The Return of the Native

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.  Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

There lay the cat asleep on the bare gravel of the path, as if beds, rugs and carpets were unendurable.  The leaves of the hollyhocks hung like half-closed umbrellas, the sap almost simmered in the stems, and foliage with a smooth surface glared like metallic mirrors.  A small apple tree, of the sort called Ratheripe, grew just inside the gate, the only one which throve in the garden, by reason of the lightness of the soil; and among the fallen apples on the ground beneath were wasps rolling drunk with the juice, or creeping about the little caves in each fruit which they had eaten out before stupefied by its sweetness.
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1878)

One of the difficulties of The Return of the Native is that there is no character who can easily carry the reader's sympathies, and the narrator, also, seems cold and remote.
Jane Smiley, Introduction, (Signet 1999)

I'd rather call old Thomas Hardy up.  I like that Eustacia Vye.
Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger, 1951).


I guess there are reasons these days not to read Thomas Hardy:  he is too modern for those who like the more traditional Victorian writers and too Victorian for those who like more modern writers; he is too full of classical references (Homer, Sappho) and uses words that to many are obscure (contumely, supercilious) about times and places that are distant.  To this I would simply say that there is much we can learn about the classics and there is much we can all do to expand our vocabularies.  One of the first characters who appears in The Return of the Native is a "reddleman" and fortunately my wife Susan knows a sheep farmer in England who was able to explain what that is.  But ultimately these are minor quibbles (and, in my case, reasons for reading the book!) about a book that is full of wonderful characters and observations and emotions that are more relevant than ever.  Hardy is a great writer whom  I loved when I was a teenager for his insights into relationships and small communities and whom I enjoy even more now, as I re-read him, for also his appreciation of children and the influences of nature, beautiful and harsh.   Unlike Jane Smiley (quoted above) I have much sympathy indeed for Clym Yeobright, Eustacia Vye, Thomasin Yeobright, Damon Wildeve, Diggory Venn and all the other characters in The Return of the Native, for their very human combinations of aspirations and self-deceptions, as well as their abilities to love and care.

Samuel Richardson's Clarissa

Is not the space from sixteen to twenty-one that which requires this care more than any time of a young woman's life?  For in that period do we not generally attract the eyes  of the other sex, and become the subject of their addresses, and not seldom of their attempts?  And is not that the period in which our conduct or misconduct gives us a reputation or disreputation that almost inseparably accompanies us throughout our whole future lives?
Miss Clarissa Harlowe to Miss Howe, Clarissa

...there was frequently a necessity to be very circumstantial and minute in order to preserve and maintain that air of probability which is necessary to be maintained in a story designed to represent real life and which is rendered extremely busy and active by the plots and contrivances formed and carried on by one of the principal characters.
Samuel Richardson, Postscript, Clarissa

Clarissa is the story of a young woman of outstanding kindness, virtue and intelligence who's made to suffer under a violently oppressive family, is tricked away from home by a notorious sexual predator, deceived, imprisoned, persecuted, drugged and raped, and finally impelled to her death.
Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa


Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Clarissa was published in 1748 and seems to be seldom read today.  I suppose in this day and age when even Trollope, Dickens and Eliot are not read that much it's asking a great deal for someone to read a 2200 page (Everyman's Library) or 1500 page (Penguin) book.  In my case I read the copy I bought at The Gotham Book Mart in the 70's when I worked as a guard at the post office at night while waiting for mail trucks to arrive.  I think the bigger problem is that people have a hard time these days immersing themselves in the past, when the world in many ways was very different.  To my mind this is one of the great pleasures of reading, especially the novels of the 18th Century, when novels were less structured and orderly, more sprawling and picaresque. Clarissa's plot is quite simple and the beauty of it lies more in the descriptions of feelings and emotions. In a sense the plot is also rather repetitive, with the same scenes described in letters by different people.  Of course this is part of the elegance of the epistolary method:  the same incident is viewed in subtly different ways by the different participants.  Terry Eagleton has made a fairly persuasive case for the feminist and class-conscious elements of Richardson's novel but I think that can limit as much as it can expand its appeal; in the end it is the style, the emotions, the insights into another time, that matter.

John Ford's Rookie of the Year

This week the estimable Turner Classic Movies showed Ford's Rookie of the Year, made for TV for the Screen Director's Playhouse in 1955.  It was made after The Searchers (but before it was released) and was also written by Frank Nugent and included some of the cast from The Searchers:  John Wayne, Ward Bond, Vera Miles, Patrick Wayne, Robert Lyden.  Ford was known to say that he liked animals, baseball and people, in that order, and Rookie of the Year is his only film about baseball.  Undoubtedly Ford knew that baseball, because of its immediacy, was not a great subject for movies and this film, very much like the later The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is more about history and emotions than about baseball.  It includes scenes of children playing baseball, just as Lloyd Bacon and Frank Tashlin's Kill the Umpire (1950), another favorite baseball-themed movie of mine, does, to capture the pure beauty of the game, and there is even a tracking-shot to a close-up of Wayne, very similar to a shot in The Searchers, to capture the intensity of his emotions as he searches for a member of the Black Sox (based on Shoeless Joe Jackson), who he feels almost ruined the game. 

In this half-hour film Ford does not go into a discussion of the Chicago White Sox of 1919 but some would argue that the game has not been the same since:  that in order for people to stay interested in the game, and to bring in new spectators, they made the ball livelier and promoted the home run, thus eventually leading to steroids and the depressing emphasis on home runs that we continue to see in today's game.  In any case, Ford captures the joy of the game and the complexity of its history in this short, beautifully directed film.

The Chicago Cubs

With the Cubs losing two games yesterday against the Yankees (they have never won in Yankee Stadium) it's time to mention that some of us, who have always liked the Cubs, like them more than ever since the Red Sox have won three recent World Series:  the Cubs have not won a Word Series since 1908 and have not been in one since 1945.  The closest they have come recently was 1984, when baseball voided their home field advantage because they only played day games and there would not be enough TV money and 2003 when the Cubs were ahead of the Florida Marlins 3 games to 2 in the play-offs and Steve Bartman deflected a foul ball with the Cubs only four outs away from the World Series!  Now the Cubs have lights and play about half their home games at night, though I think one of the best theories I have heard about their problem in winning is that the players don't treat the game like a day job and party too much the night before a game. Some people think it goes back to the Curse of the Billy Goat.  In the 1945 World Series tavern owner Billy Sianis brought his goat to a game (the goat had a ticket) and was asked to leave; he placed a curse on the Cubs as he left.

The Cubs play in beautiful Wrigley Field, one of the last of the old ballparks (along with Fenway in Boston) and it has been said that the ever-changing winds in Wrigley prevent fielding a team that is specifically suited for its ball park.  I have been to Wrigley a number of times and it is a beautiful place to see a baseball game, though I did have some of the worst ballpark food there:  ice-cold nachos! Lee Elia was manager of the Cubs in 1983 and denounced the fans:  "85% of the people in this country work.  The other 15% come here and boo our players."  Some think there is a culture of losing with the Chicago Cubs.  Columnist Mike Royko said that if one wished to predict the winner of a particular ball game just count the number of ex-Cubs in the game; the team with the most is the loser. (I have said something similar about the Mets, though the team with the most ex-Mets is likely the winner, since they trade their best players).

There was a delightful piece about the Cubs in the August 2001 Harper's:  Down and Out at Wrigley Field (available to Harper's subscribers), in which Rich Cohen recounted his life as a Cubs fan:  "In my own childhood there were the Reuschel brothers, fat, mustachioed, glasses-wearing screwballers who, to me, looked like the newspaper's photos of John Wayne Gacey."  (I once saw Rick Reuschel hit a triple against the Mets, one of four triples he hit in his career; he was huffing and puffing by the time he got to third base).  He quotes current Yankees manager Joe Girardi, then playing for the Cubs, "when I was in third grade I wrote an essay about how I would play for the Cubs," something Girardi probably remembered as the Yankees shut out the Cubs twice yesterday. Cohen's father tried to get him to root for the Dodgers or the Yankees: "he worried that in cheering for the Cubs I would come to accept losing as the natural condition of things and so ruin my life."

Perhaps one of the reasons the Red Sox have won the World Series recently is because they have a clear-cut rival in the Yankees.  It used to be a little like that with the Mets and the Cubs:  the Cubs were in first place by eight games in Sept. 1969 but eventually yielded to the Mets.  Now both teams are perpetually in the cellar and even in different divisions. I like baseball during the day, when one can see the white ball in the air against the blue sky, so I will continue to like the Cubs, hoping that they will continue to play mostly during the day, though I hold out little hope that they will be allowed to play a day game if they ever do get to the World Series in this century.

The Disorderly Orderly

Frank Tashlin is a director not remembered much today and his association with Jerry Lewis does not help.  Peter Bogdanovitch wrote (in Film Culture, Fall 1962; reprinted in Frank Tashlin, Vineyard Press, 1972) that he is "perhaps the most visually inventive comic director since Keaton" and "visually" is still the key word, since many people still listen to films without looking at them carefully.  Tashlin directed the best of the Martin/Lewis films (Artists and Models, 1955) and The Disorderly Orderly is the last film he made with Jerry Lewis ((1964).  It is full of comic invention with a plot that reminds one of City Lights:  Lewis has to work day and night to pay the hospital bills of a girl he once loved from afar.  Tashlin understands that "comedy is long shot", as Chaplin once said, and there is at least one gag worthy of Buster Keaton:  Lewis slings a bundle of laundry that, with perfect comic timing, just misses an orderly carrying a tray of food.  Many of the gags are based on Tashlin's experience as a cartoonist and animator, but what some people accept in Chuck Jones they don't always accept in live action.  Lewis works in a hospital that not only infantilizes its patients but quickly kicks them out when they can't pay:  "no money, no bed" is the slogan of the board of directors, headed by Everett Sloane (in his last film); Tashlin often criticized predatory capitalism. Lewis's character is constantly accused by his supervisor of "trying too hard", something Lewis was often accused of in his own acting and directing.  Tashlin and Lewis don't transcend the 50's and 60's the way Douglas Sirk does, with irony, but with an emphasis on satire and a garish sense of color, from a purple shag carpet to a light blue telephone.  For those who have trouble getting past their dislike of Jerry Lewis I recommend Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957); in both cases Tashlin treats Jayne Mansfield with appreciation and compassion.

The Thief

I had turned my back on everything, rejected community, rejected wholesomeness and light.  I had built a wall around myself and lived by sneaking into the gaps in the darkness of life.
Fuminori Nakamura, The Thief (translated by Satoko Izum and Stephen Coates, Soho Press, 2012)

The nameless narrator of this book is a pickpocket, though one who is kind to children and also indulges in other crimes; looming throughout is organized crime --the yakuza-- which the pickpocket unsuccessfully tries to avoid.  This slim, intense book is obviously influenced by Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and other works:  a character at one point says to the narrator, "After all, it's all about courage.  Do you know the book Crime and Punishment?  Probably not. Raskolnikov, he had no courage."  It also reminds me of Richard Stark's novels about the thief Parker, which also give details of the inner workings of crimes.  Two movies about pickpockets also seem to be influences:  Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953, story by Dwight Taylor) and Robert Bresson's austere Pickpocket (1959):  both films are similar to Fuminori Nakamura's book in their emphasis on the details of the crimes and the existential loneliness of the criminal.

Nebraska and Christmas in July

"Is a black cat crossing your path good luck or bad luck?"
"That depends on what happens afterwards."
---Preston Sturges, Christmas in July

At some point while I was watching Alexnder Payne's Nebraska it started to seem very familiar; I realized it was in some ways an updated version of Preston Sturges's Christmas in July (1940; both are Paramount films).  In Nebraska old man Bruce Dern thinks he has won a million dollars in a sweepstakes while in Christmas in July young man Dick Powell thinks he has won twenty-five thousand dollars in a coffee slogan contest (remember slogan contests?) for his slogan "If you can't sleep at night it's not the coffee, it's the bunk."  Powell's girlfriend (Ellen Drew) is skeptical (he explains constantly what the slogan means), as is Dern's wife (June Squibb). Sturges's film is more poignant than Payne's because everyone believes Powell has actually won and he proceeds to buy his mother a new sofa and the children in his poor neighborhood presents based on the fake telegram his co-workers have sent him. The humor in Payne's film is based, to some extent, on making fun of Dern's greedy friends and relatives, though it does also convey their sense of loss and faith in the so-called American Dream; the humor in the Sturges comes more from the sharp dialogue and the interaction of characters.  Sturges's film was made at the end of the Depression and suggests that intelligence and creativity can overcome adversity, while the Payne film puts the emphasis on luck, both good and (mostly) bad. Both films are rich in vivid characterizations in small roles (always a sign of a good director) and both are in black-and-white (more beautiful than color).

Replays in Baseball and TCM in April

I had barely made the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that we could do without baseball umpires when Brayden King and Jerry Kim, in the Sunday New York Times, suggested just that when they claimed that their research, about to appear in Management Science, shows that "about 14 percent of non-swinging pitches were called erroneously" and that Major League Baseball, with its high-speed camera system, could "enforce a completely accurate, uniform strike zone." Now if we could only find a way to get rid of the greedy, steroid-ridden players we could have completely mechanical baseball!

It is a good month on Turner Classic Movies, with tributes to John Wayne and Samuel Fuller.  Fuller was the great American director who famously appeared in Godard's Pierrot le Fou and said "Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word; Emotion."  Of the eight Fuller films that Turner is showing I particularly like Shock Corridor (1963) and Naked Kiss (1964), two films about madness that accurately reflect the chaos in society at that time, as well as the chaos in filmmaking brought on by the death of the studio system.  As for John Wayne, I have become tired of defending him against those who say  "he can't act; he always plays John Wayne" and I can only suggest that one watch him in the Ford films, where he goes from an exuberant outlaw (Stagecoach,1939) to an obsessed racist (The Searchers, 1956), to a defeated representative of an elegiac past (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962).  I also recommend the films he made with director Howard Hawks (Red River, 1948 and Rio Bravo,1962), in which he plays a determined professional.