Nostalgia in a box

I've been doing jigsaw puzzles lately, sometimes with my mother-in-law who turns out to enjoy them and will stay up until all hours doing them. This is one I'd bought last winter for my wife and I to do on cold nights.

It's difficult to see, but the subject is girls' adventure books of the early 20th century, and what interests me is the depth of nostalgia I found as I was putting it together. I used to read the boys' version of these when I was what we now call a tween. While I can't say I remember them well, I do remember the sense of, if not adventure, then of calm they gave me. I'm certain what both boys and girls series were intended to do was to give growing kids the sense of optimism about their future. If these misfit characters--in the above examples, The Girl Who Lost Things or The Worst Girl in the School; in my memories, Smilin' Jack and Red Ryder and Little Beaver and the Rover Boys, Paladin, even Mickey Mouse--could grow up into some sense of normalcy, defined in the novels a sense of belonging both to society at large and a smaller community of people who looked up to and appreciated the misfit, then I certainly could.

For me, these were eventually supplanted by the Whitman Big Little Books of the late 60s and early 70s, featuring more contemporary characters like Batman or Major Matt Mason or Frankenstein, Jr.

What I remember best about these series was the inclusion of death in them: the killing of a strangely behaving mouse in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the deaths of some of The Invaders, the deaths by shootout of typical bad guys in Bonanza. These led me to the Doc Savage and The Shadow novels republished in the early 70s and a mainstay of the drugstore book racks. In them, death was a constant, both for the unwary and ultimately for the villain. Someone not paying the right attention or meddling where he didn't belong could become the victim of the machinations of an unscrupulous would-be world conqueror or petty criminal, eventually given his comeuppance by the hero.

A little Friday morning reading

I've enjoyed Neil Gaiman's writing for years, and I'm interested in trying to binge-watch the new series American Gods after it's gotten good and going. (I've tried several times to binge-watch shows--The Man in the High Castle, Penny Dreadful, Dark Matter--but I couldn't watch any past the first season; they always disappointed.) Anyhow, I really liked American Gods my first reading and intend to reread it before watching the shows as I don't remember many details (and the trailers remind me I've forgotten more than I'd thought), and I want to get in on this binge-watching thing that everyone, including my wife, has been doing.

I've been reading much about how several TV shows now are especially relevent as they give insights into Life Under Trumpism, and especially American Gods and The Handmaid's Tale. But for the Gaiman book, I read a very good interview in which he says the following:

I have this mad theory about American elections. There is a reality-TV quality to them, in that they tend to go to what people think would probably be the most interesting story. “Who’s more interesting? Who’s a better story? Bob Dole or Bill Clinton? Let’s go for Clinton, it’ll be more interesting!” And there is that point where you’re going, “Okay, so is it Hillary, who still feels kind of like a rerun? Or is it Trump?” Even articulating that as a theory means that people are going to mishear what I’ve said. It will turn into a clickbait headline and people will be going, “You said that Trump was a better story!” No. I think Trump is an out-of-his-depth idiot. Who is possibly criminal. And certainly incompetent. I think that, actually, having a sane and functional right wing is a good thing. Having what we’ve got right now is a bad thing.

When the novel was written, it was written about America as a country of immigrants, of people who either came here of their own free will, or escaped here, or were brought here against their will. And what that meant — talking about the religious traditions and talking about the cultural traditions and talking about what that became. And having a lead character who was racially — and in all other ways — a melting pot. That, when I wrote the novel, didn’t seem to me to be particularly problematic, difficult, or even praiseworthy! Things that I did not think were praiseworthy or sensible included writing about indentured servants and transportation. Writing about the slave trade. Writing about a gay, Muslim salesman encountering a genie who drives a cab in New York.

I wasn’t doing it for the credit. I was doing it because it all feels right if you’re talking about America. Suddenly, Trump came in and now I’m reading articles in Vanity Fair about, “This is the most political stuff you’ve ever seen.” Well, I guess that’s all true, but it’s not like we sat down and went, We are the opposition. We simply started telling our fucking story and then the world changed. It would be like telling a pro-Jewish story in Berlin in the 1930s, and suddenly you’re looking around going, “We’re apparently doing something big and important.”

 Oddly, this theory of his comforts me, as the idea that we love a good, juicy story is a lot more appealing than that we like chaos and incomepetence. It's certainly played out at times in American electoral history (although it's important to remember we never had Presidents Bryant or Long), and if it's true it suggests that, like all the other times, most of us will get through it. Of course, some of us won't. And it's for those the rest of us must act up.

"They promised us poetry! Where's the poetry!"

As I've mentioned before, I have been reading this book for over three decades. I finished it on the most recent New Year's Eve, just a few hours short of midnight, determined that I should not carry it around another year, or let it become four decades.

Do I recall much of the plot? No, but I don't think that matters much. What I retain is the flavor of post-war Paris, or at least as De Beauvoir and her circle experienced it. As I've also said before, I like to envision myself living the life of a commentator on what goes on in people's daily lives, noting the minutia of street and cafe life. I'm currently reading The Mauve Decade by Thomas Beers and Absolute Friends by John Le Carre, both of which provide glimpses into lives and times I couldn't otherwise know anything about, early 21st century cultural life in the case of the former, mid-century British post-colonial individual experience in the latter. I've often pointed out, to myself if no one else, the reason I read is to experience lives I couldn't otherwise.

This is the passage that, in my final days of reading The Mandarins, resonated most with me. In it I hear the sound of what it was like in those days in that place.

The Communist papers had announced the reading of a masterpiece in four acts and six scenes in which Lenoir "reconciles the demands of pure poetry with the concern for delivering a broadly human message to mankind." Julien intended to sabotage the meeting in the name of the old para-human group. In the articles written by Lenoir since his conversion, there was such a servile fanaticism, and he had put his friends and his own past on trial with such malignant zeal, that Henri was looking forward without displeasure to seeing him put in his place...
The auditorium was overflowing. The whole Communist intelligentsia was gathered together--all the old guard and many new recruits. A year earlier, many of those neophytes were indignantly denouncing the errors and faults of the Communists. And then suddenly, in November, they understood--they understood that it could help to belong to the Party. Henri went down the centre aisle in search of a seat and, as he passed, faces filled with hateful disdain. In that respect, Samazelle was right: they weren't the least appreciative of his honesty. All the year long, he had laboured mightily defending L'Espoir against the pressures of the Gaullists, had firmly taken his stand against the war in Indo-China, against the arrest of the Madagascan deputies, against the Marshall Plan. All in all, he had taken exactly the same position as theirs, but that didn't stop them from calling him a liar and a traitor. He went as far as the front rows. Scriassine looked up at him and smiled, but the young people grouped around Julien eyed Henri with hostility. He retraced his steps and sat down on a stairway in the back of the auditorium.

Eventually Lenoir reads a very dull, very conventional poetry/play that is broken up by shouting from Julien and his supporters, in which Henri joins. As he leaves the place later, he's joined by Lambert, a fixture at L'Espoir, who says, "I was hoping it would be more fun." Henri replies, "As a matter of fact, it wasn't any fun at all." The cause of writing and what it was meant to accomplish, and how, is deadly serious in this time and in this place, and even the disruption of an opposing faction is political and deadly serious. I can't say I miss that but being in the center of a situation where the reading of "a scene written in Alexandrine metre [in which a] young man was bemoaning his melancholy state...Parents, teachers, friends, each urged resignation, but he swept aside all bourgeois temptations while a chorus commented on his departure in sibylline stanzas..." That such an entertainment could overflow an auditorium, think of how seeing that must feel. I don't want to attribute it to some Gilded Literary Past in which the Word takes on divine powers--the audience is there more out of a sense of duty, some at witnessing the spectacle and some at making it a farce. But that enough people had read about it and cared enough to show up for whichever reason: Now there is something.

what the sun said

To help me deal with this winter, I've been reading several books that lie for at least part of their narrative on extremes of weather, whether cold or heat or rain or whatever it might be. One of these books is a science fiction novel from the mid-90s called Evolution's Shore.

It takes place in the early 2000s, specifically 2008, six years after Saturn's moons are observed winking out of view. A year later a meteor strikes Mt Kilimanjaro and immediately grows a vegetation no one can identify but that serves to fully cover the mountain and grow at an exponential rate. It immerses everything within in and nothing that enters returns.

So it's said. There is one person who has left. Peter Werther is an early victim of the meteor, a member of a hang-gliding group that was thought decimated by the landing. It turns out, however, that the vegetation, which has come to be called The Chaga (named perhaps for the ubiquitous chaga mushroom?), had kept him alive in a manner of speaking for five years before expelling him. Gaby McAslan is a reporter for SkyNet (based on BSkyB rather than on the developer of the Terminators) who has been put into contact with Werther and has come to hear his story.

But what has struck me best and is the reason I am transcribing some of McDonald's novel here, is that the group Werther has been staying with since his "release" are called the New Millennium Travellers and are a perfect complement to what the Rainbow Family can become in an international manner. Werther's reason for being with them, too, resonates clearly with me.

The Travellers' camp was only a few miles beyond...,down a long dirt road that turned off the track to the Safariland Lodge and meandered along the shore of Lake Naivasha. Their wagons were pitched in the shelter of a stand of flame trees. Some were propped up on cinder blocks, wheels removed, a final surrender to the fuel shortages. There would never migrate along the world lines again. A beautiful hand-painted wooden sign stood over the entrance to the settlement. WHAT THE SUN SAID was its name.

What the sun said was dust. What the sun said was flies. The sun said heat. The sun said melanomas.

Tents and awnings billowed limply in the slow, hot air. Wind chimes set on ornamental door-posts barely tinkled. Japanese fish kites hung open-mouthed, stirring their streamer tails. Stranger fruit hung from the branches of the flame trees: things like cracked leather cocoons bound with steel wire. There were three of them, each about five feet long. They turned slowly anticlockwise to Coriolis force. A long generator chugged, most of the camp's power came from silent solar panels. All the vans had small steerable dishes on their roofs: the economics of techno-nomadism was that the information revolution had made it not only a desirable lifestyle, but a necessary one. You followed the sun and lived the lifestyle in harmony with the planet until one day the fuel ran out and left you stranded in the heat and drought of Africa's Rift Valley. With the Chaga approaching.

The Kilimanjaro Event had made East Africa the social navel of the planet. International Bright and Beautiful, and those who clung around them hoping that brightness and beauty were contagious, followed the planetary media circus to the plains in the shadows of the mountains. Most had moved on when Africa and things African slipped out of fashion. Some remained. They found room for their humanity to resonate in Africa's great spaces. They made their camps under the big sky and settled into sun-warmed introversion and the evolution of white-boy ethnicity. The men of What the Sun Said were bearded and sat about with their hands dangling loosely over their knees, watching what was watchable. The women, naked to the navel, carried their babies slung at their waists and intimidated Gaby with the firm upturn of their breasts. Children in beads, feathers and zinc oxide war paint on noses and cheekbones came running to greet the visitors. Their skins were tanned hard brown, there were flies around the corners of their eyes and mouths.

"Are you the people come to talk to Peter?" they asked. "We're here to take you to him. Come on." They pulled Gaby...along...In one of the big, billowing saffron tents, someone was playing a thumb piano...

This was what a man come back from the heart of darkness looked like. His face was tanned that dark brown peculiar to Teutons gone native. His hair was blond, long and worn in the community style; shaved at the sides, plaited at the back...He had the palest eyebrows she had ever seen. He did not effect the white-boy ethnic chic of the Sun-Saiders. He was dressed in a relaxed linen suit over a simple white T-shirt. No jewelry. No tattoos or ritual scarification or body piercing. His only idiosyncrasy was a leather biker's glove on his left hand...A swirl of warm wind set the black pods hanging from the trees swaying into Gaby's peripheral vision.

"They are into rebirthing," Peter Werther said, observing Gaby's distraction. "Spiritual metamorphosis."

"There are people in those things?"

"In sensory deprivation. They let them out after three, four days. The thing seems to be that they don't tell you how long they are going to leave you hanging, or even if they are going to come back at all. Face the fear and pass through is the experience. I think that after three days upside down in this heat, you will believe anything you are told about yourself. There are always willing volunteers, and not just from the community."

...[Peter Werther continued,] "I am sure you are wondering, why this place, why these strange people with their strange rituals? Well, they are a good people, it is a good life they lead, but the real reason is simpler. They were the first people I met when I came out of the Chaga. I walked, you see. I was brought to the edge, and told I must leave now, and I just walked north. They do not ask questions, you see. They accept...[These] people, in their months of travel, gave me the time and space to learn about myself, and what I have been changed into, and what it is I must do. And now I think I know, and I am ready, and these people have let me bring you into their peace and calm because they agree with me that the world needs to hear what I learned, back there."

the bark of children like hot rain

My alma mater is hosting a worship service with Reverend Mark Kiyimba of Uganda this Tuesday and I've been asked, probably by dint of having the largest world literature library, to provide a prayer and perhaps a reading. I've chosen two potential prayers, both of which needed some revision to fit our purposes, and a reading culled from a great Ugandan novel.

The first prayer is itself Ugandan, but was originally fashioned as a plea for children. It required some editing.
 

You elders, you ancestors, you older people,

Today we give you your food.

Give us health and wealth.

Let everything evil leave with the setting sun,

Let it go far away.

Elders, our homestead is now silent.

We like the sight of old people dancing,

We like the sound of young men and young women laughing.

We like to hear the bark of children like hot rain on a tin roof.

The eigth and ninth lines are purely my invention, as is the second half of the tenth line (I am really proud of that turn of phrase). The second is actually a prayer from neighboring Sudan. But my reason for including it as a possibility is that it's from the Dinka people who have just this week opted to join South Sudan in its independence from Khartoum. It is a more general prayer about life.
 

In the time when God created all things, god created the sun.

And the sun is born and dies and comes again.

God created the moon,

And the moon is born and dies and comes again.

God created the stars,

And the stars are born and die and come again.

God created people,

And people are born and die but do not come again.

This only needed the exchange of "God" for the traditional "He" and "people" for "man." Finally, I've included a couple pages from the novel Snakepit by Moses Isegawa. It takes place during Idi Amin's solidification of his reign in the 1970s. I've been told that Isegawa's description of that nation is unparalelled.

There were days so fine, so suffused with bright light falling from high-domes skies, the beauty of delicate clouds, the perfume of gentle winds, the gloss of exuberant vegetation, the sheer delight of living in a bubble of peace amidst and inferno, that Bat [Katanga] felt totally in tune with life. He was not a religious man, but once a month he accompanied his wife to church. She chose the best suit for him, the darkest shoes, the best tie. For herself she picked the finest midi- or maxi-gown, matching accessories and a subtle, expensive perfume. They would emerge from the house and stand on the steps surveying the flower bushes, red and purple bougainvilleas; the towering thousand-year-old trees, majestic, their branches spread high above, the lake, a broken marble surface linking them to neighboring countries in a fraternity of water…They would descend the steps and drive away.

            At church they would mingle with well-dressed men and women who worked in the beleaguered civil service, the diplomatic corps, the remnants of the aviation service, and the armed forces. In mufti, the soldiers and the spies tried to make themselves as invisible as possible. Bat liked the fact that these days the church had turned into a human rights podium. Priests spoke out directly or indirectly against the disappearances, the killings, the abuses. The clergy had felt the bite of the bayonet, the sting of the bullet, and it made a difference. The words rolled off the priest’s tongue with conviction, steeped in pain. Bat liked to sit there and think of good memories, his achievements, because his captivity had taught him how precious and luxurious the fine moments were.

            On such days he liked to be surprised by uninvited guests who turned up to interrupt and enrich a day he had offered to the whims of time, to his wife, to leisure. If it happened to be his sister, they would talk about her son, her work, the state of the country. Living in a rural area, she would have a different view, a down-to-earth vision..

            When [his wife] Babit’s people turned up, he would drive them round the town, to the zoo, to the airport, to the Botanical Gardens, to the landing point at Katabi where food and fish came in from the islands. Standing there always reminded him that Entebbe was a peninsula, almost choked by water, which in places was just a few meters from the road to the city. It was not hard to imagine floods rising out of the lake or crashing out of an angry sky, submerging the town for weeks, and receding to reveal a new island or clutch of small islands…During these visits Babit led the conversation, and Bat enjoyed watching her and her people interacting

should books be destroyed?

Low-cost mass production seems to diminish our sense of the sacredness of things, of food, of books, even of the Bible. Half a dozen years ago, I had the privilege of being at a conference with practicing Muslims. The reverence with which they handled their beautifully ornamented and scripted Ku'ran made me guiltily aware of my own dog-eared, written-in paperback Bible places casually on the floor beside my chair. As a Catholic, I am glad the days of chained Bibles are long gone and that we have easy access to the word of God. But perhaps I have become too familiar in my treatment of it; maybe I should kiss the Bible after reading it. Now, too, the thick leather-bound daily missals with gilt-edged onionskin pages, which some Catholics owned and used at mass, have given way to seasonal missalettes. Found in the pews of most parish churches, they are available to all. But they are paper-covered, printed on cheap gray stock--disposable. I am sure they are simply thrown away when outdated, or recycled, like newspapers and magazines.

Still, although I may have lost a sense of reverence for the sacred books themselves, the same sacramental principle that finds God in all things has impelled me to explore a spirituality of reading in different kinds of books, not just explicitly spiritual ones. Because in them, and especially in good novels, I find the astonishing richness of God's world--human, animate, inanimate--celebrated in all its haeccitas, its "thisness" (just the opposite of the mass-produced), as Duns Scotus named it.

--from Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading by Nancy Malone

Malone, who is a retired nun (can one be? any more than one can be a retired teacher or preacher?), uses the example of the novels of Patrick O'Brian to explain what she means, the ever-opening world the Aubrey/Maturin adventures invite her to live in, calling his gift of giving words flesh a "marvelous alchemy. Or better, a transubstantiation, a sacrament." And she is right. But for me the more important question is one that arises in that final paragraph above. Are we right to destroy books when they've outlived their usefulness?

Having worked in bookstores for a long while, I'm familiar with the common practice, dictated by the publishers, the "owners" of the books, of ripping off the front covers of mass market paperbacks for reimbursement and recycling the rest (by federal law a book can't be sold without its cover, not even as a used book). We do the same with trade paperbacks and hardcovers that are judged to have outlived their shelflife: they are returned to the publisher for reimbursement and destruction, sometimes by pulping, sometimes by incineration. I understand and somewhat approve the economics of this practice. It makes sense.

But there remains a lingering impulse that books, once having taken form, represent a world and the hard work of someone whose existence might otherwise be passed by. Shouldn't there be some sense of mourning at the destruction of these testaments to a writer's time and effort?

However, the corollary question is, Should we save all books? Do we restrict eternal life only for religious books like the Bible and the Q'uran? What about compendiums of Buddhist or Jainist wisdom? Or books that are "like" bibles, like the AA's Big Book?

And if we salvage books of ancient wisdom, what about more recent books of wisdom? Do we keep copies of The Prince in perpetuity? What about The Rights of Man? Nixon's Six Crises? The latest Rush Limbaugh?

And that's not to take into account classics like Huckleberry Finn, Walden, Ulysses? And once we hold up Beloved as a contemporary classic, does that mean we also keep every copy of every book Toni Morrison will ever write? The Bonfire of the Vanities was Tom Wolfe's attempt to breathe new life into contemporary literature, and while I don't think he quite managed it, it's an ambitious try. Does anyone know what I Am Charlotte Simmons is?

Maybe what Malone calls a good book's "haeccitas, its 'thisness,'" is a more reliable indicator. That certainly cuts a lot of books out it would seem: Lord of the Rings over the Inheritance Cycle; O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series over Forester's Horatio Hornblower; John Le Carre over Eric von Lustbader. But each of those books will have its defenders. Who gets to choose? And what do we do with someone like the late Tom Clancy whose novels certainly are precise and technically intricate and place you in a world most of us aren't privy to, but whose characters navigating that world are, at best, paper thin?

Maybe this is just a long argument to keep the status quo. After all, it's not as if anything could change even if all readers somehow got together and decided never to get rid of any of their books no matter how worn and tattered they become. I have several copies that long ago lost their back covers or their pages have slipped loose of the binding or a dog has gotten hold of it and ripped off part of its cover and spine. I'm uncertain exactly why, but I keep them. But I suspect that this is hoarder behavior and advise against it.

blinkered by the recent past

This passage resonated strongly with me, partly because of what it says about disillusion-ment and partly because of what I used to teach about language. I had to really press students in Comp I to understand that there was a variation of Aryan that didn't involve the Nazis and that originated in northern Asia than in Europe and that, linguistically, we had a very close connection to. We are so blinkered by recent history, and the Nazis did such an excellent job of co opting the term, that even when we're presented with proof that a word or idea predates what we think we know of it--stereotype is a less malevolent example--we find it almost impossible to see past it to its original use.

Try to imagine the scene: the Parsi grandee in the sanctum of his library, with his English friend..., a man driven by life into books, standing by an open window. So he's not completely sealed off, the library isn't a closed tomb, and through the window comes all the tumultuous sensation of the city: the scents of channa and bhel, of tamarind and jasmine; the shouting voices, because nobody ever says anything in these parts without first raising his voice; and the quarrel of traffic, the hooves, the sputtering exhausts, the bicycle bells; the brilliant light of the sun on the harbour, the hooting of warships and the electricity of a society at a point of transformation.

Now imagine a gust of wind, sweeping a crumpled page of newsprint off the filthy street, tossing it upwards in slow spirals like a dirty butterfly; until at last it passes through the window, the outside world penetrates the world within, and lands neatly by Sir Darius' polished oxfords, pleading for attention. This is a picture I keep seeing, although it couldn't be, could it, how it really happened...Prefer, if you please, some [more] prosaic version, but I'll stick with mine. Through the window came the newspaper, and Sir Darius, picking it up distastefully, was on the point of disposing of it when four words caught his eye. Aryan, Nazi, Muller, Dumezil. [These are two scholars Sir Darius and his friend study.]

Neither Sir Darius Xerxes Cama nor William Methwold ever believed for a moment that either of the great maligned scholars, dead Max or living Georges, had had a single racial-supremacist cell in his body. But when language is stolen and poisoned, the poison works its way backwards through time and sideways into the reputations of innocent men. The word "Aryan," which for Max Muller and his generation, had a purely linguistic meaning, was now in the hands of less academic persons, poisoners, who were speaking of races of men, races of masters and races of servants and other races too, races whose fundamental impurity necessitated drastic measures, races who were not wanted on the voyage, who were surplus to requirements, races to be cut, blackballed and deposited in the bin of history. By one of the wild improbabilities that, taken collectively, represent the history of the human race, the arcane field of research in which Sir Darius and William Methwold had chosen to sequester themselves had been twisted and pressed into the service of the great evil of the age. History had captured their field, and their love of it had placed them on the wrong side--the side of the poisoners, of the unutterable, of those whose crime was beyond words.

At the moment when things changed for them, Sir Darius and Methwold had been full of the delight of examining the parallels between the Viewing from the Walls in the Iliad (when the Trojans survey the besieging army while, for their benefit, Helen identifies Agamemnon, Odysseus, Idomeneus and the greater Ajax) and the similar scene in the Ramayana (in which a pair of spies, standing with the abductor Ravana on the ramparts of his fortress, identify the heroes Rama, Lakshmana, Vibhishana and Hanuman). Sir Darius read the scrap of newspaper that had blown in through the window and passed it to Methwold without saying a word. When the Englishman had finished reading, he shook himself, as if emerging from a long sleep, and said, "Let's call it quits." Sir Darius inclined his head and began to close the beloved books. It was September 1939. Rip van Cama and William Winkle stumbled blinking into the light, the roar, the stink of the real world.

--from The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie

my 1980s

[Although many dissed it, I enjoyed this Wayne Koesten-baum essay reprint on Salon, so much so that I've decided to write a similar one in the same style.  Mine will be, of necessity, shorter for the simple reason I'll try to say something in fewer words and images.]

"Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

I wanted to be the Next Great American Writer in the 1980s. I published one very bad novel and an interesting monograph on Jerzy Grotovski and a few short stories and poems. But I wrote many, many other things.  In my teens a professor told me I was a Renaissance Man and I took that to heart, wanting to whip off novels and poems with the same alacrity as Victor Hugo or Thomas Hardy; tellingly, I didn't enjoy reading either of them at the time. I envisioned myself forever sitting up late at night writing hard, amber-clear prose that never quite satisfied me. There is a wordless comic strip from Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez from that time that shows one of the characters typing and smoking late into the night in a high garret room, suddenly crushing a sheet of paper with dismay, and that's how I saw myself. I often accomplished the sitting up late, drinking instead of smoking, but rarely found anything near solid, precise wording.

***

I was married when the 80s started and divorced about midway through. It was by mutual consent and there were no kids or property to dispose of so it was relatively amicable. We had sex nearly every day because we were young and horny and it was one of the few times we didn't fight. After we divorced and I lost nearly a hundred pounds I found to my surprise she wasn't the only person attracted to me and eventually I would gain a reputation, not undeserved, for fucking nearly everyone who approached me. For a while I enjoyed sex with men as a sort of vacation from the emotional messiness of sex with women, a kind of palate-cleanser between courses.

***

I read a tremendous amount, usually on walks and under trees, from silly novels to dense philosophies. I tried to find at least one important line from every book or poem or short story or essay and then typed it on a slip of paper and taped it to the swinging door of my kitchen. I'd been given a portable manual typewriter as a graduation present and it was on this I wrote nearly everything during that time. I had had a larger manual office model someone gave me during my marriage and it was on this I wrote my novel and the monograph, but one evening after reading On the Road I stood up suddenly and began to move methodically around my little apartment collecting furniture, clothes, books, kitchen utensils, everything I decided I no longer needed, and piled them in the center of my living room floor to give away. The office typewriter was among the last items to make the pile.

***

Today I have a lot of friends who hop trains and call themselves train kids. I did that only a couple times and only for short distances, always returning to my starting point. I was alone each time and spent the whole ride hunkered close to whatever I was holding onto: my first time I clutched a pole tightly, scared shitless I would be blown off and my body found by kids a la Stephen King's "The Body," and the next times I went I belted myself to something secure. I was a road kid, spending most of my time hitchhiking or in my own car. I always had luck hitching; it was always a matter of patience and not looking angry as the cars and trucks whizzed past me. One of the few times I hitched with someone else was one of the least productive hitch times of my career; we walked hours on the side of the New York State Interstate--we were headed to Buffalo--but we made it within twelve hours of our starting by dint of catching a train outside Rochester because it was dark and no one could see out thumbs. Whenever I hear the Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls" I go back to that time and think specifically of riding around in the back seat of a car driven by a lesbian who would come out as straight within a year and who was showing us the city.

***

I acted in porn movies for a short time, a single summer, but it was enough to fund my life for a year. $500-1000 for a weekend's worth of work was great money. It was easier and less anxiety-producing than I'd feared and I loved the sex. I never thought about AIDS, not because this was before it or I knew no one who had it--I lost several friends to its depredations and I carry a healthy hatred for Ronald Reagan and his ambivalence to this day--but because I was stupid enough to think I was immortal. I actually came through those years of mostly unprotected sex without a single STD, leading my friends to joke my mother, like Achilles', had dipped me in the River Teflon. 

***



Authors I read for the first time that decade who played an important role in how I write: Susan Sontag, Jean Genet, Bruce Chatwin, John Gardner, Joan Didion, Thomas Merton, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Dominick Dunne, Tom Robbins, Louise Erdrich, Tim O'Brien, H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond Carver, John Le Carre, Henry David Thoreau, Rita Dove, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Simic, Gore Vidal, Georges Simenon, Anne Tyler, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lord, D.H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Rita Adler, Carlos Castenada, Ursula K. LeGuin, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Clive Barker, John Irving, Thomas Pynchon, etc.

***

For years after my divorce I lived in New Paltz, the town where my college was located. The town is snuggled at the base of the Shawangunk Mountain range between the Hudson and Wallkill Rivers and is home to many freaks. I found myself fitting there like fingers that curl into a fist. Three years after my divorce, through some stunningly bad decisions, I was out of work and had to give up my apartment to a friend. I was in Manhattan for a job interview and, having waited too long because I was at a bar to catch the last bus out of the City, I found a quiet berth under a construction trailer on the overpass above the Grand Central Station. I was warm, safe, and it was astonishingly easy to get in and out without being seen. I ended up sleeping under that trailer for several months, until approaching winter made me decide it was time to visit my parents. They were against my returning to the trailer, or to New Paltz, where I might have slept on friends' couches, so I said, "Buy me a cheap car and I'll live in that." They found a 77 Dodge Aspen wagon for $500 and I spent a weekend making it habitable and then lit out for the road. I lived in it for three years, seeing almost all of the country and parts of Canada, before my mother's entreaties to come back out of it and go to graduate school prevailed. I disembarked in southern Minnesota and sold the Aspen and lived in a park seven miles from town, sleeping under a gazebo and riding my bike to classes. This was September, 1989, and in another nine months I would meet my second, or as she says, my last wife. 

I was a vigilante!

Reading this essay this morning reminded me how much I loved reading this type of novel back in my impressionable early teens.  In fact, I'm certain I read at least one of the Killinger! adventures (of which there were two) (and not to be confused with Nick Carter, Killmaster).  There is no forgetting that scene of cat-massage.

Mack Bolan, The Executioner. Remo Williams, The Destroyer. Jason Striker, Master of Martial Arts. The Penetrator. The Enforcer. The Marksman. The Sharpshooter.  I inhaled these series like nitrous. I also loved the Doc Savage and Richard Benson, The Avenger, novels, but unlike them, these men who more often went by titles rather than names were quick to judge and quicker to kill. There was something liberating in all that.

Back then these books were so popular you could buy them at any CVS.  So how did guys like me end up not gun-loving, murdering, nasty pigs?  Maybe we got our ya-yas out vicariously and so on. While we imagined ourselves vigilantes and often felt the same way as Travis Bickle--"Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets" (this was years before I became a part of the scum) (yes, I read the novelization of Taxi Driver which, unlike Brian Garfield's Death Wish, is satisfyingly told in first person)--we were nonetheless distinctly aware of the difference between fantasy and reality.  I ended up writing vigilante fiction for a long time, none of which I published, all of which is now lost.  But the memory of who I thought I wanted to be tickles who I've become.

the end of alice review

The End of Alice Review

(Fair Warning:  The following includes disturbingly graphic descriptions of violence on a child.)

This is a horrible, horrible book. It is disturbing, pessimistic, misogynistic, angry, flush with anger and a lust for destruction.

Which is exactly what it should be. You should not write a novel featuring child molestation and murder without breaking a whole carton of taboos. Such a novel must be written because pedophiles are our fathers and brothers and sons and, as we’re coming to increasingly discover, our mothers and sisters and daughters as well.

The End of Alice is famous, or more accurately, infamous for its portrayal of the unnamed narrator who has been imprisoned since 1971 for the rape and murder of twelve year old Alice Somerfield. The novel is told primarily from his perspective, although he has a correspondent, a nineteen year old girl, who also narrates some of the story.

More on her in a bit. Some reviewers have called A.M. Homes’ third novel a page-turner, but it wasn’t that for me, either my first time reading it, nearly a decade ago, nor my recent rereading. And again, the acts it describes and the mind Homes tries to mirror shouldn’t lead a reader to flip pages (except maybe in self-defense, the way some people hide their faces during gory horror movie scenes). But those scenes are just as important as any exposition and, in some ways, may be even more important because they present us with a safe way of seeing the world from a very different, skewed perspective.

Here is a short, less graphic scene to suggest what Homes is getting at in these stabs at an unsanctioned perspective. The narrator is telling us of his responses to many of the letters he receives in prison, “Requests on university letterhead for an interview, an extensive study, a few questions to be answered, research papers, a book.” He is uniformly dismissive in his written response.

However, if you are open to suggestion, I would wholeheartedly recommend several men here, in particular my buddy Clayton, who allegedly—and more than once—fucked men on the Christopher Street pier and then pushed them into the Hudson River…To hear Clayton [who is also the narrator’s sex partner] tell it—and he rarely does tell it—the men he fucked were so taken with the events, so absorved with the back and forth of the in and out, that when it stopped, when Clayton breathed a sigh of deep relief and shot high into their asses, the men surged forward, flinging themselves into the water. And Clayton, so suddenly drained, so recently depleted and a nonswimmer himself, would go to the edge and simply scream, howl at the water, at the night, offering his arm, his hand, his fist, to the men, who were already dipping under, flailing far from Clayton’s reach…[Good] luck with the project

Similarly, his victim Alice is viewed by him entirely differently from the way we expect a twelve year old girl to behave. She flirts obsessively with him, says “You’re my captive, my prisoner,” is stronger than he is and can pin his arms behind his back. She ties him to a tree, “surprisingly…adept, if not practiced, at the art of knot tying.” She prefers not to wear underwear because she likes “to catch the breezes.” She calls him a dolt, wears patent pumps and a black velvet dress or meets him naked in her room or in the woods, threatens to kill him.

Alice is no Lolita, a metaphor for a young, intoxicating America. She’ll never grow up to be an overweight housewife and mother. She’s a real twelve year old girl but she is not a real twelve year old girl in the narrator’s imagination. She is a temptress who knows exactly what she is doing to him, every moment, up until the moment she forces him to kill her.

Forces him, because what he remembers is that when they have finally given in to the sexual tension of their relationship in a motel room, is that, having lost her virginity, she is of course bleeding and blames him for having “done something awful to me.” He tries to explain to her it’s menstruation but she won’t hear of it, saying “Your words get in my head…Don’t try and humor me…You’re making excuses for yourself…You cut me with the knife…You did this to me…I’m in pain…” In the novel’s final pages, this is how he remembers the scene as a cacophony of images and shouts, some his own creation and some probably real.

Her hunting knife is in her hand. It’s out of its sheath. She’s flashing it at me, all the while holding her stomach…”Put it down,” I say. “It’s perfectly normal…” She cries, puts her hand over the spot, clutching herself, as if she can hold it in, push it back inside her…

The storm. Lightning crashes. The lights go off, then on again, punctuating our dialogue…I don’t know why, but I reach for the knife, take it away…

“I didn’t touch you with it,” I say. “I didn’t touch you. This is touching you,” I say, touching her with the knife. “This is fucking touching you. I didn’t touch you here.” I poke at her skirt with the blade. “Don’t you understand? I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Then why did you do this to me?”

…”Why do you make me?” I’m crying. “Don’t make me.”

The first time it plunges in, there is resistence, but I’m angry, full of fire. I force it into her gut. The next one goes into her neck, a bigger splash, bright spray, the hiss of an artery. A hot, sticky fountain of blood douses everything. She makes a face and falls back on the bed, gurgling like a little girl…Again I plunge in. She looks surprised. Again and again. I can’t stop myself…

She’s in pieces, splattered around the room. Rivers of blood form small tidal pools. I don’t know which blood is which, from whence it came. The scent is meaty, the putrid stink of slaughter. I’m embarrassed by the vigor, the extent of my outburst. It is as if I’ve lost myself, broken away.

Have I made my point?

This question, seeming at first look to be addressed ironically to the dead Alice, and then to the parole board with whom he’s meeting, is finally revealed to be addressed to the reader. While the narrator is as untrustworthy as they come, he is also absolutely convinced that he has an audience. He does of course: “[If] you are anything at all, you know who I am—and find my disguise the silly childish senility of the long-confined, of the good mind gone sour [unconvincing]”. In the final paragraphs he echoes other unreliable narrators:

To you alone I’ve told the tale, do with it what you will. That’s all there is, there isn’t any more. I’m out of breath.

The deal is done…It is summer, the end of summer now…There is sky and trees, a high wire fence, a long road, and at the end of it you are there, waiting for me.

So glad to see you, I say. Missed you so much, thought about you every day.

Finally, the narrator is addressing not only “herr reader,” but Alice herself or the Alice of his imagination, the Alice who did not end up “decapitated, her head positioned between her legs, weapon…jammed in victim’s vagina…Accused apparently continued relations with victim after her death. Victim’s face and body covered in kisses. Accused dipped his lips in victim’s blood and then kissed deceased repeatedly.” This Alice will be more like the unnamed girl correspondent.

The girl correspondent, the nineteen year old who sends the narrator letters. She is important. As I said, she narrates alternating chapters of the novel, explaining her choice and subsequent seduction of twelve year old Matthew who is, unlike Alice, absolutely a flesh and blood boy. He smells. He is sweaty and hangs out with other nasty boys. He eats scabs. He talks back and calls what the girl reveals to him her “clip.” The letters, we are told, are not as full of information as the narrator would like, so he fills in what’s missing with fantasy.

After her successful seduction she is bored with Matthew, finds she’s bored with what her life has become, tries to kill herself, and is sent by her parents to Europe where in Paris she eventually leads a blind man and his dog up to her room. “When the girl brings the man to her bed, the dog grows excited and jumps up, joining them. ‘Couche,’ the man orders the hound. ‘Couche,’ he says, and the dog waits for his master on the floor.” She sends her final letter from the airport returning to the US. She tells him, “I’m not afraid of you anymore, I’m more afraid of myself.” This is the final lesson she’s learned from him.

Except that the girl really doesn’t learn anything from the narrator. There is no girl.

That there exist such girls, nineteen year olds compelled to work up a seduction of a twelve year old boy, coeds who write to famous child murderers to brag about both their crime and their having gotten away with it, this I don’t doubt. That the two might converge is part of the suspension of disbelief we give to fiction. And that at some level Homes intends for us to take the girl as a real character, I don’t doubt this either. There’s nothing in the text to suggest that Homes is setting us up for a fall.

My reasons for thinking the nineteen year old doesn’t exist except in the narrator’s imagination are these: she is just on the cusp between teenage and adulthood, and may even be the age the narrator was when he began molesting children (we know he molested many, many girls but he has only been charged with Alice’s rape and murder); the age of her victim is the same as Alice’s; Matthew is as mundane as Alice is idealized; the girl lives an upwardly mobile, upper middle class life, significantly different from the narrator’s own childhood growing up either traveling with his seductive mother (to whom he may have lost his own virginity) between bouts in sanitariums or staying with her mother; we know the narrator is unreliable, dealing with mental illness beyond pedophilia, and there is not a page where he doesn’t remind us of that; no one ever uses her name, even in his fantasies, just as no one uses the narrator’s name, even in his “reality.”

Finally, she gets away with it. What better fantasy is there for someone who says of himself he is “finally free” only upon being returned to his cell after being denied parole?

the "white marriage" of cunigunde (cunegonde)

THE WHITE MARRIAGE OF CUNIGUNDE (CUNEGONDE)

An Entertainment

Delivered to DUUC

March 3, 2013

            Sit back.  Relax.  This is a long one and we’re foregoing our practice of community dialogue after this.  This isn’t a sermon, by the way, but something I’m terming an “entertainment.”  So don’t worry about thinking too heavily about it.
A stereotype is a sort of mental shorthand for how to think about someone when you meet him or her for the first time.  You base your impression of someone on the experiences you’ve had with similar people or on the actions you’ve seen someone similar take.  It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just the way we think when we’re faced for the first time with somebody new or a unique situation.  Thus, there is often a measure of truth to a stereotype if only in the sense that one person I’ve seen behaved in this manner when faced with this situation.  And so long as we leave it there, as an example of a single experience, it remains true. 

            There are, however, times when whole peoples behave the same over and over again, with little change.  Then the stereotype becomes something more, something like a truism.  Thus, the truism I have often heard repeated in my Unitarian Universalism class and many of us have heard in religious and spiritual discussions:  UUs are guided by the head more than by the heart. 

            Today, we will operate as if that truism is not true.  But we aren’t going to be led by our hearts.  Actually, where much of the following will lead us is about two feet below our head.

            Among our Catholic brothers and sisters today is the feast day of St Cunigunde, the patron saint of Luxumbourg.  A descendant of Charlemagne, she marriedHenry II, then King of Germany and Italy—separate countries even then, it was possible to rule several at one time, at least in a titular way—and eventually the last Ottonian Holy Roman Emperor.  Supposedly, Cunigunde and Henry had what was called a “white marriage,” an unconsummated marriage, a union without union, what many today who have children have called “marriage.”  She is said to have died on this day in 1040, making today the 973 anniversary of her death.  It’s said they wed for companionship and by mutual consent did not have sex, although there is no evidence either was a virgin, and I suspect that when one is Emperor such niceties as an official wife who does not want to sleep with you makes a good cover for whatever else you might want to get up to.  Be that as it may, apparently both Henry and Cunigunde died childless.

Cunigunde was quite politically active during her marriage to Henry, serving as advisor and confidant while he was King and Emperor.  After his sudden death, she and her brother ruled the Empire together as co-regents until the ascension of Conrad II several months later.  She had apparently always wanted to be a nun—the dreams of girls I guess were very different then—and after Conrad’s succession she retired to a Benedictine monastery in Hesse and took vows.  She remained there until her death.  She was canonized in 1200 by Pope Innocent III in reaction to multiple miracles ascribed to her.

There were three.  The first is that, having been accused by enemies of the Emperor of having lovers, she walked across “hot irons” to prove it was not so, doing so without the appearance of even a blister.  How the one proves the other is not explained.   The second relates that both Cunigunde and her maid, having fallen asleep and allowing a candle to set fire to the linens, woke from the heat, and saved by the saint’s quick thinking:  she made the sign of the cross, which put out the blaze.  If you have been following news about the sequestration talks you know congressional Republicans have suggested that fire departments consider doing something similar in the face of municipal cuts.

Lastly, there is this: 

A final legend tells of one of Cunigunde's nieces, Judith, the abbess of Kaufungen Abbey. A frivolous young woman, Judith preferred feasting and carousing with the young sisters to the Sabbath rituals. Cunigunde remonstrated with her, to little effect. Finally the saint became so vexed with her niece that she slapped her across the face; the marks remained on her face for the rest of her life, serving as a warning to those of the community who would not take their vows or observances seriously.

This sounds suspiciously like a snap, or a “yo mama” joke:  “Yo mama so greasy when someone slaps her they leave skid marks.”  Given that “feasting and carousing” are the issues that the saint took with her niece’s behavior, perhaps celebrating her day with a feast is not what would make her happiest.  Perhaps all-day scouring of the flesh would be better appreciated. 

Now it’s not known, by which I mean he never said, whether the saint’s name provided the model for Voltaire’s near-virginal character Cunegonde from his masterpiece Candide—there are multiple famouswomen named Cunigunde, some, like Cunigunde above spelled with a “c,” most of them spelled with a “k”—and one of the other St Kunigundes (there are three) was beatified by Pope Clement XI 45 years before Candide was published making her at least as likely.  But this Cunigunde is a near-enough fit for our purposes.

It is a certainty all of you have heard of Voltaire’s novel, Candide.  It is possible some of you have even read it.  It’s very short, 130 pages of brief, almost terse paragraphs, many of which are recapitulations of what has happened previously.  Each chapter is about 2 or 3 pages long.  It took me roughly 3 hours to reread the whole novel, although admittedly, I’ve taught it in the past and know its plot pretty well, so I was able to go quickly over many parts. 

In the event, however, you don’t have the 3 or 4 hours to give to it, let me summarize its action for you.  We are introduced to our four primary characters, Candide (whose Latin, candidus, means “white” in the sense of simple or unadorned), Cunegonde, and her brother the young Baron, and Dr Pangloss (or “All-Tongue”), who live a nearly perfect life in a castle in Westphalia in northeast Germany.  Pangloss is the tutor to the three young students whose primary philosophy is that they live in the best of all possible worlds.  It is after watching Pangloss having a sexual romp with the chambermaid Paquette that Cunegonde imagines having such an interlude with her young, illegitimate cousin Candide, and when she takes advantage of the opportunity her father discovers them and throws Candide bodily from the castle.

This turns out to be a good thing although we don’t know it for a while.  Candide is quickly conscripted into the Bulgarian army where he witnesses a battle, trembling like a philosopher, and hid himself as well as he could during the heroic butchery. 

He escapes in the chaos and in Holland discovers “a beggar all covered with scabs, his eyes diseased, the end of his nose eaten away, his mouth distorted, his teeth black, choking in his throat, tormented with a violent cough, and spitting out a tooth at each effort.”  It is his old tutor Pangloss who tells him of the deaths of Cunegonde and her family at the hands of the Bulgarian army.  His own condition has come about from contracting syphilis from Paquette (whose name means “parcel,” specifically of firewood or kindling).  The syphilis, he explains, is “a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not in an island of America caught this disease, which contaminates the source of life, frequently hinders even generation, and which is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should [not] have...chocolate...”

Candide returns with his teacher to the home of the Anabaptist James who has taken him in and helps to rehabilitate him.  The 3 of them set sail for Lisbon on business, but there is a storm as they make the city and the Anabaptist and everyone else is drowned.  The event is the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755 in which nearly 40,000 people were killed.  The Inquisition rules in Lisbon and after the earthquake Candide and Pangloss are taken prisoner, Candide to be whipped while Pangloss is sentenced to be burned, as “it had been decided…that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great economy, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking.”  Pangloss is hanged instead because it rains that day, and the sniveling, wretched Candide is rescued by an old woman who secrets him to an abandoned house, bandages his wounds, and feeds him.

After several days she leads him to another house and presents him to a veiled woman “brilliant with jewels.”  The veiled woman is Cunegonde.  Candide says, “You live?...Then you have not been ravished?  Then they did not rip open your belly as Dr Pangloss informed me?”

“’Yes, they did,’ said the beautiful Cunegonde; “but those two accidents are not always fatal.’”

Her family killed before her, Cunegonde had been raped by a 6 foot tall Bulgarian soldier who was himself skewered by his captain on finding him in flagrante.  The captain takes her in, and she becomes his concubine.  But after 3 months he tires of her and sells her to Don Issachar, a jeweler who trades in Holland.  In turn, she has been spotted by the Grand Inquisitor of Lisbon who lusts for her.  He arranges with Issachar (whose name, meaning “man for hire” in Hebrew, is the same as the son of Jacob and Leah) to share Cunegonde between them, Issachar the Jew visiting her Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, and the Grand Inquisitor on the other days.  She had witnessed Candide’s punishment and Panglass’ hanging and sent the old woman to help him. 

While they are embracing Issachar and then the Grand Inquisitor enters the house, and Candide runs each through with his sword, explaining to Cunegonde, “When one is a lover, jealous and whipped by the Inquisition, one stops at nothing.”  The old woman shoos them onto conveniently waiting horses and the trio ride to Andalusia.  Unfortunately, they are robbed of Cunegonde’s jewels and money.  They sell one of their horses—the old woman, who has only one buttock, rides with Cunegunde—and continue to Cadiz, where Candide is recognized as a soldier and given command of a ship. 

Aboard ship, they entertain themselves with stories.  Cunegonde and Candide, finding the old woman’s claim she has experienced greater loss than they amusing, listen to her story.  She is, it turns out, the daughter of Pope Urban X.  On her wedding day her husband is poisoned by his mistress.  “But this,” she says, “is only a bagatelle.”  The young woman and her mother embark by ship to Gaeta but are swooped down upon by pirates who intend to sell the ship’s company into slavery in Morocco.  Her virginity is taken by the pirate captain, and when they reach Morocco the pirates are themselves raided by a rival faction, who rip apart the women and kill all the men.  She is left on a heap of dead bodies, but found by a eunuch who was once her mother’s chapel musician. 

The eunuch makes plans with the young woman to return to Italy but instead of course sells her to an official in Algiers.  There is a plague in Algiers.  “You have seen earthquakes,” she says to her companions, “but pray…have you ever had the plague?”  The official and the eunuch both contract it and die.  She is sold off to a merchant who takes her to Tunis and begins a procession of sales of her until she ends up owned by an Aga whose city is besieged by Russians.  The warriors are starving, and after eating their own eunuchs look at the women with hungry eyes.  Their imam, however, exhorts them in a sermon to “Only cut off a buttock of each lady…and you’ll fare extremely well.  If you must go to it again, there will be another buttock.”  The deed is done but the Russians overrun them anyway and she is taken by them back to Moscow.  After her latest owner is executed, the young woman, now growing old, makes her way across Russia until she reached Lisbon, where she became a servant of Don Issachar. “I waxed old in misery and disgrace, having only one half of my buttocks, but always remembering I was a Pope’s daughter.”  They agree she is more miserable.

Candide and Cunegunde intend to marry in Buenos Aires, their destination, but when they arrive the Governor is smitten with Cunegunde, sends Candide elsewhere, and proposes to her on the spot.  The old woman counsels her to accept, and meanwhile another ship enters the harbor, this one containing officers of the Inquisition seeking the murderer of the Grand Inquisitor.  When she hears this information, the old woman convinces Cunegunde to remain in Buenos Aires, where she’ll be safe, and tells Candide “Fly…or in an hour you will be burnt.”

He does.  And we now take a moment in our summary to pass over the details of the next 10 chapters.  My reasoning is this:  they have nothing to do with Cunegunde who is the subject of this discussion.  But I will tell you that Candide during this time is befriended by his servant Cacambo; discovers in Paraguay that the Jesuit commander of military forces is Cunegonde’s brother, the young baron, who was not quite dead yet; kills said young baron when he attacks Candide for wanting to marry his sister; makes his way to fabled El Dorado whose king sends him on his way with great quantities of their “pebbles,” which are gold and emeralds and rubies, as well as 100 red sheep; finds his way to Surinam where he dispatches Cacambo back to Buenos Aires to ransom Cunegonde and meet him in Venice; is robbed of much of his fortune and finally makes his way to France with a companion, the pessimistic scholar Martin.

A moment here to pause within the pause and tell you something about Martin.  Another truism about Unitarian Universalists is that we often take into our fold famous people, like Thomas Jefferson and Walt Whitman, who displayed Unitarian principles but never actually said they were Unitarians.  One such person is Voltaire, who never, by the way, said “I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.”  His biographer said it of him.  If only, we say, Voltaire had known about Unitarianism he would have been a Unitarian. 

But Voltaire, the “brain on sticks” as a contemporary called him, did know about Unitarianism.  The word had been around at least 100 years by then.  And Martin is accused of being a Unitarian, or at least one type of Unitarian.  His accusers call him a Socinian which was a type of proto-Unitarianism that rejected the Trinity, original sin, the Fall of Man, and atonement.  They were also pacifists which is why of all of them Martin never harms anyone.  For his part, Martin explains he is a Manichean since “I cannot help thinking that God has abandoned [this world] to some malignant being.”

In Paris, Candide and Martin discover Paquette who had left the Westphalian castle immediately after Candide.  Retaining her beauty despite having syphilis, she has become a prostitute whose primary lover is a Friar.  Voltaire gives her what is perhaps the most impassioned defense of women written by a man at this time, two animated pages ending “if you could only imagine what it is to be obliged to caress indifferently an old merchant, a lawyer, a monk, a gondolier, an abbe, to be exposed to insults and abuse; to be often reduced to borrowing a petticoat, only to have it raised by a disagreeable man; to be robbed of what one has earned from another; to be subject to the extortions of the officers of justice; and to have in prospect only a frightful old age, a hospital, and a dunghill.”

We now rejoin our summary.  Candide and Martin are rejoined by Cacambo, now slave to another master.  He leads them to Constantinople where he has found Cunegunde.  She “washes dishes on the banks of the Propontis, in the service of a prince, who has very few dishes to wash…”  She has become a slave herself; but what is worse:  she is ugly.

“Handsome or ugly,” Candide replies, “I am a man of honor, and it is my duty to love her still.” 

On the final leg of their journey, Candide, Martin and Cacambo board a galley which takes them up the Propontis.  The galley is staffed by slaves, two of whom row very badly.  These two slaves are, of course, the young baron and Dr Pangloss. 

Yes, the young baron survived Candide having run his sword to the hilt in his chest.  He was taken prisoner by Spaniards but released to return to Rome where he became chaplain to the French ambassador.  Unfortunately, he took a bath with a Muslim, which is illegal in Constantinople, and sentenced to the galleys.

Pangloss, on the other hand, was hanged badly.  His body was sold to a surgeon who resurrected him.  He ended up hired to a merchant who took him to Constantinople.  There he enters a mosque where he picks up a bouquet of flowers dropped by a young Muslim woman and returns them by stuffing them into her cleavage and then arranging her breasts around them.  That’s how he ended up on the galley. 

They arrive at their destination and are welcomed by Cunegonde and the old woman hanging towels out to dry.  Cacambo was correct:  Cunegunde has indeed grown ugly.  She is brown, “with blood-shot eyes, withered neck, wrinkled cheeks, and rough red arms…”  Candide is repulsed but steps forward to embrace her out of good manners.

Ransoming both the old woman and Cunegunde, the group determines to persevere.  “At the bottom of his heart Candide had no wish to marry Cunegunde,” but there really is nothing for it since, as he points out, he is a man of his word.  Similarly Pangloss, as he is a philosopher and can’t change his mind, has retained his optimistic view that everything is for the best despite having syphilis and being killed. Once the recalcitrant young baron, who remember has been killed twice, insisting to his future brother-in-law, “You may kill me again but you will not marry my sister!”, is kidnapped and smuggled back to Rome, Candide  marries Cunegunde and with Pangloss, Martin, Cacambo, Paquette and her Friar, now a Muslim, and the old woman, settles into an estate where they are equally miserable and bored.

The group makes the acquaintance of a Muslim farmer whose “labor preserves us from the three great evils—weariness, vice, and want.”  They take his example and, as Martin puts it, “Let us work…without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable.”  Or as Candide puts it in the famous last words of the novel, “All that is very well…but let us cultivate our garden.”

Well.  What are we to make of all this?  Sex, death, murder, gore, resurrection, pirates, the Inquisition, Muslims, South Americans, burning alive, hanging, venereal disease, cannibalism, El Dorado, women with monkeys as lovers (I left that part out), popes, chocolate, wine, philosophy, disputation, all served up in a magilla of the human condition.  Candide is famously a picaresque, a novel of fanciful characters in which impossible things happen and fantastic characters appear and a great lesson about life is learned.  What is the great lesson?  I’m unsure, perhaps that it’s better to be alive than to be dead.  Perhaps that work sustains life better than thought, an odd lesson for a philosophical novel.

But all that is, as the old woman says, a bagatelle.  Consider:  Cunegonde is unaware that she’s become ugly as no one has ever told her.  There’s surely a great lesson somewhere in there.  Martin’s mantra is “That is the way men treat each other,” and there’s a great lesson somewhere in there, too.  Candide, while repulsed by her, nonetheless marries her and settles into something like contentment, and surely there’s a great lesson somewhere there.  It might be, as the original Cunigunde’s union, a “white marriage,” but there’s no suggestion that Candide and Cunegonde do not make good on their intent to make the beast with two backs, although perhaps not as lustily as they’d expected to.  It has been years, after all, and they’ve been very, very busy. 

     What is certain is that this is the great lesson I’ve taken from the novel:  that if we have anything like a responsibility to life it is to leave the world in a little better shape than we found it.   Whether it is by gardening or adding laughter to the music of the spheres or feeding the birds or the homeless, it should lead inevitably to the culmination, in Judy Chicago’s words, that “everywhere will be called Eden once again.”