The illusion of refuge
Jones, Robert
agement of a laundry, the nephew steals some drugs, resells gang, moreover, is faceless; it seems to be kept around to them, refurbishes his business under the cheeky name of ...
...She makes us aware again of flight, even if it amounts to little in the quire a way of seeing . . . in which life how dangerous the world is and of the end...
...But we sustain the illusion of the most important was the desire to ac- world...
...In which so much of Tolstoy's thinking read and wrote began with Richardson in these capacities he and his brothers met does...
...The terror in which undercuts all human behavior...
...Since I have given Tolstoy a major role the most important act in the world, for in my life as moral teacher and religious both men and women...
...plexity of the issues Blackwood raises...
...the graveyard where her husband is ideas, are nothing more than tombstones There is no exile from paradise in this buried and imagines that "all around her, which mark our passage through an in- vision, but an ever present horror into the dead were lying there in the mud, herently hostile, natural world...
...Day-Lewis acts his Dim Sum, another miniature study of Eastern immigrants (this role well, but despite his continual presence, the character is time Chinese in San Francisco) making good, in which half the never fully drawn...
...Often LADIES to the Irish country house of Great there is, but often there is not...
...Nevertheless, - the doxa generated in a smoking room the two were life itself...
...Their despair is always after-the- bomb...
...But there is a passivity in the time, of how the limbo of grief reduces ination...
...at its most transcendent as belief in God...
...In so ence...
...but such separate and equal as- Tolstoy, not with any hope of making it one spent one's time in education, pects of his mind cannot obliterate that disappear, but simply of explaining it...
...It is these revelations In describing Dunmartin Hall, the an- tory and locates the sinister in the world of immobility which reveal the self's cestral hall in Great Granny Webster, itself...
...279 pp...
...The curse is that trying to live hapever after can be seen at its most rudimen- THE FATE OF ]MARY ROSE pily, we are in constant flight from life tary level as the pursuit of affluence, and Caroline Blackwood itself...
...So until she first hears the awareness of our irrevocable separation come to consciousness...
...State reside is add 8% sales VHS BETA tax...
...Much of the dialogue and interesting view of what one might call "reverse cultural action involving both is less elliptical than murky...
...In this isolation, we weeps at the depths of his feelings...
...outside who are deceived by the particular domestic dramas, and if her In this almost primitive understanding illusion of life in constant motion...
...It is not synonymous with the goes beyond any simplistic ideas of greater than the self...
...diaries is - understandably - bursting and vulgar role...
...These are in fact the ordinary de- England and Rousseau in France, and it many other varieties of "love...
...If she takes as her subject our natural, worldly inheritance...
...Blunt recited bash- that there is nothing beyond the life into lieves fervently in his own genius and fully...
...It was like a most ordinary lives in suspension and in grey and decaying palace fortress fear...
...It resembles the recent Day-Lewis), a childhood friend of Omar...
...truest calm...
...dividual to beat the odds and live exempt CORRIGAN I wondered if she would ever manfrom the injustices which afflict and de- Caroline Blackwood age to escape the demon-infested fine the past...
...The mobility that Blackwood tion...
...The creations we force Gothic imagination continues to haunt us Blunt is like Blackwood's character in upon the world, from art and architecture because it accepts doom and recognizes her short story, "Angelica," who haunts to imperialist fantasies and philosophical the world as it is and has always been...
...her, "all I really craved were the poppies nature est dans le movvement,' it is Blackwood's novels unsettle us beof oblivion...
...We who are only to demonstrate how the larger world Blackwood is unnervingly anti-modern...
...Books: THOSE FEET OF CLAY I T would be hopeless to attempt an ac- THE DIARIES OF SOPHIA TOLSTOY spoke the language of feeling...
...The engenius of our most depressed artists, in GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER ergy of human desire naturally seeks to our hearts most of us remain failed pes- Caroline Blackwood protect us from the calamity, disillusion, simists...
...But they made me realize proof that he transcended his afflic- cause she gives us the world as we susthat I shouldn't see myself as ashes where tions...
...human beings are afterthoughts to crea- fact, the result of having once had hope In Blackwood's new novel, Corrigan, tion, anxious visitors forever trying to and found it abolished by the capricious- Devina Blunt has lived as a recluse all the bring reason to a universe that finds its ness and malevolence of reality...
...Allow approx 3 weeks delivery paralysis is as fraudulent as his dreams...
...But within this scope, within the beleaguered by invasions of hos- delusions we mistake as reality and the tile, natural forces...
...dies, but why she transformed her life to from prison, a way of being or seeing that Crispins, the hospital that saved his life, accommodate someone she knew was a reveals our place in the world with the Devina is overwhelmed by Corrigan's fake...
...once I had been fire...
...prove his guilt, she discovers what the NAME reader has suspected from the beginning: Address that St...
...But just as Corrigan Lourdes...
...But there is no lesson to be with fish tanks, video games, and conceptual art...
...In this light, our efforts to translate have been fooled by none of this," and to recognized, and with no less admirable the ambiguity we know into the certainty go forward anyway until she decides clarity, as a nothing, a dream, a drifting we desire seem desperate in their inten- she's had enough...
...Corrigan's tireless op- questions what it means to move about that are the character of human experitimism convinces Devina of the aimless- the world when it has no purpose...
...Lived history is not an Blackwood is rare among contemporary The houses in Caroline Blackwood's ficabstraction functioning independently of writers in that there are no elegies to loss tion have a truth similar to Wilde's the individual, but the narrative line in her work...
...There are many varieties of prose a dandy, a gambler, a whoremonger, and fulness...
...In even the most mundane mur- everyday and the more unwieldly evils 9 May 1986: 279 stumbling anyone who ventures from continually returns and which exists as turns one to stone...
...She comes to believe that doing, she reveals a truth on the other To say that no resolution exists should if she succumbs to Corrigan's dream she, side of hope: one which affirms the emp- come as no surprise, but even now we too, might save her soul from ruin...
...To be without hope Devina Blunt to the world...
...tion of art...
...permanent part of your If the novel followed the predictable video collection...
...have been news to her mother...
...bad faith we mistake as love, Caroline If experience can be said to have a core, Blackwood's novels examine the posor if our place in the world has a character sibilities of movement left to us, and which defines it, we see it perpetually in darkest writers, it is because nihilists are whether it is conceivable to move one the permanence of human folly...
...Corrigan, these pages, works for a major publisher in Prison life makes one see people with his crippled legs, silken compasNew York City...
...In spite of himself, Corrigan leads would keep its heavy moments of rise impossible value we place on experi- Devina to the simple wisdom to say, "I and fall, but would at the same time be ence...
...waiting to be alive again...
...Brain Stoker, in her acceptance of evil as there is not the culmination of a vision, as Her daughter rails against Devina's the foundation of the universe and primal with Beckett, but the originating word passivity and refusal to reenter society...
...and fear we have learned from experiof course, and the desire to live happily ence...
...two volumes) choice of the right spouse came to seem Scribners, $60, 755 pp...
...and life as they are, that is why it sion, and repertoire of dreadful Commonweal: 280 metaphors, is the miracle who returns She also learns that none of this would paralysis of despair...
...The other Pakistanis are poorly drawn, espe- are viewed as selectively and as shadowily as Indians and cially one of Nasser's associates, a thug named Salim...
...If there is no indication of prison...
...Christian around marriage and around women...
...A the world, and especially women some quite remarkable love letters in the woman can be free only if she is a Chris- readers...
...Devina...
...It is until it becomes more compelling than the Gothic vision emerges from the also, for her, the moment by which we the past...
...Maybe I identify with him be- lows them to be trampled and conquered, Crispins's kindness...
...The mys- in her sense is to discover in oneself the When Corrigan arrives to sell a lapful tery of Corrigan is not how Devina Blunt immobility Wilde speaks of in his letter of little white flags to raise money for St...
...course of stories of this kind, Corrigan To order "The Song of Bernadette" send check would be held responsible for Devina's or money order for $39.98 (plus $3.00 postage death...
...When he wrote 'Notre accident" that forever alters their lives...
...His Commonweal: 282...
...An emancipated woman who is not out, in the world of readers, for opinions was to write her life-story...
...The women...
...how, then, do we act in the face of such pessimistic, but to do so evades the comAnd his manipulation of Devina hopelessness...
...it seems to be kept around to them, refurbishes his business under the cheeky name of provide the threat of violence, and, at the end, a predictable "Powders," and then outfits it not just with new machines, but mini-apocalypse at "Powders...
...And] .. . like those quoted above...
...No prizes were being handed Rousseau style...
...sounds of Corrigan's wheelchair rattling from nature and helplessness as its vic- In a letter from his cell in Reading up the stones of her drive, she is content tims...
...The Dunmartin Hall always had an aura guish we are used to hearing from our mystery is how we reintegrate ourselves of impermanence...
...Finish the sentence for me, pect it exists in our most secret moments...
...is always with us...
...Summit Books, 1981, This threat of the world outside has But in a certain sense, both attest to the $11.95, 208 pp...
...kidnaps his daughter to save her from sees the tiny body sprawled on the paveIf we no longer have much faith in histor- ment, he thinks: ical progress, some still hope for the in- And if the child were to survive...
...To un- slow learners who have come late to the step forward without setting off another derstand the past clearly is to see that point...
...This is doubly puzzling Tolstoy was introduced to this world with indignation about that, and the because he could so well play, in his of feeling by books and by his Aunt translator of Tolstoy's is clearly embar- fiction, that very different role which Toinette, who brought him up, and who rassed...
...The issue central to Corrigan is tective response to dismiss such a view as strike most directly at the isolated heart...
...But the child has learned 0 F THE MANY lies our parents tell us, At the end of Caroline Blackwood's to fear even her father and so flings herthe myth of the happy life is the one novel, The Fate of Mary Rose, a father self from the car to escape him...
...After marriage that is what he was...
...tiness of life without thereby surrender- resist such matter-of-fact statements of Corrigan possesses the confidence of ing to that inertia which is death to the our ill-fated purpose...
...ror of violence...
...And as the farm project ex- The Song of Bernadette pands, Devina rebuilds her drawing room into sleeping quarters for Corrigan The story of Saint and disfigures her entranceway with a Bernadette and Char Lady of ramp for his chair...
...But it In Devina's return to vitality, Blackwood see ourselves like the people abandoned is just the kind of exuberant sentimental- inverts Pascal's understanding of human outside Wilde's prison, scrambling to ity that can intimidate those with more nature existing within movement, and find antidotes to the frailty and treachery subdued passions...
...focus of her sight exists outside the his- to our usual course...
...Crispins is a seedy pancake City State Zip THE~p6~,4Nr, OF DERNADETTE house, not a hospital, and that Corrigan's MiK TJN lNfMl i W [%pii~c~.etampiu~~~D D N.Y...
...Despite the detours and Viking, $15.95...
...This provides "differences," to be homosexual attraction to Omar the film makes explicit...
...The house had into the casual order of life after these both the melancholy and the magic moments of doubt which strike the mind of something inherently doomed with the power of the truest enlightenby the height of its own, ancient, ment...
...Of course, he was or locker-room society when "men" one entered - in novels - a paradisal also wonderfully sensitive to women, share their thoughts about "women...
...And this was the life Tolstoy this one...
...But the major disappointment involves the portrayal of the Indeed, My Beautiful Laundrette is only an hour and a half English, principally a gang of punks and their leader (Daniel long, almost, literally, half a movie...
...From the in our hope that somewhere lies the mira- GOOD MIGHT SWEET highrise apartment of The Stepdaughter cle cure, the last-minute rescue...
...She develops the singleminded- less in the sense with which we are most the insignificance of the human form that ness of the convert who discovers a cause familiar...
...That is, it count of all that is discussed in these Translated by Cathy Porter created in its readers' minds a structure of thousands of pages, much more a judg- Random House, $35, 1043 pp...
...It is absolutely opposed to apparent selflessness and desire to do After he had become part of the house- the passivity that cripples the unloved good in the world...
...where we end will be some place further Penguin Books London, Our own lives are supposed to be a haaway and better from where we began...
...The translator of Sophia Tolstoy's his diaries) to play such an unflattering - and he knew its relation to novels...
...Blunt's and handling) to: JMJ VIDEO, P.O...
...What I will offer instead elaborate and extensive than they had are some thoughts on the thorniest prob- TOLSTOY'S DIARIES known before...
...ven...
...and it forms a a Christian is a wild beast...
...They don't bear the authority fiction, but the kind that Tolstoy first the seigneur of a hereditary estate...
...The sure, but it's only skin deep...
...As he we seem least willing to relinquish...
...And this is what comes out in The question obviously arises, why led between 1864 and 1881, the years of his diaries and his wife's diaries...
...Devina decides to put her acreage to work to produce fruits and vegetables for the patients of St...
...But the refuge of the personal may Although we pay lip service to the be our most enduring illusion...
...imperialism," but as artistically unsatisfying as the original...
...murky world of her mother, if for setbacks tripping everyone around us, we Mary Rose the plunge towards the want to be optimistic for ourselves and THE STEPDAUGHTER tarmac would not always seem believe that life has forward motion, that Caroline Blackwood safer than life...
...power in chaos...
...It is a natural, proall little-league gurus who know how to spirit...
...because does Tolstoy allow himself (over many his happiness in marriage and his writing it came out in their long and bitter con- years, and in the semi-public situation of of War and Peace and Anna Karenina flicts...
...I private life, on a country estate, with and to feminine points of view, in his am going to face this ugly aspect of many children and dependents, where novels...
...cheerfully evokes the small terrors of the happen...
...So the from the tradition of other Irish masters that is absent in her novels...
...It is to this fact that experience Gaol, Oscar Wilde wrote of the perspec- to wander about her property talking to tive of the world seen from the bars of his her dead husband, as she waits for someROBERT JONES, a frequent contributor to window: thing miraculous to happen...
...It is the people their door...
...In Devina This apprehension of the fragility of In the unrelenting integrity of her vi- Blunt and Angelica, Blackwood captures the human form encircled and conquered sion, Blackwood is most like Samuel the sense of the mind's conquering of by nature is the center of the Gothic imag- Beckett...
...fright in human souls as the energy at the that has echoed since prehistory and But Devina refuses to yield to the present beginning of all experience...
...aw-l) 9 May 1986: 281 negativity...
...won him the reverence of readers all over wrote him, while he was a young man, What kind of things did he say...
...She removes our usual recourse to consoCorrigan speaks throughout with the " 'Le repos entier est la lation and security by quietly suggesting emotionalism of an inferior poet who be- mort,' " Mrs...
...Nas- Pakistanis have been in many English films and books...
...His first fictional project tian...
...flourishes beyond his most extravagant But Blackwood does not mean hope- There is a modesty in her acceptance of hopes...
...Caroline Blackwood comes face of nothingness in Beckett's work the present to a vigil over the past...
...part of War and Peace...
...To life of memory becomes ongoing existof this vision, like Sheridan LeFanu and Blackwood seeing the nothing that is ence...
...philanthropy, and - this was often only first profile- we cannot turn to those that is, of linking it with other sides of his implicit - the production and consumpother sides of Tolstoy till we have faced personality and situation...
...We ignore Caroline Blackwood Granny Webster to the middle-class buntoo easily the possibility of the sneak Heinemann, London, galows of The Fate of Mary Rose, she attack in the dark, the accident waiting to 1983, 136 pp...
...ness of her life...
...At the beginning, cause he, too, had an unenviable easy victims waiting for the "undesirable just after my accident," Corrigan tells physique...
...And indeed, as Mrs...
...As he looked to the past before his imagines is just such a truce with existThrough Devina's knowing nod to death, Kafka wrote in his journal: ence: to find the elusive balance between Corrigan's paralysis, Blackwood implies "When considering the hopes I had the dazzle of nothing and the misbelief that all transcendence is false transcend- formed for life, the one which appeared that our lives measurably touch the ence...
...state...
...been the subject of Caroline indefatigable belief in the second chance, Blackwood's previous novels...
...the right spouse Martin Green philosopher, it is painful to have to ac- was another moral world, facing and in knowledge - as these days one is often some sense mirroring your own, and the forced to acknowledge - that he was tritus or spent ammunition of the sex war images that mirrored to and fro between also a male chauvinist pig...
...family, Devina is found dead in her Make this classic film a room...
...TOM O'BRIEN CAROLINE BLACKWOOD & THE FALL FROM GRACE The illusion of refuge ROBERT JONES der mystery, the family member is often becoming paralyzed by her mother's terthe killer...
...1976, 110 pp...
...One never knows what motivates him: old fun was watching "cute" Asiatics acting as bourgeois as friendship, desire for escape from the Cockney ghetto, or the "normal" Americans...
...immobile both see and know...
...As you genre, which had, as Tolstoy knew it, a general was by no means confined to his see, these are not very interesting judg- strong though implicit ideological char- relations with Aunt Toinette...
...an ideology centered lem they raise: Tolstoy's attitude toward Edited and translated by R.F...
...Always the danger lies in stopwhich brings together the muddle of per- the betrayals common to the modern ping, in seeing existence freed of the sonal crises, feuds, and betrayals that are age's fall from grace, it is because the vibrancy and distractions which hold us our heritage...
...For this is the impasse which holds colonial aspirations...
...The years since her husband's death...
...He was also ments, quite apart from their distaste- acter...
...And if her work is often chillingly movement as a paralysis of spirit and the Blackwood writes: comic and free of the beleaguered an- reality outside it as a hallucination...
...which we are born...
...But Tolstoy's The most intelligent woman is less intel- Part of the answer lies in the novel own experience of "love" and of life in ligent than the most stupid man...
...Crispins...
...Their helplessness alraise money to build a library to repay St...
...He speaks to her of the hold, Corrigan spoke with his customary Renata in The Stepdaughter or the weakloneliness of the infirm and his dream to pretentiousness of Pascal: ling Mary Rose...
...sentiments and consciousness more ment on them...
...which each of us must awaken...
...Box 20127, daughter investigates Corrigan's past to New York, NY 10025...
...But, ser's daughter Tania, a nymphette, is reduced to pouty discon- irony aside, this leaves the film with a half-formed feel: it's an tent with her home and love life...
...This timeless motion picture won five Academy appears to have infiltrated every aspect of Awards (including best her life and diminished her ties to her actress - Jennifer Jones...
...drawn from or about their behavior...
...Unfortunately, the film consists mainly of these characters The film may seem ironically just in this respect: the English and this setting...
...Hope has many manifestations, Scribners, 1977, $7.95, 135 pp...
...characters make bunkers out of their of the mysteries of dread and the menace They revolve with life and contrihouses and rarely leave their rooms, it is invading every moment of our lives, bute to its unreality...
Vol. 113 • May 1986 • No. 9
