63. Catalysts: Fictions by H. James and J. Coe, reviewed by Sandy
I recently asked Florian, who has Seen It All and Knows All, what I should be studying as an up-and-coming choreographer, and he said that there was one subject not to be scanted: social manners. I think I see what he means. Not only do social rituals sum up group motives, but you can tell a great deal about an individual from the way she or he adapts to recognized rules and regulations. So, I checked out the Ebersdorf Tower’s library for books on the subject. My favorite score was, of course, the 1922 Etiquette by Emily Post. It turned out to be addictive. I can’t get enough of the Post guide to good manners.
Pippa was helpful in pointing out an essay by Edmund Wilson in which he reports that F. Scott Fitzgerald imagined a stage play modeled on Post’s descriptions of right and wrong behavior in “good society”. Wilson describes the novelist’s proposed play: “The element of dramatic conflict would be produced by setting people at cross-purposes through stalemates of good form, from which the only possible rescue would be through the intervention of some bounder as deus ex machina to put an end to the sufferings of the gentlefolk who had been paralyzed by Mrs. Post’s principles.” Wilson goes on to suggest. – and this is really interesting -- that there are fictions by Henry James that rely on the formula that Fitzgerald found in Post’s manuals. Social ritual transformed into art!
I asked Pippa if she could recommend a James work that illustrated such a narrative mechanism, and she identified the Master’s short 1888 novel The Reverberator. This work is regularly described as a light comedy of manners, so I quickly read it from cover to cover. It deals with the engagement and coming Parisian marriage of Francie Dosson to Gaston Probert, a union that is almost thwarted by the machinations of George Flack, a nosy journalist for the American journal, The Reverberator. (Interesting that “flack” later became a term for a type of working journalist.) The narrative metaphor here is, indeed, what Fitzgerald identified: the catalytic action of the bounder Flack’s infatuation with Francie, which leads him to publish gossip about the Proberts that the engaged Francie has conveyed – in all innocence – to his eager ears. The Probert family is scandalized to be exposed to publicity, and this almost wrecks the marriage plans. James’ use of Flack as a catalyst throws many aspects of character into full light: Flack’s own motivation of revenge in being rejected by Francie; the American girl’s touching honesty in refusing to deny that she was indeed the source of the gossip; and the Proberts' eagerness to set themselves up in French society despite their American origin. The Reverberator is very amusing and shrewdly written. And it is all about social manners.
Francie is a fictional sister to James’ famed creation, Daisy Miller, although the novelist provides his new character with a happy ending: Gaston asserts his individual rights over his family’s horror of scandal, and the marriage will take place after all. As you can see, James is no friend to scandal-mongering, which is seen as a prime example of bad manners. The use of George Flack as a narrative obstruction to the rewards of true love has its paradoxical side inasmuch as without Flack’s invasive dynamism the Bossons and the Proberts would end by joining a naïve young woman with a weak young man. The catalyst himself may gain a good story for his readers; Flack loses his love object through not only a lack of taste but what may be an unconscious tendency to revenge. Thus did a great American novelist throw into relief an innate animus within social reportage aborning in the print-conscious nineteenth century (much to the delectation of many newspaper readers on both sides of the Atlantic). Fame -- however disguised -- may hide a destructive energy in its heart.
James published a more famous short novel, The Aspern Papers, in the same year, and it too features a morally unscrupulous, indeed destructive, editor-writer who would use multiple deceits in pursuit of a literary scoop. The narrative in Papers is not so light, and the ending is dark in comparison to The Reverberator. I saw the 2018 movie with Vanessa Redgrave as the ancient Juliana and with the famed actress’ daughter, Joely Richardson, as Miss Tina, the old woman’s spinster-ward. The testy Juliana is in possession of the love letters that a famed Romantic poet wrote to her as his young mistress, and the unnamed narrator of James’ novel must worm his way into the female pair’s Venetian palazzo to try to wrest the hoard of missives before Juliana burns them or is buried with them. In the meantime, Miss Tina falls in love with the narrator, who finds bargaining for the letters involves possibly giving up his manly independence when the spinster indicates that marriage with her is the price he must pay for possessing them. (Juliana has practically tossed her niece into his arms.) James paints a portrait of three desperate social panthers.
The catalytic effect of the bounder narrator upon the “witches” in the palazzo involves revelations of Juliana’s desire to see her niece “settled” before she herself dies. And Tina will exact a final price when she is rejected by what she had assumed was her suitor. Spoliatis arma supersunt! The movie’s director, Julien Landais, also associates the narrator (played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) with what appears to be a coven of Venetian lesbians led by a George Sand-styled confidante. And the film provides soft-core porn sequences that literalize the famed poet’s polyamorist proclivities. (I’m not sure James would appreciate these glosses on his narrative.) Once again, the fiction’s invasive, ethically suspect male has a catalytic effect on others that leads to social revelation. After all, Juliana was able to see her quest for Tina’s happiness put to a dramatic test, and Tina was saved from union with a “publishing scoundrel”. And the narrator was saved from Tina. Fate works in various catalytic ways.
There is a similar situation to be found in a new novel by Jonathan Coe, Mr. Wilder and Me. Coe has written a light fiction involving the making of one of Billy Wilder’s final films, the 1977 Fedora. I have read several of this novelist’s other works, most recently Middle England, which is a serious satire on the State of England under the catalytic test of the Brexit referendum. (England is the third novel in a Coe trilogy that includes his The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle.) My favorite works by this author are What a Carve Up! and Number 11. Mr. Wilder shows that Coe is fascinated by Hollywood movie history and the work there of European émigrés, especially that of Wilder and one of his career co-writers, I.A.L. Diamond.
Of course, everyone has a favorite Wilder movie. Mine is Sunset Boulevard because it reunites two artists who worked together in my favorite silent film, the 1927 Queen Kelly (von Stroheim and Gloria Swanson, as found in the reconstructed version, of course). Sunset gets a little too dark and Gothic for my taste, but Kelly is one of the great directorial achievements of its era, even in its unfinished state. My admiration for von Stroheim’s direction has something to do with the care he lavished on each elaborate scene, so that the stylistic through-line is both taut and suspenseful. You do not know where the action is heading, and everything depends on the moment-by-moment play of emotion in the performances. It is as though you know the conventions that a scene brings with it, but the new particulars are being developed right before your eyes. Thus, the lavish visuals are disciplined by economical yet suggestive details in the playing. I recommend Queen Kelly to all of my friends, and I even judge their sensitivity to the motion picture art through their responses. (The reconstruction is available on YouTube, by the way, so you too can take my test!)
Both Wilder and von Stroheim handily illustrate my theme of catalytic characterizations within social sets. In Sunset Boulevard, William Holden’s young screenwriter finds himself “kept” by an aging Hollywood star, Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson. Von Stroheim (in an acting role) is cast as her former husband and present butler in a creepily decadent villa with a welcoming swimming pool. There is even midnight organ music and a funeral for Desmond’s favorite pet monkey. The dramatic point is that Holden’s boundary-crossing advent pushes the actress deeper into her delusions, which include a comeback performance in a modern film directed by Cecil B. DeMille. The writer’s fate turns out to be as dark as Desmond’s.
In von Stroheim’s 1928-29 Queen Kelly, Gloria Swanson is an orphan girl from a convent in a decadent Ruritanian kingdom who happens to catch the eye of the country’s handsome but bored Prince Wolfram. When the Prince must betray his love for Kelly in order to marry a jealous and sadistic Queen, he is thrown into prison, and Kelly attempts suicide. Von Stroheim’s complete script involved our heroine in a subsequent journey to East Africa where she becomes Queen Kelly, the madam of a lavish brothel, but fears of Hollywood censorship terminated the picture’s shoot. (In the reconstructed film, still photos help to explain the narrative’s second half.) Swanson’s Kelly is rejected or compromised by society. She is the outsider who invades another milieu and, unopposed, might potentially bring about positive change.
Wilder’s 1978 film Fedora is like an updated version of Sunset Boulevard, in that it features an older William Holden playing a down-on-his-luck movie producer who tries to lure a glamorous retired 1930s movie star, Fedora, away from her island villa to make one final film. Fedora resides on Corfu, and when Holden’s Dutch Detweiler travels there, he discovers that the middle-aged star is apparently being held prisoner by an ancient countess and her retinue of well-paid hangers-on. An outsider (Dutch) once again invades an exclusive social situation and, unknowingly, triggers a dire fate. Fedora generates some interest in its second half, when the situation on Corfu is revealed to be quite different from what Dutch had assumed originally, but the first half of the movie suffers from tonal instability. You are never sure how to take the “mystery” of the captive Fedora. Is the film a satire, a failed Gothic thriller, an example of half-hearted Camp? Wilder’s direction feels rushed, unnuanced.
You can read Jonathan Coe’s Mr. Wilder and Me as an illustration of catalytic characterization in two ways. Wilder was a European film writer who came to the United States and established himself within the world of American movie-making. Coe shows young Wilder, self-confessedly, using friends on his climb to the top and later granting career opportunities to youngsters once he has become a world-famous purveyor of screen entertainment. By the time of the making of Fedora, Wilder is having to scramble for funds to finance his pictures. Coe makes use of the many interviews Wilder gave over the years, especially for the Cameron Crowe volume, Conversations with Billy Wilder.
You can also read the narrative as a latter-day memoir because its heroine is influenced by Wilder and his new film toward her future career. The novel is narrated by a young woman, Calista, who serves as translator on the movie crew both in Corfu and, later, in Munich. Calista is an amateur musician, and through her experience with Fedora’s making, she is able eventually to enter the professional world of film score composition. She has a very brief affair with a young man, Matthew, who is freeloading with the Corfu crew. He, a typical male, breaks her heart. He’s the “bounder” in her young life. Years later, Matthew reconnects with Calista in London and offers her a job writing the musical score for a movie he plans to make. The assignment becomes her doorway into the film industry.
In parallel to this anecdote, Coe allows Calista to tell the story of how Wilder helped one of his early lovers, Hella, escape from Berlin with the rise of Hitler and then how he unfeelingly abandoned her in Paris when he acquired a one-way ticket to America – a fateful trip that would facilitate his career as a Hollywood writer of screenplays and then as a film director. This narrative is delivered in the form of a virtuoso film script which Calista imagines could have been written by Wilder himself, perhaps with the help of his collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond (“Izzy” or simply “Iz”). Calista includes in her script a reunion of Wilder with Hella when he returns to Paris to find her married to a man who offered her security following the Occupation. Because of her abandonment by Billy, Hella even spent time in an internment camp. Mr. Wilder and Me is realistic about such moral failures. We again watch characters who enter complex social situations in which it is easy to make mistakes – to show very bad manners – and to exploit situations for selfish or unconscious ends.
The elderly Wilder is allowed to give Calista good advice about her broken heart. When she asks Wilder if he would like another reunion with Hella, he replies, “I’m pleased to report that I have no curiosity any more. What’s done is done. . . . As you get older, the hopes get smaller and the regrets get bigger. The challenge is to fight it. To stop the regrets from taking over.” Coe’s version of Wilder can also be very funny, and he shares his “Wise Old Man” role with the equally smart Izzy of the novel.
Coe’s novelized Diamond has no problem playing second banana to Wilder. He regales Calista with a true story of how Billy wanted to make a film about the life of the great ballet dancer, Nijinsky. In Izzy’s report: “[Wilder] tells a money-man the story of the dancer’s life and the producer is horrified. ‘Are you serious? You want to make a movie about a Ukrainian ballet dancer who ends up going crazy and spending thirty years in a mental hospital thinking that he’s a horse?’ And Billy says, ‘Ah, but in our version of the story, we give it a happy ending. He ends up winning the Kentucky Derby.’”
I wonder if F. Scott Fitzgerald would recognize my literary and movie examples as illustrating his imagined stage play about the difficulties of showing good manners in all situations? I suppose he was planning a story or novel based on the idea, and all I want is to apply my findings to the making of dances. A ballet can be set up with legible rules of behavior, polite stage manners, and acts of mutual respect and cooperation in the choreography. As Florian put it, “A ballet like George Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15 evokes a world where dance conventions are regularly tested through pushing the stylistic envelope. How far can you go and remain neo-classical? In ballet, the movement of the dance is another social whirl with rules that must be acknowledged even when broken.”
I also wonder, too, about my relation with my friend and collaborator Cheryl – are we having a catalytic influence on one another through our dance making? And will that influence be for good or ill? Undoubtedly, some of the ways we inflect each other’s work are unconscious. Perhaps the challenge is to become more aware of what such catalytic dynamics might produce. We are co-influencers. I must be careful how I sway her in her choices.
And alert to how I am swayed by her example.
S.
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