Notes on Recent Reading 49 (Balzac, Hauptmann, Updike)

 

Eugénie Grandet (Balzac)

     Rereading Eugénie Grandet, one of Balzac’s finest novels, I was struck by the role of commercial transactions in characterization.  The entire narrative is built around the disposition of Grandet’s fortune and his clever transactions express his nature.  Similarly the machinations of the de Grassines and the Cruchots, Charles’ alienation from Eugénie, the town’s interest in the winegrower’s affairs, all have a financial base.  The rise of the capitalist cash nexus as the lens through which things make most sense is explicit.  Each of the succeeding regimes of France offered the miser opportunities he was shrewd enough to seize.

     Yet, stripped of the political, economic, and social elements that so engaged Balzac, the story might have been written centuries earlier.  Eugénie is after all a saintly type, too good for this world, while her father is a model of the sin of greed, Charles a selfish liar (enriched by the wicked practice of slavery), and the townspeople idle gossips.  Poor Eugénie is that perennial favorite, a lovely and long-suffering woman.  For all the nineteenth century socio-economic analysis, most of the plot would not be out of place in medieval hagiography. 

     Like other portions of his Comédie humaine this story preserves a provincial tranche de vie in the author’s straightforward, often uninspired, style, sometimes including superfluous data in the interest of history.  Yet he also punctuates the illusion of the plot as an objectively recorded “reality show” with asides and addresses to the reader that highlight the artifice of the text, generating a satisfying dialectic.

 

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Der Biberpelz  (Hauptmann)

     Moe dramatically viable than most of Gerhart Hauptmann’s naturalistic dramas, Der Biberpelz  (The Beaver Coat) in its farcical elements reminds me of the Second Shepherd’s Play with its comic thievery.  Only whereas the Miracle Play ends with the dazzling radiance of Christ’s birth, here we never depart from the social theme. An obtuse official, von Wehrhahn, is too interested in sniffing out liberal subversives such Dr. Fleischer to attend to actual crimes.  Hauptmann’s satire in  a way anticipates works like Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk (1923) and Zuckmayer’s Captain of Kōpinick (1931).  Krȗger is an amusing example of an aggrieved bourgeois, exasperated at his loss of property while Frau Wolff is a cool and clever miscreant. Brecht was fond of this play and it was filmed in Germany three times (1928, 1937, and 1949), but it has been infrequently produced on English stages.  Some of the same characters appear in a sequel Der Rote Hahn  (1901, called in English The Conflagration) which concludes in a far graver tone.

 

 

In the Beauty of the Lilies (Updike)

     With perhaps a bit of the magisterial ambition that might naturally arise in an acclaimed writer, Updike has spread an epic canvas, stretching over nearly a century, with generations of characters urban and semi-rural, with odd variations like Hollywood types and apocalyptic cultists to punch up the plot.  Basically working the vein still of nineteenth century realism, Updike includes, as is his custom, references to the news and the pop culture of several generations.  The research shows a bit too clearly sometimes, but an amusing aspect of Lilies is the consistent references to films, giving the sense of a sort of history of the United States in all of its collective fantasies.  The grim conclusion is foreseeable from a considerable distance, but Updike’s readers will appreciate the solidity of the plot-line, and the emotional weight he lends his characters, whose peregrinations, though they may feel lost and wandering seem, when seen as here in the long view, to hang together and make a sort of sense.  Too weak to be fully tragic actors, Updike’s people’s lives may strike the reader as reassuringly less competent than their own, at least until they think twice.

Notes on Recent Reading 46 (Kleist, Didion, Soupault)

The Prince of Homburg (Kleist)

     To me the most striking thing about this play is not the prominence of an extreme military code of discipline not irrelevant to the author’s family, for centuries prominent in the Prussian army.  The Prince wins a great victory, but, due to his love-dreaminess, violates orders.  For this he is condemned to die.  In the end the Elector pardons him buts finds him (temporarily) too scrupulous to accept this mercy.  We may be reminded of a samurai story, though for Kleist the whole tension is, I suppose, between heart and mind.  Among the numerous complications even this thread of the plot engenders are the questions of whether the Elector had been sincere (he certainly seemed to be) when threatening the firing squad and what role the unanimous petition from other soldiers may have had.  The most dramatic and radical questions arise with the final words of the play in which the Prince, who had been subjected to a mock execution, asks if he is dreaming and Kottwitz replies “Ein Traum, was sonst," causing the protagonist to fall into unconsciousness again. 

     Perhaps the most emotionally powerful portion of the play is the pathetic passage in which the noble and courageous warrior is reduced by fear of death to abject begging. 

     The play has been justly compared to Shakespeare’s late romances for its hovering between comedy and tragedy and its magical resolution. 

 

 

 

A Book of Common Prayer (Didion)

     In Joan Didion’s reports from Central America in the New York Review of Books, later the basis for her 1983 book Salvador, the revolutionary crisis was unforgettably described.  There can be little doubt that her fierce images and ideological restraint informed the opinion of at least the American intelligentsia.  Before the violence, supported always by a pernicious US influence, became so widespread, she had depicted a fictional banana republic in her 1977 novel, set in a Boca Grande that is strikingly reminiscent of O. Henry’s Anchuria in Cabbages and Kings.   The utter and complete corruption, the domination by wealth and guns, the oligarchy that always governs in spite of democratic and left-wing charades, are historically accurate and unfortunately remain the norm in Central America.  Even when revolutionaries came to power they turned into the tyrants their younger selves had despised. 

     That society, though, is purely the setting, establishing the tone of cynical self-absorption that is normal in Boca Grande, within which the drifting Americans, in particular the distrait Charlotte Douglas, pass their time.  The narrator Grace Strasser-Mendana, who, like everyone else, has no political values, is practically the only realistic dependable observer, her accuracy buttressed by her scientific training.  Yet in the last line she reflects, “I have not been the witness I wanted to be.”

     Marin comes across with very little personality, hardly even a true believer, so dulled she is in defensive insouciance.  She seems purely a reflection of the then-current news of the Symbionese Liberation Army (though the originals were more touching and true and finally tragic).  I would have thought that there might have been room for a few manifestations of idealism or nobility from the Boca Grande guerilleros as well.  Ah well, once again, history has vindicated cynicism.

     For me the best passages were those in which the characters tossed aggressive verbal barbs amongst themselves, getting nowhere at all.  At times they sounded almost like Ronald Firbank characters.  Good fun there.

 

 

 

Lost Profiles (Soupault)

     The subtitle of this slim 1963 volume, “Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism,” is better justified than the title itself.  The old avant-garde has been canonized and what had once been rebellious groupings apart from the prior artistic power structure have now becomes standard art history.  Which is not to say boring.  Here one may find reminiscences of Breton, Crevel, and Reverdy from a central figure in Paris Dada and a co-founder of Surrealism (though he was expelled for refusing to join the Communist Party).  He conveys the ambience of the early twentieth century counterculture, emphasizing rebellion and the role of scandal.  Those who came of age in the sixties might find his account of the scenes of his youth particularly engaging. 

     He records portraits of Apollinaire, Henri Rousseau, and some less likely figures such as Proust and Joyce as well as an appreciative piece on Baudelaire.

     This edition was translated by Alan Bernheimer with a pleasant afterword by Ron Padgett and published by City Lights.