Ghost Writers and New Lives

Summer in Baden-Baden, Leonid Tsypkin

Vita Nuova, Dante Alighieri 

Like many other readers, I enjoy novels about writers--Flaubert's Parrot comes to mind, as well as Philip Roth's Ghost Writer--and also non-fiction works that take as their subject not the quotidian lives of those who scribble but the ineffable magic of making art from language: Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Springs: On Writers and Drinking is one such, as is Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence. Sarah Bakewell's How to Live is not so much a life of Montaigne as an exploration of his ideas; Sebald writes about Stendhal in a similarly oblique way in Vertigo, and Jay Parini's Benjamin's Crossing is about the last days of Walter Benjamin and is rich in psychological detail (ditto Parini's The Last Station). And then there are the books that aren't directly about writers but about the authors of the books as they reflect on the lives of authors--a little meta- I admit, but a brilliant form of literary expression if you can pull it off. Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life and Nicholson Baker's U and I are examples, as is Tsypkin's wonderful Summer in Baden-Baden, a novel about both Tsypkin and the Dostoevskys (Fyodor and Anna Grigoryevna). Tsypkin has used the Master's sojourn in Germany--his gambling, his tempestuous relations with his wife, his obsession with and revulsion toward literature--as a mirror reflecting his own life and, in particular, his journey to Petersburg that culminates in a visit to the house in which Dostoevsky died. The novel doesn't move from one story to another, from Baden-Baden to Petersburg, but folds two narratives into one another--Tsypkin's life as a dissident within the USSR overlaps and embraces Dostoyevsky's exile in Germany, an exile that is as much spiritual as physical. The brilliance of the novel lies in its seamless entangling of two literary lives, in Tsypkin's reprising the life of the Master as if it were a facet of his own. Joseph Frank's great biography of Dostoevsky (I've read only the one-volume abridgment) makes plain enough the pain out of which Dostoevsky fashioned his art--his time in the house of the dead, his epilepsy, his addictions--to writing and gambling, or perhaps to writing as gambling--his ambivalent passion for Anna Grigoryevna, his self-imposed exile. What Tsypkin does admirably is to reassemble in coherent fashion the fragments of Dostoevsky's outer and inner lives in such a way as to make his genius seem a function of his biography rather than a triumph over it.

It occurred to me a few months ago that I had better get started on my long-postponed project of rereading those books that have meant the most to me--not all of them classics, but each one significant in marking out a period of my life, or, if that's too grandiose, then let's leave it at this: books I've carried with me through a lifetime of being the sort of person who carries around books and throws away everything else. Carried them because I meant to read them again "someday." And, at last, "someday" has arrived. For no special reason I've started this project with Dante's beautiful Vita Nuova--a hymn to his muse Beatrice Portinari and to the making of poems--and C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image, one of the half-dozen works of literary criticism that isn't a chore to read and which is a perfect companion to Dante. Lewis's book teaches us how to read medieval and Renaissance poets; Dante teaches us how to read Dante--or perhaps how to misread him.  I reread my 1973 Mark Musa edition, with its no-nonsense literal versions both of the canzoni and the prose excursuses through which Dante not only prepares us with scanty biographical tidbits for his poems, but in which he explains, as a coy philosopher might, the progress of his Platonic-Christian love for the maiden Beatrice, on whom he laid eyes (if at all) exactly three times, and yet "she seemed to be the daughter not of a mortal but of a god,"as Dante describes her, reworking Homer. It was Boccaccio who identified the married (to one of the banking Bardis, according to my old guidebook to Florence's churches) Beatrice with Dante's sacred muse, his companion from Purgatory to Paradise, and the inspiration for his "book of memory," as Dante called the Vita Nuova. Thoroughly "medieval," that is, rooted in the neo-Platonic and Augustinian epistemology of the fourteenth century, Dante's love poems in the VN surely remind one of Symposium, with its yearning for erotic transcendence, but also of the medieval romans (of Chretien de Troyes) or, more intimately, of the Lais of Marie de France. But Dante is an original, and no comparison can do justice to the richness of his imagery, his mastery of the rhetorical tropes that defined late medieval poetry, or the alternating repression/confinement and overflowing of his emotions.

The first time Dante is addressed by Beatrice he nearly swoons. He records the event in detail: "It was precisely the ninth hour of that day, three o'clock in the afternoon, when her sweet voice came to me. Since this was the first time her words had ever been directed to me, I became so ecstatic that, like a drunken man, I turned away from everyone and sought the loneliness of my room, where I began thinking of this most gracious lady, and, thinking of her, I fell into a sweet sleep, and a marvelous vision appeared to me."

This is conventional. Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, allegedly written while its author was in prison, awaiting execution, also falls into a dream, but his "Lady" isn't a teenage beauty but Philosophy/Wisdom herself, summoned to bolster Boethius's justifiably waning faith in God's sense of fair play.  (Still the best book on the theodicy question btw).

Dante, who has only just now "taught himself the art of writing poetry"--as if!--sets out to write a sonnet for his lady, the first of thirty-two sonnets, canzoni, and a single ballad that make up the poetic matter of the Vita Nuova. The first sonnet has always been one of my favorites, especially the arresting image of stanza two:

Joyous, Love seemed to me, holding my heart
within his hand, and in his arms he had
my lady, loosely wrapped in folds, asleep.
He woke her then, and gently fed to her
the burning heart; she ate it, terrified.
And then I saw him disappear in tears.

[Poi la svegliava, e d'esto core ardendo
lei paventosa umilmente pascea. 
Appresso gir lo ne vedea piangendo.]

"Ardent," is right, but "burning" is better; and she ate his heart, not in terror, but with humility (umilmente pascea) as if, let's face it, she were eating sacramental bread and wine. In his gloss Dante mentions how the meaning of this poem was not clear to anyone at first, but is now clear even to the unlearned. The Vita Nuova isn't only about a rebirth in love, but about death--including, in the final sections, the death and transfiguration of Beatrice. This Beatrice, real or no, turned out to be a gold mine for Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets--swirling clouds of dust and soul-stuff, eternal love, chaste longing. Gustave Dore does a fine job of capturing the overwrought frenzy of pure love, in the same vein as Bernini's St. Theresa.

"After I wrote this sonnet there came to me a miraculous vision in which I saw things that made me resolve to say no more about this blessed one until I would be capable of writing about her in a nobler way."

Poems and glosses, prayer and prophecy.

George Ovitt (9/14/15)

“Soul Swallower”

Götz and Meyer by David Albahari

How Götz, or was it Meyer, loved children!

The photograph above features one of the converted buses that the Nazis used in their initial  experiments in the large-scale asphyxiation of prisoners, of Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians, mostly of the handicapped and Jews. As carbon monoxide canisters quickly proved too expensive for the job, the developers soon settled upon a simpler, more cost-effective method, requiring only that bus driver get out of the tightly sealed cab and reconnect the exhaust hose to a special outlet in the bottom of the bus. After about 15-20 minutes of idle driving about the countryside all of the prisoners would be dead. Not long thereafter, such jury-rigged buses were replaced by custom manufactured vans, the compact Diamond and Opelblitz, as well as the 5-ton Saurer, the most efficient of them all.   

It is a 5-ton Saurer that looms at the heart of this spare, if devastating novel by the Jewish Serbian writer, David Albahari. Based on an actual Saurer van that operated in and around the city of Belgrade during WWII, a van in which—so the narrator discovers—many of his relatives had perished. Through his research he learns in addition that the drivers of this van were two young men, two actual SS non-commissioned officers, identified plainly in the records as “Wilhelm Götz” and “Erwin Meyer”:

I never saw them, Götz and Meyer, so I can only imagine them. My interest in the two of them came at a time when I was trying to fill in the empty slots in my family tree. I had just turned fifty, I knew where I was going with my life, so that all that was left was to figure out where I came from. I went round the archives, visited museums, brought books home from the library. That is how Götz and Meyer came into my life.

What ensues in the novel is the narrator’s determined, finally desperate attempt to imagine these two men, to slip into their minds, their skins, to understand—as so many have sought to understand—what Hannah Arendt famously called, “the banality of evil,” the fact that such cruelty and violence, as was perpetrated by the Nazis, was less the product of a handful of psychotic, diabolical freaks (whom we could safely dismiss as aberrational) than the logical, rational, even inexorable outcome of an abiding ideological faith, a cultural, national creed embraced and embodied, not by monsters, but by average, often expressly “normal” men. Writes Albahari, the two young officers were altogether indifferent as killers, with no apparent stake in the matter at all:

Once you become a part of the mechanism, you assume the same responsibility as every other part. Götz and Meyer didn’t know about that. The truck was theirs to drive, and they drove, always smiling, even when the wind blew dust in their faces, and they couldn’t care less what was going on in the back, whether the load was Jews or sugar beets.

Führerprinzip, the foundation of political authority upon which the Third Reich was based, consisted essentially of the simple, incontestable belief that Hitler’s word was law. Everything followed from that. It was a principle to which Hitler’s chief henchman, SS-Obergruppenführer, Adolph Eichmann, made frequent reference during his trial in Jerusalem when defending himself and his comrades against the charges of genocide and mass murder, insisting, as he had, that they had only been “following orders.” While by now an argument that has been thoroughly discredited, and while Arendt’s assessment of Eichmann himself as “banal” has been shaken to its core, and while some violence and cruelty is indeed aberrational, the central mystery of this novel remains: How does one explain the methodical, bureaucratic murder of six million Jews?

David Albahari is a Serbian writer of Sephardic Jewish origin. He lives in Canada. Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Götz and Meyer is published by Dalkey Archive.

Peter Adam Nash

Falling In (and out) of Love

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love (a novel)

You see him (her) in a crowded room, on a plane, at a meeting, in a restaurant--someplace you weren't prepared to see anyone, all of your paltry defenses down, a neutral or even a meaningless encounter, a simple hello, a brushing of hands--nothing weighty, no ulterior motive at all. You went on a plane ride and sat next to (in this case) a woman. It was her.

Alain de Botton has the sort of talent I most admire--he can be brilliant anyplace, with any topic, and not only brilliant, but original--he thinks about things that you and I have thought about but never understood--he explains what we are reading or seeing or feeling. Architecture or Proust or, here, love. Not "explains" exactly: teases, probes, uncovers. You've thought about something one way and then, blissfully, you realize that you weren't wrong, just not paying sufficient attention.

In Chicago this summer, browsing in Powell's (yes, the Portland Powell's began in the City With Big Shoulders), I came upon a strange Picador paperback: Essays in Love by Alain de Botton, thick newsprint paper, the cover depicting a woman sitting on the floor in a library, seemingly in the ranges holding tedious government reports, reading a book.

De Botton once wrote this: "Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to."

The narrator of Essays in Love--a novel that is a work of philosophy, a work of philosophy that is, ostensibly, a fiction--feels to me like a lonely man, someone who falls in love by accident and falls out by design. I didn't understand until the last page the meaning of the cover photograph or the structure of the novel. Everything in the book is simple on the surface, yet studded with mystery. Like love itself.

De Botton has read Proust and written brilliantly about the experience. My feeling is that the inspiration for Essays in Love is the story of Swann and Odette in volume one of Proust's masterpiece. De Botton, playing both roles, analyses the coming into love that is always so surprising and uplifting, and meditates in painful detail on the unraveling of feeling, the loss of love and the unbearable aftermath of that loss. But de Botton's book isn't Proustian--it's something else, something entirely new.

"By accident," the narrator sits with Chloe on a flight from Paris to London.  "Chloe later told me that she had intended to take the ten thirty Air France flight, but a bottle of shampoo in her bag had happened to leak as she was checking out of her room, which had meant repacking her bag and wasting a valuable ten minutes." I wondered if she had said "wasted" in narrating the bit of happenstance that put her on a British Airways flight instead of her Air France plane, in the seat next to our (I can't help but think) lonely narrator? She might have. Chloe is an honest woman, and one of the marvels of Essays on Love is the truth telling--the strangers, then lovers, speak plainly with one another. Often this hurts. In matters of the heart, truth, I think, might be overrated.

The chapter headings are those of a philosophical work rather than of a novel. "Romantic Fatalism," "Authenticity," "False Notes," "Love or Liberalism," "Intermittences of the Heart" (my special favorite), and so forth. The style is mixed--not unlike Menippian satire, though in this case the satire is directed at all of the conventions of romantic love rather than at politics. De Botton imitates Wittgenstein in the scrupulousness of his dissection of his own and his beloved's feelings. From the courtship ("Subtexts of Seduction"): "We talked abstractly of love, ignoring that lying on the table was not the nature of love per se but the burning question of who we were and would be to one another. Or was there in fact nothing on the table other than a half-eaten carrot cake and two cups of tea? Was Chloe being as abstract as she wished, meaning precisely what she said, the diametrical opposite of the first rule of flirtation, where what is said is never what is meant?" A little shuffle here: the narrator semi-accuses Chloe of precisely his own inclination--to cover up his feelings with abstractions and small talk. De Botton gets this perfectly: we ascribe to the beloved exactly the feelings and motives that we have and convince ourselves of our own objectivity. See Swann's Way.

It's a funny book, especially if you've ever been in love. Early on our hero, an architect, provokes a fight over the sorts of jam that Chloe has to offer at breakfast. It's their first sleep-over, and the idea that one would be put off, angered even, by a lack of strawberry jam ("I hate having breakfast without any decent jam") is farcical. But then this scene appears in the "Marxism" chapter, and the point is clear enough: "...the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and our weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and the noble. But if the loved one loves us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that have driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe in the beloved now that [she] believes in us."? So, it isn't Karl but Groucho Marx at play here--if she loves me, who am so unworthy, there must be some mistake. How could she?

I won't spoil the ending, but it isn't happy. But a happy ending would have precluded any philosophical meditation on loss. Our hero is cerebral, an over-thinker: "Few things are as antithetical to sex as thought." It is his brooding propensity to over-think every conversation, every act of his beloved that drives her away. In some things instinct should prevail. The road from intellect to instinct is impossible to traverse--better to start with the heart and inch toward the head then to make the futile attempt to move in the other direction.

I was left not only admiring the deft way in which de Botton had alternately skewered and caressed his love affair (it has to be his story), but I was left wondering what, exactly, love might be. One line of Essays in Love travels along the road traversed by Plato's Symposium--love is not a single thing but an individual's journey toward self-knowledge and, eventually, transcendence of this world. Physical love and human desire are self-negating and, like Wittgenstein's famous ladder out of the Tractatus, lead the lovers to a realm of being in which love no longer has meaning; love leads, in this view, to Love. But this isn't what de Botton was up to--I couldn't quite grasp what he wanted me to see until the final pages.

Love is sadness: in de Botton's account infatuation and desire provide the charm of attraction, but habit and familiarity lead a couple to weariness and even disgust. What must endure isn't "love" but friendship and trust. Our narrator and Chloe tire of one another quickly, not because of a lack of desire or a failure to share themselves with the other, but because their love as we see it (through the narrator's eyes) was never about them, it was only about him: "I did not simply love Chloe and then she left me. I loved Chloe in order that she would leave me." Chloe is "merely" an instrument designed to inflict punishment on the narrator for his naive faith in the existence of love. I chaffed a bit at what seemed to me a cheapened psychoanalytic resolution of the plot--after all, it is more difficult to understand the end of love then its beginning. And who believes, really, in love as self-flagellation? No, what I was reading, I thought, was a rationalization: Chloe fell out of love with the narrator because of his egotism and her capriciousness. Very tidy, and if the author weren't de Botton, a plausible enough plot (despite the philosophical asides) to render the book worthy of the Times best-seller list.

But on second reading it seemed to me that I needed above all to take the philosophical nature of Essays in Love seriously--the meditations on love aren't ancillary to the plot, they are the plot. De Botton has written a novel about love that recapitulates the history of philosophy, from Plato to Freud, with chapters that subtly invoke Aristotle, Descartes (on the mind-body problem), Hume, Rousseau (a section on pastoral romance in the spirit of his Nouvelle Heloise), Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, and ending with ideas taken right out of The Ego and the Id.  Yes, this was it--a love story that is actually a work of philosophy, or, perhaps, a work of philosophy imbued with the idea that the truth resides in loving. Loving a person, yes, but also, more so, loving knowledge. Our hero doesn't live happily ever after but--just barely--he lives. Sadder, as they say, but wiser.

Published by Picador, Essays in Love was de Botton's first book.

George Ovitt 8/25/2015

The Ways of Pain

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

The world is what it is.

In rereading this fine, remarkably undemonstrative novel, I was struck, more profoundly than ever this time, by the notion (surely not an original one) that the story is a smart, often deeply ironic retelling of Conrad's famous Heart of Darkness, in this case from the jaded, fatalistic, sometimes painfully enervated perspective of a once-colonial subject, a fractious, headstrong young Indian named Salim.

When the novel opens, Salim, the narrator, has left his ancestral home on the coast to strike out on his own, and is living as a petty shopkeeper in a ruined town deep in the African bush, a region recently laid waste by the latest wars of independence. Ever since arriving, he has sensed his essential vulnerability there, for he is not only a man from the coast but an ethnic outsider, a 'bloody Asian,' a muhindi. "Ruins had been left as ruins; no attempt had been made to tidy up. The names of all the main streets had been changed. Rough boards carried the new, roughly lettered names. No one used the new names, because no one particularly cared about them. The wish had only been to get rid of the old, to wipe out the memory of the intruder. It was unnerving, the depth of that African rage, the wish to destroy, regardless of the consequences."   

It is out of this precariousness that the narrator's bleak, often scarifying vision of the modern world unfolds. For, while Naipaul is clearly writing about East Africa, about what he viewed as the post-colonial catastrophe that is Africa today, he is also writing about the ravages of European colonialism writ large, so that, for all of the particularity of the novel's setting (a region which Naipaul got to know quite well), there is something of the allegory to this complex and bewildering tale. As writer Neel Muhkerjee put it in his incisive 2011 reassessment of the novel, "At times, it is a book about the tension between being and becoming, played out on the bass and treble clefs of the individual and the global; at others, about the silent, patient rage of history; about how free, if at all, one can be of history and its burdens."

It is no secret to Naipaul's fans, that he, an Indian born and raised as a colonial subject in Trinidad, the precocious grandson of indentured servants, spent the better part of his life, as a man and writer, and finally as a naturalized English citizen and knight of the realm, locked in a twisted, often brilliant, finally deeply bitter struggle to find place for himself in this world. As with Naipaul himself, Salim, the narrator of this superb re-imagining of Conrad's darkest vision, is both Marlow and Kurtz, at once the innocent, the acolyte, and the one who has seen too much.

Peter Adam Nash

A Wish to Eye God

Some years ago, when my wife and I were travelling in southern Africa, we had the chance to hear a reading in Swaziland by the South African writers, Nadine Gordimer and her longtime friend and fellow activist, Mongane Wally Serote. While Gordimer read her story "The Ultimate Safari", Serote followed with a number of his poems, including (if I remember it correctly) the anguished "A Wish to Eye God".

A Wish to Eye God

God,

May it happen that one day

When the sun wipes its face

and the moon shakes its sweat like a dog removing flies

I will no longer write about people

dying in the street and bleeding through the ears and eyes

and babies suffocating in suitcases in muddy dongas;

Lord,

I am not pleading or praying

I am just polite

choking my shout from rushing out

I am calm

Since that other day when I saw that mother shout at you

     at the grave

and I knew

even her dead silent scream won't help

and I was not wrong

for

Since I have been to the graveyard to lay down a stabbed

      boy.

God

You know that

I think

and think

think

about you and all they say about you

and what I see and hear and live

and

I have never had a life

but maybe I won't live for you

why

sorry

I feel like shouting.

Peter Adam Nash

The Obelisk Index

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

                  A Militia major is driving along when he sees a militiaman standing with a penguin. "Take  

                  him to the zoo, " he orders. Some time later the same major is driving along when he sees the 

                  militiaman still standing with the penguin. "What have you been doing?" he asks. "I said take 

                  him to the zoo." We've been to the zoo, Comrade Major," says the militiaman, "and the circus. 

                  And now we're going to the pictures."

A few weeks ago I was struck by a story in the news about how, after massive flooding in the city of Tbilisi, Georgia, some zoo animals were on the loose. The residents, many of them homeless, had been warned of lions and tigers afoot. Included in the article was a photograph of a hippo standing bewildered in the street. What had struck me most about the st0ry was not the event itself, surely a sad and sensational one, but the fact that it had seemed familiar to me, as though I had read about something like it before, though for the life of me I could not remember what. Then it struck me this morning: Death and the Penguin! Where the hell was that book? Had I leant it, lost it; had I given it away, but, no, there it was, covered with dust and old spider webs, on the bottom shelf behind my chair.   

As the novel opens, Viktor, a lonely, desperate young writer living with his pet penguin in a small apartment in Soviet-controlled Kiev, has just been offered the opportunity to write copy for a major national newspaper. Excited by the prospect of money, and eager to finally see his name in print, he readily accepts the position, only to discover that the job entails writing obituaries, pithy, thumbnail biographies of many of Kiev's doyens, kingpins, and politicians—each of them still very much alive. As one character puts it to Viktor, he is "writing for the drawer," a troubling euphemism soon compounded by the more sinister description of the work as 'obelisk jobs', his task: "painting vital images of the future departed."  Not surprisingly, in a city then ruled by violence and corruption, his work proves predictive. Shortly after submitting his first obituary about a well-known State Deputy named Aleksandr Yakornitsky, he is informed by his delighted Editor-in-Chief that (miracle of miracles!) the very same man has just died: "Fell from a sixth-floor window—was cleaning it for some reason, apparently, though it wasn't his. And at night." While frightened, aghast, Viktor continues to write. It is only when a recently acquired friend of his disappears, and he is forced to assume responsibility for his daughter, that the stakes of the game become clear. 

At the heart of this darkly pleasing satire of life in Soviet Ukraine is Viktor's depressed and insomniac penguin, Misha. Rescued by Viktor from the bankrupt city zoo, which could no longer afford to feed him, Misha spends most of his time "roaming the flat, leaving doors open, occasionally stopping and heaving a deep sigh, like an old man weary of both life and himself." He eats frozen fish, he stares at the wall, he splashes around in the bathtub; and, sometimes, when Viktor is restless, when Misha gets too hot, the two of them venture outside at night, exploring the grim-faced  streets and wandering back and forth across the frozen Dnieper.

Andrey Kurov was born in St. Petersburg and now lives in Kiev with his English wife and her three children. He has published numerous other novels, including Penguin Lost, A Matter of Life and Death, The Case of the General’s Thumb, and The Milkman in the Night. 

Peter Adam Nash

The Man With the Golden Pencil

Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make (and others)(and parentheses)

He was the son of Polish Jews, born in Detroit. Like Joseph Mitchell, Pete Dexter, Mark Royko, A. J. Liebling, Luc Sante, and a handful of others, Algren wrote about urban life without mentioning the swells. Chicago, where he lived for most of his life, provided him with his subject matter--the hard lives of working class men and women, the scams of grifters and politicians, the tragedy of bad choices or of no choices at all. His best-known novel, The Man With A Golden Arm possesses the same foreboding sense of doom as James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy--the city's dynamics, its teeming inner life, bring out some of what is best and all of what is worst in everyone. Survival is possible, but at great cost, and much that other writers think of as growing out of our ethical nature, in fact depends upon blind chance. In other words, Algren, like many of the other naturalists of the period just before and just after the Second World War, worked within the social Darwinian framework exploited for different purposes by racists like William Graham Sumner and Theodore Roosevelt--the difference being that Algren and his journalist/novelist brethren felt compassion for the victims of an economic and social system that exploited their worst instincts. Reading Algren I think: nothing much has changed, except, of course, nobody writes about the world without blinking in the way that Algren did; or, better, no one writes as well from within that world.

He had an affair with Simone de Beauvoir in the late 40's and early 50's (Algren is "Lewis Brogan" in The Mandarins), was investigated by the FBI (a badge of honor in those days; Algren never joined the Party, and though he was a man of the Left, he wasn't especially political), and he was condemned by his own Chicago Polish community for his novel Never Come Morning.  His 1956 novel, A Walk on the Wild Side has the distinction of being (I think) the darkest of noir writing--the plot reads like an Elizabethan revenge tragedy--drunks, prostitutes, pimps, orphans, and murderers (dark enough to inspire Lou Reed). Algren at his best makes Jim Harrison seem upbeat. Algren disliked fiction that tipped over into propaganda or sociology. His characters are real, if unimaginable. I picked up Naked Lunch the other day to see if there was any Algren in Burroughs; not a drop. Algren brings the purity of art to his stories; Burroughs rambles on like Falstaff--a junky jester. *

Not precisely the home of the Blues, but close enough, Chicago's African-American population has known/knows a thing or two about hard living. (See Wayne F. Miller, Chicago's South Side, 1946-1948). The lyrical element in the music of someone like Jimmy Davis is reflected in Algren's prose, especially in the essay under review here.  Chicago: City on the Make, like many a blues lament, is a love-hate song: "My baby done me wrong, but I can't live without her..."

Here's a sample:

"Chicago keeps two faces...one for sunlit traffic's noontime bustle. And one for midnight subway watches when stations swing past like ferris wheels of light, yet leave the moving window wet with rain or tears."

"When chairs are stacked and glasses are turned and arc-lamps all are dimmed. By days when the wind bangs alley gates ajar and the sun goes by on the wind. By nights when the moon is an only child above the measured thunder of the cars, you may know Chicago's heart at last:
   You'll know it's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities most like Man himself--loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth."

In Algren's hands Chicago becomes what it is in geographic terms--the middle ground dividing us (Saul Bellow loved Chicago but yearned for New York; Algren was all about the odd perch of Porkopolis on Lake Michigan)--our grasping nature, our vulnerability; our indifference to others, our rare but genuine compassion; our imagination and our banality--in the end, what wins out depends on the man or woman: the City, any city, has a life of its own, disconnected from ours ("like the indifferent stars"); it is the theater in which we act out the tragicomic existence of "Man". The Mandarin herself found Algren (at first) charming, hard-edged, a man of conviction (perhaps unlike her Parisian lover); later on he bored her, or perhaps he acted badly--probably he did act badly (he sometimes did).

He was hardly a "writer's writer." In a Paris Review interview (1955) Algren disavows connections with just about every other writer, including Hemingway (he grudgingly admits to admiring Hemingway's style). Algren says a lot of interesting things about the craft of writing, including this:

"I do have the feeling that other writers can’t help you with writing. I’ve gone to writers’ conferences and writers’ sessions and writers’ clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I’m sure it’s the wrong direction. It isn’t the place where you learn to write. I’ve always felt strongly that a writer shouldn’t be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources. I mean, a writer doesn’t really live, he observes."

A writer doesn't really live...though Algren did live, richly.  Does one choose to write, or does writing choose you? Algren had no choice--writing was his means of living, of making a living, but also the way he made sense of the world. I suppose he's a footnote in American literary history; his early books are just coming back into print. It's a shame--he should be better known since his world and this one aren't all that different.

Algren died in, of all places, Sag Harbor, on Long Island, in 1981.

"The Paris Review" Interview (The Art of Fiction #11, 1955), conducted by Terry Southern, is worth reading here:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4987/the-art-of-fiction-no-11-nelson-algren

*My late-in-life disenchantment with Naked Lunch, a book I loved when I was twenty, doesn't diminish my affection for Bill Burroughs, especially for the shambling YouTube performances of his poems. And if Burroughs on "What Keeps Mankind Alive" is precious, Tom Waits singing Burroughs' lines is sublime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DSiD5CQ_Uk

Chicago: City on the Make is available from the University of Chicago Press.

George Ovitt (6/30/15)

Love After Love

House of Waiting by Marina Tamar Budhos

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger that was yourself.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photograph, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

                                Derek Walcott

One could vacation for years in the Caribbean without ever tapping its wealth. For all of its sad and violent history, by which I mean the European destruction of its native peoples and the subsequent scourges of the slave, sugar, and drug trades, the region, best known in the U.S. for its reggae, cruise ships, and Club Med, boasts an extraordinary number of fine, even world-class writers—novelists, poets, philosophers, and historians like George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Franz Fanon, José Martí, C.L.R. James, Paula Marshall, Aimé Césaire, Roy Heath, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, Jamaica Kincaid, Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Beryl Gilroy, Velma Pollard, Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Samuel Selvon, Patrick Chamoiseau, Rosario Ferré, Julia Alvarez, Patricia Powell, Caryl Phillips, Edwidge Dandicat, and, of course, the 1992 Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott.

House of Waiting, set in the early 1950's in New York City and in pre-independence British Guiana, tells the refreshingly unusual story of the tumultuous if finally redemptive relationship and marriage between a Jewish Orthodox New Yorker named Sarah Weissberg and an Indo-Caribbean man named Roland Singh who has fled his greater family and its desperation in colonial Guiana to try to make a life for himself in the U.S., only to return to his native land to take part in its long struggle for independence. 

Guiana or Guyana, meaning 'the land of many waters', was first colonized by the Dutch in the early 1600's and finally seized by the British in 1831 to where they imported thousands of slaves from western Africa to work their highly profitable sugar plantations as a means of meeting the ever-growing European demand for sweets.  With the British abolition of slavery the sugar industry collapsed, though it was eventually replaced by the mining and distribution of the still more profitable resources of diamonds, bauxite, and gold. While blacks suffered miserably under British rule, so too did the sizeable community of East Indians or Arya Hindavi (the People of Hind), recruited en masse from British India as indentured laborers in the wake of the abolition of slavery to work on the failing sugar plantations. While the sugar industry had all but completely collapsed by the time in which this novel is set, it is against this background of colonial greed and exploitation, that the bitter struggle for independence is being waged when narrator and protagonist, Sarah Weissberg's husband, Roland Singh, leaves her in New York to return to Guiana in order to join the radical PPP, the People's Progressive Party, under the populist and charismatic leadership of Cheddi Jagan. 

  

Unfortunately, as history would tell, the dream was very short-lived. When Jagan and his party won the right to govern and quickly advocated a program for the radical redistribution of the nation's wealth, entailing first and foremost the immediate seizure of the highly exploitative sugar industry, the British government (in league with the CIA) dispatched warships and 700 troops to overthrow the new government under the bogus pretext that they were acting against "part of the international communist conspiracy". 

While simply learning about this—about Guiana, about its Indian community, about its valiant, ultimately successful struggle for independence from the British—would be reason enough to read this short novel, the story itself, an intimate, deeply personal one, makes it especially worthwhile. As you might have guessed, the novel ends with the still-innocent, now pregnant Sarah traveling on her own to Guiana, to Georgetown, to save her marriage and to finally discover the truth about her husband's troubled, if significant past.   

  

Marina Tamar Budhos, the daughter of an Indo-Guyanese father and a Jewish American mother, was born in Queens, N.Y.  Author, journalist, and educator, she has written two novels, House of Waiting and The Professor of Light.

Peter Adam Nash