Notes on a Scandal

It would hardly be circumspect to avoid comparing this splendid novel to another English-language work.  Both feature a scandalous and sultry affair between an adolescent and a member of the opposite sex old enough to be the child’s parent, and both precipitate some even rasher decisions.  Most surprising of all, in each case it is the elder lover who loves more and who, unlike this poet, is not as resigned to the truism that equal love cannot be.  Books like these can only be written in the first person because they represent the narrator’s quittance with the world; an omniscient storyteller buoyed by such cynicism would rapidly drift into murky philosophical waters and, frankly speaking, come off as quite a boring old pessimist.  Its immorality notwithstanding, Lolita involves beauty that not everyone is allowed to see, hence the highly subjective first-person narrator and no small amount of pent-up anger after this beauty is lost to him.  Humbert is angry with a modern world that has reduced men of letters to impoverished and risible vagrants; angry with the gods that robbed him, at the tender age of twelve, of his one true love and, with her, his youth, his innocence, and his selflessness; angry at the Philistines who do not recognize his genius (and he is most definitely a genius) and try to make him one of them; angry at his bourgeois wife, her comforting colonel, and the kitschy materialistic values that these boors tend to espouse; and, most unfairly, angry with the young waifs he hires to forget Annabel Lee because they are not Annabel Lee.  Dolores Haze, for all her faults, is not a part of the world he wishes to escape.  For him she embodies the opposite of all that he hates, and so she becomes all that he loves.  The mistake here (which Nabokov brilliantly amends in this later novel as well as in a new English translation of a previous Russian gem) is to seek an apotheosis amidst tawdry and quasi-pornographic circumstances.  Humbert may love his nymphet, but theirs is not a love we can or will ever endorse.  Contemplating such a romance – the novel’s first half – may hardly be differentiated from a poet’s wild fantasies about his lost paradise; but its grunting consummation, the second part of the novel, ushers a few disgusting characters into our theater who proceed to ruin the rest of the performance.  

This is not to say that British writer Zoë Heller, in her second novel, patterns her text on a classic.  Rather, she seems to grasp the age-old concept that you cannot sublimate something intractably earthbound.  The core of a literary work, its banner so to speak, must be a worthy theme: love, death, intellectual curiosity, nostalgia, remorse, happiness, remembrance, and so forth.  It cannot and should never be corporal gratification, however much emotional power such a connection to another human being often produces.  Heller's narrator must then be an old Romantic gazing upon a  princesse lointaine from some secluded nook, maybe simply the other corner of  a teacher's lounge.  She also wisely understands that, to improve the formula, the child should be older (Steven Connolly is fifteen), the first-person narrator should report such an affair instead of experiencing it herself, and, most importantly, the novel should mirthfully slip into satire.  A satire, one might add, of the simplest mold: that of society’s hypocrisy in the face of scandalous private affairs.  These small changes (apart from an older and female narrator) are brilliant enough to cause a seismic shift in perception on the part of the reader. 

 

Officially, the narrative belongs to Barbara Covett, a high school history teacher who, now in her sixties, has never been married.  There have been, she tells us, many special “friends” in her life, but she has chased them all away with her combination of neediness and arrogance.  Barbara does possess a superior intellect and writes alone and confident in a library surrounded by the best of modern English literature.  Her vocabulary’s expanse and acuity of observation are rarely beheld outside the literary arena, and for that reason (among many others) she feels that she cannot relate to anyone the way she relates to her wonderfully blank, wonderfully malleable diary.  It is in this diary that she begins the odyssey of Sheba Hart – 41, haute bourgeoisie wife, mother of two, and soon-to-be adulterous teacher – and Steven Connolly, 15, the working-class boy whose supposed learning disabilities are soothed by a teacher’s caress.  If that last sentence sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is ridiculous: Sheba and Steven are as unlikely a pairing, as oh, say, Sheba and Barbara.  Did I mention that these “friends" of Barbara’s were all women?  Or that Barbara’s text was driven by “an impulse that fell outside the magic circle of sexual orthodoxy”?  

They (Humbarb and Sheblita) become friends at a local high school, but it is evident that neither one of them belongs there.  Barbara should be doing what she does most of the novel, that is, composing her salacious prose; Sheba, however, is not quite as artistic as her pretensions and trendy thoughts try to postulate.  Her husband Richard builds a basement kiln in their privileged residence for her to have a creative outlet, but Sheba ends up frittering away her time in naps and, literally and figuratively, half-baked projects.  What is interesting is how much Barbara, a brilliant psychologist of everyone except herself, demands of Sheba, a rather silly woman who has glided through life without too much countercurrent.  The most minor of Sheba's decisions are hot potatoes, and even her primary lusts are a matter of debate:

It is a nice question as to when exactly Sheba became conscious of having amorous feelings for Connolly or, indeed, became conscious of his having amorous emotions for her.  I have pressed her on many occasions for specificity on this issue, but her responses are maddeningly inconsistent.  At times she will insist that she was guilty of nothing more than maternal fondness for Connolly and was utterly “ambushed” when he first kissed her.  At other times she will coyly volunteer that she “fancied” him from the start.  I daresay we shall never know for certain the exact progress of her romantic attachment.      

Barbara’s queries for ironclad truth are not only stereotypically male, they evince the deep frustration of a scientist who has never learned to empathize with the creatures he studies.  It would almost be inhuman to begrudge Sheba her mixed feelings about such a risky venture.  But it is no surprise that the difference in age between Steven and Sheba is about the same as that between the two teachers, and Barbara, in asking Sheba how she feels about the boy, is essentially asking herself about Sheba.           

 

Barbara, Steven, and Richard are not the only ones who want her: there is another teacher by the name of Bangs who cannot stop imagining himself in Sheba's life.  One peppy day he confronts Barbara with this bit of personal ambition, thereby triggering the decisive series of unfortunate events.  Like all flirts who pretend to be unaware of their attractiveness but leave tangy tastes in their suitors' mouths, Sheba is hypersensitive to the opinions of others.  With occasional impulsive exceptions, she only wants to be wanted, but not pursued, or, God forbid, propositioned.  Rumors start that Barbara, now in wimpled guise, tries her best to squelch.  Well, maybe not her best:

Vulgar speculation about sexual proclivity would seem to be an occupational hazard for a single woman like myself, particularly one who insists on maintaining a certain discretion about her private life.  I know who I am.  If people wish to make up lurid stories about me, that is their affair.  I could not be sure, however, that Sheba would be offended, or enraged, or else horribly embarrassed.  After considering the matter carefully, I decided it was best not to tell her about the rumours.   

But writing about them at length – well, that wouldn’t do any harm whatsoever.  That the end is given full vent at the beginning of the novel helps the reader relish each well-chosen word, each delicate sentence, each felicitous combination of sound and syntax, without racing through what would otherwise be quite a page-turner.  And at the end, when Sheba’s former, changeless life is destroyed (like the tumult caused by her namesake) and her only friend turns out to be a duplicitous and lustful old woman, we sense remorse for, strange as it may seem, only Barbara.  She is, after all, unpleasant and self-serving, but she understands her limitations and parlays them into artistic achievement.  And Sheba?  Sheba is still napping on Barbara’s couch, a few pages into some novel she will never finish.

Sonnets from the Portuguese

Many years ago in a class on Russian literature, I caught myself puzzling over an aside by one of my professors (professors, after all, are famous for their asides).  She claimed that the word poetess was a burden simply because of that triliteral suffix that let us know that George Sand and George Eliot were nothing more than socially acceptable pseudonyms.  Female authors are of course far less of an oddity than they were in the days of this Gothic writer; but how men and women are supposed to differ in writing is similar to how they allegedly differ in other forms of existence.  There are numerous bestselling works on this subject and they are all wrong.  Not that, mind you, women and men shouldn't celebrate their differences, but that they should be chary of obscuring their commonalities.  It is, in all likelihood, much harder to be a woman; they are judged on their appearance much more readily and viciously; they are expected to be weak and vulnerable, because otherwise they might not be deemed womanly; they learn history by learning mostly about the accomplishments and struggles of men; and because of these circumstances they receive different treatment.  When they are emotional, we are not surprised; but when a man is emotional, he steps down the long road to becoming a great poet.  When a woman cries, we shrug our shoulders; when a man cries, he has searched the bottom of his soul for words commensurate with his feelings and surfaced gasping for air.  When a woman loves, it is because she must love in order to be a woman; when a man loves, it is because he has found a woman he can do nothing to but love.  And when a woman finds her faith, it is seen as a fallback position to not making it in the world, whereas for a man it is the beginning of the greatest journey he will ever take.  Which brings us to this collection of poems about both love and faith by one of the finest – male or female – English-language poets.

Of the forty-four sonnets, you will surely know something of the forty-third.  Despite its fame, it is inferior to at least half of its companions, and not only for its simple cadence and almost saccharine pleas to love.  Barrett Browning has a special talent for talking in circles, no less evident in the seventeenth poem:

I never gave a lock of hair away
To a man, Dearest, except this to thee,
Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully
I ring out to the full brown length and say
"Take it."  My day of youth went yesterday; 
My hair no longer bounds to my foot's glee 
Nor plant I it from rose- or myrtle-tree,
As girls do, any more. –
(XVII)

If you like this style of poetry, you will be very happy with Sonnets from the Portuguese, and, I may add, with Barrett Browning's work as a whole.  It is precisely these types of meanderings through girlhood and womanhood, through things that men can only listen to but not experience, that beget the moniker of "female writing," or less graciously, "writing like a woman."  And whatever you may think of them, they have established themselves as veritable methods of investigation in the academic community.  There are many criteria for determining male and female writers, and the criteria, like so many of our loose cultural conventions, have wriggled through a number of distinct phases in the last century and ours (for example, according to one scholar's measuring sticks, the most female of authors is actually this famous Irishman).  Indeed, Barrett Browning is aware of her femininity (a word of which I am hardly fond) insofar as she speaks to her husband, the great poet Robert Browning ("the liberal and princely giver, who hast brought the gold and the purple of thine heart" [VIII]), as his wife.  Half of her sonnets are about being his possession, in every sense of the word, and her understanding that this fatidic relationship has been approved by God.  In the thirty-third poem, she wishes unreluctantly for her husband to return her to her childhood (a wish contradicted by a superb, later poem):

Yes, call me by my pet name! let me hear
The name I used to run at, when a child,
From innocent play, and leave the cowslips piled,
To glance up in some face that proved me dear
With the look of its eyes.  I miss the clear
Fond voices which, being drawn and reconciled 
Into the music of Heaven's undefiled.
Call me no longer. –
(XXXIII)

I can find no fault in these lines; there is no error or misstep; but in comparison to other poems, the expression appears shallow, wasted on frivolous tidbits.  We all miss the "clear, fond voices" of our past, yet nostalgia for these lost people and places – and the younger years of the people we know are all lost – remains one of our most fundamental means for coping with life's downturn, with the misery that besets those who have nothing but brief time ahead.  Barrett Browning is young, but her youth, her maidenhood, is over.  She is now a woman and a wife, and will be so perhaps even "better after death."

Unless your English teacher is of a particular bent,  you will not hear much past the endless love of the Brownings and their unique place in the English literary canon.  Yet Barrett Browning is at her best when her husband, beloved as he may be (the word appears at least a dozen times) becomes an element rather than the target of her verse.  Take, for example, the exquisite thirty-sixth:

When we first met and loved, I did not build
Upon the event with marble.  Could it mean
To last, a love set pendulous between
Sorrow and sorrow?  Nay, I rather thrilled
Distrusting every light that seemed to gild
The onward path, and feared to overlean
A finger even.  And, though I have grown serene
And strong since then, I think that God has willed
A still renewable fear ... O love, O troth ...
Lest these enclasped hands should never hold, 
This mutual kiss drop down between us both
As an unowned thing, once the lips being cold,
And Love be false!  if he, to keep one oath,
Must lose one joy, by his life's star foretold.
(XXXVI)

Were I more prone to hyperbole, I would deem this poem perfect; as it were, it is unblemished.  The sonorous stack of "feared," "overlean," "finger" and "even" cannot possibly be duplicated, and the sense is so precise that no other image quite renders the idea appropriately.  More important for our purposes, however, is the separation of poet and deity: the pairing might indeed have been the work of a higher power, but the poet himself is as human as his wife, who also happens to be a poet.  She cannot "build upon the event with marble" (a stark contrast to this poet's glorious advice "forget thyself to marble") because we are dealing both with mortals and mortals are plagued constantly by one thing, uncertainty.  At times, they know nothing greater than themselves; at others, nothing lowlier.  For that reason, perhaps, we get the following lines:

I lived with visions of my company, 
Instead of men and women, years ago,
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me
(XXVI)

Few finer stanzas will you find in Barrett Browning's work.  What she captures is the essence of every poet's dilemma: to live among the rest, or imagine a world in which to live.  Every poet has preconceived notions of happiness, love, sorrow, anger; every poet wants to know every last emotion and justify it with the very event, good or bad, that might summon it from within him.  What he cannot imagine is that he will not experience everything, love everyone he is destined to love, or write everything that he is destined to write.  Yet he loves the future.  He loves the future because of the anticipation of being an even more accomplished poet.  Not in the sense of commercial success, which is all too often the barometer of mediocrity, but of writing with greater precision and scope.  Is that why Barrett Browning quotes herself in XLII ("my future will not copy fair my past")?  Should we care that she was hesitant to publish these works, with the pet name her husband bestowed upon owing to her appearance?  But Barrett Browning does care, if a bit too much at times, although read as a whole, her poetry is consistently optimistic, faithful, loving, and grateful to life for everything it has given her.  That embrace of life's wonder was rare then and is even rarer now.        

The Scarlet Letter

Claiming that we are all sinners nowadays might evoke a chuckle from those among us who have rejected the possibility of spiritual salvation.  These same people would have us believe that the times have changed and that they with their non-committal commitment to relativity, hedging, oneupmanship and admissions that we know nothing apart from the obvious fact that we can safely rule out the existence of a higher power, are at last in the majority.  Centuries upon ignorant centuries passed in the obscurity of religious humbug, where whole nations shook at the sight of a cross or minaret, everyone was thoroughly convinced that we were just puppets in some omnipotent overlord's hands, and we were all sinners who deserved the wretchedness life foisted upon us.  The brave few who did not buy this codswallop were burned, hanged, drawn and quartered, drowned, or simply tortured into confessing their blasphemy, and in this way the wicked powers that be held sway in all governments of the world at all times.  Thank God – no, actually, we can't thank Him for this –that science finally rose from beneath the cesspool of filthy propaganda to enlighten us with its truths, its methods, and its evidence that no one is looking out for us except ourselves.  History was then rewritten.  Gone were all the miracles, conversions and happiness that so many believers have attained from their faith; in their stead came mounting reports of malfeasance and hypocrisy, of a Church (just to use one obvious example; the criticism was ecumenically fired at all religious institutions) whose leaders had no faith in God but took every precaution to persuade their mindless minions of the populace's need for such an entity.  History in its newest form tells us everyone was religious, stupid and irresponsible, with the significant exception of the mandataries of these teachings.

Should you find yourself nodding along to these accusations as if your own eyes had witnessed them, you might not want to consider that the world is probably more religiously inculcated now than it ever has been.  While many have denounced faith as a useless crutch, many more – from all creeds, races, nations, and income levels – educated themselves and still selected the path of spirituality.  Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the world wars of the twentieth century (not, I should add, the atrocities carried out during these wars) had no religious motivation whatsoever.  Their engines of terror were driven by power and greed, with a dose of ideology for sure; but power and the concomitant material gain fueled the destruction of almost sixty million human beings.  That is because no one can believe in money and power and simultaneously desire the greater good of mankind; no one can rise every morning without a drop of spirituality and truly claim that they will do nice things for people they don't know and reconcile that approach with their goal of money and power; no one can hope to overcome the evils that the worship of money and power promotes by asserting that they are very moral people who simply have chosen not to believe in anything.  If you don't believe in anything higher than yourself, then you only believe in yourself.  And soon enough you will become convinced that your idol (that would be you) deserves everything you can give it.  Worst of all, you think yourself justified because you and you alone are the arbiter of all moral dilemmas, which brings us to an old tale of injustice.

Our story begins after the fact, after the birth of Pearl to a certain Hester Prynne, a young woman whose husband is far away, either above or below the distant seas.  We are dutifully reminded that this is Puritan Massachusetts in the late seventeenth century, site of some of the most infamous witch trials in modern times and a place where nonconformity may merit banishment or annihilation.  Hester is by all indications a striking beauty and as voluptuous as a woman could be in those rigid times, a perfect target for the mediocrity of thought and appearance that would ironically distinguish much later regimes.  She walks the crowds and they look at her with disdain, not because she is a queen among weary pilgrims but because she has been branded like a head of cattle with a bright mark: an A.   Her sin is her child out of wedlock, and she is to be noticed henceforth only for that crime and nothing else.  At the beginning of the novel she is taken before a committee of town elders and asked about the identity of Pearl's father, an interrogation to which she has obviously been subjected many times before.  It cannot be her husband – who must be dead, murmur the townfolk, and, lo, she doesn't have the slightest remorse for his extinction – yet it could be anyone, absolutely anyone among them.  And like every previous inquisition, Hester refuses to answer, which infuriates the crowd including as it were, her long-lost husband, who is much older than Hester and now goes by the name of Roger Chillingworth.

Chillingworth, who confronts only Hester with his resurrection, is the second part of the equation.  Our sole remaining task is to find the true father (should he be among the living) and follow these three branches until they wither and snap.  Since the goal of the novel is not suspense but the tracing of moral consequences in three intertwined lives, the candidates are limited, which allows me to include the following with a clear conscience:

In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne was shocked at the condition to which she found the clergyman reduced. His nerve seemed absolutely destroyed. His moral force was abased into more than childish weakness. It grovelled helpless on the ground, even while his intellectual faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given them. With her knowledge of a train of circumstances hidden from all others, she could readily infer, that, besides the legitimate action of his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been brought to bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale's well-being and repose. Knowing what this poor, fallen man had once been, her whole soul was moved by the shuddering terror with which he had appealed to her – the outcast woman – for support against his instinctively discovered enemy. She decided, moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid. Little accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself, Hester saw – or seemed to see – that there lay a responsibility upon her, in reference to the clergyman, which she owned to no other, nor to the whole world besides. The links that united her to the rest of human kind – links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the material – had all been broken. Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break. Like all other ties, it brought along with it its obligations.

That "terrible machinery" is the skulduggery of a single individual who shall remain nameless even if little sleuthing is required, but let us digress for a moment.  Hawthorne's style never again achieved (I spent many a summer night on his other works, to little satisfaction) this twinning of artistic precision and clarity of righteousness.   Passage after passage, you will be stunned at what beauty he finds in a collation of trivia, asides, gestures, and very private thoughts.  You may have leafed through or been forcefed The Scarlet Letter during your high school years and shaken your head at the hypocrisy of all involved (children and adolescents love it when parents lay down the law but then forget to follow their own rules),  and you were probably told some rot about how the book depicts a uniquely American experience.  Unfortunately, uniquely American experiences tend to involve economic freedom, labor mobility and extreme multiculturalism; the tale as Hawthorne spins it is as old as time itself.  Consider then why he should tell it again and what is added to our lore of extramarital affairs, small-minded townsfolk, red-cheeked revenge and the gnaw of guilt that can eat someone's entrails bite by bite.  The retelling not only reflects Hawthorne's particular views on the history of Massachusetts (that is the boring detail that gets many simple-minded teachers very excited), there lurks first and foremost an artistic urge to write the perfect allegory.  What could be more perfect than a sin that taints everyone in close proximity like a virus and then proceeds to watch them flail and kick against the crimes they have committed – and we are not talking about Hester.  Is this not the pinnacle of artistic achievement?  After all, it is Hester who has suffered: society has shunned and mistreated her to such a degree that she can no longer "measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself."  Whatever you think is moral and whatever seems to you to be just, if Hester truly cannot grasp that the moral law is both within and without her, she is no better than a desperado cowboy barging into a saloon and gunning down anyone who looks at him for a second too long, much less scoffs at his choice of drink.  But that's an American tale for another day.

The Book of Evidence

There is an unfortunate subgenre of popular fiction which can simply be labeled “the confessions of a killer.”  Even unaided by cable or other lurid purveyors of societal atrocities, an attentive observer would find many such works in any bookstore servicing the whims of the demos.  We are intrigued by such stuff, if only for a moment, because we are naturally attracted to evil.  Not because we are inherently evil ourselves — we are, I say boldly, nothing of the kind — but because bad things show us the counterpoise to normalcy that stirs our juices with the potential knowledge of why there is so much vileness in our world.  This is why the more morbid or unrepentant the culprits, the more galling and demented the crimes, the more revolting the violence, the faster the chill that races up our spines as we lurch closer to Old Nick himself.  These diabolists ratiocinate at each step of their miserable life, from the most fundamental of daily tasks to love, death, and betrayal.  Everything has a cause, effect and logical framework; everything is the fault of others who conspire against them to bring out their very worst; every line, every feature, every shadow spreads like an inkwell across the virgin white page; and what they did is simply the unerring mathematical consequence of these factors.  Yet the true indication of a master stylist is not what to include, but what to omit; and no, every last detail does not need to be fanned into a Chinese lantern.  Which brings us to the jailbird confessions of Freddie Montgomery, the insufferable protagonist of this novel.

Our book is divided in halves.  There is first and predictably a long introduction to a crime whose gory details are suggested in asides and semi−demented philosophizing.  Our man Freddie is not an original thinker, nor, one should add, does he have any pretensions in that general direction.  He is “amazed at the blue innocence of the sea and sky.”  His morals are nonexistent, but so is his lucidity of thought.  It is in the sweat−stained journal of a degenerate teenager that we may expect comments on “the bad in its inert, neutral, self−sustaining state,” a fallacy in reasoning so basic that its mention begets only shudders and headshaking.  He has a wife, Daphne, a son, and two parents all painted in the most grotesque colors, each description increasingly exaggerated, momentum caused by the excitement of stringing together macabre observations.  Yet occasionally these suicidal rantings swirl into a divine wind:

I thought how strange it was to be here like this, glass in hand, in the silence and calm of a summer evening, while there was so much darkness in my heart.  I turned and looked up at the house.  It seemed to be flying swiftly against the sky.  I wanted my share of this richness, this gilded ease.  From the depths of the room a pair of eyes looks out, dark, calm, unseeing.

This is the mood throughout: bouts of insuppressible guilt interrupted only by noticing that he has been bleeding for the last thirty minutes.  That Freddie has killed, or the identity of his victim, which is not immediately obvious, should not interest us as much as the descent of his soul into absolute darkness.  I suppose we are to be enthralled by this cultured person (he is a proponent and student of statistics and probability theory), fallen and forlorn.  I suppose as well that the freak gallery that pervades the world of Freddie Montgomery — a man possessing “an inveterate yearning towards backgrounds” so as to avoid his reality’s loathsome foreground — must be seen as they are described, as an acting troupe of clowns and charlatans, drunks and dyspeptics.  And I also suppose that Freddie and his moral warts are to be forgiven long enough for us to be aware of how much everything has changed, and how, how, how this could happen to anyone at all.

But we are not aware.  We are not aware because despite the backcover blurbs, Banville’s intention is nothing of the kind.  He seeks first and foremost, like all good writers, a collation of pleasing detail in an atmosphere of his choosing.  That is why we shuttle between Spain, a country Freddie despises once his wife and son are left as hostages, and Merrie England, where the native Irishman also does not seem to belong.  It is only when Freddie describes what he truly loves (this Irish port being one of those things) that Banville’s carbons crystalize into a diamond:

In the ten years since I had last been here something had happened, something had befallen the place.  Whole streets were gone, the houses torn out and replaced by frightening blocks of steel and black glass.  An old square where Daphne and I lived for a while had been razed and made into a vast, cindered car−park.  I saw a church for sale — a church, for sale!  Oh, something dreadful had happened.  The very air itself seemed damaged.  Despite the late hour a faint glow of daylight lingered, dense, dust−laden, like the haze after an explosion, or a great conflagration.  People in the streets had the shocked look of survivors, they seemed not to walk but reel.  I got down from the bus and picked my way among them with lowered gaze, afraid I might see horrors.

You will find motifs and motives in this painting, as well as in a certain bombing that may be the handiwork of a politically violent faction, but this passage alone justifies Freddie’s lapsarian musings and outshines every other moment in the novel.  So you shouldn’t necessarily believe Freddie when he claims his life has no moments, just the “ceaseless, slow, demented drift of things.”  His crime has neither passion nor meaning, which we cannot say about the starry sky above his darkened cell.

Vampires and Vampirism

Rarely do I peruse customer reviews because, as a rule, they are overly positive, overly negative, or so general as to add no stickiness to the paste.  But I had to smile at some proffered insight into another of this author’s books which I will do the critic the dishonor of paraphrasing.  According to this most disappointed reader, Monsignor Summers (if he were indeed ever ordained, a matter of biographical debate) is, like “most religious writers … horribly tainted” by his beliefs; he "cannot seem to write a line without referring to Our Holy Father" (which the critic, to underscore his consistency, does not capitalize); he “picks his flavor” according to his religious beliefs, not according to “proof”; with the result being a “narrow−minded” book with “strong marks of fundamentalism.”  Whatever the dyes Summers uses to color his quilt, quoting hundreds of texts in six languages from the last twenty−five centuries is probably not the most appropriate example of “narrow−minded.”  Nor does “fundamentalism” have anything at all to do with his beliefs, which are heretical in a harmless way and as far from standard doctrine as they could possibly be with good intentions.  But the real howler here is the idea that proof and belief have anything to do with one another, and that only “religious writers” (somewhat of a redundancy, for all first−rate writers have some religion) cherry−pick what they need for their arguments while the great objective empiricists include all the facts, pro and contra, before drawing their conclusions.  I cannot imagine what our good reviewer was seeking to find in a book written by a priest on the occult, but his lack of appreciation is exceeded only by my pity.  Which brings us to an authoritative take on what is presumably a fictional subject.

I say “presumably” because as fantastic and preposterous as vampires may sound, you may never find another text that could more convince you of their reality.  This has much to do with the way in which Summers, an eccentric man of awesome learning, chooses to present his information.  He is not looking at teethmarks, scrutinizing autopsy reports, or investigating missing persons; rather, he is suggesting what spiritual penury could result in a state of living death and the traditional beliefs that reflect this possibility.  He begins exactly where one should begin in such argumentation: with some of the countless occurrences of persons buried alive.  These are not, mind you, intentional happenings, but weird stoppages of vital signs that persisted long enough to persuade the local medical authorities that nothing more could be done.  We are introduced to examples from Hellenic and Slavic culture — the countries of the Balkan Sprachbund being the wellspring of vampiric lore — as well as other instances from European, African and Asian lands.  Summers then proceeds with ecclesiastical justifications for casting someone out of the church, as well as the mania of suicide that has become such an accepted component of modern society that we think little of its spiritual consequences.  As it were, features commonly associated with a vampire have their roots in basic beliefs about suicide, burial, excommunication and human psychology, although there exist less tantalizing explanations for all these phenomena (usually, that they are the products of ignorant superstition).  Yet we are never told that we must think it so; we only understand that this is his belief laid out before us like a shroud upon an oaken bier.

The instances he localizes and enumerates are impressive enough, but our respect as scholars is overtaken by our pleasure as readers.  Most renowned as the first English translator of this evil book, Summers has a lush, somewhat archaic style of perfectly weighed phrases and endless libraries to feed his metaphors and sidelights.  Take, for one, his opinion on suicide:

The belief that a man has not complete dominion over his own life and that it is unlawful for him to take it is certainly a feeling naturally implanted in the human breast, and it was only when nations were entirely barbarian or had become decadent and corrupt that the notion of suicide was held up as noble and even heroic.  Whatever certain among the later Greeks may have practiced and taught, in earlier days, as we have seen, the act of suicide was regarded as a dark and presumptuous deed.  They truly felt that there was something of ἀσέβεια, something of that  ὕβρις which so surely stirred the wrath of heaven and inevitably called down righteous vengeance.

In one way or another, we are all familiar with the pitfalls of hubris.  “Impiety” (ἀσέβεια) was the charge leveled at Socrates and later at Aristotle for crimes that they could not possibly have committed.  The obvious idea here is that life is a gift: those who choose death as some form of refuge from daily ills (Summers does not fault the poor and miserable among the suicides whose existence is but a litany of suffering) should be condemned to it eternally.  Thence is derived the mentality, to use a modern term, of the vampire, of living death, of sleeping through every manifestation of the sun, and of preying upon those who have chosen to carry on regardless of the odds.

The book culminates in two learned chapters on the vampire in literature, old and new.  We saunter through the twilights of Assyria, Polynesia, pre−Colombian Mexico, China, and, most of all, India, which has a longer and more pronounced tradition than perhaps any region on earth save the aforementioned Balkans.  Here we find curious correlations in legend, and a rather unpleasant collation of detail.  So when the final chapter on modern literature begins with a consideration of this horrific tale from the coldest reaches of Sweden, we are already sufficiently gorged on bloodthirsty subjects to discern the subtleties of storytelling that inform our images.  And our images are not only tainted with our beliefs, they seem to shadow them like soundless serpents wandering near our ankles in the dark.  Non timebis a timore nocturne.