Flights of Fancy

I watched a Bette Davis movie a few weeks ago: All About Eve. She is an aging starlet being undermined and ultimately displaced by a conniving ingénue. The story has all the hallmarks of drama from that era, the early 1950s. Davis is past her prime, and slowly slipping into that bottomless vat of acid that marked her later work.

What struck me about the story had absolutely nothing to do with the usual gushing praise or scathing criticism that falls on those rosy, but heavily censored dramas. One scene jumped out.

The stars accompany a friend to Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport in New York. Bette Davis and her unmemorable costar accompany a successful director friend to see him off on his flight to Los Angeles for a stint in Hollywood. They walk to the edge of the tarmac (!) before waving goodbye against a background of roaring aircraft engines.

I saw my grandchildren off today. They were on their way back to Ireland as unaccompanied minors. I required a special dispensation and pass to sit with them at the gate until their flight was called. This after almost an hour of discussion with a gate agent, trying to decide if they should even be allowed onto the plane. There was some discussion about their lack of a visa to enter Ireland. Ireland does not require or issue visas to minor children, but through some overly nit-picky reading of the rules, they could leave on their own but not come back, even if their mother was waiting there to greet them. Eventually, the agent reluctantly agreed to allow them to board their flight.

The point is that in sixty years, we have gone from an overly permissive, trusting society to one so paranoid even a child cannot return unencumbered to her mother. I’m not opposed to airport screening. I think it’s a good thing that someone is watching closely to prevent anyone wishing to do us harm from succeeding.

What I object to is the degree to which we have acquiesced to this universal intrusiveness. We all march through screening like cattle on the way to slaughter. Hardly anyone objects.

I object! But my response is first of all queasy fright whenever the word “airport” enters my imagination. I feel the same as when I load up TurboTax in anticipation of April 15. My second response is to avoid travel that involves security screening. We recently drove to Niagara Falls, Canada, but I refused to cross back into the US there, because I dreaded having to pass through the clutches of Homeland Security. Twice.

I have nothing to hide. I won’t even let my wife smuggle produce over the US/Canada border, but that doesn’t alleviate my unease. The scrutiny alone is unsettling.

I am now reluctant to cross any border or board any flight because of the ordeal it requires.

I’ll smell my own shoes, thank you very much.

Arc of Triumph

The original form of Greek Drama called “Comedy” was not intended to be funny. It was about triumph adverse circumstances, resulting in a happy ending. “Tragedy” retains its original meaning, dragging along a sad ending.

That said, I suppose I’m being too harsh toward Leonie!, although I’m not sure whether the story is a tragedy or a comedy. Certainly the principal character faced adverse circumstances. She was sickly. She was ill-behaved. Today she’d be classified with Attention Deficit Disorder. She wasn’t very bright, either, but that might’ve been dyslexia. Who knows?

On the other end of the arc, I’m not sure whether she overcame her circumstances or not. After much difficulty and many abortive starts, she was accepted into the Sisters of the Visitation. I suppose that was a triumph. She didn’t seem to accomplish much as a nun, especially compared to her sister Therese, who published several books before dying at twenty-four.

In Catholic eyes, she led an exemplary life, apparently inspiring other struggling postulates. She continues to have a strong following sixty years after her death. That must count for something. From my point of view, following a cloistered life is a failure. Life ought to be lived, to be filled with accomplishment, or at least facing its challenges head on. Retreating into a convent is like committing yourself to an asylum even though you aren’t sick.

But then my experience with prayer doesn’t credit it with as much value as Catholic Religious do.

Leonie! wasn’t fiction, but a dramatic biography. She was a real person with real tragedies and psychic deficiencies to cope with. She chose the same life her sisters followed, which isn’t all that surprising.

When writing fiction, we are not constrained by minor inconveniences like facts and truth. If our character needs to triumph over adversities, we can pile them on to our heart’s content. If we want a happy ending, we can easily construct one. Tragedy is there just beyond the clack of the keyboard.

My only compulsion is that a story needs one or the other. If we leave our readers dangling with an ambiguous ending, they’ll feel cheated. SOMETHING has to happen, and our readers need reassurance that a clear resolution has been achieved.

This is especially important to me as I compose a story around my autistic character. Autism is already a tragedy in the first chapter of a child’s life and often it is only through extraordinary effort that a modicum of normalcy can be achieved. When authentic genius emerges, that is a comedic triumph of the highest order — in the best sense of that word.

That’s what I want to get into print.

Inspiration

We attended the world premiere of an inspirational movie3 called Leonie!, put together by the Catholic Church.

I am neither Catholic, nor particularly in need to inspiration. I went because about half the movie was filmed in and around the house of some friends in Romeo. Their Victorian manse bears a striking resemblance to the house where Leonie and her sister Therese Martin grew up.

Local lore buffs may recognize that name. Therese Martin, aka Saint Therese, is the person behind the Shrine of the Little Flower on Woodward in Royal Oak. Though named after the same saint that inspired Mother Teresa, late of India’s slums, she seems to be little known outside Catholic Circles.

Inside is another story.

Therese, who was a Carmelite nun, died of tuberculosis at 24. She was an extremely self-effacing person, but also a prolific writer. Her wild popularity is probably due to her literary legacy as much as any good works.

All her sisters who survived to adulthood became nuns. Most of them, like her, became Carmelites, but Leonie, the subject of the new movie, entered the Sisters of the Visitation, instead. Leonie had been a sickly, rebellious, not-too-bright child who somehow slipped into the religious order. Apparently they didn’t have competitive entrance exams or a selective admission process.

After watching the film, I remain unsure how or why Leonie’s life is seen as inspirational. True, she was surrounded by suffering. Several sisters died in childhood. Her mother died at 45. Her sainted sister Therese died at 24, and her father succumbed to dementia. I imagine that life was typical of late eighteenth century France or anyplace else, for that matter. Medicine was next to useless.

While I was raised Catholic, I no longer practice. Maybe they skipped that chapter in catechism, but I never caught onto the appeal of asceticism. So you live a cloister life of denial. No one sees except the other religious. The world goes on in its slow downward spiral toward depravity. What have you accomplished?

The contemplative life is focused on prayer: appeals to God to intercede in human affairs. This is something I do have firsthand experience with, and from direct observation, it doesn’t do anything beyond self-delusion.

Are people spontaneously healed at Lourdes and Lisieux? I don’t know, but all the people with life-threatening diseases who claimed healing died anyway. Certainly God never answered any of my prayers, despite my sincere, fervent entreaties.

Leonie had a difficult childhood, grew up amid sorrow, joined a convent and died. So did many other people, most without the benefit of the Church to support them in their hours of distress.

I am not impressed. 

Someday, I'll publish an account of my own religious experience. It will not be so pretty.

Edifice Rex

We attended a wedding recently at Kirk in the Hills, a Presbyterian church in Bloomfield Hills. It hadn’t changed much since we went there regularly in the late 60s, but then it was designed to look like it was five hundred years old.

Kirk is one of dozens of magnificent edifices built primarily in the 1920s, at the height of the automotive boom times before the Great Depression. I’ve been in a few of them – Christ Church Cranbrook, Shrine of the Little Flower in Ferndale, Metropolitan Methodist, and Mariners’ Church on the Detroit River.

In contrast to more recently built structures that resemble either barns or movie theaters, the older buildings look like CHURCHES. The stereotypical image they evoke was set starting a thousand years ago and reached the peak of refinement around 1400, when the Gothic masterpieces rose across Europe.

You can get a glimmer of insight about what technological masterpieces the originals were by reading Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. He follows the construction of a cathedral in England through the eyes of a stonemason, but all the religious and political intrigue is there in vivid detail.

While most of these churches, including their modern counterparts were built to “The greater glory of God,” what they were really about was psychological warfare. When ignorant peasants and serfs came into these magnificent spaces, they had to be awed by the power implied in their construction. Yes, there must be an all-powerful God, but there must also be an all-powerful religious and political hierarchy blessed with boundless authority by that God.

Better not cross either of them.

While the edifices remain and the hierarchies that built them still hold sway, their power – and God’s – has severely eroded. We can watch as commercial structures of even greater magnificence go up in a matter of months. We are inundated with examples of moral depravity and political expedience among the clergy. The mystery, awe and power that fed the church’s dominance have been overarched. Been there, done that. What’s the big deal? Science daily debunks the cherished truths that the church used to claim omniscience for God. What is left when God is proved wrong? Should we still do as he says?

As a consequence, we are no longer afraid of God. We still have a lingering fear that he is still out there, sulking. We obey moral precepts as if God, like a radar cop, might be lurking in the shadows. We don’t want to get caught, but in truth, we know he isn’t actually there.

This is the moral contradiction that drives my character, Frank Healy. He still believes in God, but doesn’t trust him to mete justice. Frank feels like he has to do it himself. The rules are still good, we just need to enforce them ourselves.

God’s cavalry is not riding to the rescue.

Stock Characters

Jasper Fforde wrote a series of books featuring a literary Detective named Tuesday Next, who travels freely between reality and a world of fiction populated by fictional characters. She comes from a long line of time travelers whose responsibilities include correcting time anomalies so history doesn’t get screwed up. Her husband periodically appears and disappears, depending on whether someone is messing with his history.

Tuesday’s adventures are hilarious. She deals straight-faced and deadpan as characters like Humpty Dumpty and Colonel Bradshaw slip in and out of narratives where they don’t belong, like Jane Austen’s stories.

One of the things Fforde does particularly well is put a comic spin on one of the essential elements of fiction: stock characters. An author cannot afford to waste pages drawing detailed descriptions and applying well defined personality to characters that appear only peripherally in a story. If they did, readers would lose track of the plot and quickly abandon the book and the author.

Instead, authors use a quick shorthand to describe these fringe players using simple descriptions and highly circumscribed actions. Fforde plays on this by putting these players into little endless action loops where an actor does the same little task over and over, repeating the same snippets of dialog. When Tuesday Next encounters situations like that, she knows she is deep in a backstory where nothing important can happen. The characters are either slightly out of focus, with bland undefined features, or they are literally two dimensional cardboard cutouts.

While this makes for great humor, the point should not be lost that those stock characters are necessary to fill in the narrative without clogging up the story with unnecessary detail. Writers only need to be careful that the background characters don’t all blend together. Not all women are tall, buxom statuesque blondes. Not all bureaucrats are bald bespectacled accountants. Not all Nazi Assassins are muscular, blond Aryan gods.

Some of the shorthand is legitimate in the sense that stereotypes are recognizable for a reason. I recently drove past a party where most of the guests’ vehicles where jacked up pickup trucks. I saw one of the attendees. He was muscular and deeply tanned, with his spiky blond hair cut in a mullet. He was wearing a faded t-shirt with the sleeves torn off.

I couldn’t have drawn a better caricature if I was a cartoonist.