Existential Crisis

 

Overheard at Bradley International Airport:

"I called my mom in a FULL meltdown because, like, what IS business casual?"

Tey Appreciation

You guys, it’s time to appreciate Josephine Tey.

Born Elizabeth MacKintosh, Tey wrote eight mystery novels, including The Daughter of Time, which is considered one of the genre’s great masterpieces.  I’ve now finished reading all eight of them, and here is my report.

The Man in the Queue is a slightly half-baked effort; it’s clear that Tey is still working out what she wants to do in the genre.  A Shilling for Candles is stronger, but still perhaps a little generic.  Miss Pym Disposes is the first one that really feels like a Josephine Tey novel – a novel that straddles the line between crime fiction and literary fiction, in which the characters’ inner lives – their joys and yearnings and frustrations – are accorded much more time and attention than genre impedimenta like suspects and clues.

The Franchise Affair is solid, but too procedural to be really fascinating.  And then comes Brat Farrar, my personal favorite, with all the scope, depth, and feeling of a genuine human tragedy.  If ever a book proved that there is no limit to the resonance of mystery fiction, this book is it.

To Love and Be Wise is deft and clever, but slightly inconsequential.  On the other hand, it’s obvious why The Daughter of Time is reckoned to be Tey’s masterwork; it’s bold and original and massively impressive, and it contributed to the reevaluation of Richard III as a historical figure.

Lastly, but not at all leastly, we have The Singing Sands, a starkly lovely and ruminative work that has the feel of an elegy – which is appropriate, since Tey didn’t live to see it published.  It’s a masterpiece of mood and restrained emotion, in which the mystery component, while present, is almost entirely an afterthought.  In a way, it’s a summation of Tey’s whole approach to crime writing, which is stubbornly humanistic in a field that can often – even in the hands of geniuses – treat its characters more like pieces on a chessboard than living, breathing people.

And that’s it.  That’s the whole canon.  Tey wrote other books, and a number of well-received plays, but her chief legacy is her mystery novels.  The British Crime Writers’ Association named The Daughter of Time as the greatest mystery novel ever written, and although it isn’t even my favorite Tey mystery, it’s hard not to see it as a worthy choice.

For those who are interested – you poor, sad, desperate souls – here’s my own personal ranking of the eight Tey mysteries.  The first four I would recommend without reservation, to anyone who enjoys a good read.  The next two are worthwhile, and the last two missable – though far from bad.  After you’ve read one or two, you may find yourself wanting to become a Tey completist, and I certainly wouldn’t discourage it.  It won’t even take you very long.

1.     Brat Farrar

2.     The Daughter of Time

3.     The Singing Sands

4.     Miss Pym Disposes

5.     To Love and Be Wise

6.     The Franchise Affair

7.     A Shilling for Candles

8.     The Man in the Queue

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Selleck Hill

Time changes nothing.  Look around you now.

The world is all the same – the people too.

We make safe homes, in clusters, cheek to cheek,

Resent our neighbors, and rely on them.

We love, grow bored, raise children, drive them off,

Welcome them back, love more, swift-slowly die;

Our children, then, have children; then

Their children do and die, and nothing’s new.

We scar the earth; it heals, or doesn’t heal;

We breed survivors, and the earth does too.

Wars happen, wisely or by accident,

And wise wars kill as many as the rest.

Great men, great women, rise and fall,

Remembered and forgotten, gone and gone.

Time changes nothing.  Look around you now.

Fall falls, and winter freezes; then the spring,

Grateful or hateful to the human heart,

Buds forth in raw magnificence, and soon

The summer sprawls out endless, ripe as joy.

You sit.  The leaves are color.  Light is light.

You sit in silence, waiting for the rhyme.

Time changes nothing, but it leaves you this:

This life, this moment, this brief gift of time.

Old Men Sitting Too Long in Coffee Shops

Old men sitting too long in coffee shops

Are the great sages of the world;

And old men in chairs on sunny sidewalks

Are Buddha and Solomon, Jesus and Groucho Marx.

It’s possible just to sit, they say.  It is.

You might have coffee, or a paper handy,

Or an old friend who knows all your old jokes,

And laughs with pleasure, hearing them again;

But then again, you might have nothing –

No coffee, no paper, no friend, no jokes –

And that would be all right too, and much the same,

Especially if a bird hops by on the sidewalk,

Or the waitress absently smiles on her way,

Because it doesn’t take much – they say –

It doesn’t take much.  It may even look like nothing

If you’re used to something more.

But that’s the trouble, isn’t it?

You all expect the world.

And we did too, and now we sit,

Triumphs and griefs forgotten –

Or not forgotten exactly, so much as put aside,

Like the paper, the coffee, the friend, the bird,

All of which are very nice, very nice indeed,

But not quite of the essence, which is something else,

Something we can’t quite explain to you, but if

You sit here quietly for a year or twelve,

You’ll start to have a feel for it, and then

You’ll finally know what we were talking about,

Not quite too late to thoroughly enjoy it

Before you disappear, unmissed, unmourning,

As we by then will long ago have done.

Soul Season

If autumn isn’t your favorite season,

You don’t have a soul.

I’m sorry I’m the one

Who had to break it to you.

I’m sure you’re very nice, and maybe even

Susceptible to Mozart, but no soul.

Spring’s empty promises are fine for girls,

And summer’s raw seduction is a boy’s hot dream,

But full-grown human persons need a mellower joy,

And winter is for Russians

And their drunk, mad Russian bears.

So give me autumn, with its crisping leaves,

Sharp wind, rich odor, and long winterish nights.

Give me the smell of smoke among the trees,

The many-colored world, the crunching light,

And over all the smug, warm knowledge that my soul,

Battered as it may be,

Is still in me.

Girl in Bookshop, Galway

Never seen someone attack a bookstore like you did:

Diving and prowling, eyes bright with hungry fire,

Fingers racing along spines, giving them shivers,

Searching, it turned out, for Frost.

It seemed a kind of trance that you were laboring in,

And I was loath to break it, but a voice

Beat carpe diem into my dull brain

Till I was more fearful of not speaking –

Though not, admittedly, by very much.

The fire didn’t fade from those wild eyes;

You didn’t raise the shutters of politeness

Over your eager very-Irish face.

That’s when I knew it wasn’t only books

That kindled you and made you beautiful;

It was the world – the vast and brimful world –

Made vivid in a line about Vermont,

Or other places you had never seen,

Or in a stranger’s awkward hoping smile

In a bookshop, in Galway, where Frost would have to wait.

The Natural City

New York City is nobody's fault.

It sprouted here, one building at a time,

Then thousands at a time, till finally

It came to be this glorious hell it is.

Don't blame the Dutch; they only wanted

A place to park their ships.

The Brits had little more ambition, but

The city itself had its own plans.

Just look around you; does it look thought-through?

Is this a city you would stencil out?

It's a tumor, an orchid, a still-happening accident,

Reckless and unapologizing,

Flaring up like some outré lichen

On, across, this once-innocent island.

Sure, there are signs of intervention –

Parallel streets, a graceful park.

Don't let them fool you; they're the trellis that

The hungry kudzu greedily consumes.

Nothing could be more human

Than all this gruesome, unintended sprawl –

Whose knifelike spires affront the sky,

Whose roots hook deep into the meat of the earth –

Nothing could be more appallingly perfect;

Get out, get out, if you possibly can.