Gabrielle

A romantic mind will always be drawn to an era he could not possibly have known: Europe between the Great Wars; America as it began its first free century; England when Dickens was its sole witness (upon me 1960s and 1970s Northern Europe has cast an everlasting spell).  Even an acute nostalgist knows that his sentiments are mostly based on unhappy persons' yearning for a past they cannot have, thus arming themselves for a future they cannot bear, and yet he still yearns.  He yearns for love and remembrance, sweetness and wonder, and the eternity of his wretched soul.  He will watch movies and read books, and dream himself the hero who simply must triumph in the end.  Life will continue to disappoint him mildly, but life is always disappointing to those who choose to dwell in the past.  What he wants is to be transported to that period, to breathe its air and darken beneath its sunsets and know beforehand that it will be the most glorious years of his existence.  Alas, such is not our fate.  We are doomed to do quite the reverse and live as if our better days are always a step ahead.  Which brings us to a work from one of the most romanticized of all periods.

We are amidst the Belle Époque, that generation of prosperity before an Austrian nobleman would die and Europe would bleed.  Like all such times, the label will come in hindsight, as its proponents firmly believed that nothing could have been worse than the First World War – a notion that would prove to be hideously mistaken.  Like all reminiscents, they predictably overlook the malaise and woe of the vast majority in order to celebrate the minority's advances; almost just as predictably, guilt prevents them from glorifying the very elite – statesmen, kings, and industrialist mega-moguls – because, well, no one should really have anything nice to say about people so privileged as rarely having to wear the same clothes twice.  Their focus then shifts to the upper middle class, the moneyed bourgeois who have neither blue blood nor courtier manners.  Many of this stratum were of humble provenance, and made their money the old-fashioned way: a lucky investment.  Such is the case of Jean Hervey (a magnificent Pascal Greggory), who took a flyer on a "failing newspaper."  It was "a horrible newspaper, with no opinions," and initially yielded nothing more than bromides and inoffensiveness.  But without the slightest indication – at least not to its new owner – the newspaper reversed its fortune and made Jean a permanent member of the urbanized rich (Jean claims he has "an easy relationship" with money).  We see nothing of the Jean the businessman, but we can expect him to resemble quite closely Jean the socialite: that is, stuffy, boring, and dapper, with the perpetual mild indignation that snobs seem naturally to exude.  Every Thursday, then, and we begin our film on a Thursday, a couple of dozen guests – it would be too presumptuous to call them friends – gather at Jean's palatial residence for dinner, gossip, and a ritual without which their lives might be totally meaningless.  Jean has plenty of almost robotic, identical female servants to do the heavy lifting, figuratively and literally, and gets away with practically saying and doing nothing at all.  But the main reason he can permit himself such insouciance is his lovely wife Gabrielle (an even more magnificent Isabelle Huppert).

Gabrielle is one of the screen's most original creations, in no small part because she is perfectly comfortable in her existence and yet perfectly miserable.  We do not immediately deduce the latter part of that equation, but an event barely twenty minutes into our film will make that agonizingly clear.  At this first Thursday gathering, however, she is anything if not the genteel hostess.  Her guests quack and croak in the pretentious tones of those who believe current events, strong drinks, and a bit of company lead to philosophical epiphanies.  One quips idiotically, without precedence or conclusion, that he dreams of strangers falling in love; a fat woman states that she never repeats what a stranger tells her, but keeps it for herself – which implies that she repeats everything her friends and acquaintances tell her; Jean, who narrates our story, hums complacently to himself that he knows "Gabrielle's dreams" so "she could not be unfaithful"; an elderly spinster grins and announces that, "we have a set of things to do in life.  When we finish, we collapse"; and another guest observes that "you don't have to know someone to enjoy his company," and we already understand that the whole film will come to be about knowledge, about whom we really know and whom we think we know, and those we think know us.  All these comments drown out the loudmouth rants of an obese and dishevelled drunk who just so happens to be the editor-in-chief of Jean's newspaper.  Our narrator informs us that he does not think much of this slob, but, being of the Philistine vanguard, is naturally prone to taking no action and hoping for the best.  I spoil nothing by saying that on the Herveys' ten-year anniversary, Jean returns home, slinks up the stairs and through a series of rooms only to find a letter sitting on his wife's boudoir.  It is very much a Dear Jean letter, and we know its contents even if we are given only a few gigantic words on screen.  But before Jean can even decide how to react ("You did not accustom me to this, Gabrielle"), Gabrielle does what no one could have possibly thought she would: after an absence of barely three hours, she returns.  

A tale of domestic deception is a dusty chestnut, and as such, the original story cannot be recommended because its intentions are hardly sincere.  Not only is there nothing shocking about such indiscretions, they are rarely if ever imbued with any pathos.  The paramount question would seem to be – as posed by Conrad's title, "The Return" – why Gabrielle comes back.  Is she simply inured to her pointless existence?  Does a part of her long for security and ease, things that her lover will not be able to provide her?  But the smarter viewer knows that the question is a McGuffin best left to hopeless graduate students who deem existentialism a profound path; thankfully, Chéreau seems to know it as well.  The victory of style in the cinematic Gabrielle is the transformation of a plain text that wishes itself dynamic and controversial into a dynamic and controversial stage piece that wishes itself plain.  In the hands and mouths of lesser actors, we would have a soap opera whose dénouement could have been predicted somewhere around the ninth minute; but Huppert and Greggory do something extraordinary.  They try as hard as they can to be run-of-the-mill citizens – Greggory the well-to-do dullard who never laughs, Huppert the delicately sturdy wife who never cries, both stock bourgeois roles – and yet they fail.  Their savage efforts to be like everyone else lay bare the originality of their minds, most evident in the bizarre scenes between Gabrielle and her domestic, Yvonne, when sexual tension mingles with a misty sense of oneupmanship.  When Jean the narrator tells us, and us alone, that Gabrielle is "not just any woman," we sense she will answer this thought aloud later in the film, and she most certainly does.  When she waxes poetic about the suffering she endured in not leaving Jean for good ("my body, my arms, and my legs could not take it"), he accuses her of plagiarism because that is precisely how those without taste or artistic sense confront flashes of genius.  It is no surprise then that Jean's line of sight is frequently screened by his large forelock, nor that the interchangeable female staff – who sometimes feel like a Greek chorus waiting to caption tragedy – seem much more alive than the guests.   And those two moments in life when Gabrielle was happy?  Let's just say they reveal more about her than any departure or return ever could.     

The Importance of Being Earnest

One of the tritest sayings in currency among literary frauds is "I am often asked," such as, "I am often asked why I read Oscar Wilde" – a phrase that Wilde himself would have skewered with some reference to the speaker's hopeless obtuseness outweighing his excellent taste.  There is only one reason to read Wilde, and it is the same reason that one might eat a delicious, delicate tart: both are made to be devoured and savored.  His works' structure have little originality (indeed, their plots are almost boilerplate farce), almost no emotional depth, and all the characters seem to chant in one brilliant, whimsical chorus that eerily channels the voice of their creator.  Yes, he sensed the differences between Victorian men and women with startling accuracy; but his primary contribution to literature is his understanding of how a group of people can agree to a myth – the myth of a family fortune, of a long-tempered love, of England as a society of manners and leisure – and on that basis let generations be nourished.  In that way, Wilde is the most Romantic of all writers because his characters are, to a man, so blind as to stumble upon truth after truth.  There is no real upper class in England, only a bunch of rich, lazy, entitled fools; there is no class struggle in England, because class struggles are for people incapable of being accepted into society; there is no England in the idealized sense of the word because England is composed merely of a long and magnificent series of traditions that gave the world one of its most majestic libraries and one of its stiffest upper lips.  What remains are wit, passion, and optimism, even if guised in the cynical snipes so commonly incident to a great mind who finds daily existence cruel and dull.  Which brings us to one of the most famous of English plays.

Our love trapezoid will become a hexagon by the end, but our primary male protagonists are two: Algernon Moncrieff, a good-for-nothing charmer in his late twenties, and the slightly older Jack Worthing, for all intents and purposes the straight man in their stand-up routine.  Algernon has money, looks, and education, and consecrates almost his entire existence to pondering why others are not as lucky as he.  Jack, at least, has an aim: he has focused his attention on Algernon's cousin Gwendolen Fairfax, whom he adores but who knows him as Ernest Worthing.  Why Ernest?  We get the first of many answers:

We live, as I hope you know, Mr. Worthing, in an age of ideals.  The fact is constantly mentioned in the more expensive monthly magazines, and has now reached the provincial pulpits, I am told; and my ideal has always been to love some one of the name of Ernest.  There is something in that name that inspires absolute confidence.  The moment Algernon first mentioned to me that he had a friend called Ernest, I knew I was destined to love you.  The name, fortunately for my peace of mind, is, as far as my own experience goes, extremely rare.

This extremely rare experience will be doubled when Cecily Cardew, Jack's comely eighteen-year-old ward, professes the same interest in Jack's brother Ernest – who we already know has never quite existed.  It goes almost without saying that Algernon has heard as much about Cecily as Cecily has about Ernest, so their meeting is a pleasant confirmation of mutual suspicions.  This would be enough for a plain romance, but for comedy we need ridiculous obstacles, and these come in the form of Gwendolen's mother Lady Bracknell, a reverend by the name of Chasuble, a governess by the name of Prism, and Algernon's imaginary valetudinarian chum, Bunbury. 

The rest of our plot will involved an Ernest or two, an outstanding dinner bill, some wooing and cooing, and more than a few of the most scintillating ripostes ever seen or heard on the English stage.  The Importance of Being Earnest is widely considered Wilde's finest dramatic work, although it contains as much drama as a toilet flush and only slightly more workmanship.  Its genius resides in the voices, which have separate agendas by defaulting to the necessities of the plot, but which rattle and hum as the soundtrack to a single vision.  Wilde believed that we had the ability to spend hours speaking about trivialities and yet, through their observation and broader reflection, outline a remarkably precise philosophy of humankind.  Such nonchalance yields some of the finest adages we have all come to know: "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily.  That is what Fiction means"; "Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us"; "The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to some one else, if she is plain"; "All women become like their mothers.  That is their tragedy.  No man does.  That is his"; "If I am a little overdressed, I make up for it by being always immensely overeducated"; "Good memories are not a quality that women admire much in men"; "Dr. Chasuble is a most learned man.  He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows."  There is snobbery, sloth, affectation, hypocrisy, deceit, impetuousness, and unadulterated, barefaced lying – in short, the normal menu for any tale about the aristocracy.  There is also an underlying sense for the vigor and juice of life that was frowned upon in Wilde's day and is perhaps overemphasized in ours:

It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time.  The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity.  But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.

Are we really supposed to live for the moment?  Is our favorite lover, to paraphrase a famous sportsman, always our next one?  We may ruminate on such matters, but we are better off simply enjoying the show, and in terms of wit and smoothness, the show is rather spectacular.  And then there's that perambulator in Victoria Station.

The Dead Hand

We may not recall the first ghost story we heard as children, but we will certainly remember the first time we realized a fear more complex than hunger, darkness, or separation from our parents (mine was at the age of seven or so, when I learned the word "dusk" in a story about, bizarrely, a train station and the ghost of a werewolf).  And what form this fear will assume predicates what we might have come to understand.  Do children comprehend death?  Regret and atonement?  The immortality of the human soul?  Considering that a large percentage of adults reflect little on such subjects, the answer must probably be no.  But a subtler answer would claim that children understand the everlasting soul as a natural extension of a near-endless terrestrial existence, because to a child life never seems quite complete.  Some children, however, do not have the luxury of sustained curiosity and innocence, which brings us to this famous tale.

Disliking a protagonist may detract from a story's enjoyment as much as overidentifying with him, and we cannot confess to liking Arthur Holliday.  Arthur is one of those lucky fellows who have nothing to say of any profundity because they have always floated atop the lapsing waves under the approval of the almighty sun.  They are rich, comely, and carefree, which makes them ideal for indulging in most of what our earth may offer:

Thus far, his life had been the common, trifling, prosaic surface-life of a prosperous young man, with no troubles to conquer, and no trials to face.  He had lost no relation whom he loved, no friend whom he treasured.  Till this night, what share he had of the immortal inheritance that is divided amongst us all, had lain dormant with him.  Till this night, Death and he had not once met, even in thought.

Over time, of course, these types are confronted with decrepitude and stare back only to find that their corpses look remarkably like all the wizened blighters they have spent their lives walking quickly past, not inspecting them too closely out of guilt.  Right now, however, Holliday is more concerned with the annual horse race in Doncaster.  He arrives in this small town and finds, to no one's surprise except his, not a single available room for the night.  Yet he is far from discouraged:

To a young fellow of Arthur's temperament, the novelty of being turned away into the street like a penniless vagabond, at every house where he asked for a lodging, presented itself in the light of a new and highly amusing piece of experience.  He went on with his carpet-bag in his hand, applying for a bed at every place of entertainment for travellers that he could find in Doncaster, until he wandered into the outskirts of the town. 

Holliday's spirits will soon decline.  But for the time being, he is content with his incognito gandering through a rustic province, since such experiences are usually alloyed with fictional details to make them even more appealing to his dinner party commensals (Holliday remains, by nature, a smarmy raconteur who adjusts his lies to his audience).  After losing more hope than he could reasonably be expected to nurture in his narrow breast, he comes upon a large sign in the shape of a hand and follows its index finger to an inn where one customer just so happens to be checking out in no small haste.  Why that man wishes to vacate such a precious berth on such a stormy night will not be discussed here.  Suffice it to say that Arthur overpays a conniving innkeeper for a shared room and does not bother to ask himself the question in our last sentence.  Surely, as an old French film terribly tells us, everyone has his reasons, with the implication being it is neither ours to know or to understand even if we did. 

Ghost stories have often functioned as a warning to children and young adults who may not take the consequences of their actions as seriously as they should – but these tales, with very few exceptions, now appear woefully pedantic.  As we have become more liberal in print, so have modern spooks engaged in far too much bloodletting to be considered nothing if not disgusting.  Somewhere in between these extremes lie the wonderful compositions of James, Lovecraft, Blackwood, Machen, and Doyle – atmospheric, elegant, and yet ghastly in their own wicked way.  Unlike subsequent horror writers, Collins did not possess a fascination with the macabre as much an incomparable eye for human frailty.  As such, the pleasure of reading him cannot be understated: his is a subtle craft made enthralling by an inborn ability to extricate intrigue from the mildest of subjects.  That he was once the most popular writer in England shows good taste occasionally even runs in whole countries.  We may think we understand the twists in his tales; but then it turns out that his twists have twists, and his tales have tails.  The secret he knows we are instinctively looking for is often mentioned very early on, almost as an aside.  Yet when we come to it at last it is revealed to have been a simple plot detail made somewhat more significant by the fact that what we thought would happen did indeed.  Ghost stories, after all, may not necessarily be explained by earthly logic.  And you may ask yourself why there can be no better name for our lonely inn than The Two Robins.

The Speckled Band

Many years ago I remember discussing this story with a friend of mine who had read these tales in her native Russian.  Now if you are familiar with the development of post-Soviet literature, you may be aware of the inundation of mysteries, old and new, that have seized control of the market and become the topic of much popular debate (Russians tend to read quite a bit, hence the enormousness of the demand).  And the reason for this manic spree might involve the suppression of any type of ambiguities during the seventy-odd years of Soviet dominion.  In fact, when trolling around the library stacks at this German university, I came across a book that documented “the Soviet detective novel", a topic mindboggling both in its uniformity and its basic premise.  The perpetrators, to no one’s surprise, were always capitalists; the crimes they committed always clear displays of greed and selfishness that could only be remedied by the intervention of the public’s defenders, be they the Soviet police force or other cooperative agencies striving to stir equality among men.  Absent from these adventures, of course, was precisely what makes a mystery whir: suspense and ambiguity.  But these were not terms for the class struggle.  So let us return to a much more palatable time and regime for mysteries, late Victorian London, and that bizarre murder in a locked room.

As in so many Holmes tales, the two detectives are lounging about their Baker street quarters when a guest arrives, this time a young woman by the name of Helen Stoner.  She is the stepdaughter of Dr. Grimsley Roylott, “the last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in England,” and a woman living in a constant state of terror.  She will soon be married, an event that will allow her to inherit a vast annual stipend from her mother’s will.  But fear of impending doom interrupts her sleep.  It was but two years ago, she says, that her twin sister Julia reached the eve of her wedding before meeting with a most unfortunate accident.  That fatal night, Julia asked her sister:

‘Tell me, Helen,’ said she, ‘have you ever heard anyone whistle in the dead of night?’   ‘Never,’ said I.   ‘I suppose that you could not possibly whistle, yourself, in your sleep?’   ‘Certainly not.  But why?’   ‘Because during the last few nights I have always, at about three in the morning, heard a low, clear whistle … I cannot tell where it came from – perhaps from the next room, perhaps from the lawn.’

That night, there was a “wild scream.”  Helen rushed to the scene to find Julia had unlocked her door and was writhing, delirious, her only words being “Oh, my God! Helen!  It was the band!  The speckled band!”  She died shortly thereafter and yet there were no signs of wrongdoing. For all intents and purposes, she “died of pure fear.”  From the further description, we surmise that Dr. Roylott, once imprisoned in India for beating his butler to death, will have something to do with the murder.  Yet his method cannot be known without full vantage of the plot.  Suspecting his stepdaughter may have tried to betray his murderous intentions Roylott makes an appearance in Central London to ward off potential meddling from two of literature’s greatest meddlers, and twists an iron poker into a warning sign and display of his gargantuan physical strength.

None of this fazes Holmes, of course.   Soon thereafter, the duo decides to take action and visit the massive estate of Stoke Moran on whose grounds “a cheetah and a baboon roam freely … feared by the villagers almost as much as their master.”  After a dark and endless night amidst the gypsies and exotic animals that pledge no allegiance to anyone, including the enormous brute of a doctor, the truth is revealed – and it is not one to help your sleep one bit.  The Speckled Band has always been one of the most popular of the Holmes tales, owing in no small part to the exoticness of the explanation provided.  It is, however, precisely this explanation that is called into question in an article by a scientist specializing in the field, which persons unfamiliar with the arc of The Speckled Band will not want to read if they value suspense and ambiguity.  Then again, there are a lot of Soviet mysteries you might enjoy.

Black Peter

It is hardly happenstance that the greatest novel ever composed takes place at sea: once upon a time most of us had some relationship to what comprises the majority of the earth's surface – but these times are gone.  The sea has been replaced with an even more mysterious place, the sky.  While our oceans at their deepest stretch to about five miles our heavens go well past our knowledge of space and time.  It is then with some nostalgia that we review old stories of sailors, squalls, and krakens in their various guises, and most conclude that this was a stage of human development best left unbelabored now that we have metallic birds roaring above us.  Beautiful at moments, loud at others, they are not nearly as enchanting as the vessels on which Melville, Poe, and Stevenson moored our imaginings.  For that reason alone is it worth casting our minds back to this fantastic tale.

The year is 1895 and the Peter in question is fifty-year-old Captain Peter Carey, "a most daring and successful seal and whale fisher."  Carey left the endless cascading foam of the white waves, the brittle patches of life beneath the surface indifferent to his hulking presence, and retired with his wife and daughter to a small place near Forest Row, in Sussex.  Here Carey found little time for anything except drink and terrorizing his family.  Inspector Hopkins, a local official, would describe Carey as such:

He has been known to drive his wife and daughter out of doors in the middle of the night and flog them through the park until the whole village outside the gates was aroused by their screams.  He was summoned once for a savage assault upon the old vicar, who had called upon him to remonstrate with him upon his conduct.  In short ... you would go far before you found a more dangerous man than Peter Carey, and I have heard that he bore the same character when he commanded his ship.  He was known in the trade as Black Peter, and the name was given him, not only on account of his swarthy features and the colour of his huge beard, but for the humours which were the terror of all around him.  I need not say that he was loathed and avoided by every one of his neighbours.

Fiends like these do not last long, at not least in fiction.  And sure enough, not four pages into the narrative, we find our captain on the wall of his small, reclusive cabin at the end of his estate, "pinned like a beetle on a card."  What kind of weapon could make this barbarian into a mere insect?  That which has slain countless other oceanic predators: the brutal thrust of an iron harpoon.  As much as his wife and daughter would have liked to provide his end – his daughter even prides herself on not mourning her father's death – there is no way on earth or beyond that they could have possibly made use of the murder weapon in the manner described.  Are we looking for a man of gargantuan strength or is the puny fellow that Holmes, Watson, and Hopkins see breaking in Carey's cabin the real perpetrator?  Our clues include a tobacco bag, a tin containing some rather eccentric documents, a drab-covered notebook with the initials J. H. N., a bottle of rum and two dirty glasses, and a filthy wealth of coincidence that all lead the investigators to employ some most unusual methods.

Holmes has a hunch that requires research only mentioned towards the end of the story, which is a typical conceit.  But the hunch is more than facile intuition or, as in some of the less endearing Holmes outings, so abstruse as to seem grounded in processes and patterns of data collection that would baffle even more devoted readers.  As good as the story is and as satisfyingly as Holmes's deductions are maintained, the premise was clearly nourished working backwards.  That is to say, Conan Doyle had an image – the same image that "gets between" the murderer and his sleep – of Black Peter impaled upon the symbol of his exploitative trade and devised a scenario of which such a murder could be a plausible result.  Perhaps if you've read Black Peter as many times as I have, you begin seeing the cracks, retracing the story's development, and contemplating the details that are ostensibly far less important than the underlying moral fabric.  Holmes himself has been on a streak of unusual cases, and his motives have been as noble as the weirdness in his work:

So unworldly was he – or so capricious – that he frequently refused his help to the powerful and wealthy where the problem made no appeal to his sympathies, while he would devote weeks of most intense application to the affairs of some humble client whose case presented those strange and dramatic qualities which appealed to his imagination and challenged his ingenuity.

As is often pointed out by Holmesians, our detective never really accepts any monetary compensation for his work (with the exception of one story previously reviewed on these pages, which for the time being shall remain nameless), so his militant hatred for the whining of the rich and privileged is hardly surprising.  Thankfully, Holmes is neither uppity nor squeamish enough to help with the most macabre of investigations and expect nothing more than sustained praise of his genius.  Too bad Black Peter simply liked to get paid.