Writers and Offensive Opinions

Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke, and a thought on extra-literary matters

Back in the 1970's, Avon Books--a great source for European and Latin American literature in translation, now, of course, defunct as a literary press--issued an inexpensive paperback entitled Three by Peter Handke.  The volume contained two novellas (or novels, I can never tell the difference) "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick"; "Short Letter, Long Farewell"; and "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams," a memoir of Handke's mother, an "invisible woman," who committed suicide in 1971.  I reread "A Sorrow" a year ago at this time, right after my mother's death, and I was stirred again by the beauty of Handke's prose and the depth of the feeling he conveys for his mother.  "Short Letter, Long Farewell", an off-kilter meditation on a marriage, 70's-style angst, and American culture has been a favorite of mine since I first read it, though it is, I'm sorry to say, rather dated in its view of the United States. Especially off-putting is the hipster sensibility of the narrator and consequent naive nature of his view of Americans: he's no Tocqueville or Harriet Martineau* but a visitor more in the mold of Dickens or Lorca--collecting impressions rather than forming judgments.  "Short Letter" turns on the narrator's pursuit of his wife across the interstate highway system from Boston to LA, and on his encounters with what I guess Handke thought of as "authentic" Americans: workers and students and Negroes and, at the climax, the director John Ford (by no means an ordinary man, but a chronicler of America and, given Handke's involvement with film, an apt figure to provide the choral wrap-up to the journey and the novel).

Handke, born in 1941, has been a great traveler--his collection of essays Once Again for Thucydides is surely one of the better representatives of this genre--and always both a poetic and dramatic writer.  "Short Letter" is full of gems like this one:

"They [two lovers] were so engrossed in each other that the most trifling objects that had accumulated in the course of their life together became as precious to them as the parts of their own bodies."

One of the narrator's acquaintances says, "I'm completely cut off from life...It exists for me only in comparisons with my inner states. I haven't seen a fish being scaled for years, but last night when I woke up in a state of anxiety, I saw glittering scales all around me. I haven't been exposed to nature for ages, but when I reach out my hand for my glass, I feel like the body of a spider that's just been killed and is slowly, as though still alive, sinking to the ground on its thread. I've stopped noticing the commonplace acts of life, like putting my hat on, riding on escalators, or eating a soft-boiled egg; but later they come back to me as metaphors of my situation."

Legend has it that when he was just twenty-two, starting out as a writer, Handke proclaimed that he was the next Kafka.  Reading his plays and short novels, the comparison to Kafka seems inaccurate.  More apt would be to think of Handke as a German  Beckett, but then only as an approximation.  Handke is a unique figure, not exactly like anyone else, a writer whose concern with human identity, personal authenticity, the shallowness of Western culture, and the problem of communicating one's inner life through language (hence, his collaborations with Wim Wenders) remind me, loosely, of Max Frisch and Thomas Pletzinger (whose Funeral for a Dog has Handke tones and narrative misdirection).  It's not that these themes aren't common enough in contemporary fiction, nor is it true that Handke's loose (or non-existent) plots are atypical; but Handke has a style--poetic and vernacular, visually detailed and yet elusive, hip and cerebral--that is all his own. 

One cannot speak about or read Handke these days without mentioning his unspeakable comments on Serbia both during and after the genocide in the former Yugoslavia. He has defended Serbian atrocities against Croatians, Muslims, Bosnians and others and, in 2006, eulogized Slobodan Milosevic. I'm often embarrassed by the callous disregard of history evinced by certain writers--Brecht's defense of Stalin, Celine's anti-antisemitism and general bigotry, Knut Hamsun's Nazism, and so forth--it's as if some writers' imaginations cannot extend to actual human beings--this was certainly the case with Brecht, a revolutionary who had no feeling for people.  Handke has always been an iconoclast and something of an outrider, and one enjoys the spectacle of a writer challenging the tedious status quo; however, there are limits to one's toleration of cruel political views. Unfortunately, this time around I found myself losing patience with passages in "Short Letter" that never bothered me before, no doubt because I was recalling Handke's support for Milosevic, a man who was guilty of (at least) facilitating genocide.  My reaction to Handke upset me if only because it meant I would never be able to recapture the pleasure I had once taken in his books.  I loathe censorship--and am sorry that Handke has suffered suppression of his work since 2006.  But as important as art is in helping to define a life worth living, no art, or artist, transcends the boundaries of ordinary decency, and no reader should overlook an artist's complacency in the face of  cruelty. 

 

*Why Harriet Martineau's Society in America (1837), roughly contemporary with Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835), isn't more popular is a mystery to me--it's an insightful book by any standard.

Handke's Short Letter, Long Farewell has been published by New York Review Books.  One can still find the old Avon Three Novels for pennies.  

The Bewilderers: 1960’s Rhodesia

Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

The condition of native is a nervous condition.

It is no wonder that Zimbabwean author, Tsitsi Dangarembga, chose this line of Sartre's from his introduction to Fanon’s landmark study The Wretched of the Earth as the epigraph and title for her very fine first novel, Nervous Conditions. Indeed, arguably no one has ever written more cogently, more redoubtably, about the cultural and existential catastrophe of colonialism (and the need for violent rebellion against it) than Martinique-born, French-Algerian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer, Frantz Fanon.

Early on in his book Fanon talks about what he calls ‘the bewilderers,’ that multitude of moral teachers and counselors employed by a colonial power to separate the exploited from those in power, to drop upon them daily—in their homes, in their workplaces and schools—what Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o calls the ‘cultural bomb.’ “The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.”

Filled with preachers and teachers, Dangarembga’s a novel wrestles with exactly that matter. Never dogmatic, never didactic in temperament or style, Nervous Conditions is a profoundly human, astutely articulated tale about a young girl’s coming-of-age in 1960’s Rhodesia* (now Zimbabwe)—one of the last, most stubborn colonial holdouts on the continent, excepting only Namibia (1990) and Eritrea (1993). With great attention to detail, Dangarembga follows the main character, Tambudzai, or Tambu, as she struggles against the odds to negotiate her way through the tangled web of life under colonial rule, that Gordian knot of Christianity, patriarchy, racism, materialism, and cultural self-loathing that defined (perhaps in part still defines) the experience of Black Africans from Morocco and Egypt to Namibia, South Africa, and Mozambique. Fortunately for Tambu, she is a quick study, so that when her spoiled older brother Nhamo, the prince and hope of her all but impoverished family, is swiftly destroyed by the colonial system, his identity shattered to bits, she is finally given a chance to make her way. This not to reveal the story prematurely, as the author herself gives us this and more in the novel’s opening paragraph, a provocative sketch of the story as a whole:

I was not sorry when my brother died.  Nor am I apologizing for my callousness, as you may define it, my lack of feeling.  For it is not that at all.  I feel many things these days, much more than I was able to fell in the days when I was young and my brother died, and thee are reasons for this more than the mere consequence of age.  Therefore I shall not apologize but begin by recalling the facts as I remember them that led up to my brother’s death, the events that put me in a potion to write this account.  For though the event of my brother’s passing and the events of my story cannot be separated, my story is not after all about death, but about my escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s rebellion--Nyasha, far-minded and isolated, my uncle’s daughter, whose rebellion may not in the end have been successful. 

I came across the novel one year, while teaching at a boy’s school in Manhattan, when I set out to find a book, preferably by a female author of color, that I could pair with Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Nervous Conditions proved the perfect choice. As I wrote back in 1991, in an article for The Collegiate Review:

The mere juxtaposition of these books was enough for the students to begin comparing them after only the first reading in Nervous Conditions. Using each as a lens by which to view the other, the students were quick to recognize that in both cases the protagonist was an innocent child opening his or her eyes to a world in which, for reasons largely coded and obscure to them, they were outsiders and outcasts. We were forced to investigate the issues of cultural identity and the crippling, often paradoxical demands of assimilation. 

Seen in retrospect, through Tambu’s keen and dauntless eye, Nervous Conditions is a sophisticated, highly readable, deeply satisfying tale that you’re sure to find persuasive. Recommended by the African Book Club as “a thought-provoking novel that packs a huge number of complicated ideas into a simple and engaging story,” Nervous Conditions was awarded the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 1989.

Also recommended:  The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon and Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature and Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. 

* Rhodesia was named after English-South African mining magnate, founder of De Beers diamond company, politician, and ardent proponent of colonialism, Cecil Rhodes. In 1902 he established the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate. 

Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, in 1959.  She lived in England from age two through age six. She then returned to Rhodesia and finished her schooling in a missionary school there. She later returned to England to pursue a degree in medicine at Cambridge University but homesickness soon drove her back to Rhodesia where she continued her studies, first in psychology and then in film production and direction. She has written a play called She No Longer Weeps and a sequel to Nervous Conditions entitled The Book of Not (thanks in part to www.wmich.edu).

Peter Adam Nash

Stand Still Like the Hummingbird....

Judging Books by Their Covers: Henry Miller

I've made a few literary pilgrimages in my life.  I spent a memorable afternoon with Joseph Heller in his Upper West Side apartment in July, 1967 (I was inviting him to read at my college, which he graciously, and memorably, agreed to do).  Under the spell of One Hundred Years of Solitude I flew to Mexico City in 1988 and took a bus to Cuernavaca hoping to waylay Garcia Marquez in one of his favorite cafes--nothing doing--but sitting night after night in the zocolo  (right there under the arches) drinking Dos Equis and pretending I was waiting for the genius of Macondo to drop by almost redeemed the trip.  In Toronto I looked up Margaret Atwood in the phone book and walked by what I was told was her house; I stalked Philip Roth at UPenn for years, never once laying eyes on him (he was perpetually on leave).  I imagined a trip to Big Sur and an afternoon with Henry Miller--one of the literary idols of my youth--but I never got around to visiting California and was a little frightened at the prospect of a writer whose most recent title was Crazy Cock.  Yes, pathetic stuff; being a literary groupie is really no better than hiding in the bushes in Bel Aire hoping for a glimpse of Kourtney Kardashian or Brad Pitt.  But I get the whole groupie thing: you want to affirm that these magicians--the writers I mean--are somehow like you; that they perspire and shop for groceries and worry about the pages they wrote that morning.  And you (or me anyway) want to say thank you for making life a hell of lot better than it would otherwise be.

Which brings me to the subject of Henry Miller and the greatest book title (in English) of all time: Stand Still Like the Hummingbird. I see hummingbirds most days in the summer--there's a feeder outside my window--and I've noticed that there is a manner in which hummingbirds "stand still" that is remarkable.  First of all, they don't quite stand still--they oscillate with the beat (up to one hundred per second) of their wings. They appear to pause, to consider, and then to veer off on the sort of mission that preoccupies nectarivores. With their tiny hearts beating up to 1200 times per second--1200!--these lovely ruby-throated specks haven't the leisure or the inclination to remain in one place for long. Nor did Mr. Miller.  He was the sort of restless writer who moved from one idea to another, one obsession to another, with the rapidity of trochilidae. Oh yes, the Tropics and Nexus trilogy were preoccupied with sex, and Miller's libido was his best-known characteristic (but no more so than his idol D.H. Lawrence fetishized his John Thomas or Mr. Updike admired his), but Miller was also a travel writer, a critic, a wonderful book reviewer, a philosopher, and, above all, a spiritual writer, a California Buddhist:

  "We live as ghosts amid a world in ruins. All is senseless repetition. 'There am I, and there I always am,' as Rimbaud said. Neither Lao-Tzu, nor the Enlightened One, nor the Prince of Peace made any excursions into outer space, unless in their astral bodies. They changed worlds, yes. They traveled far. But standing still."

Miller isn't much read these days.  His books first appeared in drab New Direction covers of black and white--every one of them stark and gorgeous and with the best titles ever imagined: The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Big Sur and Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, The Colossus of Maroussi (the book to carry with you to Greece), Black Spring, The Cosmological Eye, Remember to Remember, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, The Wisdom of the Heart.  No author photos; never a blurb from the Times, no mention of awards as there never were any.  Miller never had a grant from the Guggenheims or the Rockefellers--in Paris, in the lost generation after the Lost Generation, he lived in Clichy (Quiet Days in Clichy) at 4 Avenue Anatole-France, another of my author-pilgrimage sites, and hung out with Anais Nin whose diaries are full of Henry's affairs and love-hate of June (his wife) and obsession with work. He neglected to get his MFA from Iowa, never taught creative writing, (wrote ad copy instead), never made it into the literary reviews, wasn't on Charlie Rose, didn't get an invite to Yaddo or a Big Contract with a corporate publisher.  Miller was a writer of the old school, the hand-to-mouth kind, but he found the great James Laughlin, and kept writing up to the end--in his 80's a parody of himself (the artist as lecher), but a great composer of sentences and of titles. A writer pure and simple.  Skip the lousy movies made of his books and pick up The Books in My Life or Time of the Assassins--the best thing ever written about Rimbaud.  

And may you stand still like the hummingbird.

George Ovitt (6/30/13)