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.

Total Eclipse

“Dogs are all liberals” – Rimbaud

“He [Rimbaud] was my great and radiant sin” – Verlaine

“I’m faithful to all my loves, because once I love them, I will always love them” – Verlaine

“The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable” – Rimbaud

A favorite topic among bibliophiles is what one literary figure might have said to another (see above) had they ever met.  Writers and philosophers living far apart on our history’s spectrum are particularly popular themes, with one writer even gaining eternal renown for a work composed of conversations between famous writers and philosophers that reads more like opposing editorials.  Other students of literature like to spend an inordinate amount of time imagining the private lives of the writers they admire.  For them, the being of a famous writer cannot emerge solely from his works as a rosebush may not live without its thorns, topsoil, or weeds.  It is not enough that we must subject great works upon their copyright’s expiration to editorial whims, we must also find new and silly ways to enter the lives of people whom we could not know and whose legacy is a pile of books that we often cannot bring ourselves to read attentively.  We must understand them as people first and writers later.  If how they talked, how they ate, and how they showed each other affection are more important than their literary production, so be it.  Their legacies will be forever tainted and we share only part of the blame.  Which brings us to this fine film about two legendary French poets, Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio).

The year, we are told, is 1871.  Germany unites into the most powerful state Continental Europe has seen since the Romans; Verlaine is twenty-seven but already fading in poetic authority (poets then were like tennis stars now, washed up at thirty); Rimbaud is ten years his junior and the most phenomenal of Wunderkinder.  This is not a love story, or at least not one in which there is any tenderness or caring.  A poet of genius in his own right if more a product of his era, Verlaine cannot do much more than get viciously intoxicated, vent on his ugly but very rich wife, and gaze at the beautiful lad who keeps asking him for small favor after small favor.  He loves Rimbaud as a younger, more gifted version of himself, one unafraid to challenge society’s mores.  Nevertheless, it is remarkable how humdrum Rimbaud’s notions of novelty seem, and how consistently a man of such talent is portrayed as a boor and a bully.  The two while away their time in absinthe bars (roughly a barrel gets consumed during the film), smoking, flirting, and obviously planning something that will ruin both of their lives.  They shift and totter between hatred and symbiotic need, and finally separate once Verlaine, in his umpteenth booze-ridden fit, decides to play William Tell with dear Arthur, who of course has too little respect for Verlaine’s promises to pay his threats any attention.  Verlaine is arrested, charged with being a sodomite, and jailed for two years.  He is released having served his full sentence and become a devout Catholic.  And at this point, Rimbaud is far away in both body and spirit.

One might suppose that the whole endeavor would sink into melodrama in a gooey, nauseating way.  Yet a certain dignity obtains throughout.  And whatever our knowledge of the times and, more importantly, of the poetic oeuvres of the two men, we are compelled to watch even if nothing really happens.  Did what is depicted really take place?  Should we alter our impressions of the oeuvres of the two artists accordingly?  A more celebrated film employs the same technique of portraying a young ingénue as a sort of rock star, the difference being that Rimbaud’s upstart irreverence curiously resembles the ignorant kitsch of Soviet and hippie manifestos.  Amadeus was a rock star, insofar as he was worshiped as a celebrity who could do no wrong upon the stage.  Methinks the problem lies with the fiction, not the reality.  I am duly aware that the intent of the film was to be authentic and that the happenings portrayed have their basis in the correspondence between the poets.  Even so, the characters, especially Rimbaud, are too one-sided, evincing modern cinema’s endemic aversion to subtlety.  The deep and recurrent problem with such recreations, as in so many historical novels, is that the literary revivalist has no inkling of the inner lives of the artistic creatures he re-imagines because he has little relationship to their work, where their true biography is found.  The result is that extraordinary persons are obliged to be understood in our terms, not theirs, and live out the plainest of soap opera ditherings. 

That being said, Thewlis and DiCaprio are marvelously cast in terms of looks and gestures.  Yet time and again they are superceded by Rimbaud's bohemian vulgarities which, as could be expected, devolve into ridiculous showmanship.  By many indications, Rimbaud was mild-mannered (some sources do portray him as the prototypical enfant terrible), if impetuous and all too ready to enthrall people with his genius.  The Rimbaud of Total Eclipse is only obnoxious, only self-absorbed, only prone to immediate gratification like all of the young and the guileful.  Verlaine, on the other hand, is without exception a sniveling, pathetic meatball of middle-age insecurities battling issues of sexual identity and creative choices.  But you cannot be a great poet if you are completely and utterly immoral.  The on-screen Rimbaud hasn’t a redeeming quality about him and temporizes awkwardly whenever asked to express any of his verse.  Such does not a poet make.  In the end, Rimbaud comes off acting his age – although his compositions are of an artist of much broader experience – with the manipulative properties of a pretty woman rather than a man of letters (most evident in his lament that he has never seen the sea).  Come to think of it, perhaps that might not be terribly distant from the truth.

The Count of Monte Cristo

The moral law within us is certain — as we are as well in our stronger moments — that there exist no benefits to revenge.  What do we learn from harboring resentment and spite?  What good does it serve to inflict upon others what we or our loved ones have suffered?  We may lead decent, unfettered lives with nary an affront, and yet this old debate continues to burn as our petty justification of redemption.  Now redemption is a great thing.  Justice for all is what we all seek in one way or another, and its fairness not only makes being moral worthwhile, it also removes all other approaches to reality.  For all the cruelty and evil perpetrated in the world, there will always be hope for those who want justice for others as much as they want it (most naturally) for themselves.  We know that a true artist’s sincerest wish is the chance to fulfill his potential, a magnanimity that he extends to every downtrodden and miserable wretch in his vicinity.  This is why the artist, perhaps the most pacific of all souls, enacts in his mind a violent revenge upon the responsible, searing them with his thoughts and banishing them to eternal cognition of their wickedness.  And if you know anything about the literature of revenge, you know the name of Edmond Dantès.

The story is one of the classics, remade into plays, films, and rewritten as the thinly−veiled plot of more recent books.  And like all such tales, its longevity can be attributed to its fundamental moral: the meek shall triumph over the blasphemous and inherit the earth.  Or in this case, a large trove of loot buried in the earth.  As it would do us little good to review the original book, a melodramatic farrago at times both charming and schmaltzy (the sure sign of a serial), we should instead turn to the most recent film adaptation.  Dantès (James Caviezel) is an illiterate French sailor in the year eighteen−fourteen, as is his chum Fernand Mondego (Guy Pearce).  Students of language will immediately note that Mondego contains the French word for “world,” while Dantès reminds us of some lesser realm.  More perspicacious readers will see a bizarre homogeneity in the fact that the first syllable of each surname contains the last syllable of the other’s first name.  To be sure, the men are mirror images, but they are also two parts of the same soul, a device mentioned earlier with regard to this book.  Mondego is so irrevocably evil and unscrupulous that no God or gremlin could hope to rescue him from speeding doom.  And Dantès, who will rise from lowliest pauper to holiest prince, has much of the avenging angel in him, vigilantism which we are supposed to cheer on like the triumphant Jacobin trains.  In this world there is no grey, no off−white, no mauve, no lilac, no azure.  Only black, white, and the red of Dantès’s flesh as he is whipped every year on the anniversary of his incarceration.

There is more to this, of course.  We have the requisite female (Dagmara Dominczyk) who loves one man but marries the other; the dying priest who cannot understand how to burrow out of a prison but knows the secret of El Dorado itself; the maniacal jailer who enjoys thrashing his wards and cackling; the disappointed father who does something particularly desperate when Edmond is convicted; the corrupt official who barefacedly ignores one man’s innocence in favor of his career; and the ingenuous teenage son who seems to remind us of someone else.  I vaguely recollect some ridiculous attempt at symbolism involving a chess piece and a quip about all of us being either kings or pawns, but that’s for those viewers who think historical figures become historical by uttering such rot.  Yet, despite its predictability (you will guess each intrigue one scene before it occurs), the film is a rousing, swashbuckling pleasure.  Dantès’s redemption is as pure as the wanton betrayal of his friend Mondego, played with sadistic relish by Pearce in what must be considered the performance of his career.  We also remember that the motto of the film, conveniently painted in bold on the wall of Dantès’s cell, is God will give me justice.  And if He doesn’t, snarls Dantès, I might just take it myself.

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.

Reversal of Fortune

You may be surprised to learn of the details of this crime, which has maintained its dual status of “unsolved” and “perhaps never occurred” for almost thirty years.  Rhode Island, 1980: we find ourselves among the well−to−do and deep of pocket and their world of disposability.  A relatively impecunious European nobleman called Claus von Bülow (whose cousin was a contemporary of this composer) has been married for fourteen years to Martha “Sunny” Crawford, an American heiress who also happens to be hyperglycemic.  By all indications, Claus seems to be no better or worse than his ilk, being interested in a comfortable career whose salary makes no difference to his well−being, the society of a select few, a large estate with all the amenities, and a modicum of respect from those who watch him with envy as he waltzes into a small store to purchase tobacco.  A graduate of the same college attended by Dryden, Marvell, and Nabokov, he tried his hand at law before his marriage but now feels restrained by his dear wife, their daughter (named after the woman who would marry both Claus’s cousin and Wagner himself), and Sunny’s two children from her previous marriage to another Germanic gentleman of title.  So, we are told yet again, Claus allegedly does what any good reader of murder mysteries would do: kill by using the person’s weakness against her.  Had Sunny been an avid skier, she would have met her frozen fate on a slope.  Owing to her blood sugar level, however, the weapon can only be one: insulin.

But Sunny does not die.  She still lies unconscious in the vegetative state induced by the insulin injected into her on December 21, 1980.*  As the person with the greatest motive and access, Claus is immediately fingered as the guilty party and brought to trial, resulting in a thirty−year sentence for attempted murder.  That von Bülow would seek to appeal the decision is hardly surprising; that he would turn to Alan Dershowitz, a Jewish lawyer from Harvard Law School, to do so, still seems a bit odd.  A self−made man, phenomenally successful law professor and civil rights attorney, and one of the state of Israel’s greatest supporters, Dershowitz initially wants nothing to do with this silver−spooned Dano−German snob whose family might have harbored more than a little tenderness for certain unwholesome forces in the 1930s and 1940s.  Nevertheless, maybe because von Bülow is so utterly convinced of his innocence, or maybe because no one else will take him on, Dershowitz consents to defend someone for whom he admittedly hasn’t a shred of sympathy.  The result is a book, as well as an absolutely marvelous film.

We meet a number of colorful characters, from prosecuting attorneys to spoiled European teenagers to a whole houseful of Harvard law students, but only three will ultimately give the film its shape: Dershowitz (the late Ron Silver), Sunny (Glenn Close), and Claus (an Oscar−winning Jeremy Irons).  Pictures of the original Sunny, an attractive, sprightly young thing, make you wonder whether the somewhat plain Close reflects director Barbet Schroeder's views on Claus’s guilt.  So too does Sunny herself, however accurately portrayed as a hypochondriac drunk whose moods alternate between belligerence, apathy, and self−loathing.  This is, in any case, the side of her that Claus wishes us and his lawyer to see.  Claus is not concerned with anything except maintaining his life as it is, free and unperturbed, and without any blot on his reputation among the few people who actually still talk to him.  His exchanges with Dershowitz, a man he looks down upon simply because he lives for his work (and even finds it more enthralling than Claus’s conversation), are superb in keeping with the personalities of the characters presented.  There can be no accord or understanding between these two worlds, only a joining of forces in the name of justice.

In this regard, Irons, who possesses an innate ability to play aristocratic pariahs, could not be better cast.  And while I cannot take credit for one reviewer’s marvelous description of his smoking posture as that of hailing a taxi, I will say that what von Bülow has on his side is poise.  There is nothing, not one hair or button that evinces the slightest sign of fear.  Indignation in the hands of the wealthy and influential is one of the oldest and filthiest tactics, but Claus does not play that card, either.  He limits himself to the facts, as well as to the very logical supposition that he could have been framed by a large number of people, and does not seem to be in a hurry to get acquitted.  As the film progresses, Claus becomes its metronome, speeding it up when he gets excited (especially when he says his wife’s name in utter contempt), and slowing it down when opinions converge against him.  Since the whole story is based on true events, calling some of the details unlikely would be rather impish on my part, so I will refrain.  But what cannot be denied is Claus’s charm.  He is smooth, welcoming, and genuine about his innocence and the state of his horrendous marriage.  Even if he is the only one who really believes all that.

*Note: Sunny von Bülow, still in a vegetative state, succumbed to cardiopulmonary arrest on December 6, 2008.