Life Sentences (17 page)

This children’s chant follows Lowry’s words about like their threatening heartbeat. Frère Jacques is possibly a pilgrim on “the Way of Saint James,” a monk who has been assigned the task of alerting others that it is time for matins (there are many conjectures), and who has failed this time to wake himself. It is the pulse for these texts, their ground bass, a memento mori, blood beating in the ear.

Special effects again.
The special effects are planned by Lowry down to the last
whaa, whaa
of Bix Beiderbecke’s horn playing “In a Mist,” and he chooses each musical piece very carefully in order to achieve, for the sound track, another kind of commentary. There is, for instance, a song for a marimba. Then into the text of
Through the Panama
, because an albatross has been sighted, float marginal notes taken verbatim from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and soon we are the reluctant guests at another performance of that poem, in unison with memories of
The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Outward Bound, Moby Dick
, and several others. The passengers in Sutton Vane’s play find themselves on a crewless ship bound for the afterlife.

Data.
You can’t film data, and there is a lot of data of the sort the ship’s log will accumulate. The ship’s positions, particularly, dotting down the map with the windblown ship of the mariner. Malc counting the shearwaters—those birds who know how to rest on a wave.

That’s how it shall be rendered: a montage of mountains, seascapes, and red lines drawn on charts that fill the screen. Now the marginal notes are no longer the mariner’s but Lowry’s, paralleling his pages of mislabeled fiction with columns of colorless info and chatty book talk. While the main body is bemoaning “the fact that having been unable to buy a bottle of Martell from the steward,” Lowry, that is Wilderness, that is Trumbaugh, had become dependent “upon an invitation from the skipper for a drink which had never seemed more necessary”; the margin is recounting how “William Paterson, founder of the great bank of England … began life
by walking backwards through England, with a pedlar’s pack on his back.”

The marginal notes squeeze the text until the canal is completely traversed. But the mariner’s thirst continues to Curaçao, where a case of rum is purchased, calming the surface of the soul, although, for the ship, there are rising winds. The camera continues its relentless movement, the ship its song, the storm its threat. Malc, his wife, and his motley crew of phantoms are spectators to the world. What makes moving pictures moving pictures is not the fact that things and people, trees and water, move, but that the camera leaves one scene for another, leaves one set of circumstances for another, rests like the shearwater on a wave, but must soon fly off to feed upon the changing light—drive off, steam off to the comfort of another name, the interest of another place, to the chant of change:
ding dang dong …
until the picture fades to black. Dissolves.

Perhaps we should leave it to the Ancient Mariner’s master to say what our experience should be, if not what it often is. “The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution, but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself.”

Hofmann’s collection includes a generous sampling from Lowry’s letters. Letters were a strength and a necessity for someone customarily cast as an alien, out of luck and far away from friends, posting and picking up his mail in Cuernavaca or Curaçao, and even borrowing the letter form for one of his most impressive stories (here included) “Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession.” Of course, he risks being a bore about his work, constantly worrying about it, explaining it, defending it, pleading or conniving for it. It is also clear that part of him has never outgrown his schoolboy years. He is both ink and blotter—wholly self-absorbed. But he is a jolly tavern buddy too, mellow and amusing, garrulous to a fault, with letters longer than patience and often linked together daily like barges behind a tow. Lowry customarily ricochets from one current bit of reading to
the next, associates not freely but compulsively, and propels himself from explanation to complaint with the same remarkable energy he repeatedly displays in his literary work, sometimes catching his own train of thought barely before it leaves the station.

Some of Lowry’s poems are here as well. They have the advantage of bluntness. The rhymes go
mirror, horror, terror, error, collar
, $ as the poem travels to Dollarton. “This ticking is most terrible of all— / You hear the sound I mean on ships and trains, / You hear it everywhere for it is doom …” In the prose, too, Captain Hook and his crocodile are regularly invoked, as well as the devoured arm and its abominable watch. “How like to Man is this man and his fate, / Still drunk and stumbling through the rusty trees / to breakfast on stale rum sardines and peas.”

Sidelong shots:
If movies move and music moves, Lowry’s favorite locales move too—the buses boats planes taxis trains—a restless mind, a roving eye—but the persistent reflexivity of the texts (Up
the Panama
or “Down the Forest Path” would make more sense), the piling on of parallels (though two could count as tracks and disappear into the distance), the array of aggressive symbols like buttons on a tunic, shards of scenes and bits of thought, perceptions briefer than butterflies, clips and tears and tatters taken from reality, the writer’s command to ponder each one, fondle it even—a swatch of idle speech, a shadow that has wandered away from its figure—these combine to bring any narrative to a halt, the ship lies becalmed in the heat, and we are staring straight ahead in a bar, at a naked babe above the bar, at bottles in front of the bar, at our own smeared face, looking for something in flicks of light that will console us, that will go behind reality and find a better appearance, hence the help sought in the kabbalah, in Yeats’s
A Vision
, in the Ouija board, in premonition; but if we examine Lowry’s capture of
Tender Is the Night
and watch him not only alter it into a sort of sea voyage of his own, including the heroic drowning of Dick Diver (to redeem him in the eyes of his love, redeem Fitzgerald too, another pretty party boy, save Malc, Sigbjørn, Martin) at the movie’s close, instead of
Diver’s gradual, almost dusty disappearance into the small towns of upper New York in Fitzgerald’s version; indeed going so far as to turn the
Brest
, once renamed
Diderot
, into a vessel now christened
Aristotle—

—a ship that will sail straight into a dreadful storm resembling the one that concludes
Through the Panama
, breaking to pieces in the process, unlike Malc’s craft, which survives a loss of steerage to struggle through to safety. Meanwhile Martin (Sigbjørn, Malcolm) like the mariner, has made promises to the sea gods he won’t keep past two smooth days, but who, perhaps as a punishment for being so remiss, will be compelled to tell his tale to anyone who will listen.

It’s a wrap.
The camera floats across a gradually subsiding sea to glide up a beach in a long slow undulation (stay with the water as its depth shallows until we can see sand shifting slightly with the current), and then lifts its attention to the walls and towers of the town Dick Diver knew as Antibes before panning to the star-filled sky, in a shot just this corny and unconvincing.

Henry James’s short story “The Tree of Knowledge” might have been more literally and less sacredly titled “The Bush of Belief.” At the center of the pleasant little paradise, which seems to be sculptor Morgan Mallow’s life, stands that artist’s complacent certainty about his genius, a confidence that he has faithfully sustained through a productive although unheralded life. Mallow’s entourage is as small as his fame is restricted, and consists of a wife so devoted she receives no other name than Missus, their only offspring, Lancelot, and finally this son’s godfather, Peter Brench, a literary figure we have learned to call “the friend of the family,” and a man who counts among his numerous discretions (including a prolonged though muted adoration of Mrs. Mallow) his refusal to publish his own literary endeavors.

These players form a box—the boundaries of a garden, if you like—of the most traditional kind: husband, wife, son, friend of the family. The dynamics of their relationships are determined by a diagonal that triangulates the box so that sometimes we are dealing solely with the family trio, while at other times with the romantic triangle of friend, wife, husband. The tale is itself of the simplest. Each individual, in ignorance of the true convictions of the others, is endeavoring to maintain the group’s belief in the genius of its
center—its grand master—and therefore each member’s reason for being. A comedy of errors ensues and epiphanies abound.

The story is told from Peter Brench’s point of view, and therefore is in the service of this careful man’s proudly held convictions, some of which are stated early and openly, while others emerge with some shyness: (first) that he has managed to maintain his friendship with Morgan Mallow while never for a moment compromising the principles of his taste by lying or deception, not easy since (second) Brench considers Mallow to be a charming man but, as an artist, a shallow pretentious hack; (third) that Mrs. Mallow’s allegiance to Morgan Mallow’s genius is the basis of her love for him; (fourth) therefore that Brench can be loyal to his love for Mrs. Mallow only by protecting her opinion of her husband as well as he has hidden his own; (fifth) that the son shares her idolatry and her error; (further, sixth) that Lancelot, despite the hopes the Mallows have for him as a painter, has no more talent than his father, if as much; (seventh) that Peter’s reluctance to publish maintains “the purity of his taste by establishing still more firmly the right relation of fame to feebleness”—that, in sum, although Peter Brench has “the misfortune to be omniscient, … it is ignorance that is bliss.” And therefore it is folly to be wise.

The Mallows put on Italian airs as if they were tunes on a phonograph, and James takes obvious delight in describing the pretensions which furnish their Eden; however, its serenity is threatened by another misconception: that Lancelot Mallow (such a disastrous name) has been born to the brush rather than to his father’s chisel. The Mallows embrace the difference because Morgan had always been a bit disappointed he’d rounded and smoothed so many stones rather than coloring and brightening canvas, and his son’s success in this line would do much to right that hereditary wrong.

Peter Brench does what he can to prevent it (he throws money in the young man’s path—a common enough gesture in James), because he fears that the Paris experience (for that is where Lancelot is headed), by educating his eye, will reveal his father’s achievement
to be as banal as his own talent is manifestly
manqué
. Before Lancelot spurs his horse toward the center of the painter’s world, Peter and Mrs. Mallow have this delicious exchange:

Peter Brench smothers all honest response to ask whether Mrs. Mallow thinks her son is going to be another Master? and receives an armload of rationalization in reply.

Henry James, as if he had been tutored by his brother, makes his entire story turn on the distinction between belief and knowledge (truth and opinion); and then upon the differences among (a) knowing a fact, (b) understanding what someone means, (c) exercising a skill, (d) affirming a faith, and (e) having an experience—for each of which the word
know
will sometimes serve.

Lancelot learns that indeed he is a dauber, a muff. “But I’m not such a muff as the Master!” For, as Peter Brench is more than disconcerted to discover, the son saw through his father as sun through clear glass early on. And, as Brench’s beliefs continue to come to grief, he learns that Lancelot’s mother, the silken and satiny Mrs. Mallow, whom his love has lived to protect … that she has also known all along. Each member of this saintly trio has conspired to keep from the others the downcasting truth lest it remove
cher maître
like a title from the Master, and shatter the blessed ignorance which holds the little group together.

So it not unexpectedly turns out that Peter Brench, the omniscient one, has not known, has only believed; and in caring for Mrs. Mallow as Mrs. Mallow cares for the Master, he has mirrored her love without receiving, as she has, any in return. His errors, in fact, have been many, because he wrongly supposed Mrs. Mallow loved, in the Master, the genius that the genius believed he had, when it was not the artist but the man; it was not the quality of the result, but the passion in the process, that drew her to Morgan Mallow and held her there.