Off List: Why Did They Head North?

I really don’t recall how, when or why I reserved Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns through the library. It just was there in the pile when I picked up a handful of lust list books. Very off topic but maybe subconsciously selected after a particularly bad spell of novels or just to read something by an award-winning author. Anyway, it was interesting and read quickly, despite its 600 pages, epilogue, afterword, lengthy list of interviewees, bibliography, acknowledgments ….

Wilkerson is mining the lives and effect of the great migration of Blacks from the South to the East, Midwest and Pacific coast. While she periodically intrudes with larger perspectives and interpretations, she essentially uses three real people to make the story real and illustrate certain outcomes she sees as typical of the people who migrated between 1915 and 1970. They are George, leaving the orange groves of Florida one step ahead of the sheriff and who settles in Harlem, becoming a porter; Ida Mae who moves at her husband’s insistence first to Milwaukee and then Chicago where she eventually comes to work in a hospital; and Bob, a successful surgeon who reinvents himself in California.

George and Ida Mae live in ghettos and their children and neighborhoods succumb to the ravishes of drugs and crime. Based on other sociologists analyses of the people most likely to migrate, Wilkerson concludes that these three people best typify the grit and determination that caused them to be gainfully employed, long married and financially secure. It was their resolve to make a better life for themselves and to earn more money than they ever could in a segregated, oppressive South, that ends up putting their children at risk, from absentee parents often working several jobs.

Wilkerson’s other theme is to explore how much of Southern heritage, culture and longing remained with the émigrés. Each of these people display both vestiges and full erasures.

Just as I was almost through the tome, the newspapers started reporting some findings from the 2010 census, most notably, a reverse migration. Not to suggest Wilkerson need write a volume two, but one throw away line, that the three people selected as representatives of the mass migration, never saw themselves as part of something larger or so designated themselves in their own minds. They were just Americans relocating to have a better life. Such personal economics would seem to be driving the population turnaround, tempered by Blacks having acquired a better education and finding Southern states more integrated and receptive.

I suspect again it is those most hopeful, most talented and most resilient who are reversing the population patterns. What I find more disturbing is that unlike those who remained rooted to Southern soil in the last century where there were still strong communities, extended if sparse families, and a common religion, those now abandoned in the Northern ghettos have no other web of support except for the government’s safety net, a system that fosters dependency and not grit.

The Marriage and Mistress Needs of Famous Men

I almost didn’t bother reading The Paris Wife by Paula McLain after I read the New York Times book review last Sunday. The comment that discouraged me to return it immediately to the library was that the depiction of Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife, was one-dimensional. But the characters were immediately familiar, like looking through old Life magazines, and the setting of Paris in the Roaring 20s ever as alluring that I raced through chapters at break-neck speed, rushing towards the train wreck of their marriage.

Instead of feeling flat, McLain’s biographical novel reminded me of a summer concert several years ago when we went to see Dolly Parton. The glitter and the fame showed up, but Dolly was inaccessible to the audience. It was as if she performed behind bullet proof glass. No emotion, no interest emanated from her act. I’m just recalling a similar experience at a Bette Midler show. Given their fame and constant media exposure, neither “star” felt compelled to be real. On the other hand, it reminded me of the shallowness of Loving Frank, an author trying to capitalize of the scandals of the famous.

McLain itemizes all the American literary giants drawn to France, like an unending game of six degrees of separation. Hardly anyone shows up expectedly, but right on cue. Hemingway’s talents remain mysterious behind his closed doors in separate quarters, too small to be garconieres, but nonetheless giving him cover for his adulterous seductions. Hadley is depicted as a woman out of synch with time, still a dutiful mid-Western, Victorian wife frightened to bob her hair or wear form fitting clothes. While Ernest marries for just these comfortable, non-confrontational characteristics, she gets depressed comparing herself to the Flappers that he finds so attractive.

Lining up TPW against The Alexandrian Quartet or even The Museum of Innocence, the Slackers might consider is it time and familiarity alone that tarnishes passion or is it the congruence of freer friends in a tumultuous setting that contributes more to marital boredom, affairs and divorce. Core themes I cull from these three novels are the human need to look backwards and ask themselves “what did we have,” “why didn’t we recognize it,” and more importantly “why didn’t I ever know what I wanted.”

The novelist uses the retrospective, all knowing how things will turn out perspective of the narrator to make the protagonist older, wiser and more at peace at the end of the story. But the drama is in the personal journey and not the emotionally mature destination. The 2011 search for lust and passion is a quest for that most thrilling of rides. It can be an experience lasting as long as racing a Texan quarter horse or an Irish hurdler; but like a kid at the fair, you always want to ask for one more ride.

Clea: Part Four

It is hard for me to come up with a four volume focus for Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. If pressed, I would say he's struggling with how to define oneself against one's friends and lovers. Although Durrell attests that all his female characters are facets of Egypt, they all die off (except Justine and Clea) and all the men end up only marginally affected by them. Especially Darley, the narrator, who goes through Melissa, Justine and Clea and still seems unfulfilled, not sexually, but from lack of a strong ego. Id be damned.

Durrell's male characters, as I mentioned in previous reviews, seem to follow a pattern: the more physically or morally flawed, they more they are extolled. Coming off as the sainted hero is cross dresser, murdered Scobie. One has to wonder how real he was or how much of Durrell's alter ego. Nessim seems resurrected after the death of his mother, but to what end as he appears still impoverished and politically irrelevant.

I laid awake at night trying to figure out how to diagram the love affairs across all the characters. Soon, that seemed pointless, as the ur-message seemed to be that like in Museum of Innocence, proximity is the main aphrodiasic and time alone causes serialization of relationships. Unfortunately, given a male author, all females fade, die or turn into shrews.

In a long diversion towards the middle of the book, Pursewarden reappears posthumously to lecture Darley as Brother Ass and to expand upon the structure of the Quartet: " ... you might try a four-card trick in the form of a novel; passing a common axis through the stories, say and dedicating each to one of the four winds of heaven. A continuum, forsooth, embodying not a temps retrouve but a temps delivre. The curvature of space itself would give you a stereoscopic narrative, while human personality seen across continuum would perhaps become prismatic? Who can say? I throw this idea out. I can imagine a form which, if satisfied, might raise in human terms the problems of causality or indeterminacy ..."

So I must eventually assess the Quartet in terms of the lust list. It lacks.

Love in the Time of Insurrection: Mountolive

Book three of Lawrence Durrell’s four part series is Mountolive, the British ambassador to Egypt around the time of the Second World War. His is a political perspective of the events occurring in Alexandria, only referring to the previous books’ main characters, namely Justine and her husband Nessim and her lover Darley, as their lives underlie the upheaval in their country and neighboring Mediterranean states.

Mountolive early in his diplomatic career was the lover of Nessim’s mother who when he was reassigned took on the task of mentoring him in absentia through years of lengthy correspondence. Upon his return to head the embassy, she refuses to meet him using the excuse of getting old and having been scarred by the ravages of pox. Mountolive does nonetheless encounter Nessim and Justine repeatedly in the swirl of his social and stately obligations.

Pursewarden, whom Balthazar in book two depicted as Justine’s real lover, is the flash character to advance this new storyline given his work at the embassy. He advises Mountolive that the War Office’s exposure of Nessim as a provocateur, adding the Zionist cause, is false. The story unfolds to belie his defense and another explanation of why Justine stays married to Nessim and why she used Darley, et al, is put forth. (This is like watching a serialized TV drama: here we are in season three with the explanation of why she escapes to Palestine and yet another explanation as to why Pursewarden left Darley money.)

Love and passion are again used as vehicles to convey (1) a greater love, love of motherland; (2) as nostalgia and longing that either deteriorates over time to something unrecognizable or is completely displaced; and (3) as is best forgotten or sublimated through duty, tradition or art.

I will complete the cycle with Clea, the woman whose name Nessim’s brother screams out on his death bed. Yet I feel like I’m on a scavenger hunt, still looking for the piece that will bring these novels together into one overarching focus. I want something greater than the sum of its parts for my efforts, something that goes beyond the clever device of relativism in narration.

Off Lust List, On Book Club: City of Thieves

I want to back of my premature recommendation to one of the Slackers to look for this book. It begins with an interesting premise, interviewing one's grandfather to find out what he did in the war. Something that is honorable for both family and national histories. But this story of a wild goose chase, a domesticated chicken egg chase, during the siege of Leningrad, is unbelievable, too fabricated, too instructive. It attempts to be simultaneously larded with black humor and gaunt with pictures of starvation and torture. Unlike The Tin Drum, Benioff's talents are not strong enough to carry a multifaceted tale, and while suspenseful, it leaves the reader what he actually got out of investing the time to read it.

I cannot derive a single focused core message from the novel. Is it war is absurd? Everyone has at least one significant week in one's life? Or that terrible times excuse terrible crimes? None of these feels predominant to me. Waiting for the end of the month to see what the group will say, or whether once again they will begin with the phrase, "Slacker-blogger of course did not like this book."

Is the Tale / Focus the Same? Alexandria 2.0

Lawrence Durrell’s Balthazar is more interesting than Justine, the first installment in his Alexandra Quartet, but only because one has first read Justine. On the second page of this novel, Durrell states his premise for writing a sequel: “Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time – not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.”

Strangely, Balthazar reminded me of the clever Zombie Wars, a science fiction book that looks at an apocalyptic war through the eyes of hundreds of participants, victims and observers. while the narrator goes about gleaning their memories for the facts. The array of perceptions makes the Wars ethereal yet mythic as they the dirty little secrets of those who encouraged the conflict or benefited there from are exposed. There are similar hidden agenda and motives in Durrell's characters.

By keeping the same narrator, but having him become the recipient of Balthazar’s journals detailing what conspiracies and deceits that were “actually occurring,” Durrell / Darley can revise his first take on his affairs and friendships.

Another metaphor that bubbled into my mind was a pousse café, that three to six layer cocktail of various cordials that are stacked in a small glass from most to least dense. I like this symbol for the Alexandria Quartet for a few reasons. First, its colors parallel those Durrell uses to describe sunrises and sunsets and waters in the port and marshes. Second, the layers are all unique, but of one piece and complementary, like his characters in Egypt. Finally, when consumed, a pousse café, unless most carefully tipped and sipped, all collapses into a ghastly thing, like the more current Long Island Iced Tea cocktail. Alexandrians are conspiring and edging toward upheavals.

With Balthazar, many of the previously “minor” characters now take center stage. Balthazar, Clea and Pursewarden become principal dancers as their parts in the adultery of Darley and Justine are explained. This is accordingly less a book about passion and love. My take on the central theme is how all people maintain perpetual facades and that when we interact with them, we are distracted by what is flawed in them and by our willingness, on occasion, to dismiss those disguises. It is interesting to note how many of Durrell’s characters are physically deformed: the barber’s hunchback, Nessim’s brother’s harelip and his mother’s pox scars, Da Cap’s eye patch and darting tongue. Durrell also uses Scobie’s and Posnal’s cross-dressing and a masked carnival to emphasize the intent to deceive and distract. What makes these characters colorful are these exaggerations, but vivid like a child’s one dimensional coloring book, not as a fully portrayed unforgettable literary character.

Balthazar’s journal’s perspective is intended to educate Darley and show him that those people he regarded as most perfect, especially Justine, were not as they presented themselves to him or the world. All were duped. Crimes and cabals are covered over or superficially investigated. Once again as in Justine, Durrell uses quotes from Pursewarden’s writings as a cover for his own thoughts: “If things were always what they seemed, how impoverished would be the imagination of man … There are only as many realities as you care to imagine.”

Or a more lengthy thesis for Durrell: “Where can a man who really thinks take refuge in the so-called real world without defending himself against stupidity by the constant exercise of equivocation? Tell me that. Particularly a poet … (who are) not really serious about ideas or people … they are for use. But there is no question of them being true or false, or having souls. In this way the poet preserves his freshness of vision …”

This premise is the devise that Durrell can toy with in the later volumes of the Quartet, retelling a fresh new story with revamped, maybe revisionist, material. And toying as well with his readers as they are forced to ponder how the author can both vest and strip a character with certain noble or base traits; how he can make them “false” in a book that is fiction per se.

On to Mountolive.

Alexandria, Mon Amour – Where Sex Left the Body and Entered the Imagination

The day after I finished reading Schiff’s prize-winning biography of Cleopatra, I wore my most Egyptian looking necklace to work: a ring of golden disks with images that could be Coptic, Roman, occult. I also wore my Greek Ionic column earrings -- capturing all the influences on Egypt. I wanted to be steeped in all things Mediterranean as I moved back to tackle Durrell’s Alexandria Quarter. I started over, having previously started with the last, Clea.

About 200 pages into Justine, I found what I think is Durrell’s focus (relying more as I will now on Pamuk’s lectures as to what the reader thinks is the author’s central focus); here namely, a study of how it is desirable to stay aloof and distanced from one’s fellow humans, no matter how sexually appealing or unique they might be.

To quote a section that illustrates this theme by the unnamed narrator: “From among many sorts of failure each selects the one which least compromises his self-respect – which lets him down the lightest. Mine had been in art, in religion and in people. In art I had failed ... because I did not believe in the discrete human personality … I lacked the belief in the true authenticity of people in order to successfully portray them.”

Alas, Durrell’s city of characters are all so superficially portrayed, devices only used to carry on his internalized dialogue on the nature of love and life. A bit farther, under the guise of interpreting a fellow author’s book, the narrator has his mistress’ husband, Nessim, say “What is astonishing … is that he presents a series of spiritual problems as if they were commonplaces and illustrates them with his characters … His apology for a voluptuary’s life is fantastically good – as in the passage where he says that people only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.” Durrell thus employs adultery and other sexual variations as steps to mental maturity.

Durrell portrays Justine as the female equivalent of a skirt chaser, Like John O’Hara, Durrell has her motivated from sexual abuse as a child: “Yet behind the acts of Justine lay something else born of a tragic philosophy in which morals must be weighed in the balance against rogue personality ... there are forms of greatness … which when not applied in art or religion make havoc of ordinary life. Her gift was misapplied in being directed towards love.” Her serial affairs are not an unquenchable sexual longing, but an intellectual thirst.

Justine becomes the vehicle for the narrator to gain insight into his own thoughts and actions: “… I see a sort of composite Justine, concealing a ravenous hunger for information, for power through self-knowledge, under a pretence of feeling.” As he ponders the unpleasant possession of lust turned to love, Durrell begins to tarnish the once goddess attributes of Justine: “… reflecting once more that in her there was nothing to control or modify the intuition which she had developed out of a nature gorged upon introspection: no education, no resources of intellection to battle against the imperatives of a violent heart. Her gift was the gift one finds occasionally in ignorant fortune-tellers. Whatever passed for thought in her was borrowed.” He cannot diminish her the allure of her body, so he makes repulsive what he wants even more -- a melding of intellects.

The affair between Justine and the narrator, or for that matter, his overlapping arrangement with Melissa the night club dancer, never ignites despite Durrell's almost randomly placed flashes of romance: “ .. to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside of each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience …” But the punch line to this line of fantasizing stresses his ultimate aloofness or disengagement: “… The love object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves …”

I wonder how Durrell will continue to portray these Alexandrians in subsequent novels since so many of the lead characters here seemed ignobly but conveniently dismissed: Justine runs away to work on a kibbutz; Nessim gets fat and lecherous; Justine’s rapist is shot by parties unknown; Melissa dies. Oops, I cheated. I peeked at the blurb to Balthazar and read that this novel is Justine 2.0 -- the time, setting, plot and characters rewritten from another perspective. It will be interesting to see if a focus on human disengagement remains the central theme.

Legendary Passion

Last weekend, a Slacker gave me her copy of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Cleopatra, by Stacy Schiff. Somewhat of a stretch perhaps to add to the lust list but am including a short review anyway. For who do people think of when asked to name famous couples; surely after Romeo and Juliet come Antony and Cleopatra.

Schiff's book is extremely scholarly, shifting through conflicting near contemporary commentaries of both her affair with Julius Caesar and the longer liaison with Mark Antony. Most of these historical accounts were written by Romans and the Egyptian queen suffers accordingly. As she recaps each ancient author's account, Schiff points out both their political spins and their need to create myths and morals. Who was Cleopatra to confront the supreme power of Rome?

Schiff's comparison of Alexandria and Rome is startling, with the latter winning hands down for beauty, culture and wealth. Cleopatra's rule coincided with Rome's state of affairs pre-monuments. Schiff attributes much of Rome's cultural refinements, as well as the improvement in the status of women, to Cleopatra.

But on to the love and passion. To counterpoint historic and interpretative renditions over the centuries, Schiff's accounts of both affairs stress the political alliances. Cleopatra's sexual allure is depicted as yet one more of the long list of talents and refinements she possessed, from military astuteness to speaking several languages to rhetorical skills and wit. Her wealth supported pomp and ceremony easily outshining Roman political theater. Her power was her independence; her ultimate weakness, her need for detente.

Yes, put up against all our lust list characteristics of life long passion, Cleopatra's loves had forced separations, were definitely outside of Roman's cultural standards, and managed to have a red flame of sex as well as a blue flame of companionship, if not in this case, such became intrigue.

This story is so "well known," not just as interpreted by Shakespeare or Shaw or Taylor/Burton, but it transported me back to sophomore year in high school, standing up to translate my Latin. That class bode no interpretation of the history and the teacher was much more focused on our learning grammar than being able to pick up on literary bias. Schiff's story inserts plenty of 21st century analogies, making the tale thereby seem timeless and recurring. Although one is hard pressed to think of any female figure as capable and confident. Way before the Bard, Cleopatra knew all the world's a stage, and she played it to the hilt.