Margaret Wappler’s A Good Bad Boy is an enormously engaging biographical narrative of the life of Luke Perry, star of the TV series Hollywood 90210, a teen drama that ran from 1990 through 2000. The series achieved huge success and a fanatical cult following among American teenagers.

Wappler brings to her account of Perry’s life the shrewd insights of a veteran reporter of Pop culture and the craft of an accomplished novelist. The result is a carefully researched and empathetic portrait of a complex man who experiences the exhilarating rewards of television fame and subsequently the necessity of moving beyond those rewards in order to achieve a deeper realization of himself as actor and as human being. This is an archetypal American story, the discovery that fame and fortune are not enough, followed by the pursuit of new values, often tragic in the elevated since of that word. Think of Gatsby.

Put together the archetype of the American tragic hero and the search for the self in the essence of acting and you have the compelling arc of Perry’s narrative as Wappler shapes it with consummate skill: a meteoric rise to fame followed by a flat period devoid of major roles followed by a renewal of energy and the prospect of roles of deeper significance, alas cut short by death.

This is the point at which to introduce a second narrative, the story of Margaret, an autobiographical account of the descent and rise of the author from pre-teen anxiety and psychological disarray to fulfilling motherhood. This narrative is interleafed into the story of Perry. It would be hard to overemphasize the richness this story adds to Perry’s struggles, as does Perry’s story illuminate Margaret’s. Part of the richness is inherent in the intense suffering and depression of Margaret, devoted fan of Perry, as she struggles to overcome a dispiriting family milieu and a culture of superficial and often destructive values. But much of the richness comes from the ingenious placements of parts of the Margaret story beside the Perry narrative. The crowning juxtaposition comes late in the book with the side-by-side arrangement of birth and death, the birth of Margaret’s child and Perry’s death.

Further examination of the two narratives will reward us with interesting questions about their relationship. First, we recognize that the Margaret of her story is different from Margaret Wappler, author of A Good Bad Boy. Margaret has her own persona, and her story is told in the third rather than in the first person, to distance her from Margaret Wappler. Similarly, Perry has dramatic personas in his acting roles different from his biographical identity. A very important instance is Dylan McKay, the archetypal bad boy of Hollywood 90201. Are Margaret’s and Perry’s layered characters parallel? Yes, some of the time. Both must struggle against entrapment in toxic American teen culture—faddish garments and hair-dos, cliques, petty jealousies, adoration of wealth, sex, drugs. And again, by the end of the book both have in parallel achieved a new sense of self. But there are differences. Margaret in her coming up out of deep depression has an indispensable mentor, the benign and insightful psychiatrist, Dr. F.. Perry has no such mentor. Some of his many friends serve as important confidants, and perhaps together they fulfill the role of psychotherapist, but the reader will more likely see Perry escaping on his own from the role of Dylan McKay, teenage heartthrob. The dramatic difference, of course, is that Perry’s ascent as a serious actor is cut short by a fatal stroke. Margaret’s horizon, after her marriage and the birth of her son, stretches out before her.

Wappler has for this book artfully deployed a mixture of textures and styles. For Perry’s story we have an engaged but generally cool voice, expert, perceptive, often ironical, even tellingly aphoristic: Perry believed “the collective [unconscious] always moves toward doing the right thing.” As for emoting about the goodness of Perry’s character, which is surely real, Wappler leaves that to the numerous witnesses of his unfailing kindness. By striking contrast, the style of Margaret’s narrative is highly emotional, verging on hysteria in the early sections; later conveying an almost ecstatic gratitude for the gifts she has received in her thirties and forties, now settled if not placid.

Finally, not to be underestimated is a powerful tension that thrums constantly under the surface of A Good Bad Boy like the menacing base beat of a dark symphony. It is the Shadow book that haunts its host throughout and thrusts itself above the surface from time to time. The Shadow would like to engage directly and dramatically with the corrupting influences of American culture especially as they affect teenagers. It would like to lay bare the implications of Wappler’s dedication, “For all the lost teenagers, yet to be found.” One, but only one, of the corrupting influences is the aggressive capitalistic drive to commodify everything—art, religion, clothing, houses, human relationships, labor, forbidden substances, sexuality, human identities, the human body and its parts, from hair-dos down to painted toenails and the secreted parts between. This pervasive commodification is dramatized for Perry when he is mobbed by teenage fans at a department store, when he releases the anguished cry, “I am product!” The Shadow that haunts A Good Bad Boy is a narrative bristling with full-scale culture critique. For serious fun take a look at the dust jacket. What’s the message? Or messages? Perry with his famous brow scar, with one of his dreamy eyes, the other hidden in darkness, is looking at us through cleverly arranged fingers. Above his wrinkled brow rides the signature pompadour of slick black hair. His expression, what? A wicked invitation to join him in the make-believe world of Hollywood 90210 with its glitter and sex? Or is this the infamous gaze that men use to fixate their female marks? Or is this a warning: do not be lured by this poseur into a world of fatally unreal values? However it is to be interpreted, this is not the good boy. To this reader it seems a character from the Shadow book, which is maybe a dystopia so popular nowadays, and for good reason. The Shadow book tells us that what was once our cultural and national history now descends into a tawdry myth of endless wealth and pleasure, never mind the plight of the have-nots.

You who, perhaps like me, passed through the 90s mostly unscathed by popular culture, you need to read this book. You will find it a moving picture of its own time and in many ways a disturbing harbinger of ours.

A cloudy late morning. Naughton walks down the short narrow hall, three doors on each side, two for the nuns’ quarters, one each for the four residents. From one a murmurous complaint, from another a clatter so muffled it may be a cracked human voice or the rattle of dishes and silver, though it’s long after breakfast. He walks past them without turning. At the end of the hall is a large window that looks out on a small rough greensward rounded with a motley of untrimmed greenery—thistle, spiderwort, vetch, pokeweed with cones of red-black berries, a rare but hearty patch of wild geraniums, its shy violet stars half hidden among the green, and the inevitable white flower-heads of Queen Anne’s Lace. Behind them in soldierly rows is a deep stand of yellow birch extending left and right beyond the confines of the window frame. There is no sun, no shadow, only a dull pewter, the source of light off somewhere in the gray sky. Just to one side of the window is a wheelchair, in it Charlene. Naughton stops and stands before the window surveying the drab scene and then turns to Charlene. Her huge black eyes are wide open, but there’s no evidence she’s looking at him. He comes a step closer. “You know, Charlene, eyelids are common walls. But they’re moveable. You can lower them, like the portcullises of old castles.”Nurse Vera appears in a white uniform. She’s large, face and hands bronze against the pale fabric. Naughton says, “I think Charlene may need to shut her eyes, Vera.”

“She does not shut her eyes, even when she sleeps.” It’s obvious that English isn’t Vera’s native language. She speaks with a practiced precision.

Charlene moves as if to retreat farther into the chair, but there’ no space between its back and her spine.

“Was she born without eyelids?”

“No. She does not use them.”

“And she never says anything?”

“One time she said no, we believe.”

Naughton returns his attention to Charlene. “I am the wall man, Charlene. Sister Claire said I could talk to you.”

Vera looks pityingly at Charlene and steps away. “I must go to Mr. Gerrity.”

Naughton puts his hands behind his back and speaks in a meditative tone. “It was just recently, Charlene, that I began to search for walls. I had the idea, and still have it now, that I could find on walls everything I’d lost.”

Under her white robe Charlene tightens as if to shrink, but there’s little of her to shrink.

Naughton nods, “I understand.” After a pause he says, “Do you like visions? Here’s one. “You’re up on the highest wall in the world, Charlene. Perched right on the edge. The sky is all around you. Not a blue dome, welkin, that kind of poetic stuff because it doesn’t matter to you if it’s glowing or weeping. You don’t care what your talons are grasping at the moment, scrabble, saxifrage, a sapling in a crevice. You depend on no such frailties. The updraft is ruffling your feathers. You feel the power. You move your telescopic eyes over the world below. Lots of quarry down there you could readily seize. Wandering wobbly calves and kids, a neglected infant in a crib, fat pigeons, rabbits, downstream salmon washed up in the shallows, the whole world in your talons. But you don’t want any of that easy prey. You’re after something bigger.”

A hint of movement crosses Charlene’s face, but there’s not enough flesh to tell exactly what it is—a twitching in the corners of her mouth, a flaring of her nostrils.

“What do you want to strike, Charlene? You launch and furl your wings. A hundred miles an hour, all the resistant air will allow. Who do you want to strike, Charlene? They’ll never know what hit them.”

Naughton abandons his meditative posture and tone. He paces like one in a condition of urgency and anger. It’s difficult to tell whether this radical change is genuinely reflective of an inner turning or is theatrical. “Charlene. Listen. We’re not going to let them take what’s ours.”

Now Charlene’s eyes roll left and quickly back to their steady forward stare, at nothing it appears.

Naughton bends down until his mouth is not far from Charlene’s ear. “Charlene. They’re gentle folks here. Lovely folks. Even smart, like Sister Claire, but they can’t help you with this. Because we’re talking about eating or being eaten. It’s not in their theology. And those others are dining on us, Charlene, one morsel at the time, at their leisure. Sure, we could slip out death’s back door. The good sisters have tried to lock it, God bless them, but they’ve got no head for numbers, Trinitarians. You and I could crack the combination in a minute. I learned that from my son Joshua. But we’re not going down that dark hall, Charlene.”

Naughton steps back, looks out the window for a long moment, nods as to himself, then turns back to Charlene. “I’m your friend, Charlene. I’m the wall man. You’re the eagle. We’re in this together.”

On Charlene’s face a faint hint of rubescence.

Joachim Frank’s extraordinarily engaging Aan Zee appears in many ways to be a traditionally realistic novel. It affords all the pleasures we’re accustomed to finding in realistic fiction—a complex protagonist with a supporting cast of colorful characters, vivid settings, a plot with twists and turns, and a grounding of thematic material. But there’s a good deal more here—a patterning deeper than the plot and a thematic questioning of nothing less than the ontological status of our being as humans.

So, meet our protagonist Hubert Belovski, whose genealogy begins with the Big Bang and leaps forward to his present identity as a scientist of atmospheric disturbances, a close companion of wind and dust in unstable states. Thus, the grounding of Hubert’s being is unsettled from our first meeting. It is further disturbed by his discovery that there are four H. Belovskis in the International Science Citation Index. He ponders whether this is a threat to the recognition of his work or a sign that he and the other Belovskis and indeed all the other scientists cited are parts of a universal mind that might produce cosmic peacefulness.

Leaving behind a financial sponge who is perfecting the cultivation of vegetables in the shape of human heads; his beloved cat Sunshine, a music lover and aficionado of Hesse’s Steppenwolf; and memories of his ex-wife, Hubert journeys to the Scheveningen district of The Hague to attend a conference on fluid dynamics. There he will stay near the beach in the seedy hotel Aan Zee, destined to become the central metaphor of the novel on several levels. Of immediate importance are its labyrinthine halls, its rooms of slyly changing configuration, a churlish staff, and a frantic gull that makes a noise outside the window at once clamorous and prophetic.

Now we will meet the three central women of the novel—Helga, an old girlfriend of Hubert’s vacationing near the Aan Zee at a nudist colony; Hubert’s Aunt Frieda, who lives in a small Alpine village in Austria and takes care of Hubert during an extended convalescence; and Ilana, a hired dancer-cum-prostitute. The first of these provides Hubert the gift of sexual awakening; the second brings affectionate care and small-town oppression; the third a bit more than a whiff of the forbidden and subsequent disgrace. Of these Helga is the most fully realized, a woman who likes to stick to the here and now, or as the narrator puts it, “She was one of those people who dwells in the armpits of the zeitgeist.” It’s no wonder, then, that when Hubert takes Helga to an avant-garde performance that features a fire marshal who preempts the entire show Helga is not entranced.

The climax of the novel and the completion of its full circle comes when Hubert returns from Aunt Frieda’s to Scheveningen and the Aan Zee. The transformations he encounters there, the personages he meets, and the vision he experiences will take the reader deep into the question of our communal being.

What remains to be said is that the author, winner of a 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and a dedicated fictionist over many years, brings to this work two finely honed sensibilities that straddle the Cartesian gap between body and mind. Hubert as a skeptical scientist must confront the possibility that he is nothing more than a granule in a stream of particles. On the other hand, his body and his emotions are capable of giving him both great pain and great joy. Does Frank bridge the gap and solve the problem of the split in our human identity? Of course not. The phrase that appears early and reappears at the end as a kind of philosophical motif of linguistic confusion is the Dutch kannitverstahn, can’t understand. It serves as a convenient encapsulation but cannot do justice to the novel’s profound investigation of the mystery of what we are.

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The Beauty of Their Youth

A Review by Ruth Knafo Setton

In the titular story of Joyce Hinnefeld’s wondrous, pitch-perfect new collection, The Beauty of Their Youth, middle-aged Fran shepherds her college-age daughter, Miranda, through Greece and Rome, including visits to the Greek lover of her youth and the Italian friend with whom she traveled to the Greek island Naxos thirty years earlier. Miranda finds a photo of Fran and her friend after their summer of sensual awakening. “You were both so young!” she exclaims. “And so pretty!”
Studying the photo, Fran agrees that yes, they were pretty, “their faces clear and open.” They were all promise and possibility. Choices hadn’t been made yet. Doors hadn’t closed. Fran hadn’t yet rewritten the experiences of that summer to suit the myth of her life, hadn’t blocked out shadowy memories, hadn’t acknowledged the truths that lurked behind the faces in the photo.
But under the light of Mediterranean skies, where the past never dies, and you stumble into ruins at every turn, Fran confronts what really happened that summer, and how it may have determined choices she made later. While Miranda faithfully posts sound-bites of her travel experiences on social media, Fran recognizes the inherent lie of the self we present to others—the photo taken under flattering light, the moment that makes us appear carefree, happy, loved, and beautiful—and the danger of believing the myth we ourselves have created. “Did Facebook somehow make you believe you would never be truly old?” she wonders.
In the opening story, “Polymorphous,” Joan, pushing sixty, has settled into her “role of local eccentric,” but she resents carrying on her late mother’s task of driving Richard, their aging gay neighbor-tenant, to town each week to do his errands. Joan’s relationship with her mother was tense, never resolved, and Richard, who may be dying, holds secrets about her mother, secrets that Joan never probed while her mother was alive, but secrets that still crackle with urgency, and that center around the “pool of desire,” the site of Richard’s mysterious, wild parties years ago. In order to recapture self-awareness and forgiveness, Joan must reenter the past and go “back into the woods, to the deepest part. The pool of desire.”
What lies in the depths of the pool of desire? The main characters in all five stories journey back to their own deep woods, their own pool of desire, and reexamine choices they made in the past, and discover unflinching naked truths. For Joan, it may be mortality—holding tight to oneself to prevent grief from entering. For the painter Van Lloyd in the story, “Benedicta,” his quest for truth leads him to the much-reviled and feared image of “a woman’s legs parted, her cervix widened beyond recognition, for the passage of a human head.”
In “A Better Law of Gravity,” Hinnefeld reimagines Frankie from Carson McCuller’s Member of the Wedding as FJ, a college girl on a mad drive with her bitter, desperate, and over-medicated sister-in-law, who advises her to “stay away from stop signs” and hurtles down a highway in a Thelma and Louise “we’re coming loose” ride to freedom or disaster or death. But in a wonderful ending that manages to be both surprising and inevitable, FJ acts in a way that makes her feel “strong enough to hold the whole world in place with her very own arms.”
“Everglade City” follows pretty German tourist, Inge, as she moves in with a handsome alligator handler in the Florida Everglades, but as their desire for each other dissipates, Inge’s “restless anxiety” rises from the swamps of this “new-hot, green world,” and she turns to the power of guns “loaded, cocked, and aimed,” to try to make sense of a man, a place, a country she cannot fathom.
These stories, with indelible imagery and incisive language, remind us that the past cannot be changed, the future has yet to be written, but we can glimpse both past and future through a wider lens that encompasses blind spots, distortions, lies, and our myths, and perhaps open the door to new choices and possibilities. Like the pool of desire, our reflection may appear serene and still, but we know it simmers and burns deep down, where no one can see.

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Three Dialogs about Ron Maclean’s Three-Part Short Story Collection,

we might as well light something on fire

I. goats, rabbits, etc.

We’re going to talk about we might as well light something on fire.

Right. You know the writer?

Yes.

Is he brave?

I was never in combat with him. Why do you ask?

Guy writes a really far out book called we might as well light something on fire, some smartass will say, right, let’s start with this book.

That would be an incendiary insult to one of the most original collections I have ever read. How do you want to proceed?

Section by section, one of the three sections for each meeting, and concentrate on one story.

OK, first section, goats, rabbits, etc. What story?

“lesser escape artists.” It’s got the right animals, but what if somebody says, this is just zany, not real surrealism?

It's neither faux surrealism nor old style surrealism, as in Breton’s manifesto, which demands the total surrender of reason. It has its own amazing brand. But what’s your take?

I’m really into the story. It’s like a Dali painting a Japanese anime artist has gotten hold of. Very weird butcher shop, very weird happenings.

What else?

No modern woman uses the old rabbit test to find out if she’s pregnant, especially a blind talking male rabbit.

Axiomatic. What else?

Your turn. What’s with all the strings?

Now is the time, said the blogger to his friend, to speak of many strings—strings on sausages and cheeses, strings of geeses, strings in figures of speeches, don’t string me along, the string is played out, strings in quartets, cats’ cradles, guitars. They string the story together.

A good thing because the plot is definitely hanging by a thread. But the butcher says string theory has been disproven.

These strings are metaphorical, not post-quantum, a fictional device that binds together basic human concerns like procreation and death, our relationship to animals, sexual relationships, control, escape.

OK, the title, “lesser escape artists.” Who’s a major escape artist?

Houdini. Mahler.

Did Houdini escape death?

No. Bacteria killed him after he escaped all kinds of physical bondage.

Mahler?

No. He put the three blows of fate in the last movement of his sixth symphony, but they didn’t stay there. His heart went thump, thump, thump and stopped.

Who are the lesser escape artists?

The goats and the rabbit.

The goats are goners. You think the rabbit escaped?

That’s for the reader to figure out.

ww!

The untested reader is not worth writing for. OK, next time love.

II. love

This section is called love. I’m having a hard time finding much of it. Maybe a female thing. You pick the story this time.

“night bus.”

OK. Is the narrator searching for love? On a tourist bus in Lapland?

The narrator has a bad love history.

So what’s he looking for?

Everybody on the bus is out in this frozen wilderness with their binoculars looking up at the sky for something extraordinary. But our narrator is a son of Pascal: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” Pensees. All the narrator sees are “. . . stars: indiscriminate, chaotic, unreachable.”

Do the others see some transcendent pattern?

I doubt it. I think they’re just hoping to see some new constellations and the aurora borealis.

What about the “talker?”

A soi-disant metaphysician craving “A sense that we’re part of something beautiful, vast, complete.”

Mushy romanticism.

Right. Here’s the choice. Do you want to seek the ground of your being or do you just want creature comforts—food, warm clothes, relationships, sex, pop music, a hobby like knitting or jotting in a notebook?

Which does the narrator want?

Both. But the odds are stacked. He’s a failed lover, there’s not enough food on the bus and he doesn’t like it anyway, he can’t connect with his fellow tourists due to the language barrier, can’t see what the guidebook promised, can’t stay warm.

Grim prospects, right?

So it seems. But he may run up against an old paradox: the way you know something exists is by becoming aware of its absence—love, order, meaning.

Is this the absence of God is God thing?

Something like that. More homely, hole in the donut. You have to have a donut.

So what do you think he’ll he do with the absences?

I don’t know. He could struggle on, knowing their presence is out there somewhere, recommit himself to the search for love and the affirmation of the value of his being. Or he could decline into hopeless Kafkaesque absurdity. Or muddle around in some middle state.

The story asks big questions, doesn’t it?

The question I’d say. And the Devil is in the details—defective mittens, a missing tooth, a smarmy guidebook, the clack clack of knitting needle, the unyielding crunch of tundra and ice.

Terrific story. About love, and Love.

Next time the section what remains.

III. what remains

OK, the last section, hauntings, the story “What Remains.” A woman hero. This is mine. You’re the straight man this time.

Understood. Your idea to light Senator La Follette’s hair on fire?

No. The author’s. His title, we might as well light something on fire. And La Follette was an incendiary. Background. Martha, our hero, a federal prosecutor, fails to win a case against the bankers and corporate types who engineered the 2008 crash. Betrayed by her boss. What to do?

What’s Senator Robert La Follette got to do with it?

A ghost from the past, anti-banker, anti-corporation. Martha’s second father.

Both fathers losers, right?

What’s a loser? Somebody who keeps fighting after the other side wins? Or somebody who caves in to the other side? Old Senator La Follette vs. Martha’s boss.

Does it seem weird to you that Martha’s last name is La Follette but there’s no blood kinship?

No. The fighting instinct can come from a fierce lineal father or from a fierce ghost. Blood or myth.

Myth? La Follette was an historical figure.

History is myth with some facts stuck on it. To win you have to control the myth. In this story the capitalist entrepreneurs control it, so far.

What about the ashes and bones subplot?

They’re remains of the fighting spirit. To fight, La Follette needed the bones of the father he never knew. Martha needs her father’s ashes. Both risk criminal acts to get these crucial remains.

So the story's about being true to your paternity?

Ha. You thought you’d catch me with that, you devious male. The story’s deeper. It’s about finding out who you are. Not a fed prosecutor. That’s just an identity with a role. I mean your Self.

The cognitive scientists haven’t located a Self.

And neither have most people. They have identities, marketable, particularly in politics, but not a Self. The thing about the Self is it can’t be commodified, has to be lived out in its own terms.

A Self. Interesting. But a tough sell.

Put it this way, to use the story’s imagery, can a fire be fanned up out of these ashes? Can these bones live? You know that one?

I’ll look it up.

Do that. Because, if you haven’t noticed, we’re in the Valley of Bones right now.

A hell of a story all right.

And a story of hell. We need Martha.

You finished Remedia.

Terrific novel—characters, places, drama, linguistic acrobatics, mystery. But I would’ve read it just to get to that great ending.

Very elegiac. The whole book resonates in it. Made me think of those last minutes of Mahler’s Ninth.

I need to talk about this book

Sure. We can start with Joyce’s subtitle, a picaresque, a rogue on the road adventure story, though his narrator isn’t really a rogue. There are lots of picaresques, but you have to think about Don Quixote.

OK, plenty of adventures alright, like Cervantes—in New York, Ireland, France, San Francisco, Iowa, the Utah desert. But our guy’s not on horseback.

No. His Rosinante takes various forms—ship, air, auto, and maybe the most memorable a brew of psychedelics that transports him halfway across the continent to an Amish colony in Iowa.

Wild. What about a sidekick like Quixote’s Sancho Panza?

The Goshute Indian Tokoa, though he doesn’t meet him at first. A very engaging vulgarian, worldly wise like Sancho but also given to mystery.

What about Quixote’s dreamboat, Dulcinea?

Ha! That’s a very funny question because our narrator’s Dulcinea is an earthy, foul-mouthed often lascivious Irish woman named Medb, Gaelic for intoxicating, here especially sexually intoxicating. Unlike Dulcinea, Medb is very real, even when she joins the desert sisterhood, which we’ll need to talk a lot about later. Meanwhile, our narrator had another lover, Laterna Magika, who’ll be very important when we talk about mission.

OK. But what about Quixote’s renunciation and return to sanity just before he dies? I don’t see that here exactly. But then I don’t have a complete grasp of the novel.

I’m not sure you’re supposed to. Not because there are loose ends narratively. Most of that gets tied up by the end. It’s because our narrator doesn’t venture forth to rid the world of miscreants, giants, witches, etc., like the Don. His is a very different, even more difficult mission. And he meets extraordinary people and witnesses extraordinary events that complicate his mission.

What is the mission exactly?

That’s the last big thing we’ll talk about. But next week the desert sisterhood. OK?

I’m in.

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The desert sisterhood. Will it embarrass you to talk to a woman about vaginal images?

No way. Once I accompanied a female colleague to a gallery to view Judy Chicago’s marvelous Star Cunt Series.

Really. What did you two talk about?

My companion was a Sybil. She prophesied: In the next century there will arise a second great writer, last name Joyce, who will dramatize these images in an unforgettable fiction. Your turn.

OK, we have three accounts of the sisterhood—the narrator’s, the photo spread in the German magazine Bild, and Magika’s multimedia show. I figure the Bild piece is just prurient sensationalism, but even it catches something of the power of the sister’s sculpted Sheela na gigs, which are way more primitive and scary to men than Judy Chicago’s beautiful versions. As for Magika’s show, just juiced up romanticization except that it creates some marvelous riffs, like “. . . turning the desert sky and stars into a sea of floating mirrors, as much like mouths as eyes, soft warm orifices shaped like the Sheela na gigs, through which swam sleek shining creatures . . .” Get it? As for the narrator’s version, he’s always searching, seeking. Here’s his description of the nuns’ cells: “There was the unmistakable scent of women’s bodies throughout the long shed of the convent, powdery, herbal bloody.”
OK, normally when you triangulate you nail the thing you’re looking for. But have we?

Remember the root of the sisterhood was not vaginal insistence but the search for a primordial silence that would overwhelm the horrible noises of the male world: “. . . the silence of some centered sense of being other than who you were.” So the sisterhood is as much sonic as vaginal, though both speak of prodigious depths.

Amazing conception. What went wrong?

To over simplify, the sisters starting making their own noise, which led them from almost silent chanting to a bacchanalian screed. Magika’s show catches that lamentable transformation. Further, they succumb to expansionism and move outward into new territory.

Why these fatal mistakes?

Great question. Something to do with the unavoidable interpenetration of female and male, which challenges the very meaning of those words and gives special significance to the Amish patriarch and to the transsexual admitted to their group. Also something to do with the irreconcilable purity of silent being and our inescapable being in this noisy world. There’s much more we could cite and admire, but I think we’ve gone about as far as we can. It’s a distinctive mark of high modernism and now even more so in postmodernism that questions of meaning don’t get answered; they multiply.
Next and last, the narrator’s mission.

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Now the narrator’s quest.

Yes, it has to do with portals.

Portals, doors, windows, hatches, caves. There’re dozens of them.

Right. And the narrator sets the theme in first sentence:
I first saw one of the doors when I walked with my mother, my hand in hers, as a child of no more than three . . .

Immediately the quest begins, to find the right portal.

What is the right portal?

I’ll tell you what it’s not, because there are false leads. It’s not an exit that just leads to the entrance to another stage. It’s not a mirror that just gives back what is already there. It’s not a grave, because that’s the end, not an entrance. It’s not a door that leads to another door, or a scrim peeled back only to reveal another layer, because that’s endless regression.

What about a camera’s eye? That’s on the cover.

Close. You can alter the camera’s image in a dark room, but ultimately it’s opaque, its depth illusory. A different, seminal instance involving the camera’s eye is the missing frame of the film in which the narrator appears as a homeless man. That lost moment of slippage took on for me the form of longing, leaving me briefly overwhelmed by a vertiginous feeling of loss . . .

This gets scary. I marked this. Sometimes I think that the doors are the light of everything and that they only sometimes expand in ways that you can discern their apertures. Makes me wonder if there can ever be the right portal. Where would it take you anyway?

In this book we don’t get to go through the right portal. To what? The Beatific Vision, Samadhi, Nirvana, the face of Allah?

Why don’t we?

I think because our narrator is thoroughly postmodern. He can never find the right portal and so he suffers the metaphysical angst typical of our age. Look. We have seen metaphysical angst dramatized with terrifying intensity in writers like Kafka and Beckett. But I have never in any other work seen that anguish expressed in so many forms and with such powerful insistence. It’s the essence of this novel.

Hopeless?

I don’t think so. I believe that the fidelity of the novel to the idea of the right portal constitutes a tautological proof of its existence. Anything that deeply lodged in the mind and expressed with such power and beauty must by the persistent enigma of its absence guarantee its presence. So the elegiac ending we have both so admired comes not from the ontological absence of the right portal but from the realization that we cannot enter it in this life.

Tough, but Amen.

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The last thing is storytelling.

Storytelling is simple, right? I’m kidding.

Listen. Cathleen is reflecting on stories of the Hudson River told by her lover:

O the world is a series of stories, she thought, a gap in the wall, windows in windows, everything linked, the whole ball strung with unnoticed silk.

Stories gain us admission to the withins within; and connect everything.

OK.

But when Noah thinks of stories, it’s different. He thinks about telling Cathleen about the French woman:

It was . . . barely possible to tell the smallest thing before a story seemed to melt away. You would begin certain that there was so much to say and then, not halfway in, find yourself already there . . 

Well, they’re very different people—poet and lawyer.

It’s more than personality. It’s about the essence of storytelling. Some stories reach out into the world’s body and knit it all together. Some distill the world into droplets. In this novel that counterpoint of expansion and concentration is masterfully handled.

Liam’s going is the long line on which the smaller stories hang. Cathleen’s story of her old love affair spans her whole life as poet, wife and mother. Noah’s story of the French woman is too rich and beaded to expand. It comes to us as sips of slant wisdom. The most delicate of all the stories in this subtle novel belongs to the old widow Antoinette—not the story of her family and how she came to own the Cezanne, but her coy courtship of Noah, all the more filigreed because she knows well it is only a game.

Sounds miscellaneous.

No. All the stories merge, not in a traditionally knotted ending but in a series of images. Here is one—Cathleen home from taking Liam to college, Noah home from his fay tryst with Antoinette, the apple orchard lover and the French woman submerged. The couple are bedded.

She would lift the sheet up in a billow like a sail, settling it over them again  . . . They would hold each other and moan for their lost baby, their son set sail across the mountains.

A beautiful book.

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                            Back to Liam’s Going, novel of extraordinary beauty.

What are we talking about this time?

Memory.

What is memory?

I don’t know, but I know how it works in this novel. I call it the music of memory. Three have resonant memories: Cathleen, mother and wife; Noah father and husband; and Antoinette, widow and owner of the Cezanne. A triad, each a different tone and timbre but together a beautiful chord. Minor key, elegiac, because what we remember we no longer have.

Tell the different sounds.

Cathleen’s a Panpipe. In her remembering you hear not just notes but also the breath and the lips passing over the pipes. On slopes above the Hudson River we are really in the land of Eros.

She lay in the arms of her lover only twice and never on a feather bed or any for that matter. Once in an apple barn and a last time in a forgotten graveyard. O what happens when we die, she thought, what happens ever after. 

And Noah’s?

A bassoon. His lips a long bent reed away from the wind’s body, but he fingers the stops well. A cautious man but intense, in his youth taught deeply by a French woman.

“Do you love anything?” The French woman had asked years before and, his own son’s age then, he did not know how to answer and for an instant then too all the world suddenly gaped like a dark cavern within him.

Antoinette?

A cello, closest to the human voice. A lament for a lost husband, victim of a belle dame sans merci.

. . . he missed the road too much no matter how much he loved me. He drank himself away eventually, turned so yellow from the jaundice the children called him the Chinaman. Cirrhosis. . . . God he was handsome though, before he turned yellow.

All very sad and sweet, but I never heard of a trio of panpipe, bassoon and cello.

Neither have I. But there you have memory’s chord—love, loss, mystery. And death, without which there can be no poignancy.

A novel of extraordinary beauty.

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A Novel of Extraordinary Beauty.

You find in your hands a work of great beauty, like Michael Joyce’s novel, Liam’s Going. It makes you uneasy. You feel like one of those Trojan elders chirping the perilous beauty of Helen. Send her back. You warily mention to a friend that you have discovered a 21st century novel of great lyric beauty. Right, she says, a baby born with a beard. That kind of fiction went out with Virginia Woolf. What about Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood, you say.

OK, moments of lyricism, but very provisional and nervous.

Why don’t you let me tell you about this book.

OK, 300 words or less.

We have a husband Noah and a wife Cathleen. Cathleen is taking their son and only child to his freshman year in college. Noah is at home helping a very old neighbor Antoinette with an electrical problem. On the wall of Antoinette’s rustic lakeside Hudson Valley home hangs an extraordinary thing, a painting by Cezanne. Noah’s eyes fix upon it:

Across the room on the wall opposite the lakes there was a small painting in blues and the faintest yellow green, a landscape like a faded lapis lazuli. Though of land, it spoke of water and seemed exactly right there, so extraordinary that the whole room seemed to float toward it.

Noah paddles Antoinette in her canoe on the nearby lake. She recounts for him the winding family history that accounts for the presence of this object of extraordinary value in so modest a house. The painting is many things: an heirloom, a representation of natural beauty, a symbol of charmed age, a passage between land and water, a benign current of inward drift. It might serve as an icon for the whole novel.

Are you still with me?

Interested. 115 more words.

OK, Joyce’s magic tricks: indelible images; a syntax of rhythms within and across sentences, the way the percussionist talks to the strings; harmonic symmetries that tie the whole book together; recollections woven unconsciously into the intimacies of marriage; the history and topography of the Hudson River Valley, a spatial and temporal lode of romantic treasures. Also the subtle sheen of Eros polishing the texture of the book with a silken wash:

The best of his stories . . . involved a woman named Alearda, a painter and wood sprite who lived alone in a cabin along the Hudson beyond the railway tracks near Rhinecliff and whom he wooed in Italian and pidgin and flute music and apple blossoms.

Lush, but go on.

I’m out of words. I’ll get back to you in a week or so with more wonders of this book. Meanwhile, click on the image below to get it.

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Raven 10-30-18

October 30, 2018

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Not a Phoenix

Special Notice to All Locals
The Eroica Trilogy is now available at The Book House in Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, NY. A miraculous and brilliant gem in a world of mass marketing. Support your local bookstore!

OK, back to The House of Nordquist.

When Is a Word Not a Word?

That is not the same question as when is a vocable not a word? Scat singers, adepts at glossolalia, and sufferers of aphasia, among others, may make word-like sounds meaningless to most of us.

In The House of Nordquist Erik is a different case. He speaks the single vocable “raven,” ordinarily a word but denuded by him of meaning—no longer word or bird. Nevertheless Paul, his naïve acolyte, hearing the sound repeatedly, writes:

“I was certain that I would dream of the raven, even though I knew the utterance did not signify a bird. It would be flying out of Eric’s mouth, enlarging itself as it flew more freely. The one visible eye would be obsidian. The other eye might be red but it would remain invisible because the bird would not turn in its flight. It would fly straight, pulling the walls of the house with it out over the brow of the hill. The Fall of the House of Nordquist. But I did not dream of the raven. I dreamt of the altered sounds of Helene’s body.”

Erik’s ruthless “raven” signifies nothing. It is the negation of meaning, a linguistic null that serves the nihilism of his infernal project: immolation of body, desacralization of music, renunciation of spirit. It is dedicated to the absolute zero bequeathed to him by his mad father, with whom he voyaged through Arctic ice to the edge of Nothingness.

Madness, right? But also terrifyingly logical. Given the human dependence on language, given the abysses of human desecration of language, what could be more germane to Erik’s nihilistic logic than the reduction of the Word to zero, prelude to the certain destruction and the dubious reconstruction of the world?

OK. Next time color and music. Promise.

See you at The Book House.

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Thoth, Inventor of Writing

Yours in darkness and light,
The Author, Devotee of Thoth

Fiction by Eugene K. Garber
The House of Nordquist
O Amazonas Escuro
Vienna ØØ
The Eroica Trilogy: Selections
Metaphysical Tales
Beasts in Their Wisdom
The Historian

Static Reference Britten Essay (sic)

October 27, 2018

Reflections on Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem

Eugene K. Garber

From the first performance of Britten’s War Requiem at Coventry Cathedral on May 30, 1962 to this day, popular and critical reception have placed it in the first rank of choral works of the 20th Century. The question proposed here, however, is not one of musical assessment but of meaning. What does the War Requiem say? It says that war is evil. Yes, but so evil that it vitiates the long tradition of western humanism? So evil that it casts humanity into a darkness inaccessible to the consolations of religion?

In October of 1958 a representative of the Coventry Cathedral Festival approached Britten about the composition of a large choral work which might use sacred or secular texts. No one could have predicted that there would be both and that the juxtaposition of the two kinds of texts would hold the forthcoming work in a profoundly provocative tension that has haunted listeners for half a century now.

Texts and Music. Of primary interest in the search for meaning is the texts, their relationships and the way in which the music illuminates them.[1] The texts of Britten’s Requiem consist of the words of the Latin Requiem Mass and nine poems by Wilfred Owen, six complete, three excerpted. The full text of the work can be accessed by readers at http://www.its.caltech.edu/~tan/Britten/reqtext.html

I will describe several sets of textual juxtapositions and the music which accompanies them. Every Owen poem lies between two sections of Latin from the mass and therefore looks backwards and forward. Take for instance the first of the Owen poems, the sonnet “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” which begins, “What passing bells for those who die as cattle?” It comes immediately after the Requiem Aeternam and the hymn to God in Zion and before the Kyrie. The poem’s bitter indictment of war’s slaughter of youth and of those who would offer consolation in the form of traditional religious ceremony is in keeping tonally with the Requiem Aeternam, the dark musical colorations of which seem to offer little hope for rest, much less for lux perpetua. The hymn sung by the Boys’ Choir sounds a fragile note of sweet piety, and the tenor, whose voice in the singing of the poem has been full of a stentorian anger, also shows some sweetness when he sings, “not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes/ shall shine the holy glimmer of good-byes.” It is moist eyes and not the candles of the mass that truly express proper grief for war’s ravages. The Kyrie that follows is preceded by and punctuated with bells—the very bells of the poem, one could say, that sound for those who die like cattle. The Chorus’s singing of the Kyrie is unanimated, monotonous—a plea for mercy without salience.

This is dark indeed. War is monstrous. Traditional religion and its trappings are ineffectual if not downright hypocritical in the face of war. Rest and mercy are at best distant possibilities. Only children in their innocence, boys in particular, may make some true expression of piety and grief. And most ironic of all, this very liturgical form we are listening to—with its expression of grief, piety, terror, consolation and hope—is deliberately being undermined by invasions of alien texts and musical structures that it cannot reconcile. Will the rest of the work simply hammer home these bleak themes, or will there be some change?

A full examination of the Requiem text by text, accompanied by musical analysis, would be very rewarding, but it would constitute a sizeable monograph. Here I can only point to a handful of text/music cruxes.

The long Dies Irae encloses four Owen poems. The first is the opening three stanzas of the fragmentary “Bugles Sang,” gentle and elegiac in tone if also somewhat ominous. The second is the sonnet “The Next War,” which begins as a jaunty challenge to the power of Death and ends with the hope that in the future men will war against Death for life rather than against each other for national aims. The third is six lines from “Sonnet: On Seeing a Piece of Our Artillery Brought into Action,” a complex poem the basic point of which is that the huge artillery piece is an instrument of necessary chastisement of those executing war but one to be purged in the future: “May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!” The last of the four poems, “Futility,” begins tenderly but ends wondering why sun and earth awakened humanity out of the elements.

Britten’s Dies Irae is suitably dark and fearful, but this is no thunderous operatic Verdi, whatever debt Britten may have owed his predecessor. There is a memorable fanfare and drums, the Women’s Choir unsettled by the all-encompassing book of deeds, a touching Recordare Jesu Pie again by the Women’s Choir, and a Lacrimosa of extraordinary poignancy. In the poems we have the same undercutting irony that we saw in the Requiem Aeternam. Sad bugles diminish the tuba mirum that calls the dead from their tombs. Death is a noxious nuisance, not a terror. The thunder of man-made guns assaults the heavens in a judgment that rivals God’s. A dead soldier was better never born. But the irony, in both words and music, has given up some of its edge. A more hopeful future for mankind is at least conceivable. The agency of God is called upon.

Britten’s treatment of the Offertorium warrants special attention. The Boys’ Choir sings with urgency its plea for the delivery of the souls of the faithful. Then baritone and tenor sing Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” a retelling of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. In Owen’s version Abraham refuses to follow the injunction of the angel of God and sacrifices Isaac anyway: “But the old man would not so, but slew his son/ and half the seed of Europe one by one.” The musical setting of the poem borrows from Britten’s own “Canticle II, Abraham and Isaac” (1952) which, using text from the Chester Miracle Play, tells the story straight and ends with praise of obedience. When the poem is ended the Boys’ Choir returns to finish the Offertorium with “sacrifices and prayers” and with a reminder of God’s promise to Abraham that his seed will “pass from death to life.” Here ensues perhaps the sharpest irony of text and music. As the boys continue to sing of the promise, their song is invaded by repetitions, sung by baritone and tenor, of the last line of the Owen poem—the slaughter of the seed of Europe. What exactly is the point here? God requires obedience. He does not require human sacrifice. If the biblical story is to be seen anagogically as a precursor to the sacrifice of Christ, Owen’s version erases any connection between Isaac and Christ. For in the poem Abraham is no longer the biblical father. He is European nationalism hell bent on the destruction of his progeny. Isaac is no longer first son of the chosen people but European youth sacrificed to nationalistic war. The irony here turns not on God’s agency or on the agency of the Church but on human perversion of sacred promise.

The Sanctus contains the most glorious and triumphant music of the Requiem. The counterpoint here between the hosannas of the liturgical text and the gloomy denial of immortality in Owen’s poem “The End” is this time uncomplicated. The liturgy proclaims the glory of God. The poem declares that death is final. Though the doleful poem has the last word, the music of the Sanctus has the greater power.

The Agnus Dei interlaces the liturgical text and Owen’s poem “At a Calvary Near Ancre.” The liturgical text petitions what it always petitions: peace from the lamb who takes away the sins of the world. The poem says that the gentle Christ is true to his sacrificial calling. It does not say he is a savior. The poem also says that Christ’s disciples have deserted him, that his priests are prideful, and that the scribes are busy whipping up nationalism. Only the soldiers bear with Christ. There is absolutely no bitterness in the tenor’s singing of the poem, which ends thus: “But they who love the greater love/ Lay down their life; they do not hate.”

Up to this point the Requiem has been moving definitely if not uniformly from expressions of bitter irony and anger toward resignation and even hints of reconciliation. Where does the Libera Me take us?

If the Sanctus has the most glorious music of the Requiem, the Libera Me has the most terrifying. Beginning with an almost inaudible drumbeat and deep strings, the chorus and the soprano slowly rise to a horrifying crescendo of desperate pleading punctuated by lash-like sounds from the percussion section. Mounting brass marks the reappearance of the Dies Irae, which plunges the singers into a panic of muddled voicings. Out of this comes the compulsive repetition of ignem, fire of war, fire of damnation, followed by the soprano’s equally compulsive repetition of tremens factus sum ego. So distraught finally are the singers that they have forgotten, we might say, to sing the last plea of this section of the liturgy: Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis. Instead,they are reduced to a constantly diminishing and ineffectual repetition of Domine. The power of this section can scarcely be suggested. It has to be heard. It is preeminently the place in the Requiem where musical effect seizes text and wrings from it the last degree of terror.

The long poem that concludes the Libera Me, “Strange Meeting,” is sparely set; the words speak for themselves. Two speakers, tenor and baritone, once enemies in war, meet in the underworld. They reject enmity and mourn their loss. The second speaker wishes he could have lived to cleanse the blood-clogged chariot-wheels of war: “I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,/ Even from wells we sunk too deep for war,/ Even the sweetest wells that ever were.” But this is not to be. They are dead: “Let us sleep now.” Now comes the Paradisum. The tenor and the baritone continue to sing “Let us sleep now,” while the Boys’ Choir sings of entry into Paradise, joined at the end by the Chorus, foregrounding the voices of women. The Requiem ends softly.

So, if the work has been a sort of contest between the liturgical text, which reposes its final hope in God, and the Owen poems, which condemn war and its perpetrators without offering much hope of human betterment or of religious consolation, where do we stand at the end? Every commentator, virtually without exception, speaks of the enormous power of the work. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the baritone for the first performance at Coventry, was completely undone and could hardly be persuaded to leave the choir stall. There are many such testimonies. Some listeners identify religious consolation as the source of power. Others do not. Mervyn Cooke finds the ending of the Requiem “profoundly unsettling.”[2] I take up these different responses in the Conclusion below.

Context. Obviously the War Requiem did not spring from Britten’s imagination as a self-contained piece of musical art unconnected to history, culture, and his own life and thought. It is richly contextualized, and the contexts are embedded in the work, often very subtly. Here is a question that takes us to several important areas of interest. Why did Britten deploy the poems of a dead poet written about a war that did not destroy Coventry Cathedral? This will no doubt sound curious: I believe that there is a strong element here of nostalgia.[3] For Britten, a pacifist, WWI is a much clearer case than WWII. Britten’s pacifism, something of a work in progress in the thirties, grew ever more steadfast, so that when in 1945 he visited Belsen he was horrified but unshaken in his faith in non-violence. The visit would have confirmed knowledge which he already had, if fractionally, when he wrote the satirical Our Hunting Fathers (Opus 8, 1936), in which he ominously couples the words German and Jew.[4] But the fact remains that WWI with its useless carnage and its hideous jingoism is a better pacifist target than WWII, fought against imperialism and Nazism. If, however, we stop here we may be inclined to charge Britten with mere opportunistic anachronism. Let us look further.

We might ascribe the choice of Owen to the simple fact that WWII did not produce poetic indictments of war with anything like the directness and power of Owen’s. If Britten had turned to American poets (unlikely given the occasion for the Requiem) like Randall Jarrell or Henry Reed, he would have found images of war sufficiently grotesque, but he would not have found, as in Owen, the defeat of idealism, the loss of innocence, the sense of betrayal. And there was no British poet to turn to. Philip Larkin, perhaps the best alternative, himself saw the uniqueness of loss of innocence in the Great War and reflected it in his poetry.[5] So Britten chose to overlay at Coventry the devastation of WWII with the ravages of the earlier Great War. The Great War was more cruelly definitive of the destruction of any sense of historical purposefulness. Old Europe died in the trenches in Belgium and France. The effect in the Requiem of this layered double image of the two wars is striking, like watching an horrific action through a scrim of bloody memory.

But there is more to the choice of Owen, whose poetry and life Britten was studying. Owen’s struggle with traditional religion was far more dramatic than Britten’s. Young Owen began to prepare himself for the priesthood, but he could not go on with it. He found life at the parsonage where he served dull and mindless, and more important he felt hypocritical teaching boys Church dogma. Thus we see in his poems (and certainly the ones chosen by Britten for the Requiem) many ambivalent references to Christianity—the benightedness of the priesthood, the ineffectualness of religious ceremony, the presumptive power of God to strike down injustice, the futile drama of humankind with its disobedience to God and blindness to its own good, the fondness of the hope for immortality, the gentleness and trueness of Christ—a conflicted set that cannot be amalgamated. This comes close to what we know about Britten’s own religious condition. He wrote much church music, and it cannot be said that he did so only because of tradition or convenience of venue and audience. His music on religious subjects is too passionate. One thinks especially of the dark Donne holy sonnets, set shortly after Britten’s visit to Belsen, and of shorter works like the unforgettable setting of the old ballad “A Lyke Wake Dirge” with its impassioned refrain: “And Chrtise receive thy saule.” Thus we see in the Requiem Britten expressing both his and Owen’s unresolved ambivalence toward religion.

And finally Britten’s choice of the Owen poems helps him focus sharply on war’s destruction of innocence and youth, a horror heightened by a highly subtilized element of homoeroticism. Fussell, treating the role of homoeroticism in the poetry of the Great War, says: “It is most conspicuously in the poetry of Wilfred Owen that these impulses of Victorian and early-twentieth-century homoeroticism converge, and it is there that they are transfigured and sublimated with little diminution of their emotional warmth.”[6] I will show how, musically, a transfigured and sublimated homoeroticism adds a special element of poignancy to the Requiem. But first let us remember that for three decades, from the writing of Peter Grimes (1945) through Death in Venice (1973) Britten works and reworks the theme of the love of boys and the destruction of innocence. Carpenter in his analyses of Britten’s operas is quite perceptive about the ways in which operatic characters play the roles of innocence and corruptor of innocence: Grimes’s apprentices/ Grimes (Peter Grimes); Billy Budd/Claggart (Billy Budd); Miles/Peter Quince (The Turn of the Screw); Tadzio/ Aschenbach (Death in Venice). Each opera comes at the theme from a different angle, but common to all is a transaction, always fatal, between the older man and the youth, a transaction tinctured—sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly—with homoerotic elements. Throughout his adult life Britten was powerfully attracted to the innocence of boys and struggled to find a way to express warm affection free of erotic interest. The operas are a dramatic, musical record of the dilemma, perhaps one not psychologically resolvable.

How is this theme manifest in the Requiem? Consider Britten’s careful spatial arrangements for his sizeable musical forces. Peter Evans describes them in this way. “ . . . the three spatially distinct ensembles move most often on quite separate planes, presenting the impassioned calm of a liturgy that points beyond death (boys and organ), the mingled mourning, supplication and guilty apprehension of humanity in the mass (choir and main orchestra, sometimes sublimated, rather than personalized, by the soprano soloist) and the passionate outcry of the doomed victims of war (male soloists and chamber orchestra).”[7] Evans is accurate, but this arrangement does not mean that Britten has at last found a way to protect the innocence of boys (as he did not in the operas). Remember that in the Offertorium the boys’ prayers of sacrifice and praise are invaded by the male soloists repeatedly singing the last line of Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”: . . . “and half the seed of Europe one by one.” And later when the boys sing the Paradisum, the male voices again interrupt, though less ominously, with “let us sleep now,” the last line of Owen’s “Strange Meeting.” And so again, as in the operas, the purity of the boys is assailed by older men.

Owen and Britten understand, then, that in any circumstance perpetual purity and innocence is not possible. But the destruction of the young male body in war is the final evidence of a nation gone mad, become the anti-Abraham who kills his sons despite the injunctions of the angel of God.

Conclusion. In preparing to write this essay I have listened to the Requiem many times.[8] I cannot listen as others, but here is my feeling. Darkness and light are here too finely balanced on the fulcrum of irony to allow for a simple either/or. Too much is held in suspension: blessings and curses, salvation and damnation, immortality and dust, belief and doubt, hope for the future and the nightmare of history. We Christians may wish that Britten had come to believe firmly in God’s infinite grace, but he remained true to the terrible equipoise between yea and nay that haunted him all his life. Yet I believe that the Requiem does provide, if not a declaration of faith, still a powerful emotional expressiveness that brings the gift of all great tragic art, catharsis. By capturing for us musically a huge mass of yearnings, fears, and hopes, the work allows each of us to gather into the experience of the work, the emotional roots of our own history, our own losses, our own faith, and to achieve a degree of release and even purification.

[1] I am deeply indebted to the musical insights provided by Mervyn Cooke, Britten: War Requiem, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 1996) and by Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, 1979)

[2] Cooke, War Requiem, 77

[3] I am deeply indebted in what follows to Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford University Press (Oxford, 1975)

[4] For biographical information I have referred always to Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: a Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York, 1993)

[5] For an extended discussion of the loss of innocence in the Great War, see Fussell, 18-28

[6] Fussell, 286

[7] Evans, 451

[8] The performance I have is by Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus (1988)

The Secret of the Caves

October 5, 2018

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Tyree and Erik Contend for Mastery of the Cave

Dear Subscriber,

We are nearing the end of posts about The House of Nordquist. The next post will pose some old questions. What is a word? When is a word not a word? And finally, the last of the Nordquist posts will delve into graphic notation—the art of creating images that can be played or sung. After that, stay tuned for some special treats from other writers.

Caves. To oversimplify vastly there are two kinds. In one you find darkness and terror, monsters like Homer’s Cyclops. In the other you discover treasures, perhaps of prehistoric art, the dawning aesthetic of our early ancestors.

And so it is in The House of Nordquist. In one cave the Faustian Erik seeks the forbidden music that will undo all history and the humans who made it. Out of such destruction, his acolyte Paul believes, he intends to make an entirely new reality. To accomplish his appalling musical alchemy Erik will find the most poisonous essence known to him—the ravages of World War II, extracted from the sounds of the body of a Holocaust victim and distilled in the alembic of pure misanthropy. From this he will compose his atrocious symphony.

In the other cave, in a dream of miraculous access, Professor Tyree penetrates the mysteries of the famous caverns of Chavet. In an interior chamber he ponders the startling image of the huge bison with eight legs. “ . . . the ancient artist’s way of indicating the rhythmic running of the beast. I heard the variously pitched drumbeat of the hooves. So here, I thought, is the first octave, long before Pythagoras, resounding in the breasts of the earliest members of our species.”

Two caves. Two musics. One the thunder of war and annihilation. The other the interval and beat buried deep in human origins.

Please consider sharing the source of these caves with your fellow spelunkers. They only have to click on this image:

With every good wish,
Your Reverberant Author

Fiction by Eugene K. Garber
The House of Nordquist
O Amazonas Escuro
Vienna ØØ
The Eroica Trilogy: Selections
Metaphysical Tales
Beasts in Their Wisdom
The Historian

Time Out of Mind

September 22, 2018

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Professor Tyree Prepares to Meet the Great God Kronos Even as You Prepare to Meet Professor Tyree in The House of Nordquist

Reminder. There are bonuses for each of the books of The Eroica Trilogy. Click mouse, tap screen, animate the images below. Resubscribe. If you buy a copy of one or more of The Eroica Trilogy books, you are eligible for a free e-copy of the prize-winning collection Metaphysical Tales, about whose author Joyce Carol Oates said “a writer of extraordinary skill and vision.” An estimation, we believe, prophetic.

In our last post we (an instance, perhaps ill considered, of the “royal first person”) noted the difficulty that Alice, habitué of the House of Nordquist, has in telling her story.

An inconsiderate respondent has offered that Alice did not have any more trouble than the author himself. The author parries.

It is unnatural to relate a story in chronological order. One does not remember one’s first romance thus: there was the first coffee together, then a longish phone call, then a dinner etc. No, one immediately remembers the blow-up, recalling unfortunate miscues, words spoken in anger. One remembers the failed reconciliation, the pain, the warning signs unheeded.

In short, one goes straight to the evil blossom, then back to the seed, the toxic irrigation, ahead to the withered flower dewy with tears, a doleful tapestry of misfortune.

So, there is an horrific fire at the House of Nordquist. What was going on before the fire? Who was there? What now motivates a strenuous remembering of the fire? Are the memories of the witnesses credible? Where are the witnesses now? What do they want? What are they doing? The fire is the center. Everything radiates from it, not in clock time but the way a blossom unfolds. That is the special pleasure The House of Nordquist offers, not sequential discovery but a tessellated mosaic. Take up the tiles, dear reader. Fit them together. You are the artist of this mosaic.

The Author

Next time: The Secret in the Cave

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Fiction by Eugene K. Garber
The House of Nordquist
O Amazonas Escuro
Vienna ØØ
The Eroica Trilogy: Selections
Metaphysical Tales

Friends of Friends

September 6, 2018

Good Friends All!

The official launch of The House of Nordquist is Saturday, September 8, 2018. Down the ways the strange house/boat goes! But not without your help. Tell your friends. Tell them to tell their friends. Friends don't let friends miss out on the profound edifications of a novel like this.

Don't have any friends? Tell acquaintances, officemates, fellow tenants, annoying neighbors, In these divisive times we must all pull together.

AND, at this very moment the book is on sale for $.99 kindle, just one half of one cent per page.

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The Author

Alice and Schroedinger's Cat

August 29, 2018

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Dear Subscriber,

In my last I promised my next would deal with uncertainty. So I’m stuck with it. But I should be. The House of Nordquist is replete with uncertainty. Well, you might think, just another trick of fabulists. Maybe. But here’s an axiom. If necessity is the mother of invention, uncertainty is the mother of imagination.

The Princess of Uncertainty is Schroedinger’s cat, black no doubt. In her box, black no doubt (black boxes also populous in The House of Nordquist), she is either dead or alive, the vial of poison having been released on signal from an atomic event, or not. But must she be either dead or alive? Maybe she’s waiting for us to open the box and look at her. Maybe it’s the nature of our gaze that motivates her to play dead, or pounce. (These speculations have not been approved by Schroedinger, but he is in his grave in Austria, dead, alive, or nascent.)

The Princess of Uncertainty in The House of Nordquist is Alice Albright, a pouncer. You want to get to know her, watch her play questioner and storyteller with her husband, listen to her twist the logicians of the Agency around her finger, watch her toss to the winds the wretched givens of her life and substitute a world of rich imaginings. Alice knows you can get inspiration anywhere: the sick yearnings of a hollowed husband, the machinations of a mad man, a narrative from the Holocaust, the vagaries of a Ouija board, old movies, especially old movies. You just need to rummage among the dubious scraps of history, culture and dementia and you’ll find all you need to create a life, a romance, a stirring novel. You’re alive every time the box is opened, the vial of poison unbroken.

So, dear subscriber, ready yourself to open the black box. Watch Alice pounce. And don’t forget to forward this email to your imaginative friends who’ve been longing to meet Alice. They just have to click on the image below to join our circle. Next time: Human Identity. Big topic.

Fire and Ice

August 17, 2018

*|MC:SUBJECT|*

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The House of Nordquist in a World of Fire and Ice

Dear Reader,

This is the third of my posts since you subscribed to these thoughts about The House of Nordquist, the last of the novels of the Eroica Trilogy.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
–Robert Frost

As I promised in my last, the subject here is fire and ice. In Frost’s memorable poem the poet speculates about two forms of worldwide destruction, both engineered by human passion—desire (fire), hate (ice). The poem was published a century ago. But how fresh it seems—the climate heating up, fires burning across California; the prospect of nuclear holocaust and nuclear winter, which we thought we had put behind us, now possible again; the universe, composed mostly of anti-matter, dispersing over unimaginable expanses of space-time, disintegrating.

Apocalyptic fire and ice are central images in The House of Nordquist. In much religious literature fiery wars mark the End-time—Christian, Hindu, Islamic and others. But I believe that apocalyptic ice is more terrifying than fiery destruction. Intense fire is horrifying, but it is not unfamiliar. There is no absolute temperature. But there is an absolute zero—complete entropy, everything reduced to inert cosmic dust. Universal negation, nullity. No one has ever experienced it. But it is the object of the perverse quest of Gunnar Nordquist, Erik’s mad father, a quest re-enacted for Paul Albright, Erik’s mesmerized acolyte.

A question haunts me. That Erik’s aim is apocalyptic is obvious. But what form of End-time does he imagine he will bring about with his demonic musical creation? What can we tell by watching him, by watching the relationships of others with him?

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