HAPPY BELATED HENRY

Yesterday was John Berryman's birthday (10/25/1914); my most recent blog took its title from one of the better-known Dream Songs, #14, which begins:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moveover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

So that quotation as a title certainly indicates some irony on my part with regard to all that "yearning" in Lawrence. Fair enough. No one made a poetics out of irony better than Berryman, and possibly no one, deep down, yearned as much either. Which means that, perhaps, the only way to withstand one's yearnings is to be ironic about them. Berryman certainly was. The persona of Henry is a screen upon which may be projected the kind of "moody brooding" that would do Dedalus proud, but he wears the motley of the tragic court jester, the Fool in Lear perhaps who can only dance and caper because "life is boring" or worse.

Berryman was an acquired taste in my "would-be poet as a young man" days. He fit the bill nicely for that feeling of being put-upon by the simple difficulty of living a life that was never as interesting as art or poetry, try as one might to make one out of the other. What's more, Berryman amused that mordant, sardonic side of me that tends (or could) toward the morbid. Berryman is so morbid it makes most of us pale in comparison. And yet we appreciate it, we savor the pose. It's not Keats' "half in love with easeful death" -- nor is it Stevens' "death is the mother of beauty" -- it's more like death is the hottest bitch for me and when can I get at her? Berryman is literally lusting for death most of the time, teasing "her," keeping her at bay, until, well, he finally gives in and dives off a bridge -- the ghost of Hart Crane, no doubt, looking on in approval.

The mention of Crane isn't simply morbid. Together these two did more for my love of syntax than any two who wrote in modern American English (or some version thereof). But Berryman is much more demotic than Crane, much more willing to speak the variety of tongues employed in our talky land -- including slang, vaudeville mannerisms, movies and radio, spruced ever with the cadences of the greats (he loved Yeats, Hopkins, Shakespeare of course), accepting in his way that gauntlet flung down by the restless intonations and mad-cap allusive spree of Old Possum's book of going quietly to pieces, "The Waste Land." Berryman wears his "going to pieces" on his sleeve, and that can get tedious -- it's like the one-joke comedian: infinitely various at dressing-up his one joke, but each poem generally leaves us in somewhat the same place.

The Dream Songs (1955-69) interests me still though -- in grad school, I recall writing about it in terms of the "long poem" -- for it is a long poem, a growth of the poet's mind, but undertaken as an almost interminable number of discrete lyrics. An interesting solution to the problem, set us by Baudelaire, of maintaining the short lyric as the form for modern life. Berryman does that because narrative isn't really the point. The point is a progress of the mind, but a progress on any given day (or number of days, depending on how long it took him to write a particular Song), that is set in place, enumerated, giving us a day to check off, "one day closer to death." I haven't read through the entirety in many years, but I do go back often enough to the ones I remember best (and lines of Berryman's leap to my mind as much as anyone's -- with the exception of Dylan and Hamlet, though TSE's up there too). And one of the few poems I can recite flawlessly is "Dream Song" #1.

So here's to huffy Henry, unappeasable Henry, wicked & away.

"WE OURSELVES FLASH AND YEARN"

"The trouble began at evening. Then a yearning for something unknown came over her, a passion for something she knew not what. She would walk the foreshore alone after dusk, expecting, expecting something, as if she had gone to a rendez-vous. The salt, bitter passion of the sea, its indifference to the earth, its swinging, definite motion, its strength, its attack, and its salt burning, seemed to provoke her to a pitch of madness, tantalising her with vast suggestions of fulfillment."--D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)

No one does this better than Lawrence. Does anyone even try? But what is "this"? Lawrence has that rarest of capacities: the capacity to express the inexpressible. It does make for some rather turgid reading at times. At times -- but only rarely -- it becomes almost laughable as sheer mannerism (show me someone who's not a mannerist and I'll go out and say a prayer for him), but mostly it's a very brave, alert attention to everything that is precisely inarticulate in our natures. Lawrence is forever, nose aquiver with the scent of blood scent, tracking a wounded ego to its lair, exposing its animal fear, its animal tensions. Lawrence's characters live in a world of physical suffering simply because passion and emotion is overtly physical. And he's quick to show that there is no satisfaction, ultimately, for our most legitimate passions. He knows that it's not a question of attaining a love object, or a desired status, or a child, or a completed work: those things are only markers, milestones, a way of saying that we have made an impression on a world that will ultimately subdue us, destroy us. Such things can't satisfy the hunger for life itself. And that hunger is so much more essential in Lawrence than all that talk of drives and repressions and sublimations is in Freud. Freud speaks for a world keen to clothe its chaos. Lawrence exults in a chaos that is part of the order, the part that provokes to the pitch of madness, and that madness isn't a neurotic condition to be exorcized with mythic platitudes. Which is one reason I tend to distrust Lawrence's own vexed attempts to create mythologies to explain his fictional world. No matter how much he wanted to be priest and prophet -- and as an intellect perhaps he might've been an acceptable layman Freud, a working-class Brit Nietzsche -- Lawrence as novelist is far too much of the devil's party. His prose is a thrust at sheer becoming -- leave it to someone else to decide "becoming what."

For me, The Rainbow will always be the best Lawrence and it's easy for me to say why. It's because there is in it no character who "speaks" for Lawrence. Sons and Lovers, necessary as it is, is so caught up with the agon of Paul Morel that it wallows in crisis -- an Oedipal one at that -- to an almost unbearable degree. And Women in Love, which begins almost satiric and fast, grows more tiresome the more we have to experience the mind of Birkin. Lawrence, unlike Joyce, never learned how to ironize his alter-ego, was never able to create a full-fledged male character because his own imago was ever too intrinsically with him. But The Rainbow, in giving us Anna Brangwen, and Ursula Brangwen, and even Will Brangwen, gives us characters who best represent Lawrence's ideas without having to give direct expression to them. What's more, the generational movement of the novel gives it a certainty about how persons live in the world it describes that is closer to Nordic sagas than to anything else. And that, to me, is the vindication of what Lawrence wants to do with rural life on the cusp of industrialization: give us the tensions of what happens when humans cease to be animals.

Could be -- in the era before such widespread literacy, before such ubiquitous communication about every trivial matter imaginable -- people had depths in a way they don't so much these days. If so, it's important to read Lawrence: to be immersed in the blood-realities, the meaning of being as a lived reality -- apart from every merely social or occupational reality. In the passage I quoted, Ursula's dissatisfaction isn't simply a dissatisfaction with her social class, or with the kind of job she might get, or with the kinds of men she might meet, or even with her own personality as a kind of given potential -- it's a yearning. Some might say "a yearning for meaning," but that would make her her author's creature: looking for a meaning that some act or thought or cultural achievement might provide. But Ursula is more than equal to such a reading: her yearning is for something that not even Lawrence can conceive or possibly provide. And that's what makes The Rainbow great.

"TO WANT IN HELL, THAT HAD ON EARTH SUCH STORE"

Mon. 15th featured a lecture by Tony Grafton on the historical figure of Faustus. I went, because I'm a Faustus fan from way back -- not Marlowe's, not Goethe's (or not just), but the actual Faustus. Grafton was trying to define exactly what "a magus" was to the mind of the time. The most interesting part of the talk was that a humanist might be considered a "magus" because of the odd learning, the relation to ancient texts and esoterica. Looking around the reception after, I saw more people who attended the FW reading group at one point or another than I have at any other gathering -- magi indeed!

Tues. 16th featured a reading by poet Charles Bernstein at the Beinecke. I've never heard Bernstein read before and it's a treat. He has a loud, somewhat hectoring voice to begin with -- and when he uses the mike for booming effects and sibilance and so forth -- it's pretty effective. In fact I can't recall any other reading at Yale that was to the same degree a reading: a performance of the poetry, a deliberately crafted aural presentation of verbal material. Some of the poems were rather odd: like one in which he read the variety of symbols that come with spam emails; my favorite was probably one that was delivered litany-like with him doing both a celebrant and respondent's voice, as it were. Elsewhere language had the requisite force of an object, something that makes more use of structure and sound than it does of sense.

After the reception, I was off to another event: the Marxists Reading Group's guest speaker Vijay Prashad to discuss his book, The Darker Nations. Brilliant, incredibly verbal and knowledgeable guy, completely unpretentious. Though I didn't read the book with the group I did want to hear what he had to say, but as I expected his work partakes of that element of the Marxist Study Group that I tend to avoid readings and discussions of: the particularized, localized discussion of political praxis. I'm hoping the next book they read is more theoretical. (Forgot to mention: between events, with two glasses of wine in me, I browsed Labyrinth Books and actually bought things -- a translation, with Latin, of Catullus (must've been the Grafton influence), Ashbery's latest, A Wordly Country, still in hardback (they didn't have Bernstein's Girly Man); and a book by Morris Berman called Dark Ages America -- it looked like fast and fun cultural studies critique of the 21st century, which is what I was in the mood for. You need books like that during an election year.)

Wed. 17th my class -- a freshman writing seminar -- meets, and we've been talking about E. O. Wilson's book Sociobiology and the debate it occasioned back in the late '70s. So happens Wilson himself was on campus to receive an award from the Peabody Museum. I went to his "fireside chat" (sans fire) with fellow awardee Peter Raven. Both talked mainly, as biologists must, about the depletion of bio-diversity in our era and the harmful effects it will have for the biosphere that we humans are historically best adapted to.

Wed. night I had dinner and Anchor Steams with a friend who asked if I could tie together the various events. Here goes: the idea of the magus as the learned man-necromancer-magician of the Renaissance is that person who is savvy toward the best technology of the day, as well as the most esoteric knowledge of the past: in the future, this figure will be the person who can create -- on the other side of the next "dark ages" we may get to eventually, especially as it doesn't seem "the darker nations" present any viable alternative -- the virtual reality that will replace the declining-out-of-sight biosphere we knew and loved. And Bernstein's computer-symbol poem will be the precursor for the lyric poem of that age...

THEY ARE WE

The '60s are back -- or at least cinematic versions of them. Next month Todd Haynes' long-awaited Dylan film will arrive. According to a story in the NYTimes Magazine, Haynes wrote a one-page treatment to elicit Dylan's participation (i.e., to allow his music to be used in the film) that began with a quotation from Rimbaud: "je est un autre": "I is an other." Fitting I guess that the other big movie recreation of '60s rock gods, Julie Taymor's Across the Universe features Bono, doing a pretty good take-off on Wavy Gravy, singing "I am he / as you are he / as you are me / and we are all togther" -- in other words, what both movies seem to render is the degree to which the likes of Dylan and The Beatles have been appropriated by their fans as the stuff of collective myth. Dylan is us; we are The Beatles. I haven't seen the Dylan film (yet) but I did see Taymor's film earlier this month.

The immediate difference between the two films, of course, is that Haynes' is derived from some of the tropes of Dylan's life, Taymor's film uses The Beatles' songs as tropes for her characters' lives, so that the songs provide a frame of reference to whatever is happening on-screen. Some of it is cutesy clever (as in having a character named Prudence so the cast can sing "Dear Prudence" at her in a manner reminiscent of Milos Forman's film of Hair), and some of it is the kind of collage-like rendering of a distinct era and its distinctive personalities that Haynes went for in his earlier glam-rock extravaganza, Velvet Goldmine. So, in Universe, we get a Janis-character having an on-again / off-again relation with her guitarist who dresses like Jimi (but never really gets around to playing like him). We also get moments of dramatic rendering of some songs, as when Jude (hey) bursts in on the SDS-like group soon to become Weathermen-like and snarls "Revolution" at them -- even gesturing at a poster of Chairman Mao at the appropriate line. It's a bit too neat, sure, but seeing the film with a teen, born almost two decades after The Beatles called it quits, made it easy to see how the film aims to suggest (for those who missed it) "the myth" of the Fab Four -- not as the story (yawn) of their rise to fame, excellence, excess, and fall to mediocrity, but as the way in which their songs inspired the times or colored the times or simply put us all in the same tuneful place -- for a time.

The film is ultimately short on story and character development, long (too long) on MTV-like sequences for an ongoing array of great songs (unlike MTV). Taymor has invented many fun-to-watch sequences, echoing, borrowing, referencing all over the place -- as for instance a draft induction scene, to "I Want You," that manages to be disturbingly original while also reminding me of Pink Floyd's The Wall, Forman's Hair, and Ken Russell's film of The Who's Tommy. All those are implicit precursors of this film, though rarely is Taymor as bleak as Alan Parker's vision of Roger Waters' bleakest album, or as stagey musical as Hair. The Russell film is probably closest to the tone (and sometimes level of invention) here, but, not surprisingly, Townshend's rock opera gave that film more of an unusual story than this film boasts.

Boy (looking and sounding like young McCartney at his most loveable) meets girl (she has a good voice, unlike the blonde our Paul married, and does a nice cover of "If I Fell" that drops the cruel line: "she will cry when she learns we are two"), loses girl, gets girl. Boy also meets American dad who didn't know of his existence. Girl's brother drops out of Princeton and gets drafted. Janis-y Sadie ("you'll get yours yet") abandons band (Big Brother and the Holding Co., capiche?) but then reunites with bluesy black dude whose guitar gently weeps. Asian lesbian (Prudence) pines for Sadie and mopes but eventually learns to dig herself "on the bus" and "comes out" to play. And so on.

Most of the action is just an excuse for a song. As when the Learyish figure, representing East Coast acid pretensions, disses CA partyman Dr. Roberts (Bono), and the latter leaves our friends to tromp into a field where they are regaled by Tim Curry singing a zany, quasi-animated "Mr. Kite." The scene, following right after the trippy bus-ride to the tune of "Walrus," is de trop, but it lets Taymor use her puppet-figures, so it stays in. Elsewhere, the appearance of Joe Cocker in multiple get-ups doing a bluesy "Come Together" was unnecessary but vastly entertaining. First shot of him is as a subway musician doing those trademark air-guitar licks and the whole song continues on its magical way. I don't know who the musicians in the film are, but there's also a lovely instrumental guitar rendering of "A Day in the Life" that unfortunately isn't on the soundtrack CD.

All in all, a splendid time is guaranteed for all. It threw my thoughts back many years to the days of first hearing -- I mean really hearing -- those songs and the way we all sat around dreaming our own respective visuals that were probably, at least some of the time, very similar to each other and, perhaps, at least more or less, like what we see on the screen here. So that "the bus" was really The Beatles albums, and we all rode it for awhile. The band's breakup was a bummer that summer of '70, but Taymor's vision, even though it includes some "bad trip" Vietnam-stuff and The Weatherman bomb-making explosion, and some awfully ersatz peace-marching (the Pentagon march is placed out of proper sequence -- after MLK's death, rather than before as in real life, whatever that is), ends up sunnier than the actual story of The Beatles themselves because the rooftop concert, shut down by The Man à la the actual Apple rooftop bash in Let It Be, resuscitates when Jude plaintively leads the cast -- as now-benign cops look on -- in "All You Need is Love," his heartsong to woo Lucy back to him. Jude and Lucy -- la la how that life goes on.

"THE ABYSS IS CLOSE TO HOME"

"I don't attach any particular importance to these generalizations of mine. They may be right, they may be wrong; I am only an ageing American with very little knowledge of life. You may take my generalizations or leave them."--John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier

Ford's The Good Soldier (1915) has emerged as one of my favorite novels of the twentieth century. It's not a novel I read during that formative era of reading, pre-thirty, when many of my tastes were formulated. It's just as well, perhaps. Because to reach an appreciation of the novel it was probably necessary that something else occur: an appreciation of the novels of Henry James. And that didn't happen, for me, until I was in grad school. I believe I first read The Good Soldier for generals. I've since read it three times for the class Modern British Fiction. Each time, I think, I have a slightly different response, but my admiration for the novel only increases.

I mention James because Ford's novel is to my mind the closest, in some ways, to the kinds of anatomies of well-to-do couples that James made his province. But if Ford's novel is like a James novel, it's a James novel in which something has gone horribly wrong. In class last week, commenting on the suicides that are necessary to the novel's melodramatic trauma, I quoted the last line of Hedda Gabler, uttered in response to Hedda's suicide: "Good God, people don't do such things!" In Henry James novels they don't. In The Good Soldier, they do. And that in itself is indicative of the ways in which Ford's novel is deliberately not a James novel. Ford assumes his readers are readers of the James novel, then twists it toward the era of wholesale slaughter that was "The Great War," a time in which a draft of The Good Soldier, called "The Saddest Story," appeared in the belligerently avant-garde journal BLAST along with a manifesto largely composed by Pound and featuring images of Vorticist art -- like analytic Cubism but with bolder lines, more jagged and machine-like and energetic -- by Wyndham Lewis and others. In other words, Ford's novel is right there in the same creative nexus that would help push to get Joyce's Portrait published and proselytize for Eliot's poems up through "The Waste Land." This is the era in which the modernist greats are doing their best early work. And Ford's novel is right up there with the best of that period.

I'm sorry to say The Good Soldier is the only novel of Ford's I've read, so I don't have much personal sense of where his career goes from there. But because this novel does what it does so well, I haven't felt my lack of knowledge as a great gap. In fact, I think it lets me maintain a conviction that The Good Soldier is quintessential Ford. I don't know what I'd do if I had to balance the voice of its narrator John Dowell against voices of other Ford narrators. It's something, no doubt, I should get around to doing, but it's not as if I confuse Dowell with Ford. The beauty of The Good Soldier is in the mastery of that narratorial performance: the tale as told by Dowell is mostly the point of the whole thing. Its exfoliating effects are achieved by Dowell's slow burn -- his "off-hand" imagery that always is much more deliberate and meaningful than his tone would suggest. His persona is benign, garrulous, sincere; his intents are either borderline demented, extremely devious, or so pathetically unequal to the task -- his own major claim -- that one is at times reminded of Dostoevsky's Underground Man and his relentless profession of emotions that show him to be perversely proud of how contradictory he is. In Dowell's case, so much depends upon his own interminable analysis: the novel ends up a kind of "no exit" space in which, indeed, hell is other people and Dowell gets closer and closer to the brink of the abyss the more squarely he looks at the life he has led with his wife Florence and their friends the Ashburnhams, Edward and Leonora.

That it is hell we are in no doubt. Leonora's Irish Catholicism insists upon it. Adulterers shall be punished, not only in the next world but in this one as well. The novel's epigram is "Beati Immaculati" -- blessed are the immaculate or undefiled -- and the persona of Dowell goes a long way to creating the most wryly satiric version of the sexlessness of James novels that one could conceive. Dowell, a virgin, must register the extent to which passion, with deliberate invocation of the passion of Christ, is a state of agony one suffers on earth, suffers for not being "immaculate." The Jamesian novel, while never giving us "the sordid details" of any marriage, lets us know something of the infinite variety of ways in which persons suffer other persons and suffer from other persons. Ford's Dowell is also rather remarkably bland when it comes to the sordid melodramas of philandering husbands, duplicitous wives, forthright courtesans, naive mistresses, and romantic convent girls, but, unlike James' ubiquitous and urbane narrative voice, Dowell's presence creates a flawed perspective, a psychological "no man's land" in which ultimate allegiances are up for grabs.

"Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men's lives like the lives of us good people . . . . broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?"

MON MÉPRIS, UNE MÉPRISE

The most recent film I've seen at WHC's film series is Jean-Luc Godard's Mépris; Contempt (1963). In French, "misunderstanding" is méprise, and that seems fitting, since I have to admit that I misread the film when I first saw it. Or let's be clearer: I never saw the film before, I only saw a videotape of it. I think I have to accept the fact that any movie I've only seen on tape doesn't count as "seen." Or to quote the old joke from Bill Murray on SNL: "I saw it on a small screen in Canada and didn't get the full effect."

So am I saying that my mépris for Godard was actuellement une méprise? Peut-être. Fact is, the film was vastly more entertaining than I remembered it. I recalled it as soporific, as an exercise in which Godard registers his contempt for the typical Hollywood fable of jealousy and abandonment by creating a lethargic movie of failed scenes, dabbling at times in his usual self-conscious "art talk" if only to underscore the characters' vapidity. Let's follow this plotless meander for plus two hours. Let's gaze at the Mediterranean -- c'est magnifique. Let's gaze at Brigitte Bardot nude on a bed -- elle est très belle. Let's indicate our scorn for "sex symbols" by having said symbol anatomize her body parts for her lover: "what do you think of my knees? can you see my butt?" Let's indicate our scorn for American film producers by having Jack Palance assail the role with the charm of a block of granite in a suit. Let's indicate our scorn for big concept films by having the unflappably cultured Fritz Lang -- he only grins when Bardot mentions Rancho Notorious, saying "I prefer M." -- play himself, reduced to talking over Homer with the likes of Palance's fatuous producer, who coughs up with a straight face lines like: "I was re-writing the Odyssey last night, and it occurred to me..."

It would be easy to keep up a patter of contempt. Contempt for its contempt: for such contempt -- if it was the whole point -- would be banal. Not worth the time. So what does Godard give us to offset that simplistic "send-up" film? Art? Yes, oddly enough. Shots that are composed not only in terms of figures and camera placement, but in terms of colors. The use of color in the film is nothing short of brilliant. It's a film that, it could be said, loves cinema so much that it can't help giving us perfectly crafted images even if the story is less than gripping. But the story is also extremely well-paced, once one surrenders to the hypnotic sense of "looking" that Godard's direction achieves. Then there's that oddly swelling melodramatic music that seems to appear at timed intervals, independent of the action. And the fact that every time Palance opens his mouth I had to laugh. Not only the lines, but the delivery is priceless -- the voice of some phony he-man from any number of sword and sandal epics that MST3K mocked mercilessly. And the fact that the sword and sandal epic being made, ostensibly, by Lang would suggest a kind of circle of hell for the German director who mentions Hitler's use of film -- likening it to Hollywood -- only to be told by Palance: this is 1963, not 1933. Elsewhere, when summoned to a conference with Palance, Lang shrugs his shoulders with world-weary charm and says to Michel Piccoli (the playwright hired to re-write the script and having pangs of conscience about the crass association): "man must suffer."

In short, the film is pointless as only a film of the early '60s can be: because the times, they were a-changin' and the "new spirit" inhabiting film-making gave directors like Godard leave to try anything, to shower the proceedings with contempt while upholding an aesthetic -- visual pleasure -- all-encompassing in its grasp of what movies are for. The film actually manages to be a character study of Piccoli's ambivalent writer that -- in its misogyny -- pretty much dramatizes the ambivalence at the heart of the film's aesthetic: what can you do with beauty other than possess it, use it -- and lose it? Is it possible to let it be?

Also, it seemed to me there are some strong indications that David Lynch had this film in mind when making Mulholland Drive -- silencio!

My phone was ringing and it would not stop
It was President Kennedy calling me up.
He said, "My friend Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?"
I said, "My friend John, Brigitte Bardot,
Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren -- country'll grow."
--Bob Dylan, "I Shall Be Free" (1963)

ROMANCE AS SPECTACLE

The novel for class last week was H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay (1909), a long, rambling tale of rise and fall: in the marketing of a "tonic" that is actually harmful (but which sells exceedingly well thanks to aggressive advertisement); in the fortunes of its inventor; and in the fortunes of his nephew and chronicler (and part-time aeronautics inventor) George. As you can tell from that brief description, the novel is busy, busy, busy (and I didn't even mention the Conrad "take-off" of a trip into Africa to abscond with some radioactive material called "quap"). Wells seems to believe that a story is interesting so long as it keeps moving. It's not that the narrative doesn't pause to reflect -- George is often reflective and the novel is at its best (because so very timely) in his comments on the changes in English class and in commercial society and in science that he notes in his lifetime -- but there's too much of a breezy kind of narration that never gets under the surfaces of things, nor really does much to create feelings, emotions, sensations, tastes, pleasures, regrets, passions or much else that the novel, not as action but as representation, is able to pack in.

So the whole affair is rather pallid and tepid. Brimming with a kind of "can-do" assertiveness that sometimes becomes an almost melancholy questioning ("what have we done?"), George is mercurial enough to keep me reading, but not nearly interesting enough to sustain devoted attention. And that trip into Africa ... talk about the packaged tour! George even kills an African -- supposedly (I guess) to make us question what kind of "savagery" is at work in the work George is committed to (saving his uncle's commercial empire / British Empire) at all costs -- but the scene is so amateurish, so lacking in anything like real drama or even symbolic mystery, that it demoralizes (by clumsily pointing out a lack of moral basis) what is otherwise an acceptable yarn about getting ahead and inventing the terms by which the public will buy in.

There is also much-too-much about George's affairs of the heart: for the most part the female characters are lacking much compelling interest, but at least there is an earnest effort on George's part to show that he doesn't understand women. However, it's in the postmortems of failed romance that I was struck by one of George's insights into what he calls "romantic love":

it does seem to me that this way in which men and women make audiences for one another is a curiously influential force in their lives. . . . I had lived for work and impersonal interests until I found scrutiny, applause and expectation in Beatrice's eyes. Then I began to live for the effect I imagined I made upon her, to make that very soon the principal value in my life. I played to her. I did things for the look of them.

This passage is not that important to the overall themes of the book, but it leapt out at me with a certain profundity. While Wells' style of writing is about as far from James or Proust as one could imagine, here he does indulge in a bit of what could almost be called Proustian self-consciousness. The idea that romantic love doesn't simply boost one's ego, or make one self-regarding around the beloved because one is driven by desires and affections, but rather creates a relation based on both parties being an audience to the other. That the source of the romance is in the fact that one wants to see and to be in the presence of the beloved, while also that the beloved must "look," must fix attention on oneself. Romance makes us players in each other's films.

I believe that Wells is trying to offset this showiness with something more real, but in terms of interpersonal relations, he doesn't arrive at anything. Tono-Bungay is very forwarding-looking in its grasp of the New Age, but doesn't bring into play moving pictures -- as perhaps it should. In any case, perhaps this "romance as mutual spectacle" idea nods at where things are tending. As George says: "I began to dream more and more of beautiful situations and fine poses and groupings with her and for her." Eventually, we'll dream ourselves into starring roles in the private film we act out together. Love, we might say, comes with looking and being looked at.