The Happy Ending Project: Anselm Kiefer

The German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer’s work can be described as “a brooding meditation on taboo subjects like genocide, the perversion of art and culture for political ends, the overpowering burden of history, and, naturally, the Holocaust.” But we prefer to describe it simply as “a huge bummer.” Kiefer’s monumental works often incorporate fragile materials like straw and wax as a way of representing the futility of the artist’s quest for immortality. As a sculptor, Keifer’s preferred medium is lead, which emphasizes in the most literal sense the weightiness of his subject matter. Recurrent images of barren fields, railroad tracks, homes aflame, newspaper clippings, and the names of both Norse gods and ordinary individuals connect his general theme of man’s vanity and insignificance against the backdrop of human history with the horrors of Germany’s Nazi past.

The titles of Kiefer’s work often reflect his preferred topics of artistic grandiosity and human frailty, recently with an added overlay of religious mythology. Current paintings include “Palmsonntag” (Palm Sunday), “Der Brennende Dornbusch” (The Burning Bush), and a series of dour works named for the obscure modernist poet Velimir Chlebnikov.

What then is to be done about the gloomy, suicide-inspiring paintings and sculpture of Anselm Kiefer? How are we to retitle them to suggest that perhaps the vast sweep of history will end happily and not with the extinction of mankind at its own hands and the scourging of man’s works from the face of the Earth by the remorseless hand of a righteous Old Testament God?

The American painter Thomas Kinkade, known to his legion of fans by his copyrighted sobriquet as the “Painter of Light,” has a rare gift. Not for painting. His mass-marketed cornball pastel-hued lollipops are justifiably reviled by critics and anyone who takes art seriously. In their own way, the paintings of Thomas Kinkade are as upsetting as those of Anselm Kiefer. But he does have a flair for cheerful titles and so we have borrowed a few of Kinkade’s evocative and upbeat titles and given them to some of Kiefer’s best known works.

We think you’ll agree that when you imagine, say, a pipe-smoking lighthouse keeper strolling through one of Kiefer’s scorched landscapes trailed by a little girl wearing open galoshes and a cocker spaniel puppy, the world no longer seems to be such a depressing, lonely, and savage place.

Here are three of Kiefer’s best known paintings — “Twilight of the West,” “Melancholia,” and “Brunhilde’s Grave” — furnished with new, better titles taken from popular Thomas Kinkade artworks:


Kind of takes the curse off it, don’t you think?

Published in:  on April 17, 2008 at 10:00 am Leave a Comment
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The Happy Ending Project: Picasso’s Guernica

The mission of the Happy Ending Project has been crystal clear from Day One. Our aim is to render classic works of literature and art (emphasis ours) more appealing to normal people by supplying them with happy endings. “Take the broom to the gloom” is our motto.

This process is relatively straightforward when it comes to literature. Concerning art, however, the methodology is potentially far more complex, since it could involve altering the appearance of the artworks by, say, putting smiles on the faces of Edward Hopper’s melancholy “Nightbirds” or installing a drinking fountain in Michelangelo’s “Pieta.”

We have decided, to quote Lenin, to “go another way.” For the artwork improvements undertaken by the Happy Ending Project, we will, for now, concern ourselves only with titles. Wherever possible, we will retitle the works in the hope of changing the viewer’s experience of them to ensure that it is a happy one. Our first subject is typically challenging, Picasso’s harrowing “Guernica,” which depicts an aerial attack during Spain’s Civil War during which civilians in the Basque town of Guernica were bombed by Nazi air forces allied to Franco’s Fascists.

The writhing human forms and terrified livestock seem to fully embody the pity and horror of war. And yet, by simply changing the title, “Guernica” becomes an altogether different work: a celebration rather than an indictment.

Here then is the original version of “Guernica”:

And here it is with a new title:

The Joy of the Dance by Pablo Picasso

Published in:  on April 10, 2008 at 10:00 am Leave a Comment
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The Happy Ending Project: Madame Bovary

“Realism” is an intellectual code word for “depressing.” It is ever the pose of the aesthete to view life as ineffably tragic. The characters in realistic fiction either learn some hard lesson or they don’t; it makes little difference since all will come to a bad end. In the “real world” of the realistic novel, only venality is rewarded, for selfishness is seen as the most authentic of human qualities.

For this great Amazon of tears that runs through the Western canon, we have Gustave Flaubert to thank. It was he who dared to tell the truth about the stifling mores of the provincial bourgeois and of French society as a whole. It was he who dared to punish virtue and reward wickedness, to make dullness a cardinal sin, and to explore the living hell of crushing disappointment that opens up to swallow anyone who dares to hope, to dream, or to love. He did so in one of the greatest novels ever written, Madame Bovary, which is also surely the gloomiest.

For a Happy Ending Project, ours or anyone else’s, to tackle Madame Bovary is not just a challenge — it is an obligation. Fortunately, the task of giving the book a happier ending is a relatively simple one, merely a matter of allowing one of the main characters to live happily ever after. In our case, though, we aim for not just a happier ending but a truly happy one. As to whether we have accomplished that aim, we shall leave it up to the reader to decide.

MADAME BOVARY

As a child, and later when he grows into a young man, Charles Bovary is mediocre and dull. He fails his first medical exam and only barely manages to become a second-rate country doctor. His mother marries him off to a widow who dies soon afterward, leaving Charles much less money than he expected.

Charles soon falls in love with Emma, the daughter of a patient, and the two decide to marry. After an elaborate wedding, they set up house in Tostes, where Charles has his practice. But marriage doesn’t live up to Emma’s romantic expectations. Ever since she lived in a convent as a young girl, she has dreamed of love and marriage as a solution to all her problems. After she attends an extravagant ball at the home of a wealthy nobleman, she begins to dream constantly of a more sophisticated life. She grows bored and depressed when she compares her fantasies to the humdrum reality of village life, and eventually her listlessness makes her ill. When Emma becomes pregnant, Charles decides to move to a different town in hopes of reviving her health.

In the new town of Yonville, the Bovary’s meet Homais, the town pharmacist, a pompous windbag who loves to hear himself speak. Emma also meets Leon, a law clerk, who, like her, is bored with rural life and loves to escape through romantic novels. When Emma gives birth to her daughter Berthe, motherhood disappoints her—she had desired a son—and she continues to be despondent. Romantic feelings blossom between Emma and Leon. However, when Emma realizes that Leon loves her, she feels guilty and throws herself into the role of a dutiful wife. Leon grows tired of waiting and, believing that he can never possess Emma, departs to study law in Paris. His departure makes Emma miserable.

Soon, at an agricultural fair, a wealthy neighbor named Rodolphe, who is attracted by Emma’s beauty, declares his love to her. He seduces her, and they begin having a passionate affair. Emma is often indiscreet, and the townspeople all gossip about her. Charles, however, suspects nothing. His adoration for his wife and his stupidity combine to blind him to her indiscretions. His professional reputation, meanwhile, suffers a severe blow when he and Homais attempt an experimental surgical technique to treat a club-footed man named Hippolyte and end up having to call in another doctor to amputate the leg. Disgusted with her husband’s incompetence, Emma throws herself even more passionately into her affair with Rodolphe. She borrows money to buy him gifts and suggests that they run off together and take little Berthe with them. Soon enough, though, the jaded and worldly Rodolphe has grown bored of Emma’s demanding affections. Refusing to elope with her, he leaves her. Heartbroken, Emma grows desperately ill and nearly dies.

By the time Emma recovers, Charles is in financial trouble from having to borrow money to pay off Emma’s debts and to pay for her treatment. Still, he decides to take Emma to the opera in the nearby city of Rouen. There, they encounter Leon. This meeting rekindles the old romantic flame between Emma and Leon, and this time the two embark on a love affair. As Emma continues sneaking off to Rouen to meet Leon, she also grows deeper and deeper in debt to the moneylender Lheureux, who lends her more and more money at exaggerated interest rates.

Over time, Emma grows bored with Leon. Not knowing how to abandon him, she instead becomes increasingly demanding. Meanwhile, her debts mount daily. Eventually, Lheureux orders the seizure of Emma’s property to compensate for the debt she has accumulated. Terrified of Charles finding out, she frantically tries to raise the money that she needs, appealing to Leon and to all the town’s businessmen. Eventually, she even attempts to prostitute herself by offering to get back together with Rodolphe if he will give her the money she needs. He refuses, and, driven to despair, she attempts suicide by eating arsenic.

The blundering Homais, however, has mixed up the ingredients in his potions and Emma has actually ingested the rye fungus ergot. The toxin causes intense hallucinations in which Emma sees the error of her ways symbolized by an enormous jolly cochon (pig) singing arias and eating cookies shaped like fleur de lis. When she awakes she realizes enough is enough; she will end her affair with Leon. A visit to the grasping Lleureux and a threat to expose his homosexual affair with the one legged Hippolyte yields forgiveness of all her debts and a generous income of 4000 francs a year.

Meanwhile, Rodolphe has been beset by guilt over his affair with Emma. He persuades Charles to join him on a joint campaign for personal improvement. Diet, exercise, and a fearless spiritual personal inventory amount to nothing short of a Yonville edition of an extreme smackdown makeover. When Emma views the newly vigorous Charles, her passion is kindled anew and this time toward its proper object. The new Dr. Bovary returns from a final detoxifying hike up Mont Blanc fully ripped and decked out in taught green blouson and high-riding hunting shorts that reveal twenty-one centimeters of uncut spiced Gallic viand with his auburn mane feathered and blunt–cut in the careless, jaunty fashion of the day. The novel ends with the still hardbodied Emma straddling her new steed, bucking herself to bourgeois ecstasy.

THE END

Published in:  on March 27, 2008 at 10:00 am Comments Off
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The Happy Ending Project: An American Tragedy

The title of Theodore Dreiser’s gripping story of the dark side of the American dream, “An American Tragedy,” tells us at once what is fundamentally wrong with the work and why it is such a worthy subject for the Happy Ending Project. Though readers might presume that we would retitle Dreiser’s book “An American Comedy,” the fact is that we are concerned with endings. We have no wish to bowdlerize an entire work of literature by substituting pie fights for duels and turning Banquo’s Ghost into “Banquo the Friendly Ghost.” Our purpose is to denature the lacrymose cumulative effect of the many intermittent minor tragedies and unfortunate events that are so characteristic of “serious” literature by providing a happy ending, not to eliminate these plot elements altogether. Thus, we call our version…

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY NARROWLY AVERTED

Raised by poor and devoutly religious parents, who force him to participate in their street missionary work, the ambitious but naïve and immature Clyde is anxious to achieve better things. His troubles begin when he takes a job as a bellboy at a local hotel. The boys he meets are much more sophisticated than he, and they introduce Clyde to the world of alcohol and prostitution. Clyde enjoys his new lifestyle and does everything in his power to win the affections of the flirtatious Hortense Briggs. But Clyde’s life is forever changed when a stolen car he is traveling in with friends kills a young child.

Clyde flees Kansas City, and after a brief stay in Chicago, he reestablishes himself as a foreman at the collar factory of his wealthy long-lost uncle in Lycurgus, New York, who meets Clyde through a stroke of fortune. Though he does not fully adopt Clyde into the Lycurgus Griffiths family, he does his best to help Clyde and advances him to a position of relative importance within his collar factory.

Although Clyde vows not to consort with women in the way that caused his Kansas City downfall, he is swiftly attracted to Roberta Alden, a poor and very innocent farmgirl working under him — thus breaking the factory rules. While Clyde initially enjoys the secretive relationship and virtually coerces Roberta into sex, his ambition forces him to realize that he could never marry her. He dreams of the elegant Sondra Finchley, the daughter of a wealthy Lycurgus man and a family friend of his uncle’s. As developments between him and Sondra begin to look promising, Roberta discovers that she is pregnant.

Having unsuccessfully attempted to procure an abortion for Roberta, who expects him to marry her, Clyde procrastinates while his relationship with Sondra continues to mature. When he realizes that he has a genuine chance to marry Sondra and after Roberta pushes an ultimatum of marriage or revealing their relationship, Clyde hatches a plan to murder Roberta in a fashion that would seem accidental.

When he takes Roberta for a canoe ride on Big Bittern lake in upstate New York, Clyde rows into a remote portion of the lake. As he speaks to her regarding the end of their relationship Roberta moves towards him. Just as she does so, an elk-hunting party led by Clyde’s uncle arrives at the lakeside. Mistaking Roberta Alden’s now-hefty form for a rutting 12-pointer, Sondra Finchley takes aim and fires a double shotgun blast into the side of Alden’s face. Her entire head is removed from her shoulders and comes to rest on a twig-style lovers-bench on the opposite side of the lake.

The trail of circumstantial evidence prior to the trip is all but erased by the generous bribes the wealthy, senior Griffiths pays to smooth over any blame that might be ascribed to his daughter. A substantial sum is also paid to the Alden family, scrub farmers more than happy with such an exchange for their whiny and unattractive daughter. (It is well known that in the early part of the twentieth century, the prospects for a poor, unmarried, homely and pregnant woman were prison or prostitution and a sure recipe for unhappy tragedy). A fancy wedding follows and the few words Clyde utters in his toast on the dead Roberta stand out as one of the exemplars of pathos in modern literature. The story ends as the happy couple roar across Big Bittern Lake on a powerful 16-cylinder, mahogany Hacker-Craft.

THE END

Published in:  on March 20, 2008 at 10:00 am Leave a Comment
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The Happy Ending Project: The Great Gatsby

The Happy Ending Project, the Old Yorker’s methodical revision of the classics of literature and art, which seeks to turn the frowns that pervade the Western canon upside down, has been called “the aesthetic equivalent of a moon shot” (The New York Review of Books) and “the most ambitious bit of editing since the Readers’ Digest tackled Proust” (Slate). Yet, despite our grand goals, there are acts of unwriting that exceed even our skill and patience.

For example, though few novels are more in need of a happy ending than Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” we may not, according to our code, remove the Napoleonic Wars from World History. For this same reason, Stendahl’s “Charterhouse of Parma” and “The Red and the Black” must remain forever sad and gloomy. Yes, I suppose we could make Napoleon the victor at Waterloo but then what would become of all of those monumental triumphant paintings of the Duke of Wellington? By giving the battle to the French, they would be rendered ineffably tragic or, at best, ironic.

No, we will not alter the major events of world history to suit our own selfish ends. But there are plenty of candidates for new happy endings that deal with more personal tragedies, ones that may, in turn, reflect the times in which they were created. “The Great Gatsby” is a perfect example. As we shall see, it can quite easily be turned from a depressing downer in which the reckless glamor of the Jazz Age leads to an inevitable crack-up, to a happy book that makes the Roaring 20s roar anew.

Here goes.

THE GREAT GATSBY (HAPPY VERSION)

The narrator, Nick Carraway, opens his story by recounting that he, a young man from Minnesota, has moved to New York, renting a low-cost cottage located in West Egg, the less fashionable of two fictional seaside communities alongside one another on Long Island Sound (the other one being East Egg). Nick visits his second cousin, Daisy Buchanan, whose husband, Tom, was a football player at Yale and who now is a phenomenally wealthy polo player. The Buchanans have an opulent mansion in East Egg. Here, Nick meets Jordan Baker, a lady friend of Daisy’s and well-known golfer.

Nick is the next-door neighbor of Jay Gatsby, an extremely wealthy man known for hosting lavish soirées in his own enormous mansion, where every Saturday, hundreds of people come.

Gatsby seems to be a mysterious character whose great wealth is a subject of much rumor; none of the guests Nick meets at Gatsby’s parties know much about his past. At one point during the party, a man begins a conversation with Nick. The man reveals himself to be Gatsby, surprising Nick who had expected Gatsby to be much older and not as personable. Nick and Gatsby begin a close friendship.

Jordan Baker reveals to Nick that Gatsby hosts these parties in hopes that Daisy, his former love, would visit by chance. Also through Jordan, Gatsby requests Nick to arrange a meeting with Daisy. Nick obliges, and the reunion is initially awkward but ultimately successful, and soon Daisy and Gatsby begin an affair. In the meantime, Nick and Jordan Baker, whom Nick re-encounters at one of Gatsby’s parties, start a relationship, which Nick already predicts will be superficial.

Eventually, Daisy’s husband Tom notices Gatsby’s love for Daisy and alleges that Gatsby is a bootlegger, in front of Gatsby, Daisy, Nick, and Jordan in an explosive scene at a hotel in Manhattan. In reply, Gatsby urges Daisy to tell Tom that she never loved him; Daisy does tell Tom, but hesitantly. Tom, seeing that he still has a chance to reconcile with Daisy tells her and Gatsby to drive together from the hotel to Tom and Daisy’s house on Long Island; Tom mocks Gatsby by claiming he knows nothing can happen between Daisy and Gatsby.

George Wilson, owner of an auto repair garage on a desolate road between Manhattan and northern Long Island, is arguing with his wife Myrtle (with whom Tom is having an affair). She runs out of the house, only to be hit by Tom’s car. Myrtle is killed instantly. Later, as Daisy and Gatsby pass, they notice the car accident. Wilson comes out of his shop, half-insane and half in shock, and rants about having seen a yellow car. Daisy and Gatsby realize that the driver of the car that killed Myrtle was Tom. Daisy urges Gatsby to tell Wilson this, but Gatsby refuses, saying it would be a breach of decency and “taking the easy way out.”

Wilson becomes more and more unhinged. He stays up all night rocking back and forth, muttering nonsense, while his neighbor patiently watches over him. Wilson thinks he makes the connection that whoever was driving that yellow car must have been the man Myrtle was having an affair with and makes up his mind to find the yellow car and its driver.

Wilson finds his way to Tom’s house with a gun and Tom, while packing for an escape trip with Daisy, names Gatsby as the driver of the yellow car that killed Wilson’s wife. Wilson, however, knows that the driver can’t have been Gatsby because Gatsby drove by after the accident. As Tom turns to resume his packing, Wilson shoots him and then staggers out on to the Buchanan’s lawn and shoots himself.

Several months later, Nick received a cryptic invitation to attend a party at Brunner’s Hotel in Grasse on the Riviera with all expenses paid. Intrigued, he travels to France where he is delighted to discover that Gatsby and Daisy are living quietly while the scandal surrounding Tom’s death dies down. The party is a celebration of their marriage. Gatsby recites his vows using his real name, “Jay Gatz,” a hint that he has reached an accommodation with both his modest past and his ambitions for the future.

THE END

Published in:  on March 13, 2008 at 10:00 am Leave a Comment
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The Happy Ending Project: The Cherry Orchard

The melancholy overtones we associate with the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov present unique difficulties to anyone seeking to turn his plays into unambiguously happy ones. Chekhov himself considered his final masterpiece, “The Cherry Orchard,” to be a comedy, though clearly not a balls-to-the-wall laugh riot. But ever since its first director, the brilliant Konstantin Stanislavsky, chose to emphasize its tragic qualities, The Cherry Orchard has been at best a bittersweet experience for audiences.

We are almost as strongly opposed to bittersweetness in art and literature as we are to undiluted bile and bitterness. The trick in adjusting the Cherry Orchard to suit our preference for happy endings is to preserve the humor, romance, and comedy that are found throughout it while excising the overarching sense of fin de siecle sadness. It’s a delicate operation, like removing a tumor wrapped around the nerves of the spinal column. And for such a procedure we need our finest tools, in this case, a buried treasure.

Here’s how our happily ended version of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” would go:

Madame Ranevsky and her daughter, Anya, return home from Paris to find that their family estate is about to be sold at auction for debt. To all the family it is quite unthinkable that they should lose the wonderful cherry orchard whose white blooms are part of their childhood memories. Madame Ranevsky is an irresponsible soul who cannot be made to realize the value of money. Her brother, Gaev, is quite as hopeless where money is concerned. Varya, the step-daughter, is the only practical one, but how can a woman raise money?

Lopahkin, a former serf, has become a wealthy landowner. Out of his admiration for Madame Ranevsky and a genuine affection that remains from childhood days, he suggests that if they will tear down the house and raze the cherry orchard, they can cut the property up into the popular new villa sites. The entire property, he assures them, will promptly be leased and the substantial income it will afford will enable them to live where and as they please.

Family pride combined with a spirit of procrastination prevents their accepting this suggestion even if their fondness for their cherry orchard would permit their considering its destruction. They continue to believe that some miracle will save their orchard. Thus they drift along until the day set for the sale. Grandmother has sent them fifteen hundred pounds and Lopahkin, the friendly former serf, suggests that this money be used to prevent the sale of the estate. But instead of using the money to redeem the house and orchard from debt, in typically impractical fashion Madame Ranevsky embarks upon a building project, erecting a summer house from which to view the orchard in bloom. Varya protests but her step-mother is determined.

The family’s lifelong retainer, Firs, begins to excavate the ground for the foundation for the summer house. As the family argues over Madame Ranevsky’s plans, the sound of the pickaxe breaking the ground rings in the distance. Suddenly the sound stops and the family falls silent. A moment later, Firs appears, out of breath, and announces that he has discovered a chest full of jewels and golden roubles buried at the site of the summer house. He shows a few handfuls of the treasure to the astonished group. Madame Ranevsky pledges to share her new wealth with all of the members of her family but first Gaev must buy back her home, which he does with the help of the worldly Lophakin who advises Gaev at the sale.

With the home and orchard secured for posterity, the characters move on with their lives. Madame Ranevsky prepares to return to Paris now even wealthier than before; Gaev intends to retire to the estate, complete the building of the summer house, and collect stamps; Varya, as a rich heiress, now has high hopes of finding a husband. Trofimov, the former tutor and “perpetual student,” prepares to return to his beloved university. Even young Anya looks forward to taking her independent place in the world. So they separate … each one intent on his own future. At the last, with characteristic inefficiency, they lock the old manservant, Firs, in the house, believing that he has already been sent to the hospital. Happily, the leave him with a bottle of his beloved pepper vodka. The only sound as the curtain falls is the ringing of pickaxes continuing the excavation and search for more treasure near the cherry orchard.

THE END

Published in:  on March 6, 2008 at 10:00 am Leave a Comment
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The Happy Ending Project: The Sorrows of Young Werther

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s classic epistolary novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” is one of the saddest ever written. Its themes of ill-fated love resonated with generations of post-adolescent men and women discovering the joys and miseries of that first great romance in the years following the novel’s publication in 1774. It is said that “Werther” caused hundreds if not thousands of suicides as sensitive young lovers sought to emulate the title character who, faced with an intolerable situation, takes his own life.

Because the subject matter is so fraught and melancholy, we will admit that the novel presents some difficulties if we are to give it a happy ending. It is not simply a matter of cutting it off at the right time as with “La Boheme.” The plot (and, indeed, the title) must be altered but, in keeping with our basic principles, without undue violence to the fundaments of the story.

Here then, the happy version of “The Sorrows of Young Werther.”

THE UPS AND DOWNS OF YOUNG WERTHER

Werther, a young artist of a highly sensitive and passionate temperament, visits the picturesque village of Wahlheim in search of inspiration. He is enchanted by the simple ways of the peasants there. He meets and falls instantly in love with Lotte, a beautiful young girl who is taking care of her siblings following the death of their mother. Lotte is, however, already engaged to a man named Albert, who is in fact 11 years her senior.

Despite the pain this causes Werther, he spends the next few months cultivating a close friendship with both of them. Seeking a confidente with whom he can share his troubles, he makes the acquaintance of the aristocratic widow Fräulein von B. Moved by Werther’s plight, she visits Albert in his humble cottage and explains the situation to him. Albert, who has grown fond of Werther and instantly recognizes the truth of what Fräulein von B tells him, resolves to release Lotte from her marriage vows so that the lovers can be together.

The widow is, in turn, struck by Albert’s simple decency, which she finds refreshing after the artificialities of Hessian high society. Together, they leave Albert’s cottage to tell Werther and Lotte the good news. The reader is left with the distinct impression that there may be not one, but two, weddings in the very near future.

THE END

It is worth nothing a contemporary of Goethe’s, the German writer Frederich Nicolai, wrote a satiric pastiche entitled, ‘The Joys of Young Werther” a few years after the publication of the original, which ignited a furious literary feud between the two men. In Nicolai’s version, Werther shoots himself but is uninjured because Albert has loaded the pistol with chicken blood. We feel our version is “less German.”

Published in:  on February 28, 2008 at 10:00 am Leave a Comment
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The Happy Ending Project: La Boheme

Philip Larkin claimed that “Sexual intercourse began/In 1963/Between the end of the Chatterly ban/And the Beatles’ first LP.”

Art and literature, on the other hand, had ended some time earlier, though exactly when is subject to debate. Art was clearly dead by the time of the post-War rise of abstraction. Literature, it is generally agreed, had ended some years before, perhaps with the initial serial publication of James Joyce’s nonsensical “Ulysses” starting in 1918.

For us at the Old Yorker, art and literature began their long decline to their current state of irrelevance when happy endings and their artistic equivalent — the unalloyed joyous sentiment of Fragonard, for example — became unfashionable. Even the rare modern novel or, more frequently, work of light fiction, that does have a technically happy ending, never achieves it without some sort of hideous tragedy or intolerable loss. It is not simply that a beloved secondary character must die so that the two major characters can live happily ever after. Instead some monstrous permanently damaging horror must occur that is first endured and, then, accepted. That’s the modern happy ending.

Don’t get us wrong. We are not opposed to tragedy or melodrama. We merely ask for a current literary corpus that includes not just comedies as a counterbalance but also romances and dramas and adventure stories and tales of manly derring-do, all with genuinely happy endings. For artists the corollary would be simple beauty, uncomplicated by irony.

This is not an unrealistic dream. We have found that the canonical works of art and literature often contain a simpler, purer version that shows what might have been, until the author or artist gave in to the unwholesome urge to inject a little gloom and doom.

To give an example, “La Boheme,” Puccini’s beloved tale of struggling artists in 19th Century Paris, is going along just fine until it deteriorates into the usual coughing fits and lovers quarrels in Act 3. Just think how much better it would be to leave the opera house smiling (having heard almost all the great arias, by the way) at the end of a final curtain that came down at the end of Act 2, rather than after Mimi’s death from tuberculosis at the end of Act 4?

Here is a synopsis of the plot of “La Boheme” adjusted in this manner.

LA BOHEME

ACT I. Paris, Christmas Eve, c. 1830. In their Latin Quarter garret, the painter Marcello and poet Rodolfo try to keep warm by burning pages from Rodolfo’s latest drama. They are joined by their comrades — Colline, a young philosopher, and Schaunard, a musician who has landed a job and brings food, fuel and funds. But while they celebrate their unexpected fortune, the landlord, Benoit, arrives to collect the rent. Plying the older man with wine, they urge him to tell of his flirtations, then throw him out in mock indignation. As the friends depart for a celebration at the nearby Café Momus, Rodolfo promises to join them soon, staying behind to finish writing an article. There is another knock: a neighbor, Mimì, says her candle has gone out on the drafty stairs. Offering her wine when she feels faint, Rodolfo relights her candle and helps her to the door. Mimì realizes she has dropped her key, and as the two search for it, both candles are blown out. In the moonlight the poet takes the girl’s shivering hand, telling her his dreams. She then recounts her solitary life, embroidering flowers and waiting for spring. Drawn to each other, Mimì and Rodolfo leave for the café.

ACT II. Amid shouts of street hawkers, Rodolfo buys Mimì a bonnet near the Café Momus before introducing her to his friends. They all sit down and order supper. A toy vendor, Parpignol, passes by, besieged by children. Marcello’s former lover, Musetta, enters ostentatiously on the arm of the elderly, wealthy Alcindoro. Trying to regain the painter’s attention, she sings a waltz about her popularity. Complaining that her shoe pinches, Musetta sends Alcindoro to fetch a new pair, then falls into Marcello’s arms. Joining a group of marching soldiers, the Bohemians leave Alcindoro to face the bill when he returns.

THE END

Published in:  on February 21, 2008 at 10:00 am Leave a Comment
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