Donington on Jung and Wagner's "Ring"

Robert Donington's Wagner's 'Ring' and its Symbols is the oft-cited Jungian analysis of the cycle of four operas. In discussing the paradox of the general situation that develops in the first opera, "Das Rheingold," Donington makes the point that the "bitterness and the sweetness of life are quite inseparable." He quotes Wagner, who wrote in a letter that "'Without death as a necessary concomitant, there is no life; that alone has no end which has no beginning.'" Music, continues, Donington, "is at its greatest when it puts us in mind at once of our own mortality and of life's worth and beauty, and reconciles us to the paradox." He goes on to extend the realization to all the arts, especially "in this age of weakened religious understanding" when "the arts have more responsibility than ever for quickening our intuitive awareness that life does hold a meaning to be discovered by each in his own individual way." In short, "great art reconciles the opposites, and in so doing helps us to reconcile them and to become reconciled with life."
Wagner is not a lovable man, or even a likable one, but in his work his (apparent?) knowledge of his own shortcomings, of man's capacity for inflicting pain, seems to enrich the music. Does this forgive his sins? No, but it may help to explain the appeal of his music.

What an Awful Man!

The Baron Ungern-Sternberg is the subject of James Palmer's The Bloody White Baron: the Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia--h0w's that for a title! Fortunately Palmer is a more concise writer than this suggests and he has a whale of a story to tell. However obscure a historical figure the Baron may be, Mongolia, the background of his short, brutal rise to power, turns out to have been a crucial battleground in the years following the Russian Revolution, as the Whites and the Reds fought for supremacy and China and Japan jockeyed for power in that part of Asia.
As Palmer says in his introduction, The Baron "in one short year rose from being a Russian nobleman to incarnate God of War and returned Khan. In Mongolia he was lauded as a hero, feared as a demon and, briefly, worshipped as a god." Having fled to Mongolia as the last best hope for the return of some sort of monarchy--his preferred form of government--Ungern raised a Mongolian army, freed the Living Buddha who had been imprisoned by the Chinese and for a brief time enjoyed a a precarious supremacy in Mongolia. This did not, however, last long, and Ungern, his army in ruins, was captured and executed by the Bolsheviks.
Palmer makes a good case for the importance of his story and in his epilogue finishes the sad story of Mongolia, a forgotten country that suffered first at the hands of the Chinese and second,from the much worse tyranny of the Soviets. Ungern was arguably a monster but his story rises above the man. Palmer has a nice sense of humor as well as a gift for conveying the historical scene. Overlook the title and read this book.

Contemplating the End

Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End is indeed about old age, which means that it's about death, but it's a bracing book that avoids many of the cliches about same, especially given that Athill is 91 and thus might be expected to indulge herself in a few. For example, on the subject of last words, she notes that although most of the famous examples are probably "apocryphal," one "likes to imagine oneself signed off in a memorable way." She makes no bones about her regret that her sensual life is over and has a lot to say about the nature of same and her relationships with various men. Her account sounds honest enough so that one truly believes it is--a rare thing it seems to me given that honesty is difficult to achieve in sexual matters. She regrets what she terms "that nub of coldness" at her center and laziness. But she claims that she will stop at those two "because to turn up something even worse would be a great bore," besides which she's not sure that "digging out past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them." Amen, and bravo--there are far too many memoirs clogged with self-indulgent self reproach.
Athill also writes well about her lack of religious faith and makes some nice points about the difference between contemporary and medieval religious art, asserting that from the "seventeenth century on there is always a taint of sentimentality or hysteria in religious art, however splendid the technique." It is, she says, "the selflessness of [medieval] art that is magnetic" because the "person making the object wasn't trying to express his own personality . . . he was trying to represent something outside of himself for which he felt the utmost respect, love or dread." I'll remember this when next looking at medieval or Buddhist or any other kind of art made at a time of religious belief.
All in all I enjoyed listening to Athill's sensible voice. As for myself, I am 71, which she identifies as the moment one steps over the threshhold into old age. She describes herself as realizing then that she was "aground on that fact," a fine phrase for the realization that one is not middle-aged any more and a good example of Athill's willingness to accept the inevitable without succumbing to it more than one needs to.

The Sealed Letter is Emma Donoghue's vivid re-creation of a notorious mid-Victorian divorce case in which Henry Codington, a vice-admiral in the British admirality, sought to separate himself from his promiscuous wife Helen. Involved in the sensational trial as a witness was Emily Faithfull, a feminist and a businesswoman as well as a long-time friend of Helen's. Born in Dublin, Donoghue now lives in Canada but her knowledge of London as it was in 1864 is extensive. Yet beyond the facts of the case, interesting enough in themselves, what makes this novel so powerful is the author's invocation of the complex snarl of emotions revolving around the relationship between Helen, "Fido," as Faithfull was called by her friends, and the admiral himself. No one of them is blameless, but neither is any one to blame entirely for the fiasco that resulted from the case, the results of which seem to have satisfied no one. All in all, the novel is an argument for the more liberal divorce laws that came in time but much later than one would have thought given the misery exposed by Donoghue. Most of all, though, it's a wonderful novel.
The Birthday Present, by Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell), is a nasty bit of stuff. This is not surprising given its author and I don't mean it in an entirely negative way. The "gift" referred to in the title is a mock kidnapping with strong sexual overtones set up by Ivor, a budding politician who is having an affair with a young married woman. She is to be "kidnapped" and delivered to him, all of which is a supposedly a happy adventure for her. Well of course it all goes awry in a big wayand what follows is the haunting of Ivor by the aftermath of the event. For about half the book I sped along, eager to pick it up again, but then it all began to seem unsavory and repetitive. Vione is a good writer with an eye for the telling detail but it's all kind of sordid unless you're really interested in the possible (and real) peccadillos of British politicians.
Lastly, having avoided the dreary-sounding movie I decided to read (I would say re-read, but I don't think that's so), Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road. Dreary, yes, horribly so, but what a good novel this is. The paperback edition I had featured a superb introduction by Richard Ford, a big favorite of mine, lamenting Yates's lack of critical attention, and pointing out what's so fine about his writing. This novel struck me as a cross between Cheever and Updike and yet it is very much it's own thing. Yates's ability to turn a phrase, to nail a character with a sentence or two is awesome, as is his unrelenting depiction of suburban angst, waste, soulessness, whatever. there is nothing very admirable (that's putting it mildly) about Frank and April, the two protagonists, and watching them destroy each other is not a pretty sight. But two other couples, friends of the main pair and their real estate agent and her husband, are portrayed with a large degree of compassions--this is not immediately evident but it becomes so in the course of the novel and it serves to sweeten the bitterness of tone. I liked it so much I might even decide to see the movie, but only on Netflix so I can walk out if necessary.

If you're looking for a good thriller I recommend The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. It's a truly gripping police procedural/freelance tale about the corpses in the closet of a large Swedish industrial family. The oddly matched but effective "detectives" are a financial journalist and Salander, a tough waif with photographic mind and advanced computer skills. The result is a classic page turner. I was devastated to read in the author bio that Larsson has died since writing this--no more to anticipate.
And for something competely different, a quotation from a Tessa Hadley story, "She's the One," published in a recent issue of The New Yorker:
“She imagined the reading she did now as like climbing inside one of those deep old beds she’d seen in a museum, with a sliding glass door to close behind you: even as she was suffering with a book and could hardly bear it, felt as if her heart would crack with emotion or with outrage at injustice, the act of reading it enclosed and saved her. Sometimes when she moved back out of the book and into her own life, just for a moment she could see her circumstances with a new interest and clarity, as if they were happening to someone else.”

In the March 16th issue of The New Yorker, amidst articles on the fashion world, are nine poems by the late John Updike on the subject of his impending death, four of them sonnets. Years ago I heard Updike read his poems as part of a series at the University of Pittsburgh. In the front row of the audience sat his elderly mother, so often a figure in his work. Listening to him, looking at her, was an oddly moving experience, like seeing a fictional character come to life. This last poetry is very moving, especially since the speaker's voice, so often heard during my lifetime of reading, is no more except in his work. What I loved about Updike, even in the things that I didn't like, was his curiosity about the world and its inhabitants and his apparent belief in the ongoing power of ordinary. Thus in one of these poems, "Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth," he thanks his childhood friends, his classmates, for providing "a sufficiency of human types," which is the end, "all a writer needs." He goes on to claim that it was all a writer needs, that it was "all there in Shillington." I tend to believe that, moreso as the years go on. All we need to do is look around us, which is what Updike always did, even when he was dying.

I have a few books to talk about, and an odd assortment at that. In the order read in which I read them, the first is Jonathan Carr's The Wagner Clan: The Saga of Germany's most Illustrious and Infamous Family. Termed by one commentator "fiendishly enjoyable," it is all of that. It's also an absorbing history of Bayreuth, the theater that Wagner wanted it to be, what is has been and what it might be in the future. Although it's sometimes difficult to keep the family members straight, especially as time goes on and the cast grows larger, it's never hard to marvel at their eccentricities. Wagner's daughter-in-law (Seigfried's wife) Winifred looms large. Energetic, intelligent, opinionated and deeply compromised by her cosy relationship with Hitler, she is nonetheless largely responsible for the continued existence of the festival, which has survived two world wars and family conflicts beyond belief. Carr narrates the tale with aplomb and sympathy; he never neglects the moral issues raised by all this happening in Germany, but neither does he preach. He also displays a constant awareness of the importance of the great music without which there would be no story and takes a sensible attitude towards the issue of whether or not it is in and of itself anti-semitic. If you're at all interested in Wagner, or in modern Germany, this is a must.
Then I took a breather and read a thriller and a mystery. The thriller was The Silent Man, by Alex Berenson. Welcome back, John Wells, savior of America in The Faithful Spy and The Ghost War. A CIA agent, Wells is, however, the despair of the CIA establishment. Preferring to do things his own way, he is given assignments that no one else will touch or else he just takes them on, permission be damned. In defying death on a regular basis, he threatens his relationship with Jennifer Exley, the love of his life and an agent herself, but one less devoted to self-destruction. Berenson is a good plotter and the details always sound right even if maybe they're not. But somehow this one left me unsatisfied, as if I'd eaten too much candy and still wasn't sated--just a bit overstuffed. I kept thinking I'd read it all before--not that I could put it down, mind you. The story involves a stolen nuclear device and an awful lot of space was given to the plotters and the physics behind their venture--more than I ever wanted to know about concocting a nuclear device, especially when I knew it was doomed to be a dud.
As for the mystery, that was Fatal Lies, by Frank Tallis, who specializes in period mysteries set against the backdrop of late 19th-century Vienna. The gas lights flicker, the sachertorte is delicious, Strauss waltzes play in the background--what more can one ask? But to be picky, there's a thing called too much atmosphere and sometimes those gaslights glowed just a hair too long. Still, Dr. Max Liebermann, an expert in Freudian psychology--the good doctor even makes an appearance--is an attractive protagonist and the plot, centered on a brutal murder at an elite military academy, is believable. It all makes for pleasant reading, and would be perfect to take to Vienna if you're lucky enough to be headed that way.