THE MAN WHO LAUGHS

"At certain times, perhaps on long spring evenings, still rainy and sad, with the cold bulbs in bloom and a light too mild for promise drifting over the sea, I have opened the windows and felt the house shrink back into wood and plaster and those humble elements of which it is made, and the life in it subside, leaving me exposed, empty-handed, but feeling a fierce and lawless quiver of freedom, of loneliness too harsh and perfect for me now to bear"--Alice Munro

I refilled my Cipralex prescription last week, but was a few days late, so it affected my dreams for a while.  About a week ago I dreamed of having been in a long, successful, marriage! (Never dreamed like that before.) And the same night, I dreamed of a thriller where a human uncovered a conspiracy by sharks to recruit humans to feed other humans to them. The other night I dreamed of Xenophon's Anabasis and the famous scene where the vanguard reaches the heights from which they can see the sea.

Finally finished the home issue of Lapham's Quarterly today.

We finished the documentary series The Vietnam War.  Very fine.

Today I finally reread the Classics Illustrated version of Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs that I bought some ten years ago, for the first time since childhood. (I approached it like an appointment with the dentist.) I've actually read the book, set in England ca. 1700, which is about the deliberately disfigured boy Gwynplaine--his mouth carved into a permanent "smile"-- who turns out to be the heir to a House of Lords title.  It's one of Hugo's especially symbolic efforts: his companions are the mountebank Ursus (Latin for bear), his pet wolf Homo (Latin for man), and a blind girl called Dea (Latin for goddess).

It was the most disturbing of the Classics Illustrated comics I read when I was young. (Moira was equally traumatized.) I've seen other illustrators' work, and Paul Leni's silent movie that inspired Bob Kane to create Batman's enemy the Joker. But artist Norman Nodel's square, basic approach, lacking in "style," somehow gets to me more than they do!