Just in time for my birthday

What is probably the best edition of Lord Jim available comes out today, my birthday and the feast day of Saint Andrew. And for more than $90 a copy it damn well better be. I have a great personal story hat goes with this novel but I won't mention it here as I am using it in something I am writing elsewhere.

A very special tune by a very special singer is called for. This one goes out to me.

The Wings of the Dove

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

Yes, I know, the book blogging has not been coming fast and furious. I'm reading very slowly. This is a hard to follow book and james doesn't help with subordinate clauses that lead you away into the desert and leave you there and enough uncertain antecedents for pronouns to wear out a army of editors. The last is a huge problem and is, quite frankly, bad writing on his part. You can read whole paragraphs thinking "she" is one person and then, three pages later, realize you have to go back and read these paragraphs again because "she" was probabaly some other person than the one you took her for.

I haven't been mentioning all the religious language and mentions of sacrifice in the book as I go along because there are too many of them but I do think there is one from a few chapters back that cannot go unrecorded This takes place at the end of the conversation between Susan and Milly about Maude Lowder's concerns about an unspecified "something" between Kate and Merton.

"You're not—and it's vain to pretend," said dear old Susie, who had been taking her in, "as sound and strong as I insist on having you."

"Insist, insist—the more the better. But the day I look as sound and strong as that, you know," Milly went on—"on that day I shall be just sound and strong enough to take leave of you sweetly for ever. That's where one is," she continued thus agreeably to embroider, "when even one's most 'beaux moments' aren't such as to qualify, so far as appearance goes, for anything gayer than a handsome cemetery. Since I've lived all these years as if I were dead, I shall die, no doubt, as if I were alive--which will happen to be as you want me. So, you see," she wound up, "you'll never really know where I am. Except indeed when I'm gone; and then you'll only know where I'm not."

"I'd die for you," said Susan Shepherd after a moment.

" 'Thanks awfully'! Then stay here for me." [P 149 in my edition, chap 9]

There is a nice bit of inflation and reduction at the end of this where, immediately after Susan's extravagant offer of self-sacrifice, Milly makes such a prosaic request.

Only, is it? There is an awful lot going on here. Unless I've missed something, we've never seen any direct evidence that Milly knows she is dying. It's becoming more and more evident that she knows or suspects something but the key event—the moment when some doctor presumably told her she only has a while to live—has taken place offstage and it seems that Henry James means to leave it offstage.

Even when Milly visits a doctor in London, no actual discussion of her impending death is explicit. They talk around it.

The thing that is most prominent in this discussion is that the doctor won't answer her directly and that he wishes to give her moral advice. The gist of what Milly says is, "Will I live?" and the gist of the doctor's replies is, "I don't know, will you?", and he means by this, you won't unless you start now.

There were, for me,  two telling moments that come out of this meeting with the doctor. Well, three if you count how utterly unconvincing it was as a report of a discussion between doctor and patient.

The first was the fact that the doctor challenges Milly about Kate. She has insisted that she has told no one but he remembers that she visited with another woman whom, as she confirms, she also told she was secretly seeing this doctor.

Hadn't there been a lady with her on Wednesday?

"Yes—a different one. Not the one who's travelling with me. I've told her."

Distinctly he was amused, and it added to his air—the greatest charm of all—of giving her lots of time. "You've told her what?"

"Well," said Milly, "that I visit you in secret."

"And how many persons will she tell?"

"Oh she's devoted. Not one."

"Well, if she's devoted doesn't that make another friend for you?"

Well, there's a question? It's one of my favourite questions. It's a question that rarely arises for modern men; we generally know that our closest friends are also our rivals. But for modern women, this is always a tricky issue. We've seen a growing lack of respect for Susan Stringham from Milly and the question of whether she will be replaced as her closest friend by Kate Croy is in the air. Kate's undeniable sexual power, even though it is exercised on Merton Densher, will, as we see, make her more and more attractive as a friend to Milly.

The second thing that jumps right out for me is Catholicism. On the way out from her first visit to the doctor, Milly was accompanied by Kate. And in describing how she feels to her, Mily says,

"Of course I like it. I feel—I can't otherwise describe it—as if I had been, on my knees, to the priest. I've confessed and I've been absolved. It has been lifted off."

Is that a good thing? I don't think so. This is my first experience with the late period James but the early James is very anti-Catholic. That Milly puts it into these terms must, I think, be a bad omen.

Would you like to read these?

There has been a lot of talk about a student who has accused her human sexuality professor of harassment because of the assignments she was given. I have to say that I see her point especially as this was a mandatory course for her degree; although I think she will have a hard time proving her case because she was not singled out but, rather, the entire class had the same assignment. It puzzles me, however, that the press is so stunningly incurious about some aspects of the story.

The term paper for the course requires students to write a 12- to 14-page sexual case study on themselves.

The project begins with a sex history -- including a directive to reveal any instances of abuse -- and continues through sexual values, arousal patterns and atypical issues such as fetishes.

Can I confess something? If someone left me alone in  a room with a stack of those assignments, I would read all the ones written by the women in the class. And I'd make a note of the really "interesting" sexual histories so that I could check out to see what the women responsible for writing them looked like.

Another assignment from that year (this is the one that the harassment charge concerns) for the students was to masturbate and then write about their experiences. A question I'd have for the professor is, Do you ever masturbate after or while reading these assignments? No, I don't know what he would say or what he actually does but I'm stunned that no one else seems to have worried about this. No one who has spent much time at a university would entertain, even for a split second, the notion that academic professionalism would be a serious barrier to such a thing happening.

Another thing about this case that would be interesting would be to find out if there is any correlation between the sexual attractiveness of the men and women who write these assignments and the marks they get. I mean, you'd worry if the hot-bodied 19 year girl who wrote about her secret desire to be dominated by another woman got especially high marks while another woman who wrote, equally if not more honestly, about her lack of interest in sex got poor marks wouldn't you?

Today, Ann Althouse highlights a similar  story about a professor who likes to take photographs of himself with his students.

Imagine unicorn sweat Pt 2

As has often been pointed out, the press sin by omission; they lie by choosing not to emphasize things they should emphasize. You can see it in the story below with some added emphasis from me:

An Ottawa city councillor says bullying was part of the reason his 15-year-old son took his own life last Friday.

Coun. Allan Hubley says in a statement that his son Jamie had been suffering with depression and was receiving care from doctors and counsellors.

Hubley says these professionals, along with family and friends, were trying to help him cope with his depression and his sexuality.

Hubley says his son was a championship figure skater for years and was just beginning to excel as a singer and enjoyed acting.

Hubley also says James was bullied.

It's pretty obvious, or should be, that the story of Jamie Hubley was a story about mental illness. But that wasn't the story you read about. The story that got played up around the world as the story of a gay teen who committed suicide because he was being bullied for being openly gay. As you can see above, however, his father was very careful not to say that bullying was the prime factor. And he was very careful not to say that because it wasn't true and Allan Hubley is one of those wonderful people who really, really doesn't like to say things he knows not to be true.

The primary cause of Jamie Hubley's suicide was, in fact, depression. Not depression like you or I feel on a bad day but crushing depression that never goes away; a depression that smothers every chance at hope. The truth finally came out in the press in a quiet little story that few people read two weeks after the initial hoopla.

So why did the press get it so wrong? Mostly because a bunch of their favourite narratives coalesced around this one little nugget. Bullying and gay teens being the most prominent of these. (As an aside, it's rather telling, don't you think, that the media are so terribly interested in the plight of gay teens and girls below the age of consent; the press doesn't take nearly the same voyeuristic interest in the lives of gay seniors or post-menopausal women. Do they not suffer too?)

But let's stop and think about bullying a moment. Were you bullied? I was and particularly so in Grade 7 and then again in Grade 9. Both times, and this is not a coincidence, when I had just moved to a different school and was a vulnerable target as a consequence.

The guy who bullied me in Grade 9 was an older and gay teen (but not openly gay, that would have been suicide at my school) who tried to force me into having sex with him and, painful irony, one of his threats as that he was going to tell others I was gay unless I gave in. It was a serious threat even though I was not gay. Perhaps it was more credible because I wasn't. He didn't, as you've probably guessed, use the word "gay"; his preferred word was "fag"and even by the standards of a high school in a mill town, he managed to get a special degree of hatred into the word.

And he followed through on his threat. And I toughed it out. I tried denying his claims but it did little good. Eventually the other kids forgot about that and moved on to some new humiliation for some other kid. It probably took only weeks but it felt it like it took all year.

Poor George, like a lot of first-class swine he never changed his modus operandi. He did it to others and eventually he got caught and disappeared from school. A little while later I had one of those experiences you never forget when I was home sick on garbage day and the garbage truck came through our neighbourhood and the guy who swung off the back bumper to throw our garbage into the truck was none other than George. At the time I felt it as a powerful incentive to finish school. I also remember feeling very sorry for the guy when I saw that.

In Grade 10 I made the football team. The coach asked me to try out after my gym teacher told him that I had run the second-fastest 100 metres of the boys in my year. I was lousy at catching and handling footballs so they tried me at defensive end. Coaches praised me for being fast that year and by graduation they were praising me for being big and fast.

You might think that bullying stopped then but it didn't. Even now I have to face bullies. There are, in fact, more bullies in the workplace than you find in your average high school. Workplace bullies can actually do you more damage than school bullies can. I worked for a client once whose joy in life was disrupting mine. I think the biggest charge he ever got in his miserable life was the day he spotted a mistake I made that he knew he could really hurt me with. I still remember the gleeful sound of his voice when I took his call.

The difference between being a boy and being a man is not how much the bullies can hurt you but your ability to cope with it.

Bullying is a fact of life. Bullies, because all they care about is wielding power over others, are very good at spotting your vulnerabilities. And they will. Every time.

What bullying is not is an unprecedented evil that has to be fixed right now. It wouldn't be worth fixing even if we had gallons of magical unicorn sweat to do the job with. For that is flip side of the people who tell us that problems must be fixed even though they have nothing better than unicorn sweat to propose as a cure: they bully others into treating the problems they care about as matters of life or death.

Imagine unicorn sweat Pt 1

That title was inspired by a great line from Walter Russell Mead:

... greens shrieked hysterically and furiously that the world’s house was on fire.  That may be true, but the greens were suggesting that all we had to do was collect enough unicorn sweat and then we could use that to put out the fire.

He's writing about global warming but the line applies to all sorts of political issues. To take just the great protest of the day, think of how the Occupy protestors resisted putting up any coherent list of demands. They thought it was enough to point at a problem.

As I've said before, this movement is anarchistic in spirit: it is driven by a magical belief that if we destroy the thing we don't like something we will like will most wonderfully grow in its place. All we have to do is care enough. The global warming crowd are no different. Mention nuclear power—which is pretty much the only viable way to produce lots of power without CO2—and they protest even louder. Virtually all contemporary leftist protest movements work on this sort of irresponsible logic.

It's not an accident. For generations now, well-meaning people have taught kids that imagination and will are all it takes. Do you remember the adult who told you that, "You can be anything you want to be, you just have to set your mind to it". Imagine there's no problems, it's easier than working for a living. Students go to university intending to learn job skills but their professors teach them that it is more important to learn to question authority and be critical of social values than to learn how to write well. After several generations of this, we have hit the point where many university professors couldn't teach students how to write well even if they wanted to for the simple reason that no one taught them in the first place.

I remember, way back in the 1980s, hearing gay activists say that the only reason a cure for AIDS had not been found was that governments didn't care about gay men. Similar arguments are made about breast cancer and women. The implication being that all we have to do is care enough and we'll cure these diseases. With it goes the corollary that any failure proves ill will.

The protestors have no intention of fixing anything themselves or even of indicating what they think will solve the problem. Someone else who is somewhere else is supposed to already know how to solve the problem. This has to be the case because, in the protestors' view, the problems only exist because of ill will.

And thus the reason why these protests always end in violence and disorder. That's not an accident but the intended result. The point is to keep attacking and tearing down until someone else makes all the things you don't like go away. Oh yeah, just one more thing, the solution, whatever it is, will not involve nuclear power, corporations, pesticides, guns, non-organic foods or men.

As you were.

The Wings of the Dove

I'm reading David Lodge and he discusses the opening paragraph of the book which begins as follows:

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once--she had tried it--the sense of the slippery and of the sticky.

David Lodge tells us that this writing is about "consciousness". He goes on to say that "in real life we can never assert such things about anyone other than ourselves, unless others report them to us."

That's nonsense. Come with me and let's hide in a closet in the room where Kate Croy's father has kept her waiting. Can we tell that she is impatient and irritated that she finds the touch of the fabric on her father's furniture unpleasant without asking her? Of course we can. All we have to do is watch her. And Henry James knows this:

... there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation ...

There is nothing she can see in the glass that we couldn't see by looking at her face and James well knows this because he describes the face as "pale with the irritation".

There are behaviours that go with impatience and irritation or touching something that feels unpleasant and we know them well.

The temptation is to say that only the person who feels these things knows for sure. But that isn't true either. Sometimes others figure out the way we really feel before we do. We can deny that we are irritated with someone we feel responsible for and we can deny that we love someone.

The question is, does David Lodge know what consciousness is? You get the feeling that he things consciousness is some special private container that only the person having it can see. But look at another person, any other person. Can you tell that they are conscious? Or, to put it another way, could you make yourself believe they weren't given what you can see?

Consider my last post that talked about Milly entering into a conspiracy of secrecy regarding Merton Densher before Kate does.  Okay, but what is going on "inside" Milly's consciousness? Is some complicated internal manœuvering taking place where psychological forces are battling inside Milly's brain? Is the important thing something we could only see if we were inside?

If this were a certain kind of French novel or something by Dostoevsky then that would be the case. In those novels people suddenly do things that make no sense because of complicated internal psychological forces but no such thing happens in Henry James. The important thing here is the context these things are happening in and that context is social not psychological. Milly is being drawn into a culture. She is being drawn into a culture where this sort of conspiring is normal. And she is being drawn in willingly. We might even say she is jumping in with both feet.

Two passages

The two passages below are both cited by David Lodge in an essay first published in 1966. The first he gives as an example of modernism and you may well have already read it as it is a hard to dodge piece from James Joyce. The second is given as an example of then-contemporary writing being from John Braine's Room at the Top. Lodge notes that the two are similar in one aspect: "Both passages describe a crucial moment of awareness in the life of a young man". But he thinks that something has been lost in the shift from the "modern" to the merely contemporary. He sees a huge loss in the quality of the language.

At the risk of being declared a heathen, I think the exact opposite is the case. Although Joyce is praised far and wide as a great writer of beautiful language, the passage given here strikes me as everything the language in a novel should not be. Compared to the Braine writing, it strikes me as not just overwrought but also as dull and boring. I want to find and read the Braine book whereas the Joyce stuff fills me with horrid memories of once having had to read it in school.

Here is the Joyce passage:

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

Blechh. I once saw a bit on public television on Joyce. When they got to Portrait they had some actor read this out but for the visual they had found a beautiful Irish girl and dressed her as in the passage above and had her stand in the water. The effect was to render Joyce pointless and bloodless by comparison.

Here is the Braine bit:

Parked by a solicitor's office opposite the café was a green Aston-Martin tourer, low-slung, with cycle-type mudguards. It had the tough, functional smartness of the good British Sports car; it's a quality which is difficult to convey without using the terms of the advertising copywriter—made by craftsmen, thoroughbred, and so on—I can only say that it was a beautiful piece of engineering and leave it at that. Prewar it would have cost as much as three baby saloons; it wasn't the sort of vehicle for business or for family outings, but quite simply a rich man's toy.

As I was admiring it a young man and a girl came out of the solicitor's office. The young man was turning the ignition key when the girl said something to him and after a moment's argument he put up the windscreen. The girl smoothed his hair for him; I found the gesture disturbing in an odd way—it was again as if a barrier had been removed, but this time by an act of reason.

The ownership of the Aston-Martin automatically placed the young man in a social class far above mine; but that ownership was simply a question of money. The girl, with her even suntan and her fair hair cut short in a style too simple to be anything else but expensive, was as far beyond my reach as the car. But her ownership, too, was simply a question of money, of the price of the diamond ring on her left hand. This seems all too obvious; but it was the kind of truth which until that moment I'd only grasped theoretically.

The Aston-Martin started with a deep, healthy roar. As it passed the café, in the direction of St Clair Road I noticed the young man's olive linen shirt and bright silk neckerchief. The collar of the shirt was tucked inside the jacket; he wore the rather theatrical ensemble with a matter-of-fact nonchalance. Everything about him was easy and loose but not tired or sloppy. He has an undistinguished face with a narrow forehead and mousy hair cut short with no oil on it. It was a rich man's face, smooth with assurance and good living.

That is everything good novel writing should be. The narrator speaks like a real human being we can care about and want to learn more about. In addition, this is good manly writing.