The Seventh Seal

To believe is to suffer.  It is like loving someone in the dark that never answers.

                                                                                                                           Antonius Block

Diversion once meant, and still means in many Latinate languages, something that amuses not simply distracts or wards off the ills of the world; it has since been replaced by a terse and ambiguous word that has so many uses as to obliterate its primary purpose – that of diversion.  Fun is what moments and memories we enjoy of life, and we wish ourselves as many of these occurrences as possible.  But what fun exactly entails will have to remain a personal matter.  For some, fun is the obverse side of what they are obligated to do – work, clean, educate, obey human laws and regulations; a font of amusement for others is the mockery of people and things that do not please them; and for a few of us, fun is achieving our creative potential, competing with no one but future versions of ourselves, and hoping that life will permit a single, brazen mind to reconcile its duties with its ambitions.  Some people, of course, think that life is most entertaining when neither duty nor ambition binds them to their days.  Which brings us to this famous film.

We begin with a knight and his squire, the former just returned from ten years in the Holy Land on the errands of God.  That decade away from his native shores has done much to embitter and crush the soul of our knight, the noble but hesitant Antonius Block (Max von Sydow).  His doubts are not stifled by the petulant skepticism of his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), who claims to love life and all its hedonistic opportunities and has neither patience for nor interest in the spiritual side of existence.  But Block's homecoming is marred by the appearance of Death (Bengt Ekerot, in an iconic role) on the otherwise clement beaches that he has not seen in so long.  Is it unfair for Death, whom he eluded time and again in battle against the Muslim faithful, to come for him so near to his family and childhood memories?  It is, but Block has witnessed so much injustice that it matters little.  He challenges Death to a game of chess with the usual Satanic provisions: as long as they play, Death will demit his office as annihilator of worlds; and should Block win, he will be allowed to live longer.  And Death, Block, and we all know that Death has never lost.   

We then drift away from the quixotic knight and his sidekick to an almost normal family composed of the actor and juggler Jof, his wife Mia, and their toddler son.  Jof is prone to visions, the beautiful and irrational visions that accost an artist his whole life; early on he sees a queen and her child, an allegorical representation of his own lovely spouse.  What is remarkable is how individual the film begins and how ensemble it becomes.  Such a wide variety of characters intrudes that Block, an obvious hero and a man who oozes gentility and honor, slips into the background as simply one of the cast.  We meet Plog, an alcoholic blacksmith, his harlot of a wife, Lisa, the lecherous actor and fraud Skat, a young deaf-mute country lass, the seminarist Ravel accused of persuading Block to join the Crusades, and another young woman about to be burned at the stake for witchcraft.  All of them are duly aware that the Black Death will be upon them soon, and their reactions convey the range of human emotion when confronted with adversity.  Plog doubles his liquid rations; Lisa and Skat find each other's embrace; Ravel decides that a deaf-mute lass cannot scream, especially in an isolated farmhouse; and the witch, in appearance an odd parody of Joan of Arc, claims to reflect the Devil in her eyes.  As the epicenter of the film, Block wanders through the countryside and finds both despair and joy, lethargy and militant resistance, ridicule and pious disgust; but more than anything else, he wants to believe.  When he talks to the witch, he asks her whether she knows Satan.  Why?  "So I can ask him about God," says Block, "he must know."  The same thirst for truth is inflicted upon Death, from whom he attempts to extract a promise when his time comes.  "And you will reveal your secrets?" he asks Death, who responds: "I have no secrets."  "So you know nothing, nothing?" he cries in despair, to which Death almost pauses before answering that he is "unknowing."  Corporal extinction may indeed yield some insight into a more elevated experience, yet even Death himself is but a ferryman to that distant shore.   

The film was apparently inspired in part by a painting from this church, and despite its numerous historical inaccuracies and general unevenness (Bergman's own assessment) it is enthralling as a medieval tale of sin with at least a dozen brilliant vignettes.  Perhaps the most magnificent scene of all is Block's confession to a priest whose face is shrouded by his cowl as he turns to hide his profile from Block but not from us.  Notably, we are not given any background to the petty conflicts that arise between the villagers because if Death were to come to any village and choose his prey, he would not be able to discern why people have disliked one another for years; in fact those involved probably could not say, either.  The small pleasures of life – love, family, friendship, fresh air, and food – these are what sustains us before Death arrives, be it in a tidal wave that swallows up all but a few survivors or at the end of our natural lives when we are wizened and weary.  Block probably had these pleasures in his daily routine when he departed to war ten years ago, and it is no exaggeration to state that he can barely enjoy any of them now.  After all, there's no risk in gaming Death if you are already dead.

Arbitrage

What can the rich do that the rest of us cannot?  According to some theories, the rich do everything they can for the non-rich: they create jobs, stimulate the economy, improve technology, and even, purely out of the goodness of their bleeding hearts, give away a sizable slice of their fortune to the most needy and downtrodden.  They are the great benefactors of society, and everything that can be undertaken to aid them in their noble quest should become our mantras and watchwords.  Nevertheless, repeated efforts are made to curb the rich in their strategies because some have felt, obviously out of envy, that they have become too powerful, too in control of governments and their subjects, too deeply embedded in every financial circuit to be removable.  Why would we want to extract such elements as if they were parasites creeping just beneath our epidermis?  If you don't immediately know the answer, dear reader, these pages are not for you.  You may also wish to avoid a viewing of this recent film.     

Life could be a little harder for the hedge fund billionaire with the everyday name, Robert Miller (Richard Gere).  He has an understanding and still-attractive wife, Ellen (Susan Sarandon), a razor-sharp protégé of a daughter, Brooke (Brit Marling), a son who has provided him with three young heirs, a mansion in New York city proper, and a nearly-completed deal to foist his company on a needy competitor and retreat from the cutthroat world he clearly adores.  Movies like to believe a man's character can be revealed by how he celebrates his birthday, and if that is indeed the case, Miller's sixtieth tells us all we need to know.  He arrives late, indifferently hands his grandkids gifts his butler procured, makes one of the most disingenuous toasts you will ever hear, and absconds shortly thereafter in defiance of Ellen's mild but implicative protests.  His destination?  A French painter by the name of Julie (Laetitia Casta), who has the very distinct advantage of being half his wife's age and occupying an apartment bankrolled by our birthday boy.  Julie has faint talent as a painter (she will be later grouped disparagingly with some "gallerists"), although her artistic 'discovery' dovetails with her status as a billionaire's paramour.  We know Julie's is a "blanker role" (to quote this writer), that of the eternally patient mistress, and one which spells the doom of the person awaited.  What we do not know just yet is what sort of doom.  And so, as the almost-closed deal gets gradually prised open, Miller eschews Julie's gallery showing for a dinner meeting his competitor, to everyone's frustration, does not attend.  Eventually he will come and comfort his lover, convince her that they are meant for each other (adulterers are notoriously persuasive), and propose that the two of them run away for the weekend, mere hours after Ellen suggested a year of travel, numbers perhaps proportionable to how many Julies Ellen has had to endure.  Miller drives off into the endless night, Julie falls asleep on his shoulder, and, as it were, Miller also catches a few winks, resulting in a wrecked car and the violent end to a French painter's career and earthly existence.

For reasons evident to even a first-time viewer of Arbitrage, to be only hinted at here, what happens next is as ingenious as it is implausible.  Ever in extrication mode, even after barely escaping the scythe, Miller places a phone call to Jimmy (Nate Parker), a young black resident of Harlem.  This information is vital for what will befall our hedge fund magnate, yet the connection between the two men (which is never hidden from us, and only temporarily from the police) is so logical that Miller's request cannot be considered a well-laid plan.  Eventually a policeman (Tim Roth) will come and discomfort Miller, as well as his whole family, with all kinds of silly questions such as how Miller might have gotten that scar beneath his snow-capped crown of hair, or why he might have some reason beyond vanity to keep his name out of the headlines (at one point, the almost-closed deal flies open like storm-struck French windows).  Our billionaire keeps slipping away from possible confrontation, consulting with his unconscionable attorney (Stuart Margolin), and checking in on the still-unsettled foisting of the family business on his rival, a peacock-maned fellow by the name of Mayfield (Graydon Carter).  The rather unbearable tension culminates in a scene at New York's most private public place, Central Park, where father and daughter, who is also his company's chief financial officer, discuss the troublesome transaction, why hedge funds basically encourage dishonesty, and, in a passionate rant, what truly moves and shakes Robert Miller.  His great love in life will not surprise you, and perhaps neither will his callousness, developed over decades of tricking people into believing he really is the "Oracle of Gracie Square."  Brooke's impression of her father sustains what may be loosely termed a sledgehammer-like blow, to be returned only as the final minutes of our film come into focus.

What Arbitrage may lack in originality, it makes for up in gentleness, superb acting, and an attention to detail.  Voices are occasionally raised, but they are in accounted indignation; vulgarities escape when they are truly warranted; and disputes between man and woman are handled as if the two were equals and always could be if both sides so desired.  Gere, attractive and boyish enough to get away with acting the immature fraud, could not be better cast (an obese, toad-like businessman like Mayfield, whose name evokes a wonderful retirement, would have taken his fall with more dignity).  To get Sarandon, whose natural beauty has been amplified by science in recent years, off a subject, Miller recalls the cheap meals they used to enjoy at a local diner, and for but a moment they again become high-school or college sweethearts.  And Miller's interaction with his lawyer is shorthand for two people who have always known each other, and known what evil lurks in the hearts of men, including their own miserable organs.  Yet the most magnificent scenes are with the two most important women in his life.  His daughter idolizes his acumen and, like every child, does not want her father to stop working because that means he may stop moving and breathing; she justifiably "cannot imagine" what they would do outside the office.  And then Ellen, who buttonholes him as he leaves his own birthday party to "go back to the office" to take care of "that thing," when she knows there is no such "thing," at least nothing that needs to be restricted to an office, will, very late in our film, make her husband an unforgettable offer.  All of which may explain why the same patriarch feels like gushing to his newly appreciated family that it took him "these sixty years" to realize what was most important.  Or maybe the last sixty minutes in the ride over from the airport.

Pasternak, "Paul-Marie Verlaine"

An essay about this French poet by this Russian man of letters.  You can read the original in this collection.

One hundred years ago, on the 30th of March, 1844, in the city of Metz, the great lyric poet of France Paul Verlaine was born.  How can he interest us now, in our fiery days, amidst our distinct lack of humor and in light of our stunning victory?

He bequeathed a brilliant record of what he saw and experienced, similar in spirit and expression to the later works of Blok, Rilke, Ibsen, Chekhov, and other modern writers, yet connected in places by a deep kinship with the newest wave of impressionist painting in France, the Scandinavian countries, and Russia.

These artists were surrounded by a new urban reality quite different than that of Pushkin, Mérimée, and Stendhal.  The sun was setting on the nineteenth century and it drifted to its end with all its whims intact, the high-handedness of its industry, its monetary storms, and a society composed of victims and mischievous children.  The streets had just been paved with asphalt and lit by gas.  There factories took hold and grew like mushrooms just like the excessive spread of daily papers.   Railways enjoyed enough expansion to become a part of every child's existence, the only difference being whether he spent his childhood years speeding by a sleeping town on such a train, or whether such night trains sped by the town's outskirts of his own impoverished childhood.

On this newly lit street the shadows did not lie the way they did in Balzac's time, and these streets were walked in a new way; we wished to draw them in this same new way, in accordance with nature.  The main novelties of this street were not, however, the lamps or the telegraph poles, but the vortex of an egoistic element which bore with it the clarity of an autumnal wind and chased away poverty, tuberculosis, prostitution, and other niceties of that era like leaves off a sidewalk.  This vortex caught everyone's eye and became the center of the picture.  With its gust the labor movement moved into its cognitive phase.  Its breath in particular provided the viewpoint of a group of new artists.

They wrote in smears and dots, in hints and half-tones, not because they wanted to do so or that they were symbolists.  Reality for a symbolist was that dimension in which everything was in transition and development; this reality in its entirety meant, if not comprised something, as well as served if not fulfilled a symptom and a sign.  Everything was mixed and jumbled, old and new, the Church, the village, the city, and the people.  Everything was a spinning whirlpool of conventions, between the absoluteness of what remained and what had yet to be achieved, that distant presentiment of the century's most important happening – socialism – and its actual embodiment, the Russian Revolution.

And just as Blok the realist provided us with an elevated picture of Petersburg singular in its symbolic gleam, so too did Verlaine the realist, in his impermissibly personal confessions, play the main role for that time and place from where his fall and repentance would arise.

Verlaine was the son of a lieutenant who would die young.  The lieutenant was his mother's favorite as well as the favorite of all the estate's servant women, and thus Verlaine was sent at the age of four from the provinces to Paris to an exclusive institute of learning.  There is something akin to Lermontov's life in his dove-like cleanliness begotten from the circle of women, as well as in his subsequent fate among his debauched Parisian comrades.  Upon finishing school he became an official at city hall.  The events of 1870 led to his becoming a militiaman amidst the Parisian fortifications; he got married; an uprising broke out; he took part in the tasks of the Commune by working in printing; and once order had been restored, he was discharged.  It was then that he began to drink.  And fate sent him an evil genius in the form of a freak of immense talent, however surly, the eccentric adolescent poet Arthur Rimbaud.

He himself dug up this "novice" in Charleroi and summoned him in writing to Paris.  Once Rimbaud moved in with the Verlaines, their normal life came to an end, and Verlaine's subsequent existence was drowned in the tears of his wife and child.  With Verlaine's family abandoned for good, Rimbaud and Verlaine began their wanderings on the longer roads of France and Belgium in a mutual haze of alcohol, leading them to London and semi-starvation where they did menial work to stay alive, to brawling in Stuttgart, and to prisons and hospitals.

Finally, in Brussels, after a terrible row, Verlaine raced after the absconded Rimbaud and fired twice, wounding him.  Verlaine was then arrested and sentenced to a two-year prison term in Mons. 

After all this Rimbaud took off for Africa to fight for the new territories of Menelik II of Ethiopia, and came into the King's service.  Meanwhile, in prison, Verlaine would write one of his greatest books.

He died in the winter of 1896, not having added anything astonishing to his long-held fame and surrounded by the reverent attention of some youths and admirers.

Verlaine began to write quite early on.  The Poèmes saturniens of his first book were written when he was still in high school.  His deceptive poetry, like the titles of some of his books such as Romances sans paroles (a rather impudent term for the production of literature), provokes false notions of aesthetics.  One might have thought that the disregard for style with which he named his works was imbued with a desire for a pre-verbal "musicality" (something few if any understand), and that he is sacrificing the logical and visual aspects of poetry in favor of its sound.  This is not so; quite the opposite, in fact.  Like any great artist he needed "not words, but deeds," even from the art of words; that is, he wanted poetry to contain the actually experienced or witnessed truth of the observer.

This is precisely what he states in his brilliant work "Art poétique," incorrectly having become the manifesto of both Zaum and "melodiousness":

Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie             (You would do well, in thrall's ado,)
De rendre un peu la Rime assagie.         (To give your rhymes a conscience, too.)

And then later:

Que ton vers soit la chose envolée        (May your verse be that thing in flight)
Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une âme en allée    (We see depart a soul so light,)
Vers d'autres cieux à d'autres amours.  (Towards other skies and other loves.)

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure      (May your verse be that fortune pure,)
Eparse au vent crispé du matin              (Strewn tense against the morning wind)
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym...   (On which shall bloom both thyme and mint,)
Et tout le reste est littérature.               (And all the rest is literature.) 

Verlaine had the right to speak in this way.  He was able in his poetry to imitate bells, seize and augment the scents of the prevailing flora of his homeland, successfully mimic birds, and reproduce in his works all the flows of silence, internal and external, from winter's starry wordlessness to summer's torpor during a hot sunny midday.  He like no one else expressed the long, engulfing and irrepressible pain of lost possession, be it the loss of a god who was and then died, a woman who changed her mind, a place which became dearer than life itself but which had to be forsaken, or the loss of peace.

Who would one have to be to imagine a great and defeated artist as a spiritual crumb, a spoiled child who doesn't know what he's creating.  Our notions likewise underestimate the eagle-like sobriety of Blok, his historical tact, his feelings of earthly pertinence, inseparable from genius.  No, Verlaine knew perfectly well what he needed and what French poetry lacked in order to convey this new vortex present in the soul and in the city I previously mentioned.  And at any stage of drunkenness or mischief-induced scribbling, having expanded the sensation to the desired limit and led his thoughts into sublime clarity, Verlaine granted the language in which he wrote that boundless freedom which was his discovery in lyric poetry and which can be found only in the novels and plays of the masters of prose dialogue.  Parisian speech and cadence in all its untouchable and captivating keenness flew in from the street and slipped in its entirety into every line without the slightest crack, like the melodic material for all that was to be constructed thereafter.  This progressive ease is the finest thing about Verlaine.  Idiomatic French was impossible for him to shed.  He wrote not in words but in entire locutions, without shattering or transposing them.

Many things are simple and natural, if not all things; and yet they are simple only at their initial level, when they remain a matter of one's conscience, and one wonders only whether they are truly simple or whether one has misinterpreted them.  Such simplicity is an uncreative quantity and bears no relationship whatsoever to art.  What we are talking about is idealistic and endless simplicity, and Verlaine was simple in precisely this regard.  In comparison to naturalness, M. Verlaine is unexpectedly natural and does not give any ground: in colloquial parlance we would say that Verlaine is supernaturally natural, that is, he is simple not so that we might believe him, but so that the voice of life roaring out from within him might not be hampered in any way.  And this is all, as it were, that we can say given our limitations of time and space.

Ancient Sorceries

I went upstairs to bed, my mind teeming with thoughts that were unusual to me, and of rather a haunting description.  By way of relief I kept thinking of that nice, prosaic noisy train and all those wholesome, blustering passengers.  I almost wished I were with them again.  But my dreams took me elsewhere.  I dreamed of cats, and soft-moving creatures, and the silence of life in a dim muffled world beyond the senses.

                                                                                                               Arthur Vezin

Surely you have heard in various and sundry situations that old adage, "less is more."  I encountered it many times as a child and adolescent, in the oddest of contexts: clothing, furniture, calories, exercise, sleep, color on a canvas, words to say to that one girl to whom you barely can say anything.  Once upon a time, this adage fell on the hardly deaf ears of perhaps the greatest musical genius the world has ever known, and he spurned it with the foreknowledge of his glory.  And in literature, it is strange how close two stories by the same author can be in motifs and how distant in effect, with the more effective story almost invariably being the one that reveals less.  A pithy introduction to one of the masterpieces of horror fiction.

At the onset of our tale we are reminded of one the world's many inequities: namely, that while it can understand the wild narratives of "the adventurous type" of person, because "such people carry about with them an adequate explanation of their exciting lives," little is to be thought of "dull, ordinary folk."  Nothing, we are informed, is to happen to these plain souls.  That is to say, nothing out of the way in what we may presume are boilerplate bourgeois scripts, the same roles and routines that drove so many European intellectuals to laud the grimy charm of the proletariat.  To what category then belongs our protagonist Arthur Vezin?  His initial account to Dr. John Silence disperses more than a few hints:

He was on the way home when it happened, crossing northern France from some mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise every summer.  He had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and the train was jammed to suffocation, most of the passengers being unredeemed holiday English.  He disliked them, not because they were his fellow countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody.  These English clashed around him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely that he ought to be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he did not claim insistently enough all kinds of things that he didn't want and that were really valueless, such as corner seats, windows up or down, and so forth.

This most remarkable passage contains all the seeds of explanation for the events to come (in particular the three Latinate words beginning with "ob," which etymologically all involve some kind of force outwards), with Vezin's surname and curious bout of anti-patriotic fervor suggesting that we are not dealing with someone of Anglo-Saxon stock.  The imperfection of Vezin's French is underscored throughout the text – an integral feature, one supposes, of his 'ordinariness' – a ploy that allows the reader to comprehend his befuddlement at the series of events in the little town into which he wanders one evening.

Vezin's final view of the town will summarize symbolically his thoughts and fears, but his inchoate impression is positive.  Indeed, what struck him then was "the delightful contrast of the silence and peace after the dust and noisy rattle of the train."  So delightful, as it were, that he "felt soothed and stroked like a cat."  Dr. Silence proceeds on the basis of a contextual clue to ask more questions about why Vezin uses this peculiar analogy, and we do not need to belabor the matter.  Suffice it to say that Vezin enters the town and finds a hotel, but despite the alleged peace of mind achieved, never quite feels at ease.  After a string of encounters with the local townsfolk, Vezin decides that something untoward may be afoot:

'For the whole town, I suddenly realized, was something other than I so far saw it.  The real activities and interests of the people were elsewhere and otherwise than appeared.  Their true lives lay somewhere out of sight behind the scenes.  Their busy-ness was but the outward semblance that masked their actual purposes.  They bought and sold, and ate and drank, and walked about the streets; yet all the while the main stream of their existence lay somewhere beyond my ken, underground, in secret places.  In the shops and at the stalls they did not care whether I purchased their articles or not; at the inn, they were indifferent to my staying or going; their life lay remote from my own, springing from hidden, mysterious sources, coursing out of sight, unknown.  It was all a great elaborate pretence, assumed possibly for my benefit, or possibly for purposes of their own.  But the main current of their energies ran elsewhere.  I almost felt as an unwelcome foreign substance might be expected to feel when it has found its way into the human system and the whole body organizes itself to eject or absorb it.  The town was doing this very thing to me.'

Such an observation would seem to be a product of the solipsistic nonsense common to "adventurous types"; but we also know that many ostensibly 'plain and ordinary' people suffer from delusions of grandeur (one of the most frequent manifestations is a professed link to a well-known catastrophe).  Yet here this is not the case.  For all his weird musings, Vezin truly senses that something personal is at stake ("something exceedingly vital to himself, to his soul, hung in the balance") that does not make him a more important being on this earth, but simply one who may belong to a different order of things.  That the town's cathedral "was ever empty, the old church of St. Martin, at the other end of the town, deserted," suggests what form of religious experience the locals may prefer.  It is the appearance of the hotel owner's beautiful daughter, however, that finally embodies our traveler's fears in a guise he can hardly misinterpret – and we should say no more.

Ancient Sorceries is understood by some as the inspiration for this famous film, and it gives nothing away to reveal that a quite similar theme is broached in another of Blackwood's tales, which shall remain nameless on these pages.  The difference between our story and the less successful effort is very much a study in omission: while occasionally, ahem, flashing its claws, Ancient Sorceries only implies that certain things may have occurred, and the forms perceived by the protagonist may necessarily be of his own composition.  The later story degenerates into one of the most flawed spectacles of otherwise first-rate fiction, irrevocably compromising the fine, if overly topical setting established in its opening pages.  Vezin's fate seems to be his doing alone, and not the work of continental strife or some other such nonsense, rendering the dénouement to our tale all the more plausible.  Plausible, that is, for a journey endangered by sleep.  And by cats.  

The Invisible Man

It is wonderful how little a man can do alone!  To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.

According to internet sources a film bearing the title of this classic novel might be released in the near future, although one will be disappointed to learn that it has been initially retooled as a wartime sequel.  What is so remarkable about the original work is the blueprint it sets for almost every action movie subsequently created.  It is fast; it is furious; it is never for a moment dull.  And unlike the crash-and-bash vehicles that have littered our cineplexes for decades, it holds together in perfect, if demented logic.

Demented would also describe the feverish state of mind of our protagonist, a scientist by the name of Griffin.  That Griffin already denotes a mythological creature should not surprise the astute reader; that the whole plot recounts an old parable with brutally modern terminology must qualify it as an astounding work of genius.  Griffin spends the first half of the novel rumbling about the small town of Iping, whose inclusion as a haunt for a being of his powers can be seen as both advantageous and wholly inconvenient.  Later information from Griffin himself suggests that the choice was motivated in no small part by the superstitions so rampant among country folk (a bias that would probably have checked off a few boxes on Wells's agenda).  Our first scene has a bandaged stranger taking a room in a backwater inn.  He has arrived without luggage and his demeanor cannot be construed as anything less than vicious.  Still, he is a paying customer, and the element of mystery is not lost on his hostess, Mrs. Hall: 

He held a white cloth – it was a serviette he had brought with him – over the lower part of his face, so that his mouth and jaws were completely hidden, and that was the reason for his muffled voice.  But it was not that which startled Mrs. Hall.  It was the fact that all his forehead was covered by a white bandage, and that another covered his ears, leaving not a scrap of his face exposed excepting only his pink, peaked nose.  It was bright, pink and shiny just as it had been at first.  He wore a dark-brown velvet jacket with a high, black, linen-lined collar turned up about his neck.  The thick black hair, escaping as it could below and between the cross bandages, projected in curious tails and horns, giving him the strangest appearance conceivable.  This muffled and bandaged head was so unlike what she had anticipated, that for a moment she was rigid.

Griffin may have calculated in his creeping madness that simple people would truckle to his whim and word; yet one would think that Iping would be precisely the type of newsy, closely-knit village in which rumor of such an amazing visitor would bring him sustained harassment.  When Griffin finally settles down to relate his story, we come to see that London is hardly too cosmopolitan not to suspect a freak of science.  But London also possesses a far greater allotment of policeman, thieves, dogs and other obstacles to a happy, invisible life.  And, perhaps most importantly, London does not have Griffin's old university chum, Dr. Kemp.

It is just in the middle of our novel that Griffin finds Kemp, likewise a man of science and a respected physician, and as hardened into skepticism of all oddities as any allegedly enlightened mind can be.  The methods of his introduction are brusque and unswerving, and Kemp, despite his hesitation, obliges himself to talk to the wafting air from where an old, familiar voice is ventriloquized.  Griffin provides his former colleague with a detailed and supremely exact method of how he came upon the faculty of invisibility, his experiments on an unfortunate feline, the suspicions and antics of his immigrant landlord, and, most relevantly, the tribulations of the public exercise of the greatest scientific discovery of all time.  The results were not what he had hoped for: 

The more I thought it over, the more I realized what a helpless absurdity an invisible man was – in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded civilized city.  Before I made this mad experiment I had dreamt of a thousand advantages.  That afternoon it seemed all disappointment.  I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable.  No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they were gotten.  Ambition – what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there?  What is the good of the love of woman when her name needs be Delilah?  I have no taste for politics, for the blackguardisms of fame, for philanthropy, for sport.  What was I to do?  And for this I had become a wrapped-up mystery, a swathed and bandaged caricature of a man?

Such misfortune explains why Griffin is continuously found cursing – at least ten times in the book's first third, and usually at either his beakers or the Iping natives – a pun on his malediction.  The Iping half also features an outrageous gaggle of dialects, probably because the overly class-conscious Wells could not bring himself to put his delectable prose in the mouths of the uncouth.  More than a century on, The Invisible Man remains the greatest action novel ever written, in the macabre stream of action novels, not those of spy and spymaster.  Apart from the disastrous transcripts of local expression, his prose has the ease and beauty of the highest literary art, and the novel would be utterly unappealing were it rendered in the hard-boiled style of modern screenplays.  Even if, as Griffin readily admits, invisibility is ultimately good for only three things: approaching, getting away, and killing.  Some things, it would seem, are better left undiscovered.