slick scott

 

The slicker was good-looking or clean-looking; he had brains, social brains, that is, and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to get ahead, be popular, admired, and never in trouble. He dressed well, was particularly neat in appearance, and derived his name from the fact that his hair was inevitably worn short, soaked in water or tonic, parted in the middle, and slicked back as the current of fashion dictated. The slickers of that year had adopted tortoise-shell spectacles as badges of their slickerhood, and this made them so easy to recognize that Amory and Rahill never missed one. The slicker seemed distributed through school, always a little wiser and shrewder than his contemporaries, managing some team or other, and keeping his cleverness carefully concealed.

From This Side of Paradise -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

[Pictured:  F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s, hair definitely slicked]

the age of desire

Speaking of Edith Wharton, Jennie Fields' The Age of Desire (2012) draws back the heavy velvet drapes of decorum by novelizing aspects of Edith's life and loves.  Wharton, of course, was a fixed member of the upper crust society she portrayed in fiction, thereby using its corseting, restrictive influence as a means of literary liberation.  In The Age of Desire, much of the focus is on Edith's unfulfilling marriage to portly, jovial Teddy Wharton, who was twelve years older and more of a gentleman farmer-type than an aesthete.  Edith and Teddy did get along fairly well at times, but the marriage was strained by a lack of sexual connection.  Edith felt little for her husband romantically and, after a while, Teddy began to turn to other women to fill those needs.

Edith's intellectual and artistic interests were also beyond Teddy's general purview.  When Edith met American journalist Morton Fullerton in Paris, there was a spark of both physical and mental attraction that developed into an intense affair.  Fullerton was younger than then fortyish-Edith and had a bit of a reputation as a player, with both sexes.  Still, Edith seemed to realize that though it would be an overwhelming and troubling relationship, she needed to go through this ring of fire with Fullerton. The characters in her novels, namely Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence and Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, suppressed passions in order to keep within a proper code of social behavior -- Archer remaining in a loveless marriage and Lily eventually succumbing to the permanent oblivion of a chloral hydrate overdose.  Edith was more willing to take the emotional and moral risk of pursuing her own romantic involvement, although interestingly enough, The Age of Innocence was published almost two decades after her affair with Fullerton.

With a framework of Edith's true-life biographical detail and quotes from letters written to Fullerton, The Age of Desire offers a complex and intimate portrait of one of literature's grande dames.  Some may find such intimacy unsettling, while others may be more intrigued by this glimpse of Edith as a living, breathing, yearning, and flawed woman.  The life of Anna Bahlmann, Edith's secretary and confidante, is also part of The Age of Desire; Anna is of another class and tirelessly earnest in her devotion to Edith, and her character is quite compelling.  Furthermore, Fields manages to portray Edith's troubled husband Teddy Wharton in a sympathetic light, though he too is full of flaws and bad impulses.

Some reviewers of The Age of Desire noted instances of dialogue or behavior seeming too modern for the era, but in the larger scope of the novel's purpose, that can be indulged.  The prose itself flows elegantly in a Whartonesque manner, with a resulting view of Edith balancing identities as a woman of her day, a writer, and a human being, and not just a frosty book jacket photograph of one of America's literary greats.  

night at the opera

But they had; they undoubtedly had; for the low-toned comments behind him left no doubt in Archer's mind that the young woman was May Welland's cousin, the cousin always referred to in the family as "poor Ellen Olenska."  Archer knew that she had suddenly arrived from Europe a day or two previously... [a]s for the cause of the commotion, she sat gracefully in her corner of the box, her eyes fixed on the stage, and revealing, as she leaned forward, a little more shoulder and bosom than New York was accustomed to seeing, at least in ladies who had reasons for wishing to pass unnoticed.

From The Age of Innocence -- Edith Wharton

Pictured:  At the Opera --  Thomas Francis Dicksee, R.A.

go holmes go

John Clellon Holmes (1926-1988) was a key member of the Beat Generation's founding circle, having met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg at a party in 1948 and thus beginning decades-long friendships.  Holmes and Kerouac -- both born on March 12th but Kerouac being older by four years -- became creative comrades as well, encouraging each other to observe and write and transform the happenings of their lives into literature.  Holmes' Go was published in 1952, before 1957's more famed On the Road, and though the novels involve many of the same characters in the roman à clef style, the tone of each book is quite different.

While On the Road has a generally more energetic, driven, Beat zeitgeist feeling, with the American post-war landscape rushing by, Go is New York-centric, at times claustrophobically so.  Bars "forlornly gathered the discontented into gaudy islands of warmth and alcohol," and the Manhattan backdrop is urban and landlocked.  Holmes' alter ego in Go is Paul Hobbes, a bright aspiring young writer living with his wife Kathryn.  And here we have another major difference between Go and On the Road -- the emotional and romantic complications of a true marriage.  In On the Road, Sal Paradise's marriage is mentioned as a thing of the past, in the rearview mirror, a vague relationship that's run its course.  Paul Hobbes is both anchored and grounded by his marriage to Kathryn, who works a day job to support him while he writes at home, and who is a strong-willed, passionate woman.  For the most part, Kathryn outrightly disapproves of Paul's "wild" friends and their excessive drinking, smoking, drug use and ambiguous morality, yet she also has a certain fascination for the likes of Gene Pasternak (Kerouac), David Stofsky (Ginsberg), and Hart Kennedy (Neal Cassady), and can't help but be drawn into their world.  She and Paul fight often, adding another claustrophobic element to Go, namely the drunken or sober squabbles in the Hobbes' apartment, but despite all the tension and friction, some sort of earthy magnetism seems to keep them from breaking apart.

In essence, Hobbes stays behind in New York while Pasternak and Kennedy surge westward into the pages of On the Road.  The prose of Go is more measured and dense than Kerouac's flowing narrative, but there are many fine moments and observations in Holmes' earlier novel.  Beyond a deeper perception of some of the female characters, Go gives a sense of this is probably how things really were among the NY Beat social set, warts and all.  Like the cruel, self-destructive tendencies of Bill Agatson (Bill Cannastra), the moody impulses of Pasternak, or the quirky, almost naive brilliance of David Stofsky.  And while On the Road is a definite American literary classic, Go surely should have a prominent place on the Beat bookshelf to add nuance and layers to the story, and for an intriguing variation of the same scene.

This generation may make no bombs; it will probably be asked to drop some, and have some dropped on it, however, and this fact is never far from its mind. It is one of the pressures which created it and will play a large part in what will happen to it. 

"This is The Beat Generation" -- John Clellon Holmes, The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 1952

balzac's feast

Honoré de Balzac died today in 1850 at the age of 51, leaving behind an enduring legacy in French literature.  His life was generally busy with writing and living amid the intrigues of Parisian society, and he loved food.  While working on a book, he kept his appetites in check, eating little and opting instead for pots of coffee to keep his pen moving across the page.  At other times, dining to delicious excess was more his style, with no oyster safe from his appetites.  This is all well-detailed in Anka Muhlstein's Balzac's Omelette:  A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré de Balzac, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.  If you're a Balzac fan, you already know how food is a frequent backdrop in Balzac's works -- and you've probably already read this book since it was initially published in the U.S. in 2011.  If new to Balzac, the focus on the delights of the table and on 19th century French cuisine -- combined with the captivating character and words of the author himself -- will make Balzac's Omelette a tasty read.

Flicoteaux's restaurant is no banqueting-hall, with its refinements and luxuries; it is a workshop where suitable tools are provided, and everybody gets up and goes as soon as he has finished. The coming and going within are swift. There is no dawdling among the waiters; they are all busy; every one of them is wanted.

The fare is not very varied. The potato is a permanent institution; there might not be a single tuber left in Ireland, and prevailing dearth elsewhere, but you would still find potatoes at Flicoteaux's. Not once in thirty years shall you miss its pale gold (the color beloved of Titian), sprinkled with chopped verdure; the potato enjoys a privilege that women might envy; such as you see it in 1814, so shall you find it in 1840 ... When the whiting and mackerel abound on our shores, they are likewise seen in large numbers at Flicoteaux's; his whole establishment, indeed, is directly affected by the caprices of the season and the vicissitudes of French agriculture.  By eating your dinners at Flicoteaux's you learn a host of things of which the wealthy, the idle, and folk indifferent to the phases of Nature have no suspicion, and the student penned up in the Latin Quarter is kept accurately informed of the state of the weather and good or bad seasons. He knows when it is a good year for peas or French beans, and the kind of salad stuff that is plentiful; when the Great Market is glutted with cabbages, he is at once aware of the fact....

From A Distinguished Provincial at Paris (Lost Illusions) -- Honoré de Balzac

the literary legacy of philomena guinea

I had read one of Mrs. Guinea's books in the town library--the college library didn't stock them for some reason--and it was crammed from beginning to end with long, suspenseful questions:  "Would Evelyn discern that Gladys knew Roger in her past? wondered Hector feverishly" and "How could Donald marry her when he learned of the child Elsie, hidden away with Mrs. Rollmop on the secluded country farm? Griselda demanded of her bleak, moonlit pillow."  These books earned Philomena Guinea, who later told me she had been very stupid at college, millions and millions of dollars.

From The Bell Jar -- Sylvia Plath

Pictured:  Woman Reading -- Kuroda Seiki, circa 1890 (Tokyo National Museum)

mango pain

. . . Aziz turned to topics that could distress no one.  He described the ripening of the mangoes, and how in his boyhood he used to run out in the Rains to a big mango grove belonging to an uncle and gorge there.  "Then back with water streaming over you and perhaps rather a pain inside.  But I did not mind.  All my friends were paining with me.  We have a proverb in Urdu:  'What does unhappiness matter when we are all unhappy together?'  which comes in conveniently after mangoes."

A Passage to India -- E.M. Forster (1924)

Pictured:  Mangoes (detail) -- Francisco Oller, circa 1901