Robert Louis Stevenson

The most really Stevensonian scenes, in their spirit and spitfire animation, are those which occur first in the prison.

                                                                                                             G. K. Chesterton

When I was in graduate school, one of my professors casually mentioned that he had been named for this writer whom, he implied, he was obliged to hold in high esteem. That he did not particularly care for Stevenson and was instead enamored with Russian writers whom he found infinitely more exotic than a shaggy-haired Scotsman who would suddenly die while mixing an exotic salad in the South Pacific, seems hardly surprising given that Stevenson is often seen as nothing more than a children's writer with success among adults. One of my favorite books as a child was this magical tome, and many of my coevals (but not I, for some reason) reveled in this classic tale whose villain became the name of a chain of budget seafood restaurants. Yet the most famous of Stevenson's creations, and the ones which have passed into common idiom, are the titular characters of this story, even though the two characters are actually the sum of one man. For that reason perhaps has modern criticism been rather harsh with Stevenson: he has been accused in reveling in boys' tales, children's worlds of fancy and monsters and pirates, and for never really developing a serious brand of literature to meet our serious tastes. Indeed, the same mudslinging that is pitched at this bestselling series (which, despite its massive adult readership, is intellectually designed for adolescents) has been the bane of Stevenson scholarship since his premature death in 1894. There have been encomia and anthologies, but few have been gracious or understanding. Maybe his stoic Scots wit lies at the center of this neglect; maybe Stevenson simply did not live long enough to manifest the true signs of his genius. One rather remarkable biography agrees with the first point but not the second.

There are many ways to approach Stevenson's oeuvre, and Chesterton is convinced they are all wrong. "The story of Stevenson," he writes, "was a reaction against an age of pessimism." Stevenson was born at almost precisely the median point between the publication of two books, The Voyage of the Beagle and On the Origin of Species, that would change our perspective on what it meant to be human; if this were not sufficiently disastrous, Stevenson was also born in Scotland. More than mild chauvinism coats the backhanded compliments that Chesterton hurls at his northern brethren ("A Scotsman is never denationalized"; "There is something shrill, like the skirl of the pipes, about Scottish laughter; occasionally something very nearly insane about Scottish intoxication"; "The Scots are in a conspiracy to praise each other"), and it is this "Presbyterian country, where still rolled the echoes, at least, of the theological thunders of Knox," that framed Stevenson's window on the world. Over his short lifetime Stevenson abandoned his faith to a great extent but retained his categories; in fact, he retained them so strongly as to make any real difference between his rhetoric and that of a Kirk pastor purely one of vocabulary:

Those dry Deists and hard-headed Utilitarians who stalked the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were very obviously the products of the national religious spirit. The Scottish atheists were unmistakable children of the Kirk. And though they often seemed absurdly detached and dehumanised, the world is now rather suffering for want of such dull lucidity.

This detachment, this streamlined austerity, this "economy of detail and suppression of irrelevance which had at last something about it stark and unnatural" – this was how Stevenson built his world that was both varied and thematically coherent. Gone are the comparisons to this writer (whose atmosphere Chesterton aptly describes as "a sort of rich rottenness of decomposition, with something thick and narcotic in the very air," a perfect account of hell), and provided are likenings to no one else because, as it were, Stevenson has no true peer. 

In fact, his combination of childish tenderness and zeal – hence the suppression of irrelevance – with the dark materials of adult interaction could be laughed at as puerile or praised as visionary. Chesterton suggests the latter course, for one very good reason:

But most men know that there is a difference between the intense momentary emotion called up by memory of the loves of youth, and the yet more instantaneous but more perfect pleasure of the memory of childhood. The former is always narrow and individual, piercing the heart like a rapier; but the latter is like a flash of lightning, for one split second revealing a whole varied landscape; it is not the memory of a particular pleasure any more than of a particular pain, but of a whole world that shone with wonder. The first is only a lover remembering love; the second is like a dead man remembering life.

In contrast to so many literary biographies which underscore "real-life" events over the works in the author's library because most every reader can empathize with childhood, adolescence, marriage, heartbreak, children, aging, and even the death of a relative or friend, Chesterton's discusses Stevenson's works with occasional allusions to his life (the exact same biographic method used in this fine study). Stevenson's life is not particularly well-known (a dearth of detail has never stopped an imaginative biographer), and Chesterton farrows no new animalia in this distant kingdom; rather, he begins with "The Myth of Stevenson" and ends with "The Moral of Stevenson," as if a retelling of his life were something like a fable. He explores Edinburgh but makes almost no mention of those Pacific islands; he speaks of style but not in comparison to anyone else's, as if Stevenson's style were a reflection of his unique childhood; he suggests a philosophy of gesture in the sense of a chanson de geste; and he quibbles not unconvincingly over Stevenson's reaction to romance and Romanticism, although Stevenson was undoubtedly a Romantic if a rather meticulous one. And what is most remarkable is how little Stevenson himself is quoted, with one of his more famous lines being clipped into a short phrase.

Chesterton is more interested in Stevenson's books than his life not only because his books were deceptively demanding and literate, but also because for all authors – and especially Stevenson who spent most of his waking hours as a convalescent in the prison of his bedroom – their real life is in their books. Their biographies are not those of ordinary men because to achieve their artistic ends they forsake much of the lowlier stuff life has to offer. In our day and age these activities would include: television, video games, touristic vacations of mindlessly banal but often scenic resorts, magazines, gambling, motorcycles, drugs, hunting, and a variety of expensive, time-consuming, and exhausting sports.  In their stead would come daily reading and writing, long walks, sitting and staring at what nature mankind has left unharmed, talking warmly to loved ones and cherishing each moment as if separation were imminent, laughing at the silliness and fraudulence of the world, and loving what we have and what we might have in the future. But most people would find such a life devoid of intrigue and let it sit, unsurveyed, upon a dusty shelf like so many of Stevenson's works sit now in all the old libraries of the world.  What a mistake that would be.

Strangers on a Train

He felt two forces, one that would move the arm and another that would not, balancing themselves so perfectly his arm was not even tense.

Have we all plotted murder in our minds? It seems like harsh Philistinism to assent to such a claim; yet we have all had our share of enemies, from the schoolchild bully who reappears as the workplace gossip or the ferociously jealous sibling of a friend or beau. The fact is that few of us have pleased everyone; fewer still have remained unscathed from the welts and scars that terrestrial life begets. As children we found it convenient to dispose of our daydreamed foes; but as adults pangs of conscience, a feeling as nebulous as karma (which, if it exists as I believe it does, is simply the boomerang of moral law), and other such qualms usually whisper that these are dark alleys down which we should not venture. Yet what if, in the bloody thrall of a childish daydream while in the body of a law-abiding adult, we come across a being who proposes a diabolic pact to rid ourselves of the person we loathe? An old question, perhaps, but one explored magnificently in this classic novel.  

The young man who would be our hero if it weren't for some serious character flaws is a budding architect by the name of Guy Haines. Guy is twenty-six, "five-foot nine, and one hundred forty pounds," a small, slender man whose nervousness is not mitigated by his awesome coffee consumption ("ten cups a day," he at one point confesses). His ambition involves nothing less than becoming the greatest architect in America, a desire fueled more by energy and talent than competitiveness: he is passionate about architecture, loves working, and, according to everyone else (Guy will pendulate violently between self-doubt and self-exaltation), could be the most talented young architect anyone has ever seen. If this premise sounds a tad overweening, there lurks a commensurate payoff: Guy has a devil of a wife, Miriam, a plague upon his body and mind, who will not so nonchalantly agree to a divorce. Miriam is cruel, vulgar, and promiscuous (a long-faced, married playboy called Steve initially triumphs over a slew of lesser rivals, although he too will be overthrown) – which should tell you something about Guy. But she is also nubile and cunning, as she must be to overcome such frailties. And in their brief span together Miriam certainly succeeded in carving Guy hollow:

The word 'marriage' lingered in Guy's ears ... it was a solemn word to him. It had the primordial solemnity of holy, love, sin. It was Miriam's round terra-cotta-colored mouth saying, 'Why should I put myself out for you?' .... It was Miriam turning from the tall, thin window in the room in Chicago, lifting her freckled, shield-shaped face directly up to his as she always did before she told a lie, and Steve's long dark head, insolently smiling .... He saw the afternoon in Chicago, framed by the doorway of his room, the image grey and black now like a photograph. The afternoon he had found them in the apartment, like no other afternoon, with its own color, taste, and sound, its own world, like a horrible little work of art. Like a date in history fixed in time. Or wasn't it just the opposite, that it traveled with him always?

Guy is professedly a man of faith, which may not be surprising (his conscience will run a decathlon), but Guy is a man of many things. And while the afternoon "like no other afternoon" might remind a reader of Emma Zunz's tragedy as the sole and eternal occurrence, Guy's destiny is sealed when, on an otherwise uneventful train trip, he meets a tall, alcoholic psychopath from Texas called Charles Anthony Bruno. 

That Bruno is insane can be surmised from this first encounter, which showcases one of the more famous offers in modern literature: Bruno will kill Miriam if Guy will do away with Bruno's greedy and unloving father. This trade scheme of unrelated murders is admittedly not very original, having been lifted from numerous noir paperbacks you and I will never read. Yet to Guy, whose last name recollects the French word for hate just as his first name, also French, makes him an average among equals, merely the thought of Miriam dead is so delicious that he has lunch with Bruno as a sort of vicarious pleasure. Some critics would emphasize the career enhancement opportunity stymied by Miriam's presence, a detail I will not spoil; others might think Guy's current girlfriend, Anne, who will make a legitimate run at the title of Longest-Suffering Significant Other, is reason enough to hope for an end to Miriam's days. But an odd passage when Guy is with Anne and her parents in Mexico City suggests something else at work:

He was staying at the Hotel Montecarlo .... One entered it through a wide carriage drive, paved in black and white like a bathroom floor. This gave into a huge dark lobby, also tile floored. There was a grotto-like bar-room and a restaurant that was always empty. Stained marble stairs wound around the patio, and going up behind the bellhop yesterday, Guy had seen, through open doorways and windows, a Japanese couple playing cards, a woman kneeling at prayer, people writing letters at tables or merely standing with a strange air of captivity. A masculine gloom and an untraceable promise of the supernatural oppressed the whole place, and Guy had liked it instantly.

The chessboard floor tiles, "playing cards," "captivity," empty restaurant," and "untraceable promise of the supernatural" all echo the fateful dinner with an evil man he should have avoided, a gambler not unlike the God of Bargains. The woman at prayer may be Guy's mother, or even Bruno's (Bruno will be portrayed as having an unhealthy interest in his mother's looks), and the black-and-white aspect, the suggestion of both newsprint headlines and strict categories, may be understood as corrosive to Guy's mind. Two images, however, extrude the "stained marble stairs," foreshadowing a hideous crime, and the "masculine gloom," the smell of war, of killing your brothers, of the endless protection of endless things, both of which stand in contrast to what Guy really wants – a wife, family, and home. The path to achieve such goals is undoubtedly facilitated by Miriam's bizarre murder, a murder not so much witnessed as sensed by a few of her libertine friends. A murder that so conveniently takes place when her husband is still in the land of Aztecs, Mayas, and very gloomy hotels. Bruno does not delay in refreshing Guy's memory of their little chat – on the train Guy carelessly left behind his personalized copy of Plato's works – and our game has begun.

Cinéastes recur with pleasure to the film based on our novel, but the two works' discrepancies are so glaring as to beggar belief. Hitchcock's Guy is not an architect, but an "amateur tennis star," which makes so little sense for a number of reasons that we had best forget about it. Other alterations, however, are far less pardonable: Guy cannot alibi for himself in Mexico since the action is transferred to the American Northeast corridor, stripping the film of its heat-induced visions and sleazy sultriness; a feeble political undercurrent is generated – 1950s America, like its present version, was infested with panicmongers – by making Anne's father a United States senator; Anne gets a sister who is mauled by Bruno in a regrettable scene which, alas, triggers even more hare-brained vignettes, including Anne's paying a visit to Bruno's mother; and, perhaps most indicatively, Plato is jettisoned in favor of a cigarette lighter with the initials of a famous amateur tennis player. There is, of course, another difference, one so woeful as to deprive the film of any artistic integrity whatsoever, but we will leave that iniquity for the curious viewer to discover. One of the pleasures of reading Highsmith is her fearless attention to detail: "The voice [was] lewd in the morning, ugly with the complexities of night"; "Like an enormous walnut in feeble, jittery squirrel hands, an idea, bigger and closer than any idea he had ever known, had been revolving in his mind for several days"; "Bruno jumped up and shouted against the roar of her running bath"; "A girl's scream was a long arc in silence and somehow the scream made it final"; "In the mirror his face looked like a battlefield in hell"; "The facts repeated and repeated lost their horror and even their drama for Guy: they were like dull blows of a hammer, nailing the story in his mind forever"; "In the night, one approached truth merely at a certain slant, but all truth was the same"; "When she dabbled her paintbrush fast in a glass of water, the sound was like laughter." And yet the most significant and dazzling of Highsmith's sentences may be one of the shortest: "Every telephone suggested Guy." The suggestion is to Bruno, who "didn't care too much about sleeping with women," deeming such acts "a silly business."  What then is not a silly business?  Well, Guy is not silly, and Guy and Bruno are good friends, aren't they now?  Is that why, upon meeting Anne, Bruno claims he and the architect – who have nothing, absolutely nothing in common – were school mates?  If only Guy were as talented in nature as he is in artifice.

cinéastes

The Black Prince

It is the woman's privilege to save herself at the man's expense.

You may know little about this author apart from what was depicted in this film, which for more than one reason I cannot recommend. Despite Bayley's presumably good intentions, the portrait of his wife could not have been any less flattering (if Iris had its way, Murdoch's sexuality and dreadful descent into dementia would become the bookends on her memorial), although writers in film rarely come off as anything other than bores, neurotic bastards, or incorrigible dreamers. Pondering what Murdoch the woman was and wasn't does not befit the discriminating reader: any biography of hers may have anecdotal value, but her true life is her literary oeuvre, the history of her soul. An odd interest in Murdoch has persisted owing to a childhood recollection of two of her books gracing my parents' shelves. The first one has a most peculiar name, but everything thereafter came as a disappointment; the second, far greater work, is this fine novel.

Our time and place is early 1970s London, and our narrator is a high-strung, largely unsuccessful British writer by the name of Bradley Pearson. Readers who like symbols and crossword puzzles will immediately note that the book's title and protagonist share initials (readers such as these, I fear, will find little catnip among my pages). At fifty-eight, Pearson is well past life's middle path; he is childless and bitterly divorced, although his sexual affiliation will be questioned on more than one occasion; his friends and acquaintances are few; he is most certainly an alcoholic; and his family consists primarily of his sister Priscilla, who will turn out in her harmless Philistine way to be one of the most annoying characters in modern literature. Pearson has published a few books to critical and consumer indifference but insists, as good writers must, that his inner life replete with unwritten tomes more than compensates for this lack of recognition (his style is streaked with genius). His nemesis, therefore, must be a prolific and utterly worthless writer who hardly bothers to edit a single line of his trendy triteness. A profile apposite to Pearson's old chum, Arnold Baffin:

I 'discovered' Arnold, a considerably younger man, when I was already established as a writer, and he, recently out of college, was just finishing his first novel .... He was a schoolmaster, having lately graduated in English literature at the University of Reading. We met at a meeting. He coyly confessed his novel. I expressed polite interest. He sent me the almost completed typescript. (This was, of course, Tobias and the Fallen Angel. Still, I think, his best work.) I thought the piece had some merits and I helped him to find a publisher for it. I also reviewed it quite favorably when it came out. Thus began one of the most, commercially speaking, successful of recent literary careers. Arnold at once, contrary as it happens to my advice, gave up his job as a teacher and devoted himself to 'writing.' He wrote easily, producing every year a book which pleased the public taste. Wealth, fame followed.

Like all thriving second-raters, Baffin is worshipped by the average person impressed by his own ignorance and too scared to develop his own opinion (indeed, one minor character stares dimly as she labels Baffin "her favorite writer"). That Pearson has maintained his alleged friendship with Baffin, going so far as to have become a weekly dinner guest, might bespeak envy or simply the proximity that two people who love books require, even if what they get out of books is decidedly different. The fact that Pearson accords most praise to Arnold's first novel (likely started while still an undergraduate, when one knows absolutely nothing), and that the novel's title suggests a young readers' paperback about Biblical characters, should tell you all you need to know about Arnold Baffin.  

As we begin our tale, therefore, Arnold summons Pearson to his house after a domestic incident concludes in abject cruelty. Mrs. Rachel Baffin, a tall, spatially disruptive woman with freckles, is comforted by Pearson and we quickly learn about their insidious past together. Of course, since there is nothing easier to write about than betrayal, this past will bleed into the present, a point that cannot be overstated, and yet Pearson is only half-heartedly interested in Rachel the person. Rachel the fictional creation of the novel he is "destined" to write, however, fills him with action, literary action, that is, the unquenchable desire to reproduce emotions and thoughts in a tidy, ethical framework. I say "ethical" framework not only to betray my own sensibilities, but also those of Bradley Pearson, that self-anointed "puritan," and lifelong member of "some old unpassionate, rather ascetic cult." Pearson's wish is that we see him not necessarily as "ethical," but that we see him at all. That we notice him from amidst the throngs of published authors who write about themselves and their circles of family, friends, and lovers and hope to God that a somewhat less ordinary existence could interest an outsider. We meet the other persons in this circle and grow more suspicious of Pearson's motives: there is Priscilla, his only sibling, a hysterical, wretched disaster freshly dumped by her rat of a husband, even if, knowing how she is, no one could possibly blame him; Francis, Pearson's brother-in-law and, as opposed to Bradley, a non-functioning alcoholic; Christian, the erstwhile Mrs. Pearson, a rich widow fresh off a couple of decades in the New World; and finally Julian Baffin, twenty, female, named after the saint, the Baffins' only child and the third main character with an androgynous first name. Why is that significant? Well, it likely isn't; it is rather a tactic to remind us to consider another, far less interesting reading of The Black Prince of the kind so beloved by fashionable minds who construct their insipid labyrinths only to cloak their utter lack of talent. Pearson will learn something very interesting about Christian and something in a way just as shocking about Francis. But his aim throughout is self-discovery, the writer's "dream of a silence which [he] must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn," and over the novel's longish arc we will discover quite a great deal about Bradley Pearson.  

Murdoch's prose has much to offer those who cannot do without impeccable style, a fact which, coupled with her strong moral compass, would be enough to guarantee her legacy. Nevertheless, she is often deemed a "philosopher," as if the added title does her or that nebulous word any justice whatsoever. Even if we were to consider The Black Prince the summit of her achievement, masticating too long on the asides and aphorisms would only direct the preprogrammed and dull to explore vacuous alleys. Samples of the style prove the point: "Julian suggested that we should collect some wood for the fire, but this proved difficult because every bit of wood we found was far too beautiful to burn"; "These were not words, but the highest coinage of human speech melted down, become pure song, something vilely, almost murderously gorgeous"; "The future had passed through the present like a sword"; "In waiting time devours itself .... yet at the same instant the terrified mind has flown ahead through centuries of unenlightened despair"; "The return of a passionate letter unread desolates far regions of the imagination"; "Death always seems to commit truth to some wider and larger court"; "The hand of death modelled him speedily, soon made his head a skull"; "Like spirits of the damned pricked by the devil's fork we bounded up." A casual sexist − a most unintendedly fabulous term − might comment that far too many humid, chatty conversations surface in The Black Prince, conversations that no male writer would ever deign to record. Given what Pearson consistently says about such techniques, the inclusion of these chats (some of them, admittedly, could stand to be diminished) should be understood as ironical, a brilliant method allowing characters to perjure themselves. And why would any one of these fine citizens perjure himself? Perhaps because no character, fictional or otherwise, may have "unassailable dignity." But whether they have any at all is another matter entirely.  

The Talented Mr. Ripley (novel)

Every morning he watched the sun, from his bedroom window, rising through the winter mists, struggling upward over the peaceful-looking city, breaking through finally to give a couple of hours of actual sunshine before noon, and the quiet beginning of each day was like a promise of peace in the future. The days were growing warmer. There was more light, and less rain. Spring was almost here, and one of these mornings, one morning finer than these, he would leave the house and board a ship for Greece.

You may never have considered how you evaluate characters in a work of fiction, but you certainly pass some kind of judgment. For the dreamers among us, there will be a direct correlation between the fictional and real worlds whereby the problems and solutions of one will be transposed into the other. The way in which a character manages his morals should allow you to deselect some of those vapid adventures where "everything is possible" because as one critic noted in a different context, if anything goes then nothing can be funny. How very true. The same can be said of any film or book praised by the irresponsible among us for being "immoral" or "amoral," with some preferring the latter because it seems to involve love. What they are really saying is that they feel repressed by the status quo or normal, good, basic values and this work grants them a fantastic outlet. There is nothing terribly wrong with such a desire provided this outlet is superior to other outlets, which I fear smacks of old-fashioned Victorian dos and don'ts. Good that such simplistic classifications don't really bother the eponymous character of this novel.

Our hero, if that is truly the right word, is first depicted as prey, a role he will come to relish. Whatever we learn of Thomas Ripley in the pages that follow, his innate ability for subterfuge and skulduggery should not be disesteemed. He is tailed into a bar by what turns out to be fortune itself: Herbert Greenleaf, the father of someone he does not know very well has tracked Ripley down as a potential conduit to his self-exiled progeny – if painting and sunbathing in Italy qualify as exile. Words are exchanged that afford the reader far greater insight into Ripley's motives than Greenleaf could ever dream of contemplating and a deal is struck: Ripley is to travel to Europe on Greenleaf's money – the name choice is now painfully clear – to track down Dickie Greenleaf with the aim of homeward persuasion. An odd job for an odd fellow:

A cap was the most versatile of head-gears, he thought, and he wondered why he had never thought of wearing one before? He could look like a country gentleman, a thug, an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a plain American eccentric, depending on how he wore it. Tom amused himself with it in his room in front of the mirror. He had always thought he had the world's dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase. A real conformist's face, he thought. The cap changed all that. It gave him a country air, Greenwich, Connecticut, country. Now he was a young man with a private income, not long out of Princeton, perhaps. He bought a pipe to go with the cap.

No other paragraph in The Talented Mr. Ripley more aptly describes its protagonist. So you will not be overmuch surprised to learn what "the world's dullest face" can do when cornered. And cornered he will be when he comes upon Dickie Greenleaf and the nominal woman in his life, Margaret Sherwood.

Margaret, dite Marge, has all the trappings of a standard issue 1950s American sweetheart. Her only added twist are her two distinct ambitions: publishing her book on photography and marrying Dickie Greenleaf. Dickie is indifferent to both these pursuits, but perhaps because his intellect only allows him to remain on the surface of things, be those things emotions, languages, or human psychology. A nice, unintelligent, conventionally handsome fellow of absolutely no talent; and yet Tom never considers that he would have become much like Dickie Greenleaf had he fed from the same silver spoon. The life of the young couple, apparently not yet lovers in the modern sense of the word, is invaded until Tom makes a fateful decision that involves murdering and replacing an indifferent, third-rate painter whose father is patiently awaiting his return stateside. This is done in a boat in San Remo and will foreshadow another murder involving a car at another Italian location, and the plot has all the petrol it will need for a long and high-speed journey. Tom usurps what he wants of Dickie's existence – primarily, the insouciance and principles of easy living – and does not consider the consequences in their dreadful entirety. He learns Italian by studying it with diligence and interest, and continues relentlessly in his attempts to lead a placid post-War life. But he encounters more than a few obstacles: Marge's inquiries, a porcine boor by the name of Freddie Miles, and a platoon of Italian law enforcement officers who resemble each other just as much as Tom looks like Dickie (Tom is actually interviewed in both identities by the same policeman). These omnipresent coppers come off more than once as disturbingly incompetent, an impression unchanged by Herbert Greenleaf's hiring of an American gumshoe to find his vanished son.   

While refraining from acerbic asides, Highsmith directs her genius to the smallest of details with a precision seldom found in modern belles lettres ("They were interrupted for a minute while Mr. Greenleaf saw that they were all seated"; "He stopped in front of an antique shop window and stared for several minutes at a gloomy oil painting of two bearded saints descending a dark hill in moonlight"; "The Via Appica stretched out before him, grey and ancient in the soft lights of its infrequent lamps"). The result is compelling in the same way that all artistic, thoughtful enterprises are compelling: they modulate our own definition of what art is. Ripley may be a sociopath, but the methods with which he hoodwinks and dispatches nuisances (you will never forget the scene with the shoe) speak of a great mind exercising his cerebral precedence over human mediocrity. The tale has been told in many different formats but almost invariably with an amount of disgust for the peon, the ignorant and the uncultured citizen who would never in a thousand moons be able to figure out the machinations of a certain Thomas Ripley. To her credit Highsmith does not pander to this facile conceit, one that is particularly disdained by oversensitive critics who think the author might have in mind these selfsame critics. We end up rooting for Ripley to succeed, and not only because he is smarter than everyone else. He is an atypical underdog, both sexually and intellectually dangerous, and his knocking off of the rich can easily be interpreted in the Robin Hood language we knew as children, bereft of course of the silly Marxist impositions. The difference is that this Robin Hood wants all of Sherwood Forest to himself. 

The original Ripley differs from the dynamic if altered English-language film mainly owing to the engagement of separate agendas. While the film attends to the glamour of Ripley's new world, perhaps as a function of the medium in which he is portrayed, the novel tries to trace, more or less successfully, his moral architecture. I say more or less because there is only so much one can glean from a psyche that yearns for European culture and nonetheless has committed murder. The film also injects much more ado regarding his boat passages that the novel leaves unexplored; specifically, a hint about the character of Peter Smith-Kingsley is realized on the screen. That Mr. Ripley would like to be anyone except Mr. Ripley is overstating the point; what Mr. Ripley would truly like is the ease and fortune that would allow him to be anyone, including an inflated, idealized version of himself, whenever imitation is to his benefit or amusement – which may be the best definition of an actor ever put forth. As evinced by the quote that begins this review, however, there persists a certain pathos to the financially poor and underadvantaged Ripley, a young man who enjoys wallowing in self-pity as much as using his circumstances as undeniable motivation. Believe it or not, indeed. 

A Month of Sundays

Women are cellos, fellows the bows.

For what is the body but a swamp in which the spirit drowns?  And what is marriage, that supposedly seamless circle, but a deep well up out of which the man and woman stare at the impossible sun, the distant bright disc, of freedom?

                                                                                                                 Tom Marshfield

There is a fine quote from an old film which will be admitted here in paraphrase to ward off the Google hounds: there is a time to frolic, and a time not to frolic, and this is not one of those times. Readers of these pages know there are works that make it here and many, many more that do not, for a variety of criteria, the simplest of which is that they do not induce the back-chilling aesthetic bliss necessary to be memorialized. For reasons that will become abundantly clear, this novel is really neither one of those works, in no small part because it is hardly a novel at all.

We begin – I take that back, we do not really begin anywhere at all. Our narrator, who introduces himself through the generally dishonest tactic of self-deprecation and martyrdom, has been shipped to a rehabilitation clinic somewhere amidst the sands of the American Southwest. He is a wiry, nervous Anglo-Saxon in his early forties (in the opening chapter he declares himself, "41 this April, 5'10", 158 lbs"), apart from his calvity almost feminine in his shape and shadow, a father of two and in principle – in fact, very much in principle – a married man of the cloth. We do not yet know the crimes that precipitated his commitment, but they will be revealed by the man itself with glee bordering on malice.  He looks around his sanitarium, for that is indeed where he is housed, if a nice sanitarium with golf and tennis available to its inmates, that is, its guests, and rightly contemplates what on earth or beyond he could have in common with this pack of rats and their keepers. His description early on affords us a hint or two:

All middle-aged men, we sit each at our table ... suppressing nervous gossip among the silverware. I feel we are a 'batch,' more or less recently arrived. We are pale. We are stolid. We are dazed. The staff, who peek and move about as if preparatory to an ambush, appear part twanging, leathery Caucasians, their blue eyes bleached to match the alkaline sky and the seat of their jeans, and the rest nubile aborigines whose silent tread and stiff black hair uneasily consort with the frilled pistachio uniforms the waitresses perforce wear.

The era, in case it mattered to you, is late Nixon, a time of paranoia and penitence and a convenient excuse for our narrator's tone. Soon it becomes evident that he has been confined for a month owing to an acute case of satyromania, which may conjure up a picture of a man-goat in our beclouded minds, but which could make for some interesting insights on what has led our man of God to become a man of the insatiable flesh. The Reverend Marshfield cannot really tell us why; but at least we may empathize with his diminishing faith in his own convictions (hearing out a sobbing parishioner he deems, "but as an act of fraternity amidst children descended from, if not one Father, then one molecular accident"). He feels enslaved by his chosen path, which at once must have been chosen for him by some Other force and must not have been. His wife Jane, herself the daughter of a clergyman by the name of Chillingworth, his two teenage boys, his weekly sermons, the lonely, broken women who sit through those sermons and gaze unknowingly at a spry, sexually perverse minister and suggest with their bodies' lack of movement the consent Tom seeks with his roving, raving mind, his sporadic visits to his father deep in the throes of dementia – all this conspires to drive our holy man away from both the Holy and mankind for all its flaws and stigmas. His solution, at least for the lower half of his mortal frame, is a wonderland where everything that should not be is, and everything that should be is not. And not surprisingly, the heroine of this land is a single mom by the name of Alicia Crick.

Alicia is also the musical director at Tom's small church, and on Sundays they are united if not in common purpose then in melody. When Jane and Tom were courting, he saw his future wife "walk[ing] a cloistered path to me, [and] it was as if a lone white rose were arriving by telegraph," a Beatrician image for those who believe in beatitudes. Not so much with Alicia, whose "jaw wore a curious, arrogant, cheap, arrested set, as if about to chew gum." Jane is portrayed as equally lithe and fragile as her husband, even if her husband's fragility is only manifest in the cavities of his conscience. Mrs. Crick, however, possessed "small ... smartly tipped breasts," a "comfortably thick" waist, "homely" and "well-used looking" feet, and "active hands, all muscle and bone." Mrs. Crick swiftly turns out to be such a "revelation" in bed – our novel is saturated (Tom might say satyr-ate-it, and be almost funny) with puns and footnotes on puns, and puns on footnotes – that life with the "good wife's administration sex," that "solemn, once-a-week business, ritualized and worrisomely hushed," becomes absolutely unbearable. One evening, the horrible truth descends upon Tom like the rain upon a lost hitchhiker along a lonesome midnight road:  

My porch. My door. My stairs. Again the staircase rose before me, shadow-striped, to suggest the great brown back of a slave; this time the presentiment so forcibly suggested to me my own captivity, within a God I mocked, within a life I abhorred, within a cavernous unnameable sense of misplacement and wrongdoing, that I dragged my body heavy as if wrapped in chains step by step upward.

We will not say much more on the matter except that Alicia, bless her soul, is acquired and discarded early on in our fragmentary flashbacks, and cannot be considered happy about such a reversal of fortune. And so Tom begins his real journey, his journey back to Alicia that merely re-captions his journey back to his lost youth of irresponsibility. This involves prurience to a degree found only in erotic trash, cussing of the kind found only in popular trash, and an apotheosis from both of these hellish straits through the occasional visits to his Alzheimer-ridden father, who alternatively does not remember Tom, or confuses him with his brother, thus erasing Tom's childhood and innocence in one fell swoop. Without first, of course, causing him and us a great deal more grief.

As a stunning exception to the vast majority of his peers, Updike was very public about his religion and religiousness, even if he migrated congregations more than once. Consequently, he was essentially obliged to make any protagonist clergyman a skeptic (what then would be the fun if not?) to avoid the execrable label of zealot. At some point I remember reading that Updike was Hawthorne's literary descendant (the ballad of Tom Marshfield begins what would be known to Updikeans as “The Scarlet Letter Trilogy"). In hindsight this claim seems less far-fetched, although Updike was far more prodigious than any other serious author and Hawthorne was, like so many, rather fussy about his prints. The problem with such productivity is not leaving yourself enough time to reflect and reconsider, and there is also such a thing as leaving yourself too much time. So does a novel like A Month of Sundays get nearly ignored by posterity by virtue of its rambling, pointless beauty – the rambling, pointless beauty of life itself – a novel, admittedly, in binding and bookstore category alone?  There are overwritten and overwrought passages, surely, and sometimes one wishes there were fewer (occasionally they begin to crowd against our sunset), and the book cannot be read in one or two sittings. It is more properly a patch of poems, a purple, thriving, majestic patch, with real genius, a rarity in our era of half-baked hallucination and urban rage. Consider: "From the far end of the house sounded the electric sloshing of television's swill";  "That money, green and golden money which instinctively seeks the light"; "I loved shedding each grade as I ascended through school"; "Children returning from school shout in the acoustic wet street"; and Frankie, one of Tom's conquests, long since rich but undersexed, "lets out ... a giggle even older than the mink" (this same woman would later be "feeding mosquitoes on the nectar in her veins [and] admiring [her husband's] dragonlike skill at igniting brickets," perhaps the novel's most sensational passage). Only the artistically obtuse would complain that there is no plot, structure, or even point to Tom's peregrinations, apart from the very acceptable excuse of wanting to create more purple patches. And maybe like Alicia, we won't mind the hypocrisy, just the unhappiness.