Auld Lang Syne

Auld Lang Syne
Despite the ongoing recession at home, dangerous foreign challenges--Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, Somalia--and a budget deficit that threatens to devour our freedom, I intend to have a great 2010. How exactly do I expect to accomplish this? Lots and lots of Valium. Just kidding. Truthfully, lots of hiking, reading, and positive thinking. What else can you do?

Lately, I've been hiking less (the culprits responsible: hernia surgery and wickedly cold weather here in Hog Heaven), but that's left more time for reading. I've used the time to explore two more authors that I've avoided in the past and another that I discovered just last year. The latter is my new all-time favorite American author, Willa Cather, and the former are British mystery writer Daphne du Maurier and prolific American novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist Joyce Carol Oates.

I can't explain why I never read Du Maurier's classic Rebecca. Mystery is one of my favorite literary genres, and I'm a huge fan of Alfred Hitchcock and his Academy Award-winning film adaptation of du Maurier's novel.

For an updated review of Hitchcock's 1940 production, look here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/jun/30/alfredhitchcock.thriller

For Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley's review of the novel see here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61821-2004Mar15.html

One of the engaging things about the book is that Rebecca, the title character and a major presence throughout, is already dead when the tale opens: the apparent victim of a boating accident. She's also the seemingly much-beloved first wife of Max de Winter, the wealthy proprietor of Manderley, an estate on the Cornish coast.

Mr. de Winter, seemingly overcome with grief, flees Manderley for Monte Carlo where he meets and marries the second Mrs. de Winter, who is seemingly nothing like the first Mrs. de Winter. The original appears to have been smart, fashionable, and universally admired while the replacement is ill-educated, naive, and inept.

The couple returns to Manderley following their honeymoon, but the second Mrs. de Winter is uncomfortable from the first. Treated with disdain by the head of the household staff, the sinister Mrs. Danvers, the new bride fears that she will never measure up to her sainted predecessor.

This is a mystery, of course, and many things are not what they seem. Du Maurier lets the suspense slowly build before revealing the unseemly secrets of Manderley's residents in a fiery climax.

QUOTABLE

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

"I wondered if it was the same in every home, this feeling of exuberance when visitors had gone."

"'Men are simpler than you imagine, my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.'"

"I felt very much the same as I did the morning I was married. The same stifled feeling that I had gone too far now to turn back."
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A confession: I began a novel by Joyce Carol Oates three decades ago but abandoned it unfinished. I don't recall what I didn't like about it, but I avoided Oates thereafter.

Happily, I finally gave the much-celebrated writer another try recently when I stumbled on a copy of Blonde, her brilliant psychological re-imagining of the life of Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe.

There's no mystery here. We know how this story ends: badly. What many readers might not know is that it also begins badly and gets worse. The mystery is that Oates' is able to keep us from turning away from such unrelieved suffering.

Norma Jeane Baker, aka Marilyn Monroe, was the child of an unknown father and an unstable and abusive mother. After her mother was institutionalized, the young Norma Jeane spent years in foster care. Is it any wonder that she grew up desperate for affection? Or, given her physical attributes, that predatory men were quick to exploit her longing?

Almost all of the men who figured prominently in Monroe's short life fare poorly in Oates' rendering: the studio bosses who raped and degraded her; jealous and controlling second husband Joe DiMaggio who beat her; and President John Kennedy who cynically used her before passing her along to his cronies.

Oates is quick to insist that readers approach Blonde as a novelization of Monroe's life, not a biography. Sometimes, though, the novelist's tools yield the greater insight. That certainly seems to be the case here.

QUOTABLE

"[I]n movie logic, aesthetics has the authority of ethics: to be less than beautiful is sad, but to be willfully less than beautiful is immoral."

"'Crying never helps. If it did, we'd all be better off by now.'"

"Any actor is a kind of female."

"'You got the right bone structure, anybody can act.'"

"'Know what celebrity is kid? Being paid to bullshit the rest of your natural life.'"

"'Of course they're deluded, but happiness dwells in delusion.'"
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I celebrated the arrival of the New Year with Willa Cather's novella, A Lost Lady. It's the story of another second wife, in this case Marian Forrester, the young bride of a well-to-do railroad man in Sweet Water, Nebraska at the end of the pioneer era.

Cather reveals Mrs. Forrester through the eyes of Niel Herbert, a local boy with a romantic bent. When the story begins, Niel is a young boy and Mrs. Forrester is newly-arrived in Sweet Water. To an impressional boy, Mrs. Forrester is exotic and larger-than-life.

But, over the years, Niel discovers that his heroine is not what he thought. By the time he's all grown up and leaving Sweet Water permanently, his earlier reverence has turned to contempt.

A Lost Lady is about perception, misperception, and change. It also represents for Cather a return to her most powerful theme: the pioneers who settled the American frontier. Cather's most important work, the novels O Pioneers and My Antonia celebrate the pioneer spirit that conquered a wilderness and defined the American character at least until the mid-twentieth century. See my earlier assessment of Cather here: http://flyover-culture.blogspot.com/2009/09/willa-cathers-america.html

A Lost Lady marks the end of an era: "the sunset of the pioneer." It is a passing that Cather clearly regrets. "The Old West had been settled by dreamers," she has Niel note, "who could conquer but cound not hold. Now all the vast territory they had won was to be at the mercy of men like Ivy Peters, who had never dared anything, never risked anything."

QUOTABLE

"Mrs. Ogden was almost unpardonably homely."

"It was already gone, that [pioneer] age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed."