Travelers and affinities, expected and unexpected

{Photo by rocketlass.}

1 I nodded off on the L on my way home from work yesterday while reading Thomas Hardy's The Hand of Ethelberta (1866), and my half-dreams were of the novel--but as if it had been written by Alvaro Mutis, whose Maqroll stories I had spent the weekend reading. Waking, I was amused at the ease with which the world-weariness of Mutis had infiltrated Hardy's uncharacteristically comic novel.

If you'd asked me, I would have said the two writers had nothing in common, but the dream reminded me that Hardy's more typically tragic novels do share with Maqroll a certain fatalistic vision. I was reminded of an exchange I've quoted before from a conversation that Hardy had with Princeton professor Henry Van Dyke in 1909, about Tess:

"Yes," he said gravely, "I love her best of all."

"Why, then, did you kill her? Was there no other way to end the book"

"There was no other way," he replied, still more gravely. "I did not kill her. It was fated."

Maqroll would understand, though whereas he tends to complacently accept, or even welcome, his fate, Tess is unforgettable because she rails against hers--and by vigorously opposing it, hastens its tragic arrival.

2 Near the end of John Updike's review of The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll in the January 13, 2003 issue of the New Yorker, he writes,

Lone rangers, from Don Quixote to Sam Spade and James Bond, are customarily engaged in combat against bad guys; they afford themselves the escapism of a virtuous quest, a perpetual cleanup. Maqroll instead presents himself as one of the bad guys, "on the periphery of laws and codes," and proposes that bad guys aren't so bad, as they smuggle and pimp and deal their way through the world.

When I read that yesterdy morning, it crystallized a thought that had been nagging me all weekend: Maqroll is also strange kin to Richard Stark's robber, Parker. Maqroll is wildly different from Parker in that he is essentially harmless, his underlying innocence somehow surviving the questionable morality of many of his occupations. But this weekend as Maqroll demonstrated again and again his preternatural ability to wait out events--as in this scene from Un Bel Morir,

Then two booming explosions echoed down the ravine. They sounded like bazookas or high-powered grenades. . . . An unexpected sense of relief lightened his step. What he had feared so much was finally here. Uncertainty had ended, and with it the anxiety that deforms and poisons everything. Once again men had begun the dark work of summoning death. Everything was in order. Now he would try to get out alive.

--I was reminded of the following exchange, between a police artist and two officers, from Stark's most recent Parker novel, Dirty Money (2008):

"I think, Gwen Reversa told her, "the main thing wrong with the picture now is, it makes him look threatening."

"That's right," Captain Modale said.

The artist, who wasn't the one who'd done the original drawing, frowned at it. "Yes, it is threatening," she agreed. "What should it be instead?"

"Watchful," Gwen Reversa said.

"This man," the captain said, gesturing at the picture, "is aggressive, he's about to make some sort of move. The real man doesn't move first. He watches you, he waits to see what you're going to do."

But while Parker waits for your move so that he can make his, Maqroll waits for your move so that he can figure out which exit to start wandering quietly towards.

3 Finally, there's the inescapable link with Italo Calvino's best book, Invisible Cities (1972), and its inspiration, Marco Polo's captivating, untrustworthy account of his travels to the far East. In Calvino's hands, Polo's journeys are stripped of their purpose as trading missions and transformed into compulsive wanderings, real and imagined:

"Journeys to relive your past?" was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: "Journeys to recover your future?"

And Marco's answer was: "Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and never will have."

As portrayed by Calvino, Marco Polo's travels, and his fantastical accounts of them to Kublai Khan, are in some sense quest for the home, with its clarity and understanding, that for the compulsive traveler lies forever just around the corner--or perhaps in the irretrievable past. As Polo, locked in a jail cell in Venice, first set down his adventures, I think Maqroll would have been welcome company:

He thought perhaps there really was no place for him in the world, no country where he could end his wandering. Just like the poet who had been his companion on long visits to countless bars and cafes in a rainy Andean city, the Gaviero could say, "I imagine a Country, a blurred, fogbound Country, an enchanted magical Country where I could live. What Country, where? . . . Not Mosul or Basra or Samarkand. Not Karlskrona or Abylund or Stockholm or Copenhagen. Not Kazan or Kanpur or Aleppo. Not in lacustrian Venice or chimerical Istambul, not on the Ile de France or in Tours or Stratford-on-Avon or Weimar or Yasnaia Poliana or in the baths of Algiers," and his comrade continued to evoke cities where he perhaps had never been. "I, who have known them all," thought Maqroll, "and in many have turned life's most surprising corners, now I'm running from this shit hamlet without knowing exactly why I let myself be caught in the most stupid trap that destiny ever set for me. All that's left for me now is the estuary, nothing but the marshes in the delta. That's all."

Or, as the Bible puts it,

Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

So the travelers shoulder their packs and keep on with their journeys:

Carried by the current, the barge sailed into the night as if it were entering a lethal, unknown world. The Gaviero, without turning around, waved goodbye with his hand. Leaning on the tiller, he looked like a tired Charon overcome by the weight of his memories, on his way to find the rest he had been seeking for so long, and for which he would not have to pay anything.

Of fashion and matters sartorial, part 6 of 8

Stories of fashion got me thinking . . . and writing fiction for the first time in years. That's one of the many dangers of pulling Invisible Cities off the shelf—it ought to be in the back cover copy for that book, like a surgeon general's warning.


From Certain of the Chronicles, by Levi Stahl (2006)
In the later years of the Jade Emperor’s reign, his armies discovered and subjugated a mountainous land familiar from legend for its intricate works of embroidery. The people who dwelled in that land dressed in nothing but the most extravagantly decorated fabrics. To those who understood the customs of the land, the mere choice of pieces of clothing, and the particulars of its decoration, revealed the story of the wearer and his family, their achievements and position. To those who did not understand that language, the embroidery was simply art, captivating, like the shy smile of a woman one has not yet met.

On their return to the capital, the Emperor’s top generals brought him the finest examples of that artistry. The ornate capes, robes, dresses, and hats that the generals presented were decorated with fluttering birds’ wings, sinuous tendrils of flowering vines, indescribably powerful fish, quick with life, swimming in pristine alpine lakes.

Hidden behind their opaque screens, the Emperor’s advisors anticipated his nonchalant response. Reduced as he was in his waning years, he felt a constant need of variety and surprise in the forms of extravagance that were brought to him. He had worn beautiful clothing before. He had seen fashions come and go. Skilled as they were, these creations did not impress him. He waved away the generals, his own silks fluttering, bidding them bother him no more with such trifles. They shuffled disconsolate from the room and exhausted their wrath on their blameless adjutants.

But the generals, unwittingly, left behind them a surprise. In their place stood a young man, wrapped several times round in a gold—no, mustard—no, plum robe, his unlined face the only part of him visible above its folds. It was unclear, even to the elite guards, how he had reached the inner chamber.

He spoke. His dialect was rough, uncultured. The habitues of the court could barely comprehend him. “Your Imperial Majesty was wrong to reject the offered works. They are the finest fruits of a culture far older and more sophisticated than the one that has placed you on the throne of heaven. Were there gods, they would rebuke you. But Your Imperial Majesty’s blindness will be forgiven—because I wear what the Emperor desires.”

Hearing the word "wrong," the Court Executioner slid his sword silently from its scabbard. But at the smallest of signals—a puff of breath—from the Emperor, he stopped. The Court Executioner froze. His blade glinted mercilessly in the warm, fading evening light.

Of fashion and matters sartorial, part 2 of 8

To be fair to Julian MacLaren-Ross, the reason I started reading him in the first place was because he is said to be the model for the rackety writer X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. So Powell bears responsibility for this topic, too—which is fair, because he, too, had an eye for clothes. Mostly, however, his interest was in how they reflected social convention or position and how, when divorced from their social value, they were often, essentially, absurd.

Like tattoos.

From Marco Polo's The Travels of Marco Polo (1298-99)

[In Kanigu province,] both men and women have their bodies marked with the needle all over, in figures of beasts and birds; and there are among them practitioners whose sole employment it is to execute these ornaments upon the hands, the legs, and the breast. When a black colouring stuff has been rubbed over these punctures, it is impossible either by water or otherwise, to efface the marks. The man or woman who exhibits the greatest profusion of these figures, is esteemed the most handsome.

From Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing (1951)

“But my dear Peter,” [said Stringham], “Why do you always go about dressed as if you were going to dance up and down a row of naked ladies singing ‘Dapper Dan was a very handy man,’ or something equally lyrical? You get more like an advertisement for gents’ tailoring every day.”

From Céleste Alberet’s Monsieur Proust (1973)

As well as tails and dinner jacket, he had several jackets which he wore with striped trousers, and to these he added a black jacket with piping. Everything was of course made to measure.

He had a collection of waistcoats, handsome but plain. I remember he had one made because he particularly liked the material. It was red silk with a white silk lining. He tried it on and showed me. I can see him now turning this way and that in front of the mirror, then saying:

“Definitely not. It would be all right for a dandy like Bonii de Castellane, but I don’t want to look ridiculous.”

And he never wore it. I put it away in the cupboard.

From Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972)

The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio. . . . So you begin to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.