Sunday, November 14, 2004

Get Happy / Richard Wilbur and the poetry of profusion

Richard Wilbur



Get Happy

Richard Wilbur and the poetry of profusion

By Adam Kirsch
November 14, 2004

In 1953, literary history—acting through the good offices of Edna Ward, of Wellesley, Massachusetts—brought together two of the most gifted, and least similar, American poets of the postwar era. Mrs. Ward was the mother-in-law of Richard Wilbur—at the age of thirty-two, the author of two acclaimed books of verse—and a friend of Aurelia Plath, whose twenty-year-old daughter, Sylvia, had just endured the hellish summer she later chronicled in “The Bell Jar.” Wilbur was invited, as he wryly recalls in his poem “Cottage Street, 1953,” “to exemplify / The published poet in his happiness, / Thus cheering Sylvia, who has wished to die.” Of course, Wilbur’s good will could not make a dent in Plath’s misery: he describes himself as “a stupid lifeguard” who finds “a girl … immensely drowned.” But the meeting was productive in another way: decades later, after Plath had written, died, and become a myth, it offered Wilbur a test and an emblem of his own, very different poetic calling.

In his poem, Wilbur slyly turns Mrs. Ward’s polite inquiry about tea—“if we would prefer it weak or strong”—into a literary and moral question. Plath, of course, preferred it strong, in art and in life; she would go on, in Wilbur’s words, “to state at last her brilliant negative / In poems free and helpless and unjust.” But where does this leave Wilbur, whose poems are brilliantly affirmative, and who has enjoyed all the blessings Plath did not—longevity, reputation, worldly success? Does the fact that he was destined for happiness condemn his poetry to be weak, the tepid milk to Plath’s acrid lemon?

The question Wilbur asks in “Cottage Street, 1953” has been posed by critics since the beginning of his career—starting with Randall Jarrell, whose review of Wilbur’s second book, “Ceremony,” complained that Wilbur “never goes too far, but he never goes far enough.” And it echoes from beginning to end of the “Collected Poems 1943-2004” (Harcourt; $35), which will be Wilbur’s monument. How does a poet who feels himself, in the words of an early poem, “Obscurely yet most surely called to praise” practice that calling in an age when poetry is overwhelmingly drawn to crisis, confession, and complaint?

This is more than just a matter of literary fashion, though in Wilbur’s public statements one can often sense his impatience at being typecast as the placid straight man to his wilder contemporaries—above all, Robert Lowell. Lowell and Wilbur made their poetic débuts in the same postwar moment; Lowell’s “Lord Weary’s Castle” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947, the year that Wilbur’s “The Beautiful Changes” appeared. And it was Lowell, much more than Plath, whom critics perpetually used as a foil when describing Wilbur. In a 1964 interview, Wilbur ruefully recited the standard contrast: “I’m all grace and charm and short gains, and he’s all violence and … Well, he’s Apollo and Dionysus locked in a death grip.”

Lowell, like Plath, John Berryman, and countless lesser poets, wrote about and out of a spiritual turmoil that amounted to, or resulted in, madness. Writing about his experience in a psychiatric ward in “Waking in the Blue,” from his hugely influential 1959 book “Life Studies,” Lowell insisted on the dangerous and pathetic majesty of the mad: he writes of Stanley with his “kingly granite profile,” of Bobbie, “a replica of Louis XVI / without the wig.” Wilbur’s poem “Driftwood,” by contrast, declares his own allegiance to “emblems / Royally sane,”

Which have ridden to homeless wreck, and long revolved In the lathe of all the seas, But have saved in spite of it all their dense Ingenerate grain. 

Wilbur has always been conscious that his particular poetic gifts and spiritual resilience were untimely. He started writing, as he later recalled, “for earnest therapeutic reasons during World War II,” in an effort to bring the sanity of art to bear on “a personal and an objective world in disorder.” (Wilbur served as a front-line infantryman in Europe, after his reputed radicalism got him kicked out of Army cryptography training.) The poems of his first book treat his war experiences in a style so elaborately formal that the most awful subjects are sublimated into irony, or even black comedy. There is something deliberately, monstrously cartoonish about “Mined Country,” where “Cows in mid-munch go splattered over the sky.” The persistence of the mines—“Danger is sunk in the pastures … / Ingenuity’s covered with flowers!”—is Wilbur’s way of writing about the persistence of the war itself, with all its psychic casualties: “it’s going to be long before / Their war’s gone for good,” he soberly predicts.

But in this poem, as throughout “The Beautiful Changes,” Wilbur’s style, influenced by the estranging precision of Marianne Moore and the courtly ironies of John Crowe Ransom, makes disorder almost parodically articulate. Surely there has never been a more aestheticized vision of K.P. than Wilbur’s in “Potato”:

Scrubbed under faucet water the planet skin Polishes yellow, but tears to the plain insides; Parching, the white’s blue-hearted like hungry hands. All of the cold dark kitchens, and war-frozen gray Evening at window; I remember so many Peeling potatoes quietly into chipt pails. 

Randall Jarrell, whose experience of military life was much milder than Wilbur’s (he served at a Stateside airbase), was far more willing to admit the sorrow and pity of war into his poetry. There is nothing in Wilbur that resembles Jarrell’s defiant matter-of-factness in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”: “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”

But then, as Jarrell wrote, “The real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time”; and the same holds true of peace poets, in whose company Wilbur confessedly belongs. In “Up, Jack,” Wilbur looks to Falstaff as a tutelary spirit for the postwar world, “a god / To our short summer days and the world’s wine.” Wilbur’s refined epicureanism is far removed from Falstaff’s grossness, but the poet dares, like the fat knight, to make an ethic of enjoyment. There is something quietly polemical about Wilbur’s proud adoption-by-translation, in “Ceremony,” of La Fontaine’s “Ode to Pleasure”:

For games I love, and love, and every art, Country, and town, and all; there’s nought my mood May not convert to sovereign good, Even to the gloom of melancholy heart. Then come; and wouldst thou know, O sweetest Pleasure, What measure of these goods must me befall? Enough to fill a hundred years of leisure; For thirty were no good at all. 

Such praise of mundane joys defies the predominant trend of English and American poetry since Eliot, if not since Wordsworth. Against the potent myth of the Romantic poète maudit—the glamorous lineage of Chatterton, Shelley, Keats, Rimbaud, and Hart Crane, fatally revived in Wilbur’s own time by Plath, Lowell, and Berryman, among others—Wilbur sets the unfamiliar ideal of the poète bénit. In a 1977 Paris Review interview, he specifically rejected the tragic glamour of a Berryman, who had compared writing to surgery: “I am obliged to perform in complete darkness / operations of great delicacy / on myself.” Berryman, Wilbur said, “was such a very hard worker that he lived almost entirely within his profession… . The impression one is left with is of a man who is working desperately hard at his job. Well, I admire that, but I think it can break your health and destroy your joy in life and art.”

Throughout his long career, Wilbur has remained committed to that ideal of “joy in life and art,” and has been amply rewarded with achievement and honors in both spheres. After the Army and a stint in graduate school, Wilbur—like most poets of his generation—earned his living as a college professor. Unlike the teaching careers of many poets, though, his was marked by long and steady tenures: twenty years at Wesleyan University, then a further ten at Smith College. He was just as warmly embraced by the institutions of literary life. Born in 1921, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1957 (for his collection “Things of This World”), received the first of many honorary doctorates in 1960, and in 1987 was appointed United States poet laureate; he received a second Pulitzer in 1989 for his “New and Collected Poems,” which this “Collected Poems” supersedes. He has also enjoyed success in the theatre, as a translator of the plays of Molière and as the lyricist for Leonard Bernstein’s operetta “Candide.” All this seems highly becoming to a poet of fruitful activity, not barren speculation.

Wilbur’s position was often a lonely one, however, in a period that tended to view all affirmation as mere bourgeois complacency. One can get a good idea of the literary climate in which Wilbur began to write from Lionel Trilling’s great study “Sincerity and Authenticity,” published in 1972. Trilling suggests that English literature from Shakespeare to Henry James had agreed on an ideal of earthly life, on the reward that awaits characters who live “happily ever after.” This is the worldly felicity promised by the goddess Juno in “The Tempest”: “Honour, riches, marriage blessing, / Long continuance and increasing.” “It has to do,” as Trilling says, “with good harvests and full barns and … affluent decorum.” But “in the literature of our own day,” Trilling goes on to argue, “the visionary norm of order, peace, honour, and beauty has no place.” Both writers and readers instinctively meet it with “bitter contemptuous rejection,” whether out of “despair over the impossibility of realizing the vision” or out of a profoundly modern disbelief that any earthly happiness could satisfy the needs of the spirit. Rather than worldly completeness, the twentieth-century mind seeks in literature “the disintegration which is essential if it is to develop its true, its entire, freedom.”

Strangely enough, the whole course of Trilling’s argument—right down to the image of “good harvests and full barns”—was anticipated, and disputed, by Wilbur in a poem from his 1956 collection, “Things of This World.” In “Sonnet,” Wilbur offers a characteristic response to the problem of the “happily ever after”:

The winter deepening, the hay all in, The barn fat with cattle, the apple-crop Conveyed to market or the fragrant bin, He thinks the time has come to make a stop, And sinks half-grudging in his firelit seat, Though with his heavy body’s full consent, In what would be the posture of defeat, But for that look of rigorous content. 

Worldly satisfaction, Wilbur acknowledges, can have the look of defeat, because it means that there is nothing more to aspire to. He insists, though, that what looks like defeat should really be understood as contentment, the only contentment available in this world: of labor completed, tasks achieved, the future secured. Still, in the last lines of “Sonnet,” he acknowledges that the weary, satisfied farmer always remains haunted, even reproached, by another figure—the scarecrow that stands in the field, “floating skyward its abandoned hands / In gestures of invincible desire.”

Wilbur is too honest a poet to deny the persistent glamour of the scarecrow’s yearnings; but his instincts are all on the side of the farmer’s contentment. And throughout his “Collected Poems” Wilbur is generally uncomfortable when he tries to imagine discontent, or what Trilling called “disintegration.” From time to time over his long career, Wilbur has attempted poems of comprehensive moral statement, which aim to do justice to the horror of the modern world. But these poems are among his least convincing, because his invocations of evil seldom avoid seeming merely dutiful. Certainly, this is the case in “On the Marginal Way,” from his 1969 collection “Walking to Sleep.” The poem begins with a walk on a beach that becomes a scene of horror:

The rocks flush rose and have the melting shape Of bodies fallen anyhow. It is a Géricault of blood and rape, Some desert town despoiled, some caravan Pillaged, its people murdered to a man. 

It is typical of Wilbur that this murderous vision should be, precisely, a vision, a mirage. Indeed, what Wilbur sees is twice removed from reality: the rocks remind him not of “blood and rape” themselves but of “a Géricault,” an already aestheticized violence. And while Wilbur goes on to invoke “Auschwitz’ final kill,” the poem does not take account of that evil in such a way that the memory of evil would affect the imagination of good. Instead, in its last stanzas, “On the Marginal Way” turns away from evil altogether, in order to receive an unaccountable consolation:

And like a breaking thought Joy for a moment floods into the mind, Blurting that all things shall be brought To the full state and stature of their kind. 

This sort of joy is not so much the conclusion to an argument as a complexion of the mind. As he explained in the Paris Review interview, “To put it simply, I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that is my attitude.”

If Wilbur’s essentially hopeful temperament leaves him ill-equipped for certain kinds of moral inquiry, however, it is also the source of his enormous poetic gifts. No other twentieth-century American poet, with the possible exception of James Merrill, demonstrates such a Mozartean felicity in the writing of verse. This is partly a matter of formal mastery: Wilbur has written the best blank verse of any American poet since Frost. Yet Wilbur’s formal poetry never has the slightly defensive tone that afflicts many writers of formal verse in this era of free verse. Just as his spirit takes naturally to “rigorous content,” so his musical imagination takes naturally to contented rigor. “I have no quarrel at all with Emerson,” he has remarked. “He said, ‘not meter, but a meter-making argument makes poetry,’ and I think that’s true. I simply write a kind of free verse that ends by rhyming much of the time.”

This seeming paradox is actually a key truth about Wilbur’s genius: for him, the conventional is organic. More than a matter of verse technique, this is the theme and argument of some of his best poems. In “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra,” Wilbur contrasts two Italian fountains that are also two ways of being in the world. The Baroque fountain of the title is a triumph of fantastic ingenuity, all shells and fauns and cherubs: “More addling to the eye than wine, and more / Interminable to thought / Than pleasure’s calculus.” But the poet cannot quite dismiss the suspicion that art should be more than just delightful: “Yet since this all / Is pleasure, flash, and waterfall, / Must it not be too simple?” Maybe, he wonders, there is more truth and more honesty in “the plain fountains that Maderna set, / Before St. Peter’s,” whose simple aspiring jet is a legible emblem of Romantic yearning and disappointment: “the main jet / Struggling aloft until it seems at rest / In the act of rising, until / The very wish of water is reversed.”

There is no doubt which of these two fountains appears more “modern,” in Trilling’s sense. But Wilbur finally declares his preference for the Baroque fountain, whose fauns, “at rest in fulness of desire / For what is given,” seem to promise that a complete happiness is possible on earth. And in poem after poem Wilbur finds new metaphors with which to assert that—to quote the title of his best-known poem—“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” In “A Black November Turkey,” he praises “the cocks that one by one, / Dawn after mortal dawn, with vulgar joy / Acclaim the sun”; in “After the Last Bulletins” the garbage-collectors, “saintlike men, / White and absorbed, with stick and bag remove / The litter of the night.” The most famous of these emblems is the clean laundry of “Love Calls Us,” in which the sight of sheets and smocks calls forth a secular prayer: “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, / Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam / And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

The profusion of such emblems in Wilbur’s “Collected Poems” is more than just a proof of his talent for metaphor. It is the poetic fruit of his distinctive metaphysics, which deserves the old-fashioned name of Transcendentalist. The condition of metaphor is the capacity of things to be likened to one another; and for Wilbur this very capacity suggests that all things share the same essential nature. “I think that all poets are sending religious messages,” he once declared, “because poetry is, in such great part, the comparison of one thing to another; or the saying, as in metaphor, that one thing is another. And to insist, as all poets do, that all things are related to each other, comparable to each other, is to go toward making an assertion of the unity of all things.” This faith in what he calls, in a late poem, “the dove-tailed world” is clearly inspired by Emerson, who wrote in “The Poet,” “Things admit of being used as symbols because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part.”

This intuition provides Wilbur with his motive for metaphor: “What should we be without / The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return, / These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?” And the happiest of Wilbur’s many happy gifts is his confidence that we do, indeed, see ourselves in nature, that the human being is profoundly at home in this world. That confidence is what makes possible the hundreds upon hundreds of brilliant images and observations that light up Wilbur’s “Collected Poems”: “a still crepitant sound / Of the earth in the garden drinking / The late rain”; “Slow vultures kettling in the lofts of air”; “the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed / To one side on a backlit chopping-board / And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints / Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail.”

It is up to the “temperament and faith” of each reader to decide whether the golden world of Richard Wilbur’s poetry is the real world. What is certain is that Wilbur has given his vision the permanence, the immediacy, and the conviction of major poetry. His “Collected Poems” has the same moving and ambiguous power that he ascribed, in an early poem, to yet another fountain, this one in “Caserta Garden”:

A childhood by this fountain wondering Would leave impress of circle-mysteries: One would have faith that the unjustest thing Had geometric grace past what one sees.



Published in the print edition of the November 22, 2004, issue.

Adam Kirsch is a poet, a critic, and the author of, most recently, “Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?

THE NEW YORKER




Saturday, November 13, 2004

Jerzy Kosinski / Being There




ADAPTATION OF THE WEEK

Inspired by Chance

Jerzy Kosinski's Being There (1979)


Andrew Pulver
Saturday 13 November 2004
Author: Jerzy Kosinski (1933-91) survived the Nazi invasion of Poland (during which he apparently lost the power of speech) and became an academic in the communist regime. He emigrated to the US in 1957 and his first novel, The Painted Bird (1965), became a key addition to "Holocaust literature".

Having fortuitously avoided the Manson murders in 1969 - he was due to be Sharon Tate's dinner guest, but missing luggage meant he cancelled his visit - Kosinski completed Being There in 1970. His literary celebrity was assured - he even took a sizeable role in Reds (1981), playing a Bolshevik. However, in 1982, an article in the Village Voice accused him of plagiarism, as Being There was apparently taken from a Polish bestseller, The Career of Nikodem Dyzmy by Tadeusz Dolega-Mostowicz. Depressed by the reception of his subsequent work as he tried to prove his credentials, Kosinski committed suicide in 1991 after taking an overdose and taping a plastic bag over his head.


Story: A modern equivalent of the "feral child" tales popular in central Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, Being There focuses on the figure of Chance the gardener, raised in complete isolation, except for TV.
Forced to leave the house where he lives and works by the death of his employer, Chance is taken in by an influential financier, Benjamin Rand, and his young wife, Eve, after a car accident. Known as Chauncey Gardiner after his name is misheard, Chance becomes a celebrity after his simple pronouncements about gardening are taken as meaningful political metaphors.
Eve falls in love with him, and plans to marry a bewildered Chance after Rand's death.
Film-makers: Hal Ashby (1929-88) was Norman Jewison's editor in the 1960s, working on The Cincinatti Kid (1965) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).
As a director, he became a key figure in the Hollywood new wave of the 1970s with Harold and Maude and The Last Detail, before finding popular success with Shampoo and one of the first post-Vietnam films, Coming Home. Playing Chance had been a long-term ambition for Peter Sellers. He sent Kosinski a telegram soon after the book's publication. But it was only towards the end of his life, when he was already ill with heart trouble, that he could get the project off the ground.
How book and film compare: Kosinski worked on the screenplay, and the film follows the path of the novel scrupulously. Kosinski inserts considerable embroidery and adds extra scenes, such as Chance's confrontation with the teen gang on his first day in the street.
The film's iconic sequence of Chance walking across the surface of a cemetery lake, however, was a last-minute inspiration of Ashby's. Ashby also personally edited in his preferred end-sequence - of Sellers repeatedly messing up a line - in all the cinemas showing the film on its first release after the producers refused it.
Inspirations and influences: The kind of symbiotic relationship with TV that Chance enjoyed became a popular theme in ensuing decades, from Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1983), which elaborated on the idea of a viewer confusing TV and reality, to Ben Stiller's The Cable Guy (1996), in which a TV obsessive has no identity other than the one that he culls from the airwaves.




Thursday, October 14, 2004

Obituaries / Bernice Rubens


Bernice Rubens


Bernice Rubens
Booker-winning novelist whose work focused on the more disturbing aspects of human behaviour

Janet Watts

Thu 14 October 2004


Bernice Rubens had just completed her autobiography when she died, at the age of 76. She worked most days. "I feel unclean if I don't write," she explained. "I don't love writing. But I love having written." Though this was her third career - she taught English and made documentary films before she took up her pen at the age of 30 - she published 24 novels, which won critical acclaim, popularity and prestigious prizes. Her autobiography was her first work of non-fiction.
Rubens's fourth novel, The Elected Member, won the 1970 Booker prize, beating work by Iris Murdoch, William Trevor and Elizabeth Bowen. She was almost unknown at the time. Though the book was a Literary Guild choice in America, at home it had been ignored by some newspapers and magazines and had sold only 3,000 copies. She did not win the prize again, although her ninth novel, A Five Year Sentence (1978), was a runner-up.

Her second book, Madame Sousatzka (1962), became a film starring Shirley MacLaine and directed by John Schlesinger; her seventh, I Sent A Letter To My Love (1975), was also filmed, with Simone Signoret; and her 13th, Mr Wakefield's Crusade (1985), was made into a BBC TV miniseries.
Rubens enjoyed the respected place she had achieved in the literary world. She was an honorary vice-president of International PEN and served as a Booker judge in 1986. She maintained close friendships with a chosen group of colleagues, including Beryl Bainbridge, Paul Bailey and Francis King. She could be combative with writers she did not like, famously disparaging Martin Amis for his backward-written Holocaust novel, Time's Arrow, both on radio and in her novel Autobiopsy (1995).
Success did not cure the insecurity that such aggression (quite convincingly) concealed, or change the wry, matter-of-fact view she took of her own writing. "Better than most, not as good as some," was her crisp verdict.
She was a compelling storyteller, weaving her novels from many strands: her own vivid experiences, her friends' and family's lives, centuries of Jewish tradition and history; above all, her remarkable and disturbing imagination. In everyday places - a suburban villa, an English public school, a home for the elderly - Rubens showed the horrors that can lie behind net curtains and cosiness, polite conversation or an unexplained wink.
Though her novels have many themes, she admitted that she really only wrote about one thing. Human relationships were the core material of her books, especially within a family. ("Everything that happens in a family is more so in a Jewish family," she said.) To this subject she brought her unsparing scrutiny, ruthless candour and a dark, unquenchable humour.
As her prolific output suggested, she was good at getting ideas for novels and fast in putting them down on paper. She only wrote one draft and she claimed she did not know what was going to happen in her ingenious plots before she wrote them. That would have been boring. But she knew her characters.
In these people lay the paradox of her fiction, which was (like them) at once intensely human and deeply bizarre. In the cavalcade of their lives - painful, funny, grotesque - death is a constant presence. A high proportion of her characters commit suicide or murder; some do both. What the others get up to may be more easily hidden, but in its own way it is no less extreme. Rubens got inside their minds, and what she found and showed there offered her readers little comfort. Fear; greed; fanaticism; cruelty; malignity (sometimes motiveless). Or the cold hell of loneliness, that itself begets monsters. She once admitted that she had lived in that all her life.
She was born in Cardiff. Her father, Eli Rubens, was a Lithuanian Jew who thought he was escaping anti-semitism for America when he boarded his ship at Hamburg around 1900. But the ticket tout had swindled him: he was shoved off at Cardiff. It was a fortnight before he realised he wasn't in New York. He married Dorothy Cohen, whose family had emigrated from Poland, and became a "tallyman", buying suits and shoes and selling them to miners for a shilling a week.
Bernice Rubens

Eli had brought a half-violin with him, and his two sons and elder daughter all became professional musicians. Harold, his firstborn, was to suffer the tragic loss of his exceptional gifts to illness; Cyril, the youngest in the family (and for Bernice, "the love of my life"), became a violinist in the London Symphony Orchestra. To her great sorrow, he was the first of her siblings to die, in 1997.
Bernice, Eli's third child, refused the half-violin. She wanted to play the cello, which was too expensive. So when the extended family visited and marvelled at the other children's playing on Sundays, she sat apart, feeling an outsider.
"You are an observer," her mother told her, perhaps in consolation. Later, she did learn the cello and the piano, and played them for the rest of her life. She liked to present herself as a failed musician rather than the accomplished writer she was.
She read English at the University of Wales, Cardiff, and married young. Her husband, Rudi Nassbauer, a wine merchant who also wrote poetry and fiction, came from a family of German Jews who held eastern European Jews such as Bernice's family in low esteem. Bernice bore two daughters, taught English at a Birmingham grammar school from 1950 to 1955, then went into the film industry. Her documentaries were well received, one entitled Stress winning the American Blue Ribbon award in 1968.
Another film took her to Java, where she was appalled at the failings of the international aid agencies and developed a deep respect for the traditional wisdom. Impressed by a local medicine man's treatment of a man who in the west would have been diagnosed as schizophrenic, she asked the healer if he had heard of Freud. "Does he live in Jakarta?" he replied. It was a bright moment in Rubens' lifelong loathing of the psychotherapeutic industry, later shared by the narrator of her 2002 novel, Nine Lives, who kills nine shrinks (and one dentist, by mistake).
Her writing began as she did, with her orthodox Jewish family in south Wales. She took the title of her first novel, Set On Edge (1960), from Ezekiel: "The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge." She dedicated it to the memory of her father, who died in 1958. It was a success: she wouldn't have continued if it hadn't been, she said later.
Her family provided her with material throughout her writing life. Madame Sousatzka was a story about a child prodigy very like her gifted elder brother Harold. The scapegoat hero of The Elected Member, driven by the pressure of parental expectations into drug addiction and incarceration in mental hospital, replayed a desperate period when Harold suffered a similar confinement.
Despite her aversion to psychiatry, Rubens prefaced this book with a line from RD Laing, who observed that patients who were "disturbed" often came from "very disturbing" families. While withholding judgment on the efficacy of Laing's practice, she admitted that she found his ideas - on a purely literary basis - "exciting".
Her third novel, Mate In Three (1965), drew less successfully on personal experience: her collapsing marriage. Rudi left her after 23 years, having fathered a son by another woman. Her sixth novel, Go Tell The Lemming (1973), covered their divorce. Rudi's departure shattered her, but her distress melted, in time, into friendship. He died in 1997. She spoke often of her ambivalence about living alone.

In her later books, Rubens moved from family life to broader historical subjects. Though she usually denied any religious feeling, her Jewishness had a central importance to her, and the theme of Jewish identity surfaced repeatedly in her fiction. It found its fullest expression in Brothers (1983), a 500-page novel that follows several generations of a Jewish family through a fight for survival that takes them from 19th-century Tsarist Russia to western Europe and Nazism, then back to modern Russia and its continued persecution of the Jews.
She talked and worried about anti-semitism and Israel, and her growing concern came out in her social relationships as well as through such recent books as I, Dreyfus (1999) and The Sergeant's Tale (2003). I, Dreyfus is a clever reprise of the French legal scandal at the turn of the 20th century in a drama of contemporary Britain. The book's hero, Sir Alfred Dreyfus, is a "closet Jew", a type of concealment that stirred his creator's anger and scorn. The novel tells of his journey through the trauma of his conviction and incarceration for child murder into a transformed relationship with his Jewishness and the suffering of his Jewish forebears.
Rubens felt more and more Jewish as her life went on, she said towards its end. But by an irony of her chosen profession, the Jewish consciousness that was to her a personal strength seemed to some critics a literary weakness, a diminution of her proven skills in creating and dwelling in imaginary worlds into what they saw as moralising or reworking history. She didn't care. Her best book was Brothers, she insisted: "because ... what it's about matters".
Her daughters Sharon and Rebecca survive her.
Paul Bailey writes: I have many happy memories of Bernice Rubens, my good friend of 24 years, but the happiest is also one of the earliest. We were in Leicester, where we'd recently met, on a tour for the Arts Council.
One day we were invited to talk to sixth-form students at a school in the city. We were met by two teachers, a man and a woman, who charmed us by asking: "Should we know your work?" We giggled, I remember, and mumbled something along the lines of: "Well ... " or: "If you want to." The man took me into a classroom, where I talked about Jane Austen.
Every so often, I heard laughter from the adjoining room, where Bernice was obviously entertaining the boys and girls. It transpired that the teacher had introduced Bernice as Denise Robins, the blue-rinsed queen of slush who was Barbara Cartland's only serious rival. Instead of being outraged, Bernice pretended to be Denise for an entire hour. When a girl asked: "How do you work, Miss Robins?" Bernice/Denise retorted: "Very quickly." Our friendship was lastingly sealed that afternoon.
Claire Armitstead writes: At this year's Hay Festival, Bernice Rubens was on fighting form. "Have you actually read my book?" she asked, fixing me with a beady eye as we made our way to the marquee in which we were to discuss her novel The Sergeant's Tale. "Of course," I stammered, with the slightly guilty knowledge that I had galloped through it overnight. "Oh, I don't mind if you haven't," she replied. "It's just easier if I know."
On stage, she was witty, candid, shrewd - and never more so than when a woman in the audience asked if she felt dissatisfied with any of her books. Yes there was one, she recalled, which she wrote just after the breakup of her marriage. "It was good therapy for me, but a rotten novel. You should always write in yesterday's blood." I, for one, won't forget that pearl of hard-won wisdom.
· Bernice Rubens, writer, born July 26 1928; died October 13 2004.




Saturday, September 11, 2004

Sweet like chocolate / Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory






Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the 1971 film.
 Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the 1971 film. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros.


Adaptation of the week

Sweet like chocolate: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Andrew Pulver
Saturday 11 September 2004
Author: Roald Dahl (1916-1990) began his prolific writing career after being invalided out of the RAF during the second world war, and being posted to the US. His first book, The Gremlins (1943), became a Disney film. In 1960 he moved back to England, and started writing in earnest, with James and the Giant Peach (1961) becoming his first significant success. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - inspired, so he said, by being used as a test consumer by the nearby Cadbury’s factory while at school in Repton – was published first in the US in 1964. A string of successful children’s books followed, including Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), Danny: The Champion of the World (1975), The BFG (1982), The Witches (1983) and Matilda (1988). He died of leukemia in 1990.
Story: Dahl’s children’s fantasy tale is set in an un-named town that’s recognisably English (and still suffering the after-effects of war and rationing). Poverty-stricken child Charlie Bucket is one of five winners of a competition to visit the chocolate factory run by the mysterious Wonka. The factory tour introduces them to a string of bizarre confectioneries (Everlasting Gobstoppers etc) as well as the Oompa-Loompas – the pygmy-sized workforce. But the fairy tale becomes a cautionary one as Charlie’s fellow competition winners are consigned to humiliation for indulging in Dahl’s pet hates - eating too much, chewing gum, being grasping, and watching TV. Charlie is then handed ownership of the factory by Wonka as the “winner”.
The film-makers: Mel Stuart (b 1928) was originally a TV documentarist, and was told about the book by his 11-year-old daughter. The $1.8m budget was raised from Quaker Oats, who were planning to market a chocolate bar around its release. Dahl wanted Spike Milligan to play Wonka, but he was considered too much of a risk for the US market. Gene Wilder, hitherto best known for his role in Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1968), was cast instead, opposite a group of unknown child actors. Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse wrote the songs.


How book and film compare: The film is first and foremost a children’s musical, with catchy tunes such as The Candy Man Can and Oompa Loompa. Though the setting remains physically similar, the film is considerably more transatlantic than the book, with most of the principal cast being American. (Augustus Gloop, the glutton, is German; Veruca Salt, the spoilt kid, is English.) The film added two significant plot elements: the sinister figure of Slugworth, who tries to persuade each child to tell him the secret of Everlasting Gobstoppers; and Wonka’s threat to expel Charlie along with the other children after he samples the Fizzy Lifting Drinks. The film transforms Dahl’s story into a classic of pop-art kitsch, with costumes, design and lettering all contributing to an extravagantly imagined work. But the author was vocal about his unhappiness with Stuart’s changes.
Inspirations and influences: The success of previous children’s musicals like Oliver! (1968) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) - on which Dahl had worked - meant that a market for this movie appeared assured. But it failed at the box office, and it wasn’t until the advent of video in the early 1980s that its bizarre stylings were rediscovered. Director Tim Burton was particularly affected: he is currently directing a remake of this film, having produced an animated adaptation of another Dahl book, James and the Giant Peach, in 1996.



Sunday, September 5, 2004

'An Evening of Long Goodbyes' / This Man Is an Island




 

'An Evening of Long Goodbyes': This Man Is an Island


By Stephen Amidon
September 5, 2004

AN EVENING OF LONG GOODBYES By Paul Murray. 424 pp. Random House. $24.95.

The economic boom that has transformed the long-stagnant Irish economy into one of the world's most productive is not without its detractors. The Celtic Tiger (as this upswing is grandiosely known) might be good news for tech entrepreneurs and real estate brokers, but the prospect of lattes by the Liffey and cellphone towers on Ben Bulben is driving many traditional Irishmen to distraction.

Charles Hythloday, the bibulous, buttonholing narrator of Paul Murray's first novel, "An Evening of Long Goodbyes," is just such a malcontent. Marooned in Amaurot, his family's seaside manor outside of Dublin, this 24-year-old gentleman of leisure casts a cold eye on the encroaching modern world. For Charles, even the briefest sortie into the "encircling suburbs" can prove a descent into hell. "The shopping center frightened me, the alien, prefabricated meanness of it: the cut-rate hair salon, the boutiques of bleak pastel frocks, the newsagent's whose staff were in a state of perpetual regression." Far better to stay at home, draining his recently deceased father's wine collection, feeding his pet peacocks and doting on his beloved sister, Bel, a would-be actress with a turbulent emotional history. He sees himself as living by the Renaissance code of sprezzatura, which dictates that every action (or, in Charles's case, inaction) must be carried out with effortless grace. Attention should be paid to beauty rather than results. "Thus, if one were to work at, say, law, one should raise it to the level of an art; if one were to laze, then one must laze beautifully."

It is, of course, an idyll doomed to failure. If there is anything the modern world disdains more than grace, it is a lack of results. Charles's nemeses are legion, and they all seem intent on driving him from Amaurot. First and foremost is Frank, the loutish "architectural salvage" specialist currently wooing Bel. There are also the Bosnian refugees squatting in the Folly, an extravagant but useless edifice that Charles is having built on the estate's grounds, as well as Charles's alcoholic mother, who returns unexpectedly from the upscale institution where she has been drying out. Rounding off this roster of tormentors is Harry, the social realist playwright who wants Bel to star in his latest work, "Ramp," a sublimely po-faced drama about the disabled.

These early scenes, in which Charles tries in vain to protect the sanctity of his ancestral home, are the novel's best. As long as he stays at Amaurot, "An Evening of Long Goodbyes" succeeds as a spirited howl against so-called progress. Once Murray casts his hero out into the world, however, the narrator begins to lose his voice. Charles's long, improbable residency with Frank in a Dublin slum lacks the sparkle of the Amaurot sequences, as does his servitude in a "bread factory" in the Cherry Orchard industrial park. (Murray has a rookie's weakness for literary allusion -- the telephone company that threatens to buy out Amaurot from the dithering, Hamlet-esque Charles and his Ophelia-like sister is named Telsinor). Since there is no doubt that Charles's foray into modern Ireland will turn out to be a disaster, his encounters with Dublin's drug lords and yuppie go-getters soon feel redundant. Murray also tends to rely on crude, knockabout humor to move his narrative along. The result is a novel whose 400-plus pages begin to weigh on the reader not long after the midpoint. Only when Charles straggles home, considerably worse for wear, does the author regain his deft touch.


If plotting is a difficulty for Murray, prose style most certainly is not. He writes with the cunning and confidence of a seasoned pro. Memorable images are frequently conjured, such as when Charles's father, a famous inventor of cosmetics, tries to mask the ravages of his fatal illness with his art: "And so the makeup was caked on with trembling fingers, layer upon layer; he lay in the half darkness like a sad, syphilitic Pierrot, his gaunt cheeks stained concavely with rouge." Charles's lacerating, hilarious voice proves as effective a weapon against creeping globalism as any smoke bomb or human blockade. The arriviste house hunters who are snatching up

the land around Amaurot are dismissed as "new people: pale and crepuscular from days and nights holed up in their towers of cuboid offices, crawling down the narrow, winding roads in BMW's or hulking Jeeps, scouting for property like toothless anemic sharks." Charles's caustic snobbery, which Bel calls his "feudal outlook," is oddly endearing, especially when it comes up against characters like Gemma from "Sirius Recruitment, Ireland's leading premium specialist in I.T., multimedia and e-business solutions NOW," whom a penniless, job-seeking Charles unwisely visits in a "slightly foxed" dinner jacket and "gaudy" waistcoat.

While Charles proves an acute commentator on the outside world, he is considerably less reliable about his inner landscape, opening a further comic dimension for the reader to savor. His project to save Amaurot as a haven "unlike the shifting, unstable world outside" is clearly doomed, especially once the chairman of Telsinor announces his plans to transform it into a corporate "Center for the Arts." Charles's relationship with his sister is even more deeply self-deceptive -- though he thinks he is simply protecting her from unsuitable suitors, he is clearly in love with her, an incestuous obsession that took root during their languid, cloistered childhood. The novel achieves an unexpected poignancy as it becomes clear that Charles's paralytic attachment to the past has as much to do with this impossible love for the fragile Bel as it does for ancient Ireland.

The story's key moment comes when its hero, quite literally, goes to the dogs. Before returning home for his final showdown with Amaurot's interlopers, Charles visits a greyhound racetrack in a desperate attempt to raise money. Championing a clapped-out old hound with the unlikely name of An Evening of Long Goodbyes, he manages to come up a winner, even after his dog is savaged by a brute called Celtic Tiger. At this moment of triumph, Charles is visited by the ghost of W. B. Yeats, who compliments him on his sprezzatura, then quotes Oscar Wilde, another Irishman who would have little time for the brave new nation around them: "In a good democracy, every man should be an aristocrat." It is a risky scene, but Murray's gamble pays off, placing his alienated narrator squarely in his nation's best traditions. In a contest between the aristocratic Charles and the egalitarian representatives of new Ireland, I suspect that many readers will be inclined to give Charles their votes.

Stephen Amidon's novels include "The New City" and "Thirst." His new novel, "Human Capital," will be published in October.


THE NEW YORK TIMES