The Paradise of Thieves

There is a point of human despair where the northern poor take to drink − and our own poor take to daggers.

You may enjoy the works of this author for their portraiture, their inimitable style, their flawless moral structure, or, one stormy and brisk late afternoon, perhaps for all three.  Indeed, it is this triptych of delights that allow these famous stories − all simple studies with complicated but fair explanations − to render the image of Chesterton and his most prized creation in glory.  It is also in the setting that one finds the precise tone.  When at home in Chesterton’s England, morals are his strongest suit; when in France, the plot and its concomitant characterizations (like all great writers, Chesterton’s characters shape the storyline, not the other way around) are most dazzling; but away from both these isles of civilization, a sensational style overtakes all else that, while present in all the stories and all of Chesterton’s other texts, is magnificent in its freedom of association, as if the unusual venue stirred his deepest longings.  Not many such stories exist, but one gem is undoubtedly this tale set in the land of wine and weal. 

The opening line introduces us to Muscari, the “most original of the Tuscan poets,” a stereotype so true to life that he cannot possibly exist except in literature or a dream.  He is cloaked by both nature and habit in black, and carries himself “as near as his century permitted to walking the world like Don Juan, with rapier and guitar.”  We already perceive the essence of this frivolous hedonist when another flourish is added:

He was neither a charlatan nor a child; but a hot, logical Latin who liked a certain thing and was it.  His poetry was as straightforward as anyone else’s prose.  He desired fame or wine or the beauty of women with a torrid directness inconceivable among the cloudy ideals and cloudy compromises of the north; to vaguer races his intensity smelt of danger or even crime.  Like fire or the sea, he was too simple to be trusted.

Muscari is somehow also an “ardent Catholic,” with the emphasis, we suppose, on “ardent.”  His ardor leads him, as it always does, to his favorite restaurant where he espies Harrogate, an English banker, and of even greater interest, the latter’s “beautiful English daughter.”  As he plans his approach, he catches sight of Ezza, an old friend and failed poet.  He chastises his friend, whom he does not recognize owing to his motley garb, for dressing like an Englishman (or, as the latter defends his wardrobe, “an Italian of the future”), and then proceeds to discuss the visiting foreigners.  Ezza mentions there is also a son in the picture, to which Muscari replies:

Harrogate has millions in his safes, and I have − the hole in my pocket.  But you daren’t say − you can’t say − that he’s cleverer than I, or bolder than I, or even more energetic.  He’s not clever; he’s got eyes like blue buttons; he’s not energetic; he moves from chair to chair like a paralytic.  He’s a conscientious, kindly old blockhead; but he’s got money simply because he collects money, as a boy collects stamps …. To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

They are all to venture through a forbidden region, Ezza and Muscari as guides, the Harrogates as moneyed tourists.  Only a sixth member to this party is added, a priest, “whose name was Brown and who was fortunately a silent individual,” and they set off.

Now we know that when characters are forbidden for a specific reason from entering a region, walking down a lonely alley, or bathing in an even lonelier cove, what has befallen others will surely befall them.  The reason the Harrogates are not encouraged to venture into the Tuscan woods is too good to be real: a king of thieves, extorting fees and fighting off the national troops, resides and reigns among those same wooden columns and uses its animals as lookouts.  His brigands appear in all parts and in all forms, and “his wild authority spread with the swiftness of a silent revolution.”  When the travelers do alight and confront the inevitable brigand and the “dubious-looking men with carbines and dirty slouch hats” who “had been gathering silently in such preponderating numbers,” their ringleader, a man called Montano, has three demands to make of his rich interlopers.  But that little priest, as silent all this time as the revolution or the dubious-looking men, has three objections to this scenario, all of which he explains at length to Muscari.  Rare is it that a poet has so listened to a priest!  The explanation, given in oblique hints as is typical for this particular priest, has just settled into Muscari’s brain when he looks around, befuddled at the turn of events:

Darkness was deepening under the mountain walls, and it was not easy to discern much of the progress of the struggle, save that tall men were pushing their horses’ muzzles through a clinging crowd of brigands, who seemed more inclined to harass and hustle the invaders than to kill them.  It was more like a town crowd preventing the passage of the police than anything the poet had ever pictured as the last stand of the doomed and outlawed men of blood.

In the end, both poet and priest are right about what is important to them.  And Muscari is especially right about those southerners and their daggers and those northerners and their potables.

The Lady with the Lap Dog

Should you have any doubts about the intentions of this story’s protagonist, look no further than his first spoken line: “If she’s here without a husband and without anyone she knows, it wouldn’t be a waste of my time to get to know her.”  Gurov is a still-young playboy on vacation from his wife and children on the beaches of Yalta, and there is no immediate reason why he should gain a morsel of our sympathy.  Not that his wife, whom we only see once much later on, has anything great to offer this world.  For to understand Gurov and why he is in Yalta to meet a woman he will never be able to do without, it is his wife one should consider:

She read a lot, didn’t write the hard sign in her letters, didn’t call her husband Dmitri, but rather Dimitri; and he secretly thought of her as intellectually limited, narrow, unrefined; he feared her and didn’t like being at home.

Yet Chekhov, too subtle a writer for modern tastes, does not allow Gurov to find his wife’s opposite.  That would be too easy, the fodder for romance novels where every maudlin expectation is gratified.  Instead, he comes upon the titular Anna Sergeevna and her Pomeranian, who may or may not be better examples of moral creatures, but whom he loves completely and absolutely.  This story has nothing to do with honeycombed love and the effusive, romanticized backwash of pink weddings and little white houses; this is a tale of destiny, of suffering akin to that of “two migratory birds, a male and female, caught and forced to live in separate cages.”  This is about the conundrum of finding your fated twin soul, and not being able to cast away the dregs of your previous life.

The love affair, like the seasons, has four parts.  Gurov and Anna Sergeevna are first seen around a summery boardwalk, and Gurov is portrayed as the rakish misogynist.  That he calls women “a lowly race” but cannot do without them for “two days” coincides with the most prolific clichés about Lotharios.  How strange is it that in this story which will do anything to convince us of Gurov’s artistic authenticity, of his difference from the Philistine masses who have assumed the contours of his daily existence, we find he is nothing more than the commonplace womanizer.  I cannot be persuaded by literature’s thousand and one tales featuring immoral beasts and hedonistic daredevils, that under some of these exteriors lurk true artistic souls.  How you treat the world reflects your innermost passions and beliefs.  If you believe in saying and doing whatever is necessary for monetary, political  or sexual gain, then you are as empty and as meaningless as the moments you spend deceiving others.  We wonder to what extent deception is part of Gurov’s repertoire.  What does he say to these lonely women as he comforts them, albeit for “a short time”?  What is his role in life outside of a comforter of women who have no interest in his personality (another tedious chestnut)?  What motivation might he have for continuing in this vein?  Why is Anna Sergeevna any different?  Is this a cautionary tale or an allegory for pursuance of the Good?

It is in the fall, our story’s next section where little time has actually passed, that we catch a glimpse of their immortality.  Where modern literary critics might dissect “the old women dressed as young women and the bevy of generals” on the pier in some kind of countercultural gibberish, the fact is that these critics have never actually bothered to look at pictures and books of the Crimea of that time period as well as lack any imagination whatsoever.  Men all aspire to some title of greatness, while women really only want to be young enough to be coy (to paraphrase this author), and there is nothing more to it than that.  Those generals and old women are as fraudulent as any sentiment that you cannot understand and deem fraudulent because your narrow world has yet to experience it.  Against this backdrop, we are given a taste of what to expect once the seas have calmed and our last breaths have slowed, and stopped:

It was so noisy below, and here there was no Yalta, no Oreanda; now it was noisy and would continue to be as indifferently and deafly noisy when we were no longer here.  And in this constancy, in this indifference to life and death, each of us is covered, perhaps, by the price of our eternal salvation, of the unending movement of life on earth, of unending perfection.  And sitting beside that young woman who at dawn had seemed so beautiful, so serene, so enchanting before the fairy tale landscape around her, the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide blue sky, Gurov came to see that if one thought about it, everything in this world was essentially beautiful − everything except when we think and ponder, when we forget about the higher goals of existence and our own human dignity.

So later, when Gurov has gone through another season, this time a harsh winter, and realized that everyone’s “true life” is hidden beneath the surface, he makes one mistake.  He assumes that Anna Sergeevna thinks the way he does.  Men, especially those in more conservative societies, have the luxury of withdrawing from human interaction and relegating their secrets to a covert smile to a mirror or window pane when no one is looking.  But women, in those same circumstances, certainly cannot.  A woman will always be branded for her adulterous machinations, while a man may very well escape unscathed.  Yes Anna is also married, to someone whom we never quite meet but to whom she has bestowed one of our language’s most ignominious labels.  In fact, her husband seems to trot beside her as a reminder of her guilt, almost as if he were her Pomeranian (the Russian word for Pomeranian, shpitz, and his surname von Dideritz have some Germanic affinity), and almost like the two adolescents smoking above Anna and Gurov’s secret encounter in the opera remind the careful reader of Gurov’s two high school−aged boys. 

It is also no coincidence that the only line uttered by Gurov's wife is, "playing the fop, Dimitri, doesn't suit you at all."  And why would "Dimitri" have to be dressed so well if it weren't in his interests to look good to women around him?   We are not supposed to trust Gurov's wife because she is a classic manifestation of poshlost', of that smug vulgarity that is the absolute antithesis of art.  So then maybe Dmitri is very good in his role as seducer, and maybe his alleged love for Anna Sergeevna is no more than a delusion − Chekhov only hints in one direction but does not compel us.   The only compulsion we have, in fact, is to read on to the end, where Gurov asks himself another, much more important question. 

In der Strafkolonie

A translation of this story’s title, which may be rendered as “in the penal colony,” seems inappropriately mild.  And not only because some people believe the word “colony” to have been derived from this man’s name.  It turns out that a colony is only one of the Romans’ many legacies; but colonies have assumed another, very distinct meaning in the years since the fall of Rome.  They have come to signify hamlets or isolated settlements for people united in a joint purpose.  That purpose may be practically anything from religion to drug use to nudity.  In other words, what was once repayment to retired soldiers for years of killing and mayhem is now often the only place where persecuted, ostracized or downright bizarre minorities may enjoy the freedoms they espouse.  A penal colony, then, would be a place where people believe in punishment, in both inflicting and receiving it, although probably not in equal measure.  Those who rule the colony must be willing to act as examples for those who do not meet the specifications of the enterprise.  Maintaining the compound of the Germanic word for punishment and the Latinate borrowing superimposes ideas as alien as the cultures of subjugator and subjugated.  What is more, any derivative of “penalize,” despite its implications, remains soft and almost schoolmaster−like, and in the modern day reminds many of cheating and roughhousing millionaires castigated by sports officials for not playing by the rules.  The hellhole in this tale is about pain, gruesome and infinite pain, and, to be frank, little else.

On an island quite removed from the influence of “European views,” a Traveler ("neither a citizen of the penal colony, nor of the state to which it belonged") is taken by an Officer to inspect a machine.  The machine is a mechanical wonder, the pride and joy of the colony’s Former Commander and now of his last adherent, the Officer.  So unpopular were the methods of this erstwhile taskmaster that his modest grave is now concealed underneath a teahouse table with the inscription:

Here lies the Former Commander.  His followers, who may not be named, dug him this grave and above it placed this gravestone.  It has been foretold that after a certain number of years the Commander will rise from the grave and lead his followers to recapture the colony. Wait and see!

Originality notwithstanding, a better epitaph for the Devil could probably not be written.  The contraption which this Commander devises also suggests unrepentant evil in the form of justice.  Justice, mind you, under the auspices of a harrow that takes twelve hours to kill.  The Traveler is presented with these facts and then invited to witness the judgment in action.

Much has been made in Kafka criticism of the diabolic nature of the torture rack.  There are numerous parallels to modern torture devices, although the Middle Ages, owing in no small part to their inefficiencies and paucity of universal human rights concepts, were far ahead of today’s monsters.  A man in chains, “an obtuse, wide−mouthed person with a shabby face and hair” who looked “so loyal, like a dog,” has been sentenced for “disobeying and offending a superior.”  The Officer relates the exact circumstances of the crime:

This morning a Captain reported that this man, who was assigned to him as a servant and sleeps in front of his door, was asleep on the job.   His duty was to stand and salute in front of the Captain's door at the stroke of each hour.  Doubtless no hard task, yet a necessary one as he has the obligation of being fresh for both service and surveillance.  Last night, the Captain wanted to check whether he was fulfilling his duty.  He opened the door at two o'clock sharp and found the man curled up in a ball.   The Captain retrieved his riding crop and hit him in the face.   Instead of getting up and asking for forgiveness, the man grabbed his master by the legs, shook him, and said: 'Lose the crop or I'll eat you whole.'

What hope is there in a world like this?  Should we then be surprised to learn that the Condemned knows neither of his punishment nor that he is to be punished at all?  All this will become clear in the course of twelve hours, his last half−day in this life.  For twelve hours the harrow will cut into his naked body and write "with many a flourish" the exact commandment of the island that he has violated.  Only then, says the Officer, does the extent of his crime dawn on him and, in a way, grant him redemption.       

Yes, this looks, sounds and feels like an allegory, but all great art is an allegory for itself.  Feeble critical attempts have been made to compare the writing on the back of "hundreds of men" who endured unfathomable pain for varying degrees of insolence to the agony of devoting oneself to letters.  This attempt and many others that seek simple ciphers to machinations of genius may smirk at a detail or two, especially at the endless zeal of the Officer that cannot be human.  Yet he is very human.  He believes that his justice is divine and that only he may mete it out.  He even goes so far as to mistake himself for his old Commander in speech, so strong is his commitment to righteousness and discipline.  And on this modern−day Devil's Island, he is the last of his kind.    

The Song of the Flying Fish

If you are familiar with my eating habits, you will forgive my repulsion at this story's most distasteful title.  As it were my disgust has no basis in fact, as the gilded gills in question are actually "eccentric and expensive toys" made of that most precious of metals.  They are also, for the time being, the property of Mr. Peregine Smart.  The elderly Smart is an indiscreet and wealthy collector of objects that might only interest similarly wealthy collectors.  No fewer than ten characters are sprinkled in the story's first three pages, one of whom is the humble priest and detective of the crime we assume will involve the titular species.  Almost all of these personalities, who cannot be explained in a short story without the thin film of stereotype, find themselves residing in close vicinity to one another in a provincial English town and, being men of some stature and financial freedom, begin to interact and share their theories of success. 

 

The most eccentric of these men is a certain Count de Lara, a French nobleman of Tartar countenance, who spares no effort to explain the 'mysteries of the Orient' to the more scientifically–minded of his colleagues.  Chesterton adores these types of debates, which are not really debates but opposing pamphlets, and to his credit always makes them shine with the gleam of novelty.  Of interest to the happenings in our story, De Lara includes several instances of thievery of a most baffling nature.  One particularly magnificent example takes place "outside an English barrack in the most modernized part of Cairo":

A sentinel was standing outside the grating of an iron gateway looking out between the bars on to the street.  There appeared outside the gate a beggar, barefoot and in native rags, who asked him, in English that was startlingly distinct and refined, for a certain official document kept in the building for safety.  The soldier told the man, of course, that he could not come inside; and the man answered, smiling: 'What is inside and what is outside?'  The soldier was still staring scornfully through the iron grating when he gradually realized that, though neither he nor the gate had moved, he was actually standing in the street and looking in at the barrack yard, where the beggar stood still and smiling and equally motionless.  Then, when the beggar turned towards the building, the sentry awoke to such sense as he had left, and shouted a warning to all the soldiers within the gated enclosure to hold the prisoner fast.  'You won't get out of here anyhow,' he said vindictively.  Then the beggar said in his silvery voice: 'What is outside and what is inside?'  And the soldier, still glaring through the same bars, saw that they were once more between him and the street, where the beggar stood free and smiling with a paper in his hand.

The superiority of the spiritual over the material needs no parable, nor is Chesterton's didacticism the least bit coy; but as he elaborates in this other book, a confession of his faith that has few parallels in English literature,  miracles only seem to count when something actually occurs or when some weirdness is perpetrated.  As his mouthpiece Father Brown quips, "all the supernatural acts we have yet heard of seem to be crimes."  

 

It is then of no surprise when we behold Mr. Smart "carrying the great glass bowl as reverently as if it had been the relic of a saint," because that is precisely the type of idolatrous appurtenance that Mr. Smart would worship.  In fact, one short paragraph brings together all the images necessary for Chesterton's symbolism:

Outside, the last edges of the sunset still clung to the corners of the green square; but inside, a lamp had already been kindled; and in the mingling of the two lights the coloured globe glowed like some monstrous jewel, and the fantastic outlines of the fiery fishes seemed to give it, indeed, something of the mystery of a talisman, like strange shapes seen by a seer in the crystal of doom.  Over the old man's shoulder the olive face of Imlack Smith stared like a sphinx. 

Imlack Smith, it should be noted, is a banker of a most bankerish disposition; what I mean by that I will leave to you to determine.  What happens subsequently is far beyond the reach of his tepid imagination, and yet well within the bounds of rational guesswork.  And while featuring one of the best short sentences ever written in English ("But the cold breath of business had sufficed to disperse the fumes of transcendental talk, and the guests began one after another to say farewell"), this is probably also the only story to contain both the phrases "spiritual burglary," and "a burst of taciturnity."  It is also, from start to finish, one of Father Brown's most exquisite adventures, and the competition Chesterton provides him makes that assessment all the more impressive.  There is far too much for me to praise in this square space, so I will leave to you to find a copy of this tale and relish every sentence, every analogy, every conclusion.  Pity that my aversion to seafood initially made me shun this gem in favor of more palatable options such as "The Doom of the Darnaways," and "The Three Tools of Death."  Those are, by the way, great stories.  Yet this special tale has something so powerful and yet so clear that our attention is seized and twisted into odd unfamiliar shapes.  Soothing, anodyne logic is provided in a race against an unbelievable crime; but sometimes "there are things even the police cars and wires won't outstrip."

The Return of Imray

Thinking of this Englishman as a writer of detective stories sounds strange, although the times and places in which he lived afforded his skills ample opportunity to develop.  What Kipling could not find in his environs in Lahore or Bombay he imported from the birthland of his forefathers, and his whimsy and sense of the nugatory cannot be better expressed than in a quote from this story:

For these reasons, and because he was hampering, in a microscopical degree, the administration of the Indian Empire, that Empire paused for one microscopical moment to make inquiry into the fate of Imray. 

This is undoubtedly one of the finest sentences of English literature: the whole tale, then, is to be a moment in the life of someone who is probably dead and surely unimportant, except to the narrator, who has other ends in mind.  Art at the microscopical degree is still art, and an inquiry into the miniature particles of its construct as commendable as the painting of a chapel ceiling.  And Imray is suddenly as significant as any other fictional character that has ever lived.

Our narrator has few contacts in the world he describes.  There is only another Anglo–Indian, Strickland, a friend and policeman who rents the bungalow formerly inhabited by the Indian Imray, and Strickland’s dog, Tietjens.  What is particular about Tietjens, a bouncy and frisky beast with more personality than just about anyone else in this story, is that she is immediately identified as both a “slut” (a connotation that in 1891 was not quite like today’s use of the word) and a “familiar spirit.”  Now I cannot say I am an expert in the religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent, but this stroke suggests a sympathy with the local tradition that is often missing in “colonial” narratives, for lack of a better term.  Kipling himself was often charged with being too negative about the civilizations his country subjugated and the glee with which he spread his literature suggested a certain pride in the accomplishments of imperialism.  That view, in retrospect, comes off as too politically charged to be of any consequence: Kipling wrote about what he saw and heard, and what he saw and heard was at times appalling and inspiring for entirely different reasons.  True enough, we watch souls through their cages and imagine what they are really like within, and sometimes our guesses are spot–on.  Other times, we gaze smugly at those around us and think that we can read a soul in the vicissitudes of its face.  Perhaps we even chat with these spirits to confirm our suspicions.  But then, one day, these spirits vanish into the crowds we never seem to have noticed and, upon taking inventory of our recollections, we find that nothing will resummon them because all along they were figments or pastiches of our own projections.  We know nothing about them except that at one time they existed, although even that is assailable.  We know nothing about them and would never be able to find them again unless they entered our world on our terms, and so we forget them and find others, more beautiful or more interesting.  And our narrator realizes he knows absolutely about Imray.

It is perhaps understood that Imray is dead or returned in some other form or both.  A shadow accompanies the story line from an appropriate distance, with a reserve that seems unlikely given the beliefs the author ascribes to the natives:

The rooms of the house were dark behind me ... my own servant came to me in the twilight, the muslin of his clothes clinging tight to his drenched body, and told me that a gentleman had called and wished to see some one.  Very much against my will, but only because of the darkness of the rooms, I went into the naked drawing–room, telling my man to bring the lights.  There might or might not have been a caller waiting — it seemed to me that I saw a figure by one of the windows — but when the lights came there was nothing save the spikes of the rain without, and the smell of the drinking earth in my nostrils.

Outside, as “storm after storm came up,” Tietjens is seen howling at something or someone.  And someone tries to call out to the narrator “by name, but his voice was no more than a husky whisper.”  After that long and magnificent description, two snakes slither their way into the story as if dispatched to destroy the interlopers in Imray’s house.  Then we meet one last character who reveals exactly why Imray disappeared, an explanation that you could not possibly expect in a purely “Western” story devoted, as it must be, to dispassionate reason.  And Imray’s strange fate, like the weblike tale in which he is entrapped, is both logical and ridiculous.