The Visitor

Rickshaw by Rabeya Jalil. Image courtesy of ArtChowk Gallery.

A working man in a coarse cap arrived at the front door of the handsome Madison Avenue brownstone of Mrs. Collier, a wealthy retired prosodist of wide renown, to whom he had mailed a poem of his composition. He had not heard back from her, and he had not made an appointment. Nevertheless, he permitted himself to knock on the finely crafted oak wood door of the impressive building in order to personally request her appraisal.

A housekeeper, dressed in a brocaded white blouse and a long black skirt, received the proletarian with some surprise and, following a pause, inquired after his purpose. He explained that his name was Alendale and that he had mailed a letter exactly twelve months to the day, after which the housekeeper recalled giving it to Mrs. Collier; and she asked him to enter and wait in the foyer. The housekeeper ascended an ornately adorned staircase as the man stood uneasily on a fine carpet, holding his cap in calloused hands.

Several minutes passed, and the woman returned, saying Mrs. Collier would spare a moment to see him in her study on the second floor. He followed the housekeeper, who called herself Sorsha, as she guided him to their destination, up the stairs and through a long corridor decorated with vases and paintings, until they arrived at the sheltered, secluded room. Mrs. Collier, in an armchair, gazed at the toiler, discerned him to be thirty-five, and smiled with apparent kindness as she connected the person to the poem.

She asked her housekeeper to bring a small lacquered box, in which she had preserved his writing as a curio, opened the box, and took out the yellowed stationery sheet drafted in pencil and dated September 24, 1909. She said matriarchally that she had scrutinized the poem when Sorsha first gave it to her last fall; however, it was not her practice to correspond with individuals outside her immediate acquaintance. The housekeeper stood nearby and listened intently.

Slowly descending, the man stopped for a moment on the landing half way down the staircase of the brownstone, peered out a window upon the busy street below, and, in his mind, heard his poem, for he had memorized it, sonorously play out before the morning scene.

Mrs. Collier invited the man to sit in a chair beside her. She perused the sheet, affected mild interest, read the lines aloud, and concluded in a whispery declaration that neglect of pentameter and grandeur made for a poor poem. That was all, and she told her guest she was sorry to disappoint him after he had waited a whole year and that it was now time for him to leave. He stood up, nodded, and turned toward the corridor to the stairs, still holding his cap.

The housekeeper, meanwhile, who had made her own assessment, had an impulse to disclose it, and after the visitor was out of view, she urged Mrs. Collier that what the ancient woman said was not helpful, that Mr. Alendale’s poem was a good contemporary poem. But Mrs. Collier was confident and pronounced solemnly that while the fashions of the times change, the standards for great poems remain the same.

Slowly descending, the man stopped for a moment on the landing half way down the staircase of the brownstone, peered out a window upon the busy street below, and, in his mind, heard his poem, for he had memorized it, sonorously play out before the morning scene.

Metropolitanly, people, buggies, trolleys, and horse-drawn carriages going to and fro with the energy of the twentieth century. Women in broad-brimmed hats with feathers; men in neckties, sack coats, top hats, and bowlers; boys in knickerbockers and flat caps; little girls in white dresses, socks, and hair ribbons; and hardy laborers carrying heavy sacks on their shoulders and placards on their fronts and backs—everyone and everything going about their way in the great pulsating engine-cylinder of urban humanity. Then, plowing through the picture, a motor bus swerving wildly and rampantly on the public city road, turning this way and diverging that way amid the frantic crowd, crashing against an electric lamppost, smashing into the side of a building.

The housekeeper dashed down the stairs to the landing window to see what happened. “That is my poem,” she heard the man say. “That is my poem.”

***

Ko Miyong, in her Pyongyang apartment, put the paper down with a feeling of contempt. “Ugh. What is this?” she said to herself. “Who reads stories like this?” She got up to get a glass of corn tea from her kitchen, returned to her living room, and turned on her television. As far as she was concerned, “The Visitor” was an old, irrelevant, and uninteresting story with nothing to say about her own time or her own needs.

“Besides,” she thought, “it’s sketchy, and there is no story yet. It doesn’t reveal much. I just don’t like short stories.”

She pulled out a container from under the television stand and fingered through her DVD collection of South Korean melodramas, which she had purchased from backstreet vendors behind Yongkwang Street. She could watch the shows for hours, and there were three hours of shows on each videodisc. After she found the one she wanted, she inserted it into a player and put on a set of headphones so that no one in the apartment building would hear or report her happy satisfaction.

How special the people in the melodramas appeared to her. How much better they lived, how much more attractive they looked, how much more romantically they spoke with their softer accents. She cried with their pain; she laughed with their joy; she celebrated with their achievements. And even if she was sometimes disappointed, seeing and feeling their world was always worth her while. At 4:00 a.m., she fell asleep, having watched four DVDs.

Daybreak came, and despite struggling to awake at the sound of her cell phone alarm, Miyong managed to make herself up in time for her Monday morning American literature seminar at Pyongyang University. She ran and arrived at the classroom, with ten minutes to spare, and shortly afterward, the visiting professor from Syracuse University walked in and greeted everyone. He stood beside the lectern and asked the five men and ten women in the room to share their reactions to “The Visitor.” A few students volunteered brief comments:

“The story was short,” said a young man.

“I thought it very sad,” a woman confessed.

“It was interesting,” remarked another woman.

“It is about inequality,” a man stated.

After she found the one she wanted, she inserted it into a player and put on a set of headphones so that no one in the apartment building would hear or report her happy satisfaction.

Miyong was tired, and her head was falling, which signaled to the professor to call on her. She lifted her head, and he repeated his request for her reaction. She felt a surge of candor and wanted to say the story was boring, that she hated it, but instead, she told the long-faced man, “I don’t know the people. I don’t know their time.”

“I am glad you said that,” the professor replied, and he began to lecture: “‘The Visitor’ is a work from a different time when different standards of literature prevailed. Nevertheless, when the story was published in the United States in 1910, it was among the most debated pieces of American belles-lettres. Here was a narrative that artistically portrayed the controversial ideas, for its era, that women could be wealthy and respected, that female housekeepers could be intelligent and discerning, and that the working class could be appreciators and innovators of poetic form. What was equally scandalous was the irony of the story, which formally conceded to upper-middle-class values by rejecting a manual worker’s mundane free-verse poem, but really, metaphorically, told readers that the upper-middle class was removed from everyday life and essentially inhabited a museum or a time capsule. We see that idea clearly represented when Alendale and Sorsha go up to the ‘second floor’ of the brownstone, when they walk through the corridor decorated with ‘vases and paintings,’ and when they enter the ‘sheltered, secluded room’ with the seated ‘ancient woman’ whose views ‘remain the same’ against the flow of time. Several past critics have explained that the irony and the metaphor allegorically extend to the characters’ names: Alendale means ‘harmonious valley’; Collier means ‘coal miner’; and Sorsha means ‘freedom.’ Genealogically, the old woman was completely cut off from her class roots. In short, ‘The Visitor’ was a controversial story because it implicitly invoked a rejection of relict traditions and static tastes and because it expressed sympathy for wage-earning men and women: the toilers, the housekeepers, the ‘hardy laborers.’ But despite the repulsion of the privileged and the self-satisfied in the 1910s, the general public opinion regarded the tale favorably, as a sensitive and thoughtful parable with truthful pictures of the times. And it was frequently reprinted and anthologized until 1945, when everything suddenly changed after Auschwitz and the Atom Bomb. Today, on its centenary, most people do not remember ‘The Visitor,’ while the few literary specialists who do, often read and interpret it at the exclusion of its social and artistic concerns. The ecocritics say it is anthropocentric. The feminist critics say it is sexist. The postcolonialist critics say it is hegemonic. What do you say?”

Miyong strained to listen to the lecture, unable to catch all of the visiting professor’s words. The other seminar students in the classroom were taking notes. She held her pen, trying to write, as her mind was drifting away into melodramas of medical doctors, revenge plots, and pure love.

Alzo David-West is a past associate editor of the North Korean Review. He writes literary fiction and serious poetry about North Korea (past and present). He is also published in the areas of aesthetics, language, literature, philosophy, politics, and social psychology. His creative writing about North Korea appears in Cha, Eastlit, Missing Slate, Offcourse, StepAway Magazine, Tower Journal, and Transnational Literature.