It is August 24, 1920. I am about to embark on the Orient Express -- the most famous and luxurious train in Europe -- destined for Istanbul.
Why am I bound for Turkey? Well, it's more like the train is heading in that general direction, and I plan to be on the train. Incidentally, I am in Paris as I conjure these words, at the old train station not the Gare du Nord.
As I am sure that you will remember, most of the great Russian novelists have at least one scene in their stories -- Tolstoy in "Anna Karenina" is a classic example -- featuring a conversation among strangers on a train dealing with philosophical issues surrounding love and death as well as the meaning of life.
You have entered a classy text with philosophical pretensions and, possibly, some sexy bits.
Sometimes, of course, the proverbial "Ship of Fools" (Katherine Ann Porter) will serve similar metaphorical purposes. By the way, the device works in movies, too. James Cameron's "Titanic" is a recent example, but several Hitchcock classics also fit the bill, as it were. I made use of the device myself in a story entitled: "Master and Commander."
Anyway, what would I be wearing in Paris, during the sultry month of August, 1920? (Yes, John Barth and John Fowles are obvious inspirations for this story and its method.)
I am wearing a dress suit, which is light by early twentieth century standards, but heavy as tweed by the standards of 2012. In fact, I am unbearably hot. There is no air conditioning in 1920. Nowhere to get an ice-cold Coke-Cola.
A tight, overly-starched white collar and thickly-knotted tie deprive me what little oxygen is available in this train station. There is a gold pocket watch in my vest pocket. I examine this time piece -- which is worth a fortune today! -- noticing that it is made by Breitling, a small company in 1920, just starting out in the wristwatch business.
I always wanted one of these babies. I can only hope that I'll get to keep it. It is now midnight according to my pocket watch.
There are a lot more people in this train station than you would imagine. Nearly every man is wearing a suit, most of these clothes worn by other men are less expensive or clean than what I have on. Most men wear suspenders and also look far less healthy than people do these days. No modern dentistry. This is pre-antibiotics, remember.
There are soldiers from the recent war still in uniform. Many of these men are missing limbs or otherwise displaying lasting injuries.
I can hear horses and carts arriving at the station, not many cars or trucks. Motor vehicles would have been primitive and unreliable by our standards -- apparently, this goes on all day and night in a city like Paris in the early twenties -- horse-drawn carts pick up supplies for the many Parisian markets.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the large mirror placed behind the bar where I sit. I am a member of the prosperous middle class, a Proustian-type hero -- except that it is a little early for Proust. Let's say "Marcel" before he was the narrator of "Remembrance of Things Past" but not necessarily gay -- or somebody like that guy.
Proust's novel has not yet appeared in full in 1920. Already there is gossip about identifying the true subjects of Proust's work. Was "Marcel," as narrator of the novel, identical with Marcel Proust as author of the work? I doubt it.
I "appear" to be 35 years-old, slim, clean and pleasant-featured. (What a relief!)
My shoes are highly polished. A bowler hat sits at a jaunty angle on my head. My hair is shiny with brilliantine, which is advertised everywhere, giving me a look that will become popular with the arrival of Valentino's stardom in about year or two. At the moment, Chaplin is the world's greatest motion picture "star."
I must be pretty well to do to pop-up in this outfit. Good. I hate it when they make me poor or a criminal or something. Never mind the science fiction stuff when I am a robot or an alien! ("A Doll's Aria" and "Serendipity, III.")
Sometimes, this one very annoying author makes me a WOMAN. This could be a fascinating experience, but he's not that kind of writer. ("What you will ...")
Am I French? I don't know yet. I can speak French. But I am thinking in English. You are probably reading this in the English language. The chances are that I am an American or a British subject. Canadian? Who knows. It's early yet. Let's see where this is going. I never trust authors.
I must have a name. How about something semi-fancy? "Ashenden, William Somerset -- at your service, madam."
That would make me English. I mean British. Isn't that the same thing? No, it can't be. The Welsh and all kinds of other weird people are also British. Scottish people are British -- even if they're not thrilled about it all the time. I don't know about the Irish. The Irish don't know about the Irish.
William Somerset Maugham was a popular Edwardian playwright and story writer whose first novel "Liza of Lambeth" had already appeared well before 1920. The name "Ashenden" would have seemed interesting to Parisian listeners, making me an "Anglo-Saxon" as the French say.
Forget the "Marcel" stuff. My guess is that this will be a spy story. I like those stories. There's probably a beautiful woman coming up soon. Awesome!
I hear the whistle signaling that the train is allowing passengers to "board." A group of persons begins to move toward the train that is visible beyond the station. An older man approaches sporting a large white moustache more fitting for the nineteenth century. He wears a magnificent suit, dark cape, gloves, and carries a gold-headed cane. (The weather has no effect on these people's need to be grand.)
His hat is made of black polished material and has a gray silk band. He is followed by a butler carrying several bags presumably belonging to this Bismark-like character. He is addressed as "Baron Von Buddenbrooks."
A family of domestic workers in more modest attire will be riding in the back cars heading home to Italy, perhaps, or Greece. The cost of this journey must amount to a month's wages for them. The conductors and other railway personnel ignore these simple people. Railway workers pretend not to see them, including the women holding heavy bags. I offer to help, but they move away, quickly, with a bow in my direction.
Several officers in the French army, swords still at their waists, sporting elaborate, well-trimmed moustaches (that may be even pointier than the swords) are laughing. They will be joining us in the first class compartments. A non-commissioned officer carries their bags.
A beautiful woman in her thirties approaches at a leisurely pace. She is followed by two older women carrying her bags. There must be ten or more suitcases carried by these women. There are also two large leather cases held by a uniformed chauffer who has stepped out of a Rolls Royce Roadster parked directly across from the train. The chauffer is following the women towards the train.
They're lucky they don't have parking meters yet. Try that today in Paris and you won't see your car again for a few days.
She is dressed in daringly revealing and close-fitting fashion. I can see her ankles! The dress is a dark velvety green -- like her eyes -- she wears a small hat and, in her white-gloved hands, she holds a large black envelope-type purse with a solid gold buckle. Her shoes are also black, well-polished, seemingly rising higher on her ankles than women's shoes today, but of much better leather.
The "ladies and gentlemen" join me in forming a line. The beautiful and grand lady is speaking excellent French to her servants. She is referred to as "Countess."
Another lady joins us in more modest clothes. A dark gray suit, longer skirt, pre-Coco Chanel. Not bad. Brunette, big light eyes, almond-shaped. She is holding a book. A veil covers part of her face. I see full lips and perfect teeth as she offers a tentative smile in my direction. I can't make out the title of what she is reading.
No doubt about it, such questionable behavior on the part of a young lady (travelling alone without a servant!) means we're dealing with an American female person. This means that anything will be possible in this story.
The train conductor is an enormous man in a uniform that glitters in the, mostly, dim gas lights of the station. A large pocket watch is examined by this person as he calls us to approach.
Ladies are immediately ushered ahead in this procession, accompanied by children (if any), then older men -- unless there are members of the French aristocracy who would have boarded already.
This means our "Countess" is even more interesting than I first imagined. She has arrived late and her title has not been used in making the arrangements. Two unconventional women -- I mean, "ladies" -- is unusual in literature and society in 1920.
These women will probably be the source of dramatic tension in our narrative. I like that.
I produce my ticket. The man tips his hat towards me and waives me ahead. I am without a servant. This also would be unusual, but acceptable for a still young and eccentric gentleman.
I carry a small leather case. I notice some clothes that are neatly folded, a classic shaving set designed for travel, also a few books: Freud in German (!), Bradley's "Appearance and Reality," and (thank you!) "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes."
As I step into the train, I am struck by the overwhelming luxury of the surroundings: There is plush red fabric on the walls -- accomodations are far more elaborate and spacious than what we find today even in luxury trains -- magnificent silk curtains cover large windows and there are doors enclosing each cushy set of facing seats in private compartments. I have a whole compartment to myself.
The amount of space afforded to these people is almost obscene by comparison with what we get in our much more crowded world. Servants and others occupying different social strata, on the other hand, are uncomfortable in ways no one would put up with today, unless servants reside with great families when they are usually allowed more room.
Servants are also disregarded or ignored in a way that is difficult for me to observe, even from my perspective as a "gentleman." No one seems to take offense at this treatment of people.
An oriental motif is visible in the decorations. Paintings in "suites" depict Arabian and Turkish exotica. Tables are covered in lace and bear exquisite silverware and crystal goblets. Servants' quarters are better than "normal" accomodations in today's best high speed rail service -- that is, if you don't mind sharing space with strangers and being regarded as baggage!
Upper-crust people at the time understood elegance and lived with notions of "class propriety" that allowed for few exceptions, insisting on rigid standards of "appropriateness" at all times. I better be careful. It's easy to slip-up in this world in a way that would reveal me to be an interloper from another time and place.
I place the modest bag next to me in my compartment. I am handed a key by the porter. I thank the man and offer a generous tip. As he leaves, I draw back the curtain. I then exit and lock my door.
I am heading for the dining car where several of the persons I saw earlier are congregating already, including the ladies. It would be considered rude simply to stay in one's compartment on a journey such as this, especially on the departure night.
The persons on this train would have deemed it a ritual to enjoy an all-night conversation on the occasion of so auspicious a journey to the mysterious East. "Conversation" is a concept that is nearly lost to us. It meant much more (but was also more formalized) early in the twentieth century.
To "converse" with a stranger on a train, as we are doing now, was a matter of some importance (or even intimacy) because words and speech mattered so much more than they do today.
Servants have been discarded or relegated to their more modest "levels" for the time being. We may be frank with each other. We read about the teens and twenties of the last century without realizing what it felt like to be one of the vast majority of people at the bottom of the social scale.
These persons, mostly, weren't in Fitzgerald's or James' novels -- except in peripheral ways -- but no one is "peripheral" in his or her own eyes. Everybody is or should be the "protagonist" of his or her story -- if not necessarily the "writer." After all, history and the subconscious (I just realized that Freud is still alive in 1920!) does a lot of the writing for most of us.
There must have been tons of resentment and anger felt by these servants and workers that, also, didn't make it into Western literature until pretty recently. Yes, there were "unpleasant" books in the nineteenth century (M. Zola, Fabian Socialists, Marx, Dickens), but the vast majority of books were written by -- and FOR -- the middle class and higher on the social scale. People like my character in this drama, not for their servants.
"Reading can deform reality in advance" -- Jane Austen warns readers in Northanger Abbey -- "so that the avid reader, living with an inflamed imagination, might well not only 'see' things which are not actually there in the external world, but also not see what is there. In this way reading may lead to misreading of the actual non-fictional given world. It is clear from the start that Jane Austen is going to subject Catherine to a fair amount of irony in this connection. We read, for instance, that 'she read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventual lives.' 'Eventfulness' is a notion (and a problem) I shall come back to. But we can see straightaway that, in effect, Catherine wants to turn life into a prolonged series of quotations. In this way she, quite literally, is in danger of perverting reality, and one of the things she has to learn is to break out of quotation, as it were, and discover the complex difference (as well as the complex connections) between reading a book and reading the world."
Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 44-45.
I approach the "Countess," remove my hat, bow, take the hand extended in my general direction and place an air kiss just over it in the prescribed manner:
"How do you do? My name is William Ashenden."
"Very well, thank you." She utters these words in a dismissive mumble, much in the manner that she uses when addresing her servants. I am expecting something out of Proust. "Guermantes?"
"My name is Samantha Rothschild." English? Wow, who knew? An heiress marrying into a title. Probably an American. Great. Smart, too! The Baron clicks his heels and ruins my moment with a Germanic interruption:
"Perhaps we should step into the dining car where proper introductions will be possible. Ja?"
The dark-haired lady turns to me and says: "I am Mantissa McTaggart. How do you do?"
We shake hands in the crass American way. Maybe she wants to arm wrestle? I am a little dazed. It is extraordinary for any lady to initiate a discussion with a gentleman, especially in a setting and among people like these folks. For a young and single woman, this is even more unusual.
"I am very well, thank you. Are you an American?"
"Yes. I am studying in Paris." She holds up her book and smiles: Mary Whiton Calkins, "The Persistent Problems of Philosophy."
I do not know the book or its author. I was afraid of this. If there is a philosophy test in this story, I am going to need some help from the author. I hate philosophy. Plus, this babe is going to get all Modernist on me and start quoting T.S. Eliot or James Joyce. Worse, Thomas Mann. My guess is she's a "social idealist." I hate "social idealists."
I have a feeling that there will be lots of ideas in this dialogue and not as much action or excitement as I hoped. Probably, I am not going to get enough sex from this author. I think our writer should read more Freud. Listen, people want a little erotic frisson. You could sell something Noir and thrilling to the movies!
Is there any way to get these ladies into my compartment? I doubt it.
"It sounds very interesting. Are you studying philosophy, Miss MacTaggart?"
"Yes." I get another smile from the dark-haired babe as I gesture for her to enter before me into the dining car. We will sit at the largest table for what promises to be a lofty conversation that will last until dawn. I am in trouble.
We are soon joined by the officers (won't the swords get in their way?), Captains Adair and Van Cauwelaert. Baron Von Buddenbrooks sits at the head of the table, like God the Father in His Heaven. This seems a little partiarchal and demeaning to women. I sit between the ladies. The officers are placed at either side of the good Baron. (A few years from now this guy could be a Nazi.)
Tea would have been brought to us pretty quickly, along with some "biscuits." (Biscuits are not something for the poodle, it's what they call "cookies" over here.)
A uniformed waiter takes our orders for "refreshments." I'm starving from all these deep thoughts. The delicious aroma of Turkish coffee fills the room.
Conversation focuses on the journey that we have begun. The experience of reading this text means that we -- you and I -- are also creating a journey together.
There is a great mystery about how this literary journey happens, when or where it happens, if you know what I mean. This reminds me of a story I read called "What you will ..." All of Borges' writings are concerned with these paradoxes, to say nothing of Kafka. Shame that it's a little too soon for those two.
You've already made a kind of "connection" with a pleasant-featured young man, protagonist, narrator or alter-ego for the author. Two beautiful ladies seem to embody feminine archetypes. I am thinking mythology. Maybe "The Judgment of Paris." They will express rival views, I suspect. A number of cultural icons have already been invoked. Some are crucial; others may be red herrings (you should forgive the expression).
Would a guy named "Ashenden" say that? No way.
Metaphysical puzzles have appeared in our story because this "unreliable" author (to say nothing of his protagonist!) has an ulterior purpose or two. I've heard of unreliable narrators, but this is the first unreliable author I've run into. Don't blame me.
Samantha points her eyes at me and says, softly: "I am an experienced traveller. However, this is my first journey on the Orient Express."
"I have visited China, India and Japan." Buddenbrooks comments in flawless English. This is a lucky break because I can't speak German.
"Have you visited the Islamic world, Baron?" Mantissa directs this question to the head of the table.
I am drawing a blank right now. Let's see: Prokosch's "The Asiatics" did not appear until about 1930. I can't use that book in this chat. Herman Hesse was around, but had not yet published the "Journey to the East." I will have to rely on my knowledge of Conrad and "The Arabian Nights."
"Only in my readings, Miss MacTaggart." This is offered with a slight bow.
"I have always been fascinated by the romance of the Islamic world."
Mantissa has a beautiful voice. Samantha is feeling the competition as a woman accustomed to being the center of attention. She has clearly drawn the admiration of the French cavalry. I fear that these soldiers will need rescuing soon.
"The world of a literary work is not an objective reality, but what in German is called a 'Lebenswelt,' reality as actually organized and experienced by an individual subject. Phenomenological criticism will typically focus upon the way an author experiences time or space, on the relation between self and others or his perception of material objects. The methodological concerns of Husserlerian philosophy, in other words, very often become the content of 'literature' for phenomenological criticism."
Terry Eagleton, "Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reflection Theory," in Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983, 1996), p. 51.
"I dare say that we will discover beyond Istanbul all of the wonders of the Arabian nights."
One of French soldiers puts in his two cents' worth. Fascination inheres in the process of "unveiling." Words on paper or a computer screen even allow us to see, vividly, the luxurious train, these colorful characters, to feel the motion as the train picks up speed, to taste the tea and sweets, and smell the coffee.
"Experience" expands to include ideas we may otherwise ignore or never discover that are handed to us by persons more exotic and interesting than those we are likely to know.
Plato made this discovery centuries ago. Ideas themselves are "characters," protagonists in adventures that interact or relate to one another. Dialectics is drama. Ideas become flesh -- sometimes beautiful flesh. In the beginning was the word.
We are at this table. We participate in this chat. We flirt. Like "our" friend, Mr. Ashenden, we are there and here. A uniformed waiter appears with bread, fruit, fine cheese. Bottles of wine are placed on our table. Other tables begin to fill with more first class passengers. The dining car is buzzing with conversation and gentle laughter.
"What do you plan to do with your education, Miss MacTaggart?"
Mantissa seems tentative and embarassed: "I am fascinated by philosophy, literature, history and ... the sciences. This new century will require a great deal from ladies. We must devote logic and effort to the improvement of our situation. We can do nothing without educating ourselves to be the equals -- or betters -- of men."
"Why do you say that?"
"I believe, Mr. Ashenden, that we ladies must take our place, as the equals of men, at the centers of power in the world. We must have the vote in America. We must be able to attend universities, enter the professions, as men do, and choose our fates."
"So few of us can do that." I say this jokingly.
Samantha enters the discussion with a surprising observation:
"I doubt that we have very much choice at all. Our roles are written long before we arrive on the scene."
The Baron seemed shocked at this remark: "You do not believe in free will?"
"Not for us," Samantha said, with a playful smile for me.
"Why not?"
"So much of life is only an elaborate fiction, Mr. Ashenden. Social roles and conventions, the absurdities of class, accidents of time and place that 'locate' us in a context. What the future has in store for any of us is no doubt far from pleasant and, much of it, is unknowable and unalterable."
"Events in Germany may bear you out on that point." Baron Buddenbrooks was saddened by this thought.
Mantissa leaned forward, her eyes gleaming with intelligence and interest: "Dr. Freud in Vienna says that we are the 'prisoners of our baser instincts.' ..."
She paused in mid-sentence, then continued in an icy tone:
"I doubt that we are entirely driven by baser instincts. There is much in what Freud suggests, however, and a pessimism derived from Schopenhauer that is frightening and sad."
"I am certainly not referring to sex," Samantha's use of the word brought a stillness into the room. "Nor am I referring to economic warfare or class. After all, money is merely another fiction -- "
" -- spoken by someone with plenty of money." I chuckled.
I receive a second friendly and amused smile in response. Is she amused at me or my remark? I am happy either way.
"Money is only as real as we make it. And then we become as real as money and other fictions make us. We rarely appreciate the forces that converge to create us, Mr. Ashenden, including the very words we speak in which we think and experience the world. Whereof we cannot speak thereof we must remain silent."
"Very well put, Countess."
"Surely, you are not suggesting that we remain passive or accepting of injustice?" Mantissa was suitably surprised.
"Do you believe, for example, that this train may arrive in, say, Brussels rather than Istanbul?"
"The train may take us anywhere or nowhere. We might just as easily be sitting in a prison cell or hospital chamber. We might have met in the trenches of a most absurd war that has taken the lives of young men by the hundreds of thousands for no rational reason that I can discover."
"Do you have an explanation for what you regard as so much absurdity?" I am genuinely puzzled.
"We may be the dream of some mysterious god or devil. We may be the dreamers of these evils I describe. It may be that there is nothing outside our crafty fictions and dreams -- nothing beyond our texts -- and that our dreams (such as they are) are better guides than reason or science, Miss MacTaggart, to a reality we only dimly apprehend."
Mantissa was having none of this: "We must move beyond mythology and religions, Countess. We must endeavor to assert our powers on behalf of liberation, even if the effort is doomed. The Greeks uderstood 'Agon' -- in mythological terms -- as the point of a life's journey. No member of my sex should remain passive to the denial of equality for any person."
"Equality cannot be denied to any person. Perhaps the concern with power is your mythology, Miss MacTaggart. Power is also found in the languages that make the stories in which we must or may 'be.' ..."
"Power means the ability to remake our world."
"It is our 'worlds' -- and I must insist on the plural word -- that make us."
"Ladies," Buddenbrooks piped in, "let us never give up on the hope for understanding. It may be naive or old-fashioned -- certainly my lifetime has been filled with horrors and, I expect, more horrors will come soon enough -- and yet 'reason' remains our 'slim reed,' to paraphrase Pascal, in confronting our difficulties. We live in an age of marvels. A day may come when we will cross the oceans in airships. Some day we may even depart from our planet."
This comment generated laughter:
"All serious art, music and literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Mathew Arnold's phrase: 'A criticism of life.' Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world. Authentic means [to] embody concentrated, selective interactions between the constraints of the observed and the boundless possibilities of the imagination. Such formed intensity of sight and of speculative ordering is, always, a critique. It says that things might be (have been, shall be) otherwise."
George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 11.
Our discussion of free will continued for hours with little alterations of the positions anounced by the various participants: Mantissa defended a very American concern with power in the "real" world. She was eminently empirical and sensible, "pragmatic" and political. Her suggestions for practical reforms in institutions and laws avoided excessive concern for theoretical difficulties.
Samantha questioned the notion of a "real" world beyond our words and the dreams to which they ultimately refer. Charmingly, our Countess insisted that we were "imprisoned" in language. With a beguiling -- even bewitching -- smile, she wondered whether "all being that can be understood is merely 'being-in-language.' ..."
"Being-in-language," I said, "living within a text, is a phrase that stays with me. But if the capacities of language are infinite, then anything may be thought by us and we are infinitely variable."
Being for a moment the center of attention, I suggested (in a whisper) that, as the sun's first rays were piercing the sky, the ladies would wish to join me in pursuing this fascinating conversation in my compartment where I might arrange for breakfast to be brought to us.
Alas, Samantha explained as she rose from the table -- accompanied by all of the gentlemen who, immediately, stood at attention -- that she always reads to her poodle in French before retiring for the evening and wouldn't dream of disappointing her favorite pet.
Mantisa made her excuses and also declined my invitation as she happened to write all of her experiences in a journal to be called, on this journey, "Conversation on a Train."
We gentlemen made our polite responses -- I will not deny my disappointment with the author of this text! -- then withdrew to our respective compartments from which to contemplate the arrival of a new day filled with hope for a promising century.
So many beautiful things await all of us in "linguistic" journeys that I feel a tinge of regret for the erotic descriptions that might have added so much to this text. (You getting this, Mr./Ms. author?)
Oh, well ... I suppose it is always a good idea to leave them begging for more.
"We are still living under the reign of logic, but the logical processes of our time apply only to the solution of problems of secondary interest. ..."
Isn't that the truth!
"Man, when he ceases to sleep, is above all at the mercy of his memory, and the memory normally delights in fully retracing the circumstances of the dream for him, depriving it of all actual consequences and obliterating the only determinant from the point at which he thinks he abandoned this constant hope, this anxiety, a few hours earlier. He has the illusion of continuing something worthwhile. The dream finds itself relegated to a parenthesis, like the night. And in general it gives no more counsel than the night."
Andre Breton, "First Surrealist Manifesto," in Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), pp. 66-67.
