Beasts and Demons
Three editions of the same novel. Four movies, four children's books and a collection of newspaper comics.
I’d hoped to have made quite a bit more progress on Pride and Prejudice so that I could, as promised, move along to other books by different sorts of writers. But on the overnight train ride from Chicago to Boston the copy of Austen’s novel that I found in a Little Free Library in Seattle began to deteriorate at an alarming rate. The cover fell away, about half of the pages of Tanner’s scholarly introduction which I finished reading in Oakland came detached and the exposed spine of the book began to flake off in chunks of dried binding adhesive, threatening the material integrity of the whole volume and making a bit of a mess of the carpeted train floor.
I did such reading as I could but became fearful of Pride and Prejudice coming apart in my very hands. I reached out to my host in Massachusetts to see if I could borrow a copy and he lent his to me when I got to his apartment in Dedham, a much older edition with a much shorter introduction by someone named Constance Garrett.
A few days later he took me to a nifty book shop in Montague, Massachusetts called The Bookmill. It’s in an old converted mill placidly overlooking a set of gently-meandering rapids and espousing the motto “Books you don’t need in a place you can’t find,” but as it happens they had precisely what I needed, which was a brand new copy of Pride and Prejudice at a reasonable price. This one has a still-shorter introduction by one Brian Busby and an up-to-date, if banally uninteresting, modern-style cover design.
As to the text, there have been interesting story developments. Collins, after being rejected by his cousin Elizabeth, has married her friend Charlotte. Bingley has ghosted Elizabeth’s sister Jane, who tries to bear her deep hurt with grace and equanimity while allowing Elizabeth to be pissed off on her behalf. Lady Catherine, Darcy’s aunt and the wealthy patroness to whom Collins is so hopelessly and irritatingly devoted, makes her appearance after being much discussed and comes off as a serious, overly self-important but not unintelligent individual. Elizabeth meets Darcy’s unhandsome but charming and gentlemanly cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam, who gives her enough gossip to allow her to deduce that Darcy was responsible for messing things up between Bingley and Jane. With the narrative powder keg now primed to explode, Darcy confesses his love to Elizabeth and the story careens into its most significant tilt thus far, with Elizabeth repudiating Darcy’s proclamation and throwing in his face what she thinks she knows of his responsibility for her sister’s heartbreak and his unjust behavior towards Wickham (according to Wickham). A passionately vicious exchange of insults and recriminations ensues.
I mentioned in the previous entry that I knew Wickham’s version of the story of his feud with Darcy couldn’t be all there was to it, and found I was right when an entire chapter was devoted to the text of a letter Darcy subsequently writes to Elizabeth explaining his account of both of the charges she has leveled at him. As promised by Tanner’s analysis, she almost immediately begins to realize that much or all of what he has written must be true, or at least honest and accurate from his point of view, and that she has allowed herself to be deceived on several points by both Wickham and herself (some of her “Prejudice” of the title). But on the other hand, Darcy is arguably a jerk in the way he conducts himself towards others, including his condescending love-confession to Elizabeth. He is a blunt, honest and straightforward individual who calls things like he sees them and thinks it pointless and wrong to be falsely cordial to others. So at this point, Darcy’s mounting attraction to Elizabeth and her fervent dislike of his personality have spilled out into the open and produced a violent chemical reaction, but both parties have licked their wounds and begun to try to consider things from the other’s point of view. Austen wrote these scintillating chapters with crispness and plausibility that make them accessible to this reader more than two centuries later.
Earlier in the day before we went to The Bookmill, my Massachusetts pal took me to The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, a modestly-proportioned museum founded by the well-respected and recently-deceased children’s book author Carle and his wife Barbara and focused around exhibitions of original art by picture book authors from various eras, genres and styles. In the Museum’s library and gift shop I pulled from the shelves and read, without sitting down, four fine children’s books:
Big Bear Little Chair by Lizi Boyd. Simple read that makes effective and creative use of a strictly-limited palette of red, gray, white and black.
Inside Outside by Lizi Boyd. Wordless sequence in which each spread has a cleverly-deployed cutout section that acts as a window onto the previous or succeeding spread. Each turn of the page transitions into or outside of the same house as the seasons progress throughout the book, so on every spread the young protagonist is doing something seasonally appropriate, in or out of doors.
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Eric Carle. One of Carle’s best-known works and one of the most persistently popular books for budding readers. I figured I should read at least one Eric Carle book while at the Eric Carle Museum.
Have You Ever Seen a Flower? by Shawn Harris was just published in May of 2021. I pulled it down from the shop shelves because I was drawn to the beauty of its arresting, electric-neon color palette, but I wasn’t prepared for the wonder of what I encountered in its pages. This is perhaps the most beautiful-looking children’s book I’ve ever read. The content, a rousing call to a sort of existential meditation on the wonder of simple things and the inconceivably vast power of the human imagination, is at once exuberantly uplifting and deeply grounding. Highly recommended.
While staying with my friend in Dedham I rifled across his extensive shelves and made quick work of the late-period Calvin and Hobbes collection There’s Treasure Everywhere. I collected Calvin and Hobbes books as a kid while simultaneously following the newest daily strips as they were published in my local newspaper. I’ve never not been a fan of the last of the great daily newspaper strips by the notoriously reclusive, deeply principled, plain-spoken and brilliant cartoonist Bill Watterson. The genius of this collection is no surprise to one such as myself who has read it many times before, but I was struck on this reading by the prescience of some of Watterson’s more acerbic social commentary at this late point in the ten-year run of the strip. In one strip young Calvin proclaims that “I’m going to whine until I get the special treatment I like” because “immediate gratification is the only thing that helps me,” prompting his father to fear a whiny, self-indulgent future which in many ways has since come to pass. In another Calvin argues that “values are relative” and that virtue “isn’t better than vice. It’s just different.” Hobbes sees the bigger picture and is unimpressed with Calvin’s reasoning, but narcissistic, parochial Calvin manages to make their philosophical exchange all about himself, stating that “I refuse to be victimized by notions of virtuous behavior.” Several strips later he exclaims to his long-suffering first grade teacher, “Your denial of my victimhood is lowering my self-esteem!” Watterson said more than perhaps even he knew; these quotations might as well be official slogans for our troubled era. I’m all for the whimsical boundary-pushing and free-flowing creativity that make Calvin who he is, but we could all do with more of Hobbes’s humble common sense and Calvin’s father’s lectures on “building character,” common sense and character both being found in painfully short supply at the moment.
During my week in Massachusetts I watched four pictures.
Steven Soderbergh’s 2021 ensemble noir caper No Sudden Move has a great cast and look and suffers from obscure, verbose dialogue and a story muddied by a compounding succession of headache-inducing double-crosses. Good postwar costume design.
The Neon Demon, set within the contemporary Los Angeles fashion industry, is the latest beautiful, starkly-colored, high-contrast nightmare from the Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn. It collapses the shallowness, degradation and nihilism of the modeling business onto a moral plane alongside homicide, necrophilia, cannibalism and a predatory mountain lion. I’ve read that Refn has some degree of color-blindness, which evidently serves as a useful constraint on his compositional approach and explains the swaths of red and black that slash across his meticulously-composed shots. I wonder if the recurring motif of grotesquely-abused eyeballs in his pictures is some allusion thereto.
My pal took me to the public library in Dedham to check out the DVD selection and we found something I’ve been wanting to watch for a while, Nicholas Ray’s 1950 noir picture In a Lonely Place with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. Bogart plays a broken-down screenwriter and World War II veteran; the movie is set up to seem like a murder mystery with his character serving jointly as protagonist and chief suspect, but the matter of who committed the crime becomes less important than the ways in which it haunts his budding relationship with his new neighbor and muse played by Grahame. They get perilously close to a life of happiness and productivity, but the title gives a firm indication of where these characters start, end and dwell. Brooding, downbeat movie with an unusual story structure and a typically fine performance from Bogart.
At the library we also checked out Sexy Beast, the great English gangster black comedy directed by Jonathan Glazer. I first saw this picture when it was released in theaters in 2000; this was perhaps my fourth viewing. It was the first movie I ever saw with the great English tough-guy actor Ray Winstone, who here plays a former criminal named Gal blissfully retired to Spain with no intention of ever returning to England. It also features a legendarily memorable performance by Ben Kingsley as Gal’s overbearing, insistent, wretchedly childish acquaintance Don whom the boys back home dispatch to recruit Gal for one last big score.
English gangster pictures seem to excavate and reinterpret the American gangster movie milieu into something much weirder and more transgressive than its gritty prewar Cagney/Bogart origins could portend. Maybe the rigid class and hierarchical strictures in English society make it seem more an act of willful rebellion than one of economic necessity when some enterprising character sneers at polite society and bypasses the rules to get ahead, which might explain why English gangster movies almost always incorporate elements of unusual lifestyles, counter-culture and camp in ways that self-serious American gangster movies rarely do. In Sexy Beast the protagonist and his friends have left their hang-ups and mistakes behind them in England to live out a bohemian retirement on the continent, but Gal is haunted by a literal specter of the past in the form of an anthropomorphic rabbit monster (reference to whom is one of the several available interpretations of the title). Kingsley’s character Don is there to drag Gal kicking and screaming to gray, grimy England and into the employ of Teddy Bess, a slick, daring crime lord played by Ian McShane, a brilliant actor I once had the great privilege of seeing perform in an off-Broadway production of the Harold Pinter play The Homecoming. Gal loves swimming and soaking up the Spanish sun, but cool-as-ice Teddy needs Gal’s bank-robbing acumen and pro-heat stance for a job that involves infiltrating a safe-deposit vault through a simmering, sweaty steam-bath. Sexy Beast is about interesting characters and a number of profound concepts, all of which it ruminates on with inventiveness, humor and narrative economy. It has style to burn and is intense, engrossing and laughaloud funny. It’s one of the crime genre’s best and strangest movies with several of its finest performances and I’ll be surprised if this was my last time watching it.
Next: Hurricaned and detained in Vermont, where I read more comics. Then on to Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and hopefully more Pride and Prejudice.