Dr. Metablog

"The Small House at Allington" (1863)

The nation is in an uproar -- the Covid-19 pandemic, mass unemployment, racial reckoning, disorder in the streets, Russians sabotaging our elections, ignorant authoritarian leadership.

We ourselves are sheltering at home, and are healthy, thanks to the masks and the cooperation of friends and neighbors, but there's little hope of a getaway. We certainly can't travel. What to do for an escape? There's no frigate like a book, so it's time to read a long leisurely novel by Anthony Trollope.

The Small House at Allington is the fifth of six in the Barsetshire series. Had I read it before? Certainly, but it doesn't matter. To read a Barset novel is to put on well-worn old clothes. Loose slippers. The Small House is comfort food. It's the mac and cheese of novels.

It's not 2020, it's 1863. Outside of Barsetshire, millions of working-class Englishmen are living in grinding, soul-destroying poverty. Cholera is rampant. India is being pillaged. Ireland is trying to recover from famine and mass emigration. There's a second Opium War in China. British ships are running the Union blockade of Confederate ports. But all is as ever in the perennial untouched Allington microcosm.  

Should the Dales continue to stay in the dower house even though the squire is sometimes impolitic?  Should Adolphus Crosbie choose to marry Lily Dale (yes!) or Lady Alexandrina de Courcy (big mistake)? Will Plantagenet Palliser run off with Griselda Grantly -- don't do it, Planty Pall!  Should Lucy Dale accept a dinner invitation from the Earl de Guest? Why won't Isabella Dale agree to accept her cousin Bernard as a husband? -- everyone in the family thinks it's a good idea, except Bell herself, who prefers poor but faithful Dr. Crofts.

Political and economic problems do not intrude into the small world of the Small House. Finding a mate, keeping a mate, repairing a frayed relationship is its subject; equally important for men, is to locate a woman of means, so that one can support a comfortable style of life without stooping to real work.  

Adolphus Crosbie, although far from our favorite, accurately describes the three things that he requires in a wife: that she be of a good family, that she have money, and that she be beautiful. Does Mr. Crosbie possess these qualities himself?  No. But he does have a handsome set of whiskers, which seems to be sufficient.

"Negative Bouyancy"

Mogambo (1953), directed by John Ford, is an eternal-triangle story in which earthy Ava Gardner and prim Grace Kelly compete for white hunter Clark Gable. Unfortunately, it's less engaging as a romance than as a travelogue -- it offers spectacular footage of African megafauna (hippos, giraffes, lions, gorillas, etc.).

Whenever I watch classic films set in "the colonies," I'm fearful that the native people will be exoticized and orientalized and trivialized, but I'm happy to report that Mogambo is less offensively Tarzanish than most -- setting aside a couple of embarrassing "fakelore" episodes. I would have been even happier if the Africans weren't just animated wallpaper -- bearers or rowers or dancers or spear-throwers -- and that they weren't depicted as entirely subservient to their white overlords. Mogambo is based on Victor Fleming's pre-Code Red Dust (1931) -- a much more sensual film than Mogambo and one which allowed Jean Harlow lots of room to wink and flirt. It's most odd that the glamorous sexy hunter in both Red Dust and Mogambo is played by Clark Gable - a rare example of filmic auto-reprising. He's hyper-masculine, at age 30, in Red Dust but in Mogambo it's too too obvious that his hair has been dyed a shiny black. When he pounces on Ava and Grace and mashes their mouths with unpersuasive 50s kisses, it is taken for granted that both ladies will immediately grow weak in the knees. 

I grew even less Gable-dazzled when I discovered a weird anecdote in Donald Sinden's recollection of the filming of Mogambo. (Sinden played the part of Grace Kelly's spineless, intellectual, oblivious husband). Sinden reports that (prepare yourself to be stunned and disillusioned): 

before leaving camp on the first morning [of shooting] I had been told to report to the hair-dressing department's tent, where I found the make-up men armed with electric clippers: 'I have to remove the hair from your chest.' 'Whatever for?' I asked, 'Orders.' It transpired that Clark [Gable], whose chest was completely devoid of hair, had always insisted that no other actor should appear on film exposing a hirsute breast. This included any member of the crew not wearing a shirt as well. He considered it a slight on his masculinity.

Surely, this is one of the most bizarre anecdotes in movie history. The King of Hollywood, the legend whose mere presence famously set roomfuls of maidens all a-quiver, was so sexually insecure that he required mass depilation of cast and crew! Follicular fragility! Big-time nuttiness?   

Question: was it in Clark's contract that he had the right to dictate the degree of chest shagginess of cast and crew -- or was he just throwing his weight around?  Suppose Sinden or some sweaty best boy had refused the electric clippers. Would the production have ground to a halt?   

It's well known that since the time of Samson and probably before, male hair has been associated with strength, but even Delilah didn't set out to defoliate every man in Gaza.

But Clark Gable's chest hair insecurity is only Donald Sinden's second most curious anecdote. Even more astonishing, at least to me, is that Sinden suffered from "negative buoyancy." Negative buoyancy is a condition in which a person is unable to float in water. In Sinden's case, negative buoyancy was discovered, he says, while filming a shipwreck scene in The Cruel Sea (1953). Sinden started to sink and was rescued from drowning by his co-star Jack Hawkins.

Almost all human beings float. Bob like corks. I don't, and neither did my father nor my male descendants. As a family, we're sinkers. I don't know why, except that perhaps we have an eccentric specific gravity or because our swim bladders go on the fritz, like sick fish. We regularly and uniformly plunge to the bottom, like a stone or a heavy lump of lead. 

How wonderful to know that there is a dignified name for our peculiar family trait: "negative buoyancy."

And now we can be consoled that we're not alone. 

There's got to be a support group for the negatively buoyant out there, somewhere.

 

Stranger on the Third Floor (1939)

 

Should I encourage my friends to seek out this film or should I warn them to steer clear?

 

Stranger on the Third Floor is one of many works of art that are more historically important, more influential than they are good or pleasing. With a thin plot, obviously padded, it moves along as slow as molasses. The main character, the focus of much of the action, is played by John McGuire who is so unredeemably incompetent and amateurish that you can't keep your eyes off him. And yet, like it or not, Stranger on the Third Floor is seminal -- acclaimed by knowledgeable folks as the first true noir, the head and font of all those 40s and 50s black-and-white films featuring betrayals, gumshoes, bad girls, corrupt city officials, errant bullets, dream sequences, flashbacks, low angle shots, deep shadows and Elisha Cook Jr.

 

In Stranger, two count-em two different men are accused of murder and are in jeopardy of getting the chair until rescued by the loyal girlfriend.

 

The director, Boris Ingster (Boris Mikhailovich Azar from Riga by way of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre) brought Eisenstein's style and German Impressionism to Hollywood. Peter Lorre (László Lowenstein from Rózsahegy, Hungary and Vienna) brought genuine maniacal creepiness to the part of the villain. 

 

Stranger on the Third Floor is gold for noir enthusiasts -- but dross for the casual film tourist.  

 

Margaret Tallichet is luminous as the girlfriend. What a shame that she retired after making only four film appearances!

Where I Stand

I stand, like most in my cohort who have lived ordinary, conventional lives, at the midpoint of a continuum stretching from grandparents to grandchildren -- at an imaginary apex looking backward and forward, Janus-like. I remember my grandparents, though only at the end of their long lives, and I know my grandchildren, though only at the beginnings of theirs. Two generations back, two generations forward and with 81-year-old me at the fulcrum.

It's been a long eventful tramp from there to here. My grandfather Isaiah was born in 1863, a hundred and sixty seven long years ago, and my youngest grandchildren, the twins Caleb and Asher, joined us just five years ago, in 2015. Although it was only an instant in geological terms, nevertheless, the interval from my grandfather's birth to this moment has seen glaciers melt, rivers change their course, cities arise, plants and animals go extinct, governments and empires grow and decline, wars and epidemics rattle the planet. He lived in a world of serfs and rabbis and pogroms; the grandchildren live in a world of nuclear proliferation, global warming, threats to democracy.

There have also been tectonic shifts in the microcosm of my own family. My Ukrainian-born grandparents would not recognize my third-generation American-born grandchildren, and my grandchildren would have an even more impossible task to understand or appreciate the lives of the great-great-grandparents. It's a long leap from StaryConstantine, old Constantine, in the nineteenth century, where my family originated in backward village Ukraine to Washington DC or northern California or Boulder Colorado in the twenty-first. Rural to urban, agricultural to technical, provincial to worldly, religious to secular, inbred to genetically various. My grandparents were born into a world of carts and horses; my grandchildren play with computers in their cribs. Yet here we are.

We're the same, but different. According to family legend, my grandfather Isaiah left StaryConstantine and his family of origin because of a dispute about religion. They, his father and family, were devout but he was a non-believer. In this regard, Isaiah was a true patriarch, because he established an enduring family template. Over the generations, we remain hostile or sometimes only indifferent to religion -- and in its place we embrace the evidence of the senses and the primacy of reason. Looking backward and forward from my pinnacle, I cannot identify a single lapsed atheist or backslider in the family landscape. I know that my father never attended a house of worship except for a rare funeral or wedding. For him, the sabbath was sacred only to his roses and azaleas. I once asked him if his father, Isaiah, had ever visited a synagogue. He said, "I can't swear about what happened in the Ukraine, but I know that once he got here he never did." For Isaiah, atheism would have been a revolutionary fracturing; for subsequent generations, not even slightly stressful. The precious gift of atheism I once called it.

What has replaced religion? Our extended family remains a people of the book. Among my grandfather's forty-seven direct descendant, thirty-five of whom are alive, six have written books, another is a journalist, and five others have earned law degrees, where not unlike the older generations of Talmudists, they can engage in disputations over nice sharp quillets of the law. There are no rabbis, but I can count at least ten teachers of one secular subject or another. My grandfather had no official schooling, but every one of his great grandchildren is a college graduate and many of them have post-graduate degrees.

There are some families that can boast of painters or violinists or actors in their old world heritage; not ours. Nor have we become creative or imaginative in the new world. I count no poets, no musicians, no actors, and except for my outlier brother who once wrote a novel and now makes bricolage sculptures, no artists. If we make anything, it's useful. Furniture or pottery -- not paintings. But then, no criminals or alcoholics or wastrels either. We're substantial reliable citizens -- firmly nouveau bourgeois. We may be conventional and dull, but we are what my father used to call, without irony and with great pride, solid, tax-paying citizens. 

The Way We Shop Now

The last time, a decade ago, that I needed a rug pad, I went hunting at various malls and shops that might stock such an item. After a few exhausting hours, I located an appropriate-size rug pad at one of those large import stores -- it may have been Pier 1 or WorldMarket. The quality wasn't quite right, and the pad was too large and too costly, but it was there --  and I do possess a utility knife with a very sharp blade. So I bought it, struggled with it, but -- it worked, and it's still there, doing its job, padding the Heriz. 

This time, covid-time, I'm not allowed to search around town, and I don't want to, so instead I did some internet sleuthing for "rug pad."

It's a revelation -- there are many, many vendors very anxious to satisfy my rug pad needs: RugPad USA, Mr.RugPad, RugPads 'R Us, Rugpad-orama, eSaleRugPads, RugPadStock, RugPadHome, RugPadSolutions, Dr. Pad, RugPad World, Royal-T RugPads, Underfoot-Inc, and My Rug Pad, among others. Costco sells a "Mohawk" rug pad made of "100% post industrial recycled synthetic fibers with all natural rubber with SBR latex backing," whatever that is, not cut to exact size, and you have to buy a shrink-wrapped package of four.

I choose RugPadUSA not only for patriotic reasons but because its site featured a lengthy explanatory essay on the potential disasters, hazards and glories of various species of rug pads. Are you not shocked to learn that that some inferior rug pad manufacturers pad out their fiber with clay?  

RugPad USA is a company that takes its rug pads very seriously. I am now up to snuff on Grip, Cushion, Longevity, Sustainability, Safety, and Made-in-America-ness. And also on materials: rubber, jute, felt, Pure Wool, hemp, and memory foam, in their various forms and combinations (and prices).

I went with an "eco friendly Nature's Grip 100% natural rubber and plant jute." It arrived in four days, cut to exact measure. Perfect. This rug pad is so beautiful, let me tell you, that I'm thinking of laying it on top and putting the old tribal Turkish Varamin tent rug underneath. Well, maybe I'm getting too enthusiastic about my glorious new rug pad.

Advantages to internet shopping: it lets your fingers do the walking, there are an infinity of choices, and after a while the item appears miraculously outside your door. Disadvantages: you can't see or feel the product before making a decision; it's a pain to return mistakes; your cash goes to an absentee merchant (RugPad USA is located in Connecticut); local shops suffer, and also, slightly delayed gratification. But the electronic mall is definitely the way we shop now.

The Whole Town's Talking (1936)

Why was I surprised that this was such a fine film? I should have done some research before viewing. It was written by Robert Riskin and Jo Swerling. Riskin had It Happened One Night to his credit and collaborated with Frank Capra on Mr. Deeds Comes to Town. Swerling wrote It's a Wonderful Life and Lifeboat. The Whole Town's Talking was directed by John Ford, venturing, for once, out of Monument Valley and into comedy.  

It's an amusing doppelganger movie, with Edward G. Robinson playing both Jekyll and Hyde. His Hyde is a monster gangster of the Little Caesar variety; his Jekyll is a meek apologetic clerk. Both of his manifestations are interested in Jean Arthur, the wise-cracking babe, but Jekyll doesn't get her until he assimilates some hydeishness and gets Hyde killed. That's America for you; until you're willing to resort to violence, you're not going to land the lady. 

 

Lucasta

 

 

 

It's Sir Richard Lovelace, born in 1617, perhaps in his late 'teens or early 20s (he survived only to the age of 40), but mature enough to have grown a splendid crop of rich black hair. Over his left shoulder is a motto that reads "prodesse non praeesse" which means something like "to be useful rather than to rule (or lead)." Of Lovelace, a contemporary said that he was "the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld; a person also of innate modesty, virtue and courtly deportment, which made him... much admired and adored by the female sex."

 

Not only was he handsome and sexy, but Sir Richard was also a soldier in the English civil war, a playwright, and an accomplished poet. One of his superlative lyrics is the famous and oft-anthologized "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars."  It's only twelve lines, but what superb lines they are! Quite a triumph, it is, to embody an entire aristocratic caste and a system of values in a single short poem!

 

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,

         That from the nunnery

Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind

         To war and arms I fly.

 

True, a new mistress now I chase,

         The first foe in the field;

And with a stronger faith embrace

         A sword, a horse, a shield.

 

Yet this inconstancy is such

         As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee (Dear) so much,

         Lov’d I not Honour more.

The "plot" of the lyric is simple: the "speaker" leaves his beloved in order to "fly" to battle (he fought, naturally, on the royalist side). He loves "honor" more than he loves his mistress. In fact, and perhaps paradoxically, honor has a multiplier effect on his love. And yet, although honor enhances love, honor is always primary, love subordinate. It's a curious kind of love lyric in which a suitor says to his beloved, I like you, but only second best.

What is "honor" for Lovelace?  It's a word with a spectrum of meanings -- nobility of soul, magnanimity, scorn of meanness, reputation, privilege of rank or birth, even chastity or virginity. But none of these possibilities seem to specifically apply in this poem.  For Lovelace and his Lucasta, honor is military. It is something won on the battlefield. About this he is uncompromising: the "new mistress" he will now "embrace" is "a sword, a horse, a shield" -- "war and arms." Not the "arms" of a lover, but weapons. 

A cynical being might therefore rewrite the last two lines of the lyric thusly: "I could not love thee (Dear) so much,/ Lov'd I not warfare more." Flat, imperfect poetry, but the parody is perhaps what the demystified poem actually asserts. Make war, not love.

What sort of war?

The primary weapons in the battles of the 1640s were mortar, cannon, musket, caliver, carbine, harquebus, and pistol. Sword, horse and shield had not entirely disappeared. Edge weapons were still in use, and the horse would remain the primary engine of war until it was supplanted in the twentieth century by internal combustion vehicles. But it would have been suicidal folly to go into 1640s battle with Lovelace's museum of weaponry. For "honor" and for the benefit of Lucasta, Lovelace evokes a romantic nostalgic world of tilt and tourney. Single combat, knight versus knight, hot horse against horse.

Lovelace imagines himself glorious in single combat, his mistress's favor (handkerchief or scarf) streaming from his helmet. It would not be so glorious to be mutilated by a cannon lugged into place by a base pioner. 

Lovelace easily conflates love, which is a private emotion, with military honor, which is clearly a public achievement. Very public, indeed, which is what led Baruch Spinoza, Lovelace's younger contemporary, to note that "honor" is not intrinsic, not an act of personal realization, but rather "a slavish subordination to the opinion of others." 

"I could not love the (Dear) so much,

    Lov'd I not a slavish subordination to the opinion of others more."

The rewrite has a different ring.

Spinoza: 

 

"In This Our Life" -- the Novel by Ellen Glasgow

In this Our Life, the novel by Ellen Glasgow is richer, deeper, and less bound by convention than the film.  Film Life follows the inherited story for its first forty-five minutes but then sharply diverges.

In the film version, bad daughter Stanley is less conflicted and complicated a character and eventually devolves into a stereotypical noir "bad girl." Novel Stanley doesn't drive Peter to suicide, nor does she she bring the film to convenient closure by driving her car down a cliff. Novel Craig is far less worthy and more passive than film Craig and doesn't redeem himself by transforming into a sleuth who exonerates Parry.

Needless to say, the novel offers no Hollywood ending; in strong contrast, novel Roy rejects Craig's offer of marriage because she knows that Craig is still carrying the torch for Stanley. Instead, she tries desperately to leave town and start life anew -- but it's not clear whether or not she will make a clean getaway. We hope that she will.

The most extensive revision is to the character of the sisters' father, Asa Timberlake. In the film, he's a uxorious martyred browbeaten milquetoast who is the long-suffering caretaker of his hypochondriacal bedridden wife. In Ellen Glasgow's novel, much of which is seen through his eyes, Asa loathes his wife, knows that he's wasted his life, craves affection, and even admits to himself that he wants her dead so that he can be free. It's Asa, not Craig, who unravels the mystery of the automobile accident. Moreover, glory be to the proper gods, Asa has a secret lady friend, a widow/farmer a dozen years his junior, whom he visits on his occasional day off. And he nurtures an escapist fantasy that keeps him sane -- he wants to end his life as a simple farm laborer. He doesn't quite get there at the novel's end, but there's hope. Kaye, his very healthy, very appropriate mistress (we think sexual partner, though Glasgow hedges) assures him that she will always have an opening for a hired hand. 

"In This Our Life" (1942)

Talk about movie "bad girls"-- here's one of the most sordid. In this Our Life is a doppelganger story of two sisters, one good and one evil. Roy (sic) Timberlake, played by Olivia de Havilland, is too good to be true. Stanley (sic) Timberlake, embodied by Bette Davis in an eye-popping, raucous performance, is wicked at the Lady Macbeth or Goneril level. She steals her sister's husband just for the heck of it and then drives him to suicide. Quite the scandal anywhere, but especially in 1940s class-conscious suburban Virginia. Her very good sister Roy marries the decent man whom Stanley betrayed -- and then Stanley tries to seduce him back. It doesn't work, I'm glad to say, and Stanley, failing and frustrated, runs her car into two pedestrians, killing one, and then frames a young "colored boy" (we might say "black man") for the murder -- and almost gets away with it. There's more in this competent soap-opera romance melodrama: a touch of incest, some distasteful bigotry, crass materialism, morbid hypochondria. A couple or three weak, enervated men, upon whom we wait for ninety minutes to grow backbones.

The movie was directed by John Huston and Raoul Walsh and written by Howard Koch (Casablanca), so it has classy bloodlines. It's so overcrowded with events and loose ends that I guessed that it must have been adapted from a novel. And sure enough, according to Wik In This Our Life was adapted from a famous-in-its-time Pulitzer prize book by Ellen Glasgow -- which I should have known but didn't. 

In This Our Life piqued my curiosity enough to download the novel onto my Kindle. I'm intimidated, though. Kindle says 745 pages.

North and South (1854)

I read Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson Gaskell's North and South (1854) on the Kindle. It's a long novel, but I don't know how long because when I don't have a book to heft, I don't know how many pages I've read and how many more are left. I can only say that I became impatient after a couple of days and started to think that Mrs. G. was being paid by the word. But just when I thought the novel would never end, I stroked the Kindle one more time, and by gosh and by golly, Mr. Thornton finally proposed to Margaret and bam! it was all over in a flash. I was unprepared. If I had been reading an old-fashioned "book," as we used to call them, I would have known that I was approaching the last page, and my reaction would have been much different. Instead of shock, closure.  

North and South was originally published in parts, twenty of them, and therefore was consumed over a period of months. Later it appeared in book form, so that enthusiastic readers might binge for a long day or two -- a very different experience than reading in discrete chapters, and one I prefer. Kindle-reading is a third way. It's less satisfying to me because I want the weight of the book in my hand and I want to track my progress by means of the physical act of turning the page. Electronic reading will no doubt become the norm; something gained, no doubt, but something also lost. I think I would have been more satisfied with the novel if I had a solid object in my hands rather than words on a screen. Strange to say, but I honestly feel that it would have been a better novel.

North and South is self-consciously "progressive." Those money-hungry northern industrialists turn out to be decent people after all. The strikers may be misguided and impatient, but they have a genuine grievance. Women might be able to live richer lives with a dollop of liberation. 

I confess that I am troubled when I read books that were progressive their own time but that seem reactionary now. I know, and I've been taught, that I should be more historical, less time bound, less, as they say, "presentist." Nevertheless, I was astonished, even offended, that Margaret Hale was to be branded a loose woman because she was seen with a guy at a railway station, unchaperoned. Good thing the man who was with her turned out to be not a potential lover, but her brother, otherwise her gross impropriety would have banished her, lifetime, from the list of the eligible-for-marriage. 

I know that Mrs. Gaskell wanted us to think well of the mill-workers, but why the heck did she make them speak in an impenetrable provincial lower-class dialect which makes them seem sloppy, and ignorant-- another species entirely, less than human?  Even though I tried to resist, the characterization of the masses left me alienated and angry.

And then there's a problem particular to me: every time one of her characters failed or suffered grievous injury or died (there are a number of spontaneous deaths in North and South), Mrs Gaskell felt obliged to invoke an all-purpose explanation -- "God's will!"  "God's will" whether thoughtful or just a tic, becomes, in this ostensibly progressive novel, a justification for political passivity and quietism.

I like this novel better when I read it the first time -- in 1963. Although it's unchanged (except for the kindling), I myself seem to have become much less empathetic and more cantankerous. Age?