Return to Park Hall (Part Two): "Volpone"

I decided to reread some books I read as an undergraduate English major at the University of Georgia in the mid-eighties and haven’t read since.  I’ll write about what I remember from 40 years ago and what I noticed this time around.

"Renaissance Drama" might have been called “Plays That Could Have Been Staged at the Globe Theatre but Weren’t Written by Shakespeare (as far as we know).”   We read Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), The Duchess of Malfi (Webster), Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Ford), The Revenger’s Tragedy (Tournier when we read it, Middleton now, thanks to those pesky literary detectives), and Ben Jonson’s Volpone.  Having taken that class has come in handy when I teach Shakespeare.  When I’m trying to persuade high schoolers of Shakespeare’s greatness, I often tell them, “If you doubt it, read the work of his contemporaries.  They’re fine, just fine, but you’ll see the difference.  His plays have something that theirs just don’t.”  I still believe that.  Call it subtlety, call it complexity, call it humanity, I don't know.  I'm just telling you it's there.  

I have chosen Volpone to revisit in part because of my experience of an adaptation of it.  In 1978, when I was in the 9th grade, the National Council of Teachers of English convention was in New York City and for this one time my father brought the whole family along.  How 1978 NYC was it?  Mom got her purse snatched in Times Square and we spent hours in the lobby of our hotel waiting for the police to show up and tell us she’d never see her purse again.  But we did see a couple of adaptations on Broadway – The Wiz and Sly Fox.  The latter was a Larry Gelbart treatment of Volpone, borrowed from a previous adaptation (in German) by Austrian playwright Stefan Zweig (who was the inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel).   I didn’t know all that authorship / adaptation stuff at the time.  All I knew was that I was watching a fun, silly play about a couple of con artists and their ludicrously greedy marks in 19th century San Francisco.  The stars were Robert Preston (The Music Man was 15 years in his past) and Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development was 25 years in his future).  The former Harold Hill and the future George Bluth were playing to their weasel strengths.  To me it was a great show.  I know I liked it enough to go to the merch stand and buy a t-shirt with the play’s logo on it.   That might have been my first experience of buying clothes in a rush of excitement without thinking the purchase through.   I wanted that shirt to say, “I saw this cool play on Broadway!”  But it didn’t.  Because of late seventies meanings of “fox” and the fact that it shrunk to skin-tight size after one wash, what the shirt said instead was, “I have raided my sister’s wardrobe.”   I think I wore it to school exactly once.  It was my Parisian Nightsuit.  

But all that embarrassment was almost a decade in the past when I took up study of Volpone in Dr. Doyle’s Renaissance Drama course.   I had good memories of the adaptation I had seen and as for Ben Jonson, along with Marlowe he was the most household of the not-quite-Shakespeare names.  And Jonson was the one who said of Shakespeare, “He was not of an age, but for all time.”  A good writer to know.  

The story:  well-to-do Venetian Volpone and his valet Mosca have cooked up a scheme whereby already rich people believe they can become richer by becoming Volpone’s sole heir.  He pretends to have one foot in the grave, and the wannabe heirs – Voltore, Corvino, and Corbaccio -  believe the best way to secure his favor is to give him expensive gifts (believing they'll get it all back anyway).  Volpone's pile of loot keeps growing, and Mosca plays the marks against each other during their private visits of "mercy" to the "ailing" Volpone, slickly baiting them into ever more extravagant bribery.  Both the plotters delight in their own genius for deviousness.   I recall enjoying a particular soliloquy of Mosca’s.  He’s boasting about his talent for grift, but to me he was also providing a perfect description of a certain kind of shifty Ultimate player:

But your fine elegant rascal, that can rise,
And stoop, almost together, like an arrow;
Shoot through the air as nimbly as a star;
Turn short as doth a swallow; and be here,
And there, and here, and yonder, all at once . . . 
This is the creature had the art born with him;
Toils not to learn it, but doth practise it
Out of most excellent nature 

While rereading Volpone, the perverse fun of watching scammers at work had me thinking a lot about Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.  Like that story of a super-elaborate big con, in this one things are cooking along beautifully for the tricksters until interest in a woman interferes with their commitment to the scam.  Once Volpone gets the hots for Corbaccio’s wife, the unraveling of his plot begins.  As he says of his own self-sabotaging conduct, "To make a snare for my own neck!  And run my head into it willfully out of mere wantonness!" And the story takes its inevitable turn toward the ruin of the scoundrels and vindication of the virtuous.  That’s how classical comedy goes.  

Speaking of comedy, I did find that Volpone is less hampered than Shakespeare’s comedies by puns and allusions that haven’t been funny in 400 years.  In the Shakespeare sitcom Upstart Crow, David Mitchell’s Shakespeare claims to his skeptical family that he’s actually really good at comedy:  “It just requires lengthy explanation and copious footnotes. If you do your research my stuff is actually really funny.”  Jonson, thank God, doesn't need his readers to know things like the Sicilian city of Hybla's reputation for its honey bees to make his jokes work.  There are lines in Volpone that actually read funny on their own, without a scholarly source to walk you through the so-called "wit".  Stuck in the agony of an endless conversation with a tiresome visitor, Volpone whinges in an aside, "Before I feigned diseases. Now I have one." Good one, Ben!  I got it right away. Some of the comedy hasn't aged well. Most contemporary productions of Volpone try to eliminate or minimize an ultra-cringe subplot about a dwarf, a eunuch, and a hermaphrodite, a storyline that is not only tedious but would get a 2025 Jonson justly cast into the outer darkness of cancellation.

The comedy in Volpone that has endured across the centuries is its satirical mockery of human venality and shamelessness.  As the Volpone of Sly Fox tells his Mosca, “Never think too little of people.  There’s always a little less to be thought.”  In the context of this story and these characters, he’s dead right. The storylines of the greedy, misogynistic, insincere, backstabbing, unprincipled marks are all of the “How low will they go?” variety.  The most striking example may be Corbaccio, who in the span of one scene goes from accusing his utterly virtuous wife of harlotry to pimping her out to Volpone.  I wish I could say that the need for satirical depictions of such monstrous hypocrisy is of an age, but it appears to be for all time.  Tim Parks has written of satire, "Its raison d’ȇtre over the long term is to bring about change through ridicule.”  I suppose that because we’re currently governed by people it seems impossible to think too little of, Volpone's ridicule has not yet gotten the job done.  

Return to Park Hall (Part One): "The Rise of Silas Lapham"

I decided to reread some books I read as an undergraduate English major at the University of Georgia in the mid-eighties and haven’t read since.  I’ll write about what I remember from 40 years ago and what I noticed this time around.

 

My professor for American Realism and Naturalism was James Colvert, a big jowly fellow who always taught in a suit.  He was an older gentleman with some Old School connections.  One day he brought to class a man I recall being presented as the last surviving Nashville Agrarian (it must have been Andrew Lytle).  I was too dense to appreciate what that meant, just as I was when another professor brought Gwendolyn Brooks to class.  Colvert’s obituary reveals that he was in the Air Force during World War II and flew 27 combat missions over Germany.  I don’t recall that he ever talked about that experience in class.  I do remember that when he was lecturing Dr. Colvert loved to use the word “resonate”, not in the gooey way people use it now (“I can really resonate with that”) but as an emphatic verb to name what a great text can do.  If a book was quality, it resonated, by god. He said that word in a growl, shaking his cupped right hand in front of him as though he was personally activating the novel's resonance.  The curriculum of that class centered on late 19th century American novels that proudly endeavored to depict life as humans actually live it, “by the light of common day” (I believe that was the phrase), as opposed to the kind of uncommon day where characters can hit nail heads with musket balls from 100 yards and other preposterousnesses that comprise romanticistic fiction. We read Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage (Colvert was a Crane expert), Sister Carrie, McTeague, and I expect some Jack London, too.    

 

And of course, given the subject matter, we had to read the work of William Dean Howells, the paragon of American literary realism.  Colvert chose for us what is probably Howells' best-known work, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).  The eponymous protagonist, a successful manufacturer of paint, is of humble origins in rural New England, a man both wealthy and coarse, trying to navigate (along with his wife, Persis, and their daughters) life among old, elite Bostonians who regard them as gauche.  The novel features two big crises.  The first is when Tom Corey (an energetic Brahmin scion who has gone to work for Lapham) falls for one of the Lapham daughters (the clever one) when everybody thought he had his heart set on her sister (the pretty one).  The second is when Lapham’s business begins to fail and he scrambles to reverse the collapse.  In the end, despite lots of melodramatic consternation, Tom and his beloved Penelope wind up together, and Lapham loses his business and his family’s prosperity but preserves his conscience.  That’s the rise of the title: he declines in material wealth and social status but he rises in moral stature.  Get it?  

 

The phrase I think of when I recall our study of this novel is "economy of pain."  It comes from a scene when the Laphams consult wise Reverend Sewell for his views on what they ought to do about the love triangle.  The sisters and their parents seem bent on the idea of all three parties walking away from the entanglement, practicing noble self-denial, embracing tragedy.  Sewell calls that idea appalling - what you want is “economy of pain.”  Tom and Penelope should marry.  That way one person is miserable instead of three, and the one miserable person won’t be that way forever.  Pretty utilitarian stuff for a man of God, but Sewell is up-to-here with romantic self-sacrifice, a bogus ideal whose prevalence he attributes to the toxic influence of sentimental fiction like that popular novel Tears, Idle Tears.  Famous book.  There's a long wait for it at the library.  Everybody’s reading it, much to Reverend Sewell's exasperation.  I knew the title, and quickly found the well-known Tennyson poem of that name, but it turns out there is no such novel as Tears, Idle Tears.  It is the Rochelle Rochelle of The Rise of Silas Lapham, a work that never existed in real life but allows the creator to mock a genre he finds ridiculous without getting in trouble with anyone who actually works in that genre.   

 

On a few other occasions when I have reread a book that was wasted on my much younger self, I have found comedy where I never perceived it before.  For example, it turns out that Madame Bovary is hilarious.  Well, a lot of it is.  I am not here to claim that The Rise of Silas Lapham is a wacky farce about what happens when some monied hicks move to the Back Bay and upset the snobs, but there are some funny bits.  I wasn’t far into the book when I recalled one of the running gags:  Lapham has marketed his product by painting his company name on rocks throughout New Engand, a landscape defacing form of tackiness that elite Bostonians love to sneer at. This time around I was tickled by Howells’ characterization of Tom’s father, Bromfield Corey, a languid aristocrat dispensing ironic commentary from the comfort of his library, in some ways like Jane Austen’s Mr. Bennet.  And Penelope Lapham has some of Elizabeth Bennet's wit in her.  Upon meeting the Coreys for the first time, she quips to her sister, “You’ve just missed the most delightful call.  So easy and pleasant every way. Not a bit stiff! Mrs. Corey was so friendly! She didn't make me feel at all as if she'd bought me, and thought she had paid too much.” Her drolleries are one of the qualities that make Tom fall for her.  Unfortunately, some of the novel’s humor has not aged well.   Howells has a taste for patronizing “Wives, am I right?” commentary that probably wasn't any funnier in 1885 than it is now.  There are quite a few of those passages.  I would fast forward past them if I read this book a third time.  

 

One reason I chose this book is that it answers a scarcity in the world of literature that I never noticed until I had been teaching a few years: detailed, complex depictions of the world of business.  It's tough to find a businessman protagonist in great literature who isn't a bit like Montgomery Burns. Commentators have noted that when Howells conceived Silas Lapham, the figure of the self-made capitalist was a relative newcomer on the American scene, and what we get is a character who is about as round as round gets  I like that Lapham is a paint manufacturer.  Paint is good, right?  He's not selling pet rocks or guns or patent medicine or financial scams or products made from slave labor.  Everybody needs paint, and Lapham is rightfully proud of his business.  He works hard and he's faithful to his family.  Yes, he's rich and ambitious, but he's no robber baron.  Of course that could be because he hasn't yet had a chance to be one. His flaws are genuine. When we first meet him he’s being interviewed for a newspaper profile (in our time it would be for a cover story in Fortune), and Howells uses this interview to introduce the extent to which Lapham has vainly bought in to his own self-made man mythology.  Not just vainly but potentially self-destructively.  How long before his ego and ambition undercut him?  That's the question as Howells engagingly narrates the ins-and-outs of Lapham’s operation of his business.  When bad luck and bad decisions bring him to the brink of ruin, he has a chance to make a dirty deal that would save him, a piece of ruthless fraud he would probably get away with.  But he can’t bring himself to do it, an ethical struggle that Howells depicts in a strikingly down to earth way: it's an unschooled man's crisis of conscience (with a stalwart wife in his corner).  It is not so much an ethical struggle – the right thing to do is obvious – but the struggle we all know of to find our backbone when we’re presented with an easy but corrupt way out of trouble.  Lapham plays it straight and he loses everything.  The novel's characters who know him recognize and appreciate the ironic "rise" of the title, and he embraces the consolations of having behaved honorably, but those consolations have a lot of work to do in light of the severity of his crash.

 

One of my favorite scenes in The Rise of Silas Lapham is at a dinner party hosted by the Coreys.  Beforehand Lapham and Persis, eager but conflicted social climbers at this point, fret about attire and etiquette, wavering between telling themselves that they’re just as good as the elite and quaking in anxiety that they'll embarrass themselves with their cloddishness.  After dinner the men (all of them Harvard-educated except for Lapham) retreat to a separate room for cigars.  Lapham drinks wine (something he usually avoids) and listens as they talk philosophically about the recent Civil War and the battlefield experience and its place in public memory.  There’s lot of highfalutin talk about heroism and patriotism and sacrifice and manly behavior.  Lapham (one of only two veterans present) listens and drinks and finally tells, in his plain rural New England speech, the unromanticized story of the battlefield death of one of his soldiers, a friend from his hometown: 

 

He said to me before the last action we went into, 'I should like to turn tail and run, Cap. I ain't comin' out o' this one. But I don't suppose it would do.' 'Well, not for you, Jim,' said I. 'I want to live,' he says; and he bust out crying right there in my tent. 'I want to live for poor Molly and Zerrilla'--that's what they called the little one; I dunno where they got the name. 'I ain't ever had half a chance; and now she's doing better, and I believe we should get along after this.' He set there cryin' like a baby. But he wa'n't no baby when he went into action. I hated to look at him after it was over, not so much because he'd got a ball that was meant for me by a sharpshooter--he saw the devil takin' aim, and he jumped to warn me--as because he didn't look like Jim; he looked like-- all desperate and savage. I guess he died hard.

 

“The story made its impression”, writes Howells.  I love that understated way of saying that the uncouth man's candidly told war experience has hit home with his patrician audience.  And then poor Lapham, unaccustomed to alcohol, has another glass, and then another, and then he starts bragging about his success and holding forth on subjects he knows nothing about, and his social triumph becomes an embarrassment.  I would not have had the scene end so cringely, but there’s something quite real about it, something of the genuine human complexity that Howells and his cohort were after.  It really does resonate.  

 

If I could meet Dr. Colvert again, I’d ask him how the old bomber pilot in him experienced the scene of Silas Lapham telling his truth about the war.   I wonder what he would say.  

Next:  Ben Jonson's Volpone

The True Conservatives

When I teach a course on literary humor, I like to present my students with this counterintuitive assertion from R.C. Elliott about the nature of satire and satirists:

The satirist claims, with much justification, to be a true conservative.  Usually (but not always – there are significant exceptions) he operates within the established framework of society, accepting its norms, appealing to reason (or to that which his society accepts as rational) as the standard against which to judge the folly he sees.  He is the preserver of tradition, the true tradition from which there has been a grievous falling away.

"A Modest Proposal" - Jonathan Swift's famous tongue-in-cheek appeal to solve the problem of Irish poverty by eating babies -may read like wild-haired looniness, but it works because Swift is being conservative, leaning in to established, traditional principles that all civilized societies profess (even if they don't always practice them so well):  Casual cruelty is unacceptable.  Indifference to mass suffering is wrong.  Jordan Peele's great horror satire Get Out works the same way.  It might look radical on the surface, but y'all, doesn't everybody think it's wrong to steal other peoples' talents?

That is the lens through which I am viewing current events, especially attempts to silence certain satirical voices.  Are they edgy voices?  Yes.  But the main thing about them is the (should be) conventionality of their values:  they hate lying, they hate cruelty, they hate hypocrisy, they hate unfairness, they hate tyranny.  Don't we all?  Yet the satirists are in trouble.  And the "why" of their trouble speaks to Elliot's characterization of satirists as preservers of true tradition.  They're in trouble not because they're infidels but because they're believers.  Their accusers are the ones responsible for the "grievous falling away" and they can't bear to have been called out for it.   

Here's Looking at You, Paul

 This short term at Paideia I’m teaching a course called, “Put ‘Em Up, Nazi”.  We study World War II films made during World War II.  Of course there are hundreds of examples to choose from, but I’ve selected the ones that most successfully navigate the conflicting agendas of propaganda and cinematic art. Films like 49^th Parallel (where the title of the course comes from), Mrs. Miniver, Casablanca, Watch on the Rhine, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.  As they worked on these films their creators might well have been asking themselves, “What if Hitler wins?” and their films are plainly designed for audiences living with that same fear, designed to stoke their courage and resilience and rouse them into action. 

Of course we’ll examine these films as works of propaganda.  How could we not?  I want my students to notice the ways they distort real life, to pay attention to how they attempted to manipulate their original wartime audiences, and to have an eye for what these stories leave out about the nations they advocate for. And of course we will historicize the films. Whatever timeless qualities they may have, however much they’re able to speak to us across the decades about things that matter now and have always mattered, it is vital that we view them as products of a particular time and place and the preoccupations and worldviews of creative people of that time and place.  They’re artifacts of the English-speaking world in 1940-1943. They help us look backward, in the manner of historians, into that world.

 

But for me, to say that these films are propaganda is not to discredit them, and to highlight the 1940ness of them is not to call them irrelevant.  There really are contemporary connections. It is not difficult to imagine that Ukraine and Gaza are laced with Mrs. Minivers, that soldiers in combat today struggle with their fears and misgivings as the pilots in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo do.  In our country today, many people feel besieged and threatened in the same way that the original audiences for these films did.  Can such people take inspiration from these celluloid relics?  On election night last November, a person despairing about the outcome cried out on social media, “What do we do now?”   Someone replied, “Go down to the bar and tell the band to strike up ‘La Marseillaise’” (referencing that stirring moment of collective defiance in Casablanca).    By itself that advice is a nice expression of why I think it is a good idea in these times to watch these films and reflect upon them. 

 

One of my guides through preparation for this course has been the book Hollywood Goes to War, by historians Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, an account of the testy but fruitful relationship between the film industry and the war effort.  Last night I was reading about the struggle to produce a 1943 film called This Land is Mine.  It stars Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara, both of them as teachers at a school in a German-occupied village in France.   When I got up this morning I watched the film.  Laughton's character, Mr. Lory, is a mama’s boy, timid in the face of the German occupiers and their French collaborators, while O’Hara's Louise Martin is rather feisty.  One of my favorite scenes is when, through gritted teeth, she instructs her students in tearing pages from their textbooks that the new regime wants removed.  When the task is over she tells the girls, “When you leave the room I want you to give me all the pages that you’ve already taken out of your books.  The day will come when we’ll paste them back where they belong.”  Hell yeah, Miss Martin!  For me that scene perfectly exemplifies how a war era movie can speak clearly and meaningfully to our present plight. 

 

With good reason, This Land is Mine is not regarded as a classic of the World War 2 World War 2 film genre.  It’s perfectly fine, but flawed.  It's too stagey, too cheesy, even when one makes allowances for the high stakes the film's creators were trying to answer to.  The trajectory of the story, of course, is for Mr. Lory to gain the courage to resist, and on the way there he makes a number of tiresomely introspective, overlong speeches about the nature of the occupation and his own internal struggles.  Still, I do enjoy a story about a milquetoast finding the nerve to do the right thing.  One of Lory’s chief inspirations is the head of his school, Professor Sorel, whose calmly defiant participation in the underground eventually puts him in front of a Nazi firing squad.   Witnessing that execution is what sends Lory over the edge into speaking out against the Nazi regime, insuring his own sacrificial death.  

Early in This Land is Mine there’s a heartwarming scene where the wise Sorel talks a dispirited Lory through a professional and personal crisis.  I’ll never forget that scene, not because it is an all-timer (trust me, it isn’t), but because I watched it this morning, on this day of all days.  

Because of an accident of classroom geography I’ve had many opportunities the last few years to talk one-on-one with Paideia’s founding Head of School, usually just to shoot the breeze (lots of swapping funny lines from The Manchurian Candidate), but from time to time to be a recipient of his wisdom. These chats - nothing in them to rival the melodrama of Professor Sorel encouraging poor Mr. Lory, but encounters to be treasured nevertheless.  We recently talked about the content of my new short term course, especially Casablanca, one of his favorite films.  I'm sure when I conceived that class part of what was going on in my head was the hope that he would think well of the idea, that I could explain it to him in one of our talks and and get a nod of approval.  

Not long after watching This Land is Mine this morning I learned that I’ll never get to experience another of those impromptu conversations with Paul Bianchi.  He died at his home last night.  The entire Paideia community is in grief, everyone for their own reasons, but all us mourning.  He was "we shall not look upon his like again" special.  As Paul’s successor astutely wrote in an email to the faculty today, “The vision, care, and love that are required to conjure a community of learning into existence rarely reside as fully in a person as they did in Paul.”   

 

At one point in that scene where Professor Sorel tries to give Lory a boost, he says, “It’s a wonderful thing to be a schoolmaster.”  I suppose it is, especially if you're a great one.  Paul was.  

So Long, Jimmy

 I read Jonathan Alter's Jimmy Carter biography not too long ago.  What attracted me to it was hearing somewhere that his thesis was that Carter was a better President than you think and not as good an ex-President as you think.  That sounded like a hot take, but I bit anyway, and found it to be a somewhat true description of the book.  Alter doesn't diss post 1984 Jimmy at all, just notes that he maybe stuck his nose in where he shouldn't have a couple of times and that some of his charitable efforts (especially early on) had a calculated "image restoration" quality to them.  But those are quibbles, and Alter says so.  An ex-Presidency for the ages.   

As for his political career, the parts that stood out to me are (1) his shame that as a Sumter County businessman he didn't get behind Clarence Jordan and Koinonia when he should have, (2) the brilliant bait-and-switch he pulled on segregationists to get elected Governor in 1970, and (3) the Panama Canal Treaty.  That's something I remember happening, and Alter's account of Carter recognizing that it had to be done, that it would a brutal job, and that there would be no political payoff for it, and then digging in and making it happen - reading about that inspired me more than any photo of him hammering nails.   A lesson for our times.    

Godspeed, Jimmy, and thank you.