GOLUPTIOUS CLASSICS
By John Davies
Published in Mattoid Issue 44 No. 3 1992/93
G.K. Chesterton, The Best of Father Brown, Selected by H.R.F.Keating, London, Dent & Sons, 1992.$11
Fate, being in a funny mood, pushed the door open and introduced...a shapeless little figure, which seemed to find its own hat and umbrella as unmanageable as a mass of luggage. The umbrella was a black and prosaic bundle long past repair; the hat was a broad-curved black hat, clerical but not common in England; the man was the very embodiment of all that is homely and helpless.
- The Absence of Mr. Glass
The Father Brown stories appeared separately and in six collections between 1910 and 1936. Dixon Scott in the Manchester Guardian hailed the first stories as "simply goluptious". They still are.
Long before Maigret and Miss Marple, before American writers defined a type of detective walking mean streets who is himself not mean, even before Columbo, there was a shy and shabby little priest who had a dull voice and dull eyes, a "small figure with a foolishly large head", "not an interesting man to look at, having stubbly brown hair and a round and stolid face", "dusty-looking... a small man with a smooth face and a demure elvish complexion". Even the way he walked was "entirely devoid of distinction".
Was this a rival to Sherlock Holmes, whose bizarre cases and enemies seemed to rise from his own cocaine fevers to meet him? Yes.
Many a murderer regretted his first condescending impression of the elfin priest. Chesterton's genius lay in his profound realisation that a man is not necessarily what he looks like. This notion had been explored by Henry James in "The Real Thing", but what was for James a notion for a single story became in Chesterton's hands the basis for an enduring character and stories which raised crime fiction to the level of literature and parable, twin peaks which his successors have rarely grasped since.
The joke, the profound joke, is that Father Brown does not like mysteries. That is why he solves them. To him they are an affront to the one great mystery of which he is a humble and "unusually insignificant" servant. Any crime, not always a murder, which bears a hint of the supernatural makes him unusually agitated. He believes in miracles but does not expect to see one. He sees in earthly mysteries "a twisted, ugly, complex quality that does not belong to the straight bolts either of heaven or hell". He sees "the crooked track of a man" and follows it.
Brown wants nothing less than to save the murderer's or criminal's troubled soul. He will go anywhere any time. He goes high and low. All men are equal in their spiritual difficulties. Brown cannot be intimidated because he serves the King of Kings.
He has a clear eye in assessing evidence. A headless body and a bodiless head pose a grim riddle until Brown points out that the two do not necessarily belong to each other. A dagger can be thrown along distance and an arrow can be inserted manually at close quarters. A deformity elaborately concealed may be concealed because it does not exist. A man may see a dragon in the moon and find it is only a fly trapped in the eyepiece of his telescope.
When he understands how a thing was done he proceeds to asking why it was done. When he knows why, he knows who. In "The Secret of Father Brown" he explains his Method, provoked by mystical speculations emanating from the Second Sight Sisterhood of Indianapolis:
Oh, I say. This will never do... I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders... I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that, until I realised that I really was like that, in everything except actual final consent to the action. It was once suggested to me by a friend of mine, as a sort of religious exercise.
When he knows who, then his real work begins:
Father Brown walked those snow-covered hills under the stars for many hours with a murderer, and what they said to each other will never be known.
He has no loyalty to the police. He does not care if a case comes to earthly trial. It is interesting to note that Chesterton became a Catholic in 1922, when he had already been writing these stories for twelve years. His own creation converted him. Father Brown has that effect on readers too.
Oscar Wilde, Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, London, Dent & Sons 1991.$15.95
It is so easy for people to have sympathy with suffering. It is so difficult for them to have sympathy with thought.
-The Critic as Artist
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.
-The Picture of Dorian Gray
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
-The Soul of Man Under Socialism
The value of a collection such as this is that it reveals the scope and seriousness of Wilde's thought. A hundred years after the first laughter he brings a hush. Reading "When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others", or "The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true", we may itch to object but we realise he is more honest than we are.
The "lord of language" affected to scorn consistency and consistently told the truth. He denied his own seriousness yet touched his paradoxes and aphorisms with a voice which is firm today preaching compassion and tolerance. The goal of life was self-realisation. He wanted life to be beautiful for everybody. He believed it can only be beautiful if we cultivate a critical sense with our other five senses. He despised ideology, hypocrisy, and compulsion. "It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine".
Wilde dazzled his own time, not least the American lumberjacks with whom he arm-wrestled and played a canny hand of poker. (This story is told in Richard Ellmann's biography.) Today he is a symbol of all things to all of us: aesthete, wit, leader of fashion, famous for being famous before he had written a line to deserve it and then famous again and vastly rewarded for his writing, a popular darling among an elite that never quite trusted him, The Great Beast to a mob to whom he wished nothing worse than a beautiful life, a martyr for the right to be oneself.
Determined to shine, he burned, inventing a cool if scented style which enabled him to touch any subject. At night he developed his jokes for the following day. If they worked he used them in his writing. He exhausted himself and made it look effortless, remarking that "only a mediocre man is always at his best".
As for the scandal and his last difficult years, it requires an effort today to appreciate that Wilde saw himself as, above all, an Irish gentleman. He could have escaped on the boat-train to France. Many eyes were willing to look the other way, but he had a sense of appropriateness that was both artistic and Celtic. He had lived "in constant terror of not being misunderstood" and dropped redwood-size hints everywhere. Forced to lie outright in an English court he remained, as an Irish gentleman, to pay the price. That was all.
That choice is all that marks him as a man of his century and not of ours.
Guy de Maupassant, The House of Madame Tellier and Other Stories, London Dent & Sons 1992. $13
"Yes, sir, I tell you the Government ought to post huge placards upon the walls every year: "Spring is here again. Citizens of France, beware of love," just as one writes on the door of a house: 'Mind the paint'".
- In the Spring
This year is the centenary of Guy de Maupassant's death. His name is still synonymous with the short story form. He made that name in 1880 with a single story, "Boule de Suif" (The Tub of Lard) and wrote prolifically for a decade before advancing syphilis ended his creativity.
Chekhov was more subtle. Maugham, surprisingly, was less callous. Maupassant swerved between a disgust for human experience and an amused detachment. Rarely did he approach pity: "Miss Harriet" is one example. A man keeps a vigil over the corpse of an older woman, a spinster whose unrequited love for him has driven her to suicide.
"The awakening birds were singing in the trees. I threw open the window and drew the curtains, so that the sky beheld us. Bending above the ice-cold body I took her disfigured head in both hands, and slowly without horror or disgust, I pressed a kiss, a lingering kiss, upon those lips that had never yet received one."
Not all his stories rely on the unexpected ending which he mastered and which has so infected generations of writers. Many are sketches with little or no resolution. Description alone carries them. "Mohammed-Fripouille" (Scallywag Mohammed) contains fine passages descriptive of French military occupation in Algeria. Some stories are comic fairy floss. In "A Deal" one drunk peasant agrees to buy another drunk peasant's wife, the price to be determined by weight, the weight to be determined by immersing her head first in a barrel of water and measuring the displacement. (Don't worry, she lives.)
For the meat eaters who want the classic turnaround twist-in-the-tail type of story there is ample sustenance in this collection. A young man renowned and snickered at for his virtuousness is awarded a large cash prize. Local girls begin to take an interest in him, but he heads for Paris to sample all he has missed out on and returns a confirmed alcoholic. In another story prostitutes attend a young girl's First Communion. Overcome by the ritual and incense and memories of innocence, they return to work with unusual relish.
Maupassant liked prostitutes, if he liked anyone. His scorn is reserved for the hypocrites who will snub a working girl in a railway carriage while secretly admiring her ankles, and for their smug wives who feel superior but enjoy a frisson of their own given the possibility of being molested by a handsome German officer.
When he approached pity, syphilitic Maupassant understood that a life can be ruined by a single mistake. In "The Necklace" a woman loses a necklace she has borrowed for a party. She buys an identical diamond necklace to replace it, without telling her friend, and spends the next ten years slaving in two jobs to pay it off. She becomes a drudge, her youth, beauty, and hope drained. At last she discovers the original necklace was merely a good imitation worth only a few hundred francs. How would you feel?
Ten years was the span of Maupassant's creative life. He knew how it felt. The age of AIDS would hold no surprises for him.
You be careful out there.