Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on the Saints)

"How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints." —British novelist and religious author C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Mere Christianity (1952)

Flashback, October 1726: Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels’ Cuts English Politics—Even Humanity—Down to Size

A London bookseller may have published Gulliver’s Travels 300 years ago this month without knowing the identity of its author, but before long English intellectuals were buzzing that it was the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift.

Growing up, I read a shortened version of this tale focusing on the six-inch citizens of Lilliput that was marketed as children’s literature. It wasn’t until college, when I read all four “books” in the Travels, that I realized it was far more:

*a satire of the political scene of Swift’s time;

*a parody of the “true accounts” of the travel genre so popular in the Age of Discovery;

*an early example of science fiction;

*a searing denunciation of what Mark Twain would later call “the damned human race”; and even

*an exercise in irony at the expense of narrator Lemuel Gulliver so sustained that it effectively became a forerunner of modern fiction in undercutting any notion of objective truth.

The ruse that Swift concocted in sending his manuscript to Benjamin Motte for publication paralleled the game he shortly played with readers’ expectations. 

The manuscript arrived with a cover letter from a stranger named Richard Sympson stating that he had just edited a travel narrative by his cousin Gulliver, a surgeon; that Sympson could vouch for Gulliver’s truthfulness; that Motte had three days to decide whether wished to publish it, based on the initial “Satyrical” first two books; and if the answer was yet, Motte would pay two hundred pounds upfront the subsequent two parts of Gulliver’s narrative.

Where to start with all of this?

*The names “Gulliver” and “Sympson” were pseudonyms;

*A friend, fellow satirist John Gay, wrote by hand the cover letter to disguise Swift’s authorship;

*Yet another friend (still unknown) wrote the manuscript, again with no clue that Swift was involved;

*Though the first two books might have been a bit satirical, the last two represented a political hot potato—but, per the agreement with “Sympson,” Motte would still have to pay for it.

Once readers started leafing through the book, they had to make sense of yet another letter, this time purporting to come from Gulliver to Sympson, in which the putative explorer scolds the publisher for releasing this “very loose and uncorrect account of my travels.” At this point, any reader would be bound to ask what on earth he was reading.

Starting with the first book, set in Lilliput, Swift upset readers’ notion of security by playing with notions of size and proportion. Gulliver wakes to find that six-inch people have strapped him down to the beach. This also begins his instinct for unconsciously assuming the mental habits of the strange peoples he visits—in this case, failing to see the ludicrousness of the Lilliputians’ charge that he has engaged in sexual intercourse with the treasurer’s wife in the land.

Like his title character, Swift was, to use the modern cliché, a “fish out of water”—the Anglo-Irish “Dean” of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, an outsider who came to view English politics and government with the disdain he had once felt for the Irish Catholic majority in Ireland.

In Book 2, Gulliver is so self-absorbed, so much the “ugly Englishman” that he is shocked to hear the king of Brobdingnag call his countrymen “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

Even in his narrative, Gulliver’s failure to make the most elementary mental connections indicates a terrible inability to understand the world—a failure that will finally prove disastrous to him.

In the final book, Swift makes horses capable of reason. Gulliver himself manifests his incredible lack of perception through his ignorance of the significance of words. Immediately after saying of the first “yahoo” (i.e., a filthy, vicious human-like creature ruled over by intelligent horses) that he never saw such an awful animal, he writes that the beast “roared” at him. Later, however, he himself roars when he’s squeezed and when the female yahoo tries to mount him.

His roaring means that Gulliver himself is a yahoo, but he glosses over this painful secret quickly, unaware that he has given a clue to his dread secret already.

Gulliver may be betrayed as a yahoo, but as the narrow of his own adventure he betrays his own mindlessness to the reader. Perhaps Swift is suggesting that, insofar as human beings shy away from and lie about the dirty little secrets confronting them, they run the risk of joining Gulliver in a circle of mindlessness.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Bad Seed,’ As an Evil Adult Meets His Match in a Child)

Leroy, a house handyman [played by Henry Jones] [to eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark]:“I thought I'd seen some mean little gals in my time, but you're the meanest. You wanna know how I know how mean you are? 'Cause I'm mean. I'm smart and I'm mean, and you're smart and you're mean. And you never get caught and I never get caught.”— The Bad Seed (1956), screenplay by John Lee Mahin, adapted from the play by Maxwell Anderson and the novel by William March, directed by Mervyn LeRoy

This week—and month—devoted to Halloween, TV schedules are filled with all kinds of horror. Much of it is filled with obvious plot twists and onscreen gore. Few of these programs compare in subtlety and scariness to The Bad Seed, an Eisenhower-era shocker that, despite its attempts to placate Hollywood’s censorship office, can still send chills up the spine seven decades after its release.

It’s a sign of our degenerating popular taste that some online viewers actually thought this movie moved too slowly. Listen, this is hardly Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, okay? You don’t need to see knives raised or blood spilled to feel the suspense ratchet up in this thriller.

You thought that the “Mean Girls” of the Lindsay Lohan movie were bad? They only murdered reputations. Pig-tailed blonde Rhoda (Oscar-nominated Patty McCormack) is onto bigger game. Her sweet smiles mask a penchant for lying, theft...and much worse. 

The only adult who senses the monster beneath Rhoda’s placid, perfect surface is Leroy, a spiteful, leering, Uriah Heep in gardener’s garb. It takes one to know one, as they say. Yet even he doesn’t grasp just how evil she is for the longest time.

Like other characters in the film, Leroy went through a transformation from the printed page to this 1956 film version, then again into a 1985 made-for-TV remake and a 2018 cable thriller, with Blair Brown and Rob Lowe taking turns as Rhoda’s puzzled, terrified parent.

The depiction of the novel’s Leroy, an African-American in the Deep South, would strike modern readers as racist. For whatever reason, he was transformed for the stage and screen as poor white trash.

The dialogue above is as deftly acted as scripted, with Jones’s Leroy modulating from mocking and antagonizing the little girl into grasping that she really is capable of the evil he was only implying before.

In the Fifties, parents threw up their hands over how they could have given birth to and raised troubled, even delinquent, teens. The Bad Seed dared to imagine that the problem dated from the beginning—through heredity. 

To me, that’s a far more frightening explanation than the one offered in the Sixties and Seventies by Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist: that it was all the fault of a devil, working black magic outside a poor, innocent darling.

Incidentally, McCormack—as remarkable a child actress as Broadway and Hollywood have ever seen—is 80 years old now. Eight years ago, in a clever bit of stunt casting in an otherwise inferior remake of this cult classic, she did a cameo as little Rhoda’s psychiatrist.

You can just imagine the writer of the teleplay, Barbara Marshall, gleefully rubbing her hands together before typing this bit of dialogue for “Dr. March” (a nod to the author who created it all): “I told Emma she reminds me of me."

Photo of the Day: Deli Skelly

Over the last three decades or so, I’ve become accustomed to Halloween décor popping up all over the place—not just lawns outside homes but also businesses. But the other day was the first time I saw this specimen on a bench outside a longtime landmark, an eatery in my hometown.

Seeing it, I was struck with a thought that I’m sure the establishment’s owners would have groaned to know about: Did this fellow assume his current state suddenly, after sampling the food inside?

Flashback, October 1966: McMurtry’s ‘Last Picture Show’ Opens Window on Stunted Texas Lives

Like Thomas Wolfe and Grace Metalious, Larry McMurtry caused a scandal in his hometown with a novel widely seen as based too closely on real events. 

Though he dedicated The Last Picture Show, published 60 years ago by Dial Press, to the residents of Archer City, Texas, many inhabitants were not thrilled by the attention they received in the first of what he called his “Thalia Trilogy,” nor with the acclaimed 1971 film adaptation by Peter Bogdanovich.

David Streitfeld summarized the local reaction in a biography of McMurtry that came out earlier this year, Western Star: 

“There were roughly three camps: Those who thought Larry made it all up. Those who thought Larry was exposing real incidents and real people and he should be ashamed of himself. And those who thought Larry was exposing real incidents and real people and, well, good for him.”

Many saw the novelist himself in one of the two teenage friends at the center of the story, Sonny Crawford. He denied it (though he did own up to identifying with the later midlife struggles of Sonny’s buddy, Duane Moore).

Others said they were the originals of certain characters—notably Ceil Cleveland Footlick, who even wrote a 1997 memoir titled Whatever Happened to Jacy Farrow? in which she claimed to be the inspiration for the teasing teen temptress who creates emotional havoc for Duane, Sonny, and other males in their high school.

McMurtry benefited from a legal environment in which prior obscenity legislation was being overturned, enabling him to depict multiple affairs, conducted almost as much out of boredom as anything else, in his fictional “Thalia” —a name he appropriated from another community, thereby annoying them, too.

Lacking intellectual stimulation, its residents are soon also without entertainment as the local cinema gets ready to close. Stuck, and barely aspiring to go anywhere, they find in sex an outlet to ward off frustration, cruelty, loneliness, despair, and death.

Particularly at that time in American life, readers (and, later, filmgoers) concentrated more on what seemed like McMurtry’s prurient treatment of such matters than on his poignant examination of aimless lives.

Playing the moral center of Thalia, “Sam the Lion,” veteran character actor Ben Johnson demurred over saying one line he deemed objectionable, concerned what his mother would say if she saw him the film. (Eventually Bogdanovich convinced him it was necessary, and Johnson ended up winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.)

The seeds of the novel were evident in a McMurtry short story, “There Will Be Peace In Korea,” published in the Winter 1964 issue of Texas Quarterly and focusing on Duane and Sonny as they try to reestablish their friendship before Duane ships out to Korea. Even that was the residue of the writer’s discarded idea of interconnected short stories modeled on Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

Two years after the publication of the Texas Quarterly article, McMurtry had completed a novel that, while departing from the Winesburg idea, still managed with admirable concision to depict the stunted lives of a whole spectrum of Thalia inhabitants.

Critical reaction to The Last Picture Show was mixed, ranging from dismissal (“seems derived from other novels about the sexual plight of the adolescent”—The Los Angeles Times) to enthusiastic (“perhaps the most honest, compelling and masterful novel ever written by a Texan”—The Houston Post).

McMurtry’s parents presented a more united front, in opposition, with his mother hiding the book in the closet and his father asking plaintively of college-educated Larry, “Good Lord, son, with all the words you know, couldn’t you have used some others?”

Four sequels to The Last Picture Show followed, steadily more depressing and less acclaimed: Texasville (1987), Duane’s Depressed (1999), When the Light Goes (2007), and Rhino Ranch (2009). How much of that was due to McMurtry’s eye for possible future adaptations and how much to the physical and emotional ills of the novelist’s later years is an open question.

But the achievement of the original novel—and of the exquisite film made from it—remains.

(The image accompanying this post comes from the film The Last Picture Show, featuring, from left to right, Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd as Sonny, Duane, and Jacy.)

Quote of the Day (Grace Jones, on Her Chief Precautionary Measure When Pregnant)

“The first thing I did when I was pregnant was to give up quaaludes.”— Jamaican-born singer, actress, and model Grace Jones (with Paul Morley), I’ll Never Write My Memoirs (2015)

I am sure her son is most grateful for this sacrifice!

Quote of the Day (George Santayana, on the Foolishness of the Simple and the Wise)

“The foolishness of the simple is delightful; only the foolishness of the wise is exasperating.”— Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist, and poet George Santayana (1863-1952) “Masks,” in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)