The Futility of Buying Life to Escape Death

El Tres de Mayo (The Third of May 1808) by Francisco Goya, 1814. Photo: [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

This novella by Graham Greene was written in 1944 (first conceived in 1938) as a screen play that was somehow discarded and lost in the MGM archives. Greene was unable to make a living from writing books and took a contract with MGM to write screenplays, and before the main story, the book includes a couple of screen sketches. In 1983, the story was found and MGM sold the rights to a publisher, hence this book.

Reading other's unfinished work is a great learning experience, and it is useful to see how the plot and structure of creative writing emerges from different authors. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon is a book I wish I had read while writing my PhD - the thought process is clear, but the details are still being threshed out. Seeing how Fitzgerald did this has left a powerful impression on me.

In the first part of Greene's book, he tells the story of what he was doing before and after the war, and how the story came about. He then introduces two film sketches that remained unfinished. It is interesting that in just a few pages, the outline of a movie appears. Greene added the film sketches because he had largely forgotten about The Tenth Man, thinking it was only (p. 10):

...two pages of outline but [it was] a complete short novel of thirty thousand words.

He then went through his own archives and found two other sketches - although less complete - that he had also forgotten about. (Wouldn't it be lovely to have written so much one had forgotten some of it?)

The main text, The Tenth Man, reads as a complete novella - there is certainly nothing undeveloped there. But the introduction sets out how the novella began as a few sentences outlining an idea. The two film sketches, which are incomplete, provide a bridge to Greene's process from a few sentences to a complete story.

As for the story, the cover blurb says it all: a rich man in a German prison draws lots to see who will die. (The Germans are going to execute 1 in 10 prisoners, and the prisoners have to decide who it will be.) The rich man loses, but offers all of his wealth to stay alive. Another prisoner, thinking of his family, takes up the rich man's offer.

I recall from reading Hemingway's letters and various articles how he developed a story out of a simple idea. For example, The Sun Also Rises is a story to answer the question, What would happen if your penis was shot off during the war? Greene's story follows a similar process: What would it be like to pay somebody else to die for you, if you gave up everything to live?

The story isn't so much Faustian, for the poor prisoner insists that the rich man sticks to the deal (after the rich man has an attack of conscience), and there is much more to the story after that.

In many ways, it addresses questions of life and death, and whether we control our fate or whether it matters or not. Or indeed, if we think we can thwart destiny, think again. Maybe the moral of the story is amor fati?

I've been reading and thinking a lot about death lately, especially the idea that all fear can be reduced to a fear of death, and, because we all die, there is nothing to be afraid of - it is a given. Perhaps it is not a topic Australians discuss in any philosophical sense, unlike what I have read by the Stoics, Albert Camus or what is explored in Mexico's Festival of the Dead. 

I think this aversion to thinking about death is philosophically limiting. But rather than Camus, which might be a little confronting for the uninitiated, Graham Greene deals with the topic in a way that makes it hard not to reflect on one's values, the purpose of life, and, I suppose, that death accompanies life.

It is certainly macabre, but there is much to learn from this novella. The story was made into a TV movie starring Sir Anthony Hopkins in 1988.

To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf's Modernist Masterpiece

Godrevy Lighthouse, Cornwall, the inspiration for Woolf's lighthouse at the Hebrides, where the "unstory" takes place. Photo by Chris Combe, 17 February 2015 [CC BY-SA 2.0] via Wikimedia.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Despite two short introductions to the book, I was not prepared for the psychological - or ethereal - or cerebral - or emotional? - context of this modernist novel. Now I have read a few commentaries about the novel, my lack of preparation could have been overcome with a bit of investigation. But the backstory on Woolf's style of prose and her role as a modernist gatekeeper is fascinating.

Whenever I think of Virginia Woolf, I immediately think of Hemingway for two reasons. 

First, Woolf's prose is the exact opposite of Hemingway's. Hemingway's prose is brief and clear and fine. 

Whereas, if one were to turn one's thoughts into one's sentences, if one might have, one day when thinking about writing prose, an idea about how a thought could be put into a sentence, which is silly because thoughts are always put into sentences - especially in novels, even people's speech is spoken in sentences, usually - but if one could imagine what a sentence might look like if it were to resemble a string of thoughts, or at least our inner monologue while thinking, while simultaneously appearing as if it was dialogue by a character, yet it wasn't, it was the inner monologue practising or speaking without actually verbalising the words, then that is as close as one might get to Woolf's prose.

And that really is it. This is a story about the thoughts and feelings of a group of people who surround a family but with the gap of a decade (which includes the Great War), and the actual story is more like an "unstory". There is no real plot - there is a location, there is socialising and limited action and dialogue.

Most of the story is built upon the inner monologues of the characters. I was hooked. It was almost like reading a book about my own mind at a dinner party or with a party of people, especially where I am concerned with either being hospitable or polite or else socially acceptable. And that is what Woolf's characters do.

Second (if you had forgotten I had a first, then I am merely mirroring Woolf's style), I knew from my reading of some of Hemingway's work (and work about Hemingway) that he took issue with Woolf's review of his short story collection, Men Without Women.

In her review, entitled An Essay in Criticism, Woolf basically says, Hemingway, you are no modernist. So I thought Hemingway then went off to hate on her a bit, like he did with so many of his so-called friends from the Paris years.

But no, Hemingway was stung by Woolf's criticism. In my copy of the three-volume The Letters of  Ernest Hemingway (Cambridge), Hemingway tells his publisher Max Perkins and his friend and fellow author Scott Fitzgerald that he can't write because of the criticism, he just wants to be left alone but the criticism won't let him be. And here was me thinking that Hemingway was thinking, Get in the ring, Woolf! But no.

Why so much about Hemingway when writing about a novel by Woolf? Well, Woolf was in effect a modernist gatekeeper. And this novel, to me, represents Woolf at the height of her modernist powers, even more so than in Mrs Dalloway. 

Woolf was part of the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of creatives and artists who lived elite lifestyles and often gave support to young artists. Hemingway notes this in his letters, but also notes that he is not one of them, and rather than give him a leg up, Woolf was standing on his neck.

To the Lighthouse was published in 1927; so was Men Without Women. Hemingway was on the rise (he was younger than Woolf), Woolf was at her peak. Both would die by suicide. Despite their differences in style of prose, the similarities outweigh the differences if one scratches the surface.

In To the Lighthouse, Woolf does what Hemingway doesn't do, except in his letters. That is, to give life to the life of the mind, without the need for heroics or even a substantial plot. I find her work sits well with T.S. Eliot's modernist poetry. 

I regard this novel as Woolf's masterpiece. It captures the life of the mind and the inner monologue that we rarely share with others (unless we wish to be snubbed, It's called an inner monologue for a reason). But I daresay others will identify with the thoughts that fly through our minds when in company, and Woolf gives us insight into the life of the various minds of her characters.

That she is able to create a story out of her characters' private thoughts is marvellous, and, for me, certainly captures the spirit of modernism as far as I understand the concept.

T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land": Pound for Pound

Gunning Golf Course, 4th December 2018.

The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After reading Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, the title of which is derived from T.S. Eliot's modernist poem, The Waste Land, I was compelled to read the poem and to learn more about Eliot. Up until today, my knowledge of Eliot was limited to what I had gleaned from Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.

I have read all around Eliot, including Djuna Barnes (whom Eliot admired)¹, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Andersen, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf. But I have shied away from poetry until only recently.

After reading the poem, I listened to the BBC's In Our Time podcast episode, "The Waste Land and Modernity". There was much interesting discussion about the original book version of Eliot's poem. Apparently, the poem itself was too short to be a book and the publisher asked Eliot to pad it out.

Eliot added a bunch of notes to the poem, many of which turned out to be superfluous. The poem had also been cut down considerably by Ezra Pound, which took away the various signals of the several stories that emerge in the poem.

I listened to a reading of the poem on YouTube (below), partly read by Eliot. In the In Our Time discussion, they mentioned that the poem was published at the same time BBC Radio began, so in many ways the poem lends itself to a radio reading. It is interesting how listening to the poem being read makes the different voices more obvious, whereas this is somewhat obscured in a first reading (to oneself).

In sum, an issue that constantly strikes me is that the more I read, the less I know. And in many ways, based on my reading around The Waste Land, and from the discussions on the In Our Time podcast, Eliot meant to show how we don't or can't know everything; indeed, we may not need to know everything.

Even the different interpretations by American versus English critics revealed different interpretations of common English sayings highlighted in the poem. And of course, there are many references to the classics and so on which I hope to discover by obtaining a copy of the original (pre-Pound) version of the poem, and also the published version with the superfluous notes added by Eliot.

The poem apparently took Eliot one year to write, and he was quite upset by the paltry sum first offered to him for its publication. Yet it is now regarded as the most influential poems of the twentieth century.

Like all great works, the poem deserves several readings. But if you want to really hear the different voices, the recital of the poem will bring this to the fore.

Notes:

1. Fleischer, G. (1998). Djuna Barnes and T.S. Eliot: The Politics and Poetics of "Nightwood". Studies in the Novel, 30(3), 405-437. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/29533280.


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