Dr. Metablog

In a Lonely Place (1950)

In a Lonely Place is a carefully written, economically directed, suspenseful, and sometimes menacing piece of work. Filmed in 1949, released in 1950, it has aged very well. I've seen it four or five times over the years, and it improves with each viewing. Humphrey Bogart is true to his natural bent as a half-crazed, paranoid, violent screenwriter, and Gloria Grahame is utterly convincing as a smart, vulnerable and ultimately self-protective young actress. It's a noir-y film, very satisfying, with only an occasional misstep (such as the five inexplicable minutes allotted to Laurel Gray's --i.e. Grahame's-- butch masseuse).  

On this last time through, I was struck by an element of the film of which I had not taken sufficient notice. It's a distinctly post-WWII movie. Dix Steele (Bogart) had been a successful writer before the war; he was, we're told, a good commanding officer; but now he's erratic, crazy jealous, his sanity at knife's edge. The film does not offer an explanation for his decline. When he's shown pictures of the brutally murdered Mildred Atkinson, he exhibits no emotional response;  it's as though he's so thoroughly inured to violent death that he lacks fellow-feeling. The audience must infer he's seen too many such deaths. In the past, I hadn't sought a cause for his symptoms, but this time, it was transparent to me that although the writers don't dwell on the war as a cause, they assume that the 1950 audience will get the point. It's shell-shock or battle fatigue or what is now called PTSD. When I came to appreciate the film's 1940s ambience, In a Lonely Place became not merely an intimate psychological drama with noir overtones, but a trenchant commentary on WWII devastation and disruption. And therefore a more profound and richer work of art.   

I was curious enough about what is left unsaid in the film to look for a copy of the novel from which the film is drawn. It's Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place, first published in 1947 and now reissued in 2017 by New York Review Books (thanks NYRB!. Not a difficult search, because it was right there on a shelf in the Boulder Public Library.  

In a Lonely Place is a novel in the Chandler-Hammett-Gardner orbit. For those who love the genre, it might be a great read. For me, not an aficionado of mysteries or detective novels, it was, I'm afraid, a plod -- much marred by an arid, graceless prose style, with many a sentence so awkward that it pained both eye and ear. But just as I suspected, in the novel the WWII material is front and center -- and it's PTSD all right. The shocker, however, is that Dix Steele is not the Bogart-Steele of the film. Not even close. He's not a disturbed  ex-officer trying to adjust to the post-war world. Instead, he's a serial killer on the prowl for another victim. He's murdered his landlord and a former girlfriend, and a trio or quartet of young pretty women. He's a textbook misogynistic nutcase and therefore not nearly as interesting the film's complicated troubled Dix Steele.

I'm in awe of the brilliant transformation from book to script. The credit goes to two writers:  Edmund Hall North, who first "adapted" the novel, and Andrew P. Solt (a refugee born in Hungary as Endre Strausz) who wrote the screenplay. And of course to the director, the great Nicholas Ray.

(In the picture above, Dix's arm is around Laurel's neck. It should be an affectionate embrace, but he's too possessive. She's justifiably wary.)

The Anti-Bucket List

Here follows a list of some of the many activities that I definitely, excruciatingly, do not wish to perform before I kick the ol' kettle. My life is perfectly complete as it stands, and I feel no psychological pressure to engage in any of these anxiety-ridden ventures. Nope, all the pressure is on the side of safety, indolence and sloth. I'm mighty "fulfilled" just as I am. As fulfilled as I want to be.

I do not yearn to explore the depths of the Marianas trench in a submersible -- nor even go down a few hundred feet to view a shipwreck. I prefer the surface of the wine-dark sea, or better still, a quiet pond where, even if I'm a daring distance from the edge, my feet can still touch bottom.  

I do not want to take up diving into shallow rivers from rocky precipices. I'm not interested in being death-defying or picturesque. I can defy death just perfectly while lying on my couch. Also, no bungee-jumping, or, even more lunatic, jumping out of airplanes with a fickle parachute on my back. No thank you.  

I have no desire to smuggle weapons or drugs across the border or into Singapore or Iran. In fact, I don't think I'll do any smuggling at all. I consider my career as a smuggler, never flourishing, to be absolutely finito.

I do not need to take up a late-life career as a wild-animal trainer. No lions, tigers, bears. Though I do wish that I could do something about the broccoli-eatiing groundhogs.

I don't wish to train for a second career as a food-taster to the mighty. I wouldn't be good at the job; I'm chronically, almost terminally hypochondriacal. I would probably find poison in every forkful or sip --  and then display all sorts of bizarre symptoms. I especially don't want to be a food taster for people on Mr. Putin's shit list. No sirree.

I do not want to go dancing with the stars. Never, never, never, never, never (as William Shakespeare wrote in a slightly different context).  No televised tangos in my future.

I am not going to sign up for that trip to Mars. Or to the moon. Or anywhere that requires a pressure suit. I'm comfortable in my "relaxed fit" jeans and shirt.

Rapelling. I do not have the least inkling of a need to rappel. 

 

Words of My Life: Provider

I first encountered the word "provider" in its positive sense as a virtual synonym "mensch": "he was a good provider; he took care of his wife and his kids and his aged parents and even his employees" (if he had any).

But nowadays the word has been stripped of its warm associations and has emerged as a cool or neutral term. I encounter the word most often when I need medical attention. A doctor is no longer a doctor; he's been renamed a "provider." I believe this usage to be the invention of the nefarious insurance companies that govern and distort our medical system. "Doctor" and "nurse" are praise-words, rich in significance. "Provider" has no resonance. It reduces your doctor to an index or reference number and is therefore of great utility to the bureaucracy. I can't imagine that a doctor, asked what he does, would be happy to respond, Ir "I'm a provider."   

The word "teacher" has, for many, a positive resonance. I was a teacher; I was not an "education provider" -- nor would I have embarked on a career with the aim of being considered such. 

I believe that nowadays the most common use of the word "provider" occurs in the internet phrase, "content provider."  And so the word continues on its long downward path.

Falling

I suppose I fell an uncountable number of times in the days of my youth, but to these floppings I paid no mind. I started to take note during my first year in Ithaca, when, a creature of sidewalks and "gutters," I fell splat on my face in the slopes and snows far above Cayuga's waters at least a score of times. Lithe and springy, I did not a whit of damage to myself.

Falling became a real issue in my life only when my father, at age 74 in 1978, took a header down a flight of basement stairs at 539 East 9. From that moment, his life changed rapidly for the worse. Whether his  arthritis was a consequence of the fall, as his doctors claimed (they called it "traumatic arthritis") I cannot say, but from that time until his death eight years later he was crippled with pain. His once athletic body wasted and shrunk, and his lively step devolved into a sad shuffle. For me, it was a warning and a precedent. Don't fall.

Nowadays, even though I'm older by several years than my father was when the arthritis finally took his life, and am most definitely marooned in what he liked to call "extra innings," I'm most aware that it is a fall that could do me in. I take precautions: not paranoid, I hope, but sensible. Some years ago I moved to a building with an elevator -- no more second floor bedrooms or basement washing machines for me. For our West Bradford summers, I've put up rope banisters where the ground is steep or irregular. I carry a stick when I walk on the paths or in the woods. "Three legs good, two legs bad." Even so, this past summer I fell twice. The first time, because a cemetery groundhog had dug a burrow next to a gravestone and grass had grown to conceal his hole. I'm glad the fall was a gentle one, because I would have hated to have gone down in local lore as the guy who died when he cracked his head on an old, lichen-covered tombstone. Too much irony, too much black humor.

My second fall was when a rope snapped -- so not my fault at all. The ropes that we used for a banister on a steep path leading from the dike to the waterfall garden had simply rotted out. I tumbled slowly and gracefully. We've now replaced that old rope with a new one so massive that it could secure an aircraft carrier.

Moreover, I've stopped going up on ladders -- not even kitchen step ladders. If a ceiling light bulb needs to be changed, I'll hire someone or beg a favor from a young person. I'm aware of the tragic story of a friend of a friend who lived in a house with a two-story entrance foyer. Though seventyish, he climbed a ladder to straighten a wall hanging and lost his balance. He lingered for a few days, but never regained consciousness.

Some friends of a decade or so younger than I came visiting yesterday. In the course of a lively conversation, I revealed that I shun step stools and ladders. One of the guys said, "I'm not ready to give up climbing on ladders." I said, "Why not, it's dangerous -- you can hurt yourself."  He said, "I'm too young. It's a matter of self-respect." To which I responded, "Fuck self-respect."

I asked my cardiologist what was going to kill me. She said, at your age, and with your state of health, the most likely cause is either an infection or a fall. Which I take to be good news of a kind. I can be vigilant about infections and I can be very cautious about where I set my feet. Especially so if I remember my "mature" vulnerability and if I keep in mind my father's history. 

Nevertheless, I'm beginning to feel that I may not be immortal.

Jane Austen's Emma; Harriet Smith's Ancestry

Both partisans and skeptics of Jane Austen's Emma will remember Harriet Smith, the young woman who becomes the object of Emma Woodhouse's officious matchmaking. Harriet's ancestry is explained by JA; she is "the natural daughter of someone" -- that is, she is an illegitimate child of obscure origin. Harriet's patronizing friend Emma imagines, without a shred of evidence, that the poor dear must be the daughter of nobility. She therefore interferes with Harriet's romantic prospects, first by discouraging an "attachment" to an upright and capable farmer -- and then by promoting relationships which we readers are taught to believe should be beyond Harriet's aspiration. JA, for all her satirical spirit, is not one to challenge the rigid class distinctions of rural Highbury. 

But then, at the very end of the novel, other options having led to disaster, Harriet and farmer Robert Martin are allowed to marry.  Almost as a coda -- an afterthought -- Austen reveals to us that 

Harriet''s parentage became known. She proved to be the daughter of a tradesman, rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been her's and decent enough to have always wished for concealment, -- such was the blood of gentility which Emma had formerly been so ready to vouch -- It was likely to be as untainted, perhaps, as the blood of many a gentleman, but what a connexion had she been preparing for Mr. Knightley -- the Churchills -- or even for Mr. Elton! The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed. 

It's a curious and I think distressing revelation.

There's an unpleasant sneer in the dismissive phrase, "daughter of a tradesman" where "merchant" or even "prosperous merchant" might have been more generous. Moreover, the pregnant phrase "illegitimacy unbleached by nobility or wealth" neatly encapsulates the hypocrisy of a society that can condone a rich bastard but condemn a poor one. 

But what is most bothersome about the paragraph is what it omits. Although JA pull back the curtain on Harriet Smith's father, she does not bother herself to reveal anything about Harriet Smith's mother. Surely even an illegitimate child had one, and surely that mother, in addition to her pregnancy and childbirth, had a story of her own -- both before and after she surrendered her child. If Harriet's father can be revealed (even though he is not named), why then, why not her mother?  What is implied by this omission? That the mother doesn't matter -- she was merely "someone's" mistress or concubine. Or perhaps a prostitute. That Harriet's status in society has nothing to do with her inconsequential mother.

Or perhaps that JA, raveling the loose ends of her story, preferred to avoid a distracting complication.  

My own theory is that JA just simply forgot. Because fathers matter a great deal and mothers matter much less, it's not of any moment who was Harriet's mother. In psychological terms, JA is guilty of a perfect parapraxis -- and unconscious forgetting, canceling, or, in modern jargon, an erasing. Harriet's mother is not even erased -- she's utterly non-existent.

Sometimes what is not represented can be as revealing as what is included.