Tag: J. P. Marquand

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Loaded Trifles: Killing Time, Wasting Life, and Assassinating George W. Bush

Well, “It doesn’t matter, does it?” That is a pivotal and oft-repeated line in Pulitzer Prize winning novelist J. P. Marquand’s Thank You, Mr. Moto (1936), the aforementioned thriller I finally put down tonight. Does it matter? The novel, I mean. Was it just a way of passing some dull hours before, in a few minutes from now, the Death of a President—the assassination of George W. Bush, no less—is being televised here in Britain, a media event you may look at as just another opportunity to “kill time”? I have always been revolted by the phrase “killing time.” Sure, I take in plenty of popular culture; but I do not consider my engagement with such alleged trifles to be quite so destructive. Instead of getting away with murder, I try to come away with something rather more meaningful and life affirming.

Last night, after watching another instalment of the four-part adaptation of Jane Eyre, one more glossy take on the classic novel (previously reviewed here) to which I am warming against my better judgment of the original, I had a glance at Reader, I Married Him. It is a documentary that borrows its title from the most famous line of Jane Eyre—the very line denied me by this latest adaptation, since those at work on visualizing the novel decided to drop the first-person narration that served actresses like Ingrid Bergman, Madeleine Carroll, or Deborah Kerr so well in radio versions of this bold if bogus autobiography.

Now, the common argument for (or against) pageturners like Jane Eyre—and the lesser works inspired by or ransacking it—is that they provide vicarious relief. They allow those reading (or viewing or listening) to leave their restricting bodies and circumstances and become fictional characters who are daring and courageous despite the recognizable shortcomings that enable us to identify with them in the first place.

Escapism is often thought of as beneficial or at any rate innocuous. It gives hope to those who deem themselves beyond escaping, those swallowed up by the mundane and too feeble or frightened to realize that the everyday is all we’ve got. Others contend that this losing oneself in make-believe mainly serves the interests of those who would rather preserve the status quo and encourage alternate realities where everyday life ought to be.

What use is any novel, any film or play, if it only leads away from the present like a cul-de-sac littered with dreams deferred? What can we take away from novels before we put them away to grab another? Is a novel or film or radio play worth our while if it does nothing but help us to while away the hours?

Luckily, I am not the kind of person who is ever bored, even though I might spend an entire day doing what many would think of as nothing at all. Early in adulthood I decided that killing time is a deadly pursuit. I left behind my former self, my miserable nine-to-five job, and turned my back on my native country because such a lethal rejection of life began to disturb and depress me. It roused me to move to the United States, where I learned in time to live for the day rather than wait for a presumably better tomorrow, a period consumed by watching diverting films and reading distracting books.

No, I did not gain this courage from reading any piece of fiction; but since escaping home I have stopped perceiving any work of fiction as being escapist. Unless I put it aside as something not worth my while, I generally manage to find something in cultural pop, however devoid of fizz, that reflects or refreshes me. Making time for such works is no longer a fast getaway but a gradual getting at something. Weaving myself in and out of fictions, I no longer find myself sneaking out of what I think of as my own life.

Now, before I witness the assassination of George W. Bush—which I will not accept as wishful thinking—I am going to share a few lines that I took away from Thank You, Mr. Moto, words be thought of long after the plot and characters have become a blur in the vapor of experience pulverized by time. The first lines are uttered by the American narrator, the second by the one who makes him change his “it doesn’t really matter” attitude toward life:

I could see myself as others may have seen me [. . .] a stranger in a strange country, living in a fool’s Paradise; and I could see myself as something uglier than that.  I could see myself as one of those misfits who cumber the earth, like spoiled children, incapable of adjustment to the life where they were placed and indulging instead in illusory futilities of existence which certainly were no part of life.  I could see myself as one of those unfortunates, unable to face incontrovertible fact, constantly escaping from reality, and at the same time endeavouring to gain applause.  That vision of myself made me lonely, empty.  More than that, it filled me with distaste. 

You can be as much of a fatalist as you like, but don’t forget there are times when you can do something.  There are times when anyone can make fate change a little [. . .].  People may be altered by circumstances but they can alter circumstances too. At any rate I’ve taught you that.

The novel hasn’t exactly taught me anything; but the relevance of these lines, so obviously designed to validate the novel as something other than a time-waster, has not escaped me. They have returned me to my own story, my inescapable past, my retreat abroad, and my current remoteness from much that I once believed to be giving life meaning. You’ve got to be prepared to sustain a few injuries when handling such loaded trifles.

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Past Escape/Inescapable Present: Mr. Moto, the Orient, and the Death of Tokyo Rose

Well, I am not a Houdinist. I mean, a hedonist who escapes artistically. No matter how many supposedly escapist works I see, read, or hear, I can never entirely lose myself in them; instead, I seem to bring to or burden them with my own story and the stories of our time. By the time I am halfway through a yarn like Thank You, Mr. Moto, a 1936 thriller I am currently reading, I have spun such a web of references that I am thoroughly entangled, lost not in the world of the text but in the context of the world I invariably find between the covers, the world that draws my mind’s eye to the not so blank spaces between the lines. It is through my writings that I try to uncover a few intelligible strands in the muddles my mind makes while reading, listening, and watching. Let me give you a “for instance.”

I had considered continuing my recent discussions about the challenges of adaptation by commemorating the anniversary of “Alice in Wonderland,” the first of a two part radio version broadcast in the US on this day, 28 September, in 1937. I took a copy of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy from my bookshelf, but left it unopened. Surely my plans would be undermined somehow, I thought, when I stepped into the floating library that is our bathtub. And so it was. Alice had to wait, and is waiting still. The aforementioned Mr. Moto was not done with me yet.

Ever since I saw Peter Lorre’s impersonation of the man a few decades ago, I’ve been meaning to read a Mr. Moto mystery; so, browsing with a friend at the aforementioned Black Orchid Mystery Bookstore in Manhattan last month, I gladly accepted the gift of a 1980s paperback copy of Thank You, Mr. Moto, the film adaptation of which was readied for release at the time when “Alice” was being squeezed through radio’s rabbit hole. Before Moto found himself in quite another ditch after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a hole from which he only sporadically and tentatively reemerged, Pulitzer Prize winning author J. P. Marquand allowed the Japanese agent to speak candidly about American culture and politics.

Indeed, I was rather surprised at some of Mr. Moto’s observations when I read them today; and considering that the Far and Middle-East—contested or world market-contending nations, regions invested with suspicion whose future is being claimed by suspicious investors from the West—are such an Occidental headache these days, Mr. Moto’s remarks about America’s view or conception of the East still ring true today:

“Affairs in the Orient are so complicated to-day. They grow so difficult, if you will pardon my saying so, please, because of the suspicions of your country,” Moto tells the American narrator; “and because of the suspicions of certain European nations regarding the natural aspirations of my own people.” Such “suspicions,” Moto claims, “make the most harmless activities of my country very, very difficult”; but did not the US and Britain “seize” and engage in “colonizing efforts” in the past? he reminds the American.

To the American listener—captured, along with Mr. Moto by a Chinese rebel—Moto’s talk seemed as strange as the “conversation at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.” Apparently, Alice was eager to make herself heard, waiting impatiently outside my bathroom and intruding herself on the story I had chosen instead. But I let Mr. Moto continue as he told apologetically of a “disturbing, radical element” in his country, “somewhat bigoted and fanatical,” which had been “a source of very bad annoyance.” Still, he asked, does not even a “great nation” like America have its “disturbing elements?”

The US, it seems, has two main responses to the world, commercial interests aside: indifference and suspicion, but rarely a sustained interest in or engagement with other cultures, cultures it is prepared to absorb or incorporate, but not to see develop independently.

Reveling in the fantasy of “equality,” it does not deal well with difference, at least not a difference that goes beyond a certain savory and amusing flavoring. Those who refuse or fail to be incorporated, those who remain torn between or by cultures, are labelled suspicious or serve as scapegoats to be impaled on the fence on which they seem to be defiantly perched. Any ambiguous “not for” tends to be read as a clear “against.”

When I stepped out of the tub, already convinced to make Mr. Moto, rather than Alice, the topic of the day, I learned of the death of Iva Toguri, the American who became known as Tokyo Rose and was convicted of treason after broadcasting to Americans from Japan, where she was sent by her mother to attend to an ailing relative during the Second World War.

Even though little could be found that was hostile or harmful in her broadcasts and charges against her appear to have been manufactured, she was stripped of her American citizenship and sentenced to ten years in prison, just about the time it took Mr. Moto to rehabilitate himself in the service of anti-Communist America.

Judged by the either/or dynamics of American thought, those positioned in between are as suspicious as those, like me, who cannot get straight to the point simply because there are so many dots left to connect.