Category: Story

“And that’s my story.”

With a dramatic flourish and certain finality, dowagers Helen O’Malley and Bow Ross finish the dish.
— Ladies’ Luncheon at Abraham & Strauss, Brooklyn, New York, circa 1957

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Leo Tolstoy Stories

by Kerrin Ross Monahan

“I am convinced that nothing has so marked an influence on the direction of a man’s mind as his appearance, and not his appearance itself so much as his conviction that it is attractive or unattractive.” – From Boyhood

In Leo Tolstoy’s stories Family Happiness (1859), The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), and The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), the author reveals a great deal about Russian society and family life. In each of these stories the characters discuss the themes of marriage, women, social aspirations, love and death. There is a definite progression in intensity of feeling, from positive and negative, as one moves from the first story to the last. One sees a gradual change from the relative gentleness, and, comparatively speaking, mild discontent of Family Happiness, to the horrifying physical violence and full-blown loathing in the finale of The Kreutzer Sonata. Each story is self-contained, of course, but when reading them one after another in chronological order, one can’t help wondering if Tolstoy himself didn’t feel that Russian family life was, in reality, gradually degenerating and disintegrating and that society was at fault.

Sergey Mikhaylych of Family Happiness seems to be the most insightful, sensible and well adjusted of the three. He believed that life was good and that the only certain happiness was to live for others (22). What was needed for happiness was a “quiet secluded life in the country with the possibility of being useful to people . . . who are not accustomed to have it done to them . . . which one hopes may be of some use.” Add to this, “nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor . . .” (45) and of course, most important of all, wife and children.

Sergey was of the landed gentry, but rather than leading a life of dissipation in St. Petersburg or Moscow society, he was a prudent, practical, and hard working man-in-residence. He believed that “society in itself is no great harm,” but “unsatisfied social aspirations are a bad and ugly business” (65). He derided the “dirtiness and idleness and luxury of this foolish society . . .” (70). He only presented his young wife Marya to society in hopes that she would quickly get the surface glamour and excitement out of her system. As it turned out, not surprisingly, she was fascinated and thrilled with its brittle sophistication and glittering aura, and was taken up and lionized by everyone. An important Prince expressed great interest in her, as did an Italian Marquis, who made an attempted seduction. Princess D. had convinced Marya that Sergey’s character had become “very stiff and unsociable” (73). Thus it was that Sergey’s dim view of society was the correct one.

Ivan Ilych, unlike Sergey, was a person of “moderate means,” a member of the Court of Justice who wanted “to appear rich” (116), and whose increased salary was never quite enough to pay for his longed-for lifestyle. He was a social climber who shrewdly gravitated towards the “best circle” (108) and was very ambitious, weeding out “various shabby friends and relatives” so that only the “best people” remained (119). He would have loved to have been included in the high school milieu to which Sergey belonged but indeed he never would have admitted. He greatly enjoyed city life and hated it when he was transferred to the provincial backwaters, so he schemed tirelessly until it was arranged that he be posted in Moscow.

Ivan’s life’s aim was to lead a “decorous life approved of by society” (110), to do the “correct” thing and to stay within the limits of good conduct that society imposed. He felt that the “character” of life was that of “pleasant light heartedness and decorum” (114). He believed that one’s duty was those in authority said it was (105). Unlike Sergey, who married for love and companionship, he married, initially because it gave him “personal satisfaction,” but most importantly because it was considered the “right thing” to do by his “highly placed” associates (109). Marriage provided him with only the basic necessities of food, shelter, and sex. On his deathbed, Ivan’s wife and daughter make vacuous small talk, all the while trying to make a quick exit so they may go the theater. When Ivan finally dies, his coworkers immediately speculate on how they can possibly gain through promotion, and his wife tries (quite unsubtly) to get a larger pension.

In The Kreutzer Sonata, Pozdnyshev was a landowner and university graduate who saw marriage as a trap. It was a sale of women; they were put on the block by society (177), and were seen by men as existing solely for their own physical enjoyment. Love, Pozdnyshev felt, was really only lust, and “the life of our upper classes . . . is simply a brothel . . . (175). Sex was an unnatural vice (182), “abominable and swinish” (187). He maintained that sexual passion hindered mankind from achieving an “ideal of goodness attained by continence and purity” (183). On the one hand Pozdnyshev felt that women were not to blame; their families and society had perpetuated their sexual inequality and subservient state; but on the other hand he became outraged and insanely jealous when his wife, after bearing several children, started practicing contraception. (The only other alternative was to be a worn-out wreck, in ill health, and burdened with far too many children.) “The majority of the present educated world (society) devote themselves to this kind of debauchery (birth control) without the least qualm of conscience” (202). Pozdnyshev was trapped – he didn’t want an exhausted, hysterical, and neurotic wife, yet he grew insanely jealous of the calm, happy, healthy, and attractive woman that she had once again become.

Pozdnyshev blamed society for fostering a sexual double standard. He confessed that he had his first woman, at the age of fifteen, egged on by other boys. He said that respected adults had approved of this, saying that it was good for the health. Brothels were under government supervision and doctors were employed to screen out the sick women (170). So at a very early age, Pozdnyshev learned to by cynical and cold about sexual relations.

The three male characters in each of these stories all had strong feelings about family and society and if they had ever met, there undoubtedly would have been a lively exchange of thoughts (and possibly blows) between them. Sergey was a proponent of love and marriage and family, and saw society in general, and what he perceived it stood for as a contaminant, something to be avoided at all costs. Best to enjoy a calm, quiet life in the country with wife, children, and neighbors in a spirit of loving reciprocity. Ivan Ilych felt that living well in society, abiding by its rules, and enjoying its approval was everything. One put on a mask and pretended marriage was successful when in fact it was not. Work and acquaintances became the center of one’s life. Pozdnyshev was obsesses with the idea that marriage was simply legalized debauchery sanctioned by a perverted society. This belief inexorably led him to the ultimate horror, that of taking another human’s life. Both of them would have disagreed with both of them, undoubtedly denouncing them as degenerates.

Tolstoy’s stories are really about death in its many forms. Marya lost the romance in her marriage but a different type of love replaced it as she grew in maturity and wisdom and began to close the nineteen-year gap in age between Sergey and herself. Ivan Ilych lost his life through terminal illness, but even worse, he realized just before he died that he had been dead all along; he had only simply existed. While living a “most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible life” (104), he wasn’t living at all. “Yes, it was the right thing” (154). In Pozdnyshev’s mind, he had been dying most of his life. To him, sex was a form of death and he had been actively practicing it and had been tormented by it from puberty. This obsession with sex was the main reason he murdered his wife. He felt that since almost all of society indulged in sex, it was doomed as well. (It might be considered a sign that society itself was saying when it acquitted him of murder.)

Sergey and his family successfully insulated themselves from their society and they were able to maintain their closeness and cohesiveness. Ivan’s family willingly embraced society and was ruined by it. Pozdnyshev was tainted by society even before he married, causing him to destroy his wife, and, for all intents and purposes, himself and his children. Thus Tolstoy has successfully uncovered the real murderer of the family – a sick and malevolent society.

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Nocturne Poem

by Julio Peralta-Paulino

Little Ms Muffet away from the spider

Show me show me show me

No, these deeds must not be thought

Jill and Jack forever Barcelona

Mountains

Newspaper and burning myrrh

Vocal forms of music an ocean apart

With a relation to the true nature

Of all things

The C major chord

The coffee, cold by now

Velvet here a major progression

Cigarettes burning in a relative key

A contract of depravity

Charlie himself nodding out

Sure he had heard that name before

Somewhere in the spell of intimacy

Unbound shade pure sheets

Knowing with a yes in the silly of a turn

But it’s not that, he said at the play

She had a vision

Something about the owl screaming

And the cricket crying

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The Man Without a Past Film Review

by Kerrin Ross Monahan

The Man Without a Past, written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki is the second part of his “Finland” trilogy. This writer/director’s films are all very short and ” . . . eccentric parodies of various genres . . . set to eclectic soundtracks, typically based around 50s rock ‘n’ roll.” — Unknown. He has been quoted as saying, “Life is too hard to bear and there is no hope for anyone.” He concentrates on that segment of Finnish society he calls “the hidden people”: the outcasts and the homeless and those who simply don’t fit in, by any society’s standards. This director is “glum, but optimistic” which is quite apparent, at least in this particular film.

Kaurismäki is known to have no rehearsals. Actors do one run-through and then they’re captured on film for good or ill. Their dialogue is spare, dry, and to the point. (When one is living hand to mouth, there are no soliloquies). In The Man Without a Past, this certainly works advantageously, because the audience is caught up in the immediacy of the moment — in the raw here and now.

Kaurismäki’s titular character is beaten so badly by street thugs that he loses his memory completely. Fortunately, he is befriended by other so-called street people — a family who lives in an abandoned sea freight container. There are other characters who also give whatever little of themselves they have left. The Salvation Army plays a prominent part and, in a very funny scene, change the tenor of their “gig” to great advantage.

The movie does indeed have many life-embracing moments; the director is never maudlin, and he allows light, even sidesplitting bits to show through. Or rather, the actors do (upon whom this director purposely puts the responsibility for most of the directing: after all, we all are for the most part responsible for the direction of our own individual lives, or at least most of us should be). The “establishment” is shown in its full, arrogant, “take no prisoners” mode, but in such a way the audience almost (but not quite) feels a modicum of pity.

All in all, a fresh, positive, feel without any “Pollyanna” takes. The “man” in a way is lucky — he doesn’t have the baggage of his past weighing him down, and because of this, he triumphs on his own terms.

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Faulkner’s Dim View

by Kerrin Ross Monahan

In William Faulkner’s short fiction, The Old Man and The Bear, the author uses a convict and a bear as protagonists of their respective stories. In a strange way, the tall convict and the animal both represent the same thing. They each stand for a certain purity, and innate innocence, in the face of an increasingly evil and disintegrating society. It is clear Faulkner feels the world encroaching upon the bear, and the world outside prison walls—is civilization at its worst, or at least a culture rapidly becoming that way.

The Old Man stands for the Mississippi River, a symbol of life itself with all its vicissitudes and unforeseen mishaps and tragedies. Restless, unpredictable, and powerful, it can obliterate and sweep away everything in its path. The story takes place in Mississippi, 1927. The tall convict, an unschooled rural type, is serving a fifteen-year jail term for attempted train robbery. The staff volunteers certain inmates to help in an emergency rescue operation brought on by a flood; thus Faulkner puts his character back in the midst of the same civilization he felt had misused the young man. It should be noted that the Deep South has traditionally had a far more conservative and repressive penal code than possibly anywhere else in the United States.

Faulkner immediately depicts what he felt were societal faults. We hear the story of the short and plump convict who was given an outrageous sentence of one hundred and ninety-nine years—for a murder he didn’t commit. In very strong terms, the author asserts those acting on behalf of the law were: “blind instruments not of equity but of all human outrage and vengeance, acting in savage personal concert . . . which certainly abrogated justice and possibly even law.” In the end, the tall convict (with eight years left on his sentence) is given an additional ten because, when he hadn’t immediately returned from his rescue assignment, he had been officially declared dead on paper, and the prison officials wouldn’t change anything for fear of making themselves not only look foolish, but also for fear of political repercussions.

Faulkner not only attacks the iniquities of the legal processes, but racial prejudice as well. One white evacuee is indignant at the fact the rescue launch is too full to take him: “. . . no room for me . . .”Another symbol of the society that had let the tall convict down was the pregnant woman he had rescued from the waters. He had spent weeks taking care of her amidst the most perilous of conditions, but the reader never sees or hears her thank him in any way whatsoever. His teenage girlfriend that he describes in the very end, quite possibly the cause of his attempted robbery, had only visited him once in jail and then sent a postcard announcing her marriage. His last words: “Women, _ _ _t” sums up the betrayal he felt toward the opposite sex.

It is then no wonder that the tall convict views life behind bars as a “comparatively safe world.” He saw the outside world as a “separate demanding threatening inert yet living mass of which both he and she (the pregnant woman) were equally victims.” Prison to him was “home, the place where he had lived almost since childhood, his friends of years . . . the familiar fields . . . the mules . . . barracks [with] good stoves in winter . . . food . . . Sunday ball games and the picture shows.” All of this certainly does evoke a comforting and homelike atmosphere. Even though, near the end of his adventure, he realizes he had “forgot how good it is to work” and make money, after he was safely back in the barracks he felt that he was then secure from the “waste and desolation” the Old Man represented. It is as if everything had been reversed: the real world, comforting and familiar was in jail, and the life outside was confusing and frightening. Because the convict had accepted his lot in life and possessed a strong feeling of duty, he is, in a certain way, free.

The Bear spans approximately eleven years, from 1877 to 1888, when Ike, the young boy, grows from age ten to twenty-one. In the beginning, Faulkner sees the bear, Ben, as free, a formidable legend of the forest. He invests the animal with wisdom and dignity and there is a worthy, although adversarial respect between him and Ike. Faulkner gives us his own feeling in the very first paragraph: “. . . only Sam Fathers, Ike’s mentor, and Old Ben and the mongrel Lion were taintless and incorruptible.” He speaks of the natural landscape as “that doomed wilderness where edges were being constantly . . . gnawed at by men . . .”Sam’s father was the son of a Negro slave and a Chickasaw chief and it is he more than anyone else who teaches Ike to have respect, almost a great reverence, for nature. Certainly, he is anxious to track down Ben, but when he had the chance, he didn’t kill him, because, as Ike said: ” . . . it (the killing) won’t be until the last day, whenever he don’t want it to last any longer.” When the hunter Boon and the dog Lion finally kill the bear, Old Sam “collapses because he knows this is the “last day,” the end of an era, not just of his own life, but also of the pristine wilderness. Sam had successfully passed on his reverence for life to Ike and it is he who makes a primitive pyre for Sam and the dead dog.

Faulkner uses racial prejudice in this story as well, to show what he thinks of the world. At first, Part Four seems out of place, a complicated genealogy in the form of a family diary. These records show there is African American blood back in the family history. Through this device the author exposes the exploitation and mistreatment of the American Natives and Black slaves by the Whites. The author then states that man should: “Hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood . . .”In the end, progress invades in the form of the lumber company. Major de Spain, one of the original hunters, had sold out and a new planing mill is built. The log train, that had once simply been an unobtrusive way in and out of the forest for hunters, now had become something more menacing: “It was a doomed wilderness. . . . The shadow and portent of the new mill . . .” Ike himself, now twenty-one, at this moment knows he will never return to the old hunting site again. Faulkner then invokes the “trinity” of Sam and Ben and Lion, a kind of resurrection: “There was no death, not Lion and Sam . . . and old Ben too . . . not held fast in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth . . .” In dying, this trio took with them the last of the old revered way of life that can only be born again in the hearts and minds of human beings.

Faulkner’s view of the worlds in which these two stories take place is rather dim and negative. Society, in the name of progress, is destroying, unchecked, a pure and innocent world. The tall convict instinctively and ironically retreats back to the safety of man-made bars in the face of nature gone amok. The bear, with a similar kind of instinct, deliberately lets himself be caught and killed; death being a safe retreat from man gone amok. Neither story holds out much hope for the future and it is clear that Faulkner had little faith in society’s ability to foretell and correct these cultural ills.

Work Cited
Faulkner, William. Three Famous Short Novels: Spotted Horses, Old Man, The Bear. New York: Vintage, 1961.

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Library Checkout: A Simple Habana Melody

by Kerrin Ross Monahan

Oscar Hijuelos’ (Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love), A Simple Habana Melody is a nostalgic, lavish, and lush story about art, politics, religion, culture, family, war, and history; about different kinds of sex and sexuality; about women: (a broad spectrum ranging from the Virgin herself to all types of “putas”). But above all it is about music, music, music — especially what the music represents.

The book is anything but “a simple melody.” On the contrary, it is a very complicated, complex, and profound oratorio on life itself as seen through the eyes of an extraordinary man: “. . . my own protagonist . . . whose dreams are the dreams of those who the wish the world well.” (Author’s note.)

Israel Levis, Cuban composer, experiences life fully through the five senses. The reader can taste the wonderful food and drink (of which there are copious amounts), smell the aroma of the tropical flowers and the richness of Cuban coffees and cigars, feel the warm, soft sea breezes, see the bright floral colors and the sun’s rays glittering on the Caribbean sea. Most of all, the reader hears the music — the notes seem to flow off the pages — swaying shades and nuances and tones that never let go; instead they continue to haunt Levis and the reader, especially Rosas Puras (Pure Roses, and as the author also interprets: Pretty Roses.) This is Levis’ most famous song, played the world over, which he hurriedly wrote at the request of his undeclared love, Rita Valladares:”Rosas Puras. I had a melody that came instantly to me, arranged with the assistance of that unseen and underappreciated inspiration which can only come from God.” Thus, the composer identifies his most popular and enduring song with Rita, the love of his life.

So here we get to the essence of the story, which is love with all of its complicated facets. Love of country, of art, politics, religion, culture, family, and humanity itself. Overreaching it all, love for Rita: countless opportunities for Levis to connect deeply with that one other soul for whom he has had a lifelong yearning. Opportunities that he let slip by. Rather, he uses “memory as companion,” his diffidence and quiet reserve always and ever prohibiting him from declaring himself to his beautiful and flamboyant young protégé. (Perhaps he should have taken his lyricist friend Manny’s advice: “Live as if no one else matters.”)

The sad part is that Rita never was able to declare her love to him, either. Rather, she ran through four husbands (he never married), and died with “his name . . . never . . . far from her lips . . . crying with tender thoughts about him.”

“The purest rose will always last, like the love in our hearts.” To Israel and Rita, a simple Habana melody represented the deep and complex unrequited love that they had always carried for each other.

Not so simple after all.