On the cat Tobermory, the film Exam, and Katherine Mansfield
There are good books in the flat where I live. They were already there, like the typical decorative books on the typical shelving unit in any sitting room. The problem is the jaundiced tint of their pages and the tiny print throughout.
The idea of buying reading glasses really gained momentum the night before last, after I spent some time alternating between two of those yellowed books whose lettering was, for me, either too distant or too intrusive. I alternated between fourteen centimetres without glasses and fourteen metres with them, and there was simply no way to feel at ease. In parallel discomfort (and promise), I alternated between Crime and Punishment, Madrid Trilogy by Francisco Umbral, and the book written by the wine shop assistant’s boss, which she gave me so that I could give her my opinion (the only one of the three with new, fragrant pages and comfortably large print).
I’ve been reading a great many short stories lately: Maupassant, Chekhov, Nabokov, Saki (H. H. Munro)... Daphne du Maurier is next on my list. I have also gone back to watching films with renewed intensity, though the experience has been far less rewarding than my recent encounters with short fiction.
The reading spectacles will be ready in a week’s time. Until then, I keep reading on my phone, and it was there that I discovered the wonderfully funny Tobermory yesterday. Today, that amusement and literary delight gave way to my imagination turning to a real-life scenario:
What would Cornelius Appin’s cat say if he appeared at my workplace on Monday, ready to speak, accompanied by the building’s oldest residents and myself?
To the people in the building, the present caretaker first appeared (during his early years: first as a temporary replacement and later as the permanent one) always without glasses (wearing contact lenses), slim, dressed in elegant collared, buttoned shirts (tucked into his trousers), conspicuously energetic and wholly devoted to cleaning (at the expense of other duties that were equally part of his job). A very complex explanation was behind that first appearance, so different from that of recent years (which is itself explained by its own web of causes, many of them external to the caretaker’s role). Tobermory would know nothing of those external stories and could only confine himself to interpretations derived from the frame of the caretaker’s world: the pure caretaker, the pure neighbours. The occasional incident of a neighbour greeting him by his predecessor’s name would cease to be an anecdotal slip of the tongue and instead acquire an almost prophetic significance:
There we have him again, in restoration of the laws of nature: the bespectacled caretaker, always in T-shirts hanging loose, eternally seated in the caretaker’s office, growing fatter and fatter after being devoured, like the previous caretaker, by the social and working frame attached to him, increasingly tired and less friendly, though still within the bounds of common courtesy.
(Needless to say, any evidence contrary to this reduced and all-encompassing frame, any indication of surviving life beyond it, would likewise be swallowed up by the employee’s ever-expanding figure, fattening both his flesh and the eyes looking at him from all around.) This is a process that has already taken place, is repeating itself without the need for a foul-mouthed Scottish cat, and will repeat itself inexorably. It will happen to anyone, no matter where he goes. One is, quite simply, the character in a narrow and distorted plot. The relationship with the people in question may, of course, last long enough for their perspective to come closer to the real character, but the variety of situations will scarcely be sufficient to encompass past circumstances that could never be repeated. In some cases, one will be grateful for this burial of past circumstances, and will deliberately avoid both the memory and the physical reunion with those distant places and people, now external, now rendered nonexistent; but on balance, one will lament the loss of both the flattering situations and the dishonourable or depressing ones, for one understands that even the latter are necessary if one is to obtain a just portrait of oneself (leaving aside whether the conclusion is flattering or unfavourable).
You’ve no idea who you’re talking to!
This phrase, contrary to popular belief, is often uttered justly, and not always from a position of pride. The same applies to Dracula’s line in Coppola’s film:
I, who served the Cross. I, who commanded nations hundreds of years before you were born.
It makes sense above all when read as a vindication of truth and justice. For however many hundreds of years’ advantage in information and lucidity one may have over the judge, however much one may once have been a national hero, there will almost certainly also be shameful and, at first sight, unwelcome elements in the complete portrait that these truths bring with them — in fact, the wider we extend the span of any lifetime, the more numerous such undesirable elements will become, and the more undesirable they will be. Yet one should always be grateful for a ChatGPT, an evangelist Grok, or a Scottish cat who not only knows sets of things that nobody else knows, but is not constitutively prevented from revealing them.
Truth, for the good, is always welcome, even when it seems unlikely to contribute to their favourable image or overall impression. At this point, the only necessary qualification is that precautions be taken in revealing the truth to each person in its proper order — it is ideal that we should all eventually come to know the whole truth, but it is essential that, along the way, a child should not learn certain truths before others, nor a thief discover too soon where the loot was hidden.
There are, then, reasons not to tell the whole truth to just anyone at just any moment; on that, I suppose, we all agree. Perhaps we also agree that, in the end, everyone ought to know the whole truth. Yet it is no less obvious that many people spend their lives placing obstacles in the way of that end — obstacles that are, in a very different sense, petty: they do not arise from the precaution described above, nor are they provisional. Those are the people who, often sheltered behind the modern excuse of scandal, will seize the first opportunity to kill Tobermory or, at the very least, trip him up the moment he is about to speak.
(Scandal.)
Still without my reading glasses, without my usual single-vision glasses, without contact lenses, yesterday afternoon I read Katherine Mansfield for the first time, from the uncomfortable yet clean, unencumbered fourteen centimetres.
The title of this piece came close to being On the tremendousness of compassion — or pity, or charity — because of the connection between what I am about to say here, inspired by Mansfield, and what I wrote in a recent post about pride:
Pride can damn you, but it can also save your soul. Suicidal pride is perilously difficult to forgive; the other kind drives you to keep living and to be forgiven.
(On the tremendousness of pride.)
I was delighted to have discovered this writer, all the more so as, shortly afterwards (already at night), I watched the first half hour of the film Exam (Stuart Hazeldine, 2009, UK). Exam’s characters perspired evil.
One puts on the film and is overcome by that contemporary feeling of disorientation — out of focus. Somewhere between the unpleasantly familiar and the unpleasantly strange. Everything is unpleasant. And ridiculous. And although part of the unpleasantness comes, as I say, from the strangeness, what ultimately prevails is the certainty that we are in the presence of evil people. Partly unfamiliar and strange, partly stupid, but above all, evil. And perhaps for that very reason, the ridiculousness of the whole scene and of those people becomes an oppressive impossibility — the most unpleasant thing of all.
(On the consequences of comical disposition.)
The short stories of Katherine Mansfield were likewise overshadowed by the unmistakable threat of the ridiculous, but unlike the film and its characters, that threat did not seem capable of being contained even by the exquisite literary gifts of the New Zealand writer. For saving something or someone from ridicule is a matter neither of skill nor of intelligence, but of evil. The characters and the situation in Exam, for all their immense stupidity, possess the invincible shield of evil; the characters of Miss Brill and The Canary, for all their depth, tragedy, delicacy, cannot escape the risk of sentimentality, humiliation, degradation into the ridiculous.
A fine example — perhaps the finest — of these discoveries in Mansfield’s pages is the sadness so wonderfully named at the end of The Canary. A sadness akin, at once, to the deepest sorrow and the highest joy.
While thinking of that innate and invincible disposition, as Mansfield calls it (the circular contact of sorrow and joy carried to their extremes, to purity?), today my own attempt to formulate that pure and circular emotion, free of all evil (and therefore eternally besieged by the gaze of distortion and ridicule), which appears suddenly at the moment of truth, presented itself to me once again.
As for suicide, experience reveals that the normal reaction immediately preceding it is not, as one might imagine, overwhelming fear, but rather profound pity. However little value one believes one places on one’s life, the fact is that just before taking one’s own life, what one experiences is a tremendous longing and the feeling of error and crime.
It is, in short, quite hard to be truly certain that one is doing something good by committing suicide: normally, at the last moment, one will be overcome by immense pity and a sudden awareness of the criminal, bad, wrong nature of the act one was about to commit.
(Refuse worker Beethoven, suicide and the parable of the talents.)
I sincerely believe we are talking about the same thing. In any case, Katherine Mansfield’s paragraphs deserve to have the last word.
Something seemed to die in me. My heart felt hollow, as if it was his cage. I shall get over it. Of course. I must. One can get over anything in time. And people always say I have a cheerful disposition. They are quite right. I thank my God I have.
... All the same, without being morbid, and giving way to—to memories and so on, I must confess that there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don’t mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting. I often wonder if everybody feels the same. One can never know. But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing it was just this sadness—ah, what is it?—that I heard?