Checking Off My Classics Club List: The Big Sleep

November 20, 2013March 16, 2014 / Carolyn O / 12 Comments

Forget Brangelina. Forget Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. The best on-screen/off-screen chemistry of all time goes to Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

Seriously. Watch the first half-hour of To Have and Have Not (1944) and you’ll be floored when you hear Bacall deliver her first line (it was her first movie, at 19). Wow-za. Plus, you can feel that you’re doing something literary, since the film is based (very loosely, I admit) on Hemingway’s novel of the same name, and the screenplay was co-written by William Faulkner. Yeah, THE Faulkner.

Anyway. I love all the Bogie & Bacall movies, but The Big Sleep (1946) is far and away my favorite. It’s dark, it’s scary, it’s engrossing. So naturally I put Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), his first novel, on my Classics Club list.

I knew the contours of the plot from the movie, but I was surprised just how much darker in tone the novel is.

Here’s the set-up: A dying millionaire calls in private detective Philip Marlowe to investigate some “gambling” debts accrued by the younger of his two wild daughters, Carmen. Marlowe’s investigation spins outward to include men and women caught up in blackmail, pornography (the movie elides this one — thanks, Hollywood censors!), murder, gambling, and disappearances. Nobody’s innocent.

Marlowe’s a great character: a cynic trying to do the right thing, curious to a fault, more interested in solving a puzzle than preserving his personal safety. A perfect fit for Bogart. Marlowe narrates, and the prose matches his style — keenly observant, hard-boiled, thorough. Never, ever florid or sentimental.

There’s some squirm-inducing material from this vantage point, nearly seventy-five years later. Marlowe isn’t overly fond of women, for one thing. Carmen may be a psychotic, drug-addled brat, but slapping her around just seems wrong. And the novel brings up homosexuality (very well hidden in the movie), but only in the context of scorn (“queen” and “fairy” is standard language in the novel). Unpleasant, very unpleasant. Here’s a telling line: about a character who’s committed murder and who was another man’s lover: “He was afraid of the police, of course, being what he is” (110). Homosexuality is clearly coded as deviance, as “other,” as part of the criminal underground that Marlowe finds himself caught up in.

These issues aside, it’s a great crime novel, great writing, and highly recommended.

“Your absence has gone through me”

November 19, 2013October 30, 2013 / Carolyn O / 4 Comments

W.S. Merwin’s poem “Separation” is perfect, a miniature masterpiece of metaphor.

It’s so perfect that I’m going to stop writing about it in just a second.

First, may I suggest memorizing it, keeping it tucked away in a mental jacket pocket?

“I want you and you are not here. I pause”

November 12, 2013November 5, 2013 / Carolyn O / 18 Comments

Tomorrow, someone I love would have turned 31.

I bought my first Carol Ann Duffy book when he was twenty-three and I was twenty-one and we were friends. He was out in California, studying poetry, and I was visiting Paris, and bought a beautiful paperback version of Ms. Duffy’s Selected Poems at Shakespeare and Co., perhaps the most storied independent bookstore ever, a feast for the imagination of literary types (I also bought Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, if you were wondering). I bought her Selected Poems because I already loved (and sill do) the sexy, glowing “Warming Her Pearls,” but I didn’t know then that the book will always fall open on another page.

“I want you and you are not here.” That’s the first, plaintive sentence of Carol Ann Duffy’s wonderful poem “Miles Away,” which is about conjuring up the presence of the absent beloved in thought and language. It’s such a perfect rendering of what I felt so keenly for so many months, and still sometimes, that I can only point toward the poem itself:

I have got your mouth wrong,
but still it smiles. I hold you closer, miles away,
inventing love, until the calls of nightjars
interrupt and turn what was to come, was certain,
into memory.

This one’s for you, EVC.

An Eighteenth-Century Gentleman Who Hated Exercise Even More Than I Do

November 6, 2013November 5, 2013 / Carolyn O / 7 Comments

One of my favorite acquisitions from my summer of bookstore love is this little gem, The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (1975). It’s just what the title suggests: little anecdotes about famous literary figures, from Caedmon to Dylan Thomas.

Now, as I’ve written before, my parents are prolific readers who read aloud to me and my siblings well into our teenage years. My dad read me Queen Margot (Dumas), From Dawn to Decadence (Barzun), and Moby-Dick, among others.

But we never made it through Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, not because I disagreed with his analysis of the decline in civic virtue, but because I was bored to tears. Gibbon is a renowned stylist, and his footnotes are chatty and ironic. But frankly, my dear Gibbon, I don’t give a damn. I’m fairly certain that this was the start of my distaste for the eighteenth century’s history and literature. After all, it’s pretty difficult to top Paradise Lost and the Defenestration of Prague.

However, reading this little anecdote—

Gibbon took very little exercise. He had been staying some time with Lord Sheffield in the country; and when he was about to go away, the servants could not find his hat. ‘Bless me,’ said Gibbon, ‘I certainly left it in the hall on my arrival here.’ He had not stirred out of doors during the whole of the visit. (109)

—made me feel as if perhaps the pudgy English lord and I would have gotten along after all. As long as we didn’t talk about the Roman Empire.

“This is the barrenness / of harvest or pestilence.”

November 5, 2013October 24, 2013 / Carolyn O / 9 Comments

Better late than never, right? It’s been three days since All Souls Day, but I’m still mulling over Louise Glück’s creepy and just-right poem, “All Hallows.”

Image Hay Bales On Freshly Harvested Fields” Courtesy of Franky242/ freedigitalphotos.net

I like that the particular line I’ve quoted in the post’s title captures the dichotomy of the end of fall (well, at least here it feels like the end of fall, even if there are technically six more weeks until winter) — it’s difficult to discern, sometimes, whether it feels like the ground underfoot is dying or bursting with life.

Just now the first stanza of the poem, which begins, “Even now this landscape is assembling.” suggests to me a painting, I think a Monet, of the gathered hay covered in lavender snow. Come to think of it, I can bring to mind several summer and spring paintings, and not a few decked with snow, but I’m having a difficult time coming up with a fall painting (if you have one you like, let me know!). Maybe that’s because, as the first line suggests, autumn “is assembling” itself for winter; it’s a flux-state, not even, really, itself.

Scary Read: Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

October 31, 2013October 30, 2013 / Carolyn O / 9 Comments

A tip o’ the hat to my friend Kate, who pointed me to a podcast about the most fascinating story in this already-fascinating book a couple months ago.

Rabid, by veterinarian Monica Murphy and her husband, Wired editor Bill Wasik, examines rabies from a cultural standpoint — but you probably got that much from the title. I went in with the my knowledge of rabies confined to that one episode of The Office, something about twenty shots in your stomach, and a settled dislike for raccoons.

Now on the other side, I’ve got a better handle on the whole subject. The rabies vaccine is only four shots in one’s arm, for one thing. And rabies is the most deadly virus identified, with 100% human mortality (as far as we know) if the disease goes untreated. And 55,000 people die from rabies every year. I guess it’s only a joke if you live in Scranton.

The best chapters in Rabid deal with Pasteur, who invented the rabies vaccine, and with human survivors of rabies, Jeanna Giese in particular (whose case is the subject of that podcast), and how an island community like Bali deals with a sudden outbreak of the disease.

Less mesmerizing are the book’s forays into literary subjects the authors associate with rabies (the bit about the Iliad is particularly unfortunate); the authors are much better equipped to deal with the scientific and veterinary aspects of the disease’s history. Based on the last three chapters alone, Rabid is worth a look. And you’ll definitely look twice the next time you see a raccoon. Or a skunk. Or a stray dog.