"Everything has to come to an end sometime, even pure unadulterated terror--particularly if there is nothing whatever to be done about it."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

This week's New Yorker features a "Talk of the Town" piece about the producers of a new staging of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit asking a group of working mediums to attempt to conjure the spirit of Coward himself as part of an audition for a job as advisor to the actress portraying the medium in the play. The piece reminded me of an odd story I read this fall, when, deep into my annual autumnal ghost story binge, I took James Hynes's advice and bought an old copy of yet another of those Robert Arthur-edited Hitchcock anthologies, Stories for Late at Night (1961). The volume is the usual mixed but very satisfying bag, its handful of truly chilling stories–Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life" and John Collier's "Evening Primrose" among them–more than justifying the minimal cost of a used copy.

The story that returned to mind today was "Lady's Man" (1961), by early film actress and novelist Ruth Chatterton, which, from the point of view of Chatterton herself, relates a ghostly encounter that she had at Noel Coward's country house, Goldenhurst. In the story, Chatterton is invited to Goldenhurst for a weekend visit with a few others of Coward's circle, including his longtime close friend Joyce Carey; put up in a first-floor room that she's never seen used as guest quarters before, she senses a male presence enter her room late in the night:

I shut my eyes but they wouldn't stay shut. Even though I tried not to look, they kept wandering to that inky vaccum beyond the wide-open door. That was when the noise began, or when I became aware of it. Tap-tap-tap, as if a fingernail were tapping on the glass of the pictures on the wall, one after the other. Then the floorboards began to creak. Someone seemed to be pacing back and forth beside my bed. I could hear it plainly.

What's most striking about the story is that, rather than a piece of fiction crafted to thrill the readers of Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine or Astounding Science Fiction, "Lady's Man" appears to be a straight-up ghost story. Though it builds to a delicious concluding line, it nevertheless has all the unaffected appeal of a ghost story recounted to a friend over October campfire drinks, its simple chronology and incidental details giving it the casual verisimilitude crucial to such tales–it's the sort of story that, if told by a trusted friend, one would have to file in the "I don't believe in ghosts, but . . . " drawer. In the midst of stories with steel-trap plots and inexorably building tension, it's a breath of fresh–if undeniably creepy–air.

Chatterton died later that same year, 1961, and my relatively cursory searching turns up no other mention of this encounter. Philip Hoare's 1998 biography of Coward, however, does mention hauntings at Goldenhurst, though in a different, newer room:

Here guests–who had included Maugham just a few months before–reported odder events. Lilia Ralli, the Greek-born friend of the Duchess of Kent, had a restless night in the French Room, a new guest room built off the long passage. Coward came to the conclusion, based on other disturbed nights, that local tales of a suicide walking the path over which the room had been built were true and that it was haunted by a lovelorn Kentish lad.

Hoare, understandably, can't resist adding in a footnote:

Subsequent tenants of the house describe a feeling of being watched when playing the piano, which they ascribe to Coward's continuing presence. His ghost has also been reported in more unlikely venues: the bar manager of the Little Theatre in Wells claimed to have seen his spectral form, clad in a smoking jacket during an amateur production of Cowardy Custard.

To return to the "Talk of the Town" piece (in which one of the producers says that the most effective of the mediums, "scared the shit out of me"): I wonder whether the producers' desire for additional coaching for their medium was a result of their having read last year's fascinating collection of Coward's letters, in which he registers vigorous disapproval of the actress who originated the role in the first London run of Blithe Spirit:

The great disappointment is Margaret Rutherford, whom the audience love, because the part is so good, but who is actually very, very bad indeed. She is indistinct, fussy and, beyond her personality, has no technical knowledge or resources at all. She merely fumbles and gasps and drops things and throws many of my best lines down the drain. She is despair to Fay, Cecil and Kay and mortification to me because I thought she would be marvelous. I need hardly say she got a magnificent notice. So much for that.

If a producer wants to avoid being haunted by Coward, perhaps it's worth taking a little extra effort over the medium?

"Some dilate upon the number and kind of books suitable for a journey . . . "

{Photo by rocketlass.}

As travelling companions books have no corrival. If they lacked other purpose or defence, this alone would justify them before men. How many hours they have scattered pleasantly on lone and long journeys; what limitless tedium they have relieved or circumvented, how they have filled the waking hours, or composed the weary brain for sleep, every reader can support.

Those lines from Holbrook Jackson's seventeenth-century-style The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1948) seem right for this post, the last that I've lined up in advance to run while I'm off in Japan. For while the 600-plus posts on this blog surely put my love of books beyond question, I have to part with Jackson here: were the choice necessary, I would always select congenial living companions over books on a journey.

The following, too, seems worth quoting, if only to remind me that, however much my shoulders may ache from the weight of too many books at this point in my trip, my bibliomania could always be worse:

Some have gone so far as to construct travelling libraries for themselves, like Sir Julius Caesar, Master of the Rolls in the reign of King James I. His library went wherever he did. It was arranged in a box, shaped like a folio volume, covered with olive-green morocco, finely tooled in an elaborate pattern. On the inside lid was a catalogue of the forty-four books which comprised the library.

Which leads me to this closing line, the italicized part of which Jackson draws from Edmund Gosse's Library of Edmund Gosse:

I might here insert many more opinions, but they all tend to one conclusion: books are not entirely valued or intimately loved unless they are ranged about us as we sit at home.

And that is where, to sit quietly with my martinis and my cats, I am headed.

"The writer of half a century has outlived his critics; and, alas! has survived those whom he once had an ambition to please."

One of the most rewarding of my many current fascinations is Isaac D'Israeli's monumental collection of literary opinion, quotation, gossip, and anecdote, Curiosities of Literature, which D'Israeli shepherded through nine editions between 1791 and 1834. The preface to the ninth edition supplies the title to today's post, which finds me looking at Isaac's son, novelist and, later, prime minister Benjamin Disraeli.

Benjamin published his first novel, Vivian Grey (1826), at age twenty, and while it sold well, the critical response was savage. The worst of the reviews, in Blackwood's Magazine, called Disraeli "an obscure person for whom nobody gives a straw," and according to the The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, we can read the following passage from Disraeli's later novel Contarini Fleming (1832) as a lightly fictionalized account of the effect it had on him at the time:

With what horror, with what blank despair, with what supreme appalling astonishment did I find myself for the first time in my life the subject of the most reckless, the most malignant and the most adroit ridicule. I was sacrificed, I was scalped. . . . The criticism fell from my hand. A film floated over my vision, my knees trembled. I felt that sickness of heart that we experience in our first scrape. I was ridiculous. It was time to die.

Though the elder D'Israeli was, according to Benjamin's most recent biographer, Adam Kirsch, so wrapped up in his books as to be "an almost ethereal presence," Isaac does strike me as the sort who would at least take note of the bad review, and perhaps even think to send his son a note directing him to the wisdom offered in the Curiosities under "Sketches of Criticism."

In that essay, D'Israeli displays his admirable habit of getting straight to the point:

It may perhaps be some satisfaction to show the young writer, that the most celebrated ancients have been as rudely subjected to the tyranny of criticism as the moderns. Detraction has ever poured the “waters of bitterness.”

After which he offers us a ringing catalog of the calumnies under which the most celebrated of ancient authors have suffered, both in their lifetimes and after their deaths. Regarding Plato, for example, we are given a catalog of epithets that gathers momentum as it descends from the heights:

Plato, who has been called, by Clement of Alexandria, the Moses of Athens; the philosopher of the Christians, by Arnobius; and the god of philosophers, by Cicero; Athenæus accuses of envy; Theopompus, of lying; Suidas, of avarice; Aulus Gellius, of robbery; Porphyry, of incontinence; and Aristophanes, of impiety.

An account of Horace, on the other hand, reminds us that, as JT still assures us these many centuries later, what goes around comes around:

Horace censures the coarse humour of Plautus; and Horace, in his turn, has been blamed for the free use he made of the Greek minor poets.

D'Israeli's account of the criticisms of the Attic Nights of Aulus Gelius (who himself, you'll recall, had the temerity to call Plato a robber) are worth including both for their turn of phrase and for their invocation of an old favorite, Robert Burton:

The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, and the Deipnosophists of Athenæus, while they have been extolled by one party, have been degraded by another. They have been considered as botchers of rags and remnants; their diligence has not been accompanied by judgement; and their taste inclined more to the frivolous than to the useful. Compilers, indeed, are liable to a hard fate, for little distinction is made in their ranks; a disagreeable situation, in which honest Burton seems to have been placed; for he says of his work, that some will cry out, “This is a thinge of meere industrie; a collection without wit or invention ; a very toy! So men are valued! their labours vilified by fellowes of no worth themselves, as things of nought; who could not have done as much? some understande too little, and some too much.”

As the ghost of Robert Frost will surely haunt me for writing, one could do worse than be a botcher of rags and remnants.

But perhaps the sweetest consolation came far too late for either father or son to see it: Blackwood's Magazine itself offered praise for Vivian Grey in its February 1905 issue. In an unsigned article titled "Musings without Method," the magazine wrote of a recent rise in the critical opinion of Disraeli's novels--and specifically of Vivian Grey:

That it has the faults of inexperience is obvious. "Books written by boys," said Disraeli, "which pretend to give a picture of manners, and to deal in knowledge of human nature, must be affected." And Vivian Grey is affected in style, in plot, and in character. Nevertheless, it possesses the quality of sincerity--a sincerity to youth and high spirits.

While the journal acknowledges that,

It is Byronic, it is lackadaisical, it is fantastic. Its hero cares not for dinner so long as he is in time for the guava and liqueurs.

--at the same time it admires the fact that

[U]nder the velvet glove of aestheticism there is the iron hand of action, and Vivian Grey, when he is not displaying his eloquence, is ready to manage mankind "by studying their tempers and humouring their weaknesses." In other words, he has always a smile for a friend and a sneer for the world. But to whatever page you turn in this romance you find traces of the life and energy which were characteristic of its author. He tried many things in his life and save in poetry he always succeeded.

I, for one, would be happy with such an epitaph as that last.

Assuming D'Israeli senior continues to hold my interest, I just may have to also dive into the works of Disraeli junior; I'll report back what I learn.

What should I tell the alien survey team?

{Photo by rocketlass.}

When someday the aliens beam me up and start asking questions, I fully expect them to ask me--once they've gotten beyond the obvious ("Did adults really watch The Dukes of Hazzard?"; "How did no one realize Cheney was a Skrull?"; "Can we hate the Yankees, too?")--what it is we readers enjoy in novels. And after I rave about the capaciousness of the form, its ability to accommodate both Moby-Dick and A Month in the Country, both A Dance to the Music of Time and Tlooth, I'll talk about how its very filler, the clutter of objects and incidental descriptions and necessary transitions that begins to really thicken up in the Victorian era, can itself here and there beautifully capture and hold our world as we pass it by--as the very action of the novel itself passes it by.

This all came to mind a few days ago because as I was reading Abraham Rodriguez's strange, staccato, stylized crime novel South by South Bronx (2008), I decided I'd hit upon the perfect illustration of that aspect of novels. In the opening pages of the book, a young blonde woman in a soaking wet minidress, trying to escape from some unknown peril in a South Bronx downpour, climbs a fire escape, and as she's climbing she's afforded a momentary, anonymous glimpse of intimacy:

Through the open window on the third floor she spotted a couple, dancing. Luis Vargas playing soft on the stereo. The one candle flickered unreliably. The woman was in a red dress, fringe splashing her thighs like water. The guy was bare-chested. Black dress pants, like a matador. She watched them dance slow and close. Took a moment before she realized the guy was wearing an eye patch.

It's a perfect little snapshot of the other lives that exist, quietly, in the eddies of a realist novel; even as they serve their essential purpose of coloring and fleshing out the world of the story we're following, they also necessarily represent directions not taken, stories unexplored.

Yet it turns out I was wrong: later in the novel it's revealed that that's not a throwaway scene, that the man with the eye patch is an important character. And though that fact essentially destroys the utility of this scene for my demonstration, at the same time it makes me even more impressed with Rodriguez's talent: how rare it is to have a secretly important detail conveyed so smoothly, so casually, yet at the same time in a way that insures it will be remembered when the time comes? It's a sign of the invention and dynamism that runs throughout the novel; South by South Bronx is impressive enough that I'll soon be heading to the bookstore in search of Rodriguez's previous novels.

But that still leaves me needing a scene to share with the inevitable aliens--unless, that is, I am willing to assume that they won't ever read all of South by South Bronx. Which, come to think of it, sure sounds like how Han Solo would handle the situation.

"Perhaps . . . a message comes to the birds in autumn, like a warning."

Aside from John Bellairs, I don't think any writer cost me more childhood sleep than Robert Arthur. Arthur wrote ghost stories and mysteries, as well as episodes of the suspense radio drama "The Mysterious Traveler," but it wasn't his own works, good as they were, that kept me up at night. Rather, it was his work as a unnamed editor of a legion of Alfred Hitchcock anthologies from the 1950s and '60s--especially a series of anthologies aimed at young readers that were republished in the early 1980s. Through those volumes I made acquaintance with any number of writers whose works I've continued to enjoy through the years, including Lord Dunsany, Agatha Christie, E. F. Benson, Eric Ambler, Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ray Bradbury.

But the story that affected me the most, read first when I was about ten and turned to again and again over the next several years, was Daphne du Maurier's "The Birds." Long before I saw the movie--which, when I did finally watch it, disappointed me greatly--I read and re-read "The Birds," to the point where I knew large stretches of it by heart.

Why did I fixate on this story, of all the stories in the volumes, many of which were far more blatantly creepy or surprising? I think it's likely that I was responding to rural isolation of the Cornish farming community that du Maurier portrays so well, the sense that, when nature unexpectedly--and inexplicably--turns against farmhand Nat Hocken and his family, they have little to fall back on but themselves. Though the rural landscape in which I grew up possessed none of the dramatic wildness of the Cornish seascape of du Maurier's story, there was always a similar sense, even in the age of television, that we were at the edge of the world, far from the important dealings and decisions of big cities. So while there was much in the story I didn't even understand--I remember struggling with "pension," "council houses," and even "wireless" when I first read it--I instantly grasped the terror of feeling cut off from the world, and not having a reason to expect anything resembling rescue to come over the horizon.

And then there's du Maurier's relentless return to the physical, her foregrounding of sensation over theme or speculation. Though I was asked to do very little work on the farm as a boy (my father's memories of having to do too much work on the farm at that age having convinced him to shield us to some extent), I knew the bone-penetrating cold that could overtake you in a field in the bitterness of spring, which gave the opening of a passage like this a familiarity and force that then naturally carried over to its more gruesome aspects:

When he reached the beach below the headland he could scarcely stand, the force of the east wind was so strong. It hurt to draw breath, and his bare hands were blue. Never had he known such cold, not in all the bad winters he could remember. It was low tide. He crunched his way over the shingle to the softer sand and then, his back to the wind, ground a pit in the sand with his heel. He meant to drop the birds into it, but as he opened up the sack the force of the wind carried them, lifted them, as though in flight again, and they were blown away from him along the beach, tossed like feathers, spread and scattered, the bodies of the fifty frozen birds. There was something ugly in the sight. He did not like it. The dead birds were swept away from him by the wind.

Which suggests another reason this story stayed with me: death in "The Birds," whether avian or human, is concrete and horrible. It takes something beautiful and right--a living, moving, even graceful creature--and it replaces it with a broken thing, a perversion, an object of horror. It is irreversible, and, as the tension mounts, page by page, it seems increasingly inevitable. To a child, that knowledge is as chilling as anything. I read the story again and again, knowing the bleak ending would never change.

I recently reread "The Birds" for the first time in years, possibly even decades, in the new collection of du Maurier's short stories from the New York Review of Books, Don't Look Now (2008), and was pleased to find its power hasn't diminished. If anything, du Maurier's refusal to provide an explanation, or even to hint at one, impressed me more than it did years ago. And while it's unquestionably the best story in the collection, the whole volume is impressive. "Don't Look Now," on which the Nicholas Roeg film was based, is a tight, creepy suspense tale, while both "Split Second" and "Kiss Me Again, Stranger" reminded me of Muriel Spark's ghost stories. The most inventive story is also the most sadistically chilling: "The Blue Lenses," in which a woman who's just undergone eye surgery wakes to find that everyone has the head of an animal--and her husband's animal head is not one that inspires trust.

Aside from "The Birds," I think the last story in the collection, "Monte Verità," is the one most likely to stay with me. An almost novella-length tale of a pair of friends and the beautiful, ethereal woman they both loved and lost, it is shot through with longing and an almost naive mysticism, a willingness to believe that the hidden places of the world and the bounds of human potential have not necessarily all been mapped. Its sense of interwar rootlessness brings to mind Patrick Leigh Fermor's travel writings, and it is told with an asperity and patience that seem suitable to its remote mountain setting.

They told me afterwards they had found nothing. No trace of anyone, living or dead. Maddened by anger, and, I believe, by fear, they had succeeded at last at breaking into those forbidden walls, dreaded and shunned through countless years--to be met by silence.

Even though it's sitting on my shelf, safely bound, I think of "Monte Verità" as the sort of story you happen across in a magazine and are completely swept away by, your whole afternoon dissolved into its enchanting strangeness. But you fail to note the name of the author, and for years afterward, you mention it to friends here and there, breathlessly relating its seductions, but you never meet with anyone who recognizes it. You begin to doubt your own memory . . and then one day in a used bookshop, you pick up a musty anthology--maybe even a Hitchock anthology edited by Robert Arthur--and there it is, a treasure returned. A life of bookstore browsing offers few better moments.



{Photo by rocketlass.}

There is no Joyland in childhood . . .

{Photo by rocketlass.}

When he wasn't torturing animals, he was actually a pretty nice guy. We usually talked girls. Our tastes in them diverged considerably. He was an ass man, and preferred blondes. I, on the other hand, hadn't yet formulated an opinion on what I liked. Besides girls, we also shared an interest in the Steve Miller Band. We loved his sound, and his lyrics spoke to us where we live: I really like your peaches want to shake your tree. It was a music that was surreal, low key, and cool all at once. We'd play Steve Miller tapes, and hang out in his garage where his father had a device for making shot-gun shells. We spent hours hand-making twelve gauge shot gun shells.

That's from "Berkowitz," by Joe Peterson, a conversational, rough-hewn, moving story of boyhood longing, risk, and violence that's one of my favorites among those I've published in my brief tenure as Chicago editor for Joyland.

Which is my way of reminding folks that I'm still happily taking submissions from Chicagoans and/or former Chicagoans; if you fit that simple criterion and have a story you think well of, drop me a line. {In particular, I'm looking for some female contributors--surely all writers who've passed through Chicago in recent years aren't male, right? I know the whole "city of broad shoulders" thing, but seriously . . . )

Meanwhile, Joyland in general is definitely worth checking out, if you've not yet done so. It continues to grow--a London editor, Benjamin Wood, has just joined the stable--while offering more than half a dozen good stories online every month for free. In the midst of the New Austerity, what more could you reasonably ask for?

"One cross is bad enough, but I hadn't ought to carry a whole god-dang lumberyard around with me!"

When I picked up Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 (1964) in an attempt to begin fulfilling one of my reading resolutions for 2009, I'll admit I didn't expect it to open anything like this:

Well, sir, I should have been sitting pretty, just as pretty as a man could sit. Here I was, the high sheriff of Potts County, and I was drawing almost two thousand dollars a year--not to mention what I could pick up on the side. On top of that, I had free living quarters on the second floor of the courthouse, just as nice a place as a man could ask for; and it even had a bathroom so that I didn't have to bathe in a washtub or tramp outside to a privy, like most folks in town did. I guess you could say that Kingdom Come was really here as far as I was concerned. I had it made, and it looked like I could go on having it made--being high sheriff of Potts County--as long as I minded my own business and didn't arrest no one unless I just couldn't get out of it and they didn't amount to nothin'.

That voice--jokey, casual, yarn-spinning--is about as far as you can get from the hard-boiled bleakness I'd expected. Cornpone folksiness? Really?

Well, yes, as it turns out--but also, and more importantly, no. Sheriff Corey's narrative voice, with its mix of homespun wisdom and nonsense, never wavers, taking control of the book from the first page and holding the reader rapt (and often laughing) throughout. But at the same time, Thompson slowly, and with remarkable control, lets us see that there's far more to the sheriff than meets the ear. Though Corey agrees early and often with everyone's assessment that he's stupid and simple--

I couldn't really argue about her saying I was stupid and spineless--who wants a smart sheriff--and I figure it's a lot nicer to turn your back on trouble than it is to look at it.

--over the course of the novel we realize how dextrous he is at using that impression to hide what lies beneath it: a scheming mind with a preternatural understanding of human nature and an uncanny ability to find its lowest common denominator. He's like an amoral Davy Crockett or a frontier Odysseus, distracting everyone with a wink and a whirl of words while he manipulates people into unwittingly participating in his dirty work.

Thompson manages the dual register of Corey's narration remarkably well, introducing more and more dissonant notes over the course of the novel, so that by the time we've realized the full extent of his cunning, we've nearly been suckered ourselves. Idiocy masks hypocrisy, laziness masks self-dealing, innocence masks violence, and throughout, the sheriff barrages everyone with folk wisdom--

I mean, well, which is worse, George, the fella that craps on a doorknob or the one that rings the doorbell?

--and faux ignorance--

I ain't saying you're wrong but I ain't saying you're right, either. Anyways, even if I am stupid, you can't hardly fault me for it. They's lots of stupid people in the world.

The result is a black comedy with the body count of a Renaissance tragedy, one which at the same time skewers the hypocrisies and structural brutalities of the rural south. And on top of all that, we get a dictionary's worth of ridiculous countrified slang; lines of dialogue like the following would almost make the novel worth reading all on their own:

"What's the matter," Rose said. "You screw Myra all the time, and don't tell me you don't, you stupidlooking jackass! You've tossed it to her so often you've thrown your ass out of line with your eyeballs!"

I've been told that my instincts were correct, that Pop. 1280 is atypical of Thompson. But assuming his other novels demonstrate anything like this level of skill and control in prose and voice, I can see why Donald Westlake was a fan, and I have no doubt that he'll be joining my list of favorites.

Es el tiempo para premios, or, says my poor Spanish: It's Awards Time!

Though many of you have probably heard about this elsewhere, I feel I would be remiss if I didn't make sure to mention the soon-to-be-awarded Best Translated Book of the Year award. An initiative of the indefatigable Chad Post and the international literature boosters at the University of Rochester's Three Percent, the award has already done a great job of raising the profile of the ten poetry and fiction finalists.

Both lists of finalists are below; it's a credit to the judging panel that for every prominent book from a major trade house (2666) there are at least a couple of lesser-known titles from small, independent houses. Though the only ones I've read so far are the two Bolaño titles, several of the others have caught my eye at various times in my browsing, and the spirit of the award would seem to require that I work my way through the lot this year. After all, while the major prizes may ultimately be about sales and publicity, this prize seems fundamentally about readers, writers, and translators, and the hard but rewarding work of bringing them together.

The winners will be announced at a party at the offices of Melville House Publishers in Brooklyn on Thursday, February 19th; as http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=1657">this post, which has more details, notes, you're all invited.

The ten fiction finalists in alphabetical order:

Tranquility by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein (Archipelago)

2666 by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New Directions)

Voice Over by Céline Curiol, translated from the French by Sam Richard (Seven Stories)

The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans, translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke (Overlook)

Yalo by Elias Khoury, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux (Archipelago)

Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions)

Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge, translated from the French by Richard Greeman (New York Review Books)

Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Carolina De Robertis (Melville House)

The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig, translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg (New York Review Books)

The ten poetry finalists in alphabetical order:

Essential Poems and Writings by Robert Desnos, translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws, Terry Hale, Bill Zavatsky, Martin Sorrell, Jonathan Eburne, Katherine Connelly, Patricia Terry, and Paul Auster (Black Widow)

You Are the Business by Caroline Dubois, translated from the French by Cole Swensen (Burning Deck)

As It Turned Out by Dmitry Golynko, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, Rebecca Bella, and Simona Schneider (Ugly Duckling)

For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu (New Directions)

Poems of A.O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud, translated from the French by Ron Padgett and Bill Zavatsky (Black Widow)

Night Wraps the Sky by Vladimir Mayakovsky, translated from the Russian by Katya Apekina, Val Vinokur, and Matvei Yankelevich, and edited by Michael Almereyda (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A Different Practice by Fredrik Nyberg, translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida (Ugly Duckling)

EyeSeas by Raymond Queneau, translated from the French by Daniela Hurezanu and Stephen Kessler (Black Widow)

Peregrinary by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston (Zephyr)

Eternal Enemies by Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

"It is delightful when there has been a thin fall of snow."

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Having mentioned Sei Shonagon the other day, it seems right to draw on her to commemorate the passing last weekend of the snow that had been our companion here in Chicago for the past month. Amounting to nearly two feet by the time it began to give up the ghost, the snow showed a tenacity unmatched in my memory of sixteen Chicago winters, while the occasional addition of an inch or two of lake effect snow kept it looking lovely, effectively masking the depradations to which it was subject as punishment for having chosen to fall in this urban environment.

In her Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon mentions snow several times, but today I'll stick to my two favorites. First, this list, which I enjoy in part because of the material picture it gives of Sei Shonagon's surroundings:

Things That Fall from the Sky

Snow. Hail. I do not like sleet, but when it is mixed with pure white snow it is very pretty.

Snow looks wonderful when it has fallen on a roof of cypress bark.

When snow begins to melt a little, or when only a small amount has fallen, it enters into all the cracks between the bricks, so that the roof is black in some places, pure white in others--most attractive.

I like drizzle and hail when they come down on a shingle roof. I also like frost on a shingle roof or in a garden.

Then this, a simple description of the way snow throws objects seen against it into powerful relief:

One Day, When the Snow Lay Thick on the Ground

One day, when the snow lay thick on the ground and was still coming down heavily, I saw some gentlemen of the Fourth and Fifth Ranks who had a fresh complexion and a pleasant, youthful look. Their beautifully coloured Court robes, which they wore over their night-watch costumes, were tucked up at the bottom and showed the marks of their leather belts. Their dark purple trousers stood out beautifully against the white snow. I could also see their under-jackets, some of scarlet, others dyed a beautiful rose-yellow. The men had opened their umbrellas, but since it was very windy the snow came at them from the side and they bent forward slightly as they walked. The sparkling white snow covered them all the way to the tips of their lacqurered leather shoes or short clogs--a magnificent sight.

Unlike winter itself, assuming it someday deigns to depart, the snow will be missed.

"So--when was it--I, drawn like blown cloud, couldn't stop dreaming of roaming . . . "

{Photo by rocketlass.}

The boy lost some of his shyness after that and began to point out landmarks on the road, a mountain where goblins lived, a shrine whose water healed the deepest wounds, a roadside spring that had never dried up in a thousand years.

That's from Brilliance of the Moon (2004), the third volume of Lian Hearn's Tales of the Otori, a fantasy series set in a magical version of feudal Japan, which rocketlass has been re-reading in anticipation of our upcoming holiday in Japan. While I don't expect we're likely to come across such marvels, I would certainly rather encounter them than some of the ghosts and demons with which I've become familiar through the work of Lian Hearn's namesake, Lafcadio Hearn. Like the flesh-eating jinkininki:

He saw that Shape lift the corpse, as with hands, and devour it, more quickly than a cat devours a rat,--beginning at the head and eating everything: the hair and bones and even the shroud. And the monstrous Thing, having thus consumed the body, turned to the offerings, and ate them also. Then it went away, as mysteriously as it had come.

Or the dread Mujina, whose regular appearances blighted the nights of a certain neighborhood in Tokyo:

Before the era of street-lamps and jinrikishas, this neighborhood was very lonesome after dark; and belated pedestrians would go miles out of their way rather than mount the Kii-no-kuni-zaka, alone, after sunset.

Hearn's account of that ghost is one of my very favorite scary stories, brief and effective. I won't tell you more for fear of ruining the surprise; the brave among you can find the whole story here, while the rest can simply read what they will into my fervent hope that rocketlass and I don't accidentally find ourselves alone on a dark stretch of the Akasaka road . . .

I expect, however, that the closest we'll come to wild spirits will be the snow monkeys we plan to visit in Jigokudani. So now to pack, in anticipation of which Bashō offers a reminder:

Thin shoulders feeling pack's drag. Body enough, but burdened with a set of kamiko (extra protection at night), yukata, raincoat, ink-stick, brushes, as well as unaviodable hanamuke, etc. somehow hard to let go of, part of the trouble in traveling inevitably.

The edition of Bashō's Back Roads to Far Towns from which I've taken that passage glosses kamiko as "strong paper clothing," yukata as "light summer clothing," and hanamuke as "farewell gifts." Note that Bashō didn't even touch on my biggest problem as a traveler: packing too many books.

On that front I am attempting to be more reasonable than usual, and having taken some good advice, I think I've settled on my library. Marie Mutsuki Mockett was kind enough to confirm me in my intention to bring The Tale of Genji; though I've read nearly 200 pages of it over the years, that still leaves more than enough to see me through. To accompany Genji, I've taken the advice of Maud Newton and have packed some Tanizaki (Seven Japanese Tales and Some Prefer Nettles), while Sam "Golden Rule" Jones led me to an unorthodox selection: Haruki Murakami's Underground, which he says is great for reading in Japan because of its portraits of ordinary Tokyo residents.

Now if someone can recommend a Japanese mystery novel, I think I'll be all set, ready to test my ability to apologize, in halting Japanese, for my halting Japanese--which would not, I am certain, find a place on any of Sei Shōnagon's lists of pleasing things.

That bloke Shakespeare

After I quoted a bit of P. G. Wodehouse deploying Shakespeare for comic effect in Thursday's post, I couldn't bear not to share this exchange from another of his Mulliner stories, "The Reverent Wooing of Archibald":

"All right," [Archibald] said, "I'll try to remember. Tell me about her. I mean, has she any fathers or mothers or any rot of that description?"

"Only an aunt. She lives with her in Park Street. She's potty."

Archibald stared, stung to the quick.

"Potty? That divine . . . I mean that rather attractive-looking girl?"

"Not Aurelia. The aunt. She thinks Bacon wrote Shakespeare."

"Thinks who wrote what?" asked Archibald, puzzled, for the names were strange to him.

"You must have heard of Shakespeare. He's well known. Fellow who used to write plays. Only Aurelia's aunt says he didn't. She maintains that a bloke called Bacon wrote them for him."

"Dashed decent of him," said Archibald, approvingly. "Of course, he may have owed Shakespeare money."

"There's that, of course."

There's a lesson for comic writers there that's old, but worth restating: the more ridiculous your premise, the more contained and straightforward your language should be. "For the names were strange to him"--can comic genius get more sublimely simple?

Where everybody knows your [drink's] name, or, "We do not often get Americans in the bar-parlour of the Angler's Rest."

Most of the time when people write about P. G. Wodehouse, they focus on either his stories about Bertie Wooster and his omnicompetent gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves, or his tales of the inhabitants of Blandings Castle. That's not inappropriate: after all, Jeeves and Bertie are the creations that have guaranteed Wodehouse's immortality, while the Blandings Castle stories constitute a rich, interconnected skein that features some of his most inspired plotting.

Lately, however, I've been greatly enjoying a less-celebrated bywater of Wodehouse's work: the stories told by Mr. Mulliner at his club, the Angler's Rest. Comprising collections of stories--Meet Mr Mulliner (1927), Mr Mulliner Speaking (1929), and Mulliner Nights (1933)--plus a handful of additional stories scattered across other volumes, they all feature a protagonist from Mr. Mulliner's seemingly endless stock of young relatives. As the Wikipedia entry for Mr. Mulliner explains, they

are mainly about love lost and found; about fortunes made and failed; and about opportunities sought and missed.

In other words, they are typical Wodehouse stories.

What sets them apart is primarily the simple but effective frame in which they are set: Mr. Mulliner is at the Angler's Rest, where his fellow patrons--identified solely, and ingeniously, by their libation of choice--are chewing over some topic of love, adventure, or contemporary life. After listening for a bit, he takes up the topic on offer and, Ancient-Marinering any opposition, relates an apposite story, rich with Wodehousian complications and comedy. Mulliner's stories are the draw, but the process of getting there is half the fun. Take this late evening scene, which opens "The Reverent Wooing of Archibald":

The conversation in the bar-parlour of the Angler's Rest, which always tends to get deepish towards closing-time, had turned to the subject of the Modern Girl; and a Gin-and-Ginger-Ale sitting in the corner by the window remarked that it was strange how types die out.

"I can remember the days," said the Gin-and-Ginger-Ale, "when every other girl you met stood about six feet two in her dancing-shoes, and had as many curves as a Scenic Railway. Now they are all five foot nothing and you can't see them sideways. Why is this?"

The Draught Stout shook his head.

"Nobody can say. It's the same with dogs. One moment the world is full of pugs as far as the eye can reach; the next, not a pug in sight, only Pekes and Alsations. Odd!"

Or this, from "Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court," which opens with "the poet who was spending the summer at the Angler's Rest" going green at the sight of some dead rabbits in the hands of a hunter:

Mr Mulliner regarded him sympathetically over his hot Scotch and lemon.

"You appear upset," he said.

"A little," admitted the poet. "A momentary malaise. It may be a purely personal prejudice, but I confess to preferring rabbits with rather more of their contents inside them."

"Many sensitive souls in your line of business hold similar views," Mr Mulliner assured him. "My niece Charlotte did."

"It is my temperament," said the poet. "I dislike all dead things--particularly when, as in the case of the above rabbits, they have so obviously, so--shall I say?--blatantly mad the Great Change."

Or, what may be my favorite Angler's Rest discussion, this one that opens "Came the Dawn":

The man in the corner took a sip of stout-and-mild, and proceeded to point the moral of the story which he told us.

"Yes, gentlemen," he said, "Shakespeare was right. There a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will."

We nodded. He had been speaking of favourite dog of his which, entered recently by some error in a local cat show, had taken first price in the class for short-haired tortoiseshells; and we all thought the quotation well-chosen and apposite.

Even given Wodehouse's deliberate absurdity, there's something about the slow-moving, gently tipsy conversation of the Angler's Rest that speaks to what we go to bars for: to remove ourselves briefly from the world of our everyday cares into an agreeable other place, where you never know who might pop in with an amusing story in which everything works out okay in the end. Which, come to think of it, is the reason we visit Wodehouse's world, too.

Joseph Conrad and Lew Archer

Last weekend, as I was reading Joseph Conrad's spooky, gripping short novel The Shadow-Line (1917), I found my thoughts unexpectedly drifting to Ross Macdonald. I've praised Macdonald recently, impressed anew by his talent after reading three of his Lew Archer novels in the space of a week, and while I'll admit that it's at least a tiny bit of a stretch, I do find similarities between the two writers. Conrad's protagonists tend to be isolated men who are racked--or even undone--by questions of honor, which is often all they have to cling to in a society that fails to understand its necessity, let alone its value. Their isolation can be geographical, but these are men who would discover--or generate--that isolation even in a crowd: finding their fellow men wanting, they would choose, rather than judging them, to look for signs of that same failing in themselves, and to use any hint of it as an unholy combination of hair shirt and armor. They are loners by trade, hopeful fatalists by nature, and they prefer a noble failure to a tarnished success.

All of that could describe Lew Archer, too--that is, if you could find a way to make room for his sense of external duty, his deep-rooted belief that someone must be the champion of the afflicted, and that a flawed champion who is honest is at least marginally better than none at all. But last weekend I realized, in reading a blog post from trusted reader Jon Faith, that Archer's qualities are cumulative, not necessarily apparent on first acquaintance. The first Archer novel I read, several years ago, didn't impress me all that much. I enjoyed it--a well-told crime story is always a pleasure--but I didn't understand why people praised Macdonald so highly. It was only when I read a second, and even a third, that I realized that somewhere along the line, without quite realizing it, I'd gotten to know Lew Archer.

Macdonald's technique is cumulative, even pointillist. Whereas someone like P. D. James will alternate chapters of plot with chapters focusing on the lives of her recurring characters, Macdonald is content to sneak in a sentence here and there in the midst of his narrative. We learn about Archer through quick asides, judgments of character, expressions of regret, moments of self-recrimination. These accumulate, novel by novel, so that by the time we've read half a dozen or so, we ache in advance every time Archer decides--ignoring the wisdom gained from his long experience--to trust. Yet we also understand why this romantic cynic insists on trusting, understand that for him the short-term cost of external betrayal is always less than the long-term cost he'd have to bear to avoid it entirely.

So if you read one Macdonald novel and aren't convinced, I'd urge you to consider trying at least one more. It's what Lew Archer would do, after all.

Wodehouse speaks

In the course of my day job, I've recently gotten to work on two new audio collections from the British Library, The Spoken Word: British Writers and The Spoken Word: American Writers. Culled from the archives of the BBC and the Library, the sets offer clips of authors being interviewed or reading from their works or occasional pieces, and for literature fans, they really are a treasure--for example, hearing Arthur Conan Doyle, in the only known recording of his voice, discussing his spiritualist beliefs is itself almost like a visitation.

Lest I begin to seem like a shill for my employer, I'll leave it at that for now--if you want more detail, you can check out this overview from the Guardian. I'm really writing today as a P. G. Wodehouse devotee, for his interview, with which I started my Sunday morning in fine fashion, is my favorite thus far. Simply hearing his voice is a pleasure: it is mild and refined, though without that Edwardian preciousness that is inescapable in the accents of, say, E. M. Forster and Somerset Maugham; the interviewer, the BBC's longtime American correspondent Alistair Cooke, described it at the time in an article for the Guardian as "secure and genial," "tuned entirely in C major." Throughout the interview, Wodehouse's tone carries exactly the hint of amusement that a fan would expect, as if, even as he answers questions, some other part of his mind is perpetually working on a joke--and enjoying doing so.

The interview, conducted in August of 1963 when Wodehouse lived on Long Island, is for the most part easy and conversational, though there's one very brief moment that anyone familiar with Wodehouse's history can't help but hear as awkward: when Cooke asks whether Wodehouse misses living in England. The question was bound to be sensitive, for at that point--and for the rest of his life--Wodehouse viewed himself as an exile from England, persona non grata because of the comic broadcasts he made from a German prison camp during World War II.

Though time has to some extent softened the initially (and understandably) harsh judgement of the broadcasts, with Robert McCrum arguing fairly convincingly in his recent Wodehouse biography that the transgression was the result of Wodehouse's utter, child-like naivete rather than any desire to curry favor with his captors, at the time they were still a definite sore spot for many English, and a source of confusion, frustration, and shame for Wodehouse himself.

After a pause, Wodehouse responds politely, though with an unquestionably hesitancy and even a bit of fumbling for words:

Well, not really, I, I, you see I never ha-have lived in England very much, I was in France . . . for so many years, and then I was over here.

To Cooke's credit, his response to Wodehouse's answer suggests that the question was likely unplanned and unthinking: seeming to realize the touchiness of the subject, he pauses, then moves on to more benign topics.

As for those benign topics, the interview is chock-full of them, from questions of translation to uses of slang to the re-emergence of butlers. A wonderful (or perhaps terrifying image) is conjured up when Cooke asks whether Bertie Wooster was modeled on anyone specific and Wodehouse replies:

I wouldn't say any definite individual, but that type was very prevalent in the days when I was in and about London, ah, 1911, 12 and 13.

Good god, a whole society of Bertie Woosters--and only one inimitable Jeeves!

A question about whether the communist countries of Europe buy the books in translation leads to an amusing exchange:

COOKE: Do the communist countries buy them?

WODEHOUSE: Ah, they've started again now; I was banned in Hungary. Do you remember a few years ago now, a great number of English authors were banned in Hungary? I was one of them. I suppose they thought my stuff was too little about the proletariat and too much about the earls and dukes and so on.

COOKE: But couldn't the, uh, couldn't, for instance, a communist country pretend to, uh, the readers, that this was an accurate depiction or a devastating picture of the decadence of the upper classes?

WODEHOUSE: [Talking over end of question, chuckling] Yes, I suppose they could. Yes.

My favorite bit of the interview, however, has to do with the frozen-in-amber quality of the blithe, early Edwardian world that Wodehouse created and peopled so brilliantly:

COOKE: Are you ever inclined to make a big jump into completely contemporary material?

WODEHOUSE: Well I'm not sure that I can manage it. This one's coming out next year, there's nothing to date it at all, it could all have happened yesterday.

COOKE: But, I mean, you're not moved by things like astronauts or urban renewal?

WODEHOUSE: [Laughing] Oh, no. No. No, I feel much happier with the sort of atmosphere I'm accustomed to.

Astronauts in Wodehouse! Actually, I could almost imagine an astronaut penetrating the hallowed precincts of Blandings Castle . . . but of course, he wouldn't be an astronaut at all, but rather a nephew or a suitor who, through some utterly absurd but flawlessly logical turn of events, found himself wearing a space suit as a disguise. Perhaps he'd even get some astronaut ice cream in his fake moustache.

And now the rest of my Sunday beckons. Who better to spend it with than Jeeves?

BOOKLE’ARNED. adj. [from book and learned.] Versed in books, or literature: a term implying some slight contempt.

{Photos by rocketlass.}

In a review of two new biographies of Samuel Johnson (including Peter Martin's, about which I've written a bit before) in this week's New York Times Book Review, Leah Price succinctly notes one of the reasons that Johnson these days is more heard of than read:

We tend to go to past authors looking for kinds of writing that remain familiar today: single-authored, volume-length, recognizably literary works, especially novels.

Aside from Rasselas, which can be tough sledding for someone not already attuned to Johnson's thought and times, Johnson wrote no novels, nor did he write anything of convenient book length, the sort of work that one can chuck in one's bag and read on the subway for a week, from start to finish. Rather, as Price explains,

His best work was topical, collaborative, and either journalistic (especially the twice-weekly essay-periodicals like The Rambler, which he turned out as regularly as any blogger) or editorial (whether in the form of compilations, abridgments, translations or even a library catalog).

That said, the obstacles to reading Johnson today really aren't that great, once one realizes that he is best encountered in his essays: Oxford World's Classics publishes a bulky and satisfying volume, The Major Works, that provides a more than satisfactory introduction to Johnson, offering the best of his essays for the Rambler and Idler, a selection of his poetry, a few of his Lives of the Poets, and a generous selection of his incidental prose. It's a volume to leave on the nightstand or keep perpetually in one's shoulder bag, to be read a few pages at a time over the course of years.

That method doesn't really work, however, for Johnson's most astonishing achievement, his Dictionary. It's hard to find in unabridged form and unbearably awkward if so found--and even then, its form doesn't lend itself to the sort of constant, slow perusal appropriate to his other works. After all, dictionaries aren't exactly books for reading; even the best of them tend to pall once one's read a few pages straight through. Despite the Dictionary's many fascinating idiosyncracies, it's hard to imagine anyone without a professional interest in Johnson actually reading the whole volume cover to cover.



Fortunately, Yale University's Beinecke Library (the same people who bring you the wonderful Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities blog) has come to the rescue: to celebrate Johnson's tercentenary, the Beinecke has started a blog on which they will post a new word from the first edition of the Dictionary every day. We're less than a month into the year--they've just crossed into "C"--and the project has already offered numerous delightful definitions.

Probably my favorite thus far is By-Coffeehouse--

BY-COFFEEHOUSE. n.s. A coffeehouse in an obscure place.
I afterwards entered a by-coffeehouse, that stood at the upper
end of a narrow lane, where I met with a nonjuror.
Addison. Spectator, No 403.

--which makes me want to adopt the term By-Bar, for a second-floor or alley bar; your help in the word's promulgation will be appreciated.

I'm also very partial to Browbeat, which Johnson defines thus:

To BRO’WBEAT. v.a. [from brow and beat.] To depress with
severe brows, and stern or lofty looks.
It is not for a magistrate to frown upon, and browbeat those
who are hearty and exact in their ministry; and, with a grave,
insignificant nod, to call a resolved zeal, want of prudence.
South.
What man will voluntarily expose himself to the imperious
browbeatings and scorns of great men? L’Estrange.
Count Tariff endeavoured to browbeat the plaintiff, while he
was speaking; but though he was not so imprudent as the
count, he was every whit as sturdy. Addison.
I will not be browbeaten by the supercilious looks of my ad-
versaries, who now stand cheek by jowl by your worship.
Arbuthnot and Pope’s Mart. Scriblerus.

Today, Merriam-Webster's defines browbeat a bit more metaporically--

To intimidate or disconcert by a stern manner or arrogant speech : bully

--which definition it does seem that the good Doctor, who was not known for the subtlety or tolerance of his disputation, might have grudgingly appreciated.

There's so much more worth perusing, from defunct words that could bear resurrection--such as "breakpromise"--to words whose definitions run off the rails, as in the case of "bezoar.". Put this one in your RSS reader, folks--you won't regret it.

{The Beinecke will also be mounting an exhibition this summer on the writing of Boswell's Life of Johnson, which means I really need to find a way to make it to New Haven the next time I'm in New York.}

"Great poets / foretell their own deaths in a single line"; I, instead, use up several on trifles

{Photos by rocketlass.}

The morning's snow is but a memory, the clouds that brought it now on their way to New York, leaving us with a cold sliver of moon . . . and what's that it illuminates? Oh, no--it's that lazy columnist's friend and succor . . . the Notes Column! Like a Rod Blagojevich press conference, this post is unlikely to offer any coherent theme or defense of its existence, but it might quote some poetry!

It's been months since I've resorted to one of these; how about this time rather than a numbered list, I tart the blog up as if it were a gossip column?

ITEM! I ventured to Chicago's Harold Washington Library on Monday to pick up some supplementary volumes for a review that is due now. {Note the italics. They're to remind me of what I ought to be doing right now rather than assembling this list. They're not, you'll note, working.}

I easily found the books I was after, but when I laid them on the circulation desk I hit a snag: according to the librarian, one of the volumes I had handed him, The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun (1988), didn't exist. Or at least it didn't exist in their system; despite what the computer asserted, the physical book did to all eyes appear to be right there in hand.

I'm familiar with the frustration of looking on a library shelf for a missing book that the system assures you is there, but this was my first experience with its opposite. Could this be some tendril of the Invisible Library infecting an actual library?

Oh, and I owed an $.80 fine. Ed, do we levy fines at the Invisible Library?

ITEM! Speaking of looking for books on shelves: anyone who has ever worked in a bookshop has experienced the dreadful moment when, as you search the shelves in vain for a book requested by a customer, you realize that the customer looming at your elbow is the author of the book in question, attempting in a decreasingly subtle way to determine whether his fears of irrelevance and disregard are quite justified. It is a singularly awkward situation, for which the only remedy is the white lie, a suddenly recovered memory of the satisfied customer who left the store mere moments ago, beaming with joy, day made because you'd sold her that very book. You're sure you'll have another copy in any day now, in anticipation of another such customer.

Well, reading Fanny Burney's journals has confirmed my suspicion that authors were always so--as, fortunately, were quick-witted booksellers:

We amused ourselves, while we waited there, at a Bookseller's shop, where Mrs Thrale enquired if they had got the Book she had recommended to them. "Yes, Ma'am," was the answer; "and it's always out--the Ladies like it vastly."

ITEM! Speaking of the Invisible Library: this blog has been remarkably free lately of writing about that master of invisible book creation, Roberto Bolaño. My mind, on the other hand, has not: nearly five months after I read it, 2666 still staggers around in my thoughts. If you're having the same problem, you might as well go read what I think might be the best review of the novel yet, Sam Sacks's at Open Letters Monthly. More than anyone else I've read, Stark assembles a coherent argument about the book's aims, starting with this proposition:

But it must be reemphasized that, with one significant exception that I’ll look into later, every character, every occurrence, and every development of this book is brought into existence for the purpose of being negated. Nothingness is the single connecting motif of the five disparate sections, and it doesn’t bind them so much as drape across them like a shroud.

His overall assessment is a more harsh than mine, but it is forceful and convincing, one of the few writings on 2666 that I'm confident will stay with me and inform my eventual rereading of the novel.

Bolaño fans should also check out the appreciative review of his collection of poetry, The Romantic Dogs, that Ed Pavlic (author of the exceptionally good prose poem collection Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway) wrote for Verse. Pavlic opens with a quotation from the fragments of Empedocles that reads like an uncanny anticipation of Bolaño's fictions:

I shall tell thee a twofold tale. At one time it grew to be one only out of many; at another, it divided up to be many instead of one. There is a double becoming of perishable things and a double passing away. The coming together of all things brings one generation into being and destroys it; the other grows up and is scattered as things become divided. And these things never cease continually changing places, at one time all uniting in one through Love, at another each borne in different directions by the repulsion of Strife.

The Romantic Dogs has mostly been drowned out by the hubbub surrounding 2666, but Pavlic makes a good case for why it's worth taking a look at.

ITEM! Way back in June when I read The Savage Detectives, I unexpectedly found myself comparing the young, horny, violent infrerealists of Bolaño's Mexico City to Giacomo Casanova. Casanova's wonderfully amoral twelve-volume History of My Life frequently finds him reciting poetry, but always in an instrumental fashion: poetry is a marker of his refinement and sensibility, one of many tools that he uses in his neverending quest to get into women's pants. There is never a sense, as Casanova is recounting his recitation of a poem, of a poem truly affecting him; the reader--or at least the contemporary reader--gets the sense that he would have used whatever was to hand, that if knowing obscure facts about CC Sabathia or Dungeons and Dragons would have pitter-patted the hearts of the ladies, he would have been just as happy to deploy those.

The infrarealists, on the other hand, while they certainly do use poetry as an aphrodisiac (part of the overly masculine atmosphere of the early part of the novel that would have turned me off were Bolaño's prose not so captivating). At the same time, however, Bolaño makes us believe that poetry also is a crucial part of their self-definition, and even their way of understanding the world. Of all the poses to adopt, they've chosen a relatively marginalized one, and the enthusiasm and vigor with which they enact it--especially late in the novel when the youngest of them, Garcia Madero, reveals an encylopedic knowledge of poetic form--is bracing. Poetry is an instrument for these young men, but it's not solely or merely an instrument; its roots and its effects run far deeper.

ITEM! Which reminds me: I promised you some poetry, didn't I? How about this, which Melville includes in the "Extracts" assembled by a "poor," "hopeless, sallow" sub-sub-librarian with which he opens Moby-Dick--and which thus, almost Ouroborically, brings us back to where we started, with libraries:

Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him;
One would think the deep to be hoary.

It's from Job, which I believe Blagojevich has yet to quote--but fear not, Rod! There's still time to work it in!

Gimme gimme gimme shock treatment!

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Over the weekend I read Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air (2008), a brief biography of eighteenth-century English scientist and thinker Joseph Priestley. While neither as compelling nor as surprising in its association of unexpected ideas as Johnson's excellent The Ghost Map, The Invention of Air is lively and fun nonetheless, offering a cast full of the sort of endlessly interesting polymaths in which the late eighteenth century abounds, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, the Lunar Men, and even, briefly, Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke.

The scene that stuck in my mind, however, was an account early of a demonstration by an "electrician," as both scientists and performers working with electricity were then known. Priestley was an early devotee of the study of electricity, and Johnson describes an electrical performance to give a sense of the sensationalized public face of the science at that time:

In this case, a young boy suspended in the air with silk ropes is positively charged by a machine that generates static electricity. First the boy's hair spikes up. Then, as the onlookers gasp in amazement, he reaches to touch a small girl, and sparks shoot between their fingertips. Willing volunteers were regularly pulled out of the audience to experience the voltage firsthand.

That scene reminded me of one from my own childhood. Once or twice each year one of my middle school science teachers, Mr. Elliott, would climb up into the junk-laden attic space above his classroom and emerge with an old hand-cranked electrical generator that he'd built around the time Ben Franklin was tying the key to the tail of his kite. Ordering the students to join hands in a circle around his desk, he would hand one alligator clip to the student on his left and one to the student on his right, then demonstrate the workings of electricity by cranking the generator with all the mania of a character out of Melville. The shock would start slowly--a tiny, even ticklish twinge--then build and build alongside the whining of the machine until it became distinctly uncomfortable and, despite our brave fronts, we began casting our eyes around the circle, wondering who would have the guts to save us by dropping their hands.

Eventually someone would do just that, to a gasp of inarticulate appreciation from the class. Then Mr. Elliott--old, leathery, smelling of tobacco and either whiskey or aftershave--would laugh. His was not, as I remember it now, a malicious laugh, but almost a companionable one, suggesting something along the lines of "We're all in this together"--though of course as Mr. Elliott had one hand busily cranking the generator and the other pressed to its wooden base, both well out of the human circuit he'd created, that was far from the case.

Being middle school students, we didn't complain; this was just one more semi-inscrutable behavior on the part of the generally inscrutable adults in our lives, little different in kind from the various punishments that awaited us every day in gym. In fact, on a couple of different occasions when the generator was on display and Mr. Elliott made the mistake of leaving the room, some of the more adventurous students took turns seeing how much current they could stand all by themselves. Few clandestine classroom activities were ever more gripping.

Relative costs

{Photo of the Jerusalem Tavern by rocketlass.}

As I was reading Ross Macdonald's The Moving Target on the train today, a scene in a bar reminded me of a line from the Paris Review interview with James M. Cain that I drew from on Wednesday. Cain talks about visiting a brothel in 1910, when he was eighteen and too nervous (or fearful of disease) to do much more than dance with the women and drink the expensive beers at the bar:

At one of these places you could buy a bottle of beer for fifty cents. "Small as a whorehouse beer" was an expression then. They'd serve them up in glasses so small that thimbles were twice as big.

What brought Cain's whorehouse beer back to mind today was a scene where Macdonald's bruised paladin Lew Archer finds himself in a swank Hollywood bar:

The back room of Swift's was paneled in black oak that glowed dimply under the polished brass chandeliers. It was lined on two sides with leather-cushioned booths. The rest of the floor space was covered with tables. All of the booths and most of the tables were crowded with highly dressed people eating or waiting to be fed. Most of the women were tight-skinned, starved too thin for their bones. Most of the men had the masculine Hollywood look, which was harder to describe. An insistent self-consciousnesss in their loud words and wide gestures, as if God had a million-dollar contract to keep an eye on them.

Hoping to make contact with a lead on a case, Archer has no choice but to belly up to the bar:

I went to the bar against the third wall and ordered a beer.

"Bass ale, Black Horse, Carta Blanca, or Guinness stout? We don't serve domestic beer after six o'clock."

I ordered Bass, gave the bartender a dollar and told him to keep the change. There wasn't any change. He walked away.

If that's an expensive beer in 1949, it makes that fifty-cent whorehouse beer from 1910 seem pricey, no?

Of course, with Archer, true costs are never measured in dollars, and this scene is no exception. Over the course of several hours and several bars, Archer purposefully pushes a washed-up, aging actress deep into an unpleasant drunkenness and holds her head under the alcoholic waves, hoping she'll slip up and tell him what he needs to know about her role in his case. The further she sinks into drunknenness, the further Archer sinks into self-loathing:

I tried smiling to encourage myself. I was a good Joe after all. Consorter with roughnecks, tarts, hard cases and easy marks; private eye at the keyhole of illicit bedrooms; informer to jealousy, at behind the walls, hired gun to anybody with fifty dollars a day; but a good Joe after all. The wrinkles formed at the corner of my eyes, the wings of my nose; the lips drew back from the teeth, but there was no smile. All I got was a lean famished look like a coyote's sneer. The face had seen too many bars, too many rundown hotels and crummy love nests, too many courtrooms and prisons, post-mortems and police lineups, too many nerve ends showing like tortured worms. If I found the face on a stranger, I wouldn't trust it.

Yet he keeps the woman's glass full, for he's pledged himself to find a missing man, and her dipsomania is the only tool to hand. If the cost of using that tool is a bitter self-knowledge that most of us would prefer to lie ourselves away from, he's willing to bear it. It's an excruciating scene.

"My father was all hell for people talking as they should talk."

{Photo by Flickr user Marxchivist. Used under a Creative Commons license.}

I slip into the vulgate every once in a while--an affectation I only half-understand. There I am speaking impeccable English and suddenly I lingo it up.

That's James M. Cain, interviewed by David L. Zinsser for the Paris Review in January of 1977, nine months before his death at age eighty-five. The interview is full of interesting nuggets about his background and vocation, with side notes along the way about style and other writers.

The son of a college president and professor of English, Cain came to novel-writing late, after several years of working in newspapers and magazines. He started out working at the American Mercury for H. L. Mencken (who, we learn, never read Alice in Wonderland, which Cain, apparently serious, calls "the greatest novel in the English language"). A few years later, after a spell in the "lung house" to recover from tuberculosis, Cain moved to New York and started working for the World. His account of how he landed that job--on the wings of a glowing recommendation from Mencken--is amusing:

I suggested a job where I would just sit around and think up articles, ideas. I said I knew articles didn't grow on trees. . . . I went on like this, with [Walter] Lippmann staring at me while I tried ot talk myself into a job. I knew I was getting somewhere in a direction altogether different, that he was listening to what I had to say, and though disregarding it, he was meditating. I thought, What the hell is with this guy? He interrupted to ask if I had any specimens of my writing. Writing, I thought, what has writing got to do with it? I was still talking about thinking up articles. Later, when we got to be easy friends, I asked him about this first interview and he said, I began to realize as I listened to you talk, that none of your infinitives were split, all of your pronouns were correct, and that none of your pariciples dangled. That was true. I talked the way my father had beat into me; he was a shot for style, and that's what got me the job.

Yet by listening to the way people actually talked, Cain the novelist became an expert chronicler of the American vernacular.

Perhaps the most interesting moment in the interview, however, comes when Zinsser asks Cain about Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the two writers with whom he is most often grouped. Cain replies,

I read a few pages of Dashiell Hammett, that's all. And Chandler. Well, I tried. That book about a bald, old man with two nympho daughters. That's all right. I kept reading. Then it turned out the old man raises orchids. That's too good. When it's too good, you do it over again. Too good is too easy. If it's too easy you have to worry. If you're not lying awake at night worrying about it, the reader isn't going to, either.

I'll admit to being surprised that Cain wasn't a fan of Hammett; I would have expected the brutal executioner's justice of Red Harvest at least to have appealed to him. His response to Chandler, on the other hand, makes sense: in the Cain novels I've read, darkness emerges from resolutely ordinary circumstances and characters, to which the almost gothic trappings of some of Chandler's best work would be entirely foreign. The producer of the film of The Postman Always Rings Twice had it right when he told Cain,

What I like about your books--they're about dumb people that I know and that I bump into in the parking lot. I can believe them and you put them into interesting situations.

Like almost everything else in the Paris Review Interviews, Volume One, in which it's collected, the whole interview is worth reading--I haven't even gotten to Cain's explanation of how the idea for Double Indemnity originated in a lingerie ad that carried a key typo in the slogan, "If These Sizes Are Too big, Take a Tuck in Them." If you're looking for a way to help out our new president in his efforts to drag our ailing economy out of the lung house, you could do worse than wandering to your local bookstore at lunch and picking up a copy.