The Ones I Liked

Not the Best Books of 2019

 

Nearly 305,000 titles were published in 2019, rendering any notion of the "ten best" or even the"thousand best" books absurd.  Naturally the lists touted by the Times, the Post, the Guardian, and my other sources of information are dominated by the same titles, the same authors (Ben Lerner!), and by the major publishers.  You won't find any small presses represented, nor will you be surprised to learn that few first-time writers, or non-MFA holders, or people who don't live in Brooklyn made the cut.  If you read this blog from time to time, you know that we here at TR like to branch out and read books out of the mainstream, small press titles, books by unknown writers, books by writers not living in the United States, translated works and books that are quirky, nontraditional, and likely to be ignored by the cultural taste makers in London and New York.  We're snobs, sort of, cultural nobodies who happen to like to read, and we operate on the premise that what is popular is often not what is best, though this isn't always the case, as my own list of favorites demonstrates. 

It has been a splendid year for books.  I can't remember a time when I stumbled upon so many fine writers, so many interesting novels, so much engrossing non-fiction, such splendid and moving poetry.

I wanted to share the titles of some books worthy of your consideration, listed here in no particular order.  I hope that you had a good year of reading and that in 2020 you will find many hours to escape from the insanity of the world in the quiet, solitary silence of good books.

***

Marion Poschmann's The Pine Islands, a slender novel about "a journeyman lecturer on beard fashions in film," was not only a pleasant excursion into Japanese history and geography, but it led me back to Basho's great classic The Narrow Road to the Deep North in the David Landis Barnhill translation. Poschmann is a highly regarded German writer whose books are just now being translated.

Ariana Harwicz's Die, My Love is a chilling story of a woman's deepening hatred for her husband and child (and for everyone else).  This isn't merely another Hollywood version of the alienated wife in the mode of "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," nor is it a story of madness; instead, Harwicz, a young Argentinian writer, mercilessly dissects the pretensions of love, marriage, and child rearing.  The corpse that's left isn't pretty.

The inimitable Daša Drndi's two novels of the life and near-death of Andreas Ban that I read this year, Belladonna and EEG (her final novel) operate in that rare space of politically sophisticated and philosophically dense fiction that is one of the staples of Eastern European writing. Ban, a melancholic psychologist and writer, meditates on history, genocide, love, hope and hopelessness in the style of Dubravka Ugrešić (The Ministry of Pain) and Zoran Feric (The Death of the Little Match Girl).  These are all bracing books--dense, unrelenting, demanding, but ultimately rewarding as you must think deeply and pay attention as you read. 

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive, which I have written about in this blog, was the most affecting novel that I read this year. I have now read all of Luiselli's books and also recommend Sidewalks, her short essays on persons and places, thoughts while walking--with a lovely introduction and appreciation by Cees Nooteboom.  I am astonished to learn that former president Obama read and enjoyed this heart-wrenching novel about our border and its victims. Would that someone with power to effect a change in our immigration policies read this fine book. 

Deborah Eisenberg has been on my must-read list for a long time. This year I read her collection All Around Atlantis and have Your Duck is My Duck on my desk.  Few writers can do what Eisenberg does with eccentric America--she is, as someone put it, "the chronicler of our madness." Funny and sad, refreshing in our time of insane public life--memorial characters who look like you and me.

I read a lot of poetry this year. The two books I have read steadily all year are collections from veteran poets: John Balaban's Locusts at the Edge of Summer and Arthur Sze's (winner of the National Book Award this year) The Redshifting Web. Both poets work in open forms, observe the world with compassion, and open up avenues of feeling that draw you not only into individual poems but into the rich body of their work.  Once attracted to Balaban, I sought out three volumes of his translations of Vietnamese poetry (he served in Vietnam as a conscientious objector during that war) and recommend these books as well.  

Andres Resendez's The Other Slavery, an account of the enslavement of Native Peoples in the Americas was a book that stayed with me all year not only for its meticulous research but for the grace and style of the story's telling. 

I read three of Patti Smith's books over the past few weeks--We Kids, Devotion, and, best of all, M Train.  The story of my coming around to read the books that everyone else has already read is too long to repeat here, let's just say that I admired Patti as a musician for many years and had no idea that she wrote splendid books until I stumbled upon M Train in our one remaining bookstore. Patti's travels, her sensibility, and her prose--hallucinogenic, surreal, and as complex as her song lyrics--are worth taking up. I especially love her travels to pay hommage to the graves of writers she admires since I have had the same habit.

Lucy Ellmann's roller-coaster of a three sentence, one-thousand page stream of consciousness book is an insightful, long, long look at where we are now as seen through the consciousness of a not-so-average Ohio housewife.  It takes patience, but Ducks, Newburyport is worth the effort.  You'll be lulled into complacency by a bunch of pop culture references (I didn't get half of them) and then startled into wakefulness by a observations that are poignant and right on target.  Ellmann is the real deal: a novelist who is willing to break up the form and create something like Joyce's final 85 pages of Ulysses--Molly Bloom, with a millennium of pages to fill.

That's it for now.  Happy New Year to all!

George Ovitt (12/31/2019)

Men, Lurking

Milkman, Anna Burns

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood

Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann

It's been a bad year for men.  Although, to be fair, when it comes to men's behavior, every year is pretty much the same.

Just recently, watching what reminded me (from my reading, not direct experience) of the spectacle of devout Bolsheviks falling over themselves to praise the Leader--"The Gardener of Human Happiness," The Man of Steel,"and, perhaps most aptly given that our Leader has been likened, without apparent irony, to Jesus Christ, "Dear Father"--I felt deeply embarrassed for my sex, age-group, and ethnicity (full disclosure: I am an oldish white male).  The defense of our recently impeached President by the apparatchiks of the GOP ("Groveling Odious Partisans") presented a nearly eight-hour spectacle not only of mendacity, boot-licking, and abject immorality, it also made it perfectly clear to this white male that what we are seeing is the end--thank God--of the rule of old white men over women, children, people of color, and our planet.

This can't go on, and the fervid displays of disingenuousness, smugness, and worst of all, the sense of entitlement that have been on display during these past weeks not only here but also in Great Britain--B. Johnson being Trump's twin, bad hair, fascistic tendencies, and a shared aversion to the truth--suggest that what is transpiring is a last, desperate attempt by a powerful but increasingly irrelevant class of old men (and young men with old souls) to cling to the prerogatives that they believe must be accorded their sex--power and money it goes without saying, but also unimpeded access to women's bodies, authoritarian control of our political and economic system, dictatorial influence over culture, and, in general, the status of demigods that has been, until now, their presumptive birth-right.  That's over, and, believe it or not, it is Trump, the Omega-Male, who is destroying what he hopes to preserve, destroying his half-baked MAGA-fantasy through fecklessness, narcissism, and immorality, and at the same time, for those persons paying attention, undoing all claims of masculine legitimacy--that is, all of the historic nonsense that has turned an ideology of masculine superiority into a farcical circus peopled by preening nobodies whose claims to "natural" domination of the world would be laughable were it not for the tragic consequences these nabobs have visited on human beings and our planet.

A bit of a rant, and poorly punctuated, but it's how we men talk.

My prognosis may appear counter-intuitive given the numerical dominance of white men in business, government, academe, the military, and everywhere else there is power to wield, but bear in mind that the demise of every hegemonic system in history--from feudalism to absolutism to so-called communism--has come at the moment of that system's seemingly greatest power.  The right-wing, anti-democratic, misogynistic, racist male egotism embodied by Trump, McConnell, Weinstein, Bezos, and their devoted followers is unleashing--even as I write these words--a backlash that is global and that will, in time, wash away the so-called principles and self-serving ideas of these men, wipe it away like a great Tsunami sweeping across a landscape laid waste by centuries of greed, stupidity, and arrogance.

This is the central point of Margaret Atwood's continuation of The Handmaid's Tale, the (I'm sorry to say) far less engaging novel The Testaments whose central premise is that rotten systems of government--in the case of the novel, brutal patriarchy--decay from within.  While the sequel to AHT was clunky, Atwood's premise is right on the money.  Rot begets rot; corruption engenders corruption; the cult of death--for that is what patriarchy really is--kills itself, though, unfortunately, not until it has claimed far too many innocent victims.

Will the rest of us--women, children, the poor and powerless, and decent fellows like myself, get out alive?  That remains to be seen.  I don't anticipate a long-term residence on earth, but I lament daily the world my daughters, my wife, and the good people I know will inherit, and I resent bitterly the stupidity and callous self-interest that has created what has passed beyond crisis to something more akin to disaster.

Yes, of course, there are wonderful men and awful women, sure, natch.  I generalize to be sure. Congressman Schiff seems a decent sort; Congressman Jordan of the shirt-sleeves, not so much. But this isn't a note about politicians, but about the trajectory of masculine behavior as it has for too long existed: we're in danger of expiring as a species; birds and turtles are disappearing; coral reefs are doomed; thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children starve and/or sleep under our freeways while the uber-rich (Rudy Giuliani!) own six homes and belong (Rudy Giuliani!) to eleven country clubs.  It's unnatural. The world is being devoured by piggish men who do nothing for anyone--they don't police our streets, fight our fires, teach our children, tend to the sick and the dying, build anything--they spend their wasteful days spinning money into more money, fomenting wars for others to fight, shitting in golden toilets, and spending an inordinate amount of time harassing, degrading, and raping women.

Enough.

***

Meanwhile, women fight back with courage, dignity, and art.

Anna Burns, for example, in a novel of extraordinary originality, plunks us into the odd reality of "middle sister," an eighteen-year-old who "reads while walking," and negotiates the violent world of what is presumably Northern Ireland during the 1970's (Burns was born in Belfast).  The unnamed characters who walk the streets of Burns's unnamed city negotiate a masculine world of political and personal grievance that leaves nearly every family mourning a son, a father, a daughter.  Burns, with deftness and imaginative scope unusual in contemporary fiction, pushes her story of sectarian violence from realism into the realm of parable: the repetitions of theme and language, the characters identified by their social role rather than by name ("maybe-boyfriend," "Milkman," "renouncers"), the circling back and forth among patterns of action, nearly all of which end in bloodshed--these rhetorical and thematic modes of storytelling add up to a novel that enacts the cycles of violence and degrees of victimization that characterize so many parts of the world in which we live. Most ominous for me are the lurking men, the "renouncers" who hate those from "over the ocean" and who inflict vengeance against any of their countrymen who deviate from a strict pattern of permissible behavior. "Informer" takes on the weight of "non-conformist": maybe-boyfriend who is middle sister's maybe love interest is suspect because he likes sunsets and stars; the Milkman (who isn't a milkman) is the chief of the "renouncers," perhaps an IRA gunman, and his unrequited love interest in middle-sister isn't offered as courtship but as the threat of sexual violence--he's the most powerful man in the community and is entitled to take whomever he wishes, no questions asked.  Middle-sister does her best to negotiate a terrain as replete with fixed rituals and unyielding culture as the Catholic Church; she fights rumors, but truth holds little sway in her world, just as it holds none in ours.  

Milkman is narrated throughout by middle-sister; dialogue is reported by her, all descriptions are filtered through her lively consciousness.  In this regard, Anna Burns and Lucy Ellmann approach the novel with similar aims: Burns reprises the psychological effect of simmering violence on the consciousness of one sensitive character; Ellmann, over the course of one-thousand pages (and about three sentences) uses a hurtling form of stream-of-consciousness (as in Joyce's Ulysses) to survey in (frankly, at times) excruciating detail the anxieties of an Ohio housewife, an Everywoman. In one sense, Burns and Ellmann traverse the same terrain, for both women view a world created by men that is baffling, full of threats, irrational, rapacious, and indifferent to the well-being of the weak, the very people for whom, one presumes, societies were created.  Ellmann's housewife isn't faced with the Shadow of the Gunman (see Sean O'Casey) but with the enervating rituals of up-to-the-minute American life. Ellmann, who has resided in Scotland for many years, is utterly hip to what is going on in our local precincts--the slipping away of a sense that we are anything other than a national shopping mall, that we can have a life outside of the internet, that we exist in any meaningful way with other people, that we give a shit about anyone other than ourselves.  Ellmann does isolation with the same intelligence that Burns does paranoia; in the end, these feelings amount to the same thing.

With Burns one is, as it were, 10,000 feet above the world, looking down at a grid of unnamed streets and neighborhoods and people, at events uprooted from time and place, at the general pattern of human folly. Ellmann, on the other hand, is like one of the historians of the annales school: she unpacks every moment, every impression, every thought of her narrator.  Both novels explore the interior life of a woman who possesses the gift of observation but who is put continuously on the defensive by a world that has become unmanageable.  Both Belfast and Ohio are sunk in violence, though of different sorts. Middle-sister lives among gunmen; Ohio-housewife lives in the murkiness of a way of life that is disappearing--security, community, child-rearing, marriage, work, patriotism--none of the verities with which Housewife has lived are enduring.  Trump makes numerous cameo appearances in Ducks, Newburyport as the talisman of this slipping away. Who better to embody the mess we are in?

What, Housewife wonders, has become of us?  What, indeed?

Christmas Day, 2019
George Ovitt

William Wordsworth, Patti Smith, and One Meaning of History

Patti Smith, M Train (a memoir)

"These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love."

--William Wordsworth, from "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"

 I finished M Train late last night, and while I should have slept in, I awoke at sunrise, my mind full of images from the book--Patti searching out the grave of Sylvia Plath, Patti photographing Bolano's writing chair in Blades, Patti at Mishima's grave, Patti and her late, lamented husband Fred Sonic Smith traveling to Suriname to fulfill a promise Patti had made to the ghost of Genet...and then the lines I have reproduced above from Wordsworth's Tintern Abby, imperfectly remembered, arrived as the sun rose in a bank of clouds over the Sandia mountains.  I next remembered an interview I had seen with Patti (I couldn't call her "Smith" if I tried) shot in 1975 when, clearly under the influence of something or other, she stole the show from five or six men, band members and a male interviewer, describing her own sense of freedom and of "breaking through to the other side." Somehow all of these disparate images coalesced into, of all things, a theory of history. 



Morning mind, like beginner's mind, is the best place to find new ideas.

Figuring out the arrival of William Wordsworth was easy enough.  His great poem of memory precisely describes Patti's working model: in "lonely rooms" (though by her own admission Patti is never lonely) and at her corner table at the Cafe Ino, she drinks her coffee and writes in her notebooks, remembering what has been a tumultuous life, full of joy, fame, and heartbreak.  Her beloved husband, Fred Smith, died young, as did her companion and lover of the late 1960's and early 1970's Robert Mapplethorpe. She has been celebrated as one of the founders of punk rock, and she was by far the finest lyricist to perform to in this style; she is a successful visual artist, an activist, and, above all (for me) a compelling writer. Her memoir Just Kids won the National Book Award in 2010; she has written half-a-dozen other books of which M Train is perhaps the finest. There is much for her to remember.

But the reason I thought of Wordsworth and of "Tintern Abbey" in particular goes deeper than the centrality of memory in Patti's work; rather it was because, as was the case for the great romantic poets of the 19th century, Patti is inspired by a deep sense of place--by graveyards in particular, but also by landscapes and seascapes, by city streets and remote villages.  Her descriptions of specific locales as a source of self-identity mirrors the Romantics' certainty that the spiritual and therefore the enduring is best discovered by traversing pastoral districts, visiting ruins, gazing on hills and oceans and then, reposing (pen in hand) in tranquility, recalling and reproducing the sensations evoked, not by the places themselves, but by their recollection. 

I can't pretend to know Patti's working methods--I'm guessing from what she has written, which may or may not be construed as a guide to her thinking--but her collections of objects and her offerings to the dead are aptly tied to her interests and obsessions: a few stones for Genet's grave, a cotton sock with an embroidered bee for Sylvia Plath, and always the Polaroid photographs of what feel like melancholy objects (Bolano's writing chair, Frieda Khalo's bed, Tolstoy's bear)--all of these images and objects possess the precise weight of memory one finds in the Romantics, or, closer to us, in the haunting books of W.G. Sebald. (Sebald isn't mentioned in M Train, but his spirit hovers alongside Patti as she writes).

  

The waking dream of my theory of history is, I'm afraid, rather sketchy, at least compared to my sense that Patti Smith is a notable Romantic artist.  But here was the thought I had, for what it's worth. 



Since the end of World War II (Patti was born in 1946), the central passion of American history has been the consolidation of economic and political power--enjoying the accidental fruits of uncontested material superiority that came after the War and the construction of a fragile consensus that would allow traditional elites to maintain social control while at the same time reluctantly doling out just enough wealth and just enough freedom to keep the majority of Americans, if not contented, then at least docile.  I know this is facile and probably untrue, but then, of course, it is true.

The 1950's (e.g. 1945-1963) were an experiment in social control through the narcotizing effects of consumerism on the one hand, and the enforcement of conformity through ideology and violence on the other. Women were locked in the domestic sphere; African-Americans were excluded from the mainstream through legal segregation and quasi-legal lynching; gays were forced into hiding, and non-elite men were pushed into economic and social roles that were, at best, constricting, and at worse, debilitating (see Richard Yates).  All power flowed to the elites of business, government, and the academies.  In other words, the aristocracy first conceived by the Founders had, at long last, been fully achieved within the comfortable borders of prosperity and global hegemony.

However:

There was bound to be an explosion, and the overthrowing of this repressive order was the work of the now much maligned "radicals" of the 1960's.  Actually not radicals so much as persons who hadn't forgotten that ideals like democracy and liberty were a reward due even the lowliest assembly-line worker, hotel maid, and stay-at-home mom.  Yes, it's true, in the Sixties there was folly galore, and self-indulgence, and the stupidity induced by drugs and narcissism, but the social impact of the age, which lasted until 1974, was indelible and salutary.

All of this is well known and it took me only fifteen seconds to think all of the above in that slipshod way I have of thinking in grand narratives.

But what I was actually considering was the weirdly exhilarating image of Patti Smith, age 29, a slender slip of a young woman, explaining to an interviewer that her life was about freedom, and that this (I thought when I heard her say it) was precisely the romantic view of human existence, and that saying this, and living as though it were true--living as though human freedom, especially creative freedom, was the point of living at all--wasn't a reason to shake one's head and worry about narcissism or the fall of American civilization but quite the opposite.

What Patti was saying was the simple truth.  And that, stripping away all of the bullshit about what it means to be a responsible citizen and a loyal American, leads one back to Wordsworth: our duty is to ourselves, to our understanding of our finite earthly existence, and that once we have managed to make some sense of what we are doing, we need to work hard to create something beautiful, however it is that we choose to do so.  All understanding is self-understanding. And the minute this not-at-all original idea came to me it also seemed clear that this was why I have been reading books all these years, precisely to discover for myself the truth and the freedom of thinking. 

Here, I finally said to myself (the sun fully risen at last), was a way to find "the best portion of a good man's life"--how to live both well and fully.

Thanks Patti. 

George Ovitt (12/7-8/2019)

Stranger in His Own Land

Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander (autobiography)

That's Maya Angelou with Langston, not sure when.

Langston may have been related to Henry Clay; in any case, his grandfathers were white Kentuckians.

He might have been gay; he might not have been. His biographer, Arnold Rampersad says not.  I only mention this point of little or no interest because I for one find in his poems an extraordinary balancing of rage and compassion, revulsion and desire.  I don't doubt that his complexity cut through the core of his being, right through to matters of greatest intimacy, His tenderness toward working-class African Americans, his mixture of anger and indifference toward white society--though not toward particular white persons, many of whom were his friends and patrons--create a poetic voice that is unique among Harlem Renaissance poets and American poets generally.

Langston was extraordinarily forthright in his judgments and observations of other people, as likely to laugh at (white) human folly as to weep, able to see irony and absurdity, but not one to write as if the world were full of moral ambiguity.  It wasn't. Isn't.

When Langston and his various companions traveled--in the South, in Cuba, in Haiti, in the USSR--Langston was neither a straightforward recorder of impressions nor a magisterial self reducing the world to fit his preconceptions. Rather he looked as a poet looks, finding the telling detail, taking each person as a unique part of a much broader experience. He then made poems or stories out of what he witnessed, adding to his observations the rich context of a perennial outsider, one who would have belonged to his country had he been permitted to do so.  Poets, I believe, can never belong to any place.  This is probably a false view and easily contradicted, but having just finished I Wonder As I Wander it feels right.

Langston, in my reading, was only marginally interested in communist, though he was hauled before Joseph McCarthy's HUAC and forced to answer ridiculous questions about his politics.  Communism for African-Americans like Hughes was as much an escape from the suffocating bigotry of Jim Crow as it was an economic or social system.  As Langston himself put it, he was an artist first and foremost, little drawn to the nitty-gritty of ideology or political work.  Nonetheless, he was a radical in every sense. Had McCarthy known the half of it, his head might have exploded.

I can hardly believe I have not before now read this autobiography. It's an engrossing volume, a kind of adventure story welded to the sensibility of a born poet. Like Whitman, whom he superficially resembles, Langston had a preternatural ability to locate and describe the significance of every moment.  In his triumphant poetry-reading tour of the Jim Crow South, made in the depths of the Depression, he shakes his head rather than his fist at the arcane social contortions white southerners engaged in to insure their insulation from the likes of Langston Hughes.

One strange anecdote takes place at a train station in Savannah.  Langston enters the Whites Only waiting room to purchase the Sunday New York Times (a newspaper, by the way, that was no friend of the African Americans in the 1930's), but a white policeman forbids his egress from the White Waiting Room through the Whites Only doorway; baffled by the absurdity of not being permitted to use a door (in which he is even then standing), Langston has to laugh at a system so witless and foolish as to enforce rules whose goal was to render an entire population invisible.

I've also been reading E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and marveling yet again at Forster's brilliant portrayal, in understated language, of the impact of racism on both its victims and perpetrators.  Nothing could be more absurd than the parcel of unconsidered generalizations about "Orientals" that burden nearly every white English person in Forster's classic story.  Aside from the remarkable Fielding (who is absurd as well, but at least he has the good sense to know it) no normal human intercourse is possible between a white person and an Indian.  The consequences of this blindness are, of course, tragic.   Indians, Hindu and Muslim, and Sikhs alike are made strangers in their own country by the overweening British.

And we Americans are exactly like them, eager to renounce tolerance and compassion, forever willing to narrow our world with walls.  The gift of fiction and poetry is to allow us to see how blind we have been and to help us to find a way to the door that is marked "human beings." Just that.

George Ovitt (11/30/2019)

A Long Walk to the Far North

The Pine Islands, Marion Posachmann

 

The old pond-
a frog jumps in,
sound of water.
(Basho, trans. Robert Haas) 


The islands of Matsushima, "the most beautiful place in Japan," have attracted poets and novelists and painters and monks and ordinary persons seeking tranquility since the beginning of time.

Eight hundred years ago Basho, among the most notable of Japanese poets, journeyed to the far north of Japan to see the islands of Matsushima.

"The months and days are the travelers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers. Those who float away their lives on ships or who grow old leading horses are forever journeying, and their homes are wherever their travels take them. Many of the men of old died on the road, and I too for years past have been stirred by the sight of a solitary cloud drifting with the wind to ceaseless thoughts of roaming.
       Last year I spent wandering along the coast. In autumn I returned to my cottage on the river and swept away the cobwebs. Gradually the year drew to its close. When spring came and there was mist in the air, I thought of crossing the Barrier of Shirakawa into Oku. I seemed to be possessed by the spirits of wanderlust, and they all deprived me of my senses. The guardian spirits of the road beckoned, and I could not settle down to work."  Basho (trans. Donald Keene)

Marion Poschmann, a highly regarded German novelist whose work, until now, has been unknown to me, uses Basho's "narrow road to the deep north" in order to frame a contemporary fable of self-discovery.

Gilbert Silvester, an academic whose intellectual preoccupation is beards in film and history, is propelled by a dream of his wife's infidelity to pack a small valise (toothbrush, change of underwear) and leave his home in Germany to fly to Tokyo.  In the airport he purchases a copy of Basho's classic account of his journey to the far north, as well as Genji and the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.  Browsing these volumes, with no plan and no apparent motive, Silvester is moved to retrace Basho's steps--to journey alone to the far north, to see the islands of Matsushima and find the sort of "inner peace" that in the West is equated with the diminution of the ego's cravings, a negative and, for the most part, fruitless endeavor.

Quite by accident Silvester's path crosses that of a young Japanese man who, nearly alone among his countryman, has a small beard: "The young man fussed around the bag and then finally seemed to reach a fragile but satisfactory state for the moment. He took a step back to admire his work and it was only then that Gilbert realized what it was about the man that had irked him. He had a small goatee beard: trendy, neat. Gilbert Silvester decided to speak to him." (26) An awkward plot device I suppose, but this is, after all, a book about impulses accepted and rejected, so why not bring two people together over the matter of beards?

Yosa Tamagotchi is a student who intends on killing himself "because he was afraid he wasn't going to pass his exams."  Gilbert thoughtfully (?) suggests that jumping in front of a train may not be the most aesthetically pleasing way to commit self-slaughter, and convinces Yosa to accompany him on a journey in search of the ideal spot for self-destruction or, in Gilbert's case, ego-destruction. Yosa agrees, is agreeable, and, for the most part, is moved about like a puppet on strings, a projection of one corner of Gilbert's impulses.

And so we have in The Pine Islands what amounts to a buddy novel, a road trip (on trains) in search of Basho, the wisdom of no-self, and a pretty spot for suicide.  It's an odd premise, and I was skeptical at first, but Poschmann pulls it off: the novel is full of pretty writing, and as the two men make their way, haltingly, toward the islands of Matsushima, the absurdity of what they are about gradually washes away. I didn't much care what would happen, since the events were besides the point, but I did relish the way Poschmann turned prose into poetry, the ordinary into the mystical.

Throughout, Gilbert writes cryptic messages back home to his abandoned wife and begins to sound a bit like a Buddhist monk.  Yosa, whom we know only through Silvester's observations, rejects one suicide spot after another, mostly based on criteria established by his German mentor (too crass, too crowded) and we begin to think he might live after all.

Eventually the two travelers are separated, as we knew they must be, for this is ultimately a novel about living, and Gilbert's quixotic search for a better self could only be completed alone.  The novel is full of anti-climaxes, but the final pages are so beautifully written that we don't mind at all that the whole thing feels like a half-baked fable intended to buck up unhappy Europeans (and now, with this translation, unhappy Americans) with the hope that by taking a long walk, carrying only a change of underwear, we too can find beauty, write poignant poems, and, just maybe, recover the lives we've squandered.

The Pine Islands, translated by Jen Calleja, is published by Serpent's Tail Press; it was shortlisted for the Mann Booker Prize in 2019, takes about two hours to read, and is worth every minute of your time.

George Ovitt (10/11/2019)

Wanna Get Away?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh 

The Journal, 1837-1861, Henry David Thoreau

The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals, ed. Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo

I've always been intrigued by solitude, by the rich resonance of being alone, and by those who can leave the world behind without a thought.  Thomas Merton was such a person, and while his introspection, circling endlessly around his faults and his guilt before God, can become tedious, nonetheless his commitment to living an austere life of reading, writing, and meditation refreshes through its purity of purpose.  Not only did Merton flee the life of an aspiring New York writer and intellectual for the austere existence of a Trappist monastery (a strict order requiring vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience), but at Gethsemane Abby, feeling distracted by his emerging fame as a writer, requested and was granted permission to live alone in the Hermitage (pictured here).  His journals, of which The Intimate Merton is a selection, remind me of Thoreau's journals. Both men sought peace in solitude, both believed that separating themselves from "ordinary life" would put them in touch with higher truths, each had a "calling," and both were at times lonely and disappointed that in their solitude they found not fulfillment but a deeper, inchoate yearning.  Being alone causes you to doubt yourself: perhaps that's why so few people are able to bear solitude.

"I sometimes seem to myself to owe all my little success, all for which men commend me, to my vices. I am perhaps more willful than others and make enormous sacrifices, even of others' happiness, it may be, to gain my ends. It would seem even as if nothing good could be accomplished without some vice to aid in it." Thoreau, Sept. 21, 1854

I find refreshing the minutiae of solitude, the little moments of unguarded confession that range from trivia--e.g. Thoreau's July 25, 1853 entry on the difficulty he has keeping his shoes tied--to the profound--Merton's tortured description of his (physical) love for the nurse he refers to as "M".

"I feel that somehow my sexuality has been made real and decent again after years of rather frantic suppression (for though I thought I had it all truly controlled, this was an illusion.) I feel less sick. I feel human." 

Merton doesn't go so far as to break "the vow that prevents the last complete surrender," and he remains "suspicious of the tyranny of sex," but, taken together, his journal entries on his love for M show how difficult it is for even the most committed ascetic and solitary to give up life in the world.

 ***
Which is why, if you aren't a transcendentalist or a Trappist and you want to escape the world you have to go to sleep.  Not for eight hours, but for eight months or a year or forever.  You have to load up on Ambien and Restoril, Xanax and Ativan.  Pay all of your bills automatically, quit your job, say goodbye to your (one) friend, and....go to bed.

It might not be fair to contrast the meditative and spiritual solitude of Thoreau with the seeming (see below) escapism of the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh's latest novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but Moshfegh is so smart that the comparison is inescapable. Instead of turning a year of drug-induced "rest and relaxation" into a soap opera of millennial angst, Moshfegh imagines a young, pretty, well-off Upper-East-Sider as a kind of latter-day mendicant, one who seeks rebirth and reawakening with the same earnestness as a transcendentalist or Trappist.  The young woman--who remains nameless throughout but tells her own story with an ingenuousness that is at the same time touching and creepy--retires to her couch, takes baskets of drugs prescribed by her lunatic psychiatrist, watches Whoopi Goldberg movies, and seeks not self-destruction but self-renewal, or maybe, in the jargon of today, a reboot.  Her father has died of cancer; her mother has recently killed herself with pills and booze; her one and only friend is bulimic and deluded (the married man she loves will leave his wife for her someday); her on-and-off boyfriend is a sadist. Who wouldn't want to wake up from this nightmare?

Moshfegh writes scathingly of her own generation.  Given the insincerity of so much contemporary writing, I find Moshfegh's deadpan style--bitterness unleavened by irony--refreshing.  The narrator's cruel boyfriend Trevor is a dick, but in New York, on the cusp of Y2K, a beautiful young woman could do worse:

"[Trevor] was clean and fit and confident. I'd choose him a million times over the hipster nerds I'd see around town and at the gallery. In college, the art history department had been rife with that specific brand of young male. An 'alternative' to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments....'Dudes' reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into the black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep. They rolled their own cigarettes, didn't brush their teeth enough, spent a hundred dollars a week on coffee."  

When you get tired of "settling" for what is offered and unpalatable, you want nothing more--I feel the same way sometimes--than to sit alone, quietly, with a good book or a dumb movie.  But Moshfegh isn't playing for cheap stakes--she never does, not in any of her stories or in her earlier novel Eileen (Stephan King meets Thomas Bernhard).  Nothing less than a cleansing of her heroine's  life, an erasure of memory, a recasting of the too, too solid flesh will do the trick, and so the young pretty woman who looks, we are told, like Kate Moss, sells all that she owns, hires a Japanese conceptual artist as a kind of caretaker, and leaves the world behind on a fake drug--Infermiterol, concocted in the manner of Don DeLillo's Dylar, a made-up magic bullet that eases one into three-day black outs, mini-deaths that, over the course of six months, succeed in erasing not so much memories as emotions about memories.  It's a Trappist retreat; Thoreau's hikes on Cape Cod; May Sarton's winter alone in a Maine cabin; John Muir at Hetch Hechty, a Sand County Almanac for the lonely and neurotic urban dweller of our Brave New World.

Come to think of it, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, while wonderfully vulgar, is also, oddly, a religious book.  Yes, to be born again we have to die, at least "symbolically," we have to take on a new body, a new self.  Sleep, after all, is what Lazarus awoke from; death can't be provisional, so he was in a coma, or in REM sleep. He was not only awakened, but, we have to concede, renewed.  How could it be otherwise? The great imperative of our age should be: WAKE UP! We're not just watching zombie movies these days; we're zombies ourselves. Not "the blind leading the blind," which at least is touching (think of those images from the trenches of WWI), but the mindless, the sleepwalkers, leading the sleepwalkers.  So Moshfegh's heroine is Everywoman.  As I read the book I kept thinking (at some level, not sure which one) not how shallow the narrator was, or how cowardly, but how brave. How estimable it was to say, "fuck it," and go to sleep. Not to become like everyone else, but to become someone else.  

I won't say another word--the ending of the novel is beautiful and astonishing.

Yesterday, watching Stealth bombers and fighter jets zoom over my beloved city--not the Washington of Trump and the rest of the hoodlums, but the city of real people--I wished for some "Infermiterol," some "Dylar," for a long sleep, a week on the Concord and Merrimack, a retreat to a monastery, time alone to sort things out.  To wake up once and for all.

George Ovitt, July 5th, 2019

Breathless

 Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless (a film)

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive 

Andres Resendez, The Other Slavery

Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn

Richard Slotkin, Fatal Environment

 

 [Apologies for the silence. It's a long story; suffice to say, it's good to be back and writing].

Thanks to the Criterion Collection now having gone online, I have been able to rewatch one of my favorite scenes in all of movie history, a scene from Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. In this part of the film, Jean Seberg and Jean Paul Belmondo are crammed together in the narrow space of Seberg's character's tiny hotel room, smoking furiously, arguing, flirting, thinking aloud the kinds of existential thoughts Parisians were bound to think in the 1960's. Godard himself pushed the wheelchair in which Raul Coutard sat filming--that's how claustrophobic the scene feels.  Belmondo, a cheap hoodlum, having impulsively shot a policeman, is on the run, hiding out with an unwitting American student and aspiring writer, played perfectly by the ingenue Seberg.  In the end, Seberg's Patricia Franchini betrays Michel Poiccard, who is killed by the police.  It's a great film, and, in 1960, it changed the course of cinema history by adopting the techniques--low lighting, handheld cameras, documentary style, long scenes full of closeups and thick with dialogue--that we associate with French "New Wave" cinema.

What makes the film especially poignant for me is the real-life story of Jean Seberg, who was haunted by the FBI for her support of the Black Panthers--stalked, photographed, libeled--until the Iowa-born expat who lived most of her adult life in Paris took her own life.  J. Edgar Hoover took as great an interest in investigating Seberg as he did in looking into the life of Martin Luther King.  His FBI agents scurrilously accused Seberg of having a child out of wedlock by one of the Panthers, demonstrating again Hoover's creepy obsession with "race mixing," sex, and black males. 

The thought of Seberg harried to a lonely death from an overdose of barbiturates--her suicide note said, "Forgive me. I can no longer live with my nerves"--for sending money to the Panthers seems emblematic of a more terrible story that I have been reading about these past several months. It's the story of America's self-created myth of a white Protestant nation; the internalized and perverted version of the "city upon a hill" rolled together with the myth of manifest destiny and godly providence, leavened with the poisons of slavery, racism, and greed.  Seberg was just one of millions of victims of a crusade to destroy any threat to a mythical country, one that existed in the minds of men whose imaginations were unconstrained by history or ethics. I can't untangle all of the strands of this story yet, but Valeria Luiselli's extraordinary new novel goes as far as anything I have read in coming to grips with this tangled history.



Here is where the story begins: On the border between the empire of the United States and the empire of Spain--this was long before the United States conquered what was then the northern third of Mexico in 1848--a state of nature prevailed. Beginning in the sixteenth-century, the northern Sonora on both sides of the Rio Grande was a source of Indian slaves for the Spanish, whose mines in Hispaniola and Mexico ground up slave labor with ruthless efficiency.  The story of this other slavery is told in Andres Resendez's The Other Slavery, a book that shatters many myths about the Spanish conquest of the New World.  For one thing, Christopher Columbus wasn't only intent on making a fortune in gold; he was also the first slave-trader of the New World, and his plans to enslave the entire population of the Caribbean were thwarted only by Queen Isabella's opposition to the enslavement, rather than the Christianization of the Indians. Resendez's account of the history of the enslavement of the Indians helped me to make sense of something I had always found troubling, namely the canonical account of Indian genocide in the Americas as being due to microbes, an account that largely exculpates the Spanish, and later, the British, from responsibility for the catastrophic demographic collapse of the indigenous population of the New World.  There is no doubting the impact of European disease on an Indian population lacking in exposure to smallpox, measles, and other infectious diseases; however, the Spanish and the British also instituted practices--revolving around impressed labor--that precipitated the destruction of the Indians. The Spanish remained ambivalent about Indian slavery thanks to critics of the practice like Bartolome de Las Casas, but the need for laborers in the mines and on the encomiendas (grants of Indian labor) in northern Mexico led the Crown to find tortuous scholastic justifications for Indian indenture or slavery.  Here I was reminded of the position of Mississippi Delta cotton planters who found themselves, after the Civil War, scrambling for ways to keep African Americans from emigrating north, including actively curtailing the Klan's racial violence and easing, ever so slightly, the odious racial practices we associate with the rest of Mississippi.  In any case, the Spanish, needing labor, ignored the strictures of the Crown, waged "just wars" against the Indians in order to take prisoners of war, or simply enslaved peaceful Indians and sold them to the mines, where the Indian lives were short and horrible.

Image from the1872 Skeleton Cave Massacre, Salt River Canyon

And then there was the war against the "savages." Here I have learned most from Karl Jacoby and Resendez, whose books, by the way, provide excellent background to Cormac McCarthy's important novel Blood Meridian. This is of course a long story, and for my purposes--a review of The Lost Children Archive--suffice to say that Indians were considered savage in direct proportion to their resistance to the Spanish/Mexican/North American conquest of their lands.  The Apaches therefore were the tribe most in need of elimination. Hence the Camp Grant massacre, a story vividly and powerfully told in Jacoby's Shadows at Dawn.  The Camp Grant massacre was a relatively late event in the story of Indian dislocation, enslavement, and extirpation (1871), but reading Resendez and Jacoby back-to-back lays out with clarity and precision the continuity of an Indian policy pursued on both sides of the Gila and Rio Grande Rivers by successive generation of Spanish, Mexican, and North American governments.  If one wishes to dig more deeply into the fate of the Indians of the Southwest, don't neglect Richard Slotkin's Fatal Environment, volume two in his "gunfighter nation" trilogy. Here Slotkin lays out the development of the American identity as it was forged in the blood of the "savages" of the West. Slotkin's isn't Turner's heroic march from Atlantic to Pacific but a nightmare of violence more in the vein of Cormac McCarthy than Thomas Jefferson's agrarian utopianism.

Border wars, Indian massacres, truth telling and memory, love and commitment, parents and children--Valeria Luiselli weaves all of these themes and more into a novel that is so smart, so fresh and surprising, so unforgettable, that now, deep into my second reading, I am still marking up the book, making marginal notes, running off to find books to help me more deeply understand what Luiselli is telling me.

I have read three of her books already: The Lost Children Archive: Faces in the Crowd, Sidewalks (reflective essays full of surprises), and Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, a kind of workbook for The Lost Children Archive.

A 'blended family'--mother and daughter, father and son--buy a Volvo and set off on a month-long car trip from New York to Arizona, to Apacheria, the vast desert extending from west Texas across southern New Mexico and Arizona which was once the home of the Apache. The parents are documentarians, that is, they produce documentaries based on sound recordings.  The husband--Lusielli uses the terms "husband," "boy," and "girl" rather than names, thus allowing the family to become representative and keeping the story from falling into the trap of banality--specializes in the world's soundscape (bird calls, traffic noise), while the wife, who is also unnamed in the book, records voices, conversations, and interviews.  With this simple distinction, Luiselli begins to reveal the fissures in the family that reflect fissures--chasms--in the world outside the tiny space of the automobile.  (Claustrophobia within vast spaces: this was something Lusielli made me think about, just as Godard had me considering how human interactions shift with locale). The husband's mind is rooted in the past, in the destruction of the Apache, in the stories of Indian resistance to the "white eyes," while the wife can think only of the lost children, the immigrant boys and girls who wander in the desolate spaces of the southwest.  This tension between past and present, between the husband's righteous anger and the wife's compassion reveals itself in the daily interactions of the family, in their fleeting moments of camaraderie and in their far more frequent bouts of brooding silence. The family is collapsing, and yet neither wife nor husband is willing to say so. Only the boy, aged ten, and one of the novel's two narrators, is able to face the truth.

Along the empty road, in the mostly silent car, the Archives, the boxes of memory, are unpacked. In them one finds books--Susan Sontag's journals, Geronimo's autobiography, maps of the desert terrain, immigrant mortality reports ("Nuria Huertas-Fernandez, Female, age 9, COD: hyperthermia, dehydration"), postcards, sound recordings, notebooks waiting to be filled.  The boxes of the children are empty, waiting to be filled with their own perceptions of the trip. The boy, an aspiring documentarian himself, takes streaky Polaroids along the way, and filters through these crude images an alternative story of the journey, one that looks inward at the family's dissolution.

Luiselli blends with perfect pitch the mundane details of a road trip--where the family eats, where they sleep--with poignant observations on the horror of lost children, the growing distance the wife feels from her husband and children, the story of the great border that divides not only countries but cultures and histories.  It's a tour de force, rich in visual and psychological description, with a plot that takes a surprising shift when the narrator hands off storytelling duties to the ten-year-old boy.  If there is a single criticism of the book, I suppose it might be of the remarkable sensitivity and intelligence of a ten-year-old; then again, Lusielli is so skillful a writer that you are prepared long before the final, luminescent chapters for the shift in point of view.

If you wish to think about borders, or the crisis now unfolding in the American southwest, you can do no better than read this extraordinary novel.

George Ovitt (June 10, 2019)

An Insidious Entrapment

A Woman’s Story and A Frozen Woman by Annie Ernaux

In an opening smartly reminiscent of the first lines of Camus’ novel The Stranger, the French writer Annie Ernaux begins A Woman’s Story (Une femme), her spare, deeply affecting memoir-novel of her relationship with her late mother, with the simple declaration:

My mother died on Monday 7 April in the old people’s home attached to the hospital at Pontoise, where I had installed her two years previously. The nurse said over the phone: ‘Your mother passed away this morning, after breakfast.’ It was around ten o’clock.

Yet the story she tells in this terse, laconic style, a style she calls écriture plate, is anything but detached, anything but absurd, as she struggles earnestly to see and make sense of her proud, self-sufficient mother, a woman for whom, all her life, she felt a profound ambivalence, a troubling mixture of love, hate, guilt, frustration, and pride. In short it is the story of daughters and mothers everywhere—powerfully, honestly told. 

Having read A Woman’s Story in a single sitting (it is just 92 pages long), I began Ernaux’s novel A Frozen Woman (Femme gelée) that same night and was even more impressed with the story, even more enamored with her style.

In brief, the novel charts Ernaux’s awakening as a teenage girl to the bourgeois realities in store for her as a young woman. Hemmed in at an early age by society’s expectations for her, the unnamed narrator suddenly finds herself a settled, intellectually stifled thirty-year-old woman with a husband and two children, trapped—like a fly in web—in the very life she’d struggled so hard to avoid. It is a poignant, familiar, finally harrowing tale, a twisted Bildungsroman in which, by the end, she can only gape in amazement at the woman she’s become:

"Just on the verge, just. Soon I’ll have one of those lined, pathetic faces that horrify me at the beauty parlor when I see them titled back over the shampooing sink, eyes closed. In how many years? On the verge of sagging cheeks and wrinkles that can no longer be disguised.

 

                                                          Already me, that face."

Peter Adam Nash

Is It A Scandal? An Economic Diversion

The Passions and the Interests, Albert O. Hirschman

The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi

Voltaire's Bastards, John Ralston Saul

While nearly everyone is familiar, usually at second or third hand, with Adam Smith's famous justification of self-interest as the most rational way to organize economic life ("It is thus that the private interests and passions of individuals naturally dispose them to turn their stock towards the employments which in the ordinary cases are most advantageous to the society," and so forth), fewer readers are aware of this passage, generally ignored by the defenders of free-market capitalism:

"These are the disadvantages of a commercial spirit. the minds of men are contracted, and rendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and the heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished. To remedy these defects would be an object worthy of serious attention."

I was reminded of this passage in The Wealth of Nations while rereading Albert Hirschman's seminal essay The Passions and the Interests, a rereading prompted by the college-admissions scandal that broke this past week.  The spectacle of wealthy families bribing college coaches, SAT and ACT tutors and anyone else who could advance the chances of their (dull-witted) children gaining admission to America's elite colleges and universities--USC, Georgetown, Yale, etc.--reminded me yet again of how unlikely it is that, despite the optimistic predictions of Montesquieu, Steuart, Smith and other political thinkers of the Enlightenment, human folly will ever by tamed by self-interest.

Hirschman's compact essay relates the history of the idea that human passions--primarily greed and violence--can be redirected into self-interested economic activity.  From Francis Bacon to Adam Smith men who saw in mercantilism an irrational centralization of political and economic power in the hands of absolute monarchs, a compressing of power that resulted, as it must, in constant wars over limited resources, developed what they believed was the antidote: the enlightened, rational, and unregulated pursuit of self-interest.  Adam Smith is the most famous of the proponents of this view, though as the quotation above indicates, he was able to see the moral risks of self-interest more clearly than many of his disciples.

The "inoculation" theory of the social and economic order has never made sense to me. The idea that you encourage individuals to cultivate their worst instincts in a framework that ends up benefiting society as a whole seems as irrational as the Victorian idea that if you have an erotic impulse you either bottle it up or redirect it, usually as violence against dark-skinned people (e.g. Passage to India).  Neither viewpoint places much hope in the possibility of human self-improvement through education, in the potential of a just government to constructively overrule the irrational passions of its citizens, or in the existence of altruistic impulses that might very well be as deeply embedded in human character as greed and vanity.

Adam Smith felt that capitalism was likely to channel our passions into socially constructive modes of economic production, but he also recognized that human material needs are limited, and that most of what industry produces is not needed for survival but instead is a form of personal aggrandizement.  What we end up with under capitalism, what we have always ended up with, are self-interested people who game the system for themselves and who have not the slightest concern for the well-being of others. (Any economic system that could lead a judge--a judge!--to placidly summarize Paul Manafort's life as "blameless" has something wrong with it.)

A cursory reading of history confirms this as a fact, not an ideological pronouncement. One might rationalize this truism (if one is capable of recognizing it as such) by saying something like, "Well, sure, but look at all the good things we have," a view that I think of as the "breaking-a-few-eggs" theory of history. Easy to say if you know you aren't going to be one of the eggs. But why not argue instead that we might have all these good things without breaking any eggs at all? (See below)

It baffles me when the talking heads and editorial writers wring their hands, as they have all week, over the college admissions scandal. (By the way, if you type the word "college" into your search engine the first link to appear will be "college admissions scandal.") Well, what did we expect?  If you set up a system of economics and social life that rewards greed and egotism, how can you be surprised by daily examples of greedy, egotistical behavior? If Masha Gessen were a talking head and offered her view of American higher education, Americans would express shock that such a "radical" perspective was allowed to be aired. Have a look at her article, linked below, and see if her interpretation makes sense.

*** 

That's a picture of Karl Polanyi, whose 1944 book, The Great Transformation has helped me to think more clearly (I hope) about politics, economics, and history.  Contrary to the classical/liberal view that self-regulating markets arose necessarily out of the developing conditions of economic history, Polanyi painstakingly demonstrates that the so-called free market, with its alleged reconciliation of the passions and the interests, was but one alternative, and that many societies have organized production and exchange along social and reciprocal lines, rather than through the deliberate optimization of personal self-interest.  The "great transformation" came when, in the eighteenth century, a particular set of economic and social relations, born in a time of relative peace and described with canonical certitude by Adam Smith and others, became an article of nearly religious faith.  The next time you are relaxing with friends try saying, "the self-regulating capitalist market, far from being the inevitable by-product of economic history, was only one option for organizing production and exchange, and not, as history shows, the best one," and see how quickly you are dismissed as a "socialist" or worse.  Every FOX commentator will tell you that Marx was wrong in seeing communism as the inevitable end of history (as he was), but suggest to them that there is no reason to see the "free market" as any more "inevitable" and you will be called a crackpot or get punched in the nose (e.g. the blowhard Bill O'Reilly on the writings of Robert Reich).

Here's a snippet of Polanyi: 

"To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity 'labor power' cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this particular commodity. In disposing of a [person's] labor power the system [the free market] would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity 'man' attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes despoiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed." (GT, p. 73)

Human beings are more than their passions and interests.  Remarkable, really, that most economists can't grasp this fact. I suppose every astronomer (as Walt Whitman reminds us) sees human beings as dust, and every cardiologist as a beating heart. Dear Milton Friedman: Communities are more than markets. And culture is more than money. And a good life, as even Adam Smith saw, is more than a totting up of possessions. Dear Lori Loughlin: Why not send your underachieving child to trade school? Better to be an honest electrician than a crooked TV actor or Instagram doyen. Way better.

Speaking of Ms. Lori Loughlin. She wanted her daughter to attend an "elite" university.  Ms. Loughlin and her husband have lots of money and so they did what (I hope) only a very few people with lots of money do--they bought their daughter the credentials she needed to join the elite at an elite university so that, upon graduating (presumably after more bribes and more cheating), she would take her place among the elite (and the rich, it goes without saying).

No one has done more to uncover the pretensions and perversions of elitism in supposedly democratic societies than the Canadian political theorist John Ralston Saul.  Claiming access to what is called "rationality," elites have, since the eighteenth century, dominated society.  Because "rationality" is nothing but a neutral sounding word for ideology, access to reason has become the holy grail of economic and social power in capitalist societies.  Graduate from Harvard or Stanford and you have been baptized into the minuscule population of true elites, and you are henceforth immune from the oversight of the masses: "There is no language available for outsiders who wish to criticize [elites]." How can an ordinary person challenge the policies of a pharmaceutical company, of Exxon/Mobil, of his local cable provider, of the wunderkind Wall Street broker who leveraged his house out from under him?  The junior college graduate, or, worse, one of the thirty-percent of Americans who don't attend college at all, has no place to stand, no voice to raise, no words to address those who tower above him in credentials, in contacts, and in social capital.  This loss of public power is what moves the voiceless to the exercise of private power and violence.  And to the support of demagogues.

Those who attend elite universities belong to a club.  They may be nasty to one another, but, in the end, when it's time for cocktails, Donald Trump (Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania) will be more likely to be sitting down with Hillary Clinton (Wellesley) than with you or me.

I pity the poor mentsh who works hard, plays by the rules, saves her pennies for the kids' college, goes into debt, who can't afford expensive tutors, and who would be mortified to learn her son or daughter had cheated on the SAT's or faked athletic credentials.  As one commentator, dismissing the seriousness of the college admissions scandal put it: "This is the way the game is played." It's callous to say so, but, unfortunately, he's right.   

   
George Ovitt (Pie/Pi Day, 2019)

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-i-would-cover-the-college-admissions-scandal-as-a-foreign-correspondent?utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_031319&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bea018c3f92a404693c1681&user_id=17871469&esrc=&utm_term=TNY_Daily

 

Reimagining (later in life) D.H. Lawrence

Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, James T. Boulton, editor

Mornings in Mexico, D. H. Lawrence

Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence

Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence

Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer 

"The world is as it is. I am as I am. We don't fit very well." (to Catherine Carswell, May 18, 1924)

He fit not at all, not anywhere.  His life was a dizzying procession through temporary lodgings, perennial poverty, ill-health, and flashes of writing, sometimes brilliant, sometimes not so much. The letters--seven volumes of them--are wonderful, better than the novels, none of which moved me when I first read them in college, but all of which have shown me more as I began to reread them in my eighth decade.  (So much is revealed that was kept hidden when we were young; then I read to understand myself, now I read to understand others). Best are the travel books. Lawrence was a keen observer, and his agility in blending objective observation with personal reflection makes his non-fiction more readable than his oftentimes mawkish stories about lust and love.

Here's Lawrence wandering Italy's ancient and sacred hills:

"But gradually, one after another looming shadowily [sic] under their hoods, the crucifixes seem to create a new atmosphere over the whole of the countryside, a darkness, a weight in the air that is so unnaturally bright and rare with the reflection from the snows above, a darkness hovering just over the earth. So rare and unearthly the light is, from the mountains, full of strange radiance. then every now and again recurs the crucifix, at the turning of an open, grassy road, holding a shadow and a mystery under its pointy hood." (from Twilight in Italy, 1916)

There's more eroticism in Lawrence's descriptions of nature than in the stormy couplings of Gudrun and Gerald.  And far less melodrama.  From Sons and Lovers onward, Lawrence was given to precise, microscopic examinations of his inner life.  To say he was a romantic or that his passions prevailed over his intellect seems false: the letters and the travel books show Lawrence to have been thoughtful, with a remarkable memory for books and ideas, with an enviable ability to blend feeling and thinking.  "I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self. ... Most [men] are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers." (Letter to Rev. Robert Reid, December 3, 1907).  The "laughter" to which men and women are reborn is surely ironic, for while there is pleasure and joy in Lawrence, he is never unaware of life's tragic dimensions. He couldn't be, given his health and the struggle he imposed on himself by declining to live as a comfortable bourgeois. And, frankly, there are some questions to be answered about Lawrence's commitment to "the terrible multitudes of brothers."

It was the provocative wag Geoff Dyer who forced me to recover from my long disinterest in Lawrence.  Reading his unclassifiable, Bernhard-infected rant/meditation on everything not about Lawrence and just sort of about Lawrence, I knew that I'd lost again.  Hard as I try to put away interests--there's only so much time--someone comes along and writes a book that I can't ignore, and that book leads to another, ad infinitum.  I hope that I am done with Karl Ove, and Founder bios, and Cormac McCarthy, but Out of Sheer Rage has made Lawrence, once again, irresistible.  Dyer, if you don't know his work, is a fabulist, a Restoration wit, an essayist in a league of his own (Zadie Smith meets W.T. Vollman)--funny, self-deprecating, vulgar and refined, lyrical and wise.  His pursuit of the ghost of Lawrence--from Taos to Sicily to Mexico to Eastwood--is evidence of enviable literary obsession.  What's the point of reading books if you don't allow yourself to become obsessed with certain writers? We do it with musicians and hobbies--I know people who "followed" the Grateful Dead for years, a few who are Miles Davis completists, and others who collect beer glasses from every micro-brewery they visit (me).  So why not chase Lawrence around the globe, read his letters obsessively, and spend years thinking of all the ways this unpleasant, brilliant, tubercular neurotic changed your life?

I feel especially engaged by Lawrence due to his having lived, thanks to Mable Dodge Luhan and weak lungs, on a small ranch outside of Taos, New Mexico.  He's buried near San Cristobal, and the letters suggest that this austere landscape meant more to Lawrence than any other. The Lawrence ranch isn't much to look at; he and Freida lived in a ramshackle cabin that looks about to collapse, but the surrounding desert and mountains invite the contemplative viewpoint one finds in the writing Lawrence did during his sojourns in New Mexico.

I first saw the shrine--for that is what it is--in the early 1990's when I was in the throes of my obsession with visiting writers' homes and grave sites.  On a warm summer afternoon, the air still and the sky a blue so deep you sensed, at once, the immensity of the world, there was a holiness conveyed by the plain cross and white-washed memorial that I think Lawrence would have approved. Of course every pilgrimage feels anti-climactic.  We ask ourselves if is this all that is left of the person whose books have so moved us? But if we carry away a memory of the place it turns out to have surprising resilience, and this memory gives the books a depth of feeling we hadn't experienced before.

***

In preparing for a spring visit to Chihuahua in Old Mexico, I have been reading Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico.  It's nearly always summer in Lawrence. As "Paul Morel" he must have tired of the coal-black skies of Eastwood, of England's grimness, and we know for certain that he tired of his fellow Englishmen:

"Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling,[sic] dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. . . . God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wishwash. Exterminate them, slime."

Always it was summer, and he bothered to learn the names of the flowers and trees, paid close attention to the birds and to the clarity of the air.  Often we find him sitting still, jotting notes or writing letters--what a loss the end of letter writing has been! He doesn't say too much about what he's eating or drinking or wearing, it's the passing impressions on his lively mind that we are privy to, and to what are often stilted conversations with the "natives." 

Martin Amis, not jolly himself, has described Lawrence as the most ill-tempered of English writers.  We know that Lawrence struck his wife (she was larger and she hit him back). He disliked Jews, wrote cringing sentences about Mexicans (Rosalino, Lawrence's faithful Indian servant in Mornings in Mexico is "a dumb-bell, as the Americans would say"), and was as often unkind and gossipy as not.  He had a Freudian dossier of sexual hang-ups--his is the finest example of an Oedipus complex since Hamlet, and that he loved men more than women is a reasonable inference from the letters and fiction.  

His writing can be overwrought, sentimental, incoherent:

"[Miriam]knew she felt in a sort of bondage to him, which she hated because she could not control it. She hated her love for him from the moment it grew too strong for her. And, deep down, she had hated him because she loved him and he dominated her. She had resisted his denomination. She had fought to keep herself free of him in the last issue. And she was free of him, even more than he of her."  Sons and Lovers, Part 2, Chapter 11. 

I find most objectionable the way in which his narrators project themselves into the minds of everyone around them, creating a world that existed solely to mirror Lawrence. A lot of writers do this, but Sons and Lovers and Women in Love feel emotionally claustrophobic, as if there were one voice speaking and everyone else was just moving her lips. This habit imparts a sameness to the novels, a predictability in terms of character and plot.  And Lawrence's women are sexualized in the way a man might imagine or wish them to be,  and they are also, like Lawrence, tormented by sex. His men are austere and predatory, not often admirable.  Nothing wrong with sex, but what seemed tantalizing when I was in the my twenties--this was long before ubiquitous porn or even the tedium of sex-obsessed sit coms--is now boring, even juvenile. There are times when I imagine Lawrence sniggering over his foolscap, shocking the Puritans, working himself up for Freida. (Joyce's letters to Nora are a nice cure for the flowery pudenda and penises of Lawrence). 

Henry Miller mirrors Lawrence's preoccupations, his fear (?) of women, his narcissism.  There might be a scholarly book comparing the two, something richer than Sexual Politics, but if there is, I don't know about it. Miller grew beyond the Tropics and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, but he remained a dirty old man right to the end of his long life. Both writers were strange, isolated men who appeared to yearn for companionship and yet disdained those who provided it. (See Miller's letters to Anais Nin). Both broke the rules and challenged taboos that now seem incomprehensible. Both had to go to Paris to get their books published, as if that were a hardship!

***

John Middleton Murry, second husband of Katherine Mansfield, flogged Lawrence in his book D. H. Lawrence (1930).  Lawrence called Murray "an obscene bug sucking my life away," and Murry repaid the complaint, finding Lawrence domineering and self-centered. Murry and Mansfield both showed up in Lawrence's novels, and the Frieda/DH/Murry/Mansfield quartet is the subject of a group biography by Sydney Janet Kaplan, Circulating Genius that I hope to read soon. Since Murry's book, Lawrence's reputation both as a man and as a writer has undergone several transformations.  I find much to admire in the writing, but, with some reservations, I have to agree with Amis--Lawrence is a difficult person to warm up to.

"Sheer rage," Dyer's title is from Lawrence's Letters, and it's a phrase that turns up often in the correspondence. From rage comes art, of a kind. Would that his sheer rage been leavened with some of Frieda's exuberance, or Geoff Dyer's playfulness.  Lawrence wrote in order to be saved--I believe he was religious, despite his protestations to the contrary.  And he found his version of the divine in "nature" though not of the romantic's sort. He appears never to have made his peace with other people.  He was a stranger wherever he went, an emigre Englishmen looking askance at the "wogs," an uptight libertine, dry and judgmental. But, for now--he's fascinating. 

  


George Ovitt (9 March 2019)