Seasons and Writers

 Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, David Reynolds, Rebecca Solnit

Does it seem to you as it does to me that some writers have their seasons? Just as a nicely chilled Pinot Grigio served with gazpacho on the back porch seems perfect for hot summer days, so do Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau seem the perfect literary companions. I could no more read Thomas Mann--say, Doctor Faustus--in July than I could sit down to a pot roast. Nor could I (I've tried) reread Paradise Lost or, heaven help us, a single stanza of The Faerie Queen, or dip into Shakespeare's problem plays on a 101 degree afternoon than I could consume a plate of fettuccine alfredo. American writers, and I mean the originals, not derivative figures like Fenimore Cooper (Walter Scott) or the ruthlessly sententious Ralph Waldo Emerson (our Plato), or Joseph Conrad's pale cousin Herman Melville (yes, yes, I am well aware of how absurd this statement is, but next time you pick up White Jacket be honest: wouldn't you rather read Heart of Darkness? ) but true originals like Whitman and Thoreau. Like the Hudson River painters, our great romantics offer the promise of sunny skies, cool mornings and languid afternoon walks, long evenings of conversation and light fare--exactly the two writers I pack on hikes or take to the beach.

Rereading the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass this past week, I was struck yet again by the felicity of Whitman's eye; truly he is not only the greatest poet of democracy, but the most philosophical American writer, Jefferson with a soul.

"All goes onward and outward...and nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier." 

What a line! You could brood on these words all afternoon, staring in the cumulus clouds bunching on the horizon, and not feel as if you'd wasted a minute. Or this piece of American Platonism, so much more digestible than Emerson, whose platitudes unfold like a bolt of cloth--

"If I and you and the worlds and all beneath or upon their surfaces, and all the palpable life, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run, /
We should surely bring up again where we now stand, /
And as surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther...

See ever so far...there is limitless space outside of that,
Count ever so much....there is limitless time around that.

Our rendezvous is fitly appointed...God will be there and wait till we come. 

Old Walt, the sly sensualist. Remember this line from Ginsburg? "I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys," written, I am certain, with wry affection, though Whitman, alone in Camden, wasn't the same man as the would-be seducer of Brooklyn, the man who wrote this beautiful line: "For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,/ For me children and the begetters of children." 

I hadn't read any of Whitman's prose since college, but then came upon this passage in Spiritual Laws:

A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him, wherever he goes. He takes only his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles around him....Those facts, words, persons, which dwell in his memory without his being able to say why, remain, because they have a relation to him not less real for being as yet unapprehended. They are symbols of value to him, as they can interpret parts of his consciousness which he would vainly seek words for in the conventional images of books and other minds.

These few sentences offer a remarkably astute analysis of how poetry works, Whitman's included. The real poet isn't merely crafty with words, but is able to draw from memory and experience those "symbols of value" that help him and the reader interpret parts of consciousness that might otherwise remain inaccessible. A person is a method...a selecting principle. And the artist, the writer, is especially this, sorting through experience not for its Meaning, but for the way in which individual experiences tie the world together, the way in which they bind people, rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight, together--yes, the finest democratic poet, perhaps the only democratic poet--a democratic vista rooted not in ideas but in the body, the source, as Whitman shows us, of all meaning.

The only critic of American literature I have read who recognizes the wit as opposed to the sagacity of Thoreau is David Reynolds, author of a very fine study designed to bring F. O. Matthiessen's magisterial American Renaissance up to date. In Beneath the American Renaissance, an investigation of what he calls "the subversive imagination," Reynolds writes: "Thoreau was confronted with a problem which faced several other major American writers of the period: theoretically committed to incorporating popular idioms, he nevertheless recoiled from the directionlessness and devilishness that characterized these idioms as they usually appeared in the popular press." Thoreau found beneath, or within, the crude wit of American popular literature an unhappiness, a despair, that he addressed in the first chapter of Walden. American angst, as Reinhold Niebuhr would later point out, was attributable to American materialism, precisely the point made by de Tocqueville, Harriet Martineau, and other dispassionate observers of 19th century American life.

This combination of sociological insight, humor, compassion, and social criticism make Thoreau the perfect companion for a long walk or a quiet hour in the hammock. While I love Walden, my favorite summer reading in Thoreau, an essay that I come back to again and again, is "Walking," found in the perfectly backpack-sized Modern Library edition (with a nice introduction by Brooks Atkinson) of Selected Thoreau, a book first published in 1937--think of that!--which I have owned since 1968. Last summer, at 57th Street Books in Chicago, I came upon Wanderlust: A History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit, a writer of whom I knew nothing. (Don't you love it when this happens? You're browsing and by chance pick a book off the shelf, page through it, read a few paragraphs, then sit down and read for half-an-hour, entranced. This happened with Ms. Solnit, whose other books I have slowly begun to read.)

Anyway, Ms. Solnit has this insight into Thoreau's essay: "For Thoreau, the desire to walk in the unaltered landscape no longer seemed to have a history, but to be natural--if nature means the timeless truth we have found, not the historic specific we have made." This is a smart rewording of Thoreau's wonderful opening sentence: "I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,--to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society...." and then the wit of which Reynolds speaks takes over...."I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school-committee and every one of you will take care of that."

And here the two strands of our complicated history, our two most original writers, and our summer season come together. As Perry Miller noted many years ago, taking his title and theme from a famous sermon ("Errand into the Wilderness") by Samuel Danforth (1670), America was at first seen as a great opportunity, as a divinely inspired project, a utopian settlement designed to glorify God's works, a city upon a hill. But as Miller points out, the aspirations of the first generations of New England settlers ran aground on the realities of the wilderness, a wilderness that proved to be both physical and moral. How, the Puritans and America's most original writers asked, can one balance the spiritual errand into the wilderness (purification, temptation, preparation) with the material wealth this wilderness bestows and the rapaciousness this wealth inspires? Whitman's genius was to discover what was universal in American life--to lift the body electric out of greed and war and slavery and into the benign fantasy of his imagination. Thoreau walked away (with a scathing look back). He walked into the woods, along the Concord River, across the beaches of Cape Cod--to escape the din of the school-committee's "civilization."

And summer? I hope wherever you are--and I know we have readers from Moscow to Paris to London to Albuquerque--and, of course, for some of you, it's actually winter!--you have time to read the books you've set aside for this season of relative idleness.

George Ovitt (7/10/16)

"Idiots, Morons, Imbeciles"

Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling (a novel)

That's Carrie on the left, with her mother, Vivian, both institutionalized at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feeble-Minded. Carrie, as the world knows, was sterilized via salpingectomy by Dr. John Bell. Here is Adam's Cohen's account of the crime against Carrie Buck:

"The first legal sterilization in Virginia began promptly on that Wednesday morning [October 19, 1927]. Carrie, who was now twenty-one years old, was taken to the infirmary in the colony's Halsey-Jennings Building at 9:30 a.m. The surgeon who would be performing the operation was no stranger to the patient: it was Dr. John Bell, who had conducted Carrie's physical examination on her arrival at the colony, and had given his name to the Supreme Court case. Carrie was anesthetized, and the operation began. Dr. Bell, working with another surgeon, removed an inch from each of Carrie's fallopian tubes. Her tubes were then ligated, or brought together, and the ends cauterized using carbolic acid followed by alcohol." (p. 283)

At the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi war criminal Otto Hoffmann, head of the SS Race and Settlement Office, the defense was based in part on Hoffmann's citation of the notorious opinion of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck versus Bell ("Three generations of imbeciles are enough"). The Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS was responsible for "safeguarding the Racial Purity of the Reich." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., whose mustachioed visage appeared on the cover of Time Magazine on the occasion of his 85th birthday, was considered "the greatest jurist in American history" by none other than Walter Lippmann. He was also, as Cohen's painstakingly researched book shows, a racist and eugenicist, a not unusual combination of views among America's educated classes during the Progressive period. Progress meant purity and the dissemination of American bourgeois values by every means possible, through settlement houses, education, war, and eugenics. The irony of Cohen's title--one can't miss it--is that the "imbeciles" weren't Carrie and Vivian Buck--Carrie was a normal girl who had been raped while working as a virtual slave in the household of the family that had taken her from her birth mother--but Drs. Holmes, Buck, Albert Priddy, and the rest of the cast of eugenicists whose delusions of racial purity based on pseudo-science and social prejudice antedated and inspired the Nazi campaign to rid the world of "undesirables." Hitler, praised by the American eugenicist Clarence Campbell in 1935 ("that great leader"), was moved by America's example in pursuing his own mad dreams of Aryan race hygiene. Even the horrors of the Holocaust didn't deter American eugenicists: as late as 1958 Virginia hospitals were sterilizing inmates against their will--"deviates, criminals, idiots, morons, and imbeciles."

$$$$$$



What explains this obsession with racial purity? Carrie Buck did well in school, but she wasn't allowed to continue beyond sixth-grade. Her family was poor and powerless; as a result she was "adopted" by the Dobbs family when she was a toddler. "Less a daughter and more a housemaid," Carrie was raped by a cousin of John Dobbs when she was seventeen. Pregnant, unmarried, and therefore immoral, Dobbs had her committed to the Virginia Colony. The moral of this tale isn't difficult to discover: at a time when American society was changing dramatically under the twin pressures of industrial capitalism and immigration, traditional "white" and Protestant Americans discovered in "scientific racism" a defense of their values,  of Anglo-Saxonism, race hygiene, and Christian sexual mores.  Carrie wasn't sterilized for being feeble-minded--she was an average, but poor and friendless young woman--but for representing the caste of down-and-outs whose presence in the landscape of early twentieth-century America was troubling to those who make the rules--to academics, scientists, judges, ministers, and politicians (the only institutional opponent of forced sterilization was the Catholic Church, but not for the right reasons). The Supreme Court's decision in Buck versus Bell has never been overturned, although Virginia and a handful of other states have issued apologies for the practice of forced sterilization.*

$$$$$$

David Goodis

We all know that Portland (above) is the coolest place in America, but in Don Carpenter's noir novel of 1964 Portland is a squalid town, full of grifters, hustlers, pool-sharks, gamblers, hookers, and thugs. Carpenter's novel, Hard Rain Falling is the bleak story of Jack Levitt, a brutish but introspective loser whose existence in the prosperous booster culture of post-War America was an affront to the dominant ethos, much as some white Americans today find the "browning" of American society deeply disturbing ("Make America White Again" is a slogan that showed up at the Trump rally here in majority-Hispanic Albuquerque). Levitt is the sort of kid who would have been sterilized had he born a decade earlier, the kind of person spawned by the thousands in a society of winners and losers, a nobody whose life comes to a inevitable nothing. This is a novel that is especially valuable for its sociological and historical insight into the lives of the poor and the incarcerated. Carpenter, who lived most of his life in Mill Valley, California, is among that group of largely unknown writers who drifted back and forth between Hollywood script work and writing serious books.  Thanks to  biographers and scholars, we know of Faulkner's catastrophic stint in Hollywood, but what of Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, and Charles Williams--all writers of popular and, in some instances, excellent noir fiction who supplemented their income writing for (mostly B) films? All are writers worth reclaiming and reading.**


The power of these writers lies in their having glimpsed--reveled in--the darker side of American life. Their hard-boiled realism challenged the facade of mainstream culture, the happy endings, the preoccupation with the rich and famous, the moral posturing that dominates much of American popular fiction. Carpenter spares the reader no horror in peeling away the psychological torments endured by Jack Levitt as orphan, reform school kid, inmate at San Quentin, and parolee. Carpenter's description of Levitt's long sojourn in solitary confinement in reform school--three months spent naked, in utter darkness in a tiny concrete cell, subsisting on a single meal each day (food laced with soap designed to induce diarrhea) is a tour de force of naturalistic style. Carpenter's sharp prose, his ability to show Levitt transformed by his ordeal, reminded me of passages in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Dostoevsky's House of the Dead, the touchstone for the novel dissecting the psychological effects of imprisonment. As more Americans find themselves slipping from respectability into debt, marginality, and, for 2.2 million of our fellow citizens, prison, the insights of writers like Carpenter, a liminal figure himself, assume greater weight.

But Carpenter doesn't believe in the triumph of the human spirit, and Levitt isn't transformed into a saint by his ordeal.  He's a thoughtful and complex figure, but loutish--the offspring of a society that puts the highest premium on wealth and breeding while denying to most individuals the means of attaining either one. Levitt exists in a moral limbo: a world that has its own rules and rituals, but a world from which there is no escape, where following the rules keeps one alive but not much more. The rule of American naturalistic fiction is that one's genetic predispositions and socio-economic circumstances cannot be overcome through the exercise of will or through love, money, God, or anything else. As was the case with poor Carrie Buck, Jack Levitt is condemned by a society that has no use for his kind--no romantic outlaw, Levitt is among the many (many!) victims of the great American hustle.

Curt Gentry, Don Carpenter, Richard Brautigan, and Enrico at Enrico's Bar

Hard Rain Falling, with an introduction by my favorite crime novelist, George Pelecanos, is in the New York Review Classics Series.

Imbeciles, by Adam Cohen, is published by Penguin.

*See Stephan Jay Gould's classic The Mismeasure of Man for details of the means by which "intelligence," as a fixed and heritable quality of a person, was determined.
 
**I'm making my way through the novels of Goodis in the Library of America series right now--they're excellent.

George Ovitt (7/6/16)

Under My Skin

The Infatuations by Javier Marías

I have now been reading the novels of Spanish writer Javier Marías on and off for about seven years, and it has taken me this long to truly begin to appreciate them, to warm to his cool, aloof, expressly cerebral style. It has taken me nearly seven years to grasp just what an extraordinarily fine writer he is (mind you, most of Europe has known this for decades), nearly seven years of patient reading for his novels to really get under my skin.

Surely a part of my preoccupation with his work (too impatient to wait for the American edition of his latest, I have just this morning ordered it in its British edition) springs from the anxiety, the despair, I often feel, living here in the U.S., at the prospect of not being able to regularly replenish my supply of the dense, unapologetically intellectual sort of novels I love, those artistically uncompromising, often tryingly original tales that have not only defined the novel for me as one of the highest forms of human and aesthetic expression but have literally made me who I am.

More and more I crave the work of writers (and characters) who really like to think—and to think hard, those who make no excuses for their obsession with character and language and form, whose idea of plot (to paraphrase a popular criticism of Proust) is often just some man or woman turning over in bed. 

 

"Self-discovery is above all, writes Octavio Paz, "the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall—that of our consciousness—between the world and ourselves." It is exactly this, this recognition of the fundamental loneliness of human existence, that sits at the heart of so much of my favorite fiction. In fact the kind of novels I most admire, those I read and reread, those I study some days like scripture, are often little more than the stories of a man or woman thinking, usually in isolation or grief. While I am no misanthrope, in fact every day more grateful for the people in my life, little is plainer (and perhaps more significant) to me than the fact that far and away the majority of my time here on earth is spent in silent communion with myself, with my own joys and sorrows, with my own fictions, plaints, and fears. Think about it: is there anything more quintessentially human than this private daily grinding we do, this Sisyphean sentence to think—and without respite, to live like monks, like nuns, within the confines of our own small heads?

It is this painful, often reluctant solipsism that lies at the heart of so many of the greatest modern novels I’ve read, from (here comes a list, for those of you who are interested) those of Conrad, Woolf, Proust, Dosotevsky, Melville, Joyce, Kafka, Roth (Joseph), Goncharov, Musil, Forster, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Svevo, and Mann to Pessoa, Lowry, Barnes, Cela, Ellison, Castellanos, Bellow, Qian, Saramago, Camus, Carpentier, Oe, Böll, Dorfman, Niwa, Voinovich, Manea, Ishiguro, Rushdie, Gordimer, Saghal, Jin, Brink, Malamud, Cortázar, Gao, McCarthy, Styron, Amado, Pamuk, Vargas Llosa, Jelinek, Klíma, Wright, Grossman, Mistry, Gombrowicz, Lispector, Morrison, Sabato, Silko, Pavese, Coetzee, Nabakov, Kahout, Olesha, Oz, Levi, Okri, Appelfeld, Platanov, Bernhard, Farah, Aksyonov, Fuentes, Bolaño, Ulitskaya, Emecheta, Sebald, Unsworth, Martin, Trevor, Kaniuk, Petry, Naipaul, Szabó, Hong, Chacel, Borges, Bowles, Yehoshua, Sōseki, Tišma, Walser, Ford, Head, Greene, Duffy, Abish, Cohen. Ghalem, Agnon, Baldwin, Handke, Ivo, Rulfo, Benet, Mahfouz, Ali, Megged, Murdoch, Hrabal, Novakovich, Bowen, Houllebecq, Ocampo, Zhang, Rodoreda, Asturias, Sábato, Soyinka, Müller, Fox, White, Adler, Vollmann, Ford, Lenz, Garcia Márquez, Platonov, Toer, Narayan, Schulze, Pekić, Carey, Wallace, Bedford, Ying, Nooteboom, Achebe, Arenas, Desai, Páral, Énard, Robbe-Grillet, Lamming, Kraznahorkai, Machado de Assis, and Gass. It is a condition, a syndrome, that also lies at the heart of Marías’s fine novel The Infatuations. 

Set in contemporary Madrid, The Infatuations explores, with elegant intelligence (and with more than a passing nod to the masterworks of Shakespeare, to Othello and Macbeth), the experience of a single woman, an editor in a local publishing house, named María Dolz who finds herself eavesdropping on the life of a handsome young couple near whom she sits each morning in her favorite café before work. At first just a passing fancy, of which she hardly thinks once she leaves the café, her interest in the couple takes a significant turn when one day they fail to appear, a disruption in the quiet, pensive routine of her life that is soon exacerbated by the news—detailed in all of the daily papers—that the man, the husband, was brutally murdered in an act of apparently random violence by a demented homeless man armed with a butterfly knife. From there the story  traces María’s growing, ultimately fateful obsession with the dead man’s wife, Luisa. Finely, eloquently told, the novel is at heart a metaphysical inquiry into the timeless issues of love and death, a catechism of betrayal and obsession and truth. It is wonderfully heady stuff.

Javier Marías has written thirteen novels, three story collections, and nineteen works of collected articles and essays. The Infatuations was translated by Margaret Jull Costa.

Peter Adam Nash

Small Bombs

The Association of Small Bombs, Karan Mahajan

It happens (literally) every single day. Thirty-two thousand seven-hundred people died in terrorist bomb attacks in 2015. Mostly, but no longer exclusively, in the Middle East. A big bomb will kill two hundred, perhaps more. A "small bomb" placed in a car or left in a backpack, five or six, wounding dozens more. We say, "It is terrible." Or, "Madness." Or, "Why did they do it?" And then we forget until the next time, rather as with mass shootings in our own unhappy country. "What can we do?" It turns out that "we" (that is, those paid to govern) can do nothing. Perhaps we wait our turn, hope for the best, turn off the news, stop reading the newspaper. Maybe elect a president who will do it to them before they can do it to us.  That's why they call it "terrorism."

What happens to the people who survive a "small bomb"? The logic of small bombs is that there are fewer victims with whom a survivor can connect and commiserate. Compassion requires a large object: the Holocaust; 9/11; maybe Biafra. Small disasters evoke curiosity, which isn't yet compassion or even empathy. It takes a lot to wake up sleepwalkers, but a small bomb--for those who have given terror some thought--is a fine way to create ripples of fear and disenchantment. Just the thing if chaos is your ultimate goal. Those merely maimed are basically alone. If the bomb goes off in India (or Iraq, or Syria) the government takes no interest in the victims, or in the perpetrators. What do the survivors feel? How do their lives go on, or do they? You could think about this problem all day long, maybe go a little crazy wondering at the waste of lives. But there's something important for us to consider, and, I admit, I hadn't, at least until I read Mahajan.

Karan Mahajan has asked lots of good questions about small bombs. The Association of Small Bombs is a very smart novel, not only for the compassion it evokes for the the innocent victims of terror, but for the honesty with which Mahajan confronts the fundamental fact that suffering is always personal and that the consequences of any political act (it needn't be a terrorist bomb) unfold endlessly. The "association" is both the organization of survivors of a Kashmir-terrorist bombing in Delhi in 1996, and the bonds that forever link the victims, the bombers, the police, and the dozens of others whose own lives are forever altered by a single, relatively low-key political act. And the implication of the novel--searingly revealed in the final pages--is that the Association is rapidly growing to include all of us. And the really smart thing I learned from Mahajan is that suffering and chaos unites us in a way that happiness and order cannot. "Unites" might be the wrong word: it is more along the lines of a brother- and sisterhood of suffering creating bonds that would otherwise never have existed. In a strange way the association of small bombs is like the association of believers, a few of whom subscribe to dogmas of violence as central to their creed. The believers create a new dispensation: that of the victims.

Bakunin took up the idea of the "propaganda of the deed" in his struggle against the Tsarist regime in Russia. Revolutionary violence was thought to be more effective than mere propaganda--ideally, the terrorist act stirs revolutionary fervor among the supine masses (Bakunin, Paul Broursse). Modern terrorism may or may not be directed at bringing down a particular state; its purpose may be to draw attention to a particular injustice, to undermine an ideology ("the West"), or simply to spread terror without a definable political goal. Mahajan's terrorists mix all of these motives with a baser alloy: a fascination with terror for its own sake. Murder, it appears, can become a job, rather like engineering or computer programming. Shockie, the bomb builder in TAOSB is a haunted, inscrutable figure. He hates the Indian government for its occupation of Kashmir, but his politics are vague. Mostly he builds and detonates bombs because that is his profession. He doesn't represent the "banality of evil," just evil's unreflecting nature. Killing innocent people is, for some, a default setting. It's difficult to hate Shockie, even though what he does is terrible. It's a very strange kind of art that can create such a figure, strange and wonderful.

Shockie sets off a small bomb in a crowded market in Delhi in 1996. Two boys, the sons of the Khurana's, are killed; their best friend, Mansoor, survives, but is wounded. The bomb is detonated on page three. What happens "next" is both a linear description of effects and a multilayered accounting of the complexity of a catastrophic event. The Khurana's lives are, of course, ruined, but not simply torn apart--rather they are blown up slowly, as if in slow motion, briefly healing and then torn open again. Mansoor grows up but he would have been better off if he too had been killed. His suffering is most acutely felt; Mahajan is at his most brilliant in his painstaking stripping away of everything that Mansoor once was, breaking him, as it were, on the rack of his own innocence. The bombers themselves suffer in various ways, but not, I suspect, enough to satisfy any sort of karmic balance. And other characters, not a part of the initial event, are also drawn into the great skein of its tragic consequences. No one survives. That too is why it is called "terrorism." Terrorism is the most acute modern reminder of the fragility of life and the impotence of politics in the face of ideology. You go to work and someone blows you up. Terrorism is the principle tool of the ideologically-inclined, just as peace might have been the natural outgrowth of politics, if politics were motivated by a desire for justice. It's a wonder that a novel so focused on individual peoples' lives could have so much to say (between the lines) about the ordering of everyday life.

Mahajan writes beautifully, with remarkable (he's very young!) compassion. I underlined dozens of passages to reproduce here. Let me quote only one.  Years after their sons' deaths, Vika and Deepa Khurana establish The Association of Small Bombs, a victims' aid group, though they can do little for the victims of bombings but visit the newly blown up in the hospital. Here is a tender passage whose description turns out to be terribly ironic:

"Together, aged, having experienced so much, [Vika and Deepa] cut warm, comforting, watchful figures in the hospitals. Often, they were observing not the victims but each other. How had they come from marriage to the death of their boys--to this? And yet, it gave them enormous solace to know that their suffering had not been for naught, that they had been able to eke a larger meaning out of it; they felt the closeness couples sometimes experience when they become rich after years of poverty, a mutual appreciation and gratefulness and wonder and an awareness of the depths of the other person--an awareness that is stronger than any affection or love."

I can think of few novels that examine evil and its consequences with as much intelligence, clarity, and compassion as this great book by Karan Mahajan. It's published by Viking, and worth your while.

George Ovitt (6/20/16)

The Summer He Died

 

The summer he died

My father discovered plants.

He grew sunflowers that leapt

over his tiny house, tomatoes

that burst in the heat, stunted

corn and rows of string beans

eaten over one July night

by a pack of ravenous moles.

He could hardly stand; he’d

lost fifty pounds—his hair,

thick and brown into his 80’s,

simply disappeared. We rose

together at mid-morning; he

ate Wheaties with strawberries

that I bought at the Farmers

Market—he told me he hated

the thought of dying and missing

his breakfast, the newspaper,

the thought of that first cigarette

(he’d quit a decade before—like all

men his age he’d ash his Lucky in

the orange half-moon of his eggs.)

Then we’d reminisce for an hour:

I knew nothing about him, nor did

he know a thing about me: fathers

and sons practice silence like monks

locked together in a desert of love.

After lunch we’d find a ballgame.

He would fall asleep and quietly fart;

I’d go for a walk, up and down blocks

of large empty houses--I never saw a soul.

Later I would drive to the store for corn

and steaks; he had no appetite and would

vomit while I cooked. I wasn’t

sad—we were standing on the edge

of something we couldn’t name or feel--

time ended in the blackness of his dying.

On the phone my wife told me about the

children; I could picture her in our bright

living room, thousands of miles from where

I stood. The house would be hot and loud

with music—my father’s house was silent

and smelled of rust and mildew;

the cicadas chorused in a manic circle—

the heat pushed the outdoors

onto the porch where we sat, remembering

the lightning bugs that I had caught

in Mason jars, the cool nights when we

could smell the faintly salty Eastern breeze,

the far off sound of fireworks from the

boardwalk, the men laughing as they

played bocce and drank beer,

the way your hand would hurt as you

dug into the icy tub for a Coke,

the snap of the church key and the cold

that hurt your throat and eye—

my mother calling us in for dessert,

my father telling me to go ahead, he’d sit a while

longer on the stoop, watching the kids play

stickball in the gathering darkness.

And the way the house was so full of us,

the five of us, the rooms dense with our

lives, the dishes drying in the sink, the

tired way my legs would feel after another

day of being alive. And my father would

come in the sit and not say a word: he was

locked up in himself even then, as I would

be when I was his age, a silence that was

watching and waiting for something better

to come along, when there was nothing better,

when there was nothing better to come.

In Memory of George Ovitt, Sr. November 13, 1919-July 6, 2010

Happy Fathers Day to all of our readers....(that's my sister, Patricia, with my father, mid-1950's)

The Kingfisher

The Kingfisher, Amy Clampitt

Amy Clampitt, the Iowa Quaker, published her first book of poetry in 1983--she was sixty-three years old--and while she had been writing poetry since her undergraduate days at Grinnell College, she had only started to publish in the late 1970's.  Simply put, The Kingfisher is among the finest sustained poetic achievements in the English language. Clampitt, who died in 1994, was born on June 15, 1920, and it was the proximity of her birthday that led me to reread this extraordinary book.

Wheeling, the careening
winds arrive with lariets
and tambourines of rain.
Torn-to-pieces, mud-dark
flounces of Caribbean

cumulus keep passing, 
keep passing.  By afternoon
rinsed transparencies begin
to open overhead, Mediterranean
windowpanes of clearness

crossed by young gusts'
vaporous fripperies, liquid
footprints flying, lacewing
leaf-shade brightning
and fading....

[From "The Edge of the Hurricane"]

Miss Clampitt's closest progenitor was Gerard Manley Hopkins (her title is taken from a line of Hopkins); both share a baroque and mystical connection to the natural world, an extraordinary lexical richness, stunning imagery, and the metaphysical poet's ability to link the seemingly disconnected into unforgettable synthesis.  Her work at Oxford University Press and the Audubon Society appear to have leached both language and observational acuity into her verse--like Hopkins, but better, Clampitt uncovers the rich symbiotic connection between poet and nature, not in search of God, and not in search of Meaning, but purely for the beauty of being alive, the wry and charming oddity of being in this world. Here's one of my favorite Clampitt poems, "Sea Mouse":

The orphanage of possibility
has had to be expanded to 
admit the sea mouse. No one
had asked for such a thing, 
or prophesied its advent,

sheltering under ruching
edges of sea lettuce--
a wet thing but pettable
as, seen in the distance, 
the tops of copses, 

sun-honeyed, needle pelted
pine trees, bearded barley, 
or anything newborn not bald
but furred. No rodent this 
scabrous, this unlooked-for

foundling, no catnip plaything
for a cat to worry, not even
an echinoderm, the creature
seems to be a worm. Silk-spiny, 
baby-mummy-swaddled, it's

at home where every corridor
is mop-and-bucket scrubbed
and aired from wall to wall
twice daily by the inde-
fatigable tidal head nurse.  

Such chewy language! Ruchy, needle-pelted, silk-spiny. And in other poems the same joyful playing with language. But not just playing, Clampitt's not a "language poet," no, there's meaning and feeling at every turn: "the nodding/campanula of bell buoys" ("Fog"); "a tatting/ of foam out where the rocks are" ("Gradual Clearing"); "Strawstacks' beveled loaves" ("Stacking the Straws"). She's one of the few poets who sends me, gratefully, to the OED--"furred with a velouté/of looking glass"--velouté, one of the Mother Sauces of French cuisine (who knew?). Then there is "scenes of transhumance," "a chromo of Hobbema," "grisaille." I especially admire the way Clampitt uses possessives and compounding hyphens to join ideas that one might not conceive of as joined, but which, in her capable hands, are effortlessly put together; her striking adjectives: "wing-dragging" killdeer or "berry-eyed and bark-brown" kingfisher. The freshness with which she looks at the every day. Great poets are always youthful, vigorous, joyful. Except if they are mopes, but in the summer I am opting for the joyful ones, Clampitt above all--a romantic in the American idiom.

Not only does she send me to the dictionary. Clampitt taken on a meandering stroll in the local landscape incites me to look more carefully: "Nightfall/hangs up a single moon/bleached white as laundry;" and this: "spilled/and scattered like/a gust of lost pollen."  No seas near me, but I do remember the coast in a storm well enough for this image: "gales hurled gnashing like seawater over fences'/laddered apertures..." ("The Woodlot").

My copy--now 33 years old--is full of pencil markings, grass stains, stuffed with cottonwood leaves, scuffed from being packed along on hikes and camping trips (along with Annie Dillard, who, like Hopkins, is a bit too pious for my tastes, but who nonetheless has the keen eye and immersion in poetic language we find in Clampitt). Clampitt wrote poems about Maine and New York City (where she mostly lived--you wouldn't know it), about Iowa and farm life in that beautiful corny rectangle of a place. About the many countries she visited--Italy and England in particular--and, some of her best and wittiest, about music. Especially memorable is her long poem "Beethoven, Opus 111," too beautiful simply to quote from and too long to type out here.

Buy the book. Write your name in it. Carry it around all summer (with a pocket dictionary). You'll be happy you did.

And finally, this:

Easter Morning

a stone at dawn
cold water in the basin
these walls' rough plaster
imageless
after the hammering
of so much insistence
on the need for naming
after the travesties
that passed as faces,
grace : the unction
of sheer nonexistence
upwelling in this
hyacinthine freshet
of the unnamed
the faceless


There are no bad photographs of Amy Clampitt. Here is my favorite.

George Ovitt (6/10/16)

The Kingfisher is published by Knopf and is still in print, thank God. 

For the sea mouse: http://www.marlin.ac.uk/biotic/browse.php?sp=4405

Eros, Philos, Agape

Seven Years, by Peter Stamm

translated by Michael Hofmann

 It was the great scholar and saint, Augustine of Hippo, who first explored with remarkable psychological acuity the nuances of human love and the connection between human erotic passion and the love of God. In the Confessions, Augustine delineates with exquisite--at times excruciating--self-awareness his journey from cupidity to caritas, from love of the flesh to love of the spirit:

“I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by love of mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.” 

In his short, exegetical work, On Christian Doctrine, Augustine argues that Scripture, as God's Word, must always be read and interpreted as tending toward the enhancement of divine love--the word alone is merely dross; its meaning uplifts the devout to knowledge of, and love for, the Divine.


****
Strange as it may seem, it was Augustine who came to mind as I read through the unusual and unsettling 2009 novel Sieben Jahre, translated with typical felicity by Michael Hofmann as Seven Years and published by Other Press. Believe me, there is nothing remotely Augustinian or even especially religious about this novel, yet I was compelled to think, as the story of Sonia, Alexander, and Ivona unwound, not of the physical compulsions of human love but of the mysterious psychological or, in this case, spiritual dimensions of attraction and obsession. The force fields of this particular triangle are oddly proportioned--unbalanced and disjointed: Alexander has married Sonia. He is a handsome, charming, and not especially ambitious architect, more deeply engaged by the practical side of design than the aesthetic; he offhandedly woos and eventually marries Sonia. Sonia, we are told (repeatedly) is beautiful, brilliant, dynamic, alluring, etc. Unlike Alex, Sonia is drawn to the aesthetics of architecture, in particular to the murky--authoritarian--utopianism of Le Corbusier. Indeed, the novel's epigram is from the great Swiss-French architect, an often-quoted modernist koan: "Light and shadow reveal form." If Alexander and Sonia are light and shadow--he all practicality, down-to-earthiness, muddle; she a ravishing mystery--then the nearly mute, devout, lower-class and decidedly unattractive Ivona is "revealed form." For what Stamm has achieved, brilliantly if incredibly, is to make a silent outcast, a mystical washerwoman, the real center of the novel, the source of its energy and cryptic meaning. How so?

Alexander has a brief tryst with Ivona, not out of attraction, but out of (self) loathing; he finds Ivona repulsive but compelling; he strips off her clothes and lies on top of her, fondles her, but does not "possess her." It's a disturbing scene: not rape, but not consensual, and it's not sexual but contractual, a tacit acknowledgment of a connection that persists over years and years, even though Alex has virtually no contact with Ivona, his life is shaped by her being, and hers by him. It is as if Ivona, the victim of a callous and unfeeling man's assault, is the seducer. For thereafter, all through his profitable marriage and business partnership with Sonia, Alexander cannot excise Ivona from his consciousness. He cannot be happy with Sonia (it appears) largely because the woman he desires is someone he doesn't love. It's a muddle, implausible, but entirely believable. The form of a life is made not by anything real, but by contrasting ideals.

We live in a building that we build ourselves. This "building" is not only our life--that's the least of it--this building is what we think about our life. The modernist ethos prescribed functionality, a prescription that grew out of the embrace of positivism and technology that swept through European intellectual life in the late 19th century. The great monuments of modernist writing accept as given the fact that we have built a world and that we are compelled to constantly reconstruct and remodel our view of our place in that world. The tension between a lived and an examined life is the source of what is loosely called "irony."* The magisterial work of modernist irony is Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, a novel that excavates the tension between the world we actually live in and the world we think we live in... Joyce, Woolf, James, Eliot, all wrote from the same ironic perspective, trying or not trying to bring into harmony light and shadow, life and thought, the building and the space it defines.

Augustine, as a believer in an omniscient deity, had no such paradoxes to resolve, and if he thought of irony at all he thought of it in the Greek sense of εἰρωνεία, the rhetorical trope for "dissimulation" or "delusion." Augustinian love is "ironic" when the the lover mistakes his erotic fascination for the real thing, as when Chaucer's Troilus, released at last from the surly bonds of earth, looks down on the world and, at long last, gets it.

SPOILER ALERT: So here is the joke, the irony in the Augustinian sense: only Ivona--fat, covered with moles, naive, unfashionable, etc. is fruitful. Only Ivona is fully alive. Only Ivona has bridged the unbridgeable gap between life-as-lived and life-as-reflection. And how does she manage this miracle? Here's where Augustine popped to mind: she is a medieval woman; she is the annunciate, the true Child of God. Sonia cannot conceive; she can design and create soulless buildings, but she cannot love her husband, or the child (Sophia!) whom he creates with unloved Ivona. It is with these unexpected developments that Stamm is most original. His love triangle offers no clarity, no resolution; there is no "happily ever after," no "blended family." Sonia runs off. Alexander broods. Ivona, out of love, gives up her baby. Stamm's wonderful insight is that "making sense" of our lives isn't a solitary pursuit, and in any case, isn't really worth the time and suffering we put into it. "Making sense" of things is a modern madness--things in themselves have sense, are meaningful, and our role is to accept that fact, or, rather, to make the leap to belief. This belief isn't--I say again--religious--but psychological. But, in the end, what's the difference?










*Among the Ancients, Socrates, as he comes to us via Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, was an "ironic" figure ("The Apology"). The next great ironist was Shakespeare (compare "The Tempest" to "On Cannibals" for the difference between irony and not-irony). This said, I am probably wrong, and if I had paid closer attention to my teachers I would have avoided this sort of shameless generalization. 

George Ovitt (6/7/16)

"Nothing is Mine for Long"

Divan of Ghalib, Nachoem M. Wijnberg

"The human / image remains imprisoned / in the mirror of the world." (Ghalib) 

Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan, whose takhallus, or pen-name, was Ghalib ("most excellent"), was born in Agra during the twilight of the Mughal Empire, though he lived most of his life in Delhi. Ghalib's "traditional divan," contains 234 ghazals as well as Urdu poems in other styles. Ghalib also composed poetry and prose works in Persian, including a history of the 1857 "mutiny." Virtually all translators and commentators (over one hundred commentaries on Ghalib's ghazals exist) agree that the task of translating Ghalib is a "doomed mission" [Frances W. Pritchett], and agree that Ghalib is "mushkil-panand"--a lover of complexity.  I have spent parts of the past few days admiring a handful of the ghazals in various translations (Niazi, Ahmed Ali, as well as adaptations by W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, and others).  I also found myself rereading Nabokov's famous 1941 New Republic article, "On the Art of Translation,"written as the polyglot novelist revised his version of Pushkin:

"We can deduce now the requirements that a translator must possess in order to be able to give an ideal version of a foreign masterpiece. First of all he must have as much talent, or at least the same kind of talent, as the author he chooses. In this, though only in this, respect Baudelaire and Poe or Joukovsky and Schiller made ideal playmates. Second, he must know thoroughly the two nations and the two languages involved and be perfectly acquainted with all details relating to his author’s manner and methods; also, with the social background of words, their fashions, history and period associations. This leads to the third point: while having genius and knowledge he must possess the gift of mimicry and be able to act, as it were, the real author’s part by impersonating his tricks of demeanor and speech, his ways and his mind, with the utmost degree of verisimilitude."

No doubt Nabokov considered himself nearly up to the task of Eugene Onegin--but to render Ghalib's subtle and delicate love poems from Urdu to English--to have assimilated not only the languages but the "author's manner and methods," his "social background," his "demeanor"--who could achieve so much, and how might we, as readers without Urdu or any other Nabokovian qualification, hope to make sense of this great poet?

While I was reading Nachoem M. Wijnberg's poems for (in honor of, as homage to, based on, etc.) Ghalib in David Colmer's fine translation, I had in mind this sentence from the collection's forward, written, presumably, by Colmer: "[Divan of Ghalib] is a book of English translations of the Dutch poems Nachoem Wijnberg wrote for Ghalib and with Ghalib with Ghalib and to Ghalib." This clarification--if you can call it that--yes, at first I thought White Pine had sent me a collection of translations of Ghalib by a Dutch poet translated into English by an Austrailian!--not only enhanced my interest in the book (beautifully gotten up, as all WP books are) but let me off the hook: no need to fret about the "accuracy" or "spirit" of the translations. This was a straightforward literary transaction: a book of poems Englished from a comfortable (bourgeois!) language from which even I--monoglot that I am--could wrestle some words, a hommage (of sorts) rather than another attempt to climb the mountain of Ghalib's esoteric genius.

This is familiar territory for me, this realm of the poetic transformation rather than translation. I have enough German to know that Rilke's sublime Duino Elegies are untranslatable (William Gass has a wonderful book on the subject of not translating Rilke), and Kenneth Rexroth's versions of Tu Fu--among my favorite poems--have always felt more like Rexroth channeling Tu Fu than surmounting the multiple Nabokovian hurdles to rendering a man as little known to us as Lao Tzu. Rexroth worked with the Chinese scholar Ling Chung on his versions of Chinese poetry; but of course Rexroth had many languages, and he was among the last poets to have read everything. I also love reading and comparing various versions of grad school stand-bys like Beowulf, wondering all the while if Michael Alexander, Burton Raffel, and Seamus Heaney had even read the same poem. But then there's John Gardner's wonderful Grendel, and that, patient reader, brings us at last to Wijnberg's Ghalib.

Nachoem M. Wijnberg, born in 1961, is the author, in Dutch, of fourteen books of poetry and, by my count, three novels. He is a professor of something called "cultural entrepreneurship" at the University of Amsterdam. And why not? The best poems are written by those who have never been "work-shopped" in Iowa or anyplace else. I have ordered both of Wijnberg's books available in English (The Jews and Advance Payment, the latter also translated by David Colmer); I will report on these books in due course. The reviews suggest that Wijnberg's novels are difficult and obscure; so much the better.

However, there is nothing obscure about Wijnberg's Divan of Ghalib--the poems are personal, chatty, direct, and commodious. No need to have mastered the intricacies of the ghazal to cozy up to "Enough:"

I have seen no more of the one who said that if he had a second 
life it would be mine.
   I wished I had seen more of the one who made morning for 
himself, who said my morning.

He can build his own hourse, he doesn't make day or night until 
the house is ready.
   His legs spread, a hand of each knee, that how he sits on a 
chair in the doorway. There is no door, he doesn't know how to 
make one....


The loose lines seem to stretch out through odd-ball commas until the idea is done. Throughout the collection, one finds a no-nonsense, declarative style: "I know how this goes, last time I didn't find a solution in time./But if I can try again I'll be more able to keep up with what's/Happening--it helps to know a lot." ("How It Grows"). Here and there I thought of Karl Ove Knausgaard's let's-have-a-coffee-and-a-cigarette-and-talk style of coming to the point; Wijnberg eschews metaphor for straight talk, as if he were doing two things at once (culture and entrepreneurship) and didn't want to waste a lot of time: "Ghalib, did you have to spend another day getting used/To the idea that the stars you see at night might have/disappeared long ago?" A rhetorical question posed in "India," not so much, one feels, to Ghalib as to the poet himself. No channeling here, but rather an unfolding meditation on reading and thinking about a predecessor, which, when you come right down to it, is what all literature is really about, an adding to the universe of language by charting one's own reflection of what, frankly, can never be what Nabokov wished--a full reckoning with another mind.

The poems in Wijnberg's Divan that I returned to several times were the most discursive and personal. I thought I might have a go at matching one divan to another, Wijnberg back to Ghalib's originals, but I doubt I'd find many resemblances, and so what if I did? The pleasure I took in this book was more along the lines of seeing how many associations might be coaxed out of "Ghalib," as if the 19th century Urdu/Persian genius were at the center of one of many millions of poetic constellations and Wijnberg's idea was to make poems reflecting this fact. Think, perhaps, of Dante's Cavalcanti or Lorca's Gypsy Ballads, not dissimilar recognitions of the power of predecessors.  Wijnberg's poetic "you," I'm guessing, isn't Ghalib, but some North Star of meaning.  I note that one of the blurbs on the book jacket points to Wijnberg as "disguising himself" as Ghalib. I respectfully disagree. The distance between the meditative subject of these poems and Wijnberg is preserved throughout; his Divan evokes unknowing, distance, the mystery of another's life and language. It is precisely the lack of disguise that is most perceptive in Divan of Ghalib. Not only is translation (sometimes) futile; so is impersonation. What remains is the kind of homage Wijnberg pays to Ghalib: we are different, but like some great perturbation in the sea of language, your words affect my own. Bloom thought of influence as anxious; perhaps, but also respectful and worthy of recognition.

This book was welcome right at this moment of my life--of our lives. So much nonsense about our insurmountable differences, our inescapable tribal loathings, tumbling from the mouths of the ignorant  and ambitious! How refreshing to encounter in a new poet (Wijnberg) an old friend (Ghalib) freshly attired. To be reminded again of what continues to matter when so much no longer does.


George Ovitt (6/3/16)

Nachoem M. Wijnberg's Divan of Ghalib, translated by David Colmer is available from White Pine Press.

A brief, accessible study of Ghalib by Ahmed Ali is here http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ghalib/texts/txt_aziz_ahmed_1969.pdf

For addition information on the ghazal and other poetic forms in Urdu I rely on Frances W. Pritchitt of Columbia University (whose translation of Intizar Husain's great Urdu novel Basti was reviewed in this blog): http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ghalib/apparatus/txt_bib_eng.html

This Is The End?

Jan Dismas Zelenka, "The Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet," ZWV 53

Let Me Be Frank With You, Richard Ford (a Frank Bascombe novel)

The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, edited by Bernard McGinn

Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, Donald J. Trump

The great Czech composer Jan Dismas Zelenka composed his "Lamentations" in the 1720's. They showcase Zelenka's remarkable contrapuntal talents--think Smetana or Dvořák, two musicians influened by Zelenka's complex harmonic style. The "Lamentations" possess a rich, introspective feeling, slow orchestral cadences, haunting oboe solos, voices that modulate across layered textures of sound--here the brass uplifts, now the viola darkens the mood. The power of the work, as in the prophet's, is in its melancholy, a text and music that meditates on what might have been, distraught, perplexed by the human foibles that have brought us to this, to the Kingdom of Babylon:

  
     ...Raise the wail and lamentation for the mountains,
     the dirge for the desert pastures,
     for they have been burned, no one passes there,
     the sound of the flocks is heard no more,
     birds of the sky and all animals
     all have fled, all are gone.
     I mean to make Jerusalem a heap of ruins. (Jeremiah, 9 "Lamentations to Zion")

Social catastrophe causes personal catastrophe to be sure, but it is the life of the individual that foretells the future of society, as in the great prophetic books of Jeremiah, Isiah, Ezekiel, and Amos.  In times of chaos, thoughtful and spiritually-inclined individuals--that is, people who are attuned to the subtle connections that bind the world together in counterpoint with the divine--are likely to turn inward, to search for signs that provide a narrative by which they can live.  Such is the prophecy of the Old Testament--an indictment of Israel, but also an affirmation of Yahweh's intentions for his chosen people. So too do we find in the rich spiritual literature of the late Middle Ages--another chaotic and unsettled era--a profound engagement with the mystical, rendered first in visions and then in the language of subjectivity, an inwardness that adumbrated the Protestant focus on silent engagement with the Word. Aside from their psychological and pathological implications, the visions of the mystics don't much interest me, but their writings are rich with Blakean symbols. Teresa of Avila is perhaps the most eloquent proponent of unity with the Divine:

      "As far as can be understood, the soul, I mean the spirit of this soul, is made one with God who is himself a spirit, and who has been pleased to show certain persons how far his love for us extends in order that we may praise his greatness. He has thus deigned to unite himself with His creature. He has bound himself to her as firmly as any two human beings are joined in wedlock, and will never separate himself from her."

(McGinn, Christian Mysticism, p. 456; every library should include a copy of this book. McGinn, the finest scholar of medieval religiosity, provides a generous selection of mystical writings, moving for the atheist as well as for the devout.)

We yearn to believe in something--it can't be denied--God works for many, but for others there is art and beauty, politics and power, love and friendship, and for those full of "passionate intensity" there is money and what it buys. Or the glorified Self, the one Frank Bascombe, at (a mere!) sixty-eight, finds not only ephemeral but ludicrous. The baggage of ego permeates all of the four Bascombe novels, but none so much as this most recent. The Self: the roller coaster at Seaside Heights, half-submerged, a wreck, a mockery of amusement.

Richard Ford, among the finest stylists writing in English--his stories rank, in my view, with Alice Munro's for their artistry and deftness at creating character--has, since 1988, followed the career of Frank Bascombe, failed-novelist, sportswriter, divorced person, real estate agent and philosopher of the everyday--the sort of phenomenologist Husserl had in mind when he described the profound ways in which we can come to know the world by simply paying attention. And Frank pays very close attention. Ford's Bascombe (the autobiographical elements in his novels and stories are unmistakable), like Updike's Rabbit or Roth's Nathan Zuckerman, travels through the landscape of post-Reagan, post-Bush I and II, post-Clinton America not unlike the way in which Jeremiah wandered through the deserts of Palestine, in search of what thoughtful human beings are in search of--not "truth", that squib of meaning, but coherence, as in, what is going on here?

If Frank has a default setting it is bemused confusion. Whether he is meeting with an ex-client whose vacation home on the Jersey Shore has been blown to smithereens by Hurricane Sandy ("I'm Here"), listening to a macabre tale of family homicide ("Everything Could Be Worse"), negotiating the delivery of an orthopedic pillow to his ex-wife ("The New Normal"), or spending a some terrible minutes with a dying acquaintance ("Deaths of Others"), Ford's four interlinked stories evoke a quietly apocalyptic landscape, a suburban world ravaged by climate change, political nihilism (the Republican nay-sayers and Tea Party crack-pots), aging (Frank is recovering from the cancer described in excruciating detail in The Lay of the Land), and the daily rub of post-modern, post-meaning, American life. It's the world of Trumpery, where "kicking ass" and "getting rich" and "fixing" a broken American by exiling everyone with dark skin revives, if not our past glory, at least the myth of our past glory. It's a sad fantasy this idea of ours, this lie about a wondrous past of unalloyed glory, but it's the one we want, the one that sells and elects presidents and keeps the machine of greed humming along. Jeremiah would recognize it at once.

Ford writes like an angel. Or like an OT prophet. The cadences of his sentences, the counterpoint of voices--Frank's skeptical inner monologues layered over the voices of those he (reluctantly) has to deal with in real life--have the quality of lamentation. Frank Bascombe was an ironic wag in the Sportswriter, a witty, disillusioned man in Independence Day, but in older age Frank is weary, eager to be left in peace, and yet constantly at the beck and call of others. He reads books to the blind, greets returning Iraq War Vets at Newark Airport, visits his Parkinson-afflicted ex-wife, and fields phone calls and visits from his former real-estate clients; in other words, Frank is enmeshed in a social world not of his own choosing, just as we all are, and much of his inner life is a wry commentary on the illusions of civil life, the tedium of others.  Saul Bellow would imagine that these interruptions served some higher purpose (as in Herzog and Humbolt's Gift), but Ford possesses none of Bellow's faith in higher meanings. He's a here and now guy, a what's-this-signify-right-this-second fellow whose only remaining faith is placed in the facts of decay and death. Time is running out for Frank--he feels the "wing'ed chariot" nipping at his heels at every junction of his ordinary days--and he doesn't wish to waste a minute. What he will do with the time he saves is an open question. Mostly, he tells us, he just wants to sit still.

Where are we headed? Back to greatness, lost because of "stupidity" of our leaders? Should we "trust our guts" as Mr. Trump advises in the most recent of his books, drop a few more bombs, weed out the un-American among us? Frank Bascombe's sensible view of the world precludes such cruelty. A suburban Buddhist, Frank believes in disengagement, in taking a step back, in being agreeable, but without agreeing. His former wife, committed to conspiracies, thinks that Hurricane Sandy (the central trope of the stories) was a personal affront, something aimed at her. Frank meditates on this notion:

   "The Default Self, my answer to all her true thing issues, is an expedient that comes along with nothing more than being sixty-eight--the Default Period of life.
   "Being an essentialist, Ann believes we all have selves, characters we can't do anything about (but lie). Old Emerson believed the same. ""...A man should give us a sense of mass..." etc. My mass has simply been deemed deficient. But I believe nothing of the sort. Character, to me, is one more lie of history and the dramatic arts. In my view, we only have what we did yesterday, what we do today, and what we might still do. Plus, whatever we think about all of that. But nothing else--nothing hard or kernel-like. I've never seen evidence of anything resembling it. In fact I've seen the opposite: life as teeming and befuddling, followed by the end."

Here is a point that clarifies Jeremiah, a cause for lamentation: we find ourselves divided between the Ann's of this world and the (fewer) Frank's--those for whom Meaning is built into the nature of the world and those for whom only actions and judgements and muddle are real. The third way, the way of the mystics, lifts us up out of this mess altogether, but isn't a path many of us would choose. The terrible thing isn't that we (Americans, humans) are divided between these two incommensurate visions of the possibilities of human life, the tragedy is that they are both wrong, or incomplete. Frank wanders back home to Haddam, to his All-Bran and ESPN and squishy liberal ideas--and his dying--without having learned a single thing from the four encounters that lie at the heart of Let Me Be Frank With You. That's the joke: Frank can only be frank with us, and frankness for Frank is a recitation of confusion and doubt. But, to be frank, I am relieved and pleased that there is nothing more, nothing deeper for me to learn. I too am tired of the essentialists, the truth-mongers, the ideologues, the big talkers. We come to this point eventually, to the moment when we only want to pay attention to the here and now, and to make (as Bascombe does) the world just a little bit better around us, in our own neighborhood. We've learned all the lessons there are to learn. Time, simply, to live.

Richard Ford's Let Me Be Frank With You is published by Ecco Press.
Bernard McGinn's The Essential Writings of the Christian Mystics by Modern Library, which has also just published a beautiful edition of the first three Bascombe novels in one book.
Jan Dismas Zelenka's "Lamantions" are, remarkably, here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI-JTx4BJKU
I've used the Jerusalem Bible for Jeremiah because my King James isn't handy; the KJ is, of course, preferable for this, and for all, prophets.

George Ovitt (May 24, 2016)
 

Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you're generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/d/donaldtrum153799.html