The Return of Service

Neglected Masterpieces IV

The other night this unusual novel crossed my desk and I lost two days and two nights contending with it, unable to put it down for more than ten minutes at a time. A compelling fiction of nine hundred odd pages attenuation, it is titled THE SWAN FLIES AT MIDNIGHT’S FALL and comes full blown from the pen of the pseudonymous Sexton Lovelady. Lovelady is a master storyteller and plot twister as I hope a brief recitation of the narrative will evidence.

At the center of THE SWAN FLIES (etc.) lies Cora Boardway, a secretary out of Cedar Falls, Iowa, who falls in love with and marries Harmon Stores, the fourth richest man in the world. At the time Harmon and Cora meet, Harmon has just learned that he has a hereditary disease (“the sins of his father visited on the son”) and that he has a life expectancy of no more than five years. Up until then, Harmon Stores had been a ruthless and unfeeling man, self-regarding in the extreme. The news of his mortality causes him, after not a little soul searching and self-recrimination, to make an effort to change himself for the better. As a step in that direction, he elects to make plain, unassuming Cora his fourth wife. Harmon decides to marry Cora, not because he loves her, though in time that too will come to pass, but because she is different from all the other women he has known (most of them great beauties), and because he wants to leave his fortune to someone sincerely deserving. Cora, in his view, is unspoiled and highly principled, the most decent person of his own generation to come into his life. She is reluctant to marry Harmon because of the disparity of their situations, but finally she is too much in love with him to let his inordinate wealth stand in the way.

Most of the preceding is offered to us in flashback or through dialogue between Stores and his friend and advisor, Dr. Rankin. When the novel starts Cora and Harmon are celebrating their first anniversary. They seem happy together — indeed we learn they are exceedingly well mated — though Harmon has a nasty predilection for chasing tail. He explains it to Cora in a characteristically eloquent passage as a “cursed disease” and assures her that “you alone illumine the dark places” in his life. “I can’t share you,” she tells him. “I’m not made that way.” Harmon promises his wife to resist the evil stirrings in his nature. He is able to keep this promise until the beautiful television newscaster, Donna Amanda Tortona, comes to interview him for a series she is planning on self-made men. They are instantly attracted to each other and drift into a volcanic affair. When Cora learns of her husband’s infidelity — she actually discovers Harmon and Donna Amanda (“their ruby thighs o’erlapped”) making love in the maid’s room — she feels that she can no longer continue living in the same house with her husband.

Cora leaves no forwarding address and Harmon hires a private detective to find her and bring her back. This is one of the most interestingly plotted sections of the novel, an interstice between circumstance and metaphor. The detective, Bill Wall, turns out to have been a high school sweetheart of Cora’s from Cedar Falls and is a personification of her innocent past. Following a hunch, Bill Wall discovers Cora working as a waitress in Beverly Hills, it is what she had always dreamed of doing as a child — and orders a tuna fish sandwich on rye toast at her table. There is a dead fly in the sandwich, a symbol of the difficulties Wall will confront in trying to bring Cora back to her prodigal husband. Wall pretends to Cora that their meeting is circumstantial, that he just happened to wander into the obscure luncheonette — a place called Hand to Mouth — in which Cora is slinging hash.

The detective is attracted to Cora all over again — he is a man who likes a woman with an intelligent face — and so has difficulty pretending to be what he’s not. Lovelady gives us a beautifully proportioned flashback at this point, showing Cora and Bill fifteen years before. Bill has taken her on a date to Lover’s Lane and is trying to persuade her to come into the backseat of the car. Cora holds out against his persuasion, winning Bill’s undying respect. In the present, in marked contrast, Bill and Cora succumb to the pleasures of the sack at first opportunity. Cora apologizes afterward, saying that she was just using Bill to get at someone else. The next day Bill wires Cora’s husband to come to Beverly Hills to collect his bride.

When Cora discovers that Bill has betrayed her — she has trusted him more than she realized — she is terribly disillusioned. “How could you have done it?” she would ask him. “If I can’t trust my friends, who can I trust?” Her questions go unanswered. Bill has absented himself from the scene.

Three times Harmon Stores asks Cora to come back to him (Lovelady uses the number three for its symbolic connotations) and three times Cora refuses. Rather than ask a fourth time, Harmon has her brought back to his house by force.

If she is a prisoner, Cora tells her husband, she will live like a prisoner; she refuses any sustenance other than bread and water. Harmon tries to win back her affection, plying her with gifts and attentions. Whatever Harmon does, it has the reverse effect of its intention. When Cora becomes seriously undernourished, Dr. Rankin steps in (he is one of the few physicians in his income bracket who still makes house calls) and feeds her intravenously. Eventually, a truce is negotiated and Cora agrees to live with her husband as his wife provided that Harmon makes no sexual demands on her. It will be in actuality, Cora says, what it has been in spirit — ”a marriage in pretension only.”

Each day before going in to breakfast, Harmon knocks on the door to Cora’s room to ask if he might come in and talk to her. Each day, Cora, true to her vow, refuses him entrance. It goes on this way for months, Lovelady using repetition to astonishing effect. “I will come back again and ask tomorrow,” Harmon says. “I can’t stop you from asking,” Cora answers, “though I would give anything to spare us both the ordeal.” Cora’s terrible pride keeps the pair apart (Lovelady perceives pride as the deadliest of the deadly sins) and just when she is about to relent, Harmon relinquishes his quest for conversation, goes on an extended trip around the world, leaving Cora the house and an exceedingly generous settlement.

When Cora discovers that Harmon has gone — she is content at first not to be constantly importuned — she falls into a spiraling depression. One day in despair she tears her clothes off and invites in the local toughs to punish her sexually in an orgy that lasts four days and thirty-two (236–267) torrid pages. I can only hope that the reader will not come to this vast panoramic novel for those pages alone. When the ordeal is over, when Cora is released from the intensive-care ward of the hospital, she feels as if she were “newborn,” cleansed by “the trick of violence.”

Having cut himself off from all human communication, Harmon knows nothing of Cora’s ordeal. He goes from one suicidal adventure to another, exciting forgetfulness through unremitting activity. No matter what he does, however, no matter where he is, Cora’s image haunts his consciousness.

At one point, each unbeknownst to the other, both Cora and Harmon are hospitalized in opposing parts of the world, their separate disabilities the only remaining connection between them. Lovelady, it must be mentioned here, has a craftsman’s affection for the parallel plot, and with no little brilliance he alternates chapters concerning Cora’s and Harmon’s analogous plights.

Harmon’s hereditary disease has caught up with him; he is dying, finds himself more enfeebled each day, while Cora, a disjunctive parallel, gradually regains her full health. In a dream she has a prescience that Harmon is dying in a remote mountain village on the other side of the world. In the morning she wires Dr. Rankin for corroboration. The news arrives two hours later in eight words: HARMON HAS SIX MONTHS TO A YEAR LEFT.

Part II begins with Cora dedicating herself to locating her dying husband. She will tell him before he dies — it is her hope and salvation — that she “forgives him his trespass.” Cora hires the now world-famous detective, Bill Wall, to help her find “the only man she has ever loved” before he dies. Their relationship, she informs Bill, must be “all business,” and she enlists an oath of abstinence from him before they set out on their quest. Bill, we learn, is still in love with Cora and, despite his oath, accompanies her with the sole hope of renewing her affections.

Lovelady specializes in a certain kind of novelistic chase — more exciting than the immediate thrills the cinema can produce — the race against time. We cut from Cora to Harmon, Harmon to Cora, watch days turn into weeks. Harmon is a little weaker each day, Cora a little nearer to the mountain hospital in the Himalayas where her husband lies at death’s door. One day, the local wise man Naja — a storied figure in these parts — comes to visit Harmon in his hospital room.

“Are you in need of death?” Naja asks him. Harmon is almost too weak to respond, says it is his fate. “The sins of my father are visited on me. Necessity is itself.”

Naja (or the Nadna, as he is called) tells Harmon that his illness is merely a failure to breathe correctly and so an invitation to be taken away by death. Harmon, bereft of other choices, takes breathing lessons from the guru. The Nadna has him do the breathing exercises for longer periods each day — the first day, one hour, the second two, the third three, and so on. Eventually, Harmon spends an entire twenty four hours doing breathing exercises. “If nothing else,” the Nadna says, “you will learn to breathe correctly before you die.”

Each day the Nadna admonishes Harmon for not working hard enough. “You will never learn to breathe, rich man, unless you take every breath as if it were your last,” he says. “Why do you hold back? What are you saving it for?”

The doctors, who expected Harmon’s death imminently (in fact, his room had already been assigned to another terminal case), are amazed at his continuing survival.

One day, the Nadna, a man notably short on compliments, tells Harmon that one of the breaths he has listened to is the first true breath Harmon has ever taken. “Your progress is slow,” says the guru, “though inexorable.” This praise brings a smile of pleasure to Harmon’s face. The next day Harmon feels a little stronger and sits up in bed while doing his breathing exercises. The day after that, Harmon walks about the hospital room for a full five minutes.

Meanwhile, Cora, crossing the Sahara, is attacked by a tribe of nomads, has her virtue compromised many times, and is sold to a brothel in Marrakesh. Bill Wall tracks her down and rescues her at the loss of his right eye and much of his dignity. (Gang rape is a recurrent motif in THE SWAN FLIES.) Although still traumatized by her unfortunate experience, Cora is anxious to continue the journey.

“What’s the point of going on?” the detective asks. “According to your timetable, Harmon must be dead by now.”

“He lives in my heart,” Cora says. Although not normally an irrational person, Cora has a mystical sense that Harmon still partakes of the sentient world, and she insists on completing her trip with or without the detective’s help. The detective officially resigns from her employ but then follows after her on the next plane to see that no further harm comes to Cora.

The plane, chartered from Marrakesh, will take Cora only so far. There are areas in the world, Lovelady is telling us, which even airplanes can’t reach. Cora must ascend the mountain, as Harmon had, to reach the hospital in which, she assumes, Harmon is spending his final days. If she avoids the luxury of sleep, it will take her two days and two nights to reach the mountain village of Ygenta.

The very day she begins her ascent is the day the Nadna chooses to leave Harmon without a word of goodbye. The loss of the guru is particularly disturbing to Harmon, who has just mastered the breathing exercises and is eager to show off his prowess. “Where might he have gone?” he asks the doctor and the various attendants at the hospital. No one seems to know where the guru keeps himself. It is a far-off cave, someone reports, circumscribed by clouds. Harmon vows to find the guru so that he can thank him properly, with the idea of bringing the holy man back to the States, where his deeds can earn just recognition.

Just hours before Cora arrives at Ygenta, Harmon sets off on his quest to find the Nadna. Had Cora not been despoiled by a tribe of Yetis in the last lap of her journey, she might have arrived at the hospital in time to see her husband restored to full health. As it is, Cora rushes to Harmon’s hospital room, feverish herself from various ordeals, to find an empty bed. She assumes the worst — what else might she believe? — and falls over in a faint. No one disabuses her of her misapprehension and she returns home (a minor weakness in the plotting) fully convinced that Harmon has died of his hereditary disease. She grieves for two years, surrounding herself with sundry morbid artifacts of her lost husband. Bill Wall looks after her during this period, limiting his practice to local detections. Cora becomes a recluse and develops eccentric habits. After a while, Bill Wall prevails upon her to marry him. Although, as she says, she must remain faithful to her “one great love,” she agrees to live with Bill and look after him, more like a nurse than a wife perhaps, for as long as he wants her.

Harmon returns to the States, unrecognizably altered, his face covered with a scraggly beard. He has become a poor man by choice, has given away all his money to the Nadna and tends to proselytize on street corners, living on money thrown at him by strangers. One day, the inevitable confrontation takes place. Cora passes his beat and hears him talking with “dazzling eloquence” about the work of the Nadna. Something about him, at once familiar and unfamiliar, moves her and she offers the street preacher ten dollars. Harmon declines her gift. Cora comes back the next day, thinking she has been refused for giving too little, and offers Harmon ten times the initial sum. He refuses her again. The next day when Cora comes to his corner — she is prepared to offer him a blank check — the street preacher is not there. She comes back day after day, looking for the unaccountably familiar holy man without reward for her efforts. His health is bad, she realizes, and by asking around she tracks him to a cold-water flat in one of the most desolate areas of the city. He is on a rug on the floor when she finds him, among lice and roaches, dying, the old disease has recurred — and she looks after his needs still not knowing who he is. “I’ve suffered too,” she says, and she tells him the story of her quest for her dying husband (Lovelady goes on a bit too long here, recapitulating old materials) and how he was dead before she reached him to tell him that she loved and forgave him.

“Had he known that,” Harmon says, “his life might have been different.”

The room is dark when he says this but she sees something in the shadows of his face that “unearths a terrible recognition.”

“Different in what way?” she asks.

“Oh Cora,” he says in his ghostly voice. “What fools we’ve been.”

“The way you say my name,” Cora says. “It’s as if you’ve known that name and used it for a long time.” Gradually, she realizes who it is, the disguise of Harmon’s beard falling away as if it had been shaved before our eyes, and they embrace with, as Lovelady puts it, “inexpressible excitation.” They talk of a future together, plan it in painstaking detail, but the reader knows that there is not much hope — Harmon will probably not live out the night — and the novel comes to an ambiguous and touching end.

I have recounted the story here (and not all of it by half) to give some indication of the range of Lovelady’s narrative invention. If this 946-page book could be said to have a fault, and what of human hand is without, it is in its occasional longueurs. Lovelady has an obsessive’s penchant for letting a good thing go on beyond its maximum advantage. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that Lovelady’s effects tend to accumulate and that the weaknesses and strengths of this book are at times interchangeable. In our literary moment when fragmentation and absurdist disjunction are the fashion, the modern reader might find Lovelady somewhat derriere garde. There are few of the fashionable modernities here, just the organ music of recognizable lives played out in a story rich with alternation and surprise. Story, one needs to remind oneself, in the raison d’être of the novel, and THE SWAN FLIES AT MIDNIGHT’S FALL is in the grand tradition of storytelling. When the last page is read and the book is shut, the swan that is Cora continues to fly in our recollections, indomitable, tarnished and forever innocent, salvaging the prodigal Harmon Stores in us all.