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Scars are souvenirs you never lose
First of all, to everyone who responded to yesterday's post: thanks! I hope not to (a) disappoint (b) scare too many of you off. So far I've had requests for characters from the work of Caitlín R. Kiernan and Diana Wynne Jones, and I will happily honor those. (Kiernan and Jones are both writers about whom I can talk until your ears fall off. You have been warned.) But for my inaugural entry in this rather irregular series, I've skewed rather far into the realm of the morally ambiguous and fucked in the head—and thank you, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28, kraada, and nineweaving for putting up with me when I was working out some of these ideas. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I present Oberstabsarzt Werner Schramm from Mary Doria Russell's A Thread of Grace,* late of the Waffen-SS and the Russian front. Also, Auschwitz.
(Cut for WTF?)
fleurdelis28: While most of the characters you imprint on are fundamentally good, you seem to be primarily interested in them for the ways in which they are weird . . . And charmingly defective.
What I may like most about Werner Schramm, in the final analysis, is how much his character keeps the reader off-balance. An idealistic doctor who joins the Nazi Party, works in the concentration camps, comes down with tuberculosis and a conscience in quick succession, deserts the army, joins the partisans, and in the end (for a reason that might be very different than the first time, and then again might not) puts his uniform back on—how are we supposed to react to that? By all rights, he should be totally repugnant. Described dispassionately, he's fairly unbelievable. And yet, he’s not only sympathetic, he’s likable. To borrow a term fromlesser_celery, if that's not radical alienation, I don't know what is.
I remain similarly impressed by the bait-and-switch Russell employs in his introduction and development, which goes a long way toward making him believable. Especially when contrasted with the clear choice for favorite character who walks onstage only a few pages later, the scarred, sardonic chameleon Renzo Leoni,** Schramm's entrance is anything but prepossessing. Briefly glossed to the eyes of amused passersby as "a Waffen-SS officer, thin, fortyish, and liquored up," with a train-wreck comprehension of Italian and not much better manners, he's looking insistently and unsuccessfully for a church in the streets of Porto Sant'Andrea. When he finally locates one, what follows is the stuff of caricature and farce as Schramm demands to see a priest, unwisely insults nun-from-hell Suora Marta, and passes out in the pews. He’s not entirely without self-perception—
"You speak the language of Dante most vigorously, Herr Doktor,*** but the people of this region generally use a Ligurian dialect, not the classical Italian you are—"
"Butchering," Schramm supplies with flat accuracy.
—but mostly he's drunk, obstinate, and obnoxious. As Renzo comments dryly, "I'm inclined to respect a soldier who has to get that drunk before confession. He must have an admirable conscience to be so ashamed." Of what, however, we have no idea. He's a medical officer on two weeks' leave who has a cough La Traviata might envy and no head for liquor. He mumbles, slurrily, "I was tryin' t' make things better . . . Sen' 'em t' heaven. Wha's wrong wi' that?" But none of the pieces align: he's a peculiar combination of sinister (a Nazi), sympathetic (who really wants to speak to a priest), and just plain pathetic (while drunk off his ass).
What's on Schramm's conscience, of course, is not silly at all: and far more than the priest Don Osvaldo is prepared to absolve.
"Ninety-one thousand, eight hundred. And sixty seven," Osvaldo whispers. "How can you know the number so exactly?"
"Records were kept. Meticulous records, at the camps. And at the hospital, the death certificates were fraudulent . . . I am neither a sadist nor a thief," Schramm insists. "I only wanted—I wanted to make things better." He stops, and swallows. "I killed no one at the front," he says firmly, "but there were 632 children in the state hospital, and 220 in the hunger research. I was stationed at Auschwitz for 26 days, and had depot duty for eight days of that time. The average thoroughput was 9000 a day. I signed off on 91,015 head. This totals 91,867."
This is a man who knows that prussic acid kills faster than carbon monoxide. He could give a lethal injection in his sleep. He has a pretty blond wife named Elsa somewhere back in Freiburg, and two sons he wants more than anything to see again before he dies, and he had a retarded sister whose birth he is convinced broke up his parents' marriage. He's thoroughly aware that he's a mediocre doctor and for eight days he sorted Jews just off the trains at Auschwitz, to the right or the left, to life or death, and he wanted to be an artist when he was seventeen. He's not the fool he looked in his first scene. He's not a monster. He's not even much of an anti-Semite. And he's got a lot of blood on his hands. "I didn't mean to— I never thought— But you see, I was compromised, because of the T-4 program, and I had to . . . I requested transfer to the eastern front. To be a doctor for a combat unit—there was some honor in that." He has memorized like a rosary the number of deaths for which he is responsible, who by fire and who by starvation, who by morphine and who by firing squad: and not once did he say no. As Osvaldo proves concisely, Schramm is a man who knows how to disobey orders he knows to be wrong—such as, fine, you wanted a penance? Go home and shoot yourself: commit suicide and condemn yourself to hell—and it's only now, when he's dying,**** that fears of consequence and responsibility have started to sneak up on him. "What you feel is not contrition, my son. It's dread. I can't absolve a fear of hell."
It should go without saying that Schramm winds up as a member of the Italian underground, once the novel's main plot begins to coalesce. He can either go home and shoot himself in the head, or he can figure out something constructive to do with his life, and he is a trained doctor . . . There’s no way to make up for taking lives: you only try to save others as best you can. But permit me to quote the immortal J. Michael Straczynski for a moment: "He can learn, yes, and he can better himself . . . but because of his actions, so many have died, so much grief has occured, that perhaps no amount of self-revelation can cover the blood on the floor."° And Russell never lets the reader forget, no matter how likeable Schramm is, no matter how clearly he has aligned himself against his former life, that the blood is there.
I knew you understood, Schramm thinks in the darkness. The most appalling things can become . . . just part of the job, and afterward . . . Christ, there are days when you’re ashamed to be sane. Ah, Renzo, God help us. Scheisse, we’re a pair.
Two scenes in particular come to mind: one a sharp dramatic moment, the other a throwaway line. Skip over the plot reasons; an unexploded bomb has exploded, and Schramm has narrowly escaped being blown sky-high along with four other people: Renzo; his mother, Lidia; and Mirella, a young mother with a nursing child. In the aftershock, as he looks from one to the next, as a doctor should, to make sure that everyone is all right, these people with whom he has spent a winter and to whom he owes his life, Schramm discovers to his horror that he is evaluating them in quite another medical capacity.
He knows who they are, but he cannot see them. They become, with terrifying ease: items, categories. Jew, too old to work. Jew, able-bodied. Jew, with child. Left. Right. Left.
There's no catharsis: only realization. Much later in the novel, a man is found buried in the snow, half-dead with the cold:
"Schramm," Renzo says as they make ready to carry the half-frozen paratrooper toward Villa Malcovato, "the ski instructors say if someone's hypothermic, you warm him up slowly."
Schramm concentrates on uncoupling the Englishman’s harness and lines. "We did some research," he says vaguely. "Faster is better."
kraada has pointed out that this is deeply, deeply creepy. I am not arguing.°* But it's this tension of sympathy and creepiness, I think, that so endears Schramm to me. This is not a man who ever seems to have once believed that he was a member of a master race—
"Would you like to know what the German lie was?" Schramm whispers. "We are the nation of Beethoven and Schiller and Goethe! We are a great people! But—" Schramm leans close. "Did I compose the Eroica? What poetry have I written? Race isn't talent! Greatness isn't just . . . being German. Who would believe nonsense like that?"
—just someone who wanted so desperately to be told that he was:
"I barely made it through the Physicum," he confesses. "The other students had no fears about their abilities. They made the same mistakes I did, but if a procedure went wrong? The patient was weak—a poor specimen. I was afraid all the time, but I had a wife, children, so I kept on. When half the doctors in Germany were fired for being Jewish, a lot of doors opened to mediocrities like me."
He's not so much a bastard on the side of Light as a nice guy who's gotten mostly away from the side of Dark—but there’s still no way to clean all that blood off the floor.°** And I like characterization that messes with reader expectation. Because when you realize that the concentration camp doctor is the character whose arc you're following most closely, because that's where you've put your emotional investment, over two dozen other characters who are far more deserving of your sympathy—that's fucked in the head. And I'm all for that.
All right. Who's still talking to me?
*Before we get into the spoilers, a word about Mary Doria Russell and A Thread of Grace. I loved The Sparrow; I found Children of God not only so unnecessary that I was prepared to dislike it on principle, because its existence canceled out The Sparrow's beautifully open-ended final scenes, but fully worthy of that dislike when actually read. There are some books whose authors should not be allowed to commit sequel, and I think The Sparrow heads that category. (Apologies to those of you in the audience who may have liked Children of God. For the record, Emilio Sandoz is still on my list of favorite characters. He covers so many touchstones of mine—masks, language, priesthood, and fucked in the head—that he probably deserves an entry of his own. Or we’ll deal with him in the comments . . .) When I found A Thread of Grace at Wiscon, curiosity and suspicion had a small catfight over whether I should buy the book or not. On the one hand, Mary Doria Russell—writing historical fiction? On the other hand, Children of God! Curiosity sucker-punched suspicion; I bought A Thread of Grace and read it on the flight back. And I liked it far more than Children of God, if perhaps not as much as The Sparrow, but I retain some strange reservations. To be specific, it's the only book I've ever read that I might rather have seen as a play or a film. One could almost read the novel as a script, as it is; with the exception of characters' backstories, narrative and description are restricted to scene-setting and stage directions—gestures, delivery, et cetera—and nearly all crucial information is conveyed in dialogue. And even if most of her characters seem to occupy that niche of the universe seen most often in films from the 1930's and 1940's, where everyone is entertainingly and improbably well-spoken, Russell does brilliant dialogue. But I like rich prose. I don't want a set, I want the precise slant of light that late afternoon sunlight in Liguria forms on a white-plastered wall in a small courtyard where limestone and sandbags have been blasted black by a carelessly dropped Allied bomb; I want the sun-soaked shade of the sky and the heat of the air and the shadows on the cobbles underfoot. I don't know what cordite and yellow soap smell like together: so teach me. Sensory detail is not the same thing as sensual writing. It's a personal preference, I know; but it's one I’m slightly fanatical about. Werner Schramm and A Thread of Grace therefore occupy a peculiar niche: a favorite character, but not a favorite book. All this said, I do recommend the novel. But don't pick it up for the prose style.
** Schramm's foil in many ways, Renzo is a former pilot who dreamed of flight since he was a toddler, walked away from five crashes, and bombed a hospital in Abyssinia under orders; and the hero who came back from war was much changed from the wide-eyed young man who went off. Out of the military and recently released from prison, he's in the process of expertly drinking himself into an early grave when the political situation in Italy shifts, and suddenly Renzo’s combination of resourcefulness and recklessness becomes a commodity not to be wasted. (Comparisons to Sydney Carton are not to be drawn for romance, because Renzo has no need to redeem himself in the eyes of Mirella, the woman he might once have married; but all other aspects are fair game.) He is the perfect film noir protagonist, with a dash of mercury: witty and bitter, careless of his own life and fiercely protective of others, with all the papier-mache elegance of the character whose everyday face is the most obvious mask of all. A nihilist, with a stubborn core of humanism he can't drink out of himself. Italian-Jewish, he impersonates a Catholic priest and a German informer with equal conviction, all the while professing to help out only for the hell of it—it's not like he's doing anything else with his time, right? But he is, de facto, a hero: the thousand-faced linchpin of the Italian underground, and he plays to the hilt his role of cynic looking to do one good deed before he dies; as much a front and as much the truth as anything else he tells himself. By all rights, I should have zeroed right in on him. Instead, I find that I appreciate Renzo, but I'm fascinated by Schramm. Go figure.
***In a sort of orthographical way, I'm entertained by Russell’s convention of throwing German, Italian, and the occasional word of French into the dialogue to identify which language is being spoken. If nothing else, her decision enables Schramm to yell, in his first scene and his disastrous, decades-old Italian, "Io need ein padre!" Were someone actually to adapt the book to film, I have no idea how the various languages would be handled: all in English flat-out wouldn’t work, because at certain points in the story it matters who is speaking which language, and I'm not sure how a mainstream audience would handle nearly an entire film's worth of subtitles (as in The Cuckoo or A Bridge Too Far). I'm still fond of that one line.
****He doesn't have pretty operatic TB, either: he has painfully-skinny-and-hectic-not-to-mention-doubled-over-choking-on-his-own-blood TB, which I appreciate for literary as well as historical reasons. The tuberculosis is a valid plot point: it provides the impetus to confess before he dies, and so get some relief from all of his (well-deserved) guilt, as well as the nicely characteristic habit of chain-smoking as camouflage for his cough. But a Nazi doctor who goes on to save Jews, no matter how historically based, is tricky enough to make three-dimensional; an unconvincingly consumptive Nazi doctor would only be that much worse.
°The likeness of Werner Schramm to Londo Mollari (Babylon 5) occurred to me more than once throughout the composition of this entry, although I eventually decided that to include a full comparison would stretch my audience's patience somewhat past the recoverable limit. But I think the characters do interest me for similar reasons, although Schramm hasn't got half of Londo's extravagant style nor his high-tragedy character arc—both raise the issues of forgiveness, and how much you can like someone even as they commit (or have committed) acts that you cannot condone, and what happens when idealism hits the wrong political situation. Here's Schramm to Renzo, after a staggering amount of brandy: "Four long years, we fought the whole world to a standstill. Then we wake up one morning in 1918, and the war is lost! . . . One day the empire's there, and the next—pfft! Gone." And here's Londo’s heartfelt and unwary answer to Morden's "What do you want?" in Season 1: "You really want to know what I want? You really want to know the truth? I want my people to reclaim their rightful place in the galaxy. I want to see the Centauri stretch forth their hand again and command the stars. I want a rebirth of glory, a renaissance of power. I want to stop running through my life like a man late for an appointment, afraid to look back or to look forward. I want us to be what we used to be! I want . . . I want it all back, the way that it was." Likewise, Don Osvaldo's remark about contrition versus dread particularly recalled G'Kar's accusation of Londo in "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari"—"You're not sorry for what you did! You're just sorry that you got caught!" That's enough for now. Thoughts?
°*kraada has also suggested Steve Buscemi for Schramm, should the directors of A Thread of Grace ever call us up for casting suggestions. I won’t argue with that either.
°**For that matter, I don't think it's coincidental that Schramm never receives the absolution he wants so badly in his first scene, because who's authorized to give a person something like that? Either you believe Christ can, or the dead must, or you have to do it yourself. Schramm follows neither an easy nor predictable route to redemption, if that's what he gets in the end; and I'm not sure.
fleurdelis28, kraada, and nineweaving for putting up with me when I was working out some of these ideas. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I present Oberstabsarzt Werner Schramm from Mary Doria Russell's A Thread of Grace,* late of the Waffen-SS and the Russian front. Also, Auschwitz. (Cut for WTF?)
fleurdelis28: While most of the characters you imprint on are fundamentally good, you seem to be primarily interested in them for the ways in which they are weird . . . And charmingly defective.
What I may like most about Werner Schramm, in the final analysis, is how much his character keeps the reader off-balance. An idealistic doctor who joins the Nazi Party, works in the concentration camps, comes down with tuberculosis and a conscience in quick succession, deserts the army, joins the partisans, and in the end (for a reason that might be very different than the first time, and then again might not) puts his uniform back on—how are we supposed to react to that? By all rights, he should be totally repugnant. Described dispassionately, he's fairly unbelievable. And yet, he’s not only sympathetic, he’s likable. To borrow a term from
lesser_celery, if that's not radical alienation, I don't know what is. I remain similarly impressed by the bait-and-switch Russell employs in his introduction and development, which goes a long way toward making him believable. Especially when contrasted with the clear choice for favorite character who walks onstage only a few pages later, the scarred, sardonic chameleon Renzo Leoni,** Schramm's entrance is anything but prepossessing. Briefly glossed to the eyes of amused passersby as "a Waffen-SS officer, thin, fortyish, and liquored up," with a train-wreck comprehension of Italian and not much better manners, he's looking insistently and unsuccessfully for a church in the streets of Porto Sant'Andrea. When he finally locates one, what follows is the stuff of caricature and farce as Schramm demands to see a priest, unwisely insults nun-from-hell Suora Marta, and passes out in the pews. He’s not entirely without self-perception—
"You speak the language of Dante most vigorously, Herr Doktor,*** but the people of this region generally use a Ligurian dialect, not the classical Italian you are—"
"Butchering," Schramm supplies with flat accuracy.
—but mostly he's drunk, obstinate, and obnoxious. As Renzo comments dryly, "I'm inclined to respect a soldier who has to get that drunk before confession. He must have an admirable conscience to be so ashamed." Of what, however, we have no idea. He's a medical officer on two weeks' leave who has a cough La Traviata might envy and no head for liquor. He mumbles, slurrily, "I was tryin' t' make things better . . . Sen' 'em t' heaven. Wha's wrong wi' that?" But none of the pieces align: he's a peculiar combination of sinister (a Nazi), sympathetic (who really wants to speak to a priest), and just plain pathetic (while drunk off his ass).
What's on Schramm's conscience, of course, is not silly at all: and far more than the priest Don Osvaldo is prepared to absolve.
"Ninety-one thousand, eight hundred. And sixty seven," Osvaldo whispers. "How can you know the number so exactly?"
"Records were kept. Meticulous records, at the camps. And at the hospital, the death certificates were fraudulent . . . I am neither a sadist nor a thief," Schramm insists. "I only wanted—I wanted to make things better." He stops, and swallows. "I killed no one at the front," he says firmly, "but there were 632 children in the state hospital, and 220 in the hunger research. I was stationed at Auschwitz for 26 days, and had depot duty for eight days of that time. The average thoroughput was 9000 a day. I signed off on 91,015 head. This totals 91,867."
This is a man who knows that prussic acid kills faster than carbon monoxide. He could give a lethal injection in his sleep. He has a pretty blond wife named Elsa somewhere back in Freiburg, and two sons he wants more than anything to see again before he dies, and he had a retarded sister whose birth he is convinced broke up his parents' marriage. He's thoroughly aware that he's a mediocre doctor and for eight days he sorted Jews just off the trains at Auschwitz, to the right or the left, to life or death, and he wanted to be an artist when he was seventeen. He's not the fool he looked in his first scene. He's not a monster. He's not even much of an anti-Semite. And he's got a lot of blood on his hands. "I didn't mean to— I never thought— But you see, I was compromised, because of the T-4 program, and I had to . . . I requested transfer to the eastern front. To be a doctor for a combat unit—there was some honor in that." He has memorized like a rosary the number of deaths for which he is responsible, who by fire and who by starvation, who by morphine and who by firing squad: and not once did he say no. As Osvaldo proves concisely, Schramm is a man who knows how to disobey orders he knows to be wrong—such as, fine, you wanted a penance? Go home and shoot yourself: commit suicide and condemn yourself to hell—and it's only now, when he's dying,**** that fears of consequence and responsibility have started to sneak up on him. "What you feel is not contrition, my son. It's dread. I can't absolve a fear of hell."
It should go without saying that Schramm winds up as a member of the Italian underground, once the novel's main plot begins to coalesce. He can either go home and shoot himself in the head, or he can figure out something constructive to do with his life, and he is a trained doctor . . . There’s no way to make up for taking lives: you only try to save others as best you can. But permit me to quote the immortal J. Michael Straczynski for a moment: "He can learn, yes, and he can better himself . . . but because of his actions, so many have died, so much grief has occured, that perhaps no amount of self-revelation can cover the blood on the floor."° And Russell never lets the reader forget, no matter how likeable Schramm is, no matter how clearly he has aligned himself against his former life, that the blood is there.
I knew you understood, Schramm thinks in the darkness. The most appalling things can become . . . just part of the job, and afterward . . . Christ, there are days when you’re ashamed to be sane. Ah, Renzo, God help us. Scheisse, we’re a pair.
Two scenes in particular come to mind: one a sharp dramatic moment, the other a throwaway line. Skip over the plot reasons; an unexploded bomb has exploded, and Schramm has narrowly escaped being blown sky-high along with four other people: Renzo; his mother, Lidia; and Mirella, a young mother with a nursing child. In the aftershock, as he looks from one to the next, as a doctor should, to make sure that everyone is all right, these people with whom he has spent a winter and to whom he owes his life, Schramm discovers to his horror that he is evaluating them in quite another medical capacity.
He knows who they are, but he cannot see them. They become, with terrifying ease: items, categories. Jew, too old to work. Jew, able-bodied. Jew, with child. Left. Right. Left.
There's no catharsis: only realization. Much later in the novel, a man is found buried in the snow, half-dead with the cold:
"Schramm," Renzo says as they make ready to carry the half-frozen paratrooper toward Villa Malcovato, "the ski instructors say if someone's hypothermic, you warm him up slowly."
Schramm concentrates on uncoupling the Englishman’s harness and lines. "We did some research," he says vaguely. "Faster is better."
kraada has pointed out that this is deeply, deeply creepy. I am not arguing.°* But it's this tension of sympathy and creepiness, I think, that so endears Schramm to me. This is not a man who ever seems to have once believed that he was a member of a master race—"Would you like to know what the German lie was?" Schramm whispers. "We are the nation of Beethoven and Schiller and Goethe! We are a great people! But—" Schramm leans close. "Did I compose the Eroica? What poetry have I written? Race isn't talent! Greatness isn't just . . . being German. Who would believe nonsense like that?"
—just someone who wanted so desperately to be told that he was:
"I barely made it through the Physicum," he confesses. "The other students had no fears about their abilities. They made the same mistakes I did, but if a procedure went wrong? The patient was weak—a poor specimen. I was afraid all the time, but I had a wife, children, so I kept on. When half the doctors in Germany were fired for being Jewish, a lot of doors opened to mediocrities like me."
He's not so much a bastard on the side of Light as a nice guy who's gotten mostly away from the side of Dark—but there’s still no way to clean all that blood off the floor.°** And I like characterization that messes with reader expectation. Because when you realize that the concentration camp doctor is the character whose arc you're following most closely, because that's where you've put your emotional investment, over two dozen other characters who are far more deserving of your sympathy—that's fucked in the head. And I'm all for that.
All right. Who's still talking to me?
*Before we get into the spoilers, a word about Mary Doria Russell and A Thread of Grace. I loved The Sparrow; I found Children of God not only so unnecessary that I was prepared to dislike it on principle, because its existence canceled out The Sparrow's beautifully open-ended final scenes, but fully worthy of that dislike when actually read. There are some books whose authors should not be allowed to commit sequel, and I think The Sparrow heads that category. (Apologies to those of you in the audience who may have liked Children of God. For the record, Emilio Sandoz is still on my list of favorite characters. He covers so many touchstones of mine—masks, language, priesthood, and fucked in the head—that he probably deserves an entry of his own. Or we’ll deal with him in the comments . . .) When I found A Thread of Grace at Wiscon, curiosity and suspicion had a small catfight over whether I should buy the book or not. On the one hand, Mary Doria Russell—writing historical fiction? On the other hand, Children of God! Curiosity sucker-punched suspicion; I bought A Thread of Grace and read it on the flight back. And I liked it far more than Children of God, if perhaps not as much as The Sparrow, but I retain some strange reservations. To be specific, it's the only book I've ever read that I might rather have seen as a play or a film. One could almost read the novel as a script, as it is; with the exception of characters' backstories, narrative and description are restricted to scene-setting and stage directions—gestures, delivery, et cetera—and nearly all crucial information is conveyed in dialogue. And even if most of her characters seem to occupy that niche of the universe seen most often in films from the 1930's and 1940's, where everyone is entertainingly and improbably well-spoken, Russell does brilliant dialogue. But I like rich prose. I don't want a set, I want the precise slant of light that late afternoon sunlight in Liguria forms on a white-plastered wall in a small courtyard where limestone and sandbags have been blasted black by a carelessly dropped Allied bomb; I want the sun-soaked shade of the sky and the heat of the air and the shadows on the cobbles underfoot. I don't know what cordite and yellow soap smell like together: so teach me. Sensory detail is not the same thing as sensual writing. It's a personal preference, I know; but it's one I’m slightly fanatical about. Werner Schramm and A Thread of Grace therefore occupy a peculiar niche: a favorite character, but not a favorite book. All this said, I do recommend the novel. But don't pick it up for the prose style.
** Schramm's foil in many ways, Renzo is a former pilot who dreamed of flight since he was a toddler, walked away from five crashes, and bombed a hospital in Abyssinia under orders; and the hero who came back from war was much changed from the wide-eyed young man who went off. Out of the military and recently released from prison, he's in the process of expertly drinking himself into an early grave when the political situation in Italy shifts, and suddenly Renzo’s combination of resourcefulness and recklessness becomes a commodity not to be wasted. (Comparisons to Sydney Carton are not to be drawn for romance, because Renzo has no need to redeem himself in the eyes of Mirella, the woman he might once have married; but all other aspects are fair game.) He is the perfect film noir protagonist, with a dash of mercury: witty and bitter, careless of his own life and fiercely protective of others, with all the papier-mache elegance of the character whose everyday face is the most obvious mask of all. A nihilist, with a stubborn core of humanism he can't drink out of himself. Italian-Jewish, he impersonates a Catholic priest and a German informer with equal conviction, all the while professing to help out only for the hell of it—it's not like he's doing anything else with his time, right? But he is, de facto, a hero: the thousand-faced linchpin of the Italian underground, and he plays to the hilt his role of cynic looking to do one good deed before he dies; as much a front and as much the truth as anything else he tells himself. By all rights, I should have zeroed right in on him. Instead, I find that I appreciate Renzo, but I'm fascinated by Schramm. Go figure.
***In a sort of orthographical way, I'm entertained by Russell’s convention of throwing German, Italian, and the occasional word of French into the dialogue to identify which language is being spoken. If nothing else, her decision enables Schramm to yell, in his first scene and his disastrous, decades-old Italian, "Io need ein padre!" Were someone actually to adapt the book to film, I have no idea how the various languages would be handled: all in English flat-out wouldn’t work, because at certain points in the story it matters who is speaking which language, and I'm not sure how a mainstream audience would handle nearly an entire film's worth of subtitles (as in The Cuckoo or A Bridge Too Far). I'm still fond of that one line.
****He doesn't have pretty operatic TB, either: he has painfully-skinny-and-hectic-not-to-mention-doubled-over-choking-on-his-own-blood TB, which I appreciate for literary as well as historical reasons. The tuberculosis is a valid plot point: it provides the impetus to confess before he dies, and so get some relief from all of his (well-deserved) guilt, as well as the nicely characteristic habit of chain-smoking as camouflage for his cough. But a Nazi doctor who goes on to save Jews, no matter how historically based, is tricky enough to make three-dimensional; an unconvincingly consumptive Nazi doctor would only be that much worse.
°The likeness of Werner Schramm to Londo Mollari (Babylon 5) occurred to me more than once throughout the composition of this entry, although I eventually decided that to include a full comparison would stretch my audience's patience somewhat past the recoverable limit. But I think the characters do interest me for similar reasons, although Schramm hasn't got half of Londo's extravagant style nor his high-tragedy character arc—both raise the issues of forgiveness, and how much you can like someone even as they commit (or have committed) acts that you cannot condone, and what happens when idealism hits the wrong political situation. Here's Schramm to Renzo, after a staggering amount of brandy: "Four long years, we fought the whole world to a standstill. Then we wake up one morning in 1918, and the war is lost! . . . One day the empire's there, and the next—pfft! Gone." And here's Londo’s heartfelt and unwary answer to Morden's "What do you want?" in Season 1: "You really want to know what I want? You really want to know the truth? I want my people to reclaim their rightful place in the galaxy. I want to see the Centauri stretch forth their hand again and command the stars. I want a rebirth of glory, a renaissance of power. I want to stop running through my life like a man late for an appointment, afraid to look back or to look forward. I want us to be what we used to be! I want . . . I want it all back, the way that it was." Likewise, Don Osvaldo's remark about contrition versus dread particularly recalled G'Kar's accusation of Londo in "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari"—"You're not sorry for what you did! You're just sorry that you got caught!" That's enough for now. Thoughts?
°*
kraada has also suggested Steve Buscemi for Schramm, should the directors of A Thread of Grace ever call us up for casting suggestions. I won’t argue with that either.°**For that matter, I don't think it's coincidental that Schramm never receives the absolution he wants so badly in his first scene, because who's authorized to give a person something like that? Either you believe Christ can, or the dead must, or you have to do it yourself. Schramm follows neither an easy nor predictable route to redemption, if that's what he gets in the end; and I'm not sure.
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I love your discussion of Schramm, it's right on the mark. I knew I was supposed to love Renzo, because he's Russell's trademark character, the Francis Crawfordesque broken brittle brilliant hero. I was extremely happy to find a wealth of other interesting people as well, who were not circling around Renzo the way everyone did around Emilio in her first two novels.
And I'm in almost total agreement abuot Children of God: it shouldn't have happened. I recall sitting upright and yelling at the point where the Mafia came into play. And, of course, when I discovered that Sofia had survived. It reneged so much of what had been paid for in the first novel. ::sigh::
I asked MDR, actually, why she felt it necessary to write Children of God. She said she couldn't leave Emilio where he was. Which is an example, if you needed one, of someone who loves her character too much, and damages the story for it. ::sigh::
My comments on A Thread of Grace are here, if you care.
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Which is an example, if you needed one, of someone who loves her character too much, and damages the story for it.
Seriously. At least when Sayers decided to marry Peter Wimsey off, we got good literature out of it . . .
I do care, and thanks for the link!
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I wonder if it's relevant that when Sayers went to marry Wimsey off (and I think she wanted to marry him off to get rid of him and liberate herself to go do something else, not to make him happy, though there's definitely the issue of an author's love for her character), she was stymied into creating good literature by the fact that the sort of woman Wimsey would realistically be happy with refused to marry him under the immediate circumstances. So Sayers had to keep writing until she found their story. Maybe it's a matter of listening closely enough to your characters? I haven't read any of this author's books, but if Sayers had, say, left off at Have His Carcasse, I think everyone would have found the romance direction a relatively unfortunate addition to the series.
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I've been told the same reasons for her creation of Harriet Vane (which is one of the reasons I'm so amused at the existence of Gaudy Night, because it's brilliant and far more complex than anything written to get rid of a character really deserves to be); I brought up Sayers primarily because she's the first example that comes to my mind of an author who fell in love with her character.* I'm not sure if it's a matter of listening closely to characters or simply being honest with yourself and them, but once she had created a fairly thorny emotional dilemma, Sayers didn't allow either Harriet or Peter a simplistic way out. I think one of the many problems with Children of God is just that. The end of The Sparrow acknowledged, very beautifully, that healing takes more than the love of a good women or a little help from your friends, that scars do not go away simply because you have shown people how you were wounded, and sometimes just getting out of bed in the morning is heroic. Children of God needed a quicker fix. And I objected to that.
*I have a professor who constitutionally refuses to like the mysteries for that reason, actually. I keep trying to persuade him to read the Harriet Vane quartet. It's uphill going all the way.
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I like Busman's Honeymoon. I don't know if I even have an opinion of it as a whole, come to think of it -- but it's got some very good parts.
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Queasy. For me, it's somewhere between cringeworthy and diverting. There's the sheer brazen Mary Sueness of it all--I mean a thousand-guinea sable cloak and a Donne manuscript? And all the babbling in tongues. It's schwärmerisch.
And then there's the humiliation of the spinster. That, I think, is of a piece with what I most dislike in Sayers: her snobbishness, her cruelty, her exaltation of Peter Wimsey. Harriet never gets to do anything better than Lord Peter, not even write. Sayers wants to be a feminist, but her animus overcrows her. Boys cool! Girls icky!
It's all right to angst if you're wearing a penis. It's like white tie.
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Harriet does get to totally knock him around emotionally just by existing and being able to read him uncannily well, though.
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Unfairly matched with an Übermensch
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