A Hole in the World

Hugh Wheeler (libretto) and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics and music) [based on a play by Christopher Bond], Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street /New York Uris Theatre, March 1, 1979

John Logan (screenplay), based on the musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler,
Christopher Bond (musical adaptation), Tim Burton (director) Sweeney Todd, the Demon
Barber of Fleet Street / 2007

My companion Howard and I saw the original musical Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street at the Uris Theatre in February 1979, during the last days of its previews. Angela Landsbury (as Mrs. Lovett) and Len Cariou (as Sweeney Todd) were unforgettable and haunted my memory for years, becoming one of my most beloved Broadway memories.

We also saw the PBS production of September 12, 1982, and although we have been unable to track it down in our collection, I believe we once had a tape of that production.

Accordingly, I attended Tim Burton’s film adaptation (screenplay by John Logan and musical adaption by the original author of this version, Christopher Bond) on Christmas Day 2007 with some trepidation. From the first moments of the film, wherein Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) and Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower) step off the ship which has taken them from Australia to London, I felt relieved as it became immediately clear that although Burton had radically changed the focus and tenor of the work, he had retained its operatic-like con-ventions and re-mained loyal to Sond-heim’s dark paean to love and revenge.

Burton has long been aware of the basic differences be-tween stage and film, comprehending that film, in its immense magnification of char-acters and scene, does not always survive theatricality [the reader should note that I personally prefer the theatrical in film; see my essay “Two Theatrical Films” in My Year 2004]. Accordingly, the director moved his camera into the dead center of each room, presenting the bizarre characters (Todd looks like a male version of the Bride of Frankenstein and Mrs. Lovett appears somewhat as a decaying Raggedy Ann doll) face on, giving them a sense of intimacy which neutralizes their bizarre costumes and physiques.

This has the understandable effect of displaying their horrific actions of murder, greed, and cannibalism in a more realistic context; while the stage musical stylized Todd’s throat-slitting shaves with a loud whistle and bang as each victim was sent on his way to the ovens below, in Burton’s always darkened landscape we cannot ignore the bright red blood that spurts out from their necks as we painfully watch the bodies slide into the hellish ovens beneath Todd’s tonsorial tower. The film, accordingly, visualizes what the musical more often suggested, transforming Sondheim’s lighter musical fable into a terrifying peep into a sickened Dickensian world.

Todd sees all of London as a hellish hole in the ground:

There’s a whole in the world like a great black pit
and the vermin in the world inhabit it
and its morals aren’t worth what a pin can spit

and it goes by the name of London.
At the top of the hole sit the privileged few
making mock of the vermin in the lonely zoo
turning beauty to filth and greed….

Sweeney has, as Mrs. Lovett puts it, turned “barking mad,” and there is little to hold him from transferring his hatred of his intended victims—Beadle Bamford and Judge Turpin, who have destroyed his life and taken from him his daughter and wife—and the world at large. As the Judge escapes, Todd, accordingly, lashes out at the whole word, including himself, shifting in one stanza from “They all deserve to die” to “We all deserve to die.”

While Burton’s more intimate approach certainly shifts the focus of Sweeney Todd to the dramatic actions of its characters, it also bleeds almost all humor from the work. One would only wish that, if only for a brief moment, Depp could call up from his grimacing frown a bit of the childish wonderment of his Ed Wood or a twinkle of camp behavior of the pirate Jack Sparrow. Comic songs such as “The Worst Pies in London” and “A Little Priest”—presented in this realistic context—lose much of their energy and nearly all of their satiric wonderment. It’s clear that, while on stage one might be able to sit and share one’s desire to “visit the sea,” in Burton’s version the ever-moving camera literalizes what in the original musical was imaginative leap of possibility. For me the Benny & Joon-like* antics make “By the Sea” a nearly unbearable place to be.

Burton’s focus on the actions of Sweeney’s razor steals from us any possibility of seeing him merely as an innocent destroyed by the society around him; by film’s end we can only comprehend him as a mad murderer caught up in a tragedy of revenge. And without the broader comic redemption of Angela Lansbury’s Mrs. Lovett, Helena Bonham Carter’s character becomes perhaps the deepest villain of the piece, a woman who without even Todd’s justification is readily willing to feed up human flesh to the citizens of London and is wilily able to ponder killing the boy Toby at the very moment of offering her in song his protection of love (“Not While I’m Around):

Nothing's gonna harm you, not while I'm around.
Nothing's gonna harm you, no sir, not while I'm around
. Demons are prowling everywhere, nowadays,
I'll send 'em howling,
I don't care, I got ways.
No one's gonna hurt you,
No one's gonna dare
Others can desert you,
Not to worry, whistle, I'll be there.

Compared to these treacheries, Todd’s vengeful dance with her into the oven because she has lied to him about his Lucy seems to be a personal moralistic piffle.

These very shifts in the story, however, only enrich the tale of Sweeney Todd. While we may miss the devilish merriment of the stage musical figures, Burton’s filmed opera (my friend Howard counted only 10 moments of any extended spoken words in the whole of the work) ultimately brings forth a whole new series of intriguing questions.

While one was willing to suspend belief concerning many issues of the original Sondheim stage work, Burton’s more realistic presentation gives rise to great gaps in logic. Why, for example, in all the time that Sweeney has been imprisoned in Australia—15 years we are told—has the Judge not before imposed himself upon his young change, Johanna. Having raped her mother, are we supposed to believe that he has had any qualms in molesting the minor? How, moreover, has Lucy survived all this time on the streets of London, a world presented nearly as cold and dark as a post-holocaust landscape? Did it truly take all those many years to drive Todd mad? And when and why did Mrs. Lovett arrive upon the scene? How, making the worst pies in London all this long while, has she and her establishment survived? Most of these questions, obviously, lie outside the fable itself, occurring as the many layers of this tale accrued in the variant versions from 1846 on. We have little choice, accordingly, but to understand the characters and their actions as having grown out of a fabulous void, a kind of hole in time, a great standstill that needed the return of Todd and the arrival of his innocent friend Anthony Hope to oil up the gears of the awful machine of hate and reaction that destroys each generation. By the end of this bloody tale the young Toby has become a murderer and Hope and his lover Johanna have become entwined in the savage deaths of nearly everyone around them. What, we wonder, will be their legacy 15 years hence?

___
*Ed Wood was a character portrayed by Johnny Depp in Burton’s 1994 film by that name; Jack Sparrow is Depp’s character in Gore Verbinski’s three-part saga Pirates of the Caribbean (2003-2007); in Benny & Joon (1993) Depp plays a mentally-disturbed young man who models himself on comedian Buster Keaton.

Los Angeles, January 1, 2008

The Perfect Servent

Olivier Cadiot AWOL in performance

Olivier Cadiot Le Colonel des Souaves (Paris: P.O.L, 1997); translated from the
French Cole Swensen as Colonel Zoo (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006).
Olivier Cadiot Le Colonel des Souaves, directed by Ludovic Lagarde. Performed at
Théâtre de la Colline, Paris, May 14 to June 20, 1999/59E59 Theater, New York City,
November 3-4 2005.

The Colonel of the Zouaves, published by my Green Integer press, was translated by Cole Swensen as Colonel Zoo, since, she argued, few Americans would understand a reference to the Zouaves (the French corps first raised in Algeria in 1831, recruited originally from Zouaua, a tribe of Berbers), best known for their colorful dress and their fighting in 1914-1918 in the First World War. Perhaps Cole did not know that there was also a regiment of American Zouaves (named after the French unit) who fought in the Civil War, and as they vanished from the U.S. military were transformed into what we now call the National Guard! In any event, she felt she captured the sense of zaniness their name called up in French culture with the suggestion of a zoo-like atmosphere.

The fiction begins with the arrival at a grand country home—the same kind of country house portrayed in Renoir’s Colinière and Altman’s Gosford Park—of a tall, elegant man “impeccably turned out in ostrich-skin driving shoes, jodhpurs inched just below the knee, and a Harris-tweed jacket over a blindingly white shirt with a jaunty open collar”—in short, a kind of moderne Zouave—who, as he leaps “gracefully” over the low door, crashes to the floor, breaking his ankle. A fleet of valets comes to his rescue, signaling the arrival of our narrator-hero, alias John Robinson, who is either the most conscientious butler who ever existed or an utter lunatic.

Much of the fiction’s humor—and, in the tradition of the British dialogue novels by Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and others, this is a satiric work—are the butler’s multitudinous attempts to improve his body and service. He runs daily, fishes the nearby ponds, and daily lectures the other servants on methods from respectful salutations to the exact curvature of the arm holding a serving platter and appropriate nods in response to the approval of the dinner guests. His fellow-servants are made to run, swim, climb trees, and various other activities in their spare time in order to improve their perfect servitude.

Much of this process of self-improvement is also used by the butler to overhear the conversations of the guests and gather information in what the reader increasingly perceives as both a possible sexual assault of one female guest and a political assault on the upper class. Unlike the perfect servant of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Stevens, who politely ignores the pro-Nazi discussions of his master’s events, Robinson absolutely delights in repeating the uncompleted phrases of abuse of those outside the society gathered at the dinner conversations over which he presides, phrases which poet-writer Cadiot hilariously presents in poetic stanzas:

Who pays in the end
who pays the subsidies?

They’ll be in our place soon
it amounts to the same thing
there’s always a high and a low

Later:

We need a governmental decree to extract
a priori this mental gangrene

If a citizen has a rotten limb
cut it off no time to stand around and talk about it

And if there’s no more either Major
you go ahead with it anyway

Bite down on that my boy
stick a bit between his teeth
and off you go.

If Robinson is frustrated at times with his fellow-worker’s lack of comprehension, he is understandably infuriated by the dinner-time chatter of those whom he serves, and seemingly leads him to work even more furiously to improve himself—or to further his hidden plan.

Ultimately, he moves so gracefully, so unobtrusively that he almost blends in with the furniture, the walls, the rugs, allowing him further opportunity to explore contents of secret drawers and shelves. If occasionally he is caught by the master and guests in a thoughtful pose or perceived in a place where he should not be, he quickly turns his behavior into a kind of theatrical performance which, since they have the attention span of a mosquito, quickly puts them to sleep.

Yet, Robinson’s maneuvers become more and more complex as he imagines and devises numerous time-saving devices and even a secret code between himself and the other servants:


“Beautiful day today” means “Change the silverware.”
“Oh, yes…” means “more bread.” Advantage: no more
foot bell or morse code (source of much error and confusion…

What, we ask, is he after?

Even as he imagines an escape to a “rented apartment” with the woman guest for whom he lusts, the reader cannot comprehend the reasons for such maniacal servitude. But then, what is any servitude but the erasure of the self? As the butler slowly transforms into a spy and, finally, into the tripping American hero, the story collapses into a game of Clue with a murder in the mansion, the reader coming to recognize that that erasure is exactly what Robinson seeks, ultimately suggesting that he himself dress as the figure of the first scene:

…Stuff cheeks with special gum. Dye hair with black
wax. Glue on false badger-brush moustache. Tri-focal
glasses with tinted contact lenses. Shoes done up in
imitation ostrich-skin. Riding breeches. Hazelnut crop
in hand. Sharp tweed jacket. Stolen white shirt…Turn
into the drive between the open gates…Cut the engine.
Leap over the low door, legs first followed by
the head levered by the arms. Hop. Twist of the hips,
and land, both feet on the ground.

And with that, his Zouave-like (and zooish) maneuvers are complete.

I found the novel a joyous pleasure—how could I, who published, it admit to anything less? But the play version of the work, directed by Ludovic Largarde and performed by Laurent Poitrenaux in Paris in 1999 and 2005 and for two nights in New York in 2005 was even more exhilarating. I attended the play with Charles Bernstein at its premier on Tuesday, November 3rd at the 59E59 theaters in New York. The solo performance was absolutely remarkable, relying as it did on a single actor who, along with appropriate sound-effects, brilliantly imitated the various voices of the perfect servant, Robinson. American actors are trained, perhaps, to find one or two voices most appropriate to their vocal and emotional range; but Poitrenaux is a performer at ease in numerous contradictory roles, the perfect match for Cadiot’s would-be social climber determined to transform himself from butler to a kind of “unknown” guest of the manor house by developing his body while thoroughly erasing any evidence of self—which is, the author suggests, what society demands of all those aspiring to the upper social class and wealth.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the American dramatic version of Colonel Zoo, A.W.O.L., directed by Marion Schoevaert. But the use of multiple actors in a far more complex script suggested to me that it might lack the direct comedy and insane transformations of the French production.

Los Angeles, September 15, 2006

I first met Olivier Cadiot at a dinner given by Dominique Fourcade in Paris in early 1990. Dominique correctly perceived that we would like one another, but given our equal inability to speak each other’s language, we mostly sat staring, all in smiles. Dominique and his wife occasionally attempted to translate, but that is always a difficult role, and one seldom enjoyed by those upon whom it is imposed.

The next time we met was when I was reading in Paris at the Biennale Internationale in November 1997. We met at a café near where I was staying on the Left Bank. By that time Olivier had become a quite noted poet in France, in part because of editing Revue de literature générale with Pierre Alfieri. He had obviously also been studying his English (while I, admittedly, made no headway in speaking French) for he spoke rather well by that time, and at this meeting, I felt, we more thoroughly got to know one another. I took his photograph, which we used on the cover of our publication of his Art Poetic’ published by my Green Integer press in 1999. I published his Colonel Zoo to coincide with the dramatic performances of that fiction and his other dramatic works and adaptations in 2005.

Los Angeles, September 16, 2006

Five Tales from Ischia: the 5th Tale (The Trip to Amalfi)

Ravello in the light

A Ravello ceremic shop

The street below my entry room window

My balcony at Smeraldo

A view from the front of the balcony at Smeraldo

A Positano ristorante at midnight

Some of the Chapman students: Danielle soucy, Kellye Zollers, Jaclyn Javier, Midzara Pencenkovic, Wesley Frazee, and Hyrum Taylor at my vineyard reading

Jean-Luc reads the Italian. All the women students (and I) were agog!

From Pompeii Marty, Rebecca, the two students, and I had planned to travel up the Amalfi coast to the small town of Praiano, where Rebecca had found a hotel in which we would stay the night. Somehow, however, we missed the coastal road, and Marty decided to take the mountain route, coming in from Ravello and driving down to Praiano.

For what seemed like forever, he darted down side streets in the town near Pompeii, but we soon lost any signs that might indicate the direction of the road we were seeking. Indeed, there seemed to be no other path, and we repeated it several times before pulling into a small gas station. Suddenly two beefy men, covered with grease came forward as Marty, speaking in Italian, attempted to get directions. The bovine mechanicals looked us quickly over, as one leaned into the car on Rebecca’s side where a map sat on her lap. He began to speak and soon after reached in and pointed on a spot on the map, the other quickly followed his lead, furtively placing his hand on the map as well. All of us looked on in consternation and they joyfully punched at the map, pleasuring themselves, evidently, by touching the paper that separated them from Rebecca’s crotch. We quickly pulled away, realizing that we would never receive any cogent information from them.

Soon after we pulled down a side street, stopping in front of an old man who stood on the sidewalk. Marty called out to him, again explaining what we sought. Suddenly the man beamed a huge smile, as if absolutely delighted with the question, almost as if he had been waiting his entire life for just this moment. He moved a bit forward and began to talk:

Abon me uh da umm bunbun ju jee gon abonma fe quo ja ja,

he mumbled, continuing for a long while in a private language of babble of which none of us could discern a single recognizable word.

Me a mo abon jug on de de mmmmm aaaabbbbb jjjjjjooooooo,

he continued, smiling beneficently. Daniel and Nidzára had slipped to the floor of the back seat in uncontrolled giggles, as the remaining three of us sat erect, pretending a friendly comprehension everything the old geezer said. I waved to the students, hand out of sight, to pipe down, but they simply could no longer hold it in as we continued the charade.

Grazie, said Marty as he began to drive away. We had moved only a few feet when Marty stopped the car as we all exploded into gales of laughter.

Another circle around the area brought us to a gellati truck, where this time Rebecca asked for directions in Italian. The gellati workers said they would be happy to give directions—if we would all buy ice cream from them. Rejecting that idea, we drove away, one of them jumping onto a motorcycle that began to follow us, finally speeding away in a whoop of derision.

The only thing we could imagine now was to turn around and take the same route in the other direction. Sure enough, a large sign proclaimed the way to road we had sought!

Soon we were approaching Sorrento, thereafter, climbing into the mountains on roads so narrow that when a bus approached, we had to pull over as close as we could to the treacherous lip of the highway just to let it pass. The drive continued in an excruciatingly terrifying trip that, from time to time, triggered my sense of vertigo, forcing me to simply close my eyes. But when I did open them, briefly, I witnessed beautiful sites.

After winding up and down the mountain trail, we reached Ravello, where we stopped, grabbing up the only parking space that seemed to remain, to tour that small, lovely city, celebrating its annual music festival. The square at Ravello looks out over the mountains on one side, flanked by two large cafes at the center of which sits a lovely white, stucco church. The light was absolutely luminous, reflecting, so it seemed, the colors of the large stanchions of flowers that stood about the place.

Ravello is also the center of a region famous for its tiles and mosaics, and several of the shops were devoted to that craft. A gallery, showing work by Yoko Ono and other performance artists was of particular interest to our small group. We also attempted to enter the church where many of the festival’s concerts were held, but it was, at the moment, closed. We walked about the town for an hour before returning once again to the road.

We passed the town of Amalfi, reaching our destination, the hotel Smeraldo in Praiano. I don’t know how Rebecca had discovered this gem of a small hotel. A recent check of hotels in Praiano on the internet showed ten hotels, without listing our choice. But once we had reached our rooms, we had all fallen in love with the place.

What a surprise then to find these exceptionally beautiful accommodations—Marty and I stayed in the hotel proper, while the students slept at a hotel apartment (three bedrooms, a kitchen and a bath) across the street—all for a nightly rate of 140 Euro.

My space had its own entry room off the street (a stairway with what seemed three million steps to the sea—Marty later reported that he’d been told it was actually 400 steps!) That room, like the bedroom, was completely tiled in red, containing two stylish chairs, paintings, a large mirror, and a window that opened up to view those never-ending steps. A sizable bathroom stood off to the side.

The bedroom itself was designed in a style that I might have described as “sheik monk,” crosses hanging over the large double bed and another single bed (for any alter boy I might meet, I guess). The room, even by American standards, was gigantic, with a full desk and a huge dressing cabinet.

On the balcony was a round, stylish metal table appointed with two Mediterranean-style chairs. In both corners of the balcony sat marine-blue lounging chairs. The view from the balcony, both from the front and the side was spectacular—the sea below and the coast line, with a view of the entire city of Positano. For the first night a large yacht lay moored beneath my window. Marty and Becky had a Jacuzzi on their balcony, a couch in their room. But I liked my room better.

We had a pleasant dinner at the hotel restaurant, home-made thick, flat noodles for primi and grilled fishes (sword fish and large prawns) for the secondi. We ordered a bottle of white wine and Daniel had brought a gift of a very good red wine.

After dinner (11:30) all came to my balcony to the watch the holiday fireworks in the ocean

below. Tentatively the Nakells and the students wondered what I might feel about staying on for second day. “Oh, we must!” I readily concurred, “We’re in heaven.”

The next morning we all got up rather late for breakfast. Marty was especially exhausted from all the driving. As in Ischia breakfast consisted of beautiful rolls, breads, jellies, fresh fruits and meats—prosciutto, Genoa salami, etc.—and juices, thick muddy coffee served with hot milk.

I toured the small city after, walking down some of the 400 steps and back, visiting the lovely church of S. Gennaro, and stopping by the local fruit stand to buy some water and a peach. Marty and Rebecca were obviously off on their daily wander, and the students (we discovered later) were walking almost to Amalfi, running up and down the 400 steps and doing various other endless activities.

I determined to return to my beautiful balcony to finish my essay on Marinetti. The writing moved quite slowly, but I plodded through into early afternoon and finally completed it. I briefly napped and then begin reading IT, an exceptional book of poetry by the Danish poet Inger Christensen. It was truly pleasant in the blue lounging chair. What bliss!

The Nakells briefly stopped by before retiring to their room next door. We decided to dine at a restaurant at the bottom of the 400 steps at 7:30.

I retreated to a nearby bar, sipping on a campari, nibbling on prosciutto, crustini, and green olives while reading my book.

At 7:00 we met for the long descent. Marty, Rebecca, and the students all chose one of the daily fishes, while I selected a local squid, cut differently than calimari, into long strips and served with fried potato rounds. It was excellent, and I far perferred my choice to theirs. They all had marzipan fruits stuffed with gellati, I a slice of lemon cake for desert.

It was now quite late, and we knew we could never again climb the steps. So we took the advice of the waiter and took a water taxi over to the neighboring city, Positano, planning to return by land taxi by to Praiano. There’s something truly exciting about being in a small boat in the ocean in the middle of the night!

Positano at midnight was a madhouse of celebration, filled with young and middle-aged, rich, loud frat-boy and sorority girl types, women dressed up in bizarre fashions that made them look more like call girls than the attractive, wealthy women we knew them to be. It was the first time I had heard so much English since I arrived. The whole city seemed to be literally partying, hopping with drunken whoops of noise. I didn’t like it, and, like some Puritan elder, led the way through the narrow streets up and up where we might find a taxi, the others trailing in their obvious desire just to wander about. When I arrived at the point where I recognized a taxi might appear, I could see the Nakells conferring with the students, and soon Becky came forward to announce that they wanted to stay on in Positano for a while. Fine with me, I responded, but I was taking a taxi back. I was tired. It was now 1:00 a.m. I told them to go on and enjoy themsevels, but as they often do, they stood frozen in place, and when the taxi finally appeared, Daniel suddenly decided to join me. He had seemed to be in a kind a funk all day. And the next morning he explained that he had run out of his thyroid medicine, which had drained him of energy. By that time, his whole personality had returned to normal.

Marty and Rebecca, so I later found out, had sat with Nidzára in a bar for a while, before wandering on, until someone poured a bucket of water upon Rebecca from a window overhead. By 1:30 I was safely snuggled up in bed.

The morning after we had returned to Ischia, I taught Marty’s class, discussing my publishing activities and attempting to explain what publishing was in relationship to being a writer. Then I turned to my own poetry, Bow Down, a book in both English and Italian which they had previously read. It went nicely, although they had only a few questions.

I then walked into Forio again, forgetting it was a holiday. The town was dead, with no shops open except for the bars. I sat at my favorite, Bar Maria, for a single campari, where I caught up on my daily journal and attempted to make some notes on Paul Auster’s novel, Oracle Night, which I’d finished reading on the plane.

The next day I returned to Forio, where I had a lemon-lime soda at Bar Maria writing letters and updating my journal. I returned to the hotel, read some, and wrote a little before dressing for my scheduled poetry reading at a nearby vineyard.

We took a taxi to the vineyard up the hill further from the hotel. It was a lovely spot, under a parabola of grapes where visitors come to taste the wine. The vineyard also served dinners (everything grown fresh, fish caught in the sea below and rabbits trapped in the hills about), and the Nakells and I decided to return for dinner two days later as my going away celebration. Since everything was cooked to order, we were asked to decide on our dinner choices ahead of time. I ordered the rabbit. But Marty and Becky couldn’t escape the vision they’d had of a man with a bag of rabbits they’d encountered in Ischia Ponte a few days earlier. Obviously he was on his way to slit their little throats!!

The reading was attended by the students and two British women doctors (M.D.’s) who had happened to visit the vineyard from their hotel in Ischia Porto. It went very nicely, with the handsome Jean-Luc (the manager-owner of this small winery) reading three of the poems in Italian. He was an excellent reader, who told me he’d performed all the Goldini plays in high school.

We then returned back to the hotel for a dinner of pasta and fresh pesce, retiring to the terrace to sip a dessert wine Marty had purchased at the vineyard. It had four fruits—apricot, cherry and two others—consisting of 45% alcohol content! Our waiter, Augusto, served it up like it were wine (the bottle might have lasted for many months) and Marty and I had no choice to drink up the brew right there and then! I woke up the next morning slow and achy, not quite awake.

Rebecca reminded us why we were feeling so groggy!

I had slept well again, however, listening to the ocean waves all night.

The following day, July 4th, Marty took the students on a boat trip around the island of Ischia. Already filled with good memories and needing to get some time to write, I stayed behind to work on my essay on Auster. I read, and caught up with my cleaning. Despite all the shirts I brought, I didn’t bring enough clothing for all the heat and perspiration I had endured.

The meal the next evening at the winery was excellent, a perfect balance of each course and pre-selected wines—but it was so filling I was almost ill. Besides, I was now quite depressed. In another day I would have to leave Ischia, when I felt my time on the island had just begun. By now, however, most of the Germans had left, and the Neapolitans—not at all appreciated by the local Ischians—were soon to arrive.

At a birthday party for one of the students, Wesley Frazee, I sadly said goodbye to the hotel staff and students. The next morning Marty and Rebecca went with me by taxi to the ferry for my last trip across the bay. “I can’t leave yet,” I protested. “We never did get to see Amalfi!” By midnight I had flown back to Dublin, leaving for Los Angeles again early the next morning.

Los Angeles, July 9, 2007

Five Tales from Ischia: the 4th Tale (Cities of the Dead)

The ampitheater at Pompeii

Pompeii ruins with Vesuvius in the background

Ruins at Paestum

Marty and Rebecca entering by the Temple of Athena

A few days after my arrival on Ischia, Marty and Rebecca decided to travel during a holiday weekend to Pompeii and on to the Amalfi Coast, asking if I’d join them. Two Chapman University students, Daniel Fingerhut and Nidzára Pecenkovic, joined us. Daniel was a sensitive Jewish boy who kept kosher (nearly impossible on the Mediterranean diet), Nidzára a beautiful Muslim girl with similar dietary restrictions (nearly impossible on the Mediterranean diet). The other students in Marty’s group had decided to spend the weekend in Rome.

We took the 9.00 a.m. ferry to Naples to pick up a car before setting out on our travels. To get to the car pick up spot, we had to break up into two cabs, I with the two students had a driver who, when he overheard me say something about Norway, asked if I spoke Norsk. Suddenly we were talking Norwegian! He was Swedish. I remembered more of the language than I had for years, in part, I suspect, because speaking Norwegian was almost a refuge in the strange city of Naples, a city at once beautiful but absolutely ugly, poorer than nearly any European city in which I’d traveled—and a more dangerous one.

Our Swedish driver had obviously learned to drive like a Neapolitan, which means operating the vehicle almost as one might a Sherman tank, moving fearlessly in and out of traffic on both sides of the street, even onto the sidewalks if necessary. Since nearly all the others cars drove in a similar pattern, the driving event was more like a bumper-car derby than anything else.

In any event, we eventually found the place, picked up our car, and inched ourselves into the same traffic. Marty, it turned out, had learned to fend for himself, darting into the oncoming lanes with the greatest of ease, even driving, at one point—when we had missed the turn-off for Pompeii—over a concrete medium, as others had done before us, to reach the coast highway. The authorities, in their inexplicable wisdom, had put the sign on the wrong side of the road.

We soon arrived in Pompeii and spent several hours walking through the vast ruins.

I hadn’t imagined the enormity of the space. Pompeii was, after all, a city of about 20,000 people at the time of Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 A.D. Although the city had already severely suffered from an earthquake in 62., some of Pompeii had been rebuilt before the volcano.

As I entered the gate to the city, I overheard a young boy ask his mother how did the city get destroyed by the volcano since clearly Vesuvius was too far away from the lava to pour out over it? She had no answer.

Hours later, after we had toured much of the space—one could spend days wandering down every street of the entire space—we stopped at a nearby pizzeria before continuing on our trip. I repeated the young boy’s question, and suddenly we heard a voice of a middle-aged woman from the next table (there is always someone in my adventures waiting at the next table): “The child was right. The people of the city did not die from the lava but from the smoke and ash which fell over it a few days later. Actually, most of the population had evacuated the city by that time, and only 2,000 people actually died of the gasses and ash, those left behind, mostly servants and the children of the wealthy for whom they cared, along with pets.” The woman was an American Latinist, visiting from upstate New York. For about a half an hour she gave us an informative short lecture about Pompeii, Herculeum (where the escapees were buried in caves into which they had retreated) and Paestum. She seemed apologetic for her erudite talk, but we were all transfixed by the information she supplied—a performance far more entertaining than a standard Baedeker entry or conversation with a local tour guide.

A couple of days later, we visited Paestum, after a leisurely drive from Amalfi. I had long known of Marty’s and Rebecca’s tendency to wander, having previously travelled with them to Northern California, and, although I desperately tried to resist my instincts for organized and planned behavior, by this time I had begun to show some impatience with their sense of timelessness.

Although I had hoped to get an early start on our trip to Paestum, where we had decided to go before returning to Naples, I knew that Marty and Rebecca would never be able to rise at an early hour. So I slept it until 8:00. I was surprised when they telephoned me. They were having breakfast already! But it still took another two and one-half hours to get through check out and to gather the students. It was 11:30 before we returned to the road—Rebecca (with the smallest bladder on the earth) had to pee, so a stop in Amalfi would be necessary.

Actually, we had all wanted to visit Amalfi during our stay on the coast, but when we finally reached the town, no matter where we looked, there was no parking. At the beach, Marty attempted to drive down into a lot that looked filled to me, and then, because of traffic, he was unable to exit, and was forced to back up—while several shopkeepers along the way gave various and contradictory instructions—what seemed like miles in a lane that was hardly wide enough to edge forward, let alone to speed away in reverse. Miraculously, he achieved our backward ascent, with a car driving toward us all the way up! But now, it was clear, Amalfi—which truly did look like a beautiful city—was out of the question.

We stopped instead in Maiori, where Becky and Daniel decided to get sandals made, while Marty got hungry and ordered a plate of mushrooms, cheeses, and olives. We weren’t on the road again until 2:00. Then, just before Paestum Marty had to stop for the famed local product of Compania, Mozzarella di Bufala (Buffalo milk Mozzarella). It was delicious, I admit, and well worth the further delay.

But we didn’t reach Paestum, the 7th century B.C. Greek City lying in that countryside, until 5:00. And we had still to visit every tourist shop in Paestum, eat gellati, consume a few more drinks, and tour the ruins before we could even begin our return to Naples, which would acquire several further stops along the way. I pondered if it would be possible to reach the last ferry in time. Oh well, I said to myself, if we miss the ferry, to quote both the Bourbons of Naples and James Bond, I’ll “see Naples and die.”

We had agreed to spend only an hour in Paestum, although I knew from the start that it would take longer for Marty, Rebecca, and the students to accomplish the task. I immediately bought my ticket and entered, and even as I moved toward the larger temples in the far distance, I knew I would have toured the entire place before they even entered it. They could not resist the many tourist shops gathered at the gate.

This fabulous Greek city on a flat dusty plain beside the ocean is an awe-inspiring sight. This is agricultural Italy, and corn and other crops grow up right to the fences that separate the ancient site from the farms hereabout.

There were three major temples: the Temples of Hera, Apollo and Athena, all in quite good condition, along with the amphitheater.

I walked very slowly to the far end of the site, discovering a beautiful tree-covered ristorante with a bar at the far end, where I sat down and ordered a campari and soda. After finishing it I returned to the park, having seen almost all of the major sites. I tried to dawdle, even loaf as best I could, wandering back toward the first gate, where the lovely white Temple of Athena stood. But all of this took only about thirty minutes. There—as I had predicted—came Marty and Rebecca, having finally entered the place.

I’m not complaining in reporting this; their sense of time was just different from mine, and as much as I tried to accommodate for the strolling-wandering life, I remained more clock oriented. I was impatient. But they so enjoyed their journeys, and the two of them were so similar in their patterns, that it was really was quite lovely to observe their peregrinations.

I left the park and sat at a café with another campari. Fortunately, the drink is light and not terribly alcoholic (and relatively inexpensive—each about 4 euro). I waited forty-five minutes longer for Marty, Rebecca, and the students to return. Then, as I had predicted, they had to have gellati, buy some water, and wander about the tourist shops a bit more! We left Paestum finally, at my urging, at 6:30 p.m.

Almost immediately we were in a long line of cars stalled bumper to bumper to Salerno and the entrance of the autostrasse. We thought perhaps that it was the pay lines at the entrance that had so held back traffic, but after about an hour and a half, we saw that it was the autostrasse itself that was backed up! We entered the highway and sat in bumper to bumper autos for 5 ½ hours all the way to Naples (what might normally have been an hour trip)! Of course, we had to stop for the bathroom along the way, and everyone was hungry again (except for me), and it was now clear that we probably would miss the midnight boat. There was nothing any of us could do but tell stories, sing, and laugh. Indeed, we had such a raucous time that Daniel suggested we meet again the next day in a car and “just hang out!” Our imitations of various family members might have made for a hit comic-skit.

Finally, we arrived in Naples, where all could observe that Marty was utterly exhausted as he seemed almost to change personalities, doggedly determined to get to the garage where we were to leave our car. The closer we had gotten to Naples, the more crazily he had begun to drive, and by the time we entered the city again he was a Neapolitan, speeding down streets on the left side of the road through red lights, traffic and anything else that crossed our path as we made our way back to the garage. I suggested he should be awarded a medal for all the driving he had done.

At the garage, they called for a taxi, which soon arrived. If Marty had developed some Neopolitan techniques of driving, we suddenly realized that the taxi driver was the “real thing.” Yet he was also used to tourists and respected their fears. He calmly drove a block as Marty explained that we were attempting to make the last ferry from Bevellaro. He turned back to the rest of us and beseechingly requested: “Permisso?”

The kids were confused, but I knew exactly what he meant. Marty and I shook our heads in reply: “Yes, permisso.” Suddenly we were tearing through the streets jutting in and out of traffic, ignoring every red light, missing other cars my inches, jumping over medians, and generally creating havoc in space. Each time he broke through the traffic, Michali (taxi drivers each tell you their name, as if it were a personal relationship with them that you had established by entering their cab) shouting “Permisso!” Laughing joyfully, like a terribly bad boy, he sped on. I believe we had clipped at least two cars along the way. We now realized that, although Marty had passed all the tests for Neapolitan driving, he was not yet a full-fledged citizen! The ride was breathtaking, as if he had gone into some amusement park—“the taxi ride!” Disneyland should add it to their fantasyland park.

We arrived at Bellevaro just in time to get tickets to the last boat to Ischia—not to Florio, but to Porto Ischia. It didn’t matter; we’d make it home that night.

The boat was a comfortable one, much nicer that the one I’d taken that first day, and roomier than the hydrofoil we’d taken across three days earlier. We also stopped, as I had on that first day, in Procida, that beautiful little town. I tried to snap some photos with the night vision setting, but the shutter took so long, that any hand movement blurred the image.

When we finally arrived at Porto Ischia, the Nakells were determined to stop for pizza, but the students and I desperately needed a shower and bed. I was one of the first ones off, quickly capturing a taxi. The others were the last to leave the boat—indeed all passengers had departed about 15 minutes before these stragglers finally dragged themselves forward, nearly frozen in space once again!

As the three of us sped away to Florio, Marty and Rebecca, looking like exhausted refugees returning to their homeland, trudged down the street for their 2:00 snack! I think perhaps Marty just needed to decompress a while before entering another car!

Forio, Ischia, July 3, 2007

Revolutions

The on-line magazine Nth Position recently publish my essay on Pedro Almodovar's film Volver.
The link to that site is listed here: http://www.nthposition.com/revolutions.php

Douglas Messerli

Leaving the Door Open

Antonio José Ponte In the Cold of the Malecón and Other Stories, translated from the Spanish by Cola Franzen and Dick Cluster. (San Francisco: City Lights, 2000).

The title story of the volume of stories, In the Cold of the Malecón by Cuban Antonio José Ponte is indicative, perhaps, of the subtlety and themes of these short tales as a whole. In a fashion that might remind one of a short dialogue by Beckett or even Ionesco, a wife queries her husband concerning his visit to their son—not only about the look of his apartment and the food they ate, but how it was cooked, and, most particularly, about their activities after dinner. It is apparent from the start of this dialogue, however, that the wife has already heard it many a time, and when, and the tale's end, she asks her husband to repeat a section, we know it is a never-ending ritual, that the recounting is something they repeat over and over to wile away their own empty lives, their own loneliness. But for the reader, the details of the visit reveal, on the surface, very little. The son lives in so small of an apartment, his father claims it could almost fit into one of their rooms. There is no evidence of any other person in their son's life. The son chopped the meat they had brought him into small pieces and had eaten it rare, not wanting "to lose the blood in cooking." After dinner, the father—in what appears as an absurd request—asks to see the "whores again." He is told that it is a bad night for walking along the Malecón, the sea, with the surf so high; they may not see any. Yet the two do go out and spot a few prostitutes along the sidewalk. One of them looks at the son, for just a moment, the father explains, "Like when you mistake someone in the street and realize the mistake immediately." The two then return home for a welcome cup of coffee.

It is the very "strangeness" of this seemingly meaningless tale, retold over and over by the couple, that forces the reader—at least this reader—to reread the tale in search of greater significance. Obviously, since the father has brought the meat with which the son so carefully cooks, it is something precious; as we discover throughout these tales, nutritious food, as well as space, is a rare commodity in contemporary Cuba. But why the fascination with whores? The woman realizes her mistake in even looking at the son: is he that disinterested in appearance? Is he gay? And why has the father insisted upon seeing them? Quite obviously they represent something outside normality, something unusual in the parents' experience, something, perhaps, not only sexual and immoral, but—in their illegal activity—more open and free? Ponte provides the reader no explanations. The parents' conversation is, in fact, absurd; but then, as the author makes it quite apparent, so too is contemporary Cuban society.

In another story located by the beach, two brothers, awaiting the return of their father (the parents have evidently gone off to care for a sick relative or friend), rearrange the furniture each night, alternating their arrivals into a totally dark room through which they must pass without bumping into the rearranged furniture to reach the light. Ponte pushes this slight tale into nearly metaphysical dimensions, as the reshiftings of the room come to represent a break in the relationships of objects, of past to present, of action to life, as at story's end the older of the two boys discovers in the dark a door "that's never been there before," which he opens and "advances among the souls."

In "Station H," an old man arrives by train at a desolate station to play a game a chess with an unknown opponent, who turns out to be a young boy. But the old man never meets him, the game is never played. The old man disappears and the young boy makes away with the chess set the old man left. "This Life" is about individuals who ride the trains, almost like hobos of the American 1920s and 1930s, with no fixed destination and no apparent reason save poverty and utter boredom. The best story in this collection, "Heart of Skitalietz," goes even further in its absurdity than the others, as a despairing employee of an "institute" misses days of work only to discover, upon his return, that his office has been moved, most employees let go, and his own job terminated. Like the "disinherited wanderers of Russia," the Skitalietz, he begins to wander the streets of Havana, encountering a dying woman—an ex-astrologer who he first met via a crossed telephone connection—with whom he develops a strange relationship. But as their wanderings through often blacked-out sections of the city verge more and more on anarchic behavior, they are arrested and taken away to clinics where they might be resocialized. Released, the hero is called to take away his friend, now near death. They return to her apartment, stripped of all objects in their absence, where he places her against the wall and rushes out to buy a bed. By the time he has returned, she is dead.

Ponte's tales in this volume are not just about purposelessness, about individuals fed-up with their lives seeking pleasure and freedom; in the world this author conjures up everything has been shifted about so completely, so many times, there is no definition even of what enjoyment and freedom might look like. What is change in a society that, while incessantly shifting, never changes? What is freedom in a world in which the individual is left only sexuality as an independent political act? In a world in which great actions have led to nothing, little acts mean everything—while resulting equally in nothing at all. Death becomes the only relief, something from which the survivors have no choice but to walk away in a kind of silent envy and respect, leaving the door open.

San Francisco, 2000

Two People I Thought I Loved

The author, Douglas Messerli

It may be difficult to explain to many people today that being gay in the mid 1960s often resulted in a series of surprising discoveries about oneself. Today, perhaps, with all the public discourse, the many movies about gay life, and even a kind of glamorization of gay living, young people are more perceptive about who they really are. In 1966, however, as a freshman in college, I could not truly identify what was missing in my sexual life—except sex. I was a good boy, and attributed my lack of sexual interest in and sexual arousal for the opposite sex to my good intentions.

I began college early, eager to leave my family behind, attending the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the summer session, when I enrolled in a freshman English course. The teacher was a stern and elderly woman, a bit gruff. She began the semester by reporting that in all her years of teaching—which my classmates and I might have suspected consisted of several decades—she had awarded her students only two grades of A. “B’s are excellent, C’s are what most of you might expect,” she proclaimed.

It may have been that that announcement was her way of inspiring slackers, for, although my educational efforts had thus far primarily resulted in B’s, I was determined to be an exception to her perverse rule.

In that same classroom sat a young woman, Nancy (whose last name, amazingly, I no longer recall). She was not exactly beautiful, but had long and angular features, with a slightly crooked smile that made her face lovely in a plain way that might remind one of Meryl Streep in her earliest film, The Deer Hunter, or of her appearance as the Polish holocaust survivor in Sophie’s Choice. Like many citizens of Milwaukee, Nancy was of German ancestry.

No sooner had she introduced herself to me than we began studying together, then dating. Soon I visited her home, run by her clearly overpowering mother and grandmother, whom Nancy, it was apparent, was desperate to escape. Always polite and solicitous, however, I got on splendidly with these ogres. They loved me perhaps more than their grandchild and daughter.

Quickly I found myself in intensely passionate kissing sessions to which this young girl attached severe restrictions. I could touch her breast under her blouse and even occasionally explore the sanctum inside her bra, but I was not permitted to grasp her crotch—although she was not restrained, evidently, from touching my slightly flaccid cock. I did not comprehend that these rules were possibly meant to be broken, that a “real” heterosexual male might one day impatiently cross over the line, in essence raping the reluctant virgin she advertised herself to be. I was a miserably good boy: when a woman said “no,” I thought she meant it!

I presumed that I was in love. Weren’t my behavior patterns, after all, what heterosexual love was about? Before long, she met my parents, who were delighted in my choice—delighted, I might imagine, of my having even made a choice. Nancy and I never had sex, but even more importantly, we seldom talked. I’d been swept up into something that secretly horrified me, and made me suspect that I was living a lie.

On several occasions she would pull away from me, protesting that she wasn’t worthy of my love. “Worthy?” I queried, “what does that mean? I’m the one… Well,” I admitted, “you don’t really know me very well!” At those times she seemed as innocent as I.

The end came, strangely enough, on an outing with my pleased parents. Plans of marriage were clearly in the air—although we’d never discussed the issue between us. We stopped by a furniture store where my mother and Nancy were suddenly, I discovered, hatching plans of how our living room would look. I was appalled—not as much by the subject matter as by their choices of kitsch, mass-produced couches, side-tables, lamps, and reclining chairs.

“I would never allow anything like that in my house,” I asserted, somewhat in shock.

“Your house?” shouted the normally sweet-tempered Nancy. “Your house?”

“Doug,” my mother interjected, “these things are a woman’s choice.”

The semester was coming to a close, and despite our English teacher’s warning, I received an A. All good boys do fine.

A few days later, I was invited by someone to a poetry reading in a local bar. The Beats were still all the rage, and I can imagine, in retrospect, that it was a dreadful event. I recall someone reading a poem about his tie, a tie which pointed, so he declared, “to you know where!”

Across the room I spied one of the most beautiful males I’d ever seen—outside of my high school heartthrob, Doug Reed [see My Year 2005]. His name was Brian O— (how easily I recall his last name). Brian and I met, and he suggested I visit him for dinner at his house. I stayed the night, him upon the bed, me upon a palette on the floor next to it. I was desperate to jump into bed with him, and even imagined that he whispered something to that effect.

“What? Did you say something?” I pleaded.

“You heard me.”

But I was uncertain whether I really had heard what I knew he’d spoken. Good boys to not rape other boys either—unless they’re invited to. And Brian, I later perceived, was a passive bisexual.

Nothing happened again. He did, however, radically change my life. Brian announced that he was transferring to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and suggested that I should visit him there in the campus YMCA.

I must have been striken with love, for I decided to take him up on the offer, clearly hoping that this time something might happen between us. If only, like Nancy, he had embraced me—even once—I knew I would spring to life!

Inaction repeated itself. But I loved the sprawling Madison campus nestled against a lake. Despite the fact that I had now met some upper classmen, and had even been asked to by poet Bruce Renner to take over the editorship of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee creative writing magazine, I decided to transfer.

In Madison, after ROTC provided me with the transcendent vision that I was an atheist, socialist, gay man [see My Year 2005], I invited Brian into my bed in my little room across from the football stadium and, in the middle of night, jacked him off. It couldn’t really be called sex, but it was a start!

As for Nancy, I later heard that she got married soon after I left Milwaukee to a worker from a local packing plant. Obviously he had known what to do—and wanted to.


New York, May 3, 2002