Tales of Terror by Guy de Maupassant

Tales of Terror
By Guy de Maupassant
Selected and Translated by Arnold Kellett
Foreword by Ramsey Campbell
Tartarus Press, December 2008
ISBN 978-1-905784-12-7

There is a telling moment in Isaac Babel’s great story, ‘Guy de Maupassant’, when the narrator, on glancing at a row of the French writer’s works, refers to them – or rather their morocco leather bindings - as ‘the magnificent crypt of the human heart’.  One arrives at the same judgement, a similar feeling comes over one, after reading this selection of 32 of Maupassant’s darkest tales, superbly translated by Arnold Kellett.

In the foreword, Ramsey Campbell warns that ‘the light of these tales may shine into your own dark’, but of course for the select few – meaning you and me, naturally, as well as one other whom you’re free to nominate – this is a very good reason to read them.

Many of these stories take a peek at the mental processes of some very disturbed people.  ‘The Case of Louise Roque’ looks at events following the rape and murder of a young girl.  It is vividly realised in terms of setting (a village astride a wood) and character (the postman who discovers the child’s body, the girl’s grief-stricken mother, the priest who likes his food, etc.) but where Maupassant excels is in his description of the torment of the murderer.

Another story along these lines – abnormal psychology and its malcontents – is ‘The Head of Hair’, an account of how covetousness and fetishism leads eventually to madness.  An antique collector shuns women – they’re alive and so fearful and dangerous – and places all of his passion into his hobby.  Yet when he acquires an eighteenth century watch, he can’t help but wonder who was ‘the first woman to wear it on her bosom, keeping it warm and cosy in the folds of her dress – the heart of the little watch beating close against the heart of the woman?’  Our hero nonetheless plumbs for the mechanical movement of the watch over a living woman’s vital heart and when he later discovers the relic of a woman’s head of hair, he is transported into an ecstatic state.  Degeneration and madness ensue.  While this is an unpleasant, perverse tale it does have a definite ring of truth; and the juxtaposed polarity of the heart/watch is, I’m sure you’ll agree, neatly done.

And, in fact, there is a psychological truth and subtlety to all of these tales.  For example, ‘Fear’ makes the point that this emotion need not be a rational response to objective danger; no, it may simply overpower and take possession of you.

The tales of escalating cruely (such as ‘Coco’ and ‘The Blind Man’) were the most difficult to read; the nastiness gradually increases, as in a Michael Haneke film, and it’s unclear how or when or indeed whether it will end.  Both Ramsey Campbell and Arnold Kellett make the point that many of these stories predict Maupassant’s own descent into mental illness, and it is difficult to disagree with this.

The penultimate paragraph in Babel’s story gives an account of Maupassant’s life and especially of his last years.  It was a hard road he trod and a harder fall he took.  Arnold Kellett has wisely selected from among the myriad health-giving but poisonous fruits of a tragic, artistically productive life.  The ‘magnificent crypt of the human heart’ indeed.  Open these pages at your own peril.

The Elias Quartet

The Elias Quartet
Manchester Chamber Concerts Society
Royal Northern College of Music, 27 September 2010

The Elias Quartet. Credit: David Shapiro

The Elias Quartet is made up of Sara Bittloch and Donald Grant on violins, Martin Saving on viola and Marie Bittloch on cello.  They delighted the audience with a programme of works from the likes of Henry Purcell, Maurice Ravel and Franz Schubert.

The first portion, Fantasia No. 5 in B flat (1680) and Fantasia No. 3 in G minor (1679), both by Henry Purcell, put one in mind of continually unfolding leaves and petals.  Horseback visions momentarily shimmering, dissolving much too soon.

Maurice Ravel‘s String Quartet in F major (1903) was a complex work of many moods.  It conjured colours which bled into one another.  Perhaps the first movement was the most richly evocative, but the following ones fed the imagination as well.  One was subject to an irresistible onrush of melody and concomitant images.  As they say, it was all good.

The final piece was Franz Schubert’s String Quartet in D minor (1824), a sombre work in the main; but bright dots of light alleviated the gloom. For this one, Schubert pillaged his song ‘Death and the Maiden’, snazzling a good number of variations out of it.  This was a fine, intense performance of the composer’s late meditation on mortality, and Marie Bittloch’s sometimes gruff cello was gorgeous to hear.

The Elias Quartet are wonderful musicians and they work hard too.  Now if only they fought evil: I could then call them the Fantastic Four.

This was one of a series of concerts organised by the Manchester Chamber Concerts Society. For details of future concerts, click here.

The Play That Killed Me

The Play That Killed Me
By Justin MacGregor
The Lowry, 23 September 2010

Marlene Dietrich with Hector MacGregor on the set of Stage Fright (1950), as Alfred Hitchcock directs. Credit: Warner Brothers

The story of the playwright’s grandfather, Hector: a man who, it is clear, touched many other people’s lives.

It covers a number of years of Hector’s life and is therefore quite compressed in parts; the emphasis is on Hector’s service in North Africa during World War Two, where he put on plays for the eighth army, Monty’s men.

Gerry Mclaughlin is terrific as the lead, Hector being in large part the narrator of his own story.  All the cast hold their end up well, mind, and Peter Hunt’s Lewis provided welcome flashes of humour.  His rank yo-yoed regularly; now three stripes, now two.

As you watch the play, Rossetti’s famous lines (‘What man has bent over his son’s sleep to brood’, etc.) may come unbidden into your mind.  A moving experience, and quite unexpected.

The Art of Recklessness by Dean Young

The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction
By Dean Young
Graywolf Press, August, 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1555975623

Dean Young’s book is one that I liked very much, 110 percent as they say in some parts of this island, and I’d recommend it to anyone who writes poetry (or hopes or intends to) or anyone who reads the stuff.  Yet I find it by no means a simple matter to summarise the book’s contents.  It is curiously encouraging in this regard that the author writes, some 13 pages or so before the close: ‘I was hoping that at some point I would figure out what this book is about – maybe you are too.’   I’m (and we the readers are) in good company.

The message that I took home from Young’s book was something like this: live to the full and make poetry (if you write it) as vital as your life.  Be sure to make it matter.  He writes early on (some of the prose is in CAPITALS) that:

THE HIGHEST ACCOMPLISHMENT OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE IMAGINATION AND THE HIGHEST ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE IMAGINATION IS EMPATHY and the ability to love, and if you don’t think that takes a profound part in the creation of the world, please close the book right now.  (14)

In fact, I read to the end, though sometimes skipping a little and then retracing my steps.  A fair whack of the book is concerned with Dada and Surrealism, just to give you an idea of where (in significant part) Young is coming from.  And the title is taken, I think, from John Ashbery (quoted on page 42): ‘Most reckless things are beautiful in some way and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful.’

Throughout, there’s a lot of luminous polemic, a slue of terrific poems (Man Ray’s ‘Untitled’ was a new one on me), a bevy of insights about art and poetry.  If you are looking for a classy thought-provoking rant, if you want something to stir and shake you up and perhaps inspire you to start writing poems (if you don’t already) then The Art of Recklessness is prescribed.  And take to heart (and to art) Young’s edict: POETRY IS ALWAYS IN ADVANCE OF CRITICISM!

Amen to that.

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

Arcadia
By Tom Stoppard
Library Theatre Company
The Lowry, 24 September 2010

Charlie Anson (Septimus Hodge) and Beth Park (Thomasina Coverly) in Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. Photo by Gerry Murray

What should you get for a play that has everything?  Such an easy question to answer: a Library Theatre production.

Arcadia has an inventive structure, what with the forth-and-back timeshifts between the Romantic age and the present day.  It is chockfull of ideas, as with all of Stoppard’s work, and it deals in particular with the clash between the two cultures of art and science, poetry and mathematics.  All attempts by we poor mortal beings to find meaning, pattern and beauty in the universe.  There’s also – again as per normal with Stoppard – a lot of dry wit on display, and an entirely earned and warranted elegiac ending.

The cast were variously excellent, from Cate Hamer as Hannah the pernickety independent scholar to Leigh Symonds as Ezra Chater, a character straight out of the pages of Smollett, to Joe Shalom, who gave an affecting performance as Augustus, the lad who’s an elective mute.  Charlie Anson as Septimus Hodge was outstanding, mind; he had a real magnetic presence.

This is a play that will move you, make you laugh and tickle your brain cells too.  You will find this production to be well-nigh perfect.  Perfectly acted, perfectly paced, perfectly realised overall.

Arcadia, a Library Theatre production, is showing at The Lowry until 9 October.  Full details here.

Fighting France by Edith Wharton

Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort
By Edith Wharton
Hesperus Press, February 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1843914518

Edith Wharton loved France, her adopted homeland, very much.

In this book, originally published in 1915, she records her impressions of the country during the first year of the First World War, from August 1914 to August 1915.  She notes the excitement and commotion surrounding the declaration of war, she weighs the costs borne by the conflict and she charts the changes by which the great nation settled on a steadfast tenacity of purpose.  Her travels took her all over France, from Paris to The Argonne, from Alsace to Ypres, a town that she describes as ‘bombarded to death’:

The outer walls of its houses are still standing, so that it presents the distant semblance of a living city, while nearby it is seen to be a disembowelled corpse.  Every window pane is smashed, nearly every building unroofed, and some house-fronts are sliced clean off, with the different stories exposed, as if for the stage-setting of a farce.  (71)

Clearly, this book cannot tell the full story of the terrible conflict that was the Great War.  Equally, it would be naive to read the book wholly outside of the context in which it was written.  One can make an educated guess that Wharton, as well as aiming to bolster morale and put (so far as was possible) a positive spin on events, was attempting to rally support for the French cause in America (for most of these chapters began life as articles in Scribner’s Magazine).

This is seen in the rhetorical claims and flourishes which, while they may show a clever and pretty use of language, hardly seem to be warranted.  For example:

We felt that on the far side of that dividing line were the men who had made the war, and on the near side the men who had been made by it. (63)

Not a few times, mind, Wharton achieves a lyricism that is not only warranted but beautiful and affecting too:

There was something strangely moving in this new Paris of the August evenings, so exposed yet so serene, as though her very beauty shielded her. (11)

The lady was a partisan and not a disinterested observer, that much hardly needs emphasising.  She was involved in the war effort, the kind of stand-up woman you’d want on your side.  With this book, she was writing steadfastly in support of the country she loved.

And because very little escaped her – she was one of those, in the words of her friend Henry James, on whom nothing is lost – what she wrote is still worth reading today.

Awakenings by Rambert Dance Company

Awakenings

Rambert Dance Company
The Lowry, 22 September 2010

Awakenings. Credit: Anthony Crickmay

Rambert’s troupe graced the stage, serving up an exhilarating evening of dance.

The first outing of three was the most colourful, the dancing being eclectic and full of humour, the costumes (some of them anyway) recalling clowns’ garb.  It was called Hush this one, an ironical title for it created a bit of a commotion, and the choreography was by the redoubtable Christopher Bruce.

Next then to RainForest and the dancers, clad in those near-nude suits – costumes that simulated nudity – assumed the sentience of those fair creatures that W.H. Hudson especially loved.  David Tudor’s music incorporated bird song and other animal melody; it was all very beautiful.  The set presented an intriguing spectacle: some stars were in the sky, others had fallen.

Now to the main outing of the evening: the world premiere of Awakenings, a work inspired by Oliver Sacks’ eponymous book.  If you want to get a sense of how inventive, affecting and thought-provoking modern dance can be, go along and see this micro-universe of motion.  Each dancer played their part but the intricate patterning between the dancers was of crucial import, courtesy of Aletta Collins’ choreography.  And Tobias Picker’s music was punctuation, rhetoric, lyric – all of the above, plus one.

Awakenings is touring throughout the UK until early December 2010.  Full details are here.

Mine-Haha, or, On the Bodily Education of Young Girls

Mine-Haha, or, On the Bodily Education of Young Girls
By Frank Wedekind 
Translated by Philip Ward
Hesperus Press, February 2010
ISBN-10: 1843914557
ISBN-13: 978-1843914556

Frank Wedekind is probably best known as the author of the ‘Lulu’ plays, which provided, in Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1928 film Pandora’s Box, an ideal role for the sublime beauty that was Louise Brooks.

This equally svelte and attractive volume collects together a novella, ‘Mine-Haha, or, On the Bodily Education of Young Girls’, and two of Wedekind’s stories.

Let us come to the novella first, then: ‘Mine-Haha, or, On the Bodily Education of Young Girls’ (1903) takes the form of a manuscript given to the author (Wedekind himself, not a fictional narrator) by a woman who soon afterward kills herself; it is a device that we are surely all familiar with, from reading Poe and others.  The manuscript describes the woman’s experience of a strange school, its routine, its etiquette-training and its curious initiation ceremonies.  All of the above being apparently a preparation for puberty; and, in a diabolical twist, the older girls mentor the younger ones.

As an erotic fantasy-cum-satire on socialisation it is all a bit (well, to be frank, a lot) weird.  Clearly, ‘Mine-Haha’ is open to various interpretations.  Personally, it brought to my mind current concerns over the sexualisation of young girls.  The advertising media and certain department stores which place an emphasis on provocative attire have been the villains here, you may recall.  Another point of reference was the beauty pageants, popular or so I’m led to believe in a number of American states, where the participants are very young girls.  On the blurb, the wondrous Marianne Faithfull describes ‘Mine-Haha’ as ‘a psycho-sexual Expressionist fable’ – so there’s another view, which has the advantage of including the term ‘Expressionist’.

Now to the two stories, ‘The Burning of Egliswyl’ and ‘The Sacrificial Lamb’, both originally published in 1897.  That the theme of both stories is love, or a poisonous facsimile of it, and the intense anguish occasioned by thwarted sexual passion will hardly surprise those familiar with Pandora’s Box.  Wedekind well knows that extreme emotion represents a danger to its possessor as well as to those around him or her.  It can easily be  converted into (self) destructive rage.  His characters in these two stories are respectively a convict and a prostitute, hence he’s not averse either to embracing the downtrodden and the wretched.

‘The Sacrificial Lamb’ is the piece I enjoyed most in this volume, but they’re all well worth a read. One would like, also, to see more of Frank Wedekind’s work translated into English.

Certified Copy

Certified Copy
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
France & Italy, 2010
Cornerhouse, 19 September 2010

Still from Certified Copy

A film that, sad to say, never really flares into life.

There is a terrific scene in a café when Juliette Binoche and the Italian proprietress become embroiled in a discussion about men, or rather husbands.  Binoche adding rouge to her lips and changing her mind about which earrings to wear makes for another very watchable few moments.  But that’s about it; slender pickings for a film with a running time of 106 minutes.

It meanders, although not in a wondrous or delightful way; rather in an interminable, ‘get to the point, if there is one’ kind of a way.

The two leads, Juliette Binoche and William Shimell, are on-screen for virtually ninety percent of the time but, truth to tell, their characters – she an antique dealer, he a middlebrow writer on a promo tour – are not really that interesting.  Also, there is an absence of peril and emotional risk: contra the superb Winter’s Bone.  If the two decide to fuck or have an affair, well, so what?  They will continue to lead comfortable, perhaps slightly melancholic lives.

We are granted an abrupt, open-ended final scene (will they or won’t they?).  Mercifully, it ends.  That is enough.

Winter’s Bone

Winter’s Bone
Directed by Debra Granik
USA, 2010
Cornerhouse, 19 September 2010

Still from Winter's Bone

In a recent interview, Donald E Westlake stated that two essentials of any great story are emotion and peril.

We find them in abundance in this fine film, an adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s intense novel.

Woodrell’s young protagonist, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is threatened with the loss of her home, her family, her life.  She must find her father, who has skipped bail and is missing.  To reach him she must test the ties that bind her to her family and her community.  It is a testing time all around for Ree.

If Lawrence is terrific as Ree, and she is, then what of John Hawkes’ performance as her uncle, Teardrop?  Man, he is as fine: intense, stand-up and on the ball.

One way to describe the film: it is like The Sopranos transposed to the Ozarks.  The kick and the subtext is the same: family transcends the law, always.  That may be an outlaw message, but it’s a value that America, and maybe the American West in particular, was built upon.

If I were Daniel Woodrell I’d perhaps query why one of Ree’s younger siblings was made a girl (they’re both boys in the novel, I think), but other than that I’d be well satisfied.  And that’s the best compliment I can pay the film.