Elective affinities: a heliotropic journey - Editorial

Christian Century, June 16, 1993 by James M. Wall

THOMAS MERTON once noted that the logic of the poet "develops the way an organism grows: it spreads out toward what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant." That image of personal development--of turning toward the source of light--made sense to me recently as I undertook a journey through the stacks of the local library--by

The journey was launched for me at Chicago's Midway Airport. Vice-President Al Gore was coming to town, and as a few of us were standing in a reception line waiting for him to come off the plane, Robert Lehrman came over to report that he had just joined the vice-president's staff as a speech writer. I met Lehrman more than 20 years ago when he was a youthful political operative. He had had the soul of a master sergeant: he was dedicated, demanding, and unwilling to listen to excuses from volunteers who failed to make their "get out the vote" telephone calls. He was not the sort one would expect to end up as a speech writer. But there he was, helping to craft the language that defines a new administration.

Instead of becoming the hard-nosed political boss I saw developing 20 years ago, Lehrman became a writer. He's the author of one adult novel (Deception) and several novels for a teen audience, including one that explores the impact of divorce on a young tennis player and another that tells the story of Lehrman's immigrant grandparents who operated a store in Brooklyn.

I discovered these books in my library computer, which just happens to be part of that national computer network that will soon grow, if leaders like Al Gore have their way, into a super informational highway, linking, in Gore's imaginative description, a little girl at home in Tennessee to all the libraries of the world.

I thought about my own youthful reading experience. What did I read before I graduated to the adult section of the library? Then I remembered my early loyalty to Penrod, and the sequel, Penrod and Sam. When I traced these books down in their remote and rarely touched places on the library shelf, they evoked memories of lazy summer afternoons spent reading in the upper branches of a pecan tree in a backyard in a small town in Georgia.

The Penrod books were written by Booth Tarkington, ton, an Indiana writer who, as John Updike suggested recently in the New Yorker, is in danger of becoming a souvenir "of a Midwestern America whose power to charm or to oppress has receded into cultural history." I thumbed quickly through Penrod. Its opening sentence sounded familiar: "Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his wistful dog." Has it been lodged all these years in my memory bank?

I turned to a second Tarkington title, continuing this journey, which seemed, in Merton's term, heliotropic, like a plant turning toward the sun, seeking the object for which it longs. The next Tarkington novel to emerge on the screen was a title better known to me from the 1942 Orson Welles movie The Magnificent Ambersons (it was Welles's second film, after Citizen Kane). The library had copies of both the movie and the book, so I went off to find a VCR and, with book in hand, to revisit the genius of Welles the filmmaker and the imaginative wisdom of Tarkington the novelist. The two artists may never have met (Tarkington died five years after the film's release), but they combined to present a striking portrayal of America as it was yielding to the industrial era, which was symbolized by the automobile. (Much of the movie's dialogue belongs to Tarkington, as does much of the imagery Welles presents to convey the trauma of the 19th-century encounter with modernity.)

My journey might have continued further into modern America, but I turned instead to follow Welles, whose third film, Journey into Fear was set in Turkey. This tale of a British arms dealer confronting a Nazi enemy got me thinking about the Balkans. Another computer search yielded several titles, including Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, by Robert D. Kaplan. In his book Kaplan recommends Eric Ambler as a fiction writer with a good feel for the region. Ambler, a Britisher who specialized in stories of espionage, is perhaps best remembered for his earlier novels, Journey into Fear (the source of Welles's film) and The Mask of Dimitrios, but he is also the author of an autobiography with the delightful title Here Lies Eric Ambler.

Kaplan is correct: Ambler's fiction is helpful in understanding the recent history of the Balkans. To my surprise and delight, I found that Ambler had been ordered by the British war department to work with American film director John Huston on the highly regarded World War II documentary The Battle of San Pietro. Huston's classic film was commissioned and then banned by the U.S. Army because its scenes of death in Italy were considered too graphic and depressing for a wartime public.

At this point two options emerged in my journey. When I told a colleague about the connections I had made, he said it sounded like I had encountered some "elective affinities." He said he thought the term came from Goethe. When I mentioned this to a German-speaking librarian, she recognized the phrase: it was the title of one of Goethe's novels, one that Thomas Mann had described as "the boldest and most profound novel of adultery that the moral code of the West has produced." ("Elective affinities," a term borrowed from chemistry, refers to the fact that when certain compounds are mixed, their elements "change partners," drawn by some mysterious force to leave one bonding and link up with a new partner.) Goethe describes two couples who change partners, upsetting the "civilized" structure of marriage--something the author ultimately condemns (though scholars attribute the novel's power to Goethe's own struggle with a forbidden love).