When I lived in London, that town of sleepwalkers alighting from the Tube and ascending long escalators without looking up from their classic novels, I had a friend who loved Willa Cather, the American author of stories of railroads and desert mesas.
He was so entranced by Cather’s 1927 novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and its setting of the clifftop villages and blue air of New Mexico Continue reading
Jane Sullivan in The Age reports today on the organisation called VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and “The Count” they’ve published for 2010.
The count concerns various “influential British and American literary and cultural journals” and two ungolden ratios:
What took them so long I say? We looked at the same question on this blog back in 2009.
Here is what we found (click on the titles):
Women in Australia: paid 83% of what men are paid, heard 27% of the time
The US: Land of the 27% woman too
And here are some of the stats VIDA found, in this case, for The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books.
If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendour of the Mighty One …
I am become Death,
The shatterer of worlds.
~ lines from the Bhagavad Gita quoted by Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945.
*****
Also in March I had a conversation I’ve wanted to have for years: to speak about the philosophical roots of The Landmark Forum, roots which go back to 500BC, to the time of a Greek philosopher named Parmenides.
There cannot be many people walking into The Landmark Forum as uniquely fitted as I was that day in September 2008 to hear those roots speaking. Just a few years before, to my alarm and continual bafflement, I’d found myself writing a thesis on Martin Heidegger, the 20th century German philosopher of what it means to be, the branch of philosophy known as ontology (from the ancient Greek te on, meaning “to be”).
It was Heidegger’s great mission to overturn the last 2000+ years of philosophy in which what it means to be has been understood in two very limited ways: as “existentia” (the fact that something exists) or “essentia” (the form something takes). Instead, Heidegger looked back to the world of the pre-Socratic Greeks like Parmenides and attempted to show how this world had had a very different understanding of Being. In this world, Heidegger said, what it meant to be was something like an arising or an abiding or a coming forth into presence. This meaning of Being, according to Heidegger, has been totally covered up and lost in the age we’ve lived in since around the time of Plato: the technological age.
Except, that is, until one arrives in The Landmark Forum.
When I walked in that day I’d been expecting something psychological. I was completely astounded a couple of hours later when the Forum leader began quoting Heidegger, and I realised we were talking about Being, the big daddy of all philosophy. Not only that, but we were talking about it as something that was of concern to every one of us in our everyday lives. At that moment I realised I had not understood one word of what I’d read or written in the three years it took to write the thesis.
It was also the moment I fell in love. I was at the very place I was meant to be at last. This was for me, and I was for it.
In one of my favourite novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (again with the B word!), Milan Kundera is funny and masterful about the role of such chance and destining in love. Tereza falls in love with Tomas at the moment her beloved Beethoven comes on the radio as she pours him a drink at the bar.
Rounding the counter with Tomas’s cognac, she tried to read chance’s message: how was it possible that at the very moment she was taking an order to a stranger she found attractive, at that very moment she heard Beethoven?
The narrator concludes,
Necessity knows no magic formulae — they are all left to chance. If love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.
*****
Matthew Parris is a writer for The Times in the UK, and a former Tory politician. I think he used to be known as the “parliamentary sketch-writer” for The Times, but perhaps now, so well-regarded is he, that he gets to write whatever he wants.
One of the things he has written is a little book called Scorn: With Added Vitriol. It’s an indispensable compendium of “putdowns and insults” made by the famous and infamous over the centuries. It’s guaranteed to give you hours of innocent pleasure.
May you be cursed with chronic anxiety about the weather.
~ John Burroughs
I fart in your general direction.
~ Monty Python and the Holy Grail
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
~ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Beneath this stone, a lump of clay
Lies Arabella Young
Who on the 21st of May
Began to hold her tongue.
~ Epitaph, Hatfield, Massachusetts
You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.
~ Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson
Mme de Genlis, in order to avoid the scandal of coquetry, always yielded easily.
~ Talleyrand
A woman’s place is in the wrong.
~ James Thurber
When his cock wouldn’t stand up he blew his head off. He sold himself a line of bullshit, and bought it.
~ Germaine Greer on Ernest Hemingway
All tragedies are finish’d by a death,
All comedies are ended by a marriage.
~ Lord Byron, Don Juan, III
It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.
~ P G Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters
*****
Images: Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being directed by Philip Kaufman (middle)
The great psychologists of love — Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenev — never went further than this. (1)
So says a reviewer about Beware of Pity, the novel by the Austrian writer, Stefan Zweig. In the 1920s and 30s, Zweig was the most widely-read author in Europe. Nowadays, apart from France where he is still read, he barely survives in memory, and a couple of publishing houses are making valiant attempts to remind the world of his contribution.
I’ve just finished reading one of the fruits of this attempt: the first English translation of the unfinished, unnamed novel found amongst his papers when he committed suicide with his wife in Brazil in 1942.
The novel goes by the name of The Post Office Girl in the English translation, and Intoxication of Metamorphosis in the earlier French and German translations (who says there’s no such thing as culture?).
It is the only other novel that Zweig wrote despite a prolific output of short stories, poems, plays and works on a huge range of European intellectual and creative giants such as Goethe, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud, Dante, Mahler, Dickens, James Joyce and many others.
Zweig was the original Renaissance man, and he paid the ultimate price when the world of high culture began to vanish.
***
A French teacher once mentioned Zweig to me. However, it was the title that prompted me to read Beware of Pity years later. It was a title that whispered “here you will find something never usually spoken of.”
I wasn’t alone.
Writing about Zweig in 2009, Julie Kavanagh cites various high profile fans of the book, a book that “turns every reader into a fanatic.” One of these is the actor, Colin Firth, who talks about
… the thrill of feeling you have this forgotten masterpiece in your hand that no one else has discovered. I was riveted by it – the way the strange pathology of the story takes the lid off what might just look like romantic love.
The Post Office Girl is every bit as stimulating as Beware of Pity.
***
When the story opens Christine Hoflehner is a clerk in a post office in an Austrian backwater called Klein-Reifling. It’s 1926 and Christine is 28 years old. She and her infirm mother survived the Great War but the cost has been great. They are poor and living in a shabby attic room which smells of “vinegar and damp … sickness and confinement to bed.”
Christine is bitter, though resigned, about the loss of her girlhood in the privations of war and its aftermath. For the war may have ended but poverty has not.
It only ducked beneath the barrage of ordinances, crawled foxily behind the paper ramparts of war loans and banknotes with their ink still wet. Now it’s creeping back out, hollow-eyed, broad-muzzled, hungry, and bold, and eating what’s left in the gutters of the war … Money dissolves while you’re sleeping, it flies away while you’re changing your shoes … Life becomes mathematics, addition, multiplication, a mad whirl of figures and numbers, a vortex that snatches the last of your possessions into its black insatiable vacuum …
One day, as Christine is dreaming among the stamps and official forms, a letter arrives from her aunt Claire who, before the war, had been paid to leave Europe for America following a messy affair. Claire and her wealthy husband are about to spend a holiday in an expensive hotel in Switzerland, and feeling guilty for the long silence and for escaping the war, she invites her niece to stay too.
Wary rather than joyful – she fears she has lost the ability to feel happiness — Christine is finally persuaded by her mother to take up the offer and she boards the train for the Engadine. After this nothing is ever the same again.
***
From her first sight of the Alps – “One push and the window bangs down, to bring this marvel closer, and fresh air – ice-cold, glass-sharp … streams through her lips, parted in astonishment, and into her lungs, the deepest, purest breath of her life” – Christine enters another world, a world of money and privilege she has never even guessed at.
Within a day, the young woman who arrives at the hotel cringing in shame in her hideous yellow coat and straw suitcase, is transformed with the help of her aunt’s tutelage and wardrobe into a beautiful young woman, desired by every man who sees her, powerful and assured beyond recognition.
She tests and inspects the image from all sides, caressing it with her eyes, smitten with herself, unable to have enough of this alluring new self that smiles as it approaches from the mirror, beautifully dressed, young, and remade. She feels like throwing her arms around this new person that is herself … She hurries down the hallway to her aunt’s room; the cool silky fluttering of the dress makes the quick movement a pleasure. She feels borne along, carried by the wind. She was a child the last time she flew like this. This is the beginning of the delirium of transformation.
Delirium indeed. The trademark propulsive force of Zweig’s writing, combined with the glamour and wealth of the setting, make this first half of the book, a re-working of the Cinderella story, utterly pleasurable to read.
The second half of the book portrays her return to her tiny, impoverished life in Austria after an awful humiliation at the hotel. She has been away only 10 days but it might as well have been 10 years, for her mother has died and the world of the poor village she was at least resigned to is no longer tolerable.
She has been ruined by her stay in Switzerland, and thereafter the book tracks her inevitable decline. She meets a man in Vienna, Ferdinand, who served with her brother-in-law in the war, a man as damaged by war as she has been by wealth, and together they plan various means of escape from their misery. At first, they think of a double suicide, and then when Ferdinand happens to visit her workplace and see the Post Office vault, they change tack and plan a robbery and exile instead.
The novel ends abruptly at this point with the couple’s plan in place but nothing yet started. It’s clear from a few circumstances that Zweig didn’t intend it to end here; for example, before his suicide he sent two manuscripts of other works to his publisher but left Christine’s story in his papers.
So the novel is unfinished. It’s also flawed. In spite of this, it’s a powerful, highly original book. It’s also a work of great imagination and compassion in recreating so successfully, so intimately, the social, economic and spiritual impoverishment of a nation ravaged by World War 1.
***
Zweig was a close friend of Freud and when Zweig left Austria in 1934 after the Nazis raided his home, he visited Freud every week in London. After a few years in London, Zweig and his second wife Lotte sailed for the US and then, finally, Brazil, which he’d discovered on a lecture tour.
On February 23, 1942 he and Lotte
took massive doses of veronal, and were found dead in bed, lying hand-in-hand. (2)
I wonder what his friend would have made of Zweig leaving an aborted story that portrayed a couple planning suicide, and then rejecting it for a plan to commit robbery instead. Was it that the change of plan didn’t ring true to him? Or was it that he couldn’t do in life what he could in art — find another possibility?
***
Notes
1. Joan Acocella, cited by Julie Kavanagh in “Stefan Zweig: The Secret Superstar”, Intelligent Life, Spring 2009
2. Kavanagh
Idea for blog post: A blogger respires in the dust of a week, trimming her offcuts and seeking a word. She is rescued by a gnome from Manhattan.
*****
Getting through the night is becoming harder and harder. Last evening, I had the uneasy feeling that some men were trying to break into my room to shampoo me. But why? I kept imagining I saw shadowy forms, and at 3am the underwear I had draped over a chair resembled the Kaiser on roller skates. When I finally did fall asleep, I had that same hideous nightmare in which a woodchuck is trying to claim my prize at a raffle. Despair.
*****
Idea for story: Some beavers take over Carnegie Hall and perform Wozzeck. (Strong theme. What will be the structure?)
*****
Once again I tried committing suicide — this time by wetting my nose and inserting it into the light socket. Unfortunately, there was a short in the wiring, and I merely caromed off the icebox. Still obsessed by thoughts of death, I brood constantly. I keep wondering if there is an afterlife, and if there is will they be able to break a twenty?
*****
Good Lord, why am I so guilty? Is it because I hated my father? Probably it was the veal-parmigian’ incident. Well, what was it doing in his wallet? If I had listened to him, I would be blocking hats for a living. I can hear him now: ‘To block hats — that is everything.’
*****
I ran into my brother today at a funeral. We had not seen one another for fifteen years, but as usual he produced a pig bladder from his pocket and began hitting me on the head with it. Time has helped me understand him better. I finally realised his remark that I am ‘some loathsome vermin fit only for extermination’ was said more out of compassion than anger. Let’s face it: he was always much brighter than me — wittier, more cultured, better educated. Why he is still working at McDonald’s is a mystery.
*****
Image: Berenice Abbott, New York at night (1932) (top)
… there lived a monk named Simeon. Wanting to escape the growing horde of pilgrims attracted by his fame as an ascetic, Simeon climbed on to a pillar in Syria in 423AD and “remained there till his death 37 years later.”
Simeon inspired many imitators including Saint Alypius, who after standing upright for 53 years …
found his feet no longer able to support him, but instead of descending from his pillar, lay down on his side and spent the remaining 14 years of his life in that position.
The Stylites (from the Greek stylos or pillar) are just some of the characters whose lives and bizarre feats the historian, William Dalrymple, discovers on his journey across the Levant following in the footsteps of a journey taken 1400 years earlier by a monk named John Moschos.
Dalrymple recorded his journey in the splendid book, From the Holy Mountain, and I’ve just had the pleasure of reading it.
*****
In my opinion, the meadows in Spring present a particularly delightful prospect. One part of this meadow blushes with roses; in other places lilies predominate; in another violets blaze out, resembling the Imperial purple. Think of this present work in the same way, Sophronius, my sacred and faithful child. For from among the holy men, monks and hermits of the Empire, I have plucked the finest flowers of the unmown meadow and worked them into a crown which I now offer to you, most faithful child; and through you to the world at large …
So begins The Spiritual Meadow written by John Moschos who set out in the year 578AD from a monastery near Bethlehem, with his companion, Sophronius the Sophist, to journey across the Eastern Byzantine world to the famous monasteries in the deserts of Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Their journey was taken in the dying days of the surprising and little-known interregnum of about 300 years, between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam, when the Middle East was
an entirely Christian world, and indeed the very centre of Christianity …
William Dalrymple begins his journey 1400 years later from Mt Athos in Greece where he cajoles the deeply reluctant monks of the monastery of Iviron, wary after the plunders of earlier British historians, to unlock their library to show him the earliest manuscript of The Spiritual Meadow.
In the next five months, he follows Moschos’s path through modern-day eastern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt, visiting amongst many others, the monastery of St Antony, the home of the monks of the famous “Sayings of the Desert Fathers”, and ending at the furthermost point of Moscos’s path at the desolate Coptic necropolis of Bagawat on the edge of Great Kharga Oasis in upper Egypt.
Along the way Dalrymple discovers many surprising things. He discovers that the world witnessed by Moschos was one of startling syncretism. In architecture, in worship, in everyday life, he finds pagan mixed with Christian mixed with Muslim. He discovers, for example, the Muslim style of prayer of kneeling and bowing was first used by the Christians, and that Christians and Muslims regarded themselves as kind of religious cousins.
What’s even more surprising is that in Syria he finds this syncretism continues still.
In the monastery of Seidnaya, he finds a churchful of “heavily bearded Muslim men,” their wives spending the night before the altar praying for a child.
Dalrymple whispers to one of the nuns,
And you have no objection to so many Muslims coming here and praying in your church?
We are all children of God,” said Sister Tecla. “The All Holy One brings us all together.”
But Seidnaya is the exception that proves the rule. Everywhere he goes outside Seidnaya, and to a lesser extent Syria as a whole, he finds cities and lands with a long provenance of vivacious multiculturalism – great ancient metropolises like Constantinople and Alexandria, pulsing for 2000 years with varied ethnicities and religions – transformed in the 20th century into a series of “mono-ethnic, mono-religious blocs.”
He finds Alexandria emptied of Greeks, an Israel for Jews only (he pulls no punches on the topic of Jewish settlements in the West Bank) and a Turkey emptied of all Christians, with one last Armenian woman living in a region of south-Eastern Turkey previously full of Armenians, old and frail and needing the protection of two male Kurdish neighbours simply to continue her existence.
In what was the birthplace of Christianity – Christianity being an Eastern religion, not a Western one, as Dalrymple reminds himself and the reader repeatedly, each time with a degree of shock – he finds Christianity almost totally obliterated, and the monasteries, once dotted in their thousands, barely surviving.
Writing in 1994, Dalrymple gives Christianity 10 years in some places, 15 in others.
Only in Egypt, with its significant minority of Christian Copts, can he imagine the persistence of Christianity.
*****
Contrary to his expectations, Dalrymple does not find Islamic fundamentalism to be generally responsible for the passing of Christianity in the Middle East. In the frightening region of Upper Egypt he visits there is severe persecution of the local Copts by Muslims, but, in general, the fall of Christianity has been a much more complex picture.
What he does find, rather, is evidence of the great tolerance of Christianity by Islam for century after century. Until the 20th century.
As he says,
How easy it is today to think of the West as the home of freedom of thought and liberty of worship, and to forget how, as recently as the seventeenth century, Hugenot exiles escaping religious persecution in Europe would write admiringly of the policy of religious tolerance practised across the Ottoman Empire. The same broad tolerance that had given homes to hundreds of thousands of penniless Jews, expelled by bigoted Catholic kings from Spain and Portugal … despite the Crusades and the continual hostility of the Christian West. Only in the twentieth century has that traditional tolerance been replaced by a new hardening in Islamic attitudes; only recently has the syncretism of … Seidnaya become a precious rarity.
Dalrymple’s book leaves the reader, and the writer, with one giant unanswered – unanswerable? – question. What was it about the 20th century that overturned 1400 years of great tolerance, even cross-fertilisation, between religions?
*****
When Simeon ascended his pillar it was about four metres high. However, his supporters kept replacing it with others, “the last in the series being apparently over 15 metres from the ground.”
Yet even on the highest of his columns, Simeon could not escape the world. As Wikipedia notes,
If anything, the new pillar drew even more people, not only the pilgrims who had come earlier but now sightseers as well.
At some point Simeon must have accepted his fate, and he began “making himself available” – in the delightful Wikipedia phrase – to visitors every afternoon.
By means of a ladder, visitors were able to ascend, and it is known that he wrote letters, the text of which survive to this day, that he instructed disciples, and that he … delivered addresses to those assembled beneath, preaching especially against profanity and usury. In contrast to the extreme austerity that he demanded of himself, his preaching conveyed temperance and compassion, and was marked with common sense and freedom from fanaticism.
According to Edward Gibbon, the author of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Simeon died in situ:
He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross, but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet … The progress of an ulcer in his thigh might shorten, but it could not disturb, this celestial life; and the patient Hermit expired, without descending from his column.
The remains of Simeon’s pillar can be seen today in the church in Syria that bears his name, and in the picture below.
*****
Notes
All references and quotations about Dalrymple’s journey from two sources:
1. William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain
2. The Religion Report, ABC radio, broadcast April 21, 1999
All references and quotations to Simeon from Wikipedia.
Images: Icon showing Simeon on the left with leg out, presumably ulcered, courtesy of Wikipedia (top); necropolis of Bagawat, the Great Kharga Oasis, Egypt, courtesy of gyst on Flickr (second from top); monastery of Mar Saba in the wilderness of Judaea (third from top); remains of Simeon’s pillar (with boulder on top) at the Church of Saint Simeon Stylites, near Aleppo, Syria (bottom).
In January I came across some great mysterious quotes. Mysterious because the sources of two are a bit hazy. One was unattributed when I saw it and I haven’t found the source via google. With the other I made the classic boo-boo. I thought, “I’ll come back later and get the details,” only to wonder later where “back” was.
If you know where they’re from, let me know.
*****
On a brochure I saw this …
Somewhere beyond the cortex is a small voice whose mere whisper can silence an army of arguments. It stands alone in final judgement as to whether we have demanded enough of ourselves and by that example have inspired the best in those around us.
~ unknown (I believe it was cited in The New York Times, June 28, 2007)
*****
On an ABC radio program one day I heard an Englishman expounding a theory with the immense poise and self-assurance of all Englishman expounding theories — in short, like it’s not a theory at all — that the signifier of the “tragic” in Western culture is the thought, “it’s too late,” and that this thought is totally absent from, say, Indian culture, in which, with its basis in Hinduism, it’s never too late.
Hence, according to this man, why Indian culture is not a tragic one.
The mysterious man could have been William Dalrymple who, when he’s not being the resident Brit historian in Delhi, is everywhere. I’m reading his From the Holy Mountain about his trip tracing the steps of the monk, John Moschos, who walked from Mt Athos in Greece through modern-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel to Egypt in 578AD and wrote one of the ancient world’s most famous texts, The Spiritual Meadow.
But if it was the honourable Dalrymple who had the great thought about too late/not too late I haven’t confirmed it.
*****
What I do know is that Deborah Ross wrote a piece on the retiring editor of French Vogue, Carine Roitfeld, in The Sydney Morning Herald in January. Roitfeld is very funny and droll with aitches in all the wrong places.
Ugg boots?, the interviewer asks her.”I don’t like. This boot is lazy and is huggly.” Crocs? “They are ‘orrible!”
She also has a charming way with the word, “really.” The interviewer notes,
When I tell her I was terrified of meeting her, she says, ‘Willy? You think I will be bitch?’
Roitfeld is 56, though as she says of Vivienne Westwood whom she adores, she is still very “rock’n'roll.” And at one point she assesses her appeal by way of an actual rock star,
‘I have interesting face but I am not beautiful,’ she says. ‘I am too Iggy Pop-looking.’
Her husband too sounds like a card. The interviewer asks if she minds getting older (“Yes!”) and about the key to “looking good as an older woman.”
You need a husband like mine. ‘Orrible. He tell you the truth. Willy, he do. He say, ‘Okay, you have a nice silhouette and you don’t have stomach but a bikini is not good for you now. Okay, you have nice legs, but better to wear long skirt for the beach.’ I cannot be in competition with a girl of 20, so I have to be best in my category.
She concludes the interview with one piece of advice for the interviewer:
If you wear the heel, the man will help you with your suitcase, and if you do not wear the heel, the man will not.
*****
Images: William Dalrymple, photo by Jamie Archer at Flickr (top); Carine Roitfeld, photo by Tommy Ton (bottom)
“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air …
I just watched Sonny’s face. His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn’t with it. And I had the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the bandstand was waiting for him, both waiting for him and pushing him along. But as I began to watch Creole, I realised that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing — he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water …
And Sonny hadn’t been near a piano for over a year. And he wasn’t on much better terms with his life … He and the piano stammered, started one way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started again; then seemed to have found a new direction, panicked again, got stuck …
Yet, watching Creole’s face as they neared the end of the first set, I had the feeling that something had happened, something I hadn’t heard. Then they finished, there was scattered applause, and then, without an instant’s warning, Creole started into something else, it was almost sardonic, it was Am I Blue. And, as though he commanded, Sonny began to play. Something began to happen. And Creole let out the reins. The dry, low, black man said something awful on the drums, Creole answered, and the drums talked back. Then the horn insisted, sweet and high, slightly detached perhaps, and Creole listened, commenting now and then, dry, and driving, beautiful and calm and old. Then they all came together again, and Sonny was part of the family again. I could tell this from his face. He seemed to have found, right there beneath his fingers, a damn brand-new piano. It seemed that he couldn’t get over it. Then, for a while, just being happy with Sonny, they seemed to be agreeing with him that brand-new pianos certainly were a gas.
Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened, and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.
And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation. Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny’s blues. He made the little black man on the drums know it, and the bright, brown man on the horn. Creole wasn’t trying any longer to get Sonny in the water. He was wishing him Godspeed. Then he stepped back, very slowly, filling the air with the immense suggestion that Sonny speak for himself.
Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.”
~ From Sonny’s Blues, by James Baldwin
*****
Image: James Baldwin (top), courtesy Wikipedia
A young white woman named Olive Schreiner writes her first novel. She calls it The Story of an African Farm and invents the pseudonym, Ralph Iron, under which it is published to great acclaim and controversy in London.
It is one of the first feminist novels ever published and contains devastating passages on the situation of women in relation to men.
It is delightful to be a woman; but every man thanks the Lord devoutly that he isn’t one.
It is not what is done to us, but what is made of us, that wrongs us. No man can be really injured but by what modifies himself. We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest — blank, and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it says — Work ! and to us it says — Seem ! To you it says — As you approximate to man’s highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and your knowledge great, and the power to labour is with you, so you shall gain all that human heart desires. To us it says — Strength shall not help you, nor knowledge, nor labour. You shall gain what men gain, but by other means. And so the world makes men and women.
Not only does the novel deal with the situation of women, it deals with racism, religion, atheism, “freethinking”, sex outside marriage, illegitimate children and transvestitism.
It breaks every kind of literary and cultural convention. One scholar calls it a “literary platypus” whose “ungainly combination of parts and functions seem to flummox both classification and periodization.” (1).
The female protagonist chooses to marry a man she thinks a fool, she eschews marriage to her lover to preserve her autonomy, she goes on a quest and a man follows (rather than vice versa), a man validates his existence through service to a woman, a good and devout man is abused, the two protagonists die incidentally, justice and redemption do not arrive.
The dog jumped on to his back and snapped at [his] black curls, till, finding that no notice was taken, he walked off to play with a black beetle. The beetle was hard at work trying to roll home a great ball of dung it had been collecting all the morning; but Doss broke the ball, and ate the beetle’s hind legs, and then bit off its head. And it was all play, and no one could tell what it had lived and worked for. A striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing.
The whole is shocking, dreamy, discordant and strangely relaxing to read.
The book becomes a best-seller, and the young woman, famous for the rest of her life. She marries her husband in 1894 and he takes her surname. She lives out one of the key scenes of the novel when she gives birth to a stillborn child in 1895. She becomes one of the leading figures in the female suffrage movement in South Africa and a champion of equal rights for all, black and white. When she dies in Cape Town in 1920 at the age of 65 thousands line the railway along which her body is transported to its burial place.
One of Latin America’s most famous and revered writers, the 52-year-old Mario Vargas Llosa, writes what The Financial Times calls an “audacious caprice of a book” involving, amongst other delicacies, the erotics of ear-cleaning, tooth-brushing and defecation.
In Praise of the Stepmother (Elogio de la madrastra) features the story of Don Rigoberto, a middle-aged man newly married to his second wife, the beautiful and passionate, Doña Lucrecia. Don Rigoberto is a sensualist of the highest order and, nightly, he and his wife climb aboard their bed to scale the erotic heights.
The Don and his wife have been afraid his young son from his first marriage, the golden-haired cherub, Fonchito, might be difficult. But, au contraire, Fonchito begs his stepmother for kisses and nibbles on her earlobe as he whispers goodnight:
To think that her women friends has prophesied that this stepson would be the major obstacle for her … Deeply moved, she kissed him back, on the cheeks, the forehead, the tousled hair, as, vaguely, as though come from afar, without her having really noticed, a different sensation suffused every last confine of her body …
The die is cast, and it’s but a light and delightful hop from here to the full consummation between the 40-year-old woman and the ageless, pre-pubescent boy. Along the way are the funny, erotic chapters on the Don’s ablutions, fantasies woven from famous artworks by artists such as François Boucher, Titian, Francis Bacon and Fra Angelico, and at the end, a lovely twist.
Reviewers search for coordinates and invoke, with relief, Oedipus. However, he’s nowhere mentioned or implied. What is implied is the annunciation and the Archangel Gabriel. What might have happened that day if, when he called on Mary, his motives were false?
In short, Vargas Llosa writes a perfect little soufflé on “the mysterious nature of human happiness and the corrupting power of innocence,” a veritable pistachio sorbet to Tolstoy’s sumptuous banquet on wedded relations. All grace and light and play, to be tossed off on a hot summer afternoon, about perversion.
Just two years after its publication in Spanish, the “Stepmother” is translated into English. It is the same year Vargas Llosa runs as a candidate for the presidency of Peru. He wins the first round with 34% of the vote, but is defeated in the run-off by a “then-unknown agricultural engineer, Alberto Fujimori.” (2)
As The New Yorker would go on to remark of the novel,
Startling … Not only would an American presidential candidate not have written it but the National Endowment for the Arts wouldn’t have given it a grant.
In 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. The title of his acceptance speech nods to the “Stepmother.”
Christos Tsiolkas, a 40-something Australian-born writer of Greek extraction, writes a novel called The Slap about a slap. A three-year old boy called Hugo is misbehaving at a family barbeque, and one of the adults slaps his face rather than looking away with the rest of the adults. A large and carefully diversified cast of characters agonise over the question of whether striking a child can be justified.
The book is lauded as “controversial and daring.” It wins many prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2009 and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, 2009. It is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2010.
A film is being made.
*****
Notes
1. Jed Esty, The colonial bildungsroman: The Story of an African Farm and the Ghost of Goethe
2. Wikipedia
3. All background information on Olive Schreiner courtesy The Sunday Times.
Images
Olive Schreiner (top); Memorial to Olive Schreiner, Kalk Bay, Cape Town, by Barbara Wildenboer, picture by The Sunday Times (second from top); The Annunication (c. 1437) by Fra Angelico (third from top)
All three novels I’ve read recently are transgressive, and all three concern the same subject matter: the possibility of romantic love between man and woman, especially between husband and wife. I hadn’t realised the commonality till now. Pure serendipity. I think.
Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata is the most transgressive. He began it in 1887 when he was 59, after the beginning of his ascetic or “moralistic” period, and finished it in 1889. In 1890 it was banned in Russia. In the same year the US Post Office banned the movement of newspapers containing serialised instalments of it. (1)
It wasn’t until Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia, gained special permission from the Tsar to include it in the collected works she was editing that the novella could be openly read.
I like to speculate what exactly was contained in the citation to have it banned. There are so many grounds from which to choose, though I bet whichever it was, it was the wrong ground.
The writer of the Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition cites “explicit sexual content.” But this cannot be right because even though sexual mores have changed between 1890 and today the protagonist, Pozdnyshev, doesn’t describe sexual acts; he only talks about them, and then using various ironic and bitter circumlocutions, eg, “swinish” behaviour, “pigsty existence”, “animal sensuality”, “… we had a reconciliation under the influence of the feeling to which we gave the name ‘love’”, and so on.
Elsewhere in the Introduction the scandal is attributed to “Pozdnyshev’s advocacy of total celibacy.” That this aspect caused a great fuss is borne out by the fact Tolstoy wrote a Postface before the novel was even finished in which he states he agrees with Pozdnyshev’s stance.
For female readers, the Introduction seems to imply, it was the horror of Pozdnyshev’s murder of his wife, though the implication is complicated by a statement contained in a letter received “from the provincial city of Voronezh about responses to readings of the work”:
‘The Sonata’ has had an extraordinary effect on everybody, struck them like the blow of a club. Furious discussions flame up; some are for, some against. Most adherents are women. The common reaction to ‘The Sonata’ is: ‘strong stuff, very strong stuff!’ [...] Some women have said that they could not sleep the night after they heard it the first time.
But to ban the book on the grounds of advocating celibacy or depicting murder is to fiddle while the mightiest construction burns to the ground, the construction of romantic love no less. Both Tolstoy and Pozdnyshev make it crystal clear that the main premise of the story is that romantic love cannot exist between man and woman, that it is the universe’s joke and that everyone is gulled. Can’t get much more transgressive than this. Yet I would be surprised to discover it was the ground on which the book was banned. For that would be to open up an enquiry no-one could afford to have opened.
There is another ground on which to ban the book which is not raised in the Introduction except in that tiny hint: “Most adherents are women.” The novel depicts Pozdnyshev’s wife as a full sexual being, with similar “animal” appetites to him and the sovereignty, despite his intimidations, to look around. Here’s the wonderful, funny description of her, after having discovered contraceptives:
A kind of provocative beauty radiated from her, and people found it disturbing. She was thirty years old, in the full flower of her womanhood; she was no longer bearing children; she was well fed and emotionally unstable. Her appearance made people uneasy. Whenever she walked past men she attracted their gaze. She was like an impatient, well-fed horse that has had its bridle taken off …
*****
I got such a good laugh reading The Kreutzer Sonata. Tolstoy is in earnest, but I can’t read the depictions of Pozdnyshev’s relations with his wife without cackling. They are so funny. They have the same effect on me as watching a Woody Allen movie or reading the novels of the Austrian and anti-Teuton, Thomas Bernhard. I go all floppy from laughing, and for the same reason. Because the writer is turning inside out the human psyche. Bringing all the craziness that streams through our minds into the light and saying “here, look at this, and if you think I’m crazy …” It’s the extreme which is not extreme. The extreme which is the norm.
Pozdynyshev’s jealousy is my jealousy, his lightning oscillations between one view and its opposite are mine, his baiting and trap-setting, oh-so-familiar. And could I kill my partner? Of course I could.
The Introduction makes the point well:
Tolstoy’s rhetorical strategy in his fiction in general depends upon his readers’ tacit agreement that he is writing truly about emotional states that they themselves have experienced or imagined. The strategy is tested most seriously when the reader is made to recall the bitter and shameful rather than the sweet. If readers have been in love but fallen out of it; if they have wanted to kill their loved ones; if they have lusted vigorously; or desperately sought the approval and even worship of others: Tolstoy depends upon our own memories to entangle us in his later tragic stories.
*****
Quoting snatches from the novel doesn’t do it justice because the humour, and the recognition, lies in the escalation. But you can catch the tone from classic passages like these:
We’d already given up trying to settle our arguments. We each obstinately stuck to our own point of view about even the most simple things, but particularly about the children. Thinking back on it now, I can see that the opinions I used to defend were by no means so dear to me that I couldn’t have got along without them; no, the point was that the opinions she held were the opposite of mine, and yielding to them meant yielding to … her.
Ah, the perfectly placed ellipsis.
When we were left alone together we either had to remain silent or else carry on the sort of conversations I’m convinced animals have with one another. ‘What’s the time? Bedtime. What’s for dinner today? Where are we going to? Is there anything in the newspaper? Send for the doctor. Masha’s got a sore throat.’ We had only to stray out of this impossibly narrow focus of conversation by as much as a hair’s breadth, and our mutual irritation would flare up again.
Just great. And here, surely we’ve all been here …?
I used to boil inwardly with the most dreadful hatred for her! Sometimes I’d watch the way she poured her tea, the way she swung her leg or brought her spoon to her mouth; I’d listen to the little slurping noises she made as she sucked the liquid in, and I used to hate her for that as for the most heinous act.
Now really, tell me, could you kill your partner?
*****
Notes
1. Wikipedia
Images
The Kreutzer Sonata (1901) by René François Xavier Prinet (top)
