The End of the Affair (film)

There is an old adage about serious writers’ contempt for thrillers, detective novels, and other such crime games, and truly, the vast majority of these products do not need our dislike, since their wooden characters, lackadaisical style, and preposterous plotting indicate they already despise themselves.  Certainly, they are not meant to be re–read and are as disposable as the brown paper bags in which we carry other guilty pleasures.  Yet most of us, I think, enjoy a good mystery if indeed there are still good mysteries to be enjoyed (they are perhaps fewer about than in mystery’s Golden Age, but many page–turners can still be found).  The premise behind these works, be they literary or cinematic, is that either something extraordinary or unusual will be revealed to us, or the process by which this revelation is made will be fascinating (in the best mysteries, both these features converge).  The thrill of discovering a solution to a complex gambit — or, to be more modern about it, some multi–tiered conspiracy — is very satisfying after a long day of work, and gives us the impression that we are in tune with the shapes and shifts of the world, that our intuition is still sharply honed, and that we have learned from life and can apply these lessons to future days. 

 

In this way, mysteries are the most basic form of literature.  They simultaneously explain and amuse, which accounts for the development in the twentieth century of this novelistic form as well as the proliferation of books and films that exploit chicanery, deception, and cabalism to wretched commercial ends.  One topic that seems caught in the undertow of this wave of intrigue is actually the most exciting of them all: that of personal mysteries and personal discoveries.  Introspection is a nice and trendy word, but it also breeds bellybutton–staring.  More acceptable practices are learning about ourselves through others and learning about these same people through ourselves.  In other words, mastering the basic recipes of human psychology and then serving them to guests.  Some guests (as we have learned) always praise the food, regardless of what they really think; others will only emphasize what could be improved; then there are those most maddening and unreadable types who say nothing and just chew quietly like some lonesome cow.  It is not clear whether they are being politely taciturn, whether they are incapable of expressing what they really feel (either good or bad), whether they do not care about food in general and consider it a biological necessity, or whether they do not care about you, the cook, who, in principle, believes in what you are serving and tries to accommodate your guests as best you can.  Now make all those guests the romantic interests you have had over the years and make your food emotion and affection, and we come to why today is about love, which is the greatest mystery there could ever be.  It is the greatest of mysteries precisely because it involves a continuous revelation of something extraordinary and unusual, and because no solution is ever guaranteed.       

The setup for this film by renowned director Neil Jordan is the mystery of how people may spend years apart and, upon seeing each other again, be swept up by that same wave and dragged mercilessly down to a bottomless trench.  The afflicted is a young novelist called Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes), and the year is 1946.  England has survived the war, or so it claims, and quilts of memories are tattered by the losses that each endured, even in a country that hardly bore the brunt of the destruction.  Maurice has lost enough of his sense of idealism and optimism to become surly and resentful towards this new world, and although he maintains a rough exterior, inside he is ravaged.  His ravager has long red hair, incomparable cheekbones, and a plain name, Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore).  Maurice and Sarah are as old as the war, having begun their love in 1939, and like the war they are over, although Maurice is as haunted by what went wrong in his small, private tragedy that is utterly unimportant for the history of the world as every citizen wondered how in God’s name such a calamity could befall civilization.  The most injurious part of Maurice’s pain is his love’s inexplicable termination towards war’s end: he is, as he always will be, in Sarah’s arms, when a shell smashes into his London home.  For a few minutes both he and Sarah think they are dead, or, much worse, that only one of them has survived.  We are given Sarah’s point of view on this event, and it takes more than a few minutes for her to realize that Maurice is still alive and will probably live.  But she leaves, wordlessly, submissively, and cannot or will not explain why she feels this step to be necessary.  I should add that she has been married all this time to a rather sympathetic civil servant by the name of Henry (Stephen Rea), and she is still married to him at the beginning of the film when Maurice bumps into Henry one miserably rainy night.

There's a mystery here having to do with Sarah’s reason for leaving Maurice’s house that day, and the reason is both good and ludicrous.  To carry out a story of such basic structure requires exquisite acting, which is provided by Moore and Fiennes, but also by Rea, who just wants his wife to be happy and understands she could never be happy with only him.  The original novel has components of the time period that allow Jordan’s adaptation to give us flavor without intrusion into the mores of the era (a tactic that is far less successful in the hopelessly anachronistic love affair in the filming of this book).  Doubtless, the steady, cuckolded husband is an old cliché, as is the artistic lover who makes life and love more intense, or the seductive beauty caught between duty and passion, and so forth.  But there are other details as well, including a small boy with a horrible affliction, that seem at first superfluous but then turn out to be essential.  Fiennes and Moore are so skilled at the small gestures and tortures of genuine affection that you will have a hard time believing they are not a real–life couple (this film might well be banned in both actors’ family settings, and not just for the corporalities).  You will also marvel at what people in love do for one another, even at the risk of losing them.  And that is a mystery that will never be solved.

The Hammer of God

There have been many responses to the greatest fictional character ever created, perhaps none as eccentric as this clergyman and amateur detective.  He is the brainchild of a British man of letters whose massive figure and intellect were the blueprint for another fictional detective.  This may be the only instance in the annals of literature when a serious writer used a colorful and offbeat character as a foil to one literary detective and, for his trouble, was bestowed immortality in the shape of another.  A bizarre story, and one befitting both Father Brown and his genial creator, G. K. Chesterton.

Every serialized character must endure certain conventions that signal to his readers that they are indeed savoring the genuine article.  We have been over this conceit with regard to Holmes and his continuing adventures, and Chesterton’s priest is no different.  He turns up in the oddest places, usually in England and France, and stays in the shadows until the last possible moment at which point he reveals, in an understated and almost embarrassed way, the solution.  Our first taste of the protagonist is normally cloaked in a casual description: “the priest was personally insignificant enough, with plain and rather expressionless features" ("The Doom of the Darnaways"), “the face of one with the harmless name of Brown” ("The Head of Caesar"), “a figure .... [who] looked like a big, black mushroom, for he was quite short and his small, stumpy figure was eclipsed by his big, black clerical hat” ("The Miracle of Moon Crescent").  Holmes is invariably described as very tall and unhealthily thin, the center of attention in every room he enters, a master of disguise and a bit of a fop when normally garbed, and a person who, if not unbelieving in things supernatural or beyond his great ken, is totally uninterested in non–scientific explanations or those based solely on swift character judgment.  A more polar opposite could not be devised.

The Hammer of God takes place in a village called Bohun Beacon, whose Presbyterian priest is the brother of the town’s biggest lout.  That the two now middle–aged men emerged from the same womb seems to baffle the omniscient narrator, adding that it is to the priest’s credit that he has veered off the path of his ancestors, who “rotted in the last two centuries into mere drunkards and dandy degenerates.”  When the weight of this world feels precisely like some Thor–like hammer, the man of the cloth retreats to his church to pray in silence for long periods of time.  Having been informed that some villagers understand his solitude as stemming from “a love of Gothic architecture rather than of God,” we are then told that this is the typically “ignorant misunderstanding” of those who need others to make themselves feel better.  Whatever the case, before the brothers, who have been enjoying a drink together in the local inn, are to part for the evening, the priest warns his rakish sibling to keep away from the blacksmith’s wife, apparently a woman of rather staggering beauty.  The brother, who is also a colonel, “a tall, fine animal, elderly, but with hair startlingly yellow,” pays no attention to such admonitions and proceeds on his merry way with a touch of lust in his eye.  Shortly thereafter, he is discovered gruesomely bludgeoned by a blunt object that suggests the employment of gargantuan strength.  And who is it among the villagers that boasts Herculean muscles and a hammer that could serve Hephaestus?  Just one person, it turns out.  That person is Simeon Barnes, a massive slab of fire–and–brimstone rhetoric who gives the story its title, although we should know better than to suspect the one person with both a motive and the raw power to pulverize a man’s skull into blacksmithereens.  It does not help to dissuade the onlookers that the victim was wearing a metal helmet to protect himself from precisely such an attack.  Curiously enough, the murder weapon appears to have been a small hammer, one which would be a matchstick in the hands of Barnes.  "So who would use a little hammer," asks one of the characters taking a look around the forge, "with ten larger hammers lying about?"  "Only," says Brown, "the kind of person that can’t lift a large hammer," a remark at once plain and cryptic but without Holmes's flair or theatricality.

If you are not sure of the morals of these stories, you might be better off.  Chesterton has an unabashedly determined agenda to follow, and even the uninitiated will feel drawn into a world where fair play and redemption are not exotic concepts.  This adds to the pleasure of the text, although an unconfident reader who wishes to experience art without an agenda (or, at least, without an overt agenda since all art does have a program) may swim away from Chesteron's glorious lighthouse.  Indeed, his touch for detail and conveying the essence of a human soul in a few short sentences has few peers in English literature, and the quaintness of the settings bereft of vulgarity, of sensationalism or of lurid detail is welcome in the face of our modern mores.   And Father Brown himself has nothing of an allegory or stick figure in him.  He is whole and flawed and beset by human frailty, as he states: "I am a man, and therefore have all devils in my heart."   And he knows exactly which devils may be able to make a hammer do godlike things.   

Anticipating the Original of Laura

Is there a greater thrill for a bibliophile than the publication of a newly discovered work by a deceased author he admires?  All literary criticism, bad and good, feels much more comfortable with the dead than with the living, and not only because the dead cannot tell them how foolish and misbegotten their analyses are.  There is, inevitably, a wholeness (especially if the writer reached a decent old age) to the oeuvre of a writer which mimics life’s own swerves and shapes.  From the brash and roguish writings of youth to more pensive middle age, to silver–haired masterpieces, to the last recounting of a long journey into night, a writer’s oeuvre is his photo album, diary, résumé, and testament.  Unless his time on earth was engulfed by extraordinary savageness or sensationalism (and we know the adage on that point), he will only be remembered for the papers he chose to engrave.  Once he is no longer around, his next life, that of a literary figure, may truly commence.    

As such, there has been more than a bit of idle chatter regarding the unpublished manuscript of this great polyglot, none of it, alas, conclusive.  After the same argument is repeated in paraphrase about a dozen times, it is then for some reason suggested that the best justification for adhering to the author’s final wishes to burn The Original of Laura would be that the half–work might endure undeserved critical silliness (as if, we suppose, his other works do merit such scrutiny).  If Nabokov, a fastidious mastermind, got as far as is claimed — roughly thirty normal pages, so maybe about twelve or thirteen thousand words, although this remains pure speculation — one can be sure that the quality of the production will be at the same standards as readers have come to expect.  The only foreseeable drop–off would be in structure, those artificial beams and bridges that often do not materialize until all pertinent details have been mapped.  Yet Nabokov was just as accomplished an architect as he was a portrait painter, a rarity in our age of overspecialization.  And although he famously claimed to have rewritten everything he had ever published at least a hundred times, his clarity of phrasing is evident even in his correspondence and discursive writings.  If anyone were to be protected by the fortress of his own talents and unable to tarnish his image with any posthumous palimpsests, Nabokov would be among the most likely to survive unscathed.

Nevertheless, if these recent rumors are well–founded, his son, translator, and literary executor Dmitri appears to be engaging in a game of handy–dandy.  Encumbered by a number of burdens, not the least of which is the maintenance of his father’s artistic integrity in the face of shifting critical winds, the younger (73–year–old) Nabokov would have burned the document by now if he had really wanted to do so.  After all, July marked the thirtieth anniversary of his father’s death.  Clearly, waters have to be tested, and maybe a bit of creative padding needs to be inserted before we get to see the semi–finished product (a few years ago, some impatient scholars decided to get a jump on the competition).  Having spent a decade working in Nabokovia, my understanding is that we will see the pink elephant in the end, although it will still be dripping with distemper.  Nabokov conceded that he would be remembered primarily for his unorthodox translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (which he justified by Chateaubriand’s rendering of this most sublime of all human creations), and this notorious novel which first brought him censure then worldwide and everlasting glory.  Since soothsayers seem to think that Laura and Dolores Haze are cousins or at least distantly related, a literary executor steeped in the riches and diversity of his father’s works might chafe at the prospect of further Lolitology.  Such is the price of fame and, of course, of original genius.

*Note: The work in question has indeed been published.  You can find a review on these pages.

Silver Blaze

Although this marvelous story derives its name from this lordly animal set to race in this region of England, its most famous line involves another four-legged friend who "did nothing in the night–time."  My edition boasts that this line is the source of the expression, "the dog that didn't bark."  If this is truly the origin (I will not even dignify it with a search, either online or off), then the future of mankind is indeed in troubled hands.  It would be hard to believe that, after thousands of years of cohabitation, we would need an emaciated and neurotic sleuth to tell us that there is something amiss about a guard dog who chooses not to fulfill his duties.  Wait until someone publishes a story featuring a cat who doesn't sleep (again no search, this cat must be out there somewhere) and decides to watch over its owner, and we may coin an even more telling idiom about human nature.  In Silver Blaze, a beautiful silvery steed from this legendary British stock is missing and its trainer John Straker is dead.  Since the horse can rightly be viewed as a sort of piggy bank – or as we say in our waggish slang, a cash cow – it seems logical to assume that the horse has vanished for the sake of the money that will be earned betting against it. 

This gambit has long since been one of the favorites of sports stories: it is just before the biggest competition of the horse's or athlete's career that the prize participant either gets injured or disappears without too much of a trace.  The team or trainer cannot believe the poor timing with which all this has occurred (although, if you're a betting man, this is the only time for this type of thing to occur; we are witnessing this even now before the largest American sports event of the year), and panic and goldfeverish speculation set in.  The investigation, narrated by the faithful and jubilant Dr. Watson (one of the steadiest and most optimistic narrators in literary history), has all the usual components for a great Holmesian tale.  There is the unique locale, either Victorian or early Edwardian London or one of England’s innumerable moors, tors, or hamlets; the somewhat overtasked police force; a handful of potential culprits who all immediately respect or fear the legendary detective; and the impossible crime itself, which in this case begets one of Holmes’s more ingenious solutions.  Apart from the missing horse, the dead trainer, a band of gypsies, a rival stable, a curious late–night visit, some curried mutton, and a set of diverging tracks, the clues are more than peculiar: a box of matches, two inches of a tallow candle, a brier–root pipe, a pouch of sealskin with that particular cut of tobacco called Cavendish, a silver watch with a gold chain, a fistful of dollars (that is to say, these products from the Royal Mint), an aluminum pencil case, a few papers, and a small, delicate knife with an ivory handle.  “A very singular knife,” remarks Holmes.  His medical companion agrees: apparently, such knives are only used for the finest of surgical incisions.  But such a knife could not possibly have been employed as a murder weapon, since Straker was bludgeoned by nothing less than a large blunt object. 

Unlike other adventures in which Holmes abandons Watson for a few pages to gather data or question informants offstage, very little detail is not made available to the reader.  Holmes’s people skills, which he can turn on and off like electric current, are displayed in their fullest form, and his charm and patience have never proven to be more effective.  And there is also that now–immortal dog who decides not to bark on the night of the murder, even though we suspect he might have every motivation to do so.  Had he barked, of course, we would hardly know of him now.  Yet perhaps one day we will instead remember Silver Blaze for Holmes’s revelatory statement that it was, “in the carriage, just as we reached the trainer’s house, that the immense significance of the curried mutton occurred to me.”  Surely, we think, there must be some aspect of human nature that can be embodied by the spiced meat from two-year-old ewes.

The Riddle of the Sands

When fiction decides to prognosticate about reality, the future of mankind and so forth, it usually does so in the guise of either some apocalyptic vision or natural progression of technology.  There are names for these types of books, the latter normally being dubbed science fiction (an odd couple, to say the least, but less bumptious than “technological fiction”), and the former treading near the subcategories of religious literature or prophecy.  Prophecy: knowing the future before it happens and having the good sense to enlighten the less clairvoyant.  When fiction prophesies and its artifices become newspaper headlines, then one speaks of a visionary.  This is rare, however, among artistic writers because the future is hardly their medium: they are interested either in the past (Romantics come to mind) or the present (like Modernists, those happiest of citizens).  The future is left to the wizards of machines and moons, starships and inexplicable forces of cosmic calamity.  Just writing that last sentence tells me why the future should probably remain undisturbed and given a generous head start.

 

Occasionally, a talented writer with primarily artistic ends in mind will gaze into a crystal ball, or perhaps an empty bottle or ashtray, and see something he knows will occur.  It may be good or bad, but it cannot be that he will leave his job, his wife, or his homeland, because these actions will only become his future if and when he so wishes.  No, he sees something greater than he is, something that will affect not only his small microcosm of existence but also the lives and fates of many others.  This is how a blind Argentine dreamed up a global library and a wealthy overeducated Dane wallowed presciently in the selfish neurosis of postwar Europe.  Dreams and desires certainly have a lot to do with what you see, and they can be delusive; but they can also allow you to catch a glimpse of something others might not even recognize.   

 

You may have not heard of Erskine Childers, but you have appreciated his labors for more than a century.  He is often credited with establishing this genre of popular fiction, and his 1903 work (his only novel amidst a dozen military histories) still gets published and read and praised.  The novel has also been featured on lists of this kind of literature, which may sound like Armageddon and Extraterrestrial Wars rolled into one large adamantine asteroid, but was actually the product of an era in which British global power began to endure sizable losses.  An earlier, even more seminal work by another Irishman is also included, because it allegedly showcases the frightening prospects of foreign supremacy and, to be twenty–first century about it, retrocolonization (a term of which your search engine is unaware but which may indeed become a headline in the next decade or so).  It was at this time that Childers, an avid sailor during school and university holidays, conceived of a most fantastic fear: the Germans attacking Britain from the North Sea.            

Our hero is not Childers, but Carruthers, a bored young diplomat who is invited by an old chum called Davies on a yachting and duck hunting trip around the Baltic.  Of course Davies does not actually have a yacht; he does have, however, another purpose to the ambitious tour in his small boat (named after a song by this composer) and the two Britons are soon embroiled in a plot to foil, it seems, all of Prussia.  In a slow narrative typical of a prolific nineteenth–century man of letters where clues and red herrings are revealed in equal quantity and very gradually, Carruthers comes to see why making maps of the East Frisian Islands for the British Navy may avert some kind of invasion.  There is also a shady German named Dollmann, his lovely daughter, and the distinct possibility of a double agent abetting the Germans in their insidious scheme.  

For reasons I am in no position to investigate, the book has been universally lauded by those in the sailing industry as being spot–on about all things nautical.  The warnings of the novel were also apparently just as accurate, since in response the British government is reputed to have established new naval outposts all along its shoreline and no invasion of any kind was ever documented.  Thus The Riddle of the Sands has that rare quality among prophecies of having been considered and acted upon before hazardous consequences could arise (and we may ponder that eternal conundrum as to whether a prophecy can only be given validity if it is fulfilled).  We might call Childers a prophet in his own country if he were not actually from another country, one that elected him to its Parliament and executed him by its firing squads, then elected his son fifty years later as its fourth President.  A remarkable end to a man who peered into the future of Europe but could not possibly have imagined his own.