This Snarl of a Life

The fiercest hearts are in love with a wild perfection.

                              —from a letter to James Dickey

                                                          August 12, 1958

I’d like to begin by praising James Wright for having written the only poem about sports I have ever loved:

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October,

Ands gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

Of course it is not really about sports at all, but about hope and despair and the power of language to quicken our blood. My good friend and college roommate, Tom Hurley, once took me home with him to Youngstown, Ohio, a once-thriving blue-collar town, which by then, by the early 1980’s, was but a shadow of its former mighty self. After an afternoon of drinking beer in a dark old Polish bar, he’d led me through a hole in a chain-link fence to a point overlooking the wide Mahoning Valley, then still choked for as far as the eye could see with the hulking remains of the city’s once world-famous steel mills, those of U.S Steel and Youngstown Sheet and Tube, mills that at their peak had employed as many as 300, 000 workers, many of them from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The silence there was eerie. 

It was out of this background, this hardscrabble industrial Ohio, that James Wright made his first appearance on the American poetry scene in 1956 with his collection of formalist verse called The Green Wall. Then too began the brilliant, tortured, immeasurably rich and thrilling correspondence between Wright and his friends and fellow poets that comprises this volume, A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright. Of friends and correspondents, his were some of the best writers this country has known: Robert Lowell, James Dickey, Mary Oliver, Galway Kinnell, Theodore Roethke, Kenneth Rexroth, Anne Sexton, Louis Simpson, Jack Myers, E. L. Doctorow, Denise Levertov, Richard Hugo, A.R. Ammons, Louise Bogan, J.D. McClatchy, Robert Bly, W.D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, Hayden Carruth, Tomas Tranströmer, Robert Hass, Stanley Kunitz, Roger Hecht, Diane Wakowski, C.K. Williams, Philip Levine, Donald Hall, and Leslie Marmon Silko.

I have long been ambivalent about reading famous people’s letters, just as I have long been ambivalent about reading their memoirs, which have struck me, more often than not, as case studies in vanity and affectation. Not so with the letters of James Wright. “In a man’s letters,” writes Samuel Johnson, “a man’s soul lies naked.” And so it is with the letters in this marvelous collection, distinguished, on page after page, by Wright’s mighty, humble, generous, infinitely hard-suffering voice. At points his candor in the letters is so raw I winced.

Perhaps above all one is struck by the high level of conversation in these often everyday missives, by the stakes—by Wright’s rare, nearly pious devotion to what he called ‘the Great Conversation,’ a correspondence, a dialogue, “in which stories and poems and those who love them talk eternally with one another.” Poetry—one feels in these letters—is a matter of life or death. And so it is for those who know. One has only to scan the book’s index to get a sense of the glorious depth and erudition of this protracted conversation of his. In thinking about poetry and life, he writes with devotion of Catallus and Virgil, of Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Lorca, Neruda, Jiménez, Whitman, and Baudelaire, speaks with pride and knowing of Melville, Lawrence, Forster, Tolstoy, Dickens, and Camus, of Freud, Ramakrishna, and Marx. His hunger for ideas—and for the language that shapes them—was stupendous.

In his poetry Wright was a perfectionist, working tirelessly to develop his own voice and form, and struggling—with every muscle and sinew in his being—against the unshakable curse of competency, what his friend and mentor, James Dickey, called “the good enough that spoils the world.” With the intimate guidance of both Dickey and Bly, he labored restlessly as a poet, and while he often reached dizzying heights in his work and friendships, he was just as often laid low by lengthy bouts of depression and despair. He smoked and drank heavily, both of which destroyed his first marriage and so compounded his nervous exhaustion that at least twice he was hospitalized for it, for what, in one of his letters, he dismisses as just another “mild crack-up.” His life was hard, the price of his poetry dear, giving this intellectually dazzling correspondence a dark and tragic weight. Yet for all the emotional turmoil of his life, Wright believed in love, lived love each day as “a kind of miraculous agony” that one struggles in vain to escape.

James Wright (1927-1980) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1972 for his Collected Poems.

Peter Adam Nash

Oulipo, or The Workshop of Potential Literature

Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books

(Pourquoi je n'ai écrit aucun de mes livres)

By Marcel Bénabou

 

 

I love this picture of Georges Perec (seated) with Marcel Bénabou--taken sometime in the 1960's.  Together with Marcel Duchamp, Italo Calvino, Jacques Roubaud, and Harry Matthews, Perec and Bénabou were member of the playful and inventive Workshop of Potential Literature founded by Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais in 1960--a group of writers interested in what might best be called the playful or ludic forms of literary expression. I have written elsewhere in TR about Perec's novel A Void, a full-length and complex book that dispenses with all words that include the letter "e." Bénabou, a historian of ancient Rome and author of a dozen scholarly works in this field, also wrote numerous fictions and meta-fictions in the Oulipoian mode--think of Borges's Other Inquisitions  pushed further over the brink of self-reference, literary-mindedness, and surrealism.  Or, as Warren Mote suggests in his own witty introduction to Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, look to Raymond Roussel's truly eccentric How I Wrote Certain of My Books (which is about everything but) to get a sense of what a writer who loves puzzles can do with fictional form. This little-known circle of mostly Francophone writers not only eschewed the conventions of the realist novel, they also negated the conventions of modernist and post-modernist fiction as well by doing away with characters, plots, themes, and even the "anxiety of influence." Perec's masterpiece, Life: A User's Manual, takes the reader on a guided tour of an apartment building, room by room, fragmented story by fragmented story. And Bénabou's WIHNWAOMB not only renounces authorship, it also plays with the notion of the book as an actually existing entity--as if Heidegger were asking the question "What is called writing"?

"Don't you go believing, reader, that the books I haven't written are pure nothingness. Quite the contrary (let it be said once and for all), they are as if suspended in the literary universe. They exist in libraries by word, by groups of words, by entire sentences in certain cases. But they are surrounded by so much empty filler and trapped in such an overabundance of printed matter that I myself, truth be told, have not yet succeeded, despite my best efforts, in isolating them and putting them together. Indeed, the world seems to me full of plagiarists, which makes of my work a lengthy tracking down, an obstinate search for all those little fragments inexplicably snatched away from my future books."

Northrup Frye, in The Anatomy of Criticism, suggested that all existing literature belongs to a universe of words and sentences, thus unifying the efforts of all writers from all places and times. When I first encountered this idea in Frye it seemed to vindicate my own inchoate sense that literature had the mystical power of Kabbalah--that the word, the Word, was indeed the creator of a universe (of language), and that it was this world of words that made sense--if any sense was to be made--of the "real" world.  That language creates reality is hardly a new idea--George Steiner, for one, wrote brilliantly about the implications of this view in After Babel, and the fictions of Borges interrogate the world that is language (rather than the world "of" language). The writers of Ouilpo have created fictions--if they are that--whose oddity comes from their self-conscious examination of the conventions of writing, authorship, and of language-use itself. It seems, for Bénabou (and in some sense for Frye, Steiner, and Borges) that the act of writing is more akin to collecting words and sentences than of creating ex nihilo. The God/gods (Gen. 3:22) of Genesis create first with the Word, and then with earth and breath (Gen. 1:3; 2:7). The writer, in Bénabou's view, moves among fragments of language and pieces together works he "has not written" but dreamed into being.

The question Bénabou asks in Why I Have Not is this: what is the point of writing (or reading)? Why not feast on reality instead? Why shouldn't we give up stories--poems too, while we're at it. After all, "we" nearly have done so already, in the name of what we are told is more compelling, or practical, or profitable. Any writer worth his or her salt knows the answer to this question: "I accepted a book's function as being not a useless redoubling of reality but its continuation by other means."  The form of the book is endlessly plastic; instead of the mirror or the lamp, we discover in literature the earthiness that Yahweh shaped into human beings, a reality unlimited by human imagination. A book can be anything--even a book that is not a book.  When Bénabou claims not to have written his books he means it--authorship implies creating, but books are already written into the world and need only (!) be discovered. This is a Platonic notion of authorship, but appealing for where it leads--which is, like everything else, to a form of love:

"Well, let's say that in the final analysis, this text could claim to be a very classic novel. Is it not the story of an ever deferred meeting, of a frustrated love strewn with obstacles and crosspieces which is the victim of illusions and regrets? Of an unhappy and perhaps ultimately impossible love, that of its author for a certain idea of literature." 



I've been reading Bénabou's colleague Georges Perec this week as well--his Thoughts of Sorts--and came upon this passage last evening in "On the Art and Craft of Sorting Books" (I read it because I've been sorting mine: if you think Perec will be any help with your own literary taxonomies, forget it):

"Like the librarians in Borges's Babel looking for the book that contains the key to all others, we waver between the illusion of completion and the abyss of the ungraspable. In the name of completion we would like to believe that a single order exists which would allow us immediate access to knowledge; in the name of the ungraspable we wish to believe that order and disorder are two identical terms signifying chance." [my emphasis]

Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, trans. by David Kornacker, is published by the University of Nebraska Press (1996).
Perec's books are published by Verba Mundi, a division of David R. Godine, who makes lovely books for our disorganized, dusty, and inchoerent libraries.

George Ovitt (6/23/14)

(The middle photo is of George Steiner. The bottom photo is of Bénabou.)

Three Wrights at the Solstice

 

Charles Wright, James Wright, C.D. Wright

 

Summer is the time for poetry--it's curious how reading five or six poems can take an entire morning when you have the time to spare. For the past week I've been reading and rereading our new poet laureate's collection Appalachia, one part of a trilogy that is itself one part of a trilogy, all of which books and their resplendent poems ask us to reconsider just what it was we thought poetry was about. Wright is a deep thinker whose loosely structured but dense poems ask fundamental questions that aren't "about" life, or death, or God--though these are among the subjects Wright tackles--but about how a person asking questions about life and death and God goes about his business. Wright brings us along with him as his inner life moves restlessly through a repertoire of questions.  Since I'm in the habit of asking myself who a poet reminds me of--a bad habit, for one should just enjoy the poetic moment--I can't help but think of how much Gerard Manley Hopkins was after some of the same things as Wright. Both look deep into the core of things, into the mystical nature of the world, poke around a bit and bring up (more often than not) a shiny stone.  Here's a poem I can't stop thinking about called "Basic Dialogue":

The transformation of objects in space,
                                                            or objects in time,
To objects outside either, but tactile, still precise....
It's always the same problem--
Nothing's more abstract, more unreal
                                                            than what we actually see.
The job is to make it otherwise.

Two dead crepe-myrtle bushes,
                                                   tulips petal-splayed and swan-stemmed,
All blossoms gone from the blossoming trees--the new loss
Is not like old loss,
Winter-kill, a jubilant revelation, an artificial thing
Linked and lifted by pure description into the other world.

Self-oblivion, sacred information, God's nudge--
I think I'll piddle around by the lemon tree, thorns
Sharp as angel's teeth.
                                     I think
I'll lie down in the dandelions, the purple and white violets.
I think I'll keep on lying there, one eye cocked to heaven.

April eats from my fingers,
                                            nibble of dogwood, nip of pine.
Now is the time, Lord.
Syllables scatter across the new grass, in search of their words.
Such minor Armageddons.
Beside the waters of disremembering,
                                                             I lay me down.

Nothing is more unreal than what we really see...

I love the restlessness of this poem; the visceral feel and rub of specific objects (it's not a nature poem!), the casual movement from the mundane to the almost sublime (but never quite); the language ("piddle" and "nibble"), the shock that comes with the line "Now is the time, Lord," as if challenging God to make good on some promise that's encoded in the dying blossoms--a "jubilant revelation." Can a poet get away with being as philosophical as Wright? I don't like everything he does ("Syllables scatter across the new grass" is forced), but there's hardly a false move in the three books of Wright's I've been able to read.  How about this: "How small the stars are tonight, bandannaaed by moonlight, / How few and far between--Disordered and drained, like highlights in Dante's death mask." ("Star Turn II").  To ask about Wright's "themes" is to ask what a seventy-something-year-old, observant, well-read, and word-mad man might think about in the course of a day.  His theme, I guess, is how to live. Mine too.

And then there's C.D. (no relation to Charles, as far as I know). Carolyn D. Wright, of the Ozarks, has a sensibility quite different from that of her fellow southerner, Charles. Where Charles (of Charlottesville) is philosophical and formal, Jeffersonian, preoccupied with the deeper questions, C.D. is informal and immediate, raw and visceral, Jacksonian, casual in the way she presents the everyday shocks of life:


A girl on the stairs listens to her father
Beat up her mother.
Doors bang.
She comes down in her nightgown.

The piano stands there in the dark
Like a boy with an orchid.

She plays what she can
Then she turns the lamp on.

Her mother’s music is spread out
On the floor like brochures.

She hears her father
Running through the leaves.

The last black key
She presses stays down, makes no sound
Someone putting their tongue where their tooth had been.

("Tours")

God isn't going to be showing up anytime soon in a C.D. Wright poem. In C.D.'s poems folks are also waiting around, but not for the dying blossoms of winter; they're waiting instead for a bit of rest, or a rag of dignity:

Approximately Forever

She was changing on the inside

it was true what had been written

The new syntax of love

both sucked and burned

The secret clung around them

She took in the smell

Walking down a road to nowhere

every sound was relevant

The sun fell behind them now

he seemed strangely moved

She would take her clothes off

for the camera

she said in plain english

but she wasn’t holding that snake

"The new syntax of love." I was just downtown here in Albuquerque picking up an old pair of boots I'd had resoled. The shoemaker is an Hispanic man a decade or so older than I am (and going into his shop always takes me back several decades).  As he handed me my boots I joked that I'd love to go dancing in them now that they were repaired, but that, unfortunately, all the good country bars in our hometown were closed. And he said, "Nothing's like it used to be anymore," and I thought how often I've heard that line lately--how often I've said it myself. C.D. Wright, bless her poetic soul, is a poet who, among other things, laments the way things once were, or perhaps the way we wish they had once been. 

Then there's James--the Ur/Uber-Wright. I'm tempted to reproduce "The Blessing" here, but I'll restrain myself and offer this one instead. You'll notice how the great bard of Dobbs Ferry, Ohio, a man who in his youth looked eerily like my deceased best male friend, threads the needle between Charles and C.D.--there's the quotidian and the metaphysical in every line Jim wrote:

Crouched down by a roadside windbreak

At the edge of the prairie,

I flinch under the baleful jangling of wind

Through the telephone wires, a wilderness of voices

Blown for a thousand miles, for a hundred years.

They all have the same name, and the name is lost.

So: it is not me, it is not my love

Alone lost.

The grief that I hear is my life somewhere.

Now I am speaking with the voice

Of a scarecrow that stands up

And suddenly turns into a bird.

This field is the beginning of my native land,

This place of skull where I hear myself weeping.

("Listening to the Mourners")

I've been immersed in poetry for weeks now. Translating some contemporary French poets, reading through the Complete Lorca, dipping into old favorites--Maxine Kumin, Stephan Dunn, Ruth Stone, John Logan--trying some translations of Antonio Machado (without success), and writing some new ones of my own.  Summer is the time for poetry, baseball, beer, and long walks...Enjoy!

Try these books:

Appalachia, by Charles Wright (FSG)

Rising, Falling, Hovering, by C.D. Wright (Copper Canyon)

Above the River: The Complete Poems, James Wright (Noonday Press)

George Ovitt, (6/18/14)

 

A Truer and More Terrible Place

The Way to the Cats by Yehoshua Kenaz

What does it feel like to be old and helpless? What does it feel like to be old, enfeebled, and alone? While surely I have caught a glimpse of it, now and then, felt a twinge of it, if only in the seditious aching of muscles and joints, it remains hard if not impossible for me to imagine a day when my life is no longer my own.

If death is the most universal human truth, then aging—the path to get there—runs a close and certain second. Again and again my mother-in-law has wrung from my wife and me the solemn promise that we will never commit her to a nursing home, no matter what, that if one day we find her collapsed in her house we will make no effort to revive her but turn swiftly on our heels and close the door behind us. Terrible as this may sound, the specter of the nursing home looms just this largely, just this darkly, in the minds of so many elderly people today—and for good reason, as the statistics alone are grim. Once removed from familiar surroundings, once stripped of their autonomy (however impoverished it may seem or be), elderly people often lose the will to live—and quickly. Here in the U.S. the first-year morality rate of men and women moving into skilled nursing facilities is as high as 50 to 60%. In the first six months the rate is even higher.*

 

Kenaz’s novel The Way to the Cats, tells a story of “the isolation, pain, and terror of the aged with bold objectivity,” writes Philip Roth, “neither minimizing nor exaggerating the everyday smallness, even the banality, of a human life soon to be extinguished.” The novel’s main character, the vain and finical retired French teacher, Yolanda Moscowitz, is haunted by her own aging and helplessness, an experience exasperated, suppurated suddenly, in the Tel Aviv nursing home where she is recuperating from a fall, when a friend and fellow patient, the artist, Lazar Kagan, shows her the sketch he has done of her:

He wheeled his chair toward her, and when he was close, he turned the page with the drawing to face her. What she saw resembled a spider’s web. An infinity of fine and thick threads stretching lengthways and sideways and crosswise, straight threads and humped ones, wavy and rounded, creating in their density, as on a map, hollows and peaks, heights and slopes, and among them allusions to the features of a face, blank, empty slits of eyes, eyebrows like black bruises, the shadow of a nose and two pits of nostrils, shriveled lips, the ruins surviving a disaster, shadows gradually being eaten away and obliterated with the death of the flesh.

For all his good intentions, it is for Mrs. Moscowitz a glimpse of herself, a presentiment, she simply cannot shake:

On her way to bed, Mrs. Moscowitz went into the bathroom. In the mirror she saw the strange woman who had begun to invade her thoughts and memories, on her face a close network of fine deep wrinkles, spun out like innumerable spiders’ webs. The face of the woman in the mirror was very strange. It was swollen and trembling with effort, as if the woman wanted to say something to her but was unable to do so…

Later, in speaking to the artist himself, she despairs:

“Lately, when I look in the mirror, I see that woman with those hairs that are falling on each other, and that face, with the wrinkles. Like you made her in that picture. You know her. Not me. And she isn’t me. She’s not normal. And little by little she’s sending her thoughts into my head, what she remembers that once happened to her. And it’s nothing to do from my life. It isn’t Moscowitz Yolanda, believe me! It’s something else. I’m so ashamed…”

Yet the twist to this remarkable novel, what makes it so heartbreaking, so poignant, is the discovery that Mrs. Moscowitz had been so lonely in her existence as an elderly woman on her own in the city that, for all the abuse she suffers on the crowded ward, all the pettiness and rivalry, all the screams of terror and cries for help, she is actually reluctant to go home. 

Yehoshua Kenaz is the author of several novels and story collections. He was born in Israel in 1937 and now lives in Tel Aviv.

*lifecarefunding.com

Peter Adam Nash

"History Has No Use for Witnesses"

"Communism ought to be saved from Communism. But people won't go without an idea, never. It would be easy to die if this were mankind's last great myth. To die, to commit the greatest crimes, so that people should never again believe in any sun. But it's no use. After a while some new madman will come along; he'll get hold of an icon and run through the city carrying it.....if I were born again, and if I wanted to take revenge on people, I'd create a new ideology for them. To lead crowds to the sunny days of the future--that's the biggest joke of all."

The Graveyard, by Marek Hlasko

He looks a little like James Dean, or maybe Kerouac--thick hair swept back, the scowl, cigarette (freshly lit for every photo) clenched between his teeth. Hlasko was  tough guy, a hard drinker, an "enemy of the people" and died at age 35, probably from a mix of booze and drugs. A worker rather than a full-time writer; certainly not an academic. Hlasko, born in Warsaw, worked in construction and transportation and had frequent run-ins with the communist authorities.  He began his publishing career writing for Trybuna Ludowa, then wrote stories that slowly found an audience, and, free at last of menial labor for the state, began to write the raw, deeply alienated novels that are the basis of his fame in Poland.  He had to leave Poland to live in the West--it was that or give up writing, and Hlasko lived to write. He settled in France, but also, at the invitation of Roman Polanski, briefly lived in Hollywood. There was much drinking, love affairs, suicide attempts--the usual afflatus of the alienated genius-author. Luckily, we have the books. 

The Graveyard is a darkly satirical dissection of the Communist Party's rule in Poland in the 1950's. Franciszek Kowalski, a former Polish communist partisan during the War, a (to all appearances) loyal apparatchik, goes out for a few vodkas with a former comrade. He has too many drinks, and on his way home has a run-in with the security forces, is detained, and through circumstances that neither he nor the reader entirely understand--for it is, after all, the sort of world where things simply happen--loses his membership in the communist party--which means he loses his job, his home, his family, and his identity. Of course, this sort of thing happens here as well, though not so melodramatically; nowadays you might simply wake up and someone has taken your identity--so it goes.  Oddly, Kowalski remains semi-loyal to the Party--he even expresses his pride in the turncoats (or loyalists) who denounced him.  The skeptical reader--how could such things have happened?--needs to recall that The Graveyard is set in he 50's: in the era of the Bomb, of NATO, of the Berlin Crisis, of the Suez Crisis, of the Truman Doctrine--in other words, during the decade of the hottest part of the Cold War. Kowalski, eager to be reinstated in the good graces of the Party, applies to his former partisan comrades for support in his appeal, only to find that the men who fought for a communist future against the atavistic Nazis now find themselves either alienated from their former ideals or working as hired thugs and spies in the service of the regime. Neither option satisfies Kowalski, who yearns for the intellectual and ideological certainty that his former standing in the Party provided. 

Reading this short novel reminds one of the great fictional expressions of disillusionment with the ideas of Marxist-Leninist thought: Darkness At Noon, 1984, The First Circle, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. The Graveyard is in some ways even more compelling than these other novels insofar as it begins with what is seen by the protagonist as his unfortunate, even tragic  alienation from the powerful ideal that had sustained him during the darkest days of the struggle against fascism. Koestler,

Orwell, and Solsjenitsyn, begin with an assumption of alienation from communism. Not Hlasko. The satire unleashed against the pro-Moscow regime in Warsaw by Hlasko is scathing, yet at the same time subtly explores the cost to an individual of losing his "true faith," even if it is a hideous one. One has the sense that what interests Hlasko, aside from settling scores with a regime that banished him, is exploring the apostate's disillusionment with a political system that had once literally saved his life. Kowalski believes in communism not for the sake of a job or for the convenience of an apartment, but because he believes, or  believed, in the brotherhood of man, in the future triumph of a just and humane communist revolution, in the goodness of his comrades and the correctness of their ideals. He had fought and nearly died for something he believed worth fighting and dying for.  To have that faith taken away by the ubiquitous security police and party hacks was, for Kowalski, and perhaps for Hlasko as well, unbearable. For, in the end, what is the alternative? Capitalism, with its own cruelties, or nihilism with its denial of all values? Kowalski wasn't cut out for cynicism, and Hlasko brilliantly sets out a cruel sets of options for his hero.  What is to be done? One might come to love Big Brother, but that's too simple a solution for Hlasko, who has imbued his beleaguered hero with a depth and complexity not often found in political novels.  

(Warsaw at the end of World War II)

The Graveyard is published by Melville House.  The novel was translated from the Polish by Norbert Guterman.

George Ovitt (6/8/2014) 

 

Almost Summer

Almost summer in New Mexico.  The winds have died down, the mornings are cool and clear, and we even had three days of afternoon showers. The temperature today was a tepid 94 F, headed to 97 F tomorrow. Not only is the polar ice melting, the mountains are turning to slush. A few days ago my friend from UPS dropped off one of my summer books, Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, Book III.  Archipelago Books has done a beautiful job with this volume--it's an undersized hardback with creamy paper, ribbed end-pages, and a crisp clean type.  This volume begins in 1969--Karl Ove is a one-year-old--and ends when he is thirteen. As the novel/memoir opens, his family has just moved so that his father can take a position as a rural middle school teacher on an island off the coast of Norway..  The tone of the first pages is already elegiac, as if from the moment he came into this sad world Knausgaard was prepared to both long for and reject his childhood. In this way he is unlike Proust (with whom he is often and inaccurately compared), who laments "lost time" but whose art heightens and vivifies events; Knausgaard, on the other hand, sees through a glass darkly, or rather, sees darkness everywhere. Even in the early pages of volume III there are premonitions of family troubles and inevitable unhappiness.  For Karl Ove, all contentment is elusive: his father is cruel; his mother is kind but invisible, his brother and friends feel like ghosts.  He grows up an overly-sensitive, even effeminate boy; in his frequent spilling of tears, his lust for, but fear of girls, his meek surrender to the will of his peers, his chronic inner turmoil, Karl Ove seems detached from his surroundings, too passive to make a strong impression on anyone.  Here is where I think we find the essence of Knausgaard's "struggle"--not with the forces that act upon him, but with his own inability to act in pursuit of a life that suits him (I predict that in 2017, when the final volume arrives--if I'm still among the reading public--the final act of self-definition that is the "struggle" will be KOK's decision, like Proust's, to become a writer.) This is what attracts me to these books--through their evocation of a quotidian life they remind me not so much of my own struggles, but of the fact of struggle that lies at the heart of any self-conscious life.  For all the clumsiness of these books--they are at times maudlin, repetitive, and reeking with self-pity--Knausgaard is a great Romantic--perhaps the Shelley of our age.

Mid-way through My Struggle I thought of Stop-Time, the brilliant, iconic memoir that Frank Conroy published in the 1960's, the first truly raw and wholly honest memoir I'd ever read.  Compared to Conroy's youthful self, Karl Ove feels almost transparent--lacking the density and complexity of a fully-formed person.  Perhaps this ephemeral self is the product of Knausgaard's working out of the relationship between his human voice and his literary voice. Unlike Conroy, Knausgaard doesn't wholly succeed in breaking down the barriers between the artist and the person he once was. Whole pages of the book feel rote, as if written in haste, or in a trance, without concern for their artfulness.  It seems ungrateful to ask for even more details in such a long and dense book, but I often wished for a fuller sense of the inner life of the narrator--for it is in the inner life and not in the external behaviors that we come to know another person. By the end of the book Karl and his family have moved on, and the world of his childhood is lost, he tells us, forever.  It would be at this point that Proust or Joseph Roth or Isaac Bashevis Singer would commence the resurrection of this lost world, using the medium of storytelling not only to preserve specific events, but to preserve the inner world lost to time. 

Speaking of lost worlds, I'm near the end of George Prochnik's remarkable The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, an enthralling study of Zweig's years of exile from his beloved Vienna.  Prochnik, whose own family was displaced by the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930's, recounts the pain that the loss of Zweig's home, his library, his friends, and, most of all, his ties to the cultural world of Vienna inflicted on one of greatest and most prolific writers in the German language.  Unlike Thomas Mann or Albert Einstein (to name only two of the more famous exiles from Hitler's Germany), Zweig was never able to find happiness in the New Worlds of London, New York, or, at the end of his life, Petropolis, a small town in Brazil.  Of course even in exile Stefan and his second wife, Lotte, (that's Zweig''s first wife, Friedeike, in a 1924 photograph) found moments of happiness, made friends with other exiles, and Zweig wrote The World of Yesterday--the best book on the decline and fall of the Hapsburg Empire.  In despair at the spread of fascism to Brazil (under Vargas' "Novo Estato"), Zweig and Lotte committed suicide in Petropolis on February 23, 1942. 

Other books on my desk include Thomas Piketty's monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a work of dense macroeconomics--lots of data, which is just the way economics should be--but so clearly written you'll feel as if you understand exactly what is being argued (though you might be mistaken).  And is there a more pressing topic than the one Piketty addresses--inequality in incomes and the political ramifications of this deepening rift in Western societies?  I have heard a lot of red-baiting swipes at Piketty in the blogosphere and read several in the pages of the Times.  But the truth is that Piketty is no Marxist, and that his data appear irrefutable. 

I'm also looking forward to reading Kenzaburo Oe's The Changling--published in Japan a decade ago and translated into English in 2010.  I've always enjoyed Oe's slight, deeply personal ficitions, his accounts (in particular) of life with his son.  The Changling is based on Oe's relationship with the Japanese director Juzo Itami, and, in particular, with the latter's suicide. 

Other pending books: Canti by Giacomo Leopardi in the Jonathan Galassi translation....The Collected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, edited by Christopher Maurer (both of these beautiful volumes are published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux; now, with Knopf gone the way of Penguin and the rest, FSG is the go-to commercial publisher of  high quality literary works).  To my shame and embarrassment, I once again failed to finish Middlemarch and have reluctantly decided to save this book for the afterlife, if books are permitted and time is as expansive as the theologians claim.  I also hope to finish Joan Richardson's biography of Wallace Stevens, Reiner Stach's final volume of his Kafka project, and Fred Kaplan's biography of my third favorite president, John Quincy Adams, all in this life--by August. If the world doesn't melt in the meantime. 

Happy reading...

George Ovitt (5/27/14)