have often laughed at in another, for fear you should [think me] either too unhappy or perhaps a little mad… Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write immediately, and do all you can to console me in it—make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me—write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain… Do write immediately. There is no Post from this Place, so you must address Post Office, Newport, Isle of Wight. I know before night I shall curse myself for having sent you so cold a Letter; yet it is better to do it as much in my senses as possible. Be as kind as the distance will permit to your

Present my Compliments to your mother, my love to Margaret and best remembrances to your Brother—if you please so.

“So cold” a letter? Wow. I wonder what the letters he wrote at night looked like. Now, the reason I chose to share this particular letter with you is because of the word “entrammelled” (that’s his spelling, not mine; as Andrew Jackson has it, it’s a damn small mind that can only think of one way to spell a word). This is a word which I have always found delightful and entrancing, one which conjures up associations with Andrew Marvell’s The Fair Singer, JW Waterhouse’s depiction of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and yes, Rapunzel.  

"La Belle Dame Sans Merci"

I always want to call this movie Entrammeled.

 The Fair Singer is about a woman who is not only enchanting because of her physical appearance, but also because of the beauty of her voice, a voice which envelops the speaker of the poem in such a way that he is hopeless to resist. An excerpt for you:

I could have fled from one but singly fair,

My disentangled soul itself might save,

Breaking the curled trammels of her hair.

But how should I avoid to be her slave,

Whose subtle art invisibly can wreath

My fetters of the very air I breathe? source

The speaker is all tangled up in her, not only in “the curled trammels of her hair” but also the invisible, ethereal bonds of her voice. Being tangled up in hair makes Rapunzel come to mind for obvious reasons. From there, moving to Waterhouse’s depiction of Keats’ poem is easy enough. If ever a knight were entrammeled in hair, Waterhouse's knight surely is.

So, lots of good associations (fairy tales, beautiful women, handsome knights), but I suppose that, ultimately, the reason that I like this word so well is that it  seems to convey a sense of the captive being caught up in something that he loves or at least in some way desires. Even in Keats' poem, while La Belle Dame is a dangerous beauty, he is distraught to wake from his dream and find her gone; part of him wanted to remain enthralled by her. And surely the cruelty that Keats speaks of in his question to Fanny Brawne ("Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom") is a "cruelty" in which he delights. It is a freedom he is glad to surrender. I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: we humans are meant to give ourselves to something. We're made to lay ourselves down for something, be it a cause or a person, that is more worth fighting for and in some way dying for than our own comforts. Maybe "entrammeled" doesn't dig quite so deep and heady as that, but it's in the same direction: being completely undone, being at peace with the surrender of freedom, being captivated, surrounded, enveloped and overcome by something lovely and strong, graceful and worthwhile, something far superior to ourselves.

The Silken Tent - Robert Frost

Field Trip!

If you're ever up in New Hampshire, you should be sure to stop by the Robert Frost Farm in Derry. Also, it's about an hour north of Boston, so really, if you're ever in Boston, you should make the drive up. During the three years I lived in Manchester, I visited there a number of times, occasionally bringing students, sometimes taking a picnic with one or two fellow poetry lovers, and, of course, sometimes on my own. There are still some apple trees on the farm, very old, quite large, and stunning in late May. In addition to the trees, the farmhouse and old barn, there are paths through the surrounding woods, paths that take you right over Mending Wall and Hyla Brook. My second favorite thing on the farm, after one of the apple trees, is the big field behind the house. I suppose there's nothing objectively particularly remarkable about it; it's just a big field with some stone walls and woods around it, but whenever I see it I think about his poem The Silken Tent, and imagine the "she" of the poem to be pictured in this very field:

 She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware. 


Favorite words and phrases of the poem: "its pinnacle to heavenward...signifies the sureness of the soul"; "is loosely bound / by countless silken ties of love"; "capriciousness". The overall picture I have in my head is of a tall, graceful, strong, vaguely ethereal and nobly beautiful woman, a woman who is dependable, capable, hardy, full of love and goodness, fine in everything she does and is, but still human in that part of her that, when the summer breezes blow through, feels the littlest bit bound and trapped and desirous of life without bonds, even if they are bonds of love.

Here's the website for the farm, if the mood strikes: http://robertfrostfarm.org/index.html

Excerpts: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

The author, Marisha Pessl

By now I'm well over 300 pages into Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and feel much better qualified than I did last time to say a bit about it. Marisha Pessl is an excellent writer. Like many contemporary novelists, she does have an unfortunate tendency to showcase how well read she is, though, given her skill, I find it more forgivable than I often do (see The Weird Sisters or Treasure Island!!!). And, after all, Dante did the same thing, right?

The story centers on Blue van Meer, the daughter of a highly intelligent, self-satisfied and sometimes scathing, but still very likable university professor whose wife died behind the wheel, tired out from butterfly collecting. After the death of his wife, Gareth van Meer moves himself and his seven year old daughter three to four times each year, teaching at small community colleges all over the country. In his words:

"Why should I waste my time teaching puffed-up teenagers whose minds are curdled by arrogance and materialism? No, I shall spend my energies enlightening America's unassuming and ordinary. 'There's majesty in no one but the Common Man.' " (When questioned by colleagues as to why he no longer wished to educate the Ivy League, Dad adored waxing poetic on the Common Man. And yet, sometimes in private, particularly while grading a frighteningly flawed final exam or widely off-the-mark research paper, even the illustrious, unspoiled Common Man could become, in Dad's eyes, a "half-wit," a "nimrod," a "monstrous misuse of matter.") (23)

Determined, however, that his daughter should attend Harvard University, as he did, he enrolls her in the elitist St. Gallway School, and settles in one town for Blue's senior year of high school. A delightful excerpt on how the school got its name:

The booklet also featured a delightfully eccentric blurb about Horatio Mills Gallway, a rags-to-riches paper industrialist who'd founded the school back in 1910, not in the name of altruistic principles like civic duty or the persistence of scholarship, but for a megalomaniacal desire to see Saint in front of his surname; establishing a private school proved to be the easiest way to achieve this. (62)

When she arrives at her new school, Blue, like any new student, is nervous, worried about making the right impression, and figures herself a cut above the company (and she's right on that last point, in many ways):

I'm obliged to reveal an old trick: implacable self-possession can be attained by all, not by pretending to look absorbed in what's clearly a blank spiral notebook; not by trying to convince yourself you're an undiscovered rock star, movie star, top model, tycoon, Bond, Bond Girl, Queen Elizabeth, Elizabeth Bennett, or Eliza Doolittle at the Ambassador's Ball; not by imagining you're a long-lost member of the Vanderbilt family, nor by tilting up your chin fifteen to forty-five degrees and pretending to be Grace Kelly in her prime. These methods work in theory, but in practice they slip away, so one is left hideously naked with nothing but the stained sheet of self-confidence around one's feet. Instead, stately dignity can be possessed by all, in two ways: 1. Diverting the mind with a book or play; 2. Reciting Keats. (65)

Visual Aid 2.0 -- Blue is half-hidden

Despite Blue's obvious intelligence and clarity of vision, she does fall in with the cool crowd at school, a shiny, attractive, "mature" group of five kids whom she eventually discovers to be monumentally unhappy. Charles, Jade, Nigel, Milton and Leulah become her constant companions. I have yet to discover how it will all resolve, if there can possibly be a satisfactory conclusion to what is in many ways a very dark, very sad book. It is quite a bleak, though I think accurate picture of the emptiness behind "school popularity" and the ethereal hipster indie mystique. And yet, despite this emptiness, even to us audience up on our safe and sage observing tower, there's still something fascinating and entrancing about these five young people. Though it has taken me a while to get here, sharing these descriptions of Nigel, Milton and Leulah is actually why I started this post. Perhaps I'm reading the wrong things in general, but it seems to me that it's not often in contemporary literature that characters are introduced so vividly, so imaginatively, so tangibly:

Nigel was the cipher (see "Negative Space," Art Lessons, Trey, 1973, p. 29). At first glance (even at second and third), he was ordinary. His face – rather his entire being – was a buttonhole: small, narrow, uneventful. He stood no more than five-feet-five with a round face, brown hair, features weak and baby-feet pink (neither complemented nor marred by the wire glasses he wore). At school, he sported thin, tonguelike neckties in neon orange, a fashion statement I guessed was his effort to force people to take notice of him, much like a car's hazard lights. And yet, upon closer examination, the ordinariness was extraordinary: he bit his nails into thumbtacks; spoke in hushed spurts (uncolored guppies darting through a tank); in large groups, his smile could be a dying lightbulb (shining reluctantly, flickering, disappearing); and a single strand of his hair (once found on my skirt after sitting next to him), held directly under a light, shimmered with every color in a rainbow, including purple. And then there was Milton, sturdy and grim, with a big, cushiony body like someone's favorite reading chair in need of reupholstering (see "American Black Bear," Meat-Eating Land Animals, Richards, 1982). He was eighteen, but looked thirty. His face, cluttered with brown eyes, curly black hair, a swollen mouth, had a curdled handsomeness to it, as if, incredibly, it wasn't what it'd once been. He had an Orsen Wellesian quality, Gerardepardieuian too: one suspected his large, slightly overweight frame smothered some kind of dark genius and after a twenty-minute shower he'd still reek of cigarettes. He'd lived most of his life in a town called Riot in Alabama and thus spoke in a Southern accent so gooey and thick you could probably cut into it and spread it on dinner rolls. Like all Mysteriosos, he had an Achilles' heel: a giant tattoo on his upper arm. He refused to talk about it, went to great pains to conceal it – never removing his shirt, always wearing long sleeves – and if some clown during P. E. asked him what it was, he either stared at the kid as if he were a Price Is Right rerun, barley blinking, or replied in his molasses accent: "Nunna ya goddamn business."

 And then there was the delicate creature (see Juliet, JW Waterhouse, 1898). Leulah Maloney was pearl skinned, with skinny bird arms and long brown hair always worn in a braid, like one of those cords aristocracy pulled in the nineteenth century to summon servants. Hers was an eerie, old-fashioned beauty, a face at home in amulets or carved into cameos – a romantic look I actually used to wish I had whenever Dad and I were reading about Gloriana in The Faerie Queene (Spenser, 1596) or discussing Dante's love for Beatrice Portinari. (“Know how difficult it is to find a woman that looks like Beatrice in today's world?” asked Dad. “You've a better chance running at the speed of light.”) Early in the fall, when I least expected it, I'd see Leulah in a long dress (usually white or diaphanous blue) strolling the Commons in the middle of a downpour, holding her little antique face up to the rain while everyone else streaked past her screaming, textbooks or disintegrating Gallway Gazettes held over their heads. Twice I noticed her like this – another time, crouched in Elton House shrubbery, apparently fascinated by a piece of bark or tulip bulb – and I couldn't help but think such faerielike behavior was all very calculated and irritating. Dad had carried on a tedious five-day affair with a woman named Birch Peterson in Okush, New Mexico, and Birch, having been born outside Ontario in a "terrific" free-loving commune called Verve, was always entreating Dad and me to walk untroubled in the rain, bless mosquitoes, eat tofu. When she came for dinner she said a prayer before we "consumed," a fifteen-minute plea asking "Shod" to bless every slime mold and mollusk. "The word God is inherently male," said Birch, "so I came up with she, he, and God rolled into one. Shod exemplifies the truly genderless Higher Power." I concluded Leulah – Lu, as they all called her – with her gossamer dresses, reedy hair, decisions to skip daintily along everything but sidewalks, had to have Birch's persona of bean curd, that espirit de spirulina... ("There's something sour about her. She's totally past her Eat-by date," I heard Lucille Hunter remark in AP English). (90-91)

Well, if you're not sold after all that, I don't know what would get you hooked on this book. Give yourself some time (it's over 500 pages), brace yourself against the darkness, and bear in mind that it is quite humorous as well. Buy it! Read it! Talk to me about it.