An Unabashed Promotion
Until January 31, 2012 you can purchase my book The Night Blooming Cereus and Other Stories from Lulu at a 25% discount using the following coupon code: LULUBOOK305.
Please note that the coupon does expire January 31, 2012 and there is a $50 Max Savings.
You can find my book at www.Lulu.com. Search under the title of the book or under my name: Harold O. Wilson.
New Post on my Website Coming
Happy New Year Everyone:
I want to let you know that I’ve decided to serialize the new novel I’m working on. It should start appearing on my website www.haroldowilson.com this coming January. Give me to about the middle of the month to get things together and the first installment posted. I hope this opening paragraph from the first chapter will peak your interest a little:
“Sara Morgan is on her side. She stretches her legs and shifts her body beneath the muscled arm circled to her stomach. The bed creaks. Except for an angle of shalerose light cast across the dresser from the diner sign in front of the motel, the room is dark. Sara is not asleep, but she is not awake either. Her mind drifts in a half-dream state where the subconscious pokes its head above the horizon and deposits snippets of illusion, nothing of thought or ideas, but visions, creations of its own desire mocking the world of line and sight, reason and rhyme: unwelcome wisps of accusation appearing from the past—or the future.”
My essay on Mann’s The Magic Mountain is still under construction but should be finished in January as well. What a task that has turned out to be. A ton of literature has been written on the novel and I struggled to find anything unique or new to say about it. I think I’ve hit on something concerning Mann’s treatment of time in the novel, however, that no one has discussed so far. We’ll see. Look for the essay on my website in January as well.
If you haven’t read The Magic Mountain or have been separated from it for a while, consider reading it or make the effort to read it again. It’s a magnificent novel and surprisingly relevant for today. Here’s the opening paragraph of my essay:
“It is evening and we are in Director Behrens’ apartments in the sanatorium Berghof. Director Behrens; Hans Castorp, our protagonist; his cousin Joachim Ziemssen; and the narrator of The Magic Mountain are with us. The narrator is describing Hans Castorp’s reaction to a painting by Behrens of Frau Clavdia Chauchat, another sanatorium resident. The narrator is speaking:
‘Where her tender, though hardly meager bosom lost itself under the bluish drape, its subdued shimmer of white seemed taken from nature. The bare skin…’”
Okay, that should get your attention. Look for the essay toward the end of January. I’ll alert you when both the essay and the first installment of the novel are posted.
Oh, just one more thing— my book The Night Blooming Cereus and Other Stories is available from my website and as an e-book from Barnes and Noble.
Peace be with you all.
TWO NEW CRITIQUES
La réalité ne se forme que dans la mémoire.” — Proust
My dear friend and website designer Tiffany Windsor, and my daughter both insist that if I’m to be a writer and literary critic I must move into the 21st century. As a concession to their wisdom, here goes:
Welcome to Wilson’s Blog: a place to talk about imagination and the world of writing.
“The room is a single-bed dorm room in a redbrick building constructed before the Civil War. It is hot and musty and smells of age and decay. Thurmond Roydal crosses the room and lifts a black and white promotional photograph of Gertrude Lawrence from his dresser. He studies the woman’s features for a moment then gently traces the outline of her face with his fingers. Her look is withdrawn and distant. A highlight on her lower lip expresses its contour and contributes to this appearance of melancholy. On her mouth, the dried smudge of a kiss soils the glass, then there is another, partial, overlaying the first. Clearly visible, each kiss is a translucent whitish stain hovering above the image.”
This is the opening paragraph of my short story, “A Kiss for Gertrude.” It’s a story of defiance and courage in a university setting and is posted on my website www.haroldowilson.com. Margot Miller has reviewed the story and her fine essay is posted here.
I’ve also published an analysis of J.D. Salinger’s short story, “For Esmé, With Love and Squalor” on my website. It discusses Salinger’s idea of time by comparing Sergeant X’s sickness with Quinton’s suicide in “The Sound and the Fury.”
Marcia Gagliardi takes issue with me (or at least a different tack) in her essay posted below. Repressed Sexuality she finds more germane to Salinger’s story and to Quinton’s suicide. I think you’ll enjoy her critique, “A response to Harold Wilson’s Essay, “Time and a Different Look at J. D. Salinger’s, For Esmé, With Love and Squalor.”
Share what you think by posting a comment or even your own critique.
By the way, no one has reviewed the poem “Rain” on my website, please be the first.
On another matter, submissions are now being received by “The Delmarva Review,” a literary magazine published annually. I’m on the editorial board and encourage you to visit our website www.delmarvareview.com for submission guidelines. Send us your best poetry, short story, or creative non-fiction. We want to read your work. Issue # 4 of the Review has just come out and is available on the website as well.
Repressed Sexuality In Salinger and Faulkner: A response to Harold Wilson’s Essay
Repressed Sexuality
In Salinger and Faulkner:
A response to Harold Wilson’s Essay
“Time and a Different Look
at J.D. Salinger’s
For Esmé—with Love and Squalor”
By Marcia Gagliardi
Wilson’s essay sent me back to the internet to re-read “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” for the first time in at least thirty (and possibly almost fifty) years.
It’s brilliant of him to compare it with The Sound and the Fury and X with Quentin. And to pursue the authors’ obsessions with clocks (and, in different ways, time).
I had long since forgotten why I remembered “For Esmé” with fondness, although I think it had something to do with the delicate descriptions of the children and the poignancy of X’s presence during the war. On rereading, I think, What a tour-de-force of narrative, of clear and crisp EB White-sanctionable writing, of economy and essential detail, of wonderful use of adverbs and adjectives in spite of the fact that we should rarely use them, of character drawing, of evocation of emotion and of time and place.
I have read The Sound and the Fury at least ten times, the last of them at least twenty-five years ago. Surely Quentin and Sergeant X are similarly displaced (Quentin at Harvard, X in the war whether he is in England or Belgium or on his way between them), intense, anxiety-ridden, conflicted, obsessed with their unfulfilled sexuality (Quentin overwhelmed with his desire for his sister Caddy and X evidently going through the motions of a suffocating marriage that was expected of him, even if possibly he loves his wife). Most of Wilson’s observations I find instructive to both works, although I can’t say that I agree with him about the narrative elusiveness of The Sound and the Fury which always seems to me to be an interweaving of viewpoints as well as moments, a particularly effective both impressionistic and expressionistic approach to developing character and story.
His essay’s consideration of the metaphysics of both works, of the underlying nature of things as stirred by Sartre, has led me to look at both works in terms of their vantage points (the psyches of self-absorbed young men each displaced and each fixated, in the narrative, on a young woman). And, as I mull these over in post Stonewall America, I wonder about the authors’ understanding of the nature of repressed sexuality in both young men and how the literary climate of the late 1940s/early 1950s informed that understanding and a reader’s reception of it. Overtly, each man is fixated on a young woman: Quentin on Caddy and X on Esmé. But why? Each young woman portends an impossible relationship, Caddy because she is Quentin’s sister and Esmé, because she is too young. We are never overtly told either what occasions Quentin’s suicide nor X’s breakdown, and here resides a sure brilliance of each work. We are left with inducing truth from narrative, one of the finest and most satisfying exercises of reading good fiction.
In both Salinger and Faulkner, as Wilson observes, there is “eerie unchanging present filled with the past,” but the prospect of hope for the future is also implicit. X imagines liberated Europe which will mean his return to the vapidity of his marriage and life in New York, and eventually, he has a breakdown. Quentin imagines the impossibility of a normal life with Caddy, and eventually he commits suicide. If only time would freeze in an ideal moment where each man could enact his fantasy without the intrusion of reality, each author seems to say. It is a reinterpretation of Sartre’s “misfortune in being time bound.” And yet, too, each man would be happier, the authors suggest, if he could escape the bounds of corporality and remain alive to experience true platonic love.
The Cost of Courage and the Price of Justice: Harold O. Wilson’s “A Kiss for Gertrude”
The Cost of Courage and the Price of Justice: Harold O. Wilson’s “A Kiss for Gertrude”
By Margot Miller, http://margotmiller.co/
In 1958 at Price College, a fictional institution, a student whose name, Thurmond Roydal, means loosely “prince,” or “god/king-son-of-the-god/king” [i] is in despair and obsessed with a photograph of dead film star, Gertrude Lawrence, whom he thinks of as his mother. He is doing his best to flunk out of school. Between the name of the character and the name of the mother-figure, a perhaps coincidental reference to Hamlet’s mother, the close reader is already watching for something more than the story of a late adolescent packing in his studies in defiance of a powerful, distant and patriarchal father or because of some confusion about Gertrude Lawrence.
The literary references in Wilson’s “A Kiss for Gertrude” are many. We see immediately the reference to Hamlet and the predicament of the young man in a struggle for justice in a world he does not truly inhabit. Equally important are the inter-texts with Heinrich Böll’s “The Balek Scales,” [ii] Shirley Jackson’s, “The Lottery,” [iii] and a number of biblical references as well as the setting and time of the emerging civil rights struggle in the American South. Roydal’s professor (Dr. Ballack), whose name of course recalls Balek, is, however, not simply a deceptively benevolent father figure in this story. Rather, because he does eventually try to challenge the status quo, he also earns our sympathy in a way comparable to Jackson’s Mrs. Hutchinson.
It is always useful to remember that it is sometimes possible to think of each character in a story as a part of a single self. The kiss for Gertrude is a smudge on the glass of a framed publicity shot and is explained when Ballack finds the image inscribed as the “Mother of us all,” clearing the way for a symbolic understanding of the mother/feminine side of the prince/self. Thus, Gertrude Lawrence with her distant expression can be seen as the male-handled and oppressed Feminine, revealing both anger and refusal within the self of Thurmond, whose efforts to stand up for justice are thwarted by the father figure faculty members as well as his own father, a “father” who is not only external but equally possible within the self, a “father” capable of rejecting the Feminine part of the self. Ballack, more importantly, is the individualized father figure who comes to understand his own complicity in the social, academic, and racial tensions of the times.
Because the literary and cultural references are both many and transparent, they provide clues to what the author might be hoping to say in a dialogue with the earlier texts, but for the reader who does not have these references at hand, the story still works. Even without them, we understand that Gertrude’s photograph is symbolic, and because Thurmond Roydal does his homework perfectly before throwing it in the trash, we know that his academic failure is a symbolic refusal as well.
It is Roydal’s rebellion, and the subsequent rebellion of his professor, foreshadowed by the remark that Thurmond will be unable to help Ballack any more than the latter can help Thurmond before the disciplinary committee, that form the axis of the story. Thurmond’s choice is the deliberate mark of courage, a principled and modeled refusal by the princely part of the self, but the story then turns its focus to Ballack. Perhaps the latter’s rebellion is an impulse but it is nevertheless an important and necessary expression of truth. The final act of Ballack’s career is his alliance with Thurmond and the guilty solicitation of the inevitable condemnation of his colleagues. The faculty and Dr. Ballack with them have long defended the status quo of segregation and sorrow in the American South in general and in the arena of Price College in particular; the time has come for these institutions to change. There is a price to be paid, however, and Ballack must be the first to pay it.
Wilson’s narrative centers around the notion of fairness, the struggle each of us faces at some time in our lives to speak out about shortcomings in our socially constructed systems and institutions or in ourselves. Every one of them, from individual personal relationships to social customs, to government programs, to institutions both concrete and abstract, weighs in at some point “fifty-five grams short of justice,” and the one who refuses to go along or who speaks out, the whistle-blower, the voice that tells is always condemned, ostracized, metaphorically crucified, or, as in the comparison to Jackson’s character in ”The Lottery,” lapidated. Here the stones are only chalk, but the effect is social death.
Ultimately, what matters in “A Kiss for Gertrude” is not so much the particular cultural references, although they are delicately chosen and exquisitely exploited, but the fact that Wilson calls them up to challenge the reader’s views on the social constructs of justice and courage, self-sacrifice, condemnation of the one who tells a truth, and ultimately, love. Wilson shows us that, as with any modeled idea, the macro construct of institutional tradition can easily be turned inside out to reveal the individual or micro construct of the self, and vice-versa. Each holds the other within its borders.
As Wilson so often does in his fiction, “A Kiss for Gertrude,” gives us a new look at the eternal question of what it means to be human. There is no answer, of course, but there are new questions leading to interesting discussions for his readers about a shared struggle for justice and courage in a world we have to work hard to inhabit authentically. Wilson reminds us that the cost of courage and the price of justice are incalculable, except in terms of the time we give to their consideration and to their exercise. Time is, after all, the ultimate commodity and the only thing we have to give, whether to others or to ourselves, as we face our own shortcomings in the measure of being.
[i] Thurmond is derived from Thor, Norwegian for god/king, and Roydal is transparently ‘royal.’
[ii] Böll, Heinrich, “The Balek Scales,” IN Heinrich Böll: 18 Stories, New York, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1966, pp 25-35.
[iii] Jackson, Shirley, “The Lottery,” IN The Lottery and Other Stories, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1948, pp 291-302.
