The Running Bowline

Well, this is why I got into this mess in the first place: to read the giants of western literature. And no matter who you are, there is little doubt that Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote is a qualifying entry. Four-hundred years old, and inspiring more art and interpretations than any single work I know of, this is a book to be handled with due reverence. Despite the age and the shadow it casts, however, the first handful of pages contains much for a 21st century reader to consider.

Right from the “Preface to the Reader”, Cervantes makes no effort to hide the fact that his book is going to “ridicule the absurdity of those books of chivalry.” His approach, though, is somewhat tongue in cheek, and really pretty sophisticated for the 15th century. Rather than a simple bashing of medieval romances, the reader is presented with Don Quixote, “the most virtuous and valiant knight who had appeared for many years.” Quixote, of course, is nothing of the kind, but Cervantes as narrator tells the story as though his hero’s madness were perfectly reasonable in a chivalric knight, and therein may lie his harshest critique.

More than anything, Don Quixote seems less like a comic figure than he does a tragic one.   In the countless manifestations of the character I’ve run into over the years, he has always come off as a bit of a loony. What strikes me as sad is the isolation which seems to have driven him to his outlandish ways. Cervantes tells the reader that Quixote (whose real name is Quixada) spent all his leisure time reading chivalric tales. A man of landed wealth, he has no friends, no other occupations to fill up his time but reading. As much as I love books, his life seems to have an unwritten loneliness in it before he sets off as a knight-errant. In his seclusion, I don’t think it is a far leap to read our man of la Mancha in a modern context.

How often have you heard it discussed that the modern American, despite our society’s connectivity, is more isolated now than ever? I know I have heard it talked to death, and yet cannot deny the truth of it. The Internet gives us access to more information than has ever been possible in the history of mankind. We can instantly trade ideas with people continents away. Documents pass through it.  Whole books are digitized, encoded and whisked out for mass consumption. Social networking sites are on the verge of becoming institutional. You can even live a Second Life in a virtual world, with a virtual you. It’s all part and parcel of the digital world we live in, but is it any different from crazy old Quixada locking himself up in his closet and reading endless stories?

It seems to me that the more dependent we become on modern technology for our entertainment and communication, the more we risk becoming a society of Don Quixotes. Yes, social sites let us stay in contact with people, no matter where they are, but we have to sit at the computer to make it happen. We ignore face to face conversations with our neighbors in favor of people we may never actually see again. Like Quixote, we lose ourselves in a world of words and images of far off places, sacrificing the immediacy of our present lives. Like Quixote, we can take on false names and fake faces, becoming avatars of ourselves in an effort to be greater than our circumstances. And, like Quixote, it never comes off quite like we imagined.

Growing up as a suburban kid, even one with a fairly unique childhood, I can sympathize. There were so many times when I wanted to be bigger, older, more adventurous. I too reveled in fantasy worlds and would pretend I was a part of them. Shoot, I still have daydream moments that turn my rattletrap of a car into a star-fighter. Embracing reality doesn’t mean giving up daydreams, not by a long shot, but I do think it means understanding which dreams can happen, then doing something about them. I cannot turn my jeep into an X-wing. As much as it breaks my heart to say it, I just can’t. I can train for a marathon, however. I can travel to far off places I’ve never been. I can remember people’s birthdays (my daydreams are a weird and varied bunch). There are always ways to make yourself more, to make yourself better. The difference between doing it and not is simply a matter of courage.

Up until know, my knowledge of Don Quixote has been pretty much limited to the incident of the windmill (which, by the by, is a brief, almost passing, part of the early story). No character, no book, however, can have such a lasting effect without being more complex than simple slapstick. Not even two-hundred pages in, I am already finding this true of Cervantes’ opus, and there are still many roads for the valiant Don Quixote de la Mancha to explore.

* * *

Author’s Note: Something I learned while reading Bleak House was that great literature cannot be rushed. It’s like the difference between driving and walking a city. Doing either one allows you to say you’ve been there, but it’s only by taking your time and putting you feet on the ground that you come to appreciate the character of the place. Don Quixote is such a long book, in part, because it is actually made up of two books. “Part One” was published in 1605, while “Part Two” wasn’t published until 1615. Both halves are weighty tomes in their own right and so I will treat them as such, spending this month on “Part One” and dedicating August to “Part Two.” I am curious to see what changes I will find, both in the book and in myself, given the decade gulf between the two.

Talk about turning a corner! No sooner had I finished writing the last column and picked up my book again, but things get dramatically better. Where the heroes had been wishy-washy and divided, they become courageous and united. Where the villains had been distant and vague, they suddenly snap into nefarious focus. The last third of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers is not only great reading, but it makes what had bordered on tedious totally worthwhile.

For whatever reason, Dumas’ characters in this last section seem to leap off the page. I felt like I learned more about these people in the last 200 or so pages than I did in the nearly 400 which came before. It’s not just that secrets are revealed either, but we get to see the characters act and react in tense, exciting situations. Of particular note and interest are Athos and Milady, who are linked together by a common past.

SPOILER ALERT! If you are planning on reading The Three Musketeers, you may want to skip down a bit.

Athos has been something of a father figure throughout the novel. He talks less than the others, and is generally the go-to guy when a decision has to be made. This also has the effect of taking him out of much of the action. With the revelation that his young wife, long thought dead by his own hand, is alive and going by the name Milady, he withdraws even more. Like the other characters, however, when the siege of La Rochelle begins in chapters 40-41, Athos comes alive. He takes a more active role in leading the musketeers and becomes determined to help d’Artagnan bring down Milady, especially after she tries to kill the young soldier a couple of times. Ultimately is is Athos leadership, courage and ingenuity which brings about her destruction and d’Artagnan’s salvation. Athos becomes the character I hoped he would be: wise, brave, distinguished, and conflicted. It is the last adjective which truly endeared him to me in the end.

You see, Milady (who is manipulative as hell, but more on that presently) once tricked Athos into marrying her. He was a well-to-do nobleman who fell in love with the beautiful sister of a priest. Turns out she was a liar and a thief, and her priest brother was actually her first husband. Learning all of this, Athos fulfills his role as a nobleman and hangs the woman, his wife. Somehow she survives, even though he thinks her dead, but the weight of betrayal and murder drives Athos to change his name and join the musketeers. While there had been hints of all this early in the story, it isn’t until the last third that Dumas really gets the plot cooking.

Whereas Athos is good and just, albeit conflicted, Milady is nothing short of a Machiavellian nightmare. As an agent of Cardinal Richelieu, she is dispatched to England during the siege to find a way to assassinate the Duke of Buckingham. Fortunately, Athos, d’Artagnan and the boys catch wind of the plot and get messages off to the Duke and Milady’s brother-in-law, Lord de Winter. De Winter intercepts Milady and takes her prisoner. Does this slow the lady down? Not even close. Over the course of five days, Milady uses lies and seduction to drive de Winter’s best guard mad with religious and sexual fervor. The poor John Felton falls in love with her, helps her escape and then murders the Duke for her, while she takes off back to France.

The eight chapters which it takes for all this to happen is some of Dumas’ best writing in the whole book. The tension and conflict between Milady, Lord de Winter, and Felton is expertly played out, and serves to enhance to story, even if it takes the musketeers out of the action for a while. It is a necessary diversion, however, because in seeing the depths of Milady’s duplicity, the reader loses all sympathy for her. Dumas needs his readers to be unequivocal in their feelings about Milady so that, when Athos and d’Artagnan execute their revenge, there is no question that she gets everything she deserves.

There is more to the ending than just Milady’s encounter with justice, but I’ll not give the rest away, as it really is a great ending. That’s the impression I am most left with, a fine conclusion. Dumas ties up the loose ends, including d’Artagnan’s mistress Madame Bonacieux, and all the characters acquit themselves appropriately. There is even room and tension enough between d’Artagnan and the Cardinal to pave the way to the sequel (No, it’s true. Like most people, I didn’t realize that Dumas wrote two more books about d’Artagnan: Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne). But I am left wondering if a good ending can make a mediocre book great.

It’s not as through the rest of the novel was worthless - it certianly held my attention - but it wasn’t great. With the start of Chapter 40, it felt as if I started reading a whole new book. The tone and pace changed; the characters solidified into dynamic entities and it was a race against myself to make it to the end. But is that fair? Can an author put a reader through a so-so beginning and middle just to get to a fantastic conclusion? In the case of this author and this reader, I suppose the answer is yes on both counts. And after all, if the end is what you remember most of any work, I can certainly see why so many people stoutly defend The Three Musketeers.

In a world surrounded in sameness, hemmed in by homogeneity, bogged down by boredom, where can you turn?  Who will initiate imagination and cultivate creativity?  Enter the Charm City Craft Mafia!

(I think that’s quite enough alliteration, don’t you?)

This past Saturday, the aforementioned Mafia hosted the 2nd annual Pile of Craft at St. John’s Church in Baltimore, and I couldn’t have been more impressed.  Packed into two rooms just off St. Paul’s street were more than forty vendors, both Mafia members and not.  For the better part of seven hours, you could find anything from stuffed monsters made from recycled fabric, to handmade jewelry, to vegan pastries.  The important thing to realize here, indeed the exciting thing, is that these aren’t simply part-time efforts.  The people who were at this show are artists, and there’s no better word to use.  

In the hour or so I spent there with my wife, there was no way to really get a good look at every table.  There were, however, a few folks who jumped out and grabbed our attention.

• I had the chance to meet and talk to Michael S. Bracco of Spaghetti Kiss.  Not just a nice guy, he is also the artist and writer of two graphic novels, Birth and Novo.  The black and white art is hauntingly engaging as Bracco tells the story of Novo, the last survivor of the Teran race, who is searching for his place in the world.  I also bought one Bracco’s powerfully cool t-shirts (a dark grey affair with a blue goat-man in a whirly-gig flying machine).  He was also good enough to sketch on and sign the inside cover of my copy of Novo.
    

• Meanwhile, my wife wandered over to visit The Broken Plate Pendant Company.  This woman has a philosophy on art I can get behind.  From her website: “giving new life to old plates, glass, vintage slides and anything else in my way … in hopes of finding an audience that will help support my need to break plates.”  The result of this hammer inspired art work is a series of ever changing and surprisingly delicate pendants.  Each piece is unique and a testimony to the beauty of details.

• My darling girl also picked up a button made from a vintage silk Kimono by Allison Fomich at the Tiger Lilly shop.  The fabric covered pin is delicate and in the same vein as the plate pendant.  Fomich makes all manner of jewelry from all manner of things.  She has copper pendants, glass rings, and even earring made from 1950’s lucite.  She is also starting a line of rubber stamps.

• In the world of crazy, independent art business names, Noosed Kitty is one of my favorites.  Jamie Fales rather acurately describes her work as a “sweet, but despondent world of animals and girls.”  At the show she had some fantastic prints and greeting cards, along with t-shirts featuring a pirate llama (yeah, you heard me right).  I picked up a small card (I had quite run out of money at this point) called “I have the Power”, which features an armored bunny hoisting a sword. 

What I took most from this show, and from the CCCM for that matter, is hope.  It does my soul good to see people living and working creatively, especially in my home town.  The world’s a crazy place these days.  Fuel’s on the rise and it wasn’t so long ago that there was a rash of recalls on things made in China.  Tie these to the sense of community inherent in local art, and I think you’ve got a powerful argument for shopping at events like Pile of Craft.  If you missed this show, more are in the works, but in the meantime, most of the artists have online shops.  Have a look; it’ll do you and them nothing but good.

Our own personal pile of craft.  

If I’ve learned anything so far in The Great Book Adventure, it’s that expectations will get you absolutely nowhere when in classic literature.  It seems that people will take whatever they want from books and apply them however they want, simply ignoring the parts they don’t like.  This can lead the prospective reader far, far astray.  Nowhere have I found this more true than in Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers.  

Take, for example, the Musketeers’ motto: all for one, one for all.  I can’t count the number of times I have heard that trumpeted as a theme for unification.  It has a nice ring to it and is filled with noble sentiment, and it imbues the musketeers with much the same.  The problem, of course, is that it’s only been brought up once in the two-thirds of the book that I’ve read.  I’m not sure why, but I always thought they used it as a sort of rallying cry.  You know, before each encounter with the Cardinal’s men, they would circle up in a frilly French huddle, put their hands together and cry out ‘all for one, one for all!’.  As I read, I keep waiting for that moment, waiting for them to dash into action as a team.  Of course, to do that, the four main characters would have to stay together longer than five minutes.

Long about chapter 20, when d’Artagnan and the three musketeers set out on a mission to deliver a letter from the Queen of France to the Duke of Bukingham in London, things looked promising.  I thought for sure I was in for a good bit of adventure, with duels and battles along the way.  It panned out that way only sort of.  There were three attacks, apparantly by the Cardinal’s men, but at each one, rather than stand together, they left someone behind.  First, Porthos gets sidetracked in a duel, then Aramis gets shot in an ambush and left at a roadside inn, and finally Athos gets accused of being a counterfiter and is attacked.  Each time, d’Artagnan leaves his friends to fate, dashing off with whatever members of the dwindling party are left to follow him.  By the time he makes the crossing to England, it is only his ever present servant Planchet who is still with him.  This is a long way from the ideal of brotherly togetherness I came into this book expecting, but as I said, expectations will get you nowhere in classic literature.  This, I find, is becoming more and more true as it relates specifically to d’Artagnan.

I had high hopes for this young musketeer wanna-be.  I thought for sure, under the tutelage of his more experienced friends, d’Artagnan would become a first class hero.  Not so much.  Instead, what I’ve gotten the last three hundred pages or so is a Machiavellian character who is only growing in manipulative power and ability.  After his mistress disappears with a suggestion of violence, he moves into the bed of a chambermaid to a powerful lady.  Even as he professes his new love for Kitty, he is plotting his move into her employer’s bed, ignoring the fact that Milady (as she’s called) is a duplicitous servant of Cardinal Richelieu bent on using d’Artagnan for her own purposes.  When Milady tries to kill him, he turns around and puts Kitty in danger by making her help him escape.  All of these romantic machinations aside, d’Artagnan has also managed to gather secrets about each of the three musketeers which no one else knows.  While he hasn’t put them to any malicious use yet, he seems content to bide his time and use the information to his advantage when it suits him best.  Forgetting expectations for a moment, none of this makes me particularly fond of Dumas’ main character and I am fervently hoping this young Gascon prat gets his just deserts, or at least learns something virtuous from all this scheming.  

As of this writing, I am sitting at chapter 40, with a third of the book to go.  D’Artagnan is walking into what is surely a Cardinal trap and the four friends are set to go to war on the following day.  There is certainly enough leg room for Dumas to redeem his characters’ many moral failings, but it would seem like a drastic departure for him to do so.  Throughout, he has persisted in excusing their behavior as part of their times, noting that it is different from his own.  This smacks of a cop-out and doesn’t hold much water for me as a reader.  Nevertheless, I am committed to the book and it has, if nothing else, held my attention.  Perhaps, with the beginning of war, the nobler virtues in these men will rise to the top and save us all, but I’m not going to expect too much.  

  ”All for one, one for all.”

As far as literary one-liners go, that’s pretty far up there on the recognition scale.  Indeed, the idea of the three musketeers, three compatriots, is one which has permeated the cultural language fairly consistently.  How many times has a group of three American friends, usually children, been dubbed such?  With that in mind, it has come as something of a surprise to me that the character who is taking the lead in Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers is not even part of the titular triumvirate.   

The novel begins as something of a picaresque, with the teenage d’Artagnan setting off from his home in the provinces to become a member of the famed King’s Musketeers.  After getting past a little introductory trouble, he lands in Paris where he is granted an audience with Monsieur de Tréville, the commander of the musketeers.  De Tréville informs d’Artagnan that he cannot become a musketeer without first serving an apprenticeship in a guard unit.  Once a a spot is found for him, d’Artagnan leaves de Tréville’s study, but manages to get himself into duels with three of the most prominent musketeers before he’s even found a place to live.

The dueling culture was a vitriolic, bloody and persistent part of manhood, especially in seventeenth century Europe.  I had already become familiar with it all after reading Richard Cohen’s excellent history of swordsmanship, By the Sword.  Coming into The Three Musketeers, I was ready for the sword play, the use of seconds (back-ups), and the isolated meeting places.  What I wasn’t ready for was just how touchy everyone was, and how easily men got involved in duels.  When d’Artagnan gets himself into his three musketeer duels, all of them start, essentially, over nothing.  The duel with Athos is arranged because d’Artagnan bumps into Athos’ injured shoulder, they exchange words, and agree to meet behind the Carmes-Deschaux monastery at noon.  Not a dozen steps later, d’Artagnan bumps into Porthos and gets caught in his cloak.  The two exchange words, and agree to meet behind the Luxembourg gardens at one o’clock.  As he walks away from the Musketeer compound, our dashing young hero begins to regret his hot words to a pair of experienced swordsmen.  Seeing the third of the group, Aramis, d’Artagnan tries to make friends, but only ends up upsetting him, and, you guessed it, the two exchange words and agree to meet at Monsieur de Tréville’s house at two o’clock.  

What all of this sets up rather nicely, of course, is d’Artagnan’s moment of acceptance into the group.  When the time comes for him to meet Athos, the latter has asked Porthos and Aramis to be his seconds in the duel.  The overlapping duels are found out, but before a solution can be found, the Cardinal’s men show up.  The newcomers, apparantly because they are bad guys, decide to have it out with the three musketeers.  They give d’Artagnan a chance to leave, but he stays and proves his worth to his new compatriots.  Even though he still can’t become a musketeer, d’Artagnan becomes a friend and comrade in the musketeers’ defense of the King.  

The Musketeers and the Cardinal’s guards are mortal enemies, even though their masters (King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, respectively) are supposed to be working together.  This brings up something which I find both intriguing and perplexing.  The King and the Cardinal were real people, just as Paris was a real city.  As for the rest, d’Artagnan and the musketeers, I’m not sure what to believe.  Dumas wrote a preface to the novel explaining how he “happened up on the Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan” while researching the life of Louis XIV.  That book, in turn, led him to the “Memoirs of Count de La Fère”, which he got permission to print as The Three Musketeers.  As a writer, I know what a dishonest lot we can be, especially if it serves the plot, and so I don’t believe Dumas’ claim for a second.  If you do believe it, I suppose it gives the story a slightly more credible air that it might otherwise lack as plain historical fiction.  Or, perhaps, Dumas felt it necessary to clothe it in such a way because the King and the Cardinal, two such prominent icons of French history, are living, speaking characters in his book.  Whatever his reason, there is no doubt the book is a historical fiction.  Just how much is history and how much is fiction remains to be seen.

As of this writing, I am about a quarter of the way through the novel.  I must say, there has been more talking than action on the whole, which is not what I expected.  From talking to friends who have read Dumas before, especially The Count of Monte Cristo (which was a great movie, by the way), I was looking forward to more cut and thrust than chit-chat.  Nevertheless, it has held my attention for twenty chapters, and there seems to be plenty of mystery and adventure still to come.