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Gruene Street Vol 01 Issue 01
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G R U E N E S T R E E T: An Internet Journal of Prose & Poetry
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Volume #1, Issue #1 Summer 1995
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Editors Amelia F. Franz
Matthew Franz
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* * * * C O N T E N T S * * * *
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Contributors
About the Editors
Submission Guidelines
---- P O E T R Y ----
Autopsy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leilani Wright
Spoor
The Gun of A Dead Man
Three Mile Island. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Janet McCann
Coming Back From Okanogan. . . . . . . . . . . George Perreault
Vespers
Dancing Naked on the Mesa
Temporary Meaning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James Cervantes
Neighbours. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Colin Morton
---- F I C T I O N ----
The Way You Swim in Dreams. . . . . . . . . . . Douglas Lawson
The Jew's Wife. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thomas Hubschman
from _Oceans Apart_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Colin Morton
---- E S S A Y S and C R I T I C I S M ----
On Collaboration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sherry Lee Linkon
The Writing on the Bijou Wall. . . . . . . . Steven G. Kellman
---- R E V I E W S ----
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, _Strange Pilgrims_ . . . Douglas Lawson
Kay Cattarulla, Editor. . . . . . . . . . . . Amelia F. Franz
_Texas Bound: 19 Texas Stories_
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(c) Copyright 1995 ISSN Pending
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Unless otherwise stated, authors retain copyrights over all
work appearing in this publication. Individual articles, poems,
and stories may be duplicated in accordance with the fair use
provision of U.S. copyright law. Issues of _Gruene Street_ may
be electronically reproduced in entirety and in their original
form for non-commercial use only.
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C O N T R I B U T O R S
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LEILANI WRIGHT (cervantes@mc.maricopa.edu) lives in the original
square mile of Mesa, Arizona, with her daughter Hannah and
husband Jim Cervantes. She has recently published in _Hayden's
Ferry Review_, _Hawaii Review_, _Exquisite Corpse_, and other
journals. The chapbook _A Natural Good Shot_ was published by
White Eagle Coffee Store Press in 1994. Leilani is presently
editing an anthology of Arizona poetry with Jim Cervantes,
which will be published by the University of Arizona Press in
early 1996.
DOUGLAS LAWSON is currently the editor of _The Blue Penny
Quarterly_ (http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/bpq/front-page.html)
and _Virginia Online_ (http://www.comet.chv.va.us/vol/cover.htm).
His fiction has appeared in _The Willow Review_, _The Alabama
Fiction Review_, and other print journals. He received a Henry
Hoyns Fellowhsip in Fiction from the University of Virginia,
where he completed his MFA.
STEVEN G. KELLMAN is the Ashbel Smith Professor of Comparative
Literature at The University of Texas at San Antonio and film
critic for _The Texas Observer_. His recent books include _The
Plague: Fiction and Resistance_ (Twayne) and, as editor,
_Perspectives on Raging Bull_ (G. K. Hall).
JAMES CERVANTES received the 1987 Capricorn Poetry Prize for
his latest volume of poetry, _The Headlong Future_, which was
published by New Rivers Press in 1990. His poetry has appeared
in the _Altadena Review_, _Pacific Review_, _Starline_, _Blue
Mesa Review_, and other magazines. After much wandering,
he has settled in Mesa, Arizona, and teaches at Mesa Community
College.
THOMAS HUBSCHMAN attended Fordham College and has lived in
Brooklyn for twenty years. He has published two novels and
several short stories with small presses. His novela, _Lies_
(published by _Brooklyn Free Press_) was listed in the _Best
American Short Stories_ & _The O. Henry Awards_. He is currently
a freelance editor, and consultant to Black Excel, a scholarship
service for minorities.
SHERRY LEE LINKON is Coordinator of the American Studies Program
at Youngstown State University. Her poetry has appeared in
_Bridges_ and _Youngstown Poetry_. She has also published
articles on pedagogy and American Women's literature. A member
of Shillelagh Law, she has recorded and performed Irish,
Scottish, British, and American folk music since 1992.
COLIN MORTON is a Canadian who will serve as writer-in-residence
for the '95-'96 academic year at Concordia College in Minnesota.
His first novel, _Oceans Apart_, was recently published by
Quarry Press of Kingston, Ontario.
JANET MCCANN teaches English and Creative Writing at Texas A&M
University, and her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals
throughout her career. The recipient of a 1989 NEA grant, recent
publications include a book on Wallace Stevens and (as co-editor)
_Odd Angles of Heaven_, an anthology of contemporary Christian
poetry.
GEORGE PERREAULT is the author of two books of poetry, _Curved
Like An Eye_ and _Trying to Be Round_. He has served as
writer-in-residence in Montana, New Mexico, and Washington,
and currently teaches at Gonzaga University in Spokane. In
addition to his teaching and writing, he edits the electronic
journal, _Research and Reflection_.
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A B O U T T H E E D I T O R S
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MATTHEW FRANZ (mdfranz@tenet.edu) lives in San Antonio, Texas,
where he teaches History on the middle school level. He attended
Texas A&M University, receiving his BA in English & History in
1993. His fiction and poetry have appeared in _The Inkshed
Press_, _Portland Review_, and most recently in _Morpo Review_.
AMELIA FORTENBERRY FRANZ (aff@tenet.edu) also lives and teaches
in the San Antonio area. She received her BA from the University
of South Alabama and her MA in English/Creative Writing from
Texas A&M in 1993. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared
or will appear in _The Texas Review_, _Morpo Review_, _The Blue
Penny Quarterly_, and _English in Texas_.
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S U B M I S S I O N G U I D E L I N E S
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_Gruene Street_ is published quarterly. Fiction, poetry, essays,
and reviews are accepted year-round. Address all correspondence
to Editors at INTERNET: aff@tenet.edu
POETRY: Submit up to *five* poems, preferably under 100 lines
each. _Gruene Street_ will publish up to three poems
per writer.
PROSE: Fiction and essays up to 5000 words. Short fiction,
novel excerpts, personal essays, literary and cultural
criticism, pedagogy, composition and rhetoric, gender
and ethnic studies, liberation theology, etc.
REVIEWS: Book reviews and review-essays of recently published
(within the past 2 calendar years) novels, poetry &
short fiction collections, criticism, or any work
that might be of interest to a general academic or
literary audience. **750-2500 words in length.**
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
HOW TO SUBMIT
Submissions should be singled-spaced and formatted in ASCII
text, 67 characters per line, if possible, and sent via email
to ** aff@tenet.edu **. Your submission may be included in
the body of your message (or "attached" to the message if your
mailer is MIME compliant). The work's title and genre should
appear in the subject line of the message, e.g.:
SUBJ: FICTION/The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
ESSAY/Politics and the English Language
POEM/The Second Coming (or five poems)
REVIEW/Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire)
Your e-mail and street address should appear at the end of the
message in addition to a short paragraph (5-10 lines) that
contains biographical information such as previous publications,
grants, awards, education, etc. Unless you specify otherwise,
your email address will appear in the contributors section
in both the ASCII and hypertext versions of the journal.
Previously (print) published work is accepted, as are multiple
submissions.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
_Gruene Street_ acquires the one-time rights to publish prose and
poetry, and to maintain on-line archives that contain current and
previously published material.
The editors accept no payment for the work they put into this
journal. Writers receive no payment apart from (increased)
Internet readership.
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LEILANI WRIGHT
Autopsy
Beyond a swinging doorway, I saw bodies,
each cut in a Y pattern,
from shoulder blades to pelvic bone.
What else could I have expected,
upon entering the morgue
but skin the color of marble,
laid open in the most
convenient manner.
No delicate technique is required,
only the revelation of organs grown cold
and a need to know why they had ceased
needing to function.
A three dimensional puzzle
glistens in the heavy light,
legs parted and genitals
shamelessly exposed.
I had opened the wrong door,
searching for my brother,
to identify his remaining dignity.
No evening's warm erotica tonight.
No drifting toward a gentle, evening sleep.
...................................................................
Spoor
In the dark of early morning,
I lift my heavy weapon and begin
to track myself in earnest
across Mogollon Rim Trail
down into the high desert gorges
between Payson and Mesa.
I find spoor
near Sunflower
under a cottonwood whose leaves
are a crowded audience,
clapping at my skill.
The scat has hardened,
even though the creek
remains full of noise,
and the occasional trout
manages to avoid
the hook, even in shallow
currents, until now.
Remnants of fish bone lie scattered
around cold ash
and a bed of broken leaves.
* * *
During last light,
you track prints across linoleum
by laying your left cheek
against its cool surface
at the open kitchen door.
The dust-shift gives the feet away
in shallow but distinct relief,
like tracking squirrel through frost
on a cold, blue morning.
A silhouette before the TV light
helps me draw a bead
on this thin form
that squats before the screen.
Shall I skin myself from top to bottom
or do it by halves,
like peeling off the shirt
and then the jeans?
My prey looks up, startled,
then smiles,
the trusting, old doe
that everybody needs.
(previously published in _Visions-International_)
...................................................................
The Gun of A Dead Man
The time I stumbled over that femur,
remember? There's more to it.
We found a pile of bones, too,
with leathery strands
still holding it all together,
except for this leg bone.
A coyote must have dragged it around
and left it on the trail.
It went rolling, me with it,
down into an arroyo
full of mud. By the time
we came to rest,
I was clinging to it
like a baby to a bottle.
No smell, the ball joint
at my cheek was cool,
smooth, almost kind
in the bleaching sun. Gene,
so amused by this nuzzling,
just grinned down and mumbled
something about shooting
from the hip. Now,
that would be a feat, even
bedding down with the whole
skeleton. And then
Gene almost whispered--Look,
he's got a gun--as I
clambered up the bank to stare
at the skull, its star shaped hole,
and a weathered .357 magnum
revolver, lying next to his left
foot, or hers (the way the pelvis
flared). You could see
it was a snub-nose Colt Python,
Pachmayr grips, too, over blue steel.
I flipped it with my bone
and saw the barrel was
Mag-Na-Ported
beneath the grime,
probably hand finished, too,
knowing this guy. We
picked it up and were impressed--
the radioactive sites worked fine,
once I cleaned them off.
But the five unspent
semi-wadcutters in the cylinder
were hard to dig out;
still, the trigger job
was smooth as butter.
We're just in awe--Pythons
are expensive, but the custom
job alone would cost
at least $500,
top drawer weapon. He thought
maybe we might clean it up,
take the whole thing
apart, soak it in kerosene,
sans grips and sites,
finish up with a little Hoppes #9
and then some gun lubricant.
But nobody
wants the gun of a dead man.
Gene ended up trading it
for your old Army jeep,
didn't he? And you never
knew the difference.
(previously published in _Exquisite Corpse_)
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JANET MCCANN
Three Mile Island
The Amtrak conductor introduces it
like a distinguished guest. I see it now
there in the distance, four curved stacks
in the mist, seemingly bolted
to the earth, with black root-like pipes
reaching down. I think I hear it
churning above the train's rattle and roar,
spilling out poisons,
belching its particles of deadly air.
I remember sixth-grade science and my quest
for the Universal Solvent. I wanted it
for its power, I just wanted it.
Imagined it dripping through
the bottom of my test tube, through
Mr. Inman's desk, the tiled floor,
the cement foundation, dirt, strata, bedrock,
to the earth's core, where it would rest
darkly spinning forever,
a substance like blood.
It was the opposite game
from lying in a field and looking up,
making your mind go toward infinity, pushing,
thinking more and more space, gazing past clouds
until you were lost in cloud,
your head a cloud.
Three Mile Island disappears
into the past. We are not
children, the train moves on
over the blank green fields toward Philadelphia.
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GEORGE PERREAULT
Coming Back From Okanogan
You cross the river east south east and note
how volcanoes and irrigation define the West
and that maybe taking separate cars is not
like anything else: how you have to calculate
ahead and behind and the traffic decides
not just for you but for the one who trails,
with a pickup between, through towns where
they play eight-man football and at least half
the cheerleaders are virgins but each of their
breasts is its own little animal, and you
pay more attention to every curve, whether
she's keeping pace and when you have to ease
a while and how, when snow begins to spit
as you twist down the Coulee, it asks that you
weigh everything twice: the dusk, the impending
miles, the trucks slow and heavy with hay:
it's not like conversation, or marriage, or even
like making love; it is what it only is:
a late afternoon in mid-October, driving back
from Okanogan through the weathered hush.
...................................................................
Vespers
Tonight in Mission Park, the homeless offer up
their battered tale: "That kingfisher by the river,
he's bigger than an eagle"
and I speak as I've learned to the gentle mad,
those voices tangential to mine,
a promise to be careful.
"Oh, there's no need to worry," they say, "not you --
he's just carrying off the dead."
And I remember that bird:
One night on the plains the seven-foot hawk
knocked upon my dreams, took me
carefully into his claws
and lifted with long, sinuous strokes, above
sectioned fields, wheat and cattle and
little tree-wrapped towns,
above the abstract demarcations that scarify our days,
above pain and hunger and the stale crust of habit,
above the black edge of life itself.
And when he was done with me, set down
and draped his wing across my shoulder
and showed me to the door.
Still, there are days, even whole weeks which pass
and I forget to think of him, that great bird
of mercy.
But tonight, from this place beside the river, please
may he hear, better than an owl, the cooling
embers of my brother's brain;
may he hear the caught breath of his wife and children
held until their sides ache
even in their sleep.
Come down, great bird, kingfisher or hawk, come down
to the dark side of the planet and lift,
lift my brother clean.
...................................................................
Dancing Naked on the Mesa
It's spring and I'm climbing again
rising through pinon and alligator juniper
into the lives of birds and the open face of the sky,
shirt thrown back, pants, everything down to skin
flung to music, to the guttural urge
for a chant older than language, older
even than names -- this raven croak, this head-back cry
I aim wherever you could be hiding,
every sandstone swell or shadow, every
delicate hint wet and green, and I'm dancing,
dancing to the darkhaired friend, to the wing drum,
dancing with a feathered strut and flutter and the long shriek
of mated falcons as they plunge toward earth and barely slide apart
into this dance, this naked hot and dusty dance, this
always and forever ache I ache for you.
*******************************************************************
JAMES CERVANTES
Temporary Meaning
Things sit around, decompose, or get thrown out.
This is what I think of the broken hoe
and a blackened orange while neighbors hammer
and grackles drop and stab into the watered lawn.
Now, at this moment, the universe clicks into place,
admits quite openly that all is pointless and bestows
temporary meaning on several philosophies.
At what point, I wonder, will it dawn on everyone?
Should I run to the fence and ask, "Have you gotten it yet?"
Instead, I yell: "Your repairs are useless!"
The mindless hammering stops and it occurs to me
that I am the chance generator of a silent wave
that rolls in all directions, sucks everyone
into its undertow and never spits them out.
Or that I'm the last to catch on and the first one
tossed naked onto the long awaited Mohave beach.
This would explain a sign that says "Psychic Dump."
It would also explain how easily birds
have learned the ring of a cordless phone,
and why everytime they sing, I run to answer.
(this poem will appear in _Tumblewords: An Anthology_ to be
published by the University of Nevada Press)
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COLIN MORTON
Neighbours
Fall mornings we bent over our gardens
side by side, paused to compare tomatoes.
At times I heard Sting on your stereo
as you must have heard Chopin on mine,
but we never raised the volume in anger.
We neighbours believe in the music
of shared spaces, like the 'cellist
I read of in the news, who used to play
Albinoni each day at four o'clock
on the main street of his distant city.
For that one brief movement the low,
lone voice of his instrument silenced
even the snipers on nearby rooftops,
but for weeks now he has not been heard,
and here the wind has turned cold.
We have shut up our windows for the season,
listen only to private thoughts,
turn the page on a photo of lovers'
bodies clasped in death, still
lying between the lines.
Snow drifts silently into our gardens,
heaps against the fence that joins them,
while in that distant city a father burns
all the leaders' hardbound speeches
to cook his family's evening meal.
Tomorrow, he says, they must warm their hands
by the weak flames of poems in paperback.
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DOUGLAS LAWSON
The Way You Swim In Dreams
Decide: this is the time in your life to catch a nine-spined
stickleback and forget about Lawrence the Painting Instructor, who
has just moved back in with his wife. Wake from your dreaming.
You are almost thirty-five, a successful sculptor. Get out of the
city. Tie your Uncle Uriah's old green canoe on the roof of your
Toyota and drive up and pick up Ray, the man who was once your
husband in a different life. That life you had before the
miscarriage, but don't start thinking about that. Take that rutted
dirt road out into the marsh and watch the dust covering your
tracks.
*
Tell Ray your Uncle Uriah's story. It's one you think he will
relate to. This is how it goes: Uriah and his golden retriever
Max were fishing in Moosehead Lake, north of Harford's Point, when
a storm came churning in low over the water. The waves were higher
than the sides of the canoe and they drove the canoe against some
rocks. It tilted, water poured in and Max went over the side, into
the lake. Your Uncle reached for the dog's collar but could not
catch it. He managed to get the canoe (this canoe!) righted
somehow, but by then the storm was already blowing over. Far away,
towards the middle of the lake, he could see his dog swimming south
toward home. Make your voice dramatic and tell him that the dog
was never seen again.
Listen as Ray tells you of his own experiences in lakes. You've
heard the stories before; his tongue paddles around familiarly in
names like Shoodic and Quakish and Pemadumcock, even one lake
called Chemquasabamticook. He tells you how he used to canoe and
fish and swim and how he worked through college summers as a
lifeguard, as if you don't know. As if you are strangers meeting
for the first time.
Neither of you knows how to do this.
"Don't you go worrying, Karen," he says in that easy speech of
his. "Just take it slow. You know I'd always watch out for you
all right. You know I'd keep you afloat." He tells you he's taken
time off from teaching Biology; he's writing a book.
Then he tells you about his garden, that the arugula is coming up
and that the woodchuck still gets to the zucchini despite the fence
he put up. These are things you wanted to hear. Realize: you
don't quite know how to feel. 'Guilty' is only a stepping stone,
worn smooth by a year and a half of rough water.
*
At the launch, help Ray take the canoe off the roof and put it
into the water. Put in the bug spray, the small styrofoam cooler
and the net. Direct Ray into the front seat and hand him a paddle.
Push off. Steer.
Watch the green-headed flies. They bump into reeds and cattails
and the muddy sides of the bank, and occasionally one falls into
the water and is eaten. Move the canoe deeper into the marsh.
"There." Ray points. "Mummichog. Genus Fundulus."
Ask, "The fly?" because there is one in the water, wriggling
where you're looking. Its legs make tiny indentations in the
surface of the water but do not break it. "No no," says Ray. "Did
you forget everything in Boston? The fish, right beneath. See?"
Ray leans far over the edge of the canoe and points again.
The canoe rocks. You watch ripples spread out into the water and
think about Lawrence's wife, which is not really thinking of
Lawrence, or so you tell yourself. Decide she probably has thin,
pale fingers with rings, and catches cold easily. The kind of
woman that wears hand-woven scarves around her shoulders indoors
and drives a Mercedes down to the corner store for slim, European
cigarettes in a blue box. You can see the way she'd suck in smoke,
lips tight, a blush painted on her white cheeks like a doll's.
*
Open the cooler, pass Ray a sandwich and take one for yourself,
salami on white bread with butter. Realize: Ray wants to know
everything, about Boston, about your studio, about Lawrence the
Painting Instructor, but isn't going to ask. He wants you to tell
him about your clients, too--those alien men and women who smell
like leather and strange, pungent flowers. Who talk about things
like line and color value and the virtues of negative space. The
ones who write checks while their chauffeurs wait smoking on the
street, double-parked. This, you can tell him about. So you do.
Then tell him what it feels like to carve stone.
Steam rises off the water. A dragonfly lands on the seat between
you and Ray and moves its wings.
Remember your dream as you're speaking. But say nothing yet.
*
Paddle and think if you were to sculpt Ray from clay, that this is
how you would do it. You would use simple, blunt strokes for the
the shoulders and hands--those large workman's hands of his--but a
sharp knife to cut the lines of his face. With the nail of your
right index finger you would scoop out the hollow of his throat,
and you would use something quartzlike to cover his eyes, circles
thick like the sides of fishbowls, and bound with a slender copper
wire. A pale, translucent glaze for his skin, probably. Something
that glistens. Moss, you think, for his hair. Yes.
From his chest down, decide you would cover him in scales. You'd
make him a creature of water with a smooth and silvery tail, one
that billows out in his wake like a cloak.
If you were to sculpt Lawrence the Painting Instructor, you'd make
him a sea creature too but different, you decide. Flashier colors
on his top half like the sun on water, while the lower part of his
body would be eel-like, coiled in on itself in a confused and
shadowy jungle, shaped from some dark stone that always looks wet.
Decide this too: If Lawrence the Painting Instructor was the last
person on the planet besides you, and you were the last living
artist, then the tradition of American Figurative Art would quickly
sicken and expire.
*
Watch Ondrata zibethica wriggle out from between some reeds and
remember you're here to catch a fish. "Over there," Ray says. He
digs in the water with his paddle. "Driver, follow that muskrat!"
You both push ahead, moving the canoe into a deeper pool, scraping
over a shallow lip by setting the paddles against the bottom and
pushing. Here the water is darker. Here, the sticklebacks are
hiding.
"Hah!" says Ray. "Where's that net?"
You move closer. They swim in a group, just ahead of you,
flickering green in the sunlight and each no more than an inch
long. You can count the spines along their backs.
You see the one you want. Nine spines and a red belly this
season, on display for the female. Men!
Dip in the net. "Slowly," says Ray. "Real slow."
But this fish is quick. He twists out of reach and dives deep and
away. Remember--you just learned this lesson. Try again for
another. Move the net through the water as if it were just a part
of the water, as if it were a piece of grass or bark or an innocent
stick that happened to be floating by. Ray leans closer, reaches
for your hand and helps guide it. Remember how he took your hand
in the hospital too, back when everything changed. He reached
beneath the rough white hospital sheet but you didn't want to be
held, then. You left your hand limp like something he might put in
a jar for students to look at, while something that might have been
your creation together was leaving you.
His hand closed around yours like it does now. Remember this.
He points and now you see another stickleback. This one moves a
little slower than the last. A little less majestic, perhaps. But
it has a wide, unbitten tail and subtle, more matured colors.
Nothing like the quick one, maybe. And yet.
You move the net with the water, Ray's hand on yours.
There. The fish swims into the net as if it had wanted to be
there all along.
*
Now tell Ray your dream.
Say how you dreamt you were making love to a merman. His penis
was covered with a fine down, and like a cattail it sprouted from a
patch of coarse spartina grasses in a tiny, shell-shaped crevice of
scales. You were both covered with algae, under a roof made of
mud, and you were breathing water there while tiny fish were
chewing on your fingers and toes. You could feel the merman
swimming in and out of you slowly, like the gentle rise and fall of
tides.
Then, together and holding hands, you and the merman were out in
open water. Above the surface there, dragonflies were falling.
One after another, they curled their wings in on themselves and
fell out of the sky like tiny red and green meteorites.
When they hit the water, each one spit like a match.
They drifted down to you and hung turning in the water near you,
curved like so many unborn babies--miniature embryos turning in the
water above you there just out of your reach, and together you
stretched out your fingers. Yours were so thin and white and
covered with the dust of stones. His were blunt and green and
wrapped together with a pale netting that seemed to shimmer. But
you could not catch the dragonflies. The currents grabbed them,
and moved them around. Try as hard as you might, they eluded you.
In the dream then, you were diving alone into water that was deep
and cold, and full of sightless creatures that pressed against you
for your warmth. Though the merman pursued, and though you somehow
knew he had been swimming for all of his life, even he could not
catch you.
Tell him you have been swimming a lot in your sleep lately. Say
"The way you swim in dreams," as if everyone knew what you meant,
as if everyone knew that feeling, that selfish and ungrateful love
that water has without your having to explain.
If anyone understands, you think, it would be Ray.
*
Ray is not sure what to say though he wants to say something.
You can see that in the corners of his mouth. He is a smart man
and knows what is going on and there are hundreds of words in there
that want to come out. But he doesn't know where to start.
Say nothing just yet. Put the fish back in the water and let it
decide where to go. It swims off a short distance and seems to
hover there in the current, letting it's tail keep it in place.
Its watching you, you think. Its waiting to see what you will do
next.
Sit for a while together, you and Ray, and experience here what
you couldn't in the city. Feel the rough, chipped wood and the
cracked caning of that worn seat beneath you. Smell that smell of
damp that rises up out of the water and heads towards dry land; it
leaves the faint taste of salt on your lips. See that the tide is
coming in and all the insects are crawling up the reeds and grasses
together to avoid drowning. Aedes solicitans, the mosquitoes, are
pooling in the shadow of the canoe. Melampus, the salt marsh
snail, works its slow way up a piece of cordgrass. As it nears the
top, its own weight bends it down near to the surface of the water,
again, and beneath it two sticklebacks are circling. The snail is
just out of their reach.
One fish is the one you caught and let go. The other is the one
you could not catch. The snail moves closer and then away from
them. It bobs from one side to the other with the wind, and the
fish move beneath it, rising with the currents, changing positions
of left and right and displaying their colors, as ripples from the
canoe and breeze wash over them.
You do not want the snail to fall in and be eaten. Think that if
you were a snail at one time, in a similar situation, you might
have stayed on that piece of grass, swinging in mid-air forever.
*
Now is the time of day too when the dragonflies hover near the
surface of the water to eat. Their wings are nearly invisible.
They move there, back and forth in the air, before you. Tell Ray
just how beautiful they are. Ray is excited now in his own calm
way, that way of his that, in the past, has made magic happen.
Students' eyes have lit with an understanding of Latin when he's
been excited. Arugula has sprouted from overwatered soil and
woodchucks have eaten only weeds. He tells you to hold out your
hand and you do. "Just keep it there," he says. "Don't move."
"Then what," you ask.
"Shh," he whispers.
Then, as Elmer Fudd: "We're hunting wabbits."
It seems like you wait for a long time. Shadows spring up around
you like trees. Your arm grows tired and you rest it on Ray's
shoulder, and you lean in against him for his warmth, too. This is
Maine, remember. You think maybe you're getting a little too old
for things like this.
But then a dragonfly lands. For a moment you can't believe it's
actually there. It places its tiny legs in the center of your hand
and rests there, like a tiny and well-made toy that lifts its
minute wings up and down to the beat of some microscopic internal
clock. It's looking at you, you think. Just like that fish was,
but with forty-thousand-odd eyes. You think it's deciding whether
or not you're good enough to hold it.
Study it back. Its colors are the brightest gold and emerald you
have ever seen. So tiny--you couldn't sculpt it from anything but
the most fragile of materials.
"Stay still," Ray mouths. "Watch."
A long minute passes and the dragonfly doesn't leave. In fact,
another one circles you and lands. And then, another. You think
they must communicate, like birds, and then you wonder if they have
something like a collective, dragonfly sort of soul shared between
them. Something with a thousand wings and a million eyes. Who
knows?
More crowd into your hand as the sun goes down and more are
coming. They're sailing out of the dusk. You hold out your other
hand, reach it out above your head and they land there too. There
must be fifty now! They sculpt the setting light with their own
warm humming. They shape and refract it with their eyes for you.
They crowd around you and jostle for position, brushing your face
with their wings, landing on your shoulders and hair and the tops
of your knees where your jeans are damp, and they sing to you the
music of the dusk here, where everything is possible.
Then, they are silent. Resting. Their wings rise and fall now
to the rhythm of your breathing. The sun exhales and dives behind
hills, and for a moment, its last rays light your Uncle Uriah's
canoes with strings of tiny, winged torches.
You and Ray exchange glances. Then, he claps his hands, and the
dragonflies lift into the air as one, and are gone.
Wait now and huddle together.
It's time to watch for the late rising of the moon.
*******************************************************************
THOMAS HUBSCHMAN
The Jew's Wife
Georg cursed the Jew as his pickup struck a pothole in the
fading light. Ten years ago he would have spotted the hole in
time. Twenty years ago the road would have been in better repair.
And forty years ago the idea of his working for someone like
Hyman Gottlieb would have seemed preposterous. Jews were
moneylenders and small businessmen where Georg came from, not
gentlemen farmers.
He had been up since 5:00 a.m. His day usually began an hour
later, but he had to make an early trip into town for feed so as
to be done with his chores by supper. He ate a quick meal, made
sure his chickens and two milk cows were comfortable for the
night, then started for the Jew's house.
"Call me," his wife Hilda had pleaded. She had spoken in
English and he had replied in the same language. They used
English more than their native dialect. It started with just a
phrase or odd word. But the use of their adoptive language
gradually expanded until now it was the unfamiliar expression from
their native tongue which had to be given an American equivalent.
Speaking English to the Jew was one thing -- a necessary lingua
franca, since Georg knew no Yiddish and the Jew pretended
ignorance of dialect -- but speaking English to his own wife
seemed to Georg like a disease which had gradually claimed him
over the years and now was too far gone to cure.
Hilda knew he couldn't call her. Gottlieb's wife unplugged
the phone at dusk, even when her husband was away. Unplugging it
was, in fact, the Jew's idea. No one of consequence would call in
the evening, and Gottlieb and his wife had no children or
relatives in this country, at least none Georg knew of. The fact
that the telephone company only charged for outgoing calls didn't
seem to matter.
The tobacco looked ready for harvesting. With any luck he
would see his share before the year was out. Thanks to the Jew's
crop and his own more modest planting, he was holding his own: a
small but comfortable house, a growing bank account. He needed a
new pickup, but the one he was driving could be patched together
for another year or two. He was certainly better off than he had
been five years ago, and living like a prince compared with what
he had when he first arrived in this country. It was difficult
even to recall that confused immigrant. His children told him he
still spoke with an accent, but he couldn't hear it, and the only
time he spoke dialect was when his son or daughter visited. For
some reason English failed him then.
He even felt contempt for recent arrivals from the old
country. Every year he hired one to help bring in his crop, using
the Jew's machine which he rented to Georg after his own tobacco
was cut and stored. Yet Georg had once been just as awkward and
disoriented as any of those greenhorns. The day he landed, he and
his wife and daughter (the boy arrived the next spring after two
years in a DP camp) were packed into the back of a pickup with
only bags of feed to cushion the rocky backroads. The driver
dropped them off at a cabin in what seemed the middle of a forest.
Inside they found a candle, two dirty mattresses, and a
cellophane bag decorated with red, blue, and yellow polka dots.
They hadn't eaten since breakfast, but it did not occur to any of
them that the outlandish bag might contain food. When their
sponsor -- an immigrant himself, though seeming as American to
Georg then as Franklin Roosevelt -- arrived the next morning, he
called them fools for going hungry. But even after he had opened
the bag and exposed the slices of white fluff inside, Georg still
could not believe it was kin to the rich dark loaves he had eaten
in his homeland. Oddly enough, he was now addicted to that sweet,
spongy substance.
The pickup began pulling hard to the left. He had put off
rotating its rubber, knowing that, come winter, he would have to
buy snow tires. He stopped as close as he dared to a deep ditch
where the road's shoulder ought to have been.
The left-front, merely bald a few weeks ago but now showing
brown fiber, was flat. The spare was in no better condition. He
didn't see how he could get by with either of them, even if he
reversed the front and rear wheels. He had hoped to avoid any
major outlays until spring, when profits from the harvest would be
safely in the bank. But now it looked as if he would have to dip
into his savings, something he dreaded even more than he did the
hellfire which the pastor of his old Sunday school used to warn
his charges to fear worse than death. Sin, after all, could be
expiated, but a withdrawal in a bankbook was a perpetual stigma of
his improvidence.
He cursed the Jew again as he lifted the spare tire free of
its moorings. If he had not been obliged to go on this foolish
errand, he would not have gotten this flat, and so would not have
realized how badly off the pickup's rubber was. He could have
spent the evening at home with his old woman, watching their
favorite TV show. As it was, he would see no television (the
Jew's was broken), and would worry all night about the money he
must withdraw to buy new tires.
He was too old for this kind of work -- up at dawn, with no
rest until the sun set. At his age, back in the old country he
would have been able to start taking it easy, delegating the heavy
work to his son who would be happy to give his youth to the farm
on the prospect of one day calling it his own. But that wasn't
the American way. Here, it was every man for himself and to hell
with the old folks. A man had to work until he dropped and give
the best fruits of his labor to a damned Jew too cheap to keep his
television in repair or use a telephone for anything but business
-- the same Jew who, back home, would not have dared to address
him without first doffing his hat and calling him "sir." If this
was democracy, he would gladly exchange it for the more sensible
life his ancestors had enjoyed.
The familiar gate was barely visible in the fading light.
Gottlieb never swung it closed. Its weathered planks served no
purpose but to mark the turnoff for the dirt track leading to the
farmhouse surrounded by large tracts of tobacco, Gottlieb's and
his neighbors'. To reach the house you had to risk life and axle
on a winding road deeply rutted by the runoff from the raised
fields on either side. If you chanced upon a vehicle coming in
the opposite direction, you or the other driver had to back off to
the main road or reverse all the way to the Jew's property a
quarter mile in.
The house itself, a standard American two-story with aluminum
siding, was newer than Georg's but was already deteriorated in a
way his own older wood-frame never would be. The white metal
siding looked imperishable, obscenely so, but he knew the roof
leaked (Gottlieb paid his neighbor's boy a few dollars to do
patchwork and kept a couple pails handy for when it rained), and
the septic tank overflowed once a month. Inside, there was dirt
everywhere, most of the furniture was broken, and from early
spring to late fall the ceilings were spotted with thousands of
black flies. Georg had never seen a flyswatter in the house, much
less witnessed anyone using one.
He parked the truck on the baked clay where the front lawn
ought to have been. His own house was surrounded by lush grass
and patches of seasonal flowers which his wife tended as lovingly
as she did her plates and linen -- crocus and daffodils in spring,
roses throughout summer, chrysanthemum and marigold at this time
of year. But there wasn't even a green weed to grace Gottlieb's
barren homestead. It might have belonged to some hillbilly on
welfare. It was shocking that a landsman, even a Jew, should live
in such circumstances. God knew he had the means to do better.
There was no light showing as he inserted his key in the
back-door lock (the front door was bolted shut). He knew where
everything should be in the big kitchen, but he took his time,
careful not to bark a shin or trip over the cat's dish. If he
ever did take a header while doing the Jew's bidding he could
expect no compensation for his injury -- Gottlieb insured nothing
but his farm machinery. If the house burned down Gottlieb would
present himself at Georg's door as if he were kin claiming a
birthright. And Georg knew he would have no choice but to take
him in.
His knee struck a misplaced chair. Edna doubtless heard it
and was now beside herself, imagining some killer-rapist had
broken in.
"It's me!" he shouted.
She didn't answer, probably buried under a mountain of quilts
in the double bed she and the Jew shared. Even on the hottest of
nights she slept beneath two blankets and, when winter came,
appropriated every coat and sweater in the house. She would
rather be chopped to pieces by a homicidal maniac than expose
herself to the night air. Gottlieb, of course, would not turn on
the furnace until there was a clear danger of the pipes freezing.
It would serve her right, Georg decided as he lumbered up the
creaky stairs, if he really _was_ a crazed killer instead of just
her husband's obedient employee. She was so frail, so tenuously
attached to life, always suffering from one complaint or another.
She never lifted a finger except to make herself a cup of
chamomile tea. She was a dry twig ready to snap and be thrown
into the fire.
"Is that you?" she hissed from the bedroom where a dim lamp
cast a sickly light through the half-open doorway.
"Yes, yes," he replied, thinking what a fool she was. He
could be anybody -- Fuller Brush man, meter reader, chainsaw
murderer. He felt the same disgust mixed with pity that he felt
for a sick animal he was about to destroy. But Edna Gottlieb was
not even his chattel: she was the Jew's responsibility. His own
plump Hilda was home watching their favorite television show or
baking a crumbcake for his breakfast. What was he doing here with
this dessicated hag? Why had he ever agreed to take on this, the
most disagreeable of his chores?
"Take off your shoes," she croaked as he approached the bed,
her blue-white brow barely visible above the mound of bedclothes.
Strands of gray hair lay on the sallow pillow like stubble in a
barren field. He took off his heavy boots and pushed them under
the bed. "The door is locked? You locked the door?"
"Yes, Edna."
He lay down on the bed, having no need for the threadbare
blanket she had left for him. He would sleep in his clothes so as
to be on his way more quickly in the morning. The Jew would not
return till after noon. Georg did not know where he had gone, nor
did he care.
In the dark he could just make out a chest of drawers and,
near the gray window, a rocking chair. Edna's breathing had
already become deep and regular, with a little puff at the start
of each exhale. Soon she would have her first nightmare. She
would moan like a sick animal, awaken suddenly, and reach out to
make sure he was there. Then she would sigh, pull the mound of
covers higher on her neck, and go back to sleep. He knew her
sleeping habits as well as he did his own Hilda's, who never
stirred from the time she laid her head on the pillow until she
awoke bright and refreshed the next morning.
What was it she dreamed? All he really knew about her was
that, like himself, she and Gottlieb had been Displaced Persons.
The Jew once mentioned a family business in the old country, but
Georg could not remember if they had been grain dealers or
moneylenders. One thing the Jew could not have been was a farmer.
Only Christians held land, and Protestant and Catholic regarded
each another with as much suspicion as they did Jews. Even cattle
took on their owners' religious identity. There was a time when
he himself believed he could distinguish a Catholic cow from a
Protestant cow.
He had a long day ahead of him and needed his sleep. He
wanted to shake her awake but was afraid she might report him.
"_'itte_," she gasped, breathing hard as if she were running
away from something. Then, more clearly, "_Bitte_, _bitte_," like
a child pleading not to be punished. He pressed his hands over
his ears until all he could hear was the roar of his own deafness.
What was he doing here? he asked himself again. Why was he being
punished for crimes he never committed?
He uncovered his ears. There was no sound.
"Edna?"
He reached out to touch her, but his hand sank into a mountain
of soft blanket. It was as if her old bones had immaterialized,
or as if they had never been solid to begin with, a walking,
breathing specter of those wasted corpses that troubled his sleep.
An old but familiar terror began to stir in him, the fear he used
to feel as a boy when he walked past a graveyard. And just as
they did when there was only the unpredictable dead to beleaguer
him, his legs wanted to run, to carry him away from this house of
misery and bad dreams.
He heard a low whimpering, then the sounds of more serious
weeping -- not a spoiled child's self-indulgent tears but the
half-stifled sobs of ancient, hopeless bereavement. The Edna he
knew was capable of whining with self-pity over an imaginary ache,
but the woman beside him was grieving for something greater than a
muscle spasm or a nightmare.
The dark room began to blur as if a part of his own interior
landscape matched precisely the shape and cause of the misery
beside him.
It was like trying to get his arm around a snowdrift. At
first she didn't seem to notice his embrace. Then her breath
suddenly caught short.
"Yah, yah," he grumbled, just as he used to when one of his
children woke from a bad dream. "Yah, yah, yah."
She hesitated, sniffing as if trying to identify him by smell.
Satisfied, she gave a long, uneven sigh and pulled the covers up
around her ears. He removed his arm, feeling suddenly foolish.
She might even have mistaken his intentions.
For a few moments there was no sound. Then, insubstantial as
the darkness, the voice of a very old child whispered . . .
"_Danke_."
*******************************************************************
COLIN MORTON
from _Oceans Apart_
(a novel)
ONE
I wake in a sweat from a dream of search and rescue, hunter and
prey. Already the memory is fading, but I know it had something to
do with what Ray said about the years he spent in hiding in that
Hong Kong cellar. He never minded the rats, he told me. Those he
could drive away. What he couldn't endure were the millions of
six-legged creatures; the things that lay their eggs beneath the
skin.
*
Kim (that is what we will call him) first drew breath under a
bombed-out army truck in a ditch near Saigon in the chaotic month
of April 1975. His father had died a week before, trying to defend
his two cattle from the advancing North Vietnamese army. At least
so the child's mother told her fellow refugees before she died of
dysentery four years later, last month on the South China Sea.
Having seen her husband and all the rest of her family
murdered, she fled her ruined village for the supposed safety of
the capital.
En route, her labour overtook her. No one stopped to help.
Villagers she begged for food and water beat her away from their
doors, afraid she would bring destruction down on them. When her
child was born, a month premature, the mother didn't dare rest.
Next day she resumed her flight on foot, her baby wrapped in a
sling against her chest. Finally, approaching Saigon, she
encountered masses of terrified people fleeing the other way, back
to the countryside. The clear sky thundered with the sound of
distant artillery. She returned to her home village, but by then it
had been torched, along with the whole surrounding countryside.
I remember the newscasts of those days like a recurring
nightmare. The colour photos in the news magazines: napalm victims
running, no idea where; prisoners shot in the head without
ceremony; toddlers playing in minefields amid the wreckage of
trucks; helicopters lifting off from the U.S. embassy with
desperate Vietnamese collaborators hanging from the landing gear. I
remember our confused emotions in the NDP campaign office when we
tried to put a wrap on the story. We should have felt jubilant, I
suppose, the war finally ending the way we always said it must,
vindicated at the sight of helicopters dumped from overloaded
aircraft carriers. But the dominant mood was a kind of weary
relief. A little heartsick, we couldn't forget those images that
had haunted our youth. The blistered stumps of legs and arms, the
faces wide open in a long wail of pain. We had little reason to
rejoice. The forests and rice paddies were still mined, waiting for
more victims. The wreckage of tanks and helicopters still smoked in
ditches where, without my suspecting it, my son was being born.
Homeless and alone, Kim's mother took to the relative safety
of the swamps, where at least she could fish to stay alive.
Eventually she made her way to the sea and somehow gained passage
on a boat whose captain promised to take her to safety. That is as
much as she told the women who befriended her on the overcrowded
boat where she died. They dumped her body overboard a few days out
of Hong Kong. How she survived as long as she did only to end that
way is a part of this story that will never be told. Her life is
beyond my power to imagine.
*
If May ever did live in the happy family she dreams of, she has
lost the memory of it, perhaps in some terraced brick Hong Kong
street. From the time she was four years old and her family left
its village in China until she began her high school years in
suburban Calgary, her life was upset. Sometimes she remembers brief
fragments of that lost life. The scent of lotus root simmering stirs
something more than hunger in her. Light glinting through grassy
shadows at a certain angle ambushes her with a vivid memory of the
long journey on foot across the Chinese frontier.
A peacock starting up out of the bushes near her one misty
morning. The great bird's fierce squawk and offended squeal; its
massive display of feathers. That is her clearest memory of China,
but she no longer knows for certain whether it is a real memory or
one she has willed into being.
Her father must have carried her on his back most of the way,
for that is the way she remembers him. Not his face, nor even his
voice, but his back and shoulders, his straining breath. After the
family reached Hong Kong, she remembers only a terraced alleyway, a
large pot of duck eggs packed in straw sitting on the top step, a
tiled courtyard where she had no one to play hopscotch with ....
Nothing more.
*
An old wooden chest, a foot locker my father must have used in the
army, inhabited the back of the closet in my parents' room in the
house where I grew up. On loose-ended afternoons, home from school
before they arrived from work, I used to explore my mother's
dressing table and jewel box, the darkest reaches of their closet.
In the foot locker, shadowed by the fragrant skirts of my mother's
slips and dresses, I found my father's khaki uniform, his war album
filled with photographs, news clippings, cartoons from his
regimental newspaper, a poem he wrote to his parents on their
wedding anniversary. The last black page of the album held a glossy
four-by-six photo with "December 1945" written under it in a large
shaky hand. At least a thousand soldiers on the deck of a
commandeered ocean liner: his regiment somewhere in the North
Atlantic on the way home. They stand leaning against the railing,
or sit with legs hanging over the gangway, or cling to ledges
waving at the camera, rows of men disappearing off the edge of the
picture. Not even my father could pick himself out in it.
"We were a day out of Halifax when they took this," I heard
him tell a friend once. "We all had diarrhoea, and the excitement
of getting home was almost unbearable. You felt like diving into
the water like some Tahitian."
A generation later, I boarded a jetliner one night in the
foothills of the Rockies, watched the lights of Calgary drop away
beneath me, ate a reheated dinner, then caught a few winks while
the Atlantic rolled away below, palely reflecting the moon and
stars above.
My flight over the Pacific (was it yesterday?) felt the same.
I didn't really cross either ocean; I dozed over them, dreaming.
....................................................................
from SEVEN
*
They are all in uniform, my father and his two younger brothers,
lined up opposite white-gowned bridesmaids in the photos of the
wedding party. Doug -- in rough khaki, trousers gathered at the
ankle, beret buttoned under his epaulet -- stands rigid, heels
together, his bride on his arm. Ruth has pushed back her white veil
to display a smile. But the shutter has caught them squinting into
the hot June sun. Their eyes have in them the excitement of
children being chased by a bull.
It is one week after D-day, and Doug has only three days'
leave before his regiment ships out for England. His brother and
best man, John, after two months' ground training, can't wait to
fly. Walt, the youngest, six-foot-three and still growing, is too
long-legged for his cadet uniform. Ray should be here too, should
be best man, if not bridegroom. But he is somewhere in Asia, dead
or in a prison camp.
In another part of the churchyard, the parents of the groom
pose uncomfortably in front of the camera. My grandmother appears
embarrassed at having to put a brave front on her terror. Her
husband, though, pulls no false faces. He begs no favours of
posterity; rather, he demands. The wedding is at his insistence.
The young couple have simply had to put their doubts aside.
"Marry the girl," Dean Stanley had ordered his son. "Give
yourself something to come home to. And for her there's the wife's
allowance. She won't have to keep working in that bank."
The patriarch challenges the camera, his look stern, strong as
the grip he gave his son's hand at Union Station a few days later.
"See you stay out of trouble, son," he said.
*
So you slog through the blood and shit of a European war. You stare
through the fog at the ghostly cliffs of Dieppe and swear at the
universe. Ride in tin-can troop carriers being bombed by the
Luftwaffe and RAF. Scrub your mess tin out with sand and learn to
live with diarrhoea. Learn to kill for a living with gun, grenade
or bayonet; no commission.
One day you are pinned down by sniper fire, hit once. Your
buddies on either side of you die before your eyes. You go into
shock and wake up on a stretcher. Through a night of pain your only
comfort is the darkness. A tin can drags you through the ruts and
ditches of Normandy to a field hospital under canvas. Drinking
water. Sleep.
By morning, two letters have caught up to you. One from your
bride. ("I'm fine, your mother's fine, we're all fine.") The other
from your father. ("Dear son, I hope you are not wasting your
time.")
Shit. You can't hold yours, can't get up to void, and do it
all over yourself and the bedding. Everyone on the ward hates you,
none more than yourself -- but less for the stink than the crime of
surviving. You are the only one who knows if it was your blunder
that wiped out your patrol or the other guy's -- maybe your only
friend in the world -- the guy who lies stiffening under a blanket
now.
Wasting time? Shit. You decide you will stay in bed all day.
Doctor's orders anyway. You think you may just stay in bed from now
on. As long as you don't have to rely on anyone and no one has to
rely on you.
*
On return to active duty, Doug asked for and received a transfer.
His new unit was called intelligence, which meant he spent the
night behind enemy lines with face blackened, his mission to scout
out enemy positions and strongholds. If he came upon a lone enemy
he was to disarm and subdue him if he could without raising an
alarm, then bring his prisoner back to base for questioning.
Torture was more like it, sometimes. Most German soldiers had
little enough to tell; most parted with their knowledge readily.
But sometimes, when the sergeant thought his prisoners needed
encouragement, a little aide-mmoire, he gave it to them in the
form of a long cold blade. Doug swore he would never surrender.
He hated the big shells, but the ones you heard weren't the
ones that would get you. He hated the machine guns equipped with
infrared sensors that could see in the dark. Most of all he hated
the blade. The knife he carried kept him alive a time or two out
there in the dark, where a shot would call down fire on him. Or
mortar shells, or flame-throwers, or flares that tinted the night
sky the colour of hell. He had killed with the blade. If he hadn't
he would be dead. But he hated it, and he hated the fatal
contradiction of hating the thing that saved him. Sometimes he
actually hated his life and thought he wouldn't care if he lost it.
After one all-night mission he lay in a foxhole and wrote a
short note to his mother, then a longer one to his wife. Both
letters began alike: "I can't tell you what I have been doing since
it is classified, but I must believe it is all for the best. In
good health. Have decent food. Lonely but not afraid, at least not
all the time." Writing to Ruth he lingered with his pen over the
page for a long time, but wrote little more. "I am thinking about
you now with the same love as when we used to meet in the park. I
can't put it into words but I think you know what I mean."
********************************************************************
SHERRY LINKON
On Collaboration
"John Anderson, my jo, John We've climbed the hill together, And
many a canty day, John, We've had with one another . . . "
After four years of practice, we sing this old Robert Burns song
together easily. Without looking at each other, or with just a few
glances, we sing parallel lines and crossing phrases. At our best,
we pronounce the words together, two voices as one. I imagine us
taking on the roles of the couple in the song, who have spent years
together, both looking in the same direction, following fortune's
chosen path. We are not married, but for the time it takes to sing
this song, we are partners.
Like the marriage described in the song, music so nearly right
grows out of time spent together, out of repetition and comfort,
and out of affection and mutuality, but also out of rehearsal,
argument, calculation, error. The best musical moments -- like the
times when "John Anderson" works -- result from effort as well as a
shared love, not only between myself and those I sing with but even
more between each of us and the music. That combination of shared
work and shared love makes any kind of collaboration worthwhile and
productive, but this is something I've only recently come to
appreciate.
My musical career began in 4th grade, when I played Dorothy in The
Wizard of Oz. On opening night, I stepped out between the curtains
in the elementary school gym, lights making the audience as large
as I could possibly imagine, and sang. Alone. I don't remember
what it felt like. Perhaps I had stage fright. More likely, I
felt pleased to be getting so much attention. It doesn't really
matter. What matters is that I did it, and at that moment I became
recognized by others and began to see myself as "the singer." From
the time I was nine, I sang in choirs. Later, as a teenager, I
took voice lessons and spent afterschool hours sitting at the
piano, singing show tunes and arias to an empty house. In choirs,
I always sang soprano, the lead line, the melody, so I never had to
think much about the other parts or about how the whole piece fit
together. When I was sixteen and failed to win a place in the top
choir at my high school, the director said it was because I was too
much of a soloist, that my voice wouldn't blend with the others.
Until recently, I always preferred to sing solo. Left to my own
devices, singing alone, I could revise the music as I saw fit,
often adding unneeded breaks and embellishments. And I suppose,
too, that I always liked the idea of having all those eyes and ears
on me, though my voice always falters when I actually p
erform by
myself. I suspect I was also just too lazy to learn any part
besides the melody. I kept singing soprano even after it caused
nodules on my vocal chords, which put me out of commission -- on
doctor -prescribed silence -- for several months. But I wouldn't
switch to the alto part. I preferred to sing the lead even if it
sometimes strained.
I had my first significant experience as a group singer in college,
in a choir that spent seven hours a week rehearsing under the
demanding, idealistic lead of Dale Warland, who now conducts one
of the few professional choirs in the country. Not only did I
begin to sing second soprano, the part just below the melody, but
more important, I also experienced the power of well-wrought
collaborative sound. I can still recall the sensation of being not
an individual singer but part of an instrument, of creating such
rich, synchronous, deeply textured music. I felt almost physically
connected to the twenty other singers. Some I hardly talked with,
but when we sang together, we became one being. We achieved such
moments only occasionally, and only after hours of repetition and
experimentation. Often, the work frustrated us, and sometimes
rehearsals were boring. But those few perfect minutes ruined me.
I have never since been able to tolerate a community choir, with
its rough choruses and ragged stops, even though I would love to
sing that kind of music again.
I've come close to repeating that experience over the past few
years singing in a band with three friends. We started out
sounding awful, enjoying the music and each other's company but
having no illusions that we were any good. We're still pretty
amateurish, regularly forgetting words and chords, our unison
singing almost never in synch, our performances entertaining but
uneven. But with these friends, I have learned to sing harmony,
and while it hasn't made any dramatic change in life, it has
brought me a new and different experience of musical pleasure.
At first, I sang what I was told, following the lines taught to me
by a man who hears music more fully than anyone I've ever known,
with his whole body it seems, and who always insists on intricate
harmonies instead of simple ones. Then I started to get brave, to
risk my own renditions, and more and more lately, my harmonies
work. I'm learning to hear a part of the music that used to be
silent to my ears. Even now, as I become more confident of my
ability to find the patterns by myself, I am still surprised and
delighted by what often feels like luck and magic. I have begun to
be able to hear the notes that aren't obvious, the ones that live
beneath, above, around the melody. I'm learning the pleasures of
not being heard, of blending in so well that listeners can't tell
the melody from the harmony.
I'm learning the same lessons about the other work I do, teaching
and writing. In the past few years, over the same time that I've
been learning to sing harmony, I have collaborated with three
friends on various projects. As with music, each experience is
different, and each requires its own rehearsals, its own patterns.
With two of my collaborators, I've found that a clear division of
labor, punctuated by conversations and many traded notes, creates
programs and texts that appear relatively seamless. We can each
identify the parts we're responsible for -- the section I wrote in
an article on teaching, the tasks I completed for a grant proposal
-- but the final product could easily pass for the work of one
person. In another case, nearly all the work so far has happened
in conversation. We question each other, interrupt each other,
offer and reject ideas in a slow duet of shared creation. The
products of this most recent collaboration -- a team-taught
course, some presentations, and an article or two -- are not yet
completed, so I don't yet know if this more interactive, intense
version of shared work will result in a significantly different
kind of product. But the process is absorbing, entertaining,
sometimes stressful, always exciting.
These collaborative projects yield good work, but it always
includes aspects that I'm not fully comfortable with -- a sentence
that seems awkward, a conclusion I don't fully believe, some
mistake I thought someone else corrected, an idea I wish I could
take credit for but that I know came from someone else. Always,
something that marks the text or program as not completely my own.
Of course, I'm never fully satisfied with the work I do on my own,
either. But with collaboration, I recognize that these errors,
rough spots, uncertainties result from negotiation, shared effort,
compromise, and conversation. And while I'd like my writing and my
teaching to be as perfect as those few "just right" performances of
"John Anderson," I take pleasure in the process of collaboration no
matter what the product. These markers of an other's presence
don't disturb me. In fact, I find them reassuring, reminders that
process is as valuable to me as product. I've learned to
appreciate the effort that goes into creative work -- singing,
writing, or teaching -- as well as the work itself.
Somewhere between fourth grade and now, I've become, perhaps, a
more sociable person, someone more interested in conversing with
others than in talking at them (though my friends and colleagues
would no doubt remind me that I'm still quite good at lecturing,
hogging the stage, being bossy). I've learned that working with
someone, not taking the lead but also not hanging back, can help me
both personally and professionally. When I came up for promotion
last year, a large portion of my work was collaborative, and I
would not have succeeded without those projects. And throughout
the process, four of us, colleagues, friends, but also competitors,
shared drafts and ideas to help each other create the most
impressive promotion applications. And while I can't credit this
collaboration alone for our success, the fact is that working
together did help us all get promoted. Our model of collaboration
instead of competition was validated.
It sounds idealistic, and I don't think I'm naive enough to believe
that collaboration always works, or that cooperative approaches are
all good. But more and more, I find comfort in the challenge of
singing harmony, despite all the wrong notes I still stumble onto.
It's rarely perfect, but that's not the point. I listen more
attentively to "John Anderson" these days. The lyrics emphasize
"climb[ing] the hill" and "walk[ing] on together," pleasures of
partnership that apply in any good work.
===============================================================================
STEVEN G. KELLMAN
The Writing on the Bijou Wall
With the possible exception of Jean-Jacques Annaud's THE BEAR, a
representation of ursine experience that is disturbed by only 657
words of human dialogue, THE PIANO is the least verbal of
contemporary talkies. "The voice you hear is not my speaking voice
but my mind's voice," announces Holly Hunter's Ada, and even that
voiceover is muffled after the movie's prologue. For reasons that
are never spelled out to appease those anxious to read
explanations, the unwed Scottish mother who arrives on the desolate
coast of New Zealand with her daughter and her piano has been mute
since the age of six. Music is Ada's private language, one that
she can share with no one, except eventually George Baines (Harvey
Keitel), the unlettered neighbor who confounds keyboard lessons
with adultery.
And yet, the logic of Jane Campion's erotic plot is undone by the
written word. To satisfy the practical necessities of mundane
communication, Ada goes about her daily paces fortified with a
pencil and pad. Early in the film, while her new husband Stewart
(Sam Neill) is off buying Maori land, Ada appeals to Baines to lead
her back to the beach on which Stewart abandoned the piano. At
first, she conveys her request by writing him a note, but the
effort is futile. "I'm not able to read," says Baines, who must
rely on her nine-year-old daughter and later his own instincts to
interpret Ada's desires.
Much later, in the decisive action of the drama, Ada inscribes:
"Dear George, You have my heart" on a piano key and instructs her
daughter to deliver it to Baines. Instead, young Flora (Anna
Paquin) hands the message over to Stewart, who is so irate over
this evidence of his bride's perfidy that he chops off Ada's
finger. It was an obvious blunder for Ada to have put her feelings
into writing, a medium accessible to any reader. But it was a
baffling gaffe for writer-director Campion to have inscribed this
scene into the script. Ada obviously knows that George cannot
read. Why, then, would she write him a note whose consequences
could be so painful?
Cinema is the quintessential art of post-literate culture; THE AGE
OF INNOCENCE is likely to attract more viewers than readers. Yet
the medium remains stubbornly logocentric. Like Ada, filmmakers
continue to favor letters long after they have lost their function.
Like Robert De Niro's Jack Cady, who uses a copy of Henry Miller's
SEXUS to beguile Juliette Lewis's Danny Bowden, Hollywood
acknowledges the residual power of writing even as it attempts to
burn its books behind it. "What about your books?" a guard asks
Cady, who, in the opening scene of CAPE FEAR, walks out of prison
without any baggage. "Already read 'em," replies Cady, abjuring
literacy to enter the film.
Prophets who read the writing on the wall proclaim the demise of
the book, but millions gaze at the writing on the screen. Movies
begin in memos and end in reviews, and virtually every story is
framed by printed credits. Titles in effect made silent films into
illustrated texts, and foreign releases usually oblige the eyes to
decode the alphabetical characters that flash beneath the faces of
speaking characters. However, even Hollywood talkies frequently
betray their deference to print. The title of Spalding Gray's
filmed performance piece MONSTER IN A BOX refers to a mammoth
autobiographical manuscript that Gray has been toiling on; for
movies in general books are the silenced monsters whose ghostly
traces haunt the silver screen. "I would rather take a fifty-mile
hike than crawl through a book," declared Jack Warner, but he and
many of the other vulgar moguls bought the rights to classy titles
in order to camouflage their cultural insecurities. Though
moviegoing is so popular that the Amblin production of THE BRIDGES
OF MADISON COUNTY will likely outsell even that ubiquitous book, it
is still generally regarded as one of life's guilty pleasures. The
culture still feigns its first allegiance to print. Millions flock
to see THE FLINTSTONES who think they should have read the book.
Adaptation is the tribute that cinema pays to print, and, though
cinema has always cannibalized publishing, an extraordinary number
of recent releases--among them, THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, CLEAR AND
PRESENT DANGER, THE CLIENT, DAMAGE, ETHAN FROME, FORREST GUMP,
HEAVEN AND EARTH, HOUSEHOLD SAINTS, THE HOUSE OF SPIRITS, HOWARDS
END, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, THE JOY LUCK CLUB, JURASSIC PARK,
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE, LITTLE WOMEN,
THE MUSIC OF CHANCE, ORLANDO,AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD, THE
REMAINS OF THE DAY, RISING SUN, A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT, THE ROAD
TO WELLVILLE, SCHINDLER'S LIST, THE SECRET GARDEN, and SHORT
CUTS--began as books. THE FIRM, LORENZO'S OIL, THE PELICAN BRIEF,
and PHILADELPHIA each feature crucial scenes set in a library,
where characters seize control of their plots by reading published
texts. The prison library is an oasis from the desolation of
incarceration for inmates in THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION. Access to
the Beast's vast treasury of books is Belle's reward for nursing
him back to health after an attack by wolves in Disney's 1991
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.
Depicted as a bookworm, Belle is, like Emma Bovary, disappointed in
quotidian existence after gorging herself on romantic fiction.
"There must be more than this provincial life," pines Belle, whose
favorite book describes Prince Charming. Gaston, the comely dunce
who strives to win her love, is certainly not the man of Belle's
print-shaped dreams. "It's not right for a woman to read,"
declares Gaston, whose misogyny and bibliophobia merit the violent
death he meets at movie's end.
Beauty and the Beast is set, we are told, "Once upon a time in a
faraway land," and its animated format further distances the story
from a contemporary world in which reading has come to seem
atavistic, and studio executives merely cook their books. In the
quaint title PULP FICTION, Quentin Tarantino pays flippant tribute
to an era when tawdry stories were printed on coarse, cheap paper
not projected onto the silver screen. The Charles MacArthur-Ben
Hecht play THE FRONT PAGE was made into a movie in 1931 and again
in 1974, and in 1940 as HIS GIRL FRIDAY. However, its 1988 avatar,
titled SWITCHING CHANNELS, transposes their sturdy story from the
realm of tabloid print to the electronic global village in which
only TV anchors ever read the news and television has supplanted
newspapers as the principal source of information for most. In its
hyperbolic freneticism, THE PAPER, directed by Ron Howard from a
screenplay by David and Stephen Koepp, is a throwback to the old
comedies of deadline competition. Michael Keaton's Henry Hackett,
metro editor at the New York Sun, passes up an offer from the
genteel NEW YORK SENTINEL, a wordy daily that, in its devotion to
journalistic principle, resembles the NEW YORK TIMES, in vibrancy
and urgency resembles Euclid's Elements. Instead, Hackett throws
himself into the rush of tabloid coverage, where headlines count
for more than sentences and photos for more than words and where
veracity does not count for as much as speed and impact. During
the single hectic day dramatized by The Paper, The Sun manages to
triumph over its tabloid rivals, but it is only for twenty-four
hours. The Sun's antiquated editor-in-chief, Bernie White (Robert
Duvall), is dying of prostate cancer, and the paper itself remains
on the verge of bankruptcy. THE PAPER, whose opening credits are
accompanied by a voiceover of the news as broadcast by radio,
augurs a world of paperless communications. TV monitors in the
newsroom of The Sun keep the paper's employees ahead of what they
read and write.
Similarly, Charles Shyer's I LOVE TROUBLE is a playful exercise in
nostalgia, smart homage to both the old screwball comedies and to
the newspaper movies that flourished then, when local dailies still
vied and thrived. Nick Nolte's Peter Brackett, a famous Chicago
Chronicle columnist who competes with Julia Roberts' Sabrina
Peterson, a reporter for the rival Chicago Globe, has just
published his first novel, a quaint object that seems passe in the
post-Gutenberg galaxy evoked by I Love Trouble. "I'm dying to read
your book, man," an old crony, Sam Smotherman (Saul Rubinek),
assures Brackett. "When's it coming out on tape?"
In the old Romantic paradox, exuberance is opposed to print, and
print loses. Wordsworth, in a book, advises his friend to quit his
books, because "One impulse from a vernal wood/May teach you more
of man,/Of moral evil and of good/Than all the sages can." The
same lesson is offered more recently by WITH HONORS, directed by
Alek Keshishian from a screenplay by William Mastrosimone. The
movie establishes a dichotomy between zestful existence and the
Harvard honors thesis that Joe Pesci's Simon teaches Brendan
Fraser's Monty is better off burnt. In MISERY, James Caan, playing
Paul Sheldon, a successful author not unlike Stephen King, who
wrote the novel from which director Rob Reiner derived the film, is
confined and tortured by rabid reader Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates).
The 1990 release is a parable of scribocide, the assault on
authorship that popular movies enact,even as they feign reverence
for the authority of print. That all readers might be ogres is the
implication of naming the cannibal genius of The Silence of the
Lambs Hannibal Lecter. In Robert Redford's QUIZ SHOW, bookish Mark
Van Doren (Paul Scofield), a man so purely literary that he does
not even own a TV set, is utterly powerless against the new
electronic media that devour his beloved son Charles (Ralph
Fiennes), an intellectual prince who was born to read.
Dominic Sena's KALIFORNIA is a movie about the calamitous creation
of a book, a study of mass murders that accumulates additional
corpses during its own composition. When a publisher offers Brian
Kessler (David Duchovny) a contract for a book on American serial
killers, he and his photographer girlfriend Carrie Laughlin
(Michelle Forbes) begin a cross-country trip to document the sites
of infamous homicides. To help pay for gas in their old Lincoln
Continental, they advertise for riders and end up in the company of
Early Grayce (Brad Pitt), a psychopathic killer who outdoes the
carnage of the miscreants Brian presumes to study. "How the hell
you gonna write about something you know nothing about?" snarls
Early, who proceeds to provide the mousy graduate student with
graphic lessons in his chosen subject. More malignantly than ZORBA
THE GREEk mocked his bashful, learned Boss as a "pencil-pusher,"
KALIFORNIA provides its viewers with a lesson in the fatuousness of
mere book-larnin'. It demonstrates the inadequacy of print to
convey the bloody horrors of a phenomenon we see graphically
conveyed through film.
Nevertheless, the redemptive power of reading is celebrated in DEAD
POETS SOCIETY, when Robin Williams' John Keating inspires his
students with affection for Romantic literature. In quaint
contrast to what adolescent males do for excitement in BILL AND
TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE or BOYZ N THE HOOD, Keating's boys assert
their vitality by sneaking off at night for furtive encounters with
Tennyson, Cowley, and Thoreau. But when one tender lector commits
suicide, Keating is held responsible and dismissed from the Welton
Academy. The era of good readings is ended. Though released in
1989, DEAD POETS SOCIETY is set in 1959, before Beavis, Butthead,
Forrest Gump, and Bart Simpson displaced Stephen Dedalus, Jake
Barnes, and Eugene Gant, when poets and their readers were not yet
all dead. It was two years before Franois Truffaut shot Jules and
Jim.
In its treatment of reading, as in much else, JULES AND JIM is a
landmark work, and the land that it marks is the frontier between a
culture of readers and a culture of viewers, between DEAD POETS
SOCIETY and WAYNE'S WORLD, whose two main characters frame their
lives through the lens of a video camera. Saturated with allusions
to books, Jules and Jim is an elegy for the death of literature
even as it revels in the expressive possibilities of cinema. Based
on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roch, the film records the final moments
of an age in which to be young and creative was to be a writer; its
three principal characters, Jules (Oskar Werner), Jim (Henri
Serre), and Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), are all authors. But Jules
and Jim is the product of a later age in which Bohemia has been
relocated to the Cinematheque, and the New Wave of artistic
insurgency, young men like Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, and
Rivette, broke over film.
JULES AND JIM is rich not only in general nostalgia for the way
things were before the nationalistic frenzy of World War I and then
World War II. But allusions to Shakespeare, Cervantes, Baudelaire,
and other European authors evoke a vanished literary culture, the
cosmopolitan cafe Arcadia inhabited by Jules, Jim, Catherine and
other lively poets, playwrights, novelists, journalists, and
translators from a variety of nationalities. A bookish gesture,
Jim's urgent return to Catherine of her copy of Goethe's Elective
Affinities, provides the pretext for the first consummation of
their love. But the last reunion of Jules, Jim, and Catherine
occurs in a movie theater, where, just moments before we witness
the cremation of Jim and Catherine themselves, the three view a
newsreel in which Nazis gleefully immolate books. Book-burning was
to be the central image and atrocity of FAHRENHEIT 451, which
Truffaut, whose own initiation into the movie business came through
print, as a professional critic, adapted from a Ray Bradbury book
in 1966. JULES AND JIM, an epistolary film that advances its story
largely through the letters exchanged among Jules, Jim, and
Catherine, is a cinematic epitaph for an age in which epitaphs were
still written and read.
According to Anthony Hopkins' C. S. Lewis: "We read to know we're
not alone." SHADOWLANDS begins in 1952 and ends, with the death of
Joy Gresham, in 1960, before the release of JULES AND JIM. Richard
Attenborough's drama about the romance of Lewis and Gresham is
rooted in a world of reading. It is her admiration for his books
that induces the American poet Gresham (Debra Winger) to begin
corresponding with Lewis, and an exchange of letters encourages her
to visit him in Oxford. Much of the appeal of SHADOWLANDS is in
the unlikeliness of the story for cinematic treatment. The ancient
donnish campus town that Lewis lives in offers no evidence of any
movie marquee or even a television antenna. In depicting the
gentle love between two middle-aged authors who died thirty years
ago, SHADOWLANDS evokes an era in which reading was spiritual
discipline and a superior form of human intercourse. As portrayed
by Hopkins, Lewis is a lonely soul redeemed by the boisterous
intrusion of the woman who would become the love of his life. But,
despite his dictum that we read--and presumably need--to know we're
not alone, reading is a solitary activity. Though it links us to
others, the act of reading also isolates us. By contrast,
moviegoing is a social activity, much as filmmaking--unlike
writing--is a collaborative endeavor. In a crowded society where
privacy and solitude are suspect, viewing displaces reading. For
many, SHADOWLANDS the movie speaks volumes about Lewis and Gresham.
The most affecting testimony by contemporary film to the
enchantments of the written word occurs in Bruce Beresford's 1991
BLACK ROBE. Father Laforgue (Lothaire Bluteau), a French priest
who journeys to the frigid wilds of colonial Quebec, brings along a
few books as well as pen and paper. Early in the story, an
Algonquin chief is puzzled to find the Jesuit missionary scratching
squiggles on a sheet of parchment. Laforgue tries to explain what
writing is, but the natives are letterless. So he demonstrates.
Laforgue asks the chief, Chomina (August Schellenberg), to tell him
a secret. The Jesuit writes Chomina's secret down, and then walks
the sheet over to Daniel (Aden Young), another Frenchman. To the
awe of Chomina, Daniel is able to repeat his secret. What magic is
it that enables private information to be conveyed from man to man
without either moving his lips? The scene is a parable of
writing's crucial role in the transmission of ideas, in the
creation of communities of thinkers regardless of the spatial or
temporal proximity of their members, but it is set in 1634, when
that magic had not yet lost its potency.
While not as numerous as drug dealers, dinosaurs, or lawyers, print
professionals are common figures in recent film. They most
commonly reject their craft. An executive at a major New York
publishing house, Glenn Close's Alex Forrest neglects her job once
she becomes consumed with avenging rejection by Michael Douglas's
Dan Gallagher in FATAL ATTRACTION. Similarly, Sharon Stone's Carly
Norris, whose neighbor teaches "Psychology of the Lens" at NYU and
whose landlord is an electronic voyeur, begins SLIVER as a book
editor; however, by the end of the film she has become absorbed in
peering at video monitors that covertly record activities in every
apartment of the narrow high rise into which she has moved. In
BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY, Michael J. Fox's self-destructive Jamie
Conway bungles his work as a magazine editor, and, acknowledging
that what destroyed his marriage to a fashion model is that: "She
wanted to live a magazine ad, and I wanted to live a literary
cliche," abandons literature if not cliches. In the movie's final
line, Jamie tells himself: "You'll have to learn everything all
over again." The editors and writers with whom Woody Allen
populates ANOTHER WOMAN, HUSBANDS AND WIVES, INTERIORS, MANHATTAN,
MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY, and SEPTEMBER are feckless and neurotic,
misfits in an electronic culture where publishing is a quaint
anachronism. "Chapter One," announces the tremulous voice that
opens Manhattan, as though we were reading a book, but Allen's book
editor Larry Lipton solves his Manhattan murder mystery by going to
a movie theater. "I'll never say that art doesn't imitate life
again," promises Larry at story's end, but the art that mocks the
plot he finds himself in is Lady From Shanghai, not a work of
printed literature.
In WOLF, directed by Mike Nichols from a screenplay by Jim Harrison
and Wesley Strick, Jack Nicholson's Will Randall is editor-in-chief
of MacLeish House, a venerable New York publisher that is a bastion
of urbanity in a bestial urban world that is a bloody war of all
against all. Print culture is losing that war, and MacLeish has
just been acquired by a multimedia conglomerate for which book
publishing is just another profit center. The boss's daughter
calls Randall "the last civilized man," an odd way to describe a guy
who turns lupine every night when the sun goes down. The boss
himself, icy tycoon Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), fires
Randall after telling the veteran bookman that he has only two
flaws--taste and individuality. Randall demonstrates his taste by
insulting Judith Krantz. And he maintains individuality by
continuing to line-edit his own authors' manuscripts. When Alden
and his corporate lawyer meet with Randall, it is in a room lined
with bookshelves, but the shelves are filled with videocassettes.
Randall lashes out at the crassness of post-literate contemporary
culture, but he is powerless to save MacLeish before his bizarre
metamorphosis into a wolf, which, among other things, makes him a
better reader, even without glasses. WOLF fantasizes the revenge
of Gutenberg on video culture and of personal art on cartel
capitalism. But it does so in a movie, produced by giant Columbia
Pictures, and by means of lycanthropy, a tactic unavailable to most
book people.
The most servile adaptation from print to cinema would be a film
whose opening frames offered nothing more or less than page one of
a book. After allowing viewers sufficient time to scan the text,
the camera would then focus on page two, followed by pages three,
four, five, and on, until we have read every word in the volume.
Such a film would, of course, make a mockery of both viewing and
reading, since, instead of moving pictures, it would be projecting
a tome in much enlarged type, and, instead of a personal literary
experience, it would oblige us to participate in a collective,
public scan. It would be a clever scam not unlike some multi-media
stunts that manage to secure grants. However, the most cunning
examination on film of the delights and limits of reading is Michel
Deville's LA LECTRICE (The Reader), which Orion marketed in the
United States as "a seductive comedy for people who like to read in
bed." The description might seem more applicable to bound
bawdiness like THE GINGER MAN or PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT.
In contrast to Martin Ritt's STANLEY AND IRIS, in which Jane
Fonda's Iris King befriends the illiterate Stanley Cox (Robert De
Niro) and helps him acquire the skills necessary to decipher a
telegram announcing his father's death, LA LECTRICE is a film about
and for sophisticated readers, singular viewers familiar with the
writings of Tolstoy, Marx, Sade, and Baudelaire. The film is
constructed around a story-within-a-story, but both of its frames
portray a character who reads a book to someone else. In the outer
story, Constance (Miou-Miou) lies in bed beside her lover and reads
him a novel titled La Lectrice. Within that novel, a woman named
Marie (also played by Miou-Miou) becomes a professional freelance
reader and recites the texts of books to a succession of disparate
clients. At one point, Marie even reads from Marguerite Duras' THE
LOVER, a novel that was actually being transformed into a film, by
Jean-Jacques Annaud, at the moment that LA LECTRICE was insisting
on the work's identity as something to read. Marie's own story
concludes with the words: "It is almost certain I will now be out
of a job." Uttered in a modern medium eager to absorb and
transcend print, the prophecy is a cry of despair for the remnant
of writers and readers.
(this article is forthcoming in _The Centennial Review_)
****************************************************************************
DOUGLAS LAWSON
_Strange Pilgrims_ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated by Edith
Grossman. New York: Knopf, 1993. 188pp. $21
Reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez is like watching a flock of
parrots. They're colorful. They fly. They speak to you. Except
that these birds tell you things you'd never expect, and it's only
then that you realize they're far from normal. They're
extraordinary birds. Their feathers are woven of silk and gold
leaf. Their eyes are bright like diamonds.
I first encountered _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ when I was
sixteen, and it changed my life. After reading it I could not look
at fiction, or life for that matter, with the same expectations,
the same traditional preconceptions. The rules for things had been
changed. Now, a decade later, I'm reading _Strange Pilgrims_, and
life shifts again. I can't help but compare myself to the narrator
in "The Saint," (my favorite of these stories) who returns to Rome
after twenty-two years to find his old friend, Margarito Duarte,
still ceaselessly lobbying the Pope for the canonization of his
deceased daughter. Here, in this collection, Marquez is still
tirelessly working at his own self-made calling. In the story, the
daughter lies in a wooden box and refuses to decompose. Duarte
refuses to give up hope of the church's sanction of her sainthood.
In much the same way, Garcia Marquez refuses to stop creating art.
Though you can argue he's achieved his success (a Nobel Prize is a
good indicator of success in my opinion, although according to Mr.
Marquez it's only good for getting him to the front of lines)
writing is a continual struggle between one's self and the blank
page.
In this effort Mr. Marquez continues to strive and to succeed,
where many writers might have relaxed. And too, his art refuses to
fade. It remains quietly present and, perhaps, preternaturally
aware of us and its space in our lives.
The territory worked in this collection is a land of Mr. Marquez's
own imaginings, a place only tangentially akin to our own
conception of Europe. The twelve stories in this collection center
on men and women, unique in the way only Mr. Marquez can make them,
in exile and self-exile and having strange and sometimes magical
encounters in lands foreign to them, lands that seem to border on
the country of Death.
In the prologue Marquez tells us the history of the works. They
are pieces written over an eighteen-year period of time and
intended as interrelated parts of a whole, unlike his three
previous collections of short stories. Some had been drafted in a
notebook, lost, and then subsequently reconstructed. Five of these
had been journalistic notes. One was a television serial and one
was transcribed by a friend and subsequently rewritten on the basis
of that friend's version. Regardless of the spans in time, he
places his characters in related situations of alienation and
confusion, where the true nature of things is often obscured, and
as we watch the reality becomes slowly, sometimes terrifyingly,
clear to them.
In the most powerful of these tales (and there are several that are
wonderful) we enter deeply into the mind of the exiled and those
around them. In "Bon Voyage, Mr. President" we see how a deposed
Caribbean president in Geneva, soon to face an operation that may
end his life, brings to the life of an ambulance driver and the
driver's wife. Believing the president wealthy, they first try and
take advantage of the wealth they believe he hides. Later, they
adopt and befriend the old man. Finally, he is like their own
child; they pay for his hospital care with part of their own
savings.
In Maria Dos Prazeres, a prostitute in Catalonia is faced with a
premonition of death, and trains her dog to cry over her
newly-purchased gravesite. She watches the dog day after day,
running to her grave with tears in its eyes, falling deeper and
deeper under the spell of her own precognition only to find that
life still contains surprises, that all isn't as it appears. And,
in "The Saint," we realize that it is Margarito Duarte's efforts
that are truly transcendent.
In all of these tales, Life grows and changes beyond a person's
ability to perceive, beyond one's fears. But the characters here
stubbornly persist in the troubled beauty of their humanity.
The stories are translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, the
second of Mr. Marquez's English translators, and she retains much
of the rhythm and virtuosity inherent in the original prose. There
is certainly a beauty in the writing here that writers both young
and old could strive to emulate, and an undefinable quality that
smells Marquezian. While taken individually, the stories are of
varying levels of quality. Some I found unsatisfying, some I
thought brilliant. ("The Ghosts of August," detailing the
paranormal encounter in a castle in Tuscany, is disappointing on
its own.) But a cohesive volume asks other things of itself, and
if the stories are combined and looked at as a whole as the author
intends, they tell us a poignant story of loss and confusion, of
life's frailty, of the mysterious and frightening ways life can
shift around us when the ground rules are misunderstood or
misinterpreted. Life is a flurry of extraordinary parrots, parrots
beyond our understanding and control, he seems to say. And we are
mere spectators, left covered and changed by the pearls dropped
from their mouths.
*******************************************************************
AMELIA FRANZ
_Texas Bound: 19 Texas Stories_. Edited by Kay Cattarulla. Dallas:
SMU Press, 1994. 244 pp. $10.95
It must have been the pickups and cacti. Or maybe it was the lone
star wrapped around the spine. Oh! I thought, another one of those
things, my hopes raised from 1989 Corona Publishing's _New Growth:
Contemporary Short Stories from Texas Writers_. _Texas Bound_,
however, distinguishes itself from other recent Texas fiction
anthologies, including _New Growth_, in its genesis: all the
stories of the collection have been featured in the "Arts and
Letters Live" series at the Dallas Museum of Art, a program in
which such Texas actors as Tommy Lee Jones and Tess Harper read
"Texas stories" to live audiences. The success of the readings
prompted director Kay Cattarulla to publish the stories as a print
collection. Though I couldn't decide whether to be pleased or
disappointed at only recognizing four of the contributors (Rick
Bass, Shelby Hearon, Reginald McKnight, Larry McMurtry), I decided
to risk the letdown of getting hold of a mediocre set of stories.
After all, there had to be a few winners in the group.
What interested me most about the collection, once I got hold of it
and started reading the preface, was this idea of "Texas" stories.
Let's take Rick Bass, for instance. His talent speaks for itself,
as do the worthiness of his stories for inclusion in any anthology.
But does the fact that Bass happens to have been born within the
boundaries of the state of Texas make him a Texas writer, and does
he write Texas stories? Probably not. But Rick Bass sells
anthologies, and perhaps there's nothing wrong with this kind of
promotion. The idea of regionalism in fiction is, however, a
problematic one. Setting residence requirements for writers living
in certain states and regions seems a bit drastic. And what would
guarantee a writer who'd lived half his/her life within a state
(Texas, in this case) writing "Texas stories"? Cattarulla skips
over the problem by summarily answering that "every piece... has
its origin in the state in one way or another" (viii).
Lawrence Wright, contributor to the collection and staff writer
for _The New Yorker_, undertakes a sort of testimonial in the
foreword, for the current state of "letters" in Texas. Using Larry
McMurtry as example, Wright describes three stages of development in
Texas writing: stage one, characterized by swaggering, macho Texas
stereotypes; stage two, a forsaking of Texan roots for all things
cultured, refined, cosmopolitan; and finally stage three (which
Texas writing now inhabits), the stage of "reconciliation," in
which the now-educated and accomplished writer (McMurtry, McCarthy)
finds him/herself free of insecurities about the past and able to
return to the "juicy roots of his own culture" for material and
inspiration.
To these juicy roots only a handful of the nineteen stories, in my
estimation, return. Among them, the late William Goyen's "The
Texas Principessa" and "Precious Door," display Goyen's virtuosity
as a Texas writer capable of evoking (in "Precious Door") the sad
and tender nuances of understatement in east Texan dialect against
the backdrop of a child's love for a dying stranger; and (in the
Browning-influenced "The Texas Principessa") humor and satire from
an unreliable narrator relating the life and death adventures of a
wealthy Texan who marries European nobility and thus acquires a
seventeenth-century Italian palazzo, through which wander all
manner of Texas eccentrics and stereotypes.
"Precious Door" and "The Texas Principessa" reveal Goyen as a Texas
writer, but not for their inclusion of a few references to towns,
rivers, and cultural symbols (oil, Aggies, ranches) as setting.
Nor is this phenomenon primarily a matter of dialect, since
traditional Texan speech patterns differ from the Rio Grande Valley
to the Great Plains, from the Piney Woods to the New Mexico border.
Rather, the distinct and resonant sense of place achieved in the
two stories results from a subtlety that seems somehow artless, as
if the story could have been contemplated in no other place, as if
"Precious Door" could have occurred nowhere else but an east Texas
cotton town bracing itself for a hurricane blowing up through
Galveston. In my judgment, this is the mark of a great regional
writer, as opposed to a merely skilled one, and reminds me of the
same utterly authentic and unquestionable loyalty to place in the
Faulkner novels. The language and cultural mythology of Northern
Mississippi give rise to the story of declining aristocracy in _The
Sound and the Fury_; the language, religion, and social customs of
rural east Texas yield, in "Precious Door," the initiation of a
young boy into empathetic love for a murdered stranger. These two
works succeed as regional fiction for their firm and authentic
grounding in the culture of the place, not for the simple fact that
they seem to be "set" in Mississippi and Texas.
Larry McMurtry's "There Will Be Peace in Korea" succeeds as a Texas
story for its evoking of the geo-mythological aura of the Texas
high plains: a flat, lonely land where the wind blows through
ranching towns scattered from Dallas to Amarillo. Sonny, a recent
high-school graduate, feels guilt for fighting over a girl with his
former best friend, Bud, who is due to leave for the Korean War the
next morning. In recompense, Sonny picks up Bud at his rooming
house in the middle of a Texas norther, and the two head to Fort
Worth to repair their friendship over bottles of Pearl. Though in
the end friendship remains, Sonny is left (archetypally) alone on
the plains to deal with the loss of Bud and also of Laveta, now
engaged to a boy from Dallas: "There were some dust and paper
scraps whirling down the street toward me but when the bus was out
of sight it seemed like Bud and Laveta were gone for good and I was
standing there by myself, in the wind" (167).
Reginald McKnight's "The Kind of Light that Shines on Texas"
recreates a tension-filled classroom in the recently-integrated
Texas public school system of the 1960s. In a story chronicling a
sixth-grade boy's struggle for his identity as an African-American,
Clint "Uncle Toms" his white teacher in a need to prove his
superiority to the other sullen, indifferent, (and ignored) black
children in his class. As a result, Clint is accepted neither by
whites nor blacks. The situation is complicated by the fact that
Clint is an Army brat well acquainted with not fitting in: "I'd
been to so many different schools in my short life that I ceased
wondering about their differences. All I knew about the Texas
schools is that they weren't afraid to flunk you" (145). In the
climax, a white bully prepares to pound Clint into the concrete
when Marvin, a black boy who distinguishes himself only by sleeping
through most of class and never being awakened by the teacher,
steps in and takes on the bully in order to save Clint. Marvin and
the bully are removed from class, but Clint remains, finally able
to acknowledge the undeniable bond--that of oppression--shared with
his fellow black students.
Other notables in the collection include Rick Bass's "Antlers" and
Diane DeSanders's "When He Saw Me," neither of which are Texas
stories, and Lawrence Wright's "Escape," one of two non-fiction
pieces included. "Escape," however (as opposed to Bryan Woolley's
non-fiction "Burgers, Beer, and Patsy Cline") seems no less a
"story" than the adventures of Harry Monroe in Barry Hannah's
_Geronimo Rex_, or any number of rambling, young-adult-awakening
novels. At any rate, the distinction is an academic one, and the
piece walks the line between the nostalgic personal essay and the
coming-of-age story.
There are no bad stories, per se, in _Texas Bound_. My least
favorites of the group were Robert Flynn's "The Midnight Clear" and
William Hauptman's "Good Rockin' Tonight." In the case of "Good
Rockin' Tonight," I blame the genius of Padgett Powell and Barry
Hannah, those two masters of grotesque southern humor, for my
relative lack of enthusiasm over Hauptman's tale of honky tonks,
transsexuals, and Elvis impersonators. Perhaps I'm not being fair
to Hauptman, but once you've been to the mountaintop with _A Woman
Named Drown_, ordinary Elvis impersonators pale in comparison.
My criticism of Flynn's "The Midnight Clear" is a bit more
even-handed. On the one hand, Flynn is to be congratulated for an
ambitious attempt: the story occurs on the nineteenth-century
(Texas?) frontier, complete with wagons, mules, and frontier
dialect. The overall structure, however, relies too heavily on
parallelism, and eventually the convention becomes repetitive.
Obviously, this is a subjective aesthetic judgment. Some readers
will no doubt enjoy Flynn's quaint humor and sing-song narrative
voice, but I found "The Midnight Clear" somewhat tiresome.
With all this said, I am sure that _Texas Bound_, like many
regional fiction anthologies, will enjoy a fairly active shelf
life, particularly in libraries around the state. It is unlikely
that many readers will seriously question the appropriateness of
the label "Texas stories" for pieces that display no discernible
relation to the state, written by writers living in Montana and New
York. It will be enough that these are good stories, mainly. And
perhaps they're right.
And no, the collection is not necessarily representative of the
best of contemporary "Texas" letters; one notes the absence of
Cormac McCarthy, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sandra Cisneros, among
others. On the other hand, Lawrence Wright is correct: many
writers, not a select few, are raising Texas writing "to a higher
point than even Texans imagined" (xiii), and in this wealth we can
certainly take pride.
*******************************************************************
We can never know what to want, because,
living only one life, we can neither
compare it with our previous lives nor
perfect it in our lives to come.
Milan Kundera
_The Unbearable Lightness of Being_
*******************************************************************
