Desk Notes No.31
The Eternal Return: Time, Memory, and Love in Vladimir Nabokov’s Mary, and David Lowery’s A Ghost Story
Dear friends,
Pumpkin season is upon us. Social media feeds are aglow with orange, yellow and gold, cosy cups of hot coffee, candles, and books piled by the fire. It’s the season of comfort. Encroaching nights drawing a soft, sheltering curtain around the day, inviting us to rest.
Outside, my own crop of winter squashes is disappointingly sparse, a consequence of the cold, wet spring. Every garden year is different — sometimes crops succeed, sometimes they don’t, often without apparent reason. Nature teaches the gardener not to idealise; to treasure instead its unpredictable gifts. While leaves tumble, the dahlias have somehow defied the early frosts; balls of purple, peach and bronze can be seen from the window, candescent in the low sun. With the turn of the hours, their pretty hue is stolen, sinking into shades of cheerless grey and deep black. I think about a line from Dorothy Richardson:
“Isn’t it funny how dark they are, and yet the colour’s there all the time, isn’t it?”
As I retreat indoors, the outside world continues just the same. I wonder about those for whom the cosiness of home is barely tangible; a remote concept for the distant future. Damp walls, crowded rooms, noise, bad air. Earlier this year I shared an experimental piece about public health and social responsibility. A history of neglect that’s brought into sharp relief by the cosy season.
Print — Mary by Vladimir Nabokov (1926); and Selected Poems by John Clare (1793-1864)
Screen — A Ghost Story (2017) directed by David Lowery; A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf (1921)
Print
Mary by Vladimir Nabokov (1926)
Selected Poems, by John Clare (1793-1864)
“He lay on his back and listened to the past.”
In Vladimir Nabokov’s debut novel, an officer exiled from Russia re-lives his first and most profound love affair with childhood sweetheart Mary. Squashed into a dusty Berlin boarding house with half a dozen other Russian refugees, Ganin discovers his old, yellow-bearded neighbour is now Mary’s husband. As the two men await her imminent arrival in Berlin, Ganin slips into reverie. Past and present concertina, and Mary becomes the product of Ganin’s memory and imagination.
“Now, many years later, he felt that their imaginary meeting and the meeting which took place in reality had blended and merged imperceptibly into one another, since as a living person she was only an uninterrupted continuation of the image which had foreshadowed her.”
The novel takes place over four days, heavy with anticipation. In the stagnant limbo of the boarding house, Nabokov creates a striking feeling of being trapped by time; the present dragging us away from a past to which we can no longer return. It is apt that the novel opens with the two men— Ganin and Alfyorov — stuck in a lift.
“Don’t you think there’s something symbolic in our meeting like this… the fact that we’ve stopped, motionless, in this darkness. And that we’re waiting.”
All the boarding house residents are “perpetually waiting,” trapped in a foreign country desperate to go home. Indeed, time is tied to space by the very room numbers named for the day and month — April 1, April 5 — torn out of a desk calendar and pasted to the doors. Poet Podtyagin is ensnared by red tape, unable to get the correct papers for travelling to his family in Paris. Nabokov wrings tragedy from bureaucracy — his cruelty to his characters as staggering here as it is in later books. Nabokov’s women are particularly hard done by, used and disposed of by fickle men. Seen through the eyes of Ganin trapped in an unsatisfying relationship with his mistress, Lyudmilla appears “repulsive” — “the painted rubber of her proffered lips,” her “unwanted flesh,” “something sleazy, stale and old in the smell of her perfume, although she herself was only twenty-five.”
This suffocating relationship is contrasted with the intense sensuality of his reverie.
“Amid the hubbub of the autumn nigh, he unbuttoned [Mary’s] blouse, kissed her hot clavicle; she remained silent —only her eyes glistened faintly, and the skin of her bared breast slowly turned cold from the touch of his lips and the humid night wind. They spoke little, it was too dark to speak. When at last he struck a match to consult his watch, Mary blinked and brushed a wet strand of hair from her cheek. He flung his arm around her while impelling his bicycle with one hand placed on its saddles and thus they slowly walked away in the night, now reduced to a drizzle; first there was the descent along the path to the bridge, and then the farewell there, protracted and sorrowful, as though before a long separation.”
When the St Petersburg winter thwarts the intimacy between Mary and Ganin, memory sustains their relationship, becoming a part of the relationship itself.
“Long walks in the frost were agonising, and finding a warm place alone in museums and cinemas was most agonising at all. No wonder that in the frequent piercingly tender letters which they wrote to each other on blank days, they both recalled the paths through the park, the smell of leaves, as being something unimaginably dear and gone forever: perhaps they truly realised that their real happiness was over.”
That long-distance relationships are half imagination, is suggested by Mary herself. “You write that you would give your whole future life for a moment from the past — but would it be better to meet and verify ones feelings,” she writes in a long treasured letter. For Ganin, his reverie is a “deathless reality,” in which he and Mary can never perish.
I recall the nature poet John Clare whose life I wrote about earlier this year. Suffering from hallucinations and depression, Clare was certified insane for the first time in 1837. The poem To Mary — penned by Clare for his first love while living in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum towards the end of his life — expresses a similar longing to live in memory; a ceaseless reverie carefully disguised from the outside world.
I sleep with thee and wake with thee And yet thou art not there; I fill my arms with thoughts of thee And press the common air. Thy eyes are gazing upon mine When thou art out of sight; My lips are always touching thine At morning, noon and night I think and speak of other things To keep my mind at rest; But still to thee my memory clings Like love in woman’s breast. I hide it from the world’s wide eye And think and speak contrary; But the soft wind comes from the sky And whispers tales of Mary.
Years earlier, in 1841, Clare had escaped a private asylum in Epping Forest walking 80 miles along the Great York Road all the way to Northborough in search of Mary, whom he continued to love. He didn’t find her. Mary had died from burns sustained in accident three years earlier. In his prose account of the journey he writes:
July 23rd 1841. Returned home out of Essex and found no Mary — her and her family are as nothing to me now, though she herself was once the dearest of all — and how can I forget
Back in Northborough, Clare writes Two Songs for Child Harold, haunted by Mary’s death.
Nor night nor day nor sun nor shade Week month nor rolling year Repairs the breach wronged love hath made There madness—misery here Life’s lease was lengthened by her smiles —Are truth and love contrary No ray of hope my life beguiles I’ve lost love home and Mary
Raw and aching with sadness, there is more pain in John Clare’s longing than Ganin’s. The absence of hope is crushing. For Ganin there is a sense, however remote, that he and Mary might live again. Quoting Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return — which suggests time is an eternal loop — Ganin muses:
“It seems there’s a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity is that I’ll never find them again — never. I once read about the ‘eternal return.’ But what if this complicated game of patience never comes out a second time? Let me see — there’s something I don’t grasp — yes, this: surely it won’t all die when I do?”
Screen
A Ghost Story (2017) directed by David Lowery
A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf (1921)
“Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.”
In his review for Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson described A Ghost Story as “a meditative poem about the enormity of time.” In seven years of thinking about it, I’m yet to find a better way to put it. Like Nabokov’s Mary, this is story about waiting. C (Casey Affleck) is killed in a car accident, awaking as a ghost shrouded in mortuary sheets. Drawn back to the home he shared with M (Rooney Mara) he spends the rest of the film — the rest of time — trapped in this small space waiting for her to come home. This is a ghost story without any of the cliches; ambitious, original and utterly magnificent.
“Death was the glass; death was between us,” writes Virginia Woolf in her short story A Haunted House, which provides the film with its epigraph. This glass — the invisible force separating the dead from the living — powers David Lowery’s film. The opening scenes establish a tender intimacy between the couple sleeping close in bed, quickly contrasting it with the aching, vacant distance of the mortuary slab. Getting home, C — barely visible, a white column in the corner of the frame — watches M as she slides to the kitchen floor eating, through tears, an entire apple pie. Lasting a full six minutes, it’s an awards-worthy performance. C can only look on as his living existence is gradually erased; M clings to their bedsheets as she changes them for the last time.
Balancing the naturalistic and the surreal — quiet scenes run on for minutes; Affleck spends almost the entire film covered in a white sheet with two holes for eyes — all the film’s elements are in complete harmony. Lowery and his cinematographer, Andrew Droz Palermo, choose the near square aspect ratio of 1.33:1. It’s just enough space for two people in close up, underlining the intimacy of the living couple. One suddenly absent, the loss becomes more profound, the loneliness palpable in the empty space of the frame. As M moves out, driving away from the house bathed in golden light, C is left behind in a palette of blue-grey. The rest is filmmaking at its purest, with hardly any dialogue — some in Spanish without subtitles — time passes in scenes that recall another Woolf novel, the middle portion of To The Lighthouse.
Looking out through the bleak window C spots another ghost in the nearby house.
Hello Hi I’m waiting for someone Who? I don’t remember
I can hardly think of a cinematic moment more poignant; the immensity of time dawning on both C and ourselves. That Affleck is able to wring so much emotion from stillness is, frankly, staggering.
C might have died, but the sense that he is the one who has been abandoned begins to weigh heavy. In the subtext, the frustrations of long-term relationships emerge. Buried within the lyrics of the song C writes and shares with M, I Get Overwhelmed, is a long-seated fear of being deserted; and a suggestion of unhappiness about the couple’s mismatched hopes for the future.
All the awful dreams Felt real enough Is your lover there? Is she wakin up? Did she die in the night? And leave you alone? Alone No children Just emptiness No place like home Just a fucking mess Mess
A Ghost Story is rich with subtext and intertextuality. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot a copy of Nietzsche flying from a bookshelf. Even the tracks of Daniel Hart’s gorgeous, atmospheric score are named for lines of Woolf’s short story. The time, the distance, the loneliness; it makes my heart ache. This is perhaps the most romantic film ever made — waiting for the end of time for one more glimpse of the person you love. And desperately sad.
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If you’d like to read more, here are the articles mentioned in this post
This month’s featured image is from ‘A Ghost Story’ written and directed by David Lowery (2017). Banners are courtesy of the Internet Book Archive.