Paradoxes & Prejudices

I have a head-cold.  Botheration.  As a responsible citizen, I stayed home from work and I should of stood in bed, as someone or other once famously said. Instead I wandered the family manse seeking distraction to break up a little my otherwise restless napping, as one will when bored and nose-blowing.  Books came down from high shelves, only to be abandoned on the sofa.  I couldn't read for weeping, as it were, which is just a poetic way of describing a runny nose, an aching head and streaming eyes. Food, I found, had no flavor.  Likewise social media, as no one, it seemed was paying much attention to my misery.  Poor me.  So despite my determination not to waste the day away entire, I did what one does; I made a can of soup and watched television.

As I'd already resorted to infant amusements; chicken noodle soup and cartoons, I decided to go whole hog and enjoy a favorite from The Million Dollar Movies of my childhood, and so I watched a Charlie Chan.

You kids today won't know, but in the remote days before cable television -- and television remotes -- we watched pretty much anything on offer on a weekday afternoon home sick from school.  One was indulged to the extent of being allowed pajamas and real pillows on the couch, Premium Saltines and lukewarm ginger ale, and best of all, control of the television.  This was not so lux as it sounds, my dears, with but three channels from which to choose, but it did mean that instead suffering through The Edge of Night or the boring early news, one might watch the whole of some Hollywood hash from the supposed Golden Age, and if one was lucky, it might be Errol Flynn in Captain Blood, or, undreamt of good fortune, Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!  More often than not though the Fates proved cruel and what was on offer was nothing more than Ida Lupino blind in the snow, or Ann Rutherford on a horse.  "Eesh," cries the memory of an uncouth nine year old me in snotty disappointment.  The best one might hope for most days was a Mister Moto or a Charlie Chan.

I remembered both of those "oriental" gentlemen fondly, but I'd seen neither in years.  What could be better with a warm ginger ale?  And so, to Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan in The Scarlet Clue, 1945, directed by one Phil Rosen and featuring Mantan Moreland as "Birminghan Brown, chauffeur" and young Benson Fong as Tommy Chan, "Number Three Son."  In this one, Charlie and Co. were ostensibly in pursuit of "radar secrets" at a radio station and... oh, Hell.  Need I go on?

For the moment, I must.  Appalling, kids, truly.  Forget for a moment the merest fart of mystery or the lingering odor of an old, dead plot.  Forget the coin-purse budget and the tattered print.  Forget even the sclerotic Sidney Toler in his ten-gallon-Panama-hat.  Forget all that -- or rather, don't and be warned! -- and let me confess what it was that finally broke me.  It was not, I'm ashamed to say, poor Mantan Moreland's bug-eyed horror of "haints," nor even his grotesque stooging with the hapless Benson Fong every other scene.  Not even the embarrassingly unfunny encounter with the "Norwegian" char-woman with the unconvincing Harry Tenbrook accent was enough to make me turn from this vile racist potpourri.  I was horrified, but I got a head-cold and I was all doped up on the antihistamines and shit, so, you know. 

So, what finally drew me in anger from my bed of pain to turn the wretched thing off?  When Charlie and the cops come in to question the cast of a radio soap, one of the minor characters, some camp in a pencil mustache, rolls his eyes and, for want of a better verb decamps from the stage, swishing.

And, scene.

After all the depressingly weedy "fun" that came before, this last straw was, I admit, willow-thin.  To be honest, I'd long since decided to turn the thing off and be done with it -- and Charlie Chan -- for good.  Don't get me wrong, I have always had a soft spot for those great supporting Hollywood camps like Franklin Pangborn and Edward Everett Horton, etc.  But after all that had come before, that last sad bit of bashing, though far indeed from the worst of it, was just too, too.

Talking to a reviewer friend recently, I was more than a little shocked to learn that he had decided not to accept what must have seemed to both said reviewer and his editor an assignment right up his street.  Rare enough for any part-time writer: the uncashed check, however small.  What's more, my friend had already read most of the book.  So?  The book he was asked to review was a soon to be reissued novel by Alberto Moravia, a novelist once of no small reputation, now much neglected in the United States.  Moravia moreover is a writer my friend otherwise much admires. Finally, the book is forthcoming from no less than Europa Editions, a publisher my friend specially loves.  He's reviewed with pleasure perhaps a dozen or more of their titles in just the last year or two.  Like NYRB, Europa brings back into print many a great and neglected work, as well as introducing all sorts of important and interesting European writers to grateful American readers, like my friend.

So what was wrong with the Moravia novel now not to be reviewed? Well into it, it seems that there is a sad little man who wants to hold hands with the handsome boys riding on the ferry and isn't that horrible, and aren't such perverts disgusting, etc.?  Done.  For my friend, that tore it.  I get it, I do.  We all have our limits.

Many an otherwise good or even great writer has had his or her... unfortunate moments.  Moravia wrote the famously anti-Fascist novel, The Conformist, later made into the even more famous Bertolucci film.  His writing was known for a spare realism, moral malaise and what for the time was a shocking sexual honesty.  And yet, that sad cliche of predatory old queen.  Disappointing.

I'm reminded of being not infrequently jolted by the casual Antisemitism of an Agatha Christie or a Josephine Tey, to say nothing of what might now be called "racial insensitivity" in nearly every white American writer before the Second World War.

Without having read the Moravia my friend decided not to review, I can't say if I would have exactly the same reaction.  I might well. Just hearing the scene described left me in depressed spirits.  Myself not so long ago made yet another futile go at William Faulkner and his Snopes.  I can say that his relentless brutality seemed specially egregious in the pornographic romance between Ike and the cow -- possibly the ugliest thing I've ever read by a major artist -- but ultimately what made me quit was the revolting fecundity of Eula, or rather Faulkner's thin-lipped pleasure as he endlessly maws the Female Principle like some cracker-barrel D. H. Lawrence.  Hateful stuff. Just hateful.

Actually, I tend to be of the school of thought that believes it unfair to judge the whole history of art by the politics of today.  (One Fourth of July not so long ago, I was frankly outraged by the friend who suggested that my habit of reading from the Adams/Jefferson letters each year on that day somehow constituted an "endorsement of slavery."  Oh please.)  Nonetheless I do find myself ever increasingly chary of spending my time in the dank corners of a circumscribed artistic sympathy and, having wandered all unsuspecting into narrow ways, my instinct is strong now to just back the fuck up and go.  I seem to be in some ways less tolerant myself nowadays, or at least grumpier than ever, even when I am not suffering from a head-cold.

Back then to soup and Saltines, and maybe just a little music to sooth my jangling sensibilities.  Maybe some Schubert, or even Wagner.  What could go wrong, right?