brownstones

  

This is the best example I have of an 1860s Manhattan brownstone.  Eliminate the flower boxes and A/C.  They are imposing, but rather severe in style; no frills or curlicues, no balconies or bay windows.  Steep stoops and tall ground-floor front windows.  (Ground floor is the so-called parlor floor, reached by the stoop.  Level with the street is the basement,  which can also have front windows, but not tall like on the parlor floor.)








Turn-of-†he-century Brooklyn brownstones.  Too ornate and too differentiated for 1860s Manhattan brownstones, rows of which can be similar in style.  But see how the brownstones cluster together as row houses.






Brooklyn brownstones.  But: in 1860s Manhattan, no bay windows.  But a sameness of style for them all; no one stands out.  No fire escapes in the 1860s.





More Brooklyn brownstones.  But no bay windows in 1860s Manhattan.  See how the whole row of them are similar in style; no one of them really stands out.

472. Bullies

BROWDERBOOKS

The Brooklyn Book Festival is going to be held online, and for authors to participate will cost only fifty dollarooonies.  So will I participate?  No way!  Author events can be done online, but book sales, never.  What sells books (or anything) at a fair?  Two things:

1. Books on a table, carefully arranged.
2. A steady flow of traffic to your table.  

Minus either of these, few sales.  Minus both, none.  So I'll keep my fifty smackeroonies for myself.

My next historical novel, Forbidden Brownstones, about an educated young black man in nineteenth-century New York, has been through two close readings by my in-house editor, and now, after a final third read-through, will go to a copyeditor.

Google Ads is now advertising my latest nonfiction title, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You.  I have launched two campaigns, the second slightly less inept that the first, and I have tried to add images to them, but with little control over formatting, which promises dismal results.  Here is a photo from my 2019 book release party for The Eye That Never Sleeps that made it into my college alumni bulletin.  A great photo, but Google, being fussy about dimensions, won't take it either as a rectangular image or a square one.  The photos it does take are usually chopped up, captionless, and meaningless.  I'm fed up with Google already.  My solution: delete all the photos.  If they can't be presented properly, they can go, and they are now gone.

(BTW: Read the sign in the lower left corner, if you can.  When traveling by Greyhound bus in the West years ago, a refugee from Academia, I grabbed it out of a drab little hotel in Montana as a kind of souvenir.  The misspellings are probably not legible here.)

Amazon won't let me advertise, and Google has the beginnings of a fiasco, so I will have to try something else.  Not easy.  With my local post office closed tight, at the moment I can't mail books myself.  One possibility: BookBub.  At least, I'll look into it.

For a post with all my books, go here.  And for my new website, go here.

                                             BULLIES

I hate them, always have, and my fictional characters hate them, too.  This dates from my childhood.  My first bully was my brother David, three years older than me.  He was tall and dark, I was a blue-eyed blond whose hair soon turned to brown.  In our early years, when he came at me, I didn't know if he would kiss me or hit me.  What's scary is that he didn't know, either.  He was a creature of impulse, with little thought of the consequences.  There was an unspoken rule between us: if he only scared me, but didn't actually hit me, I wouldn't tell our parents.  But in a park one day he heaved a brick at me, probably meaning to miss me narrowly.  But he aimed too well: I went home screaming with pain, a big lump on my forehead.  They rushed me off for an x-ray; luckily, nothing was fractured.  What they did to my brother I don't know; I was too busy screaming with pain.

      David was a rule breaker, always in trouble.  How he must have, at times, hated little Hal, his blue-eyed brother, never in trouble, quite content if he could just quietly read a book and let it generate rich fantasies of life in another time.  Sometimes David would leave me alone, and sometimes not.  Once he got me so angry that I snatched up a letter opener from my mother's desk in the living room and flung it at him.  Years later, when we were older and calmer, he told me that was the only time that I really scared him.  I'd like to say that I hurled it with such force that it lodged in the woodwork inches away from his noggin.  But no, I flung it rather gently and it clattered to the floor well short of him.  But if the gesture scared him, that was something gained.

      David was not the only bully in my life.  Even a quiet, order-loving, respectable town like Evanston, the Chicago suburb where I grew up, abounded in them.  Every block seemed to harbor one, always male, often the despair of his well-meaning parents.  I had a few close brushes with several, but was never really abused.  Then one late winter afternoon, trudging through a field of snow not far from my home, I was accosted by a kid somewhat younger than me, but tough.  "I want to fight you," he said.  With him was a friend, so it was two to one.  I was older, but a glasses-wearing nerdy-looking bookworm, an easy target.  "Well," I said, out of desperate bravado, "no better time or place."  Fight or flight is the choice all creatures have, when in imminent danger; I chose flight.  I raced off, but he easily overtook me, tackled me, and tumbled me down in the snow.  Triumphant, he towered over me. "That's just some snow in your glasses," he said, and it's true that my glasses were filled with snow.  "C'mon," he said to his buddy.  "Let's not waste any more time with this sissy." And off they trudged, in search of more victories. 

      A third boy, a neutral, had witnessed this.  With him watching, I got up, dusted the snow off me, wiped my glasses clean, and left.  My flight had in fact accomplished my main goal: to be rid of the bully; perhaps I even let him tackle me.  But when I got home, brooding alone in the living room, I burst into tears and wept for the next twenty minutes.  I never told anyone about this incident, but the memory of it haunted me for years.  My brother felt that only he had the right to bully me; if anyone else did, he would lay into them.  But his reactions were so violent, that I knew not to trigger them.  I preferred to keep my troubles to myself, even if they rotted my innards.  

      In fifth or sixth grade a kid named Hilliard had the habit of challenging me.  I had in no way offended him, but he still greeted me, saying, 

      "Hal, you're a sissy and I can prove it.  I challenge you to a fight."  

      "I don't want to fight," I replied.  

      "See?  You're a sissy."  And he flashed a smug, triumphant smile.

      One day, as I was walking home from school, I came upon a bunch of classmates, one of whom, Billy, was in tears. "Hilliard punched him," explained the others, and in the distance I saw Hilliard sauntering off with his little brother.  Everyone there sympathized with Billy, who had done nothing to provoke the attack.

      A glimmering of the truth began to dawn in me.  If there was any kid in the class more vulnerable than me, it was Billy, a nice, quiet, harmless kid, immensely likable.  Hilliard wouldn't challenge any of the tough boys in the class, he only went for me and Billy.  In this instance, he was showing off for his little brother.  Years later, of course, I realized that Hilliard, like my brother, was very insecure inside, and reassured himself of his manliness by bullying.  Scratch a bully, and inside you'll find a scared little boy, profoundly insecure, desperate.  I too was insecure, being a nerdy bookworm who hated sports, but I didn't take it out on others.  Most of us don't; bullies do.

     The Russian writer Solzhenitsyn, recounting his days in the Soviet Gulag, tells of how he once found himself lodged together with another prisoner, a big, muscular man who from the start made it clear that he was in charge.  He ranted, he blustered, he bullied.  So Solzhenitsyn stood up to him, quite ready to fight physically, if necessary.  Challenged, the bully burst into tears.  Solzhenitsyn was bullied no more.

      Years later, when I realized I was gay, the question of proving my manliness, or hiding the lack of it, became irrelevant.  I'm gay, I thought, I'm different.  I don't give a damn about manliness.  Let the straight guys worry about that.  And worry they do, many of them. My e-mail SPAM folder is crammed daily with offers of promised hardness and secrets for seducing women, presumably addressing just such an audience of would-be Don Giovannis.

      Can a woman be a bully?  Once, long ago, when I was a freelance editor, I had a temporary desk on the East Side in a building owned by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.  On the same floor near me was the rented office of an agent, whose assistant worked there with two young people, a boy and a girl in their twenties.  The agent was never here, but her assistant lorded it over them.  "I expect you to take manuscripts home every weekend and read them.  I want results, or else.  This is no idle warning."  So she expected them to give up a good chunk of their weekend, without additional pay.  The two kids looked cowed, intimidated.  Yes, women too can be bullies.

      Many a CEO is a bully; I've heard stories of it all my life, and seen films about it, too.  They get results, but at a price.  Cult leaders too can be bullies, though in a subtler, more insidious way.  As for politicians, need I say more?  His inability to take criticism or admit faults, his speedy dismissal of those who don't kowtow, his twittering rage at his enemies --  all these I take as signs of a bully.  If he isn't successful next November, he will fall into even more erratic rages, mouthing wild accusations and counter-truths, promoting a world of fantasies to shield him from reality.  A bit like Hitler, who in his last days in the bunker lapsed in fantasy, ordering nonexistent divisions into battle, and proclaiming to the very end, "What I have tried to do for the German people!"  Such was his state of mind, even as Soviet troops approached, Berlin lay in ruins, and the only solution for him was suicide.  In the long run, bullies don't fare well.  There are exceptions -- certain CEOs -- but usually time is against the bully.

     Why do bullies do what they do?  I have suggested deep insecurity.  But maybe the real reason is simply, because I can.  Which would explain a lot of evil in the world, if explanation it is.  Because I can.  Scary.

Coming soon:  Apothecaries: Cocaine, Arsenic, and Opium, and All of It Just for You.

©   2020   Clifford Browder

471. Dangerous Falls

BROWDERBOOKS

I am now advertising with Google ads -- a new experience fraught with risk and hope.  Risk because I'm new to it, have to learn such esoteric terms as PPC (pay per click), KPI (key performance indicator), and ROI (return on investment), and am blundering ahead, confident that one learns by doing.  Hope because every time someone clicks on my ad, they will be transported to my new website's HOME page, where New Yorkers is featured, with a brief description and links to Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  At last report, 20.4K impressions, 55 clicks, but 0 conversions.  So the ad has been shown 20,400 times, 55 people have clicked on it, but no one has bought the book.  Well, it's early in the month-long campaign, so who knows?  And I'm launching a second campaign with a much better set-up, based on what I've learned so far.  Again, hope.  Good old battered but resilient hope.

      When my newly created Google ads account disappeared from my computer screen, taking my campaign with it, I consulted a Google technician  to recover it.  We worked all Thursday afternoon without results, then resumed on Friday morning and finally recovered it, but by then I was utterly worn out.  A closing upbeat note: the technician  said he had gone to my website, discovered New Yorkers, and is buying the book.


                   DANGEROUS  FALLS

Friends and blog followers who responded to the story of my fall, which toppled a bookcase, gave me such interesting, albeit alarming, accounts of falls of their own, that I decided to do a post on falls, including, with their permission, their own.  Here are their stories.  Understandably, most of these falls occurred to older people, though not all the falls are age-related; one can fall at any age, and for any reason.

A friend in Florida, retired, told me of three separate falls.

• As recommended by his podiatrist, he was wearing a protective boot on his right foot.  The boot caught on the leg of his bed, and down he went on the hard tile floor.  His left shoulder was injured and hasn't been the same since.  He can't raise his left arm.
• While taking a nap on his bed, in his sleep he rolled off the bed onto the floor.  No damage, just a startled awakening.  Now, when napping, he makes sure he doesn't lie near the edge of the bed.
• On another occasion, after taking a few sips of his first cocktail, he wandered out into his back yard (he lives in a duplex), set his drink down on a table, and walked over to a fence to say hello to his neighbors, who were sitting on their side of the patio.  Suddenly, to their astonishment, he keeled over.  Fortunately, he  landed on the grass, and not on the brick pavement he was standing on.  No damage, but a mystery: not intoxicated, no dizziness, so why the fall?  Was he tripped by the slightly uneven brick pavement?  He has yet to figure it out.

With three falls in the last two years, he is concerned.  Fortunately, there is a fire station nearby, so a 911 call brings them promptly to help him get back on his feet.

      Another friend tells me how, just after she retired from teaching, she was crossing 72nd Street at Third Avenue one afternoon, when she slipped on some gasoline spilled out on the street and fell on her right shoulder.  The resulting pain was so intense, she knew she had a serious injury.  Hailing a cab, she rushed to the Lenox Hill Hospital emergency room, where she was luckily seen at once.  X-rays revealed a fracture in the rotator cuff, but she was having guests over for dinner that evening, so she went home.  The following day she phoned her internist, who recommended a surgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital, and she had surgery on the shoulder.

      When she told me this, I had never even heard of a rotator cuff, but some quick online research describes it as a group of four tendons connecting the shoulder muscle to the shoulder bone.  Injuries here are not uncommon, especially if one falls on one's shoulder.  Once again, I realize how lucky I was in falling: the bookcase got all the damage; I had only a slight scratch.  But my friend was lucky, too.  After surgery she worked with a physical therapist and fully recovered, except for occasional pain, if it is about to rain.  Then, when it rains, the pain goes away.

      Another older friend, who lives in Massachusetts in a house with four acres of grounds around it, tells how, when moving an art work to get things out of the way of a flood, he fell against it and demolished it.  He and his partner are aware of the risks of falling, seem to get clumsier as they age.  Well, who doesn't?  Join the club.

      Another really serious fall was told me by a friend who lives here in Manhattan on the West Side.  She had been taking photos of the sunset from a window in her apartment, then went to bed.  Later, she got up to get something from the kitchen, and went there in the dark, thinking she knew the way.  But she forgot that she had moved an ottoman in the living room.  Tripping over it, she fell on the hard stone floor.  She lay there for a while, aware of broken glass, blood, and a bruised face.  She thought of calling her neighbors, but in time got up, cleaned up the floor with towels, and got dressed, in case she needed to go to an ER.  Instead, she stayed up all night, icing her head, and contacted her children the next morning.  With a bruised face that hurt, she didn't go out in public for a long time, and to this day has a scar in her eyebrow.  She threw out the ottoman, and now has night lights on.  Still haunted by the memory of her fall, she relives it and talks to herself about it.

      Yes, my bookcase fall was minor, compared to some of these stories.  But I've had other falls, too.  I can remember tripping on something and falling on the sidewalk near a restaurant with tables outside.  Diners at the tables gasped, then asked if I was all right.  Uninjured, I got up quickly and assured them, "I'm fine.  I always bounce back."  In those days I did.  

       Another of my falls resulted not from age, but from carelessness.  This was years ago, when Bob was out of the city, and I was home alone.  To access something on a high shelf in my bedroom, I stepped up on a wooden boxlike structure enclosing a radiator.  The insecure surface gave way, and I tumbled down on the floor.  Stunned, I just lay there for a few minutes, aware of bruises.  The best thing I could do, I ecided, was to get to the bed and lie there quietly, taking deep, regular breaths.  With effort I got up, took a few wobbly steps to the bed, and lay down.  After fifteen minutes of rest and quiet breathing, my mind cleared, and I was fine.  A bruise or two, but nothing else.  Ever since, I have been careful, very careful, where I step.  Lying quietly while taking deep breaths has always been my short-term solution for physical mishaps.  It lets me clear my head, so I can deal with the situation.

      About three years ago, crossing the street in daylight, I fell and hit my face on the hard pavement.  No dizziness, so why I fell puzzles me to this day.  No one else was around to help me up, but I managed to get back on my feet.  I had a splotched purple face, a bruise or two, and a broken glasses frame (the lenses were intact), but no other injury.  The splotch concerned me, for in two months I would be exhibiting at BookCon, the big two-day book event at the Javits Center here in Manhattan.  A splotched purple face would be appropriate for science fiction and horror stories, but those genres I don't do, so I was concerned.  But slowly, with time, the splotch receded, and I had a reasonably normal appearance for the event.

      Yes, compared to some of my friends, my falls have not been serious.  Painful, yes, and sometimes with bruises, but no lasting ill effects.  But I know to be especially wary going downstairs and stepping off curbs.  And where there is no railing, I don't venture.

      Seniors are a stubborn bunch, often ignoring sound advice. When Bob was housebound with Parkinson's, the nurses and therapists who came to us had sad stories to tell of some of their elderly patients.  "She has fallen three times," one therapist told us, "but she won't hire a home-care aide.  She lives alone, and she's going to fall again.  But there's nothing I can do about it."  Yes, seniors can be stubborn, blindly and foolishly so.  Let's be reasonable, clear-headed, and careful.  We can't anticipate every problem, but we can have a plan in mind, should a problem suddenly arise.

Coming soon:  Bullies.

©   2020   Clifford Browder

NYers cover

470. An Eye-Gouging Whodunit, Siegfried and Lance Armstrong

BROWDERBOOKS

Good news: E.L. Marker, the hybrid affiliate of WiDo Publishing, has issued a press release announcing my signed contract with them to publish my next historical novel, Forbidden Brownstones.  For the press release, go here.  I'm now working on the manuscript with an in-house editor.  I anticipate publication early next year, which is fine, since I hope to publish a new work every year.  (Until I run out of unpublished manuscripts; four to go, this being one of them.)

This year's work, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, was self-published and continues to get good editorial reviews (reviews by professionals), though not good reader reviews on Amazon.  In fact, there is only one on Amazon to date, a 2-star review.  I'm hoping there will be more, so as to balance that one out.  Reviews can be short: a few sentences, one sentence, a phrase, a single word.  So, readers, how about a review -- even a mini.

For New Yorkers and all my books, go here.


        AN  EYE-GOUGING  WHODUNIT,
  SIEGFRIED  AND  LANCE  ARMSTRONG

Last time we did two of the five basic stories, The Journey and Boy Meets Girl.   Now we'll do the rest.  For the third, I propose

                                       Whodunit

Of course this makes us think of Earl Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, Georges  Simenon's Inspector Maigret, A. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and countless others.  But I propose an ancient forerunner of them all: Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.  Only the Greeks could come up with a whodunit like this.  To save Thebes from a devastating plague, Oedipus, the king of Thebes, sets out to discover the killer of his father Laius.  Slowly, relentlessly, the truth comes out: he himself is the killer; worse still, he has unwittingly married his own mother, Jocasta.  Horrified upon learning this, Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus gouges out his eyes in despair.  Sophocles' haunting comment at the end: don't account a man happy until the last day of his life.  Oedipus was a happy, successful, and much esteemed ruler, but in the end he lost it all.  For me, this is the whodunit of whodunits, impossible to top.  

Oedipus, as presented in a Dutch production, ca. 1896.

A friend once told me of seeing Laurence Olivier in the role in a 
double bill onstage.  When Oedipus blinded himself, Olivier uttered a shriek such as the audience had never heard; it haunted them  throughout the intermission.  Then, in the second play of the evening, Olivier came on as a Restoration fop, glib, silly, and amusing; coming right after Oedipus, it was the most astonishing transformation conceivable.  And for my friend, a veteran theatergoer, the most brilliant and unforgettable performance that he had ever experienced.

For the fourth basic story I suggest

                              Travails of the Hero

"Travails"?  Why not "Troubles" or "Problems"?  "Travails" sounds a bit hifalutin.  Exactly: I want hifalutin.

To be a hero -- or heroine -- one has to have obstacles to overcome, monsters to slay, villains to defeat.  Assuming, of course, that the story ends in triumph.  In the Iliad Achilles, wronged by the Greek leader Agamemnon, broods in his tent, allowing the Trojans to drive the Greeks back to their ships; only when Patroclus, his best friend (and lover?  Homer doesn't quite say) is slain by Hector, does Achilles go forth to confront and kill Hector.  A triumph?  Yes, but...  (With the Greeks, there is always a "but...").  It has been foretold that, if Achilles kills Hector, his own death will soon  follow.

Achilles and Hector, a German engraving of 1518-1530.
But in the Iliad, it's just the two of them in the final confrontation.

Wagner's Siegfried would seem to be the hero of heroes.  (Wagner and many a German thought so.).  In Joseph Campbell's scheme of things, as presented in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the hero's task is often to slay a monster and rescue a maiden or claim a treasure.  In the opera Siegfried, this sturdy young son of the forest kills the dragon Fafnir, and then pierces a ring of fire to waken the sleeping Brunnhilde, thus winning a double prize: Fafnir's gold and Brunnhilde's love.  (She, by the way, is Siegfried's aunt, but let's not dwell on that.)  In the story that follows, Siegfried forgets Brunnhilde, becomes engaged to another woman, and finally gets himself killed by the villainous Hagen.  So once again, the hero's victory is temporary; in the long run, these guys don't do well.

Siegfried slays the dragon.
A U.S. book illustration of 1914, artist unknown.
Siegfried's hair is long; no barbers in the forest.

So how about the girls?  Flaubert's Madame Bovary, stuck in a dreary provincial town and married to a well-meaning but oafish husband, fights against boredom through adulterous affairs and the purchase of luxury items on credit, and finally, overburdened with debt, takes arsenic and dies.  Her plight so gripped readers that her frustrated romantic yearnings were given a name: bovarysme.

Ibsen's Hedda Gabler is another frustrated wife trapped in a loveless marriage.  Her romantic yearnings prompt her to 
urge a depressed but brilliant young scholar to commit suicide "beautifully"; when she learns that he died messily in a brothel, she herself commits suicide.  A complex and perhaps baffling character, but one that has haunted the public ever since Ibsen's play was first performed.

The Swedish actress Gertrud Fridh as Hedda, 1964.
A haunting stare, and perhaps a troubled one.

When one thinks of Joan of Arc and Mary, Queen of Scots, two famous historical figures whose lives have often been retold in theater, novel, and film, one may well wonder if any female hero -- or any hero at all -- ever triumphs and survives.  Hardly, it would seem.  Henry VIII's aspiring second wife, Anne Boleyn, has been acclaimed by feminists for pushing as far as she did and almost getting away with it, but she ends up on a scaffold.  No, at the moment I can't come up with a heroine who ends happily, in triumph.  It seems to happen only in fairy tales.

Just as Joan of Arc saved France, the women of America
can save their country by buying war savings stamps.
A 1918 lithograph, a wartime inspiration of
the U.S. Treasury Department.

And the boys?  Well, Shakespeare's Henry V defeats those silly French at the battle of Agincourt and then marries a French princess: triumph aplenty.  (Though history belies the bard: the king killed his French prisoners, and was so foolish as to die young, leaving the throne to an infant son who became the pawn of his guardians.  As for Agincourt, it was more than canceled out by Joan of Arc's remarkable victories.  And who remembers Henry V anyway?  A few history buffs.  But Joan of Arc is renowned the world over.)

Why are triumphant heroes and heroines in such short supply?  Do we know too much about them, or too much about life?  With rare exceptions, to be heroic is to be riding for a fall.  To be victorious is to soon be doomed.  Witnessed by the hoi polloi, this humbling of the great is relished.  We, the lowly, like seeing our betters dragged down to our level and below.  It's justice, it's fate, it's democracy.

And today, few of our real-life heroes, commemorated in sculptures  and the names of institutions, are doing well.  In the South, statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis are being torn down, or at least quietly removed from public places, given their defense of slavery in our Civil War. 

In the North, Teddy Roosevelt -- the San Juan Hill-assaulting hero of our mercifully brief Spanish-American War -- is being removed from its outdoor site at the Museum of Natural History in New York.  Why?  Because flanking his heroic pose on horseback are a black man and a Native American, whom he seems to dominate.  Though progressive in many ways, Teddy was an avowed racist and imperialist, two personae that don't sit well with the public today.  

Heroic Teddy, mounted, flanked by a Native American
and a black man on foot.  
LunchboxLarry

And Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian by birth, is having his name removed from the School of Public and International Affairs, and from a residential college, at Princeton, because as U.S. President he segregated the civil service, which had been racially integrated for years.  Yet he was hailed by crowds in post-World War I  Europe as a champion of peace and the League of Nations, a forerunner of the U.N.  It's no easier being an apparent hero in real life than in myth and literature.  

"Uneasy rests the head that wears a crown" (Henry IV, Part 2), and that crown can be symbolic as well as real.  Crowns have a way of slipping off or being snatched away.  The American cyclist Lance Armstrong won an unprecedented seven Tour de France races in a row (1999-2005), but in 2012 was stripped of his wins when accused of having taken performance-enhancing drugs.  Even I, usually uninterested in sports, became fascinated by his exploits ... for a while.  His very name conveyed heroic power.  I was well aware of the Tour de France, for when hitchhiking in France in the summer of 1952 I was overtaken by it.  Hitchhiking became impossible, so I sat at the side of the road and watched the cyclists whiz by.  But when, years later, Armstrong was dethroned, I conceived a skepticism about all athletic triumphs that is with me to this day.

Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France, 2009.
Pills or no pills, the guy displayed heroic effort.
McSmit

Even George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, long revered among the Founding Fathers, are somewhat suspect, having been slave owners.  Will they too be dethroned?  I doubt it.  Rename the city of Washington, D.C.?  Unthinkable.  And the Jefferson Memorial in that city?  Unlikely.  One has to compromise at times.  We need heroes, can't do away with them all.

So much for heroes.  But how about comedy?  What are we to do with Molière's Monsieur Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme?   His deluded attempt to imitate the gens de qualité makes him light, fluffy, and laughable -- the very opposite of heroic.  So it is with most of Molière's characters, so blindly and foolishly out of step with the reality of their times.  So finally I propose

                                    The Fool Exposed

The hero is not a fool; if he were, we couldn't cheer her on or lament his sad end.  The fool so goes against reality that we laugh; satire is, by definition, laughter that rebukes.  But there are exceptions -- above all, Tartuffe, one of Molière's most brilliant creations, a cunning hypocrite who is anything but laughable.  It is his dupes, Orgon and his mother Madame Pernelle, good pious Christians, who are made to look foolish, if not quite laughable, and that got Molière in trouble.  (He had difficulties in getting the play produced for the public.)

Shakespeare's Falstaff, a superb comic character, is not a fool to be laughed at.  He is old, lustful, gluttonous, and a hearty drinker, but his boundless appetite for life enlists our sympathy.  We laugh with him, not at him.  If we must classify him, he is a hero, even if a coward on the battlefield.  He loves life too much to be heroic.

And Cervantes' Don Quijote, is he a hero, or a fool to be exposed?   Maybe a bit of both.  I would have to have another look at the work to be certain.  But great comic characters are often hard to classify, which speaks well for the authors who created them.  We humans are complicated, riddled with ambiguities.  Which makes us interesting.  Some of us, at least.

Coming soon: Apothecaries: cocaine, arsenic, opium, and devil's berries, and all of it just for you.

©   2020   Clifford Browder

469. The Five Basic Stories of All Time

BROWDERBOOKS

My nonfiction title New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, has been reviewed by Publishers Weekly.  Since it is a self-published work, this is almost unheard of.  And a good review at that, even if they dropped a word from the title.

It has also been reviewed favorably by a Hindi blogger whose English is less than perfect.  But that review is welcome, too, since there is a market for English-language books in both India and Japan.  I count on IngramSpark to make the book available abroad, and on Amazon to sell it in the U.S.  That's how it works, if you self-publish.

For this and all my books, go here.



                 THE  FIVE  BASIC 
            STORIES  OF  ALL  TIME

The idea came to me long ago, when I read somewhere that there are only five basic story types, repeated endlessly with variations,  and that one of these is The Journey.  Well, why not?  One immediately thinks of Homer's Odyssey and Odysseus of Many Wiles (as Homer describes him), who spent ten years voyaging in the Mediterranean in an effort to return to his home, Ithaca, and his wife, Penelope.  And Virgil's Aeneid, where Aeneas, fleeing the destruction of Troy, heeds the gods' inspiring him to go to distant Italy and found the race that will create the city of Rome, destined to rule the world -- at least, the known Western world.  

Aeneas in a storm.  A Dutch engraving of 1737.  Dido / Britannia on the right; Neptune with his trident in the sea; overhead, three boys representing the winds: one blows, one kicks a hat, and the less said about the middle one, the better.

      Odysseus's journey is a personal one, spiced up with encounters with the witch Circe and the seductive nymph Calypso, with whom he lingers on the island of Ogygia for many years.  Aeneas's journey, on the other hand, is a mission willed by the gods (some of them) and opposed by others (especially the wrathy Juno) with the fate of the Western world at stake.  And if Calypso diverts Odysseus from his homeward journey, Dido, queen of Carthage (Rome's future antagonist) likewise diverts Aeneas, though only briefly; abandoned by him, she dies on a funeral pyre whose smoke Aeneas sees from a distance, uncomprehending, as he heads for Italy.  These journeys were not easy, and someone always pays a price.

Odysseus, strapped to the mast, hears the song of the Sirens,
which entices seafaring males to their destruction.  Their ears plugged,
his men row on, ignoring his deluded pleas to be set free.  He is 
determined to be the only man to hear the Sirens' song and survive.
From a fifth-century BCE Greek vase.

      Journeys less epic are related in Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), a Beatnik classic, and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939), which takes the Joads family from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to the promised paradise of California, which turns out to be less than God's country.  Of Kerouac's story, I chiefly remember he and his friends reveling noisily in a Mexican whore house, to the amusement of the locals.  Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (original French edition, 1872), which I know from the memorable movie of 1956, is another example, and some would add Huckleberry Finn's trip down the Mississippi.  And come to think of it, let's add Melville's Moby Dick, relating Ahab's frenzied and doom-destined pursuit of the monstrous white whale.  The Journey can be a mission, an escape, a diversion, a search for God's country, or a pilgrimage.  And it can end joyously, sadly, or disastrously, thereby offering a lesson of some kind to the reader.

The famous balcony scene.
An 1867 lithograph for Gounod's opera.

      But the most obvious basic story, one that surely comes to everyone's mind, is Boy Meets Girl, with its necessary modern variations of Boy Meets Boy / Man, and Girl Meets Girl / Woman.  Of these there are many examples, prominent among them Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, and even Midsummer Night's Dream, since it includes the troubled relationship of Oberon and Titania.  The Brits have also given us Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, the latter so melodramatic that it makes her sister Charlotte's eminent work look tame.  Other examples: Goethe's Werther and Colette's Chéri and La Fin de Chéri, reminding us that these love stories don't always end happily; both Werther and Chéri commit suicide.

The lovesick Werther.  Alas, the lady is
 a married mother and faithful to her husband.
An Italian painting, no date, inspired by Goethe's novel.

     Oddly enough, I can't think of any American play or novel to add to the collection.  Surely there are some.  Why do they escape me?  Well, here's one: my historical novel The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), a prime example of Boy Meets Man.  But honestly, I didn't plan this so as to promote a novel of my own.  (Yes, I hear the cynical titters and almost discern the knowing winks.  But honestly...)

      So much for two of the five types of stories.  I'll add the rest in my next post.  Can you guess what they might be?

Coming soon: Oedipus and Siegfried, Hedda Gabler and Lance Armstrong, Joan of Arc and the women of America.  Not to mention Falstaff, Teddy Roosevelt, Achilles, and Tartuffe.

©  2020 Clifford Browder