Book Excerpt: A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin, Part 3

You can read Part 1 of Book Excerpt: A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin here and Part 2 here. 

In this my concluding post on this novel, I wanted to highlight three motifs within the novel that are striking.  Let me be up front here, I don’t claim to fully understand their full significance after only one reading, but I’ll bring out what I do understand and document it for further scrutiny when sometime in the future I may do a second reading.  The three motifs are the relationship to children, the significance of birds, and the significance of colors.  I’ll highlight the three motifs by excerpting three passages.

In the last chapter of the novel, where Alessandro recites his history to Nicolò, Alessandro explains to him why it took so long to go back to teaching in the university after the war was over.  Alessandro explains:  

“At the time, I had no way to be a professor or even to teach in a subsidiary position.  The universities were in lock-step with fascism.  Real intellectual independence simply wasn’t tolerated.  I had an appointment here or there, but I didn’t stay.  At first I simply could not stand the conformism and the cowardice, and then, with the results predetermined, I came up against the loyalty oaths and informers.  I would have left anyway.  After having gone through the war, I couldn’t quibble and take offense over the meaning of a passage, or to live, die, and divide for their idiotic theories and schools.  And nearly everything they said seemed to be in contradiction to the truth of what I’d seen.

 

“And yet if you ask me what that was, I can’t tell you.  I can tell you only that it overwhelmed me, that all the hard and wonderful things of the world are nothing more than a frame for the spirit, like fire and light, that is the endless roiling of love and grace.  I can tell you only that beauty cannot be expressed or explained in a theory or an idea, that it moves by its own law, that it is God’s way of comforting His broken children.

 

“Such a point of view does not lend itself to the lecture hall.  No.  I returned to the university only after the Second World War, and, even then, not having been in the resistance, I had political difficulties.”

 

“Why weren’t you in the resistance?”

 

“I was tired.  And you have to have a certain temperament.  You have to be fixed on the point.  You need what politicians have, which is the absence of a sense of mortality.  It comes, like a drug, from adoration and deference.  Revolutionaries get it from dreams.  They say that nothing is apolitical, that politics, the bedrock of life, is something from which you cannot depart.  I say, fuck them.

 

I was interested in birds.  Are birds apolitical?  And I thought the finest thing in my life was being with my son when he was a baby.  People used to look at us when we went around in the daytime, and wonder what a man was doing taking care of a child, but every word that came from him, every expression, every smile, even his tears, were worth a million times an honorable profession.”   [829-30]

 

Even though Alessandro’s son appears to have an almost insignificant roll in the novel, I think Alessandro’s life altering relationship with his son—never dramatized fully in the forefront of the narrative but as a backdrop—is one of the key themes of the work.  It puts the novel of war in a fuller context, contrasting the struggle of survival and struggle with the tender interaction of love and passing on of instruction.  Notice how many children appear in the novel.  There is Alessandro as a child and the extended narrative with his father, there are Guarilglia’s three children, there is Nicolò, who in many ways is still a child (see p. 852 where Alessandro says he would like to him in his arms “in the way I used to hold my son”), and there is Alessandro’s son.  It is because of his children that Guarilglia deserts, and because of that it leads to his execution.  That little touch of knowing the value (“a million times”) of the love of his son is particularly moving, since I have a little boy and completely understand first hand.  It is through the relationships between fathers and their children  that forms a backbone to the war novel. 

In that passage I quote, the bird motif shows up.  “Are birds apolitical?”  What is Alessandro’s interest in birds?  Birds frequently appear in the novel.  At the exact middle of the novel, page 430 of 860, Helprin puts in this digressive set piece.  Alessandro is home, in desertion caring for his dying father, and steps out for a walk and looks across the sky. 

The trees on the banks of the Tiber had not lost their leaves, and as the wind coursed through them it rattled their brittle foliage and raised fantastic black clouds, for Rome was occupied by millions of birds, perching on every branch , singing as if to warm the wind, hopping about in mad distraction on rails and cornices.  The starlings, warblers, finches, and swallows had come from Northern Europe, the Baltic, and Scandinavia, and were about to cross to Africa, to the deserts and the savannahs, the Congo, and the Cape of Good Hope.

 

Their journey was so deep and impulsive that even at rest they knew only delirium and drive, and their immediate and explosive rising at any sound or motion was not an indication of fear but rather of the love of flight.  When someone below merely clapped their hands, when a truck lurched by, or when the wind itself became anxious or fierce, they rose in a buoyant cloud that hovered over the trees like a ball of hot smoke and then formed into a wing that rallied back and forth until it broke into a hundred thousand anarchic flights and the air was uniformly colored by birds darting on the winds of catastrophe.

 

The smaller birds rose with a deafening sound.  Sometimes their flickering mass was shifted by the wind, like a black balloon, but one by one they returned to their perches, gliding to a landing with the seriousness of new pilots, and then they jumped and chirped in the branches until they took to the air once again.

 

As the warblers and finches filled the skies, people looked up at the weaving above them and felt their more prosaic burdens lighten.  The starlings were a plague, almost like bats, though somewhat smoother as they moved.  They were the birds that formed the clouds that held the sunlight and the air, and hovered gently over the swollen Tiber.  Though they seemed to float with great ease, Alessandro discovered in watching them that the motion of each one was no less a struggle and no less beautiful for their having been caught up in such a way that their individual paths were hard to trace, for if you followed one, and if you had the patience, if your eyes were quick enough to keep him separate and to stay with him in the dizzying turns, you could see that the way he took the air was a great thing. 

 

But of all the birds resting in the trees along the Tiber at the end of October, none was half the flier, half the sounder, half the whistler, or half the darter of the swallow.  The swallows flew in great circles, picking up speed, and rising like leaves in a whirlwind.  The ascended like madness, climbing up and up, until they flew among the higher and thicker clouds, in a soft and rosy walls of which they would disappear and from which they suddenly burst in surprise.  Though you could barely see them—at those altitudes they were only spots  and flecks that vanished as readily as they came into view, as if they were merely the coloration of the sky—it was very clear that in the high altitudes they encountered something of extraordinary beauty and import, which is why they strained so hard to rise and stayed so long.

 

Coursing from cloud to cloud, in roseate light, they had escaped, they knew the pure and abstract and were freed from everything saved light, force, and proportion.  The waves of air high above the clouds were more hypnotic than waves in the sea.  The light was a burst of pink and gold, and the color of the sky ran from China blue to the pale white that held the sun.

 

And yet, though they were taken by the wind, and flew like golden confetti in the clouds, and might have stayed, they descended, they came down, they whistled like rockets as they fell toward the ground.  They chose to return, as if they had no choice, and what struck Alessandro above all was the consummate and decisive beauty of their fall.  It was not a hopeless fall, for as they shot downward they fought the air, and, ascending momentarily with great strain, they sailed off to left or right, and circled about on the plateau they had marked, before another dizzying drop, another spreading of wings, and another partial ascension.

 

They seemed to fly faster than the imagination could imagine.  They turned with breathtaking force.  They made perfect curves.  The air sang with their passage.

 

And when they were finished, these small birds that had been flecks of gold airborne on light and wind in a place from which they need never have returned, they settled gently in the dark spaces among the branches, and here, at the end, they sang a simple and beautiful song.          [p. 430-2]

 

What is the significance of such an extended passage that has nothing to do with the story line?  It is interesting that doves figure prominently at the novel’s opening pages.  And at the very last passage of the novel, Helprin ends the book with swallows being killed.  And so, Helprin has birds figure in the opening, the exact center, and the closing of the novel.  Clearly he is using them as a symbol.  But a symbol for what?  A metaphor for our human limitations and drives?  A contrast to human depravity?  A symbol for their transcending capabilities?  Their similarity to angels and therefore God’s representatives on earth?  A symbol for aesthetic perfection?  Perhaps all those qualities or a combination of some.  I can’t answer it fully.

And finally let me turn to the motif of colors.  In that last chapter Alessandro returns to Giorgione’s painting, La Tempesta, as he tries to articulate to Nicolò the meaning of his life story.  If you want to see the painting La Tempesta, turn here to my blog on the painting.   

“Someday, Nicolò, when you get the chance, go to Venice to look at La Tempesta.  Imagine then that, by the grace of God, the soldier would lose his detachment, and that, by the grace of God, the storm from which he had emerged would pass, and that by the grace of God the child in the woman’s arms was his.

 

“In Giorgione’s painting you find very little red.  The dominant colors are green and gold: green, of course, being the color of nature, and gold the divine and tranquil color of which, like perfection, so little exists.  The painters of Giorgione’s time, by and large, spoke in these terms.  Red was the instrument with which they portrayed mortality; green, nature; gold, God.  With the notable exception scattered from painter to painter and school to school, you will find this born out subtly and simply.

 

“You may not even have thought of red as anything more than just a color for decoration, but red is a most precious sign when you’re at the bedside of someone you’ve just lost, for they haven’t a trace of it.  And red is the color of real love between a man and a woman.  Its absence from the flesh in the act of love is far more profound than any protestation or vow, the rest useless and profane.

 

“I think that had Giorgione painted a sequel to La Tempesta, in which the soldier moves to the woman and child, he would have reddened them and made parts of the landscape reverberate in crimson.  All the gold and the green, the lightening, the reflected sunlight, and the cool colors of the storm, make for a dream like air.  It’s like floating in the clear summer shallows of the Aegean, or the separation of the body from its sensations prior to the separation of the senses from the soul before the soul’s ascension.  That is the natural course, and, upon it, Giorgione, and Raphael, and the others, predicated their work.  In Dante, too, the colors are refined with the soul until, at last, one has risen through lighter and lighter blues, silvers, and golds, and what is left is merely white with a silver glare, far too bright to see or comprehend.”

 

“What of it?  What of it?” Nicolò asked, thinking that the old man was ranting, and would not be able to bring his talk of colors into focus.

 

“What if you didn’t want to go in that direction?” Alessandro asked with frightening urgency, so that the hair on Nicolò’s arms and on the back of his neck stood up.

 

“I still don’t understand.”

 

“What if, after having come into the presence of God, in voiceless perfection, in perpetual stillness that is yoked to perpetual movement, you asked nonetheless to be released, to go back, to descend, to go down, to revert.  What if you chose, rather than silver and gold, and white that is too bright to comprehend, the lively pulse of red?

 

“I have felt that perfection.  I have had a glimpse of the light.  I have a notion, perhaps more than a notion, of eternity in its flawless and unwanting balance.  Compared to it, the brightest moments are but darkness; and singing, like silence.  What great sin do I commit, therefore, if I hold that it is insufficient?

 

“For when I put my arms around her, Ariane was red.  Her cheeks and the top of her chest blazed like a burn, or rouge, and the color spread to her breasts and her shoulders and was only dilute once it had cooled by running, like a viscous waterfall, down the length of her back.

 

“The baby followed his mother in this flesh of her coloring like a chameleon following the light.  She averted her eyes.  She would not look up.  Her lips trembled as if in prayer or concentration.

 

“What if that moment had lasted?  What metaphysical rapture could equal it for its substance, its frailty, and its beauty?  Haven’t we been taught that it’s better to live in a simple house overlooking a garden or the sea than to reside in a palace of great proportion?”

 

“What are you saying, Signore?”  Nicolò asked.

 

“I’m saying that now I know exactly what I want, and that though I doubt it fits the scheme of things, I’ll chance it nevertheless.”  [p. 832-4]

 

Colors figure prominently all through the novel.  Let’s see how Helprin uses the colors in this passage.  We see here that Helprin is color coding aspects of human experience: red for physical life, gold for transcendence, and green for nature.  Here in the end, before Alessandro faces his mortality, he desires the red of life with his beloved more than even the transcendence of God.  But he is asking for the impossible.  What Alessandro desires is for that moment of total perfection in Ariane’s arms to exist eternally.  But human beings are not fixed as a painting.  “What if that moment lasted?”  Alessandro asks.  Well, a moment can’t last in life.  It always moves on.  The son is born, they build a life, a new war comes about, the son dies, the wife dies, and Alessandro lives his life in exploration of aesthetics.  The red of life seems to be a passage to the gold of transcendence. 

 

Notice too that Alessandro describes his life in the diction of how he described the flight of the swallows from the passage at the midpoint of the novel: 

“What if, after having come into the presence of God, in voiceless perfection, in perpetual stillness that is yoked to perpetual movement, you asked nonetheless to be released, to go back, to descend, to go down, to revert.  What if you chose, rather than silver and gold, and white that is too bright to comprehend, the lively pulse of red?

 

“Released,” “go back,” “descend,” “go down,” revert.”  That runs parallel to the flight of the swallows of that passage at the novel’s midpoint.  And at the last paragraph of the novel, the birds are splattered in red while Alessandro gives a final exclamation:
 

To the sight of the swallows dying in mid air, Alessandro was finally able to add his benediction.  “Dear God, I beg of you only one thing.  Let me join the ones I love.  Carry me to them, unite me with them, let me see them, let me touch them.”  And then it all ran together like a song. [p.860]

Somehow the colors and the birds intertwine in imagery and symbol.  I do not claim to fully understand it, but if the logic and aesthetics  integral to the novel comprehensively holds together, then this novel should rank as one of the great novels at the end of the 20^th century. 

Painting: Giorgione's La Tempesta

In Mark Helprin's novel A Soldier of the Great War, the painting, La Tempesta, by the 15th century Venetian painter figures prominently.  See my post on the novel here. The painting is worth a blog of its own.  Here it is.

“In Giorgione’s painting you find very little red.  The dominant colors are green and gold: green, of course, being the color of nature, and gold the divine and tranquil color of which, like perfection, so little exists.  The painters of Giorgione’s time, by and large, spoke in these terms.  Red was the instrument with which they portrayed mortality; green, nature; gold, God.  With the notable exception scattered from painter to painter and school to school, you will find this born out subtly and simply."

                               Mark Helprin, from A Soldier of the Great War, p. 832

This is a great painting.  I love Helprin's commentary on it.  Read more commentary that I excerpted in my blogs on Helprin's novel. 

Book Excerpt: A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin, Part 2

You can read Part 1 of Book Excerpt: A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin here.

I’ve been behind with posting on my readings, but it has been a busy summer.  Let me try to catch up with two more posts on Helprin’s novel.  This will be the first.

It is difficult to present the full scope of this large scale novel.  This being my first reading I feel hesitant to flesh out the major themes.  What I can say is that Helprin strives to show that life is a sequence of difficulties, pain, agonies, and tragedies—grouped as a sorrowful or dark side of life—contrasted with the moments of luck, blessings, happiness, joy, and love—grouped as a luminous side of life.  It is through Allessandro’s full life and through the microcosm of the war that both these groupings become acute.  Ultimately we understand that these two groupings are not just two opposite sides of a coin, but integrated strands that lead one to a transcendent fulfillment, to become part of a divine whole.  With this and one more post I hope I can give one a glimpse of Helprin’s vision.

 
It is no coincidence that many parts of the novel have allusions to paintings and music.  Alessandro after all is a professor of aesthetics.  Art, in its fullest sense, is a representation in the novel of the divine creation that is life.  I mentioned in my first blog on this novel that Helprin starts so many threads within the first two hundred pages that it seems he has attention deficit issues and questioned whether all these threads will ever be consummated.  I believe all the threads do come to culmination, supporting this vision of an integrated whole.  All those threads make life appear as complicated, but the complexity does fit within wholeness.  This wholeness completes a canvass of a very complex picture so that through Alessandro we see beyond our own curtailed faculties, that our lives are much more integrated than random events.  Helprin’s vision is of unity, not fragmented disorder.

I am not going to be able to show the nuances and subtleties of the novel from this first reading.  The details are not on my fingertips.  The dark sequences of the novel are apparent: the war battles, the deaths of friends, the injuries, hardships, even being taken  to prison for treason and facing a firing squad, separation from his family, including his love who he erroneously believes was killed, and so on.  What I’m going to present in this post are three scenes that show Helprin’s rationale for keeping faith in life’s transcendence.

Here is a scene where Alessandro is locked in prison with a Marxist, Ludovico.  Both are scheduled for execution.

 

Ludovico now began what appeared to be a series of desperate calculations.  It was as if he felt that in a clarified understanding of the working of economics he could make himself comfortable with the notion of eternity—but due to the minimal relation of economics and eternity, he was forced to calculate faster and faster, and to no avail.

 

“Marxism won’t carry you into the next world,” Alessandro said.  And then he asked, “How can you reserve your most sacred beliefs for a descriptive system, and one that is imperfect at that?  I can’t imagine myself believing in trigonometry or accounting, and yet you guide your soul according to a theory of economics.”

 

“It won’t fail me as surely as your system will fail you.”

 

“I don’t have a system.”

 

“Theology is your system.”

 

“Not my theology.”

 

“Then what is it?”

 

“What is it?  It’s the overwhelming combination of all that I’ve seen, felt, and cannot explain, that has stayed with me  and refused to depart, that drives me again and again to a faith of which I am not sure, that is alluring because it will not stoop to be defined by so inadequate a creature as man.  Unlike Marxism, it is ineffable, and it cannot be explained in words.”

 

“Well,” said Ludovico, “socialism is effable, which is what I like about it.  It’s solid.  Very little of it is conjecture.  It may be limited, but it’s honest and down-to-earth and you can prove it.  It gives me something I know I can hang on to.”

 

“Why don’t you hang on to a toilet?”

 

“I’d rather hang on to a toilet than believe in a collection of wishful thoughts.”

 

“The, in that case,” Alessandro answered, “all you need to do is secure yourself a toilet and you will have solved the mysteries of the universe.  It would be easy enough to provide every man with a toilet at his death, or a porcelain amulet, and then the world would be perfect.  Husbands would not grieve for their wives or wives for their husbands, children would not suffer the loss of parents, nor parents the loss of children, as long as production were regulated and the workers controlled the economy.”

 

“To tell you the truth, Alessandro,” Ludovico said combatively, “I’m not concerned with what happens after life on earth, since I believe that nothing does happen.  I’m concerned with what I’ve been allowed, and screw the end.  It only takes a second.  Why waste time worrying about it?”

 

“The answer is simple.” 

 

“The church has a simple and unprovable answer for everything.”

 

“I don’t care what the church says.  This is a simple answer that comes from my own heart.  I’ve seen and felt many things that I cannot believe are material artifacts.  They so clearly transcend all that is earthly that I have no doubt that they can run rings around death.”

 

“What things?”

 

“Had you been with me, Ludovico, for the last twenty-seven years, I could have shown them to you, one by one.  They exist everywhere.  They’re as simple as music, or the wind.  You need only see them in the right way.  Perhaps I could not have shown you.  The question that comes to me is why would you need to be shown?  Why haven’t you already seen?”

 

“What, exactly, are you talking about?”

 

“I’m talking about love.”

 

“I’m unconvinced.”

 

“I wasn’t attempting to convince you.  I’m now sufficiently tranquil not to have to convince anyone of anything.”

 

“Will you be tranquil in front of a firing squad?”

 

“I don’t know.  We’ll see tomorrow.  You’ll be able to watch from the window.”  Alessandro winked at Ludovico, to show him that he was undisturbed.

 

“The way you winked,” Ludovico said accusingly, “the way you winked at me was just like a religious fanatic.”

 

“Sorry,” Alessandro said.  “I’ll try to wink like a Marxist.”  [p. 479-81]

 

Here is a very different scene.  Alessandro and his beloved wife to be, a nurse who has cared him back to health from a war wound, steal away into the mountains for some intimate time together.  The painting that is alluded, Giorgione’s La Tempesta,  is perhaps a single visual representation of this vast novel.

 

The slope from Gruensee to the Adige was white without imperfection.  Alessandro and Ariane skated down and across it for an hour.  Falling brought not pain but surprise, for the snow was powdery and dry, and even when they fell they stayed warm.  Though the glare hurt the back of their eyes, and they were quickly sunburnt, they felt like angels who inhabit the cool air above a flume, and who, with nothing to do but sing, give to the water its tranquil and hypnotic sound.

 

On the riverbank they found a bare concave rock facing south, and stayed there for as long as the sun warmed them, lost in lovemaking in which sometimes Ariane’s hair hung over the edge of the rock and was lapped by the ice-cold Adige as it surged and relaxed.  The river roared, and on their granite platform it was so hot and bright that they leaned down to cup the cold water in their hands and drink. 

 

“What is the name of the painting?” Ariane asked as if she had suddenly realized that she hadn’t remembered. 

 

“It’s called La Tempesta, and it’s in Venice, in the Gallerie dell’Accademia.  They say, what could it mean, a woman with a child, disrobed, and the soldier, standing apart from her, disconnected.  But I know exactly what to make of it.  Today I saw a lovely sight—the nurses lacing their boots, brushing their hair, fastening their earrings.  If I were a painter, I would have wanted to paint it.  So with Giorgione.  He intended to praise elemental things, and to show a soldier on the verge of return.  I’m not surprised that scholars and critics don’t understand it.  Giorgione live in the time of the plague, and the scholars and critics, for the most part, have had to do without plague or war, which make the simple things one takes for granted shine like gold.  What does the painting mean?  It means love.  It means coming home.”

 

Alessandro had been ordered to a unit of Alpini far to the north of Gruensee.  “When the war is over,” he said as he held her, full of hope, “we’ll marry, we’ll live in Rome, and we’ll have children.”

 

She cried.  [p. 569-70]

 

In my previous post on this novel, I mentioned how Helprin employs a circular structure, the story being  a reflection back starting from Alessandro’s old age, a telling of his experience to a young man, Nicolò.  At the end of the novel, Alessandro tries to explain to Nicolò how the intellect, the spirit, and the flesh come together to give life meaning.  Again it is through an art medium that leads to insight.  Alessandro asks:

 

“Are you familiar with the ‘Madre, non dormi…’ from Il Trovatore?” 

 

‘No.”

 

“When you get home, seek it out.  It begins with a nine-bar harmonic progression from D-flat major through A major and back to D-flat.”

 

“And what is that?”

 

“A bunch of tones.”

 

“And?”

 

“And, my son had a top.  If you pumped it up it would spin and generate precisely the sequence from the ‘Madre, non dormi…’  How it dropped and went up again I don’t know.  Perhaps, as it slowed, an internal gate fell back and opened a new passage for a higher register.  I don’t know how it did it, but it did.  It was designed with a mysterious and enchanting brilliance.

 

“The sequence of notes at the beginning of the song is one of the saddest and most beautiful things I have ever known.  Listening to its melancholy, lucid progression has the effect of stopping time.  It made the faces of the children infinitely touching, infinitely beautiful, and infinitely sad.  When I used to listen to it with Paolo, it transported me to the point where we would separate forever, which I thought would be when I died.

 

“That simple progression had a power far out of proportion to its elements, for it came close to the elemental truth in which hope, remembrance, and love are joined.  After a lifetime of thinking a great deal about the question of beauty—I have found nothing that illumines or conveys it save another beauty.  No better gloss upon a painting than a song, no better gloss upon a song than its lyric.  And in the end, perhaps nothing is as beautiful as a song, perhaps because nothing can be as sad.

 

“I realized both too early and too late—a long time ago, and yet when I was old enough to have this tremor in my hand—that what I had been seeking in a thousand beauties was one, and that I had had it, and it might never have been better, sitting on the floor in Paolo’s nursery, helping him push his top.

 

I asked myself, why do I love, and what is the power of beauty, and I understood that each and every instance of beauty is a promise and example, in miniature, of life that can end in balance, with symmetry, purpose, and hope—even if without explanation.  Beauty has no explanation, but its right perfection elicits love.  I wondered if my life would be the same, if at the end of the elements would come together just enough to give rise to a simple melody as powerful as the one in Paolo’s top, a song that, even if it did not explain the desperate and painful past, would it make it worthy of love.

 

“Of course, I still don’t know.  God help me to have a moment of his saddest beauty in which I do.

 

“Perhaps I am wandering.  Perhaps that was my intent.  No matter.  I can wander, because my notion of what it is to come to rest is clear and unencumbered, and I may yet find it.

 

“The top, you see, that my little boy, at the age of three, twirled round and round, played a beautiful song—a song that, from time to time, I still hear.  What is the song?  The song is love.  [p. 793-5]

 

What all three very different scenes have in common is that at the heart of understanding human experience is love, and that love is connected to the transcendence.  Let me return to that scene with the Marxist, Ludovico.  An argumentive statement trying to describe the ineffable transcendence to life falls flat, so Alessandro resorts to assertion: “I’ve seen and felt many things that I cannot believe are material artifacts.  They so clearly transcend all that is earthly that I have no doubt that they can run rings around death…Had you been with me, Ludovico, for the last twenty-seven years, I could have shown them to you, one by one.  They exist everywhere.  They’re as simple as music, or the wind.  You need only see them in the right way.”  It is only after reflecting on the two other scenes that we can now make sense of this from Alessandro’s argument.  Love and beauty shape life toward the divine, toward more than the earthly.

Book Excerpt: A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin

Oh this is a long novel, 860 pages long.  After about six weeks of reading I’m only a little more than half way.  I am a slow reader, and so I anticipate this will be a three month read.  I don’t like to stretch books out that long.   For one, it takes me away from other works, but, two, I just get tired of the same work lasting that long.  I wish I were a faster reader, but I think I would lose my close attention to a work if I weren't.  If a work were not worth the entire read, I would quit a long read somewhere around a third of the way through.  This book is worth the read.

 

 

Still at this point I cannot tell if this is a great work or not, just that the characters, the situation, and the writing style hold my attention.  I will give some initial thoughts, but do keep in mind I am doing this from not having finished the novel.

If you have never heard of Mark Helprin as a novelist, you may have heard of him as a Conservative commentator.  He has churned out essays, mostly regarding foreign policy, in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and The Claremount Institute.  He has been a soldier himself, serving in the British Navy, the Israeli Army and Air Force. 

A Soldier of the GreatWar is a coming of age novel centered on the character Alessandro Giuliani, an Italian, son of a wealthy Roman attorney, who as a young man serves as a soldier in World War I.  Alessandro’s great love of life is the study of aesthetics, and before entering the war he was a professor on the subject at a university.  The war—a war he did not support—creates great hardships for him and his family.  And so we have two parallel motifs that seem to run through the entire novel, the analysis and understanding of the beauty around him and the pain and misery that he is subjected to during wartime.  The novel’s central theme seems to be the coming to knowledge of how beauty and misery exist side by side.

Helprin starts the novel in a fashion I particularly don’t care for.  He starts the novel in 1964 when Alessandro is an old man.  In a odd set of circumstances he meets a young man, Nicolò—I think he’s under twenty years of age, but I can’t quite remember exactly—and having been kicked off the bus they are on they take a walking journey from Rome to two destinations that are on the same road.  They have an extended conversation on life, love, aesthetics, politics, and then war.  When I say “extended,” it’s really extended.  In an 860 page novel there are only ten chapters, so the chapters average over eighty pages each.  After the conversation turns to war, Alessandro is pushed to tell the story of his war experience, the experience that has shaped the man.  And so the novel's real story then starts, and I assume will end in a circular fashion returning to Alessandro’s conversation with Nicolò.  In effect then Helprin is presenting his themes and his values up front.  The story then is a fleshing out of those themes, and the values are what the character learns as a result of his experience.  I’m not a huge fan of this structure.  For me it subtracts from the reader’s immersion into the story.  I would have preferred the novel start in medias res, by thrusting the situation right before the reader.  Let the values and themes emerge as the story develops.  I’ve never seen the real advantage of that looking back start.

Second thing that irks me about the novel (again it becomes a delaying strategy from getting to the real story) is the frequent development from one thread to another.  Until the novel really gets started with the war part of the story, it seems Helprin suffers from ADHD.  He develops an incredible number of threads of story line.  Here are a few story threads that I remember.  There’s a meeting of an Austrian princess when Alessandro and the princess are children; there’s the taking care of the Austrian musician on a ski gondola ride down when it’s thought the musician had a heart attack; there’s the meeting of the beautiful young lady, Lia, who happens to be his neighbor; there’s the horse ride through Rome being chased by the Carabinieri, all to meet Lia by the beach; there’s the meeting with Orfeo, the midget hunchback, who is the scribe at his father’s office, along with the discussion on how typewriters will do away with scribes; there’s the meeting with the man, Rafi, who will be his friend and his sister’s betrothed (not sure yet if they ever get married), who is attacked for being Jewish; there are the extended mountain climbing trips with Rafi, where Rafi learns to be a world class climber; there is the meeting with the Irish woman on the train and their trip to Munich to look at a painting in a museum.  And so on. 

What do all these threads have to do with the story?  Well, they serve two purposes.  It shows the myriad of life’s activities before the war.  Once the war starts and Alessandro is immersed in it, life essentially changes, and so does the narration.  The war is the life altering event, and that is not just told but felt as the novelist generates thread after thread which ultimately stops.  Second it creates a character in full, a man who has lived a complete life.  If the novel were only about a war experience, then the character becomes limited to fighting and camaraderie.  Helprin wants Alessandro to be more than that.  He wants to create a character that has lived the life of the early 20^th century and has something to say about it.  Alessandro does not represent an idea or a concept.  He is flesh and blood, and so the novel’s assessment, I think, rests on how well Alessandro, the values he espouses, the wisdom he has learned, engages the reader as a likable and real character. 

Let me add here that what has always impressed me about Helprin’s writing is his wonderful prose style.  This is the second of Helprin’s works that I’ve read.  A number of years ago I did read Memoir From Antproof Case, and while I didn’t think it was a great work (I may not have understood it) I reveled in Helprin’s delicious prose.  Let’s give a couple of examples from this novel.  Let’s start with the novel’s opening paragraphs.

On the ninth of August, 1964, Rome lay asleep in afternoon light as the sun swirled in a blinding pinwheel above its roofs, its low hills, and its gilded domes.  The city was quiet and all was still except the crowns of a few slightly swaying pines, one lost and tentative cloud, and an old man who rushed through the Villa Borghese, alone.  Limping along paths of crushed stone and tapping his cane as he took each step, he raced across intricacies of sunlight and shadow spread before him on the dark garden floor like golden lace.

Alessandro Giuliani was tall and unbent, and his buoyant white hair fell and floated about his head like the white water in the curl of a wave.  Perhaps because he had been without his family, solitary for so long, the deer in deer preserves and even in the wild sometimes allowed him to stroke their cloud-spotted flanks and touch their faces.  And on the hot terra cotta floors of roof gardens and in other, less likely places, though it may have been accidental, doves had flown into his hands.  Most of the time they held in place and stared at him with their round gray eyes until they sailed away with a feminine flutter of wings that he found beautiful and not only for its delicacy and grace, but because the sound echoed through what then became an exquisite silence.

As he hurried along the Villa Borghese he felt his blood rushing and his eyes sharpening with sweat.  In advance of his approach through long tunnels of dark greenery the birds caught fire in song but were perfectly quiet as he passed directly underneath, so that he propelled through their hypnotic chatter before and after him like an ocean wave pushing through an estuary.  With his white hair and his thick white mustache, Alessandro Giuliani might have seemed English were It not for his crème-colored suit of distinctly Roman cut and a thin bamboo cane entirely inappropriate for an Englishman.  Still trotting, breathless, and tapping, he emerged from the Villa Borghese onto a wide road that went up a hill was flanked on either side by a row of tranquil buildings with tile roofs from which the light reflected as if it were a waterfall cascading onto broken rock.

Had he looked up he might have seen angels of light dancing above the throbbing bright squares—in whirlpools, will-o’-the-wisps, and golden eddies—but he didn’t look up, for he was intent on getting to the end of the long road, to a place where he had to catch a streetcar that, by evening, would take him far into the countryside.  He would have said, anyway, that it was better to get to the end of the road than to see angels, for he had seen angels many times before.  Their faces shone from paintings; their voices rode the long and lovely notes of arias; they descended to capture the bodies and souls of young children; they sang and perched in the trees; they were in the surfs and the streams; they inspired dancing; and they were the right and holy combination of words in poetry.  As he climbed the hill he thought not of angels and their conveyances, but of a motorized trolley.  It was the last to leave Rome on Sunday, and he did not want to miss it.  [p 1-2]

 

[Excerpts from A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin, Harcourt Books, Inc. 1991.]

You can see in that passage the focus on beauty, on the flesh and blood man, on the values he holds, and even subtly on the life lived in the 20^th century.  The hardships that will test and shape him are not there yet, but they will come.

Here’s a wonderful passage of Alessandro at University where he attends operas, which shows the silly unruliness of students and the beauty of music. 

Young singers of little experience and old ones of poor voice often found themselves in Bologna in a theater that was supported by huge tresses and timbers arrayed against its bulging outer walls.  The architectural decorations on the façade of this doomed opera house had been so worn down by wind and water that the devils were toothless, the gargoyles faceless, and the cornices round, but Italy had always been full of buildings that seemed just about to fall down, and this one, in its timber girdle, waited until Alessandro had left the city.

 Three times a week, Rossini and Verdi marshaled sufficient force and beauty to shut the students up and bring them to the kind of rapt attention that the singers of La Scala thought the natural state of mankind.  When one singer questioned another about a run in this theater the query was, “For how long did you clear the air?” meaning for how many minutes in his aria was he able to rid the sky of the paper airplanes that crossed and collided over the orchestra in a traffic unlike any that had ever been seen on earth.  They were sometimes ten or twenty layers deep, they would meander in circles, or zigzag, a hundred or more sailing about unimpeded.

Everyone kept his eye on his own craft or his favorite.  As the planes darted through the huge empty space, the singers looked out not only upon the missiles themselves but upon a thousand boys whose heads, as if in a completely anarchic tennis match, moved back and forth in may different directions—and not only back and forth, but slowly and gradually down.  Singing there was like performing in a hospital for nervous diseases.

On occasion one or more students who knew the lyrics and were gifted with powerful voices stood in their seats and competed with whatever wretch was unlucky enough to be on stage.  Whether it was done as a compliment or derision was immaterial.  The result was the same.  Worse, perhaps, was the unfolding of several hundred newspapers, signaling an insulting neutrality.  Bombardment by eggs and vegetables, shouted insults, and the occasional shoe that landed next to a terrified soprano, were, of course, unambiguous.

But should a young singer with heart and courage to face these things and keep on singing, sing well, a thousand boys as unruly as animals and as jumpy as unbroken horses or caffeinated bulls on a festival day, would suddenly become still.  The house electrified, beyond the footlights a thousand faces would show expressions of sadness, longing, and desire, and some would sparkle back at the lights, in tracks that ran down the cheeks from bright eyes that caught the light.  Ands when the aria ended, after a few seconds of silence the students would erupt into a roar of appreciation that put the audiences of major opera houses to shame.

After a lively overture with a orchestral signature attributable mainly to the fact that theatrical impresarios have known for ages that adolescents can be quieted by hunting horns, the curtain rose, crushing several paper gliders in its fold.  An extraordinary painted backdrop lowed in the light.  Giotto’s blues and Caravaggio’s shadows had been united to portray a tranquil forest in neither night nor day but, rather, in a condition of the spirit.  In combination with the overture, the weak and dream-like blue, the clouds of dark green that marked the tops of the trees, and the motile and confusing shadows, several forms of art kept the students as quiet as the dead.  [p. 156-7]

That is a funny scene, charming and beautiful and so realistic I can swear I’ve been to something like that as a college student myself.