JACK LONDON AND THE MELANCHOLY OF MATERIALISM

Jack London wrote 210 short stories, and one of the last was Kanaka Surf, probably written in Hawaii in the summer of 1916, just the year of his death. By this time, it was Charmian Kittredge London who revised, corrected and typed everything her husband put on paper. Probably she really authored some of them, including Kanaka Surf. Certainly, since the publication of Martin Eden (1909), a change in London's narrative style has already been noteworthy. The Marxist and Neo-Darwinist writer seemed a thing of the distant past when novels like The Call of the Wild and White Fang made him the highest-paid writer of his time. One of the most telling changes in Jack London's philosophy is in his concept of the feminine. Before knowing Charmian, the woman in his work was a mere object of greed, her value compared to those of dogs, rifles, furs and whisky. In that world which he depicted so well of soulless men seeking gold and power, the native woman is only worthwhile to cook and procreate. Charmian was just the antithesis of that kind of woman: very independent, a forerunner of feminism, a photographer and exceptional swimmer and Amazon. On top of that, she was an accomplished pianist and used to play Liszt and Chopin while London wrote his novels. 

*

On November 19, 1905, Jack and Charmian got married in Chicago. Charmian paid for all the expenses of the honeymoon in Jamaica and Cuba. In 1907, they were determined to go around the world in their yacht, Snark, but they only reached Australia after visiting Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, Bora Bora and Solomon Islands, Hawaii. It was during this long nautical pilgrimage, which lasted more than a year, when London finished Martin Eden (his best novel). A travel that changed his literary style and conception of the world. From being materialistic to becoming a theosophist.

*

It is on the seaside of Waikiki, in Honolulu, where the plot of Kanaka Surf unfolds: Lee Barton (a projection of London himself) and Ida Barton (a projection of Charmian) are a superman and a superwoman happily married for twelve years, both exceptional swimmers and surfers who have decided to challenge the monstrous Kanaka Surf. Her revealing swimsuit shows daringly her naked legs, a spectacular body summoning the envious and frown-upon glances of holidaymakers, with the only exception of a married couple of sculptors, who take pleasure in moulding such a perfect body with the imagination. Both Lee and Ida take on the Kanaka Surf and succeed in riding it, leaving jaw-dropped to the expert natives that feared the worst. All was running smoothly in their lives until Sonny Grandison turned up. He was a swarthy and virile Hawaiian, educated at Harvard, a scientist and captain of a polo team. Every night party on the seaside, Ida chose Sonny as her dance partner, so Lee ended up suffering bouts of sheer jealousy. Dried out for a long time, only drinking orange juice, he was again off the waggon with a lot of whisky and opium, suffering all night long paranoid delusions wherein he asked himself if the woman, in truth, was an immoral creature, beholden to the Devil, as she is described by the German pessimists, that is, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. One morning, the couple decided to challenge the Kanaka Surf again; however, this time, Lee wanted to prove if Ida really loved him, and, already on top of the gigantic and foamy crest, he pretended having cramps in the legs, floundering, struggling not to get sucked by the water and drown. If Ida doesn't love me, he thought, she will let me die. If she does, I will be safe, or we'll die together. Well, the ending does nothing to do with whatever the German pessimists did think... The true event that inspired Jack London to write this short story was to see, while surfing in Waikiki, that Charmian was capable of riding a big wave several times, whereas he was already done for, doomed, just turning 40 (Charmian was 45). Already seriously ill with uremia. dysentery, rheumatic feet, nephritic colic, terrible headaches and acute melancholy. "A splendid ruin of a man," so he defined himself, a far cry from being that superman Lee riding the waves, swimming like a dolphin and fucking like a satyr.

*

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (another alcoholic and aquatic writer) believed that all the Americans were born with fins, or maybe they were born just as they are, so the money is a kind of fin. In the case of Jack London, he was striking rich but had lost his fins in Honolulu that last summer of his life. By then he only believed in reincarnation and in the mysterious power of myths and dreams, as a good reader of Blavatsky and Jung. The last words he said to Charmian, a little before his last breath: "Thanks, God, that you are not afraid of anything." That night he fell asleep reading a book by James W. Page about a trip to Cape Horn. He didn't wake up again, at least in this world. 

   

   

ELIOT, VIVIEN AND THE WASTE LAND

 

On April 24, 1915, a young American poet, Thomas Stearns Eliot, struck up a relationship with a young English girl from a well-to-do family who used to haunt famous bookshops and, above all, to dance "like a faun" every Saturday in the Savoy. To Eliot the names of the English girls sounded very amusing: Phyllis, Ottoline, and Vivien.

Vivien, or Vivienne Haigh-Wood, was the daughter of a Victorian artist who made his fortune painting sentimental landscapes. She lived with her parents in Hampstead in a massive house with twelve rooms and a tennis court. Two months later, on June 26, Eliot and Vivien tied the knots discreetly. Eliot confessed to his brother Henry: I love her simply because I want to burn my ships and stay in England. They spent the honeymoon in the Landsdowne Hotel in Eastbourne. It was seemingly a disaster. April used to be the cruellest month for those who, like Eliot, cannot dance.

Seven years later, Eliot published The Waste Land, probably the most famous and misunderstood poem of the century. Incidentally, seven years lasted the metamorphosis of Tiresias into a woman:

"I, Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

old man with wrinkled female breasts"

And, according to Eliot's notes on The Waste Land, Tiresias holds the key to the whole poem. He also was torn between two lives, two identities. Vivien tittered in two minds too, or else several minds. Actually, in 1936, when she was already insane, she adopted three identities: Daisy Miller, a nurse called Gordon and Cataline the Great. Eliot profoundly distrusted the feminine and detested "the female stench". Ironically, he ended up living as a nurse looking after his wife, always bedridden with neuralgia, colitis, neuritis, migraine, damaged liver, insomnia, anxiety... By that time, Eliot could not know that Vivien suffered what the psychiatrists called today "Munchausen syndrome". Neither did he know until 1925 that his wife was anorexic and a drug addict for many years. However, on the positive side, Vivien showed off her charms as a flapper muse: an outstanding dancer, exquisite taste for books and a very good reader of poetry, with a critical eye and a quick ear for the cockney. Her contribution was capital to the final version of The Waste Land. Vivien was his muse, although a sick and unfaithful muse, because besides dancing, Vivian also craved to be desired. Unfortunately, Eliot, unlike his friend Ezra Pound, was not a regular student of the Kama-sutra.

*

Vivien started to dally with the Welsh philosopher Bertrand Russell, a pacifist and staunch supporter of "free love", such a kind samaritan that offered to the Eliots his flat in London. Russell, a renowned philanderer, wanted to take Vivien to bed in sooth. "Bertie is all over me," complained Vivien, though she was really enjoying the situation, even more if Bertie treated her with expensive jewels and silk knickers. "We have here a kind of ménage à trois, more or less," said Vivien, who frequented, three times a week, a basement lounge in Carnaby Street, Soho, to take dance classes (paid for by Bertie). She danced there and danced with a very short black skirt. Bertie and Eliot used to come over oftentimes. The dance teacher called them "darling". In those days, Tom Eliot hardly ever wrote a line of poetry, earning his bacon as a schoolmaster in Highgate. He owned up to his brother Henry that, many times, he believed "Prufrock" was his swangsong. At least, he promised himself to learn dancing that "Negro rag-time" as well as Vivien in the Savoy or in the Elysee Galleries.

An utter hell; that was the blunt conclusion of Bertrand Russell about his fleeting affair with Vivien Eliot. Curiously, Eliot weighed up that same conclusion about his marriage: "I have been boiled in hell-broth," he said to Virginia Woolf in 1925 when the doctors had already identified the cause of Vivien's everlasting ailments: her addiction to chloral hydrate, a hypnotic anti-depressant that can damage irreversibly the liver, apart from causing gastritis, convulsions, dizziness, stomachaches, etc.

In the last ten years, Eliot had turned, gradually and deliberately, into a machine of no feelings, a machine that had killed Vivien alive. He had become the banker Tom, hard-working in a lugubrious office from 9 to 5, then arrived home, shattered to bits, with just the sap to read a little, tend her nearly invalid wife, who demanded punctually a hot water bottle at ten. Hence these verses in 'A Game of Chess': 

'What shall I do now? What shall I do?

I shall rush out as I am and walk the street

with my hair down, so.     

What shall we do tomorrow?

What shall we ever do?

The hot water at ten"

At the end of 1921, Eliot slumped in a depression so crippling that he had to leave his work at Lloyds Bank for several months. He went first to rest in Margate and later to Lausanne, Switzerland, for psychiatric treatment. It was in both places where, playing the mandoline, Eliot got the final élan to craft the poem that made him famous, The Waste Land:

"By the water of Leman I sat down and wept...

*

In a rather cryptic essay on Dante, Eliot posited the idea that the Vita Nova was a manual of sexual psychology. One should affirm the same idea about The Waste Land, an erudite and poetic testimony about a conjugal humiliation. Lyrical and blinding flashes of an armour hiding someone who yearns to be natural and authentic, lest he cannot be a great lover. "I don't know yet what the core is, the egg of things," confessed Eliot, always torn between the stringent Protestant ethics of the Unitary Church and savage, metic soul. He couldn't dump Vivien to the river like a dead animal, but he didn't want either to renounce his secret soul of a Sweeney with homoerotic or even pornographic penchants. "I never lay with a woman I liked, loved or even felt any strong physical attraction to," said Eliot in 1939 when Vivian was already admitted to a mental asylum. This homoerotic impulse came to surface, for example, in Mr Eugenides of The Fire Sermon: a merchant of Smyrna, unshaven, with the pockets full of Corinth raisins, invites the poet to a weekend in the Metropole (a luxurious hotel in Brighton, well known by then for his gay and loose atmosphere). It's clear that, after seven years of marriage, the poet is feeling wasted and intellectually barren and diagnoses himself as neurasthenic. His sinister and gloomy gaze terrorised Virginia Woolf, and Lady Ottoline Morrell called him mockingly "the undertaker".

*

"Complimenti, you bitch," wrote Ezra Pound to Eliot from Paris on February 24, 1922, just the day Tom gave the last touch to The Waste Land. Even so, he was not completely sure the poem would work. On April 20, Eliot told Sydney Schiff that he was ready to abandon poetry and literature. That same April, Vivien had been in bed for eight weeks with psychotic delusions. Tom was also on the verge of another suicidal depression. April is becoming the cruellest month afresh. Fortunately, his father-in-law paid him for a sojourn in the hotel in Bristol in Lugano, near the village called Paradiso. There, Eliot got over quickly, quaffing red wine Barolo and Asti Spumante, enjoying an Italian-Swiss festival at the lake with night fireworks. "I should like six months of Italy and heat and sunshine and have never felt so lazy and languid. " And, to top his feeling of bliss, he met Hermann Hess, who, by this time, lived in Montagnola, writing Siddhartha. His marriage was in tatters, but Eliot, loyal to the Unitarian faith, nursed his sick 'Belladonna, Lady of the Rocks' until 1932, when, taking advantage of a trip to the United States, he decided to separate for good 

VIA QUERINI, VENICE, !972

 

Some wench with eyes of jackal

digs deep into the ruins of my name,

burrowing along the debris of my brain,

A wench with greengage-bosoms

sniffing deep in my ashes

arising me from the dead with a kiss

and gone

He is about to give up his ghost

his last breath           nearly

to become a dense mist shrouding La Giudecca.

Ezra Pound  melancholy stares

the little finger of Olga Rudge

(tiny little fingers couleur de rose).

There she is as always for the last ten years

near the carcass of the old poet

who lies down in bed by the window

overlooking the canalside, mumbling

snippets of his Pisan Cantos

while the shadows of gondoliers

sing Puccini arias out loud

louder         the seagulls hovering

over the isle of San Michele,

the belfry of San Giorgio Maggiore

like birds of ill-omen.

The pearly wench, Hebe, has made me

immortal with a kiss

and gone...

.     The Canale Della Giudecca

       J. M. Turner

       ©Tate Britain

L'INCONNUE DE LA SEINE

"Le Seine parle tout le temps, tout le temps du suicide"

(Louis Aragon)

September 1906. When living in Paris the poet Rainer Maria Rilke used to stop over the shop of the mouleur Lorenzi, in the quartier de l'Odeon.

There hung on the display window death masks of Mozart, Cromwell, Dante, Keats, Napoleon... But the brooding poet was rather obssessed on contemplating just one: the mask of a girl with no name, a Jane Doe smiling "as if she knew". It is well known the Rilke's fascination for women from the Madonnas painted by the Venetian masters to the greengrocers in the street market on the Giudecca. Rilke, by then, was  still outlining the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge where he bestowed on the girl-mask an halo of mystery, " because she was so beautiful deceitfully smiling, as if she knew..."

Who was that girl? Nobody knows so far and probably we'll never know. Legend has it that, by the close of the XIX century, a young woman was found dead floating in the Seine near the quay of Louvre. She was taken to the Paris Morgue, behind Notre-Dame, where a coroner, smitten with her smiling face, decided to cast it in plaster as a death mask. Some people recognised in her hairstyle a peasant or a tramp. Others assured she was a Hungarian star of music hall, murdered by her Parisian lover. The Lorenzi's heirs-who still run the business- affirm that the mask was taken from a beautiful model in some atelier, and it is technically impossible to mould it from the face of a drowned person.

And so the myth of this Parisian Ophelia was born. It didn't take long to be worshipped as a post-romantic muse, giving rise to a massive amount of novels, poems, plays, movies, photography books.

The first time she became a literary character was in "The Worshipper of the Image(1900) by Richard Le Gallienne, a decandent British novelist. The last time, in the Guillaume Musso' s novel L'inconnue de la Seine(2021).

Albert Camus called her "the Giaconde of Suicide" , and according to Al Alvarez, during the roaring twenties and the dawning of the thirties almost all the students in Europe had a copy of the death mask as a kind of pin-up girl. A whole generation of German women became inspired by "la Inconnue de la Seine" as the archetypical model of female beauty. Even Nabokov, in 1934, wrote an exquisite poem morphing her into a kind of the 'neznakomka' of Blok and the Shakesperean Ophelia. Anais Nin recalled her briefly in "Houseboat"(1944), and Jules Supervielle clearly drew inspiration from this drowned muse to write his dreamlike story 'L'enfant de la haute mer".

For the publishing of his comedy, L'Eglise(1933), Celine sent not his photo required by the editor but a snapshot of 'L'inconnue de la Seine'. The editor got so incensed that nearly cancelled the contract.

But the best book ever written about this subject is Aurélien by Louis Aragon, a long novel appeared in 1944. A beautiful love story and a cultural kaleidoscope of those years amidst the carnage of WWI. Aurélien is a young womanizer, freshly demobbed, who fell in love with Bérénice, a provincial girl married to a pharmacist, despite she's not his type of woman, not even a beauty. Charles Swann, in the Proust's novel, fell head over heels in love with Odette de Crécy because she reminded him of Botticelli. Aurélien fell madly in love with Berenice when she closed her eyes, because her face reminded him of the smiling mask of L'inconnue... He also hung a copy of the famous mask in his room.

Bérénice, in a fit of jealousy, tore the mask into pieces trying, besides, to break something else: the enchantment, the malignant attraction this unknown woman is able to spell from death. 

Nowadays, 'l'Inconnue de la Seine' is the most kissed woman in the world, because her face was taken as the model for Resusci Anne, the mannequin normally used for CPR, that is, cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

©Jeanne Moreau et L'inconnue de la Seine

SEIJAKU

 

Standing at the revolving belt

of a Japanese buffet

he picked out a teriyaki bowl.

Soon the bowl is empty soon

full of gleaming tears. A tiger-moth

flitting over the gleam.

A mug of coffee steamed up

the windows of his mutism

where suddenly someone smiled.

Someone who loved him the most

but never existed.

.                    Mizuumi Japanese bowl

                     ©Osara New York

SUMMER LOVE

 

A trysting couple 

about to kiss each other

by an opalized light of June

bathing the seaside promenade.

Van dwellers dance to a gypsy

accordion like dogs barking

around a bonfire.

The sea hushed and aglitter.

A solitary poet at a pub bench sips

a glass of frothing Guinness

and waxes lyrics on a serviette

about the couple the squeezebox.

The moon waxing full

over the twilighted promenade

regardless the sigh-lorn poet

and the lovers now parting

gloomy without a word.

In a red and white puppet booth

Judy takes a swipe at Punch.

The van dwellers still dance wildly

under the spell of gypsy tunes.

    ©Aric S. Queen

POEM

 

Just now the sun proffers to me 

a glass of elderberry wine.

Then a glass of mead.

I shut the eyes and sip.

I open the eyes: the world ain't there anymore,

not even my books and the sea.

Circe and Helen smirked

staring at my solitude. 

I bit a golden apple.

And the vast Time gets distorted 

and dwindles

to become a blade of grass.

Time small as a pebble.

MELAMPYGE

 

Once upon a time there was

 a tabby cat called Melampyge

(so named after Casanova's dog)

 he was the only deceased 

when the San Marco's campanile

was doomed to collapse in 1902

Last night I dreamt myself petting

Its harlequin-fur at sunset just before

the tragedy came across la Serenissima

Rilke the poet -a black Homburg in hand-

was walking past me at a seraphic pace.

He whispered with a broad smile his last elegy

to some kind of elegant Comtesse

attired in blue organza and yellow gloves

Both blended slowly into the foggy backstreets.

 Melampyge (podgy but nimble)

with tigerish paws

followed their ambling shadows

that scent the canals with violet hues.

I followed Melampyge toward the hidden

alleys off the beaten paths in Dorsoduro.

Suddenly Rilke looked back

and frosted his countenance 

with exactly the same blue eyes

of the cat glinting at me

just before running away to

 la Piazza San Marco...

TITANIC'S COAL STOKERS

 

What were they singing the Titanic's coal stokers?

What did they choir along in the steam engine

 while shoveling coal on end amid screams, 

expletives and sailor jokes?

What were they humming larksome soaked

 in rills of sweat, ale and eating beef stew, plum

pudding like ravenous gannets?

Were they guided finally by Virgil as a lodestar

while walking through the last and eternal

flames of their lives?

What did they ever sing somewhere

 in the waiting room to the other side

 through the pearly gates? 

I hear their hobnail boots tapping

a rag-time on the flooded floor.