Bel-Ami - Guy DeMaupassant

George Duroy is the Jason Bourne of literary social climbers. Not once does he make a mistake, not once does he find himself back to square one watching the world he has built come crashing down around him like Nana.  Not once is he in danger of losing everything, only one day to wake up with nothing, cold and alone in an empty apartment like Becky Sharp. No, it is almost like he has been nefariously programmed to cheat his way to the top, taking advantage of all that fall across his path, manipulating one person after another with his wily charms and charismatic mustache. 

When we meet Duroy he has once again found himself down to the last dregs of his limited savings, forced to make the decision between two dinners without "luncheon" or two luncheons without dinner. As he wanders about, looking at his fellow pedestrians and wondering why the gods of solvency have taken a particular dislike to him, he feels in his heart "all the instincts of a noncommissioned officer let loose in a conquered country."  

As he wanders about, nearly destitute, his attitude is a bit more carefree than one would expect. While having little to boast of, he is the proud owner of a fine physique and if it comes to that he should be able to make a few sous loitering in front of the opera house. All he has to do is catch the eye of a beautiful and desperate lady, or rich and desperate as the more likely situation would be, and then he should have enough to get by for at least a week or so…

His plan is momentarily suspended when he happens upon an old friend, another comrade of the Sixth Hussars, Forestier, who is now the political editor of the Vie Francaise. After Duroy quickly lays out his cards, Forestier says maybe there’s something for him at the old editorial desk, and asks if Duroy is up on his Cicero and Tiberius. Duroy assures him that he is and then Forestier utters what is to become the life motto of our hero: 

“Good, no one knows any more, with an exception of a score of idiots who have taken the trouble. It is not difficult to pass as being well-informed; the great thing is not to be caught in some blunder. You can maneuver, avoid the difficulty, turn the tables and floor by means of a dictionary. Men are stupid as geese and ignorant as donkeys.” 

Little does Forestier know that he is paving the way for his usurper to slowly crawl into his life and gradually consume it from within. 

One thing leads to another. A dinner party is organized by the Forestiers and all notable editors and writers from the Vie Francaise are invited including the head honcho, the ploy being of course, to land Duroy with a spectacular job. While Duroy says “yes, yes of course I’ll go old boy” what he really means is “hang it all”. Duroy is the type that admires himself in mirrors and storefront windows etc. and he is very aware of his lack of appropriate dress. He quickly rents a thing here and buys a pawned thing there until he has mustered up something he hopes will pass for dinner attire. As he makes his way up the regal stairs to his friend’s apartment he catches a glimpse of a well dressed and somewhat gruff and judgmental man- only to realize it’s just his reflection! This party is destined for success and as he makes his way through the door…the reality of his situation comes crashing down on him and he remains mute and nonverbal for the majority of the evening.  

Finally, after being almost catatonic with nerves and the profound realization that he is out of his milieu, he is thrown a bone. The great question, posed by Monsieur Morel in the Chamber representing the colonization of Algeria comes up again and for a fleeting second a wave of confidence mixed with terror washes over our hero. Algeria? Why he’s been there…

“George Duroy opened his mouth and said, feeling as much surprised at the sound of his voice as if he had never heard himself speak: “What is chiefly lacking there is good land…” 

His monologue on Algerian agricultural practices goes over very well. He is given a job almost immediately and promises to have Part 1 of his “Recollections of a Chasseur d’Afrique” handed in ASAP. 

He leaves the party feeling very pleased with himself…only to realize he actually doesn’t know how to write. But since he’s Jason Bourne and is a nonhuman robot when it comes to upward mobility, he doesn’t get bogged down in the details of grammar and appropriate verbiage, no…he finds the people that he can manipulate into doing his work for him and that person for the moment happens to be Madame Forestier, or Madeleine as we will soon know her. While she does not seem particularly overcome by the irresistibility of his mustache, she does have a secretive past, one that allows her to see the potential in a rising star and pay forward with the anticipated dividends tucked away in the back of her mind. 

She agrees to dictate his paper, the newspaper knows her handwriting from years of writing her husband’s assignments, and within a couple hours they have concocted the perfect “recollection” filled with heroism and danger and just enough bawdy gossip to keep the lower classes interested. And that is that. He hands in his paper and is a sensation. 

Only…it’s not like he can show up on Forestier’s doorstep every morning so that his wife can write his assignments for him. As his natural writing is quickly exposed as very mediocre, he has managed to convinced himself that he’s seconds away from becoming editor in chief and continues to live a life of excess, before long finding himself even further in debt than before. 

What he really needs is Forestier’s little wife to write his papers…but all in good time. Forestier has developed a chest cough which bodes well for our protagonist and in the interim, Duroy has begun an affair with one of Madeleine’s unhappily married friends, Clotilde. 

While Clotilde has access to all the right people, she demands a certain lifestyle that is infinitely beyond Duroy’s means. At first it’s just expensive meals and evenings at the opera, but quickly Duroy’s apartment becomes inconvenient and Clotilde procures a much better flat in a much better neighborhood, and since it was all Clotilde’s idea, Duroy is happy to let her pay the rent. This does not count as being “kept” in his mind and he appreciates the aesthetic lifestyle change, after all his garret quarters were hardly acceptable for the soon to be editor in chief of the most popular Parisian newspaper. But one day, after complaining to Clotilde that he literally doesn’t even have a sous left to his name, he returns home to find a gold piece in his pocket and another in his boot. “What luck” he thinks for about a nano second…until the creeping realization that he is after all someones “manstress.” 

One would think since Duroy was not above a quick promenade about the opera in search of an unhappily solvent woman and some easy cash, that being a “kept” gentleman would be a step above, but one would be wrong. The affair has lost the excitement that comes from risky unscrupulous behavior and instead has become a banal farce. A rich woman, unhappy with her absent older husband, takes up with the new writer. It’s all so predictable. 

He has played his hand well thus far and has transformed himself from street urchin to political writer, biding his time as he anticipates his next metamorphoses to be even grander. 

All at once, Madeleine sends word that Forestier is very sick and they are leaving for the seaside to take a palliative cure of sea air. Duroy waits until he is officially sent for and then makes haste to be at his good old friend’s bedside. While his friend declines and slowly, raspingly is at death’s door, Duroy makes furtive glances at Madeleine, suggesting “this is all very sad, my dear girl, and when it is all over I promise to be by your side.” 

If flirting over the warm corpse of a close friend isn’t bad enough, the second Forestier is declared officially dead Duroy is offering his hand in marriage: “He’s aways admired and secretly coveted his friends wife, he’s said often to himself ‘if only I could find a wife like that one…only now the facsimile can be set aside and he would find himself being truly honored to be the husband of the original”…  of course she should not reply immediately, that would be too coarse and base, but when the dust settles and she is ready to move on…he will expect to hear her acceptance speech. And with that he departs, and heads home to see if Clotilde is free for a few months while he has time to kill before his impending marriage. 

And mind-blowingly his plan works! A few months later, like clock work, the wealthy, (and now even wealthier having come into her late husband’s estate) Madeleine is ready to officially become Mrs. Duroy. She does have one condition. Can he just change his name slightly to make it sound more regal? With a stroke of the pen George Duroy has become George du Roy de Cantel. 

“She looked at her writing, holding it at a distance, charmed by its effect, and said “Wth a little method we can manage whatever we wish.” 

Duroy has entered the chrysalis phase. He is wealthy and made even more so each day by his equally brilliant and conniving wife. She writes his papers and organizes the right social acquaintances that will propel him forward and he works on his charm and irresistibility. Perhaps for a moment he thought that he had found his soul mate, they are after all two peas in the same rapacious pod, but it is quickly made evident that Madeleine’s scheming and conniving is her first love and there is little love or emotion left to create a sense of intimacy with her new husband. This should have been obvious considering the circumstances in which she agreed to marry Duroy…but Duroy rather than being introspective, decides he’ll use her for what he can and wait for his next big opportunity. 

“George reflected: I should be very stupid to fret about it. Every one for himself. Fortune favors the bold. Everything is only egotism. Egotism as regards ambition and fortune is better than egotism as regards woman and love.”

When Duroy’s boss and owner of the newspaper comes into an enormous fortune after a slightly shady insider trading scenario, his two homely daughters all of a sudden find themselves  in the spotlight of enterprising eligible young bachelors. 

This is a real fortune, millions upon millions, nothing compared to the simple hundreds he and his wife have accumulated in such a short period of time. Now they seem almost poor comparatively, and Duroy finds himself resenting his wife and scheming for ways to get rid of her.

While walking arm in arm with the least homely and unattractive daughter, Susan Walters, George thinks to himself:

“If I had been really clever, this is the girl I should have married. I could have done it. How is it I did not think of it? How did I come to take that other one [this could either be his wife whom he obviously resents or Susan’s mother with whom he has had a recent and flagrant affair.  The mother is absolutely obsessed with him and he finds this very boorish and exhausting.] What a piece of stupidity! We always act too impetuously and never reflect sufficiently.”

But one should never underestimate a charming mustache. Duroy wedges himself into Susan’s heart and vows to be her protector, and with each turn around the pavilion extracts another promise until she has all but pledged herself to him. Now he must find a way to get rid of that horribly provoking wife. 

From his stint at the newspaper he happens to know all the right police commissioners. He also happens to know that his wife meets a certain political gentleman (the reason her political writing is so on point) at the hotel at a certain time. So he calls a small militia together to surround the hotel and surprise his wife in flagrante, therefore allowing him to file for an immediate divorce. He quickly writes the whole thing up and submits it for publication in the next days paper. He of course is written as the innocent victim, his wife the nefarious adulterer. 

The plan goes flawlessly. With his wife out of the way and Susan in love with him, all he has to do is convince her to elope with him which will force her parents into allowing them to marry to avoid a scandal. 

Despite the fact that Mrs. Walter is apoplectic with rage and disgust that her “manstress” is about to become her son in law…there is no way to explain her rage and disgust to her husband without implicating herself as well. 

Duroy’s previous wedding is annulled due to a technicality, allowing them to be married in the church and he finds himself the unlikely star of Parisian society. Everyone of notable personage must be at the wedding and those that don’t make the cut flock to the church to catch a glimpse of the heiress and her husband. The glorious man with impeccable mustache. 

His metamorphose is complete. He is George Duroy.

“He felt little quiverings run all over his skin, those cold shivers caused by overpowering happiness. He saw no one. His thoughts were solely on himself. When he saw the crowd collected- a dense agitated crowd, gathered there on his account- on the account of George Duroy.  The people of Paris were gazing at and envying him.  Then, raising his eyes, he could see afar off, beyond the Place de la Concorde, the Chamber of Deputies, and it seemed to him that he was going to make one jump from the portico of the Madeleine to that of the Palais Bourbon.”

The Prison of Love - Diego de San Pedro

This past Christmas Matthew gave me a stack of medieval literature, all of which looks terrifying and unpronounceable. After a cursory glance, it was obvious that The Prison of Love was by far the shortest, so it seemed like a good place to start. 

In short, this epistolary novella, is a treatise on exactly what not to do when trying to woo a beautiful princess or to be a bit more generalized: a female. 

As the book opens the narrator stumbles upon a furry beast of a man dragging a captive, who is emitting piteous cries. Not cries for help, but rather cries of anguish; an anguish which stems from the knowledge that he has laid eyes on a treasure which will henceforth consume him. While the beast of a man holds a thick shield in one hand, in the other, almost like the proverbial carrot, he dangles before the prisoner the figure of a woman carved into such a brilliant stone that it almost seems to flicker. Periodically a bit of flame leaps out of the effigy and singes the captive’s flesh.

Our narrator, being the inquisitive type, stops to inquire of the unruly henchmen what task he has been given: 

"Traveler, naturally I have not the least wish to converse with you; my office is rather to execute evil than to conciliate with good. But being of noble stock, I will treat you with the grace of my rearing and not with the malice of my character. Know then, since it pleases you, that I am chief officer in the House of Love; my name is Desire; and with this shield I smite all hope, with this icon I kindle longings and with them I burn lives to cinders, as you can see with my captive, whom I am escorting to the Prison of Love, from which death is the sole means of escape.” (1)

All of this seems a bit steeped in histrionics. But our narrator, having just returned home from war, and with little else to occupy his time, decides that this just might be the campaign he has been destined to champion. As he approaches their final destination, which can only be described as allegorical, he disconcertedly makes his way through the prison until he is face to face with the captive. The room is dark and bleak, being illuminated only by the light emanating from the captive’s heart. Despite being continuously gored and prodded, the captive has the fortitude to introduce himself and describe his plight: 

"I am Leriano, son of Duke Gueriso and Duchess Coleria. I am of this kingdom, which is called Macedonia. Fate decreed that I should fall in love with Laureola, daughter of King Gaulo, our present sovereign. I should have fled this affliction rather than seeking it out; but man cannot elude the stirrings of sensuality, as Thomas Aquinas has explained, and rather than routing them with reason, I embraced them with my will. In this way Love defeated me and dragged me to this house, which is called the Prison of Love. Pitiless, watching the sails of my desire unfurl, he condemned me to the state you find me in. And that you should better understand what lies behind it all and the meaning of what you have seen here, you should know that the stone on which the prison is founded is my hope, which steels me against my torments for the sake of the benefits they harbor. The four pillars that rise above it are my Understanding, my Reason, my Memory, and my Will. Love ordered them to his presence before he sentenced me, and that justice should be served, he asked each in its turn whether it consented to his taking me; for if any had not, he would have chosen mercy.” (1)

In a nutshell, our captive has fallen prey to a morganatic infatuation, and while this might bode well for such literary characters like Cinderella, for Leriano the situation is dire. 

Our narrator agrees to be the courier for the “star-crossed lovers”. First he goes to court and after a character assessment of our Princess, decides to approach her and make her privy to Leriano’s plight. Laureola  is initially enraged that our narrator would be so bold, she is the heir to the Macedonian throne, what is she supposed to do? Be courted and wooed by every peeping Tom that comes her way? The outrage! 

But as our narrator watches Laureola’s behavior, he seems to interpret a disingenuity. She sighs often and frequently makes excuses to be alone, ergo she must be in love! And with none other than our Leriano!  Our narrator returns to the prison and persuades Leriano to write a note to his fair lady and quickly Leriano sends off a missive that surely would melt even a heart of stone. With bated breath and amidst much duress, he waits in agony for the response. 

Disclaimer 1: I know virtually nothing about Medieval courtship rituals…so what follows is a very unenlightened interpretation of what went wrong. Perhaps this relationship was always destined to fail, but I see some definite “red flags” that could have been avoided and made his fated outcome a bit less tragic. 

Number one: Don’t lock yourself in a prison made entirely of your emotions and torture yourself on the rack of your desire/ will to live/ hope etc.

Number two: In the unfortunate scenario, where you find yourself in the above mentioned predicament, if you feel the urge to write your unrequited lover a missive, perhaps refrain from calling her a murderer more than you absolutely have to. (Which would equal zero times…)

Disclaimer 2: In a very sad twist of fate, I lost my heavily annotated copy of Prison of Love and had to instead ferret around the internet to find some of the quotes that I wanted to include. (Sources are listed below.) Because of this travesty I will not be able to include all the wonderful quotes about murder or the 35 reasons why women should be esteemed, except from my faulty memory. 

As one would expect, when Laureola receives her love note filled with various histrionic threats and accusations, she is about as enthusiastic as one would imagine. Since Leriano’s genre of wooing is akin to blackmail, she has little choice but to respond to his letter, unless she wants to be known as an infamous murderer of love. She hesitatingly responds with a very cautious letter, which in summary is as follows: Listen guy, since you say you will kill yourself in your hopeless despondency unless I agree to be penpals…I agree. But this in no way means that I love you or even know you. We are strangers. This is not a relationship. 

Her response is interpreted as: My dearest Leriano, I can only imagine what our future babies will look like. Will they have your dimples? (Do you have dimples, I just realized I actually don’t know what you look like, since it is only you that has seen me from afar.) Alas, whatever you look like I imagine to be perfection. I await with bated breath for you to get here and begin the arduous process of courtly wooing which will in no time result in our happy union and by default, your acquisition of the Macedonian throne. 

The letter is the antidote Leriano needed. Within seconds he has thrown off the weight of his chains, the Prison of Love comes crashing to his feet and within a thrice he is hero once more. 

He arrives at court and it is not long before his surreptitious glances and heartfelt looks of mutual understanding find him a jealous rival. This rival accuses the couple of infidelity, and the King quickly throws his daughter in prison and demands that the gentleman fight a duel. The situation disintegrates and Laureola finds herself just days away from being executed. Leriano concocts a brilliant rescue plan and saves her life, and while she races away with her Uncle, his band of essentially merry men face the Kings army with dignity and valor. Eventually, Leriano and his men manage to drag one of the reprobates that was paid to besmirch Laureola’s good name and when he is summarily executed…one would think we were on the cusp of a happy ending. 

One would be wrong. 

Despite Leriano’s bravery and valor, despite his brilliant calculations and commendable leading, instead of receiving medals of honor and the hand of the woman he loves, the plot repeats itself. 

Leriano sends his sweetheart a letter and is again rejected. Despite his bravery, this is still a morganatic relationship. He is still a commoner and she is still the heir to the Macedonian throne. 

As soon as he realizes he is destined to play the unrequited lover in perpetuity, he contracts “lovesickness” and his health slowly deteriorates. While to the modern observer this may seem a bit attention seeking, for the Medieval chivalrous lover this is the honorable thing to do. He will be devoted in sickness and in health and if his presence upon this earth causes his fair mistress discomfort, then he will delicately remove himself from it. 

At one point a friend appears to defame women, hoping to rouse a bit of healthy resentment in our hero. Instead, he does just the opposite, and Leriano devotes his last iota of strength to defending the virtues of women. 

I wish I had my book because out of his 35 reasons that women are to be esteemed there are some real gems. 

Ultimately, as he realizes the end is near, he asks for his correspondence between himself and Laureola to be brought to him. Not once has he mentioned her name, choosing to honor her anonymity; with his last reserve of strength he rips her letters into tiny shreds and swallows them. Having concluded his business of honoring her to his last breath, he succumbs to his sickness of love.

At first I thought there was a similarity between the Prison of Love and the Phaedra plays and novels, whether by Racine, Euripides or Jeffers. The protagonist, usually a woman, falls in love with a man she cannot marry, ultimately committing suicide either out of desire or to preserve her honor. Granted the Phaedra type is always married, so there is a legitimate/ murky incestuous reason that she cannot have the man she desires, who always happens to be her new stepson. 

In these examples there is a clear delineation of where mortals can and cannot tread, and a world of assigned rules and laws governing the behavior of the classes. When the rules are defied, for example when Hippolytus refuses to worship at the shine of Aphrodite, the arrogance toward the gods is met with just vindication. The collateral damage and carnage that is left in the wake of this lesson is almost besides the point, making the suicides less of a plot culmination and more of an aside. 

For the medieval protagonist, lovesickness was a death sentence, an illness of mind and body ignited at the sight of beauty. From the first second we see Leriano, gazing at the face of the woman cast in stone, he is in the process of dying; the malady creeping its tendrils about the unlucky heart. For lovesickness the only antidote is requited love and since he has been destined to fall in love with a woman far above his station, he is destined to die. 

What I initially took as histrionics, may have actually been a fundamental medieval interpretation of science and medicine. He really was being murdered. And in this situation the only option for a man of virtue is to do die gracefully and with honor. 

1: Translation by Adrian West (http://www.asymptotejournal.com/fiction/diego-de-san-pedro-the-prison-of-love/)

Adam Bede - George Elliot

Picture this, you're a girl (named Dinah) and you've recently found Jesus and Methodism and Chastity and you're into wearing super ugly clothing and street preaching around the Victorian English countryside. You travel to the most inhospitable places ever to work alongside coal miners and contribute your wage to the poor. Occasionally when your aunt can't take your prolonged absences anymore, you make your way to your relative's house where you will cook and clean and tend to your nieces and nephews. Yet, while perhaps domestic service can be draining and tending to little “Totty” isn’t always pleasant, since you have plenty of food and are not in contact with people actively dying, this does not classify as a hardship tour. While the luxury you must endure is all very grievous to you....it does bring you into close proximity with the penultimate model of Victorian masculinity: Adam Bede. 

Adam is what everyone would expect of a Victorian hero; chivalrous, hard working, demanding perfection, but willing to pick up the slack that is constantly around him, because deep down inside he realizes he is the only one with standards. He is a woodworker and while at one point he had amassed enough of a fortune to potentially buy into a partnership, he used up the majority of his money to buy his brother's place out of the military and the rest has been drained away keeping his drunkard father solvent. So basically he’s the full package: hardworking, muscley, and a loyal and devoted son. He’s almost just perfect enough for you to reevaluate your life goals and maybe…entertain the idea of falling in love.

Luckily for you, Adam doesn’t really realize you exist. He’s too obsessed with Hetty Sorrel, a coquettish beauty that knows she’s gorgeous and spends too much time looking at her reflection in milk jugs. Hetty, although a cousin, is the exact opposite end of the spectrum, potentially even a different species altogether from your own. While you are industrious, hard working and never complaining, sacrificing daily for the needs of others, Hetty does just enough to classify whatever she is doing as being “done” while resenting the fact that she has to do it to begin with. She hates Totty and spends far too long churning butter. But what she is good at is flirting with everyone and fantasizing about her future. 

As is common with beautiful flirtatious women, she has many suitors, one of which is the most eligible bachelor - Adam Bede. And while she tolerates his overtures and gives him just enough attention for him to think they're basically dating, she is keeping her options open in case a better option presents itself.

Not that you need or even want suitors, but while everyone and their brother is chasing Hetty around, the one brother that seems devoted to you, is Seth Bede. He has become a methodist and follows you around like a little puppy, kind of like a Lennie Small. Seth may not crush you in his big bear arms like a little bunny, but his devotion is of the same caliber. So while a part of your heart is secretly pining for the Bede you can never have, the Bede you never wanted follows you around wanting to discuss your potential relationship. In this scenario, obviously celibacy is the preferred and higher calling. But that Adam Bede. If only he knew how that trashy Hetty was two timing him behind his back…but what can you do. You love that trashy Hetty Sorrel for what she is, a sinner in need of redemption. 

But…you do have a point. Hetty is two timing Adam. And whether Adam is too good natured to notice, or whether he is giving her space and time to look around and weigh all her options, he is confident that eventually she will make  the right decision, and in the meantime he can diligently work to pay off his father’s debt and hopefully accrue enough to purchase a share in the local woodworking business. Then there will literally be no reason for Hetty to not jump into his arms, he is far superior to all his competitors. 

Or is he?

Little does Adam know, but his childhood friend and next in line to be squire, Arthur Donnithorne, has taken a fancy to little Hetty Sorrel. In his summer boredom, while he waits to come into his inheritance (his grandfather while sickly will not die and insists on carrying out all the estate business on his own with little help from the enthusiastic Arthur) he wanders around checking up on the tenants. And one day while making such rounds he stumbles upon the scene of Hetty churning the butter, her dimpled little arms (arms are always little and dimpled in Victorian literature) churning away, a blush upon her fresh cheeks etc. And what can he do but ascertain her weekly itinerary and know just when she will be walking across the green alone. Hm, interesting information. He is not a reprobate. He believes in class order and such, but if he happens to be running an errand at the same time Hetty Sorrel is running an errand…isn’t that more like fate? 

And so, as only luck would have it, after totally not planning to be on the green at the same time as Hetty…he finds himself there, walking in the twilight with a beautiful girl. And for a moment he rues the day classes and social structure were invented, taking offense that one so incredibly beautiful could be relegated to a lower class simply from order of birth. It’s really quite base that such a perfect specimen should spend her whole life scrubbing floors and babies and making gruel etc. But within the next second he is no longer a rational man, no longer a Victorian man, but merely a 23 year old man. 

And so one tête-à-tête leads to another until that fateful day when Adam, whistling a toon and walking through the forrest happens upon the couple kissing under the shade of a tree. Now this is problematic for a bevy of reasons, but to name the top three: 

1: What is a squire doing making out with a milkmaid? That can only go poorly for the milkmaid, and shows very poor character of the squire. While the maid’s head will balloon into enormous self importance, when she realizes she will never be married to the squire and must henceforth live a life of comparative squalor and misery with the gardener…this can only lead to chronic depression. 

2: Why would Hetty be making out with Arthur when she’s supposed to have the hots for Adam? They’ve never exchanged more than a conversational pleasantry and that took effort, they were slowly working their way up, one building block cemented with mortar at a time, to that beautiful day when they had built a bedrock foundation and could finally in good conscience take their first kiss. Now literally everything is ruined!

3: Isn’t Arthur supposed to be Adam’s friend. Isn’t this stabbing your friend in the back?!

For all the above reasons and sundry more, Adam finds himself understandably apoplectic. Hetty runs away and Adam charges on his friend, a true fist to cuffs if ever there was one, culminating in the gentry being landed and Adam feeling less angry…but still pretty angry.

When Arthur regains consciousness, they hobble their way back to the Hermitage which Arthur has remodeled for his obviously nefarious reasons. While Adam scurries around looking for supplies, Arthur, clutching his ribs and internal organs scurries around looking for something quite different: a pink neckerchief. 

At this point it’s all really quite obvious what has happened. But since this in Victorian literature, we gasp, and slowly begin rocking back and forth praying it isn’t true. 

Arthur is persuaded to write Hetty a letter calling the whole thing off and decides it would be best if he joins the military, he can’t sit around forever waiting for his grandfather to die. So he writes his letter and then makes his way to the colonies or the harbor or somewhere very militaryish. 

Meanwhile Hetty, after all only a girl of 16, has been loved and petted her whole life getting the cherry on top in every situation. But now, after falling in love with the biggest cherry and having that love seemingly reciprocated…she gets a “Dear Jane” letter? 

At first her plan is to pretend she’s ok with everything and just marry Adam after all and then slowly maim him with her bitterness…but as the months progress, seven months to be specific, she feels less and less energetic and more cut-off, hurt and confused. She can not marry Adam. It is true now. There is nothing left in her heart, or rather in the shadow that was once her heart. She collects her few insignificant belongings, and makes her way, only a couple weeks before her wedding, to find Arthur and escape into the life that he promised her. 

But of course this plan is impossible to execute, because she has no idea where Arthur is! After she makes it all the way to the address on his last postscript only to realize he has left the country for military training…she has nothing to do but survive the best she can by pawning off her jewelry and special items and trying to make it back home…before the BABY IS BORN! 

But the baby is born. And everything is sad and devastating but also happy in that way only new life can allow. But Hetty is a narcissist and add postpartum depression into the mix of her already high levels of depression and the result is bat #$@^ crazy. So she sneaks off into the woods, two days of motherhood being more than she can handle, and hides her baby in a hole in the ground by a tree stump. She hopes that a goodly woodsman will come along and rescue the baby. She then attempts to escape, but is haunted by the baby’s cries and after she makes her way back to the tree stump the baby is ….dead or gone…I don’t really remember the chronology. It dies. 

So then of course Hetty is borderline catatonic and thrown into prison for the murder of her child, a soul on the cusp of eternal damnation. And that’s where you come in…

You were waiting this whole time, just on the periphery of the scene in some mining town or other inhospitable climate where you tended to the poor, the helpless and the needy, and now you make haste to your cousin’s prison in her time of distress. (You sort of mentioned something like this could happen back on page 12 but now is not the time to mention that). The guards escort you past the vermin and stench filled cells, deeper and deeper into the labyrinthine prison system until a door is opened and you stare into the pitch black room and whisper “Hetty?”

Hetty, barely conscious, consumed with shame and regret at a cellular level, has refused to speak to anyone, but now, after hearing your sweet charitable voice, a spark appears. At first there is resistance to talk, but talk is what you must do, because while the body faces perdition the soul can still be rescued. 

And there you sit for days. Your arms wrapped around your jaded and dejected cousin who has lost everything. Day after day you hold her and tell her the truth: that God can still save her soul. She has already been found guilty, she has already been sentenced to “hanging by the neck until you be dead”…the terror is engulfing, but she allows herself to hope, and she gives her life, the last remaining dregs of it to Christ and meets her destiny with the strength that comes only from Faith. 

Months pass. You’re back in Adam Bede country because his mother is obsessed with you and you're always the first person/ only person she calls to come stay when she isn’t feeling well…which is often. There is now a mutual respect between you and Adam, you both cared for Hetty down to the last second and in doing so revealed a greater depth of character than either of you may have imagined existed. Adam talks to you, walks you home, though never offers you his arm, he seems to think of you as a sister, and while that is so good…it’s also so sad. Your cheeks burn whenever he looks at you with the direct gaze of his, and it’s beginning to become obvious that your affections may not only be for God…

Manon Lescaut - Abbe Prevost

I guess I’ll just start with the proposal, even though that comes a few pages before the close of the novel. 

‘“We are both too sound in heart and soul,’ I said, ‘to go on living in defiance of our duty. It is true that we did so in France, where it was equally impossible for us to give up loving each other and to satisfy our love in a lawful way; but here in America, with nobody to depend on but ourselves and no further obligation to observe the arbitrary laws of social standing and public option, where indeed we are thought to be married, what is there to prevent our being so in fact, and purifying our love by the vows authorized by the Church?’

There seems to be some cavernous hole in the plot that I’m missing. But let’s back up.

We meet the Chevalier des Grieux, looking mopey and despondent as he follows a chained procession of prostitutes that are about to be sent to America as a punishment for their crimes. The narrator gives this seemingly pathetic barnacle some money and a few tender and sympathizing looks and the young man is hurried off. 

Two years later, a “chance” meeting reintroduces us to this young man, now shabbier and with an ambiguous housing situation (i.e. possibly homeless) and bereft of his fair maiden. The young man agrees to follow our good narrator to a pub and once again leach off his good will and generous spirit and as a form of compensation the young man entertains him with the sad narrative of his life. 

The Chevalier des Grieux represents all second sons in a land that practices primogeniture. While he is petted and spoiled he is also completely superfluous, the wealth and title will go to his older brother and he must take up his cross (of Malta - the order his parents intend for him to join), and devote himself to the church as all good second sons do. But upon our introduction, des Grieux is a 17 year old boy in all the biologically predictable chaos of puberty and a life of chastity just isn’t really his jive. 

As he’s wandering the streets one day he happens upon a carriage filled with beautiful women, some about his same age, all about to be forced into the nearest convent for a life of monastic chastity. It takes him one second to realize these women are prostitutes and the next to fall in love. 

“I had not been in love for more than a minute, but already love had so sharpened my wits that in a flash I made up my mind that such a project must not be allowed to blast my hopes. The way I spoke to her soon made her realize the state of my feeling, for she was much more experienced than I was. I gathered she was being sent to the convent against her will, and I see now that it was probably to check the pleasure-loving tendencies that had already shown themselves in her, and that were to bring so much suffering on herself and me.”

I think within the first 13 pages everything is laid out for us. 1) He is the superfluous son of a wealthy family and as such lives a life of little expectations.  As long as he can manage not to completely destroy the family name it’s a no holds barred situation. 2) He never has any intention of legitimizing his union with Manon…she is a one dimensional prostitute and as such gets what she deserves. 

I would argue that this is in no way a love story. A love story is Cinderella being discovered as the only one with an impossibly perfect foot and the waif like structure that can be supported by a glass slipper…and then of course the unlikely situation where class systems and economic striation are thrown to the wind because after one dance and said foot structure the Prince is in love enough to publicly commit himself to this ash maid and make her his queen. Cinderella pulls at our heart strings because we ultimately want to believe that love can triumph over even the most improbable of situations despite what Claude Levi-Strauss has to say about it.

Manon Lescaut  is the antithesis of Cinderella, but also the more pessimistically realistic version of life. 

Upon des Grieux' discovery of Manon he decides he must marry her and free her from her life of forced matrimony to God…only…he doesn’t quite make it that far and instead shacks up with her, hidden away in the labyrinthine streets of Paris. (aka the Prince upon discovering Cinderella to be the proprietor of the sought after foot doesn’t marry her or publicly acknowledge her as his queen but secretly keeps her in a attic apartment in Paris = not a love story). 

What makes this whole narrative so incredibly painful, isn’t the fact that he’s a rich kid with a mistress, but his constant professions of love and introspective soliloquies on his faithful devotion, countered by her fickle nature and predilection for pleasure and conspicuous consumption. His take away 5 pages into their perfect bliss is “everything was so perfect, if only Manon wasn’t a whore and completely unfaithful to me…” 

His lack of agency and actual introspection makes me wish for a time machine so I could travel back to 1728 and punch this fictitious bastard in the face. 

It gets so much worse. 

After his spending money runs out and they are forced to support a meager lifestyle of limited outings and plain food, he notices Manon begins dressing nicer and wearing jewelry he doesn’t recognize…Only to catch her with her new sugar daddy, an old man with an infinite supply of disposable income. Des Grieux can’t compete with this man’s independent wealth and his older brother dutifully arrives and drags him back home where he is lectured just enough to make the reader want to gag, but not effectively enough to lead to character development. 

And so, in what can only be described as a Woody Allen Möbius strip, the plot repeats itself three times, each time the stakes are raised and the consequences increasingly disastrous. At first des Grieux attempts to get over his cuckolding by devoting himself back to the church and a life of quiet thought and contemplation…only to have Manon show up at one of his lectures (presumably on chastity) and woo him back to the life of a reprobate:

“Manon, devil, oh you deceitful devil!’ She repeated, amid floods of tears, that she she was not trying to justify her abominable behavior. ‘What do you want then?’ I cried. ‘I want to die,’ she answered, ‘unless you give me back your love, for without that I cannot live.’ ‘Then why don’t you ask for my life?’ I said now weeping too, in spite of myself; ‘ask for my life, which is all I have left to give you, for you have had my love along.’

The couple finds themselves put in and escaping from prisons and dungeons, dodging dragoons and  militias only to be found time after time by the same old man enraged and apoplectic at their continuous defiance of his right and prerogatives. 

What I don’t understand is if des Grieux had married her from the beginning none of this would have been an issue. Or even after the second plot repetition. But marriage is not comprehensible, because in real life you can only jump one class level at a time. A Maid might marry her boss in Manhattan…but if he’s working, he’s not independently wealthy, the .01%. Des Grieux is the .01%. And in that echelon you don’t marry scullery maids (Cinderella) or prostitutes (Manon) no matter how beautiful they are…unless…

In the last and final plot repetition, as des Grieux finds himself abandoned by the private militia he has spent his last franc on hiring to fight off Manon’s captors, he realizes his only hope is to follow Manon and the other prostitutes from a distance, hoping to be included in whatever plans their nefarious captors have in mind. The plans happen to be a three month boat ride to the colony of Louisiana and forced marriage to a lucky colonist. Des Grieux sneaks on the boat and somehow convinces everyone by his good manners and pathological lying that he and Manon are married and as they disembark to this new world, they are free to begin their lives together as husband and wife. Only…even this concept is anathema to the literati of the French 1720’s. So an elaborate plot twist makes des Grieux and Manon once again run for their lives, this time while pausing to whisper sweet nothings and do acts of service for each other- culminating in the star crossed lovers spending a night in the cold (des Grieux gives up his clothes to make a bed and pillow for his darling love) only to have her DIE FROM EXPOSURE! 

GA. Literally this novella was the worst. 

The only thing more annoying than des Grieux….and he may have been the most infuriating protagonist ever…was his loyal dog of a friend, Tiberge. If it is unlikely to jump more than one social strata at a time, it is even more unlikely that des Grieux had friends. His only form of communication is that which involves asking for money and then spending it all on his prostitute…but while our hero is bereft and destitute in New Orleans, who shows up with a little extra spending money just to check on him? Tiberge!

I honestly don’t even know what genre to classify this in. It took Abbe Prevost 2 months to write this novella and it seems about what one would expect from 2 months worth of work and a lot of coffee breaks. 

Green Henry - Gottfried Keller

In 1815 Switzerland was suffering with its identity. Where did it belong in a world increasingly more global? In an essay by Karl Schmidt ("Petty-State  Malaise"), he describes the feeling of oppression the Swiss felt by their perceived exclusion from history. As the countries surrounding them became players in an ever growing global world, Switzerland was left on the periphery to contemplate its involvement. At some point, it had become incapable of making its own decisions, instead finding its fate dictated by its policy of neutrality.  In this moment of stasis and confusion, on the cusp of a new world order, our protagonist, Green Henry, takes his place among the countrymen and artisans, desperate for a sense of place and identity. 

"In the meantime, however, the softly rustling, artificially flowering springtime that followed the Battle of Waterloo diffused its pallid candle-light in all corners of Switzerland, as it had done in every other country...the honorable Dame Restoration was solemnly installed, with all her handbags and cardboard boxes, and she settled in place, as it had done in every other country."

Green Henry, at the opening of the book has lost his father. He is five years old and his mother and he are now left alone, adrift on the maelstrom of fate. Green Henry's father was a brilliant architect and although he had a short and brilliant career, the small family is left only slightly above the status of destitution.  

The mother, the inveterate spendthrift, finds ways to economize even their meager needs. And while they have little to live on, she forces him to go to the best school they can afford, and he finds himself surround by children in a social strata far above his own. Their teacher is bullied by the children, and in an effort to gain street cred, Green Henry concocts an innocuous plan: the children will march to the teacher’s house in a huge cavalcade and then...won't he be surprised! 

The plan is quickly adopted, gathering momentum, until it seems all the children have gathered and instead of a parade have created a churning mass of chaos and rioting. The neighborhood women hastily close the doors as the mob passes and when they finally arrive at the teacher’s house, the mob has become a beast with a mind of its own. The children pour into the house throwing things and wreaking havoc. They torment the teacher and then at the last minute before the police arrive they all disperse and scatter into the surrounding woods. 

This was not what Green Henry had in mind. But he assumes childhood pranks are to be expected and that at least he has a certain level of anonymity. Not true. His classmates hate him, and quickly place all the blame for the entire endeavor on his shoulders and he is immediately expelled. 

And so begins his phase of the ‘misunderstood victim’. From this point on he carries with him the weight of entitlement, demanding that his mother find an apprenticeship for him as a painter. In the meantime, while his mother carefully spends close to nothing, he spends all of his inheritance left to him by his father on stupid bets and trying to purchase friendship, sneaking one gold piece after another out of the family safe. When he is caught and “punished” he sort of vows never to be so stupid with his finances again…but whether he just has a predilection for financial impropriety or whether or not he is just really stupid…this is a lesson he really never learns from. 

Eventually he is sent to spend the summer with his cousins, where he falls in love with Anna, a young cousin of his and foil for Diana, the maidenly goddess of Nature. At a nearby farm is another young woman, Judith, a widow that has been left well provided for by her late husband and as such is free from all societal convention. Judith is the foil for Venus, a beautiful, desirable matron that uses her prowess for seduction. Green Henry is caught between the two, the innocent virgin and the temptress. He finds a little gray area where he can snuggle Judith while Anna is slowly dying of consumption. 

This polemic will be again repeated with Rosalie and Agnes, the debate between the tamed and refined and the wild and natural, a foil for the greater debate between the transition from romanticism to realism in life and art. 

Eventually, after learning all he can from his teachers, Green Henry decides to kick the dust from his crummy little town off his feet and make his way to Munich to become a real artist. But his images of the grotesque and sublime landscape don’t quite become the hit he was hoping they would. He tries to hunker down and get discovered, but mostly he spends all his money on frivolous things and pretends he’s an artist. 

In this quest to become a real artist he comes across various characters that persuade him of the folly of his spiritualism; scoffing at his lazy imaginings. It’s always easier to invent a little gremlin than to learn from nature and paint what is before you. 

“Spiritualism is that dread of work which is the consequence of a lack of judgement and of the proper equilibrium of experience, and substitutes for the industry of real life the gift of working miracles…[in contrast] All creation proceeding from necessity is life and toil, which consumes themselves, just as, in blossoming, the process of decay begins to draw near; this blossoming is the true labour and the true industry; even a simple rose has to help valiantly from morning till evening with its whole physical nature, and its reward is that it fades. But the compensation is that it has been a real rose!”

While Green Henry may sympathize with this method, he is at baseline lazy. He has been petted and overindulged until the mere hint of work has become noxious. Instead, he quickly spends all his reserve savings and then one by one sells off all his possessions. 

Eventually he is completely destitute and after asking his mother to send him any extra cash she might have lying around, he holds his breath and stays indoors until his ready money is supplied. His mother has been scrimping to an almost maniacal standard. Eating little but broth, having but a tiny candle, which she lights only on the sabbath, she has been saving away all her funds for such a moment as this. Hoping that maybe her son will finally realize how much she has done for him and at least in exchange for her sacrifice offer up even a modicum of gratitude.  But after the reserve funds come in, Green Henry once again returns to his life of excess and frivolity. 

Finally, there is nothing left. In his shame at how quickly he has spent his mother’s money, he decides the best plan of action is to never contact her until he can figure his miserable failure of a life out…but before he hits rock bottom he sells off all his paintings one at a time, followed by his sketches, until at last, he is the proprietor of nothing. As he is about to walk away from the pawnshop, the owner asks if he would like to earn a little cash by painting flag staffs…initially this type of work is repulsive to our hero…but after he realizes this is his only option he gets a quick tutorial and slowly resigns himself to a day laborer. 

Still working with a paintbrush, but now doing actual and substantial work, he begins to slowly build back his integrity. 

“This was a unified, organic existence; life and thought, work and spirit the same activity. But yet there is also a separate, in a certain measure inorganic, life of equal honesty and fullness of peace, that is, when a man daily performs a modest, obscure task to gain quiet security for liberty of thought, like Spinoza, grinding optical glasses. But with Rousseau copying music, the same situation is distorted into something distasteful, since he seeks therein neither peace nor calm but rather torments himself, as he torments others wherever he happens to be.” 

For five seconds I thought the book was going to end with Green Henry realizing he had been a bastard and turning himself diligently to his work, saving up his money to send home to his mother and making reparations for his wrongs. 

Nope. 

He works hard for about a minute. Then heads home somewhat remorseful for treating his mother like crap…only to get waylaid at a Count’s estate and realizes he is an artist after all! He returns home as his mother takes her last breath, overcome with grief and disappointment over how much of a failure her son turned out to be. Her son, in turn, somehow becomes rich and is enabled to live a life of pleasure. 

Judith shows up at the last second and says “hey- I’m really into you, but don’t worry, you don’t have to marry me or even ‘keep’ me. I’ll just live in a tiny house by the river and wait for you to come whenever you want to.” 

The end. 

I recently read a Huffington Post article by Rhonda Stevens about contemporary parenting, (Are Today's Parent's Getting a Raw Deal April 11, 2016) in which the author makes the case that today's children are more demanding, egocentric and selfish than previous generations. The author uses herself and her children as examples. When Stevens was a girl, secretly coveting all the kids with Converse sneakers, she wouldn't dream of demanding them from her parents, but rather when she is presented with the cheap knock off, not only wears them, but even manages to muster a modicum of thankfulness for having shod feet.

Stevens thinks this generation is dealing with the worst kids on record, but I submit Green Henry as evidence to the contrary. I think kids have always sapped their parents down to the last drop. I think this is less of a question on how horrible kids have become, but how overindulgent parenting always results in overindulgent children. 

Rousseau thought children were perfect little examples of the natural element in its purest form, these children needed to be tended to lovingly like a rose, never a harsh word uttered that could crush the integrity of their little petals, encouraged to become the child star and prodigy that they were, coddled indefinitely until upon adulthood they awoke one day to take their place as fully functioning members of society. 

Obviously Rousseau spent little time with 3 year olds. The whole “spare the rod spoil the child” thing is for real. The prerogative of children is to destroy their parents life. They are only kept at bay with full on diligence and calculated tactical resistance. This is a war of attrition and the balance is not in our favor. 

I know a few “Green Henrys” that could have done with a bit less coddling. I’m not saying they should have become chimney sweeps at 3 or something…but I am in favor of some legit hard work and a huge dose of failure. Life is hard. 

By far, the worst part of this book though, is Green Henry’s treatment of Judith. She is faithful, stable, gorgeous…ok she might be 10 years older or something…but that’s nothing right? Instead of even considering fidelity, he refuses to tether himself to her. He doesn’t fear commitment, it’s not even in his lexicon. Sound like a millennial you know? 

So I think this problem of ungrateful, commitment phobic underachievers is not new to this generation, we’ve just started resenting it a bit more. 

Angels in America - Part Two: Perestroika- Tony Kushner

When I was 8 or 9, my sister and I were avidly working our way through the children's library, one book shelf at a time. We would bring home stacks of books and devour them.  Eventually, when I had made my way to the science fiction area and started bringing home books with dragons on the covers, I think my dad thought we had better add some non-fiction to the mix before we ended up in a basement involved in some Live Action Role Play.

I remember walking over to the shelf of non-fiction books thinking, "oh great, I'm going to have to read some boring book about bus mechanics or something", when, what caught my eye was a series on conspiracy theories. Intriguing. The first one I picked up was about the Rosenbergs. Now this was the early 90's, a few years before the VERONA documents would have been released confirming the involvement of Julius. Let's just say it was a bit on the traumatic side. I remember, with unnerving precision, the black and white photos of the electric chairs. I think what I found most horrific though was the idea that maybe, just maybe, they could have been innocent. 

Let’s just say I have a low tolerance for the Rosenbergs being put through any additional, even fictional, ringers. 

Out of all the horrific, in your face obscenity, tricking Ethel into singing a lullaby for her nemesis, is like the powdered sugar topping on a cake made of excreta. But I think it is a good summation for everything I dislike about this play. It’s just too gratuitous. It’s bad enough that Roy gloatingly takes full responsibility for sending Ethel to the chair, he then has to continually thumb his nose at her wandering spirit. Ethel has shown up at Roy’s sick bed to hopefully be the one to personally deliver the news of his disbarment. Ultimately she wins, not only because she is able to pass on the losing tidings of his career, but because in a way she is able to forgive him and offer the kaddish at his bedside as he slowly dies, painfully and in agony. 

I think the most effective parts of the play are the opening and closing scenes, because they tie the play to a place and time and provide a backdrop of contextualism to what is otherwise a gay love fantasy. 

Scene 1 begins with the oldest living Bolshevik asking questions about the future:

Prelapsarianov: The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change? In Time? And we all desire that Change will come. (A little pause, then with sudden, violent passion:) And Theory? How are we to proceed without Theory? What system of Thought have these Reformers to present in this mad planetary disorganization, to the Inevident Welter of fact, event, phenomenon, calamity?…If the snake sheds his skin before a new skin is ready, naked he will be in the world, prey to the forces of chaos. Without his skin he will be dismantled, lose coherence and die. Have you my little serpents, a new skin?

Scene 2 begins where Millennium Approaches left off. Harper is still wandering around Antarctica, but the periphery begins to dissolve. She has gnawed through a pine tree, in part to assuage her grief, in part because she’s on pharmaceuticals, and as the snow melts around her, her mirage drips away. Joe’s form, ungraspable, is the thing that is slowly crushing her with the weight of it’s absence. Her heart is slowly breaking and she reflectively pauses to consider why she is even still alive. Shouldn’t you die when your heart breaks?

Later, while Harper and Joe’s mother, Hannah, take up residency at the Mormon visitor center, Harper will spend her time lethargically watching ‘the great history of mormonism’. In the diorama the Mormon Mother has no lines, but is a passive victim to her fate, while some characters embrace change, desire and progression. Harper is a mirror image of the Mormon Mother. She’s stuck in place, glued to the fantasy of a desire. She is the only truly one dimensional character. Without Joe she is nothing, merely a psychotic wandering the streets of Manhattan in the 1980’s. When for a nano second Joe returns, she quickly hops into bed with him, which is strange and almost out of character, if in fact she had a character to be out of. She is merely a pining away, one dimensional foil for Joe’s desirability. He’s the ‘Marlboro Man’ and both genders are duly attracted to him. When afterwards he once again leaves, unsatisfied, to “go for a walk.”, she’s at the breaking point…but since this is the only place she has ever existed, this doesn’t come across as much of a climax, but more of a “what just happened?” 

To be fair “What just happened?” Is kind of how this whole play comes across. But back to the Bolshevik. It’s 1986. Gorbachev has begun his new economic policy of ‘Perestroika’; a restructuring to reform and preserve the socialist system. The years of fabricated starvation are behind them and the fear and the terror of the Cold War is coming to an end. Change is in the air, and with it comes hope. 

Scene 4 brings us to the hospital room where we have last seen Prior. As the previous play came to a close the Angel had crashed through the ceiling calling out “Greeting Prophet; The Great Work begins; The Messenger has arrived.” We now see Prior reeling from the shock of what he has just witnessed, but while the “Angel” will prove to be inept and reactionary, Prior is competent and thoughtful. It is unclear how or why or for what purpose Prior is called to be a “prophet”…but he effectively serves as a counterpoint for the ineffectual redundancy of spiritualism. 

It is a new world order. God has left in 1906 after the San Francisco earthquake. For 70 years there has been unmitigated chaos. The Angels run hither and thither trying to persuade people to stop moving, hoping that if everyone could just stop, could just remain sedentary, maybe God could be persuaded to come back.

Angel: Forsake the Open Road:

Neither Mix Nor Intermarry: Let Deep Roots Grow: If you do not MINGLE you will Cease to Progress: Seek Not to Fathom the World and its Delicate Particle Logic: You cannot Understand, You can only Destroy, You do not Advance, You only Trample. Poor blind Children, abandoned on the Earth, Groping terrified, misguided, over Fields of Slaughter, over bodies of the Slain: HOBBLE YOURSELVES! There is no Zion Save Where You Are!

While Prior contemplates the Angels injunctions, for a moment it almost makes sense. Maybe he is a prophet. Maybe all of those, dying crippling deaths, in this epidemic of AIDS have caught the ‘virus of prophesy.” 

Prior: …Be still. Toil no more. Maybe the world has driven God from Heaven, incurred the angels’ wrath. I believe I’ve seen the end of things. And having seen, I’m going blind, as prophets do. It makes a certain sense to me. 

Angel: FOR THIS AGE OF ANOMIE: A NEW LAW! Delivered this night, this silent night, from Heaven, Oh Prophet, to you. 

Prior: I hate heaven. I’ve got no resistance left. Except to run.

Act 3 begins with another sort of illogical miscalculation. Louis has had a dream that Joe is in a cult, like the moonies or the mormons or something….meanwhile, we have been privy to their intimate or rather public sex life and it seems unlikely that Louis would not have noticed Joe’s special underwear. When Joe says…’actually I am a Mormon…’ Louis is shocked…(’oh…so that’s what that body suit is…’)  

Louis: OY. A Mormon. 

Joe: You never asked. 

Louis: So what else haven’t you told me? Joe? So the fruity underwear you wear, that’s…

Joe: A temple garment.

Louis: Oh my God. What’s it for.

Joe: Protection. A second skin. I can stop wearing it if you…

Louis: How can you stop wearing it if it’s a skin? Your past, your beliefs, your…

Louis then begins his panicky reassessment, which is his safe place… Louis is all talk, and beneath the very thin facade is a cowardly man with his sexuality being the only dimension he truly embodies. He is a coward because he refuses to stay in any relationship long enough to encounter the truth and the pain that comes hand in hand with love. When Prior is diagnosed with AIDS, he sticks around until Prior is lying prostrate on the floor begging for help. When the ‘Marlboro Man’ becomes a reality; a living, breathing, bisexual Republican/Mormon, Louis runs back to Prior, and Prior, unlike Harper, has the agency to choose not to pick up where they left off. 

As Harper wanders the city with the Mormon Mother from the diorama, she asks how people can change. 

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching. 

Kushner’s world view has changed over the last few years. Now instead of God throwing people willy nilly out of the boat, he is actively tormenting them, and it is up to us, one Howard Beale after another to shake our fists and yell “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” 

Ultimately, Prior isn’t a prophet to humanity, but to the angels. He walks in on the angel equivalent of an office meeting. The angels are wringing their hands over the absence of God and the catastrophe of Chernobyl. Prior walks in, throws down his prophetic mantle and says he’s done with the whole thing. He’s not going to sit around waiting for a God that obviously doesn’t care. They should sue the ‘bastard’ and be done with him. How dare he. 

Throughout this speech, there are 3 thunderclaps, perhaps a reference to the Viconian cycles of history? With the last thunderclap, a new era of history has dawned, the era of men. God is no longer needed, he has failed and it is now time for men to pick up the pieces and make sense of where he has left off. 

In the last scene, Prior, Louis, Belize and Hannah all sit at the Bethesda fountain in Central Park. The Bethesda angel is immortalized in stone behind them. This angel would stir the waters in a pool near Jerusalem, and the first person to touch the water afterward would be healed. Now at the angel’s feet sit the the whole gauntlet of the human race, a WASP, a Jew, an agnostic, a Mormon, a gay son, and a grieving mother. Together, in their unlikely solidarity, they will usher in the new restructured social order, an order without the need for the divine. 

I guess the question that remains, is whether or not this play is still relevant. At one point in the play while Belize, the transgender nurse is taking care of Roy, who is evil incarnate, Roy asks why Belize is helping him: 

Belize: Consider it solidarity. One faggot to another. 

But as homosexuality loses it’s outsider culture, it loses one of the things most integral to its unification. In a New York Times article, “Historic Day for Gays, but Twinge of Loss for an Outsider Culture” (Kantor, Jodi. June 26, 2015)  Andrew Sullivan is quoted asking “What do gay men have in common when they don’t have oppression?” 

The sense of community, the solidarity, shared by the protagonists of Kushner’s plays, largely comes from each character representing an outsider culture. But now, gay marriage is legalized and Gordon Hinckley did his best to white wash Mormonism into an almost palatable brand of Christianity. Instead of reading this play and observing a cast of characters, struggling against the odds to be heard and to have a voice…it feels like a lot of whining, interspersed with a lot of gay sex. Even the nihilism feels a bit worn, kind of like a less successful modernization of Kafka. Rather than take any responsibility or agency, each character has the perfect scape goat to blame for their current hell and like a Kafka character, they wander around, inside what has become little more than a joke hidden behind the buttresses of political theory. 

Angels in America - Part One: Millenium Approaches - Tony Kushner

It is 1985. There is an atmosphere pregnant with hope for the coming millennium, a hope that each year this country is getting closer and closer to truly being a land of the free and a home of the brave, but there is an underlying disillusionment politically fed by the rhetoric of the conservative right. It is the year Reagan doesn't expressly forbid children with AIDS from going to school, but he expresses concern about the possibility of contagion, adding panic to what was already an atmosphere of fear.  Reagan is slow to acknowledge there is an epidemic of HIV. There is a hostile attitude towards the socially deviant, this is the curse given to pay for their sins. Meanwhile, the disease is proliferating with great speed across a country that feels less and less like home for so many. 

Despite the hope that a new millennium may bring, the  play is saturated in hopelessness. The complexities of the shape shifting lines of oppression are at the heart of the political culture and trickle into every aspect of even the most banal daily life. At one point a bleak worldview is offered:

Prior:."I think about that story a lot now. People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable men, irresistibly strong, seize...maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown." 

As the play opens, we are privy to a funeral for an old Jewish woman. Her grandchildren had assumed she died years ago and are shocked to realize she had been alive all this time. She is a symbol of the last clearly definable diaspora. She belonged to a people and a place and is now being buried here, a stranger in a strange land, like the last of the Mohicans - the forefathers of the "American" oppressed. The next scene is a juxtaposition between the old fragmented and forgotten diaspora with the new foreign: Mormons and homosexuals. 

Roy, a successful New York lawyer and unofficial power broker, who is secretly gay and soon to be diagnosed with AIDS, is screaming into multiple phones, while Joe, a young lawyer who is chief justice for the Federal court of appeals, waits patiently for him to finish. As Roy screams and curses, Joe quietly requests: "Could you please not take the Lord's name in vain?" The request is so shockingly out of place it could be in a different language. 

At first Joe seems like a model citizen, no substance abuse of any kind and a respect for order and decency. But beneath the surface Joe wrestles with his own Angel, or rather wishes he was. Despite the fact that homosexuality is a short one way trip to excommunication, he cannot exorcise his demon. He is married and is the proprietor of a sexless marriage. His wife, Harper, was always the wrong kind of Mormon, in a culture where coffee is frowned on for it's addictive properties, Harper has been nursing a rigorous valium addiction.  And two of our protagonists are a closeted Mormon and his 'mentally deranged sex-starved pill-popping housewife.'  

In Harper's defense, her husband has never loved her and the only person that truly listens to her is her imaginary friend/angel/demon, Mr. Lies of the International Order of Travel Agents (their motto is: "We mobilize the globe, we set people adrift, we stir the populace and send nomads eddying across the planet. We are adepts of motion, acolytes of the flux.") Our introduction to her character is through a rambling soliloquy:

Harper: "People who are lonely, people left alone, sit talking nonsense to the air, imagined...beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart...everywhere, things are collapsing, lies surfacing, system of defense giving way...This is why, Joe, this is why I shouldn't be left alone."

While Joe and Harper have a marriage on the rocks, their gay counterparts fair even worse. 

We meet Louis and Prior on a bench in front of the funeral home. It was Louis's grandmother who has just passed away, and as they sit there contemplating mortality and familial guilt, Prior decides since they're on the topic of death, now would be a good a time to bring up his own recent medical discovery...("Bad timing, funeral and all, but I figured as long as we're on the subject of death...") He has discovered large purple spots on the underside of his arm, something that can only bode poorly. He has consulted with the best physicians and his prognosis is grim. 

Proir: "K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death."

Louis: "(Very softly, holding Prior's arm): Oh please..."

Prior: "I'm a lesionnaire. The Foreign Lesion. The American Lesion. Lesionnaire's disease." 

Louis: "Stop. "

Prior: "My troubles are lesion." 

Louis: "Will you stop."

Prior: "Don't you think I'm handling this well? I'm going to die."

Louis does not take being blindsided well. He gets up and wanders off to bury his grandmother and contemplate his options. What kind of person abandons someone in their time of need? As much as he loves Prior, playing nurse to his slow atrophy wasn't exactly what he had in mind. Sickness, sores, disease, these things don't fit into his "neo-Hegelian positivist sense of constant historical progress..." He knows he's a coward, and whatever other epithet fits...but in all honesty the need to have deviant sex in the park, trumps his need for the stability and commitment of a loving relationship. He decides he'll try to stay committed as long as possible...but he doesn't anticipate that being very long. 

Meanwhile, Joe has been offered a position in Washington DC and as he gets back from one of his long walks around Central Park, where he watches things he wishes he could do, but always from a distance, he feels like a move would not only be an incredible job opportunity but would pull him away from this growing desire that he's feeling less and less capable of combatting.  Reagan's Washington DC is a place of hope and promise. 

Joe: " America has rediscovered itself. Its sacred position among nations. And people aren't ashamed of that like they used to be. This is a great thing. The truth restored. Law restored. That's what President Reagan has done, Harper. He says 'Truth exists and can be spoken proudly.' And the country responds to him. We become better. More good. I need to be a part of that, I need something to lift me up...."

Chronologically, I don't think the audience would know Joe is gay until he bumps into Louis in the bathroom and Louis outs him to the audience. Up until this point, Joe has been an almost boringly upright citizen, with the excitement of new job prospects, a strange infatuation with Reagan and a crazy wife. 

When he sees Louis, crying in the bathroom, he's the first one to go further into the room and ask if anything is wrong, if he needs help. Louis tells him he's the first to come in and offer sympathy, usually the door creaks open, and when the intruder notices a crying man they flee post haste, these "Reaganite heartless macho asshole lawyers." Joe defends Reagan, and Louis, somewhat jokingly says "Oh boy, A Gay Republican." Joe is caught off guard. What did he say? Is it that obvious? He protests slightly, and Louis quickly apologizes:

Louis: "Sorry...sometimes you can tell from the way a person sounds that...I mean you sound like a..."

Joe: "No I don't. Like what?"

Louis: "Like a Republican."

A little later in a confusing dream sequence, Harper and Prior meet up and chat about the ludicrous situation they have found themselves in. Harper is a Mormon, she's not supposed to be addicted to anything and yet she's downing valium in 'wee fistfuls'...there's an exchange where she tells Prior that in church they don't believe in homosexuals and he counters that in his church they don't believe in Mormons. It seems as if these little hiccups of unbelief are irrelevant in a mixed dream sequence and they have a familiarity and friendship solidified by the 'threshold of revelation' that is shared by the two dream friends. Harper intuits that Prior is very sick and then asks if there is anything he can intuit about her- "Your husband's a homo." 

Harper: "Well I don't like your revelations. I don't think you intuit well at all. Joe's a very normal man, he...Oh God. Oh God. He....Do homos take, like, lots of long walks?"

Both couples must try to hold together their worlds as they are spiraling out of control, the bottom falling out beneath them. For Harper, being married to a homosexual at first is not as bad as the fear that he will leave her. Prior, on the other hand is left by the one person he hoped he could rely on almost immediately, while he lies sick on the floor, covered in his own shit and vomit. 

Joe has been wrestling for what seems an eternity. He's fought with everything inside him to kill his desire for so long that nothing is left; he's just a shell. An upright, rule following shell, his behavior is decent and correct in the eyes of the church...but he can't do it any longer. He has to go to Washington, now for a different reason, to escape. 

Joe: "I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really remember the story, or why the wrestling- just the picture. Jacob is a young and very strong.  The angel is...a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course...It's me in that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It's not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God's. But you can't not lose."

While Joe wrestles his angels, it seems as if Prior has been chosen by his angel to be the foil for cryptic messages: 

Voice:"...You must prepare."

Prior: "For what? I don't want to..."

Voice: "No death, no: A marvelous work and wonder we undertake, an edifice awry we sink plumb and straighten, a great Lie we abolish, a great error correct, with the rule, sword and broom of Truth!"

Act 3: Scene 2 we get to what could be the crux of the matter. While Reagan has ushered in an era of hope, the end of liberalism, the end of New Deal Socialism, the end of 'ipso facto secular humanism and the dawning of a genuinely American political personality..." Beneath all this rhetoric of democracy and freedom is a deep seated sense of hate. This is the land of the free and the brave, but only in an ontological sense, and only if your ontology matches party lines. In fact, this is a country that while holding the torch of liberty, simultaneously oppresses one preferred demographic at a time, standing on their backs to raise the torch a little higher.  Peter Minuit purchases Manhattan, for some beads and then ten seconds later Andrew Jackson is marching the Native Americans down the trail of tears. The Chinese almost single handedly build the continental railroad, but when gold is found at Sutter's Mill, the Chinese (and Native Americans) are almost completely systematically removed.  Of course then there's our history with slaves and the deep seated racial bigotry. But Louis argues (to his friend Belize, a black cross dresser) that our intolerance is less of a race issue and more of a political one. 

What AIDS has done for this country, during the prosperity of Reaganomics, is to reveal the limits of tolerance and the fundamental buttressing doctrines of deep seated, intense passionate hate. 

While Louis tries to make his argument concise, without offending Belize by negating the enormity of race, his summation is that we lack a cohesive monolith that truly unifies us. We, as a country are fragmented and susceptible to being infinitely tossed on the tidal waves of political uncertainty. Power is the definitive force behind ontology. We have no sense of spirit or spiritualism, we killed off all the indigenous spirits in America along with the Native Americans. 

Louis: "...There are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics, the shifting downwards and outwards of political power to the people."

Going from Federico Garcia Lorca plays to Tony Kushner is kind of like going from tango to rave. While there is the underlying rhythm of a surrealist beat in the tango, and there are motifs and themes that seem complex and unfamiliar...with Tony Kushner you're in a mosh pit with bodies throwing themselves at you and opioid addicted protagonists wandering off into the frozen tundra. There is so much going on. On the one hand it is a narrative of the complexities of oppression and the shifting mercurial demographics of the oppressed, and on the other hand it is a narrative of the disillusionment and hypocrisy of love.