November 7, 2012 at 12:45 P.M. Congratulations to President Barack Obama on his reelection. America has chosen hope over despair. The Republicans have admitted to being "baffled" by the election results. Mr. Romney's declared policy yesterday to prepare "only a victory speech" did not serve him well.
Mr. O'Reilly's comments on Fox News were inappropriate and highly irresponsible: Mr. Obama was not elected (or reelected) because 50% of Americans want "stuff" for free from the government. Only 1% of the people demand stimulus funds and tax cuts after leading us into an economic crisis.
But enough about Bain Capital. It is time for bipartisanship in the national interest. Sadly, we will not see cooperation in Washington, D.C. We will see more gridlock, obstructionism, division -- and the American people as well as the global population will suffer. Americans cannot afford these continuing post-election ego contests. Let us deal with the reality that is facing us, N.J. and G.O.P. members. Our children will thank you for it.
Mr. Boehner's comments claiming an alleged "mandate," despite losing the presidential election -- suggesting an inflexible as well as non-cooperative approach on economic issues that must be intended to undermine President Obama's efforts -- is unfortunate for the American people. I have never heard of a Speaker of the House and Minority Whip refusing the reelected U.S. President's phone call on election night.
Perhaps Republicans on the Hill have not taken in the numbers. Far from being a "tie," like Bush v. Gore or Kerry v. Bush, this election was not as close as many expected: The president's popular vote lead was over 2 million, according to the latest accounts, and he will be credited with Florida's electoral votes when they get around to counting all votes, if they ever do. President Obama will have Florida's electors added to his 303. Jeff Zeleny & Jim Rutenberg, "Obama's Night: Tops Romney in Bruising Run & Democrats Turn Back G.O.P. Bid For Senate," in The New York Times, November 7, 2012, at p. A1.
November 2, 2012 at 3:55 P.M. I did not expect to reach this site after being unable to write at one library branch. Although I have completed a draft of this review by hand, on a legal pad, I cannot say when I will be able to transcribe the full text here in order to post the work on-line. I will try to write every day. ("What is it like to be censored in America?" and "How censorship works in America.")
Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child (New York: Vintage, 2011), 435 pages.
Alternative Review: James Wood, "Sons and Lovers," in The New Yorker, October 17, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/011107/111017crbo_books_wood?
"I sometimes hold it half a sin."
I hope that many people will read The Stranger's Child. The novel is so sumptuously and elegantly written that the delights of the prose alone justifies the cost of the book.
Reviews of Mr. Hollinghurst's books in America, generally, have been favorable. Concerning The Stranger's Child, however, critics and reviewers -- including Mr. Wood, perhaps -- have been less sympathetic or understanding than one might have hoped: for example, few readers have paused to consider the author's dedication of the novel to "I.M." [In Memoriam] "Mick Imlah 1956-2009."
This terse dedication to a deceased friend clues us in to the haunting and powerful presence of death in the story and in all of our lives in the AIDS-era and after 9/11.
I write this essay as a storm devours the lives of about 80 persons from my city and neighboring areas, including killing persons whose precautions have been impeccable and whose lives have no doubt been utterly moral even as less worthy others are spared, seemingly, for no rational reason or purpose.
Much the same may be said of the bloody spectacle that was once called: "The Great War." Hundreds of thousands of the finest young men of a generation perished for no particular reason in a stagnant military struggle now known, more accurately, as only the first World War.
Mr. Hollinghurst's writing is tinged with melancholy and pain at loss -- loss of friends, possibly, and a sharp, middle-aged appreciation for the tragedy and transitory nature of all forms of beauty. I suspect that many personal losses have been transformed into art in this work. Beauty fades all-too quickly, vanishing before our eyes, leaving only a ghostly and sweetly-perfumed presence in the memory.
Mr. Hollinghurst's subjects in Stranger's Child are memory and time, love and loss, eros and thanatos.
Evelyn Waugh is one important influence on this author, not only Brideshead Revisited but even more Decline and Fall and Sword of Honor.
On one level The Stranger's Child is an elegy for a Rupert Brooke-like World War One poet who falls in battle.
On a deeper level, the novel is a personal exploration of Hamlet-like themes of lost affections and vanished youth.
On yet another level, the book raises profound questions concerning literature and life, history and imagination. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "Metaphor is Mystery.")
What is a poem about? To whom does a poet/poem "belong"? At what point does a poet become his or her poem? Is the truth found in a work of literature external or internal to the work?
An "elegy" is a "song of mourning or lamentation for the dead, with reflections on the departed life, often ending in a mood of calm and consolation."
Tom McArthur, ed., The Oxford Companion to the English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 343.
The Stranger's Child is an elegy that focuses on a possibly gay central character -- "Cecil Valance" -- with several supporting players in the drama also being gay, so that this extraordinarily fine work is in danger of being ghettoized as a "gay novel" that is meant to be read only by gays and lesbians.
Nothing could be more wrong or absurd. If there is such a thing as "gay literature" then this is not it: Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest; Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time; Henry James' The Wings of the Dove; or, for that matter, Shakespeare's "Sonnets" and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice; also Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar and A Search for the King -- transcend attempts to limit their importance to so-called "gay issues." These works and many others today become universal meditations on aspects of human nature and life.
An example of a kind of elegy for the first AIDS generation of gay men is Edmund White's haunting Farewell Symphony. Much the same may be said of E.M. Foster's Where Angel's Fear to Tread and Howard's End which touch on themes of loss and yearning for a vanished Edwardian age.
A.S. Byatt's Possession examines parallel themes of scholarly greed for "possession" of genius in literature; and Sarah Waters' gorgeous neo-Gothic Affinity, a novel I am currently reading, should be mentioned as well since in that novel death is analogized to "imprisonment" of various kinds in terms of the situation of women in sexist Victorian society and of many lesbians today. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory" then "Master and Commander.")
These books provide true touchstones for Mr. Hollinghurst's meta-literary preoccupations that complement his romantic story. There is so much added pleasure in this novel when one is reminded of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure and of Derrida's riddles about textuality as one delights in Mr. Hollinghurts's luxurious prose.
Mr. Hollinghurst's lush style is not "antiquarianism," Mr. Wood, it is simply fine writing. It only appears "antique" to us because we have become accustomed to bad writing in our print media and novels. "LOL! Whatever." ("God is Texting Me!")
" ... 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory' is Yeats's first full statement of what he took to be a complex and tragic situation: the position of artists and contemplatives in a world built for action, and their chances of escape, which are in effect two: the making of images, and death."
Frank Kermode, "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory," in Romantic Image (New York & London: Routledge, 1957, 2002), p. 37.
Mr. Hollinghurst -- like "Cecil Valance" -- is concerned with "the making of images and death" in this novel. The name "Valance" suggests duality: "valance" refers to a veil or curtain placed before something private and also to dual aspects or bivalent levels of reality. ("Magician's Choice" then "The Soldier and the Ballerina.")
Literature, like Mr. Hollinghurst's protagonist, possesses this "yes-and-no" quality by describing the internal and external "world" of its makers. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")
Was Cecil Valance "gay"? The question misses the point that the major concern of this text is a poem, "Two Acres." The title to the novel, for example, and the opening pages of the work establish a relationship with Alfred Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam." This masterpiece of English literature written "for" Arthur Hallam who died suddenly in 1833 at the age of 22 is among the most gloriously ambiguous of texts:
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like nature, half reveal
And half conceal the soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies,
The sad melancholic exercise,
Like dull narcotics numbing pain.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam," in Paul Negri, ed., English Victorian Poetry: An Anthology (New York: Dover, 1999), p. 30.
Equally significant is Rubert Brooke's (1887-1915) most famous sonnet:
If I should die, think only this of me;
That there is some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blessed by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learned of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Rupert Brooke, "The Soldier," in Robert M. Bender, & C.L. Squier, eds., The Sonnet: An Anthology (New York: Washington Square Press, 1965, 1987), p. 290.
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."
Shortly before the First World War Cecil Valance is invited to spend a weekend at the family home of Cambridge University classmate and lover, George Sawle.
George's sixteen year-old sister, Daphne -- like England -- is in the midst of a transition from innocence in adolescence, amidst Edwardian splendor or comfort, to experience in the aftermath of ghastly wars and resulting deprivations.
Significantly, allusions are offered to Tennyson -- a friend of the Sawle family -- whose poems are read aloud in the suburban house called, "Two Acres." This unusual name will also serve as the title to Cecil Valance's poem written in Daphne's journal in gratitude and commemoration for the stay.
England's decline in the twentieth century and the "shabbiness" of the once lovely Daphne will be analogized in a subtle comment on the effects of a terrible century upon the English language and civilization.
A reference to Wagner's "Flying Dutchman" (p. 27.) whose haunting themes of timeless searching for an evanescent beauty and agonizing sense of loss will mirror the quest of several characters for a return to an instant of perfect bliss in the June of life -- individual lives, certainly, but also in the life of a great nation -- will be captured forever in verse in the form of Valance's poem "Two Acres."
"Two Acres," two siblings -- Daphne and George -- each is romantically involved with the poet who is the symbol of English beauty and literary genius represented in the form of a single image at the center of the novel: a marble tomb for Cecil Valance that is to "stand for all time."
A poet/poem becomes a "monument" to the English language and people: Is literature something "living" and vital that is about "eternal" aspects of human nature? Or is literature merely a fleeting confession of sexual "sins" or other autobiographical fodder for People magazine? Is what matters in the long scope of history the meanings of great works that are universal? Or personal confessions? Is there a difference between two kinds of "communication" personal and philosophical?
You, the reader, are invited to answer these questions by Mr. Hollinghurst.
"Now the lovely tune," the introductory theme of Dutchman, "was pulsing through the garden, full of yearning and defiance and the heightened effect of beauty encapsulated in an unexpected setting." (p. 28.)
As in Alice in Wonderland the English garden is an idyllic setting for symbolizing innocence and youth, also romanticism about landscape and people. ("A Review of the T.V. Show, 'Alice.'")
The title to the novel hints not only of Cecil's possible fathering of a child while on leave during the war, as part of a brief encounter with Daphne, but also points to some famous lines from Tennyson's "In Memoriam":
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to "The Stranger's Child." (p. 52.)
The novel's reader is the true "Stranger's Child" wandering into this text.
This blessed "plot" of English soil will be hideously altered by time. English poetry and civilization are depicted as crumbling, falling from a state of glory, as we all must, into decrepitude and death (?), even as Cecil's poem and life are transformed into rich matter for small-minded literary scholar-squirrels digging for the hard nut of "truth" as opposed to Truth.
The sharpest disapproval in the novel is reserved for literary journalists and devoted readers -- like Alan Hollinghurst as "Paul Bryant"? -- digging into the personal lives of their favorite authors.
Is James Wood also another "Paul Bryant"? Aren't all of us, as readers, a bit like Mr. Bryant? I suspect so. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince" and "An Evening With Gore Vidal.")
Mr. Bryant's focus misses the point to the poem and, indeed, to the life of Cecil Valance because of an inability to appreciate the "seven types of ambiguity" and complexity of this genius for an earlier generation of English persons. That generation has now been taken from us by time and war, placed forever on the far side of a divide between the living and dead, a "valance" between living readers and dead poets, including (someday) the readers of this very novel and the novelist, Mr. Hollinghurst, who must depart the scene in the fullness of time.
Time's passage and the acid-like effects of history upon even marble monuments -- or black ink -- is underlined for readers for whom "Time's Winged Chariot" must draw near:
" ... The bracket clock whirred and then struck eleven, its weights spooling downwards at the sudden expense of energy. She had to sit for a moment, when the echo had vanished, to repossess her thoughts. Other clocks (and now she could hear the grandfather in the hall chime in belatedly) showed a more respectful attitude to telling the hours. They struck, all through the house, like alternative servants. Not so that brass bully, the morning room clock, which banged it out as fast as it could, 'Life is short!' it shouted. 'Get on with it, before I strike again!' Well, it was their matter, wasn't it: Carpe diem. ..." (p. 88.)
And the point is emphasized, again, as George Sawle visits Cecil's tomb when the question arises whether the likeness of the carved figure is accurate to the poet's appearance in life.
How do we understand the poetry and lives of our greatest literary figures? Do our monuments in the world of letters reflect "reality"? Are our "heros of the pen" flesh-and-blood men and women, or do they become myths?
" ... 'Hello, Cecil, old boy,' he said pleasantly and not very loudly, with a dim echo, and then he laughed to himself in the silence that followed. They wouldn't have to have an awkward conversation. He listened to the silence, with its faint penumbra of excluded sounds -- birdsong, periodic rattle of the distant mower, soft thumps that were less the wind on the roof than the pulse in his ear." (p. 119.)
Daphne marries the Evelyn Waugh-like Dudley, divorces him, then marries Revel Martin, an important painter, in search of the fleeting magic offered by Cecil in an English garden.
Is Daphne the "Flying Dutchman" in this myth? Daphne's memoirs are at least as true as the mythical "objective" history reconstructed by Paul Bryant. The "reality" of these lives is beyond all individual accounts; finally, it can only be confined to Cecil's marble tomb. ("Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question" then, again, "Master and Commander.")
Paul Bryant (James Wood? Alan Hollinghurst?) is the inheritor of English civilization -- heaven help us! -- who does very nicely by exploiting the lives of persons he is incapable of understanding. "Hooper" in Brideshead Revisited has inherited the estate.
Britain has entered a new Dark Ages, we feel, where "Sonnets" have been replaced by "texting" and Wagner by "The Spice Girls." Like Oliver Cromwell, David Cameron has come to rule over lord and vassal alike. Actually, the age of Mr. Cameron sounds pretty good. Boris Johnson is next. ("There will always be an England.")
To focus on the possible gay identity of the poet to the exclusion of other themes in this ambitious novel may confirm many of Mr. Hollinghurst's worst fears concerning the decline in reading skills among us peasants.
Perhaps the most tragic and important character in this story is Daphne, not Cecil. After all, to have lived, genuinely and eternally, only for a few moments early in a long life may be agony worthy of Wagner's music.
Setting down this novel one is struck by the realization, once again, that any human life is as variable and complex as the greatest works of the finest writers:
"'As it happens,' said Stokes, 'we weren't quite able to decide, were we, George? Is it Cecil, or is it, as it were, someone else?' He had a slight air of taking sides and teasing" -- as does Mr. Hollinghurst -- "Madeleine, [Proust?] while George entirely understood and bitterly resented? ..."
Then,
" ... 'I'm afraid I don't think it's him!' ..." (p. 129.)
Is Cecil the great poet everyone thinks he is? Cecil is indeed a great poet because his words mattered, if only for a little while, at a moment of crisis for a great nation.
George Sawle's yellowing photographs and the almost comical destruction of Cecil's revealing letters at the conclusion of the narrative hint at the insignificance of biographical detail to the importance and meaning of literature to say nothing of the accidental nature of the Canon of Great Books.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could face
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His longing face, like a child's sick of sin,
If you could bear, at every joint, the blood
Come gurgling from the froth corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile incurable sores on imminent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest, --
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfrid Owen, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," in Oscar Williams, ed., The Mentor Book of Major British Poets (New York: Signet, 1963), pp. 477-478.
Wilfrid Owen, Sigfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke and other poets are echoed in Mr. Hollinghurst's text.
"Anthem for Doomed Youth."
Cecil Valance in Stranger's Child creates a poem that reflects the happiness of a perfect weekend. Fortune and the day come together to make the poem a masterpiece that is reflective of personal and public concerns, a significant moment in history and individual lives is captured in verse -- however fleetingly -- with Churchill's quoting of the lines on the radio during the worst moments of the Battle of Britain.
The Valance poem's meaning seems, simultaneously, external and internal to the text. The words point to emotions of the artist as well as to horrible events in the world. This will be the judgment of posterity at a moment of literary-mythical need.
Recognition of the importance of such needs for myth is one aim of Stranger's Child.
Predicting what literary works will survive the ravages of time is a fool's game. One writes out of a need to establish a larger communication with the world knowing that Paul Bryant-types will never understand literature as anything but veiled autobiography. Astonishingly, these days, the most complex short stories and novels are routinely reduced to stereotypes meeting P.C. expectations.
The true subject of a poem, this novel suggests, is the poem itself. The poem's multiplicity mirrors the subjectivity of the author/poet (all that personal stuff), but also must reflect the felt needs of intelligent future readers and recipients of a work's coded personal revelations. ("What you will ..." and "Conversation On a Train.")
Tensions are explored by Mr. Hollinghurst between literature and life: Dudley's indifference to "Wilfrid" (his son or perhaps his brother's son) -- the name offers an allusion to Wilfrid Owen -- and Dudley's equal indifference to the body of a woman who has died as a guest in his home is contrasted with his literary concerns as a society novelist. (p. 186.)
Absence of genuine feeling is then contrasted with the affectation of "literary sensibility" at several points in the text, notably during Paul Bryant's interview of the aged Daphne.
"It was one of those disorienting moments, all too common in Paul's life, when he saw he'd missed something, and thinking back he couldn't see what had triggered the change in emotion in the other person. He wondered if she was about to cry. Socially awkward, but wonderful for the book if the trick had worked and he'd stilled some brand new memory; he glanced at the patient revolution of the tape." (p. 371, emphasis added.)
Memories captured in words or images cannot be tested against an objective external world. They may be self-sufficient and reflective of that objectivity ("truth" if you like) that is independent of the individual keeper of memory, but memories must be embodied in some enduring form that matters to the person recollecting in tranquility. ("What is Memory?")
"Two Acres" is that enduring form in this novel -- a novel that is also "enduring form" for the affection and sense of loss of the novelist that is felt and expressed for a departed friend -- and, like a marble monument, the text is transformed into a "likeness" of its reader/subject/maker.
This is one of Shakespeare's greatest lessons and themes that "in black ink my love may still shine bright."
Every work of literature, as a great writer once explained, is "for you." You the reader of the work. This is because to "live" the work must resonate for readers with powerful meanings.
A work of literature must live in and "for" you, as a reader, if it is to survive.
The poem, "Two Acres," in the story we are told met the needs of an embattled generation of British persons for expressions of patriotism. Patriotism, of the ethical variety, is desperately needed today in America and Britain. The cathartic function of art allowed British people to endure the horrors of that great conflagration that would be followed by an even more dreadful war. What would allow Americans to survive a life-threatening struggle today? "The Simpsons"? ("Who killed the liberal arts?" and "Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
The future importance of Cecil's poem in Stranger's Child is an open question. With most literary works "survival" is always in doubt. Survival will always depend on their merits, to be sure, but equally on the needs of posterity. You are invited to decide this issue with regard to "Two Acres," as a poem, and to the fine novel in which it is placed.
Mr. Hollinghurst's achievement, as a faux World War One poet, matches the achievement of Siegfried Sassoon, but falls short of the standard of Wilfrid Owen and Rupert Brooke.
The most profound observations in the novel have to do with the "ephemera" that fills the lives even of scholars in the humanities: egotism, gossip, jealousy that prevents men and women from achieving an adequate understanding of a poem or poet -- even of themselves.
Busy scholar-squirrels and seekers of power fill their days with distractions from the reality of death and of our need for love and beauty not as some terrible weakness; rather, as a matter of being fully human we NEED these things. We must, as W.H. Auden says "love one another or we shall die." (Pages 411-412.)
As for wars, military and otherwise, George Santayana -- who knew many of the World War One poets, as his students, and who may be a better poet than Mr. Hollinghurst! -- reminds us of the illusory nature of so much human pride, arrogance, and conceit as well as of our easily dashed hopes for peace and love:
"Only the dead are safe; only the dead have seen the end of war. ... This war has given you your first glimpse of the ancient, fundamental, normal state of the world, your first taste of reality. It should teach you to dismiss all your philosophies of progress or of governing reason as the babble of dreamers who walk through one world mentally beholding another."
Soliloquies in England (Ann Arbor: U. Mich. Press, 1967), pp. 102-104.
This is the lesson that a great generation of poets sought to impart to us and that we have yet to absorb:
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.
Wilfrid Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth," in Major British Poets, p. 479.
