Roderick Haig-Brown Tribute

The British-Canadian naturalist, writer and sportsman Roderick Haig-Brown was born 101 years ago in England. After his father was killed in WWI, he washed out of prep-school, and later emigrated to Canada in the early 1930's, specifically to Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Rural Northwestern Canada in those days was rough country. Haig-Brown worked in the logging and fisheries industry, married a Seattle girl, and settled in Campbell River. An avid fisherman since he was a teenager, he'd already published two books by this time on angling, Silver: The Life of an Atlantic Salmon, and Pool and Rapid (1932). He would go on to write and publish some 25 more books, both fiction and non-fiction, juvenile and adult titles.        

I first discovered Haig-Brown as a budding fly-fisherman in the 1970's. Flyfishermen may come to the hobby in childhood, or discover it later on their own. In my case, it was a little bit of each.

My stepfather, Harry W. Faville, who had grown up in Wisconsin, had fly-fished as a boy. In the 1930's, following the break-up of his first marriage, he wandered around the West in an old jalopy, taking odd jobs and wetting his line in the trout streams of the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest. He would tell stories about great days trout-fishing on the Yellowstone and Madison, and Steelheading on the Klamath and Eel River. Before WWII, vast tracts of the West were largely unspoiled, and unregulated. An enterprising sportsman could find plenty of good water and fish for the taking.

By the time I was coming of age in the 1960's, the Vietnam War and the Student Protests had driven a stake into the heart of my relationship with my parents, and what enterprise might have developed between my stepfather and me, quickly evaporated when I went off to college. All I had were a few scattered memories of a day casting spinners to "half-pounders" on the Klamath and a couple of trips to remote back country Sierra Nevada lakes. But there were those stories....

I never suspected that "fishing" writing could be as compelling as true literature. Who would have thought that a Canadian naturalist could be as good a writer as John Steinbeck? The new generation of nature writers that emerged in the 1960's has really given the green movement a shot in the arm: Edward Hoagland, Edward Abbey, John McPhee, Barry Lopez, and a host of others. Anyway, the first book of Haig-Brown's I picked up was Fisherman's Summer [1959]. There were four books in the series, for the four seasons, and I was hooked with the first one. Prose style is a combination of several things: Clarity of purpose, graceful phrasing, balance between sentence lengths, judicious measure, fairness, passion for subject. Haig-Brown had all these things and more. Flyfishing--wading, stalking, casting, watching, playing--requires discipline; it's not unlike playing baseball, periods of waiting followed by sudden spasms of action and emergency. No one who has tried to do it methodically would deny this. Haig-Brown was the one writer capable of imparting accurately the simple clarity of physical, emotional and mental impressions of flyfishing with complete fidelity--he has a bracing quality, the freshness of action, of the feel and sparkle of wild fish in hand--which can be thrilling. But he was so much more than that. 

Haig-Brown was sensitive to nature in ways that all great naturalists have been. His sense of the power, and fragility of plants, animals, weather, streams--their beauty, and mortality--is touching, and sobering. In the latter half of his life he studied and wrote about the natural history and environment of British Columbia, and actively participated in environmental preservation. On the imaginative side, he wrote effective first-person accounts, as well as "animal" fictions about the natural world, neither condescendingly nor stuffily; on the practical side, he strove to bring about protections and sensible attitudes that would help preserve the countryside he loved. He was one of the first to understand that we have to change how people think about nature before you can convince them to conserve and value it. As exciting and seductive as his "sportsman's" essays are, it's his wider concern for preservation which marks him as a crucial figure in the world environmental movement.                    

The ethics and culture of modern dry-fly fishing was in its infancy then when Haig-Brown first began to write about his experiences. Over-exploitation was the order of the day. Wild fish were still regarded then largely as a food source. We're all familiar with those sightly embarrassing old photos of "lucky anglers" standing beside a clothesline of fish hanging in rows, the "haul" of a single afternoon's "harvest." Those days are over. Haig-Brown was among the first to see how catch & release, the deliberate returning of caught fish back to the water--as a way of perpetuating the species and maintaining runs--would eventually be the standard by which sport-fishing would survive.

As a provincial magistrate [1941-1974], Haig-Brown meted out justice to his fellow citizens. The same sure hand he used on "the bench" he used in all his dealings. In 1974, he sold his house and land along the Campbell River to the BC government, now used as a B&B and Canadian Council's Writer In Residence. A provincial park and a mountain are named after him, in honor of his contributions to preservation of the Fraser River and its tributaries, the salmon runs and spawning grounds. 

Reading his works now, 50, 60 or 70 years after they were written, is to be taken back to a time before the West had been overrun, before it had been fished and logged and mined and paved to near-extinction. His ability to evoke the felicities of streams and rivers, and the lively fish that lived in them, along with all the other aspects of unspoiled nature--for those who care about such things--is endlessly romantic. Who would you rather have as a companion on a cold Fall day on the water, than Roderick Haig-Brown? 

When I was first married, my wife and I read Measure of the Year [1950] together, in which Haig-Brown sets out the parameters of a consciously frugal and responsible family life, which naturally included the piecemeal acquisition of a fine private second-hand library. What better advice could anyone give?         

        

Max Beerbohm - Dandy Cartoonist (& Excellent Essayist Too!)

Of all the figures of the fin-de-siecle--the "Gay Ninetees"--the Yellow Decade--last hurrah of the 19th Century's decadence and indulgent refinement(s), Max Beerbohm [1872-1956] is probably the most interesting of all. Wilde's scandalous biography notwithstanding, no one else possessed a comparable talent, perceptivity, clarity of mind, equanimity, rich humor, and sense of purpose that Beerbohm did. As a precocious 19th Century Dandy, he lived on well into the 20th, a tolerant and bemused witness to the revolutionary changes in civilization, and a perfectly preserved example of the spirit and outlook of another age.

I first discovered this fascinating writer and caricaturist through S.N. Behrman's affectionate extended Portrait of Max [Random House, 1960], which appeared first as a New Yorker Profile. I immediately fell in love with his delightful caricatures (cartoons), and his elegant, modest, and refined personality, accurately recorded by Behrman over a series of visits he made to Beerbohm's villa in Rapallo, Italy. (Rapallo, it will be recalled, was the one-time hang-out of Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, and other literary lights.) 

 

Beerbohm became my introduction to late Victorian and Edwardian English culture: Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Rothenstein, Bennett, Conrad, Hardy, Swinburne, Beardsley, Kipling, etc., all turn up in familiar garb and attitude as subjects of Beerbohm's razor-sharp artist's pencil. In Beerbohm's cartoons and reminiscences, these figures came alive: Rather than stuffy, respectful subjects, he saw them as fragile, vulnerable human beings with all their flaws and peccadilloes. 

 

The first thing to note about Beerbohm was that he was precocious. As the youngest member of a talented generation of writers and artists, he was destined to survive the longest, the last witness to the guttering gaslight of late Victorian aesthetic pretensions, a superannuated mock-historian and charming wax-museum piece, still chuckling, 50 years on, about the fads and foibles of a simpler time. The only other octogenarian with whom he shares this privileged vantage--to my knowledge--was E.M. Forster [1879-1970].   

 

By the time Behrman began to interview him, Max had long since abandoned England, departing to live in Italy, with his new bride Florence Kahn, in 1910. This removal has always fascinated me--not sure quite why. Max had "conquered" London society, albeit as a fun-poking observer of its excesses; it was almost as if, sensing the falling curtain on a whole phase of cultural history, he made his neat escape "out of history" and into a half-century's exile in an indefinite twilight of nostalgia and superannuated self-preservation. 

Max excelled in several media. His reputation in posterity will doubtless always depend upon his cartoons, or caricatures. (I once had an argument with one of my English professors about just what made a caricature a caricature. She insisted that the head of the subject had to be several times larger than the body, but in many of Beerbohm's best caricatures this isn't the case at all--in fact, in many of them, the head is actually smaller in relation to the size of the body than it should be, but there was no arguing with this woman--she couldn't imagine any of her students knowing more about anything than she did, and couldn't admit a fault.) In any case, caricature as a form is primarily a satiric medium, designed and practiced as an amused imitation of a figure, often a well-known one (the better well-known the better, actually), with or without a caption. Cartoons routinely tell a kind of story, have a narrative, or impart a message or present a visual editorial. Caricatures are primarily an explication of character, poking fun at excesses or eccentricities of physical impression, or manner of address. Beerbohm produced hundreds of these studies over his lifetime, in a characteristic style, and they are, nearly all of them, classics of the genre. 

                              

     

Some of his wickedest caricatures were of Wilde, Kipling, and Prince Edward. Though he was usually gently mocking, Max could be vicious and pitiless, as this exaggerated mask of Oscar Wilde (below) shows--  

--or, as this portrait of Watts-Dunton and Swinburne shows, even harsh in his implied judgment.

 

Beerbohm's artistic contemporaries included, of course, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley's more violently distorted imaginary portraits belong to the same tradition as some of Beerbohm's most audaciously bizarre ones. Whether these are true caricatures, or some more elaborate form of serious art, I can't say. This one of Beardsley himself, seems to belong on the edge between silliness and total abstraction. Like all of Max's best work, it's stylish and chic without seeming totally dated. Those tiny trees, for instance, like a sort of child-like freize, as a weird backdrop,--what exactly do they signify?

      

Max's next great gift, a twin to his graphic, was for literary parody. Parody and caricature are allied, since both forms use the assumption of style and method to create an impression through exaggeration and mimicry. Max's collection of parodies, A Christmas Garland [1912]--all developed on the theme of Christmas--contains what are probably the finest examples in that form ever done. Dwight MacDonald, who edited Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm and After [1960], flatly states that Beerbohm was the greatest parodist in history. His "versions" of James, Kipling, Conrad, Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, Chesterton, Frank Harris, etc., are sheer genius, capturing perfectly the tone and manner of each writer's characteristic style, while preserving a sense of fun and games at the same time (not an easy feat at all!).    

In addition to these ventriloquist's gifts, Max was also a serious essayist and reviewer, having replaced Shaw as the drama critic at the Saturday Review for twelve years. As a casual essayist, Beerbohm's interests were neither philosophical, nor political, nor scientific--as an essayist he was a lightweight, but a charming lightweight, and a masterful stylist. Pick up any example of his prose, and admire the balance and rhythm of his sentences, his paragraphs. Never before, or since, has anyone managed to lavish so much skill of so little subject matter.   

Last but not least, Beerbohm was a novelist. Zuleika Dobson; or an Oxford Love Story [1911], was his only fiction, but it has held a special place of honor as the most perfect example of the spirit of its age. A fantasy on the theme of unrequited love, it involves the mass suicide of a host of Oxford undergraduate suitors to a classic femme fatale. The book has been in continuous print since its initial appearance, and continues to draw admirers after nearly 100 years. It is modern in its limpid ironies, and never takes itself seriously. These are qualities too often lacking in the world today, as indeed they are at any time.

      

Original Beerbohm drawings regularly come up at auction, though I have never been moved to own one. There were ten editions of his drawings published during his lifetime, and they can be had for a fraction of the cost of originals. If you want to see what the "yellow" nineties were like, or how people thought about things in the Edwardian era, Beerbohm's essays, caricatures and parodies are a good place to start. 

 

Beerbohm himself was quite modest. He determined early on that his gift was a limited one, and he set about exploiting it in the most efficient manner. Every age deserves a Beerbohm, to keep it honest, to puncture egos and pretensions, and to make it laugh at itself. Calvin Trillin has done yeoman's work on George W. Bush--certainly one of the easiest targets of satire ever to rise to high office in our political history--churning out light-hearted doggerel on the theme of corruption in the executive office. But we need more. The best antidote for bad governance is humor--wicked and sharp and vicious!    

The Third Man [1949] - Classic Noir with a Twist

The Third Man is probably the most exotic of all the classic noir films--an amalgam of shadowy menace, seductive corruption, and deeply ironic fatalism. 

Most unusually, the screenplay (by Graham Greene), was a cinematic original, later turned into a crime "entertainment" novella for the literary market. The film was, in addition, a brilliant vehicle for Orson Welles, whose career had been in eclipse since the release of Citizen Kane [1941], having to endure a de facto blacklisting initiated by the Hearst Corporation. It is in many ways, Welles's best role outside of Kane, and the character he portrays is so close to the skin it almost feels like real life. Joseph Cotton, who'd shared billing with Welles in Kane, also stars, as does the unforgettable, drop-dead seductive beauty Alida Valli, and Trevor Howard. 

The film is many things: A murder mystery, a triangle love-story, a comedy, a chase, and not least, an expressionistic portrait of the city of Vienna, where the filming was done on location. All these elements co-exist in a shifting, improbable series of black and white narrative set-pieces. The cinematography is masterful, and the theme music played on the zither, a "plucky" stringed instrument, is profoundly evocative of place and time.

Briefly, it's the story of an American "Westerns" writer, Holly Martens, who is called to Vienna by his old friend Harry Lime. Just as Martins arrives, he learns that Harry has died. Poking around post-War Vienna--jointly run in four sectors by Britain, America, France and the Soviet Union--Holly insinuates himself into Harry's shady corrupt world of black market drugs and small-time crooks. He falls (predictably) for Harry's girlfriend Anna Schmidt (played flawlessly by the hypnotic Valli) and eventually tracks Harry down. Their meetings are furtive and picturesque: The first time, riding a huge ferris wheel in the Prater park, then later, down dark, wet cobbled streets in the dead of night. Eventually, Martins is forced to acknowledge his old friend's evil nature, finally agreeing to help set a trap for him, which leads to a suspenseful pursuit through Vienna's complex system of underground sewers. Along the way, Martins ends up delivering a "talk" to a high-minded little literary society about "Mr. James Joyce"--an absurdist subplot typical of Greene.                    

The whole movie is a surrealistic romp. Everyone, except perhaps Martins--who's so disingenuous and naive that he seems to have stepped out of a 1940's cigarette ad--is into deception. Even Anna sort of pretends to be falling in love with him, though she's irretrievably stuck on Harry, the ultimate ambiguous charmer, and is merely playing along to be reunited with her vampire lover. 

 

One favorite scene of mine's set along a dark abandoned street, Martins and a British officer are lurking in the shadows of a building, when an ancient (goat-footed???) balloon-man, with enough balloons he appears capable of levitating, notices them, and not realizing the suspense afoot, insists that they buy a balloon:  "Mein herr, balloon...balloon...balloon"--it's like a scene straight out of an Antonioni flick, crazy and hilarious at once,. teetering (as does the film) precariously between farce and tragedy. 

Everyone, it seems, in this decadent, layered, metaphorically catacombed (worm-eaten) ancient city has become cynical and selfish. In the end, after Lime has been killed, Martins, hoping against hope that Anna will accept his advances, meets her at the graveyard. Standing at the edge of the long allee, lined in perfect perspective with barren trees, he waits as she walks, in measured, deliberate strides towards him, autumn leaves drifting softly down, and watches with a kind of defeatist's stoicism, as she walks right by him and out of his life. Would having had Anna have been the triumph he imagines? All these characters know is hunger:  For love, sustenance, excitement, comradeship, hope. The war years are like a deep chasm of devastation, out of which Europe claws its way upward towards redemption, and the promise of happiness.              

Frederick Sommer - Aesthetician and Photographer

Frederick Sommer [1905-1999] occupies an indistinct position in the history of photography, owing to the oddity and eccentric perspective of his art. He's not easy to place. 

Somewhat unusually, Sommer was born in Angri, Italy and raised in Brazil. He studied to become a landscape architect at Cornell, but never practiced. He and his wife soon moved to Arizona, where Sommer began his long career as an experimental avant garde photographer. 

It becomes clear to anyone who delves into his work, that Sommer's primary interest wasn't confined to any single genre or medium, but in aesthetics generally. His thinking and meditations on the effect of light on surfaces, the effects of time on matter (decay), and the metaphorical implications of ambiguous form are entirely original, and without precedent in the history of art. To get a sense of what he's about, you can't simply sample his visual works--you have to read his texts. These aren't densely philosophical tracts, or analytical disquisitions, but cryptic pronouncements in the manner of riddles or syllogistic conundrums. 

 

Sommer was interested in how the transfer of light (reflectivity) between varieties of substance can evoke dialectics among disparate events or functions. The eye perceives phenomena via light, out of which it constructs an analogous counterpart (design, meaning). The metaphorical potential of any such counterpart bears a mysterious relationship to its source "in the external world." The process of what we call photography is, in its essence, a manipulation of the most mysterious and perhaps unknowable functions there are. The imprint of form, texture and mass upon the sensitized surface of the back of the eye occurs in almost the identical way that photographic projections are recorded on "light sensitive" surfaces. The eye is a camera. 

The structure of the eye, the structure of anything, is a function of its use. In a philosophical sense, nothing that happens in the universe is wasted, or unnecessary, or accidental. Meaning is total. All living and non-living things emit energy, and "light." A camera is one tool in recording the ballet of matter, in its various reflectivity, of the halo of energy within which it is enveloped, by virtue of which it is perceived. 

Vision is a continuous process of photographic images, a sequent pattern in the mind. Its efficiency deludes us into thinking of movement, and of our perception of reality, as being continuous, whereas it is in reality a deck of superimposed filmic membranes. Vision, one might say, is energized matter "looking at" itself. This reflexivity is one of the keys to Sommer's work. 

What is film? What is a negative? What information does a two-dimensional surface carry? Sommer was interested in exploring the aesthetic implications of recorded image-making.

One of Sommer's famous images, is of a severed foot (below). A local physician, guessing that Sommer would be interested, contacted him and offered the anatomical fragment--which became available as the result of a bum having fallen asleep on the railroad tracks--as a potential photographic subject. Sommer was delighted. Reactions to this image are predictably intense. What is the point of recording something as horrifyingly painful and ghoulish as an amputated foot?

But Sommer's interest in this image is almost purely intellectual. On one level, it exhibits a beauty and sensuality which is in the tradition of all anatomical illustration. Da Vinci, after all, was possessed by an intense curiosity about the particulars of anatomical structure. In the ordinary course of experience, most people never come face to face with the disturbing fact of wounds, the way surgeons or medics do. Sommer's study (a still-life) asks the question directly: When we get beyond the initial shock value of the image, what do we actually think about it? In what sense does this foot "belong" to the man to whom it was once attached? In what sense, if any, is the foot "alive"? The camera, the negative, our eye(s), our human brain--each records the image of "itself" such that the severed foot becomes a metaphor for self-consciousness, of the neutral curiosity which drives all mental activity. Mind (an organ) perceives a separated limb (not its own) via the eye (a camera) and deduces, in descending order, surprise, revulsion, fascination, interest, and finally, distraction.                    

Pictures of children probably comprise the single most (over-) used subject-matter of the medium. Children are "little people"--so cute, so charming, so specific. What might it mean to photograph a child with the same intense probity one uses with adults? Is such regard inappropriate? Like all of Sommer's "portraits" this one of a kindergarten-aged girl has a hypnotic intensity. What we "see" is not a "child" but a being, suspended by her own concentration (or perhaps obedience, or a patient curiosity?). Of greater significance, however, is the reflexivity of the moment: The photographer is "taking a picture" of her, but she's also "taking a picture" of him (and us!) with her camera (eyes) too. Brain researchers believe that our brain stores every image, every impression, every smell, every taste, every feeling it receives from the five senses (as well as what it creates through the theater of dreams). In other words, Sommer has saved this image of the girl, but she has also saved the image which she sees too, the one which we can't see, of the photographer and whatever else is present in her field of vision at that moment. This simultaneous coincidence of image recordation has profound implications for our sense of the meaning of the photographic act. The girl has extraordinary eyes--they queue us into what the real subject of the portrait is. The weathered wood, which serves as backdrop, is a typical, repeated texture in Sommer images.   

     

  

Sensitized surfaces. A negative is a transparent "film" or membrane which is light-"sensitized" by the application of a chemically active organic substance. Sommer frequently experimented with the parallel "surface" of two-dimensional planes, as subjects. 

Panchromatic visible light photography is of course only one kind of image-making. X-rays, infra-red, ultraviolet, ortho--these are alternative modes of image recordation. Sommer was fascinated with the human body, or to be more precise, with the desire of humankind to understand itself, and by extension, all life forms. He pored over anatomical drawings and illustrations, using them often in collage or in fragmented isolation. Here, in Paracelsus [the 16th century physician/alchemist/astrologer, 1493-1541], Sommer employs a novel technique--oil on cellophane--to create a monochromatic image which suggests an anatomical dissection of a torso. It also suggests armor--there's almost a metallic quality--or a sort of plastic sculptural malleability. An ironic relationship exists between this membrane of reflectivity and the negative image recorded by the silver halide of the panchromatic film emulsion on the film membrane. The image is like an aesthetic "x-ray" of a metaphoric human torso, a clinical penetration of solids, turning them transparent, revealed. The symbolic power of vision to see into matter is one of Sommer's characteristic philosophical jokes.

            

Another way of manipulating a two-dimensional surface is to score it, allowing the resulting masses to sag into three-dimensionality, offering seductive, ghostly designs which wrinkle and coagulate the light. The complexity of angles, of bulging convexities, and lurking voids is endlessly intriguing. As a defining log of possibilities, such abstractions bear a strong resemblance to some of Duchamp's experiments with chance operations. Each of Sommer's "cut-ups" is unique, and unrepeatable; they are neither sculpture, nor collage, but a hybrid.    

       

A number of Sommer's images involve dead animals. Wandering around desert country, such sights are common, the dry desert air preserving remains long after they would have been denuded under more temperate climes. The "shadow" of the body of this dead rabbit is in fact the imprint of its once-living flesh and bones. The literal "stuff" of the plane of the ground field is a kind of equivalent (see under Stieglitz) of the manipulated cellophane of Paracelsus. This elaboration of the visionary plane, tracking "ghosts" of once-animated beings, has almost a mystical aura. When our automated unmanned vehicles roll around on the surface of Mars, there is a weirdly absent sense to those images of dry red rocks and sand. It isn't "earth" surface (dirt)--it's an alien planetary deposit. Something of this "alien"t quality of things is native to Sommer's odd super-objectivity.

           

Earlier, in my post on Irving Penn's Portrait of de Kooning and Kiesler I postulated a theoretical relation between the combustion of photographic processes, and the progressive oxidizing decay of entropy, symbolized by the snowy white cigarette ash poised on the end of de Kooning's butt.  

Sommer is like an alchemist, sifting the detritus of a dry landscape for particles of light, his mind of the very dust he sifts, glowing with fascination.      

The Movie PATTON after 40 years

The death, this week, of Karl Malden (at the age of 97!!), reminded me, again, of the movie Patton [1970], in which he plays the part of Gen. Omar Bradley, Patton's primary foil in the film.  

 

Malden was a veteran actor of stage and screen, and his big trademark slavic nose was very much in our face(s) for 50 years. He was the consummate professional. As was, too, George C. Scott, the lead who played Patton, which garnered him his only Oscar, which he refused (irascibly insisting that the Oscar routine had descended into shameless promotion and greed). I don't think many would disagree, given the unevenness of the award's history.

     

Scott was already a highly admired actor by the time the part of Patton came along. He'd already done Anatomy of a Murder [1959], The Hustler [1961], Adrian Messenger [1963], Strangelove [1964], The Flim-Flam Man [1967] and Petulia [1968] by this point. After Patton, he got sidetracked: He married Trish Van Devere, and made a string of cash-out flicks which did nothing for his reputation. Scott was a classic "heavy," able to marshall deep emotional resources of authority, anger, cockiness, amusement and paternal tenderness. 

The same could be said, of course, about Malden, an actor whose raw energy seemed like a force of nature at times. Pitting these two actors against each other in Patton looks in retrospect to have been a masterstroke. Malden plays the straight, by-the-book man--the "GI General" as Ernie Pyle, the war correspondent, characterized him--against Scott's impulsive, audacious, grandstanding Patton. 

As a piece of cinematic entertainment, Patton has epic pretensions. Set in Africa, Italy, England and France, it recounts key events in General Patton's wartime commands, shrewdly and dramatically building a portrayal of his strengths and weaknesses, his obsessions and contradictions. 

The famous flag speech at the beginning, which never actually happened, perfectly sets out the terms of the thematic dialogue which the movie subsequently dramatizes. This speech is simultaneously addressed to the audience, to history and to posterity, as well as to an imaginary company of soldiers. It functions both as a formal "apology" for the film--much as the Stage Manager's opening speech in Our Town [1938] does--and a defense of character. The film contains a series of such speeches: The "apology" speech for the slapping offense, in Italy, the "destiny" speech outside Ike's headquarters office after being relieved of command, the love of battle speech, and the concluding "Roman emperor" speech at the end. This series of dramatic monologues holds the movie together, like philosophical bridges between the carefully selected battle scenes.  

Of equal value to the film's continuity is Jerry Goldsmith's score, its combination of subtle mood-line effects and ersatz original martial music functions like a steel scaffolding for the narrative. Goldsmith won only a single Oscar (though being nominated 18 times!)--he should have won for Patton. Interestingly, the scene towards the end with the Russian balalaika band playing on the mezzanine above a joint forces celebration, created special requirements. Unable to find enough actual balalaikas, or balalaika players, to perform in the movie, Goldsmith actually had to go out and find enough balalaikas, and train men to play them! 

Though the film purports to be biographical, apparently a lot of the story is simply made up for dramatic effect. But artistic license is certainly justified: Truth is usually stranger than fiction, but we seldom get the real story to begin with, so playwrights and screenwriters have to exercise a little ingenuity to make things more effective. After all, it is the distilled essence of character and the fulcrums of action which makes the best stories, not a dry recounting of events. 

One very effective technique employed by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North (the screenwriters), is the evocation of classical history and echoes: Patton's speech about the Romans and Carthaginians in North Africa, the exploits of Alcibiades in ancient Sicily, of Frederick the Great, of von Schlieffen's plan for defeat of the French in the hedge-row country, of the Roman emperors' victory parades at the end as Patton walks towards a towering windmill. This puts both Patton's character, and the significance of events, into a more serious perspective, setting a contrast between the dignity and austerity of the judgment of history, and the expedient demands of current conflict. Patton's notion of reincarnation, of participating (repeatedly) in events through history, lends a sense of timelessness, of inevitability. "How I hate the 20th Century," his character says, because chivalry and honor and noble motives no longer matter in the world of modern warfare. 

 

Both Malden and Scott had notoriously ugly snouts. In one scene early in the film, Patton remarks that the one thing of which he was most terrified as a soldier, was being shot right in the nose. Bradley (Malden) replies "and such a handsome nose, George," as both actors smile in ironic acknowledgment.  

The King of Grunge - Manny Ramirez Returns

Well, it's official. Manny Ramirez is set to return to the Dodgers line-up this Friday (tomorrow), after serving his 50 game suspension for violation of the Major League drug policy.

 

As if the Dodgers needed him. They're leading all of baseball presently with a gut-busting 50-29 record; they look like a shoe-in for Series contention, and the season isn't even half over yet.

What is it with Ramirez? Sloppy uniform, dreadlocks, headscarves, dirty batting helmet, scruffy beard, out-of-shape 30 pounds of gut, the attitude, his lack of hustle, the cheek? What's with this guy? 

No argument about the guy's talent. He's scary at the plate. Maybe Pujols is better, but not by much. Maybe the problem is these guys get sour on the idea of professional baseball being a business, not a game or a fan-club or a fraternal society. Maybe for some of these minority guys, they feel like outsiders, so rather than try to fashion themselves into an acceptable version of the ideal player, they assume the role of spoiler, of "bad" boy. They're cut extra slack, because they know they're good enough that there are different rules for them. They can play hooky and act "gansta" 'cause they got license. Why should we expect talented athletes to be model citizens? Once a jerk, always a jerk. 

I do wish Ramirez would go on a diet, trim the dreads, take a shower, and pull his pants-legs up so his uniform at least looks like he means business. The pant-legs under the heel-spikes is definitely counterproductive. Was it Bonds who started that shit? Whoever. 

Wouldn't it be great if some Irish ump told Manny his uniform wasn't regulation, and sent him back to the clubhouse? Would Manny throw a tantrum like George Brett did when they caught him pine-tarring his bat? That would be sweet.   

Prose as Cubism - Hemingway, Gris, Stein - "The Big Two-Hearted River"

One of my favorite Hemingway stories is the two part "The Big Two-Hearted River," published in Hemingway's first trade edition book, In Our Time [1925]. The story is of especial interest to sportsmen, as it relates a fishing trip the central character takes on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan shortly after the First World War. It captures in Hemingway's unforgettable style the feelings and sensations--the sheer physical exhilaration--of hiking, eating, wading,--all the simple impressionistic details, with an immediacy and pungency that are unmatched in straight narrative writing.     

What are the qualities of Hemingway's prose style, where did he derive the special techniques which are the basis of his innovative method? It isn't my purpose here to explicate the thematic meanings of the story, which scholars have been doing relentlessly over the last half-century. Rather, I'm interested in how the prose exemplifies formal discoveries and tricks which stretched and expanded our concepts of composition. 

It has frequently been speculated that Hemingway's style is derived from conversations he had with Gertrude Stein, regarding certain aspects of her own work, and also from her and Hemingway's perceptions about Cubism, the brash experimental abstract painting style in vogue at the time. How could writing incorporate the configurations of Cubism into abstract narrative? Let me quote randomly from the 15th paragraph of Part I:

"Then it was sweet fern, growing ankle high, walk through, and clumps of jack pines; a long undulating country with frequent rises and descents, sandy underfoot and the country alive again."

On its face, this is a straightforward sentence, grammatical, and filled with vivid detail characteristic of Hemingway's concentration on concrete objects and impressions. One important aspect of the story is Hemingway's evocation of the burned-over destroyed town of Seney--and the vitality and verdancy of the natural landscape. This contrast is used to symbolize the central character Nick Adams's (Hemingway's stand-in) spiritual wound from his war experiences, and his desire to reawaken and renew his primitivistic regard for nature and solitude. It's a journey of healing. 

The clause "walk through" is used as both a modifier and a noun phrase, which interrupts the descriptive flow. The phrase "and the country alive again" differs from the other parts of the sentence in not being descriptive in sequence, but is a commentary--judgmental, moralistic--upon the whole scene. It's a grammatical enjambment set against the ("undulating") flow of description. The rhythm of the prose is an analogue of the progress of the character's movement, through the foliage, thinking as he goes, reflexive, multi-leveled. Hemingway classic insistence on sensory impressions foregrounds the visual and tactile qualities of actual things, and wedges mental iterations and deductions into the structured dimension of the prose: Time, words flowing, mind noting, images coming forward, all fitted tightly into an order that is at once illogical (irrational)--in the traditional sense--but deliberate. 

Compare this technique with these random sentences from Stein's Tender Buttons [1914]:

A circle of fine card board and a chance to see a tassel. 

*

NOTHING ELEGANT. 

A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest. 

*

A RED STAMP. 

If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue.

Though the quality and occasion of Stein's experiments is different from Hemingway's, the same kind of technique is at work. Stein's enjambment of descriptive language and reflexive commentary "if they do this they need a catalogue" is set off against the "red stamp" and the "white lilies"--"they will dirt a surface" etc. In other words, the tactile and visual qualities of actual things are forced together to form distorted constructions which may resemble more accurately the way in which perception actually occurs in the brain. The language thus becomes both a vehicle and an analogue for a program of representation of experience. 

This may be what Hemingway "learned" from Stein and Cubism. Though Hemingway was not, in the strictest sense of the word, an "experimental" writer, he saw how a description of raw sensory data tightly conjoined to overly simplistic, direct statement--"Nick was glad to get to the river...His trousers were soaked with the dew as he walked...The river made no sound"--would allow him to eliminate unnecessary bridges and connectors in the interests of concision and rapid continuity. The flow of sensation runs like a thread through consciousness, picking up specific impressions, leaving nothing behind--the silent flow ("no sound") of the current of time/feeling.

           

Stein's experiments seem much more closely aligned to a true "Cubist" elaboration, derived from painting. Language, however, is multi-dimensional, and multi-contextual, in ways that two-dimensional art is not. Both Stein and Hemingway admired the work of Juan Gris, whose classic cubistic arrangements are perhaps the most distinctive and satisfying of the genre. Employing straightforward objects, distorted into competing dimensions and perspectives implying multiple, simultaneous views, his compositions are nevertheless tightly controlled puzzles of angles and masses, which "fit" together to make decorative arrangements "locked" in a kind of frozen tension.   

Though Gris's studies and still lifes are static and immobile, they imply a kind of meditative accommodation which is a commentary upon the paradox of perceptual integration and disintegration, as well as acknowledging irrational distortions that modify the experience of perception itself. In the canvas below, the left hand side of the open book becomes both a (verso) leaf, and a mirror reflecting the recto leaf lying flat (it's almost like an Escher!). Abstract shapes accidentally suggest other things--a hand with finger pointing, a bird head and beak, etc. This kind of whimsicality bears comparison to Stein's deliberate linguistic distortions. A coffee-cup may suggest dirty yellow, coal black, rose-wood, but what do these sensations lead to? Perhaps a "mingled astonishment"?