[This is another one of those entries rescued from my defunct, totally failed attempt to start writing a regular blog a couple of years ago. As was the “house style,” this is another meandering and incomplete series of observations on something I’d then recently read. I re-post it here merely for historical interest.]

I’d never heard of it before, but the description alone caught me: “

Fantastic Night is the story of one transforming evening in the life of a rich and bored young man.” I know it doesn’t explain, or even promise, much, but I quickly convinced myself I was going to love the book, by new favourite Stefan Zweig. I found it while I was looking for another Zweig book on Amazon, and the title, the description, and the beautiful cover, which you can see above (and which is a detail of the painting “Donali’s Comet over Balliol College” by William Turner), plus my familiarity and growing interest in Zweig’s writing, pretty much did it for me.

Yeah, I guess in pretty much every way I judged a book by its cover. Did I mention that the volume it came in also contained the novella 

Letter From an Unknown Woman

, basis for one of my favourite movies, and which I hadn’t even known at the time Zweig had written? The book seemed on back-order or something; it took months to arrive, months after everything else in my order had shown up, and this delay somehow did even more to convince me of its awesomeness.

You can see where this is going:

I finally got the book, I read 

Fantastic Night

, and, well, yeah, I wasn’t feeling it. The story is prefaced by the kind of framing device Zweig tended to rely on (and I’ve gotta confess my ignorance here as to whether this was a common feature in the writing of the period, or his own particularly stylistic idiosyncracy; if I had to guess, based on no real information whatsoever, I’d lean towards the former), a brief note at the beginning that explains that what we’re about to read was found among the papers of Baron Friedrich Michael von R… following his death in 1914 “fighting with a regiment of dragoons as a lieutenant in the Austrian reserve.”*

Baron Friedrich, we learn, from these papers written in his own hand, was a highly disaffected Viennese (of course) aristocrat of great means. “I had all the satisfactions an elegant, noble, well-to-do good-looking young man without ambition could desire,” he tells us. And yet, after living well for many years, he discovers, in his mid-30s, that he’s begun to experience a “curious paralysis” of his feelings, leaving him empty and unmoved by any of it… love, sex, art. Even the fact of this emptiness is insufficient to move him. He describes this condition beautifully: “I felt as if I were made of glass, with the world outside shining straight through me and never lingering within.” I want to quote more, but if I do I’ll never get around to what I want to talk about (although I’m beginning to wonder if, now that my initial disappointment has dissipated, I actually like Fantastic Night more than I thought).

It isn’t till the night that’s the subject of the story that the Baron’s spell finally breaks. It begins one Sunday at the races, where he flirts with a married woman and then accidentally picks up a winning ticket dropped by her husband. Impulsively, he cashes it for himself. This casual theft is what, it seems, is necessary to break him open. You have to suspect that this has something to do with the honour code of the Austrian class**, and the traumatic effect the realization that one had broken it might have on a gentleman of that time.

Whatever the reason, it’s enough to send him into a delirious frenzy as he opens up to the world again. He visits a fairground, has an awkward and somehow touching encounter with a prostitute looking to scam him with a couple of her partners, and, well… that’s about it. The description of his emotional state as he begins to awake from his detachment is beautifully written too, but I won’t quote any of it here.

Anyway, looking back at it now, I think 

Fantastic Night 

has some really great stuff in it (can you tell I didn’t plan this entry out in advance?), but it somehow wasn’t what I was looking for. What really attracted me to the novella wasn’t necessarily just the description, the cover, the writer’s rep, 

… although all of that was enough to seize my interest. I think what really yanked my chain was the simple fact that it was a mini-epic set in a single night (and in one of my favourite settings).

There’s always been something I’ve loved about books and movies that take place in the span of one day or night. I guess the granddaddy of them all is 

Ulysses

, though more movies than books really come to mind right now: 

,

and

(Richard Linklater has a real affinity for it),

… I could keep going.

I’d like to try and unpack what it is about the “24-hour-movie” or book that I love so much (although to be honest, I’m not sure how far I’m going to get).

Maybe we should return to 

Ulysses

, cuz it seems to me that there’s something uniquely epic about movies or books that convey an arc in such a deliberately limited timespan, and the Joyceman seems to have started that, at least most explicitly. Since then, maybe, it makes more sense to tell an epic story by giving it prosaic, human limitations; maybe this all filters down from Modernism somehow.

And/or maybe this is another reason why: any given story will have an arc that plays out over the course of its telling, and it almost always involves a character changing somehow. When this happens over perceived days or months or years it’s one thing, but shrink it down to a day and it’s somehow bigger, more momentous, because of its context is smaller. I’m sure most people have had at least one transformative experience that happened over really short period of time: an acid drop, falling love, a trip somewhere weird… There’s a density to that kind of experience, and maybe that’s why they translate so well to fiction.

Okay maybe this needs a little more working out, but I want to keep thinking about it. I also want to end with one of my favourite fake books ever, the novel that Joseph Mitchell writes about not writing in this very long passage (sorry) in his article “Joe Gould’s Secret”:

My novel was to be “about” New York City. It was also to be about a day and a night in the life of a young reporter in New York City. He is a Southerner, and a good deal of the time he is homesick for the South. He thinks of himself as an exile from the South. He had once been a believer, a believing Baptist, and is now an unbeliever. Nonetheless, he is still inclined to see things in religious terms, and he often sees the city as a kind of Hell, a Gehenna. He is in love with a Scandinavian girl he has met in the city, and she is so different from the girls he had known in the South that she seems mysterious to him, just as the city seems mysterious; the girl and the city are all mixed up in his mind. It is his day off. He has breakfast in a restaurant in Fulton Fish Market***, and then starts poking around the parts of the city that he knows best, gradually going uptown. As he wanders, he encounters and reencounters men and women who seem to him to represent various aspects of the city. He goes up Fulton Street and walks among the gravestones in St. Paul’s churchyard, and then goes to certain streets on the lower East Side, and then to certain streets in the Village, and then to the theatrical district, and then to Harlem. Late at night, on Lenox Avenue, he joins a little group of men and women, some white and some Negro, who have just come out of a night club and are standing in a circle around an old Negro street preacher. He had seen the old man earlier, preaching at a street corner in the theatrical district, but had not listened to him. Now he listens. The old man is worldly wise and uses up-to-date New York City slang and catch phrases, but he also uses a good many old-fashioned Southern expressions, the kind that are mostly used by country people, and the young reporter realizes that the old man is also a Southerner, and, like himself, a country Southerner. His sermon is apocalyptic. There are fearful warnings and prophecies in it, and there are phrases snatched from bloody old Baptist hymns, and there are many references to Biblical beasts and fruits and flowers..to the wild goats of the rocks and to the pomegranates in the Song of Solomon to the lilies of the field that toil not, nor do they spin. The old serpent is in it, and the Great Whore of Babylon, and the burning bush. Like the Baptist preachers the young reporter had listened to and struggled to understand in his childhood, the old man sees meanings behind meanings, or thinks he does, and tries his best to tell what things “stand for.” “Pomegranates are about the size and shape of large oranges or small grapefruits, only their skins are red,” he says, cupping his hands in teh air and speaking with such exactitude that it is obvious he had had first-hand knowledge of pomegranates long ago in the South. “They’re filled with fat little seeds, and those fat little seeds are filled with juice as red as blood. When they get ripe, they’re so swollen with those juicy red seeds that they gap open and some of the seeds spill out. And now I’ll tell you what pomegranates stand for. They stand for the resurrection. The resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and your resurrection and my resurrection. Resurrection in particular and resurrection in general. All seeds stand for resurrection and all eggs stand for resurrection. The Easter egg stands for resurrection. So do the eggs in the English sparrows’ nest up under the eaves in the ‘L’ station. So does the egg you have for breakfast. So does the caviar the rich people eat. So does shad roe.” The young reporter intends to stay for only a few minutes, but he is held fast by the old man’s rhetoric. Even though he feels that he has heard it all a hundred times, he is enthralled by it. The old man reminds him of the Fundamentalist evangelists who were powerful in the South while he was growing up and who went from town to town holding revival meetings in big tents. He had hated and feared these evangelists..their reputations were based on the hideousness of their descriptions of Hell; the more hideous the description and the wilder the sermon, the better the evangelist was considered to be..but nevertheless they had left him with a lasting liking for the cryptic and the ambiguous and the incantatory and the disconnected and the extravagant and the oracular and the apocalyptic. He finds himself drawing oblique conclusions from the old man’s statements in order to make them have some bearing on his own spiritual state. “All you have to do,” the old man says, “is open your eyes and see the light, the blessed gospel light, and you can enter into a new time. You can enter into it and live in it and dwell in it and reside in it and have your being in it. You can live in the three times in one time. At one and the same time, believing in Him, you can live in the time gone by, you can live in the time to come, and you can live in the now, the here and now.” As the young reporter listens, it dawns on him that it is not the South that he longs for but the past, the South’s past and his own past, neither of which, in the way that he has been driven by homesickness to think of them, ever really existed, and that it is time for him to move out of the time gone by and into the here and now..it is time for him to grow up. When the sermon is over, he goes back downtown feeling that the old man has set him free, and that he is now a citizen of the city and a citizen of the world.

* A lot of Zweig’s stories seem to be cut in half by WWI like this. I guess the reason for that is fairly obvious. Incidentally, this observation is based on very skimpy anecdotal evidence.
** “The final criterion of an officer’s behaviour was invariably not the moral code of society in general, but the special moral code of his caste, and this frequently led to mental conflicts, one of which plays an important part in this book.” .. Author’s Note to Zweig’s Beware of Pity (although to be fair the Baron does break both codes in this instance)

*** RIP

•  15 March 2010