Notes on Recent Reading 41 (McCarthy, Priestley, Ehirim)

The Stones of Florence (McCarthy)

     McCarthy provides a pleasantly idiosyncratic account not only of the art that makes the city such a popular destination and of the city’s history, but also of the Florentine character in the mid-twentieth century. Offsetting the oh-so-aesthetic sensibility Tuscany often inspires, she makes a point of the region’s practicality, business sense, and even plainness in contrast to the sensualism of Venice. She creates a vivid sense of fifties Florence, still under the war’s shadow, bustling with Vespas and equal measures of pride and irony.
     Her freshness and vinegar are physic to the viewer who has ever felt that Botticelli, Fra Angelico, and Filippo Lippi can be a bit sweet. In a certain mood Pater’s enthusiasm can be off-putting. It is then that McCarthy’s acerbic comments are particularly welcome. Florence attracts enthusiasts; it is refreshing to have this account by a cynical and sharp-eyed intellectual.
     The Stones of Florence reads as though it was a weaker sequel to her excellent Venice Observed. Nonetheless, the book deserves a place in the libraries even of those who are not travelers.


An Inspector Calls (Priestley)

     J. B. Priestley practiced a profession virtually obsolete today; he was a man of letters, the author of at least twenty-eight novels, as well as books of short stories, and a good many plays and films and four books of literary criticism aimed not at specialists, but the general reader. He wrote English Journey, a road book worthy of being placed next to Jack London’s The Road, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Responsible in addition for a number of works on history and politics, autobiography, and essays, he was an exemplary hard-working professional writer.
     He is most remembered today for one play of enduring popularity, a favorite of community theater, An Inspector Calls, written rapidly as a bit of agitprop as WWII ended and first performed in Moscow. The play’s success in repeated revivals by companies of all sorts is not due to its tendentious theme, however, but rather to its disguise as a conventional mystery story.
     The genres are not mixed without hazard. The trajectory of the unfolding of the inspector’s indictment is so clear that the viewer has little doubt what will happen by the end of the first scene. Lacking opportunity to surprise expectations in the main line of the story, he resorts to a switcheroo or two at the end instead.
     When Mr. Burling wonders why he put up with the inspector’s accusatory behavior and his independence from any legal forms, the audience is likely to wonder with him. Having been simply enough amused to watch the working out of a pattern clear from the start, they may have neglected to worry about realism. By the end of the play we are to accept the supernatural when it appears the inspector is not a regular police agent at all. Unconcerned with making arrests, he is nonetheless devoted to tending to the moral order. Once the resemblance to Everyman emerges, realism is no longer relevant. When the Burlings realize that it is possible that the various incidents for which they feel culpable may have involved not one woman, but many, this cleverly mirrors the thematic implication that they play is not about a single egregious case of persecution, but about the capitalist system.
     All very well, but why, then, does the final telephone call occur, letting them know that an inspector is on his way. Is what they had just experienced happening again? Is it happening now for real whereas it was before a phantom summoned up by a family full of guilty consciences? Is it all of a sudden about one woman again? What is going on? But before one can think, the curtain has fallen.


Prince of Monkeys (Ehirim)

     Nnamdi Ehirim’s first novel provides an overview of Nigerian life during the nineties, and the picture is disturbing, even tragic. The plot concerns the emergence into adulthood of his protagonist Ihechi and his circle of school friends in a profoundly corrupt society. The bleak depiction of Nigeria is intensified by the older characters’ memories of the Nigerian Civil War.
     The middle class Ihechi is anti-colonialist, yearning for a distinctly African form of communalism, leading him and his set to idolize Fela. Yet he is as scornful of the Ifa orisas to which his mother is devoted as he is to the Anglican Jesus. Given the political theme, the horrifying ending is perhaps inevitable, as each individual comes to grief, doomed simply for having independent judgment and conscience.
     The lurid character of the final scene is of a piece with the over-striving of some of the prose. Ornamental alliteration or figures of speech that seem to be for show alone occasionally distract the reader, but it is in a way exhilarating to see style and rhetoric for their own sake. Very likely West African fancy for oratory in the days before literacy influences even this young writer. The ample use of proverbs is without a doubt traditional (and European ones sneak in as well).

Arrival in Nigeria

     On our way to take up teaching positions on the Nigerian Airways flight the featured film, which, though I did not watch, I saw on a dozen monitors, was, I swear, Raquel Welch wearing a fur bikini as Loana the Fair One in One Million, B.C. Why this was shown so long after its production I cannot say. What I do know is that it complicated the already peculiar knot of associations for “the primitive” which I carried with me to Africa. We had left New York snowed under, only to be enveloped by heat and humidity the moment we stepped off the plane at Mohammed Murtala Airport, then a modest and shabby place, filled with touts and other small businessmen. Many if the affluent Nigerians on the flight carried vast amounts of merchandise while we had shed many possessions. Five-year-old Clare had even happily given many most of her toys.
     We made our way to the Palm Heights Hotel in a remote neighborhood amid goats and chickens wandering free down lanes of shanties and more substantial workers’ homes and then, unaccountably, this second or third class hotel, rather grand by contrast. The neighborhood’s fishy odor mingled with the scent from the open sewer in the center of the roads. I thought of Shakespeare’s London and all the other pre-modern cities that did for so long without running water. It is little wonder that many of the old homes have the plainest of facades on the street, holding courtyards and gardens within.
     The Palm Heights was a proper place, running water and all, though its pretensions had moderated. Towels and half the signs bore the prior name The Paradise Heights. It had the odd characteristic of much ritzy Nigerian architecture: expensive materials and shoddy workmanship. The marble stairs, for instance, were set so awry as to challenge footing in a few places. Months in the future Mr. Elempe would explain the phenomenon: “They are paid so little, they are sloppy most often on purpose.”
     The room was just fine, however, and we set out to get a sense of where we were. There were no businesses except a few tiny shops. Clare began to get acquainted with a little goat until several people who had settled in to enjoy the afternoon by observing us shouted cautions, “No! No . . .worms. The goat has hookworms.”
     Once we returned to our room, the youths who worked at the hotel and their friends and hangers-on had heard of our arrival and came calling. We asked whether it were possible to hear Fela and his band at his famous club in his compound the Kalakuta Republic which the army had assaulted only a few years before. While I cannot pretend to know the facts, we were told that he was indeed in residence, but the show would not begin until after midnight. Each concertgoer receives a basket, we heard, in which to store clothing since nothing but undergarments is permitted inside the shrine-like hall. We did not make it to hear Fela.
     One of our guests had spent the last half-hour of his visit in our toilet. Once everyone had left, we found that the toilet was plugged and on the verge of foully overflowing. A call to the front desk seemed to inspire no action. Repeated requests eventually brought a helpful lad up carrying a chamber pot. The toilet was never fixed during our stay, though it doubtless needed nothing more than a good plunging.
     The next morning I woke to the song of the mosquitoes. After a single conscious inhalation, I wondered whether it was our toilet or the world outside that so emphatically struck my nostrils. Our spell in the tropics was undeniably underway in either case.