Point Counter Point

Bad people doing bad things, but in a very witty way. That is a brief, if incomplete, summary of Aldous Huxley's novel, Point Counter Point.
It is more broadly a "novel of ideas" with a novelist of ideas, Philip Quarles, at its center surrounded by friends and family whose lives are like those of the monsters that Philip writes about in his journal. Just as Philip decides to structure his novel on the contrapuntal techniques of music (think Bach and Beethoven) the novel Huxley has written is structured in the same way. We are presented with an opening overture of more than one-hundred-fifty pages at a dinner party that serves as an introduction to most of the characters. The remainder of the novel intersperses scenes from their lives, letters from lovers and most interesting, the writings of Philip Quarles, who with his wife spends most of the first half of the novel returning from India and who is the closest to a protagonist that we get. While there is a bit of a literary explosion near the end, this is more a novel of the daily lives of London sophisticates in the 1920s. It catalogues their alternately sordid and ludicrous (sometimes both) erotic adventures, which generally end unhappily.
I particularly enjoyed the wealth of references to literature and philosophy, Huxley's polymathic mind shows through on every page. Among the literary references was the use of Dickens in a way that captures one of his essential character traits, "the appearance of Dickensian young-girlishness" (p. 19). Overall, I found the play of wit and ideas compelling, enough to bear with the bad people and their antics.

Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley. Harper & Row, New York. 1928.

Uncommon Novel of Manners

Bertram Cope's Year 

by Henry Blake Fuller

"'Oh,' thought Randolph, 'one of the cool boys, and one of the self-sufficing.  Probably a bit of an ascetic at bottom, with good capacity for self-control and self-direction.  Not at all an uninteresting type,' he summed up." (p 33)


My favorite novels from late nineteenth-century America include Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage which I first read while I was attending high school, and Harold Frederic's less well-known The Damnation of Theron Ware which deals with personal religious issues of the titular character. It was not until the end of the twentieth century when I was in my reading maturity that I discovered this somewhat similar and equally good novel by Henry Blake Fuller.
Fuller, who was born in Chicago and spent most of his life there wrote many novels , most of which are forgotten today. His novel of Chicago, The Cliff Dwellers, is probably his best known, but late in his life in 1919 at the age of sixty-two he published Bertram Cope's Year about a young (twenty-five year old) English instructor at a Middle Western university (admittedly modeled after Northwestern University). Cope is good looking and a pleasant companion. Early in the novel he is adopted socially by a local hostess, Medora T. Phillips, and begins regular attendance at her soirees. He also makes another acquaintance, Basil Randolph, who is a collector of objects d'art and admirer of handsome young men. Cope's involvement with these characters and their crowd leads him into complicated social situations with young women who pursue him, unaware of his attachment to a young man, Arthur Lemoyne. Cope had left Lemoyne in Wisconsin when he moved to Churchton but following some correspondence soon expected Lemoyne to join him. The natural way that Bertram and Arthur live a life that mimics a young married couple is just one of the surprising aspects of this stylish novel of manners. It also may explain why Fuller had to publish the novel at his own expense in spite of his success with earlier efforts. As a novel of manners the book reminds me somewhat of Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, and like that book it does not have any truly likable characters. Cope himself, who is at the center of the novel's social wheel, is pleasant enough, but lacks a spine with which to stand up to those characters (too numerous to mention) who try to direct his life. One aspect of this and the novel as a whole is that of unmet expectations, Cope does not meet the expectations of the other characters and in this he disappointed this reader as well.
However, as Edmund Wilson said in the introduction to the Triangle Classics edition of the novel, "This curious book, which is perhaps Fuller's best, seems never to have had adequate attention." (p. xxxi). That is a shame because it is one of the earliest natural and positive depictions of the life of a young gay man in American society. Both this and the excellence of the writing recommend this novel to all readers who enjoy understated social novels.


Bertram Cope's Year by Henry Blake Fuller. Turtle Point Press, New York. 1998 (1919)

The Bonfire of the Vanities 

by Tom Wolfe

On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? - three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? - had become precisely that … Masters of the Universe.

Bonfire of the Vanities is a novel that reads as if it were taken right out of the current news, or at least the news when it was written in the late 1980s. The story focuses on a "master of the universe" Wall Street bond trader whose life unravels as the result of a literal wrong turn taken. His life is then turned upside-down by the machinations of several other characters including an ambitious journalist, a hypocritical reverend, and the questionable actors from the judicial system. The denouement does not reward the good characters for in this book they do not exist. The result is a great read, the best book about unlikeable characters since Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, and what I would now consider great historical fiction about an earlier time and place.



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God of Carnage

by Yasmina Reza

"This is the worst day of my life."

Bad people doing bad things, but in a very witty way, was how I described the characters in Aldous Huxley's novel, Point Counter Point in my review in October, 2008. The same description applies to the four characters in Yasmina Reza's play, God of Carnage, that is currently playing at the Goodman Theatre in downtown Chicago. More than one hundred years after Oscar Wilde's brilliantly witty comedy we have award-winning (Tony, Olivier, Moliere) comedy with wit, but without the soul. Not since attending Moliere who gave us The Misanthrope have I seen such misanthropic characters on stage. While I was yearning for some wisdom to show itself to reward the pain being endured on the stage -- both Veronica and Annette exclaim the comment quoted above -- there was little on the stage that approached anything other than sheer Bacchanalian chaos.  However, Euripides this is not.

The evening was made bearable by beautiful acting from the ensemble, great direction by Rick Snyder, an efficient set, and a well-constructed play.  The skill with which the ensemble slowly raised their passions and the ensuing chaos I would compare to the gradual and inexorable increase in sound of a Rossini crescendo. That the playwright succeeded in her presentation of comedy with wit and thought is a tribute to Reza, but this is a world that I would want to stay away from. The only thing more violent than the passions on stage last night were the missiles reigning down on an insane North African dictator thousands of miles away. The verbal missiles and bombs on stage made for comedy, but it was a comedy filled with laughter that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Enchanting Island

South Wind 

by Norman Douglas

“History deals with situations and figures not imaginary but real. It demands therefore a combination of qualities unnecessary to the poet or writer of romance - glacial judgment coupled with fervent sympathy. The poet may be an uninspired illiterate, the romance-writer an uninspired hack. Under no circumstances can either of them be accused of wrongdoing or deceiving the public, however incongruous their efforts. They write well or badly, and there the matter ends. The historian, who fails in his duty, deceives the reader and wrongs the dead.”   ― Norman Douglas, South Wind



South Wind is a unique novel. Rather than presenting a traditional plot it seems like an olio or mixture of lectures and observations on various, often obscure, aspects of geology, climatology, history, morality, religion, and folklore, among other topics. The author's use of articulate characters confined to a restricted setting allows for ample airing of views and recalls the methods of English novelist Thomas Love Peacock, whose country house novels were once very popular.

South Wind’s setting itself becomes a character as the island Nepenthe, which is not to be found on a map, comes alive as the narrative progresses.  The literary reference is to the magical potion given to Helen by Polydamna the wife of the noble Egyptian Thon; it quells all sorrows with forgetfulness; figuratively, nepenthe means "that which chases away sorrow" (Odyssey, Book 4, v. 219–221). However, it is usually considered a fictional version of the isle of Capri, about which Douglas wrote a series of scholarly pamphlets and upon which he was living when he completed South Wind. It reminded me of Shirley Hazzard's literary meditation, Greene on Capri in which she also captured the essence of the island. She also noted the friendship between Graham Greene and Douglas in the late 1940's when Greene first began to frequent the isle, "he had the company, when he chose, of a handful of lively and literary resident compatriots . . . [and] had enjoyed the last effulgence of Norman Douglas . . ."(Greene on Capri, p 47)

Douglas did not deny his novel’s debt to a real location but insisted that Ischia, Ponza, and the Lipari Islands (all lying off the southwest coast of Italy) were the actual sources for Nepenthe’s natural scenery. Douglas even incorporated a version of his observations regarding the pumice stone industry of the Lipari Islands, the subject of one of his first publications. Douglas’s creation had deep roots in his own experience—the details of which he drew upon heavily.

The novel’s characters are the result of much the same observational mode which allows the reader, if he is willing, to gradually develop an acquaintance with the place through the idiosyncrasies of the characters.  An example may suffice: "Mr. Keith was a perfect host. He had the right word for everybody; his infectious conviviality made them all straightaway at their ease. The overdressed native ladies, the priests and officials moving about in prim little circles, were charmed with his affable manner 'so different from most Englishmen';" (p 131)

One or two characters may be based on historically obscure acquaintances of Douglas, but others are little more than personifications of facets of their author’s own personality. The voluble Mr. Keith is most likely a spokesman for Douglas’s hedonistic views, and Mr. Eames and Count Caloveglia represent Douglas’s scholarly and antiquarian interests. All are perfectly adequate mouthpieces, but none emerges as rounded or particularly memorable outside of the group.

Several British writers of Greene’s generation were directly influenced by Douglas in general and by South Wind in particular. Aldous Huxley’s satirical novels Crome Yellow (1921, in which Douglas appears as the character Scrogan), Antic Hay (1923), and Point Counter Point (1928) bear its stamp. Greene himself generally wrote books of a darker character, but his lighter comic novel Travels with My Aunt (1969) bears similarities to South Wind. Douglas's erudite yet pleasant style reminds me a bit of Lawrence Durrell. Needless to say this is an engaging novel with plenty of interesting characters that more than offset the lack of a robust plot.

The Eternal Man

Ninety-Three 

by Victor Hugo

“History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.”  ― Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three






Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo is a glorious romantic imagining of an episode from the year 1793, during the French Revolution and the year of the Great Terror. The setting is Brittany where counter-revolutionary forces have risen up to oppose the Revolutionary leaders. The leader of this group, the aged Marquise de Lantenac, is a romantic hero in the grandest sense. A Breton noble, he disguises himself as a peasant after landing on the western coast. His mission, which he pursues with ruthless single-mindedness, is to act as a leader to the rebels, harness them to the royalist cause, and contrive an opportunity for an English military invasion.

His fate seems to be determined by the Revolutionary forces which are led by his grand-nephew, Gauvain. Pitted against Lantenac, Gauvain, formerly the Vicomte de Gauvain, has renounced his noble heritage and embraced the republican cause. Gauvain commands the republican troops allied with Marat and tasked with hunting down and killing Lantenac.

The third protagonist is Cimourdain, once a priest and Gauvain’s tutor, now a fervent revolutionary. It was from Cimourdain that Gauvain first learned the political ideals he has adopted. Cimourdain has a secret, the one weak spot in his ideological armour, for he loves Gauvain, has loved him since childhood, like the son he himself never had. Cimourdain is sent by the revolutionary leader, Marat, as a special agent to the Vendée to ensure that Gauvain does not waver in his loyalty, for Marat has heard disturbing rumors that Gauvain may be capable of mercy, and revolutionary leaders view this as a cardinal sin.

The tension of the story is provided not only by the action, which is fiercely exciting, but by ideas. At one point Gauvain says to Cimourdain:
"Louis XVI was a sheep thrown among lions. He tried to flee, to save himself . . . But not everyone can be a lion who wants to. His feeble attempt was regarded as a crime."
He asks Cimourdain, "lions? What are they?"
"This made Cimourdain think. He raised his head and said, 'Those lions are consciences. Those lions are ideas. Those lions are principles.'" (pp 197-98)

While Gauvain is a man of action, a revolutionary for the republic, he is also a thinker and it is his thoughts about the humanity of men that lead him to his ultimate actions. 
The grandeur of this novel is superb, while Hugo builds suspense in every section. Some scenes are so vivid that you are unlikely to forget them. One scene that is sometimes excerpted from the novel is the great cannon episode; depicting a loose cannon on a ship of anti-revolutionary French Royalists sailing towards Brittany, to aid the anti-revolutionary Chouannerie rebellion. 
The whole of the novel is like this, filled with one astonishing experience after another, keeping this reader spellbound.


Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo. Bantam Books, 1962 (1874)

Betrayed by His Passions

The Red and the Black 
by Stendhal


“Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.”   ― Stendhal, The Red and the Black


I have enjoyed rereading Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) by Stendahl. It is a historical psychological novel in two volumes, published in 1830, that chronicles the attempts of a provincial young man to rise socially beyond his lowly upbringing through a combination of intelligence, talent, hard work, deception, and hypocrisy. He ultimately allows his passions to betray him. 

While the novel is usually classified as a bildungsroman or novel of education, in entitling it Le Rouge et le Noir: Chronique du XIXe siècle (The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the 19th Century) Stendhal suggests a two-fold literary purpose as both a psychological portrait of the romantic protagonist, Julien Sorel, and an analytic, sociological satire of the French social order under the Bourbon Restoration. The title refers to the tension between the clerical (black) and secular (red) interests of the protagonist, which is a matter of some debate.

The story tells of a young man, Julien Sorel, whose provincial nature is inflamed with the passion of youth, a passion for the ideals of the Napoleonic age, but whose greatest passion is his ambition which, overwhelming any natural pudency, takes him to the heights and sets in motion his tragic fall. His passion is contrasted with his intellect which is strong enough to allow him to escape both his difficult home life and his lowly status. Stendhal is able to present his narrative with unmatched, for his time, psychological depth and realism. The love affairs of Julien and the political intrigues in which he participates are spellbinding for the reader even today. This novel truly presents a "mirror" of reality and provides an engaging challenge for the reader. The story presents a protagonist torn between his passion for the ideal of Napoleon represented by the red of the cavalry dragoons and the black of the bishops of the church. Ultimately he finds hypocrisy on all sides and turns upon one of his loves while rejecting his only true friend.

Stendhal repeatedly questions the possibility, and the desirability, of “sincerity”, because most of the characters, especially Julien Sorel, are acutely aware of having to play a role to gain social approval. In that 19th-century context, the word “hypocrisy” denoted the affectation of high religious sentiment; in The Red and the Black it connotes the contradiction between thinking and feeling. Le Rouge et le Noir is set in the latter years of the Bourbon Restoration (1814–30) and the days of the 1830 July Revolution that established the Kingdom of the French (1830–48). Stendhal was consciously writing a historical novel set in the present. The subtitle, "a chronicle of 1830," made his contemporary readers aware of not only the historical context of the novel but of their own lives as well. Julien's choice between the black of the Church and the red of the army was a decision that many of Stendhal's readers had to make themselves. His worldly ambitions are motivated by the emotional tensions, between his idealistic Republicanism (especially nostalgic allegiance to Napoleon), and the realistic politics of counter-revolutionary conspiracy, by Jesuit-supported legitimists, notably the Marquis de la Mole, whom Julien serves, for personal gain.  It is his first moments at the home of the Marquis de la Mole that I found most memorable (as a reader who loves books);  Julien rises with the help of Father Pirard to private secretary for Marquis de la Mole. His office is to be the library. ”A few minutes later, Julien found himself alone in a magnificent library; it was a delightful moment. So no one would come to him, excited as he was, he hid himself in a dark corner. From there, he looked out at the books’ glittering spines. ‘I could read every one of them,’ he told himself.”  

Even though Stendhal does not directly refer to the 1830 Revolution, he highlights the political tensions and corruption that had reached a recent boiling point. But this emphasis on history also serves as a warning to readers: Julien's failure to succeed in French society and his betrayal by M. Valenod present a foreboding distrust of the victorious liberal bourgeoisie. Would the death of the aristocracy mark the death of French society? Stendhal's comparison of the gamble of revolution to the red and black of a roulette wheel, presents a harrowing glimpse of the volatility of French politics--a vision that still fascinates readers today. 

In his famous book of literary criticism, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, philosopher and critic René Girard identifies in Le Rouge et le Noir the triangular structure he denominates as “mimetic desire”, which reveals how a person’s desire for another is always mediated by a third party, i.e. one desires a person only when he or she is desired by someone else. Girard’s proposition accounts for the perversity of Julien's relationship with Mathilde, the daughter of the Marquis de la Mole. This becomes clear when he begins courting the widow Mme de Fervaques to pique Mathilde’s jealousy, but also for Julien’s fascination with and membership of the high society he simultaneously desires and despises.

To help achieve a literary effect, Stendhal headed each chapter with epigraphs—literary, poetic, historic quotations—that he attributed to others. The first book of the novel is headed with the following epigraph, "Truth, bitter truth." - Danton. This quote, presumably from the works of the famous revolutionary leader who was sent to the guillotine in 1794 by Robespierre is prescient in hindsight as we read of the rise and ultimate fall of young Julien. With its psychological insight, social criticism, and political intrigue this is still an exciting, even exhilarating read and truly a great book for all time.


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Trusting "Contraries"

Notes on the Poetry of Robert Frost

So must pure lovers’ souls descend

To affections, and to faculties,

Which sense may reach and apprehend,

Else a great prince in prison lies.

To our bodies turn we then, that so

Weak men on love revealed may look;

Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,

But yet the body is his book.

-  John Donne,  from "The Ecstasy"

Robert Frost's short poem "West-Running Brook" is a little drama about some very big ideas.  He began writing the poem in 1920 and decided to make it the the titular piece for a collection of poems he began compiling in the winter of 1927 and saw published the following year.  

One notices that, of the couple in the poem, we have only a name for the man.  His wife is either "my love" or "my dear".  
Neither referents are all that bad, but they are indefinite, and when the couple are joined with the brook (two become three) it is the wife that goes unnamed even as she is the one who names the brook.  It begins with a question, "Fred, where is north?", that folds into a discussion of the brook that runs west contrary to expectation and to "all the other country brooks" which flow east.  He then announces one theme of the poem, contraries, as according to him "It must be the brook / Can trust itself to go by contraries" which he immediately compares to their relationship.  This leads him to the conclusion that they are a "we", a couple who "must be something, but then adds the brook, saying:

"We'll both be married to the brook.  We'll build 
Our bridge across it, and the bridge shall be 
Our arm thrown over it asleep beside it."


Thus the brook becomes the third to their two and is suddenly anthropomorphized with a wave that lets them know it hears".   The lovely image of "our arm thrown over it" suggests a joining of the two together and with the brook as a third, perhaps a family.  This also can be inferred from the wife's response below.  The contraries of the poem are not violent, rather they are like some waves whose motions against the grain are like a resistance to going with the "drift of things".  However when Fred suggests the river "wasn't waved to us" his wife disagrees:
"It wasn't, yet it was.  If not to you / It was to me--in an annunciation."


Fred's response suggests that it is her fantasy and about such a brook "I have no more to say."  But with her contrary encouragement the big ideas soon appear as Fred responds with a rhapsody on the primitive "water we were from" with Darwinian connotations leading us from "long before we were any creature."  The metaphor of the stream of life also appears with hints of Lucretius including  "a swerving" that suggests indeterminacy in the direction of the stream of life.  In its flow we see,
"A universal cataract of death / That spends to nothingness".  It is a throwing back (another sort of contrary) that demonstrates to us our source, the "nature we are from."  His lengthy commentary on the source of life and the nature of its flow with currents "against the stream" seems an excess of eloquence.  All this may be most unsettling to his wife, but her comment is a more simple recognition of where they are that concludes with "Today will be the day of what we both said."  

I like the recognition that while she seems to say in effect we will agree to disagree, she is still referring to "we".  They are a couple whose love, like that of Donne's (see the epigraph above) and many others can withstand such disagreements.  But we should note that this poem demonstrates many of Frost's preoccupations with its eloquent use of the stream metaphor and his ability to merge the dramatic with the lyrical form.  The poem, at least if you side with Fred, seems to suggest that as humans we are ultimately redeemed by our natural resistance in the face of extinction.  But, as is usually the case with Frost, the meaning is not explicit, the difference between husband and wife is not resolved.  It is left on the table.  Yet, the poem ends with them still a "we".


West-Running Brook

'Fred, where is north?'

'North? North is there, my love.
The brook runs west.'

'West-running Brook then call it.'
(West-Running Brook men call it to this day.)
'What does it think it's doing running west
When all the other country brooks flow east
To reach the ocean? It must be the brook
Can trust itself to go by contraries
The way I can with you -- and you with me --
Because we're -- we're -- I don't know what we are.
What are we?'

'Young or new?'

'We must be something.
We've said we two. Let's change that to we three.
As you and I are married to each other,
We'll both be married to the brook. We'll build
Our bridge across it, and the bridge shall be
Our arm thrown over it asleep beside it.
Look, look, it's waving to us with a wave
To let us know it hears me.'

' 'Why, my dear,
That wave's been standing off this jut of shore --'
(The black stream, catching a sunken rock,
Flung backward on itself in one white wave,
And the white water rode the black forever,
Not gaining but not losing, like a bird
White feathers from the struggle of whose breast
Flecked the dark stream and flecked the darker pool
Below the point, and were at last driven wrinkled
In a white scarf against the far shore alders.)
'That wave's been standing off this jut of shore
Ever since rivers, I was going to say,'
Were made in heaven. It wasn't waved to us.'

'It wasn't, yet it was. If not to you
It was to me -- in an annunciation.'

'Oh, if you take it off to lady-land,
As't were the country of the Amazons
We men must see you to the confines of
And leave you there, ourselves forbid to enter,-
It is your brook! I have no more to say.'

'Yes, you have, too. Go on. You thought of something.'

'Speaking of contraries, see how the brook
In that white wave runs counter to itself.
It is from that in water we were from
Long, long before we were from any creature.
Here we, in our impatience of the steps,
Get back to the beginning of beginnings,
The stream of everything that runs away.
Some say existence like a Pirouot
And Pirouette, forever in one place,
Stands still and dances, but it runs away,
It seriously, sadly, runs away
To fill the abyss' void with emptiness.
It flows beside us in this water brook,
But it flows over us. It flows between us
To separate us for a panic moment.
It flows between us, over us, and with us.
And it is time, strength, tone, light, life and love-
And even substance lapsing unsubstantial;
The universal cataract of death
That spends to nothingness -- and unresisted,
Save by some strange resistance in itself,
Not just a swerving, but a throwing back,
As if regret were in it and were sacred.
It has this throwing backward on itself
So that the fall of most of it is always
Raising a little, sending up a little.
Our life runs down in sending up the clock.
The brook runs down in sending up our life.
The sun runs down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.
It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.
It is from this in nature we are from. It is most us.'

'To-day will be the day....You said so.'

'No, to-day will be the day
You said the brook was called West-running Brook.'

'To-day will be the day of what we both said.'


West-Running Brook by Robert Frost. Holt & Co., 1928.