The detective is attracted to Cora all over again—he is a man who likes a woman with an intelligent face—and so has difficulty pretending to be what he’s not. Lovelady gives us a beautifully proportioned flashback at this point, showing Cora and Bill fifteen years before. Bill has taken her on a date to Lover’s Lane and is trying to persuade her to come into the backseat of the car. Cora holds out against his persuasion, winning Bill’s undying respect. In the present, in marked contrast, Bill and Cora succumb to the pleasures of the sack at first opportunity. Cora apologizes afterward, saying that she was just using Bill to get at someone else. The next day Bill wires Cora’s husband to come to Beverly Hills to collect his bride.
When Cora discovers that Bill has betrayed her—she has trusted him more than she realized—she is terribly disillusioned. “How could you have done it?” she would ask him. “If I can’t trust my friends, who can I trust?” Her questions go unanswered. Bill has absented himself from the scene.
Three times Harmon Stores asks Cora to come back to him (Lovelady uses the number three for its symbolic connotations) and three times Cora refuses. Rather than ask a fourth time, Harmon has her brought back to his house by force.
If she is a prisoner, Cora tells her husband, she will live like a prisoner; she refuses any sustenance other than bread and water. Harmon tries to win back her affection, plying her with gifts and attentions. Whatever Harmon does, it has the reverse effect of its intention. When Cora becomes seriously undernourished, Dr. Rankin steps in (he is one of the few physicians in his income bracket who still makes house calls) and feeds her intravenously. Eventually, a truce is negotiated and Cora agrees to live with her husband as his wife provided that Harmon makes no sexual demands on her. It will be in actuality, Cora says, what it has been in spirit—”a marriage in pretension only.”
Each day before going in to breakfast, Harmon knocks on the door to Cora’s room to ask if he might come in and talk to her. Each day, Cora, true to her vow, refuses him entrance. It goes on this way for months, Lovelady using repetition to astonishing effect. “I will come back again and ask tomorrow,” Harmon says. “I can’t stop you from asking,” Cora answers, “though I would give anything to spare us both the ordeal.” Cora’s terrible pride keeps the pair apart (Lovelady perceives pride as the deadliest of the deadly sins) and just when she is about to relent, Harmon relinquishes his quest for conversation, goes on an extended trip around the world, leaving Cora the house and an exceedingly generous settlement.
When Cora discovers that Harmon has gone—she is content at first not to be constantly importuned—she falls into a spiraling depression. One day in despair she tears her clothes off and invites in the local toughs to punish her sexually in an orgy that lasts four days and thirty-two (236-267) torrid pages. I can only hope that the reader will not come to this vast panoramic novel for those pages alone. When the ordeal is over, when Cora is released from the intensive-care ward of the hospital, she feels as if she were “newborn,” cleansed by “the trick of violence.”
Having cut himself off from all human communication, Harmon knows nothing of Cora’s ordeal. He goes from one suicidal adventure to another, exciting forgetfulness through unremitting activity. No matter what he does, however, no matter where he is, Cora’s image haunts his consciousness.
At one point, each unbeknownst to the other, both Cora and Harmon are hospitalized in opposing parts of the world, their separate disabilities the only remaining connection between them. Lovelady, it must be mentioned here, has a craftsman’s affection for the parallel plot, and with no little brilliance he alternates chapters concerning Cora’s and Harmon’s analogous plights.
Harmon’s hereditary disease has caught up with him; he is dying, finds himself more enfeebled each day, while Cora, a disjunctive parallel, gradually regains her full health. In a dream she has a prescience that Harmon is dying in a remote mountain village on the other side of the world. In the morning she wires Dr. Rankin for corroboration. The news arrives two hours later in eight words: HARMON HAS SIX MONTHS TO A YEAR LEFT.
Part II begins with Cora dedicating herself to locating her dying husband. She will tell him before he dies—it is her hope and salvation—that she “forgives him his trespass.” Cora hires the now world-famous detective, Bill Wall, to help her find “the only man she has ever loved” before he dies. Their relationship, she informs Bill, must be “all business,” and she enlists an oath of abstinence from him before they set out on their quest. Bill, we learn, is still in love with Cora and, despite his oath, accompanies her with the sole hope of renewing her affections.
Lovelady specializes in a certain kind of novelistic chase—more exciting than the immediate thrills the cinema can produce—the race against time. We cut from Cora to Harmon, Harmon to Cora, watch days turn into weeks. Harmon is a little weaker each day, Cora a little nearer to the mountain hospital in the Himalayas where her husband lies at death’s door. One day, the local wise man Naja—a storied figure in these parts—comes to visit Harmon in his hospital room.
“Are you in need of death?” Naja asks him. Harmon is almost too weak to respond, says it is his fate. “The sins of my father are visited on me. Necessity is itself.”
Naja (or the Nadna, as he is called) tells Harmon that his illness is merely a failure to breathe correctly and so an invitation to be taken away by death. Harmon, bereft of other choices, takes breathing lessons from the guru. The Nadna has him do the breathing exercises for longer periods each day—the first day, one hour, the second two, the third three, and so on. Eventually, Harmon spends an entire twenty four hours doing breathing exercises. “If nothing else,” the Nadna says, “you will learn to breathe correctly before you die.”
Each day the Nadna admonishes Harmon for not working hard enough. “You will never learn to breathe, rich man, unless you take every breath as if it were your last,” he says. “Why do you hold back? What are you saving it for?”
The doctors, who expected Harmon’s death imminently (in fact, his room had already been assigned to another terminal case), are amazed at his continuing survival.
One day, the Nadna, a man notably short on compliments, tells Harmon that one of the breaths he has listened to is the first true breath Harmon has ever taken. “Your progress is slow,” says the guru, “though inexorable.” This praise brings a smile of pleasure to Harmon’s face. The next day Harmon feels a little stronger and sits up in bed while doing his breathing exercises. The day after that, Harmon walks about the hospital room for a full five minutes.
Meanwhile, Cora, crossing the Sahara, is attacked by a tribe of nomads, has her virtue compromised many times, and is sold to a brothel in Marrakesh. Bill Wall tracks her down and rescues her at the loss of his right eye and much of his dignity. (Gang rape is a recurrent motif in THE SWAN FLIES.) Although still traumatized by her unfortunate experience, Cora is anxious to continue the journey.
“What’s the point of going on?” the detective asks. “According to your timetable, Harmon must be dead by now.”
“He lives in my heart,” Cora says. Although not normally an irrational person, Cora has a mystical sense that Harmon still partakes of the sentient world, and she insists on completing her trip with or without the detective’s help. The detective officially resigns from her employ but then follows after her on the next plane to see that no further harm comes to Cora.
The plane, chartered from Marrakesh, will take Cora only so far. There are areas in the world, Lovelady is telling us, which even airplanes can’t reach. Cora must ascend the mountain, as Harmon had, to reach the hospital in which, she assumes, Harmon is spending his final days. If she avoids the luxury of sleep, it will take her two days and two nights to reach the mountain village of Ygenta.
The very day she begins her ascent is the day the Nadna chooses to leave Harmon without a word of goodbye. The loss of the guru is particularly disturbing to Harmon, who has just mastered the breathing exercises and is eager to show off his pro
wess. “Where might he have gone?” he asks the doctor and the various attendants at the hospital. No one seems to know where the guru keeps himself. It is a far-off cave, someone reports, circumscribed by clouds. Harmon vows to find the guru so that he can thank him properly, with the idea of bringing the holy man back to the States, where his deeds can earn just recognition.
Just hours before Cora arrives at Ygenta, Harmon sets off on his quest to find the Nadna. Had Cora not been despoiled by a tribe of Yetis in the last lap of her journey, she might have arrived at the hospital in time to see her husband restored to full health. As it is, Cora rushes to Harmon’s hospital room, feverish herself from various ordeals, to find an empty bed. She assumes the worst—what else might she believe?—and falls over in a faint. No one disabuses her of her misapprehension and she returns home (a minor weakness in the plotting) fully convinced that Harmon has died of his hereditary disease. She grieves for two years, surrounding herself with sundry morbid artifacts of her lost husband. Bill Wall looks after her during this period, limiting his practice to local detections. Cora becomes a recluse and develops eccentric habits. After a while, Bill Wall prevails upon her to marry him. Although, as she says, she must remain faithful to her “one great love,” she agrees to live with Bill and look after him, more like a nurse than a wife perhaps, for as long as he wants her.
Harmon returns to the States, unrecognizably altered, his face covered with a scraggly beard. He has become a poor man by choice, has given away all his money to the Nadna and tends to proselytize on street corners, living on money thrown at him by strangers. One day, the inevitable confrontation takes place. Cora passes his beat and hears him talking with “dazzling eloquence” about the work of the Nadna. Something about him, at once familiar and unfamiliar, moves her and she offers the street preacher ten dollars. Harmon declines her gift. Cora comes back the next day, thinking she has been refused for giving too little, and offers Harmon ten times the initial sum. He refuses her again. The next day when Cora comes to his corner—she is prepared to offer him a blank check—the street preacher is not there. She comes back day after day, looking for the unaccountably familiar holy man without reward for her efforts. His health is bad, she realizes, and by asking around she tracks him to a cold-water flat in one of the most desolate areas of the city. He is on a rug on the floor when she finds him, among lice and roaches, dying, the old disease has recurred—and she looks after his needs still not knowing who he is. “I’ve suffered too,” she says, and she tells him the story of her quest for her dying husband (Lovelady goes on a bit too long here, recapitulating old materials) and how he was dead before she reached him to tell him that she loved and forgave him.
“Had he known that,” Harmon says, “his life might have been different.”
The room is dark when he says this but she sees something in the shadows of his face that “unearths a terrible recognition.”
“Different in what way?” she asks.
“Oh Cora,” he says in his ghostly voice. “What fools we’ve been.”
“The way you say my name,” Cora says. “It’s as if you’ve known that name and used it for a long time.” Gradually, she realizes who it is, the disguise of Harmon’s beard falling away as if it had been shaved before our eyes, and they embrace with, as Lovelady puts it, “inexpressible excitation.” They talk of a future together, plan it in painstaking detail, but the reader knows that there is not much hope—Harmon will probably not live out the night—and the novel comes to an ambiguous and touching end.
I have recounted the story here (and not all of it by half) to give some indication of the range of Lovelady’s narrative invention. If this 946-page book could be said to have a fault, and what of human hand is without, it is in its occasional longueurs. Lovelady has an obsessive’s penchant for letting a good thing go on beyond its maximum advantage. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that Lovelady’s effects tend to accumulate and that the weaknesses and strengths of this book are at times interchangeable. In our literary moment when fragmentation and absurdist disjunction are the fashion, the modern reader might find Lovelady somewhat derriere garde. There are few of the fashionable modernities here, just the organ music of recognizable lives played out in a story rich with alternation and surprise. Story, one needs to remind oneself, in the raison d’être of the novel, and THE SWAN FLIES AT MIDNIGHT’S FALL is in the grand tradition of storytelling. When the last page is read and the book is shut, the swan that is Cora continues to fly in our recollections, indomitable, tarnished and forever innocent, salvaging the prodigal Harmon Stores in us all.
The Adventures of King Dong
The trip to the island takes longer than one might expect. The head of the expedition, a famous impresario down on his luck, keeps a journal of the voyage. Nothing much happened today, he writes each day. At night he is unable to sleep, made anxious by the dark, tormented by impotence. His dreams of failure waft like smoke before our eyes. Apparently, no one knows of his affliction, not even his beautiful assistant, the touching and vulnerable Lola. A run of unseasonably bad weather, most of it fog, puts the expedition a week behind schedule. Bad omens are in abundance. The rats leave in an unprecedented hurry. There is talk of mutiny among the crew, savage whispers of discontent.
Pages and pages of journal are written before the island is sighted. It is none too soon. The journal entries have become increasingly bleak. Rations are low, Commander Buck writes in his journal. We are reduced to eating the bread of affliction. And then the fog lifts to reveal the uncharted island Hong Dong (“Mysterious Expanse” in English) like a small black cross in the distance. That night, the impresario calls a meeting of the crew to reveal the mission of the voyage. “I’ve kept you buzzards in the dark for a reason,” he says. “We’ve come to Hong Dong to bring back the thirteenth wonder of the world.”
There are some murmurs of disbelief, but as one of the crew, an old-timer, mentions, Commander Bill Buck has a reputation for unearthing the inexplicable.
That night there is an unanticipated full moon. A muted eeriness pervades the restrained shipboard celebration. Nothing out of the ordinary happens except for three separate attempts by drunken crew members to interfere with Lola, who, as it happens, is the only woman aboard. She is saved from these unwanted attentions by the intercession of the handsome First Mate, who has appointed himself, for whatever reasons, her protector. Lola, at this point, seems indifferent to rapists and protectors alike.
The island is just as we imagined it, an ominous and impenetrable place, majestic and uncivilized. There is something erotic in the very atmosphere. Lola remarks on it to Commander Buck, who says that there is a legend to that effect. The deeper one penetrates into the heart of the island, says Buck, the more potent the erotic influence.
One of the party is bitten in the leg by a snake, and Lola, who has had some training as a nurse, draws off the poison with her mouth.
Lola and the First Mate embrace in soft focus behind the screen of a waterfall. “I don’t want this,” says Lola. “This is not what I had in mind.”
“Sometimes we answer to a power larger than ourselves,” says the Mate.
Moments later, the entire expeditionary force is surrounded by a band of savage pygmies. The pygmies speak a primitive squall, a dialect (explains Commander Buck) that has remained unchanged for thousands of years. Buck converses with the group’s leader, mixing language with gesture to make himself understood. The diminutive savages are intent apparently on taking Lola as their white queen. A queen of opposing color has been a long-standing tradition in their country. Odd growling sounds like some monumental indigestion seem to come from behind the high walls of the fortress and send tremors of fear through the populace.
Buck translates the conversation to the others, says the pygmies will allow them to return to their ship if they hand over Lola. There are murmurs of dissent. Lola is a great favorite among the men. Buck says that the wisest thing to do at this point is to pretend to
leave and then come back, under cover of surprise, and rescue Lola. The First Mate is dead set against the plan, indicating that Commander Buck has a reputation for being a dissembler. Lola intercedes in the argument, saying that she welcomes the challenge of a new job, that her background and training have prepared her for a position of authority among backward peoples.
Lola is turned over to the pygmies and the small band of adventurers, under the leadership of Commander Buck, retrace their path (or seem to) back to their ship. A tracking shot, delineating each of the men in turn, reveals that the First Mate is not with the others.
The Mate, we discover, has followed the pygmies back to their encampment. Hiding himself in the tall grasses on a cliff overlooking the pygmy settlement, he is witness to the following scene.
Lola, who has been stripped to the waist and garlanded about the breasts and neck with chains of red flowers, is recumbent on a hammock like throne. One by one each of the males of the tribe pays obeisance to her. The ceremony is odd—its particulars difficult to follow—and has something to do with shooting sperm in the air (over the queen’s navel) like a fireworks display. It is the tribe’s primitive way of paying homage.
Meanwhile, Commander Buck and his men are lying in a field of yellow flowers, enervated, lost to the world of responsibility. Buck, rousing himself briefly, reminds the men that they have made a promise to Lola to return. “We will,” they say. “Give us time.” Buck tells them of King Dong, the object of their quest, and we cut away from the small band of white men to a huge black hand. The hand reaches over a wall and lifts the queen from her primitive throne.
The pygmies seem unsurprised at the theft of their white queen and go about their business—chanting and darting back and forth in their ritual manner—as if nothing more exceptional than a change in the weather had passed.
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