Quote of the Day (Francois Mauriac, on a ‘Close Correspondence Between Individual and Collective Crimes’)

“The mystery of evil—there are no two ways of approaching it. We must either deny evil or we must accept it as it appears both within ourselves and without — in our individual lives, that of our passions, as well as in the history written with the blood of men by power-hungry empires. I have always believed that there is a close correspondence between individual and collective crimes, and, journalist that I am, I do nothing but decipher from day to day in the horror of political history the visible consequences of that invisible history which takes place in the obscurity of the heart. We pay dearly for the evidence that evil is evil, we who live under a sky where the smoke of crematories is still drifting. We have seen them devour under our own eyes millions of innocents, even children. And history continues in the same manner. The system of concentration camps has struck deep roots in old countries where Christ has been loved, adored, and served for centuries. We are watching with horror how that part of the world in which man is still enjoying his human rights, where the human mind remains free, is shrinking under our eyes.”—French novelist (and lifelong Catholic) Francois Mauriac (1885-1970), Nobel Literature Prize acceptance speech, delivered on Dec. 10, 1952, in Stockholm, Sweden

Quote of the Day (Stephen King, on ‘The Evil That Men Do’)

“I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling.”—American horror-fiction writer Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot (1975)

Evil can live on in politics, as well as among the undead.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Two Towers,’ With One of My Favorite Inspirational Scenes)

Frodo [played by Elijah Wood]: “I can't do this, Sam.”

Sam [played by Sean Astin]: “I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”

Frodo: “What are we holding onto, Sam?”

Sam: “That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for.”—The Two Towers [Part Two of The Lord of the Rings] (2002), screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair, and Peter Jackson, adapted from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, directed by Peter Jackson

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Flannery O’Connor, on Why ‘The Artist Penetrates the Concrete World’)

“St. Augustine wrote that the things of the world pour forth from God in a double way: intellectually into the minds of the angels and physically into the world of things. To the person who believes this—as the western world did up until a few centuries ago—this physical, sensible world is good because it proceeds from a divine source….The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality. This in no way hinders his perception of evil but rather sharpens it, for only when the natural world is seen as good does evil become intelligible as a destructive force and a necessary result of our freedom.”— American short-story writer and novelist Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), “Novelist and Believer,” originally delivered at Sweet Briar College, VA, reprinted in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1957)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on ‘The Instruments of Darkness’)

“Oftentimes to win us to our harm
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
In deepest consequence.”—Banquo to Macbeth, upon hearing the prophesies of the three witches, in English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Macbeth, Act I, Scene 3 (1606-07).
 
The image accompanying this post, Macbeth, Banquo and the witches on the heath, was created by England-based Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825).

Quote of the Day (Ann Radcliffe, on the Vicious and the Good)

“Though the vicious can sometimes pour affliction upon the good, their power is transient and their punishment certain; and that innocence, though oppressed by injustice, shall, supported by patience, finally triumph over misfortune!”— English Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

Quote of the Day (Vespasiano da Bisticci, on Writers ‘Chasing Away the Darkness’ of Ignorance)

“All evil is born of ignorance. Yet writers have illuminated the world, chasing away the darkness.”—Italian humanist, biographer and bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci (1422-1498), quoted by Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance (2021)

Quote of the Day (Henry Fielding, on Good and Bad Men)

“It is much easier to make good men wise, than to make bad men good.”—English novelist Henry Fielding (1707-1754), The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)

The image accompanying this post shows Albert Finney as the title character in the Oscar-winning adaptation of Henry Fielding’s classic. As you might surmise in this scene, Tom Jones, for all his good instincts, is very, very far from wisdom.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on How Lies Formed a Human Monster)

“I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape….

“Cathy's lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility, and they were used for profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they have told or because the lie is suddenly faced with an incontrovertible truth. But Cathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also -- either to interlard her lies with truth or to tell a truth as though it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out to be the truth, there is a backlog that will last a long time and protect a number of untruths.”—Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning American novelist John Steinbeck (1902-1968), East of Eden (1952)

Several months ago, I thought of using the above quote to mark the 70^th anniversary of the publication of East of Eden. Though I didn’t have time to write at the length I wanted then, it may have turned out for the best. This meditation by John Steinbeck on a monster in beguiling human form is appropriate for the present moment—the weekend before Halloween, not to mention an evil hour in the life of the American republic.

Several years ago, when the American version of House of Cards was still in production, a close relative of mine asked about Robin Wright’s Lady Macbeth-type political wife, “How could a woman so beautiful be so evil?” 

Claire Underwood’s American psychological predecessor was Steinbeck’s Cathy Ames, who sheds lovers, homes—even past identities—as periodically as a serpent does its skin.

I use “serpent” advisedly, as East of Eden, as alluded to in the title, is an allegory. 

The two male characters with first names beginning with “A”—Adam and Aron Trask—are innocent or naïve, like Adam and son Abel in the Book of Genesis. The three males with first names starting with “C”—Cyrus, Charles and Caleb—are analogous to Cain—wild, resentful and despairing.

The letter “C” also suggests Cathy’s affinity with the second set of Trask males. But as the novels’ principal female, she also functions like Eve or Lilith, the she-demon of Near East mythology.

Since its publication, East of Eden has not been treated warmly by literary critics, who have complained that Steinbeck grafted this allegorical structure onto a historical saga about his maternal family, the Hamiltons; that the novel is long and ungainly; and that the author intruded commentary on the action, violating the injunction to today’s creative writing students to “show, not tell.”

But, though East of Eden may not be perfect, it is surely compelling, with its dramatic qualities recognized when it was turned into a film in 1955, a network TV mini-series in 1981, and (now in development) a Netflix limited series written by Zoe Kazan.

Hollywood’s divergent treatments of this sprawling epic partly set in Steinbeck’s own Salinas County resulted in different main characters. The movie’s director, Elia Kazan, narrowed the plot to the book’s last quarter, spotlighting James Dean in a prototype thereafter indelibly associated with him: a conflicted, tortured youth.

But in the early 1980s, the golden age of the mini-series, TV offered the opportunity for a more expansive treatment of the novel—6½ hours that concentrated on Adam and Cathy. Inevitably, viewers focus less on Adam, who fundamentally changes little, than on Cathy (played by Jane Seymour, pictured in the image accompanying this post).

Midway through the plot, Cathy abandons her life as wife and mother to become Kate, a prostitute and madam. Her sexuality is not itself sinful. It’s her use of it, combined with her propensity for deceit, that makes her fascinating and unpredictable.

As cunning as Eden’s serpent, Kate becomes additionally cynical as she learns how the hypocrisy of her clients in the sex trade leaves them utterly vulnerable to her insatiable drive for wealth.

While middle-aged Adam is scrupulous to a fault, refusing gains from son Caleb’s speculation on beans in a wartime economy, Kate says in business by keeping a stash of photos of brothel clients for blackmail.

Rereading East of Eden after over 40 years, I found inadequate Steinbeck’s explanation that monsters like Cathy/Kate are “variations from the accepted norm to a greater or a less degree.”

But the better word to describe this heinous type is “violations” rather than “variations.” While “variations” are something inherent that a person is born with and unable to change, “violations” are products of free will.

Cathy/Kate violates every norm of responsibility and selflessness. She shares with Cyrus, Charles and Caleb a willfulness that leads to destructive outbursts, but unlike them never resists this impulse.

That lack of remorse renders her utterly alien, Steinbeck observes, in the same way that, “To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish.”

In the postwar period, the United States struggled to understand the radical evil that gave birth to the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union. But Americans’ aspirations for liberty didn’t eliminate their own vulnerability to cynics ready to exploit falsehood and bent on power.

After all, East of Eden arrived halfway through the reign of terror perpetrated by Joseph McCarthy, as careless about truth as he was about the damage he created through his access to the media and investigative responsibility in the U.S. Senate.

Steinbeck abominated McCarthy but did not find him alien to the Eden of American democracy, according to an article this past week in the British paper The Guardian. 

In an essay that originally appeared in 1954 in the French journal Le Figaro Litteraire (now published in English for the first time by Strand Magazine), the novelist wrote:

“We have always had a McCarthy. I could list names and movements going back to the beginning of our history. And always the end was the same … It changes its name every few years. It always uses the bait of improvement or safety.”

The exterior of Cathy Ames may have been beautiful, but her interior was as ugly as Joe McCarthy’s. The senator, Steinbeck warned in his French essay, represented “the taking of power by a self-interested group.”

Current events lead me to think that Cathy schemed enough but didn’t dream big enough. All she wanted was wealth accumulated and invested as a sex worker.

Nowadays, if applied on the campaign trail, her reckless disregard for truth, her mockery and infringement of every civilized norm, could have landed Steinbeck’s monster on Capitol Hill, a serpent in the temple of American democracy.

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Evil and Imagination)

“Evil…has every advantage but one—it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil…but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself.” —English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “At the End of the Quest, Victory” (review of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King), The New York Times, Jan. 22, 1956

TV Quote of the Day (‘Game of Thrones,’ In Which Olenna Takes the Measure of Cirsei)

"I wonder if you’re the worst person I’ve ever met. At a certain age, it’s hard to recall, but the truly vile do stand out through the years." — Queen of Thorns Olenna Tyrell (played by Diana Rigg), to Cirsei Lannister, in Game of Thrones, Season 6, Episode 7, “The Broken Man,” original air date June 5, 2016, teleplay by Bryan Cogman, adapted from George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire," directed by directed by Mark Mylod

Flashback, September 1949: ‘Third Man’ Exposes Evil in Postwar Vienna

The Third Man, which premiered in the U.K. 70 years ago this month, is now frequently regarded as the greatest British film of all time. 

No wonder—it featured a supernova of creative forces in front of and behind the camera: producers Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick, director Carol Reed, assistant director Guy Hamilton (who later graduated to helm three James Bond features), stars Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, and, in a small but pivotal role, Orson Welles. 

The production history of this drama set in postwar Vienna is fascinating in and of itself, including the clash of wills between Korda and Selznick, the accidental discovery of the musician who contributed the distinctive “zither music,” Anton Karas, and the hurdles thrown up at will by the willful Welles.

But the prime mover behind this classic thriller may have been Graham Greene. Not only did the finished feature stick closely to both the novella he wrote as, in effect, a treatment as well as the screenplay, but it sounds themes he returned to consistently throughout his five-decade writing career. 

Easily among the most famous literary converts to Roman Catholicism in the last century, Greene still resisted making his chief characters simple conveyors of virtue. Riven by doubt himself even after converting, Greene depicted characters twisting in the coils of sin, utterly unable to escape even when they knew the right path to take. The Third Man was no different.

Until relatively late in his career, Greene classified his novellas as one of his “entertainments,” a name given to distinguish his crime melodramas from his other, supposedly more profound, works. But, as he recognized as time went on, that division was too neat and facile.

Like many entertainers, Greene knew how to pay more attention to his work by joking about it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the satire directed at the hack writer of Westerns, Holly Martins, when a literary group he’s to address presses him for something profound.

"They want you to talk on the crisis of faith," he is told.

"Cri-? What's that?" Martins asks, stupefied. 

"Oh, I thought you'd know,” comes the reply. “You're a writer."

In a discomfort he could never have previously imagined, Martins must address this “crisis” not only in a lecture hall or on the printed page but also in his own life. He will have to answer to what extent his loyalty matters when the friend he thought he knew so well, Harry Lime, turns out to have made a fortune peddling diluted penicillin that resulted in the maiming and deaths of countless innocent children. 

Divided politically by four occupying powers who often find it hard to speak the same language, the Vienna of The Third Man is riven spiritually by the eternal sins of greed and hatred. Through the Oscar-winning cinematography of Robert Krasker, the “old Vienna of Strauss music and bogus easy charm” has been reduced to a city of shadowy, slightly tilted streets. 

Martins, a penniless pulp fiction writer, finds it even more dangerous here than his earlier callow predecessors, the American innocents abroad of Henry James. Amid proud but crumbling buildings, it is not merely hard to see here, but even to maintain one’s balance. It is a striking visualization of Greeneland.

With the war having reduced survivors to a Darwinian struggle for existence, crossing borders, geographically and ethically, becomes commonplace, even expected. Identities are cast aside, then utterly confused. Martins is mistaken at the hotel for a more acclaimed author; Anna Schmidt mixes up his first name with that of her onetime lover and Martins’ friend, Harry Lime; Martins drunkenly calls the unillusioned British Major Calloway “Callaghan”; and the plot centers on the uncertainty identity of the title character.

But it is in the sewers of Vienna that Greene finds the ultimate metaphor—a Stygian repository for human waste to which the desperate run for an illusory escape. Even amid the loud roar of this rushing underground river, humanity runs aground. From here, fate—what passes for the justice of God in this fallen world—arrives in the form of a relentless police manhunt.

The late, fine mystery novelist Philip Kerr suggested that, in the confrontation between Martins and Lime on the Ferris wheel in Vienna’s Prater Park, Greene underscored the moral hypocrisy of the Western victors of the war, as Harry disclaims any sense of responsibility for his victims: “Victims?” says Harry. “Don’t be melo­dramatic. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money?”

There is another way, however, to view this scene: as one where the devil cites scripture to his purpose. Lime, a figure of energy and charisma, binds men and women to him. But all of that intelligence and charm, instead of being directed toward life-affirming ends, is devoted to selfish ones. Rapid by necessity on his feet, he is just as agile with his tongue, as made beautifully clear in a speech ad-libbed by Welles:

"You know what the fellow said: In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love--they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

But all of this is clever, honeyed words. Not only does Lime take facts taken out of context (the Renaissance was hardly confined to Italy), but he doesn’t address the sources of Martins’ rage: How can Harry endanger the lives of innocent people? If he loved Anna as much as he said, why did he betray her to the Russians by disclosing the secret of her forged papers?

Greene’s friend Kim Philby—the British intelligence operative who sold secrets to the Russians—has been proposed as a model for Lime. (Philby’s given first name was Harry.) But it might be even more appropriate to regard Greene himself as a possible source for the character. Not only was his real first name Harry, but the character was associated with a fruit of a green(e) color. 

And both author and creation remain nominal Catholics, with Lime remarking cheerfully to Holly, "Oh, I still believe, old man. In God and mercy and all that. I'm not hurting anyone's souls by what I do.The dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here, poor devils."

If Harry Lime lives—and he does, more so than any other character in the film or, arguably, throughout all of European film noir—it might be because Greene (himself a serial betrayer, of his marriage vows) was a paradoxical secret sharer of his sinful humanity. 

In a famous address on “The Virtue of Disloyalty” given at the University of Hamburg, Greene observed: “Loyalty confines you to accepted opinions: loyalty forbids you to comprehend sympathetically your dissident fellows; but disloyalty encourages you to roam through any human mind: it gives the novelist an extra dimension of understanding." 

That “extra dimension of understanding” elevates The Third Man to an unforgettable cinematic experience long after Anna cold-shoulders Martins at the wintry second funeral in the haunting final scene.

Quote of the Day (Vasily Grossman, on Power, Evil, and Withered Souls)

“There are people whose souls have just withered, people who are willing to go along with anything evil—anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever is in power.”—Russian novelist-journalist Vasily Grossman (1905-1964), Life and Fate (1960)

Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, on a First Encounter With Edward Hyde)

“Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him. ‘There must be something else,’ said the perplexed gentleman. ‘There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? or Is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it Is on that of your new friend.’”— Scottish fiction writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886)

The creation of Edward Hyde, the embodiment of pure evil in the physical ugliness so vividly portrayed above, is what has led so many to view this “Strange Tale” as a horror story.

But there is another horror that, to Dr. Henry Jekyll, might be just as dismaying: Hyde’s creator and opposite is not a saint, but the same old Jekyll: a proper, basically decent Victorian gentleman who cannot banish his primal urges—“that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair.”

According to a fascinating Huffington Post piece by Melanie Kendry, “When Does a Man Become a Monster?”, the original draft by Robert Louis Stevenson indicated that the crime of the “ordinary secret sinner” Jekyll was not murder (or even the consorting with prostitutes shown in so many cinematic versions) but homosexuality. 

It was an anticipation of a later, wittier, but equally horrifying story of a double man in Victorian society, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Such were the taboos of the time in England, however, that even in the latter, more daring case, Gray’s secret sexuality could only be implied.

(The image accompanying this post shows John Barrymore, in the classic 1920 silent film version of Stevenson’s novella. Remarkably, Barrymore depicted the violent and disturbing physical transformation into Hyde without benefit of special effects. As fine as the 1933 Fredric March performance was—worthy enough of an Oscar---I still prefer Barrymore’s. I may be the only person I know who still recalls Kirk Douglas’ performance in a 1973 TV musical adaptation of the tale by composer Lionel Bart. That production was a horror story all its own!)