In the Days of the Comet

H.G. Wells – 1906

"I wish at times,” said I, with a gesture at the heavens, “that comet of yours or some such thing would indeed strike this world–and wipe us all away, strikes, wars, tumults, loves, jealousies, and all the wretchedness of life!”

The novels of H.G. Wells were probably the biggest political influence on me since I started reading them in my early teens. Their common factor that stayed with me was the readjustment of perspective caused by the extraordinary situations Wells conjured, that combined with his Freudian apprehensions about the human condition as well as his beautiful prose. I loved the fact the Martians in The War of the Worlds were defeated not by human cunning or technology but by mere germs in our atmosphere whose impact no one could foresee. I loved the portrayal of a future society in The Time Machine where human beings have diverged into the caveman-like Morlocks and the beautiful but dumb Eloi. The Island of Dr. Moreau (my favorite of all) forces you to question what right humans really have to regard themselves masters of all life on earth, and When the Sleeper Wakes demonstrates that not even centuries of technical advances can cure people of their hunger for messiahs.

In the Days of the Comet tells the story of a willful young working-class man in Victorian England, William Leadford, as he wrestles with personal and economic problems while a comet, at first only faintly observed in the night sky, makes its way steadily towards earth. I expected a presentation of society at large, but the story keeps close to William’s personal story as the external forces steadily close in; not only the comet but civil strife and even looming war between England and Germany. After being casually indoctrinated into socialism by his friend Parload, William begins to conflate his personal hardships with the injustices of the world. When he loses his job at a pottery bank and his fiancée Nettie rejects him for a wealthier man above her class, he swears revenge and purchases a gun. He witnesses violence between a local mining company and its oppressed workers. He identifies society as the Secure versus the Insecure, a Darwinian battlefield of predators and prey. Just as all crises converge – William stalking Nettie and her lover, enemy ships approaching the English coast – the comet gets close enough to illuminate the land all night long. Moments away from William committing murder, the comet breaches the earth’s atmosphere and beings to disintegrate, dousing all life on Earth in a mysterious “green vapor” that temporarily knocks them unconscious. The gas turns out to have not just transformative but curative effects on the human body’s nerves and brain. Humanity wakes up from this brief trance filled with feelings of compassion and connection with all living things. Greed and jealousy are universally left behind as primitive and childish, and societies around the world begin rebuilding systems and structures that edify rather than crush the human spirit. To William’s great surprise, Nettie wants to return to him while also staying with her current husband. He turns her down out of feelings of propriety, which he eventually comes to dismiss as an outmoded moral prejudice, entering into a polyamorous relationship between Nettie and her husband and William and his wife Anna. This is where the story abruptly ends, with an ambiguous interjection by the narrator reacting with shock to the elderly William’s memories of professed sexual freedom, suggesting either that the effects of the comet’s vapor wore off or possibly that the story we’ve been told was imagined or invented by William. I’m not sure I interpreted the finale correctly, or how I feel about its implications. I was along with Wells for the ride, fascinated by his radical propositions, so I felt a little let down if indeed the tale of the comet’s quickening effect on humanity is false. I say that even though I acknowledge that this would be in line with Wells’ relentlessly grim outlook on the nature of Man. I thoroughly love In the Days of the Comet for its beautiful language and ideas, but I can’t deny being disturbed by Wells’ suggestion that even the heights to which humanity can climb are only temporarily accessible at best.

The World of Dreams

Havelock Ellis – 1911

Although he provides many examples of his own dreams, Havelock Ellis doesn’t offer a lot of new or personal insights about dreams in general, except for a few brief asides at the end of some chapters. The book is more of a survey of dream research and theories up to that point.

Here are a few passages that I liked:

“In dreams, planes of existence that in waking life are fundamentally distinct are brought together, so that events belonging to different planes move on the same plane, and even become combined. Acting and life, the picture and the reality, are no longer absolutely distinct. Art and life flow in the same channel.”

“In our dreams we are brought back into the magic circle of early culture, and we shrink and shudder in the presence of imaginative phantoms that are built up of our own thoughts and emotions, and are really our own flesh.”

“I have cultivated, so far as I care to, my garden of dreams, and it scarcely seems to me that it is a large garden. Yet every path of it, I sometimes think, might lead at last to the heart of the universe.”

The Sirens of Titan

Kurt Vonnegut – 1959

“At first glance, the laboratory-gowned scientist seemed to be a perfect servant of nothing but truth. At first glance, one was convinced that nothing but truth could please him as he beamed at his test tube. At first glance, one thought that he was as much above the beastly concerns of mankind as the harmoniums in the caves of Mercury. There, at first glance, was a young man without vanity, without lust – and one accepted at its face value the title Salo had engraved on the statue, Discovery of Atomic Power.

And then one perceived that the young truth-seeker had a shocking erection.”

Empathy and cynicism meet and meld in The Sirens of Titan, which is Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel but the one in which he truly found his voice. The satire is often unbearably brutal and there are moments of powerful grace and humanity. Though not a solipsistic writer, Vonnegut’s inner conflict is never concealed. He sees life as futile and human beings as horribly flawed, but at the same time he finds so much redemption in the smallest instances of sharing and kindness between any two people. It’s a philosophical battle that never quite gets settled in his greatest books, which is what makes them so potent. An eccentric millionaire, Winston Niles Rumfoord, builds a spaceship and blasts off with his dog to explore the universe, getting sucked into some kind of wormhole or vortex that transforms him into a multi-dimensional being who can see the future, at least well enough to seem omniscient to most mortals, allowing him to remake society in his image, orchestrate interplanetary wars, and unify the world under a new religion called The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, the sole tenet of which is that all events are complete accidents, not the will of the Almighty. Meanwhile, another rich man, Malachi Constant, lives a completely frivolous life and becomes a pawn in Rumfoord’s agenda to demonstrate the absence of divine justice in the cosmos. And just when we think that Rumfoord is essentially a demigod, we find that he is not only at the mercy of natural forces but also of an alien race known as the Tralfamadorians, who have manipulated human history for no other reason than to make them able to produce and deliver a replacement spaceship part for one of their messenger robots stranded on Titan, a task that takes hundreds of thousands of years. (One other point of interest about the book is that it describes a future society where citizens accept handicaps to minimize any kind of physical or intellectual advantages they may have other others, a concept that will become the main premise of Vonnegut’s later famous story “Harrison Bergeron.”) The plot is not dependent on twists and turns, but there are several that bowled me over. More than the story, though, are various isolated scenes and subplots that really surprised and moved me. The Tralfamadorian robot, Salo, alone for millennia, has developed compassion and a profound sense of loneliness. Salo is crestfallen to find that Rumfoord, the only other intelligent being on the Saturn moon, has no interest in his friendship and only resents him as a fellow tool of the Tralfamadorians. This leads to Salo committing suicide by disassembling himself by a lakeshore. Chrono, the estranged son of Constant, is a surly brat on Earth but after being on Titan for many years, he goes feral and leaves his family to live with the native bluebird flocks, wearing feathers and learning their language, and even building votive structures in their honor all over the landscape. Near the end of his life, the repentant Constant undertakes cleaning and maintaining these shrines as a means of bonding with his son. Most striking of all, for me, is the tale of Unk and Boaz marooned in the deep catacombs of Mercury, (thereby – by Rumfoord’s design – surviving the disastrous Mars-Earth war). There is a native species in these caverns called ‘harmoniums,’ creatures that have no higher functions or thoughts beyond existing and who are fueled by vibrations. Dazzled by their simple beauty and the music they produce, Boaz bonds with the harmoniums, letting them feed on his own pulse, and ultimately chooses to remain alone with them on Mercury rather than escape with Unk. Whether foolish or heroic, or both, the willingness of characters to risk self-destruction to experience a bit of genuine warmth, kindness or tranquility is a phenomenon that Vonnegut returns to often. As he writes in The Sirens of Titan, “It was all so sad. But it was all so beautiful, too.”

The Godfather

Mario Puzo – 1969

Possibly one of the most mediocre novels ever to be turned into a masterpiece of a film, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was nevertheless a bestseller that captured the public’s imagination, largely due to Puzo’s ingenious idea to fuse recently exposed details about the American mafia in nonfiction books like The Valachi Papers and Gay Talese's Honor Thy Father with the trashy roman à clef novels of Jaqueline Susann and Harold Robbins. It’s not great literature, and even Puzo himself, (like director Francis Ford Coppola), was not especially happy about his name being synonymous with mafia epics over the more serious, personal works that he took pride in. But it’s easy to see why the book lent itself to a screen adaptation. The characters are well-drawn, with the family dynamic being loosely patterned on The Brothers Karamazov. Without Coppola’s involvement in the film, it would likely have been a more routine Hollywood affair like Airport or Love Story. Speaking as someone who has seen the movie a hundred times and read the novel once, I can only say that the latter seems incredibly soapy, artless and puerile in comparison. Coppola was generous in sharing credit with Puzo for the adaptation, even insisting on the phrase “Mario Puzo’s” above the title on screen, but it’s apparent that Coppola is primarily responsible for everything great about the film, including Brando, the music of Nino Rota, Gordon Willis’ cinematography, and the huge cast of newcomers that he discovered. It was Coppola who outmaneuvered Paramount chief Robert Evans’ relentless interference. Evans, who wanted another Love Story, pushed for Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal to play Michael Corleone instead of Al Pacino, and generally needled, harassed and second-guessed Coppola the whole way. When the time came for a sequel, one of Coppola’s requirements was that Evans be kept away from him; (pretty much the last time Coppola would have the clout to make such a demand). The point is that I believe Coppola retroactively made the Puzo novel seem better than it was. For every “make him an offer he can’t refuse,” there are endless paragraphs that dwell on the sordid details of minor characters’ lives, like Lucy the bridesmaid who doesn’t know what to do about her abnormally spacious vagina. The writing is ridiculously misogynistic. Dwelling ad nauseum on Johnny Fontaine’s entire sexual history or on Sonny Corleone’s massive phallus and animal libido, Puzo’s prose comes off like the work of a terribly insecure and unattractive man with minimal experience with women trying to sound like he knows everything about them. Worst of all, probably, is the fact that Puzo allows no space in this 450-page novel for reflection or to critique the milieu he depicts. He describes the behavior of all these reprehensible people in almost a journalistic way, with a dearth of feeling about it all, which got translated faithfully into the film, which in turn led to the impression that both Puzo and Coppola were glamorizing the mafia. This is why Coppola made sure that the sequel was unambiguous in showing Michael, (despite being an impressive Machiavellian strategist), as a soulless shell of a human being due to the evil he had wrought, all thinly justified with a pretense of concern for “family.” The finale of The Godfather, Part II shows Michael completely alone, having killed, exiled or alienated all of his loved ones. Puzo’s novel contains no moments even remotely comparable in depth, poetry and pure decisiveness in its treatment of themes. This, combined with the absence of any style or beauty in Puzo’s writing, makes The Godfather pretty underwhelming, in my opinion.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Henry Farrell – 1960

It’s not great literature by any means, but it’s an interesting, light read as kind of a fan-fiction mashup of A Streetcar Named Desire and Sunset Boulevard, leaning towards the sordid instead of pathos or poetry. Possibly because the 1962 movie is so famous and is such a strict adaptation, the book reads like a novelization of it, not incredibly graceful or visceral, just efficient in its juicy storytelling.

Splinter of the Mind’s Eye

Alan Dean Foster – 1978

The king of movie novelizations and the ghostwriter of “George Lucas’” Star Wars novel, Alan Dean Foster was commissioned to write a sequel to the hit film, but was advised that it had to be something that could be easily adapted into an inexpensive movie if the powers-that-be decided that Star Wars needed a sequel. Obviously, and thankfully, that plan was scrapped in favor of The Empire Strikes Back. Nevertheless, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye retains the distinction of being not only the first Star Wars sequel but the very first work of “expanded universe” building in the Star Wars fiction galaxy, a sub-genre all its own that has flooded the earth with seemingly innumerable comics, novels, TV shows, video games, etc. Yes, it even precedes the notorious Star Wars Holiday Special, which taught us about Life Day and introduced Boba Fett before he ever appeared in film. Foster’s novel, presumably crafted with input from Lucas, is pretty underwhelming. It feels like Foster barely got Star Wars, and in all fairness, hardly anyone at that time could conceive of what it would become. The plot has Luke and Leia, still before knowing of their own sibling connection, crash land on an industrial outpost planet and scramble to evade capture by the always pursuing Empire. Luke retains some of his youthful humility from the 1977 film (aka A New Hope), but Leia is more irritable and unlikeable than she previously was. The focus stays on them the entire time as they pass through a frontier mining town and witness injustice while trying to stay undercover. Eventually, late into the book, Darth Vader finally shows up to fight a duel with Luke, whose Force powers are magnified by his contact with a sacred crystal. It’s an interesting read, but it never gets past the TV-movie mentality that would later give us The Ewok Adventure, an economical detour into a somewhat Star Wars-y landscape. But all this restraint makes no sense because it’s a novel. Foster could have made it more epic and ambitious than any movie, but he was curtailed by the demand to keep it simple for the sake of a future B-movie budget that never even came to pass. Thus we see that, as early as 1978, Lucas was already bending his art over to accept the insertion of corporate demands, something that would only get progressively worse over the years, culminating in his sale of the whole beloved franchise to the Disney media conglomeration.

Pictures of the Gone World

Lawrence Ferlinghetti – 1955

“...couples going nude into the sad water in the profound lasciviousness of Spring in an algebra of lyricism which I am still deciphering.”

Not only is this Ferlinghetti’s first book, it’s the first publication by his bookstore and printing company City Lights in San Francisco, which went on to put out books by fellow poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and many others. Ferlinghetti just died a few years ago at the age of 101! These poems are printed in scattered fashion across the pages, making use of wide unused spaces and without punctuation or justified edges. Altogether, they give the impression of someone reflecting upon considerable travels around the world. Ferlinghetti has the same detached, ironic voice of most of his fellow Beats, reacting to human activity with an alien’s bemusement and a bit of disdain. By far, my favorite poem in this collection is ‘The World is a Beautiful Place.’

“The world is a beautiful place to be born into, if you don’t mind some people dying all the time.”