Click 
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.
I admit that I bought The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) because of the great cover NYRB Classics gave it on their recently released edition. Of course, it helps that the book is an NYRB Classic. When you trust an imprint as much as I trust them, you can afford to select their books based on their covers. It also helped that Moore was Booker shortlisted three times in his career, and that several of my favorite bloggers rate him highly. But really, the cover was the kicker.
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne takes place in Belfast in the middle of the century. Miss Hearne is just over forty. She was raised to be the wife of a wealthy man, though none have ever paid her much attention. To make things worse, when her aunt was growing older, Judith sacrificed her most eligible years in order to take care of her. Her powerful aunt didn’t give her much choice in the matter. But for Judith, this might just have been a good way to excuse away the fact that at forty she is not married, has no prospects, and has little skills she can use to earn some money to pad her meager annuity.
This may sound familiar. We’ve encountered women in this situation before. This is similar to the fate left to Lily Bart, though at least Lily was beautiful and had some pride; she had many chances and could blame society for much of her downfall. Judith lives with the repressed knowledge that she’s unattractive to men. Judith’s mind has developed all sorts of ways to delude herself. She also gets comfort from the protection and love she receives from two figures given life by her imagination; these figures also render judgment. It’s horrifying, really, and the first few paragraphs lay the horrors out nicely as Judith moves in to a new flat.
The first thing Miss Judith Hearne unpacked in her new lodgings was the silver-framed photograph of her aunt. The place for her aunt, ever since the sad day of the funeral, was on the mantelpiece of whatever bed-sitting-room Miss Hearne happened to be living in. And as she put her up now, the photograph eyes were stern and questioning, sharing Miss Hearne’s own misgivings about the condition of the bedsprings, the shabbiness of the furniture and the run-down part of Belfast in which the room was situated.
After she had arranged the photograph so that her dear aunt could look at her from the exact centre of the mantelpiece, Miss Hearne unwrapped the white tissue paper which covered the coloured oleograph of the Sacred Heart. His place was at the head of the bed, His fingers raised in benediction, His eyes kindly yet accusing. He was old and the painted halo around His head was beginning to show little cracks. He had looked down on Miss Hearne for a long time, almost half her lifetime.
Moore begins the book perfectly! Not only is his writing captivating but in a few short paragraphs we get a sense of how damaged Judith is as well as the a glimpse at some of the elements that hold such strong power over her.
All of that is superbly done, but the book is made even better by the additional damaged characters. The home Judith has moved into is ran by Mrs Henry Rice. Mrs Henry Rice’s son Bernard is a fat drop-out with long curly hair who believes he is the next great poet. His greatness gives him license to live off his mother, which she doesn’t deny. In another softly horrifying scene, Judith goes downstairs to find Mrs Henry Rice washing Bernie’s hair in the living room, Bernie half naked by the tub of water. Those two characters are terrifying forces who eventually set themselves up against Judith.
The reason they come against Judith is Mrs Henry Rice’s brother, James Madden. Madden has recently returned from America. Thinking Judith must have some money, he pursues her interest for business gain. She, of course, misunderstands — or is misled.
Her busy hands flew, unpacking the linen sheets, putting them away in the dresser drawer. But she paused in the centre of the room. He noticed me. He was attracted. The first in ages. Well, that’s only because I’ve been keeping myself to myself too much. Go out and meet new people and you’ll see, she told her mirror face. And the face in the mirror told it back to her, agreeing.
When Madden learns that Judith has no money, he stops. There’s worse to Madden, though, and this is tied to an ugly secret he shares with Bernard. Bernard wants Madden to leave, so he convinces Judith that she should pursue Madden more directly.
If it seems that I’ve given away a lot of the story, I can assure you I haven’t. There’s much more to it. There is also more to this book than the sad story alluded to above. Moore’s writing is exceptional. There are multiple perspectives, all clearly defined. He describes the setting in such a way that the reader can feel physical discomfort:
There, under the great dome of the building, ringed around by forgotten memorials, bordered by the garrison neatness of a Garden of Remembrance, everything that was Belfast came into focus. The newsvendors calling out the great events of the world in flat, uninterested Ulster voices; the drab facades of the buildings grouped around the Square, proclaiming the virtues of trade, hard dealing and Presbyterian righteousness. The order, the neatness, the floodlit cenotaph, a white respectable phallus planted in sinking Irish bog. The Protestant dearth of gaiety, the Protestant surfeit of order, the dour Ulster burghers walking proudly among these monuments to their mediocrity.
And there are may echos of James Joyce, from the actual syntax and diction, where we often catch a glimpse of “stately plump Buck Mulligan,” to the interior dialogue, to the blur between the physical and mental world.
No, she said, smiling at the bottle. You’re behind the times. There is, she told the bottle, no earthly reason to feel sorry. Because there is no heavenly reason to feel guilt. At least, nobody has shown me that there is. And I’m waiting to be shown, dear bottle. I’m waiting patiently. It’s five o’clock already. / Too much, the black bottle said. Nearly empty. You are drunk. You drink too much.
Drunk? And why not, nobody’s to mind, nobody minds if I’m anything. Nobody, not a single soul. I’m free. I’m — falling.
The bed, not mine at all. The hotel. The drink spilled on the bedspread. I’ll have to pay, who cares? Only money as Dan Breen used to say. Only money. And meanwhile, as long as I’ve fallen on this bed, I might as well sleep. My shoes, I should take off. Off with my shoes. Sleepy shoes.
Sleepy smiling shoes.
Sleep.
This book actually took me quite a while to read. At just over 200 pages, I expected to breeze through it, but it demanded that I slow down — in a good way. The language and the cadence of the story, at first delicate and then raucous, made it impossible to read quickly. The best thing about this book is not the cover.
It’s been almost two years since I first heard of the author John Williams, right here on this blog, in the comments to my review of American Pastoral. There Kevin from Canada said “John Edward Williams may be the most overlooked novelist in American history.” Last year, all over the blogosphere, I saw people reading his book Stoner, so hopefully he is getting less and less overlooked. About Stoner: I haven’t read it — at least, I haven’t read all of it. I have it, and I’ve read the beginning of it several times and each time put it down in a bit of ecstasy. Frankly, it was so good I didn’t want to read it yet (yes, strange). I wanted to save it for the perfect reading weekend, which just doesn’t occur that often (i.e. never) when there are young children and busy jobs clamoring for attention. For similar reasons, I had also been saving Butcher’s Crossing (1960), but when I finished Blood Meridian I wanted some more literature taking apart the American west. Oakley Hall, I’ve got Warlock on my radar too.
In its history, America has been looked upon as a land of promise, a place where people can come and reach as far as their hope and hard work will allow them. The land to the west represented, among other things, untapped resources; and these represented untapped wealth to anyone with enough endurance and ingenuity to get there and take it. This idea of America deserves its criticism, and a healthy perspective is as dire yet hard to find today as it was back then. Resources were eaten up with disregard if not pure malice to human life, that of the laborers or natives. Policies were in place to encourage complete exploitation of the resource itself, all but guaranteeing its speedy depletion and the broken dreams of those who came just a fraction of second too late. I grew up in the western United States and saw many dead cities, completely abandoned when the dream of prosperity turned out to be a figment of their imagination. Last September I drove around Southern Utah, looking along the old trails to California for cities of which there is no trace whatsoever (it is haunting to look at barren ground and realize that not long ago it was covered with homes and businesses and families). In other places there are still the bare foundations of homes, a few signs, a small cemetery, but to get there one must drive in the middle of the desert — no one goes there anymore, except we curious few. These cities bore the names of founding families, now forgotten, or collective aspirations and ideals, never achieved. Despite the numerous success stories and the very real wealth gained in the process of expanding the United States westward, this destruction is a substantial part of our past that we tend to forget even as we continue to repeat it.
As an American reader, deeply interested in what literature has to say about this land, its promise, its spirituality, and its emptiness, Butcher’s Crossing hit me with the same force as (if not more than) Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Age of Innocence, The Great Gatsby, Martin Dressler, American Pastoral, and Gilead. Yes, I expected Butcher’s Crossing to be great, I expected it to be well written — people told me so — but I was shocked at how much it contained, at how well it balanced jubilance and heartbreak, innocence and depravity, all while reinventing the western to expose the fault lines the American Dream is founded upon. Another part of the shock was that such a book, fifty years old, is all but forgotten. Thanks to the superb work of NYRB Classics for ensuring that this book is available to us again, and in such a lovely volume. Still, it’s been out by NYRB Classics for a number of years now, and I’m still ignorant of any burgeoning awareness.
A week or so ago, via Mark Athitakis’ blog American Fiction Notes (go there for more context in the commentary), I read this 1962 quote from James Baldwin, and it expressed perfectly what I found in Butcher’s Crossing:
One hears, it seems to me, in the work of all American novelists, even including the mighty Henry James, songs of the plains, the memory of a virgin continent, mysteriously despoiled, though all dreams were to have become possible here. This did not happen. And the panic, then . . . comes out of the fact that we are now confronting the awful question of whether or not all our dreams have failed. How have we managed to become what we have, in fact, become? And if we are, as indeed we seem to be, so empty and desperate, what are we to do about it? How shall we put ourselves in touch with reality?
Okay — that’s enough of a preamble to the book itself. Butcher’s Crossing begins with a fitting reference to the American spirit. The young Will Andrews has left Harvard in his third year, inspired by the lofty injunction of Ralph Waldo Emerson to go find “an original relation to nature.” Andrews packs up and heads to the frontier in the west, eventually ending up in Butcher’s Crossing, a “hide town,” where a Mr. J.D. McDonald, an old family acquaintance, has set up a business tanning buffalo hides he acquires from the town’s rough buffalo hunters. When Andrews arrives, McDonald takes a paternalistic role and tries to get Andrews to work for him in the tanning business – the paperwork is a burden for him alone, the buffalo hunters are beasts and a curse to any who joins them, and, besides, the railroad is soon coming through town, guaranteeing that anyone with a head for business and real estate can make it rich. That isn’t what Andrews wants, though:
“Mr. McDonald,” Andrews said quietly, “I appreciate what you’re trying to do for me. But I want to try to explain something to you. I came out here — “ He paused and let his gaze go past McDonald, away from the town, beyond the ridge of earth that he imagined was the river bank, to the flat yellowish green land that faded into the horizon westward. He tried to shape in his mind what he had to say to McDonald. It was a feeling; it was an urge that he had to speak. But whatever he spoke he knew would be but another name for the wildness that he sought. It was a freedom and goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous. What he sought was the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source, rather than search it out, as the prairie grass around him sent down its fibered roots into the rich dark dampness, the Wildness, and thereby renewed itself, year after year.
Instead of entering the employ of McDonald, Andrews seeks someone who knows the land, someone who can help him find that “source and preserver of his world.” All fingers point to Miller, a man with a history that goes further west than Butcher’s Crossing into Colorado and the mountains. Miller has hunted buffalo, but he is prideful and will not hunt with the other men in town, nor will he accept McDonald’s requests that Miller hunt for McDonald. The buffalo near Butcher’s Crossing have been weakened by massacres; their hides are scrawny. What Miller wants is a way to get back to Colorado where, nearly ten years earlier, he saw an enormous buffalo herd sheltered in a hidden valley. He’s certain the herd is still there, that their hides are thick, and that anyone who can enact the slaughter and harvest the hides will be rich. His only problem is finding someone who will pay for the voyage.
It is surely obvious what is going to happen here: Andrews doesn’t blink an eye when he offers to underwrite the trip, just let him come along. A few weeks later four men set off for Colorado: Andrews, Miller, Miller’s sad, Bible-reading side-kick Charley Hoge, and the less-than-spiritual skinner. On the journey, Williams shows his writing skill by entering the consciousness of Andrews as he observes the land and begins to soak in what it represents. The land, incidentally, and the men’s experience with the land, is another highlight of the book. The descriptions and the feelings felt real and reminded me of my own time in the mountains; here is an example from one of the first mornings in the Colorado valley:
When Andrews awoke, Charley Hoge was already up and dressed; he huddled over the fire, adding twigs to the coals that had been kept overnight by the banking. Andrews lay for a moment in the comparative warmth of his bedroll and watched his breath fog the air. Then he flung the blankets aside, and, shivering, got into his boots, which were stiff and hard from the cold. Without lacing them, he clumped over to the fire. The sun had not yet come over the mountain against which their camp was set; but on the opposite mountain, at the top, a mass of pine trees was lighted by the early sun; a patch of turning aspen flamed a deep gold in the green of the pines.
Another highlight is the change that overcomes the men in the valley. Miller becomes as tyrannical and obsessed as Captain Ahab (again, there are many connections to Moby-Dick). Andrews transformation is more subtle, more disturbing:
The stench of the buffalo, the feel of the warm meat on his hands, and the sight of clotted blood came to have less and less impact upon his senses. Shortly he came to the task of skinning almost like an automaton, hardly aware of what he did as he sucked the hide from an inert beast and pegged it to the ground. He was able to ride through a mass of skinned buffalo covered black with feeding insects, and hardly be aware of the stench that rose in the heat from the rotting flesh.
One thing that also makes Andrews’ own transformation more interesting is the fact that Andrews himself, at times, is conscious of its occurrence and watches, helplessly knowing that he can never go back and no longer fully understanding all that he’s lost. Butcher’s Crossing deserves to be sitting on the shelf with the great books of American literature, even those that speak with the authority of the American conscience.
I’m afraid I won’t be able to review any more of the Lost Booker shortlist before the voting period ends on Friday — but at least we got that extra week, right? I still don’t think the public was given nearly enough time to read and properly vote on the winner, especially when there are a couple of long, dense works that should be strong contenders. Troubles (1970) was one of those long, dense works. It took me quite a long time to read. Some of it was because I have been incredibly busy with work, taking away my nights and weekends to the detriment of my reading and blogging, among other things. However, it wasn’t only the work that made this a long read. Troubles, though a pleasure, is a heavy historical work dealing with a very complicated mess. In a matter of pages, many things can happen, each with its parallel meaning, so I ceded to the book’s demand and slowed my pace. I’m glad I did, too, because in the end I was happy to have spent so much time with this book on my mind.
Troubles is part of Farrell’s Empire Trilogy, books that take a snapshot of the British Empire in various states of decay. Also included is The Singapore Grip, which I haven’t read yet, and The Siege of Krishnapur, one of my favorite Booker winners. Troublestakes us to Ireland in 1919. Major Brendan Archer has survived France in the Great War and is on his way to Ireland to meet up with his fiancée, Angela, an Anglo-Irish daughter of the once-wealthy Edward Spencer. The Spencers own the Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. Just a generation or two ago, the hotel was a thriving, luxurious abode of the gentry. In 1919 it has a few remaining elderly guests whose presence brings the past more sharply in relief; they feel like ghosts of a better past still haunting the grounds. Here is how Farrell introduces the Majestic; he devotes to it his first lines in the novel:
In those days the Majestic was still standing in Kilnalough at the very end of a slim peninsula covered with dead pines leaning here and there at odd angles. At that time there were probably yachts there too during the summer since the hotel held a regatta every July. These yachts would have been beached on one or other of the sandy crescents that curved out towards the hotel on each side of the peninsula. But now both pines and yachts have floated away and one day the high tide may very well meet over the narrowest part of the peninsula, made narrower by erosion. As for the regatta, for some reason it was discontinued years ago, before the Spencers took over the management of the place. And a few years later still the Majestic itself followed the boats and preceded the pines into oblivion by burning to the ground — but by that time, of course, the place was in such a state of disrepair that it hardly mattered.
The state of disrepair is obvious to the Major when he arrives. He is surprised to find rooms that haven’t been touched in years, rooms where cats are thriving, and eventually, trying to find a suitable room, he has inhabited a good number of the Majestic’s space. As he arrives, a bit disoriented, the Major is surprised not to have Angela waiting for him. He meets her father, her brother Ripon, and many more inhabitants before encountering Angela as she sits taking tea. She had written him so many letters, but he is surprised to find she is not at all how she was in the letters or indeed as she was when they first met. Not that that meeting had been anything impressive:
They had kissed behind a screen of leaves and, reaching out to steady himself, he had put his hand down firmly on a cactus, which had rendered many of his parting words insincere.
Still, over the course of the years since that kiss, he felt confident that they were engaged. One of the best features of Farrell’s writing, however, is how he creates ghosts in the narrative. The Major rarely meets with Angela throughout the course of the entire book. And there are other ghosts in the narrative. First is Sarah Devlin, one of Angela’s friends and the woman with whom the Major will fall in love. Where Angela is Anglo-Irish, Sarah is pure Irish and a Catholic:
“Angela told you all that, of course. But you’ve forgotten the most important thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The fact that I’m a Catholic. Yes, I can see that she told you but that you regard it as a fact too shameful to mention. Or perhaps you regard it as good manners not to mention such an affliction.”
“What absolute nonsense!”
“Pay no attention, Sarah got out of bed the wrong side as usual.”
“Be quiet, Ripon! It’s not nonsense at all. Ripon’s father calls us ‘fish-eaters’ and ‘Holy Romans’ and so on. So does Ripon. So will you, Major, when you’re among the ‘quality.’ In fact, you’ll become a member of the ‘quality’ yourself, high and mighty, too good for the rest of us.”
“I hope not to be so bigoted,” said the Major smiling. “Surely there’s no need to abandon one’s reason simply because one is in Ireland.”
Though the Major falls in love with Sarah, and though we do encounter her every once in a while, she still is, for much of the book, an absence felt. Months go by without their meeting, and she haunts the Major all the time. He even finds a warm room full of sheets in which he retires to imagine her with him. Farrell’s humour can be highlighted (the whole book is full of comedy) by looking at a few passages with the Major and Sarah. Here he the omniscient narrator speaking about the hopeless Major:
Until now, incredible though it may seem, the Major had never considered that love, like war, is best conducted with experience of tactics. His instinct helped him a little. It warned him, for instance, against unconditional surrender. (“Do with me as you see fit, Sarah.”) With Sarah he somehow knew that that would not work. He was learning slowly, by experience. Next time he had a love affair he would do much better. But to the love-drugged Major that was not much consolation.
And here is a bit of the comedy of manners that comes out:
Although his indifference to her had been amply demonstrated, the Major still could not prevent himself from haunting the couple, in the hope of getting further opportunities to demonstrate it.
Of course, the book has a very dark side. There is a lot of destruction going on and a lot of death offstage (and onstage, periodically). Which brings up another conspicuous absence: the Sinn Feiners, the rebel Irish who are, according to Edward Spencer, destroying the country. Or, according to others, the Patriots who will settle for nothing less than home rule. There are frequent tales of a Sinn Feiner shooting a cop or blowing up something, but we almost never see one. And even when there is a group of them present, it is written in such a way that we can feel them but not see them. It’s wondrous how Farrell does this.
In this context, Troubles becomes an intricate allegory of the British Empire in Ireland. The Majestic, it is obvious from page one, represents the Empire itself. But the Major’s motives for being at the Majestic are tied to the historical context. The cats, the bamboo, the statues, the sea: all come together in surprising ways.
But, if allegory scares anyone, Troubles is also a great historical read. Farrell is not obviously allegorical, as some are. His narrative goes on naturally and one need never look for symbols to understand the tragedy that is occurring in the lives, historical and personal, in 1919 Ireland.
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting with Edwin Frank, the editorial director of NYRB Classics. NYRB Classics is one of my favorites, both as a publisher and as a brand. Their books are lovely to behold and lovely (or, at the very least, always interesting) to read. They’re an important publisher because they seek to print literary treasures, whatever the genre, lost to time by simple neglect or because the commercial publishers simply didn’t think they were commercial. While visiting NYRB Classics, Mr. Frank offered me two of their new books, one of which was Skylark (Pacsirta, 1924; tr. from the Hungarian by Richard Aczel, 1993) by Dezsö Kosztolányi. The one, he said (in my words, because I can’t remember exactly what he said), was great; Skylark, he said (in his words), is a masterpiece.
Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.
Skylark has an interesting, yet somewhat mundane, premise. Set in a small provincial Hungarian town in 1899, Mother and Father are sending their daughter Skylark away for a week-long holiday to visit an uncle’s estate. Skylark is in her mid-thirties, yet her parents fret over her preparations as if she is a little girl. They worry about how she will cope. Were they foolish to send her away for a week? How will they cope? Skylark takes care of them, fixes all of their food. What are they going to do without their beloved daughter? During all of the preparations, as we attempt to figure out the family dynamics, we get this wonderful description of Father and Mother — as mouses:
Father wore a mouse-grey suit, the exact colour of his hair. Even his moustache was the same light shade of grey. Large bags of crumpled, worn, dry skin hung beneath his eyes.
Mother, as always, wore black. Her hair, which she slicked down with walnut oil, was not yet altogether white, and her face showed hardly a wrinkle. Only along her forehead rant two deep furrows.
Yet how alike they looked! The same trembling, startled light in their eyes, their gristly noses narrowing to the same fine point and their ears tinted with the same red glow.
Meanwhile, Skylark (“They had given her that name years ago, Skylark, many, many years ago, when she still sang. Somehow the name had stuck, and she still wore it like an out-grown childhood dress.”) sits outside waiting for them to call her:
She did not move at once. Perhaps she hadn’t heard.
In any case, she liked to sit like this, head bowed, peering at her work even when she had tired of it. The experience of many long years had taught her that this posture suited her best.
Perhaps she heard some sound, but still did not look up. She governed herself with all the discipline of an invalid.
As you can see, much of the joy in this book is in the great descriptions, always perfect but unexpected: mousey parents, a name like an out-grown childhood dress, a woman governing herself with all the discipline of an invalid. These descriptions create such a wide range of possible interpretations. On the surface parents and child love one another — perhaps too much. Or is one being bullied by the other? Finally Skylark goes in to see her doting parents, but the contrast is immediately present:
The elderly couple watched with fond smiles as she drew near. Then, when her face finally revealed itself between the leaves, the smiles paled slightly on their lips.
Why the paled smile? Do they fear her? Do they pity her? Do they despise her? But soon Skylark is on a train, and Father and Mother are bereft. They really do miss their daughter. Trying to figure out how to spend their time, they begin making their way to the only restaurant Skylark deemed passable while she was away. Their presence on the street is a strange sight:
The interest that had met the couple in the restaurant followed them out into the street. Strangers turned to look at them as they passed. Not that there was anything unusual about their appearance. People simply weren’t accustomed to seeing them there in the street, like old couches that belong in the living room and look so strange when, once or twice a year, they’re put outside to air.
Again, so much wonder is in the subtle descriptions. All that I’ve summarized above takes place in the first few pages of the rather short novel. Father and Mother still have a week to suffer through. Only, to their surprise and not-slight horror, they find that they enjoy themselves. The food at the restaurant is wonderful. Skylark, who must have a sensitive stomach, always produces such bland dishes. They reunite with old friends and go to the theater, something they don’t usually do becasue Skylark’s eyes are sensitive and cannot cope with the theater smoke and the closed-in area.
I must stop summarizing the plot now. I think it is obvious this book is about a father and mother who are basically voluntarily enslaved by their daughter who is sick or ugly or both. However, the book is so much more than that, both in scale and intimacy. This is Hungary in 1899. Father and Mother read the newspapers, but they aren’t interested in the events that we, with hindsight, know are important. But why should they care? Their lives are in complete stasis with so much emotion and power carefully covered up below the surface. This week without Skylark threatens to destabilize the existence they have created.
In a state of excitement, things that normally pass unnoticed can seem pregnant with significance. At such times even inanimate objects — a lamppost, a gravel path, a bush — can take on a life of their own, primordial, reticent and hostile, stinging our hearts with their indifference and making us recoil with a start. And the very sight of people at such times, blindly pushing their lonely, selfish ends, can suddenly remind us of our own irrevocable solitude, a single word or gesture petrifying in our souls into an eternal symbol of the utter arbitrariness of life.
The ending of the book is masterful. As one would hope with a “masterpiece,” the threads don’t tie up in the way we might expect, and the pattern turns out to be far more complicated than we imagined — and much sadder. Much is said in this line:
Nothing had been settled or resolved. But at least they had grown tired. And that was something.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
A few weeks ago when I reviewed Spring Tides, the ever-perceptive John Self asked whether I had also read The Invention of Morel (La Invención de Morel, 1940; tr. from the Spanish by Ruth L.C. Simmons, 1964). Though I couldn’t say there’s any thematic similarities, similar elements abound: an island with only a few developed structures, an unnamed man and named woman, loneliness, and the tides — spring tides, to be exact. As fate would have it, I had purchased The Invention of Morel only a few weeks earlier and had it packed with me while on holiday. At a mere 103 pages, each densely packed and adroitly controlled, it was definitely a pleasant holiday read.
The cover image that NYRB Classics chose to place on this book is a 1927 publicity still of film star Louise Brooks. It is both misleading and perfect. Louise Brooks apparently inspired this novel, but it’s a spoiler to say how. So I won’t.
In fact, I don’t really want to say much of anything about the book — it’s worth exploring with little to no foreknowledge. In what I have written below I have tried hard not to spoil this book for anyone. I think the best place to start, then, is the first paragraph. On a first read, it sounds like Bioy Casares is simply establishing the setting:
Today, on this island, a miracle happened: summer came ahead of time. I moved my bed out by the swimming pool, but then, because it was impossible to sleep, I stayed in the water for a long time. The heat was so intense that after I had been out of the pool for only two or three minutes I was already bathed in perspiration again. As day was breaking, I awoke to the sound of a phonograph record. Afraid to go back to the museum to get my things, I ran away down through the ravine. Now I am in the lowlands at the southern part of the island, where the aquatic plants grow, where mosquitoes torment me, where I find myself waist-deep in dirty streams of sea water. And, what is worse, I realize that there was no need to run away at all. Those people did not come here on my account; I believe they did not even see me. But here I am, without provisions, trapped in the smallest, least habitable part of the island — the marshes that the sea floods once each week.
Astonishingly, this first paragraph is packed with plot elements. It’s a very different paragraph after having read the book. What we know now (well, we’ll know it in a few pages) is that our narrator is hiding out on a mysterious island. He is an escaped convict, nervous that these newcomers will turn him in to the authorities. Even when he figures out that they are not aware of his presence, he continues hiding out in the marshes. The part of the island he had to leave was much more pleasant. There was a museum, a chapel, a swimming pool. All were completed in 1924 but then abandoned, leaving these strange, lonely structures. Despite these strange, lonely structures, it doesn’t appear that anyone will be visiting the island. Indeed, that is why the narrator came here. When escaping, he was told,
“Chinese pirates do not go there, and the white ship of the Rockefeller Institute never calls at the island, because it is known to be the focal point of a mysterious disease, a fatal disease that attacks the ouside of the body and then works inward.”
Then why did these strange people, who look like snobbish vacationers, come? The plot thickens when our narrator falls in love with one of them. From a hidden vantage point, he watches an ambiguous woman as she silently watches the sunset. She hardly misses a night, and neither does he. Hating the hope it engenders, the narrator nevertheless thinks of ways he can meet the woman, whose name, he learns, is Faustine. But as he gains courage, he finds that something is keeping them apart, no matter how close he gets to her.
It’s a very lonely novel, and the loneliness is nearly driving the narrator mad.
I dreamed of Faustine. The dream was very sad, very touching. We were saying good-bye; they were coming to get hre; the ship was about to leave. Then we were alone, saying a romantic farewell. I cried during the dream and then woke up feeling miserable and desperate because Faustine was not there; my only consolation was that we had not concealed our love. I was afraid that Faustine had gone away while I was sleeping. I got up and looked around. The ship was gone. My sadness was profound: it made me decide to kill myself.
One of the best things about The Invention of Morel, though, is that even when we readers understand the nature of what is going on, Bioy Casares doesn’t stop there. Many lesser books stop with cleverness. In this one, the intelligent construct is only incidental to an even more intelligent examination of love, lust, loneliness — and the ambiguities of immortality.
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