Tag Archives: Robert Nathan

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Train in the Meadow,’ by Robert Nathan

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“For the artist,” said Mr. Freundlich, “the problem of immortality comes second only after the problem of staying alive. Of all people, the artist is the one most horrified at the thought of a catastrophe which would end everything, including music, poetry, ceramics, art, and making mobiles out of chicken wire and bits of string.”

Robert Nathan published his novel, The Train in the Meadow, in 1953. I have to wonder if he ever read C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, which came out in 1945. Because there are few novels as similar as those two, though they have very different conceptual foundations.

In a meadow in a high mountain pass, a railroad train rolls to a stop. After a while, another train, headed in the opposite direction, pulls up next to it. As they wait for something to happen, the two groups of passengers are supposed to stay apart, but there are some interactions.

The passengers in the first train are a mixed lot. There’s an old Jewish couple, one of them a famous art critic. They’re rather dejected to have been summoned in the middle of the night and expelled from their home for the second time in their lives. There’s a salesman, and also a waitress with whom he once had a one-night stand. There’s a Catholic priest, and a former president of the United States. A hard-working, embittered woman who was abandoned by her daughters. And a little orphan boy, worried because he doesn’t have any “papers” to present at the border. Before long we suspect – and then we know – that these people are all dead, on their way to the next world.

After a time a table is set up in the meadow, and two officials take their stations there. This spot is, apparently, the border. A long line forms, and each person presents his or her papers and gives an account of his or her life. (Though each of them is worried about not being allowed to enter, it doesn’t appear that there’s anywhere else to go.)

It should be no surprise that The Train in the Meadow handles such matters differently than The Great Divorce. Author Nathan did not subscribe to Christian doctrine, as far as I know. His concept of eternity seems to be based on mercy, which is pleasant to read (sometimes heartbreaking, too). His Catholic priest seems to me a pretty poor Catholic, as his hopes for eternity seem to rest on the authority of his office, rather than the grace of God.

The Train in the Meadow is a charming book, and comforting. Theologically, that’s not a great thing, but it was enjoyable and moving to read.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Sir Henry,’ by Robert Nathan

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“However,” he said, “if you will not enter the tournament, promise me that you will stay for the banquet afterwards, when there will be some very interesting discourse on love, in which I would be glad to have you join.” “I should be delighted to,” said Sir Henry, “though I do not think I can add anything to the general knowledge on the subject.” “No matter,” said King Anselm, “for no one else knows very much about it anyway.”

Robert Nathan was an eccentric author; I suspect he reveled in that quality. In Sir Henry, first published in 1955, he provides us with a medieval romance – of a sort.

The titular Sir Henry is a middle-aged knight of no great distinction, riding about seeking chivalric adventure on his horse Ponderer, accompanied by his hound Manfred. (Charmingly, the animals talk to one another.) He comes upon a fiery dragon and slays it pretty much by accident. Thereby he frees the dragon’s captive, the lady Alisane, a practical-minded maiden who immediately starts discussing their future home and domesticity.

Further along, they encounter another knight who insists on combat, and Sir Henry slays him as well, again by mischance. This leaves that knight’s companion, the lady Meghan, in his care as well. Sir Henry has a carriage constructed to carry the three of them, and they proceed to various adventures, most of them bloodless.

Alisane is focused on establishing a home. Meghan, on the other hand, is keen for adventure and glory, and finds Sir Henry rather a disappointment. Eventually they do find a home and start constructing a castle, but the upshot of that arrangement will be a total surprise to Sir Henry.

I’ve gotten used to not deriving clear lessons from Robert Nathan’s books (though I think I understand Portrait of Jennie to some extent). Sir Henry is a gentle (and well-crafted) riff on chivalric literature, and also an allegory, with a touch of psychomachia. It’s fun and likeable and bittersweet. I enjoyed it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘One More Spring,’ by Robert Nathan

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He was playing Bach, to keep his spirits up. The great German, who wasted nothing in his life, asks of the performer only attention and respect; in return for which his music, in which there is no evidence of self-pity, gives courage to those able to perform it.

I read several of Robert Nathan’s books back in the 1980s, and One More Spring was one of that number. I had fond – but vague – memories of it. Reading it again now, I found it very enjoyable, though I came away a little uncertain exactly what the exercise was in service of. (Which is probably the wrong question to ask in the first place.)

The year is 1933, the height or (low point) of the Great Depression. Mr. Otkar, an antiques dealer in New York City, has just lost his business. He sits for the last time in his shop, left with only a few cooking utensils and an ornate, carved bed he can’t find a buyer for. In wanders Mr. Rosenberg, a young, starving violinist. Mr. Otkar, sadly, gives him his last egg to eat. Then they join forces, piling the disassembled bed into a pushcart and taking it to the park, where they spend the night in the open.

The next day, playing for change in the street, Mr. Rosenberg meets Mr. Sweeney, a street cleaner who agrees to let the two men stay in the little shed where his cleaning cart is kept, in exchange for violin lessons. (Mr. Sweeney has great passion for music, but no talent.) Later they are joined by Elizabeth Cheney, a hungry young prostitute with nowhere to go, whom Mr. Otkar meets while they’re both out stealing food.

It’s a strange household they form. Mr. Otkar finds himself surprisingly carefree, liberated from the burdens of owning things. Mr. Rosenberg is tortured by finding no outlet for his art. And Elizabeth just wants love. In time they are joined by Mr. Sheridan, president of a failed bank, saved by Mr. Otkar from a suicide attempt.

Most of Robert Nathan’s books, in my experience (Portrait of Jennie is an exception) tend to fade out in the end, rather than having a dramatic climax. That happens in One More Spring too, though the plot is better resolved than the one in The Bishop’s Wife. This is a book without villains, where everyone means well, and salvation comes through understanding. Also, remarkably, there’s no fantasy element (unless you count so much human kindness as a fantasy). I had a good time reading it.

Fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Bishop’s Wife,’ by Robert Nathan

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He discovered the wealthy lady in a small house near the river, furnished in the style of the last century, which is to say that everything was uncomfortable. She received the archdeacon in her library, in which there still remained a few books.

I approached Robert Nathan’s The Bishop’s Wife with some hesitation. Fond as I am of Nathan, he was a Jewish writer, and I wasn’t looking forward to finding out how he dealt with the Christian church. In the event, it was indeed a little awkward, but that wasn’t the only awkwardness I experienced with this story.

The Bishop’s Wife was made into a movie in 1947, starring David Niven (as the bishop), Cary Grant (as the angel), and Loretta Young. It’s a minor Christmas classic, not as popular as “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but like the Capra movie it features Christmas and an angel. The movie isn’t bad; I was surprised to discover how far it veers from the book at the end.

Bishop Henry Brougham is a dignified, earnest churchman (one assumes he’s Episcopalian, but references to Luther and the Augsburg Confession suggest to me he might be Lutheran). His great vision is to promote the Christian home, but he believes (for some reason) that the way to nurture good homes is to build a cathedral. The challenge of raising funds is daunting to him, so he prays to God for an archdeacon gifted in fundraising. That’s when Michael appears. He informs Henry that he’s an angel, and that he’s here to do that job. Henry accepts him, but they keep the angel part to themselves.

Henry introduces Michael to his wife Julia, and Michael immediately falls in love with her. It’s a novel experience for an angel, except that it reminds him of the world before the Fall, when all was innocence and love. Julia is a frustrated wife – there’s no passion in her marriage, and she pours her affections out on her daughter Juliette. (I did not like Juliette much – her dialogue seemed very artificial to me.)

Both Michael and Julia are strongly tempted, but (spoiler alert) nothing more than a kiss happens between them. Unlike in the movie, where the angel (called Dudley there) helps the bishop to understand his deeper ministry and to appreciate his wife, the book ends with nothing much changed in that regard. Michael completes his assignment and returns whence he came, with a deep and tragic and new understanding he never had before. Julia gains one thing in her life, but her marriage is left pretty much the same.

It’s hard to know what to say about The Bishop’s Wife. My orthodox Christianity made me an argumentative reader. The overarching theme seems to be that the joy and love of Heaven, which permeate Michael, are so much higher than Christian theology and morality that they render them rather irrelevant. (I’m sure that’s true in a sense, but it’s hard for a Christian to conceive of an angel being indifferent to the Son of God.) Henry is both a bad churchman and a bad husband, I think – he overspiritualizes his marriage and overmaterializes his ministry. It’s disappointing that he leaves the stage as clueless as he was before.

The Bishop’s Wife left this reader oddly flat. It’s remarkable to me that it’s one of Nathan’s most famous works.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The River Journey,’ by Robert Nathan

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“Well, then,” said Minerva at last, “what are we to believe?”

“Believe in what you do not know,” replied Mrs. Mortimer promptly. “Believe in your own ignorance.”

I wasn’t entirely happy with the last Robert Nathan book I read, but now I’ve finished The River Journey (published 1949) and it’s all right again. This novel is a sort of an allegory. I didn’t entirely understand it, but it raised the right issues.

Minerva Parkinson is a middle-aged housewife in an Iowa town on the Missouri River. When her doctor tells her she’s dying, she decides not to inform her husband Henry. Instead she intends to give him the adventure he’s always wanted but never reached out for. He’s always wanted to go down the river to St. Louis and New Orleans. So now she’ll cash in her stock certificates and buy a houseboat, and they’ll take that journey. She isn’t sure she’s made him happy all these years, but he’ll have this happy memory when she’s gone.

When they finally set out, she’s a little disappointed at first. Henry isn’t sure about this whole thing; it’s kind of frightening. He’s mostly coming along to please her. But the situation changes in Nebraska City, where they take on two passengers – a young woman named Nora and a mysterious, dark man named Mr. Mortimer. Mr. Mortimer, Minerva comes to realize, is Death. And Nora, like Minerva, is dying. When a flirtation begins between Nora and Henry, Minerva suppresses her jealousy, wanting to give them both a little happiness before she departs.

In terms of strict morality, I didn’t entirely approve of the plot of The River Journey. But I don’t think it’s intended to be taken on that level. This is a journey through the heart, a confrontation with mortality and the things we must leave behind.

The bottom line is that I enjoyed The River Journey very much. It possessed the full Robert Nathan magic.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Stonecliff,’ by Robert Nathan

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He sighed, and shook his head. “The world has always been full of magicians,” he said; “they crowd the bookstore shelves, they fill the theaters . . . but they do not do anything with the heart, the way Benét did. They do tricks with cards, with a chicken in a hat . . . It is all sleight of hand, one can buy such tricks anywhere; even in a brothel. The true sorcerer deals with illusion; he does things with the heart.”

Another novel by Robert Nathan, the unjustly nearly-forgotten 20th Century urban fantasist. (He wrote Portrait of Jennie, which I recently reviewed, but he also wrote The Bishop’s Wife, which was made into a movie with Cary Grant and David Niven once upon a time, and more recently re-made with Denzel Washington.)

I’ve decided I’ll try to boost Robert Nathan on this blog. I picked up a later book, the 1967 novel Stonecliff. I wouldn’t say it’s his best work, though.

The narrator is a young writer named Michael Robb, who has gotten a coveted assignment, to write a biography of Edward Granville, a celebrated novelist, now old and beginning to be forgotten. To interview him, Michael drives to Granville’s remote home, Stonecliff, a cliffside dwelling on the California coast.

He finds Granville welcoming enough, but he’s surprised to find that the man’s wife is not present. Instead there is Nina, a lovely young woman who seems to occupy some undefined position in the household. Is she Granville’s mistress? Michael wonders about that increasingly, as he finds himself romantically drawn to Nina, who is distant and seems rather unhappy.

In between interviews, Michael roams the grounds, from the hills above to the beach below. He wonders about a treehouse he finds, where he’s sure he saw a serpent. He also believes he saw a cougar, perhaps – he’s not sure – walking in Nina’s company. His growing frustration and fascination with Nina leads to an inevitable confrontation and a shocking revelation.

I found Stonecliff less delightful than other Nathan books I’ve read. I wasn’t sure what to take away from the story, except that it’s about an artist growing old (a subject generally of keen interest to me). The specter of Merlin haunts this book, with echoes of the legend of Nimue, but Nathan uses that fantasy for his own purposes.

I also found the prose less lapidary than in Portrait of Jennie. There was not as much precise description of nature – though fog is described in a hundred ways.

Stonecliff wasn’t a bad book, but it may be that Nathan was losing some of his magic by that point.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Portrait of Jennie,’ by Robert Nathan

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From then on, the sky seemed made of another blue, and the clouds, too, were a different white, with tones of yellow in them. Yellow is the true color of spring, not green, the new grass, the clouds, the misty, sunny air, the sticky buds like little feathers on the trees, are mixed with yellow tone, with the haze of sun and earth and water. Green is for summer, blue for fall.

***

I smiled at him across the table. “I’m only beginning to think about things like that,” I said.

“Well,” he said unhappily, “I wish you wouldn’t. The artist ought not to think so much. It’s bad for his color sense.”

Having watched and reviewed the old movie, “Portrait of Jennie,” a few days ago, I went and got the original novella. It’s better than the movie, even better than I remembered.

The film veers off from the book toward the end, but it starts pretty much the same. On a winter’s day in Manhattan in the 1930s, Eben Adams, a struggling artist, meets a strange little girl dressed in oddly antique clothing. The sketch he draws of her the next day becomes the first work of his that a particular art dealer finds interesting. On the basis of this sale, he begins an increasingly successful period of his career. Occasionally through that winter he meets the little girl again, and each time she is visibly a few years older. Gradually he realizes (as she seems to know from the start) that they are living in different timelines, which cross occasionally. She is “hurrying,” she tells him, to grow up in time to catch up with him.

In the movie, Eben goes to visit the convent school she attended, where he learns from a sympathetic old nun that Jennie studied there decades before, but died in a hurricane on Cape Cod. That is a departure from the book, where Eben goes to Cape Cod for artistic inspiration, and has his final encounter with Jenny there unexpectedly. In my opinion, the book’s ending worked better. (Another change the film made is changing Eben’s friend Gus from a Jew to an Irishman. Thus we lose Gus’s ruminations on the “tough break” God handed his people.)

Aside from the entrancing, fantasy love story, the great pleasure of Portrait of Jennie is the prose. Robert Nathan was a superb literary craftsman. His descriptions reminded me of Sigrid Undset – he revels in detail, in texture and scent, but especially in color – as is entirely appropriate for a story narrated by a painter.

I highly recommend Portrait of Jennie. Robert Nathan was Jewish, but there was almost nothing in his meditations on God and eternity that I disagreed with.

Reviews

Old movie review: ‘Portrait of Jennie’

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YouTube, which grows more annoying as time passes, is now featuring old movies provided (for some reason) with the wrong titles. When one came up called “The Painted Memory,” featuring Joseph Cotton, I had an idea it was probably the 1948 film “Portrait of Jennie.” As is so often the case, I was right.

I watched it with great interest. I haven’t seen it since I was a kid, but it was one of those movies that stuck in my mind. When I first saw it, I was still aspiring to be a visual artist, so I identified with the main character. I little expected that the story would be formative for me in a way I never anticipated.

What do I think of it, after 60 years? Read on, if (for some reason) you care to know.

The film is based on a 1940 novella by Robert Nathan, an author who ought to be better remembered. He was a pioneer of what we call urban fantasy today, and his stuff is quite good. I found several of his books in a public library when I lived in Florida, and enjoyed them.

The plot: Joseph Cotten plays Eben Adams, a starving artist in Manhattan during the Great Depression. Dealers find his work competent but uninspired, and he doesn’t sell much. Then one day in Central Park he meets a little girl named Jennie Appleton (Jennifer Jones), who dresses strangely in old-fashioned clothes. They make friends, and he is charmed. When he looks for her the next day, however, she does not appear. He draws a sketch of her, and a gallery owner buys it immediately, saying it’s the first inspired thing he’s ever done. Throughout the year, Jennie shows up periodically, and each time she seems years older. Eben does research and discovers that she was the child of trapeze artists in old vaudeville, decades before, and was orphaned when they died in an accident. Then she went to a convent school and college. Finally she appears to him again as a young woman, and he paints her portrait.

He goes to the convent to talk to an old nun who knew her. She informs him that Jennie used to go out to a place on the coast called Land’s End, where she died in a freak tidal wave. As a present-day tidal wave builds out at sea, Eben rushes to Land’s End to meet her and – he hopes – to rescue her this time. He fails, but an epilogue tells us that Eben Adams achieved greatness as an artist after his “Portrait of Jennie.”

What did I think of it? The movie flopped on release, in spite of the popularity of the original novella. In the years since, critics have revised their opinions upward, and now it’s considered a minor classic.

For my own part, I was a little disappointed. (This is the way of things remembered from childhood. They never live up to your memories, do they?)

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