dual personalities

Yesterday the temperature reached 48, the rain fell in torrents and the snow turned to ugly brown slush. There were flood warnings.

Never fear. Mother nature was only toying with us. By this morning she had restored the familiar snowy scene and lowered the temperature back to 12. I don’t mind. Bad weather is a good excuse to stay home and finish reading Joseph Conrad’s Victory. I’ve been putting it off because I know it doesn’t end well (do any of his books?). It is, however, full of deep thoughts and beautiful turns of phrase. I loved this scene toward the beginning of the book when the main character, the self-possessed Swede, Heyst, runs into a dejected acquaintance who declares:

“I prayed like a child, of course. I believe in children praying–well, women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more self-reliant. I don’t hold with a man everlastingly bothering the Almighty with his silly troubles. It seems such cheek. Anyhow, this morning I– I have never done any harm to any God’s creature knowingly– I prayed. A sudden impulse– I went flop on my knees; so you may judge–“

They were gazing earnestly into each other’s eyes. Poor Morrison added, as a discouraging afterthought: “Only this is such a God-forsaken spot.”

Conrad writes so well that it’s easy to pay more attention to his prose than to the plot – and what a wonder that anyone could write so well in his fourth language! He was a genius.

Well, last night I was too tired to read, so I looked around on Amazon for something to watch and found a 1997 version of Victory starring Willem Dafoe as the aforementioned Heyst and Sam Neill and Rufus Sewell as criminal ne’er-do-wells. Intrigued, I started watching. I’m afraid I only got about half an hour into it before giving up. It’s not a terrible movie. No, the problem lies in the inability of any film to do justice to Conrad. Take, for example, his description of the all-female orchestra with which the heroine performs: “The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy.” How can any director hope to capture that on film?

This director could not. Nor could Willem Dafoe become a man who had once “in solitude and in silence… been used to think clearly and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-deceptions, of an ever-expected happiness.” The film manages to follow the storyline closely, but in failing to reproduce the languor of the tropics, the main characters’ inner turmoil, and the existential contest between good and evil, it ends up being a rather dull love story. Conrad deserves better. Read his books, though be warned that by today’s Draconian standards they contain racism and sexism. The way I see it, if that’s all you find in his books, then you are reading with blinkers on and missing his point entirely. You can read Victory online for fee here or at project Gutenberg.

Have a grand weekend, and if the shoveling gets you down, consider a trip to the tropics via Joseph Conrad – at least the weather will be different!

Saturday afternoon update…. it’s a white-out and super windy. I hope you don’t mind the weather updates but nothing else is happening and they remind me of the letters my father used to write me when I was in college and grad school 🙂