The Ninth Gate

If you are familiar with this book, you may wonder why director Roman Polanski was so bent on transforming it into a film.  The book deals with, on the one hand, a club based on the works of a nineteenth–century Frenchman, and, on the other hand, a triptych of rather macabre illustrated tomes written by a seventeenth–century Italian who was burned at the stake.  We are all well aware how many innocents fell victim to inquisitions during that harried time, but this fellow, Aristide Torchia, seems to have had certain forces on his side that led to his downfall.  Yes, those forces.  And if this conceit is not painfully clear from the first few minutes of The Ninth Gate, this is probably not going to be your type of movie.

Regardless of the original novel’s name, the Dumas story line is both secondary and far less compelling (occupations of the idle rich usually are), so Polanski wisely elects to focus on Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) and his journey through a wicked game of cat and mouse.  The problem is that Corso is both the pursued and pursuer, slipping effortlessly from Spain to Portugal and then to Polanski’s beloved France on the trail of three extant copies (the rest were torched with Torchia) of The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows.  Depp is particularly skilled at playing down a character’s inner needs in favor of reacting to his environment in a composed manner.  He is never really flustered, although he witnesses both death and evil deeds.  And when he understands a chance encounter in a train with a rather seductive blonde (Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski’s wife) as just that, a chance encounter, we know his character is far too intelligent not to suspect that more devious gears are churning.  Yet for some reason he feels that these gears have been in motion for a while now and that his entanglement is inevitable, as evidenced by the very last action he takes.

Without giving too much away, I should add that Polanski does a little tinkering.  Corso’s book dealer chum Bernie (James Russo) and the “dishy” (to use the film’s terminology) widow Leona Telfer (Lena Olin) are given slightly different roles, with the latter becoming a foil to the green–eyed stranger who keeps running into Corso at opportune times just like, well, a guardian angel.  Then there is the matter of Boris Balkan (Frank Langella), who in the film combines the roles of two of the novel’s personages.  Balkan, a fabulously wealthy man and renowned translator and bibliophile, is seen very early on giving a lecture that Corso finds soporific, but that doesn’t discourage him from accosting Corso and showing him the money.  The favorite subject of Balkan’s priceless shelves just happens to be the alleged collaborator on Torchia’s work.  And if you’re wondering who might be famous enough to have thousands of volumes written about him and still find a reason to help an obscure Italian achieve eternal infamy in the year 1666, of all years, I would recommend rewinding to the beginning to survey the entire audience at Balkan’s lecture.

In the novel Corso has a back story and a soul.  He loved a young Jewish woman, but his love for books and money has come to justify their separation, at least when he doesn’t think about her too much.  Polanski’s Corso, while perfectly cast, remains a shell seeking some kind of form.  Guidance from the stars, belief in the supernatural, skepticism of coincidence and human intentions — all of these may or may not be factors for his actions and statements, which belie his actions.  Corso is not a liar, but he’s not honest with himself or anyone else, and in time he begins to understand that the happiest of men are those whose lives permit them to tell the truth as often as possible.  There is no one to whom he can open up or reveal the mildest traces of humanity and compassion, but we recognize in this condition so many lives bound by invisible, self–imposed rules and past pain that Corso becomes a real person with real problems.  And what he chooses in the end is peace with himself, or whatever is left of it.   

Ae Fond Kiss

Once and rather peremptorily, I hypothesized to a young woman that the realization of love came upon reflection in old age.  And she, a fellow student at this German university, told me in no uncertain terms that I was an unfortunate soul who had not seen the bright side of life.  Well, she was quite wrong about what I had and hadn't seen; and as often happens when those of us prone to pondering come upon what they think is a piece of the truth, I repeated the same proposition to other people (that first student was someone I met and spoke to for thirty minutes who then vanished into oblivion).  Some were just as skeptical; others, more understanding of cranks and their speculation, nodded as if admitting that the plainest idea – and my idea was quite plain – sometimes juts forth like a crag of truth amidst the clouds of doubt.  Yet most of us do not want to find our alpha in our omega: we yearn for experiences of emotion akin to those in this world–famous play of star–crossed lovers, if without the final chapter.  Romance against impossible odds is the finest metaphor we have for forging lifelong human relationships, for beating time by engaging in something that is its superior.  Should you be a little along in years, or even just a particularly insightful if inexperienced person, you know how much easier it is to wait through an entire life for perfection than accept lapsarian shortcomings.  When luck prevails, we catch glimpses of paradise in the form of another mortal who appears as the answer to all the questions we never knew to ask.        

Now you may read a few thousand books and watch a few thousand films in your lifetime, derive from them expectations of plot, characters, and meaning, and then wonder whether we are all bound to certain role-playing modules.  Even for those of us who seek out cinema which (to paraphrase this fine author) alters the film machine and doesn't just feed it, there are a limited number of plausible scenarios.  I will not bore you with a disquisition on what themes arise most frequently, but you can be sure that one of them is forbidden love.  Forbidden not because it is perverse or in violation of some statute on indecency, but forbidden by much higher powers: by fate, by parents, by God.  The Montagues and the Capulets did not approve, and their children could not live in submission and so died in defiance.  Is love worth infringing upon your parents' ideals and dreams?   The question is so fundamental and at the same time so silly that only an example will suffice, which brings us to this fine film.
 

The title is not a misspelling but a quote from a poem by that most quoted of Scottish bards, Robert Burns.  It doesn't really matter what the title is anyway since the plot is formulaic and predictable and yet most of the time perfectly delightful.  The reason for our delight is the chemistry between Casim, the token Easterner (Atta Yaqub), and Roisin, the token Westerner (Eva Birthistle).  They meet in knightly fashion on her territory, a Catholic school where Roisin teaches Casim's younger sister music.  Nothing but the coincidence of location prepares the viewer for this relationship that will blossom, fade, then hopefully blossom again during the course of the film.  Casim’s family is Pakistani and Muslim, although both he and his younger sister, who dreams of studying journalism but will not be given the chance, are fully integrated, accentless natives of Scotland; their older sister is more traditional and already engaged to the son of other Pakistani immigrants on the straight path to becoming a physician.  What they wish for most of all, of course, is the right to choose how to live their lives.  For Casim that means the love of an Irishwoman and a Catholic.

They don’t get that right because that would deprive their parents of their very essence.  Love is great and wonderful and sometimes even blind, and romantic relationships are pieces of our soul that, at life’s end, form something particular, unique, and everlasting.  It may be that we have loved many or none; or maybe there was and will always be only one person for us.  Yet whatever final figure we reach, we will only have one set of parents and one life to make sure they know that we love and appreciate them (if they deserve love and appreciation, which most do).  Going headstrong against their wishes is as self-destructive as a parent’s insistence on being heeded simply because of seniority.  In either case, a reason must be presented and accepted, and if I’m getting a wee too philosophical about the whole matter, that’s because this is purely a matter of philosophy and how to deal with leaving our parents and starting our own life is one of our hardest projects.  Either extreme, complete rejection or compliance, should be avoided, which makes Juliet and her Romeo, while great poetry, a rather pathetic soap opera.

And where does that leave Roisin and Casim, the brainchildren of this fine director?  I cannot say I rightly know what to make of their relationship, improbable as it is because their attenuated music commonality (she is a music instructor, he a deejay) might be, apart from physical attraction, the only thing they share.  Loach loves his political statements and he usually makes them blunt, affable, and correct.  Roisin and Casim are certainly affable, blunt, and flawed, and that renders the whole affair less tragic and more substantial.  Yes, classic Greek tragedy is not real: it is an exaggeration of our emotions into the stratosphere of the gods.  These lovers thankfully don’t come anywhere near the stars.  

Nikolai Gogol

Ten years ago, I happened to attend a conference on the literature of this country whose name has been slightly amended since 1993.  One of the conference’s more spirited speakers, an ethnic Ukrainian, recalled a conversation he had had with a famous Russian–born writer at a cocktail party years before.  After the usual small talk on wind and weather, the Russian became curious:

Writer: You have an accent in English.  Are you from Europe?
Ukrainian: I’m from Ukraine.
Writer: From Urania?   [walks away]

Whether such an exchange ever occurred (the joke has the bitter flavor of truth) is not as interesting as the context.  Contempt for Ukrainian literature and the concept of Ukraine as a cultural and political entity independent of both Poland and Russia is still widespread, owing largely to its lack of famous men and women of letters.  Although the founder of the modern language was a poet and artist whose balding head, handlebar moustache, and resigned chin (to the fate of his native tongue, some would say) are engraved into numerous monuments worldwide, his existence is practically unacknowledged outside Slavic departments.  Even in those hallowed halls enthusiasts tend, after Russian, to study Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Bulgarian before knitting their brows at the oddities of the Ukrainian alphabet, Cyrillic with a sprinkling of one–eyes and two–eyes.  Most Ukrainian writers, history regrets to inform us, chose other mediums in which to express themselves.  And none was weirder and more brilliant than this small dainty man, the subject of one of the English language's most succulent literary biographies.              

 

Succulent thanks to the slow, effortless circles which the biographer, himself one of the finest craftsman in both Russian and English, sketches around young Gogol.  We begin with Gogol’s death and end with his birth, and in–between we find that our long–standing impressions of nineteenth–century Russia owe much to his handiwork:

Symbolism with him [Gogol] took on a physiological aspect, in this case optical.  The mutterings of passers–by were again symbolic, this time an auditory effect which was meant to render the hectic loneliness of a poor man in an opulent crowd.  Gogol, and Gogol alone, spoke to himself as he walked, but the monologue was echoed and multiplied by the shadows of his mind.  Passing as it were through Gogol’s temperament, St. Petersburg acquired a reputation of strangeness which it kept up for almost a century, losing it when it ceased to be the capital of an empire.

This is very much the oddness of Petersburg that pervades Russian literature from Pushkin to Bely, the incongruity of traditional European architecture and customs against the thoughts and rapturous originality of its natives.  I have not been to Petersburg in a few years, but little has changed.  Thirty years passed between Nabokov’s last spring in his hometown and the passage above, which, fifty years later felt like it had been culled from the evening edition of Argumenty i fakty.  The point is that Gogol, and Gogol alone, changed Russian literature both for its creators and its admirers, domestic and otherwise.  With the possible exception of Pushkin, he is more responsible than any author for how Slavic literary scholars have evaluated the last two hundred years.  

He did not, however, come about this brilliance by living the simple and successful life of an academically–minded writer who spends days in a library and nights behind his desk.  A soft, effeminate man, Gogol was completely impractical in mind and body: he was constantly impecunious, ill, or both; he loved to fib and exaggerate because, like all great writers, fiction was far richer than the worries of a mortal; he listened to no one but himself, fled from creditors and would–be benefactors alike, and traveled alone and aimlessly in Europe for years as if trying to absorb its culture by sponging its streets with his boots.  The results were few (Gogol would die, we are told immediately, in his early forties after an abortive leeching cure) but magnificent and his modest corpus is still studied with avidity by Russianists everywhere.  Nabokov demolishes some previous attempts at rendering Gogol’s eccentric prose (so badly, in fact, that I don’t think any publisher would have ever hired these poor dead souls ever again) and supplies his own passages, which display his own mastery and wit and swell and ebb with the same unmistakable rhythm of Nabokov’s discursive writings.  All of which, I may add, could probably not be written any more clearly or concisely, nor with more passion and understanding for his subject.

Yet Gogol’s most significant contribution may well be his obsession with a rather untranslatable word, poshlost’, about which Nabokov digresses for over twenty pages.  Poshlost’ has no precise English synonym (the German Kitsch is probably the closest, although this latter is strictly speaking an aesthetic term), but might be explained as the "the belief in or propagation of superficial, sentimental and populist values as true culture."  Examples would be pop and paparazzi shows and magazines or any Hollywood love or war story, but with a modicum of discipline these can be ignored.  Much more egregious offenders are books which might portray an earnest young man who, in an effort to "make it in the world," befriends some multicultural characters, falls in love with sunsets, dogs and soft jazz, repeats to himself that life is really not about the pursuit of material wealth — although he doesn't quite convince the reader of that — and, at the end of his "journey," metaphorically envisions humanity's fate in the hands of the scattered few around him.  Most books, as it were, fall into this disreputable category.  The word itself is in very common usage in modern Russian, and has come to signify the unshakeable twitch that surfaces upon hearing or seeing something so absolutely false and so infuriatingly pandering to common thought and common happiness that even pacifists like myself want to smack someone in the vicinity.  To Russians' great credit, the word is extremely old and consistently applied; and to Gogol’s credit, he is in every way the opposite of it, just like Tomas is a “monster in the kingdom of kitsch” in this novel.

And to Nabokov’s credit, he restrains himself for the most part from overtaking his beloved forerunner.  Yes, it is Nabokov’s show; but if you are familiar with his work, you know that he cannot share a stage to save his life and that his imprint is indelibly left on everything he touches.   He even has time to tell us about his deepest fears:

In his Dikanka and Taras Bulba phase .... Gogol was skirting a very dreadful precipice.  He almost became the writer of Ukrainian folklore tales and ‘colorful romances.’  We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then he would have been lost.  When I want a good nightmare I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume of Dikanka and Mirgorod stuff about ghosts haunting the banks of the Dneipr, burlesque Jews and dashing Cossacks.

This alternative reality may sound terrifying to Gogol connoisseurs, but some Ukrainians probably would not have minded.  And they would have deeply resented any comments on their status as a minor literature just as much as crude puns, of which Nabokov was particularly fond.   Pity that young Ukrainian writer could only remember Nabokov's last two comments.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

    I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
    And Mourners to and fro
    Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
    That Sense was breaking through –

    And when they all were seated,
    A Service, like a Drum –
    Kept beating – beating – till I thought
    My mind was going numb –

    And then I heard them lift a Box
    And creak across my Soul
    With those same Boots of Lead, again,
    Then Space – began to toll,

    As all the Heavens were a Bell,
    And Being, but an Ear,
    And I, and Silence, some strange Race
    Wrecked, solitary, here –

    And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
    And I dropped down, and down –
    And hit a World, at every plunge,
    And Finished knowing – then –

A friend of mine once lamented signing up for an entire semestral course on the works of this famous poetess (or simply female poet, as some consider the suffix to be as sexist as the tail of a long ballroom gown).  Yet he lamented this choice not because of the work itself, nor owing to the narrowness of the scope that it covered, the inevitable repetitions that a poet, dying young, are likely to incur.  I cannot really comment on the repetitions, having read only about a hundred of her poems; but from what I have absorbed, a tempting conclusion presents itself that may not please all her admirers or detractors: the repetition of which my friend spoke might not be a product of young age (Dickinson was fifty–five at her death), but a result of a lack of interaction with a wide public.  Now there is the old chestnut about real writing taking place in the mind and being betrayed by the page, and that many great writers have never published a word.  This is an acceptable premise, and I think every writer will tell you he has much greater success in conceptualizing his thoughts than reflecting them on pale parchment.  Dickinson barely published anything during her lifetime (research reveals only a dozen non–posthumous poems), which would be fine if she were writing about the Peloponnesian war or Boethius.  These were not, however, her subjects; her one and only subject was something perhaps far richer: the tapestries and whirlwinds of her soul, as in the unfinished poem above.

In our modern times, there is more than a mild impetus to foist psychological problems on an artist whose turbulent inner life has been a playground for critics since the publication of an authoritative collection of her work over fifty years ago.  I will not belabor the matter; nor is it, I may add, of any importance.  Few eager psychotherapists would ever tell you that many rational persons (especially those of extraordinary imagination who secretly try their hand at every possible internal experience) allow themselves during more pensive periods, or perhaps even to get to sleep, to think of themselves in wholly altered states.  Death being the most altered state (or "not a human experience," as a second-rate philosopher famously quipped), thought first drifts beyond this life.  Out of pride, love, or simply out of longing, we then tend to picture our mourning by those we have loved and, more fantastically, those we have yet to love.  But there is another, even more capricious leap to be made: the condition in which the artist is dead because she can no longer create. From those outside her soul, even those tenderly loved, this death may not be immediately, if at all, obvious.  But as soon as this death is confirmed by the artist, then everything and everyone seem to be participating in a large funeral march, the slow progression to death that becomes increasingly unbearable and heavy as if the artist were being pushed lower and lower into the ground, buried beneath thousands of other forgotten souls.  

Dickinson’s initial humility yields an even more remarkable impact.  She is willing to endure almost three stanzas of what may be loosely termed hackneyed imagery just to make us believe this is but another self–important writer fantasizing about the tragedy of her demise.  But she pastes a mystifying end to the third stanza, “then Space – began to toll,” and we see things a little differently.  This line is followed by one of the finest stanzas in American poetry: the heavens, the wild paradise of the artistic soul, are forevermore the monotone peal of a bell; her being, her artistic essence, is only a passive ear so that she may observe but not create (an artist’s true prison); she and silence are cellmates, ethnic pariahs from the world of life and language; finally, being unable to do anything creative she is alone for all eternity — only the dead remain grouped in endless multitudes —and the saltations of her poem are complete.

There is also the matter of the comma in the title and first line.  Dickinson’s punctuation, a subject of much scholarly analysis, can be described at best as idiosyncratic, but the comma (not included in every citation of the poem) certainly does alter the sense.  The spongy realness of the word brain, as opposed to mind or soul, make any sort of feeling inherently physical and inferior to the abstract ecstasies of the human intellect.  But “I felt a funeral,” as oddly as the line rolls off the tongue, has in it undeniable poetic appeal.  There is something Viking and epic about this presentiment, the smell of war or battle or Valkyries finding warriors strewn like slugs over a shore of pebbles and carnage.  A grand and tragic end to a queendom of lyric beauty left almost entirely to the whims of history.

This Craft of Verse

A marvelous writer once stated with regard to a lesser writer (I shall spare you both their identities) that "self-conscious eclectic literariness" was the genuine sign of postmodernism, that dreadful beast that has Grendeled our beautiful world.  That designation is only true by virtue of the inclusion of "self–conscious," the hallmark of the modern mind who thinks so much about himself that he either forgets that other people’s opinions may be superior to his, or so much about others’ opinions that he fails to see his own genius.  Another marvelous writer — at times, the most marvelous — had a lovely observation on this fact:

I think that one of the sins of modern literature is that it is too self–conscious.  For example, I think of French literature as being one of the great literatures in the world (I don’t suppose anyone could doubt this).  Yet I have been made to feel that French authors are generally too self–conscious.  A French writer begins by defining himself before he quite knows what he is going to write.  He says: What should (for example) a Catholic born in such–and–such province, and being a bit of a socialist, write?  Or: How should we write after the Second World War?  I suppose there are many people all over the world who labor under those illusory problems.

Far too many, but their number is no longer legion.  We are returning, little by little, to a world with values — eternal, moral values, the only type that resists all movements, waves, and so–called revolutions.  People are growing sick and tired of relativism, or hearing how whatever one throws on a defenseless canvas or page must be deemed equal to the great masterpieces of all our centuries.  What the proponents of the smears and bangs that compose modern “art” perhaps do not know is that there has been inferior stuff floating about in every century; there have been puppets and pantomimes and infantile attempts at significance that make anyone with a drachma of aesthetic taste shudder; but history has wisely chosen to obliterate them.  True art defies all these mindless categories and rises above them to a greater arena: that of the morally admirable.  And of all twentieth–century writers, perhaps no one is as morally admirable as Jorge Luis Borges.   

If you have never read Borges, this short collection of six lectures he gave from memory at this renowned institution of higher learning forty years ago will readily impart the bones and twigs of his fortress.  For those of us who read Borges every week, we get a rare opportunity at seeing himself present his ideas orally and, most interestingly, in English (Borges, owing to familial diversity, was bilingual from an early age).  Borges is obsessed — and all great writers are obsessed — with certain works, lines, authors, periods of language (Old Norse and Anglo–Saxon, for example) but not really with big, bland ideas, the fodder for the literary criticism he so shunned.  His lectures, he claims, are about poetry, but then he adds prose and verse are "all one."  He postulates some ideas about translation, a field in which he often exceeded the work he rendered into Spanish, then quickly retracts them.  He retracts any idea pursued to too great a length for the simple reason that he wishes it to remain a hint or suggestion and not to become an argument:

As I understand it, anything suggested is far more effective than anything laid down.  Perhaps the human mind has a tendency to deny a statement.  Remember what Emerson said: arguments convince nobody.  They convince nobody because they are arguments .... But when something is merely said or — better still — hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination.

This explanation, coupled with Borges’s admission that he does not write novels out of laziness (only half–true) and owing to novels’ inherent padding (movement from scene to scene, continuity, etc.), gives us the core belief of his world: that poetry, even poetry expressed in prose, remains the only way in which anything of any substance can be conveyed.  When we think back on our lives, we want our memories to be poetic, we want each last promise, farewell, or ecstasy to suggest more than it could say explicitly.  We want a world of hints, allegations, and mystery, because that way we remain at least partially undiscovered, still waiting for the perfect soul to understand us.  Like any good poem or novel waits patiently for its perfect reader.

Since these lectures are given from memory (Borges was almost completely blind at the time), there are repetitions that may lead the casual reader to think Borges the type of older gentlemen ensnared in a handful of trivial detail that he likes to inflict upon younger generations as his contribution to the world of Truth.  Borges surely loved detail and does have certain favorite themes and authors, but he was far too careful a speaker and interviewee to allow himself to get more than superficially embroiled in a dispute that could only be resolved in writing.  For the purpose of his talks, he limits himself to literary moments where he finds real poetic insight, including lines or phrases from Keats ("thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!"), the Ode of Brunanburh, Lugones, Chesterton, Stevenson, Carlyle, Frost (especially his pre–sleep miles), and an obscure quote ("a rose–red city, half as old as Time," referring to this city, one of the Seven New Wonders of the World) from an obscure writer whose name even Borges cannot recall.  An amazing fact if one believes the story that Borges still remembered in 1976 an eight–stanza poem recited to him by a Romanian refugee in 1916, although Borges himself never spoke Romanian.

The web of these notions (to borrow Stevenson’s metaphor) comprises what one thinks of when asked to define poetry, which Borges calls, very tentatively, "the expression of the beautiful through the medium of words artfully woven together."  He and his readers all know that this definition is insufficient because poetry defines itself by expanding its reach over what we find poetic.  Over time and many pages, we come to understand the difference between what is vulgar, platitudinous and morally indefensible, and what is just, poetic and moral.  Whether morality itself is inherently poetic may be a matter of scrutiny and perhaps even of taste, but as Borges warns all frivolous relativists: "if a reader thinks that you have a moral defect, there is no reason whatever why he should admire you or put up with you."  And not having any moral defect at all is the divine word itself, from poet or god, that he so worships.