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Month: May 2009

The Rules of the Game, by Georges Simenon

Cover of UK paperback edition of 'The Rules of the Game'Ah, there’s nothing like a dose of Georges Simenon to remind us of the worms lurking just beneath the surface of normality. He really was a master of finding that loose thread that can unravel the whole fabric of one’s existence with a simple tug.

The Rules of the Game, one of the dozen of so novels set in the U. S. that he wrote during the ten years he lived there, is a perfect example. As the novel opens, Walter Higgins, manager of the local Fairfax supermarket in Williamson, Connecticut, father of four (with another on the way), school board treasurer and assistant secretary of the Rotary Club, finds out his application to the local country club has been rejected–for the second time.

“The application meant so much to him. It was important for his family’s place in Williamson society, in society in general.” He takes it hard. “I’ll kill them!” is his immediate, silent response. The rejection undermines his entire sense of self. “They were telling him he wasn’t worthy of belonging to the community,” he thinks. It strips away the facade of respectability he’d worked so hard to establish: “He was simply ashamed, as if he had found himself stark naked in the middle of the supermarket, among his employees and outraged customers.” “That was, in fact, a dream he had often had,” Simenon adds, tellingly.

He begins to question everything around him. He begins to speculate on silent conspiracies against him, on hushed conversations held behind his back. “Somewhere in Williamson, there was at least one person who must be chuckling contentedly at the thought of the clever trick he’d played on Higgins.” The fact that no one mentions the black-balling, that no one reacts or even seems to know of it, offers no reassurance. “It was almost as though everyone was deliberately behaving normally, giving him nothing to latch on to.”

Simenon then reveals just what Higgins has been trying for years to cover up. His mother, an alcoholic, is reporting missing from her rest home and then found dying in a gutter. He returns to his home town in New Jersey to retrieve her and is reminded of everything he’s worked to put behind him. The squalor of the tenement apartments he’d grown up in. The shiftlessness, drunken neighbors. The petty thieves, shirkers, and child-beaters. His own mother, reeling from binge to binge, often abandoning him to sleep alone, cold, and hungry. It’s as if the country club men of Williamson have always been able to smell the poverty he’d managed to escape.

It’s a nightmarish experience that drives the tee-totalling Higgins to drink and to a short breakdown. But he pulls himself up again and returns to the supermarket and his facade of fitting in. Now, however–in apt Simenon fashion–he no longer believes in what he is doing:

He didn’t have all the details worked out yet, but he was sure he was on the right track. The reason people thought he didn’t count was because he didn’t know the rules of the game. Yes, it was a game–like the games of his childhood. He hadn’t known that, maybe because he’d had to start too young, or too low, he, the son, as his mother said sarcastically, of Louisa and that scum Higgins.

But that wasn’t the main thing. What was important was to conform to the rules, certainly, but most of all, to know it was all a game. If you didn’t know that, you could make things impossible for other people.

This, to me, sums up what is so perfect about Simenon’s American novels: this is very much the American dream viewed through the eyes of a European. It’s not a dream of self-advancement, of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps: it’s a game. A slightly different game from the European game of success, with its older and more intricate rules of religion, property, nobility, and class, but a game nonetheless.

Simenon’s view is certainly cynical, but it has something of the attractive bitterness of a glass of Campari. I wouldn’t drink one every night, but these short, intense novels have that same effect of bringing your senses to attention.

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The Rules of the Game, by Georges Simenon
Translated by Howard Curtis
New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1988

If It Prove Fair Weather, by Isabel Paterson

I had mixed feelings as I started If It Prove Fair Weather: I looked forward to reading another novel by Paterson and regretted that after this, there would be no more–at least, no more except for her lesser historical novels. If there’s one writer I’ve come to feel, since starting this site, whose work has been most unjustly forgotten, it’s Paterson.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'If It Prove Fair Weather'Paterson’s three novels published between 1933 and 1940–Never Ask the End, The Golden Vanity, and If It Prove Fair Weather–are marked with an intelligence, humor, and keen sense of feminism that would seem to be a natural fit for many readers today. She writes with a distinctive voice–ironic, self-deprecating, wistful yet pragmatic. Her heroines are women who’ve never defined themselves based on whether there was a man in their lives, even though each has a romantic streak and an attraction to the company of men. These are women who enjoy having a man hold her hand, and yet wonder at men’s utter cluelessness.

If It Prove Fair Weather presents just such a woman, Emmy Cruger, an associate professor of mathematics at a Manhattan college, in her mid-forties, single, happy to own her own apartment: “… the only refuge she had ever owned. Once she was inside, nothing could get at her until tomorrow.”

Out of nowhere, James Wishart, a publishing executive Emmy has known for years, approaches her at a cocktail party and asks her to dinner. Despite the fact that Wishart is very married and very conservative, she has sensed some mutual interest for years. Now, however, he seems to want to take things further.

Or does he? Even in the privacy of Emmy’s apartment, something holds him back. They kiss and embrace, but then he leaves in haste, concerned not to be seen returning to his hotel too late. There are several rounds like this, each stopping short of Emmy’s bedroom.

Emmy deconstructs each encounter with her friend Christine Jackson, trying to understand Wishart’s motivation and intent. The problem, as Emmy see it, is that Wishart is so bound up in convention he himself has no idea. She compares him to a medieval burgher in some painting by Breughel: “The medieval face was squarish, cautious, set; it connoted the land-bound man, who kept within limits, by mark and custom, on the traveled roads, whatever their turns and windings. He feared death and the judgment, comets and portents and plagues; he walled himself in and accumulated things of substance….” “He’s got himself so surrounded by precautions that it leaves him completely exposed,” Emmy concludes.

These would-be lovers are separated by oceans: marriage, convention, inexperience, and, above all, sex. Wishart is a terrible kisser: “When he kissed her mouth, she thought, he doesn’t know how. Like a child….” Women are an utter mystery to him. “Is there any difference–between one woman and another?,” he straight-facedly asks Emmy at one point–a question she chooses to ignore. He has no idea of how to play the game of love: “… [Y]ou didn’t think of me again till yesterday?,” Emmy asks him one evening together.

“Sometimes,” he said. “I thought about your knees. They bothered me a good deal.”
My knees, Emmy thought, blankly astonished. How can any woman understand a man either? … Women don’t think like that. Never. I thought about–I thought about him.

Wishart is such a stranger to himself he doesn’t even know he’s ticklish. In a friendly tussle one evening, Emmy reaches around and sets off a fit of giggling. Wishart is dumbfounded at his reaction. To herself, Emmy wonders what this says about the emotional and physical coldness of Wishart’s marriage.

The trouble is, after half a dozen evenings together, this is still where things stand. Then, as if to signal just how lost he is, Wishart mails Emmy a clipping about himself from a trade journal, along with a note saying nothing more than, “Sincerely, JNW.” “Why did he take the trouble to write and say nothing?,” she wonders.

Slowly, the truth dawns on her. Wishart wants to have an affair–but he wants her to make the first move. He takes it for granted that she is the more experienced party in such things: “He wants me to. An excuse. To make him do what he wants…. No chance.”

She gives up on Wishart and moves on. Huntley, another married executive–trucking this time–shows an interest. Unlike Wishart, however, he has no hesitation. Their second evening ends with them in bed, Huntley exultant and Emmy mildly amused. She appreciates the contrast and feels a certain physical attraction, but no more. After a few months the affair fizzles out in mutual disinterest.

Wishart appears one more time, to say, in his own clumsy way, that there can never be anything more between them. His wife is suffering from cancer. The perfect moral way out–or at least so Emmy recognizes Wishart’s own view of the situation. This last demonstration of emotional ignorance and cowardice seals the deal, in Emmy’s eyes.

Still, even as she happily parts from this clod, she also mourns the loss of the inexplicable bond she and Wishart felt in some way from their very first meeting. There was, and always could be, some undeniable spark, some attraction that existed on a completely different level from anything she felt with Huntley. Some “… happiness they had no power to resist while they were together, because it consisted simply in being together….”

This affair that ends without ever really taking place would be a pretty thin foundation for any novel, and were it not for the pleasure of seeing it all through the eyes and voice of Emmy–which really means the eyes and voice of Isabel Paterson. It’s a little unfortunate that Stephen Cox’s 2004 biography, The Woman and the Dynamo, has led to a minor rediscovery of Paterson as a libertarian icon, since it leaves her far more substantial literary merit in the shadows.

Paterson was one of the funniest and smartest writers of the 20th century. Employed for several decades as the principle book reviewer of the New York Herald Tribune, Paterson was among the best and most widely read people of her time. The novel’s title comes from an old poem by Sir John Suckling, “The Constant Lover”, in which the poet admits at the end that,

Had it any been but she,
And that very face,
There had been at least ere this
A dozen dozen in her place.

As with Never Ask the End and The Golden Vanity, Paterson riddles If It Prove Fair Weather with snatches of poetry, folk song, and stories that reveal with incredible richness of her reading. I took the time to track down every quote in the book, and this sample from the first 100 pages gives a good indication of how intricately interwoven literature high and low must have been with her own thoughts:

  • “The Corruptible”, a poem by Elinor Wylie (an acquaintance and contemporary of Paterson’s)
  • “To a Woman Young and Old”, a poem by John Keats
  • “Memoirs of the Jukes Family”, a humorous piece by Will Cuppy, one of Paterson’s closest friends, that appeared in The New Yorker in 1931
  • A variation on “Peter Bell”, a poem by William Wordsworth, that appeared in works by Shelley and Charles Lamb
  • A story about Ninon de l’Enclos that appeared in the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon
  • “I’ll go no more a’roving”, an English sea shanty
  • “Ulysses”, a poem by Alfred Tennyson
  • “To a Lady Asking Foolish Questions”, a poem by Ernest Dowson
  • A deathbed quote from the Emperor Hadrian, as adapted by Elinor Wylie

Further on, we encounter bits from Browning, T. S. Eliot, Kipling, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Yeats, Tin Pan Alley, Cocteau, Sappho, and King Harald of the Danes. What is most impressive is that Paterson had to have been working purely from memory–almost every other quote proves to have a word or two wrong or omits a line, just as they would if recalled from years of reading.

She is also a writer who drops in wisecracks and aphorisms as easily as punctuation. Here are just a few from among the many pages I dog-eared:

  • Fame means that one-tenth of one per cent of your fellow citizens have heard your name; not that they care.
  • By the time we know what to do with time there is no more.
  • Friendship exists, complete and absolute from the beginning. You don’t make friends, you recognize them.
  • The fact that other people have their separate being and may continue to exist without us, appears as a kind of treason.
  • Perhaps no man listens to any woman. He understands only that she is amiable or out of humor, as if it were fair or stormy weather.

And, sadly for Emmy Cruger, her true love proves not to understand even this much.

I closed If It Prove Fair Weather with mixed feelings like those I started it with. It was a genuine treat to share Isabel Paterson’s company for 300-some pages, and it was sad to know there would be no more new Paterson novels after this. And it was frustrating to realize that it will soon be seventy years since this book was in print.

Won’t someone PLEASE do America a favor and republish this wonderful woman’s work?

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If It Prove Fair Weather, by Isabel Paterson
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940

Excellent new article on Jetta Carleton and The Moonflower Vine

Harper Perennial’s reissue of Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine has garnered coverage in a number of newspapers, but by far the best to date–in fact, the most substantial piece on Jetta Carleton’s life and work yet published–appears this week in the St. Louis Riverfront Times: “Moonflower Resurrection.” Staff writer Aimee Levitt penned a long and sensitive article that gives considerable due to both the novel and Carleton’s life and work before and after its publication. I recommend it highly to any fan of this site.

H. M. Pulham, Esquire, by John P. Marquand

If Ford Madox Ford hadn’t already used the line, I might say that this is the saddest story I have ever heard. And there are at least a few strong parallels between H. M. Pulham, Esquire and Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier. Both novels are related in the first person by unreliable narrators–unreliable primarily due to the incredible strength of the cultural and social blinders they’ve grown into–and both narrators are utterly oblivious to the fact that their wives are having affairs with men they consider good friends.

Cover of first U.S. edition of ' 'H. M. Pulham, Esquire'Compared to Ford, however, Marquand is more craftsman than artist. His prose style is never much more than workmanlike, and he has at time a tendency to fill pages more for the sake of providing his audience with a good thick read than for shaping his story. But observation, not artistry, is Marquand’s long suit. He is an ideal observer–a novelist of society, perhaps America’s best after Edith Wharton. Like Wharton, he is both immersed in society, having been raised in family highly sensitive to–if not highly placed in–Boston society, and able to detach himself and note its many ironies and shortcomings. And H. M. Pulham, Esquire is a perfect example of what he could accomplish at his best.

Pulham, gives us a year in the life of Harry Pulham, graduate of St. Swithins School for Boys (think Choate or Andover) and Harvard as he nears 50. Roped into organizing his college class’ 25th anniversary reunion, he narrates the book as one long contemplation on what he’s going to tell his classmates about the course his life has taken.

In his time, Marquand was considered a satirist, but his sensibilities are far more nuanced than that. One could read Pulham, and conclude that Harry Pulham is a one-dimensional man utterly lacking in irony. I use irony here in the sense so well discussed recently by Roger Scruton: “a habit of acknowledging the otherness of everything, including oneself.”

After all, the result of a year’s worth of Pulham’s meditations is a vapid piece for the reunion book with such stereotypical statements as, “I do not believe that either Mr. Roosevelt or Germany can hold out much longer and I confidently look forward to seeing a sensible Republican in the White House.” And, even more strikingly, after being everything but told outright that his wife and best friend have been having an affair, he writes that he “never regretted for a moment” his marriage “since our life together has always been happy and rewarding.”

What is remarkable about Marquand’s accomplishment, though, is how deftly he manages to bring out a number of subtexts in Pulham’s apparently superficial narrative. One is the story of a life defined by the road not taken–the advertising job in New York City he left to return to Boston when his father fell ill, the attractive and challenging woman (“a good deal more of a person than I was, more talented, more cultivated”) he fell in love with and left behind as well. Pulham has based most of his most important choices on what was expected of him:

Romantic novelists have created the illusion that it is hard to find someone to marry. From my own observation I think they are mistaken. There is nothing easier than doing something that nature wants you to do, and there is always someone ready to help you. Before you know what it is all about, you are selecting cuff links for the ushers.

Nature, in Pulham’s case, is society, specifically the proper social elite of Boston. Being a member of that society means belonging to the right clubs, sending your children to the right schools, summering in the Maine isles, and conforming to a narrow pattern of behavior:

I met Cornelia Motford at the Junior Bradbury Dances, the second series that started close to the cradle and ended in the vicinity of the grave. In fact, only two years ago Cornelia and I were asked to subscribe to the Senior Bradbury Dances. If we had accepted we would have seen the same faces that we had seen at the Baby Bradburys almost thirty years before.

Another subtext, then, is the story of a man whose life was defined for him. Of course he married a girl from his own class, a girl he’d know socially since childhood: what else could he do? How could he describe the confines of his life as a prison or straitjacket if there were no other choices offered him?

But if Harry Pulham is not a cardboard conservative, neither is he a pathetic victim. and this is not the saddest story I’ve ever read. Probably the thing I like most about Marquand’s books is how remarkably grown-up a writer he is. He understands that the number one reason you don’t chuck it all in and run off with the secretary or your old girlfriend or rebuild your life from ground up is that it would hurt the people you love.

Pulham is not completely lacking in introspection. He might write to his rah-rah classmates that “life together has always been happy and rewarding,” but to himself he has the capacity to admit, “It might have been better for us both if we had been frank instead of nursing a sort of reticence, and a fear that one would be defenseless if the other knew too much.”

It’s hard to believe, for example, that Pulham is not well aware of the tongue-in-cheek humor of the following:

I was never reminded so much of death as I was when we were engaged. There were certain pieces of furniture that we could have now, but it was necessary to remember that there were lots of other pieces–rugs and sofas and tables and pictures–which we would have when Mother and Mrs. Motford died. When Mrs. Motford died we could have the large Persian carpet with the Tree of Life that was in the parlor. When Mother died we could have the Inness, and it would be much better to plan on having these things some day; and yet when we actually did plan, both Mother and Mrs. Motford would always resent it. They would say that Kay and I talked as though they were dead already, and neither of them was going to die just to please Kay or me; and once Mother said that I wanted her to die, and Kay told me that Mrs. Motford had said the same thing.

And throughout the novel there are wonderful little moments when Marquand gives us wonderful little glimpses into Pulham’s awareness of his own passage through time:

We came into Providence, and the car grew dark and gloomy because of the train shed over it. Then it moved out into the afternoon and the cold rays of the sun came through the left-hand windows and I saw the state capitol. Once long ago when we had to change cars at Providence on the way to some place like Naragansett Pier, Mother had taken Mary and me into the capitol, and we stood in the rotunda, looking at the flags brought back from the Civil War. I might pass that building a thousand times without ever setting foot in it again.

OK, À la recherche du temps perdu this ain’t, but neither is it Babbitt. Pulham is a rich and realistic account of one man and the society and world he lived in by a man with a rich sense of irony. I remember thinking when I read The Good Soldier, “This would be considered a tour-de-force of narrative voice if it were being published today,” and I often had the same thought while reading H. M. Pulham, Esquire. Once again, I have to say that with Marquand’s being out of print and out of favor, a very respectable and interesting body of work is being unjustly neglected.

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H. M. Pulham, Esquire, by John P. Marquand
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1941