Click 
I’m not one to go digging around for old psychological studies — or any old studies, for that matter. Because of this, it is unlikely I would have ever heard of Milton Rokeach’s fascinating The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (1964). Why did I end up purchasing and reading this? It’s an NYRB Classic. That’s enough. If they publish a psychological study from fifty years ago, that means it’s worth reading. This one is.
In 1959, Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist working at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, brought together three patients who each firmly believed hunca life katalog he was Jesus Christ. Rokeach says, “Initially, my main purpose in bringing them together was to explore the processes by which their delusional systems of belief and their hunca life behavior might hunca life change if they were confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity.”
His study was inspired in part on an account set out by Voltaire in which a man, Simon Morin, believing he was Christ ran into another man proclaiming to be Christ. Simon exclaimed that the other must be crazy and, realizing what this meant, was cured of his delusion for a time (though he was eventually huncalife katalog burned at the stake). As he introduces the study, Rokeach says, “This is the only study on which I have ever worked that has aroused the interest of children.” I must say, it’s easy to see why. This is a fascinating look into the minds of three disturbed men.
The three patients are not referred to by their real names, though the book is so well written that these names, as simple as they are, are permanently part of my literary consciousness.
Clyde Benson was the oldest. At 70, he had been hospitalized for 17 years after suffering from a series of tragedies in a short period of time that took from him his parents and his wife (in a botched abortion). Rokeach makes the case that Mr. Benson was never really his own man, that since childhood he had allowed others to make decisions for him, and the strain of losing these authorities in his life was too much. In this book, Mr. Benson is easily forgotten. He’s always sitting there during the meetings, but he rarely speaks, or if he does it is mostly gibberish. Perhaps because of this, Rokeach rarely has the book focus on him, though he does have some good lines, like this one:
Late at night. All fifteen patients in the dorm are in their beds, but there is a great deal of restlessness because one of the patients is snoring loudly. Finally one of the patients, exasperated, yells: “Jesus Christ! Quit that snoring.” Whereupon Clyde, rearing up in his bed, replies: “That wasn’t me who was snoring. It was him!”
Joseph Cassel was 58 and had been hospitalized for nearly 20 years. A timid man, he grew up with a strict father (who called him Josephine) in a french-speaking household in Canada. Perhaps as a response to the fact that he was not allowed to bring anything “English” into the home, Joseph, besides considering himself Jesus Christ, also considers himself a patriot of England, who protects him and whom he protects. One of the strangest accounts in the study is one when, in peril of losing his beloved placebos, Joseph still will not say that the hospital is not an English stronghold. He doesn’t even have to believe this to keep his placebos; he need only pretend — to lie. He won’t do it. Interestingly, Rokeach notes that had he lied, it would have been a sign of improvement.
The youngest was Leon Gabor, at 38, who had been hospitalized for five years already. Leon was raised by a super-religious mother who, by all evidence, was severely psychotic herself. She instilled in Leon a profound sense of sexual guilt that he struggles with through the entire book, particularly since he is probably gay. Leon receives a great deal of attention throughout the book. He’s vocal and causes the most conflicts. It also seems he is the smartest, or, at least, he is the only one of the men who doesn’t simply deny the others’ claims but tries to reconcile everything. Rokeach seems particularly hopeful that Leon can be helped.
So Clyde, Joseph, and Leon are brought together. They sleep in adjacent beds, eat in the same room, have the same work duties, and hold meetings each day. The meetings take up a large part of the book as we watch these men interact with each other, sometimes with a great deal of tension and sometimes with what can almost be brotherly love — I say “almost” because even though the relationship gives them some contact they desperately desire, they also desperately want to hold on to their beliefs and fret each time they are challenged.
Remarkably, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is not clinical in tone. Indeed, Rokeach has a great sense of tone, understatement, and timing, that one would think he was also a great novelist. These men are brought to life before our eyes, and we feel their pain and feel compassion towards them. Some parts are funny (like the “squelch eye” incident), and many are incredibly sad.
Yes, it’s very sad, and we can credit Rokeach for helping us feel these emotions through his highly skilled presentation. However, we can also blame him for being the source of some of the more terrible passage. This is a deeply troubling book. In his afterword, written twenty years later, Rokeach doesn’t apologize for his experiment, but he admits that, in a way, there were four men who thought they were god — the three patients and himself, the psychologist who, albeit in the pursuit of knowledge and in the hopes of helping the men, played with their lives.
In the introduction, Rokeach explains that while the initial plan was to see what happened when these men were brought together, “[s]ubsequently, a second purpose emerged: an exploration of the processes by which systems of belief and behavior might be changed through messages purporting to come from significant authorities who existed only in the imaginations of the delusional Christs.” Fully hoping to help these men out, constantly scrutinizing ethical concerns, Rokeach assumes writes letters to Joseph and Leon pretending to be authority figures from their delusions. For example, Joseph rejects his real father (to an extent — he calls him Josephine after all) and has taken to calling the head of Ypsilanti “dad.” With permission from “dad,” Rokeach begins writing to Joseph, asking him to do certain things, hoping that because of his trust in this authority figure, Joseph will begin to changes some of his delusions. This failed, as shown above when Joseph simply would not disclaim that the hospital was an English stronghold.
But even more heart-breaking and cruel were Rokeach’s letters to Leon in which Rokeach assumed the guise of Leon’s non-existent wife. Though never married, Leon often buttressed his claims to godliness by giving details about fictional women in his life, many of whom were gods in their own right and who became his wife. But does Leon actually believe in these women? And what if he received a letter from one? Here is his response to the first:
Leon’s initial response is disbelief. Without divulging the contents of the letter, he tells the aide that although he has never seen his wife’s handwriting he knows that she didn’t write or sign this letter. He says further that he doesn’t like the idea of people imposing on his beliefs and that he is going to look into this.
A couple of hours later, during the daily meeting, we notice Leon is extremely depressed and we ask him why. He evasively replies that he is meditating, but he does not mention the letter. This is the first time, as far as we know, that he has ever kept information from us.
August 4. This is the day Leon’s wife is supposed to visit him. He goes outdoors shortly before the appointed hour and does not return until it is well past.
So, yes, both Leon and Joseph believe in the delusions they have constructed, and in assuming these authorities’ voices, Rokeach, in a way, assumes the role of a god in the lives of these troubled men.
As I said above, the book is hardly clinical in its tone. It does not read like a study at all but rather like a deeply felt narrative of the troubles of these three men who came together for a time in Ypsilanti State Hospital. I highly recommend it.
A couple of years ago, NYRB Classics introduced most of us to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky when they published Memories of the Future. Krzhizhanovsky died in 1950 having lost most of his battles to publish his work to the Soviet censors (of his hundreds of stories, plays, criticism, etc., he published only nine stories in his lifetime). His work remained archived until it was uncovered in 1976. Even after that, it wasn’t until 1989 that much his work first began being published in Russian. Finally, his work is trickling into English, and we’re catching on to the fact that here we have one of the greatest Russian authors of the twentieth century. Recently, NYRB Classics has published another of his works, The Letter Killers Club (Klub ubiits bukv; tr. from the Russian by Joanne Turnbaull with Nikolai Formozov, 2011).
Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.
One doesn’t have to read far into this book to figure out why the Soviet censors — in particular, Maxim Gorky – considered Krzhizhanovsky ”untimely.” Here we meet a kind of secret organization of men – all using pseudonyms – who meet in a room surrounded by empty book shelves. They shun the written word, yet they meet every Saturday evening to tell each other their “conceptions,” short pieces of fiction that, very importantly, were not and will not be written down. And they come up with the strangest things . . .
But before we get into that, there is some reason to this ritual. Our narrator is a literary man, and one day he is shocked to discover that a famous writer has decided to quit writing. The narrator finds the man and asks him what is going on, and the man (the eventual founder of The Letter Killers Club) explains. When he was a poor young man, he loved reading and was proud of his library, despite his modest circumstances. But when he received word that his mother had died, he had to sell his entire library in order to make the trip to her funeral. Returning to his room with its empty bookshelves, the man discovered that these empty bookshelves still held the weight of their ideas, and the act of reimagining the books allowed him to succeed in his own writing. Eventually, though, he has rounded up all of his words and his ideas have become pent-up in his books. He longs for the freedom he felt imagining stories before they became limited by the page.
Writers, in essence, are professional word tamers; if the words walking down the lines were living creatures, they would surely fear and hate the pen’s nib as tamed animals do the raised whip. Or a better analogy: do you know about the production of astrakhan fur? Suppliers have their own terminology: they track the patterns of the unborn lamb’s wool, wait for the necessary combination of curls, then kill the lamb — before birth: they call that “clinching the pattern.” That is exactly what we — trappers and killers — do with our conceptions.
So this man, the president of The Letter Killers Club, invites our narrator to one of their meetings. On each Saturday, one of the members stands up and recites a conception. The other members comment, critique, and reimagine the story as it meanders around. This seems innocent enough, but the air of secrecy invokes the fear of a secret society. Perhaps more strangely, the members themselves feel some amount of fear toward the president of the club.
The stories themselves are all fun to read. Krzhizhanovsky favors the surreal and absurd, and his mindset is enmeshed in experimental modernism. The first story takes us to Hamlet. To show how inseparable Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are, the teller also splits Guildenstern into two characters: Guilden and Stern. Guilden and Stern are both in love with Phelia and both hope to win the role of Hamlet in an upcoming production. Soon “Role” itself comes out and speaks to Guilden and Stern, and discusses how it is to be best played, including a short bit on how it has been portrayed in the past. This particular story is a bit convoluted, but, as I said, it is fun. Better stories follow.
In particular, I was taken by a remarkable science-fiction tale where a few men, building off of each other’s ideas, are attempting to figure out a way to take over a human being’s physical movements. In other words, they want to find a way to quash the individual human will and use that body to do their own will.
Anonym’s ideas had the immediate effect of broadening Tutus’s outlook and the scope of his experiments: he realized that the machine must take control of those human movements and muscular contractions that had a clear social significance. Anonym maintained that reality, whose component parts are actions, had “too many parts and too small a sum.” Only by taking innervation away from a separately functioning nervous systems and giving it to a single, central innervator, said Anonym, could one organize reality according to plan and put paid to that amateurish “I.” By replacing the jolts from individual wills with the jolts from one “ethical machine” built according to the latest advances in morals and technology, one could make everyone give everything back: a complete ex.
However, so complex is the human body and the human mind that all experiments keep being ruined by “unaccountable scrawls of will.” But there is a breakthrough:
After three weeks of attempts to break through to life, the tightly tied sack of skin and fat, pushing the pencil lead inserted between its limp fingers, managed to scrawl: kill myself. Tutus pondered the plan and decided to turn it into a sort of experimentum crucis: even in his experiments with this seemingly completely demuscled subject, the work of the mechanical innervator had been spoilt by unaccountable scrawls of will that got mixed up in the machine’s precise musical score. It was impossible to anticipate every form of volitional resistance; what’s more, an experiment with suicide was bound to involve a moment of violent conflict between the will of the machine and that of the man. Tutus proceeded as follows: having quietly emptied a bullet case of its gunpowder, he slipped the cartridge — in full view of his subject — into the cylinder of a revolver, cocked the trigger, and enfolded the weapon of death in the inert fingers. Now the machine went to work: the fingers twitched, then gripped the gun handle; the forefinger produced an incorrect reflex — Tutus adjusted the refractory finger inside the trigger’s curve. another press of the key — the man’s arm sprang up, bent at the elbow, and brought the barrel to his temple. Tutus scrutinized the subject: his facial muscles showed no signs of resistance; true, his eyelashes fluttered and the points of his pupils had become large black blots. “Very good,” Tutus muttered, turning around to press the next key — but how strange, the key was stuck. Tutus pressed harder: he heard a metallic click. First he inspected his machine, depressing and releasing the key that had now come unstuck. Then he flipped some switches, and suddenly the human sack with the incomprehensible self-will pitched forward, flapped its arms like a bird shot in flight, and slumped to the floor. Tutus dashed up: the subject was dead.
Krzhizhanovsky’s work was “untimely,” indeed.
This is not the only suicide in the book. As the club members continue to meet, the narrator is increasingly unsettled by what they are doing and the basis for their weekly meetings. He thinks he may see discontent among other members as well and seeks to speak with them about what is going on these Saturday evenings.
I read a lot of great books this year, but I believe this is the best of them all. It is incredible that such a voice was unheard for most of a century and was nearly lost for good. Makes one wonder about all of those voices we haven’t been so fortunate to recover.
I knew nothing about Gyula Krúdy or about this book before picking it up — what does this Hungarian have to do with the more famous Persian sailor? – but with NYRB Classics one doesn’t have to worry too much about such things. One can just pick up a book and begin. And when I opened up The Adventures of Sindbad (Szindbád Három Könyve, 1944; tr. from the Hungarian by George Szirtes, 1998) I was in for many pleasant surprises.
Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.
Krúdy was a prolific writer who lived from 1878 to 1933, and he wrote many stories focused on the young (or old — or dead — or mistletoed) Sindbad, from 1911 to 1917. Here we have them collected in one volume. In his introduction, translator George Szirtes tells readers what’s to come, though I don’t think we can entirely understand until we read the stories. They are so unique, in Hungary there is a term: “Krúdyesque.” I think a good example, then, is to refer to the other “-esque” author from roughly the same period: Can you imagine trying to explain — beyond simple plot – a Kafka story to someone who hadn’t experienced the Kafkaesque first-hand? Me either. So here we have the Krúdyesque, which Szirtes aptly describes: “an experience comprised of the nostalgic, the fantastic and the ironic.”
We first meet Sindbad in “Youth,” a rather conventional story that in no way foreshadows the strangeness that is to come, though it does touch upon central themes, particularly love and lust. The story begins by taking us to “a damp and moonlit night” when an old man is “watching the autumn mist form figures of chimney-sweeps on the rooftops.” His mind is taken to an old monastery where, as a child, he used to see a painting of an intimidating and authoritative Prince Lubomirski. The red-bearded, shaggy-haired Prince has been dead for two centuries, but still “[t]he young ladies of Podolin who came to the monks for absolution would wreathe his picture with flowers fresh from the meadow, and women, who a couple of centuries before would have given birth to red-bearded, shaggy-haired children, prayed before the prince’s image precisely as they did before pictures of the saints.”
This opening – the introduction of an old man looking back to a painting of someone then two-centuries’ dead, as well as the adoration of the image – foreshadows the idea that the boundaries of time do not always hold up. Sure, two centuries ago the Prince would remove his gloves in the presence of ladies and cannot do so now, but that isn’t stopping their current adoration.
We soon learn that the old man in “Youth” is Sindbad, who was a student at the monastery. Because “in those days” it was common for romantic souls to choose their own name, Sindbad indeed named himself after the sailor in The Thousand and One Nights. In many ways, this collection of short stories is just as varied in time and form as The Thousand and One Nights, and just as populated with a type of mystical eroticism. And, perhaps in homage to the tales, Krúdy wastes no time giving us a conclusion that keeps us wondering “How did all this happen?”: “It was in this office one Sunday, while wearing his red surplice, that [Sindbad] succeeded in seducing Anna Kacksó, who had come to Mass along with a few friends of hers.”
But this is a false start (one of many). As the story moves from “How did all this happen?,” we meet Anna’s two sisters and the story focuses on Róza, the youngest, the real love interest. Róza teases Sindbad as they study together. Sindbad deals with this by playing with a fellow classmate he often picks on, Pope Gregory (his chosen name), who has a hunchback. Róza is mean and withholds affection. Sindbad deals with this by going swimming with Pope Gregory. Krúdy has the ability here to make the reader’s mind become quiet.
Naturally, the boys bathed in the deep still water, holding on to the iron staples in the timber, dangling their legs in the bottomless pool. The little hunchback felt absolutely safe in the company of the brave and admirable Sindbad. Suddenly he gave a triumphant cry, ‘Hey, I can feel the river bed here!’ He extended his thin legs. His inky fingers let go of the metal bar and the water silently closed over him. For a brief second Sindbad could still see the curious hump on his back under the surface of the river, then the water, the shore and the tall limes nearby grew unaccountably quiet as if the monastery had touched them with a magic wand and they had died on the spot, as in The Thousand and One Nights.
Sindbad is terrified. He searches for Pope Gregory, imagining that the Prince is already coming out of his gilt frame, knowing he will be blamed for the drowning. The story ends (it’s a short story, and the first of many, so I don’t feel terrible giving all of this away) with Sindbad in bed, and Róza leans over and whispers into his ear: “You are a brave boy. And I will love you for ever now.”
It’s a dark story. The death of a foolishly trusting young boy is used to move the action between a young man and a young woman. I immediately turned to the next one.
As I mentioned above, “Youth” is a bit more conventional than the rest, and because of this is kind of an outlier. In some stories, he is dreaming. In one he is a sprig of mistletoe. But painful love remains because Sindbad is always “a tireless voyager, a friend to women, a knight errant for those in sleepy provincial towns; he was the last worldly thought of virgins about to enter convents and the hope of the ageing.” In fact, not even death (Sindbad is dead in many of the stories but just as mobile and influential as Sindbad imagined the Prince to be) can stop him. That last line I quote, in fact, comes from a passage where Sindbad is wandering out of the graveyard periodically for affairs before returning, listening to the rain on the gravestones for maybe a year, and then lying in the crypt to talk to his dead relatives around him.
That image — returning to a graveyard after an affair, sitting pensively in the rain, then communicating with the dead, all the while waiting for the next affair to start — encapsulates a lot of the feelings in the book. There’s a lot of wandering through space and time, and melancholic (but somehow pleasant) love prevails, so well, in fact, that even the grave is nothing terrible — a moment to yearn, thus making the heart grow even more. Of course, all of that is still tinged with shadow and is quite disturbing if you think about it. It is beautifully done here, in the same way, say, a dusty wedding dress from the 1850s — that someone died in — is beautiful.
One aspect of the book that I cannot comment on other than to pass along what I read is the fact that these stories were written at the end of the Hapsburg Empire. Hungary would no longer be the Hungary of these tales, and both the introduction and the book’s blurb speak about “the uncanny evocation of the Hapsburg Empire.” As I said, I cannot comment on this because I know so little about this time period at that part of the world. What I experienced while reading the book, however, was just that nostalgia, fantasy, and irony — the Krúdyesque, and I could see connections with the ending of an epoch — autumn or early winter is a great time to read this fantastic book.
Earlier this year, Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver won the Best Translated Book Award (my review of the book here). It’s an excellent book, quite wintry, that I highly recommend if you’re feeling too warm this summer (well, I strongly recommend it even if you aren’t). I’m happy to say I liked Jansson’s Fair Play (Rent spel, 1982; tr. from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, 2007) even more. It’s not necessarily summery, but if you’re feeling a bit chilly, this book will warm you up with its subtle love. Hmm, if I “highly” recommended The True Deceiver, I’d best “strongly” recommend Fair Play.
Fair Play concerns two old women, Jonna and Mari. They are best friends and for years have been happy to limit their society to each other. Each is an artist, and they live on a tiny island on the southern side of Finland; there’s a great line when they’re on the ocean during a fog and worry they’re going to end up in Estonia. When they venture out on it, the sea creates a great atmosphere and emphasizes their solidarity and remoteness. So does the apartment complex the two women live in; one lives on one side, the other lives on the other, but there’s a well tread path through the attic that lies in between.
The book is short — just over 100 pages — and it feels shorter still as it is separated into 17 very short chapters that stand fairly well alone, as much as the relationship’s many layers are revealed in each, whether they are redecorating or sitting down to watch movies.
“Mari,” she said, “are you unhappy that we don’t see people?”
“No, not anymore.”
“That’s good. I mean, if we did see them, what would it be like? Like always, exactly like always. Pointless chatter about inessentials. No composition, no guiding idea. No theme. Isn’t that right? [. . .]“
They’ve been together for a long time and have, so far, survived everything that has stood in the way of their continued friendship, including the time that Jonna shot the island gull:
“Typical,” Jonna said. “Of course you had to be the one to find it. Well, okay, I’m sorry. I shot it.” And she added, “At a hundred meters.”
That quote, besides introducing a long period of silence (they fight like old friends too), shows some of the book’s humor that Jansson injects on the sly in dialogue spoken on the side, the way Jonna and Mari express many of their emotions. In fact, sometimes the turmoil is not expressed at all; rather, we feel their discomfort by the way they look at the room around them.
This turmoil is an integral part of the book. On the one hand, their lives look stable, but in actuality their friendship is threatened from many sides. For one thing, they are getting older. It simply cannot last. Also, despite their age, they still have plans for life that might not include the other person. In each section, there is the potential for separation.
Strangely, despite this, the book is also a testament to stability and solidarity. There is certainly the sense that all will continue on as it has for years, and this too is implied subtly, though, impressively, at the same time the threat is implied.
They waited, but nothing more happened.
I purchased Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver (Den ärliga bedragaren, 1982; tr. from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, 2009) quite some time ago. I heard great things about it and found the cover, featuring art by Jansson herself, very attractive — as I always seem to do with books from NYRB Classics. However, when I pulled the book out in the dead of winter, its opening page made me colder and I put it up. When I pulled it out in the spring, well, again, it made me feel cold. A year later, the book has won the Best Translated Book Award, an award worth following faithfully. Obviously, that was the ticket. Here’s a quick spoiler to my review below: I liked this book so much I’ve since gone out and read the other two Jansson books that NYRB Classics has published — The Summer Book and Fair Play – and I liked them even more.
As I said above, the opening to the book is cold, which is fitting, yes, because it is an early dark winter morning, but also because we are meeting the coldest character, Katri. Katri is 25. She and her brother Mats, who is 15, live in a tiny room above the town’s shop along with the big dog, who has no name. Katri is coldly calculating, tremendously good with numbers, which is a gift of dubious value when she uses similar arithmetic, like an economist, to analyze other aspects of society. Nevertheless, her reputation for analyzing a situation and coming up with a fair, honest solution that adds up is such that many people in town come to her for advice:
Katri’s advice was widely discussed in the village and struck people as correct and very astute. What made it so effective, perhaps, was that she worked on the assumption that every household was naturally hostile towards its neighbors. But people’s sessions with Katri were often followed by an odd sense of shame, which was hard to understand, since she was always fair. Take the case of two families who had been looking sideways at each other for years. Katri helped both save face, but she also articulated their hostility and so fixed it in place for all time.
The advice she gives out matches her perception of the world, which is that it is self-interested and not to be trusted. She believes people’s affairs should be governed without emotion and her method of combatting emotion is through what she considers honesty, even if that honesty isn’t pleasant.
Katri is not satisfied with her and Mats’ situation, so she has a plan to make their lives more comfortable. Anna Aemelin is an older woman who lives alone. A celebrated children’s books artist, famous particularly for her incredible renderings of the forest floor when the snow is gone, she has plenty of money she doesn’t know how to handle, not that she cares. She and Katri are quite different, but both sit on the periphery of society. For Anna it isn’t because she’s cold and honest; rather, it’s her artistic temperament and her success: “she was only fully alive when she devoted herself to her singular ability to draw, and when she drew she was naturally always alone.” We know from the outset that Katri is searching for some way to move in with Anna. To start her goal, she goes to the town messenger and offers to take Anna her mail:
“Are you trying to help?”
“You know I’m not,” Katri said. “I’m doing it entirely for my own sake. Do you trust me or don’t you?”
The messenger, sure that Katri is the most honest person he knows — after all, she admitted right there that she’s delivering for her own purpose — gives Katri the mail, and Katri gets her first glimpse into the home of Anna Aemelin. She doesn’t say anything to Anna, but neither does Katri try to look inconspicuous as she scrutinizes the abode, knowing full well that it all adds up: she and Mats will live her soon.
Naturally she wants a fluffy floor. Carpet or no carpet, it’s all fluffy in here anyway — hot and hairy. Maybe there’s more air upstairs. We’ll have to crack the window at night or Mats won’t be able to sleep.
But there’s much more to the book than this. It is a rather dark character study, bitter yet empathetic. We sense personal demons on every page, even though for the most part the snow is falling in the dark and all appears at peace, or at least empty. As cool and controlled as Katri appears to be, we can feel a deep well of emotion under the surface. For one, she has a deep motherly love for Mats. She’ll do anything to protect him, and that is the main object of her plans to move in with Anna. She also has a deep hatred for the shopkeeper over whose shop she lives. Her objectivity is tested time and again as she claims he’s a swindler, an awful man. Perhaps he is, but we can’t fail to note that Katri hates him because he once loved her. Honestly, I don’t know whether he was dangerously lustful, which is surely what Katri thought, or if he was simply attracted to the woman. He isn’t nice to her, but she humiliates him time and time again. At any rate, her deep hatred of him, and some of the weight it puts on her, becomes apparent when she cleans the room above the shop in preparation for the move to Anna’s:
Katri had scrubbed the room above the storekeeper’s shop, scrubbed it with a kind of painstaking rage, the way women clean when they can’t lash out. She scrubbed away the neighbors’ shamefaced talk about envy and petty favours, she scrubbed away all the black night thoughts, and most of all she scrubbed away the doorway where the storekeeper used to loiter on some pretext, standing in hungry vigilance, waiting for some sign to tell him if he could go on hating or if there was the tiniest little handhold for his lust. The room became as clinically clean and naked as a wave-washed skerry.
Katri’s move to Anna’s happens early on. The bulk of The True Deceiver, this excellent book, deals with Katri’s insinuation into Anna’s contented solitude. The “dreadful Katri” (whom we feel for nonetheless) brings with her too much honesty, that refusal to overlook, which infects the old children’s artist: “Several neighbors passed by, but she didn’t notice their greetings, just wanted to get home, home to the dreadful Katri, to her own altered world which had grown severe but where nothing was wicked and concealed.”
Yes, you’ll need to put on a blanket when you read this book. Spring is late coming.
Continuing my quest to read more of NYRB Classics’ not-fiction titles that I began with J.A. Baker’s nature writing in The Peregrine, I opted to go to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travel writing in A Time to Keep Silence (1957). NYRB Classics publishes a few other Leigh Fermor titles, including the newly republished The Traveller’s Tree (Leigh Fermor’s first book) and A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, the two books wherein Leigh Fermor relates his famous travels through Europe in the 1930s.
A Time of Silence takes place later, in the 1950s. Wanting some peace and distance, Leigh Fermor decided, “[w]ith curiosity and misgivings,” to visit an abbey and request temporary lodging. He loved all that cities have to offer, and he was not seeking religion (nor did this trip cause him to become religious), but something about the isolation and retreat from the world appealed to his curiosity and offered him the isolation and retreat he himself was searching for. In this book he recounts his travels to a few of the most famous monasteries in Europe in three sections: The Abbey of St. Wandrille de Fontanelle, From Solesmes to La Grande Trappe, and The Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia.
For me, the most fascinating section was the first. It isn’t that I prefer St. Wandrille, that I shun the incredibly strict lifestyle of La Grande Trappe, or that I don’t appreciate the impressive and mysterious monasteries hollowed out of the coned rocks of Cappadocia. Indeed, each section provided fascinating descriptions of the places and related (albeit briefly) the histories and lifestyles of each. The reason I preferred the first section is because that was where Leigh Fermor first suffered from the isolation and then found in it unexpected beauty. It is there we sense that his world is opened up, and the later trips to monasteries served to offer him what he’d already learned as he forced himself to leave the world behind — or, rather, what he’d already felt as he cannot quite put his finger on the cause of his attraction.
But, in spite of these private limitations I was profoundly affected by the places I have described. I am not sure what these feelings amount to, but they are deeper than mere interest and curiosity, and more important than the pleasure an historian or an aesthete finds in ancient buildings and liturgy; for I could have seen the former in many places and the latter — though seldom, perhaps, as well performed as at St. Wandrille or Solesmes — I had always known.
As in The Peregrine, one of the strength to this volume is the writing. It is clear and direct and yet rich. When he is spending his first tortured nights in St. Wandrilled he says, “The place assumed the character of an enormous tomb, a necropolis of which I was the only inhabitant.” Though he appreciates the solitude he is afforded and is not really offended at the austere boarding offered, he suffers withdrawals from human society. He is surprised, however, to find a shift in his mood:
I lost the sensation of circumambient and impending death, of being by mistake locked up in a catacomb. I think the alteration must have taken about four days. The mood of dereliction persisted some time, a feeling of loneliness and flatness that always accompanies the transition from urban excess to a life of rustic solitude.
We see it coming, but Leigh Fermor describes it beautifully: he finds something at St. Wandrille that he does not find in the outside world, something, even, of value. When he leaves the monastery, the transition out is almost as painful as the transition in:
The Abbey was at first a graveyard; the outer world seemed afterwards, by contrast, an inferno of noise and vulgarity entirely populated by bounders and sluts and crooks. This state of mind, I saw, was, perhaps, as false as my first reactions to monastic life; but the admission did nothing to decrease its unpleasantness.
Entering this other world with Leigh Fermor is an excellent reading experience. It was possible, in fact, to feel the peace he was describing even while I was on a commuter train. It is also fascinating to read about the monks’ routines and the various disciplinary standards he encountered, including the historical reasons the standards differed. I do think he undercuts his points once when he says that without belief, that faith in religion, ”the life of a monk would be farcical and intolerable.” After all, Leigh Fermor did not possess belief, yet he found and convincingly writes about the value of discipline and solitude. It seems, then, that there is some link missing in the book.
And, as I alluded to above, I felt some disappointment despite the great writing (which is particularly nice when he takes us to the rugged rocks in Cappadochia: “a dead, ashen world, lit with the blinding pallor of a waste of asbestos, filled, not with craters and shell-holes, but with cones and pyramids and monoliths from fifty to a couple of hundred feet high, each one a rigid isosceles of white volcanic rock like the headgear of a procession of Spanish penitents during Passion Week.”). Because of my interest in Leigh Fermor’s inner feelings as he visited the monasteries, I felt a bit unsatisfied when the later sections focused primarily on descriptions of the monasteries, their unique rules, and their history. I still wanted to feel the effects these places had on his inner life.
That said, uncoupled from my expectations (silly silly to expect a book to be about what I want it to be about), these descriptions do not disappoint. What we have here is a remarkable look from a keen observer at a world few of us can comprehend. The book mimics the world it describes: it appears to be slight (it’s only 96 pages long) but it is rich and provides a nice balance to the often raucous world of fiction.
One of the many things I like about NYRB Classics is that while they bring us works that should never have gone out of print they don’t focus on fiction only. They publish memoirs, travel journals, biographies, histories, nature sketches, etc. And since the mind behind the whole operation remains the same, you can read these knowing you’ll get your fill for great, literary, timeless writing. I’ve picked up several of these other-than-fiction titles, but the first I’ve read confirms what I wrote above. J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967) is a phenomenal piece of nature writing I’d recommend even to those who most abhor nature writing.
I first heard about The Peregrine on Twitter when someone simply said that I must read it. I’m tempted to say the same thing here and make this my briefest review yet. But, because I highlighted so many passages and found so much that fascinated me, both because of the substance and the writing, I will go on — happily.
Reclusive J.A. Baker (in the introduction I learned that we don’t even know when he died) spent a decade tracking the peregrine falcons that hunted around his home. This is his account, laid out like a journal, of one of those years. In it, not only does he beautifully write about the weather and that land, he gets the heart racing as he describes a hunting scene. At other times, he personifies the wildlife; I particularly remember an episode where Baker stumbled upon an owl and the two looked at each other for quite some time: ”It’s face was like a mask; macabre, ravaged, sorrowing, like the face of a drowned man.” But, as wonderful as they are, these objective scenes aren’t what make the book so great, that make the book transcendent.
First, and still not the most fascinating aspect, Baker, in a tone that foreshadows W.G. Sebald’s great The Rings of Saturn. In many ways, this is a patient walk around the countryside, a walk that presents to the narrator many objects that deserve deep reflection, a walk that I, as a reader, am happy to follow.
East of my home, the long ridge lies across the skyline like the low hull of a submarine. Above it, the eastern sky is bright with reflections of distant water, and there is a feeling of sails beyond land. Hill trees mass together in a dark-spired forest, but when I move towards them they slowly fan apart, the sky descends between, and they are solitary oaks and elms, each with its own wide territory of winter shadow. The calmness, the solitude of horizons lures me towards them, through them, and on to others. They layer the memory like strata.
Coincidentally, like The Rings of Saturn, The Peregrine also takes place in East Anglia and ruminates on the remnants of dead or dying pieces of history. In contrast, The Peregrine focuses exclusively on the passing of a place’s natural history. In the late 60s, pesticides and other pollutants had all but destroyed the peregrine population, among others.
I pursued them for many summers, but they were hard to find and harder to see, being so few and so wary. They lived a fugitive, guerrilla life. In all the overgrown neglected places the frail bones of generations of sparrowhawks are sifting down now into the deep humus of the woods. They were a banished race of beautiful barbarians, and when they died they could not be replaced.
For me, though, the most incredible aspect of this book is the portrayal of one man’s desire to escape humanity and become the creature he hunts. It is an account of a man who truly lives on the fringe, again, written beautifully.
I have always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger.
It is a strange, yet seductive transformation that occurs subtly throughout the book until Baker makes a surprising statement and finds himself at one with the hawk and baffled by humanity.
I found myself crouching over the kill, like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts. I looked into the wood. In a lair of shadow the peregrine was crouching, watching me, gripping the neck of a dead branch. We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men. We hate their suddenly uplifted arms, the insanity of their flailing gestures, their erratic scissoring gait, their aimless stumbling ways, the tombstone whiteness of their faces.
There is another book I’d like to draw a quick comparison to: Melville’s Moby-Dick. Perhaps I only remembered the great Moby-Dick chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” when I read in The Peregrine the phrase ”tombstone whiteness of their faces,” and that small connection made me read Baker with Melville in mind. Nevertheless, there were many times I thought of that great book while reading this great book (yes, all three books that show up in this review are “great”). Both take a natural subject and blow it up to universal proportion. Both have the gift of language that both haunts and seduces.
There is a big difference, though: The Peregrine is a short book. There is no real excuse for not reading it now.
Well, here we go with the second NYRB Classic in a row. Because they are always refreshing and always interesting, I often crave NYRB Classics, and neither this one nor the last one have disappointed (though, be careful, they only make the craving stronger). I’m always shocked because I cannot believe the book I’m reading once languished out of print. This one was no exception. Despite the title — The Murderess (1903; tr. from the Greek by Peter Levi, 1983) — I was for some reason not expecting quite the chilling read this little book provided.
The title character is introduced with three names. She is ”Hadoula, or Frankissa, or Frankojannou, [. . .] a woman of scarcely sixty, well built and solid, with a masculine air and two little touches of moustache on her lips.” Frankojannou’s daughter has just had another child, and — horror of horrors, is there no mercy? — the baby is yet another girl. And she’s sick! Besides the father, no one is getting any rest in this new infant’s household.
For many nights Frankojannou had permitted herself no sleep. She had willed her sore eyes open, while she kept vigil beside this little creature who had no idea what trouble she was giving, or what tortures she must undergo in her turn, if she survived.
In the first few chapters, as she sits caring for her new granddaughter, Frankojannou’s consciousness wanders, and Papadiamantis describes her life in small episodes. The portraits of the underclass in nineteenth-century Greece are wonderful because we quickly understand — we can feel — why Frankojannou at sixty, caring for her granddaughter, would lament, ’O God, why should another one come into the world?’ And so we readers go back and forth in time: at one moment Frankojannou is sitting up in that night trying to quiet an infant; in another, she is a young woman getting swindled by her own mother (who, in turn, she steals from); in another, her son is threatening to kill her in the street.
As Frankojannou gets more and more tired and agitated, her reason starts to warp in a terrifying way:
Ah, look . . . Nothing is exactly what it seems, anything but, in fact rather the opposite. Given that grief is joy and death is life and resurrection, then disaster is happiness and disease is health. So are all those scourges that seem so ugly, that mow down ungrown infants, the smallpox and scarlet fever and diphtheria and the rest of the diseases, are they not really happiness? Loving gestures and wingbeats of the little angels who rejoice in the heavens when they receive the souls of children? And we humans in our blindness think of these things as unhappy, as the strokes of heaven, as an evil thing.
The astute reader (who merely needs to read the title of the book) knows where this is going, even if Frankojannou does not. It’s just off the edge of her reasoning at this point.
Her accustomed prayer for little girls was ‘May they not survive! May they go no further!’
On occasion she went so far as to say:
‘What can I say to you! . . . The minute girls are born a person thinks of strangling them!’
Yes, she did say it, but she would certainly never had been capable of doing it, Not even Hadoula herself believed that.
The unthinkable happens, and happens again (and again . . .). Soon in the novel, quite a lot of damage is done to the community, all absolutely inexcusable and yet understandable. In other words, never does Papadiamantis excuse Frankojannou’s actions, but the road to those actions is sadly plausible. It’s a brutal look at a society where a woman was a utility, where both anger and compassion can drive someone to kill.
We spend the last half of the book following Frankojannou’s sixty-year-old frame as she desperately tries to survive in the Greacian hills while the law pursues her through days and nights. The scenery is beautiful, with its echos of Homer, and enriches the pursuit as well as the complicated look at justice, both from below and above.
I kept holding out on buying Vivant Denon’s only literary work, a novella — no, a short story — because it didn’t seem sensible to pay full price for something that will only last 30 pages. But when a few of my favorite book bloggers praise it, and it’s published by one of my favorite publishers, I had to see what the fuss was about. Now I know: it may be that the story is only 30 pages (though in the NYRB Classics edition, the book also contains the original French and an excellent 20 page introduction by Peter Brooks), but No Tomorrow (Point de Lendemain, 1777, revised in 1812; tr. from the French by Lydia Davis, 1997) will be read again and again. It gives a reward several times that of a new, expensive, 800 page hardback.
The story itself is fairly simple. Our narrator is looking back to his youth at a particularly pleasurable night he passed with a marvelous woman. I’m sure you can guess why it was so pleasurable. The next morning, he leaves, never to encounter the woman again — at least, not . . . err . . . in the same way. The magic of the story is the vim of the style and the way that style presents the machinations going on under the text. Here is how the story begins:
I was desperately in love with the Comtesse de — ; I was twenty years old and I was naive. She deceived me, I got angry, she left me. I was naive, I missed her. I was twenty years old, she forgave me, and, because I was twenty years old, because I was naive — still deceived, but no longer abandoned — I thought myself to be the best-loved lover, and therefore the happiest of men.
That clipped, clear, succinct, moving introduction is brilliantly translated by Lydia Davis (another reason I need to revisit Madame Bovary now that she’s put her translation out there; oh, and it is also the reason I jumped up and got her collection of short stories). As succinct as it is, though, we hear three times that the narrator was twenty years old and three times that he was naive. It’s a great passage into the mind of the older narrator who is mocking his youth at the same time as he envies it. These three sentences are a marvel of construction.
Comtesse de — , our narrator’s deceitful lover, is friends with Mme de T — . One evening, our narrator meets Mme de T — at the opera. When she sees him, she begins the game:
A divine hand must have led you here. You don’t by any chance have plans for this evening? I warn you, they would be pointless.
One can read this story as a straight line from Point A (the Opera) to Point B (the Night), and it is still a fantastic story, a seductive bit of erotic literature that is highly literate, just a pleasure to read:
Kisses are like confidences: they attract each other, they accelerate each other, they excite each other. In fact, I had barely received the first kiss when a second followed upon its heels, and then another: their pace quickened, interrupting and then replacing the conversation. Soon they scarcely left us time to sigh. Silence fell all around us. We heard it (for one sometimes hears silence), and we were frightened. We stood up without saying a word and began to walk again.
But this story is much more than that straight line between Point A and Point B. Mme de T — tells the narrator to accompany her to her estranged husband’s house for dinner. During the course of the meal, the husband is visibly angered at the youth his wife has invited, but he praises his wife’s foresight. It’s good she invited a friend since he would be retiring early that night.
The game continues, and, as the evening progresses, Denon’s story ventures into the nature of lust and passion and just what an intimate connection between two people means. And also how to get the most out of it:
When lovers are too ardent, they are less refined. Racing toward climax, they overlook the preliminary pleasures: they tear at a knot, shred a piece of gauze. Lust leaves its traces everywhere, and soon the idol resembles a victim.
Again, though, there is much more to this story than meets the eye, and a couple of rereads continues to reveal the subtleties in the text and the true game that is being played. This short book is not to be missed.
I recommend reading the blog reviews I linked to above. John Self read a different translation, and I think the strengths of Lydia Davis’s translation are apparent when comparing the first paragraph of his text to the first paragraph here. All three showcase different strengths from this superb story.
Earlier this year I read and reviewed John Williams’s other well known works, each a masterpiece: Butcher’s Crossing and Augustus. The first John Williams book I bought, though — and the first I’d heard of, and the first I heard great things about, indeed, the book that made me go out and read the other two — was Stoner (1965). Last year it seemed everyone I follow on the blogosphere was picking up and reading this book. Everything written about it made the book appealing to me: a story set in the academy in the American mid-West, early twentieth century, precise prose, humble character, a man who “did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and [whom] few students remember . . . with any sharpness after they had taken his courses.” But it was the first few lines that made me stop reading the book each time I picked it up:
An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.
See, I found them so beautiful, I could sense the love John Williams had for William Stoner, that I couldn’t bear to read the book yet.
And you’ll not be surprsied to find out that I loved this book. Williams shows once again that he was a master worthy of holding a place among the greatest American writers. His observations and precise language about human relationships reminds me of Edith Wharton, his sense for place and time and ability to invoke it through language reminds me of Sherwood Anderson, his compassion for people reminds me of William Maxwell, and his ability to imbue deep meaning into the quotidian reminds me of Emily Dickinson.
Though the book begins by telling us that Stoner has died in 1956 and that no one much remembers his life, the book is all about Stoner’s life, though he himself will eventually wonder “if his life were worth living; if it ever had been.” He was born on a farm to a “lonely household . . . bound together by the necessity of its toil.” When Stoner is old enough, his father suggests he go to university to study agriculture, hoping Stoner could then return to the farm and help improve it. Unexpected by either father or son, Stoner falls in love with language and literature, eventually dropping his science classes to focus on the impractical study of words and thought. The rest of his life will be spent — sequestered, some would say — in the halls of academia, where a friend and fellow graduate instructor will say,
But you have the taint, the old infirmity. You think there’s something here, something to find.
……….
It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear.
Williams does an exceptional job showing just how dispossessed Stoner is. He still has contact with his parents, but theirs is such a tired life that nothing much comes out of the infrequent visits. Eventually Stoner meets a beautiful young woman from a higher social class. The awkward budding of their relationship is really difficult to watch. There is so much silence, so much unsaid, so much they simply don’t know about each other, and so much they will never know about each other. We don’t want them to get married, but they do.
They went into marriage innocent, but innocent in profoundly different ways. They were both virginal, and they were conscious of their inexperience; but whereas William, having been raised on a farm, took as unremarkable the natural processes of life, they were to Edith profoundly mysterious and unexpected. She knew nothing of them, and there was something within her which did not wish to know of them.
And so, like many others, their honeymoon was a failure; yet they would not admit this to themselves, and they did not realize the significance of the failure until long afterward.
Eventually, when Stoner is forty-two years old, “he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.” Yet he still feels passion about literature and language, and he has a passion for teaching it to others. It seems so strange that a man whose life is, by his own account, hardly worth living can find so much in examining deeply thoughts about life and death and love. In many ways, then, this book is about that quest that, even if futile in life, can still be life-sustaining. Stoner still manages to see truth and beauty, even in the toil:
He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living.
This all connects together into one of the most pleasurable and profound examinations of the link between heart and mind I’ve ever read. That link is the key to understanding this book and to seeing it as more than just a biography of an unlucky, quiet man. Stoner takes us through the early twentieth century. When World War I is taking students from the university and teaching them to despise the Germans, Stoner sees one of his beloved professors weeping. Not long after, Stoner has the misfortune to witness a repeat of all of this during World War II:
One part of him recoiled in instinctive horror at the daily waste, the inundation of destruction and death that inexorably assaulted the mind and heart; once again he saw the faculty depleted, he saw the classrooms emptied of their young men, he saw the haunted looks upon those who remained behind, and saw in those looks the slow death of the heart, the bitter attrition of feeling and care.
This book about the humanities is filled to the brim with humanity. Stoner‘s aesthetic beauty underlines its own themes, which Williams explores in a variety of ways. The book isn’t simply about a man growing old alongside a wife who never loved him. There is a daughter involved, inter-departmental politics, old friendships, and old enemies who (as was touched on in Augustus) after so many years gain some of the qualities of a friend. I do hope that the resurgence this book had a year ago, when everyone seemed to be reading it, doesn’t die down.
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