Rereadings

by Anne Fadiman

  The brio, the elan, the sprezzatura of The Charterhouse of Parma are an attempt to illustrate novelistically the charms of aristocracy Now, Stendhal was not an aristocrat; though a man of the world, he had to be bluffing his posture here somewhat. I’m ashamed to say (it sounds so unworldly) that part of what put me off the novel this time was its class snobbery. We are told early on, doubtless with a trace of irony, that Fabrizio believes his high birth entitles him to a greater share of happiness than other men are entitled to. But Stendhal at times seems to swallow the notion of a highborn person’s moral or aesthetic superiority. When Fabrizio kills a jealous actor, Giletti, who comes at him with a sword, all the enlightened characters treat this act as inconsequential, because the actor was riffraff. Stendhal’s narrator himself says: “Actually the murder of Giletti was a trifle, and only political intrigue had managed to turn it into a matter of any importance.” All right, so Stendhal was not a democrat, even if he was a liberal. But can he really have felt that murdering a human being meant nothing? Or was this his way of satirizing the solemnity of moralists? Either way, the absence of further clarification leaves me uncomfortable.

  Later, when Fabrizio is being booked for this crime, we have the following exoneration by bloodlines: “During this brief exchange, Fabrizio stood patiently amid these police, showing the noblest expression [which] contrasted charmingly with the coarse appearance of the policemen around him.” It would be one thing if Fabrizio were such a charming character that the reader himself felt inclined to forgive him; but here we come to my central complaint. Fabrizio is a bore, a cipher, unfit to hold the focus of such a complex novel. His raptures by the lake, his mooning over Clélia in prison, all of these passages dragged for me.

  How could I not have seen this when I was younger?

  I went back and read my college paper. What impressed me was my earlier patience with Fabrizio. For all my underlying malice against this lucky pup, the younger me still accorded him the respect due a legitimate leading man. Rather than being irritated, I was curious about why Stendhal should choose him as his narrative vessel, and I went to the trouble of developing a literary thesis around it. What had happened to me over the years, that I’d gotten so much dumber? Was it that, with aging and balding, I no longer had even minimal patience for stories of privileged youths? Or had experience taught me that we were all golden boys and girls at moments; and thus the archetype had lost its morose fascination?

  I was particularly taken with Fred Dupee’s penciled comments on the first page: “Thorough and well reasoned essay—on a fruitful topic. I only think that you might distinguish more between F’s ‘unconsciousness’ and the consequences of it for his temperament; his being able to ‘live happily in the moment,’ as Stendhal says. Isn’t it this last that makes him great, rather than unconsciousness itself?” Living happily in the moment has proved not to be my forte. I think that even at twenty I suspected it would not be, and was already mounting defenses against the lack. Professor Dupee was pointing to this blind spot. Dupee himself was, I think it safe to say, bisexual in his longings, if not his practice. He had, in fact, a crush on my friend Jon, which the latter told me about. It may be that the homoerotically inclined retain more of a lifelong enchantment with the youthful Adonis figure, which would enable them to appreciate better the comedy of that superior older person, Gina, fainting in anguish at the indifference of Fabrizio. It may be that great artists, be they Mozart or Stendhal or Shakespeare, always possess something of the hermaphrodite in their character. I am just speculating here. In any case, Stendhal believed in Italy, dolce far niente, happiness, in a way I no longer could. To that extent, the novel had stopped working for me.

  Nevertheless, because I knew I was wrong, I went back and read parts of it a third time. With pleasure. Taken a little at a time, like a poison or a homeopathic medicine, The Charterhouse of Parma remains delicious.

  DAVID MICHAELIS

  The Back of the Album

  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, by the Beatles

  In June of 1967, when I was nine, my brother and I were farmed out to summer camp in Vermont. In those days you went off with a fully packed trunk and spent more or less the whole summer far from home. You were not allowed to bring anything that connected you with civilization, not even a transistor radio to follow the baseball season. But late one morning in July, I heard by chance the opening bars of a record that had somehow arrived in camp from civilization’s very epicenter. I had been on my contented way from archery, in the upper field, to woodworking, in the barn—a day that could just as easily have been taking place in 1947, because none of the traditional forms of a boy’s camp life had yet changed, as everything about the way we thought and dressed and did things was to change after 1967—when from the barn’s shuttered hayloft the electric sound of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band bolted through the clean, sunny air.

  The counselors’ lounge was seedy and inaccessible, an outpost of adult mysteries. The physical presence of the new Beatles album up there behind closed doors created a charged atmosphere I will never forget. I was almost sick with the sheer nerve of it. I remember feeling pierced by the words—It was twenty years ago today—and in that first instant of listening in, the shock of the new Beatles record combined with the prestige of the counselors’ lounge to produce an alternate reality.

  Archery? Woodworking? I couldn’t have cared less. Of course I couldn’t give them up, either. I loved archery, I wanted to impress my parents with a Bowman’s Medal, and as that summer went on—the Summer of Love, it turned out—I felt the clear, straight lines of my boyhood becoming blurred in a way I did not fully understand.

  I knew a little about the Beatles already. I owned two Beatles records (A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles ’65), and when I was six and my brother seven, we had owned Beatles wigs. They were oddly shaped, scruffy thatches of synthetic black hair that fit over our heads like ladies’ bathing caps and didn’t look anything like the real thing. We didn’t mind—these were Beatles wigs, and there was something deliciously insubordinate about wearing them. Years later, when I studied a passage of Milton that described Adam and Eve’s childlike rebellion in Eden, I had a pang of giddy joy that reminded me of the liberation I had felt each time I pushed my scalp through the wig’s hairy opening.

  This new album was different, more complicated. It was no longer just a release of youthful energy; there was an elegiac tone in both the words and the music, and that was what made me feel I was entitled to their hidden truths. The previous summer my parents had sat my brother and me down for an important talk. I knew before the word “separation” knifed into our living room that it really meant divorce. “Nothing will change,” they said. “We both love you very much.” It was my mother who for years afterward would say, “We’re still a family.”

  The message of Sgt. Pepper was that things were not as they appeared, which made me, I felt intuitively, the perfect student of its puzzles. Every day, it seemed, additional information about Sgt. Pepper came into circulation: a 20,000 Hz tone, audible only to dogs, had been recorded backward into the inner groove at the end of the album’s British version. It was said that dogs all over England were going bananas when tonearms on hi-fi sets failed to pick up automatically and instead drifted into the subversive inner groove of Sgt. Pepper. Every night, it seemed, the two counselors in my cabin discussed the album, quietly debating shades of meaning we didn’t understand; I recall one of them telling the other that the reverberating piano chord at the end of the record (E major, held for forty-two seconds) gave him cold chills because it was supposed to make you think of a nuclear explosion.

  It almost didn’t matter that we weren’t allowed to listen to the album, let alone hear the chiller chord that ended “A Day in the Life” or the 20,000 Hz dog alarm. The mystification that surrounded Sgt. Pepper had as much to do with the art on the cover as it did with the record itself. Marijuana plants, for example, could be clearly seen in the cover�
�s photographic tableau—real pot plants, daringly placed in plain sight at the Beatles’ feet, or so the counselors said.

  One night they brought the album around for inspection. We each had a turn with it. The infamous tableau was as densely woven as a tapestry; it was hard to know where to look. Under the big blue Northern England sky, tiers of cutout faces, cloth figures, waxworks, ferns, potted palms, garden ornaments, and sculptural busts were arrayed around the flesh-and-blood Beatles, who, tiger-bright in military-band regalia and holding brass and wind instruments instead of electric guitars, stood poker-faced behind a circusy Lonely Hearts Club Band drum skin. We tried to name faces in the crowd behind the band. Somebody pointed out Sonny Liston. There, too, was Marlon Brando from The Wild One, a popular poster image on the bedroom walls of older brothers in my neighborhood. I recognized the early Beatles as Madame Tussaud’s wax figures, and I knew Bob Dylan—he was a folk singer. All else was unknown to me. I recall turning over the album. There, vibrating in black print on a Chinese-red background, were the words.

  It’s hard to remember now what this meant then. To paraphrase Kenneth Tynan’s remark about how Citizen Kane changed filmmaking: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band revolutionized pop music as the airplane revolutionized warfare. Until Sgt. Pepper, the pop single had dominated the recording industry, each 45 rpm record comprising two songs, the hit tune on side A, a lesser song on side B. Pop singles were marketed in a plain sleeve with no sign that the lyrics were to be treated as anything more than bubble gum, chewed once and tossed away.

  From Introducing the Beatles in 1963 to Revolver in 1966, the Beatles had supplemented the traditional release of new hit singles with annual appearances of two-sided LPs, the covers of which, though increasingly brash and inventive, gave no warning of what Sgt. Pepper would unleash. Inside and out, everything about the new record was narrative. It was bursting to tell a story. The Beatles made their regular instruments, from bass guitar to drums, sound like voices that had something fresh to say while making the harpsichord and the fiddle, as well as classical instruments from India, seem integral to the most far-out aspirations of rock ‘n’ roll. It was the first rock album to insert orchestral scoring for narrative effects—one of many ways in which Sgt. Pepper was created more in the manner of filmmaking than by the conventions of the music industry. And if the recording processes devised in the Abbey Road studios gave Sgt. Pepper the aura of a mod film, the sumptuous packaging that the Beatles insisted upon clothed the record in its most characteristic quality: readability. Here was the first album ever to publish its lyrics on the back. The songs told a story that was connected by a theme and that could be read cover to cover.

  After that first eager glimpse in camp, I bought the record, with my mother, at Sam Goody’s, on a visit to Manhattan. Back in our living room, at the exact middle of the sofa, where my mother’s gay designer friend sat each of us in turn to demonstrate the brand-new effects of stereo (a scientific moment that my father would previously have husbanded us through), I settled into a habit of sitting cross-legged and alone, ostentatiously studying Sgt. Pepper’s words without playing the stereo at all. It was a deliberate act to read the Beatles without the music. Using eye instead of ear to ransack the lyrics for their hidden adult meanings turned even a ten-year-old into a seeker of ambiguity, an investigator of the imagination, a devotee of poetry. I had no musical ability then or now, and being given the words on a Chinese-red platter was like being rewarded in school with a period of free play. The literariness of Lennon and McCartney was just my speed. Looking-glass ties? Cellophane flowers that tower over your head? A hole that needs fixing? Where had I heard this before? Of course: Alice on the riverbank, Alice down the Rabbit-Hole, Alice in the Garden of Live Flowers.

  Sgt. Pepper seemed nothing less than an Alice in Wonderland for the brave new psychedelic world. Everything in Pepperland was reversed, just as in Lewis Carroll’s mirror-crazy Wonderland. The Lonely Hearts Club Band was “in style” one moment, “out of style” the next. In “Getting Better,” things got better because they could get no worse. In “Fixing a Hole,” it really didn’t matter “if I’m wrong / I’m right.” Life in Pepperland flowed two ways at once: “within you and without you.”

  Curiouser and curiouser! The most forward-looking recording in the history of rock music began by looking back to a day twenty years in the past. Recorded tracks, when reversed and played back, had new and sometimes sexual meanings. The cover image was full of reversals: old heroes were young again; celebrities were “lonely hearts”; the most popular rock group in the world had become a small-time brass band. Look in the tableau’s foreground, where the hottest name in 1960s show business—BEATLES—was spelled out in a deliberately parochial form of display: municipal flower-bed lettering.

  My true experience of Sgt. Pepper was as a reader. The wordplay was no more complicated than that which I had adored in Edward Lear’s nonsense verse or in O. Henry’s grifter stories, which I was reading in sixth-grade English. M. C. Escher, whose magic realism I encountered in math class, thanks to a brilliant and iconoclastic teacher, also showed that things were not as they seemed. The Beatles were asking the same question: What’s wrong with this picture? Over and over, I read the album, trying to decode the tapestry on the front and the strange, spangled words on the back.

  The Beatles had written songs that set out to be not understandable. Sgt. Pepper was a world in which, instead of receiving clear-cut statements, you projected your own dream onto a cloud. It was like Zen: the song was the question. You had to go through a process of self-emptying before you could absorb the answer. But the album’s organizing principle, its thought-out-edness, took you … where? Back to itself. The Beatles coded their imagery, as all Romantic poets had, so that the younger generation, once it thought it had answered the riddle, could feel safe in its knowingness. Sgt. Pepper belonged to a genre evergreen to adolescents: If you get it right, you will understand it, but the deeper truth is always one more magnification beyond where your non-dreaming mind can see.

  As a boy, I thought the Beatles were the suave, avant-garde leaders of the culture. Whatever they wore in the early 1960s—Chelsea boots, mop haircuts, collarless jackets—everyone wore. By 1967, trapped by worldwide fame, they weren’t so much leaders of the culture as hostages to its hot center. Sgt. Pepper shows them to be the spokesmen for an age that now seems nearly as quaint and faraway as Dickens’s London. The Beatles didn’t invent the New, as I thought; they invented an attitude through which to picture the New and the Old simultaneously. The costumes they chose for their Sgt. Pepper alter egos were takeoffs not just on the British imperial past but on the swinging London of 1967, when kids flocked to Carnaby Street and the King’s Road to buy recycled police capes and brass-buttoned military coats at boutiques with names like I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, which was also the title of a pop song by the New Vaudeville Band (“Winchester Cathedral” was their big single). Its chorus went:

  Oh Lord Kitchener, what a to-do,

  Everyone is wearing clothes that once belonged to you.

  If you were alive today I’m sure you would explode,

  If you took a stroll down the Portobello Road.

  Rereading Sgt. Pepper thirty-five years later, I sat down in my office in Washington, D.C., with the scuffed album from Sam Goody’s—it’s been marooned for years with the rest of my records in a summer house that still has a record player. In my office, the only way to listen to music is on a compact disc inserted into the Microsoft Windows Media Player. Although I’ve updated most of the music of my youth with CDs, Sgt. Pepper is one of the albums that look so ridiculous in the miniature form (Woodstock is another: more than 6 square feet of visual material shrunk to 4¾ by 5½ inches of plastic casing sealed by the most infuriating packaging ever invented) that I haven’t had the stomach to replace the original.

  I scanned the back of the record cover, where five newspaper-column-size lines of black type still pulled me in with
the opener: “It was twenty years ago today, / Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.” I wanted to fall right into the audience—to “sit back and let the evening go.” But the lines were hard to read, and not just because the record inside the cover had rubbed a white circle onto the printed surface, erasing entire words. The lyrics are in my memory anyway. I didn’t need to see them in print, because they alighted automatically, almost too quickly, on my inner ear. It was as if I had written them myself, and therefore could no longer lay claim to what happens only once during the initial excitement of creation: an awakening to life itself. Coming from within, predigested and reconstituted, instead of fresh and new from without, the words had calcified.

  What rereading without music did allow me to see, however, was how concrete a place Pepperland actually is, and how much the Beatles’ cloudlandish, countercultural effects needed the solid institutions, traditions, and even architecture of the receding Empire—“all that Trafalgar Square stuff,” as John Osborne, England’s brash young playwright of the 1950s, referred to the country’s crippling nostalgia. Hallowed British scenes and settings in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—“a boat on a river,” “a bridge by a fountain,” “a train in a station”—are blown apart and repatterned by “tangerine trees,” “rocking horse people,” “plasticine porters,” a “girl with kaleidoscope eyes.” Every bit of color-saturated 1967 psychedelia comes alive because of the contrast with images of drab, gray postwar England.