February 9, 2010
Today in history, February 9, 1980
Feb. 9, 1980
3 days before the opening of the Olympic games in Lake Placid.
Madison Square Garden. A fundraising exhibition game between the US and the USSR hockey teams.
Today in history, February 9, 1923
Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in. -- Brendan Behan
Brendan Behan, Irish playwright and terrorist, was born on this day, in Dublin, in 1923. He led a life of poverty, violence, controversy, and seemingly aimless wandering. He spent time in jail as a teenager, for being part of a plot to blow up a bridge (he had the bombs in his bag). Then he was involved in the attempted murder of two detectives, and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. While in prison, he (like so many other convicts) spent that enforced solitude writing. He wrote memoirs, confessions, poetry. He was still only 23 years old. His IRA activities ceased after that time, although he remained connected and friendly with most of its members (naturally - his whole family was involved). While in prison, he learned the Irish language. He drank like a fish. He had trouble getting published in Ireland (so he was in a grand continuum of other Irish writers who faced similar censorship issues). Behan was raised in a staunchly Republican family. His father was involved in the Easter uprising. Behan was Catholic (of course) - but not by name only. He was a true believer.
In the 1950s, he left Ireland (again, in a grand continuum of Irish writers who feel they must leave in order to be an artist) and moved to Paris. He wanted to be free, to write, to publish, to live life the way he wanted to live it.
I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
When we were in Ireland as a family, my dad took us to the writer's museum in Dublin. It's like going to the Vatican of artists. Nobody is more dominant in the written word than Irish writers. Who knows why that is, it doesn't even matter why. The museum is great. Even as a kid I appreciated it, especially because I grew up being surrounded by these old Irish authors, on my dad's bookshelves. I hadn't READ any of the books, but people like Flann O'Brien and Brendan Behan and Francis Stewart and WB Yeats were a part of the warp and weft of our family. We had a big picture of Brendan Behan in our living room - actually, we still do: it was a drawing of Behan's big bloated meaty face - and it was all done in one line, with the pen never lifting from the page. You can see it on the wall over the television in this photo here. I still remember our visit to the museum and seeing Behan's battered typewriter under glass (you can see images of it on the museum's link). I didn't even know who he was, as a writer - I just knew his books were all over our house, and I just knew that he was on our living room wall. So he was omnipresent. And even as a young teenager, I was into "objects", the same way I am now. Like seeing Alexander Hamilton's DESK at the New York Historical Society and literally having to walk away from the display because I didn't trust myself to not reach out and touch the damn thing. Behan's typewriter is one of the few things I remember from that trip to the museum. I think perhaps it is because I had a battered typewriter of my own - given to me on my 10th birthday - and it lasted me pretty much until I went to college. Old-fashioned, where I had to buy ink ribbons on spools, and where certain letters came out quirky, no matter what you did. I loved my typewriter, and I wish I still had it. Even just as a curio. Behan's typewriter looked kind of like mine, which was strange to me ... I was a teenager living in the early 1980s ... Behan seemed like a man from ancient Rome to me, yet his typewriter was like mine!
"I am a drinker with writing problems."
His cynicism about the Irish and Ireland borders on the psychotic at times (but if you know the Irish, you know that cynicism about themselves appears to be built in to the national character - part of why they are so charming and so much fun. They ARE serious, but they don't take themSELVES seriously.)
If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.
But he also said:
It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.
In my opinion it is his cynicsm that makes his work so exciting to read. It palpitates on the page. His feelings and judgments tremble before you. He lives in his words. He is unforgiving. Yet also so so funny. A typically Irish combination. If you just have the unforgiving attitude, you'll be a rather humorless writer, a propagandist. But Behan was a riot.
Never throw stones at your mother,
You'll be sorry for it when she's dead,
Never throw stones at your mother,
Throw bricks at your father instead.
-- Brendan Behan, "The Hostage", 1958
It doesn't surprise me at all that he and Jackie Gleason were best friends. Of course they were. They both had the same dead-eyed response to absurdity, the same intolerance for stupidity and silliness, the same potential for explosive rage and explosive tragedy, and also the same huge humor.
They had become friends because of a notorious drunken appearance by Behan on a television talk show, where Gleason was also a guest. Behan was wasted, it was shocking to many - but Gleason saw a kindred spirit.
So happy birthday, to a wonderful Irish writer, a man I grew up with, a character in my childhood lexicon. He was not outside our family at all, he was inner circle, like Flann OBrien (one of his friends) and Yeats and Joyce and Synge. Behan was on our wall. He was one of us. As an adult, I finally read all of his plays and realized what the fuss was all about.
1954's The Quare Fellow, about his time in prison, ran for a short time in Dublin, and was a modest hit. The prison language is meaty, funny, and shows Behan's gift for satire. There's a Pinter-esque quality in some of it (strange as that may sound if you are familiar with Pinter) - in that a lot of times the events that happen OFFstage take on far more importance than what is happening ON. So that adds to the audience's feeling of imbalance, or wanting to peek around corners to get the whole story. "The Quare Fellow" is never seen in the play, although he is referenced constantly. Now enters Joan Littlefield and her Theatre Workshop into the picture. We really can thank her for the fact that Brendan Behan is so famous today. I am not sure that fame was a done deal for someone like Behan - in the same way that it was for someone like Joyce, who seems destined to be a singular star. Behan was more on the fringe, more of a scrabbler. But Littlefield, a theatre director and producer, took The Quare Fellow over to England where it was a smashing success. Eventually the play moved to Broadway, bringing Behan worldwide fame.
My dad wrote me a note about The Hostage (another one of Behan's plays):
Dearest: I saw the play done once in the 70s: it seemed like John Cleese [or some other Python] had adapted Frank O'Connor's Guests of the Nation for the stage. I believe that it owes most of its success to the director [Joan Littlefield?]. love, dad
My father's comment reflects the general consensus that seems to be out there: that it was Joan Littlefield who took Behan's work, wrestled it into a theatrical form, produced it so that its strengths could shine through, hiding its weaknesses - and that any collaboration that Behan had afterwards suffers in comparison. Behan owed much to Littlefield. Perhaps that is why they had such a testy relationship, notoriously difficult.
The Hostage
Interestingly enough, my copy of the book, given to me by my father, was an early edition, 1959, and in the biographical sketch on the back it says: "Brendan Behan, the son of a house painter, left school at thirteen, and three years later served his first prison term for political reasons. As an IRA terrorist he has spent eight years of his life in various jails ..." The use of the word 'terrorist' really stood out for me. So often now, regardless of whether the person is actually a terrorist or not, the word is surrounded by little quotation marks. Or it's just not used at all. They're "insurgents", they're "rebels", they're "militants", "freedom fighters", etc. That little bio of Behan is quite a time-traveler, from an earlier decade when people weren't so hesitant to call a spade a spade.
Yeah, he was a terrorist. He blew shit up. He went to jail.
He also was a writer.
I appreciate the clarity and openness of that biographical sketch, and miss that kind of forthrightness (without the huge chip on its shoulder, too) today.
The Hostage was an enormous theatrical success in London, Paris, and New York. I love the play. It's laugh-out-loud funny at times, but also angry, pointedly political, sad ... with certain Keystone Cops slapstick elements. In my opinion, it should be played like a bat out of hell. You should only "pause" when Behan tells you to pause. Other than that, let it fly, keep the speed up, ba-dum-ching! Otherwise, the thing could be in danger of taking itself seriously. The points made are awesome and difficult and prickly - still relevant today ... but points such as those must not be underlined for the audience. God, I wish every director - for stage, TV, and film - would LEARN NOT TO UNDERLINE (with music, dialogue, closeups, repetitive language in the script to make sure we all "get it") what is already obvious.
Behan's work exists in a fiery world of high stakes, humor, and denial. If you pause, if you slow it down, its power unravels.
The Hostage takes place in a brothel in Dublin which is owned by a former IRA commander. The cast of characters is a motley array of whores and night-owls and other fringe-dwellers. It's a fast-moving theatrical work, very Irish - full of wise cracks, and jokes. It seems that NOTHING is taken seriously. But that's so very Irish. When the play opens, we eventually learn that the following day an 18 year old IRA member is to be hanged. He was accused of killing an Ulster policeman. This is on everybody's minds. Lots of talk and chatter about the IRA, and 1916, and martyrdom, and Ireland ... A young Cockney soldier, Leslie Williams, is held hostage in the brothel, in the hopes that somehow this might stave off the execution ... When the IRA member is hanged the following day, the British police eventually attack the brothel, and Leslie ends up getting killed by gunfire.
The Hostage was Behan's last major success.
Critic Kenneth Tynan said:
While other writers horde words like misers, Behan sends them out on a spree, ribald, flushed, and spoiling for a fight.
Here is an excerpt from The Hostage - a play that is well worth looking into if you are not familiar with it. Don't forget, despite the IRA themes and the title: this is a comedy.
Notice in the excerpt below that a "pause" is written into the script. And, hysterically, the Officer shouts "SILENCE!" after the pause. If you're in a production that is floppy, in terms of cue pickups, with pauses left and right, people stopping to think, or ponder - then that moment would be lost, the timing would not be right, you need to be able to "hear" the joke that Behan has written into the thing. It needs to be rat-a-tat dialogue all along, no pauses between lines, so then that sudden "Pause" will really have an effect ... and the fact that the Officer shouts "Silence" after the ONE pause in the script so far - is hysterical, and says worlds about that character. (This, too, is very Pinter-esque. In terms of "Pinter's pauses" - follow them like you would a musical score. Do not add more. Do not subtract any. Just DO WHAT HE SAYS ... and almost by default, the script will take on an ominous almost unbearably tense feeling. Example here of what a Pinter script looks like. Those "silences" are deliberate, written into the thing by Pinter. This is not always the case with such "directorial" additions to a script - sometimes they are added from production notes, and are not BY the playwright. But in Pinter's case, he wrote those "silences" in. They are much a part of the dialogue as the things actually spoken. It's not up to the actor to muck with that stuff, to decide when to pause - at least not with Pinter. With Pinter, you do what he says. Believe me, it will help.)
So happy birthday to Brendan Behan.
You make me think, basically, of my whole damn life. You were given to me, by my father, like so much else. It was through osmosis, rather than anything more deliberate.
Wherever I look, you are there.
EXCERPT FROM The Hostage
OFFICER: Now your rent books, please, or a list of the tenants.
PAT. I can give you that easy. There's Bobo, Ropeen, Colette, the Mouse, Pigseye, Mulleady, Princess Grace, Rio Rita, Meg, the new girl, and myself.
OFFICER. [PAT fetches his notebook] I'll tell you the truth, if it was my doings there'd be no such thing as us coming here. I'd have nothing to do with the place, and the bad reputation it has all over the city.
PAT. Isn't it good enough for your prisoner?
OFFICER. It's not good enough for the Irish Republican Army.
PAT. Isn't it now?
OFFICER. Patrick Pearse said "To serve a cause which is splendid and holy, men must themselves be splendid and holy."
PAT. Are you splendid, or just holy? Haven't I seen you somewhere before? It couldn't be you that was after coming here one Saturday night ...
OFFICER. It could not.
PAT. It could have been your brother, for he was the spitting image of you.
OFFICER. If any of us were caught here now or at any time, it's shamed before the world we'd be. Still, I see their reasons for choosing it too.
PAT. The place is so hot, it's cold.
OFFICERE. The police wouldn't believe we'd touch it.
PAT. If we're all caught here, it's not the opinion of the world or the police will be upsetting us, but the opinion of the Military Court. But then I suppose it's all the same to you; you'll be a hero, will you not?
OFFICER. I hope that I could never betray my trust.
PAT. Ah yes, of course, you've not yet been in Mountjoy or the Curragh glasshouse.
OFFICER. I have not.
PAT. That's easily seen in you.
OFFICER. I assure you, my friend, I'm not afraid of Redcaps.
PAT. Take it from me, they're not the worst [to audience] though they're bastards anywhere and everywhere. No, your real trouble when you go to prison as a patriot, do you know what it will be?
OFFICER. The loss of liberty.
PAT. No, the other Irish patriots, in along with you. Which branch of the IRA are you in?
OFFICER. There is only one branch of the Irish Republican Army.
PAT. I was in the IRA in 1916, and in 1925 H.Q. sent me from Dublin to the County Kerry because the agricultural labourers were after taking over five thousand acres of an estate from Lord Trales. They had it all divided very nice and fair among themselves, and were ploughing and planting in great style. G.H.Q. gave orders that they were to get off the land, that the social question would be settled when we got the thirty-county Republic. The Kerrymen said they weren't greedy like. They didn't want the whole thirty-two counties to begin with, and their five thousand acres would do them for a start.
OFFICER. Those men were wrong on the social question.
PAT. Faith and I don't think it was questions they were interested in, at all, but answers. Anyway I agreed with them, and stopped there for six months training the local unit to take on the IRA, the Free State Army, aye, or the British Navy if it had come to it.
OFFICER. That was mutiny.
PAT. I know. When I came back to Dublin, I was court-martialled in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
Pause.
OFFICER. Silence!
PAT. Sir!
OFFICER. i was sent here to do certain business. I would like to conclude that business.
PAT. Let us proceed, shall we, sir? When may we expect the prisoner?
OFFICER. Today.
PAT. What time?
OFFICER. Between nine and twelve.
PAT. Where is he now?
OFFICER. We haven't got him yet.
PAT. You haven't got a prisoner? Are you going down to Woolworths to buy one then?
OFFICER. I have no business telling you any more than has already been communicated to you.
PAT. Sure, I know that.
OFFICER. The arrangements are made for his reception. I will be here.
PAT. Well, the usual terms, rent in advance, please.
OFFICER. Is it looking for money you are?
PAT. What else? We're not a charity. Rent in advance.
OFFICER. I might have known what to expect. I know your reputation.
PAT. How did you hear of our little convent?
OFFICER. I do social work for the St. Vincent de Paul Society.
PAT. I always thought they were all ex-policement. In the old days we wouldn't go near them.
OFFICER. In the old days there were Communists in the IRA.
PAT. There were, faith, and plenty of them. What of it?
OFFICER. The man that is most loyal to his faith is the one that will prove most loyal to the cause.
PAT. Have you your initials mixed up? Is it the FBI or the IRA that you are in?
OFFICER. If I didn't know that you were out in 1916 I'd think you were highly suspect.
PAT. Sir?
OFFICER. Well, at least you can't be an informer.
PAT. Ah, you're a shocking decent person. Could you give me a testimonial I could use in my election address if I wanted to get into the coroporation? The rent, please!
February 8, 2010
Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin
Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale
Helprin writes in sometimes a lush prose about New York City, making it seem like a Never-Never-Land of beauty and possibility. His writing reminds me so much of Walt Whitman's, with its sweeping observations about things like crowds, and sunrise, and bridges. Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" has to be an enormous influence on Helprin, with not only its everyday images of commuters on the ferry, staring at the city, but also its vision of time and the future, Walt Whitman squinting into the space-time continuum for those who will follow him.
Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you - I laid in my stores in advance,
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.
Starting this book was a daunting experience. First of all, it is almost 800 pages long. Second of all, it comes so highly recommended by my friends Ted and Mitchell (and everyone who has read it also says stuff like, "It's one of my favorite books of all time") that it's intimidating to leap in. Thirdly, I have owned it for YEARS, so it's one of those "perpetually unread" books on my shelves that end up kind of haunting me, looking at me like, "So. You ever gonna deal with me or what?" And fourthly: I haven't read a novel since 2008. Fiction has been really challenging for me. Reading itself has been challenging for me, since my nervous breakdown last year. But fiction has seemed self-indulgent (for the first time in my life). It held no appeal. Well, thankfully, that is all over now. I'm back. Sheila's back!!
My taste in literature has always been towards the books that challenge. I've written about "beach reads" before, and how it is assumed that people want to read "easy" books on the beach, and while that may be true for the general population (it must be!), it is not true for me (and for many other people I know). When I have time (as I did in January on the Island), I gravitate towards the big, the difficult. Only the difficult truly engages me in a type of forgetfulness and fantasy that I look for in fiction. Winter's Tale is not challenging in the same way that, oh, Ulysses is, but it is challenging in the way that War and Peace is. It's big. It's comprehensive. It's deeply thoughtful. You cannot skim it. It demands things OF you. YOU must succumb to IT. There are probably a hundred main characters, and you leap around, from one to the other, and slowly, as each page turns, you start to feel the tapestry of the book, the interconnections, and it's one of the most exhilirating reads I have had in a long time, for that reason. It's rare that a book gives me actual goosebumps. This one did. It's similar to the last page of The Shipping News, which slayed me and left me in a puddle on the ground the first time I read it. I resisted even reading it, because I didn't want the book to end, and it's one of those moments in literature which is rare nowadays, when the style is much more ironic, with writers resisting the grand gesture. The scope of the book expanded, the scope of its emotional impact, Proulx did not let me off the hook, she forced me to go there. She forced me to realize what it was I had REALLY been reading, in that quirky weird story of Newfoundland and wind and misfits and miscreants. She forced me to see the theme. She was brave enough to state her theme, and to do so in the last page of the book? Balls. True balls.
Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do. A row of shining hubcabs on sticks appeared in the front yard of the Burkes' house. A wedding present from the bride's father.For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
That's an ending that you need to earn. Annie Proulx does.
Helprin does as well.
In the beginning chapters in the book, he tosses all of the balls into the air. It takes almost 800 pages for all of them to land. What ends up happening, as a reader, is that you get sucked in, here, there, you get captivated by the scenes you are presented with, and from time to time, you remember: "Oh yes. This is in reference to the gold carriers from chapter 3." "Oh yes. This is about the horse again." "Oh yes. Now we go back to the Penn family." Helprin doesn't miss a beat. There is no episode that drags, no character that jars. I was thinking a bit of Don Delillo's failed masterpiece Underworld, and how he must have been thinking (on some subconscious level perhaps) of Winter's Tale, and that that was the kind of story he wanted to tell. Multiple characters and times, huge span, and, underlying it, a deeply thought-out rumination on America, New York, and the time in which we live. There are times when Delillo is deeply successful, but overall the book did not work for me. The opening sequence, the baseball game, is as good as it gets, in terms of writing, and the book never quite lives up to that opening, which was a disappointment to me (I love Don Delillo). I believe he was going for the same effect as Helprin, and Delillo is an incredible writer, which just goes to show you how difficult the task Helprin set before him, and how 100% successful he is on every count. It is not self-indulgent, it does not overly complicate things, it does not go off on tangents: each episode dovetails back into the whole, and although the whirling white cloud wall may not be mentioned for pages at a time, you always feel its smothering presence. You never stop wondering about it. What is it?? And what might be out there, in the world, that is working on me, without me even realizing it? Don't we all have a whirling cloud wall, to some degree? Helprin makes the bold move of having it be an actual physical phemonenon, not some collective unconscious fantasy, but the real deal. There IS a cloud wall around Manhattan. There always has been. Sometimes it recedes, sometimes it surges forth (usually around the turn of centuries and millennia, apparently), but it is always there. Why?
What are we, as a culture, not paying attention to?
Winter's Tale examines those questions. To Mark Helprin, the universe is a place of wonder and pain, where things make sense. Not in a neat tied-up kind of way, but in Vaclav Havel's sense of it, when he said:
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
It is a redemptive view, but difficult. Everything happens for a reason, or so the idiots say, but what is the reason? Could it be bigger than anything we had ever imagined? Helprin believes that nothing goes away. In a classical sense, his is a conservative viewpoint (strip the current-day meaning of that word, if possible, although that means basically going back to Edmund Burke to get what I mean when I say that word). Things may be destroyed, and that is a shame, but nothing goes away. The fact that two forgotten people at the end of the 19th century met and fell in love is not nothing, even if nobody remembers them at the end of the 20th century. Such an emotion, such an experience, is like matter, which cannot be destroyed. It affects us today. Love cannot be destroyed. It exists, in between the molecules, in the atmosphere, adding to the collective experience of the human race. THIS is what Mark Helprin is about. In the same way that certain landscapes hold the memory of what happened there, wars, battles, fires, even if there is no record of the cataclysm, the human race holds the memory of all who have managed to love, connect, grow, live well, transcend, even in the midst of the worst horrors. It is not nothing. In Mark Helprin's world, these things, events, past history, don't just live in a metaphorical way, as in "she will live on forever in our hearts" - no, it is much more literal than that. They ACTUALLY live.
He takes as his canvas New York City, and one of the greatest gifts of the book is that it has made me see where I live in a new way. Now I am one of those people who loves history, and is always looking for evidence of the city that once was here, and now is no longer. I even remember some of it, because the changes have been so drastic in the last 20 years. I love the ghost-signs on the sides of old buildings, the old-fashioned signage which is quickly disappearing from the landscape, the beauty of the buildings built a century ago, and how our gleaming skyscrapers may be awe-inspiring, but they can't hold a candle to those old buildings, in their ornate glamour and poetry. There is a world running alongside the current world, even in New York where things are torn down and built up repeatedly, where you can get glimpses, where it is not just as though you are looking through a glass at another era, but where the other era seems to swim up from the depths towards you, and stands side by side with the modern world. Sorta like Kate & Leopold, if you will. Winter's Tale takes place in a space where such things are possible.
Like I mentioned, Helprin's vision of the world (at least in this book) is, ultimately, redemptive, but not without a price. The book was written in 1983, so the "1999" section was about the, at that time, near-future. It's not a futuristic book, it doesn't read that way, and much of the world in 1999 resembles the world in 1899, although the "towers" are mentioned (not by name). There are a couple of interesting moments when you realize, wow, 1983 ... For example: in one of the sections about the major newspaper rivalry going on in Manhattan, one of the papers is described as having offices in all of these major countries, including "The Soviet Union". Who could have predicted that a mere six years after Winter's Tale was written there would be no "Soviet Union" anymore? Additionally, the 1999 in Winter's Tale is curiously devoid of computers, although one is mentioned, except that it is more of a giant government-owned information database, and you have to drive to Connecticut to access it, and it costs millions of dollars to operate it. None of this anachronizes the book, however, because it all does seem to take place in a sort of time-out-of-time, or, more accurately, a river of time, where you dip into one era, dip into another, and it's not so important to recognize your own time, or what Helprin "got right" or "didn't", because that's not where the power of the book lies.
One of the best parts of Winter's Tale is that it gave me "scenes" unlike anything I have ever seen in any book, in life, in theatre, movies. So specific, so fantastical, that they could only have come from the expansive imagination of one man. Here are some of the things I have never seen before, but now I have, thanks to the magic of Mark Helprin's pen:
-- a white whirling cloud wall around Manhattan, with waves breaking against it
-- Peter Lake sleeping in a little compartment above the Grand Central Station green ceiling of stars
-- Meeting of thieves in the underground water tunnels of New York City
-- A white stallion galloping through a vaudeville burlesque theatre
-- Handmade human-catapult contraption made to vault two people over a raging river in Yellowstone
-- Train frozen in the snow
-- Drift of snow spanning the Hudson River, 1000 feet high. People have to climb up and over the drift, like an ice-climber on Everest, just to get through. On the top of the wall, New York can be seen in the distance
-- The Hudson River frozen over completely, with thousands, hundreds of thousands, of tents pitched across the ice
-- The Short Tails Gang, terrifying, murderous, all on ice skates, chasing Peter Lake, down the frozen Hudson River
-- Legions of consumptive people, all sleeping on their rooftops, trying to freeze the disease out of their lungs
These are just a few examples. Each section of the book had some indelible image to implant in my brain forevermore. I will never forget the "Lake of the Coheeries", the frozen (in terms of it being winter, and in terms of it being frozen in time) town north of New York. I will never forget the raucous "oyster bar", populated by thieves and prostitutes, in an underground cavern somewhere beneath the streets of Manhattan. I will never forget the image of the "machine display" in Madison Square Garden, the pistons and gears and mechanical motions that catapulted Peter Lake into the knowledge that he was a mechanic. I will never forget the stone bathtub at the Penn mansion where Peter Lake and Beverly would embrace and swim, before the fever overtook her and she was done for the night. I am forever grateful to Mark Helprin for showing me these things from his beautiful dreamspace, because now they are mine. Forever.
They are not nothing. Nothing goes away. Even things of the mind, the imagination, the dream, are important information to have as we try to navigate our way through the world.
There is more to say. The prophetic nature of the book, in terms of September 11th, has not really been addressed, and I don't remember it being mentioned in the wake of that awful day, at least not in the same way that E.B. White's essay was, repeatedly, with its dread-making phrases of vision and prophesy:
The city, for the first time, in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island of fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
E.B. White wrote those chilling words in 1948.
In the wake of September 11th, I heard them quoted again and again. He was right. He was right. Mark Helprin was right, too, in more ways than one (he got the destruction wrong by one year - he put it in 2000, not 2001), but I didn't see his book bandied about in the same way as E.B. White's essay. For whatever reason, his deeply beautiful and haunting poem to New York City escaped resurrrection.
But it remains indestructible.
As the city does. Which appears to me to be one of Helprin's messages. Burn it down, go ahead. You will not destroy what is here. You can destroy the buildings but ultimately New York, like all cities, is an idea before it is a place, and ideas, like matter, cannot be destroyed. As a New Yorker, as someone who loves this place, his book brought me to tears of love, which is a very strange thing, and a very beautiful thing. It is not every day that a writer comes along who reminds you to love your home. To look around and value not just what it is, but what it has been, what it started out as, and what it will always be.
Manhattan, a high narrow kingdom as hopeful as any that ever was, burst upon him full force, a great and imperfect steel-tressed palace of a hundred million chambers, many-tiered gardens, pools, passages, and ramparts above its rivers. Built upon an island from which bridges stretched to other islands and to the mainland, the palace of a thousand tall towers was undefended. It took in nearly all who wished to enter, being so much larger than anything else that it could not ever be conquered but only visited by force. Newcomers, invaders, and the inhabitants themselves were so confused by its multiplicity, variety, vanity, size, brutality, and grace, that they lost sight of what it was. It was, for some, one simple structure, busily divided, lovely and pleasing, an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built.
A masterpiece of the 20th century.
February 7, 2010
Tumblr?
I like the layout, and like the fragmentary nature of it, although I am not sure if I'm doing it right. Blog will still go on naturally, but I do like having a little bin to put quotes and pics, it creates a nice collage.
Today in history: February 7, 1867
It's the birthday of a beloved American author - Laura Ingalls Wilder. She was born on February 7, 1867.
Her books are so much a part of my childhood that they don't even feel like books to me. I was 7, 8, 9 when I read them, and I can barely say I read them. I LIVED them. And the fact that at the same time that I was LIVING these books - a wonderful television series based on these books came on helped me immerse myself in that bygone age even further. Despite its bizarre and explosive ending, the series captured some of the simplicity and beauty in those books. Laura, Mary, Nellie Olson - all of these people were just woven into my childhood. We used them as reference points as kids. Whispering to each other about a classmate: "She's such a Nellie Olson". Even now, that particular description would work for me, in terms of telling me everything I needed to know about a person.
Here's a wonderful image of the kind of pioneer cabin that the Ingalls family probably lived in:
Not only do her books work as great stories in and of themselves, but they portray the pioneer experience in such an immediate and first-hand way that it came to life for future generations. There I was, frolicking in the dirt of my backyard in Rhode Island, but because I had read those books I knew about the great plains, and covered wagons, and how medicine was ... er ... different back then ... and what it was like to have NO money so that one Christmas they each got a cookie, and a shiny penny and a peppermint candy for presents. And the girls were THRILLED about these presents, which seemed insane to me, but the way the book was written I went into THEIR world, rather than expecting them to reflect mine. Laura Ingalls Wilder described that one blizzardy Christmas so well, and the beauty of those simple hand-made gifts - that I, as a child, really learned something about the world. I remember thinking, (I must have been 8 years old): "They only got a candy-cane and a cookie? And a PENNY??? But ... how could they have been happy with that????" But the WAY she wrote it made it clear that the entire thing was magical and exciting ... as the snow pounded against the log cabin windows. And so then I realized: "Wait. This is Christmas. This is their Christmas. They were happy. They were happy." And I learned a wee lesson about ... oh ... materialism, and gratitude, and stuff like that. I learned that my world was not the only world. That my time was not the only time. Worlds of imagination opened up in my head.
Their lives were SO different from mine - and yet human beings themselves don't change, and I found so much to relate to in those books. Getting into trouble, learning tough lessons about life, dealing with snotty school girls, the excitement of setting out on a journey with your family ... these were all things I fully recognized from my own life.
Laura Ingalls Wilder was encouraged by her daughter (who was also a writer) to write down stories of her childhood. To get a glimpse of just how intense that relationship was, check out this fascinating New Yorker article about Rose Wilder. Quite a family psychodrama there, and it seems far far removed from the fresh windy air and wide open spaces that make up the landscape and world of the Little House books. By the time, Laura Ingalls Wilder started publishing, the entire world she described had pretty much disappeared. In one person's lifetime. Her first book Little House in the Big Woods was published in 1930. Lindbergh had flown across the ocean. There were railroads criss-crossing the country. Autmobiles. Telephones. Laura Ingalls Wilder straddled an enormous generational divide. Her books are the bridge.
My favorite of the books were By the Shores of Silver Lake and also The Long Winter. I believe The Long Winter is her best book.
I'll close with an excerpt from Little House in the Big Woods that brings a lump to my throat, and kind of captures the simple home-spun magic in these books:
When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?""They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."
But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods.
She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
Happy birthday to an American treasure. And thank you for making me see, as a young child, that things like log cabins and Pa and Ma and firelight "could not be forgotten" ... thank you for making that "long time ago" come to life for me, a young East Coast girl at the tail-end of the 20th century.
February 6, 2010
Movie Marathon
While I had tons of time to read, and walk, and have visitors, and write, and dream, I also had an orgy of movie-watching out on the Island. I brought some movies with me, but for the most part, I kept my TV on TCM the entire time and went wild, seeing whatever was on.
Some I took notes on, others I didn't. Here is the list of total movies seen in the month of January, with notes when applicable. Oh, and my "mirror" notes are part of that damn post I've been percolating over for literally years: men looking at themselves in the mirror in film. Basically, my theory is now bust (that men looking at themselves in the mirror in every other movie began in the 70s mostly)- I love that my original theory is now bust - it puts the post (in my head) in a whole new and exciting direction. And it actually ends up proving my original point.
Darjeeling Limited
Period of Adjustment
Two Weeks in Another Town
All Fall Down
Young Lovers
The Informer - NY Film Critics Best Picture of the Year, 1935
-- shot in one month
-- "nauseating, beastly" - Catholic Legion of Decency (focused on the scenes in the brothel) - "an insult to Celtic women"
Play Girl
-- effed-up pre-Code
Life Begins
-- maternity ward
"What's it for?"
"I'm not supposed to tell you but the doctor wouldn't order it if you didn't need it"
Heroes For Sale - Richard Barthelmess
-- great!
She Had to Say Yes
Key to the City
-- Clark Gable, Loretta Young
The Scarlet Empress
-- awesome
Finishing School
Registered Nurse
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison
Fear Strikes Out
-- Red Sox!! Jimmy Pearsall
-- great, moving, ahead of its time, portrayal of mental illness
-- Karl Malden, Anthony Perkins
Tender Mercies
Two Girls and a Sailor
The Great Debaters
The Double Life of Veronique
A Place in the Sun
Play Girl
-- Kay Francis
Searching for Bobby Fischer
The Feminine Touch
-- Drunk man on phone to operator: "Hello? Yes, I'd like Sydney Australia ... No one in particular, just Sydney, Australia."
Comrade X
-- Love!!
-- "co-pilot, co-co pilot and co-co-co pilot." "Stop stuttering."
-- "Comrade, I am obeying you blindly."
Night Must Fall
-- Mirror moment!!
Rage in Heaven
-- Robert Montgomery, George Sanders, Ingrid Bergman
-- great
A Woman's Face
-- fave of mine
Cast a Dark Shadow
-- Dirk Bogarde
Sounder
The Band Wagon
The Fountainhead
The Subject Was Roses
In a Lonely Place
Funny People
Rain
-- Joan Crawford
-- holy crap
The Whole Town's Talking
-- Edward G. Robinson
-- Mirror moment!!
The Long Night
-- Mirror!!
5th Avenue Girl
-- adore this movie
The Wedding Night
-- sad. Touching
Philadelphia Story
-- CK Dexter Haven is a deceptively simple part. It's actually quite difficult to get it right - without coming off as awful or condescending. Grant nails it.
Johnny Guitar
-- brill
The Adventures of Mark Twain
Love, Lombard-style
And Sheila-style as well.
Found this poster in a bin on Bleecker Street and promptly purchased it. It now hangs in my room, a glorious reminder of the upheaval of love (before breakfast and otherwise). I am in love with it.
I've only had a black eye once. It happened the first time I ventured into a mosh pit. Boom. Clocked right in the eye. Not quite the same thing.
UPDATE: Tim Lucas made a really great comment about this poster on my FB page: He said it reminded him of a Gibson Girl, the period look of the poster - only she is a "Gibson Girl, defiled and defiant." Nice!!
Block Island collage 2
More scattered images of my time on the island. I haven't quite acclimated yet, but last night was very windy (we were supposed to get a blizzard - no sign of it yet) and the sound of the wind was very comforting, made me think of the island.
Today in history: February 6, 1564
Playwright, poet, prodigy, agent in Her Majesty's secret service: the incomparable Christopher Marlowe was born on this day.
(this 1585 portrait is widely thought to be of Marlowe)
I love Christopher Marlowe. He died so young. It was a turbulent time, for England certainly, but for the theatrical world, in particular. Marlowe was accused of putting atheistic ideas into his plays, and was on the verge of being arrested, when he was killed. There was also the little matter of Shakespeare to deal with. Those two were contemporaries. How did they inform and perhaps copy one another? Evidence shows that it was Shakespeare who did most of the copying, which is no surprise, since his plots and stories were always taken from other sources, with one or two notable exceptions. Scholars have studied this literary symbiosis for years, and it's all juicy awesome stuff. The answer seems less interesting than the inquiry itself. Shakespeare is rather dim, in terms of what we know about his life. There's very little evidence left behind. (Besides the plays, I mean.) But Marlowe emerges with more clarity - there's just more that is known about his actual life. The revelation that he was, indeed, a spy, adds definite luster to an already fascinating young man. And then that he would die, in a sword-scuffle over who was going to pick up the check ... there's a lot here to keep conspiracy theorists happy for centuries. It certainly drives the scholarship forward.
But his plays! His language! His influence is so vast as to be nearly invisible now. There are times when people quote Marlowe without realizing that it is he whom they are quoting. For example:
This is from Doctor Faustus - a famous excerpt:.
The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss:
Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies:
And all is dross that is not Helena:
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wertenberg be sack'd,
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest:
Yea I will wound Achillis in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter,
When he appear'd to hapless Semele,
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms,
And none but thou shalt be my paramour.
SOME QUOTES ON MARLOWE:
"No leaf he wrote on but was like a burning glass to set on fire all his readers." -- Thomas Nashe, a friend of Marlowe's
"His father lacked cash, always a grave trouble for the family. The chief cause of this lay not in John's imprudence, but in the fact that payments to shoemakers were often made by either bond or book, which meant that a cobbler often waited for cash while his tanning needs made matters worse. Still, if cash and credit's mysteries intrigued Christopher, his father's shop did not. In a juvenile play - which may be his apprentice work if it dates from about 1580 - the script refers, somewhat condescendingly, to Kent and cobblers. Certainly, throughout his writing career, Marlowe avoided his father's trade, and in this he was unlike the poet of Stratford. Whereas Shakespeare, as the son of a Midlands glover and processor of leather, readily alludes to a glover's implements or to animal skins, Marlowe, in his known work, never uses words such as shoe, shoemaker, sew, or sole (as for a shoe), but distances himself from his father's concerns. At various times, when he refers to leather, or boots, or even when he uses the word sell, the allusions are oddly repulsive:
Covetousness: begotten of an old Churl in a leather bag (Doctor Faustus (1616)
wormeaten leathern targets (His version of Lucan's Pharsalia)
As if he had meant to clean my Boots with his lips (The Jew of Malta)
our boots which lie foul upon our hands (Doctor Faustus, (1604)
You will not sell it [a sacred crown], would you? (Tamburlaine, Part One)
"Such lines may suggest hatred not of the cobbler but of his work, and we can be sure that he never envied John Marlowe's slavery." -- Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy
"The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to over-estimate. To none of them all, perhaps, have so many of the greatest among them been so deeply and so directly indebted. Nor was ever any great writer's influence upon his fellows more utterly and unmixedly an influence for good. He first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the right way of work; his music, in which there is no echo of any man's before him, found its own echo in the more prolonged but hardly more exalted harmony of Milton's. He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Before him there was neither genuine blank verse nor a genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made straight, for Shakespeare. " -- Algernon Charles Swinburne
"Christopher Marlowe's life was short, sharp and irresistible. His fame rests not only on six violently glittering plays written in his 20s but also on the tantalizing story that may be considered his masterpiece, for Marlowe inhabited his time like a player strutting upon an invisible stage. His life was his most remarkable piece of theater. Everyone imitated Marlowe. His first play, Tamburlaine, was staged when he was 23, and its success can most readily be gauged by its imitators. As David Riggs notes in his new biography, The World of Christopher Marlowe, within the next couple of years three new plays were staged that were more or less direct copies of Marlowe's original, while Shakespeare wrote his early Henry VI plays under the influence of Marlowe's style. A decade later, as the church authorities burned copies of Marlowe's semipornographic love poems in the streets, Shakespeare again returned to imitating his predecessor in As You Like It. Marlowe's contemporaries regarded him with a mixture of awe and fear." -- Daniel Swift in "The Nation"
"In common with the greatest - Marlowe, Webster, Tourner, and Shakespeare - they had a quality of sensuous thought, or of thinking through the senses, or of the senses thinking, of which the exact formular remains to be defined." -- T.S. Eliot on the Elizabethan-Jacobean poets
"What an example for our distracted poetry, which so often now strikes at the absolute and achieves the commonplace! These poets [George Chapman and Christopher Marlowe] lived life from the ground upwards." -- Edgell Rickword, 1924
"The unity of tone and purpose in Doctor Faustus is not unrelieved by change of manner and variety of incident. The comic scenes, written evidently with as little of labour as of relish, are for the most part scarcely more than transcripts, thrown into the form of dialogue, from a popular prose History of Dr Faustus, and therefore should be set down as little to the discredit as to the credit of the poet. Few masterpieces of any age in any language can stand beside this tragic poem - it has hardly the structure of a play - for the qualities of terror and splendour, for intensity of purpose and sublimity of note. In the vision of Helen, for example, the intense perception of loveliness gives actual sublimity to the sweetness and radiance of mere beauty in the passionate and spontaneous selection of words the most choice and perfect; and in like manner the sublimity of simplicity in Marlowe's conception and expression of the agonies endured by Faustus under the immediate imminence of his doom gives the highest note of beauty, the quality of absolute fitness and propriety, to the sheer straightforwardness of speech in which his agonizing horror finds vent ever more and more terrible from the first to the last equally beautiful and fearful verse of that tremendous monologue which has no parallel in all the range of tragedy." -- Algernon Charles Swinburne
"His narrator [in Hero and Leander] is abrupt, devil-may-care, often unreliable, but brilliant enough to be worth listening to, even though he might be asking us to buy him another drink. One thinks of Chaucer's Canterbury-bound raconteurs, but a much closer parallel exists in works such as T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', or again in monologues by Frost, Lowell, or Tony Harrison. In other words, Marlowe foreshadows the method of the dramatic and psychological monologue. What the narrator says is slanted, but one is encouraged to see through the aberrant report to the real state of psyches, and beyond that to symbols of the human condition. The poem takes a giant step ahead in form, and the form itself partly arises from Marlowe's need to conceal his feelings; he never permits himself, here or elsewhere, a direct viewpoint of his own. He uses hyperbolic images to distance sexual love, but then explores what might be his, or anyone's initial experience of it. If the action is cruel, its shame and pain are offset by fumbling tenderness. Nor can we blame the tale-teller for being perverse of inconsistent. Typically, the narrator digresses in an anecdote about Mercury, loses the story's thread or its relation to the love-story, and so becomes irrelevant, only to enthral in all that he says. His voice has so strong a movement that nothing impedes it, and the poem's beauty begins to look inevitable, though no more consciously planned than nature's forms may be. Nothing is overtly patterned in Hero except for the stepping stones of its couplet rhymes. One result is that it becomes a laboratory of the imagination, even a discourse about writing, and a work so free of correctness that it exhibits at every turn the primacy of creativity itself. Marlowe's major poem has been admired for centuries, though never more avidly than by the Victorians. It's 'riot of passion and of delight in the beauty of colour and form,' wrote George Saintsbury, 'has never been approached by any writer'. For Havelock Ellis, the poem was 'the brightest flower of the English Renaissance,' and Swinburne, with Hero and Leander doubtless in mind, called its poet 'alone the true Apollo of our dawn.' Such praise had been foreshadowed in lines which Sir Francis Verney sent to Robert Cecil, then earl of Salisbury, only a few years after Hero was published. Verney hails Marlowe as 'the splendour of our worthless time', as if no other Renaissance poet could touch him." -- Park Honan - on Marlowe's poem "Hero and Leander" in Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy
"He took his BA in 1584, his MA three years later, by which time he had probably completed Tamburlaine. He was the first of the university wits to employ blank verse. It's generally thought that most if not all of his small surviving body of nondramatic verse - Hero and Leander, 'The Passionate Shepherd', and the Ovid and Lucan translations - were written in his university years, the fruit of youth and relative leisure. The six years that elapsed between his taking his MA and his shadowy death - possibly as a result of drink, or low political intrigue, or a romantic entanglement with a rough character 'fitter to be a pimp, than an ingenious amoretto', or perhaps a tussle over the bill ('le recknynge') - at the hand of Ingram Frisar in a Deptford tavern on 30 May 1593 were busy ones. He wrote plays, was attacked for atheism, was associated (if it existed) with Raleigh's 'School of Night,' and lodged with Thomas Kyd (author of The Spanish Tragedy), who later brought charges of blasphemy against him. These he had to answer before the Privy Council in 1593, the very council that secretly employed him to spy on English Catholics on the Continent. He achieved much in a short life." -- Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets
"If one takes The Jew of Malta not as a tragedy, or as a 'tragedy of blood,' but as a farce, the concluding act becomes intelligible; and if we attend with a careful ear to the versification, we find that Marlowe develops a tone to suit this farce, and even perhaps that this tone is his most powerful and mature tone." -- T.S. Eliot
"He was no timorous servile flatterer of the commonwealth wherein he lived. His tongue and his invention were foreborn; what they thought, they would confidently utter. Princes he spared not, that in the least point transgressed." -- Thomas Nashe
"In Marlowe's superb verse there is very little to indicate that the writer had ever encountered any human beings." -- James Branch Cabell
"Marlowe painted gigantic ambitions, desires for impossible things, longings for a beauty beyond earthly conception, and sovereigns destroyed by the very powers which had raised them to their thrones. Tamburlaine, Faust, Barabbas are the personifications of arrogance, ambition and greed. There is sometimes a touch of the extravagant or bombastic, or even of the puerile in his plays, for he had no sense of humor; nor had he the ability to portray a woman. He wrote no drama on the subject of love. Furthermore, his world is not altogether our world, but a remote field of the imagination." -- Martha Fletcher Bellinger, 1927
"Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, like Goethe's Faust, finds himself before the specter of Helen (the idea that Helen of Troy was a ghost or apparition is already present in the ancients) and says to her, 'Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.' And then, 'O thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.' He does not say 'evening sky,' but 'evening air.' All of Copernican space is present in that word air, the infinite space that was one of the revelations of the Renaissance, the space in which we still believe, despite Einstein, that space that came to supplant the Ptolomaic system which presides over Dante's triple comedy." -- Jorge Luis Borges
"And so it befell, in that affray, that the said Ingram, in the defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of twelve pence, gave the said Christopher a mortal wound above his right eye." -- Coroner's inquest, 1593
I'm armed with more than complete steel,
The justice of my quarrel.
Christopher Marlowe, Lust's Dominion. Act iii. Sc. 4.
"He came to London to seek his fortune . . . a boy in years, a man in genius, a god in ambition. Who knows to what heights he might have risen but for his untimely end?" -- Swinburne
One of Marlowe's plays was Tamburlaine, the brutal story of one of the many conquerors of Central Asia (known as Timur, Tamerland, Timurlane, etc.). One of those who galloped in, sacked everything, and then, strangely, built things back up again. Coliin Thubron, in his wonderful The Lost Heart of Asia describes the conundrum of Timur (conqueror, artisan, WTF?):
Tamerlane, the Earth-Shaker, was the last, and perhaps most awesome, of these world predators. Born in 1336 fifty miles south of Samarkand, he was the son of a petty chief in a settled Mongol clan. He acquired th ename "Timur-i-Leng" or "Timur the Lame" after arrows maimed his right leg and arm, and passed as Tamerlane into the fearful imagination of the Weset. By his early thirties, after years of fighting over the splintered heritage of Genghiz Khan, he had become lord of Mavarannah, the "land Beyond the River", with his capital at Samarkand, and had turned his cold eyes to the conquest of the world.From the accounts that are left of him, he emerges not only as the culmination of his pitiless forerunners, but as the distant ancestor of the art-loving Moghals of India. Over the terrified servants and awed ambassadors at his court, his eyes seemed to burn without brilliance, and never winced with either humour or sadness. But a passion for practical truth fed his unlettered intelligence. He planned his campaigns in scrupulous detail, and unlike Genghiz Khan he led them in person. He clothed his every move with the sanctions of the Islamic faith, but astrology and omens, shamanism and public prayers, were all invoked to serve his needs. An angel, it was rumoured, told him men's hidden thoughts. Yet he assaulted Moslems as violently as he did Christians and Hindus. Perhaps he confused himself with God.
No flicker of compassion marred his progress. His butchery surpassed that of any before him. The towers and pyramids of skulls he left behind -- ninety thousand in the ruins of Baghdad alone -- were calculated warnings. After overrunning Persia and despoiling the Caucasus, he hacked back the remnants of the Golden Horde to Moscow, then launched a precipitate attack on India, winching his horses over the snowbound ravines of the Hindu Kush, where 20,000 Mongols froze to death. On the Ganges plain before Delhi, the Indian sultan's squadrons of mailed elephants, their tusks lashed with poisoned blades, sent a momentary tremor through the Mongol ranks; but the great beasts were routed, and the city and all its inhabitants levelled with the earth. A year later the Mongols were wending back over the mountains, leading 10,000 pack-mules sagging with gold and jewels. They left behind a land which would not recover for a century, and five million Indian dead.
Now Tamerland turned his attention west again. Baghdad, Aleppo, Damascus fell. In 1402, on the field of Ankara, at the summit of his pwoer, he decimated the army of the Ottoman sultan Beyazid, and inadvertently delayed the fall of Constantinople by another half century.
Between these monotonous acts of devastation, the conqueror returned to the Samarkand he cherished. At his direction a procession of captured scholars, theologians, musicans and craftsmen arrived in the capital with their books and tools and families -- so many that they were forced to inhabit caves and orchards in the suburbs. Under their hands the mud city bloomed into faience life. Architects, painters and calligraphers from Persia; Syrian silk-weavers, armourers and glass-blowers; Indian jewellers and workers in stucco and metal; gunsmiths and artillery engineers from asia Minor: all labored to raise titanic mosques and academies, arsenals, libraries, vaulted and fountained bazaars, even an observatory and a menagerie. The captured elephants lugged into place the marble of Tabriz and the Caucausus, while rival emirs -- sometimes Tamerlane himself -- drove on the work with the parvenu impatience of shepherd-princes. The whole city, it seems, was to be an act of imperial power. Villages were built around it named Cairo, Baghdad, Shiraz or Damascus (a ghostly Paris survives) in token of their insignificance. It was the "Mirror of the World," and the premier city of Asia.
Tamerlane himself confounds simple assessment. He kept a private art collection, whose exquisitely illuminated manuscripts he loved but could not read. His speech, it seems, was puritan in its decorum. He was an ingenious and addicted chess-player, who elaborated the game by doubling its pieces -- with two giraffes, two war-engines, a vizier and others -- over a board of 110 squares. A craving for knowledge plunged him into hard, questing debates with scholars and scientists, whom he took with him even on campaign, and his quick grasp and powerful memory gave him a working knowledge of history, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy.
Yet at heart he was a nomad. He moved between summer and winter pastures with his whole court and horde. Even at Samarkand he usually pavilioned in the outskirts, or in one of the sixteen gardens he spread round the city: watered parks with ringing names. Each garden was different. In one stood a porcelain Chinese palace; another glowed with the saga of his reign in lifelike frescoes, all long vanished; yet another was so vast that when a workman lost his horse there it grazed unfound for six months.
Marlowe, age 22, how is that possible??, took on this historical figure as his launching-off point. Marlowe wouldn't know how to "start small" if he tried.
Excerpt from Tamburlaine
Enter Tamburlaine, Techelles, Theridamas, Usumcasane, Zenocrate, Anippe, two Moores drawing Bajazeth in a cage, and Zabina following him.
TAMBURLAINE
Bring out my footstool.
[They take BAJAZETH out of the cage.]
BAJAZETH
Ye holy priests of heavenly Mahomet,
That, sacrificing, slice and cut your flesh,
Staining his altars with your purple blood,
Make heaven to frown, and every fixed star
To suck up poison from the moorish fens,
And pour it in this glorious tyrant's throat!
TAMBURLAINE
The chiefest god, first mover of that sphere
Enchas'd with thousands ever-shining lamps,
Will sooner burn the glorious frame of heaven
Than it should so conspire my overthrow.
But, villain, thou that wishest this to me,
Fall prostrate on the low disdainful earth,
And be the footstool of great Tamburlaine,
That I may rise into my royal throne.
BAJAZETH
First shalt thou rip my bowels with thy sword,
And sacrifice my heart to death and hell,
Before I yield to such a slavery.
TAMBURLAINE
Base villain, vassal, slave to Tamburlaine,
Unworthy to embrace or touch the ground
That bears the honour of my royal weight;
Stoop, villain, stoop! stoop; for so he bids
That may command thee piecemeal to be torn,
Or scatter'd like the lofty cedar-trees
Struck with the voice of thundering Jupiter.
BAJAZETH
Then, as I look down to the damned fiends,
Fiends, look on me! and thou, dread god of hell,
With ebon sceptre strike this hateful earth,
And make it swallow both of us at once!
[TAMBURLAINE gets up on him into his chair.]
TAMBURLAINE
Now clear the triple region of the air,
And let the Majesty of Heaven behold
Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.
Smile, stars that reign'd at my nativity,
And dim the brightness of your neighbour lamps;
Disdain to borrow light of Cynthia!
For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth,
First rising in the east with mild aspect,
But fixed now in the meridian line,
Will send up fire to your turning spheres,
And cause the sun to borrow light of you.
My sword struck fire from his coat of steel,
Even in Bithynia, when I took this Turk;
As when a fiery exhalation,
Wrapt in the bowels of a freezing cloud,
Fighting for passage, make[s] the welkin crack,
And casts a flash of lightning to the earth:
But, ere I march to wealthy Persia,
Or leave Damascus and th' Egyptian fields,
As was the fame of Clymene's brain-sick son
That almost brent the axle-tree of heaven,
So shall our swords, our lances, and our shot
Fill all the air with fiery meteors;
Then, when the sky shall wax as red as blood,
It shall be said I made it red myself,
To make me think of naught but blood and war.
February 5, 2010
Saying goodbye to the island
Watching it stream away from me on the horizon.
