LUCKY ELEVEN

    After a few false starts (heat wavelets followed by cold rain and hail stones in the Northern Hemisphere), spring seems finally to have arrived.  And with it, suffused with the spirit of the season, comes this eleventh edition of The Fickle Grey Beast.

    Entered into this springtime compilation (though hardly as lambs) are several of our stalwart regulars:  David Rankin (writing on dance), Daniel Snowman (on song as a labor of love), and David Fine with another quasi-sepia-tinted memoir of Los Angeles long ago (long for LA, at any rate).  A first look at a gifted London artist, one last (though I trust no less salient) reading of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and news from our closest cousins in the Great Ape clan round out this month’s offering.

    Our readership, I’m happy to say, has increased appreciably, and so --owing to vagaries of climate-- has this spring’s glow-worm population.  (A promise: no lame jokes in here about turning readers on.)  Nonetheless, the conjunction inspires a dedication of this edition to Lampyris Noctiluca, the alluring little lightning bug long a fixture of folklore and song.  May both Beasts glow like an incandescent wire.

                                                                              WW

JAMES SINCLAIR: MASTER OF AMBIVALENCE

 Walter Wells



       Besides his extraordinary color work, the quality that intrigues me most in the paintings of London artist, James Sinclair, is their shimmering vacillation between abstraction and the recognizably apocalyptic.   For me, there’s more than a hint of Rothko in them --combining with a palpable sense of dread.  The combination comes through especially clearly in his 2011 painting, Red Sky, shown here below.

Red Sky (2011) Oil on canvas       A night sky has been dramatically reddened by some cataclysmic force.  A flash --not of lightning per se, but of something less mannered, more direct-- shoots to earth from out of a blighted cloud or layer of airborne smoke.  The force, whatever its source, has transformed a network of high tension wires and poles into a landscape of shorn and abandoned crucifixes.  It’s a ruined industrial Gethsemene.  Yet the wires (and the power of communication implicit in them) remain connected.  Some revelation seems at hand.

    I tracked the artist down.  A handsome, congenial man of forty or so, Sinclair sidestepped the matter of apocalypse (to which I’d referred as an evident “theme”) and addressed instead the matter of form.  “Poles and wires,” he said, “these are industrial things.  They're in my 'Pylon' paintings as well.  We see these things all over the countryside, and I find them quite beautiful.  They’re elegant, rhythmic.  Stacked up against nature, they’re also quite fragile.”  One can only add that under the extraordinary quality of “nature” depicted in Red Sky, the poles are fragile indeed.

Horizon (2005) Oil on canvas       The artist also admitted to being unhappy with the painting at first.  “I went back and think I managed to energize it by getting more expressive with color and line, and roughing up the paint a little.  Basically,” he said, “I had to get the thinking out of the picture.”

       Sinclair’s abstractness comes through even more clearly in certain other paintings, ones more subtly disquieting than Red Sky: his Iceberg series (2003-2004), for example, or Horizon (2005) here at left, pictures in which the suggestion of apocalypse, while muted, remains unmistakable.  As Robert Frost wrote long ago: “Some say the world will end in fire.  Some say in ice.”

Black White (2004) Oil on canvas       Another strand that characterizes Sinclair’s paintings is more representational, a strand both erotic and fantastic.  In Black White (2004) for one, there seems a strange miscegenation going on between a woman and an oddly reluctant monster.  One feels a push-pull between animal sensuality and sudden moral compunction: a superego momentarily asserting itself against the id.  The monster, rather sleek but for his arms and animal ears, pushes his beautiful young sex object away from the black field that provides his background into the white one now behind her.  The picture resonates with seductive ambivalence.

       When I asked Sinclair about another of his erotic paintings, Red 2 (2009), immediately below here, he responded quite ingenuously: “I just love burying my head in the belly of a female.  You’ll Red 2 (2009) Oil on canvasnote the male has wings, at least the elements of wings, and religion and sex always make good bed partners.”  Then he quickly shifted back to form.  “You see the figures are contorted.  They share lines and textures, her stomach is carried through his arm, his torso through her leg.  So there is intimacy.”  And he added: “Maybe even a little shame on his part.”  

       I didn’t, but wish I had asked if shame was why the white “wing” at the picture’s center actually looked more like a hand dragging its fingernails down the image.

       Certainly, hands are a critical part of Sinclair’s erotic arsenal, in Black White, in Red 2, and in earlier images like Fish (1996), or Carabou (1998), or Snail (1996).  They range from the Schiele-like (in Fish or Snail) to hands more nearly resembling those of Murnau’s Nosferatu (as in the Hyena series of 2007).  “I put hands in these various paintings,” he told me, “to make you think about touch.”  

       “But can the touch of such hands,” I asked, “offer anything like comfort, short of the perverse?”  My answer was a smile and a shrug.

       Apart from Sinclair’s paintings, there are his "posters."  “Are these concessions to commerce?” I asked him.  

       “Yes, they are, in part,” he said.  “I wanted to produce something I could more easily sell.  But there’s more to it than that.  Walter Benjamin reminded us long ago that we’re in an age when art is mechanically reproduced, or reproducible anyway.  And I like that.  I like that posters are disposable.  I like the material they’re presented on, fairly low quality paper.  The thing isn’t too precious.  If it’s damaged, you can always get another one.  And you can manipulate their range, I mean the artist can.  Make it small, blow it up, move things around.  It gives you real intimacy with the image.”

Rear View Window (2012) Poster       I asked Sinclair specifically about his recent poster, Rear View Window (2012), seen here at the right, with its ominous nighttime setting, and its immolating flames that seem nonetheless latent with explosion yet to come.  These flames remind me of the “threatening” quality of those jagged, oddly linear splashes in David Hockney’s early LA swimming pools.  Was the image here simply drafted, or was it computer-generated?  There seems a hint of the latter even to an observer untutored in electronic art.  

       “They’re not computer-generated per se” he replied, “but computer-assisted, yes.  I don’t want it looking too natural.  I do sketch out the basic idea, often in various ways.  Then, working with the sketch that feels closest to what’s in my head, I figure out realistic space, perspective, vanishing points, etc.  Nothing too exciting.  Then I draw each of the pieces separately on tracing paper (which scans well): in this case, the building, the car, and the flames.  Each gets its own different texture.  For the flames, I used the computer to invert the tone.  Then everything’s assembled in Photoshop.  All quite mechanical, really.  I can build up the image in layers and play around with it.  There’s a lot of freedom in that, and no fear of damaging anything.”

       I suggested that part of the image’s ominousness might owe to the absence of human beings in the picture.  “That might be,” he replied.  “I never considered putting one in there.”  A precognitive decision? 

Edward Hopper, Night Shadows (1921)       Though nature, in one sense of the word, abhors a vacuum, in another, whether forest, mountain, prairie or sea, it quite accommodates human absence.  But the city is different.  City streets without a soul in sight are inherently threatening, unnatural.  Add night, blank windows, and a Gorgon-like vehicular conflagration –all immaculately drafted and maneuvered into place—and they reflect a human compass set unerringly toward anxiety.  Such is Sinclair’s.   

       He’d referred to my earlier question about his working-method with casual allusion to perspective, among other things: just another element to be manipulated.  In truth, perspective is much more for him.  Edward Hopper, for one, showed what it and the implicit vanishing point could achieve if rendered vertically, as in his well known 1921 graphic, Night Shadows: the angle of view is precipitous, adding an acrophobic dimension to the already disquieting prospect of a Raven (2008) Posterman walking alone at night in the city.  Sinclair, in posters like Heights (2007), Hanging (2008), or Raven (2008), pushes vertical perspective to vertiginous extremes.  We are dangled, along with his subjects, above an abyss, a deep canyon of concrete and mortar.  One can think of it as fear-mongering on the cheap, yet Sinclair, in Raven at least, compounds his stomach-churning effect with an inverted chiaroscuro: brightness bidding us far down below, with a shadowed darkness immediately at hand on high.  Even granting its exploitativeness, the image is disconcerting, at the least.  I’m willingly had by it.

       Raven inevitably invokes James Marsh’s recent white-knuckled documentary, Man on Wire, the story of Philippe Petit’s tightrope escapade across the void between the two, then-newly-built towers of New York’s World Trade Center.  What at first glance seems a scraggly extension of feathers behind the boy is, on closer look, a frenzy of black birds attacking his own “natural” wings in the manner of Hitchcock’s birds molesting Tippi Hedren.  (Swarms of frenzied black birds do appear elsewhere in Sinclair’s posters.)  Here they make the boy’s precarious perch all the more threatening, even as he dangles one foot off the edge of the buttress, further teasing our acrophobia.  But is he really in danger?  He appears unfazed by the frenzy of the birds and does, after all, have wings of his own –though they’re small and perhaps, in their own way, as inadequate to flight as those of Garcia-Marquez’s very old man with enormous ones.  Meanwhile, the wisdom of Manet’s raven vies with the “nevermore” mutability of Poe’s.  Credit the picture, among all else, for possessing a very rich store of allusion.

       Allusion, but also creative ambivalence.  “I’m afraid of heights,” says Sinclair.  “But there’s also some wish-fulfillment in these pictures.  I’d love to be comfortable in such circumstances, to have a feeling of freedom there.”

Girl With a Cuban Cigar (2011) Poster       “To be able to fly?” I asked.

       “You bet!” he replied.

       The freedom to fly indeed, Freud might say, especially noting Sinclair’s erotic impulse --which comes through in his posters, his “throwaway” art, as in his paintings.  It’s unmistakable in his Budapest Metro series, and his Hyena in Budapest images;  it’s predominant in the Amazon v Spartan series, and in his gently acerbic, Girl With Cuban Cigar (2011), which tweaks Freud (When indeed is a cigar not a cigar, especially if it’s Cuban?), and has a go at Bacon's Pope Innocent X as well.

       But one might object: surely these are comic-book images --true, at their best, like Lichtenstein’s works without the Benday dots or speech bubbles.  Hesitantly, I put this as a question to Sinclair (hesitant only as anyone fully aware of Lichtenstein’s place in the Pop Art pantheon would be).  “Of course they are,” he replied.  “They’re a great influence, especially Marvel comic books.  I have quite a decent collection.  Wish I’d kept more of them.  They’re a great release from the very different rigors of painting –though neither one, frankly, really pains the soul.  Shifting from one to the other helps me to get some distance on my work, helps me decide what needs changing.”

       “You’re still young,” I said to him.  “Your art has a long way to go.  What do you feel most needs changing in it?”

       He pondered for a moment.  “I'll tell you," he said.  "For the most part, I’m too conservative."

       The full range of James Sinclair's work --paintings, posters, and drawings-- can be seen on www.paperst.co.uk

                                                                 ______________________________

James Sinclair, Mountain (2008) Oil on canvasJames Sinclair, Iceberg (2003) Oil on canvas_____________________________________________
WALTER WELLS is founding editor of The Fickle Grey Beast and author of Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper, winner of the 2009 Umhoefer Prize for Achievement in the Arts and Humanities.      

  

HALLELUJAH!

Daniel Snowman


[Editor's Note:  Our dear friend and regular contributor, Daniel Snowman, has, among his numerous pursuits, sung over four hundred concerts as a member of the London Philharmonic Choir --one of the finest choral ensembles in Britain and the choir of choice for the London Philharmonic Orchestra.  His first concert with the LPC (and LPO) was a performance of Edward Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius" at the Royal Festival Hall in March 1967 under the baton of Sir Adrian Boult.  This past March, forty-five years later, Daniel sang "Sea Drift," by Elgar's contemporary, Delius, in the same hall, with the same choir and orchestra, under the direction of Sir Mark Elder.]   
 
 
Sir Adrian Boult, who led the London Philharmonic Orchestra, as chief or emeritus conductor, from 1950 to 1978.       Actually, my choral singing goes back even further than that Gerontius under Boult.  In July 1959, as a member of the Cambridge University Music Society, I sang my first Verdi Requiem (at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge) under David Willcocks.  As recently as last summer, I was again singing the Verdi Requiem – this time with the LPC and LPO in a sold-out Promenade concert at the Royal Albert Hall conducted by Semyon Bychkov, a performance filmed for television. My mind wandered back over the many occasions I’d sung this work with the LPO:  under Solti, Rostropovich, Klaus Tennstedt, Vladimir Jurowski and others --and to the fact that Verdi himself had conducted it here, just a few years after the Albert Hall had been inaugurated by Queen Victoria.
 
                                                      ***************************
 
The author in rehearsal with the LPC       What has sustained my interest in choral singing over so many years?  I suppose there is an element of inertia, of habit.  Many times, I’ve been tired at the end of a busy day, aching for a quiet evening at home.  But it’s rehearsal night.  So off I go, in bad grace and probably in bad voice.  Why?  Because it’s what I do on Monday and Wednesday evenings.  Then, almost invariably, the miracle occurs, and I return home three hours later with body and mind revivified by music, companionship and the uplifting physicality of singing.
 
       But the Choir is more than a visit to the gym, or a club.  Through the LPC I have become intimately acquainted with some of the great musical masterworks.  They have become revered friends whom, every now and then, I have the huge pleasure of revisiting.  I sometimes joke that I joined the Choir in order to go to lots of free concerts.  And, indeed, over the years, either before or after singing the assigned choral composition, I have heard countless performances at close range of the symphonies and concertos of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, or wonderful orchestral showpieces by Stravinsky, Ravel and others --works that everyone in the hall had to pay to hear.  I’ll never forget, for example, the stupendous, high-risk performance of Mahler’s Fifth that Tennstedt conducted right after we finished the brief incantation that concludes Schoenberg’s  A Survivor from Warsaw.
 
Kurt Masur       We also sang many concerts under Tennstedt’s friend and compatriot, Kurt Masur.  Physically unable to wield a stick, Masur would beat time, if at all, with partially clenched hands and shoulders.  His gestures were small.  At rehearsal, he’d speak very quietly, regardless of the size of the forces before him.  One often had to struggle to hear him.  Typically, he’d ask for the spirit of a piece, for intensity rather than volume, and his criticisms could be devastating, expressed as sorrow rather than anger, as though we had committed a moral rather than a musical infraction.  At the initial piano rehearsal of Dresden, 1945the Britten Requiem in spring, 2005, this distinguished German conductor told us how, sixty years before, he had been a teenage soldier trying to save his country from defeat – which, he said, thank God he didn’t. He talked about the destruction of Coventry.  And of Dresden.  "Imagine," he said, "that your city, one of the most beautiful in the world, has been destroyed."  As I struggled to enter the spirit of this deeply felt work, I reflected on the career of a man who had lived under both Nazism and East German Communism and who, from his base in Leipzig (where he’d been Chief Conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra), had emerged as a pivotal figure in the peaceful transition to democracy and German reunification.
   
                                                     **************************
 
       Above all, membership of the London Philharmonic Choir has enabled me to get to know --from the inside, as it were-- some of music’s great masterpieces.  I think in particular of such profound evocations of life, death, war, peace and eternity as are encapsulated in (for example) Haydn’s Creation, Mahler’s 2nd (Resurrection) symphony or the sheer élan of Beethoven’s great Ode to Joy with which he concludes his Ninth Symphony (a piece I first sang in 1963 under Eugene Ormandy with the Philadelphia Orchestra when I was a member of the Cornell University choir).  Or requiems to the dead as set not only by Verdi and Britten but by Mozart, Berlioz, Brahms, and Fauré.  

Hector Berlioz       People often caricature Berlioz as a big noisemaker (they did so in his lifetime).  But, to me, the greatest music of this colossally talented genius lies, as it does with Mahler, in the delicate, chamber-like sub-textures of his orchestration.  True, the giant double fugue of the ‘Lacrymosa’ (in his Grande Messe des Morts, or Requiem) is every choral singer’s dream opportunity for a big loud belt.  And his ‘Tuba Mirum’, with its sixteen or more timps banging away, must be the loudest piece of classical music ever penned.  I remember being nearly deafened by a playback of the Tuba Mirum when we recorded the Grande Messe at Walthamstow under Previn in the 1970s (one of the first-ever digital recordings and capable, I noted, of capturing not only Previn’s four separated brass bands but also, quite clearly, our choral line).  Yet what is equally miraculous about this work, as in so much of Berlioz, is the still, quiet beauty of the alternating movements, like the ‘Sanctus’ with its gentle, tinselly touches of cymbal adding a silvery note to the tenor’s ethereal utterances.  Glorious.

                                                     ****************************
 
       I am not, I confess, much given to spiritual reflection.  But great music superbly executed can touch the soul and change lives.  Like most of us in the LPC, I relish the great occasions when a major work, with outstanding soloists and an important conductor, is given with our own ‘mother’ orchestra, the LPO, after proper rehearsal time in a packed hall to a discriminating London audience.  I think, for example, of a Bruckner Te Deum in December 1996 and a Mahler Two in December 2002, both of them under Bernard Haitink at the Royal Festival Hall with the LPO in superb form.  Earlier in 2002, we gave a performance of Elgar’s Gerontius with the LPO Sir Mark Elder away from the podiumled by Mark Elder, a conductor capable of ratcheting up the excitement and drama of any music he touches.  More recently, not long after that Verdi Requiem under Bychkov, I was privileged to participate in profoundly moving performances of Rossini’s Stabat Mater and (in February this year) Bruckner’s Te Deum, both concerts under the richly expressive leadership of the young French-Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin.   By now, I have sung under conductors born nearly a century apart!
 
                                                     *****************************
 
       And after so many years of choral singing I’ve noticed certain trends that, in my mind, have taken on the patina of almost Newtonian laws. On reflection, I have to admit that they are not quite invariable.  But, for what they’re worth, here they are:
 
* The first is that opening sections of works are almost always over-rehearsed, and final sections under-rehearsed.  Conductors and chorus masters are aware of the importance of making a big impact in the first minutes of a concert when audience expectations are at their highest.  But I can think back to occasions, when, for example, the Choir studiously rehearsed the peasant dance in the opening pages of Berlioz's Damnation de Faust, or the repeated staccato incantations from the beginning of the Britten War Requiem, while leaving dangerously under-rehearsed the tricky Hellish (in the Berlioz) and Heavenly (Britten) passages that can ambush an unwary chorus in the final pages.
 
* I have also noticed that the earlier you arrive at an orchestral tutti the longer the maestro will make you wait before calling upon you to sing.  Not quite fair, perhaps, but some conductors are less considerate of us amateur forces than others.  At a recent full-orchestral rehearsal of a piece involving a boys’ choir, the youngsters were kept waiting for most of a long evening before being asked to sing their bit.
 
* A third neo-Newtonian law: The greater the impatience and/or irritability displayed by the chorus master or the conductor --especially if directed towards the weakest section of the choir-- the worse the singing that will emerge.  Sunshine always achieves better results than storms.
 
Ladies of the London Philharmonic Choir* Another more-or-less iron law concerns decorum and deportment on the concert platform. Concert managers strive to get the Choir to enter the platform, usually ladies from backstage right and men from backstage left, with appropriate dignity and measured symmetry. Yet the results achieved are often in inverse proportion to the amount of instruction received. As for the ‘stands’ and ‘sits’, both during the concert and in acknowledgement of applause at the end, another golden(ish) rule is that, however thoroughly instructed and rehearsed, these tend to resemble a Mexican Wave.
 
* Finally, it is an ineffable law of choral singing that your required periodic re-audition will be scheduled on a day when you wake up with an incipient cold!   I can already feel mine coming on. . .

______________________________________________________
DANIEL SNOWMAN, historian and former BBC Radio producer and broadcaster, is also the author (among other books) of Hallelujah! An Informal History of the London Philharmonic Choir.  The book opens with a recollection of the Choir’s one-time chorus master, Frederic Jackson, imploring his charges, “Ladies, please look up at Sir Adrian when you reach your climax!”  See www.danielsnowman.org.uk 
 

WHAT'S NEW WITH THE COUSINS?

Walter Wells



       After systematic observation, primatologists at the University of Zurich have concluded that chimpanzees, like humans, engage in the arbitration of disputes.  The behavior, a major underpinning of our moral and legal systems, is prelinguistic and not limited to humans alone.  Primatologists call it “policing.”

       To maintain social cohesion, a highly ranking member of an extended group will intervene, quite impartially, when conflict arises between other chimps in the group.  Arbiters can as easily be female as male, but must enjoy the group’s high regard.  The more parties there are to a dispute (that is, the greater the threat to social cohesion), the more quickly and decisively an arbiter will step in.

       The Zurich study was carried out with four different groups of chimps at the Walter Zoo in nearby Gossau, home of the largest chimpanzee enclosure in Switzerland.  Claudia Rudolf von Rohr, its lead author, said:  “We were lucky enough to be able to observe a group of chimpanzees into which new females had recently been introduced, and in which the ranking of the males was also being redefined.  The stability of the group began to waver.  This also occurs in the wild.”

       So our own interest in peacefully resolving conflicts, it seems, is deeply rooted.  One might also speculate that possessing language –that is, the ability to say such things as “weapons of mass destruction,” “Great Satan” or “let’s refer it to the Security Council”—might even be getting in the way.  

                                                          _______________________


       Meanwhile, chimpanzees in the rainforest at Bossou, in Guinea, seem to be learning faster than chimps elsewhere to avoid the traps set for them by humans hunting for “bushmeat.”  Some intentionally seek out the traps –which snare, maim and kill thousands of chimps across Africa— and deactivate them by setting them off without themselves being trapped.

       At Bossou, primatologists Gaku Ohashi and Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University observed five male chimps, several of them juveniles, seeking out snares.  Most often, when they found them, the chimps took hold of the trip stick, shaking it vigorously until the trap broke.  On several occasions,  a chimp would lightly push the bent sapling to which a snare was affixed, thereby springing the trap.  He then grasped it firmly and broke it.  In every case, the chimps avoided touching the dangerous part, the wire loop.  

       One mistake, of course, could prove fatal, so the chimps couldn’t really be said to have learned their caution through trial and error.  Messrs. Ohashi and Matsuzawa speculate that the chimps had long ago learned by seeing others victimized by traps and passed their awareness down through generations.  They did observe one case in which a juvenile male watched an adult deactivate a snare, then move in and handle it himself once it was neutralized.

                                                          _______________________


Bonobos being bonobos       Then there are the Bonobos, another branch of the family.  These slenderer, comparatively long-limbed great apes with their long, parted hair are as closely related to us as is Pan troglodyte, the common chimp.  Genetically, in fact, they’re both more akin to homo sapiens than to gorillas or orangutans.  We’re talking first cousins here.

       Unlike the more aggressive, male-dominant societies of the chimpanzee, bonobos enjoy a more passive, “make-love-not-war” reputation.  Not surprisingly, they are female-dominant.  Recent studies at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology suggest the extent to which this is so.

       Ordinarily, as is the case across primate species, the higher up in the social hierarchy a male bonobo is, the greater Camillo, the highest ranking bonobo in the study group, was often seen in the company of his mother.his success in mating with female bonobos.  Evidence now shows, however, that more ordinary males (the “blokes” among bonobo society) greatly increase their chances of connecting with estrous females if their mothers accompany them.  

       As they grow up, male bonobos tend to stay at home with their natal group, the matriarchal family into which they were born.  Mothers and sons seem to be inseparable, and mothers –who, in bonobo society, have the leverage to intervene in male conflicts—inevitably favor their sons when it comes to the mating game.  Their sons clearly benefit, but what do their mothers have to gain?    “By helping their sons,” says Martin Surbeck, an Institute investigator, “the mothers may likely increase the number of their own grandchildren.”  He didn’t say if being Jewish played a role.

                                                         ________________________


       And who these days is not aware of the “infinite monkey” theorem? –the idea that monkeys randomly hitting keys on a typewriter (or computer keyboard), if given enough time, will ultimately reproduce the works of William Shakespeare.  

       Though by now it's a part of conventional wisdom, the idea was recently put to the test experimentally at the Paignton Zoo in Devon, England.  Zookeepers left a computer keyboard in a cage with six rhesus macaques for a month.  Granted, the experiment’s duration was insufficient, but the trend definitely tended not to support the theorem.  The monkeys produced only a five-page document (consisting mostly of the letter s) until the alpha male bashed the keyboard with a stone, and the other monkeys urinated and defecated on it.
________________________________________________________________

"TICKETS, PLEASE"

David Fine



       It pained me to see the place torn down.

       As a student, I worked there a few nights a week, in the mid 1950s.  The Beverly Canon Theater
in Beverly Hills.  No ordinary movie house, it was the first theater in or around L.A. to showcase foreign films.   The Beverly Canon Theater in its heyday.In a previous incarnation (as the Esquire Theater on Fairfax Avenue), it had been located in the heart of the “Borsht Belt,” sandwiched between kosher delicatessens.   Its move to Beverly Hills mirrored the migration of the city’s Jewish population westward across the L.A. basin.

       The Beverly Canon looked like no other movie house in town, inside or out: neither the generic one-size-fits-all neighborhood theater, nor the exotic 1920s movie palace masquerading as a Chinese pagoda or Egyptian temple, nor the suburban multi-screen theaters soon to come.  It was a small, intimate “art” house with a lobby that looked like a living room: dark, wood-paneled walls; a thick carpet in discretely-muted beige; two period couches with curved mahogany legs; Tiffany-style lamps on end tables; and somber prints of stormy seascapes and thickly-clouded skies on the walls—the works of some cut-rate Turner.   Only a glass-enclosed candy counter and popcorn machine disrupted the domestic mimicry.

       Imported films were something of a novelty then.  We drew a different and more varied audience from that of conventional movie theaters.  We had film buffs, filmmakers, actors, or the merely curious drifting in, and oftener than not out, bored by the slow pace, the subtitles, and the typically grainy, black-and-white cinematography.  Generally, it was an older crowd, hardly the place for a youthful Saturday night date.  And there were class divisions: enlightened or unenlightened, culture vultures or mere entertainment seekers.  There were two classes of seats as well—more expensive “loge” seats in the back, elevated and plusher; and the “general” seats lower in, closer to the screen.  I preferred, even then, to be close to the screen and didn’t understand why anyone would pay more to sit in the rear.

       We showed a wide variety of films.  Where else could one see a Samurai epic with Toshiro Mifune sitting on his heels or murderously flailing a sword, Italian neo-realism like Rossellini’s Open City or Fellini’s La Strada, a French thriller like Clouzot’s Wages of Fear or Les Diaboliques, or an Alec Guiness comedy or some other hilarious British film like The Green Man with Alistair Sim?   Guiness’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, about a man who finds ingenious ways to do away with his relatives and grab their inheritances, was one of the longest running of our offerings.

       As an usher, aged sixteen, I was outfitted in an old, threadbare, over-sized grey suit with red piping down the pant legs.  Armed with a flashlight (pointed mostly at the floor), I felt like Virgil leading patrons down the dark aisle, flicking the beam at the best seats I could see.  Many, though, peeled off to find their own seats, leaving me more like Sisyphus endlessly condemned to repeat the same futile task.  

Danielle Darrieux       But I loved the job, largely because standing at the door I could, between descents down the aisle, watch movies again and again.  Repetition was the essence of the job, and the source of its pleasure.  I clock my love for movies more to my time as an usher in a foreign-movie house than to all the Saturday afternoon double bills I watched as a kid.  It wasn’t John Wayne but Jean Gabin, not Barbara Stanwyk but Danielle Darrieux, not  Betty Grable but Jeanne Moreau whose features were etched on my frontal lobe.  I looked forward to certain scenes, scenes that never lost their appeal to me.  Since we ran films for extended periods, I got to know what time these scenes would come on the screen, and I'd be sure to be at my post at those times, even if it meant letting patrons, who might come in at any time, stumble blindly down the aisle.  

       Since this is a confession, I confess first of all that my favorite scenes were the hottest ones—the quick exposure of breast, thigh, buttocks.  Back then, French and Italian films were far more generous with female flesh than Hollywood was.  The movie screen was my window into the otherwise elusive and mysterious world of sex.  For a time, my favorite scene was Gina Lollabrigida in a long-forgotten historical drama descending into a Roman bath.  We see her from the back as a servant removes her robe, and for all of about six seconds we see the white, dimpled globes of Gina’s buttocks, like the elliptical twin hemispheres on the world map pinned to the wall of my geography class.  I never tired of that one.      

       The joys were more than prurient, though.  Anticipating well-remembered scenes is a pleasure distinctly different from seeing them the first time.  What was lost in suspense and surprise, I gained in the comfort of the sumptuously familiar.  It felt like participating in the film, being part of the cast, an insider, a collaborator.  I was the director, out in the audience, watching his own work.  I listened for the audience’s reactions.  I wanted them to be moved to tears, or to laughter.  It was I who was giving them this movie.  I laughed with them as Alec Guinness did his family in, wept with them when Greta Garbo as the dying Camille tells her lover, Armand, “I loved you as much as any woman can love,” and I revelled (silently) when the boy, Antoine Doinel, escaped reform school and the dull, corrupt adult society and ran free on the beach.  I wanted to direct the audience’s response, nudge them to full attention, tell them what to pay particular attention to, what to notice, who to root for. . . .

       After a time I was promoted from usher to ticket-taker.  That too offered adventures, plus (another confession here) the opportunity for a few petty crimes.  The ordinary procedure had the girl in the box office dispensing tickets from the dispensing machine.  When presented to me, I was to tear the ticket in half, giving one half back to the patron and stuffing the other half into a slotted box.  The tickets were numbered, and the manager would periodically check the numbers against the cash taken in.  Whose idea it was, I don’t remember —Fortune’s or mine?  (The cashier’s name was Fortune Zimmerman.)   She would punch out a ticket, tear it in half herself, then sell the other half to the next patron on line.  We made a few extra bucks this way, but knew when to stop.  Far from hardened criminals, we were in terror of being caught by the general manager, a huge, unsmiling Scotsman named MacDougal who from time to time would lurk behind parked cars across the street, counting the number of people who bought tickets.  Then he’d walk across to our box office, as though he’d just arrived, and count the cash.  But we usually knew he was there, and were never caught.  While he was spying on us, we spied on him spying. Our theft we rationalized as compensation for the meager hourly wage.  

       Less flagrantly criminal, I also collaborated with the girl behind the candy counter, whose name was Faith, Faith Zimmerman, Fortune’s sister.  Honestly.  I adored cute little Faith and often spent my ten-minute break chatting with her.  Her part in my thievery was simply to look the other way while I opened packages and removed a little of the candy or an ice-cream bonbon or two.  Who'd notice if a little were missing?   If a customer did complain, I told him or her that contents tended to settle.  If pressed, we offered to swap the customer’s open package for a new one, then pawn his off on another customer.   
    
       But back to my post by the door.  Standing tall there next to the slotted box, I got to see, and greet, our celebrity patrons—mostly movie luminaries.  Among others, Lauren Bacall (post-Bogie) with Jason Robards, Anne Bancroft, Jack Benny.  One night Groucho Marx came for the late show.  Arriving early, he flopped across the length of one of the couches in the lobby, smoking a cigar.  The lobby was crowded, and the house manager, a small Irishman named Victor Dunne, told me to tell him to make room for others on the couch.  When I complied, Groucho just looked at me, and said nothing.  He just puffed away, occupying the couch.  Then there was Dorothy Malone, who came on a crowded night and waited on line outside for the early show to break.  I didn’t know then who she was.  I’d been assigned crowd control, walking the line periodically reminding people that they had to buy their tickets before joining the line.  Dunne, who stood nearby, spotted her and instructed me to invite her in and escort her to a couch.  Thinking he’d made up her name as a joke, I blurted out, “Who the hell is Dorothy Malone?”  She was about ten feet away. I looked to the line and saw a truly beautiful woman with a very red face, who declined my invitation to wait in the lobby.
    
LES DIABOLIQUES, the corpse in the bathtub. . .       In my time at the Beverly Canon, the most popular film we showed was Henri Clouzot’s French thriller, Les Diaboliques.  It ran for months to packed houses, and offered me the chance, during the late show, to enter into a devil’s pact of sorts with old chain-smoking, Lanahan, the projectionist, to have some fun.  With Dunne gone home early, and both the box office and candy counter locked up (Faith and Fortune had gone home too), only Lanahan and I held the fort.   Les Diaboliques was frightening enough, but he and I concocted a scheme to raise the ante.  In the climactic and scariest scene, Michel, the husband, and his lover attempt to frighten his wife, Vera, to death, knowing she has a weak heart, in order to inherit the . . . the corpse arisesboarding school she owns. The bizarre plot includes the faked drowning of Michel (the audience, not let in on the scheme, thinks he’s dead).  We hear strange noises in the night.  Lights go on and off in various rooms.  A badly frightened Vera, searching for the causes, winds up in the bathroom, where the “body” has been stashed in the tub.  Suddenly, it rises, terrifying the audience as well as Vera.  That’s when Lanahan and I went to work.  Just before the scene, he turned the sound down to a barely audible level and I dimmed the house lights even further.  Then, as the “corpse” rises, we jacked the lights and sound up to their limits.  Whether the screams in the audience were amplified by our efforts, I can’t be certain.  We liked to think we scared the shit out of them.
    
       Seven years ago this September, the Beverly Canon Theater was demolished.  Progress as usual.  But the memories remain.  Whenever I go to a movie, I always attend to the sound levels, wondering if the ghost of old Lanahan isn’t monkeying around.  Buying a ticket, I make sure it’s a whole one, and imagine grim MacDougal lurking suspiciously across the street.  At the candy counter, I usually wink at the salesgirl, then check to assure the box is full.
____________________________________________________
DAVID FINE is Emeritus Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, and former literary editor of Westways Magazine.  Among other of his works, he is the author of The City, The Immigrant, and American Fiction, and Imagining Los Angeles, winner of the Southern California Historical Society's Pfleuger Award as regional book of the year (2000).   See www.socalhistory.org           

TERPSICHORE AROUSED

David Rankin

       Let’s be blunt.  Ballet provides a field day for oglers of  the female crotch or, as the eye may prefer, the male behind.  Female dance attire has gradually moved away from the ponderous, operatic gaudiness of the early days to airy long dresses and tulles and, finally, to tutus, bell-shaped and flouncy, or very short and stiff, jutting from the waist (the “pancake” tutu.)  For male dancers, by the end of the 19^th century, tights had become standard.  Both outfits admitted a peculiarly encapsulated view of what was disallowed in public.  Until everyday panties became wisps of cloth, viewers so inclined could imagine that ballet girls were tip-toeing in their undies, briefer than ones likely to be encountered in bedrooms and such, and could banish the knowledge that under the undies lurked another barrier of cloth from the tights.  Even the pinched stovepipe pants of the Parisian dandy did not advertise an exact contour of what resided within, as did the tights of the ballet cavalier.

The pas de deux from Le Corsaire       Put less graphically, ballet has always been about sex.  The prince does not kiss Sleeping Beauty back to wakefulness only to arrange a poetry reading in a moonlit garden.  The black swan in the third act of “Swan Lake” is not luring Siegfried to a game of checkers.  (Margot Fonteyn’s eyes in this role showed quite other than a girlish twinkle.)   In “La Fille Mal Gardée,” the Innocent Young Thing does not escape her befuddled duenna just to play hide and seek with the boy.  No stripper wields a fans more provocatively than Kitri, ballet’s all-star flirt, in “Don Quixote.”  The rip-snorting pas de deux in “Le Corsaire” is mostly a spectacular display of erotic male bravado.  The glove-seller in “Gaité Parisienne” is selling more than gloves to the Peruvian newly arrived in Paris with two satchels full of money. Even danced in the quick and pretty Danish style of Bournonville, the tarantella in “Napoli” is a mating dance.  Which is to the point.

       That dominant sexual motif reminds us of the probable origins of dance, in every culture, its roots in fertility festivals.  Folk dance aims to make the population grow, as well as the crops.  Girls tie ribbons to the Maypole and dance around it.  Boys encircle a circle of girls.  Variations on these patterns occur from culture to culture and climate to climate, but the essential symbolism is remarkably constant.  The action scene inevitably incarnates the culture’s ideal of beauty for girls, strength for boys, often in combat, often martial, as in Georgian folk dance; and flirting takes whatever form local customs deem permissible, from coy to direct.

       Many of these seminal images are either adumbrated or directly form the basis of choreography in numerous ballets.  Cavaliers woo reluctant maidens (the reluctance real or faked) either on their own or in company with retinues, who themselves are clicking their heels, sometimes literally,  to impress “the girls of the village.”  There is male combat, and occasionally death, as in “Romeo and Juliet.”  Most of the time, the action is ritualized and decorous and, on the surface, chaste.  But all that strutting, those acrobatics, that swooning, all that competition can scarcely be taken as prelude to a game of bridge.   The natural culmination of romance takes place off stage, as did the killing in Classical Greek drama.

The late Kenneth MacMillan       Which brings me to Kenneth MacMillan, director and later resident choreographer of London’s Royal Ballet.  Why did he aver at one point that sex, if not ignored in ballet, had certainly been slighted?  There might be passion and love in ballets old and recent, but in his mind the portrayal of “it” --if there was any “it” at all, or even a hint of “it”-- was too pallid, too abstract and enervated, too evasive, too shackled by conventions.  One must not shock the paying customers, whether the shock real or feigned,  or hypocritical.  (Point of order, someone might say.  At the end of “Afternoon of a Faun,” doesn’t Nijinsky sit on a rock, masturbating?  Yes, once.)   MacMillan aimed, quite on his own terms, to reinvigorate on the ballet stage the most powerful driving force in human life.

Vaslav Nijinsky in Afternoon of a Faun       Late in life, when he asked about the libretto for a proposed ballet of “Carousel,” and  was told that the story contained much sex and violence, he replied, “It’s what I do.”  Those were his terms.  They can be seen  in two of his full-length ballets, “Mayerling” and “Manon,” and in two shorter ones, “The Invitation” and “The Judas Tree.”  What “he does” in the aggregate  is portray deep kissing, fondling and baring of breasts (though only to the male on stage, not to the audience), and groping.  There is tormented passion, violent psychotic lust, murder, mutual suicide, and gang rape --all dramatized quite explicitly. 

       Many critics and viewers of these ballets at first complained that the treatment of the subject matter was outside the range of ballet.  In time, however, as critics became more hip and public taste more latitudinarian, the ballets continually won more adherents, and “Mayerling” is now regularly dubbed a masterpiece.  MacMillan’s place in the pantheon of choreographers seemed fixed.  His inspiration and influence were felt and seen during his lifetime, and, if anything, have grown in keeping with the prominence of explicit sex and violence in other art forms, to this day.  To wit, this New York Times review of Wayne McGregor’s “Carton Life,” as danced by the Royal Ballet,  referring to the

isolation of various body parts, the sequences of attention-grabbing gestures, an            extravagant kiss, little bouts of same-sex coupling, unisex costumes, and male pointe work     . . . all emphatically delivered . . . all vacuously enjoyable.   As a coherent view of human energy, Mr. McGregor’s choreography is without interest.   As a series of wow effects, however, it’s frothily charming.

 The same reviewer says of Liam’s Scarlett’s “Sweet Violets,”  

 [W]hereas MacMillan’s ballets brutally but excitingly addressed and undressed the sexual hypocrisy of high society, ‘Sweet Violets’ goes further (it opens with a bedroom scene that ends in the man killing the woman) by desensationalizing sex and female flesh.

       I’ve not seen, and probably won’t see, either McGregor’s “Carton Life” or Scarlett’s “Sweet Violets,” though I have no doubt the dancing was splendid.  As indeed it has been in every MacMillan ballet I have seen.  Dancers can do anything, and apparently love dancing these ballets.  Of more immediate interest is whether a brake will be applied, either within the industry or from outside, to prevent new ballets  from “going further” than these two go beyond MacMillan.  Perhaps Grand Guignol en pointe, in the nude?

       I was bored by “Mayerling.”  It is much too long and much too obsessed with obsession. The dancing and the content are frequently incongruous, as some of its early critics said.  The choreography includes some of MacMillan’s familiar self-indulgences: if one lift is good, two must be better, and three best, in quick sequences, legs scissoring. “The sexual hypocrisy of the upper class” was a tired theme long before MacMillan attempted it.  The old story ballets did not shy from dealing with class and caste.  In “Giselle,” for example, the sweet peasant girl is betrayed by the prince who wins her heart while he’s attired as a rustic.

The black swan conspires with the evil von Rothbart in Swan Lake.       Nor were those old ballets innocent about the dark side of human sexuality.  The evil wizard is a staple in them: von Rothbart in "Swan Lake," Carabosse in "Sleeping Beauty," Kashchie in "The Firebird," and others as well.   These three all exert themselves mightily (what roles! what costumes!) to deny the prince access to the heroine.  It takes little imagination to grasp that they symbolize the possessive, destructive power of sex.  They want the girls for themselves.  While they’re at it, they’re both scarier and more fun (now that’s great dancing) than are the human monsters in latter day realistic dance.

       Monsters have been attenuated of monstrosity by psychoanalysis, and left with something perhaps short of tolerance, but far from repugnance.  The advanced sensibility is shocked by nothing because it purports to understand everything, or at least to try to understand everything, and thus to set aside judgment.  MacMillan was long in psychoanalysis, and a conference was devoted to psychoanalyzing his characters.

       Those early critics were brushed off as mumpsimuses.  I can’t recall whether any of them used the term “decadent.”   It would not have been misplaced.   Al Jolson used to say, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”   Now it’s being seen.

_________________________________________________________

DAVID RANKIN, Emeritus Professor of English and Humanities at California State University, Dominguez Hills, is also an established glamor and fashion photographer based in Los Angeles.  “Dance Gallery,” his portfolio of ballet photography can be seen at www.davidrankinphotography.com.

NAVIGATING TROPIC OF CANCER (Part 3 of 3)

Walter Wells



       For all the complaints it has engendered over the years, and the effrontery, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer has withstood –indeed, it has quite easily passed—the test of time.  Three-quarters of a century after its first, unheralded publication in the troubled 1930s, the book today provides both a valuable, refractory look at its own moment in western history and the twentieth-century updating of a timeless myth.  This in addition to being a cracking (if more than occasionally vulgar) good read.

       George Orwell was right to see in the book the work of a remarkable literary stylist, a prose writer writing in the spirit, and with the expansive rhythms, of Whitmanian free verse.  But Orwell was even more astute in noting that there was “something rather curious in being Whitman in the nineteen-thirties.”  Whitman’s nineteenth century was a time of democratic ascendancy, of widening prosperity and, for whites at least, of freedom for economic striving.  Whitman's language is a language of acceptance, of embrace.  In his time and place, he heard “America singing.”

       Miller’s 1930s, however, were an altogether different time.  His prose, like Whitman’s verse, is also a language of embrace and acceptance.  Only now (asks Orwell),

                              What is he accepting?  In the first place, not America, but the ancient
                              boneheap of Europe. . . . [and] not an epoch of expansion and liberty,
                              but an epoch of fear, tyranny, and regimentation.  To say “I accept” in
                              an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps,
                              rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, . . . gas masks, submarines, spies,
                              provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons. . . .

George Orwell. "What is he accepting?"       Unlike Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage to the End of the Night (a lurid depiction of the 1930s to which Miller’s book was often compared), Tropic of Cancer is, as Orwell says, “almost exactly the opposite.”  Both books “use unprintable words, both are in some sense autobiographical.”  However, while Céline’s view of modern life amounts to “a cry of unbearable disgust, [e]xactly the aspects of life that fill Céline with horror are the ones that appeal to [Miller].”

       Somehow, writes Miller about midway in his book,

                              the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect
                              on me. . . .  [I]nspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I
                              felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my
                              shoulders. . . .  I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not
                              the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself.  
                              Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to
                              destroy me; nothing had been destroyed but my illusions.  I myself
                              was intact.

       Miller’s protagonist, superficially himself, is actually that same self writ large, himself as prototype of the successful voyager through “the quiet dawn of a new day.”  In a time and place “giddy with crime and distress,” he turns himself into the quintessential survivor who aims, in his lyrical labors, to show us the way.

                              Had one single element of man’s nature been altered. . . by the
                              incessant march of history?  By what he calls the better part of his
                              nature, man has been betrayed, that is all.  At the extreme limits
                              of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. . . .
                              On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour.

Conventional spirituality has become vacuous.  “God. . . has been picked clean: he is a skeleton."  As his own protagonist, Henry Miller has found Him, but finds Him “insufficient” for the age.  Miller deems himself, like his fellow survivors, “spiritually dead.”

"An epoch of fear, tyranny, regimentation."       To accept, much less embrace, such overwhelming obstacles to freedom as prevail in Europe in the 1930s, one had to challenge, even (in a sense) threaten, the age however he could –as indeed Miller seems to have threatened many readers ever since, even in less blighted times.  His first and most obvious threat is to decorum.  If spiritually dead in the face of those obstacles, why worry about threatening anyone with rude language or raw sexuality?  They’re part of the fightback.

Paris, 1934       Miller swaggers through the book, singing in Devil-may-care defiance of those conventional mores that have led to a worldwide morass.  Like Spengler, he bears witness –with the leer of a brash-phallused and most unsettling clown—to the impending ruin of western civilization.  Flouting the traditional notion that beauty manifests itself as wholeness and harmony, Tropic of Cancer offers a counter-aesthetic, one of disintegration, chaos, and ugliness.  As one critic has put it, the book’s prevailing metaphor of disease, epitomized by cancer, conveys the grotesquely moribund condition of “modern life.”  Miller’s images of decay, says another, “burst into apocalyptic visions.”  And amidst it, this retributively vulgar, blustering, sexual adventurer, this bargain-basement Don Juan, will not only survive, but find contentment.

       As his merrily twisted, lightly surrealistic adventure ends, he sits outside watching the Seine flow past.  More than a moving current, the river signifies, as rivers in literature will, the archetypal passage of time and history.  And as this average Everyman watches, a “great peace” comes over him.

                              So quietly flows the Seine that one hardly notices its presence.  It is
                              always there, quiet and unobtrusive, like a great artery running through
                              the human body. . . .  

After brief digression on the strangeness and perversity of human beings, he concludes:

                              The sun is setting.  I feel this river flowing through –its past, its ancient
                              soil, the changing climate.  The hills gently girdle it about: its course
                              is fixed.

       Several years after Tropic of Cancer was published (engendering praise from the cognoscenti, appreciable backstreet notoriety, and polite revulsion), Henry Miller met George Orwell in Paris as the latter traveled to Spain to join the anti-fascist struggle there.  Orwell later remembered Miller telling him

                              in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an
                              idiot. . . . [M]y ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy,
                              etc., etc., were all baloney.  Our civilization was destined to be swept
                              away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely
                              regard it as human –a prospect that did not bother him.

In Tropic of Cancer --which Orwell had read-- Miller had already likened his own enthusiasm for soldiering to his feeling for a fifteen-franc Parisian whore:

                              The way she works over me, to blow a spark of passion into me, makes
                              me think what a damned poor soldier I’d be if I was ever silly enough to
                              be trapped like this and dragged to the front. . . .  But she’s got her mind
                              set on the fifteen francs and if I don’t want to fight about it she’s going
                              to make me fight.  But you can’t put fight into a man’s guts if he hasn’t
                              any fight in him. . . .  My mind is on the peace treaty all the time.

When asked in a magazine survey of writers to express his attitude on war, Miller replied (again, as Orwell recalls it)

                              in terms of extreme pacifism, an individual refusal to fight, with no
                              apparent wish to convert others to the same opinion –practically, in
                              fact, a declaration of irresponsibility. . . .  He is fiddling while Rome is
                              burning [but], unlike the enormous majority of people who do this,
                              fiddling with his face toward the flames.

"The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through. . ."       Orwell’s lengthy and perceptive essay on Miller is entitled, “Inside the Whale.”  For all of Miller’s verbal fireworks, Orwell sees his literary strategy as one of “quietism –robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.  Get inside the whale –or rather admit that you are inside it (for you are, of course).”  Miller had also written an essay that, in passing, cites a remark Aldous Huxley made about the paintings of El Greco.  Huxley claimed that the people in those paintings always look as though they are in the bellies of whales, and that there was something horrible about being in a “visceral prison.”  Miller disagreed: he found the idea rather attractive.  With Tropic of Cancer, Miller is embracing a myth, and we feel its force.  It’s the biblical myth of Jonah, with its powerful hold on the collective imagination.  Let's recall the myth as set out in the Book of Jonah’s first three chapters:

       God comes to Jonah and instructs him to go unto Ninevah, the wicked city, and to raise a cry there against its wickedness.  But Jonah wants no part of the assignment and tries to escape God's command.  He finds a ship bound for Tarshish, pays his fare, and boards it.

       Once the ship is seabound, however, God (who knows plain well what Jonah is up to) whips up a mighty storm.  Terrified, the crew all begin praying to God, except Jonah who, still determined to evade God's mandate, sneaks below and goes to sleep.

       The shipmaster, also terrified of the storm, goes below, rousts Jonah, and commands him to return up top and pray with the rest of them, which he does.

       Desperate, they all decide, lest the storm tear them apart, to draw lots to determine whose fault the tempest is, to see who has so caused God's disfavor.  The draw points to Jonah.

       Why, they all ask him, is God's wrath so upon him, and hence upon them as well?  Jonah confesses the reason.  They sympathize, sort of, but nonetheless implore him to do something --anything-- to turn God's wrath from them so they won't break up in the storm.

       Resigned now to God's will, Jonah instructs the others to cast him into the sea.  Compassionately, they try first to navigate toward safe harbor, but it proves impossible.  So they throw Jonah into the raging sea.

       And lo, the storm subsides.  The sea becomes calm.  Jonah, meanwhile, thrashing frightfully in the water, is swallowed up by a great whale whom God has sent for the task.

       "And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights."  Strangely enough, he's happy in there.  It isn't the greatest place he's ever lived but, considering the alternative, it isn't bad.  After all, he's been saved.

"And lo, the Lord made the whale to regurgitate. . ."       Gratefully, he prays to God: O Lord, I cried to be saved, and You did save me.  The sea flooded in over me, yet You let me not drown.  Thou hast brought up my life from corruption, O Lord.  And so, if I ever get free from this fish, I will sacrifice unto Thee with the voice of thanksgiving.

       And lo, the Lord made the whale to regurgitate and throw up Jonah onto dry land.  Having saved him, God again assigns Jonah to the task: "Go ye unto Ninevah and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee."

      This time, Jonah, who's no fool, complies.         

Henry Miller       What meaning resides in the myth of Jonah?  That a man, having come (like all of us) from human belly, lives, and becomes corrupt.  Once circumstance forces him to realize his error, he has himself cast onto treacherous waters.  He should have died, but instead is saved: saved by re-entering a surrogate belly (a feminine, maternal archetype), which Miller’s selfsame protagonist does with promiscuous frequency in the book, and there, so to speak, realizes the nature of his salvation.  He is reborn into a new, re-dedicated life, a life now liberated from error and false ways.

       This is indeed, at least in broad outline, the story in Tropic of Cancer.  Its mythic dimension is resonant: a myth that embodies the human attraction to freedom at a time when freedom was most grievously under threat.  If Miller’s freedom in these pages is here and there more licentious than yours or mine might be, it’s the price –an inexpensive one at that—for the contemporary myth he’s given us.  It's a gift really, a bit soiled, but valuable nonetheless.

       Novelist Erica Jong is right, I think, to see Miller’s writing as

                              full of imperfection, bombast, humbug.  Sometimes its very
                              slovenliness makes it hard to defend.  But the purity of his example,
                              his heart, his openness, makes him unique among writers.  He will
                              surely draw new generations of readers to him.
_________________________________________________________________
WALTER WELLS is Emeritus Professor of English and Humanities at the California State University, Dominguez Hills, where he taught American literature for over thirty years.  Now living in London, he is founding editor of The Fickle Grey Beast.  Various links of interest about Henry Miller can be found on www.henrymiller.org/hminfodirectory.html#University