By Stuart Mitchner
My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?
So ends Feodor Dostoevsky’s long story White Nights, which was the model for Robert Bresson’s 1971 film Four Nights of a Dreamer. The title change was necessary because the picture that Claude Mauriac (L’Amour du cinema) called Bresson’s “most gorgeous work” was shot in “the colors of the night.” Roger Greenspan’s New York Times review spoke with awe of a “strange romantic vision of the city, the river, the softly lighted tourist boats in the night” while film critic David Kehr watched “the transformation of Paris at night into a dream landscape pulsing with electric mystery.”
Bombs, Books and “Frankenstein”
I streamed Four Nights of a Dreamer on the first day of the attacks on Iran, the magical blue and gold of Bresson’s nocturnal Paris a benign contrast to the clouds of orange, red, and black smoke looming over the sprawling cityscape of Tehran.
The bombing also coincided with my plan for a column previewing the Annual Bryn Mawr-Wellesley Book Sale, which begins March 11 and ends on March 15. Since I’m writing ahead of an opening day already in progress, it’s too late for a proper preview. However, in my Sunday visit to the work-in-progress of the preparation, I learned that one of the sale’s star attractions is a massive donation of books and DVDs billed as “The Golden Age of Hollywood.” Of all the great feature film franchises to emerge from the studio system, one of the most spectacularly profitable was the series of movies based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was published on March 11, 1818.
Dostoevskian
Meanwhile, Bresson reawakened my lifelong fascination with Dostoevsky to the extent that I recently, briefly, convinced myself that he was born on March 11, when I knew perfectly well that the correct date was November 11, 1821, three years after the arrival of Shelley’s creature. Dates from that era have also been confused by the Russians’ old style/new style habit of putting October 30 into his birthday mix. Anyway, the Elevens rule if only because the author of The Gambler always has a Dostoevskian stake in the great game, as he did even on the day of the bombing.
What I mean by the D-word, which will presumably never be used or mis-used as excessively as “Kafkaesque,” was brought to life by a Slavic Studies professor who taught the classics in translation at the mercy of certain mannerisms — an absurd smile, more often a laugh, that was embarrassingly at odds with what he was trying to say. Whichever murder he was discussing — the old pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment, old Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov — he’d accompany it with a grotesque giggle that came to mind on the day of the bombing. I’m referring to the absurd moment in the 2008 presidential campaign when candidate John McCain turned the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” into “Bomb-Bomb-Bomb-Iran,” accompanying his play on words with nervous laughter.
Leaping Into March
According to A Book of Days for the Literary Year (Thames and Hudson 1984), February 29 is Leap Year Day because in 45 B.C. Julius Caesar took it upon himself to adjust 46 B.C. — “known as the Year of Confusion with its 445 days — by fixing 365 days and six hours as the length of a year, with one day intercalated every four years, a leap.” If not for Caesar, I could have transitioned neatly from the death of Henry James (“the distinguished thing”) on February 28 to the March 1 births of Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man) in 1914 and Robert Lowell (Life Studies) in 1917. As Fate would have it, Caesar paid the price a few months later on March 15, 45 B.C.
This Week
If you begin the week of the Bryn Mawr-Wellesley sale on March 8, you’re in interesting company, at least so says the Book of Days. On that day in 1931, John McPhee (A Sense of Where You Are) was born right here in Princeton. Six years after Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and The River was published on March 8, 1935, Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio) “ingested a toothpick along with an hors d’oeuvre” at a cocktail party in Panama and died at 64 “of the complications of peritonitis” (I can almost hear my old professor’s ghostly ghastly Dostoevskian cackle). On March 9, 1918, Mike Hammer’s creator Mickey Spillane (I, the Jury) was born in Brooklyn (“Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar”). On March 10, 1948, the Ides claimed Zelda Fitzgerald, who died in a fire in an Asheville, N.C. hospital, “along with eight other women.”
Since Dostoevsky was definitely not born on March 11, the only event that could loom as large is the aforementioned publication of 21-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus.
Looking for Dostoevsky
If I were making an appearance at this year’s sale in the guise of a bargain-hunting bibliophile, the single most fabulously impossible to wish for item would be a first edition of Frankenstein, which, according to a September 2021 CNN broadcast sold at auction in New York for $1.17 million that year. Otherwise, Dostoevsky would be at the top of my list, except that I own reading copies of all his works, most of which have sentimental value, like my mother’s copy of The Idiot with her bookplate and a Modern Library Brothers Karamazov inscribed to me (“doesn’t this book remind you of something?”) by a girl I fell in love with while we were reading Crime and Punishment in Lit 101. The only sufficiently desirable item I can imagine would be Stavrogin’s Confession and the Plan of the Life of a Great Sinner, published four decades after Dostevsky’s death by the Hogarth Press, Richmond, as translated by Virginia Woolf and S.S. Koteliansky. An authenicated manuscript page signed by Dostoevsky would be over the moon, of course, and fun to live with until reality bites and off it goes to Sotheby’s.
Clair and Ryan
That forever relevant term “follow the money” is at the heart of my book sale history during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when “making ends meet” was the order of the day. Book sale (and garage sale) bargain hunting was an enjoyable way to supplement a freelance copy/proofreader’s income with a baby in the house. The upside is that many of my favorite books were scored during those years and they’re still here, companionably surrounding me.
Given the magnitude of the Golden Years of Hollywood donation, however, I would be looking for books about two birthmates, the French director René Clair (March 11, 1898), who made several interesting films in Hollywood (I Married a Witch, And Then There Were None), and the actor Robert Ryan (March 11, 1909), one of the most menacing presences in Hollywood’s ever popular film noir genre. At his best in classics like On Dangerous Ground, The Woman On the Beach, and Clash By Night, Ryan could be at once dangerous and sympathetic and would have made a magnificent Creature if the Frankenstein franchise and Boris Karloff had room for him.
Happiness
Driving to Stuart Country Day School on Sunday, with the window down, spring breezes blowing, and the stereo playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, I’m thinking back to the last sentence from White Nights because I experienced “a whole moment of happiness” the morning I wandered into my first Bryn Mawr Book Sale hours after the birth of my son. That was on April 28, 1976, two decades before Wellesley became a co-sponsor. Still in a blissful birth morning daze, I was incapable of serious browsing. I floated in and I floated out. When he celebrates his birthday next month, I’ll be thinking of that morning, and of the days he came with me to later sales, the first ones in my arms, one hand free.
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Founded 95 years ago, the Bryn Mawr-Wellesley Book Sale is a nonprofit organization that accepts and sells donated books to raise money for college scholarships. One hundred percent of its profits go directly to support local students. It will be held at Stuart Country Day School, 1200 Stuart Road, on March 11-15.
Opening Day tickets are $32. All other days are free. For further information, contact Elizabeth Romanaux at bmandwbooks@gmail.com or (609)203-5188.