Madness Immortal

 

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

This extraordinary novel is worth buying for the introduction alone. No kidding: you could read it and feel sated; you could read it and feel redeemed—so fine, so telling is the prose. The introduction (some thirty-seven pages short) offers not just a trenchant glimpse of the novel itself, outlining and extolling the story, as it does, in some of the freshest, most surprising language I’ve read in years, but represents a salient example of the deft, demiurgical criticism for which the poet, Randall Jarrell (see photo below), was well if less commonly known.

While titled The Man Who Loved Children, a facetious reference to the man of the house, the vain, happy, puritanical, self-glorious father, ‘Mr. Big-Me,’ Sam Pollit, it is unquestionably around his wife, the neurotic, brilliant, suicidal martyr of a mother, the ‘Great I Am,’ Henrietta Pollit née Collyer, that this astonishing novel turns. As Jarrell himself remarks in his introduction, “…the book’s center of gravity, of tragic weight, is Henny.” Indeed, remarkable as Sam and his daughter Louise are as full-blown eccentrics in their own stupendous rights, they pale in comparison to the “dirty cracked plate” of a woman and mother, the deeply, darkly, monstrously empathetic Henny who haunts Tohoga House:

She was an old fashioned woman. She had the calm of frequentation; she belonged to this house and it to her. Though she was a prisoner in it, she possessed it. She and it were her marriage. She was indwelling in every board and stone of it: every fold in the curtains had a meaning (perhaps they were so folded to hide a darn or stain); every room was a phial of revelation to be poured out some feverish night in the secret laboratories of her decisions, full of living cancers of insult, leprosies of disillusion, abscesses of grudge, gangrene of nevermore, quintan fevers of divorce, and all the proliferating miseries, the running sores and thick scabs, for which (and not for its heavenly joys) the flesh of marriage is so heavily veiled and conventually interned.

To read of Henny’s life, to follow (with an eye to form and coherence) her useless existential flailing is to feel the fate of women and mothers everywhere, if in extremis ad infinitum—the smothered frustrations; the bleak, inchoate rage; the grinding daily theft of autonomy, of self. She is “one of those women who secretly sympathize with all women against all men; life,” she knows in her bones, is “a rotten deal, with men holding all the aces.” She—clam-and-oyster Baltimore belle, now wretched wife and mother—“shares helplessly ‘the natural outlawry of womankind.’” It is through the sieve of her experience, through the fractured lens of her madness, that the entire story is pulled. Yet to feel sorry for her, to reduce her to an object of pity, is simply not possible. “There is something grand and final, indifferent to our pity about Henny,” reflects Jarrell, at one point in his introduction, “one of those immortal beings in whom the tragedy of existence is embodied, she looks unseeingly past her mortal readers.”

Strange feeling, that.  

 

Set in “Tohoga House” in 1940’s Georgetown, D.C., an overgrown zoo of a place with its teeming Pollit family and their menagerie of rescued creatures, the ramshackle house and garden is an American Eden run riot and abandoned by God—Sam, with his gluttonous naming (or re-naming of everything and everyone) its exasperating Adam, the heart-scarred Henny, its remote and bitter Eve. 

The Man Who Loved Children is one those rare novels that seem to come out of nowhere—starkly original, immaculately, miraculously conceived. You will never read anything like it.  

(Title page of David Foster Wallace’s copy of The Man Who Loved Children.)

Christina Stead, a lifelong Marxist, was the author of over a dozen works of fiction and the recipient of the prestigious Patrick White Prize. She was born in Sydney Australia in 1902, lived in France and Spain and the United States, only to return to Australia where she died in 1983.

*The lead image is a study by Swiss artist, Alberto Giacometti.

Peter Adam Nash

Geoff Dyer is a Very Strange Person

Three by Dyer:

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence

The Ongoing Moment

Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

I always laugh when I think of Eric Idle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail saying (of the Frenchman who is taunting King Arthur) "What a strange person!"  Though he's extremely smart and one of the most engaging writers around, when I read Dyer I feel that either he is a very strange person (and wouldn't be offended to hear you say it and would be great fun to get drunk with) or he has perfected a literary persona who could be a member of the cast of Fawlty Towers.  In my favorite of his books, Out of Sheer Rage, a memoir/biography/travelogue circling around the subject of how Dyer manages to avoid writing a book about D.H. Lawrence, Dyer channels a strange brew of Thomas Bernhard and Rodney Dangerfield--an intellectual malcontent who travels compulsively, is misanthropic and self-absorbed, hedonistic (Dyer often smokes weed and, despite his minutely categorized physical deformities, is never without a beautiful woman with whom to have lots of sex), untrustworthy, opinionated, and, come to think of it, not all that different from David Herbert himself.  It didn't occur to me until late in the book that Dyer was channeling Lawrence--a writer so self-absorbed, priapistic, and clueless about other people as to invite exactly the sort of parody served up by the witty Dyer. But even more than Lawrence--a writer I have never been able to warm up to, and whose books I read only for the sake of some grad school course--the presiding genius of Out of Sheer Rage is Bernhard, as here, in Dyer's send up of academic literary criticism:

"I burned it [the book of lit-crit essays about Lawrence] in self-defense.  It was the book or me because writing like that kills everything it touches.  That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches.  Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch."

That's Bernhard: no complaint is worth making that can't be made three times.  And no grievance is ever anything less than fatal--compare Dyer here to Bernhard's Concrete or Gargoyles for the origin of a style that recognizes life as neither comic nor tragic but farcical. Dyer's riffs on where to live, on why he hates eating fish, on bathing at a nude beach in Mexico, on not speaking foreign languages, on his long-suffering girlfriend Laura, are funny in the sense of not servicing that annoying ironic urge of educated people to laugh at everything, but in the sense of Dyer's being willing to focus on how foolish we are when we can't control our contrary desires.  

Dyer is likely to make you laugh out loud.  As when he confesses he honestly can't even read Lawrence except for one or two of the most obscure of his travel books; Dyer would rather read Rilke than Lawrence any day, and much of the time the observations about Lawrence and on literature that Dyer makes draw on a sensibility that is Germanic and Rilkian rather than English and Lawrencian.  That is, a sensibility that is Apollonian rather than Dionysian, or formal rather than felt.  Dyer's ambivalence toward DHL extends to England itself: away from home on some distant "research trip" in New or Old Mexico, Dyer waxes nostalgic about England but can't think of anything he misses but the telly.  One of the best bits comes when Dyer leaves Paris and agonizes over where to live--he hates children so he's footloose and could live anywhere--he tries Rome but ends up, of all places, in Dullford, Oxford, land of academics and bores. But of course Lawrence loathed England, left early and didn't return, but remained an Englishman all his (brief) life.  Dyer's play with these facts of Lawerence's bizarre, restless existence (how did DHL ever get any work done?) are really quite brilliant: I'm rather surprised Dyer didn't perish of TB by book's end.  But then, the ending of Out of Sheer Rage is extraordinary, not to be given away here.

The most obvious influence on Dyer's work isn't Lawrence or Rilke or even Bernhard but John Berger (right), the remarkable novelist, art critic, travel writer,  and cultural critic.  Dyer edited Berger's Selected Essays and contributed an admiring essay to the volume (which I have been enjoying, an essay a day, for a month now).  Other evidence of Berger's influence on Dyer is the latter's The Ongoing Moment, a smart and incisive book-length essay on the photography of Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston.  Dyer looks at clusters of related photographs, including portraits of the photographers by their peers. His insights into the art of the photograph are impressive for an amateur--the book contains so many interesting ideas that I couldn't make up my mind which quotation to include here.  How about this:

"In Stieglitz, the will to power was both highly and insufficiently developed.  Highly developed in that he had to overcome others; inadequately developed because he was powerless to achieve the ultimate Nietzschean project of self-overcoming."

As someone who knows very little about the history of photography, I profited from Dyer's close readings of particular artists and their styles--for example how Dorothea Lang approached the composition of thematic scenes--her sequence of blind beggars, for instance.  Dyer also sent me back to books on Kertész and Walker Evans, photographers whose images of New York evoke a beautiful city that is now gone.

As for Yoga: well, the reviewers claim to have loved this collection of essays about Dyer's vertigo-inducing travels; I've renounced travel myself, so a vicarious adventure in Thailand isn't unwelcome.  But I didn't care for this book.  I made it through three or four of the "essays" (actually, loose bits of memoir) but quickly tired of the book.  My Dyer problem began when he tried to outdo Bruce Chatwin: What's the weirdest thing you've ever done in a foreign country?  How gross were the poor people?  How vile were the accommodations?  I do have sympathy for the traveler who hates everything about going places; when I used to travel I would find everything about my journey insufferable aside from the memories of the journey once I was safely at home.  While I enjoy Dyer as a travel writer, that isn't his strength--he's best when he's at home (wherever that might be) just being himself, thinking, paying attention, looking at pictures or people, complaining.  Anyway, my all-time favorite gonzo travel writer (who I want to plug here) is Redmond O'Hanlon (see if you can lay hands on In Trouble Again) who is, if anything, crazier than Dyer.  

If you haven't read Dyer, pick up one of his books. There's plenty of them.  I'm just starting on his fiction now and am looking forward to his book on jazz, But Beautiful.  Here's Dyer's workroom.  The red walls seem right: manic color for a manic writer.

 

 George Ovitt (May 21, 2014)

Little Nothings

The Waitress Is New by Dominique Fabre

Oh yes! I hated Sundays,

Because that’s the day when I think

And count the days past and to come

Pierre Morhange

The desire to live in Paris for an extended period of time—a month, a season—has been growing steadily in me for years. I don’t want to live there and work, I don’t want to make myself useful, I don’t want to make my mark on the city at all. What I want is to live there and do nothing but live—that is, wander the city on foot each day, haunt the museums and bookshops, and sit for untold hours in humble cafes, sipping coffee and wine, reading eccentrically, and merely (merely!) watching the people go by. I have a hunch I’d be good at it.

Of course, who wouldn’t like to spend their time like that? Parisians themselves have been doing it for hundreds of years, in the course of which they’ve created a café culture unlike anything else in the world. “You start at a café table,” writes Irwin Shaw, “because everything in Paris starts at a café table.” Indeed one can hardly think of Paris without thinking of this distinctly French institution—of Café de Flore, Le Cépage, and Les Deux Magots, of such illustrious café-goers as Picasso, Beckett, Sartre, and de Beauvoir, of Baldwin, Hemingway, and Joyce. For the café tradition runs deep: the first café in Paris, Le Procope, was founded by a Sicilian in 1702. By the time of the Revolution, just eighty-seven years later, Paris had some 3,000 cafes, 4,500 in the late 1840’s, 22,000 in 1870, 42,000 in the mid-1880’s, and around 30,000 from the late 1880’s to the start of World War I. Even today, in this age of smartphones, the Internet, and flat screen TVs, the café culture of Paris is alive and—thankfully—quite well.

The Waitress Is New is in many ways a story of French café life as one might find it on the outskirts of Paris today. Set in a modest café called Le Cercle, far from the city center, this spare novel follows the moods and musings of a lonely veteran bartender named Pierre who spends his days observing his customers, wondering idly about himself, and gazing out the window at the dreary winter streets. When he learns one day that the café must close its doors for good, his life is suddenly thrown into stark relief, a change that triggers in him a fresh accounting of his wan and lonely days. 

At a time when even American literary fiction is increasingly hostage to glibness, sensationalism, and plot, to the Pyrrhic dictates of popular culture and rampant corporate greed, it is refreshing indeed to discover that there is still room—still a publisher, still an audience, still a need—for such fiction as this. One more reason to love small presses like Archipelago Books. One more reason to love the French.

Dominique Fabre has published nine works of fiction. The Waitress Is New, translated by Jordan Stump, is his first novel to appear in English. 

Note: I (and my fellow writer, George Ovitt) like this press so much I have just ordered five new titles from their list, which I hope to write about in coming posts. See it for yourself: http://archipelagobooks.org/about/ .

Peter Adam Nash

Gabito, Brandi, Nemerov

"Before adolescence, memory is more interested in the future than the past, and so my recollections of the town [Aracataca] were not yet idealized by nostalgia."

In the late 1980's I undertook two trips to Mexico City and to Cuernavaca to catch a glimpse of the man who was, in my mind, the greatest living novelist.  While I put in a lot of bus time, passing through tiny, dusty pueblos in Morelos, Puebla, and Oaxaca, I never spotted my idol, whose novels, especially One Hundred Years of Solitude, I had read over and over through the 70's and 80's.  Knowing of Márquez's ill health, I wasn't shocked by his death, but still it feels as if a chasm in the world of writing has opened.  The hypocrites at the Washington Post--enthusiasts for the war in Iraq, dupes of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal--fell all over themselves condemning Márquez's embrace of the Cuban revolution and of Fidel Castro.  And what sort of politics was a man like Márquez supposed to have, growing up as he did on United Fruit lands, witnessing the goons of UFCO massacre the banana workers (recounted in Cien años de soledad and throughout his books and stories), a Latin American living in the era of Abrenz and Allende, of Kissinger and the Reagan Doctrine?  The pundits on the Potomac who have been busy condemning Márquez's leftist politics are able to count on American forgetfulness; the whole point of Gabito's life's work was that the poor of Latin America don't have that luxury--in their vast solitude all they have is memory.  I have been reading his memoir Living to Tell the Tale, a lovely glimpse into the intersection of Márquez's life and books--it is full of tender portraits of his family, his youthful colleagues, his friends, and lovers.  One story Márquez told (on the anniversary of the sale of the ten-millionth copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude) was how he and his wife Mercedes took the manuscript of the greatest twentieth-century novel written in Spanish to the post office but only had enough money between them to mail what turned out to be the second half of the book to his publisher.  Forty-two pesos.  Luckily his publisher liked the novel well enough to send Gabito the difference.

All Márquez ever wished to do was write--and, thankfully, despite years of poverty and struggle, that is what he did. 




I was fortune enough to attend a gala used-book sale last week and purchased forty-two--yes, that's 42--books of poetry.  Among them was John Brandi's Heatbeat Geography, Selected and Collected Poems, 1966-1994. I have wanted to write about Brandi for some time; I have his newest book somewhere in the chaos of my study, but I was happy to read through this earlier collection and to get a feeling for the development of Brandi's unique sensibility.  Brandi and I live in the same general neighborhood--New Mexico, a wee state perched on either bank of the Rio Grande and wedged between the madness of Tejas and Arizona.  John B. is up the road from me in the northwest corner of our state; we're not too far distant in age, and while he has traveled considerably more than I have, we have visited many of the same places.  His sensibility, if not his poetic style, reminds one at once of Whitman and of Gary Snyder--it's my surmise that these poets, plus Neruda, Kenneth Rexroth, and Denise Levertov have influenced his work--but I'm only guessing.  Poetic influence is difficult to make out among older poets.  Nowadays, with most poets trained in MFA programs, there are clear affinities between writers and their mentors; in Brandi's day one read a lot of poems but worked out one's style alone, perhaps in the Altiplano or on the road in Chiapas or Alaska; Brandi, as I said, has been around, and this collection has a strong sense of place attached to its great variety of voices, styles, and subject matters. Here's one I like:

It is Spring Now

The stars rush out
with a special odor through the weaving pines.
There are sparks in my mouth. A whirling universe
stands still on the blue beach of our bedcovers.
Nobody is dancing but us.

It is a great dance floor
& we are simply alone.  It seems like
an eternity, then out of nowhere spectators applaud
from the walls.  All is finished. The lights dim.
Your fingers slowly release
their grasp.

It is spring now,
aroma of sage & lucious portions
of ripe fruit from little fruits peeled beneath your eyes.
Everything in bloom!
Beyond the windows, a severe wind picks up.
I watch the blossoms spin through
the deepness of night.

And feel the greatness
of your smile, forever warming me.

Brandi wrote this poem in Guadalupita, probably in the same little motel I have stayed in a few times.  Once, in the middle of a freezing winter night, my wife and I were driving through the snow from Guadalupita to Angel Fire and a herd of elk crossed the narrow road just in front of us.  I turned off the lights and opened the windows and all we could hear was the wind riffling the snow and the breaking of the ice under the rush of elk.  These beautiful wild corners of our state retain enough desolation to allow the poet's imagination to imprint whatever he wishes on the landscape.  Brandi has a gift for fitting his life into the places he's visited--leaving something of himself behind, but also taking something away and sharing it with us.

 
Thanks to a lucky prompt from a friend, I reread Howard Nemerov's Selected Poems a couple of weeks ago and remembered as I did how much his writing has meant to me over the years.  Nemerov wakes us up and forces us to pay attention:

Running and standing still at once
is the whole truth. Raveled or combed,
wrinkled or clear, it gets its force
from losing force. Going it stays.

This stanza opens "Painting a Mountain Stream."  How about these lines from his famous poem "The Town Dump": "Objects of value or virtue, / However, are also to be picked up here, / Though rarely, lying with bones and rotten meat, / Eggshells and mouldy bread, banana peels / No one will skid on, apple cores that caused / Neither the fall of man nor a theory / Of gravitation."  Nemerov has the sensibility of a metaphysical poet, jarring us with oddball images and associations, in quietly balanced lines, with diction that runs the gamut from Philip Levin's vernacular to Mark Strand's stately sophistication: this is "Learning by Doing:"

 They're taking down a tree at the front door,
The power saw is snarling at some nerves,
Whining at others. Now and then it grunts,
And sawdust falls like snow or a drift of seeds.
Rotten, they tell us, at the fork, and one
Big wind would bring it down. So what they do
They do, as usual, to do us good.
Whatever cannot carry its own weight
Has got to go, and so on; you expect
To hear them talking next about survival
And the values of a free society.
For in the explanations people give
On these occasions there is generally some
Mean-spirited moral point, and everyone
Privately wonders if his neighbors plan
To saw him up before he falls on them.

Maybe a hundred years in sun and shower
Dismantled in a morning and let down
Out of itself a finger at a time
And then an arm, and so down to the trunk,
Until there's nothing left to hold on to
Or snub the splintery holding rope around,
And where those big green divagations were
So loftily with shadows interleaved
The absent-minded blue rains in on us.
Now that they've got it sectioned on the ground

It looks as though somebody made a plain
Error in diagnosis, for the wood
Looks sweet and sound throughout. You couldn't know,
Of course, until you took it down. That's what
Experts are for, and these experts stand round
The giant pieces of tree as though expecting
An instruction booklet from the factory
Before they try to put it back together.

Anyhow, there it isn't, on the ground.
Next come the tractor and the crowbar crew
To extirpate what's left and fill the grave.
Maybe tomorrow grass seed will be sown.
There's some mean-spirited moral point in that
As well: you learn to bury your mistakes,
Though for a while at dusk the darkening air
Will be with many shadows interleaved,
And pierced with a bewilderment of birds. 

"A bewilderment of birds."  Yes, that's how they sound these days, blown about by New Mexico's relentless April winds, mourning in the clear dawn the passing of a great writer.

George Ovitt (4/29/14) 

Yellow Birds and an Orange Crescent Moon

Last Trolley From Beethovenstraat by Grete Weil

From the trolley car to the train. The train will travel east. The east is nothingness.

On May 10^th, 1940, the German army invaded the Netherlands and began their five year occupation of the country under the ruthless administration of the Shutzstaffel or SS, Himmler’s elite Nazi guard, an especially well-regulated command that in less than three years was to orchestrate the plundering, deportation, and murder of eighty percent of Dutch Jewry—Ann Frank and her family included. For many of these Jews the eastern ‘nothingness’ was the infamous Austrian death camp, Mauthausen. Weil’s own husband, the playwright Edgar Weil, was murdered there after being arrested one night in Amsterdam, to where, seeking refuge from the Nazis, they had emigrated in 1933.   

Described as a story of “memory, guilt, and the meaning of responsibility,” Last Trolley From Beethovenstraat is one of the most complex, most poetically compelling Holocaust novels I have read in years. Set in Amsterdam, that “centrifuge,” that “city of pilings, mirror-city, city of circles,” it unfolds through the eyes, the experience, of a young German named Andreas, a yet unremarkable poet and reporter posted to Amsterdam during the Occupation, who is haunted day and night by the incessant rumblings of the trolleys that pass beneath his window where he lives.  

Still, like a good German of the time, a young man born to bourgeois parents who, even after the war, refuse to acknowledge Hitler’s crimes, he does his best to distract himself from the horror unfolding around him each day and from the blatant hostility of the Dutch themselves with the writing of his official weekly reports and with the novel that he has been struggling to complete—the story of a man, a painter and forger named Sebastian L. who forfeits his own style for that of others “out of hunger for money, for life.”

Soon, however, his life in occupied Amsterdam gets dramatically more complicated when he agrees to hide a Jewish boy named Daniel in his apartment, a boy for whom he feels a curious, finally harrowing affinity. This we learn in retrospect—of his secret friendship with Daniel, of Daniel’s eventual capture by the Gestapo—the matter framed, complicated, at the start of the novel, some years after the war is ended, by the protagonist’s troubled marriage to a Jewish woman, Daniel’s twin-like sister, Susanne.

Art plays a poignant, often haunting role in this novel, manifesting itself not only in Andreas’ vocation as a poet, writer, and witness, but also in the fragment of a painting by Paul Klee that the refugee, Daniel, brings with him into hiding, a painting Andreas had happened to glimpse in full in the Rosenbusch home—“green branches, with yellow birds sitting on twigs, hanging upside-down, standing on their heads, and flying without spreading their wings. Above them hovered an orange crescent moon.” 

At heart, Last Trolley From Beethovenstraat is the story of Andreas’ guilt and complicity as a German, of his overwhelming need to reckon with the past, which he attempts to do, at last, by returning alone to Amsterdam, then, finally, by visiting the death camp Mauthausen itself, where his friend Daniel was murdered, hoping against hope to lay this ghost to rest.

 

Grete Weil was born in Germany in 1906. The author of four novels and two short story collections, she lived most of her life near Munich. Her previous novel, The Bride Price, was awarded the ALTA Translation Prize. She died in Grunwald in 1999.  Last Trolley From Beethovenstraat was translated by John Barett.

Peter Adam Nash

Number One Hundred and Fifty*: Not Jude but Thomas the Obscure

Thomas the Obscure, by Maurice Blanchot

 Reading Thomas the Obscure reminded me of my college days, spent, in part, reading writers like Hermann Hesse (pictured here), Par Lagerkvist (Barabbas), Knut Hamsun, and Max Frisch--but especially Hesse, and, in particular, Hesse's Siddhartha.  At the time, as an aspiring literary poseur,  I found these writers inspirational, and books like Demian, Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game, and Journey to the East struck me as profound, beautifully written, and indisputably great.  Now, I'm afraid, I find Hesse mostly unreadable, dated, and labored--though I didn't see it then, the impact of Freud on Hesse's thinking was pernicious.  But this judgment merely shifts the blame away from me; the honest thing would be to admit that I had no clue what made a literary work worth my time, and often confused seriousness with profundity.  There's a quality in all of these writers, in Hesse especially, that struck me as I was reading Blanchot--at first I couldn't put my finger on what this quality was, or why I felt unable to engage with the text (as Blanchot himself would have put it), but it has come to me that the great weakness of the kind of philosophical literature represented by Hesse and Blanchot is the substitution of murkiness for clarity, a narrative misdirection that is intended to invoke metaphysical truths but which ends up seeming inscrutable.

Is it too obvious to mention that Thomas is, of course, doubting Thomas?  (John 20:24) "Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe."

   "What [Ann] said to [Thomas] took the form of indirect speech. It was a cry full of pride which resounded in the sleepless night with the very character of dream. 
   'Yes,' she said, 'I would like to see you when you are alone.  If ever I could be before you and completely absent from you, I would have a chance to meet you. Or rather I know that I would not meet you. The only possibility I would have to diminish the distance between us would be to remove myself to an infinite distance. But I am infinitely far away now, and can go no further. As soon as I touch you Thomas....'
   Hardly out of her mouth, these words carried her away: she saw him, he was radiant."

Blanchot (left), among the founders of post-modern French literary theory, is recreating a myth--some say of Orpheus and Eurydice, but I'm not sure that's quite right. In any case, the fragmented, dreamy, semi-erotic, thanatopsic, disjointed story of a man who is obscure (to himself and others; a sort of ghost) and a woman who yearns for oblivion, a story that has all of the qualities of myth--the suggestiveness, the yearning for universality, the reduction of all things to the personal: "On the retina of the absolute eye, I am the tiny inverted image of all things," Thomas tells us, and then "With me, the laws gravitate outside the laws, the possible outside the possible."  Madness, of course, lurks behind the plots of many of these semi-surrealist writers.  Siddhartha, who may or may not be the historical Buddha, always struck me as a bit daft for his insistence that staring at a river all day long could teach one the truths of life.  Thomas also spends his time floating in the sea, wandering in forests, and reading without noticing the words--in a bubble of self-regard that tries to pass itself off as cosmic and universal. I am sure that in a room full of undergraduates, well stocked with that which alters consciousness, these Thomistic pronouncements would evoke ejaculatory cries of pleasure among the readers or auditors.  For me, an older gent with lots of post-war French literary shenanigans under his belt, the effect was quite different.  

Blanchot was an important philosopher.  Serious students (I was one) read The Infinite Conversation (available only in French) in the heady 60's.  I came at Blanchot's theoretical work mostly at second hand--especially through my reading of Georges Bataille. I heard that Blanchot had taken principled stances against fascist collaborators during the war, although it appears now that his writing before the Occupation might not have been as anti-fascist as his supporters have maintained. This time around I was inclined to enjoy Thomas the Obscure, but was disappointed, and thought again about how often philosophers fail to write novels that "live."  Sartre, for example, has never tempted me, and while I can enjoy scattered pages of some of her vast output of fiction, Iris Murdoch engages me more for her writings on ethics than for her fiction; ditto Camus, whose essays seem far better than his novels or plays.  To what extent, I wonder, can fiction bear up under the weight of ideas?  Thomas Mann, among the finest of philosophical novelists, excelled at blending in-depth character studies with lengthy ruminations on obscure topics (scholastic theology!), but who else can pull this off?  Thomas the Obscure felt a bit like an undergraduate seminar in metaphysics--a little too solipsistic ("It seemed that, through a phenomenon awaited for centuries, the earth now saw him"), a bit too sophomoric ("I think, it said, I am subject and object of an all-powerful radiation..."), and a little too full of yearning for my tastes.  Anne's "death" reminds me of Werther's--pointless, freighted with meaning that it cannot sustain and that it doesn't deserve.  Blanchot is celebrated as the first post-modern novelist.  This seems right to me--he was a precursor to Alain Robbe-Grillet (for example)--and for this reason his novels and his critical writing have great interest for the scholar of French thought in the pre- and post-war years. But as a novelist he leaves me yearning for a bit of Germanic refreshment--a few pages of Bernhard, for example, or a bowl of Böll.  Give him a try, or write and tell me that I'm full of hooey--I'd love to hear from my post-modern friends.

There's a good overview of Blanchot's work here: http://www.spikemagazine.com/0602blanchot.php

Thomas the Obscure is available from Station Hill Press, translated by Robert Lamberton

*This is Talented Reader's one-hundred and fiftieth post.  Thanks for reading.

George Ovitt (4/7/14)

Trainstopping

or Ejaculatio Praecox (Bohumil Hrabal, Part II*)
 

 Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal

Woe betide the country that needs heroes.

                                                                                            Bertolt Brecht

Reading this short, funny novel, this “optimistic tragedy,” was for me a bit like a roller-coaster ride in the dark: at the start I was thrilled, then toward the middle my interest dipped precipitously, only to soar sky-high in the magnificent final pages. Thank you, Joseph Škvorecký, for pressing me to ride it through to the end. 

Like so much modern fiction, this novel is about heroism in one of its unlikely modern forms. The hero (think—sans cynicism—of a Czech Holden Caulfield; think—sans Jim—of a Czech Huck Finn), a timid failed suicide and virgin named Miloš Hrma, discovers one day, when naked with a woman he admires, that he cannot stay erect, that when called to action his penis “wilted like a lily.” What follows is a sad and quirky tale of sex and trains and paranoia, as the hero, a young railroad traffic apprentice, grapples with his fate and masculinity against the menacing backdrop of daily life in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

Like the work of William Faulkner, Hrabal’s fiction is a compelling mixture of the “high” and “low,” of the vernacular and folkloric “filtered through a sophisticated intellect.” Indeed Hrabal is deceptively complex in his vision and craft, imbuing this seemingly simple, nearly plot-less tale with great resonance and depth. Described by countrymen and fellow writer, Josef Skvorecky, as “a national hero, a revolutionary of prose, an innovator, a revitalizer of language” who extricated Czech writing “from the vicious cycle of propaganda and set in back on the path of art,” Bohumil Hrabal writes here with an irony and humor, with a nimbly eccentric realism that is as bold and tonic today as it must have been to the art-starved, sex-starved, truth-starved Czech public in 1965, by then all but vanquished, in flesh and spirit, by nearly three decades of Soviet rule.

 

While the fumbling heroism of this novel’s protagonist, the young railroad signalman Miloš Hrma, is not the heroism of any formal, organized Czech resistance to the Nazis, nor surely does it presume the nature of the epic in either its motives or consequence, it is nonetheless remarkable for its ringing depiction of innocence lost—of innocence lost and gained. 

“BOHUMIL HRABAL TRAGICALLY DEAD,” ran the headline of the front page of the daily Mladá fronta, 4 February 1997. The 82-year-old Hrabal died instantly when, on 3 February, he fell from a fifth-floor window at the Bulovka hospital in Prague. He had been at the hospital’s orthopedic clinic since December 1996 for back and joint pain and was scheduled to be released soon. According to witnesses, Hrabal was trying to feed the pigeons on his window sill when the table he was standing on tipped and fell.” (The Art Bin)

Closely Watched Trains was translated by the late, great Edith Pargeter, a lifelong Czechophile who almost singlehandedly brought Czech literature to the attention of the world.

* see George Ovitt’s post “The End of the Book” (February 25, 2013)

 Peter Adam Nash

The Post-Modern Family

Tirza, by Arnon Grunberg

How many books have actually caused you to laugh out loud?  I remember laughing to the point of crying at the Major Major sections of Catch-22.  Vonnegut can still make me laugh in one paragraph and nearly weep in the next; Dorothy Parker's little stories ("The Cradle of Civilization") are quite funny, and while I don't think this is entirely normal, whenever I need to cheer up I reach for Thomas Bernhard--the only writer I know of who can make suicide seem witty--or I'll reread the sections of Pale King that reliably do the trick (e.g. David Cusk's sweating episodes).  On the other hand I don't find the New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs" funny--ever--nor do I even chuckle at David Sedaris, Calvin Trillin, or the late Nora Ephron. But I at least smile when I try to read Heidegger or Hegel--what else can one do?--and so I admit that my sense of humor is quirky and probably says more about the oddities of my character than anything else.  I've been reading The Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen (which is why I haven't been writing here), and it occurred to me at about page 150 that it was the heavy-handed, almost self-parodying irony that, more than anything else, was keeping me from enjoying the book.  But irony, deftly deployed, can be funny, as it is, for example, in A.M. Homes's delightfully weird novels.  Bernhard's running joke is the same one that made MAD magazine so smart back in its Al Feldstein/William Gaines years--namely the conceit that everything is absurd if examined properly, that is, honestly.  Irony, of course, is the recognition that the "meaning" (scare quotes de rigueur) of experience is slippery at best, that there are no "final" or definitive correspondences to anything in our relationships and our inner lives; every human exchange has an ulterior motive or is fraught with ambiguity.  There's nothing in this formulation that is inherently funny, so that Thelen's pounding away at the quirkiness of his alter ego's experiences isn't funny, while Bernhard's repetitive, Beckettian, over-the-top formulas (the Cone!) do the necessary work of humor, which is to relieve us of the burden of seriousness--after all, comedy releases us from fate, assuring us that either we are in control of our lives or no one is. I remember reading once that there could be no Christian tragedy; maybe so, but there can't be any Christian comedy either, except in Dante's sense of comedy as transcendence.  There is no point in lamenting a world that makes no sense, so one might as well laugh at it.  (See Watt, page 37)  The forbidden is funny, as is the gross, and even the unspeakable can be funny in context--comic relief--but then all of these things are stupid and embarrassing if not done with intelligence.  Tragedy is natural in storytelling--the narrative arc is built in--but the comedic plot presents an altogether difference sort of problem.  I respect a writer that does tragedy well; I marvel at one who can do comedy.

"One more thing about paranoia and irony: paranoia without irony is unbearable. And the combination of paranoia and irony might still be the best answer to the horror of our times." 

Aaron Grunberg, the Dutch novelist who lives in New York, and who is, I suspect, right at this moment working in his kitchen in Queens (he writes in the morning, in his kitchen, listening to music, and, apparently, hooked up to an EKG as part of a study of the creative process--I like picturing this), also writes a blog that I have been enjoying--he has opinions on everything, and they're often good ones: as in the quotation above: paranoia without irony is unbearable.   You can tell Grunberg has been in the U.S. a while--paranoia has replaced optimism everywhere: we're being watched, and what we're doing, though hardly worth a second thought, is probably illegal.  His novel Tirza, which I enjoyed, is set in an upscale enclave of Amsterdam, though its disturbed and disturbing central character Jorgen Hofmeester could just as easily live in Gotham City, though not in Ed Koch's favorite borough--maybe on the Upper East Side--where the horrifying and hysterical (in both senses of the word) unraveling of his family would seem no more absurd that anything else currently transpiring (how's this: "A Generation Redefines Mourning: Millennials have begun projecting their own digitalized sensibilities onto rituals and discussions surrounding death," NYT, 3/23/14; my emphasis). 

 So: Hofmeester's wife has left him, but, spectacularly, returns on the eve of the big party he is throwing for his youngest daughter, Tirza.  Mrs. H has been off with a lover or ten, living on a houseboat; she is, it transpires, a slut, while hyper-bourgeoise Jorgen has fantasies of "dirty" salesgirls. Hofmeester's reunion with his estranged wife is one of the funniest and most cringe-inducing enactments of marital hatred I have ever read.  Ibi, Hofmeester's oldest daughter, loathes her parents and has run off to France; Tirza has what can only be described as unnatural affection for her father--who reciprocates by making his youngest daughter the center of his paranoid and ironic universe. Hofmeester himself has been let go from his job as an editor and passes his days at the airport, acting the role of a person who awaits the arrival of a loved one; he also cooks and cultivates the image, but not the substance, of a concerned father.  Tirza has a boyfriend who looks like Mohammed Atta, at least to her father, and is ingenuous to the point of idiocy.  The party, which occupies much of the book, is hellish and yet utterly banal--Grunberg excels at depicting the calamity that is everyday life.

Yes, we've come a long way from "Father Knows Best," all the way from bland patriarchy through emasculating feminism to unmitigated domestic horror.  But the horror stories no longer require ghosts or vampires or zombies--now everyone is a monster, and the wittiness of a book like Tirza derives from the absurd notion that there ever could have been such a thing as a happy family.  I won't mention the Sopranos here, or Walter White, but what Grundberg does with the nuclear family evokes the sort of rueful smiles of recognition one often had in watching Tony at table with Carmela and Meadow and little Anthony.  The post-modern family: no longer is the home a refuge from an unkind world but rather a perfect replica of that world.  Cruelty has become the face of love, and aside from the banality of pop fiction and network TV, everyone gets it--from Amsterdam to New York--the family is where we sharpen our claws, nothing but a dress rehearsal for the flaying we are expected to dish out in the "real" world. Ironically the roles have been reversed: now one goes to work to find a modicum of peace and quiet, bracing oneself for the return home, to the horrors of one's family.

   "Ibi was at a cafe with friends, the wife was painting in her studio and receiving her almost exclusively male models. Jorgen Hofmeester sat in the living room and underlined one paragraph after the other in the informative book about his youngest daughter's disorder, and in her bedroom beside the cello Tirza was busy giftedly starving herself to death.
   That was how the Hofmeester family lived at the start of the new millennium."


Tirza is published by Open Letter, University of Rochester, and translated by Sam Garrett.

George Ovitt, 3/24/14