The Talented Mr. Ripley (film)

Modern critics will be happy to tell you that the best works of literary (and, for that matter, cinematic) art are those which yield numerous interpretations.  For them, the wonderful thing about modernity's sad indecisiveness is that it parallels their own: nothing has any one meaning, thus stripping the critic of his responsibility to understand a work on its own terms.  You will find the most egregious offenders in this regard among those who read philosophy as if they were reading a novel, chopping and picking at whatever appeals to them to formulate their own theories that, upon closer inspection, turn out to distort and disrupt the original.  Does a poem by Cavafy have the same significance if read by a Greek or a Chinese speaker?  Certainly not; yet Cavafy possesses, as all good writers do, a certain frame of reference that might be simplified as his cultural context, but which in the final analysis is nothing more than his own moral structure.  Regardless of where his readers may hail from, Cavafy will ultimately be judged on his ability to delineate right from wrong and convince us that his particular delineation adds to our knowledge of this difference.  If nothing matters to him, it surely will not be worth a damn to us.  My mentioning Cavafy is not a coincidence, nor are any of the details pertinent to the plot of this film.

Our protagonist is a certain Thomas Ripley (Matt Damon), a moody, artistic youth who obviously has never had the opportunities of many other, far less talented coevals.  His surname might have something to do with this phenomenon whose founder died at the peak of his renown a few years before Highsmith's book was published; yet more important is his Christian name, which in Aramaic means "twin."  What we will witness, with the slow precision of a crime planned years in advance, is the twinning of paths, the old and familiar fable of the double: the first path will be the simple, straight road of guaranteed luxury; the second the sinuous struggle of a very intelligent but impoverished young man.  Ripley is playing the piano at a social function when he is approached by Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn),  a moneyed businessman who assumes quite logically that Ripley's Princeton jacket must mean he went to Princeton, and that if he went to Princeton, he must certainly know his famously wayward son, Dickie Greenleaf.  Ripley's response to Greenleaf's conversation sets the tone for the film: he lies, but doesn't simply agree to his mistake, he moves a step further and knowingly asks, "How is Dickie?"  Those three words grasp Greenleaf's weakness in its totality.  And the consummate businessman does what only very rich and arrogant people are accustomed to doing: he tries to purchase Ripley's services and dispatch him to bring his son back from Europe.  Most young men with an easy past and a bright future might find this assignment somewhat humbling; but most young men with an easy past and bright future also have the indelible tendency of never having enough money to satiate their whims.  This Ripley fellow, however, is different.  He is humbler, more sensitive and artistic, probably close to his money, a responsible youth who will go very far.  So when, from a distance, he sees Ripley embrace a girl outside the club and hand over his Princeton jacket, Greenleaf cannot imagine that the girl is not Ripley's significant other, or that the jacket and Princeton degree actually belong to her boyfriend.  Greenleaf sees only what he wants to see; we, the viewers, see the truth as well, as we will at every step of Ripley's journey.

It turns out that Dickie (Jude Law), being the smart boy he is, has made his way to Italy with a pretty young thing named Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow), and his plan is to have no plan at all.  Ripley tracks down the couple, ingratiates himself with the mistake provided by Dickie's father, and soon is sharing in the Byronic decadence that Dickie has so pathetically misidentified as the freedom of youth.  Yet it is on his way to Europe by ship that we first catch a glimpse of Ripley's real intentions.  Upon meeting a young woman named Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett) – another bored rich person who doesn't quite feel guilty about her easy life as much as annoyed that she knows she should feel guilty – Ripley introduces himself as Dickie.  Should we nod our politically correct heads at his obvious envy of Dickie's privileges?  Should we snicker at the pun on "Tom and Dick," the original form of the catch-all expression, "Tom, Dick and Harry," which was incipiently a reference to two working-class youths from Bow and Whitechapel?  Should we understand Ripley's lie as an attempt to bed Meredith, who is rich and attractive and more than a little naïve?  Were this a more typical tale of the inequalities of postwar Europe and America exemplified by the ideological war of socialism and capitalism, the answers to these questions might all be yes.  But they are not yes.  We are not confronting rich and poor in an allegory of societal malfeasance and Tom Ripley couldn't care less about Meredith or any other woman.  The only person for Tom, you see, is Dickie Greenleaf.

For better or worse, the film runs through the permutations of understanding Ripley's motives with sufficient objectivity.  When Dickie asks what makes Ripley special ("everyone should have one talent") and Ripley replies that he is particularly skilled at "forging signatures, telling lies, and impersonating practically anyone," we are led to believe that Ripley is evil.  Until we realize, perhaps, that deception is a stereotypically feminine trait, and coyness and an unwillingness to give a straight answer the signs of the coquettish woman who will never directly express her desires.  When a loud, hedonistic boor by the name of Freddie Miles (Phillp Seymour Hoffman) comes racing into town, Ripley hasn't the slightest desire to join the jetset, make love to every woman he sees, or stumble about in the drunken bubble of irresponsibility that is the calling card of wealthy foreigners living the sweet life.  No, what he wants is for Freddie to get as far away as possible from Dickie.  Soon enough, Dickie's true character is revealed through not-so-clandestine arguments with the lovely daughter of a local shopowner, his utter lack of ability in anything useful, creative or smart, as well as Marge's running commentary:

The thing with Dickie is that ... when you've got his attention, you feel like you're the only person in the world... it's like the sun that shines on you and it's glorious.  And then he forgets you and it's very cold.

Ripley, of course, being the sedulous listener that he is (all good impersonators are very good listeners), knows all this, but continues to hope that he will prove to be the exception.  And so, the first and most damning crime takes place one beautiful fall day in Sicily (November 7, we learn later from the police report) and Tom finally gets to become Dickie to everyone who didn't know him, exactly, as it were, halfway through the film.  It has taken him that long to find, catch, and replace Dickie, who did not share his interests or affection; and it will take the film's remainder to make sure that no one learns of the switch, that Dickie's foul temper and general lack of culture will make him an easy frame for other misdemeanors, and that even those who knew him would bow their heads in sullen acceptance of his world gone wrong.  But we viewers see the duel, as Meredith and Ripley attend this legendary opera featuring another tragic duel between friends, and we know what Tom Ripley wants: "to be a fake somebody rather than a real nobody."  If only Dickie Greenleaf were somebody worth being.

Notes on a Scandal

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

The Scarlet Letter

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Frivolity

Some may surmise that these pages have arisen as a consequence of a society that encourages relativism, as well as its distant, more provincial cousin, frivolity.  While I will not gainsay such allegations, frivolity is a staple of childhood and adolescence, a condition that we only acknowledge more clearly as the years pass and our values – one would hope – gel into a structure that promotes a universally applicable moral law.  A philosopher, especially one of the last hundred years or so, would not hesitate to ask whether frivolity and morality are in any way mutually exclusive; well, they are in most ways; but it would be difficult to argue that the idle pastimes of the young and very restless are necessarily immoral.   An economist of any time period (they really do begin to resemble one another upon close inspection) might calmly explain that with the exception of professional athletes – a very small percentage of our population – people tend to get better at their jobs as they get older.  That is why in places like Denmark so many citizens start university in their mid- to late twenties, having spent five to ten years traveling, partying, and loving.  There are, of course, extenuating circumstances (family illness or invalidism, for example) that would hamper such escapades; but for the most part, this can be accomplished with a bit of imagination, luck, and intestinal fortitude.  Mostly, as it were, to combat the solitude that frivolity inevitably begets.  And a poet of some caliber would write an ode to frivolity, because frivolity and odes, and the writing of frivolous odes, are almost intrinsically linked.  Wine, women, and song was a phrase I heard uttered many a time as a child, and it seemed rather ridiculous that someone could devote his life and work to the momentary lapses of hedonism.  But if the poet himself cannot truly write what he feels in his heart and his loin, he may be relegated to eternal frivolity and then to regret.  This is, we come to understand, a particular form of damnation.

And yet there are advantages.  Frivolity becomes desirable in the wake of a relationship of some importance, ostensibly because we want to rid ourselves of emotional responsibility for one night or a bit longer.  The irony of course is that such interludes only underscore the importance of what we have just left.  From a male perspective, one has less of a tendency to break down in middle age (also known as prime daddy and breadwinner age), acquire a red convertible sports car and a barely legal convertible girlfriend, and race off into the sunset or whenever the car and the girl lose some of their luster.  That this maudlin occurrence keeps, well, occurring allegedly tells us how important it is to exploit the variegation and vicissitudes of youth.  Many very happy people may boast of teenage titillation that has grown into lifelong partnership, and I have always admired such souls.  I have admired them because life would be much simpler and safer that way.  Most of us, however, require practice, perhaps because we are less sure of what we want, or perhaps because we have always envisioned exactly what we want.  So when, in the quiet stability of our middle years, temptation rears its very pretty head, we may stroll down a crooked, frisky path in the bottom of our soul and take solace in the fact that the adventure portion of our program has been completed.  And this is why we are encouraged to indulge our frivolity when we are younger: we have to build a set of memories, people, places, feelings, and thoughts that will serve us later when we look back at our accomplishments and failures, and act as a guide for further action.  The only question is at what point we should start looking back.  We want to know that what we have done, experienced, and lost, has taught us well enough to enrich our futures with expectations, hints, shades, colors – everything that makes us smirk at those young fools who know nothing of life.  We know, and we're right.

Strange is it, then, that we counteract this overwhelming desire to be right – which we only get to be once we're adults – with the encouragement of frivolity in our children.  You will hear it in the well-worn phrase, “a child needs time to goof off and be a kid.”  Few truer things have ever been said.  But why is this true?  Perhaps when we are wee chicks scurrying about the henhouse, sometimes after other chicks, the frailty of our bonds seems temporal and dull.  When I reflect upon all the time wasted in the pursuance of things that neither help me now nor had any edifying or interesting qualities whatsoever (listening to popular music being one of the more egregious sins), I shudder at so much of life fretted away.  I remember time plodding along as a child because my memories – however deep, however yearning for significance – were hopelessly superficial replicas of the memories of others, of what we are taught as children to think and believe.  We all learn that childhood and adolescence are garish tributes to frivolity; that adults might indulge us our observations, even occasionally chuckling at their unintended appropriateness, but that we really know nothing about this world; that we may yearn to be adults and then spend our adult lives reminiscing about the freedom from responsibility that so characterized our younger years; and most of all, we learn that to fit in with everyone else our age, we must embrace this frivolity.  We are then ranked by our peers as to how quickly we have assimilated this mediocre manner of existence where the only thing mocked more than excellence is ineptitude (high schools have much in common with governmental bureaucracies).  Nothing, and I mean nothing, is more infuriating than watching a bunch of teenagers react in perfectly predictable fashion to some lewd provocation.  It is the end of all thoughts, the moment when we become base robots for the most mindless (and often cruelest) goading, all in the name of claiming to understand what we are supposed to do and how we are supposed to think.  Which, if so many adults wander through life without a clue about, neither a child nor a teenager will be able to grasp.  We know this now, and children have an eerie premonition about it as well.  They know they are not adults; they know that they really don’t know a lot; and yet they persist because otherwise they might admit defeat and make their actions before the age of twenty-two or twenty-three completely and utterly valueless.  But later it is precisely these early years that we cherish for their innocence, for their discovery, for their simplicity.  And once again we find ourselves staring at a mirror and seeing regret.

But life is about memory not regret.  We may choose to remember or obliterate certain things, yet others envelop us without our consent; things we learn and things we experience from life outside of efforts to improve ourselves intellectually.  In time we are left with two testaments, legacies that require formal terminology, so let us call one intellectual pension and the other, its opposite and ally, mnemonic pension.  Intellectual pension is what we learn over a lifetime, what people truly bound to the accumulation of systematic knowledge are to take with them into the grave and perhaps into a beyond.  Obviously, intellectual pension is optional but highly recommended: we don't really need to read, to learn, to improve ourselves, although history tells us we should do everything possible in that regard.  Mnemonic pension is what we all feel at one point or another, our nostalgia for youth or for what we have experienced regardless of age.  It is the river that we cannot enter twice; it is the storage of moments – sweet and bittersweet – we have when we have come to the realization that we are no longer twenty-one or twenty-two, or even twenty–five, and that a distinct part of life is gone forever.  At what point exactly this understanding sets in, and whether it is necessarily joined by acceptance, varies from soul to soul.   But mnemonic pension is stacked full of frivolity: in fact, most of our memories mean nothing to anyone except us and almost all of them have little valence for the course of human events.  These are flashes of smiles; moments of hurt or joy; for someone like me, words used in particular circumstances that will always be associated with one person or one event; sounds, smells, the softness of fabrics, glimpses at something out of the corner of our eye.  And there will be regrets, because anyone who has decided not to take a risk will have pangs of remorse while gazing upon a purple sunset.  O those frivolous days lost to our calendars of order and assignment!  There might have been something to them after all.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Some of us have the unfortunate habit of ignoring those works or manifestos which do not concur with our own.  Only too natural, we might say, because life is short and consecrating time to theories we know to be patently false (for whatever reason) is a waste of our dwindling days.  So bereft of imagination or credibility are many of these decrees that more demanding readers, readers whose main aims are beauty, truth, enjoyment and a moral framework for all aspects of life, are infuriated.  If that sounds like a lot to ask for, you might question why you read at all.  Personally, I read to seek out that one moral law that has always existed within me and is reflected by the starry night above me.  I do not find it often; sometimes it only exists in snippets or flashes amidst a garish carnival of platitudes.  In some rather infrequent cases there obtains a concatenation of detail evoking the shadow of that law, however ignored by the text itself, and the result is what the Greeks called irony.  Rarer still are images of purported truth cast in colors and shapes that could not possibly mean anything more than earthbound pleasures – until you look very closely and see that a few of these pleasures (especially affection, physical attraction, laughter, and friendship) are indeed reflections of something much, much greater.  Thus we are bound to examine all information we come across.  In fact, we can and should assume that within the maze of misperception, bias, and fear there lurks a crazed beast whose roar can bring us something of this law.  Modern psychology, a field with which I am very unfortunately well-acquainted from readings, has taken it upon itself to explain all our dreams, nightmares, waking moments and desires through a children’s set of boxes and crayons.  It has tried (and failed gloriously) to make us think we are all puerile players in a nonstop run of a tasteless musical on the Great White Way, singing the same chants and dancing to the same bongo drums.

Now there is nothing wrong with childhood, but there is something terribly wrong with its ignorant revolt against authority.  Curiosity, optimism, the sense of immortality that many children’s circumstances permit them to enjoy – all of this we should never forget; the love of family, of one’s homeland, of the moments and other souls that make us into responsible adults, all of this we should cherish.  When people long for their childhood, it is either because their childhood was very happy or their current life does not contain this sense of immortality, of unending meadows cascading among unending hillocks.  The assumption of another persona to the psychologist indicates a deep-seated urge to escape one’s existence, although every writer of fiction, like every actor, assumes a myriad of guises over a career and can still be (and often is) very content with his “real” self.  To what other vocation does such an apparent paradox belong?  To those persons of deep faith, those who appreciate their earthbound existence but also look forward to redemption in some higher state; loving one does not mean hating the other.  A lengthy but necessary introduction to one of the finest short stories of the English language.

The basic facts are known even to people who have never opened Stevenson’s text: Dr. Henry Jekyll, a scientist of genius and loner by nature, has acquired a nasty and violent friend by the name of Edward Hyde.  That Hyde might be sponsored by Jekyll is the direct suggestion of the narrator, who culls his details from Mr. Utterson, a London lawyer who hears of an awful crime involving a young girl and a payoff to her relatives from very respectable circles (a strange foreshadowing of these legendary crimes).  Since Utterson is in every way an upstanding Victorian citizen as well as a scholar of the law, this crime of moral turpitude cannot go unpunished.  The trail boomerangs back to Jekyll, who happens to be one of Utterson’s clients as well as an old friend, reminding us of the aphorisms about how well we think we know our dearest comrades. One wonders what the first-time reader might have made of the strange comings and goings of Hyde from a building adjacent to that of Jekyll, and from the physical deformity and abhorrent cruelty that distinguish Hyde from his maker:

The lawyer stood awhile when Mr. Hyde had left him, the picture of disquietude.  Then he began slowly to mount the street, pausing every step or two and putting his hand to his brow like a man in mental perplexity.  The problem he was thus debating as he walked was one of a class that is rarely solved.  Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him.  ‘There must be something else,’ said the perplexed gentleman.  ‘There is something more, if I could find a name for it.  God bless me, the man seems hardly human!  Something troglodytic, shall we say?  Or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell?  Or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent?  The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend!’

The story proceeds in magnificent suspense until a pair of fatal decisions are made, and Utterson is left with a letter from Jekyll detailing his descent into hell.  The letter, which I should like to quote in toto, is such a literary delight that we are struck anew by the ability of its author, and of the temptations of evil in the face of knowledge and progress.  It is here that Jekyll becomes Hyde and Hyde turns into Jekyll, that the two persons once thought distinct appear as anagrams of their own weaknesses.  It is also here that Jekyll reveals why he might have wanted such an escape, and his explanation – for a moment, in any case – appears to be as lucid an ancient codex on combating evil as anything else we might have heard, in this case by grasping, literally and figuratively, at its tenebrous strength.

What one shouldn’t conclude, however, is that the titular bicephalous beast somehow metaphorizes an affliction.  Nor should we suppose that the whole project can be reduced to the modern plight of a small percentage of our population with a misunderstanding of their proper persona, in some cases leading them to conduct their business as totally separate people.  Stevenson, like Utterson, was a lawyer not a doctor, and his interest is in the motives of men not some cerebral malfunction.  That evil and goodness should operate within the same immortal soul is our oldest and still our most critical moral quandary; nevertheless, that a man of superior intellect would generate, in his own nightmare, such a lowlife scum as an alias speaks more of his own inner darkness than any shame he might have had in inducing the transformation.  Despite his claims, Dr. Jekyll is not a good man gone wrong: he is a bad man who finds an outlet in his creative work, in time making himself into his own Frankenstein's monster.  For that reason perhaps is man “commingled out of good and evil,” whereas Edward Hyde, “alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”