Reading or Recently Read
Ethics by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain
Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
The Instrument by John O’Hara
A Daughter of the Samurai by Etsu Ishigaki Sugimoto
Morning, Noon, and Night by James Gould Cozzens
Horatio Wragge in No Name by Wilkie Collins
Captain Horatio Wragge appears on the scene early in Wilkie Collins’s 1862 novel No Name. Poor but tidy with one “bilious green” eye and the other “bilious brown,” Wragge accosts the severe Miss Garth, governess of Norah and Magdalen Vanstone, with a request to speak to the girls’ mother. Mrs. Vanstone, in London on a mysterious errand, is related to the impecunious Wragge, who is in the habit of touching his relative from time to time for a small loan. Miss Garth sternly promises to send Wragge’s card to her mistress and abruptly ends the interview. The attention and wit that Collins lavishes on this odd character tell us that Wragge will play no small part in this remarkable novel.
No Name is often overlooked in the shadow of Collins’s two better-known books, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). While those novels typified the Victorian detective genre with its gothic overtones, No Name focuses on an unconventional heroine working her way through an excessively complicated story line. The plot of No Name is indeed complex, but hardly more so than most of the novels by Collins’s lifelong friend and collaborator, Charles Dickens. (Collins’s worked on both Household Words and All the Year Round under Dickens’s editorship. The two writers were so close that Dickens suggested alternate titles for No Name and even offered to finish the book when Collins fell ill.) Collins’s heroine, Magdalen Vanstone, the “No Name” of the novel’s title is interesting, but more so is Captain Wragge, a vulgar and vivid adventurer known by many names, not the least of which is the one he gives himself: moral agriculturalist.
Collins’s introduction of Wragge is exceedingly droll and broadly picaresque. From the crumpled mourning band around his hat to his carefully preserved umbrella and neatly darned black cotton gloves, Wragge presents the appearance of a “clergyman in difficulties.” His poor costume is offset by his mellifluous voice and deferential manner, his flow of persuasive words and power of moral suasion: “shabby as he was, perennial flowers of courtesy bloomed all over him from head to foot.” He is a pitchman of much facility, eager to bestow a compliment—or to step into an opportunity.
The opportunity presents itself in a most unexpected way. Readers of Victorian literature will be all too familiar with the laws of disposition of property among the landed gentry. Novels abound with second sons forced to join the army or become clergymen because their older brothers have inherited the estate. Second wives and their families often find themselves in the sad situation of being homeless or reduced to penury because the estate is entailed away from them. Both such situations occur in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, for example.
Here, Collins offers a situation that is very irregular, one influenced undoubtedly by his own chaotic life. When their parents die in quick succession, the Vanstone daughters learn that their mother and father were not legally married. Magdalen’s engagement to the benignly useless Frank Clare is put off indefinitely while he is sent to China as a clerk-apprentice. The girls’ comfortable life disappears virtually overnight and they must go to London to learn how to earn a living. Norah goes out to be a governess. Magdalen, however, runs away determined to regain the lost inheritance.
When Magdalen and Wragge meet in London, both have fallen on hard times. Wragge has lost what little he had in the railway speculation crash of 1847, but he is undaunted, “From top to toe, every square inch of the captain’s clothing was altered for the worse; but the man himself remained unchanged—superior to all forms of moral mildew, impervious to the action of social rust.” Magdalen has developed a plan to turn her talent for drawing room theatricals into a stage career. As a gentleman’s daughter alone and unprotected in the city, she has placed herself in a very dangerous position; the contemplation of a career on the stage means the certain loss of every shred of reputation that a lady would possess.
Wragge presents her with a vaguely decorous proposition: Magdalen may hide from her family in his lodgings with his wife until she decides what to do. She agrees to go with Wragge even though she tells him that she had heard he is a “rogue.” Little does she know that Wragge, who is indeed a rogue, has picked up a handbill offering a £50 reward for information on her whereabouts.
Before long, Magdalen and Wragge have concocted a bold scheme that meets their needs. Using her dramatic skills, Magdalen performs a one-woman show around the countryside in a number of disguises (one of these disguises is based on the governess Miss Garth). Part Svengali, part agent, Wragge books and promotes the show and keeps more than his fair share of the receipts. Magdalen is able to hide from her family while he reaps the profits. Magdalen, however, grows increasingly unhappy and bitter.
The only redeeming element of Magdalen’s existence is her gentle treatment of Mrs. Wragge. This creature, surely one of the most comic figures in English literature, is a former waitress who loves fine dress. A modest sort of heiress (hence Wragge’s motivation for marrying her), Mrs. Wragge is a little slow, “constitutionally torpid” with a penchant for letting her shoes fall off her heels and for wearing her cap crookedly. Wragge keeps his unnaturally tall wife on task by shouting in order to “stimulate her mind,” but his sense of orderliness is constantly offended by her confusion and slovenly appearance.
The Victorian heroine who would choose her own livelihood and take on the laws of primogeniture is clearly not typical. It has to be said that Collins’s portrait of Magdalen seldom escapes the literary platitudes of the day. Rather, the author enlists our sympathies for Magdalen’s plight by showing her willing to set aside her sheltered, passive upbringing and use cunning, courage, and determination to elect her own destiny (granted, this is more of a modern viewpoint than one shared by most Victorian readers). She gradually sets aside her fastidiousness and comes to a grudging admiration for Wragge, even allowing for the self-serving motives of each party.
We readers have to admire Wragge not just for his discipline and inventiveness, but also because he is a man who has no illusions about how he makes a living. Like many an adventurer, Wragge rationalizes that he only takes what is freely given out of “Christian charity”—who, he asks, has the right to persecute him “for habitually exciting the noblest feelings of our common nature”? He lays claim boldly to enlightened ideas about his profession, one that he likens to the farmer plowing and seeding the soil in the hope of harvest. He may be called a swindler by some, but this empty word fails to acknowledge his superiority in a crowded profession: “Swindler. Definition: A moral agriculturalist; a man who cultivates the field of human sympathy.” To emphasize his dedication and professional acumen, Wragge shows Magdalen his account books, what he calls his “commercial library” in which years of sums (stolen or “lent”), false identities (those used and those in reserve for the future), and profitable districts have been catalogued in blot-free black and white. Indeed, Wragge’s “library” demonstrates not only his professional discipline and credentials, but also humanity’s bottomless willingness to be deceived.
It is Wragge’s orderliness that gives Magdalen a way to act on her plan. Her objective is to marry the son of the man who inherited her father’s property and money, an astronomical sum close to £80,000. Michael Vanstone, already wealthy, believed that his brother Andrew, Magdalen’s father, plotted against him and had a lifelong hatred of his brother. The elder Vanstone dies and the money goes to Michael’s son Noel, a vain, sickly skinflint managed with exquisite skill by his housekeeper, Mrs. Lecount.
Mrs. Lecount is the female counterpart of Captain Wragge, his equal in dastardly imagination, but his social opposite. Well-dressed and respectable, she is a femme d’un certain âge who has been with Noel and his father for years. She has ingratiated herself with Noel to such a degree that he can’t make a move without her approval. Wragge understands that the way to Noel is through Mrs. Lecount and he lays the groundwork with care.
Wragge, his wife, and Magdalen adopt the name of Bygrave and install themselves in a seaside cottage near where Noel and Mrs. Lecount have alsoo moved for health reasons. Recognizing the hold that Mrs. Lecount has over her master, Wragge turns his eye to that lady’s weaknesses. Vanity is first among them and Wragge uses his most unctuous and flattering tone to gain her attention. When he learns that she is the widow of a prominent scientist, Wragge picks up a copy of Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues from 1807 and commits whole passages to memory so he can bedazzle her with ready-made science. His seaside discourses on hydrostatic principles and the Theory of Floating Vessels are marvels of prolixity and ponderousness. When Mrs. Lecount reveals that she still has the professor’s aquarium tank and the “foreign Toad” that lives in it, Wragge seizes the chance to cement their acquaintance by viewing the toad in the “public’s interest”: “Never had Captain Wragge burnt his adulterated incense on the flimsy altar of human vanity to better purpose than he was burning it now.”
We have seen Mrs. Lecount’s toad before. Earlier in London, Magdalen had donned one of her performances disguises and invaded Noel Vanstone’s own house where she meets Mrs. Lecount (boldness that will have dire consequences for our heroine’s plans). There, Madelyn sees the tank and the toad and quails before them (keeping fish and reptiles was uncommon in England at the time). The slimy snails, slippery efts, and tiny fish swimming in green water under the cold gaze of a bright-eyed toad startle Magdalen and establish Mrs. Lecount as a woman with an unexpected, even shocking side. Collins also uses the fact that she is a foreigner (from Switzerland) and dresses above her station to emphasize her sinister character.
Back at the seaside, the project to encourage Noel Vanstone to admire Magdalen and propose marriage is delicately brought to fruition. It is surely Wragge’s finest work as a moral agriculturalist. He even contrives to have Mrs. Lecount leave the country when the wedding takes place—a particularly tricky bit of business involving a forged letter that draws the housekeeper back to Switzerland to the bedside of her supposedly-dying brother.
Magdalen marries Vanstone (making her Magdalen Vanstone Vanstone), but Noel dies and the money slips through her hands due to a technicality. Making one last attempt to recover her inheritance, Magdalen decides to impersonate a servant in the house of the man who inherited Vanstone’s money. At this point, Collins indulges in one of his characteristically gothic scenes, one which layers on sleepwalking, missing papers, moonlight and shadows, and a menacing old sailor all in a house called, atmospherically, St. Crux-in-the-Marsh.
Having failed, Magdalen is back in London living in cheap lodgings, alone, ill, and friendless….except, that is, for Captain Kirke (not that one) who has rescued her after having fallen in love with her from one chance glance at the seaside. The predictably maudlin ending is put off by one final appearance by Captain Wragge. He appears in glossy black with an impeccably white frilled shirt, clearly successful. The moral agriculturalist, he tells Magdalen, is now the medical agriculturalist. Wragge, it seems, has capitalized on the patent medicine craze with a successful wonder pill. The “founders of [his] fortune are three in number. Their names are Aloes, Scammony, and Gamboge” (709-710). Wragge has indeed put the scam in scammony. His hilarious recounting of how he became a “Grand Financial Fact” describes his assault on modern medicine (“Down with the Doctors!”), his catchy marketing slogans (“A Pill in Time Saves Nine”), and his subtle packaging featuring the face of Mrs. Wragge (“she is the celebrated woman whom I have cured of indescribable agonies from every complaint under the sun”).
Wragge’s parting gift to Magdalen is to clear up how she came to be rescued by Captain Kirke. The news causes the invalid to start and she grabs Wragge’s sleeve, “Gently! Gently! You mustn’t take hold of my superfine black coat-sleeve in that unceremonious manner.” He departs soon after, promising that Mrs. Wragge may come and live with Magdalen. Ever the businessman, he offers to supply Mrs. Wragge with a few thousand advertising handbills carrying her portrait. Since she will inevitably drop these fliers wherever she goes, her clumsiness will result in extra advertising for her husband’s Pill. “Don’t think me mercenary,” Wragge nods wisely, “I merely understand the age I live in.”
© 2012 Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.
From Morning, Noon, and Night by James Gould Cozzens
Marked criticism of Cozzens’s last novel probably helped send his literary reputation into the semi-obscurity in which it languishes today. In spite of blockbusters like Guard of Honor, winner of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize, and the controversial By Love Possessed from 1959 (see OTG “What Is Love’s Season?” January 10, 2011), Cozzens is seldom read today. His novels, which usually take place over two or three days, are not plot driven; their incidents, often of the most prosaic kind, serve to bring characters together so their inner workings may come out. In addition, Cozzens’s dispassionate, distanced stance as narrator is a technique that many readers find off-putting.
He was a writer primarily concerned with craft. His long sentences, studded with clauses, adjective phrases, and parenthetical asides, put him alongside Henry James, as does Cozzens’s penetrating focus on human foibles and (often misguided) motivations. Over the course of his career, he most frequently examined how men and women handle duty, and the constraints put on people by institutions like the military (Guard of Honor), the law (The Just and the Unjust), medicine (The Last Adam), religion (Men and Brethren), and marriage and society (most all of his books, but especially By Love Possessed).
Cozzens begins his last novel, Morning, Noon, and Night (1968), with a bracing meditation on growing old. The main character, Henry Dodd Worthington, uses the idea of navigating a river as a metaphor for life. However, just when the undeniable attraction of one’s youthful exuberance seems about to take the upper hand, the cautious wisdom of old age appears to ensure that no fancies will take flight. A sense of the hackneyed reins in the elegiac, as if Cozzens wants to assure us that he doesn’t seriously think that an out-of-favor author penning a book about growing old is looking for critical acclaim and lucrative book deals.
Here, in particular, Cozzens tempers the virile nautical tone with naïve descriptions taken straight from a boy’s storybook where the illustrations might show ships parting sparkling oceans under golden sunlight. Our protagonist could have read just such a book about the fifteenth century Voyages of Discovery in which European explorers were trained by one Prince Henry the Navigator. Lest we become enveloped in the golden haze of dawn’s departing mists, Cozzens rounds out the mighty rhythm of the penultimate sentence—a sea chanty of sorts—with an elusive, Virginia Woolf-esque locution on memory.
“Now Henry the navigator knows his time of day. Heart conturbed, with dissolution’s icy wind on him, he does not, he cannot, elect to look ahead and, trembling, prefigure in the final gloom of night the river’s calamitous sliding without intermission over the rock edge and wreathed with spray and vapor thundering down. In useless offer at evasion, in futile hope of ways out, he is apt instead desperately to look back. Let the night boat be the morning boat. Where eventide’s scared old man crouched cowering, now sits, eager and jaunty, a youth perhaps ten years old. Slowly he has been floating clear of the dawn’s early mists. Sunlight shines golden; sky-blue water sparkles. For the start of the river trip the year’s at the spring, the day’s at the morn, the morning at seven. Now or about now memory’s record can commence adequate coverage of the life and strange surprising (to him, at least) adventures of Henry Dodd Worthington, boy mariner (10).”
(Harcourt Brace, first edition)
© 2012 Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.
Recently Read
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Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, translated by Daphne Henry
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Men and Brethren by James Gould Cozzens
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
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(second reading)
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A Happy Death by Albert Camus
Translated by Richard Howard
Style is the centerpiece of this novel, Albert Camus’s first and one that remained unpublished until after his death. A Happy Death (La mort heureuse), written between 1936 and 1938, prefigures The Stranger (L’étranger), Camus’s most well-known novel. In English and even more so in French, The Stranger is quite simply revelatory, the existential story of a soulless man moving through a natural world of such astonishing vibrance that it seems impossible he is not rehabilitated by it. A Happy Death introduces an earlier incarnation of the main character, Patrice Mersault (spelled Meursault in The Stranger), whose “will to happiness” outweighs concerns such as filial piety, marriage, or morality.
In his notebooks outlining the structure of A Happy Death, Camus described the novel’s final section as “story of the pursuit of the sun.” Mersault, however, is no exalted Icarus, seeking to fly high and meet the sun, rather he is a stone, hard, accepting, devoted to what he calls “impersonality.” When Mersault and his friend Roland Zagreus talk about the nature of happiness, Mersault says “Everything else that would happen to me would be like rain on a stone. The stone cools off and that’s fine. Another day, the sun bakes it. I’ve always thought that’s exactly what happiness would be.” Happiness to Zagreus meant one thing when he was whole, but now as a cripple who lost his legs in the Great War, he finds happiness in the knowledge that he is not a burden to his caretakers. Zagreus is, in fact, a rich man, keeping a strongbox in the house that is filled with a fortune in cash. But he fears that his life has been “consummated” without him and that he’s lived marginally.
In spite of his inertia, Mersault rouses himself sufficiently to perpetrate a particularly low deed. Actually, he is handed the perfect crime. Zagreus lives alone and his door never locked. His strongbox is kept in plain sight and he has shown Mersault where he keeps the key. Zagreus has even thoughtfully provided a suicide note: “I am doing away with only half a man. It need cause no problem—there is more than enough here to pay off those who have taken care of me till now. Please use what is left over to improve conditions of the men in death row. But I know it’s asking a lot.” Mersault enters Zagreus’s room, shoots the man, and places the revolver in the cripple’s hand. He cleans out the strongbox, puts the money in a suitcase, and returns home to take a nap.
In a sense, Zagreus’s money does go to a man on death row. Although he is not convicted of a crime, Mersault choses his own form of “conscious death.” Instead of finding death at the end of old age, however, he will die young of tuberculosis. But not before he leaves his job at the docks, travels to Europe, and returns to Algeria and buys a house. He has a number of love affairs and even takes a wife, though they do not live together. Mersault may live in society, but he does not participate in it. All that intrudes on his consciousness is the sea, the sun, a cigarette, and the need to get through the hours of the day. A century before with Flaubert, this would have been called detachment, but with Camus it is unequivocal alienation.
When Mersault is on his deathbed, receiving the sun’s “offering” like a bursting citrus fruit with the “glistening sea irradiated with the smiles of his gods,” it is not a golden, comforting end that he finds but suffocation. His disease ascends like a stone from the pit of his stomach. The stone that Mersault saw as the metaphor for his existence is instead an implacable life force, one that spends itself and returns him “in the joy of his heart to the truth of the motionless worlds.”
A life like Mersault’s is breathtaking in its hollowness and lack of focus. It is Camus’s genius to concentrate the reader’s attention on this fact by surrounding Mersault with the vivid materiality and beauty of the world around him. It is difficult to imagine anyone better than Camus at rendering sea and sun in words. “Summer crammed the harbor with noise and sunlight. It was eleven-thirty. The day split open down the middle, crushing the docks under the burden of its heat.”
In another passage, Camus contrasts Mersault the modern man with rustic Algerian herders. “Early in the morning, the fog lights of Mersault’s car were gleaming along the coast road. Leaving Algiers, he passed milk carts, and the warm smell of the horses made him even more aware of the morning’s freshness. It was still dark. A last star dissolved slowly in the sky, and on the pale road he could hear only the motor’s contented purr and occasionally, in the distance, the sound of hooves, the clatter of milk cans, until, out of the dark, his lights flashed on the shining iron of the horseshoes. Then everything vanished in the sound of speed. He was driving faster now, and the night swiftly veered to day.”
Mersault in his car drives fast into the promise of the day. He flirts with death by taking a high curving road at top speed, indifferent to how easy it would be to miscalculate the handling of his machine. Again, Mersault is surrounded by the physical world, but hardly engaged with it. Eating and drinking give no satisfaction, they are just ways to pass the time. Even the house he lives in is virtually empty. He is like a lizard basking in the sun, functioning merely as a foil for the natural world vividly alive all around him.
A Happy Death was published as part of the Cahiers Albert Camus, a response to scholars who wish to study all of an author’s works, even youthful, imperfect efforts. Richard Howard’s 1972 translation is supple and self-effacing, but A Happy Death has its flaws. Cahiers editor Roger Quilliot described it as “‘both clumsily composed and remarkably written.’” Undoubtedly, this is true, but the book still shows that Camus had the confidence of his authorial voice even at a young age. It is a voice of assurance even though it leaves one enervated by its nihilism.
© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved. Photography: Camus in sunlight; cover of the 1995 Vintage International paperback edition
May Day by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Melville House continues its mission to reissue little known short works by classic authors in The Art of the Novella series. May Day by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a model of the genre, piquant and bristling with the kind of sarcastic brilliance for which the author is best known.
It’s the first of May 1919 and New York City is sparkling with triumphant arches, jubilant soldiers back on American soil, and saucy flappers promenading in the “wealthy sun.” The jazz age meets the aftermath of the Armistice and the encounter is rocky. The giddy freedom for which Fitzgerald’s college men and flappers seem so eager comes with a dark side: bickering, class warfare, dissipation, poverty, and fatal despair. In May Day, Fitzgerald even branches out into other societal trends of the age like bolshevism, hooliganism, and subversive journalism.
Fitzgerald sold May Day directly to the Smart Set editors H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan for $200. When the novella appeared in the 1922 collection Tales of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald said:
“This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the ‘Smart Set’ in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a pattern—a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation.”
The pattern that May Day weaves is formed of the interconnected stories of the failed illustrator Gordon Sterrett and his grasping girlfriend Jewel Hudson, the debonaire flapper Edith Bradin and her anarchist brother Henry, two merry Yale men, Peter Himmel and Philip Dean, and a pair of dim soldiers, Carroll Key and Gus Rose. Over about 24 hours, these characters collide in a story that turns what should have been a time of celebration—“this paradise of violet blue,” as Peter calls it—into a series of miscalculations and humiliations that ends in tragedy.
Fitzgerald opens May Day in an arch tone:
“There had been a war fought and won and the great city of the conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with thrown flowers of white, red, and rose….So gaily and noisily were the peace and prosperity impending hymned by the scribes and poets of the conquering people that more and more spenders had gathered from the provinces to drink the wine of excitement….”
The twin temptations of materialism and venery color the meeting of Gordon Sterrett and Philip Dean who haven’t met for several years. Dean teases Sterrett about his love affair with Edith Bradin and tells him that she will be at the Gamma Psi dance later that evening at Delmonico’s. Fortune has been kind to Dean who can afford a grand hotel and thick silk shirts. Sterrett, on the other hand, nervously hides his frayed cuffs as he works himself up to his errand— borrowing $300 so Jewel won’t make trouble. The fastidious Dean fobs him off with a five-dollar bill and stands him to breakfast. They part as cordial enemies.
The adventures of Privates Carroll Key and Gus Rose would be comic if they weren’t tinged with self-loathing and anti-Semitism. Key, whose “name [hints] that in his veins, however thinly diluted by generations of degeneration, ran blood of some potentiality” represents one of Fitzgerald’s alter egos as the author himself was remotely related to Francis Scott Key. Rose, “swart and bandy-legged, with rat-eyes and a much-broken hooked nose,” is defiant, brutish, and easily led. Key develops a plan to find his brother who is a waiter at a “hash joint” and get their hands on some liquor.
On the way, they encounter a crowd milling around “a gesticulating little Jew with long black whiskers” who harangues the group with socialist propaganda. An angry soldier-blacksmith sends the “God damn Bolsheviki” sprawling, and the crowd sets off to beat up more anarchists. Key and Rose are caught up until they remember their mission. Finally, they find brother George who has moved up in the world and now waits tables at Delmonico’s. Key and Rose hide in a closet and pilfer liquor from the refreshments set up for the Yale Gamma Psi dance. Peter Himmel discovers the soldiers and teases them as "Harvard men" before joining them for a few closet cocktails.
Himmel is trying to rescue some self-esteem after being rebuffed by Edith at the dance. His crime was attempting to put his arm around her shoulders and, more calamitous, mussing her coiffure. Fitzgerald’s picture of Edith as she descends the staircase at Delmonico’s is a marvel of sensuality, sentimentality, and shallowness. She is the quintessential flapper, perfumed and sleek, slangy, and bewitched by her own potential for love and adventure. “I smell sweet…I’m made for love,” she thinks and channels her thoughts into rosy dreams of curing Gordon Sterrett of his helplessness.
Drunk and desperate, Sterrett has found Edith at the dance and bares his soul, tearfully saying that he is going crazy, that he is a failure, and that he’s desperately poor. This is a little more reality than Edith is prepared to handle. She passes the evening dancing with other men and avoiding Sterrett’s gaze. Finally at half-past one, she escapes and goes to visit her anarchist brother Henry at his newspaper office nearby.
"Where do you keep the bombs?" she asks flippantly of her brother and his bedazzled colleague. Within minutes, a mob crashes in, the same crowd that beat up the Jewish socialist. The police break up the scene—but not before Henry’s leg is broken and Key is pushed out of a window and falls to his death. Unnamed and unmourned, he dies in his uniform, though hardly a hero. It is the kind of irony that Fitzgerald interjects surely as a reference not only to the senseless casualties of war, but also to the social deadbeats he chronicled throughout his career. (Key’s body is identified by name a few pages later when his buddy Rose forlornly watches it loaded into an ambulance.)
The story winds down with Rose following the gleefully drunk Dean and Himmel as they strut down the street sporting large IN and OUT signs torn from the kitchen doors at Delmonico’s. Rose hopes to be recognized and perhaps given a little something by the society gentlemen. Instead, it is Edith who recognizes the soldier as one of the mob from her brother’s office. Like the Jewish street orator, Rose is set upon and beat up.
May Day ends in bleak despair with Gordon Sterrett “irrevocably” wed to the gold-digger Jewel. (The situation is not unlike Maugham’s Of Human Bondage in which the impoverished Philip Carey is blackmailed into marrying the slatternly waitress Mildred. It is also worth noting that both Fitzgerald’s novella and Maugham’s 1915 book were strongly autobiographical.) Hungover and dull-witted by his predicament, Gordon shoots himself in the head.
The satire in the novella’s opening paragraphs—“Never had there been such splendor in the great city”—preempts the high ideas and heroism of war with drunkenness and crass commercialism. From these lofty heights, we quickly descend to the sordid facts of human actions. These facts, culminating in the dispassionately recounted death of a failed artist, sound disturbingly prescient in view of Fitzgerald’s own premature death from a heart attack in 1940.
© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved. Photo: John Held's cover from the 1922 edition of Tales of the Jazz Age
From the Terrace by John O’Hara
Author of more than 400 short stories, 17 novels (one posthumous), several plays and non-fiction collected works, 13 short story collections (and more posthumous collections), and two screenplays, John O’Hara (1905–1970) was often accused of writing too much. O’Hara was so prolific, in fact, that he banked his royalties with Random House and at one time had about $1 million on deposit (Gibbsville Preface 12).
The 1999 Carroll & Graf second reprint edition of From the Terrace comes in at 897 pages and weighs almost five pounds. The cover promises an introduction by Budd Schulberg (screenwriter of On the Waterfront) but, regrettably, it is nowhere to be found. Still, it is a clear printing and fairly sturdy for a hefty paperback. (Just for the record, at no point, did I wish for the convenience of an e-book.)
O’Hara is often accused of “bloated” books and certainly one might feel that a four page telephone conversation, for example, is a bit much. But O’Hara’s boundless confidence in his ability to entertain is contagious, and any real fan gulps down his portions with the glee of a real trencherman. If a sign of a good writer is that he can be trusted, then O’Hara is one. Like all of his fiction, From the Terrace is rich and varied, full of fascinating period detail and the pitch-perfect dialogue for which he was well-known. From the jazz age lingo of the opening chapters to the Depression-era statistics and the 1940s wartime jargon—words like “logistics” and “squared away”—O’Hara plays it back with gusto and charm. It must also be admitted that he was a master of scatological phrases and R-rated slang.
From the Terrace charts events in the life of Raymond Alfred Eaton, second son of Pennsylvania iron and steel magnate Samuel Eaton. But as O’Hara notes in the introductory passage, the book’s purpose is more ambitious than merely cataloging the men, women, and children who intersect with Alfred’s life. What exactly that might mean is carefully deferred because “an early statement of our purpose…might tend to make us too constantly aware of our purpose” (5). Rather, O’Hara plunges into the lives and events of the characters at hand, their delineation being his immediate goal.
From the Terrace has all the makings of an epic. The book spans from 1894 to almost 1950. Its characters are involved in two wars, the advent of automobile and air travel, the crash, and the Depression. The main characters start out in O’Hara’s fictional mecca, Pennsylvania coal country, and rapidly fan out into domestic playgrounds from Connecticut to Long Island, Manhattan, and California. What they wear, what they drive, the clubs to which they belong, and the cocktails they drink offer a comprehensive view of American culture in the first half of the twentieth century. But O’Hara was not interested in the generational family saga. O’Hara shares much with the likes of Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis such as their sardonic perspectives and their interest in the slow despair of daily life. But O'Hara's prose has an earthy boldness and a swagger that sets him apart.
The clubs, the cocktails, and the clothes are all props for the real story, which as always with O’Hara centers on sex. Critics and readers might be excused for thinking him more than a little obsessed with sex. However, his is not a prurient interest, but a clinical eye cast on how sex powers the hidden engine of social machinery. Sex turns the plot, it develops character, and, of course, it brings forth future generations to perpetuate the action.
O’Hara’s treatment of one blatantly voyeuristic scene in From the Terrace demonstrates this approach. Alfred’s marriage to Mary St. John has disintegrated, and Alfred and his mistress Natalie Benziger are together in their New York love nest. They have begun to make love when photographers burst in and begin to snap incriminating photos. Alfred worries that these images will be splashed across the newspapers and that this public exposure will violate the agreement that he and Mary have to keep their respective affairs quiet. Rather unexpectedly, Mary isn’t interested in blackmail and she even agrees to turn over all the photographs.
The incident fizzles into nothing because O’Hara isn’t interested in being a voyeur. Rather, he wants to demonstrate how Mary exerts her sexual power. Surprisingly, it is the lead female protagonist of the novel rather than the lead male protagonist who repeatedly wields power in the sexual game. Mary’s need for this kind of power has resulted from her liaison with her former fiancé Dr. Jim Roper, a quack whose practice consists of persuading society women to fulfill themselves sexually. He is also a bit of a degenerate, using Mary (with her cooperation) to lure young men to his apartment for all sorts of sexual shenanigans. In thrall to Roper, Mary becomes increasingly skeptical about love. She doesn’t even seem to care enough about Alfred to feel jealous of Natalie—after meeting Natalie, Mary gloats that she would rather have “guts” than Alfred’s adoration. Mary's sexual dalliances have tainted her very soul, turning a self-disciplined young girl into a contemptibly promiscuous woman.
Where Mary is portrayed as the skeptic who doesn’t believe in the possibility of love, Alfred is shown to be consumed with it. Having failed his father and been unable to reach his mother, Alfred as a young man seeks love in the wrong places. His high school love is killed in a motor accident, and his affair with an older girl is cut short when she dies in a murder-suicide pact with her married lover. Overseas during World War I, Alfred’s good looks and diffidence lead to many casual affairs. After the war, Alfred's apartment becomes a playboy’s paradise. Alfred's marriage to Mary leads to her sexual awakening, but her timing if off because Alfred, having already slaked his youthful sexual urges, is transferring his energies to his career. They satisfy each other in bed, but it becomes clear that they want different things. When Alfred meets Natalie, he is away from home, lonely, and stalled in his professional ambitions. He sees Natalie as a refreshing contrast to the decadent sophistication of his city life. She represents the innocent, uncomplicated love that he does not have with Mary.
Almost exactly halfway through the book, O’Hara checks in again, this time in a third person voice that turns out to be Mary. They are newlyweds, and Alfred is trying to make a go of the aviation design business. He has returned to his hometown of Port Johnson in 1921 to inspect the fire damage at the Eaton steel mill. Its devastation represents the loss of his father’s lifetime of work. With his father gone (he died on the day of Alfred’s wedding, finding even in death a way to spoil his son’s happiness), the fire is a decision point for Alfred. He could have stayed in Port Johnson and resurrected the family business. But he doesn’t, because as Mary says “he was not a second-rater. He could have been the leading citizen of Port Johnson without much competition, but it would have been avoiding life and rather cowardly. . . .All through his life he has been one of those men who gravitate toward the top by instinct, and I suppose that’s one of the reasons why I love him. It is very complimentary to a woman to know that she is loved by a man who has a touch of greatness” (411).
The introductory narration was coy, refusing to divulge the author’s purpose. Here, O’Hara engages in deliberate misdirection. Mary’s voice at this point is an odd dislocation, easily forgotten as the pages pile up. It is a subtle yet masterful maneuver. For the first half of the book, O’Hara has set up one set of expectations for Alfred. Against an epic background, Alfred has made a prodigal return. He could have saved the family business and brought the family home all the warmth it never had while his father was alive. Mary, the dutiful—and egocentric—young wife, wants to see greatness in her husband not because Alfred is inherently heroic, but because it shows her good taste in marrying him.
But has Alfred really “gravitated toward the top”? As a second son, he never received his father’s love because his father had invested all his love in the first son who died of spinal meningitis at age 8. Alfred never had his mother’s love because she began drinking and taking lovers after Samuel shut her out. Two women Alfred loved died violent deaths. He had a respectable showing in the war, but was hardly a commanding officer. His attempt to run an aviation business has failed, and he had to rely on a loan from a Texas oil millionaire friend to buy out his interest.
O’Hara advances the possibility that Alfred could have a “touch of greatness,” and, in another (truly) epic novel by another author, he might have. In this book, however, by the time of the story's ineffably sad conclusion, it is clear that Alfred is no more than a mediocrity. He had a remarkable career as a partner at a private banking firm, he weathered the Depression, and had the stalwart friendship of one of the firm’s founders. (Granted, he received these advantages because he’s saved the life of the founder’s grandson.) During World War II, he embarked on a cross-country promotional tour among American industrialists at the request of FDR, a president whose policies he disliked but whose goodwill he coveted. His wife was beautiful, popular in society, and a loving mother (at least to outward appearances).
But in California, Alfred’s real nature is revealed. Divorced at last from Mary, Alfred and Natalie marry and move to Los Angeles so he can recuperate from a hemorrhage that precipitated an early retirement. They are living in the Beverly Hills home of Alfred’s long-time friend, Texas oil millionaire Jack Tom Smith. Alfred spends his days sleeping on the terrace in the California sunshine, golfing, and lunching with friends. Gradually, Natalie begins to wonder if Alfred was worth all the years that she waited for him to marry her. Her regret becomes a quiet scorn, even hatred. It’s a shocking realization, one of those moments that critic George V. Higgins calls an O'Hara signature moment of “random despair.” Alfred, too, senses that he has become a banality. He has been doing things his whole life, but he has accomplished nothing. In the end, the most he can do is watch the world pass by from the terrace.
A word about the 1960 film version
From the Terrace, the motion picture, starred Paul Newman as Alfred Eaton, Joanne Woodward as Mary St. John Eaton, and Ina Balin as Natalie Benziger. The movie takes many liberties with the book’s chronology, opening with Alfred returning home after World War II. In an effort to distill the book’s denseness and sprawl down to manageable movie length, the producers focus on the relationship of Alfred and Mary and Alfred’s love affair with Natalie. Much of the novel’s sensational aspects—its language, its sexual situations, and the homosexuality or bisexuality of various characters—is, not surprisingly, omitted.
Paul Newman as Alfred is perfect. He combines the right amount of virility and vulnerability and his finely calibrated sense of patient perplexity is an important aspect of his character as O’Hara built it. It is critical to his ultimate failure in the novel, so it does not quite jibe with the movie version of Alfred as a rebel who chooses love over social expectations. Joanne Woodward’s portrayal of the ice queen Mary St. John is somewhat reserved, but her chemistry with Newman, to whom she’d only been married for about two years, is palpable.
The great weakness of the film, besides Mark Robson’s wooden directing, is Ina Balin as Natalie. Physically, she couldn’t be further from Woodward. Balin has a dark voluptuousness with large, limpid eyes and thick black hair. In keeping with the mannered look of the entire production, she is dressed in decorous ensembles rather more stylish than her coal-town surroundings might indicate.
Balin’s own limited acting skills, or maybe Robson’s lack of rapport with her, fail to give her the drawing power necessary to believe that Eaton would fall for her. The movie clumsily offers the idea that Natalie is a simple, small town girl open to love, without sophistication but not dumb. If Balin had turned up the heat even a few degrees in her portrayal, there might have been a tiny hope of some chemistry between her and Newman.
The most remarkable performances in the film are Myrna Loy as Martha Eaton and Leon Ames as Samuel Eaton. Ames, who may be most well-remembered as the kindly father in Meet Me in St. Louis, is here the brutal mill owner who can’t get over his first son’s early death. His marriage to Martha is ruined because of his isolation and his relationship with Alfred is catastrophic. Cruel and even brutal, Ames doesn’t overplay Samuel, but it is almost unbearable to hear him call the Myrna Loy a “pig.”
Loy’s small, but powerful role is heart-breakingly sad. When the film opens, she has passed out on a train. It comes out that she was drunk and on her way to visit her lowlife lover Charles Froelich in Philadelphia. Because of Samuel Eaton’s position, the incident is hushed up, but Mrs. Eaton’s drinking problem is common knowledge. Loy is frail with a thin, plaintive voice, and her characterization of the destroyed wife and mother is committed and true. Anyone who knows Loy only has the jazz age sophisticate of the Thin Man movies will be impressed by the energy and intensity of her short time onscreen.
The high-style production design of From the Terrace is a tribute to the O’Hara fictional universe. Especially notable is the Eatons’ New York apartment with its taupe color scheme and Chinese accessories. It reeks of money and class with just a hint of nouveau riche garishness—especially those center knob front doors in black and red. The Benziger home, on the other hand, has burlap-covered shrubberies and patterned wallpaper—sure signs of bourgeois homeyness.
This being the end of the 1950s, makeup is heavy but flawless, tending to emphasize the two-dimensional image onscreen. The wardrobe is vintage Travilla, the American designer most well-known for dressing Marilyn Monroe in some of her most memorable gowns (including the white halter dress with pleated skirt in The Seven Year Itch). His negligees, daywear, and formal gowns look stunning on Joanne Woodward and the statuesque Elizabeth Allen as the nosy Sage Rimmington. To the popular wasp-waisted silhouette of the day, Travilla added contrasting lengths or structured drapery falling from the hip. He favored monochromatic looks in this picture, something that is particularly successful in the film’s penultimate scene when Woodward arrives for a board meeting at Newman’s office in an ensemble of corporate grey—dress, furs, gloves, bag, and turban head wrap. Travilla says much with this costume: Woodward is trespassing on a male-only domain and she’s there on sufferance in spite of the deference of the gentlemen. Everyone thinks Alfred is about to deliver an important presentation, but instead he quits dramatically. He leaves the room and jumps in a taxi, declaring his independence from Mary. Woodward is left on a New York street corner, shouting “Alfred!” like any common fishwife. She may look like Park Avenue, but she’s really Bed-Stuy.
© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.
“Anthem for a Doomed Youth” by Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?—
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of silent minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
(Owen died 4 November 1918, helping bridge the Sambre-Oise Canal in France.)
From the Treaty of Versailles
Ratified 28 June 1919
Prisoners of War and Graves
PART VI: SECTION II
GRAVES
Article 225
The Allied and Associated Governments and the German Government will cause to be respected and maintained the graves of the soldiers and sailors buried in their respective territories.
They agree to recognise any Commission appointed by an Allied or Associated Government for the purpose of identifying, registering, caring for or erecting suitable memorials over the said graves and to facilitate the discharge of its duties.
Furthermore they agree to afford, so far as the provisions of their laws and the requirements of public health allow, every facility for giving effect to requests that the bodies of their soldiers and sailors may be transferred to their own country.
Article 226
The graves of prisoners of war and interned civilians who are nationals of the different belligerent States and have died in captivity shall be properly maintained in accordance with Article 225 of the present Treaty.
The Allied and Associated Governments on the one part and the German Government on the other part reciprocally undertake also to furnish to each other:
(1) A complete list of those who have died, together with all information useful for identification;
(2) All information as to the number and position of the graves of all those who have been buried without identification.
. . .
Done at Versailles, the twenty-eighth day of June, one thousand nine hundred and nineteen, in a single copy which will remain deposited in the archives of the French Republic, and of which authenticated copies will be transmitted to each of the Signatory Powers.
Photography: (top) Wilfred Owen's draft of “Anthem for a Doomed Youth”; (bottom) signing of the treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, 28 June 1919
