The amorous affairs of a British colony - weird by any measure - in The Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter (1943) takes a turn toward the weird in part 2 as GG shifts the focus to the complex love lives of the two counterbalanced protagonists, Scobie and Wilson (there are many "pairings" in this novel, including also the Syrian merchants Yusef and Tallit, the two beloved women, Louise and Helen, Wilson and Harris ... ). Scobie (police Major) is thrown into action as a large group of survivors of a torpedo attack - they had spent many horrendous days in lifeboats as water and food diminished - arrives in the British colony. Strangely, Scobie is smitten with one of the survivors, Helen, a woman of about 20 whose husband - they had been married only one month - dies in the attack. At first it seems she may die (a young boy dies in the infirmary as Scobie is reading to him; the nurse crudely reprimands him for wasting his time doing so), but she survives and gets access to government housing while waiting for passage back to England. She seems entirely indifferent to losing her young husband; we can only assume she's still in some kind of shock. Scobie assumes nothing, however, and spends a lot of time talking to her and eventually pretty quickly they become a couple; how he squares this with his Catholicism or with his own conscience - he's obviously taking advantage of a much younger, inexperienced, vulnerable woman - remains in doubt, at this point at least. Meanwhile, Wilson - whom we're now pretty sure is secretly in the colony to investigate diamond smuggling and police corruption associated w/ that - confronts Scobie about mistreatment of his (Scobie's) wife, Louise; Wilson threatens Scobie, then breaks down in tears - and Scobie is surprisingly sympathetic to Wilson. As in the earlier chapters, we see that it seems to take a burden off his mind when someone else is in love with his wife - perhaps that gives him the freedom to seek love and sex elsewhere (Wilson, in a great scene, seeks sex in the brothel near the police station). As for Wilson, he seems to yearn for the inapproachable and unavailable - mooning over Louise more in her absence than in her presence. He writes her a poem (bad and old-fashioned - this is 1942, not 1842), which he sends to his boarding-school newsletter for publication - how pathetic! - and he's "unmasked" by his roommate, Harris, who reads the magazine and decodes the poem's dedication. No doubt the amorous affairs of a remote British colony are every bit as weird and complex as Payton Place or Updike-land, but some of this seems perverse or at least weird by any measure. 


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Groff's story about two children abandoned on an island - tells us all we need to know and no more

Good story from Lauren Groff, Dog Says Wolf, in current NYer, and what's especially good about this story - of two young girls (ages 7 and 4?) abandoned on an island in a Florida lake or swamp - is what it doesn't say or do. Who in their right mind would leave two young girls on a deserted island? We get only glimpses of the girls' mother and of their life with her up to that point, all from the girls' POV, but it's enough to know that she was unstable, unsettled, possibly an addict - we don't see any more than the girls themselves could describe or understand. So the mother, current boyfriend, and the 2 girls are on this island as some kind of rustic vacation?, hideaway, getaway? and the mom tells them she''s got to leave them for a while but she'll be back - and she doesn't come back. The girls at that point are left alone on the island for several days, and they manager to survive as the food, water, and other resources diminish. Could it happen? They're amazingly sanguine and improbably resourceful, but then again from what we know of their lives up to that point they've probably had to fend for themselves much more than most children. Groff keeps us completely engaged with these two children and their struggle to survive - and she avoids a melodramatic or surreal conclusion. Interestingly, there's one paragraph toward the end that gives us just a glimpse of the future lives of these two children - and that's enough, it opens the story into a new dimension, it's as if a beam of light shining for a moment on this dark passage. There are horrendous, villainous adults involved in this story, but they're kept on the periphery, and Groff resolutely tells us only what the children see and on what we need to know, without weighing the story down w/ needless narrative, such as the details on the lives of the adults and of the eventual, inevitable rescue. This story tells us all we need to know and no more. 


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Plunging deeper into sin and official corruption in The Heart of the Matter

Moving deeper into The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene, 1943) we see the protagonist, Scobie (he is a high-ranking police officer, not the Commissioner, as I incorrectly stated yesterday) now desperate to figure a way to ease his wife's depression - a hopeless task, I would say, as she seems to have a completely morose view of life and a horrible self-image, and it has nothing to do w/ where they live - borrows money from the Syrian "merchant" (aka, diamond smuggler) Yusef to pay for his wife's passage to South Africa. Doing this changes the stakes: Now Scobie is indebted to a known smuggler who can pressure him in untold ways and obviously jeopardize his police career or even push Scobie into illegal transactions. Moreover, with wife Louise now out of the picture Scobie has to deal w/ Wilson, the newly arrived British official whom Scobie, oddly enough, had encouraged to begin an affair w/ Louise. Now Wilson is depressed that Louise, whom he believes he loves, has departed - and this is a problem because Wilson learns (from Yusef) that in fact Wilson has been sent to the colony under a ruse - he's not a clerk or engineer but his role is to investigate the diamond smuggling (particularly important because industrial diamonds are valuable in wartime - setting is 1942). So we'll watch the inevitable decline of Scobie into illegality and immorality - unless he rises up and opposes the forces of evil. It's important that Scobie, like Greene, is a practicing (if not always devout) Catholic, and his confrontation w/ all of the dark forces - smugglers, German soldiers (haven't seen any yet), infidelity, government corruption - will be a struggle for his soul. We see this in the strange episode in which Scobie goes to an outpost - Bamba - to investigate and report on the suicide of the young police commander, whom he learns was indebted to Yusef - a foreshadowing of what may happen to Scobie, though Scobie believes that suicide would endanger his soul for eternity - a price he won't pay. But will he get sucked into Scobie's orbit, and how will he protest or resist? 


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The sin of despair, and a husband panders for his wife - in The Heart of the Matter

The central character in The Heart of the Matter - the police commissioner in the West African British colony, Scobie - resigned to his secondary status, to his tepid marriage, to the need continuously to console his nervous wife and assure her that everyone in their community loves and respects her (in effect to lie to her) - is like Graham Greene a Catholic, and he is forced to grapple with a confounding ethical question. He has vowed to do all that he can do to make his wife happy - which at the moment involves his acquiescing to her plan to leave the colony, retire, and settle in S. Africa. He in fact takes the initial steps to do so (he has just been passed over for promotion), but has almost no money in the bank and can't get the bank officer to loan him anything near the requisite amount. So he does have an avenue open to him: as police chief he has man opportunities to receive bribes (we have just seen him refuse even the appearance of impropriety with a sketchy Syrian merchant and flat-out refuse a bribe from a Portuguese caption whose ship the police are inspecting in port, searching for contraband (diamonds, usually) or any unusual communications that might be spying signals for the Germans (the novel is set in 1942). So is it the right thing for him to take this immoral course in order to be true to his sacred vow? Scobie, perhaps as a mouthpiece for GG himself, reflects at one point that despair is the greatest or gravest of sins, but tht oddly only good people can be prey to despair, as evil and corrupt people do not hope for or expect salvation in any event. Strangely, in Part 2 of the novel, we see that one way in which he is making his wife "happy," esp as the most likely will not be able to the colony any time soon, is to facilitate her having an affair with Wilson, a newly arrived official, who shares with wife (Louise) a passion for literature and poetry - Scobie is in effect pimping or pandering for his own wife; morality is loose and strange in this colony, but this behavior seems way over the top unless his true goal is to get her to leave him, and he gives no hint at that - there's no "other woman" on the scene. 


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Graham Greene

Re-reading Graham Greene's 1942 novel, The heart of the matter, and right away from 1st chapter I'm immersed in the British colonial culture of w Africa - the snobbism, racism, loneliness, class structure (narcissism of small differences - those "in" and "out" of the "club" nearly indistinguishable in manner and stature to those on the outside ), the criminality (bribery, exploitation, corruption) - and above all the tenuous social position of the British hanging on in the last moments of colonial rule as the world around them is at war. The heart of the matter so to speak, however, is the dwindling marriage of a Scobie and his pallid, "literary" wife , Louise - friendless, nervous, insecure, sickened that scobie has been passed over once more for promotion - and the arrival of Wilson, a shy intellectual and an obvious match for Louise - w outsiders. Very sad scene at the club when S overhears a crude, callous remark about his wife and hopes to protect her from the knowledge that she is such a social pariah, tho he knows she intuits this already. Also hints of a complicity in crime - diamond smuggling - between police chief Scobie and the syrian shipowner, Yusef. Many forces at work in first 30 or so pp and headed for collision sure to be sad and tragic - hints of Brief encounter and maybe even Greene's own end of the affair? - or british melodrama of illicit love among the misaligned, the misfits, and the misunderstood.

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Denis Johnson

The two concluding stories in Denis Johnson's 1992 collection, Jesus's Son, form a great coda to this series of stories and nicely balance each other as well. The penultimate is yet another in this collection centered on a detox unit in a hospital (it's also the 3rd in a series of Seattle stories, stories about nearly suicidal binge drinking). This one told almost entirely in dialog as the narrator shaves a fellow patient and probes him about his life story in particular about bullet scars on his face. Unique in this collection the narrator self-identifies as a writer-poet and tells the man he's shaving that his words will someday be part of a story and pledges to quote him exactly. We can assume he does and that this story - save for a few beautiful observations about the feelings of drug-assuaged detox - has done so. It's like one of the so-called "found poems " popular in the 70s, the setting for all the stories in this collection, made famous in Michael casey's book of Vietnam poems, Obscenities. The final story, perhaps the longest in the book, is set in Phoenix and has the narrator again in detox and working in a hospital where he cares for some of the most ill and deformed patients. He develops an obsession w spying on a young woman and her husband hoping someday to witness them having sex - tho the closest he comes is to see them in a ritual ablution. The image is extremely powerful - the narrator on the outside lonely and sad watching a loving couple secure in their faith. In both of these stories and many others in this book the narrator is looking back from a seemingly healthier vantage of 20 years and hoping to find in his generally antisocial behavior some evidence of his caring for others. He is hardly their salvation- the hint from the title - but at least he is an attenuated version of grace, salvation once removed.

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Denis Johnson

Reading the two stories toward the end of Denis Johnson's 1992 collection, Jesus' Son, that are set in Seattle leaves me w the feeling of sadness. Whereas most of the other stories are dark passages of addiction and violence they also include some winsome humor - honor among thieves - and a sense of the narrator's trying to ride into a new life and if regret for those whom he may have harmed (all of the stories are from a perspective of looking back 20 years or so to a troubled youth). The two Seattle stories are of a man w little or nothing in his life aside from addiction - much darker stories than the others and less complex in emotional register (they make a interesting contrast w Sherman Alexie's story about a 2-day alcoholic binge in the same territory but leavened by the social obligations and generosity of the Native American community). I am not so dumb as to think these stories are strictly autobiographical - but also not so naive as to think they are entirely of the imagination, either. All writers draw from both all the time tho w varying and ever-changing degrees (when I interviewed DJ years ago as noted in earlier post we talked about his then-new novel, Fiskadoro, set in the Florida keys and I was surprised to learn that DJ has never been there). But to think that such a kind and talented writer had experienced even a portion of this despair in his youth is troubling - and maybe in a perverse way inspirational, too, to think he could have made art of these experiences (interesting contrast w his near contemporary also recently passed, Thom Jones) and go on to a great if too-short career as a writer and journalist.

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Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson's collection of linked stories, Jesus' Son (1992), is as tense and precise a narration as any I've come across and about as dark as it can get, which would be an unbearable combination of forces were it not for Johnson's subtle wit and, perhaps more important, his sympathy for his characters and their despair. Too often writers create characters and settings of darkness and decrepitude to try to achieve an effect - shock, revulsion - but w DJ there is an abiding sense of love for his characters (including the narrator who may be a version of himself in harder times). This love is the light reflected in the title; no matter how destitute and corrupt his characters - thieves, addicts, pimps, pushers, brawlers - he is always thinking and believing that they have spiritual worth and may be saved. Two really great stories appear together: Emergency (a man comes into the Erne a knife stuck in his eye - you would not believe that this could be a darkly comic story, but it is) and a story the narrator tells about a day in his youth - 20 years or so back; his survival to tell these tales is significant- when his girlfriend has an abortion and he rides the el train in guilt and anger trying to come to terms w what it means to terminate a pregnancy. He can't explain his anger nor his self-destructive behavior. I regret taking so long to come to these stories.

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Thoughts about the characters and the title of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son

For some reason I'd never read Denis Johnson's collection of "linked stories," Jesus' Son (1992), not sure why except that I was underwhelmed by his massive and prize-winning previous work, Tree of Smoke - which goes to show that the super-ambitious projects tend to win awards, from critics generally afraid to call a brick a brick, while the more intense and focused works that achieve their goals completely tend to be written off or overlooked (by me, too). But Jesus' Son has remained on reading lists, and it came to my attention again when Johnson died earlier this year - too soon, too young. He was a really excellent writer and by all accounts a good if troubled soul (I interviewed him by phone once, and we had a great conversation - years later he had a reputation as averse to journalists and publicity, but that wasn't the case when he was starting out). I've read the 1st 4 or 5 stories in Jesus' Son and and impressed and overwhelmed - there are literally no darker works of American fiction, I would say. The stories, told by the same unnamed eponymous narrator, are of a small city somewhere in Iowa that seems to be populated entirely by drug addicts, alcoholics, dealers, thieves, tough guys, abused wives and girlfriends, and other low-lifes of various spectra. The stories involve, in no special order: a hitchhiker (the narrator) addled w/ an assortment of drugs who is involved in a fatal highway accident (he's an unharmed passenger); guys to survive by stealing SSI checks still arriving at the abandoned house of a dead man; guys who put together about $60 (a fortune) by stealing copper wire from a half-abandoned house; and so on. This milieu would be unbearable were it not for DJ's excellent and precise writing - he is a descendant of Hemingway and Carver, at least in this collection, not in all of his writing - and his wry self-deprecation; there's also the sorrow and edginess of wondering the extent to which these stories touch on DJ's own life or experiences. It can be easy to fabricate stories of crime and squalor, but something in these stories has the ring of authenticity and knowledge earned the hard way. Also, what are we to make of the title? Yes, it's a quote from Lou Reed's "Heroin," but there's also the hint at various points that the characters are looking for grace or salvation, though in all the wrong places; does the narrator see himself as one to provide mercy on others? Or is the title consciously ironic or delusional? 


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How Brighton Rock differs from Greene's other "catholic" novels

Yes the end of Brighton Rock (Graham Greene, 1938) is melodramatic (a suicide pact, which one of the characters - no spoilers here - fails to keep) and yes the idea of a 40-something, fun-loving woman (Ida) could take it on herself to investigate a mob killing and could unravel the whole matter is beyond ridiculous, but all quibbles aside this is a pretty great novel - an entertaining plot (it was no surprise to me to read in Coetze's smart intro to the Penguin 2004 Graham centennial edition that GG had originally embarked on BR as a screenplay), some really fine writing - esp the descriptions of the tawdry, tacky South Coast of England seaside resorts - and strong and unusual characters engaged in a great conflict of good v. evil (from the theological point of view, which GG keeps to the forefront throughout) or right v wrong (as Coetze notes, that's the world view of Ida - whereas the two main characters, embroiled in evil, are self-defined devout Roman Catholics, Ida follows "false idols," such as the ouija board). I particularly admire how GG handled the matter of the vile and blasphemous voice recording that the gang leader, Pinkie, prepared for his wife, Rose - I noted this recording in yesterday's post and was surprised to read how GG brought the recording into play toward the end of BR. I suppose the stakes are not as high in this novel as in some of GG's other novels of faith, notably The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair (I will have to re-read these works): those are novels of great empathy, in which readers can and do identify with the plight of the protagonists and suffer with them; in BR, as in say a traditional gangster crime novel of movie, we don't identify w/ the protagonists, just watch them from a distance with interest and at times revulsion. We can see why GG may have divided his fiction works, by his own account, into "novels" and "entertainments"; BR shows how the lines can blur, however - it's not necessarily and either/or classification. 


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Forces of good and evil collide in Brighton Rock

By this point - beginning the final section (#7) of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock (1938) - it's painfully obvious that Pinkie, aka The Boy, is a complete sociopath who's been drawn into a bloody battle for mob control of the Brighton race track that can end only in is death. He's reminiscent of Macbeth, drawn in blood so far that returning were as tedious as go oe'er, or, in GG's world view, he is satanic, cursed, and unable to seek mercy even at the point of death. The last obstacle before him seems to be Rose, the 16-year-old (to be fair, he's only 17) whom he marries in order to ensure her silence about some of his murderous crimes (he pins a lot on the idea that a woman can't be compelled to testify against her husband; of course, she can testify of her own free will). He marries her even though he loathes women in general and her in particular. She is a poor naif who seems unable to recognize, or perhaps to acknowledge, that to him she's as disposable as a piece of tissue. The scene of her waking on the morning after her marriage and finding the house deserted, the kitchen, in the basement, cold and dirty - hasn't been used in months - and w/ no idea how to begin a domestic life in this environ. The plot seems to hinge now on two points: first, she takes some money that she finds stashed away in a soap dish, and I expect that when Pinkie discovers this petty "theft" he will come at Rose furiously - all he needs is an excuse. From her angle, the key point will be the recording that Pinkie made at a booth on the pier in which he tells her to get lost, he never cared about her, she's a nuisance, and worse. I suspect when she finally listens to this recording - which she expected to be a sentimental statement of love (he made this recording, at her urging, right after their wedding) she will turn against him and provide info to Ida, the woman who's trying to unravel Pinkie's schemes and killings (yes, highly unlikely in reality though perhaps not in allegory), and she may be "saved."



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Graham Greene

Came across an intelligent blog yesterday, Philosophy for Life, in particular a post on Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, which cited this novel as a foundational example of the poetics of seediness - noting GG's many descriptions of "seedy" dwellings and establishments on the s coast of England - blogger noted the roots of this poetics in works of Baudelaire. I think that's a profound observation but would prefer to call his milieu the poetics of tawdriness - as I think this novel is hardly seedy in comparison w many other 20th C novels and memoirs and I think tawdriness captures the sense of cheap entertainments and establishments mainly for the working-class "holiday makers" - the piers, the games of chance, the tea houses and huge cheap restaurants, the boarding houses. There's a class element to the milieu - seediness would be the drug dens a "gin joints" whereas tawdriness would be the shooting galleries and souvenir shops along the boardwalk. Both elements but particularly the seediness became essential to the noir crime fiction in the US, and I wonder whether GG influenced the later writing of Hammett and Chandler. Influence aside Brighton Rock is a powerful novel in part because of its sense of place - so many great scenes in the boarding house, along the Promenade and the piers, in the classy hotel (which snubs Pinkie aka The Boy), at rose's parents' house, even at the race track tho that scene is more for action than description. The long chapter in which pinkie and rose marry is especially powerful, w the wedding itself darkly comic and then their long perambulation through the "tawdry" seaside resort as pinkie- terrified of sex and revolted by rose - fearfully delays the inevitable. The religious aspect about which I've commented in earlier posts, pushes more to the forefront in these later chapters as it becomes more clear that pinkie is satanic and the he and ida - still trying to figure out who killed her casual acquaintance Hale - are in a struggle for rose's soul and her salvation.

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Film versions of Brighton Rock and further thoughts about its allegorical structure

Following up from yesterday - Atlantic City was an original screenplay, not an adaptation of Brighton Rock (Graham Greene), although I think an updated Brighton Rock could be set in today's AC. There have been 2 film versions of BR, one from 1947 and another from 2010 - neither a big success, I imagine. Greene's fine narrative hits its stride in the section where Pinkie goes to the Brighton race track w/ the member of his crew whom he wants to get rid of; he thinks he has a deal worked out with the rival Colleone gang to kill the guy, but it turns out he was double-crossed and the Colleone gang turns on him instead - though he does managed to escape w/ a # of knife wounds. He still thinks his man was killed however, but it surprised when he gets back to his apartment to learn that his man escaped the attack as well. Enough said, he pushes the guy over a banister and more or less walks away: he is completely cold-blooded and socially deranged. In other to keep the last witness, Rose, quiet he sets up a scheme to marry her (they're both teenagers, so this requires some legal intervention) - and GG makes it clear that Pinkie not only dislikes Rose but he's repulsed by sexuality (he grew up in a small house w/ no privacy and was frightened and disturbed when he could hear his parents having sex and seems to never have recovered - quite the head case). Once again, it becomes increasingly clear that GG is writing some kind of allegorical crime novel, with the forces of darkness and atheism in conflict with the goodness and mercy, represented by Ida, who at her own expense is trying to figure out how her casual friend, Hale, actually died - the police have written it off as a heart attack - and who killed him. The 2 women in this novel, Rose and Ida, seem seriously endangered as they entwine their lives with the satanic Pinkie.

More religious themes in Greene's Brighton Rock

Following up on yesterday's post on Graham Greene's Brighton Rock (1938), which as indicated from the first sentence becomes a crime story, of sorts, with two rival gangs jostling for control of the betting operations at the nearby race track - the upstart gang led by a 17-year-old, Pinkie, who is cold-blooded and has no remorse about killing one of the gang members who in some manner betrayed the group and slashing the face of a guy who didn't pay off his gambling debts. The established gang is led by a true mafioso type, can't remember his name but it might as well be Corleone, who is cool and distant and lives a life of luxury and is somewhat taken by the Pinkie's fearlessness -but also ready to squash him if need be. Pinkie's problem is that a young (16) waitress at a seaside place witnessed some aspects of the murder and he has to keep her quiet; he flirts with her for a while, at which point we learn he is essentially asexual - his flirting is just a business proposition. In fact, he's repulsed by her and by the whole concept of sex. Both he and the girl, Rose, are "Romans," but Pinkie has no faith, no belief in mercy or salvation - though he recognizes that many plead for mercy when in the face of death. Another witness to part of the murder, a 40-something woman, Ida Arnold, becomes increasingly - and foolishly - curious about what happened (she'd met the victim but had not real relationship to him) and she begins following a # of leads and clues to prove that the victim, Hale, was killed and didn't die of natural causes, as the so-called inquest ruled. She is like a pilgrim, seeking the truth. Many potential conflicts loom: between Pinkie and his somewhat recalcitrant gang, Pinkie and "Corleone," Pinkie and Ida, Ida and the (paid off?) police - and it seems all this will culminate at the race track. Just wondering: Was the movie Atlantic City, which I saw so many years ago I forget all the plot details, based on this novel, transposed to the U.S. ca 1970?

Greene's Brighton Rock as religious allegory?

If one didn't know that Graham Greene had converted to Catholicism and had written at least one overtly "Catholic" novel (The Power and the Glory), you'd - or I'd - read his other novels differently. That is, would readers group The End of the Affair, for ex., as a "religious" novel? Doubt it. Yesterday I started reading Brighton Rock (1938), one of the GG novels I'd never read, and note that it is sometimes grouped among his "religious" novels (GG himself clearly distinguished in lists of his works between "novels" and "entertainments," such as Our Man in Havana, which stands up well as both, in my view). So that will be in my mind as I read through - though it doesn't start out as a religious novel in any conventional sense. The beginning is a little tricky: We meet a man, Hale, working as promoter for an English newspaper by distributing prize money in the seaside resort of Brighton - but he's wanted man, and in the first chapter most of his efforts involve trying to escape notice by his pursuers. We don't learn what they want from him, but apparently it has something to do w/ gambling debts. No matter. Though the first chapter would let us think the novel will be about Hale and his flight from assailants, as it happens they catch him and kill him in between chapters 1 and 2 - and the novel settles down into a different course: The main character seems to be a middle-aged woman, Ida, whom Hale flirted w/ while he was being pursued. She wonders why he abandoned her as she went into the ladies' room, and when she learns from news accounts that he died - supposedly of a heart attack - she becomes suspicious and begins investigating his death. She's the most unlikely of amateur sleuths, but so be it - the novel is off and running so to speak. Perhaps we can make a religio-allegorical leap and see her quest for information as much like a pilgrim's search for truth and salvation? If so, she starts off on the wrong course, using some kind of ouija board to get a "message" from the now-cremated Hale: This would be entrusting false idols, when the true devotee would need to trust in The Word. We'll see how this develops.

A disappointing collection supposedly of stories about Paris

Been reading from time to time in an anthology I picked up ahead of travel to France, Paris Stories, Everyman's Library, and, hm. Well, Everyman editions used to be very good in a # of ways: Great selection of materials, a good chronology (I think - not as complete as Library of America, but adequate), great production including a little ribbon to serve as a book mark. If this anthology is evidence the only thing remaining is the ribbon (albeit, I think they improved the font or point size). This anthology is pathetic. First of all, the selection of materials is strange to say the least - for the most part a few pages from much larger works (going back to Rabelais and ending w/ Modiano) that may, sometimes, give you the sense of a Paris neighborhood but never give you a sense of authorship or of a completed literary work. There are at least two nonfiction sections, which hardly fit in w/ the idea of "stories." And for all that the very few complete short stories are not of the highest order: Julio Cortazar's Blow-Up, which aside from a lot of blather about the narrator's struggle to decide whether to tell story in first, 2nd, or 3rd person, and so forth, is a brief account of a photographer who intends to shoot a scene of people in a park and finds he's shooting some kind of tryst or illegal encounter - Antonioni et al. made much more of this in the film version. A story by De Paupasssant, A Paris Affair, is OK though not one of his best: A woman in a stifled life in a suburb (think Mme Bovary) sneaks away for a weekend in Paris where she seduces a famous author, finds the whole experience sordid and unpleasant, and then returns home w/ a "frozen" heart; what's good about this story is the surprising frankness about sex and the fact that she does not sheepishly return to her boring husband chastened and wiser nor guilt-ridden and ashamed - just cold and indifferent, making this simple story strangely dark around the edges. Aside from these: Why is there no context about any of the selections, no information about the authors and their works? Are these really the best stories one could find about Paris? Nothing by Mavis Gallant? Nothing by Proust, Sartre, Camus, Genet, Hemingway, Fitzgerald [correction: Anthology includes from FSF an excerpt from Tender Is the Night; what, you couldn't find one FSF story set in Paris?!], Nemirovsky, Orwell ... ? Seems to be a well-made book whose contents were drawn together on the fly and on the cheap.

Cusk's Outline: The inverse of most first-person narrations

Toward the end of her novel Outline, Rachel Cusk gives us a glimpse of what the title signfies. The narrator (we learn, I think, in the last chapter that her name is Faye, though it's hard not to think of her as the author herself) crosses paths w/ the woman who will take over the Athens apartment that she's been housed in for the week of the writing seminar. The woman coming in, a playwright, is odd and deeply troubled, in fact traumatized, as the victim of a recent mugging and attack. The woman speaks almost non-stop, telling the story of her life and her eccentricities (eating disorders, among other problems), and at one point she remarks that as she hears others talk of their struggles, their marriages, the creativity, she feels as if all these lives are filled in around her and whereas her own life story is empty - the stories she hears constitute an outline of her life, but her life is not "filled in" so to speak. This ties in w/ what I'd noted in an earlier post, that is, the opacity of the narrator - she hears many life stories, in fact somehow she seems to inspire the confessional instinct in everyone she meets (many of them writers or aspiring writers), but we know little about her - the inverse of most first-person narrations. She never "confides" in her readers; what she tells us about her life is only told through her recollection of her interactions with others. In a broader sense, what Cusk is getting at I think is that our lives are made up not only by the story we would tell of our life - what one might say, for example, to a therapist - but also by the stories of all the lives of people we know, and people we meet. In fact, Cusk might go so far as to say that it's the stories of others that constitute the lived experience of our lives. Sartre said "hell is other people," but Cusk reverses that: life is other people (literature, too, for that matter). Without the narratives of others we would have no sense of how to narrate our own experiences; life consists of shared narrations.

The many narratives in Cusk's Outline

Another intriguing and somewhat puzzling scene in Rachel Cusk's Outline (2014) concerns the writing seminar the narrator (Cusk herself on some level) leads in Athens, the raison d'etre for her journey and therefore for this entire narrative. It's a class of (I think) 10 students, all aspiring writers, of varying ages and levels of experience. She begins the class, the first meeting, by asking each of the students to describe or recount something that they observed on the way to the class that morning. That leads to several strong presentations (my thought was that this was a fabulous class or writers - of course the fiction is fictive, and no class of varying abilities could come up w/ such astute observations), including one narrative in which a woman hears a strand of a Back keyboard piece from a window as she passes by a music conservatory, making her think of her failed attempt at a career in music. We can see that each of these observations could lead to a really fine story, or even a novel - all of which makes this seem to me that Cusk has presented a fine exercise for a writing seminar. Strangely, one of the students - the youngest, and the one whom she'd been warned would take over the class if allowed to - says he doesn't make such observations as they have nothing to do with his writing. At the end of the class, the final student, who'd remained silent up to that point, denounces Cusk as a terrible teacher. During the class Cusk received a frantic call from her young son, back home in England, who'd become lost on his way to school - over the phone she navigates him back to safety. So what have we here: Cusk (or the narrator, if you prefer) leads a terrific seminar but gets blasted, unjustly, by a student w/ bad attitude, and is made to feel guilt for leaving her children home possibly w/out sufficient supervision. So we see the forces pulling her apart: commitment to family, commitment to career, need for self-esteem, peculiar facility for evoking in others the desire or even need to tell their stories. This theme continues in the next chapter, w/ a twist, as the (unnamed, I think) guy she met on the plane (curiously, throughout she refers to him as her "neighbor") invites her for the 2nd day in a row to go out w/ him on is boat; she obliges, and can we be surprised that after these long conversations and her willingness to go for a ride w/ him, the "neighbor" makes a pass at her - which she brusquely rejects: he's unattractive to her, and she is no doubt put off by his serial failures at marriage. So why does she want to spend so much time w/ him?

The opacity of the narrator in Rachel Cusk's Outline

One item to note in Rachel Cusk's fine and challenging novel Outline (2014) is the opacity of the narrator. The entire narrative (at least so far, 2/3 thru) is from the POV of the unnamed narrator but surely someone meant to be much like if not identical to RC herself, as she travels to Athens for a writers' workshop and during her stay in Athens. he has an astonishing capacity to meet people and to propel them to tell her their life stories, w/ particular focus on the challenges and breakdowns for their marital life and their struggle to raise children while engaging in a career in the arts. We meet, in I think this order, an Athenian man from a wealthy family who's ended 3 marriages and, we learn somewhat later, is devoted to caring for his son who is suffering from schizophrenia; a fellow writer at the conference, an Irish author, somewhat stymied in his work after initial success, w/ a propensity for flirting w/ young women and ostensibly (or so he says) w/ the tacit approval of his wife; a Greek novelist whom she knows from the past who invites to a dinner meet another novelist, a woman, who is suddenly somewhat famous largely because of the feminist principles that she puts forward in her novel - and she (like the Irish writer, for that matter) is an extraordinary egotist and narcissist - and a few others - but the overall point is how much they say and how little RC says - though everything she says is trenchant and pointed, including the observation about infancy noted in yesterday's post and, as another example, her brief discussion about her two sons and their gradual alienation and separation from each other, after a childhood of shared games and illusions. All of these narratives circling around the central narrator are in a sense a paradigm for the life of, & the role of, the writer and the artist: making sense of the stories of other people's lives, bringing these stories into confluence - all lives, RC seems to be saying, are narratives, and we each create the narrative of our life, though rarely get to articulate these narratives (except perhaps in psychotherapy). Something about her draws people out into lengthy confessions, that she absorbs and, in a sense, appropriates. It's at times hard to keep the narratives separate in our minds as we read through this novel, which is I think exactly the point - by the end we get a broader picture of what it means to live a life and to tell, even to oneself, the story of our lives.

Rachel Cusk's novel Outline much better than it may sound when summarized

It's obvious that the British novelist Rachel Cusk is in the spotlight, as she's received strong reviews in both the U.S. and U.K. and has been recently the subject of a NYer profile and an NPR interview, both somewhat rare for a literary novelist - yet something has kept me from reading her much-praised recent works - a trilogy (the 3rd volume not yet published) in which the narrator, a woman presumably much like Cusk, listens to the stories of various people she encounters in her travels who confide in her about their troubled lives and broken marriages. Sounded pretty dull and depressing to me. N.the.less, spurred by curiosity and remembering a strong recommendation from old from E.S., I started reading the first vol of the trilogy, Outline (2014), and find myself impressed and interested at this point (read the first two, of ten I think, chapters). In the first chapter, narrator listens to the life story of a man seated next to her on a flight to Athens (she will be one of the leaders at a writers' workshop); he tells of his family fortune that he's more or less lost through two unhappy marriages/bitter divorces - his narrative is much like a strong short story, with occasional commentary - much like a therapist or counselor  - from the narrator, and it's the narrator's (i.e., Cusk's) great intelligence and insight (sure, why not, she's creating these characters) that propels the story. Early on (p.18) Cusk provides a truly astonishing observation, noticing how an infant will toss to the ground an object such as a toy, then cry in despair, then the adult (mom) will pick up the toy and return it to the child, who will immediately toss it to the ground then cry again. Why? She surmises that the child gets such great pleasure from the alleviation of despair that the child would rather toss the toy aside than hold onto it. Without saying so, Cusk implies that this dynamic lies behind so many loves and marriages: why do some keep making the same mistakes in choosing their partners? Because the alleviation of despair is so gratifying, perhaps. 2nd chapter involves her listening to the tales of woe from a fellow teacher at the writer's conference, and she gets an invite to go out on a boat w/ the Greek man from chapter 1, so there will apparently be some interlacing of these narrative segments. Whether she can sustain the interest through 10 sections, much less over the course of 3 novels, I don't yet know, but all readers will feel they're in sure hands.

Great travel writing v imperial arrogance and hegemony

Sybille Bedford concludes her Mexican journey - A Visit to Don Otavio (1953) - in high style w/ an account of a journey by car from the inland lakeside town San Pueblo to the Pacific Coast. No need to worry about spoilers, as obviously SB survived the trip, but it was the most reckless, dangerous, in fact idiotic excursion anyone's every embarked upon. She went w/ to British/American men; they'd been warned by the obnoxious Englishman, Mr. Middleton, about the myriad dangers of the trip - flooded arroyos, no gas or services, danger from heat and dehydration and hunger, danger from mosquito-borne illnesses, fragility of the car, and so forth - and he tells them about a thousand things they should do to prepare for the journey. The owner of the car, in reaction against the meddlesome Middleton's unsought advice, takes almost no precautions whatsoever - and they encounter all of the difficulties and more: being stuck in sand, blasting through deep water only to soak and stall the engine, a flat tire w/ no suitable spare, and so on. In fact, they never make it to the coast, as they wisely (first smart decision) decide to turn back when an arroyo crossing is too treacherous even for this crew. This aborted journey, and the suffering that ensues (SB gets seriously ill) is almost the metaphoric conclusion to this travelogue, in effect a warning against imposing one's own values on a foreign landscape. SB's spirit of adventure and eagerness to immerse herself in a foreign culture is the essence of good traveling and travel writing; but her participation in a stupid stunt jaunt that no native would ever attempt in a vehicle unsuited to this landscape is the essence of imperial arrogance and hegemony - as she intuits, in retrospect.

Travel writing v novel writing and the works of Sybille Bedford

As I am enjoying reading Sybille Bedford's travelogue, A Visit to Don Otavio (1953) and consider, on friend's recommendation, that I read her first novel, A Legacy, thinking for a moment about differences between travel writing and literary fiction (which is almost exclusively what I read). Travel, like memoir, is a little different from other nonfiction in that it tends to have a narrative arc, a strong narrative voice, and a strong emphasis on character and setting; all of these characteristics make travel writing much like fiction-writing - i.e., more "novelistic." But of course our enjoyment of travel writing depends on our acceptance that the people, places, and events related are true and accurate. Also, our enjoyment depends to a lesser extent on our familiarity with the subject matter; for example, we might prefer to engage with a travelogue about a place we've visited (or lived, or live), and in a sense compare notes and impressions over the course of the reading. Or, conversely, we may engage in travel writing that pushes the level of exotica - writing about places we've never been and would never go, armchair traveling (the kinds of books that my friend Rory Nugent writes, for ex.). So as I read Bedford's account of her travels part of my enjoyment is in knowing that the hardships (and beauty) she describes is a true experiences; if A Visit to Don Otavio were a novel it would not stand up as well, or at all - and parts of it would defy belief of course. (The famous quip that if we were to put this in a novel nobody would believe it - novels in a way have to be more "credible" than nonfiction.) This phenomenon played out in public about a decade ago with the "memoir" A Thousand Little Pieces that was quickly exposed as a fabrication; in fact, the writer had submitted his work for publication and an editor suggested he "rework" it as a memoir. But once the truth was out the work was pointless and uninteresting - the demands of fiction, the need to create character and plot, are much higher than for nonfiction (which partially explains my reading preferences). Bedford's work is great on its own terms - an almost perfect piece of travel writing, funny, informative, insightful, dramatic, exotic. Whether her skills as an observer and raconteur can make her a great or even a good novelist is another question; I'll probably try to find the answer.

Why Sybille Bedford says so littel about herself in A Visit to Don Otavio

Continue to read w/ pleasure Sybille Bedford's A Visit to Don Otavio, a terrific travelogue about her journey through Mexico in 1953 - and not sure how much Mexico may have changed (in one respect it's much more dangerous, with the drug trade and militant criminal elements, in others, travel there is much easier - with better air transport, more info from numerous guidebooks, better hotels in the larger cities at least). She does a great job blending tales of travelers' woes - in particular, the train journey to Mazatlan is a great chapter, w/ the train arriving a mere 17 hours late (in one amusing sequence as she inquires about leave Mazatlan she's told the net day's train is sold out and so is next week's; what can she do? She's told: Take yesterday's train. It should be here soon.), with the hotel a place of squalor and infestation, and so forth - balanced against some scenes of absolute beauty. Similarly, she maintains a puzzled amazement at the Mexican culture, the indifference to punctuality, the swarm of red tape, etc. - but balanced against a love and respect for the spirit of the people, the openness and hospitality and generosity - at least most of the time (she also witnessed an inebriated passenger literally tossed from a moving bus and left scraped and bloody in the highway, and nobody particularly caring). One curious aspect of this chronology: She tells us virtually nothing about herself or her life: where is she from? how is she supporting herself on this journey? who is she? Some of this of course we can learn from Wikipedia and other sources, but it's striking how little she reveals - making this book, I think, even greater as we can more easily identify w/ her travels in that her personality doesn't mediate between the subject and the object (us). Because she says so little about herself, the journey is ours.

The clash of cultures in Bedford's A Visit to Don Otavio

Part II of Sybille Bedford's great travelogue on her "Mexican Journey" (1953) is the eponymous Visit to Don Otavio, in which S, her partner (E), and a male friend, Anthony, pay a visit to Otavio at his remote lakeside estate not too far from Guadalajara. The visit begins with a bonecrushing ride in a cart pulled by a mule, yet after this inauspicious beginning, which shows us how remote the estate is, as well as the insouciance of these travelers, they are greeted by O and put up in a beautiful hacienda, for what seems to be an unlimited stay; the generosity of all the Mexicans she meets is amazing, and gives a real sense of the culture: relaxed, open, friendly, moving always at its own pace. Over the next few chapters we learn of O's life - a member of a once wealthy, titled Mexican family that lost a lot in one of the revolutions; now he's the obviously unsuccessful youngest son, given the task of turning this family property into a hotel - a hopeless proposition it would seem. The (still) wealthy siblings visit for a family meeting about the hotel plans and O's role therein, which leads to a long and hilarious chapter, mostly in dialogue, that could well be a scene from a play, or could stand alone for that matter. Over the course of their stay, Bedford et al. encounter a few other European expats living in this isolated but idyllic region; each of these is obnoxious, suspicious, and eccentric - though each in a different way - but the overall sense is that those foreigners who've settled in Mexico have no appreciation for the culture, whereas the intrepid travelers are open to new experiences and to new people. Throughout, Bedford's writing is excellent, an incredible eye for detail and great power of selection, and a real sense of humor and sharp wit. Learned from Wikipedia that she was a German-born, English-language writer and that Visit to Don Otavio (originally called The Sudden View, a much worse title) was her first book - followed by several novels, collections of essays, and the authorized bio of Huxley, who was a friend. She'd also crossed paths with Thomas Mann and other well-known German writers before the war; though she lived in Italy she was in danger of deportation to Germany, because she was (half? 1/4th?) Jewish - she married British homosexual out of convenience (she was a Lesbian) to get safe passage - one of several writers, maybe many, who took this route to safety.

A Mexican travelogue that reads like a novel: A visit to Don Otavio

I rarely read travel books, in fact rarely read books other than literary fiction, but lifelong friend DC, who has never steered me wrong going back to his recommendation that I read a little chapbook called Howl, suggested I read Sybille Bedford's A Visit to Don Otavio: A Mexican Journey, which DC says captures the essence of Mexico better than anything he's ever read. Though I know little about Mexico, have only visited for a week or so many years back (DC traveled there extensively in the 70s and I believe has visited multiple times since then), this travelogue is a great piece of writing, seems entirely believable and authentic, reads like a novel, actually, and I can pay it no higher compliment. It's from 1953, and you'd expect many things have changed since then, though part of the ethos of this work is that things in Mexico tend to endure for centuries, throughout decades of subjection to foreign conquerors, oppressive dictatorships, political crime and corruption - the spirit of the people endures and the terrifying beauty of the country endures. Bedford wrote the book in 1953 (I believe the great NY Review Books has republished it recently), so some elements of her travel feel quaint and remote - in particular the travel by train and sleeping coach - but others feel contemporary. First of all, she conveys the sense of travel through a difficult country so that we experience Mexico vicariously; she's neither a "tourist" (this is by no means a guide book, though she has amusing things to say about several of those) nor an adventure traveler - though she is unafraid to go to out of the way places by public transport. In fact, she's fearless (she travels w/ a female companion; not clear whether there is a relationship between them, but it doesn't matter either way), and that shows the one major difference between Mexico then and today: She has no fear in the 1950s regarding drug cartels and robbery. The dangers she faces are mainly the hardships of travel, though these are prodigious, and quite funny in her telling. She gives us plenty of detail about scary bus rides, crowded trains, dicey hotels and restaurants, but also the beauty of the landscape, the generosity of strangers, the plentiful meals, and most of all some really sweet and amusing passages about communication, or miscommunication, with the Mexicans, such as the day her hotelier suggested they stay inside, the day of a "small election": Is it safe to go outside? Yes, very safe. Safe as sage. But you should stay in side. The next day: Only a few people shot. It was a small election. Terrific scenes, strong opinions - she's not afraid to say when a museum is dull or crappy - and even some capsule history of the land, told in a smart, brisk, manner - totally engaging.

Don't expect a clear sense of an ending from Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday

Not surprising or even disappointing that G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday ends in a hot mess. How else could it end, really? The six undercover officers finally catch up w/ the President (Sunday) of the anarchist league and chase him across London in an absurd pursuit: first by horse-drawn cabs (the novel was written in 1908), then into the London zoo, where the president hops on an elephant and goes charging through the streets of London, then he's airborne in a balloon - and so forth. When they finally catch up w/ him at a big shindig in a mansion in the south of England, who turns up but the one true anarchist, and no attentive reader will be surprised that it's the poet from the first chapter - and he goes off in an unintelligeable rant about destruction - and one of the 7 responds with some hokey philosophy about all mus suffer - I really couldn't understand this. But does it matter? As Chesterton noted in a brief afterword, the subtitle of this work is "A Nightmare," and it really does just follow dream-logic, so don't go in expecting a satisfying and clarifying resolution. I think Kingsley Amis in the foreword oversold this novel, calling it one of the greatest he'd ever read - clearly he read it first as an impressionable youth and retained that impression over the course of his career. What the novel does provide are some amusing twists and intriguing passages of pursuit and intrigue; at times, it seemed a forerunner of Lovecraft's horror fiction. It also probes the social anxiety of its era, and ours, about the malignancy of terrorists and anarchists who destroy peace and order with no clear aim or intent other the disruption and destruction.

A curious insight in The Man Who Was Thursday that's on point in the US today

One curious and timely aspect in G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday: the novel concerns a group of undercover police officers who are trying to foil an anarchist sect that is plotting a series of bomb attacks in public venues. One of the police officers, as they the team is fleeing across the Normandy countryside with the leaders of the anarchist sect in pursuit, expresses concern that the people in the region will rise up in support of the anarchists. The leader of the police group says that this fear is groundless. He notes that the working class, despite the pretensions or delusions of the anarchists themselves, has no interest in an anarchist movement; the movement will have the support of the wealthiest, the French nobility. He reasons: the poor sometimes wish to get ride of a bad government, but the wealthy always (ital) wish to get rid of all government. This message is timely and on point today at the dawn of the Trump administration: it's the 1 percent that supports Trump and wants to get rid of all government, specifically regulations and taxation; the working class is deluded into thinking that the decimation of government is in their best interest - obviously not the case. This insight is proven correct, in the course of Chesterton's novel, as the wealthy landowner whom the police officers believe to be their friend and ally turns upon them and betrays them. What will happen in the U.S.? Abandoning regulation (SEC, EPA, et al) and diminishing government services (health care, national parks and monuments, et al.) serves the best interest of exactly whom?

G.K. Chesterton

Following on yesterday's post in fact there is a movie based on Chesterton's The Man who Was Thursday in fact a recent (2016) movie, which I guess was unsuccessful- and no surprise there either as it would require a deft hand to strike the right balance between a politics thriller about thwarting a terrorist sect (in the novel they're planning an assassination of the king of France) and a satiric-comic story about weird eccentrics, secret cults, a messianic leader. Who could bring this off? Maybe Tarantino? In any event: the novel centers on a group of 7 anarchist leaders each of whom adopts the moniker of a day of the week (hence the title) - think Reservoir Dogs - w the protagonist, Thursday, being a member of the British police anti-terrorism squad. Part of the joke is we gradually learn that each of the members except (perhaps) the president, Sunday, is a member of the police - so they've been spying on one another. Of course we expect a realization about Sunday as well - is he the only terrorist among them? Or has he shrewdly led the police down a false trail while the anarchist terrorists proceed w their planning? If taken literally some of the scenes in which Thursday (aka Syme) feels endangered could be quite dramatic- yet GKC can't resist going for broad comic devices that the that use to effect their disguises, such as fake beards, dark glasses, stage makeup, and fake polish accents - as well as some weird scenes in which the characters "converse" thru an elaborate system of finger tapping. In short it's a move that's all over the place and never quite clear about its progeny or its intention, which may be why today it's obscure - certainly in comparison w conrad's novel on a similar theme, the secret agent.

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G.K. Chesterton's novel from a century ago on a theme that's w/ us today

G.K. Chesterton's 1908 novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, is so odd, loopy, lunatic, and improbable that it just might make a good movie. Not sure who or what brought this novel to my attention, but I can see why people may be turning to it in these days, as it's ostensibly about a gang of terrorists who are plotting to create havoc in England, London in particular, by setting off bombs in public places. Unlike today's terrorists, these guys are not of any particular religious or ethnic persuasion; they are self-identified as anarchists, and their goal is to eradicate all government and regulation. Extreme as this sounds, the anarchist movement was apparently a true threat in Europe - the descendants of Nietzche - in the early 20th century. For a more conventional novel about this movement and its effect on the community and on individual families, and its ties to radical foreign power, see Conrad's great novel The Secret Agent. Chesterton's novel is on the same theme but is far more cartoonish, exaggerated, and at times comic in approach. In short, the novel begins in a bohemian London neighborhood where a young poet, Gregory, often holds court; on the night in question another poet, Syme, shows up and engages G in a debate about the art of poetry: G believes in free form and breaking all rules, whereas S is conventional in every way. At one point, G offers to show S something that will amaze him, but first extracts a pledge that S. will never speak of this to the police. S agrees, and G leads them to a working-class pub, which turns out to be a front for a cell of anarchists; S joins the meeting of the cell and, improbably, gets elected to represent the group at a higher-level secret meeting. S confesses to G that he is actually a member of the anti-terrorism squad at Scotland Yard - though he says he will keep his pledge and not report to his superiors. In the summary, this sounds like a conventional thriller, albeit w/ some highly improbable plot elements (would an anarchist truly bring a stranger to a high-level meeting?, e.g.), but GKC's telling of the tale is almost comic; for ex., the anarchists hold to the theory that the best way to avoid police attention is to publicly bill themselves as ... a meeting of anarchists. Satire aside, this novel, so far, is a good piece of social commentary from a century ago that prods us to think about the uses of terror and difficulty of thwarting those who will stop at nothing, even today.

What Fitzgerald might have done had he lived to complete The Last Tycoon

One can only imagine that F. Scott Fitzgerald would have improved The Last Tycoon had he lived longer and worked on this novel to the finish; he was a famous reviser, unafraid to dramatically change earlier drafts, and the surviving notes - included in the Scribner edition - about his plans for TLT and an outline of the complete plot as he'd planned it - show how engaged he was in his writing: not among the first-thought, best-thought school, far from it. So, well, what would he have changed? First of all, I suspect he would have ditched the whole idea of the young woman, Cecilia, daughter of a producer, as the narrator; if she truly is to become the love interest of Stahr, the eponymous tycoon, she's completely inappropriate as a narrator: compare Calloway w/ his detached insouciance and his sharp insights. Second, one hopes he would have improved the plot as he worked further into this novel. The finished text concludes with Stahr getting in a ridiculous fist-fight w/ a union organizer (a "red"); it would be way better if that organizer were introduced earlier and that the tensions between labor and management were a significant theme from the outset. Third, there are many opportunities to make this a story of crime, murder, revenge - a la Gatsby - but FSF in his plot outline avoids them all and has Stahr die in a plane crash. That's a cheap way out of the story - anyone knows that if you're killing the protagonist it shouldn't be just some random (and extremely rare) event. Then, please, let us hope FSF would have given up on the complicated chapter he outlines in which 3 kids come across the wreck of the plane and start purloining materials from the crash such as Stahr's briefcase. This plot device is not only preposterous but it takes the novel off into a divergent course - these kids have nothing to do w/ the Hollywood story, such as it is. And why would he have Cecilia narrate the whole story from a sanatorium, where she is dying of TB? All told, except for scholarly interest and for those lay readers curious about how FSF developed a plot, the best thing editors could have done w/ TLT would be to trim it of everything except the Hollywood stuff - make it a short (or long) story. As it stands it's a mess - and it's clearly not something FSF would have owned it its published form; still wondering how the adapters will develop this story: Stay w/ FSF's outline and notes? Or develop it as they see fit?

Why the love stories in The Last Tycoon don't work

Yes, the love story (stories) in F. Scott Fitzgerald's uncompleted novel, The Last Tycoon, are quite ridiculous and I'll be interested to see how the adapters managed to build a credible plot out of the shards that FSF left behind - and we have to believe he would have improved the plot had he lived to complete this novel. But really: famous producer (Monroe Stahr) sees 2 women who seem to be trespassing on the back lot during a storm and flash flood. One of them reminds him of his late wife; he manages to track her down (some confusion ensues as he first meets up w/ the other woman, not the one he's seeking). He encourages her to go for a ride w/ him; after seeming quite uninterested, she eventually goes back to his beach house and they have sex. Then he discovers a letter she'd left for him in which she says she's about to get married. Hm, I thought there was something here - maybe her husband-to-be in a fit of jealousy and rage attacks Stahr (or even his finacee, Kathleen Moore?), but no that doesn't seem to be what happens. After a long (chaste) 2nd date, in which she tells her sad and sordid life story - a childhood of abuse, followed by time as a mistress to a (married) man, a king no less!, somewhere in Europe, they part and the next day Stahr receives a telegram - she went ahead and married the guy. All OK I guess, but compare this w/ Gatsby, in which we really understand why it's so important to him to win back Daisy; in this novel, there's no real connection between Stahr and this woman other than her resemblance to his late wife. Another element is the crush the narrator - Cecilia (?), daughter of another producer - has on Stahr, and maybe she'll win his heart, but she's such an undeveloped character - FSF seems to forget for great swatches of time that she's the one narrating the tale - that we don't particularly care about her relationship to Stahr one way or another; in fact, we haven't seen them together except for a passing encounter on an airplane in flight. What does work throughout is FSF's account of the film industry in the 1930s - and of course that is what has drawn screenwriters to this tale at least twice. Anticipating the miniseries The Last Tycoon and thinking the more it can show us life in Hollywood (and the less that hangs on these tepid romances), the better.