[AE.Books, AE.Politics, AE.ADHD] Bluebeard Revisited
It's an interesting thing, re-reading a book that I had found to be profound as a teenager, as an adult.
It's not the first time I've read this book since reaching the age of legal drinking, but it's the first occasion where enough time has passed since the last that I feel like I am reading it with fresh eyes, where I'm seeing all of the words on the screen in their own right without any nostalgic impression of them.
The book is Bluebeard, by Kurt Vonnegut. If you plan to read it some day and haven't yet, be advised that there will be spoilers involving some details of the plot, though I have no reason to reference the answer to the central mystery hinted at by the title and so I shall not be doing that.
If you haven't read the book but are still reading this: the book in question is not a retelling of the fairy tale of the same name, nor is it about the literary character Bluebeard. It is about a fictional Abstract Expressionist painter named Rabo Karabekian whose reputation, personal life, and career self-destructed when all of his famous works did the same, owing to an unfortunate manufacturing defect in the materials he favored. With his best and worst days behind him, Karabekian lives a comfortable if lonely existence in a house that contains the most important collection of Abstract Expressionist works in the world, owing to him having accepted payment in kind for financially supporting his fellow artists in the movement's heyday.
On the grounds of his estate is an enormous old potato barn that was once his studio, which he keeps conspicuously secured with half a dozen locks. Acquaintances who visit him along with the scholars and tourists who come to view his private collection inevitably suspect he must be hiding even more important and valuable works in the barn, but he will neither show nor tell, and it's this locked barn that forms the allusion to Bluebeard.
I'm re-reading this book... well, I was looking for something to read as a way of testing the waters of how that sort of thing works for me on ADHD meds, but how I landed on this book in particular is that I've recently sought a bit of inspiration from one of my foundational memories of it, which concerned an older (though younger than the narrator) widow named Circe Berman who wrote what we would today call young adult fiction under a pseudonym, Polly Madison.
Circe Berman's arrival at the Karabekian estate is the inciting incident behind the novel; in many ways, she gives the impressiont that she is a walking one-woman inciting incident. Perhaps this is a peculiar privilege that some novelists may claim, when they have sufficiently internalized the structure of a long-form story that they can see it at work around them.
In the specific case of Rabo Karabekian and Bluebeard, she quite literally incited the novel into being: the novel is framed as a manuscript being written by Karabekian after she maneuvers him into writing the story of is life.
At one point she explains to him that the trick to writing is you have to write for one person.
I will always remember that at the time I read this, I fully expected her to go on and say that one has to write for oneself, that you have to forget about the audience and the critics and the whole world and just write whatever you personally need to write, the thing that only you can write, etc.
But it transpired that she wasn't saying that at all. Her advice was more literal: she meant find one person to write for, and then write as though you're speaking to them.
I definitely remembered that part, the general gist of it. The subversion of the obvious stock writing advice stood out. Little can fix a memory more clearly in my head than adding a frisson of surprise to it, pleasant or otherwise.
I also remembered that her one person was a mature male professional, which felt like it was chosen by the author to give a great contrast to her presumed target audience of teen and near-teen girls.
I did not remember and thus was surprised to learn that the person she referred to was specifically Dr. Abe Berman, her late husband, a character who never appears onstage in the drama because the perspective of the novel means that all we know about Dr. Berman comes from his widow's conversations with Rabo Karabekian as he transcribes them.
The connection between her and the silent recipient of the one-sided correspondence that was her literary oeuvre did not make much impression on me as a callow youth. I did not feel any impact at the time at the revelation that she was still having conversations about intimate and important things with her husband, that she was still writing because she still had things to say to him.
Another way that my impression of Mrs. Berman's situation has changed from when I first read the novel in high school: the age difference between her and the narrator did not seem quite as wide. I recalled that she was younger than he was, but mostly I read it as Rabo Karabekian being a pointedly crotchety old curmudgeon and her being equally pointedly vivacious and active. To my teenage self, it seemed like I was being presented with two different visions of aging rather than two different stages of it.
So it was a little jarring, reading it as a woman of 41 year old who is currently feeling cautiously optimistic about finding some good years ahead of me, to learn that the aging widow is all of two years older than I am.
Before and outside of this experience, I wouldn't have categorized myself as the sort of person who was ever prone to that particularly youthful folly, at least not once she reached the double digits of age herself. But apparently I read a book about a 43 year old woman and a 71 year old man and thought to myself, "These are basically the same thing."
There are other things that read quite a bit different in the text. In previous readings, I recall having dismissed the side character Dan Gregory, an abusive mentor to Karabekian, as little more than a ridiculous caricature of a buffoon. Reading the book this past week for the first time in well over a decade, I found that the parts about his admiration of Mussolini and disastrous involvement in World War II Italian propaganda efforts familiar. That, I hadn't remembered them but reading them but they didn't surprise me.
I was surprised when I read his views, both the ways he expressed them to the narrator and the ways the narrator summed them up. Because of course, the man who went to Italy to aid the Mussolini regime in the run-up to World War II was a whole and actual fascist. And the text makes it clear, in ways that I now recognize as being grounded in reality and serious as a... well, serious as a fascist element.
It's possible and even likely that I would have reappraised his character in terms of his politics if I'd remembered specifically that he had any, but I hadn't. Because at the time, reading from a vantage point that was decades on the hindsight side of Mussolini and that was comfortable in terms of not having to think of overt fascism as an extant threat, all I could make of him was that we were supposed to find him risible: LOL, this guy backed the losing team.
When I started re-reading the book, I didn't remember that he had been shot by Allied soldiers while wearing an Italian uniform, but when I got to that part I remembered that at the time I had thought he was killed by his own foolishness, that his executioners had made an understandable mistake in thinking that he was actually a fascist. I thought his fate was his own fault, in the sense that his mistake created the situation where soldiers had to figure out what to do with someone in an enemy uniform, but at a basic level I thought he died for the mistake of having spouted ideas and worn symbols that he didn't understand.
In short: I didn't think he was really a fascist, just somebody who said fascist things, wore a fascist uniform, and sucked up to fascists without really knowing what he was doing.
I'd say "what a difference a couple of decades can make," but if I'm honest, it's mostly the past five years.
There's more that sits differently with me these days. I'm more acutely aware of the racism, sexism, and homophobia both described and evinced by the narrator, and those are all things -- along with the fascism and repeated recitations of the death by suicide of various artists in Karabekian's former circle -- I would take into account when recommending or describing the book to others. I didn't miss those things before, but I didn't think about them the way I do today.
In terms of things that just absolutely land differently, though, I would say the big three are: the relationship between Circe's target audience technique and grief, the significance of her age, and the actual and serious nature of Dan Gregory's openly avowed fascism.
I meant that last preceding paragraph to be a kind of summation of the post, but after writing the last clause I just have to reiterate this: I read this book and gave a man who was an open and avowed fascist (to the point he was shot wearing a fascist uniform in World War II) the benefit of doubt in assuming he didn't really mean it.
And I point that out not to excoriate my younger self or to beat myself up over it. The reason this is so jarring to me is that I have seen so many other people making the exact same excuses but for real-life public figures whose fascism also reads as a foolish affectation to those who see no reason to be concerned if it's real.
It's almost enough to lead one to suspect that those who fail to learn from history are missing out on a lot of lessons from literature, as well.