Marginalisation and utopia in paul auster, jim jarmusch and tom waits (routledge research in america
Marginalisation and Utopia in Paul
Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits (Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture) 1st Edition Tedde
Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://textbookfull.com/product/marginalisation-and-utopia-in-paul-auster-jim-jarmusc h-and-tom-waits-routledge-research-in-american-literature-and-culture-1st-edition-ted de/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant download maybe you interests ...
Reconfiguring Human Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture Perspectives on the Non Human in Literature and Culture 1st Edition Sanna Karkulehto (Editor)
This book explores how three contemporary American artists through the mediums of film, literature and popular music have contributed to the tradition of American progressivism, and provides an invaluable companion to the understanding of complex issues such as inequality and social and economic decline that are apparent in America today.
Connecting the works of these artists through a fictional country – the ‘Other America’ – the book shows how they have refuted middle-class values and goals of success, money and social affirmation to unveil the less celebrated, dark side of contemporary America, which, despite the troubles currently faced, never loses hope for a better future. This utopic vision in the face of adversity is explored through the plots, characters and mise-enscène of Auster and Jarmusch’s work and Waits’s lyrics and sound. This vision challenges the dominant narratives of America as the land of opportunity and values democracy, civic engagement, communitarianism and egalitarianism.
Offering an important new perspective to literature on contemporary American culture, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of American studies, film studies, popular music, postmodern literature, cultural studies and sociology.
Adriano A. Tedde holds a PhD in American Studies from Griffith University, Australia (2019). His research interests are in US popular culture, US twentieth-century intellectual history and the history of neoliberalism. His articles have appeared in Literature Compass, Comparative American Studies and Riffs Journal.
Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture
Trauma and Fictions of the ‘War on Terror' Disrupting Memory
Sarah O’Brien
Global Ambiguity in Nineteenth-Century American Gothic A Study in Form, History, and Culture
Wanlin Li
Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature Voices Gone Viral
Joelle Mann
Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife A Step Closer to Heaven
Edited by Jennifer McFarlane-Harris and Emily Hamilton-Honey
Alzheimer’s Disease in Contemporary U.S. Fiction Memory Lost
Cristina Garrigós
Pragmatism and Poetic Agency
The Persistence of Humanism
Ulf Schulenberg
Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place
Alice Sundman
Marginalisation and Utopia in Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits
The Other America
Adriano A. Tedde
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-American-Literature-andCulture/book-series/RRAL
Marginalisation and Utopia in Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits
The Other America
Adriano A. Tedde
First published 2022 by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge
The right of Adriano A. Tedde to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-03-211714-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-03-211715-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-00-322117-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221173
Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK
To Vittorino
4 Surviving in the Other America: hope and the comfort of humanity 76
Hopefulness in a hopeless world 80
Something kind about mankind 85
Dream away 90
PART THREE The democratic hero
5 The needs of the body: depictions of street life, wasteland and downward mobility amid the culture of wealth 101 Nobody was born a bum 105
Those who can care 112
6 The needs of the soul: failure and adoption of simplicity amid the culture of success 120 A fully experienced life 124
As little as humanly possible: rediscovering Thoreau 132
FOUR
7 The neoliberal age: facing crisis and decline from Ronald to Donald
Ugliness is the truth 146
The sand’s at the bottom of the hourglass 151 Bad coffee and debris 155 The mutilated country 160
8 Art as resistance: a utopian alternative in the age of consumerism, greed and selfishness 167 Broken things 170
Pre-fab doghouses, commercials and the arbitrary nature of reality 173
A sensible alternative: a counterculture of the 1980s? 179
Acknowledgements
This book is the result of four years of doctoral research under the supervision of Amanda Howell, Christine Feldman-Barrett and David Baker at Griffith University.
My sincere thanks go to Casey Nelson Blake and Christopher Florio of Columbia University for their guidance, respectively, into the intellectual history of twentieth-century United States and the history of US poverty.
I thank Luc Sante for his precious comments on my project upon my arrival in the United States, and Lyndsi Barnes and Mary Catherine Kinniburgh of the New York Public Library for their help, patience and courtesy during my archival research through Paul Auster’s manuscripts at the Berg Collection.
I am grateful to the staff at the American Studies Centre of Rome, where I found my first reading room for this project. I would also like to thank the staff of the Biblioteca Comunale “Rafael Sari” of Alghero, where I concluded this work.
My gratitude goes to my mother and my siblings, Anna, Jolanda, Luca, and Alessandra for always believing in me, never judging my choices. I would like to mention the following friends and colleagues who supported me in many different ways along this journey: Grazie Miccichè, Luigi Tomba, Manuel Santoro, Stefano Barone, Serafino Murri, Steven Freeland, Emanuele Marchisio, Nicola Comi, Giuseppe Cirillo, Pier Forlano, Simone Desmarchelier.
I wish to thank Lucy Batrouney, Lucy McClune, Sarah Pickles and Georgia Oman at Routledge for their invaluable assistance in the making of this book. Last but not least, my love and gratitude are for Emily – and our beautiful daughters, Gloria and Maria – without whom I would have never done this.
Introduction
Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits have always talked to me with one voice. It was a friendly voice, one that I could understand and spoke of things that were close to my own consciousness. Through them, I learned that America is not the Promised Land depicted in mainstream culture. It is also a country of marginalised outcasts, impoverishment, wasteland and disillusionment. There is one storyline that crosses the books, movies and songs of these authors; it depicts an alternative America. It is a story of Americans who, not adhering to dominant middle-class values, escape the marketplace logics, live on society’s margins and appear in the eyes of the majority as failures, or losers. The present book focuses on this alternative narrative that I call the “Other America.”
Paul Auster (b. 1947) is a renowned writer, whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Jim Jarmusch (b. 1953) is an acclaimed filmmaker and an exponent of so-called independent cinema. Tom Waits (b. 1949) is a singer-songwriter whose popularity has grown steadily worldwide since his debut in 1973. These three contemporaries have enjoyed cult status among audiences and critics alike since the 1980s, when their artistic personalities fully blossomed. They have produced a remarkable body of work: thirty-two books for Auster inclusive of novels, memoirs, and screenplays; thirteen feature films, two documentaries and a few short films for Jarmusch; twenty-one albums for Waits. These works embed a voice of dissent against the opulent society that neglects to address the necessities of the poor and the weak. It is a voice that, notwithstanding its criticism of America, belongs to the fabric of American culture. It originates from a consciousness of the country’s flaws that has accompanied many thinkers since the early nineteenth century. This study looks at the works of Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits as ideal companions to the recent history of the United States. More specifically, it shows how their alternative, imagined America understands, explains, and confronts the problems of real America. These three objectives underlie the structure of this work. While Part One offers the framework for the book’s purpose, the other parts are dedicated to each specific goal: Part Two is about the perception of America in the texts under observation; Part Three looks at how the country is depicted and explained in the texts under examination;
Part Four deals with the concept of art as resistance, and explores the confrontational nature of the works of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits.
Each part consists of two chapters. Chapter 1 defines the concept of “Other America”, the imagined country that ideally connects the oeuvres of the three authors. This fictional country is not an original creation, rather the combination of ideas and ideals of an intellectual tradition that descends from the nineteenth-century fathers of American literature. Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871) is analysed as a founding document of this tradition and adopted to explore links with literature, cinema and music that carried on its values throughout the twentieth century. This tradition can be summarised as a permanent defiance of America’s materialistic society, backed by the ideals of equality, freedom and social justice. American scholar Leo Marx called this “the doctrine of ‘doubleness’,” taking inspiration from a verse in “Misgivings” (1860), a poem by Herman Melville that reads: “I muse upon my country’s ills–[…] On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.”1 According to Marx, it is possible to criticise America as it is – greedy and plutocratic – never losing sight of America as it ought to be – egalitarian and democratic. Chapter 2 presents a short biography of each author and a survey of the coinciding topics, characters, aesthetics and ethics in their works.
Chapter 3 begins the second part. It examines the extensive use made in the works of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits of a quintessential American narrative trope: the road. A look into the road books, road movies and road songs of these authors reveals how the ideologies of the “American Dream” and the “Manifest Destiny” are at odds with their Other America. However, the revisitation of American symbols offered through the road narrative recovers notions of freedom that belonged to an old left-libertarianism and delivers a renewed version of the myth of America as the land of the “new man.” The understanding of contemporary America delivered in the fiction of the Other America continues in Chapter 4 with the recurrence of another fundamental US narrative element: hope. Hope erodes slowly from the fabric of the nation, but it remains, unexpectedly, a central feature in stories of marginalised and dismal realities. It takes the form of human warmth, nearness and simple living, which are capable of providing even the most unfortunate characters with a reason to believe in a better future.
Chapters 5 and 6 address two important recurring topics: poverty and failure. Rejected and despised as un-American, these issues are nonetheless omnipresent in the American experience. They co-exist with the affluent and more visible society as integral categories of everyday life, anytime, anywhere. They are the mirror image of a materialistic culture that imposes wealth accumulation and social status as life’s ultimate triumphs. Poverty and failure offer a window on the bleak reality of contemporary America and raise questions about the true goals of the world’s richest economy. Chapter 5, in particular, challenges the idea that the poor are caught in a “culture of poverty” and offers a description of poverty as the outcome of a “culture of wealth” that
dominates those components of society blindly devoted to the imperative of money-making. Chapter 6, on the other hand, describing some of the unambitious losers of the Other America as democratic heroes, assumes that a culture of success generates unreasonable and superfluous expectations that inevitably lead to failure.
The fourth and last part focuses on the countercultural value of the works of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits. Chapter 7 concentrates on the references to a state of continuous crisis that have always appeared in the background of these works. Seen as a widespread malady that afflicts humans, nature and inanimate things, this crisis is mostly imputable to a ruling class that is transforming democracy into an oligarchy. The works of the Other America have routinely depicted the first victims of a decaying system whose numbers, through the years, have grown to include members of the middle class. It is a picture of a “mutilated country” that has failed many of its young citizens, imposing neoliberal dogmas of economic rigour and efficiency, which have caused the erosion of social safety nets. Chapter 8 closes the book examining the Other America’s rejection of consumer culture. With the supremacy of neoliberal free-market ideologies, a rampant consumerism has turned citizens into customers who are dedicated to the pursuit of individual gratification more than communal living. The latter survives against the odds in the stories of characters who seek alternative ways of living. This is the core narrative of a counterculture that elects simplicity over wealth, and universal values over individualistic preferences, and resuscitates utopian instincts in times when utopian thought is dismissed as unnecessary fantasy. This last consideration links Auster, Jarmusch and Waits back to the American resistance tradition begun with Whitman.
The argument of the book draws on two main texts: Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas and Richard Rorty’s Achieving the Country (1997). Both the great poet and the philosopher wrote of an ideal America, inhabited by a democratic society of women and men inspired by fraternity, solidarity, equality and respect. They both knew that their ideal country was not accomplished and denounced the failings of the world they lived in, a century apart from each other. In between these two fundamental books, I use several other cultural and scholarly references to insist on the ability of different authors to criticise their real country while maintaining a utopian ideal for a nation yet to come. The art of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits replicates such possibility, depicting a marginalised Other America and projecting utopian desires for a society based on love and togetherness. To mention some of the main references in this book, I employ Leslie Fiedler’s literary studies to observe the Road mythology (Chapter 3); James Truslow Adams and Herbert Croly’s histories of the United States to ponder over the meaning of the American Dream (Chapters 3 and 4); Michael Harrington’s seminal studies on poverty (Chapter 5); Gavin Jones and Scott Sandage’s works on failure (Chapter 6); John Kenneth Galbraith’s economic theories (Chapters 7 and 8).
Notwithstanding its evident focus on specific study areas – literature, film and popular music – my wish is to place this book within the field of American Studies. I have been conducting my research following the classic American Studies methodology of the so-called “Myth and Symbol” school of Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx and Alan Trachtenberg. For these scholars, American Studies is the field of inquiry into the intellectual and cultural history of the United States with a “predominantly literary orientation.”2 As my purpose is to trace Auster, Jarmusch and Waits back to an American progressive tradition, I wanted to rediscover the fundamentals of a discipline that originated in an age of US progressivism as the result of an all-American debate in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Therefore, I approached my American subject through an American theoretical framework that owes much to a tradition of civic engagement, democracy and egalitarianism. In particular, as specified in different parts of the book, my intent is to reconnect the three artists to a traditional social critique and thought that finds its roots first in Whitman and Thoreau, then in the progressivism of the New Deal and finally in the neo-pragmatism of Richard Rorty and his so-called “social utopia.” This theoretical approach allowed me to bring such artists as Auster, Jarmusch and Waits – often perceived as “Europhiles” – into the context of American progressive thinking. The main goal of my methodology is to make sense of a country through popular culture texts. In order to do so, my reading of both Auster and Jarmusch concentrates mostly on plots and characters, with sporadic attention to prose and mise-en-scène. For Tom Waits, the analysis concentrates evenly on lyrics and sound, giving the latter equal importance as a carrier of a socio-political message. Occasionally, I take Waits’s work as a film actor and a writer into account as well. The examination of the three authors’ works is conducted simultaneously in each chapter to allow these texts to speak to one another across different art forms, and draw parallels and connections when possible.
Marginalisation and Utopia is the first comparison of the oeuvre of Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits. This comparison insists on the strong American identities of authors who are often praised for the deep European sensibility that distinguishes their works.3 The proximity to European sensibilities is also confirmed by the imbalance in the commercial success enjoyed by these works on the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the Old Continent never failing to provide more enthusiasm that the US with every new release. Perhaps one explanation of these three men’s lack of mainstream success or popularity at home is in their rejection of the ideology of American exceptionalism. The myth of the land of plenty, the idea that the USA is a unique place of freedom that the rest of the world envies and wants to imitate is widely accepted and deeply entrenched in the US. The stories of the Other America of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits expose a truth that is all but desirable. There is little to envy or emulate in the marginalisation, poverty and
5 pillaged landscape of the Other America. Taken as a whole, these images of America generate a refrain on actual poverty and decline that never fails to emerge in every work of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits. This is the social realism in their work that this book wants to emphasise, finding it behind the artists’ often romanticised rendition of human life. The aim of this study is then to participate in the scholarship of living authors, examining their contribution to a better understanding of contemporary America and to the creation of a new countercultural critical lens through fiction and art. Read in the light of an American resistance tradition, the texts analysed in this book acquire significance as testaments to the failings of American mainstream society and as a source for the rediscovery of the better parts of a forgotten, other America. Despite their harsh assessment of American life, Auster, Jarmusch and Waits indeed adopt and endorse traditional American myths in their narratives. The comparison of these three American contemporaries might suggest other possible questions that this study will not address. For example, the book does not explore the contribution that these men have received in the making of their artworks from their life partners, who are nonetheless quoted in these pages. Another aspect that is left out of this is that of creative industry and audience dynamics – i.e. the way these works are produced, distributed and consumed – and the dilemma posed by a criticism of the marketplace from artworks that are indeed commodities accessible through the market system. Last, an issue that emerged at every public presentation of this project is the apparent lack of diversity in my choice of authors. I have been asked why I am comparing works of three white middle-class men to find an alternative America. My answer to that has always been that the three authors I chose speak to me with one voice from an America that elects solidarity and equality as its main values. Their privileged background did not prevent them from forming a criticism of American society “from within” that very society. This is evident in the choice of concentrating on marginalisation in America. They describe a vast humanity array made of men, women and children of all classes and ethnicities, who endure hardship in the United States. Marginalisation emerges from these works as an intrinsic problem of the American experience that these characters share, notwithstanding their differences, becoming what Mark Lilla calls a “universal democratic we on which solidarity can be built.”4 From the point of view of the reader, little does it matter if people like me, middle-class readers who fantasise about heroic alternative living, form the greater part of their audience. I am convinced that the works of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits stand out as artworks that anyone can engage with in his/her own terms in finding a universal as well as a personal meaning that goes beyond categories of class, gender, race and religion and the relationship between author and reader. Their unabashed portrayals of marginal life in the world’s most powerful nation, compensated by a never-ending hope for a better tomorrow, confer an inspirational value to these works, demonstrating the power of artworks in revealing alternative ways of living.
Notes
1 Leo Marx, “Believing in America. An Intellectual Project and a National Ideal,” Boston Review 28, no. 6 (2003): 31.
2 Alan Trachtenberg, “Myth and Symbol,” The Massachusetts Review 25, no. 4 (1984): 667.
3 On European influences, Jarmusch affirmed: “I feel very aligned with directors like Claire Denis in France and Aki Kaurismäki and Emir Kusturica […]. I feel close to these filmmakers, whom I consider amateurs in the most complimentary way.” Scott Tobias, “Jim Jarmusch,” AVClub online magazine, 19 May 2004, www. avclub.com/articles/jim-jarmusch,13869/ (accessed 25/09/2021). Auster, who speaks fluent French, in his early writings composed essays on Franz Kafka, Jaques Dupin, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Carl Rakosi. Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger (New York: Sun & Moon Press, 1992). Tom Waits, whose music and theatrical performances have drawn inspiration from Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht, published the album The Black Rider in 1993, based on a German traditional tale that inspired an opera of Carl Maria von Weber.
4 Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal. After Identity Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 137.
Part One
The Other America
1 The democratic dream
A traditional social critique in America
Tom Waits received his first music award in 1986 at a songwriter festival called “Premio Tenco,” held in Sanremo, Italy. The official prize motive read: “To Tom Waits for giving voice and form of song to a romantic America, poor and marginalised […] alcoholic and ragged, made of wanderers and losers, poetically deluded that life, like in a Frank Capra movie, is always wonderful.”1 Waits’s performance at the festival was televised (late at night) under the title “Tom Waits, the Other America” (Tom Waits, l’altra America).2 An enthusiastic review of the concert appeared the day after in the national press explaining that the singer’s Other America was what “the optimism of the Reagan era hides, removes, completely ignores.”3 Waits was greeted as the balladeer of a forgotten reality that did not belong to the mainstream image his country projected abroad.
The expression “Other America” has been used on different occasions to portray aspects of the United States of America that somehow contradict a general idea of America as a powerful, confident, and wealthy nation.4 In the following study this expression will describe an America that emerges not only from the songs of Tom Waits, but also from the films of Jim Jarmusch and the novels of Paul Auster. Exploring thematic connections between these artists and with American thinkers of the past, this book will investigate how texts of popular culture allow an understanding of the social and political reality of a country. Auster, Jarmusch and Waits are three renowned American artists, born between the end of the 1940s and the early 1950s, in different regions of the United States. They gained international acclaim in the 1980s, when, all living in New York, they produced a series of works that defined their artistic personalities. Auster published The Invention of Solitude (1982) and The New York Trilogy (1987), books that have left a lasting impression on his subsequent literature; Jarmusch filmed Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984), which contained all the central elements he would later develop with his bigger productions; Waits, who already was a well-established recording artist, released Swordfishtrombones (1983) and Rain Dogs (1985), the albums that radically transformed his music into one of the most distinctive productions of American song-writing. Growing up in the post-war baby-boom era, these three men witnessed America at its
economic and political peak in their childhood and adolescence during the 1950s and 1960s. Raised in the ease of white middle-class families, at some point in their youth they all understood that they were not going to follow a path made of certitudes and economic security through a steady job and observance of marketplace rules. They have instead dedicated their lives to artistic creativity, becoming storytellers of a marginal America, its people and its unconventional lives. Despite being products of distinct career paths, the works of these three men have pictured America with striking similarities, which will be examined in the ensuing chapters. This fictional Other America of the works of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits finds its deep roots in a certain stream of American culture that belongs to those who express discontent and disapproval of their country while upholding the democratic ideals of social justice and equality upon which the country was founded. The Other America contains an idea of America that is alternative to that of a perennial victory narrative. It looks at society from the bottom up, celebrates the common man and does not hide its failures.
To provide a visual analogy, if this America were to be exemplified by a human being, it would have the face of cult anti-star and character actor Harry Dean Stanton, the personification of the eternal struggling outsider.5 After a long series of small roles, Stanton came into prominence in his late fifties with the leading roles in Paris, Texas (1984, dir. Wim Wenders) and Repo Man (1984, dir. Alex Cox). His final, semi-autobiographical film Lucky (2017, dir. John Carroll Lynch) was routinely compared to Jim Jarmusch’s cinema.6 The character played by Stanton, a solitary stubborn old man, whose life revolves around a repeated daily routine, could easily be one of Paul Auster’s “wounded men” out of novels like Oracle Night (2003), Travels in the Scriptorium (2006) or Man In The Dark (2008). In Lucky, Stanton also performs an a-cappella rendition of a classic Mexican popular song, “Volver, Volver,” which reminds much of the immediacy and simplicity of some of Tom Waits’s works.
The Other America imagined through different media by Auster, Jarmusch and Waits offered a response to the dominant worldview of the Reaganite 1980s. This literary America, however, engages with a much longer tradition of American artistic production and political thought. The fundamental text to catch the spirit of the Other America is the essay Democratic Vistas (1871) written by Walt Whitman, which is a literary precursor of an alternative idea of America. The poet was hopeful that his country could form a true democracy, fulfilling the task of modern history to put into practice the “long deffer’d […] theory of development and perfection by voluntary standards, and self-reliance.”7 Notwithstanding his vision for a glorious future, Whitman had no delusion that this historical task had not yet been accomplished with the first century of the Republican experience and that indeed the New World was up until that point in time “an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results.”8 In order to accomplish its democratic destiny, the essay insisted, America had to solve
The democratic dream 11 three cardinal matters: limit its greed, bring its people together, and develop an autochthonous literature. These main issues advanced by Whitman – criticism of American materialism, tribute to common people and production of original ideas and culture – persist as the foundational points of the country depicted in the fiction of the three artists under examination in this study.
American avarice
Against the greediness that he saw around him, Whitman developed his harshest critique of America. He detected a “hollowness at heart,” corruption and hypocrisy in American society:
In business (this all-devouring modern word, business), the sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician’s serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field.9
Whereas the author declared that he was not against the material success of his country and actually believed that accumulation of wealth was important for “amelioration and progress,” the appetite for money was America’s greatest soul corruption.10 A blinding desire for riches is the main obstacle to the development of a spiritual dimension; and in the worst cases, it is the source of great suffering. Only fourteen years before the publication of Democratic Vistas, another important intellectual of the nineteenth century, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, pronounced these words in a public address on slavery:
[T]wenty thousand lives are annually sacrificed on the plantations of the South. Such a sight should send a thrill of horror through the nerves of civilization and impel the heart of humanity to lofty deeds. So it might, if men had not found out a fearful alchemy by which this blood can be transformed into gold. Instead of listening to the cry of agony, they listen to the ring of dollars and stoop down to pick up the coin.11
Accumulation of material fortunes has the power to deprive humanity of a basic respect for human life. A century later, Richard Wright, tracing the character of African-American people, reminded how the traffic and trade of humans was a perfectly accepted activity in the eighteenth century for the sole reason that it generated revenues like no other business had ever done before. Slave traders were the “captains of industry” and “tycoons of finance” of a pre-industrialised world and the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes banners on the masts of soldiers symbolised the protection of a free trade in human bodies.12
A clash between norms and goals of economic growth and needs of spiritual and emotive spheres is present in the Other America created in the artworks of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits. Their stories, films, and music
The Other America are decidedly at odds with the “greed is good” ethic of the Reagan era, as prospects of material gain usually corrupt the characters’ inner serenity. A point in common between their works and the ideas of Whitman is that accumulation of wealth is not only the cause of a desensitised conscience in front of people’s suffering; it also provides a manipulation of personal aspirations of free individuals. If on the one hand, the chase for great gains can harm humans, slavery being one extreme example of such harm, on the other, the diffuse necessity of money-making can impose social conformity to a whole nation. Unquestioned dogmas of economic growth and expansion turn masses into alienated workers who never wonder whether a life spent in accumulating money is a worthy endeavour. Auster, Jarmusch and Waits are not the first American artists to reflect on such issues. In 1922 Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis immortalised this type of individual with his novel Babbitt, which appeared at the same time as the establishing of consumer culture in America, offering a portrayal of the average American man. The title of the book became a neologism, as a synonym for the middle-class conformist consumerist, he who “without hesitation […] considers it God’s purpose that man should work, increase his income, and enjoy modern improvements.”13 This character became in turn the “square” of 1940s and 1950s jazz and Beat culture. The figure of the square is that of a man who has limited ability to appreciate the cultural variety around him. Musicologist Phil Ford defines the square as a man who “has absorbed the American ethic of conformity, authority, and consumerism so thoroughly that he can no longer function without being told what to do, what to like, and what to believe.”14 Bob Dylan popularised this figure with his Mr. Jones, the central character of “Ballad of a Thin Man” (1965), whose restricted consciousness does not allow him to understand the world around him. Possibly a worthy member of society, Mr. Jones is oblivious to the weirdness of the world outside his habits and customs,15 while the amused singer repeats at the end of every verse that something is happening but he doesn’t get it, does he?16 The dulled perceptions of the Mr. Joneses of America and the numbing of their consciousness and conscience derive from the materialism that bothered Whitman. In the 1850s Whitman and Henry David Thoreau17 both believed that limiting this materialism is a necessary measure to avoid the weakening and dilution of a national culture into conformity. Restraining greed is also indispensable to stop the division of society between free buyers – masters of the past, and the wealthy of the present – and powerless subjects – slaves of the past, and the poor of the present. For Whitman, control over materialistic impulsions was an essential step to release the democratic potential of a nation in a subject called the “People.”
Absolute soul
Only by controlling its thirst for wealth, America could direct attention to its spiritual dimension and proceed to the realisation of an anti-feudal state and
The democratic dream 13 society founded on the principle of egalitarianism. Walt Whitman believed in the presence of an “absolute soul” that makes all human beings equal to one another. Democracy for the author is the recognition of this fundamental equality and the practice of one great word: “Solidarity”. After all,
of all dangers to a nation, […] there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn – they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.18
Hence, equality “is for Whitman the self-evident truth of democracy.”19 The purpose of the democratic rule is therefore to bring everyone together “on one broad, primary, universal, common platform.”20 Democratic Vistas always returns to the centrality of the common man: “the average man of the land at last only is important.”21 Democracy places him at the centre of society. Anticipating by half a century John Dewey’s theories on the links between democracy and education,22 Whitman believed that a truly democratic society, based on universal participation, could only exist with a solid training of all citizens, both women and men.23 Properly trained and free, the common man is capable of becoming a law that assures control and safety for the self and the multitude. For Whitman, individual and mass were contradictory terms that he wanted to reconcile with the hope that from this reconciliation a third entity would rise, a democratic nation, the People. He believed that it was possible for individualism to merge with patriotism to the point that, according to scholar Francis Matthiessen, he anticipated that “the crucial task for the American future was reconciliation of the contradictory needs for full personal development and for ‘one’s obligations to State and Nation’, to ‘the paramount aggregate.’ ”24 The poet embraced the Romanticism of the nineteenth century, believing that in the People resides a true patriotic spirit and love for a common project, an emblem and a flag, an ideal country that was yet to come.25
A national-popular rhetoric of the people was reprised in the wake of the Great Depression, which left millions unemployed and undermined the country’s economy and morale. A culture of the people developed in the 1930s with the contributions of different art and intellectual works. The sight of common people suffering inspired the production of photographic documentaries that displayed a torn nation to the eye of the national public, among which the most famous were photographer Dorothea Lange’s pictures of internal migrants. Tributes to average and forgotten men were paid in literature and the arts.26 Hollywood director Frank Capra produced some of the decade’s most successful movies focusing almost exclusively on stories about average people.27 He would later state: “let others make films about the grand sweeps of history, I’d make mine about the bloke that pushes the broom.”28 Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” (1942) and Earl Robinson and John La Touche’s “Ballad For Americans” (1939) were two vastly popular compositions that demonstrated music’s power to celebrate
the culture of people. In a different form of musical comment, songs played by common people themselves were captured for the first time with the field recordings of musicologists John and Alan Lomax, and Charles Seeger. Travelling through rural America, they recorded the sounds of farmers, sharecroppers, prisoners, miners, and migrants, and popularised a regional music labelled as “folk” and “race” that was then unknown to mass audiences. In addition to these works of art and scholarship, intellectuals followed in the steps of Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, retracing America’s traditions and democratic aspirations in a series of studies of the national character. Among these works, it is worth mentioning William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain (1925); Constance Rourke’s American Humor (1931), John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934); and Van Wycks Brooks’s The Flowering of New England 1815–1865 (1936). A democratic humanism took over the language of class struggle. At the first American Writers’ Congress of 1935 a new language of the people was adopted. Author and literary theorist Kenneth Burke invited his colleagues to replace the word “worker” with the “people” in the rhetoric of the left.29 Hence, the notion of the people permeated the culture of the 1930s, producing “a gallery of allegorical icons of victimization, innocence, and resilience, ranging from Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘forgotten man’ to Steinbeck’s Ma Joad, from Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother to Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith.”30 The egalitarian spirit of the Roosevelt administration further encouraged such culture. The President once said: “it doesn’t help much if the fortunate half is very prosperous – the best way is for everybody to be reasonably prosperous.”31
Historian Michael Denning, who examined the rise of a “Cultural Front” in the age of the left’s Popular Front, observes how the 1930s are often remembered as decadent, vulgar, populist, sentimental and simplistic. Yet in terms of the concerns of this study, that decade forms a point of continuity between Whitman’s ideas and the popular art that it created. The aesthetics of those years are generally linked to a patriotism of the left captured by the popular tune “Ballad for Americans” with its optimistic lyrics about an idealised classless and racially harmonious country. The key objections to the culture of the Popular Front have been: “its commitment to ‘the folk idiom and the documentary aesthetic’, its social realism, its sentimental populism and narrow nationalism, its masculine brotherhood, and its fundamental conservatism.”32 During the 1950s Cold War, critics of the Popular Front often called its culture “middle-brow”, while in the 1960s the New Left equally criticised the thirties Left by calling it “the vanguard of commercial culture.”33 In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was seen as the ultimate heir of the Popular Front culture, a champion of mass cultural style conservatism. Against this criticism, Denning reclaims the historical importance and the cultural impact that the national-popular culture of the Depression years has had on American twentieth-century culture as a whole. He believes that this culture was not a sentimental plea for “a people without race or ethnicity” or for “the ‘politics of patriotism,’ resolving all conflicts in the
The democratic dream 15 harmony of ‘Americanism.’ ” Rather, it was a culture that, having its roots in American folk values, made an effort to “imagine a new culture, a new way of life, a revolution.”34 More importantly, the crucial point in the formation of the Popular Front’s culture of the people is not the romantic praise of the people as much as the awareness of their absence. The thinkers and artists of the thirties reflected “on the absence of the people: the martyrs, the losses, the betrayals, the disinherited.”35 These are the central subjects of the works explored in this book, too. These people form a nation that does not exclude the weak but aim to generate a community that embraces all humankind in a society that evolves “from ‘I’ to ‘we’.”36 Rather than projecting differences, the works of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits tend to underline common conditions of necessity of a whole community. In this way, their work echoes popular and populist works of the 1930s. This is what John Steinbeck envisioned at the end of the decade in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) with the Joad family: a utopian “universal community of all people held together with bonds of love so strong that oppression would be impossible.”37 Some fifty years later, in a very different political and social environment, the same need for bonds of love was felt and envisioned in the works of the Other America. While Steinbeck responded to a nation torn by the Great Depression, Auster, Jarmusch and Waits came to prominence in the midst of economic growth and opulence of the “greed is good” decade. Indeed, mainstream media persistently celebrated and exposed that part of society that only seemed to mind about success stories, especially those of multi-billionaire men who, in the collective imaginary, were seen as the living proof of the American Dream. The three authors belonged to a resistance against this mind-set that developed especially in the arts of the 1980s.38 Offering a meditation on the less fortunate, the “absent” people of a society, the Other America discloses the simple fact that everyday life in America is more often dominated by failure and necessity, rather than the success and avidity celebrated in mainstream narratives. The majority of people have to struggle through life, despite enunciations of basic equality and freedom for all. Their stories tell something about injustice in American history that is often overlooked by the mainstream, as Jim Cullen reminds:
The exploitative company store of the post-Civil War South; the misleading railroad company brochures luring homesteaders onto the arid plains; the unenforced Civil Rights statutes in the wake of thousands of lynchings – this is an old story in American life, and one that is far more common than the Donald Trumps, Lee Iacoccas, or Ronald Reagans the world would care to admit.39
The works of the Other America rediscover this “old story” of exploitation and injustice, readapting it to the past four decades of American history. These works’ shift of narrative concern – from success stories to failure in times of prevailing materialism – is an indication of the solidarity that Walt
Whitman spelt with a capital “S,” democracy’s great word. It is the recognition of the basic dignity and equality of all humans that the poet called the “absolute soul,” so to say, the core value of democracy. Singing the stories of common people means therefore spreading the values of democracy, which in Whitman’s Vistas is the ultimate goal of a new vibrant literature.
The imaginative soul
Whitman was sure that the country would achieve great wealth and material success. But he recognised that wealth alone is not enough to create a democracy. A spiritual dimension is necessary, too. By limiting its insatiable desire for wealth, the United States would have a chance to release the absolute soul of the people, namely, equality. The spiritual guidance to this end had to come from the nation’s “imaginative Soul” which, writes Whitman, “in these Vistas, is LITERATURE.”40 He lamented the lack of a modern national American literature that could speak to the masses. He believed that education, social standards and literature in the United States were still in the grip of old feudalism and lacked democratic character. He wrote: “America has yet morally and artistically originated nothing.”41 Whereas material riches were a certainty, proper American ethics and aesthetics were still absent. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson did before him,42 Walt Whitman longed for a truly independent national American literature, and looked forward to a new generation of democratic writers, who could relate to the multitude of Americans, generating one “great original literature” which “is surely to become the justification and reliance […] of American democracy.”43 The poet attributed a vital role to literature in the formation of popular aesthetics that could spread democratic values. Writers in the twentieth century preserved that role, contributing to the formation of democratic aesthetics; and such endeavour has also spread from literature to other fields of popular culture. While Whitman considered literature as the voice of democracy in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century popular music and cinema also rose to speak of democratic values.
A democratic vitality is evident in countless major and minor film and literature currents, groups, “waves,” movements, genres and styles. Among the works that are ascribable to “democratic literature” and “democratic cinema,” those that descend from a Whitmanesque tradition recall the poet’s ability to capture and celebrate the worthiness of the unremarkable, the uneventful. Whitman was someone capable of finding “transcendental meaning in the stuff of everyday life.”44 He took inspiration from both nature and the creations of men, their “ingenuities, streets, goods, houses, ships,” that were changing the outlook of the nation.45 He was the true American inspirational poet that Emerson was longing for: the first American who could praise the visible results of inventiveness and labour, namely, the artificiality that erupted in nineteenth-century landscape in the form of factories, railways and other modern innovations.46
Whitman’s vision of democracy in the domain of letters is reflected in works that build universal meaning out of the experience of the common man. Whereas popular Hollywood cinema seems to have absorbed and promoted an optimistic narrative of success and achievement, literature has paid greater attention to the character of the loser, and themes of exploitation, hunger and failure.47 To fulfil the goals of a democracy, literature becomes the means to give voice to unheard, downtrodden people, like the immigrant workers of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1904), the marginalised AfricanAmericans of Ralph Ellis’s Invisible Man (1952), or the repressed psychiatric patients of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). The social novel of the 1930s, from John Steinbeck to John Dos Passos, inserted in the larger movement of the “cultural front,” promoted a somewhat “American Naturalism,” for its realistic narrative and the frustration of the individual’s free will against the pressure of chance and other external elements. These are traits that characterised the French naturalism of the late nineteenth century, when writers like Émile Zola described humans as animals in a natural world: people without free will that respond only to environment or instincts. This was somehow true for the human condition in Great Depression America when workers were at the mercy of uncontrollable forces. However, American writers differed from French naturalism insofar as their stories are not hopeless. Hope never abandons the troubled characters, especially the least fortunate. The social novel’s lowest classes of unemployed workers are indeed the most hopeful against a middle class that seems to succumb under the failure of capitalism.48 The Beat culture that came with the following generation of writers produced literature in a context of widespread prosperity. As a consequence, their works concentrated on the rejection of mainstream values and materialism, and on the search for individual freedom and a new consciousness outside middle-class certainties.49 The Beats saw a forefather in Walt Whitman, respected his vision of America and shared his love for nature. However, they had to cope with an America gratified by consumerism and conformity, uninterested in the great call of history for true democracy. A sense of doom for the fulfilment of the old democratic dream replaced Whitman’s high hopes and left the Beat poets with nostalgia for “the lost America of love” as Allen Ginsberg romantically called it in his “A Supermarket in California” (1955). With this poem Ginsberg imagined meeting the old bard in the aisles of a modern supermarket, the ultimate emblem of America’s twentieth-century civilisation, wondering what happened to the America Whitman left when he passed away.50 The Other America follows in this line, conscious of the lost treasure, disenamoured with a progress focused solely on wealth and material growth, but always looking for the innate humanity that animates people beyond the constraints of mainstream materialism.
Literature’s attention to marginal America is re-enacted in a popular cinema that speaks to experiences of the everyday. The conception of modern American poetry, as something tightly connected to the tangible, was first reprised in photography as a form of artistic communication with “an
aptitude for discovering beauty in what everybody sees but neglects as too ordinary.”51 The use of a camera to immortalise trivial sights, anonymous faces and common objects unleashes a democratic energy, giving visibility to what is considered unimportant. This energy was translated from still photography into motion pictures. The trials of common people, the everyday life in a rapidly expanding industrial and capitalist society, were at the centre of some of the major box-office successes of the early Hollywood industry. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton’s slapstick comedy entertained masses, making fun of modern idiosyncrasies while directing its eyes to social problems. The sentimental cinema of the aforementioned Frank Capra played with the idea of the American Dream, openly criticising the obstacles imposed to self-realisation by a corrupt, greedy and unjust system. The values of American democracy then became prominent with propagandistic Hollywood productions during the years of World War II. In order to support the fight against totalitarianism, lone protagonists left the scene to “team-players” and groups of soldiers that symbolised the strength of a democratic society. Even while undemocratic practices (xenophobia, segregation, the “red scare”) resurfaced with the end of the conflict, Hollywood war propaganda movies remained popular with large audiences and “did perhaps have some influence upon those young Americans who […] became the Civil Rights activists and opponents of [the Vietnam War].”52 After World War II, a new social realism expressed “a set of ideas about American social life more complex than generally acknowledged,”53 depicting marginalised Americans – often played by unknown actors – in the films of such directors as Elia Kazan, Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray. Fuller, in particular, a director who could “hardly expect intellectuals to look to him for moral guidance” because of his rough, violent, and direct pictures, offered a brutal vision of American metropolitan life in his film noir, yet was able to find beauty even among the worst urban settings.54 To this day, social problems have often appeared in low budget movies (as in the case of Fuller) crafted outside the studio system by independent artists, like Jarmusch. American independent cinema has seen in recent years an “institutionalisation” that turned it into a brand desired by national and international audiences.55 Changes intervened in the film industries since the 1990s have increased the connections between major and independent film companies in America, with the latter becoming commercially more “dependent” on the former.56 New processes of distribution and marketisation of “Indie” films have boosted profits taking commercial cinema “to areas that had been previously uncharted and [making] American film come closer and closer to being ‘a democratic art.’ ”57 Perhaps the form of art that the United States is most commonly associated with, cinema has taken over the legacy of Whitman on many instances, by glorifying and visualising the democratic potential of the country and its people amid a hostile reality.
One art form that arose from an egalitarian ethos in the United States is popular music. In Democratic Vistas Whitman wrote of the democratic power of music in these terms: “music, the combiner, nothing more spiritual,
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
Think that which might lead him to believe she was untrue, and leave him to be happy yet with some other girl, who might love him as she now loved him, and as he wished to be loved.
And more keenly did these thoughts distract her mind after the—to her —fatal night of the bal masqué.
CHAPTER XVIII.
LE REDOUTE MONSTRE.
Alison found herself in a great oblong saloon, brilliantly lighted by crystal gaseliers, decorated by lofty mirrors, surrounded by a colonnade of elegant pillars and overlooked by a balustraded orchestra occupied by the fine band of the Garde Municipale. The centre of this saloon, the floor of which was carefully waxed, was specially reserved for dancers; but a platform on four sides of it, and without the lines of pillars, was occupied by promenaders, for whom there were seats and lounges.
One end was closed by the proscenium and green curtain of the Théâtre des Variétés.
The majority of the male dancers were in evening costume, though a few wore fancy dresses, and there were spider-waisted Belgian officers from the adjacent Caserne St. Georges, with loose gold epaulets, dark blue tunics, and baggy light grey pantaloons.
Many of the ladies were in fancy costume—some a little prononcé, being almost that of the Corps de Ballet, though their dresses were often trimmed with rich, old, coffee-coloured Flemish lace; but the majority wore dominoes of black satin or silk, and all had black velvet masks and thin black lace veils, or head-dresses, like the Spanish mantilla, so commonly
worn by the women in some parts of Belgium—a relic of the days of the Duke of Alva—the 'Castigator de los Flamencos.'
Many were hovering about in corners, or near certain pillars, evidently waiting to keep appointments made elsewhere with those who would recognise them—though masked to the upper lip—by a particular flower worn in the breast, by the rosettes on their white kid boots, a little patch on the chin, or so forth; and while the round dances—waltzes, polkas, and mazurka—were in progress, Alison, to whom the scene was entirely new, watched the lovers—for such she supposed they must be, and no doubt many were—and, with an interest in which her own heart shared, saw many a glad meeting, a smile, a pressure of the hand interchanged; and then by tacit consent they whirled into the gay and fast-increasing throng, while overhead the music of Straus or Chopin came pealing from the lofty orchestra.
Alison felt her little feet beating time to the music, the 'Soldatenlieder' of Herr Gung'l, 'Je t'aime' of Waldteufel, and so forth. How she longed, sealskin jacket and all, to join in the then delicious waltzes! She was very young, and life would indeed be wretched were it a blank at her years. The whole scene was a novel and brilliant one; most strange to her eyes, and, if her situation was an anxious one in Antwerp, it was not without its sad romance; but for a time, as she looked around her, she forgot even that, or was only recalled to it when Lord Cadbury addressed her.
And, meanwhile, the parvenu peer, pleased with the delicate beauty of his companion, in whose pale cheeks a little rose-leaf tint now came, with a sparkle in her usually quiet eyes, felt very vain of the handsome girl who leant on his arm, and attracted the admiration of many a passing and many a lingering man, who hovered near to admire her.
Among these were two Englishmen, Sir Jasper Dehorsey (a sporting baronet) and his friend, Mr. Tom Hawksleigh, also well-known, and not very reputably, on various racecourses. They seemed to know no one there, and were mere spectators, though doubtless amid that vast throng they might have introduced themselves to some of the fair dominoes without being severely repulsed.
Both were in full evening-dress, with loose, light dust coat worn open, and crush hat under the arm; both were gentlemanly in bearing and appearance, and their faces would have been good but for the sinister, rakish, and blasé expression of their eyes, and the sensual and sneering curve of their lips. Sir Jasper, the taller of the two by half a head, stuck his glass in his right eye, and said,
'Tom, look at that girl with the blue velvet hat; she is English—I'll swear she is.'
'And a regular beauty, by Jove!'
'Doocid curious place for her to be, this. She is all right, I suppose; what do you think?'
'I think it doubtful—hails from the latitude of Regent Street, I should say,' replied the other, who thought evil of everyone and everything.
'Who is that moyen-âge individual with the white horse-shoe shaped moustache and coarse ears, who seems to regard her with such a proprietary air?'
'By Jove, it is old Cadbury!' exclaimed Mr. Hawksleigh.
'Cadbury—it is!' added the baronet; 'the little party can't be particular to a shade if she is with him. She'll not set much store on the whole duty of woman.'
'What is that?' asked Hawksleigh.
'Why, to get married—to get well married, if possible, but anyhow, to get married on any terms.'
'He is a lord; but a silk purse can't be made out of a sow's ear.'
'I am too poor a devil just now to sneer at his money or position, or, by Jove, I would do so at both. His father was "something" in the city, whatever that means. Let us take the girl from him.'
'All right—I am your man,' exclaimed Hawksleigh.
'He doesn't seem to have even an old woman to play propriety or act chaperon.'
'When did he ever study Mrs. Grundy? But to see such a girl as this with him reminds me of Beauty and the Beast.'
'Her wisdom is no doubt in her dressing-case, and her modesty—well, ah—in her pocket, I suppose. Well, here goes——'
'Stop, don't be too hasty. Ah! the old rip, he doesn't care about acting lotus-eater at Cadbury Court, and so has come abroad with "somebody's luggage." Who can the little girl be?'
'Not much, when she is with him, as I said before,' responded the blasé baronet. 'We'll soon find out. Like the conspirators in a burlesque, who turn up the collars of their coats, we must say, "Let us dissemble!"'
What their precise plans were they perhaps scarcely knew, but half-past ten was announced as the time when, as the programme had it, the curtain was to rise on the Rideau de Séparation de la Scène, et commencement de la Kermesse, when the stage appeared with a landscape and busy groups in peasant costume, showing the whole business of a Flemish fair; the dancing ceased, and an immediate rush towards the proscenium took place from all parts of the saloon, the refreshment-rooms, and adjacent passages.
The Belgians are not famous for their politeness, and many of those present on this occasion were of the bourgeois class; thus when the curtain rose there was instantly a rough, unceremonious, and furious crowding towards the proscenium, and in the crush the hand of Alison was torn from the arm of Cadbury, and they were hopelessly separated by a crowd of more than a thousand persons, tightly wedged together.
So far were they apart that he totally failed to see anything of her or where she was, and nearly an hour elapsed before the follies of the Kermesse were over, and a resumption of the dancing dispersed the crowd about the greater space of the saloon. Immediately on this taking place,
Cadbury began a search on every hand, amid all the groups and in all the adjacent rooms and corridors—even between the wings of the now open stage—for Alison, but she was nowhere to be seen.
He questioned the waiters, the door-keeper, and other officials, but none had seen any lady, who answered to the description given, leave the hall.
Midnight was past now, and as the bal masqué would last till four in the morning hundreds of more ticket-holders came crowding in, and Cadbury became at last convinced—and with no small alarm—that Alison must have quitted the place, and missing him, or indifferent as to what he might think, had got a voiture and driven home to their hotel.
When he quitted the theatre and got a similar vehicle snow was falling heavily, and when he reached the Hôtel St. Antoine great was his alarm and dismay to find from the concierge and waiters that she had not returned!
Not returned—snow falling and the cathedral bell tolling one in the morning.
Her room was searched; she was evidently not there—not with her father or in any part of the house. No doubt remained of that.
With all his selfishness, Cadbury was dismayed and enraged. Where was she—with whom?
The snow was still falling, and the storm showed no sign of abatement. The vast space of the Place Verte was one sheet of white, across which the lights from the hotel windows and the street lamps cast long lines of radiance, and high in the tall spire jangled the merry carillons.
'Out in a night like this—in a foreign city, more than half the inhabitants of which speak nothing but Flemish, where can she be?' he thought. 'Why does she not make an effort to get back to the hotel?'
He drove back to the Théâtre des Variétés, where the music and the dancing were still in full progress, to repeat his inquiries in vain; when
morning dawned the snow had ceased, but there was no appearance of Alison.
'This will kill her father!' was now Cadbury's thought.
Had an accident befallen her? With earliest dawn he had messengers despatched to all the hospitals and gendarme stations, but in vain. No accident had happened, nor had anyone answering to the description of Alison been seen.
Her absence could no longer be concealed from her horrified father, who at once concluded that she must have eloped with Goring, of whose predicament and whereabouts Cadbury had kept him ignorant, so he was not ill-pleased to let him think so.
Rage at the adventurer, as he deemed Goring, acted like a spur on Sir Ranald. He left his sick couch and seemed to make a struggle to get well that he might join in the search and trace them out.
Cadbury had not been without daring ideas of luring Alison away from Sir Ranald and compromising her; but now she was he knew not where, and in the hands of a man perhaps more unscrupulous than himself!
His memory was now full of the hundred terrible stories he had read in the public prints of English girls entrapped to Belgium and never heard of again, and, though his mind was always prone to evil, he was exasperated as well as dismayed when days passed and no tidings were heard of the lost one.
It was winter in earnest now. The banks of the Scheldt were fringed by masses of ice, and ice covered all the great bassins of Antwerp, while stainless snow shrouded all the surrounding country, and the stone Madonnas at the street corners had a chill and deadly aspect, for it was weather to make hands blue and noses red, as the frost was keen and strong.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE CAFE AU PROGRES.
The two Englishmen to whom we have referred—Sir Jasper Dehorsey and Mr. Tom Hawksleigh—saw how Cadbury and Alison were for the time hopelessly separated by the pleasure-seeking crowd, and hastened at once to improve the occasion by taking advantage of the confusion and of her excessive dismay.
After a word or two of hasty instructions whispered to his friend, Sir Jasper approached Alison, and said, with a profound bow,
'They are rather sans cérémonie here, but don't be alarmed. I shall take care of you. Trust to me, and permit me,' he added, drawing her little hand over his left arm, and leading her away in a direction opposite to where he knew Cadbury was doing his utmost to get free of the crowd. 'Do not be alarmed,' he resumed, 'we shall soon restore you to your friend.'
He spoke most suavely, as though he was, what he wished her to think him—a chivalrous and gallant protector, and, sooth to say, Alison was glad to hear an English voice, and to see some one who appeared like an English gentleman, and, externally, Sir Jasper certainly was one.
'This way, please; let me draw you out of the crowd,' said he, guiding her towards one of the saloon doors.
'How rude—how rough the people are,' exclaimed Alison, with reference to the crowd that separated her from Lord Cadbury, of whom she could see nothing now, and the hubbub of the kermesse on the stage was stunning.
'Well,' said Sir Jasper, with a lazy smile, 'they are not the crème de la crème of Antwerp, nor crème of any kind; and, truth to tell, I was surprised to see you here.'
'Indeed!' exclaimed Alison, with annoyance at having been lured, as she certainly was, into a false position.
At that moment Mr. Hawksleigh, who had been in the corridor, came to say that Lord Cadbury, being unable to find the young lady, had gone to the Café or Restaurant au Progrès.
'Without me!' exclaimed Alison.
'His lordship felt faint, and awaits you there.'
'Did he say so?'
'Yes,' was the reply of the unblushing Mr. Tom Hawksleigh.
'Most strange!'
'Shall we not follow him?' urged Sir Jasper, with his blandest tone.
'I ought to go home to the Hôtel St. Antoine,' said Alison, with doubt now added to her dismay.
'You can't do that alone. The Restaurant au Progrès is close by—almost a part of the theatre—and if Lord Cadbury is unwell——'
'Then let us go instantly, please.'
He led her at once from the hall and down the staircase, up which fresh groups—men in evening dress and ladies in masks and dominoes—were crowding, all laughing and joyous, and thence into the Rue des Escrimeurs, where they crossed the street, and entered a brilliantly lighted café; but avoiding the great pillared dining or supper hall, which was fitted up with marble tables, crowded with guests (many of them masked dominoes), he led her upstairs to a private supper-room, preceded by a waiter, to whom he gave some instructions rapidly in French.
Where was Lord Cadbury, he inquired.
The waiter did not know. Among the many now in the cafè, milord might be one; but he would inquire. Meantime, what did monsieur wish for supper.
In the fair cheek of Alison the delicate colour came and went, and in her eyes there was a strange look of inquiry as she glanced from one man to the other, ignorant that in an instant there was a secret understanding between them, and that the Belgian valet de cabaret took in the whole situation at once.
'Supper—ah—à la carte—salmi of guinea fowl, Ris d'Agneau, sauce champignon, and some Moselle. Meantime, ask for his lordship.'
The waiter grinned in what Alison thought a disagreeable manner, and disappeared with his towel over his arm.
The decorations of the little room were very handsome. The hangings were of blue silk, the floor was polished oak, and the chairs were all lounges of blue velvet, but some of the statuettes on brackets and consoles were, to say the least of them, a little startling in design.
'This is a very strange place,' said Alison. 'I cannot imagine what induced Lord Cadbury to select it.'
'Have you been in this part of the world long?' asked Sir Jasper, as he divested himself of his light dust-coat.
'A few weeks—I was about to say years.'
'Poor girl! Has the time been so slow?'
'Well,' said Alison, haughtily, as she disliked his pitying tone, 'I have the old and ailing——'
'Cadbury to nurse—surely not?'
'Of course not, sir. How could you suppose that?'
'Pardon me.'
Proud as Lucifer with all her sweetness, thought Sir Jasper, as Alison bowed haughtily, but no smile spread over the regular contour of her face.
'We have met before—at least, I remember now to have had the pleasure of seeing you,' said he.
'When?'
'This very day.'
'But where?'
'At the coiffeur's in the Rue des Tanneurs. I sat beside you, and saw your hair dressed, and lovely hair it is!'
'You sat beside me?'
'Yes, and watched you.'
'Why?
'I ought to apologise for making a lady's face a study; but need I say how deeply yours interested me?'
He was bending over her chair now in perfect confidence. He thought he had her in his power, and felt
'How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds Makes ill deeds done.'
Not that he thought there was much harm in 'levanting with old Cadbury's girl;' it seemed rather a joke, in fact!
'Won't you take off your hat and sealskin before Lord Cadbury comes?' he urged, in a low voice.
'No—excuse me; and I shall not take them off after he does come.'
'Why so? Will you sup with them on?'
'Yes—or I don't want supper at all.'
'A deuced decided little party,' thought Sir Jasper, who never took his blasé eyes off her.
'Where can Lord Cadbury be?' she exclaimed, impatiently, after the waiter had gone twice in search of him in vain.
'Can't say for the life of me; are you anxious about him or yourself?'
'Myself, perhaps.'
'Oh, be assured I shall take the greatest care of you,' said Sir Jasper, noting with delight how perfect was the contour of her face, the form of her hands and ears.
'Thanks; but this situation is intolerable—he ought to be here.'
'I wonder he doesn't look better after his property.'
'What do you mean?' asked Alison, at this impudent remark. 'I am not his property.'
'Oh—a relation, perhaps.'
'Not even a relation.'
'And you came to Antwerp some weeks ago?'
'Yes.'
'From Paris?'
'No; from Southampton in his yacht.'
'In his yacht—oh, by Jove! what other ladies were of his party?' asked Sir Jasper, quizzically, while stroking his tawny moustache.
'No lady but me.'
'In—deed!'
There was profound insolence in his drawl, yet Alison never suspected it.
Sir Jasper Dehorsey now believed that he might be as impudent as he chose; but the girl's manner nevertheless bewildered him.
'Why, sir, do you stare at me so?' she asked.
'May I not look at you?'
'Not as you do,' she replied, with hauteur.
'You grudge me that pleasure?'
'I do not understand all this!' she exclaimed, as she started from her chair and felt a difficulty in restraining her tears.
'Do be seated. If Cadbury does not appear in five minutes, I shall go in search of him.'
'Or kindly get me a voiture to the Hôtel St. Antoine.'
'So it is there they hang out,' thought he. 'Do you often go to the theatre?'
'Not now.'
'Ah, you should see Antwerp when it is en fête.'
'When is that?'
'In the carnival time.' Then he continued, 'And how do you like this city by the Scheldt?'
'Not at all,' she replied, curtly.
'Indeed! You have been at the opera, of course?'
'No.'
'Or the picture galleries?'
'No.'
'What! Have you not seen the Royal Museum, the antiquities at the Steyne, and the Musée Plantin-Moretus?'
'I have seen none of those things.'
'Nor the splendid churches, and all the rest of it?'
'I have been nowhere,' replied Alison, thinking sadly of her father's sickbed.
'How this old snake has kept this lovely girl all to himself!' was the thought of Sir Jasper, in whose heart envy now mingled with exultation.
'How I should like to show you all these places, and Brussels too!' said he at length.
'I have often heard of the Musée Plantin, with its quaint old rococo furniture and antique pictures—the old-world air of the place—its stillness and gloomy seclusion,' said Alison.
'It is doocid slow. Still I should like to have the pleasure of showing it to you,' said he again, stooping over her chair, but seeking even then to throw her off her guard. 'The place itself is rather dark and gloomy with its high wainscots, oak carvings, ebony and ivory cabinets, faded tapestries, casement windows, and all the rest of it—said to be haunted by the ghosts of the funny old printers who lived there and printed the first Bible with old types which are yet there, and which it is said they come once a year at midnight to set up again, for the creak of the ancient presses is heard. But, be all that as it may, I don't know a more stunning place for a steady spoon or flirtation than the solemn old quadrangular Musée Plantin, with its suites of antique rooms, furnished with cushioned lounges, heavy curtains, and beds like tombs—like plumed hearses, or the old state-beds in Hampton
Court—beds in which the dead Plantins slept three hundred years ago. By Jove, you must let me show you all that to-morrow. But as that duffer, old Cadbury, is so doocid long, had we not better have supper without him? Shall I order the waiter to serve it up?' he added, laying his hand upon the bell rope, as if her assent would follow of course.
'Oh, no—no,' exclaimed Alison, starting from her seat now in positive alarm at the idea of supping alone with a man whose name was unknown to her, and in whose watery, wicked eyes she was convinced there was an expression now there could be no mistaking.
'A glass of wine, then,' he urged, suavely.
'You must excuse me.'
'How shy you are! I can never imagine why any woman who is young and handsome need be shy.'
'You know Lord Cadbury, of course,' said Alison, suddenly. 'Intimately.'
'May I ask your name?'
'Captain Smith,' he replied, without a moment's hesitation. 'The world says queer things of old Cadbury.'
'What do people say?'
'Well, people, of course, say anything but their prayers. So rough things are said of Old Cad., as he is called. But never mind him; let us talk of ourselves, and don't look so uneasy. I assure you I am a perfect archangel of virtue, and have always laughed at love at first sight till—now,' he said, in a manner so pointed that it made Alison's usually pale cheek flame. 'What a deliciously fresh, unconventional, and lovely little darling you are!' he exclaimed, laying a hand upon her arm.
'Sir!'
'Hoity-toity. Come, it mustn't give itself little airs. Look at that pretty picture.
She gave it a glance. It was the production, doubtless, of some Parisian artist, and the subject made her tremble with fear and just anger.
She felt herself deeply insulted, and was now convinced that she had been ensnared. The blood of a hundred gallant Cheynes welled up in her heart, yet there was an expression of agony in her blue-grey eyes and on her blanched and quivering lips.
At that moment the room door opened, and the waiter appeared with the supper tray. She formed her resolution quick as lightning, and acted upon it quite as quickly. Young, active, and half wild with terror, she darted from the room, nearly knocking over Mr. Tom Hawksleigh, who was coming to enjoy his share of the little supper ordered by Sir Jasper, then down the staircase of the café, and out into the darkened streets, through which she fled like a hunted hare; she knew not in what direction, nor did she care, provided that she was not overtaken by 'Captain Smith' or his companion.
At that hour the streets of Antwerp are usually deserted by all save the gendarmes, and she had fled a considerable distance, conscious only that the snow was falling fast, before she stopped, quite out of breath, and began to think by what means she could reach the Hôtel St. Antoine, or get a voiture to convey her there.
She had run to the end of the Rue des Arquebusiers, and now before her opened on either hand the long and spacious street called the Place de Mer in which the stately house of Rubens and the royal palace stand side by side.
Not a cab was to be seen, nor a gendarme; the wind was keen, the snow falling heavily, and, like 'Policeman X' and other guardians of the night, the gendarmes had betaken themselves to some cosy estaminet, or sought the hospitality of friendly kitchens and confiding cookmaids.
Which way was she to turn? where seek aid or shelter? She closed her little hands in terror and dismay, and, while shuddering with cold, suddenly
a chorus burst upon her ear, and, before she could think which way to turn, a dozen of great fellows in kepis, blouses, and sabots, fresh from some estaminet, surrounded her, with shouts and mockery.
One put an arm round her and tried to kiss her, tearing away her veil; but endued with strength beyond herself, by the extremity of her terror, she dashed him back with both her hands.
'God help me!' she exclaimed.
And hemming her in by a ring, they danced round her hand in hand, singing a song, which, as it was in Flemish and unknown to her, she supposed was something very ribald and horrible, yet it was only thus:—
'Hark to the sound
Of the fiddle and horn, The dance and the song— 'Tis a festal morn.
Oh! little they reck of dull care
Or of sorrow; They laugh for the day
Though they weep on the morrow.'
'Ouf!' shouted one, 'that would make a grand pendant to the Zeike Jongeling,' referring to Jan Van Beers, the greatest lyric poet of the day.
'Une blonde English mees—une nymphe—parbleu!' cried one fellow.
'Sommes-nous fantastiques! N'est-elle pas jolie! ('Isn't she pretty!') cried another.
'Sur mon honneur, ma belle coquette!' cried a third, making a clutch at her.
Others shouted strange things in Flemish, showing that they were boors or artizans, redolent of garlic, beer, and tobacco; but with a gasping sob of
terror she broke away from them and fled again. She heard the clatter of sabots behind her, as some started in pursuit; but she was too swift for them, and the sound soon died away in the distance.
Along the dark and now silent streets she ran, close past the great doors of innumerable houses, as there are no areas or front garden plots in Antwerp, where the entrances open directly off the footpaths. Many a bellhandle and many a large knocker—lion's heads and bull's heads as large as life—were within her reach; but, fearing to be roughly or coarsely repulsed, she dared touch neither.
She passed a church of vast height and colossal proportions—St. Jacques, though she knew it not—where Rubens lies under a slab of spotless white marble. There were few lamps in the streets in this quarter, and the oil lanterns before the Madonnas perched on stone brackets at the street corners, swung dimly and mournfully to and fro in the sleety and snowy wind.
She felt an apparently mortal chill in her heart; her whole clothes were now soaked with sleet by her falling once or twice as she slipped.
Again she heard a tipsy chorus ringing out upon the night, and, in terror lest she was about to be overtaken by the roysterers from whom she had escaped, on finding herself near a great doorway in the Rue Rouge, as it eventually proved to be, she grasped the swinging handle of a bell and pulled it violently. She heard the sound of the bell respond at a distance, and, incapable of further endurance, before the door, which was a double one of great size, was opened, she had sunk down senseless, and lay huddled in a kind of heap upon the step of the house.
The last thing of which she was conscious was feeling the hand of a man roughly and daringly searching her pockets, as he muttered, with an oath,
'Sacré! not a sou—not a centime!'
CHAPTER XX.
CROSS
PURPOSES.
The morning was a clear, bright, sunny, and joyous one, the sun without cloud, the chimneys of Antwerp, as usual, without smoke, though the season was winter, and all its spires and countless crow-stepped gables were standing up clearly defined against a pure blue sky, when Bevil Goring, with high spirits, yet not without just emotions of great indignation, walked forth a free man from the place in which he had been detained, and, stepping into a voiture with his luggage, told the driver to take him to the Hôtel du Parc in the Place Verte, and kissed the ring of Alison which was on his finger again. He was free, and it had come about thus:—
The papers and manifestoes found among his property were of so serious and compromising a nature that he was on the point of being transmitted with them to Brussels, but he contrived to employ an advokat (as an attorney or barrister is called there) in the Rue de l'Hôpital, who soon traced to the arrested Belgian workman those unlucky papers, and it chanced, oddly enough, that the mischievous Mr. Gaskins, having got a serious smash up in an accident on the railway to Waterloo, believing himself to be dying, made a full confession of the trick he had played to serve a lucrative master; and the Belgian authorities, duly aware at last of Goring's rank and position in society, confessed their haste and mistake, and, with a 'million pardons,' released him from an arrest that, after it had extended to some days, was nearly making him frantic, and he was welcomed and ushered to his former apartment at the hotel by the waiter Jacquot, though Maître Jean Picot, remembering his arrest, had some unpleasant doubts about receiving him.
Bevil, however, lost no time in repairing to the Hôtel St. Antoine, resolved to see Sir Ranald—Alison too, if possible, if it was not too late; but he was rather unprepared for the state of affairs that awaited him there.
Meeting the concierge or hall-porter at the door, he asked with some anxiety if Sir Ranald Cheyne was still there.
'Oui, monsieur,' replied the porter, saluting in military fashion.
'And Miss Cheyne?'
'Non, monsieur.'
The reply sank deep in Goring's heart, and he was perplexed when the official at the same time mysteriously shook his head and shrugged his shoulders with a deprecatory expression in his face.
'Is Lord Cadbury here?'
'Milord is out also,' was the reply.
'Also—then they are together!' thought Goring. 'Take up my card to Sir Ranald, and ask if he will receive me.'
It was taken up by a waiter, who returned promptly to report, in Continental parlance, that 'Sir Cheyne desired him to walk up.'
Much depended upon the issue of this visit if Alison was still free. He had come frankly, freely, to urge humbly his suit again, backed by the undoubted wealth which had flowed upon him since last they met at Chilcote.
He found Sir Ranald in a handsome apartment, seated in an easy-chair, but looking pale, thin, and worn. He made no offer of his hand, as with both he grasped the arms of the chair, tremulous with rage, while his eyes glared like those of a rattlesnake through the glasses of his pince-nez at his unexpected visitor, who scarcely knew how or where to begin, and looked nervously round him for some evidence of the recent presence of Alison, but saw nothing.
'Permit me to congratulate you, Sir Ranald—' he began.
'On what?' asked the other, savagely.
'On the escape from death by drowning which we were all led to suppose you and Miss Cheyne had suffered.'
'I don't want your congratulations; and, so far as Miss Cheyne is concerned, your appearance in Antwerp sufficiently accounts for her mysterious disappearance.'
Utter bewilderment, in which emotions of dismay, fear, and anger coursed through his mind, tied the tongue of Bevil Goring—dismay and fear he knew not of what, and anger lest this was some fresh trickery of Lord Cadbury.
'Mysterious disappearance!' he faltered.
'Your conduct, Captain Goring, has been shamefully deceitful—most dishonourable!' exclaimed Sir Ranald, in a broken but still enraged tone.
'How?'
'You came to my house at Chilcote a welcome guest, then you stole the affections of my daughter. You have followed her to Antwerp with plans best known to yourself; and where—oh, where—is she now?'
'Sir Ranald!' expostulated Goring, piteously, and feeling his face grow pale.
'Talk not to me!' resumed Sir Ranald, in his tone of fury again; 'every silly girl thinks she is in love, or that she must love the first man who says he loves her.'
These strange utterances made Goring half forget the errand on which he had come, and utterly forget the fortuitous but fortunate wealth which would, he hoped, have made that errand perhaps successful.
'Vile trickster, you shall answer to me for all the mischief you have wrought!' exclaimed Sir Ranald, breaking the silence that had ensued, though, if glances could kill, Goring's earthly career had ended there and then. 'We are in Belgium, and, old as I am, I shall cover you with a pistol at
