Roll 16: 1040 = Edgar Allan Poe
1041 = Poetry and Tales
1043 is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Well, I read that too.

This was quite an undertaking.

Prior to this self-assignment, I had read:

of the poetry: The Raven, The Bells, and Annabel Lee
of the tales: MS. Found in a Bottle, Berenice, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gold-Bug, The Black Cat, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Sphinx, The Cask of Amontillado, and Hop-Frog
as well as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

And possibly a few others, when I was young, that left little impression.

That (minus The Sphinx and maybe also Hop-Frog, and plus Ligeia, William Wilson, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and maybe The Conqueror Worm) seems to me to a fine list of Edgar Allan Poe’s truly “canonical” contributions to literature. Of course there’s room for debate. But the scope of that selection is about right: about 15 famous stories and poems. Beyond its fuzzy borders lies the rest of his output, and the rest of his output is clearly auxiliary. It is very much “other work by Edgar Allan Poe.”

No matter how revisionist and even-handed you want to be, you must accept and embrace that “The Raven” and “Literary Life of Thingum Bob” are two entirely different classes of cultural artifact, just as you must accept that Edgar Allan Poe is a different category of personage from Alfred B. Street, the poet whose work “Winter” occupies the same position in the March 1845 issue of The American Review that “The Raven” did in the February issue.

Ah, but doesn’t The Canon make mistakes? Isn’t the cultural consensus really just a hodgepodge of received wisdom, a big game of “telephone” with nobody at the other end? Doesn’t a lot of this stuff get famous for silly reasons, and then get considered important just for being famous? Aren’t there some treasures in the attic and some lemons in the Louvre? Yes, undoubtedly, there are some. For some people that’s an exciting notion; for others distressing.

When you dig into the other work, the stuff that didn’t pass the Test Of Time, you tend either to hope either that the Test Of Time will turn out to have been rigged (that if it weren’t for the hanging chads, Alfred B. Street would be in the Library of America and Edgar Allan Poe would be languishing deep in google books) or conversely that the forgotten works will be reassuringly bad and the Test Of Time will be vindicated. Which outcome you hope for depends on your personality and your politics.

Sadly, you don’t usually get either kind of satisfaction. I already wrote once about the bitter fact that unspecial, unloved works are generally perfectly good. The larger, even more disheartening truth is that the same goes for the special, loved works. They’re perfectly good. But seen in context and out of the historical limelight, it becomes clear that in pretty much every way, they’re exactly like their siblings. Transcendence is something that happened to them, not something they were born with.

They were born with something, of course, because they lived on where their siblings didn’t. They survived because they were fit, and that fitness is very usually, if not exclusively, related to quality, as we’d like it to be. But Time isn’t a critic; it’s just an evolutionary pressure. Its selections, like evolution’s, are real, significant, and also arbitrary. Are elephants better than mammoths because they’re still around and mammoths are gone? In one sense, yes. But nobody really cares about that sense.

Reading a very well-known story in the context of the author’s complete corpus – loved and unloved alike – can be a little like following a cool friend to his family reunion and suddenly recognizing that his “cool” is just a mannerism shared by every uncle and grandmother in the room, and it isn’t actually cool at all. A third dimension comes into focus, which is humanizing, and to humanize is to diminish.

Or: It can be like seeing the other portraits of Christina Olson and realizing that the famous yearning young woman in “Christina’s World” is actually a 55-year-old cripple crawling pathetically, and that the painting has never tried to disguise that – it’s about that. Despite being famous as something else entirely. (Isn’t it? Isn’t it in waiting rooms because people think it’s a picture of a pretty girl with big dreams, like Belle? I may be wrong.)

Anyway, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” for one, is – all anthological pomp aside – clearly none other than a pulpy piece of dated hackwork, churned out to make a few bucks by feeding a public’s prurient interest in first-person narratives of torture, the more outlandish the better. It’s the 19th-century equivalent of Saw IV, both in aesthetic ambition and cultural significance. “Sensation stories,” they were called, and the phenomenon had been around for years before Poe’s career began. In fact, Poe himself wrote a satirical piece, “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” mocking the formulaic horrors and flimsy pretensions of these junky staples of magazine writing: “Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations — they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet.” Etc. This is followed by a parody example, in which his ditzy narrator gets stuck while peering through a hole in a clock face and is very slowly decapitated by the sharpened minute hand, all the while narrating with prissy detachment. It’s an amusing piece (certainly one of the most successful of EAP’s many attempts at comedy, most of which are clumsy and bizarre) but from our standpoint, the snarky disdain rings a bit insincere, seeing as the author is after all Edgar Allan Poe. But how was he to know that in 150 years he’d the only remembered practitioner of this ubiquitous, trashy genre?

That story, “The Scythe of Time” (later dryly retitled “A Predicament”), is a joke – but the swinging blade from “The Pit and the Pendulum,” written four years later, is entirely serious. Or is it? Maybe it’s indulgently campy fun? Or was Poe perhaps sneering cynically from behind his pen, as he served the rabble the slop they deserved? The question of Poe’s personal taste and intent is crucial to a modern reader contending with the fact of his work’s canonization despite its close familial resemblance to the lowest of pulp. The question was crucial to Poe too, because his ego was at stake.

From my point of view, the best defense of Poe’s work is the enlightened dismissal of standard high/low assumptions; the idea that a comic book about aliens can potentially be a great work of art, just as a symphony about the brotherhood of man can potentially be a piece of junk. The best executed of Poe’s stories have a thrilling quality of dim lighting and claustrophobic portent; the savor they offer is full and lasting. There is no more to be asked.

But despite its elegance, that’s a very recent idea, and one that’s still hard for even the most liberal-minded to sustain consistently. It certainly wasn’t available to Poe, at least not to the part of him that worried about things like taste and reputation. And he did worry, at some level. Here he is in his preface to his own anthology, “The Raven and Other Poems”: “In defence of my own taste… it is incumbent upon me to say, that I think nothing in this volume of much value to the public, or very creditable to myself. Events not to be controlled have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice.” The preferred field being, of course, real poetry – e.g. whatever kind of poetry you the judgmental reader think is respectable.

The following, I believe, is the crux of it. Here is a friend, calling Poe out in a letter: “Some of your bizarreries have been mistaken for satire — and admired too in that character. They deserved it, but you did not, for you did not intend them so.” And here is Poe’s response: “You are nearly, but not altogether right in relation to the satire of some of my Tales. Most of them were intended for half banter, half satire — although I might not have fully acknowledged this to be their aim even to myself.”

“Nearly, but not altogether right,” eh? “Most of them,” eh? Not even to yourself, eh? What you see here, readers, is petty weaseling of the most childish sort, the specialty of the very lonely.

I believe that Poe was a certain pathetic type that we’ve all met: the chronic misfit who, desperate for affection from the human social system that has marginalized him and whose workings he cannot intuit, careens wildly from calculated idiosyncrasy to calculated conformity, hungry for whatever approval he can get but untrainably clueless about how he is perceived. He was, in short, a difficult nerd.

He was the orphaned child of two actors (the Poes), raised by a well-meaning couple (the Allans) who didn’t know what to make of his immoderate nature as it emerged and who left him feeling unloved. He was a trench-coat type by the time he got to high school, and then a willful “character,” drinking and gambling to flamboyant excess, by the time of his stint at UVA. Inspired by the fashion for Byron, he proudly nurtured his most “passionate” tendencies, writing barely coherent, over-the-top poems of visionary yearnings (“Al Aaraaf” is quite an ordeal), burning bridges with the Allans and everyone else, and generally flattering himself that he was a true poet let loose on the world. Then suddenly he finds himself 21 years old, living at his aunt’s house with no prospects and no friends. So he starts entering writing contests, turning out stories that follow various standard middlebrow/sensationalist models but are totally convoluted by his many and conflicting desires to impress – trying to show all at once that he is loftier than the material and disdainful of it, that he is superior to other writers of such stuff and is beating them at their own game, that he is widely read and learned, and that he is an original and independent thinker. Occasionally he forgets himself, however, and manages to write in a state of relative unselfconsciousness. In this state he is naturally driven to indulge his actual and unfashionable sense of fantasy, which, true to his nerddom, is elaborately developed and totally immune to the doctrines of taste.

He writes indefensibly tasteless stories like “Berenice” with obvious relish and commitment, and then deludes himself when confronted, saying that this is the sort of thing the market demands. His career begins to move along and he starts writing snotty reviews in approximately the persona of Comic Book Store Guy, mercilessly trashing books for syntactical errors and irrationalities. He drinks constantly and sloppily, argues loudly with everyone. He has absolutely no idea whether what he’s doing is being a hack or the greatest genius who ever lived, is worried that others know, tries to pre-empt them either way. He marries the only human being he has ever felt close to, his much younger cousin. He suspects that, in the many hours spent alone in his head, he has figured out the deepest secrets of time and space, and starts hinting at them in his writing, hoping someone will notice. He writes “The Raven,” which, when it becomes incredibly popular but as a novelty rather than as a profound work, embarrasses him enough that he feels the need to concoct a “how I wrote The Raven” piece in a professorial mode, making very clear that the poem was no more than a calculated exercise in pleasing the masses.

He loses jobs, shows up drunk for important interviews, sabotages his one distinguished invitation to appear before an audience by reading his unbearable teenage “Al Aaraaf” (Because he actually thinks it’s his only “good” work? Because he doesn’t know and wants to find out? Because he is terrified of people and has no clue?) – and generally doesn’t get anywhere in life despite his steadily expanding reputation. He writes to his wife, as she is dying: “My darling little wife you are my greatest and only stimulus now to battle with this uncongenial, unsatisfactory and ungrateful life.” She dies. He is totally lost. Then he too dies, unexpectedly, while on a trip meant to help him put some of the pieces back together, quite possibly the random victim of thugs.

This is all less than conjectural; it’s just an impression. But reading a man’s life’s work is like reading a man’s life, and whether I’m right or wrong, I certainly feel like over the past year with his book I’ve developed some sense for Poe the man, as though I’ve been in his company and have learned to anticipate his rhythms. This social experience was what made the process difficult. The reading itself was fun; it was the man, the sad, stunted man, that wore me down. The way one feels spending time with a truly maladjusted loser – no matter how warm you try to be, the hopelessness of their social problems eventually becomes oppressive and dispiriting.

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In the early poems, Poe opposes vital Fantasy to numbing Science, but at first the conflict is just adolescent self-promotion: his poet’s soul longs for the unearthly, while the fools around him content themselves with drab reality. But somewhere along the way — around the time of the 1831 collection of poetry — he recasts the issue as something less egocentric and more valuable. From the bloggy “Letter to B__” that opens that collection:

[Coleridge] goes wrong by reason of his very profundity, and of his error we have a natural type in the contemplation of a star. He who regards it directly and intensely sees, it is true, the star, but it is the star without a ray — while he who surveys it less inquisitively is conscious of all for which the star is useful to us below — its brilliancy and its beauty. . . . .

Poe intends to get at the nature of experience by intentionally investigating things neither directly nor intensely. He wants to write about the twinkling that will not submit to analysis because it is actually in the eye rather than the star; the things that to the mind seem external but to science seem internal. This standard leads him in a good direction, away from whining and epics, and toward the eerie and psychological. It is essentially the de-romanticization of the romantic aesthetic – still about the seraphs and shades of the mind but no longer so enamored of the individual whose mind it is.

By the time he ends up reusing this very metaphor of the star ten years later in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, there is no longer any implied opposition between the rational and the irrational approach. Poe puts the metaphor in the mouth of his detective hero Dupin, who is simply advocating against the narrow and restrictive approach of the police in favor of a more wide-ranging, imaginative investigation — but one that is still proudly rational. Science, Poe seems to have realized with some pleasure, is simply right. The uncanny does not oppose science but lives within it. In fact, only Dupin’s aggressively rational approach allows him to reach the entirely creepy conclusion that a raging orangutan mutilated the victims. Spoiler, sorry.

This line of thought could be extended, and we could say even broader things about Poe’s body of work — that it is about the rise of science in the popular imagination, about the intersection between industrial materialism and fashionable romanticism, etc. etc. But to say things like this is to get away from the work — these sorts of analyses describe history above and beyond Poe, leaving him as a mere individual bobbing in the greater current. And if we’re only going to use him to get away from him, why read him at all? The real thing is to talk about the work itself, from within its own world.

And, unfortunately for me, that was a depressing world.

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While I was going through it, I felt like the best thing I could offer in the end would be to point out a few of the more interesting “lesser” works.

• Morella is sort of a first pass at the more-famous Ligeia, but the overall effect is somewhat less feverish and the gimmick a little creepier, to my mind.

• Eleonora is yet another pass at similar material, this time particularly overcooked in style, but ending on an unexpected note of weird transcendence that I found striking.

• The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion is a destruction of Krypton sort of thing — sci-fi apocalyptic, 100 years before sci-fi apocalyptic became culturally resonant and thus popular. Interesting to see one century’s preoccupations anachronistically explored in the previous century’s style.

• The Colloquy of Monos and Una is, to me, the most eerie and interesting of Poe’s several works set in the heavenly ether-world where dead souls dwell. It’s a long crypto-scientific description of the dissolution of a consciousness after death, reduced gradually from being to non-being over eons. It’s weird, and is a good way to dip a toe into a whole realm of Poe’s output — the mystico-scientific stuff that falls somewhere between crackpot philosophy and crackpot poetry.

• The Philosophy of Furniture is not properly a tale, but it has a poetic bent to it, which I guess was enough for the Library of America people. It’s ostensibly an essay on the effects of tasteful interior architecture and home decoration, but it turns into a long, almost fetishistically loving description of an imagined room.

• The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall finds Poe more or less inventing science fiction, to my mind — focusing on the excitement of the technical and pseudo-scientific details, rather than any overall romance, in his description of flying a hot-air balloon directly upward all the way to the moon. This he bookends, perversely, with some silly-name zaniness and a roly-poly moon-man who seems, in combination with the balloon, like a clear precursor to Oz. It runs overlong and isn’t much of a story, but definitely an intriguing curiosity.

• The Man of the Crowd has a sort of Kafka flavor about it – a little more urban and noir-ish than usual, and more overtly philosophical than others. Though perhaps a bit confused.

Okay, that’s plenty.

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So Bloom says Poetry and Tales and then in a separate entry Essays and Reviews, and those are the titles of the two Library of America volumes. They also offer a one-stop Poetry and Tales and Selected Essays paperback, which is what I bought and read. Its footnotes are pretty bare-bones and during “Al Aaraaf” I felt a little at sea, so I sprung for the Norton Edition seen above as a supplement. Unfortunately, it’s the worst sort of reflexive PC academic mushwork, offering strenuously noncommittal commentary on worthless topics like Poe and race, or Poe and politics. All the information relevant to actually reading the works seems mostly undigested — paraphrased with minimal comprehension from other scholars, or from encyclopedias. The selection isn’t bad, but neither is the selection in the Barnes & Noble Poe, I’d imagine. Don’t buy the Norton edition.

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Let’s wrap this up with some pictures. The mustachioed, greasy-haired, grim-looking man you see on the cover above, and on bookstore café walls the world over, is Poe in the sad final years of his sad little life. Apparently for most of his life he didn’t look like that. In the interest of encountering the “real” Poe the way I felt I did, here he is being less of an icon, more of a person.

This is the portrait that was said, by those who knew him, to best resemble him.

And this is the earliest known photograph of him, from around 1843.

Who is that guy? Just some guy we don’t know. I spent some time getting to know him and I assure you, it was depressing. The superficial relationship I had previously, to an abstract icon of a man’s head and moustache, and to some stories detached from any particular time, place, or personality, was ultimately a more nourishing one for me. And I expect to get it back now that I’m finally done writing this long-ass entry about this long-ass book.

Everyone, I shout to you from the trenches: The Masque of the Red Death is exactly whatever you got out of it when you were eight years old. There’s nothing to see here. Move along.

Raymond Roussel (1877-1933)
Locus Solus (1914)
translated into English by Rupert Copeland Cunningham (1970)

Roll 15: 1361 = Raymond Roussel
1362 = Locus Solus

This was a surprise and a delight the likes of which I doubt will be repeated anywhere else in this enormous list.

Before I read it, I read some online reviews. They all said how wonderful it was, that it was a marvelous feat of imagination. But when they offered quick previews of the wackiness in store – e.g. telling me to look forward to reading about “… an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat, and the preserved head of Danton…” – I was left a bit apprehensive. The images in question seemed no more charming than any other bits of random nonsense, and I didn’t relish the idea of plugging through hundreds of pages of deep surrealism.

But I loved this book. It was indeed wonderful, and yes, a marvelous feat of imagination. The problem is that, having experienced this cavalcade of the fantastic, one imagines that just naming these crazy things will surely give others a taste of the fun. But it doesn’t at all. Yes, I’m strongly tempted now to rattle off some of the craziness – because boy is it crazy! – but I’m going to try to resist because it would miss the point entirely. You really have to read it for yourself.

Unfortunately you probably won’t be able to, because the English translation is out of print and extremely rare and the French original is, unfortunatement, in French. None of the public libraries had a copy (!), nor did any used bookstore, and I couldn’t even buy one online for anything like a reasonable price ($120 and up on abebooks!). The copy I read, seen above, was borrowed for me from Firestone Library at Princeton University. I would love to own a copy of the text, but the actual edition, rare though it is, is of no particular aesthetic interest, so I’m not about to spend the big bucks.

This book is all but unobtainable, despite being not only in Harold Bloom’s canon but also in the considerably more populist 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (it’s number 257). It is RRRRRripe for the reprinting. NYRB Classics, are you listening? Actually, I think I’ll write to them for real.*

Anyway.

When I was a kid my sense of humor put great emphasis on craziness. In part this was because I didn’t actually understand very much of the comedy I encountered. Didn’t understand it, but still “thought it was funny.” I responded to the ambiance and rhythm of humor without necessarily being able to parse the content, and since I seemed to be having the same reaction as adults – namely, enjoying it – it seemed apparent to me that my spotty understanding was in fact sufficient and complete. I think I truly believed that much of adult entertainment culture consisted of a barrage of near-nonsense, delivered with panache. That was what adults enjoyed. The more brazen the nonsense, the funnier. And I found that a very congenial standard.

Of course, fondness for craziness is common to all kids, to some degree, and entertainment for kids bears that out. The books and movies in which silly really was the name of the game probably only reinforced my impression that adult comedy operated the same way.

The fascination of craziness, the meaning of no-meaning, is a particular kind of giddiness that I can still savor, but now it tends to be diluted by knowledge. Locus Solus got me back in touch with the essence of craziness – pure, unqualified, Porky in Wackyland-grade craziness. It functions almost as an inquiry into craziness: what does it mean for something to be crazy? And conversely, what does it mean for something to make sense? If you can explain something rationally, does it cease to be irrational?

Okay, here’s what the book is. A genius scientist is giving a tour of his fantastic estate, showcasing his various “experiments” and “inventions.” These consist of intensely surreal tableaux, described slowly and carefully. Such as, yes, a floating automated device building a mosaic out of a huge supply of variously discolored human teeth. There’s more to that scene, but, like I said, just telling you about it misses the point. Because: after each scene has been lovingly laid out in all its jarring irrationality, our host sets about explaining it. The explanation meticulously addresses absolutely every absurdity and creates a history and a context that justifies it and justifies their juxtaposition. Roussel writes story after story – highly inventive and amusing stories, but essentially as conventional as possible – until what once seemed an hopelessly dense clump of nonsense has been entirely defused. Or has it? It’s still all nonsense. But now it’s explained nonsense.

Each chapter repeats the process with a new tableau. Like a good performer, Roussel knows to up the ante a little bit each time. As each chapter wrapped up, I would think, “okay, I get it now,” and then upon reading the next chapter would find myself laughing and shaking my head in amazement – “boy, and I thought that was crazy – now this is crazy!” The number of individual absurd details rises in each new tableau, so that in the later ones they accumulate in drifts, like heavy snow. As the craziness kept piling up higher, I would feel the pressure rising too. “Come on! how is he possibly going to be able explain his way out of this one?”… and then, like Houdini, he would! I wanted to applaud.

It’s like a delightful combination of watching an escape artist and listening to your dad improvise a bedtime story.

The explanatory stories are what make the book truly great. But even the setups, the mere descriptions, are fascinating. Unlike the actual Surrealists, who were in it for the shock of unfamiliarity, Roussel does everything he can to underplay the weirdness. His descriptions are as scientific and un-dreamlike as possible. He frequently points out quaintly that various things “surprised” the spectators or “seemed miraculous.” Here’s a snippet to give a taste.

…the sibyl took a pack of tarot cards from a tall, narrow box of old leather, whose lid was missing–and placed one of them flat, its back in contact with the table. Before long a tinkling music issued from the card, though there was no abnormal thickening to suggest the presence of any internal mechanism. The tune, an incoherent adagio which seemed to be due to the capricious improvisation of living creatures, progressed indolently and was of an extremely bizarre nature, though free of any errors of harmony.

A second card which took its place beside the first produced a livelier air. Others laid one after another on the table all played their separate pieces with pure, metallic notes. Each was like an independent orchestra which once laid down sooner or later launched into its symphony, languid or lively, sad or joyful, whose almost hesitant unpredictability betrayed the personal touch of living beings.

The ear was never offended by any infringement of the rules of harmony, but only confused by the multiplicity of these various ensembles, which were too soft anyway for their simultaneity to constitute an unpleasant din.

The evident localization of the sounds forced one’s mind to admit that, contrary to all likelihood, there was a miraculously thin musical device imprisoned within each tarot card.

That’s only one of many many many details in a very elaborate scene. The narrator is not complicit in the craziness, nor does he find it unnerving. He is, simply, a reasonable fellow, and he happened to see some tarot cards that played weird music. No need to get upset, because surely there is some explanation. And of course there is.

Having read up a very little bit on Roussel, I can let you know that the way he wrote was by generating the nonsense through wordplay, mostly phrase homonyms – sort of a Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames kind of thing – and then working from the output. Which is certainly interesting, but beside the point. In his essay on his process, he admits that he can’t remember specifically how he came up with most of what’s in Locus Solus. The book itself really is the point.

I’m not sure what this book “says” or “means.” It’s been nearly a year and I’ve been thinking about it frequently, but it resists any simple analysis. The great beauty of the book, in fact, is that it is not expressive of anything; it has no interior. That’s not to say that it doesn’t “mean” anything – it is rich with potential meaning, even as it pulls the rug out from under all meaning. Both the form and the content are concerned with the interface between the mechanical and the human, between the automated and the chaotic. Things we are shown turn out to be simulacra, even when that seems impossible. Repeatedly, things that seem reactive and human are revealed to be blind automata, and the appearance of normality revealed to be dependent on pre-planning of unthinkable, infinite precision. Actually, this makes me think that maybe Roussel’s method isn’t irrelevant after all: his text, too, is a product of unfeeling mechanical techniques, rendered into flesh and blood.

Is Roussel poking fun at science, or is he celebrating it? I think neither but probably closer to the latter. He is grasping the essential strangeness at the heart of rationalism, the dizzying notion that our lives, our loves, our fairy tales, all are just vast assemblages of cold data. A notion so essentially weird to contemplate, in fact, that it doesn’t feel “rational” at all. This is the hall of mirrors in which the book takes place. I thought it was spectacular.

I want to note that with this entry I am now UP TO DATE with my Western Canon reading. How can that be, when I read Locus Solus almost a year ago? It can be because the next spin of the wheel turned up something truly long, an entire corpus, which cried out to be broken up with other reading. I have heeded those cries and taken several extended hiatuses from the main assignment, which lingers on even at this late date. No regrets there, especially since it’s afforded me the opportunity to catch up with myself. Hooray!

* There was no need. Many months have passed since I wrote the first part of this entry, and I have since learned that a UK reprint is imminent. Good!**

** More months yet have passed since I wrote the preceding footnote – these entries build up very slowly, like sediment – and I have now in fact bought a copy of that reprint. It was oddly expensive, here in the States, but I had no qualms. So now what I said above is simply no longer true. The book is not at all out of print and it’s quite straightforward to obtain a copy. Whew.

Bruno Schulz (1892-1942)
Sklepy cynamonowe (1934)
translated into English as The Street of Crocodiles by Celina Wieniewska (1963).

The 14th random number: 1814. Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles.

Here’s what I wrote quite a while ago – because I read this quite a while ago! – on a book review site elsewhere on the internet:

Beautiful, painterly, profoundly atmospheric. Maybe the finest rendering into text of the actual dream-life of the mind, of fantasy as it touches childhood (and adulthood), that I have ever read.

I stand by that and don’t feel the need to say too much more. But unfortunately I don’t have the guts to let that stand alone here, in such verbose company – it would seem unfair to this book that I so admired, to write so much less about it than about the others. So out of misdirected guilt, here’s some more.

The book is a collection of short pieces, each originally written to be sent to the author’s literary pen-pal. They feel befittingly delicate and private, and would be marvelous things to get in the mail. The stories do not form a sequence or an internally consistent set; they share settings and characters, but only, it seems to me, as a consequence of all stemming from the same psychological zone within the author. His creative impulse – as a writer and as a graphic artist, too – seems to have emanated directly from his personal experience of life, without interest in invention for invention’s sake. It all means something to him; it’s all meant to be felt as he felt it. So it’s no surprise that the stories all feel of a piece, even if they vary in tone and substance – because it’s clear that they all have the same author’s real life at their heart.

The world in these stories lapses into fantasy not through whimsy or invention but through confusion – a quiet confusion that touches everything and so goes unquestioned. There are no falsehoods imposed on the reality; the reality is just parsed murkily, like a child might. Or an adult, for that matter. His fantasy is more like superstition: the fiction is not fanciful; it’s like something actually believed.

Children can work themselves into a frenzy of confusion and lose themselves, to the point where they come to believe that a story they made up might actually be true. These stories have that quality, of being believed because belief has become a maze. Impossible things are described but they seem neither like nightmare nor happy fantasy; they’re like the lingering residue of dreams still experienced while awake. Wait, I’ve got an even better one – have you ever had a memory that you take for granted for years, but one day when you finally analyze it, you realize it cannot possibly have ever happened? The stories are like that.

Schulz’s mastery of this fuzzy area is the greatest I’ve ever encountered. Of course, given the shadowy, chilly Eastern European dream-reality, comparison to Kafka seems to be standard fare for commentary on Schulz. But I feel them quite differently: while Kafka’s fantasies are caricatures of reality, Schulz’s fantasies are just extensions of reality. Schulz’s writing is expressionistic in the best sense – it distorts in order to deliver real sensations that might otherwise be too quiet to hear, too slippery to isolate. Not like the Dr. Caligari sort of expressionism – or, let’s be frank here, the Arnold Schoenberg sort of expressionism – in which distortion is used as a launching pad into Krazyville, where would-be sensations of alien intensity dwell. Schulz’s stories do not take place in Krazyville. His angst is real and human in scale, and we feel it with him as the world bends and buckles around him.

I’m placing too much emphasis on the surreal elements. There are also entirely realistic pieces here, and many descriptive passages that could pass as straightforward memoir writing. There’s a delightful one about the personality of the family dog. Each story goes where it will and isn’t bound. The author was writing for pleasure and discovery and when he hits a particular note that you enjoy, you can bet that he won’t ever quite return there again; he’s going to try other things instead. But he’ll be nearby.

The two stories that are most whole and seem to form a matched pair at the center of the book are “Cinnamon Shops,” after which the author titled his collection (see above – that’s what the Polish means), and “The Street of Crocodiles,” after which, for some reason, the translator retitled the collection. This change is significant, because whereas “Cinnamon Shops” is an eerie but deeply warm dream of the city at night, “The Street of Crocodiles” is about sleaze and illusions, about facades of facades. Over the course of the book, the light and dark have about equal play, but the overall impression is a melancholy nostalgia; “The Street of Crocodiles” strikes a cynical note that, to me, sours the whole collection if it’s taken as the overarching title. The nocturnal drift of “Cinnamon Shops” is far more the spirit of the thing.

It’s possible that the darkening of the title was undertaken posthumously in light of the idea that Bruno Schulz was a tragic figure, due to his depressing and absurd death at the hands of the Nazis, about which you can read elsewhere if you like. But the book doesn’t feel tragic in the least. Sad, yes, but not tragic.

I really do recommend this. Of course, I recommended it strongly to [a friend who will no doubt comment below], who promptly read it and basically shrugged it off as not his thing. So maybe it won’t be your thing. It’s also worth nothing that I mentioned that I’d read this to a Jewish Literature Scholar acquaintance, thinking that it was mildly obscure, and he immediately proceeded to rattle off a list of works influenced by Schulz, including one or two that incorporated or fantasized the figure of Bruno Schulz himself. I’m not sure I like that; any whiff of “these are a few of my favorite things” post-modernism generally turns me off.* But the point is, in certain Polish and/or Jewish circles, Bruno Schulz is not obscure at all; he’s a big big deal, big enough to play games with. I don’t think you should read him that way. These stories were written to be taken out of a mailbox with no expectations. And that’s more or less how I read them, less the mailbox.

Final comment, because now I feel perfectly comfortable with the length I’ve reached, and hopefully so does the book: I knew the title, and only the title, prior to reading the book, because I had seen the memorable, but heavily overrated, 1986 Brothers Quay animated short of the story. And, I might add, not understood what it meant. What it definitely doesn’t mean is the same thing as the story, because after reading the story I went and watched it again, sure that this time I’d be able to crack it, and while certain scenes and moods became clearer, most of it didn’t. A good deal of what goes on still needs to be interpreted from the ground up. Contrariwise, if you come to Bruno Schulz looking for a book about decaying dolls terrorizing each other and tiny screws drilling through watches stuffed with meat, you’re in the wrong place. God help you, in fact.

The subtle beauties of the book, to my mind, serve as a mature counterexample to the “oh man that’s so creepy” MTV baby-doll nightmare of the short film that happens to borrow its name. Yes, the Quays were doing baby-doll nightmare before MTV. They get some credit for that. But it’s still what it is, and why, why that of all things?

I don’t know. Enough about those guys.

Here’s a very long excerpt for you. I tried to reduce the length, but I wanted it to be this passage and there was no way to cut without diminishing the effect. I think you’ll enjoy the whole thing. I have to marvel at his skill – even just now, reading it for the third or fourth time, still that lightheaded sense of twilight half-reason kicked in vividly. He heads directly and surely for that sensation and begins painting in it, without hesitation. The fantasy is so present and clear you can smell it. The unreality he describes here is at least as familiar to me as anything in a “realistic” novel, as any cartoon character from Dickens. In this case the fantasy is at one remove, in the fevered mind of the narrator’s father, but it’s the same fantasy that lives in the world of the book itself.

Here my father began to set before our eyes the picture of that generatio aequivoca which he had dreamed up, a species of beings only half organic, a kind of pseudofauna and pseudoflora, the result of a fantastic fermentation of matter.

They were creations resembling, in appearance only, living creatures such as crustaceans, vertebrates, cephalopods. In reality the appearance was misleading – they were amorphous creatures, with no internal structure, products of the imitative tendency of matter which, equipped with memory, repeats from force of habit the forms already accepted. The morphological scope of matter is limited on the whole and a certain quota of forms is repeated over and over again on various levels of existence.

These creatures – mobile, sensitive to stimuli, and yet outside the pale of real life – could be brought forth by suspending certain complex colloids in solutions of kitchen salt. These colloids, after a number of days, would form and organize themselves in precipitations of substance resembling lower forms of fauna.

In creatures conceived in this way, one could observe the processes of respiration and metabolism, but chemical analysis revealed in them traces neither of albumen nor of carbon compounds.

Yet these primitive forms were unremarkable compared with the richness of shapes and the splendor of the pseudofauna and pseudoflora, which sometimes appeared in certain strictly defined environments, such as old apartments saturated with the emanations of numerous existences and events; used-up atmospheres, rich in the specific ingredients of human dreams; rubbish heaps, abounding in the humus of memories, of nostalgia, and of sterile boredom. On such a soil, this pseudovegetation sprouted abundantly yet ephemerally, brought forth short-lived generations which flourished suddenly and splendidly, only to wilt and perish.

In apartments of that kind, wallpapers must be very weary and bored with the incessant changes in all the cadenzas of rhythm; no wonder that they are susceptible to distant, dangerous dreams. The essence of furniture is unstable, degenerate, and receptive to abnormal temptations: it is then that on this sick, tired, and wasted soil colorful and exuberant mildew can flourish in a fantastic growth, like a beautiful rash.

“As you will no doubt know,” said my father, “in old apartments there are rooms which are sometimes forgotten. Unvisited for months on end, they wilt neglected between the old walls and it happens that they close in on themselves, become overgrown with bricks, and, lost once and for all to our memory, forfeit their only claim to existence. The doors, leading to them from some backstairs landing, have been overlooked by people living in the apartment for so long that they merge with the wall, grow into it, and all trace of them is obliterated in a complicated design of lines and cracks.

“Once early in the morning toward the end of winter,” my father continued, “after many months of absence, I entered such a forgotten passage, and I was amazed at the appearance of the rooms.

“From all the crevices in the floor, from all the moldings, from every recess, there grew slim shoots filling the gray air with a scintillating filigree lace of leaves: a hothouse jungle, full of whispers and flicking lights – a false and blissful spring. Around the bed, under the lamp, along the wardrobes, grew clumps of delicate trees which, high above, spread their luminous crowns and fountains of lacy leaves, spraying chlorophyll, and thrusting up to the painted heaven of the ceiling. In the rapid process of blossoming, enormous white and pink flowers opened among the leaves, bursting from bud under your very eyes, displaying their pink pulp and spilling over to shed their petals and fall apart in quick decay.

“I was happy,” said my father, “to see that unexpected flowering which filled the air with a soft rustle, a gentle murmur, falling like colored confetti through the thin rods of the twigs.

“I could see the trembling of the air, the fermentation of too rich an atmosphere which provoked that precocious blossoming, luxuriation, and wilting of the fantastic oleanders which had filled the room with a rare, lazy snowstorm of large pink clusters of flowers.

“Before nightfall,” concluded my father, “there was no trace left of that splendid flowering. The whole elusive sight was a fata morgana, an example of the strange make-believe of matter which had created a semblance of life.”

Fantasies of plantlike growth, of the animate in the inanimate, I’ve always found particularly unnerving, so this passage had special meaning for me. But what I love most about it is its unsummarizability. Even after reading it and understanding it well, you can’t really say what it is that’s doing the growing. Illusions, and matter, and memories; all at once, because in this philosophy they are all the same thing. As they are in our minds.

* It seems likely that the works he mentioned included this, which doesn’t sound the least bit deserving of my complaint, and this, which does.

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
Murphy (1938)

1509 Beckett: Watt
1508 Beckett: Murphy

I bought this in Kansas. They have Samuel Beckett in Kansas as much as anywhere else.

The tone is so unwaveringly dry that it plays as comic even when nothing funny is happening – and vice versa, whatever the vice versa is. I found it useful to imagine it being read aloud with deadpan savor at some kind of coffeehouse public reading. In those settings, the tiniest false-alarm tremor of possible wit will set off solicitous literary chuckling in the crowd. Keeping that kind of self-congratulatory audience in mind – an audience eager to show that it “gets” everything, even when it doesn’t – actually helped me stay attuned the meaning (and the humor) behind the stylizations of the text. (“What could they” – the imagined audience – “possibly be chuckling at this time? Oh, I see.”) More to the point, it helped me keep the stratified tone properly suspended – the surface being deadpan; the layer below that being chuckling, sometimes smarmy, at the unspoken; the layer below that being a doubly unspoken coffeehouse seriousness. Which is nonetheless sometimes spoken.

The trick to being in one of those audiences is being able to tell the difference between the passages where one should appear amused by something wry and the passages where one should appear to be savoring something aesthetically fine. If the two are mixed up closely, all the more satisfaction is to be had in picking them apart. If you can’t tell them apart you have to settle for appearing to do both at once – and isn’t that, after all, what makes this dude’s writing so amazing? It’s kind of amazing.

I’m on a tangent here, talking about an imaginary writer and not Beckett himself, though surely these straw men I’m mocking do also like Beckett. But just because literary deadpan is a natural watering hole for pretentiousness doesn’t mean it can’t also be, on its own time, good. I liked Murphy, coffeehouse undertones be damned.

The coffeehouse is far from the only milieu where a relentlessly wry dead-tone delivery is prized. I also found it orienting to imagine the text in the mouths of certain peers of mine as they lounged in certain ivied halls. It is the diction of intellectual elitism diverting itself – the conspicuous consumption of obscurity. And yet Beckett, though he may well have learned the craft from being a witty intellectual among witty intellectuals, puts it to aesthetic work. The weary detachment of his deadpan is in fact the philosophical essence of the book.

I knew to associate with Beckett’s name the concept of “tragicomedy,” and also to associate him with the influence of James Joyce, but neither connection was actually apparent to me from what little of his work I’d read. In Murphy both are very much apparent. Reading Murphy helped me a great deal in clarifying the spirit and origin of Waiting for Godot, which seems like a more rarified version of the same attitude: philosophy rendered into absurdity structured like tragedy delivered as deadpan wit. It also fell stylistically about halfway between Joyce and Godot and thereby helped to indicate the road that connects them.

The book reads like a lark – a difficult lark, but a lark – but is in fact a serious piece of work, and a complex philosophical vision to be reckoned with. It is thus doubly difficult. I had to read it twice. The first time was 10 months ago. The second time was just now, as I was attempting to write this and get it overwith; I realized I wouldn’t feel ready until I had read it again. It was much easier and more satisfying the second time. I now feel almost embarrassed about the paragraphs above, which suggest that this book is needlessly difficult and snide, when this time it seemed mostly straightforward and pleasurably clever. It also, for all its snark, seemed more directly and overtly serious than it had before. I think the initial and secondary responses are both elements of the style, and not just of me.

The issue is whether to embrace the real world or escape to an inner nothingness; the book pities (or sadly mocks) the proponents of either option. Murphy fantasizes about the latter. His climactic chess game against an institutionalized lunatic encapsulates his quest: he tries to ape the madman’s pure and perfect detachment from reality, but can’t. The comedy, pathos, and wackiness of this game – and the whole concept of a pivotal scene being written in chess notation – gives some idea of the book. Of course, you can watch the game and get a sense by clicking through the moves on the site linked to above, but you can’t really “read” the scene without the narrator’s tongue-in-cheek annotations.

I like including excerpts when I post about my reading – it’s like I brought you souvenirs from my trip!

Originally I had a bit of fairly simple comedy stuff here, but I’m replacing it with this, the central passage of the whole book, in my mind. From the crucial “section six,” which explains Murphy’s personal philosophy of mind.

Sorry it doesn’t totally stand alone but you don’t need too much: “The chandlers,” “Miss Carridge,” and “Ticklepenny” are all characters unsympathetic to Murphy. “The Belacqua bliss” refers to Murphy’s previously-described fantasy of an after-death paradise.

As he lapsed in body he felt himself coming alive in mind, set free to move among its treasures. The body has its stock, the mind its treasures.

There were the three zones, light, half light, dark, each with its speciality.

In the first were the forms with parallel, a radiant abstract of the dog’s life, the elements of physical experience available for a new arrangement. Here the pleasure was reprisal, the pleasure of reversing the physical experience. Here the kick that the physical Murphy received, the mental Murphy gave. It was the same kick, but corrected as to direction. Here the chandlers were available for slow depilation, Miss Carridge for rape by Ticklepenny, and so on. Here the whole physical fiasco became a howling success.

In the second were the forms without parallel. Here the pleasure was contemplation. This system had no other mode in which to be out of joint and therefore did not need to be put right in this. Here was the Belacqua bliss and others scarcely less precise.

In both these zones of his private world Murphy felt sovereign and free, in the one to requite himself, in the other to move as he pleased from one unparalleled beatitude to another. There was no rival initiative.

The third, the dark, was a flux of forms, a perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms. The light contained the docile elements of a new manifold, the world of the body broken up into the pieces of a toy; the half light, states of peace. But the dark neither elements nor states, nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming, without love or hate or any intelligible principle of change. Here there was nothing but commotion and the pure forms of commotion. Here he was not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom. He did not move, he was a point in the ceaseless unconditioned generation and passing away of line.

Matrix of surds.

It was pleasant to kick the Ticklepennies and Miss Carridges simultaneously together into ghastly acts of love. It was pleasant to lie dreaming on the shelf beside Belacqua, watching the drawn break crooked. But how much more pleasant was the sensation of being a missile without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion. So pleasant that pleasant was not the word.

This is a rich and disturbing passage for me, especially the description of the third zone. I am reminded of cellular automata, and of Silent Snow, Secret Snow. And the whole gist of the book reminds me of the end of Brazil. Among other things.

Murphy was a fine and rewarding book. I do not regret reading it twice in one year. More Samuel Beckett please, random number generator.

The random number generator says, “no.”

First edition:

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Personæ: The Shorter Poems (1908-1920, collected 1926)

2141 Ezra Pound: The Cantos

But I haven’t read, and so must revert to

2140 Ezra Pound: Personae: Collected Poems

A train of thought recorded while reading:

Interesting that looking up a single obscurity so frequently feels like it sheds significant light on the whole poem. Perhaps the research mindset simply primes the mind for the task of synthetic interpretation. Investigating any given word helps one comprehend that the task at hand is investigative, which for better or worse it is. The effect might be the same if I read the dictionary entry for a word in the poem I already know. It helps with the problem of coping with allusion; one tends instinctively to take the current limits of one’s own knowledge to be inflexible – allusion to the world outside the poem and so possibly outside that limited knowledge can seem gratuitous. But using the dictionary reminds us that any word is an allusion to its own meaning; that everything the poem could possibly be about is “outside.”

This relationship of inside to outside is always a challenge in reading. There is an implicit promise that reader+book are a self-sufficient unit – “all you need is your own two eyes…” – but this promise is almost always broken; what’s needed is, in general, outside the unit. Only if you happen to have taken it into yourself prior to meeting the book are you prepared to understand.

I’ve read a bit more of it at this point but poetry still strikes me as an unreliable affair, especially as it tends toward profundity. The deeper a thought, the more other thoughts it contains (or rejects, or uses). The only way to zoom directly to the apex (or the nadir, I guess, if “deep” thoughts are metaphorically lower altitude) is to ensure that the shoulders-of-giants are already agreed upon and in place. But poetry ensures nothing – it sketches and gestures, and we must recognize its gestures to move with it. I may recognize that a poem is ascending some kind of invisible ladder to talk about something in the sky, but if I don’t already possess the ladder myself, I have to watch from a distance. Poetry is for people who share a culture. When that culture is the culture of being a human being and smelling things, regretting things, fearing things, there’s a strong chance that communication is still possible. But when that culture depends on all sorts of historical contingencies, on a particular kind of upbringing and schooling, on having read the same book as the poet last night and had the same conversation with the same other poet, and then waking up with the same string of thoughts that led to the thought in the poem – invisible ladders all. Unless the poet is building the ladder as he goes.

In my experience people are not generally very good at the task of estimating other people’s likelihood of comprehension of a given thing. Poets are very likely taking into consideration that other people may not know what they are talking about, but then are too much themselves to correctly gauge how much help they will need. Then, of course, people tend to savor ambiguity, not to mention savor the emperor’s new clothes, so the poets generally never receive the “sorry, I don’t copy” feedback that would help them hone their communication skills.

I respect James Joyce because I think he was, during Ulysses, anyway, very aware of how far was fair; his obscurity is not based on self-centeredness; it’s calculated and constructed. Then in Finnegans Wake I think he dared a little too much; the temptation to believe those voices that say “it’s brilliant, we’re with you!” must be very great. From what I’ve read of it, it seems likely to me that there are thoughts he put into Finnegans Wake that will never be extracted; the only context in which they “sounded” was his own brain. I think he might have believed – and I think a lot of poets might believe – that a sufficiently attentive reading would allow the reader to recreate his brain within theirs and thus understand everything he understands. But that process of mirroring, I think, has practical limits. People that for years I have loved or lived with very closely I can generally mimic, internally, to a fine degree of accuracy – but fine only from the exterior! I can’t say with any confidence what something will remind them of, or what a given word feels like to them. I can guess what will make my girlfriend feel sad but I can’t tell you what kind of aesthetic connection she might or might not feel between her life right now and the landscape of Greek myth. Not unless she told me outright. So if she wrote a poem about that, it would still have to explain itself pretty clearly. And James Joyce is not my girlfriend.

Neither is Ezra Pound.

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The book was bought new – not often stocked these days but it just happened to be at the little bookshop down the street – but is now a bit worse for the wear, as somewhat seen above, because I knocked some water off my nightstand while lying on my back and trying to throw my pillow high enough to touch the ceiling. Still haven’t succeeded at doing that – we have high ceilings – but I have finished the book.

I do not recommend the poetry of Ezra Pound.

My principal criticism – and I mean this to be thoroughly damning – is that he certainly seems to be interested in poetry, but not in life.

A good majority of the writing here is in response to study of the troubadours, or of ancient Chinese poetry, or classical Greek poetry, or various other interests of a poetry student, and seems to aspire to achievement only in the realm of showing a smug mastery and ownership of those fields. The loves and ladies and regrets and flowers that form the content of these poems is, if not pure affectation, certainly 100% secondhand. None of it is his own observation, and I am unable to see merit in his project of giving this stuff newer, truer life – if that is indeed the project – because nowhere here was I given cause to believe that he had any particularly astute understanding of the subjects of ladies or love or regrets or flowers as they occur on earth. When he lets his poetry venture out into the modern world around him, it is characterized almost exclusively by disdainful ego, and – only occasionally – by the superficial soft-focus impressionism that the self-regarding pretentious young man injects into his thoughts to remind himself that he has a gift. Every effort to show that his mind is a rich soil in which great things grow quickly runs aground on his being, quite obviously, an asshole.

You can say, you Poundistes, that the following is not an important work and that it comes from a period of intentional, experimental brashness – but I say to you that knowing that the poet ever had it in him to write this – and this is on page 83, folks, this isn’t like his first childish scrawl – makes all too clear to me what’s going on underneath much of the rest.

TENZONE

Will people accept them?
      (i.e. these songs).
As a timorous wench from a centaur
      (or a centurion),
Already they flee, howling in terror.

Will they be touched with the verisimilitudes?
      Their virgin stupidity is untemptable.
I beg you, my friendly critics,
Do not set about to procure me an audience.

I mate with my free kind upon the crags;
      the hidden recesses
Have heard the echo of my heels,
      in the cool light,
      in the darkness.

Many of the “modern” poems also have what to me seemed like a leering misogyny; the “you think you’re so hot but I’m a poet and I see how pathetic you really are” brand of sour grapes, directed at shop girls or people he saw in the park. The big work here is Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Contacts and Life), an elaborate, obscure, riddled-with-allusions poem about, so far as I can tell, a young smarmy poet who hates everybody. And possibly also some other poet who isn’t as disdainful and is therefore, it is implied, not as good.

The obscurity and allusiveness of the poetry, which gets worse and worse as the book wears on and Ezra gets older, represents a serious challenge. I grew more and more confident, as I read, that there was no reason at all to rise to that challenge. (The stuff above about looking up words was written quite early on, while I was still reading the lyric Medievalist early stuff). Not a single glimpse of truth came through the web to tempt me inward with the machete of research.

Nabokov, not exactly my hero, but someone whose work I respect infinitely more than anything I found here, called Pound a “venerable fraud.” I’ll get behind that.

The one pleasant thing in this book is the section called Cathay, Chinese poems by Li Po, reworked by Pound, who spoke no Chinese, from translations by Ernest Fenollosa. Pound may have chosen the words on the page, but these poems are not by him, and in this obnoxious book, they’re a breath of clean fresh air. I’m happy to give him credit for his contribution. The man seems to have been a genuine and intelligent poetry enthusiast. Just not a genuine and intelligent poet.

Apropos of what I said last time about bigotry and Turgenev – Ezra Pound’s asshole politics are again, to me, relevant to his art because they are an indicator that his worldview was ill-formed. The difference is that unlike Turgenev, with Pound that was screamingly obvious from the work itself.

This was a blackboard-scrape of a chore to get through and I don’t know what I’ll do if I get assigned the Cantos.

Read them I guess.

Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883)
Записки охотника (A Sportsman’s Notebook) (1852, expanded 1874)

The roll was 969 = Ivan Turgenev. First work below his name is 970 = A Sportsman’s Notebook, translated by Charles and Natasha Hepburn. I purchased (from The Strand) and read this very translation. See above. The Everyman’s Library edition is a pleasure to hold in the hand.

Unconnected short stories of Russian peasants and landowners. “Sportsman” here means hunter.

One point of reference that occurred to me is Dubliners, from 60-odd years later. Both are portraits of the quotidian that zoom inward until some tiny detail seems to reveal a hidden kind of significance. Joyce very much had allegorical meanings in mind, and the idea that the everyday could serve as an allegory for the profound was absolutely part of the project; Turgenev I don’t think had any specific notion of meaning in mind. What they have in common is that they sketch whole scenes, characters, courses of events, painting in broad strokes, then finer and finer, until, at the pivotal moment, they just breathe very lightly on the canvas, and it’s as though the whole structure has just been to give us sufficient context for this breath to register. In Joyce these “breaths,” the tiny non-epiphanic epiphanies, have fairly clear moral content. In Turgenev they sometimes “wrap things up” in a clear enough way, or blatantly surprise us, but to actually pick them apart and understand them is more difficult because the stories do not contain any clear moral content at all. The subject of the stories is the experience itself. Smells, colors in the sky, breezes are given genuinely equal weight to the characters and dialogue – and the infinitesimal point of drama to which each story progresses ends up seeming to embody, in some mysterious way, the crucial essence of that experience. This is the effect of the form, and of his control with language, but it captures something real about life: the way – described by Proust many times over – that some certain detail of an experience can arbitrarily become, to an individual, the linchpin detail in the memory of that experience.

Another point of reference for me, and this is deeply stupid but god bless the internet for giving it a home, was text adventure games of the Infocom variety. In those games, an eerie sense of actual locality builds up around the reader/player, just from the sheer emphasis on descriptions of surroundings – an emphasis not found in many other kinds of writing. Turgenev’s calm, descriptive voice placing trees, waving grass, shifting clouds, dirt roads, sheds, shadows, etc. etc. etc. all around me was infinitely more artful and refined than the one that told me I was “in a valley in the forest beside a stream tumbling along a rocky bed” but had a similar effect of drawing me into a world of actual space that was, like Adventure, strangely quiet – almost more meditative than the actual outdoors. The characters in the stories sometimes seem palpably distant, seen only through the scrim of the narrator’s reflection on them, despite the fact that this reflection is completely unstated. We feel his presence because we know he’s the one smelling the air and noticing all those clouds. In one of the stories – probably my favorite one, “Bezhin Meadow,” the narrator gets lost walking home through dark fields, and the sense of physical, sensory situation, and of lostness, is very strong. This is a particular and peculiar sort of talent for an author to have.

I went to the right, through brushwood. Meanwhile night approached and grew on me like a storm-cloud; it was as if darkness was welling up from the ground on all sides, with the mists of evening, and streaming down from above at the same time. I fell in with a rough, overgrown path, and went along it, keeping a sharp look-out ahead. Soon it was all dark and still around me–there was only the call of quails from time to time. A small night-bird, flying low on soft and soundless wings, almost knocked into me and shied off to one side. I came to the end of the brushwood and continued along the edge of a field. It was already difficult to distinguish distant objects; the field made a white blur around me; beyond it was a gloomy, towering mass of darkness which looked nearer every moment. My footfalls sounded muffled in the stagnant air. The sky, which had become drained of colour, began to grow blue again–but, this time, with the blue of night. Against it, little stars were stirring and twinkling.

What I had taken for a wood turned out to be a dark, round hillock. “Then where on earth am I?” I repeated again…

The passage is much longer than that and it all accumulates wonderfully up to that point and beyond it. And then, only after this has all built up, we are introduced to the characters of this story, and after that to the “theme,” and then only at the very very end, to the dramatic throwaway that either is or isn’t the point of the whole thing. I know this kind of concentric spiral construction was common in 19th-century literature, but generally I’m used to such things leading to a big shocker that in retrospect makes clear how the buildup was meant to function. In these stories, though, the would-be payoff only lends value to what preceded it, rather than drawing value to itself. I said that already.

Another angle on the same: It is rare in literature that one reads about things described for their own sake. Here the scenery is not particularly the scenery for some action; it is simply scenery “in-itself,” to be experienced directly, perhaps in combination with other meanings and events but not mediated through them.

Another author for whom the scenery is the message: Tolkien.

These stories were beautiful and their quietude seemed philosophically durable; they did not feel at all antiquated, even though they’re entirely concerned with the details of a lost time and place. I very much enjoyed the book.

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Here’s a food-for-thought postscript. I recommended the book to my grandmother, who was inspired to do a search for Turgenev, and quickly came across a somewhat obscure early story, “The Jew” (1846). The stock character of the slimy hateful Jew goes with the territory of 19th-century Russian literature, but this story is strikingly noxious. (My grandmother notes that the Russian title itself, Жид, is in fact a slur – some translations give it as “The Yid.”) For my grandmother, that was it for Turgenev. I personally feel torn.

My initial reaction was honest surprise, because there is in fact a Jew in one of the stories in A Sportsman’s Notebook, portrayed in the same even, potentially sympathetic light as nearly everyone else in the book. From a certain point of view, the story is actually a sort of satire on the meaningless and undeserved prejudices that burden the Russian protagonist’s dealings with him. It may be worth noting that this is one of the two stories added 20 years after first publication. But there’s no denying that this early story, “The Jew,” is morally indefensible; it savors in the repugnance of the Jew’s amorality and the horrible pathos of his whining as he is executed.* And, most damning of all, that’s the entirety of the story; there’s nothing else in there giving it purpose.

This brings us to the old Wagner question – does it matter to us what terrible things the artist believed? In Turgenev’s case, what if he didn’t believe them his whole life? Or what if we can’t be sure what he really believed? A Sportsman’s Notebook is not in any way itself an anti-Semitic book; how relevant then is the issue? I generally don’t like the kind of thinking that holds grudges against inanimate objects; or, rather, boycotts against dead entities that cannot feel the sting of the boycott and will never learn their lesson. Outlawing “Tristan und Isolde” in Israel implicitly lends legitimacy to some of Wagner’s most hateful thinking: that anti-Semitism is the core of a rich philosophical vein, a whole aesthetic way of being, and that it can produce great art. “Tristan” doesn’t really have anything to do with Jews and is quite beautiful – holding it in contempt as “aesthetically anti-Semitic” is being awfully generous to anti-Semitism. Of course, the situation is more complicated – Wagner’s present-day admirers are the actual intended recipients of the boycott’s sting, and perhaps that’s not so unreasonable.

So as for Turgenev, “The Jew” I deem absolutely indefensible; A Sportsman’s Notebook I highly recommend, and in general that wouldn’t seem to me hypocritical. But in this case, discovering “The Jew” did in fact give me pause, and I still don’t know how to reconcile my feelings on the question.

The capacity for grotesque bigotry indicates an insensitivity to seeing the world accurately. These stories I so admired were all about the gentle, introspective observance of life. I read them in sympathy because I felt that the narrator was truly open – as open as I can be, at least – to things revealing themselves as they are. Prejudice is the very opposite of being open to things revealing themselves as they are, and learning that the quietly observing person at the center of these stories was capable of sneering racial contempt is not just a historical incidental; it is at direct odds with my reading of the stories. Their philosophy was opposed to it. Maybe this is a case of the reader projecting his own beliefs into a void, a blank self. Or maybe Turgenev was being insincere in one place or the other, or both. I don’t have an explanation for it. But it has indeed tarnished my reading. I note that the question of Turgenev’s ambiguous thoughts on Jews has been written up in several scholarly articles that I find online. I can understand why.

I give the book a strong aesthetic recommendation draped precariously over a moral question mark.

One more down. Four more to go before I’m caught up with myself.

* Actually, the tone of the story becomes peculiar toward the end, as though Turgenev is striving for something rich and humane, all within the context of this horrendous caricature. Maybe there is even some kind of twisted attempt at sympathy in there. All the worse, in a way. But there’s certainly room for debate about what particular effect he was going for. That’s not to say there’s room for debate about whether the story is founded on a hateful stereotype. Boy howdy is it ever.

John Hawkes (1925-1998)
The Cannibal (New Directions, 1949)

Roll #9 is 2332: The Cannibal by John Hawkes.

So can we talk about that cover? That is the most unacceptable cover I have ever seen. A swastika is always gonna be pretty rough going, but there can be mitigating circumstances. But in combination with a motorcycle? Forget about it. The effect is only bolstered by the typeface and the layout. And frankly the title doesn’t help either. This cover seeks to be offensive and succeeds, wildly. Way to go, cover designer Gilda Kuhlman. Note that Gilda Kuhlman (nee Hannah) was the second wife of Roy Kuhlman, whose first wife had been Ellen Raskin. I’m not sure what that’s worth but it’s interesting to me. Book design was a small world, I guess.

So I got assigned this book by the randomizer, found it – to my pleasure, in a nice old used copy at Westsider Books – and then had to immediately hide it until I could make a plain brown wrapper. I think I ended up using a page from a catalog with pictures of chairs on it. Did it not occur to Gilda Hannah Kuhlman that making your book cover scream “I AM AN ACTUAL NEO-NAZI” is a way to prevent people from wanting to buy it? If I saw a dude reading this book on the subway I’d stand somewhere else.

Also, to gradually approach the subject of the book itself, this is a terrible cover for this book. There is a motorcycle in it, true, and it is set in war-torn Germany (sort of). But it all takes place in a dream and a haze; the Nazi party isn’t really mentioned as such – I don’t think the word appears – and swastikas play no role that I can recall. Human degradation is the theme of the book, and the ghost-town shadow-puppet experimental-literature fantasyland “Germany” in which it takes place has very little to do with, and is poorly represented by, a big fat swastika. This itself might be a count against the book – in fact, I’m going to say it is – but the book still has to take ideological precedence over its own cover.

But yes, you might well ask: if this book isn’t actually or specifically about what happened in Germany during World War II, why is it “about” that in a dreamy way? And is it not perhaps a disservice to recent history, and to human tragedy, to use it as fodder for an aggressive avant-garde-ism; is it not, shall we say, in poor taste? Or, shall we say, obnoxious?

Or shall we say student-y. We shall probably not say the non-word “student-y” but we shall say that this book has the grim stubbled quality of the ambitious, self-regarding collegiate experimentalist. In a professorial introduction by Albert J. Guerard, we hear that this talented young writer has forged a genuinely new style that requires careful consideration and acclimation. What we do not hear, but what is true, is that this young writer is Albert J. Guerard’s student at Harvard and that Guerard has arranged for his publisher friends to publish this book, which will launch his student’s career. I’m not saying that such circumstances could never produce a work of true greatness. Nonetheless I found this information helpful, when I came by it, in giving some shape and category to my dissatisfactions.

I would esteem this a very worthy submission indeed, if I were a writing professor, and I would encourage this student fully. On the other hand I would not know exactly how to go about helping him improve.

Hawkes – who, please note, was 24 when he wrote this – had flunked his way out of his first year at Harvard, had then become an ambulance driver in Europe during the war, and then had a few years later eventually returned to finish his undergraduate education. The tone and subject of the book are derived from his war years, as are some descriptions in the book of various specific horrors. For example, there is a description of a chicken being killed in someone’s bare hands; this apparently is something Hawkes had occasion to do under some semi-desperate circumstances during his service. His basic artistic conception is perfectly sound: this kind of immediate, personal horror is both a nightmare symbol and actual symptom of the war as a whole. One could write a book on the ravages of war entirely in nightmare mode.

The problem is that he purports to have historical perspective even though the technique is utterly ahistorical. The book is in three parts: 1945, 1914, and then 1945 again. In 1914 we see the characters younger and get a smattering of World War I references, including a quasi-Kaiser and an abstract “reenactment” of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Then we return to their degraded World War II selves. The heavy implication is that we are learning something about how Germany came to be what it is, the ghosts of history that walk through the present. But unless I missed some subtle historical thesis – which I may have – Hawkes’s sense of history is actually just as impressionistic and limited in real depth as everything else in the book. All the historical specifics are a sophomoric pretense to an understanding that he doesn’t actually have. What he has written is a dream-impression of a ravaged town (and a contrasting impression in flashback); the insinuation that the whole thing is girded by an elaborate scheme of penetrating historical symbolism is, I suspect, just a smokescreen, which a more mature writer would have been confident enough to do without.

Okay, a break of several months occurs here in the writing of this entry because I’ve been very busy, and also because I felt a sudden trepidation about my attitude. I don’t actually know that much about German history, so where was I getting off saying this book didn’t either? Maybe it knew a lot more than I did and I was missing the whole point. So I went back and tried to reread it with a humbler and more attentive mind. Really, to reread the whole book. After the first section I felt reassured that my first reading had been pretty close to the mark, so I stopped. But it did put me back on track a bit, and some of the above is indeed a bit out of line.

The book is obviously attempting to be a psychic history of Germany, not a real one. But it is, and maybe I had underappreciated this, sincerely attempting to be a psychic history of Germany. I guess that’s not inherently a misguided task, but it’s a difficult one. Some historical specifics are in order – but which ones, and what order? How the history of human psychological experience relates to the history of events and artifacts is a deep and intricate question – for the philosopher, for the historian, for everyone. (What I found so wonderful about Auerbach’s Mimesis (still haven’t finished) is that he was making convincing inroads into this question.) Hawkes’ model for the relationship is, I stand by this, too simplistic and vague, and derived more from thinking about literary style than from thinking about humanity. But it was probably wrong for me to write that it was mere student-y pretension, which is an obnoxious criticism. His efforts to address something real certainly seem sincere enough. Sorry about that.

It’s my personal position that we must be very careful about the distinction and relationship between interior experience and exterior fact, and I feel that this book’s conflation of the two is due not just to poetic license but to an actual philosophical misapprehension. There it is in a nutshell.

Okay, that feels more fair. Now to the positive. The over-grim landscape felt a little ahead of its time – it felt as seedily gothic (or gothically seedy) as a music video, or some other late-20th-century fantasy of decay. I thought of music videos several times, not only because of the claustrophobic gray grime, but also because the formal construction was similar, intercutting among several semi-independent tableaus as they each become progressively morbid. The final surreal shocker in this book (from whence the title, hint hint) comes as the sick payoff of a long chain of vague ill omens. Just like on MTV. It’s actually very well delivered. For these things, for the purely aesthetic side of the book, Hawkes deserves some credit.

Even so, fantasies of decay aren’t really my cup of tea; and contrariwise, I don’t know that the teenagers whose cup of tea they are would ever find anything gratifying in this wordy book with the air of a college literary magazine. So I’m not sure I can recommend it. I don’t yet feel like I know the lay of the land well enough to really judge whether it merits inclusion in Bloom’s canon. But it’s hardly an obvious choice on any grounds I can see right now.

Here’s some sample text for those of you at home to make your own call. The aforementioned chicken-killing scene. Reader discretion is advised, I guess. This paragraph really sums up the whole book. If you like this, you’ll love The Cannibal, by John Hawkes.

“But you don’t have to take my word for it.” Cut to Albert J. Guerard.

Before dawn on the morning of the riot, Madame Snow stood alone by candlelight in a back room where cordwood had been piled, holding a stolen chicken struggling lightly beneath her fingers. She did not see the four stone walls or the narrow open window, and standing in a faded gown with the uneven hem that was once for balls, the untied soiled kimono flapping against her legs, she looked into the frightful eyes of the chicken and did not feel the cold. Her bare feet were white, the toes covered with grains of sawdust. The door behind her was locked, tallow dripped from the gilt holder and the bird fluttered, tried to shake its wings from the firm grasp. The old woman’s pulse beat slowly, more slowly, but steadily, and the narrow unseen window began to turn grey. The feathers, bitten with mange, trembled and breathed fearfully. The soft broken claws kicked at her wrist. For a moment the Kaiser’s face, thin, depressed, stared in at the cell window, and then was gone, feeling his way over a land that was now strange to his touch. The old woman watched the fowl twisting its head, blinking the pink-lidded eyes, and carefully she straddled the convulsing neck with two fingers, tightened them across the mud-caked chest, and with the other hand seized the head that felt as if it were all bone and moving bits of scale. The pale yellow feet paddled silently backwards and forwards, slits breathed against her palm. Madame Snow clenched her fists and quickly flung them apart so that the fowl’s head spurted across the room, hit the wall and fell into a heap of shavings, its beak clicking open and shut, eyes staring upwards at the growing light. She dropped the body with its torn neck and squeezed the fingermarks into a bucket of water, and stooping in the grey light, squinted, and plucked the feathers from the front of her kimono.

Whew, glad that’s done with. It’s been months and months and months that this has been sitting here waiting to be finished. Even more months since I actually read it. What happened to all my time?

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell (1982; this edition Vintage, 1989)

Roll #8 gives me 1645, which is the last of four Rilke selections. I fall back to the first: “Selected Poetry (including the Duino Elegies).” Bloom specifies that he means the collection translated by Stephen Mitchell so that’s what I bought, brand new at Barnes & Noble. It doesn’t look brand new anymore, see above, because it was shuttled around in various bags and eventually had wine spilled on it – how literary! It had the opportunity to get so beat up because I took a long time with it.

It took a long time.

Here follows some stuff I wrote months ago while I was still in the middle of reading it. Even though I wasn’t yet finished, it’s written in the past tense because I thought it would serve as the basis for my eventual entry here… which I suppose it is now doing, but only in quotation marks. Or rather, between these horizontal lines:

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This was heavy going, not because anything was obscure, but because real emotional understanding of the poems required me to find my way to his philosophical head-space at every sitting, and that often wasn’t a place I wanted to go. He was talking about the big issues – life, death, and meaning – and seeing them in a cold, modern, sober way… but without the consolations of sobriety! He writes about the terrifying indifference of the real world, and the ways we hide from it and create our own homely ideas of beauty and meaning (same as Camus, same as many people in the past hundred fifty years) – but he writes about these seemingly post-Romantic ideas from within a resolutely Romantic framework. The indifference of the universe and the painful absoluteness of death and the illusions under which we live – all this stuff is treated via gods and visions and mythic figures, and all of it is made extremely personal to the poet. The life of the writing is emotional struggle, cast in basically religious terms. To the Romantic mind, this indifference of the universe to human affairs is absolutely shattering – almost incompatible, really. It’s pretty much the exact antithesis of the Romantic, which tells us that the emotions of the individual should be the basic frame of reference. Seems like once you can see the forest for the trees, that will inform the way you talk about trees. But Rilke is constantly in both frames at once, determinedly writing about what’s outside the cave but only in the language of shadows. He writes about philosophy but never lets the pain out of sight. That’s why it was hard reading – because to be comprehending it meant finding my way back to that pain.

It didn’t seem like I was being brought toward pain because Rilke specifically thought that was the right way to think about these things – it just seemed like the only way he was capable of thinking about them.

The Plague moved me because it was a vision of how life must extend beyond the losing battle against meaninglessness. Rilke only offered (me) a sort of update on the creepy old 19th-century Tod und Verklärung type attitude: that only when we admit defeat, when we surrender to philosophical death, only then will the portals of transcendent beauty be opened to us. And the saints and Orpheus and a nymph with a vase and the whole gang will all be there. I get what he’s saying, and he’s saying it better than almost anyone else I’ve ever read – but all that Tristan und Isoldery is a serious distraction.

I guess what I’m really saying is: the standard task of adjusting for the work’s period/culture of origin was in this case burdensome because the subject matter is too important to me. As period pieces, as art, these are very beautiful and I was deeply, truly, impressed by them. As communication from human to human about life, there’s a bit of a generation gap, and so the lecture started to grate. Because the meaning of life is still a sensitive subject. As in I KNOW, MOM, yes, we’re still trying to figure out how to think about death! Enough about Orpheus, Mom! Nobody talks that way anymore! I’m going to my room.

Rilke’s most famous poem has him (or you, really) looking at an “archaic torso of apollo” and as the poem ends, realizing in a flash “You must change your life.” Yes, this is what art can do to a person. But Rilke’s art does not – it seems to me – endeavor to do for me what the torso did for him. His art is not an example to show us the way (or even, like the torso, simply shame us) – it’s a picture of him, looking about at the world in very fine-grained consternation. And yes, we all have reason to look about in consternation – the struggle and the frustration are there for all of us – but he paints that struggle with such fervor and craft that you’d think he thought he was getting something done other than just naming it.

This art is exquisitely put together, of great aesthetic value, serious-minded, has every reason to exist, but can’t really do anything for me. It doesn’t offer me any solace or advice, and it also doesn’t slap me hard in the face with something I’ve been denying. It takes things that I know, that are difficult and sad, and simply works them toward beauty. But beauty itself isn’t in such short supply in this world that I personally need to seek it out in the form of things that are merely difficult and sad.

This was a rewarding reading experience in that I was exposed to it and it is admirable, and that it is one of the well-made things that’s out there on this earth, and now I’ve seen it. But it was not rewarding in re: my soul, and if not that, why couldn’t it have been about pirate treasure? I hope my next book is about pirate treasure.

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I even edited out a bunch of it, if you can believe that.

Anyway, I’m afraid I must now go on to say still more, because the preceding was written before I had properly finished with The Duino Elegies, Rilke’s acknowledged masterpiece and the star attraction of the book. Their 60 pages took me much longer than the rest of the book because they are that much richer; they are worked out at greater length and depth than anything else here. Though some of the above was written in response to the first of the ten elegies, by the time I was done I felt they actually addressed my complaints; they felt like a hard-earned opening out of Rilke’s worldview, exactly the “reach beyond” that I had felt was lacking. There was a sense that his ego had finally dropped out of view and that he was writing to save the world rather than to show off. This is indeed a fine line, in the arts, but crossing it makes all the difference. In his really excellent introduction, Robert Hass writes that some of the early poems “just slightly… tend to congratulate the poet and his reader for having feelings and experiencing beauty.” I appreciated his having said it. The Duino Elegies, however, read deeply, cannot be confused with self-promotion; they are a heartfelt effort to grapple with weight and to do a philosophical service. And there really is no reading them shallowly. That, again, is why this took so long.

I must admit to having lost touch with the depths of these poems in the months since I made the effort; I’m flipping through them now to refresh my memory but it’s not an experience so easily refreshed. What I retain is a sense of a rich, savory melancholy, converting to and from deep thought. A bit like this – (which, good lord, was destroyed in a fire last week??!!) – but a really superb visual mood analogue is this painting, about which one of the Elegies was explicitly written, back in a time when to see this tremendously famous Picasso, you had to be lucky enough to know the lady who owned it and be invited to stay in her living room, staring at it, while you work on a poem.

Stephen Mitchell, who we last encountered as someone whose translation of Gilgamesh I didn’t read, has here done a job of translation that I would call “good.” The English is readable, unpretentious, and conscientiously enough matched to the German, which appears opposite, that one can more or less easily read the originals using the translation as guide. Which is what I considered myself to be doing. However, Mitchell’s efforts to exactly preserve the meaning of complicated interlocking ideas are, on occasion, both overly apparent and unsuccessful. Untranslatably elegant German conceptual arrangements are rendered in solutions that are often ambiguous, in ways I don’t think he foresaw. There were quite a few places where I had to retranslate the German myself before I realized that he intended some meek little “as” or “for” to function as a crucial logical connector. There was also at least one place where, on translating it myself, I realized that he had gotten something wrong in the meaning; the speaker rather than the addressed was the actor in a sentence, or something of that sort. Also – and it’s probably too much to ask – but his English is not actually beautiful. When the ideas were rich and intimate I wanted to be surrounded by rich and intimate sound; sorry, only on the German side of the page. The English feels like it has been worked out carefully rather than fluidly. It reads like exactly what it is; a great poet translated by a smart, touchy-feely guy who likes translating.

This is a fine and admirable volume and I’m not saying I think there are better translations out there to be had.

This has been long enough. There is much more to be said about Rilke but I’ll either say it in the comments when people write in to complain, or we’ll all just agree to let it go unsaid.

As for the sample poem. One of the last things Rilke wrote (“May or June 1925”), and one of the last things in this book, is this odd “trilogy,” which as you’ll see from the subtitle, he wrote expressly with the intent that it would be set to music by Ernst Krenek, then 25 years old. Krenek did it the next year, only a few months before Rilke’s death. Don’t know what Rilke thought of the settings, but as they were the ultimate realization of his wishes for these poems, it’s odd – at least to me – that they are far far more difficult to come by than the text itself, which is in every bookstore. So I’m putting them up here even though it’s a copyright violation; again my justification is that the fairly exclusive readership here puts a very real limit on the potential scope of damages to Universal Edition, which I estimate at $0 if not less. When this site gets featured on the news, I’ll take it down, along with the Absil.

The score.

That’s my scan of the New York Public Library copy. It seems to be a first edition, and judging by the pencilling on the cover, someone seems to have at one point taken it to the 15th floor (of the Steinway Building?) to the office of the League of Composers to give to Mrs. Reis so that Mr. Bamberger could play from it during the concert. That is, the concert on February 27, 1938 at the Cosmopolitan Club, at which Mr. Krenek himself played his Suite for Piano. Too bad they didn’t get him to sign this score while they had him there. This opus has been recorded; you can buy this or this if you want to hear it. Or just listen to the samples from the first link to get an idea.

Anyway, the score contains the German; here’s Mitchell’s English. For what it’s worth, this is hardly one of the most successful (or ambitious) poems in the collection, but it is very much characteristic. I think it shows up Mitchell’s weaknesses, too. Krenek does a reasonable if dated job of trying to make something respectful and intelligent out of it but he illustrates the text too literally, and overall misses the pensive quality that seems essential to Rilke. His opening page comes the closest, I think.

O LACRIMOSA
(trilogy for future music of Ernst Křenek)

I

Oh tear-filled figure who, like a sky held back,
grows heavy above the landscape of her sorrow.
And when she weeps, the gentle raindrops fall,
slanting upon the sand-bed of her heart.

Oh heavy with weeping. Scale to weigh all tears.
Who felt herself not sky, since she was shining
and sky exists only for clouds to form in.

How clear it is, how close, your land of sorrow,
beneath the stern sky’s oneness. Like a face
that lies there, slowly waking up and thinking
horizontally, into endless depths.

II

It is nothing but a breath, the void.
And that green fulfillment
of blossoming trees: a breath.
We, who are still the breathed-upon,
today still the breathed-upon, count
this slow breathing of earth,
whose hurry we are.

III

Ah, but the winters! The earth’s mysterious
turning-within. Where around the dead
in the pure receding of sap,
boldness is gathered,
the boldness of future springtimes.
Where imagination occurs
beneath what is rigid; where all the green
worn thin by the vast summers
again turns into a new
insight and the mirror of intuition;
where the flowers’ color
wholly forgets that lingering of our eyes.

A.R. Ammons (1926-2001)
Collected Poems: 1951-1971 (1972)
396 pp.

Roll 8. 2448: A.R. Ammons: Selected Longer Poems, but it’s preceded by Collected Poems so we go with that first. Dug out of the Brooklyn Public Library closed stacks again. It turns out it’s still in print, though. In a nice-looking edition, too.

About Ungaretti I said that my acclimation to poetry may well have to be a harsh dive into cold water, but that all the same, I doubted anyone would have recommended that I start with Giuseppe Ungaretti. I can, however, imagine that someone might have recommended I start with A. R. Ammons. I’m glad I read this, I enjoyed reading it, and I think I’ve made some definite poetry progress.

This was poetry not as “great art,” but as someone’s habit. It was like thought, the way that a diary is like thought.

That poetic language can actually resemble thought more closely than prose – because the human mind is loose even though reason itself is rigid – is something that has taken me some getting to to get to. Maybe poetry is out of fashion because in these scientific days we need better indoctrination in the difference between mind and idea. Poetry seems to me to be more about the former, in an era that heavily emphasizes the latter. Perhaps the language of psychology passing into common parlance – or something like that – has de-aestheticized* the inner experience. We tend to see the haze within quasi-scientifically, as something to be sorted and known accurately from without, if possible. Or ignored.

Earlier (like, pre-19th century) art is not particularly interested in the individual, and on the other hand, the “Romantic” idea of portraying nightmares and passions seems awfully self-pitying and counterproductive compared to Dr. Phil and Oprah and so forth, whose message of common-sense reasoned self-possession I wholly endorse, irritating and shallow though it may be.

This is exactly what I did not know about art until quite recently, then: the dividing line – that there is, or can be, a value in knowing the inner experience as is, consolation in recognizing it in art, and also value in this kind of knowledge without framework, without ground rules. That knowing what it is like to be alive is knowing something real, even if we can’t say what exactly we’re talking about. That it is possible to traffic in this kind of knowledge usefully and discriminately, even if sub-rationally. That poetry could be a real tour of real places, despite eschewing reason, because the interior life is both real and unreasoned. And that language, being in its strictest form a record of reason, must be handled specially and abnormally to accomplish this task for which it isn’t quite cut out. You have to package the not-quite-reason in sloppy poetic chunks of words or else it won’t survive being expressed.

A.R. Ammons himself, in fact, has a typical and lovely metaphor for this last notion in his Essay on Poetics in this very volume:

…
stop on any word and language gives way:

the blades of reason, unlightened by motion, sink in,
melting through, and reality’s cold murky waters
accept the failure: for language heightens by dismissing reality,

the sheet of ice a salience controlling, like a symbol,
level of abstraction, that has a hold on reality and suppresses
it, though formed from it and supported by it:

motion and artificiality (the impositional remove from reality)
sustain language: nevertheless, language must
not violate the bit, event, percept,

fact–the concrete–otherwise the separation that means
the death of language shows…

Which brings me to the book itself and how it relates. Ammons helped solidify my confidence in everything above because he is a modern-day American man, living, like me and my friends, within an essentially scientific philosophical framework, who is nonetheless writing from and about thought and experience, not rationality. In reading his musings about wind and sand and seeds and flowers, in terms of patterns and anomalies and larger patterns, in terms of vague general principles of perception and being like the one vs. the many, nexuses vs. peripheries… I recognized the quality and flavor of these thoughts, even in their specifics, and also while recognizing it, knew clearly (because Ammons knew it clearly) that this was not quite reason. That it was a sort of thing that lived in my head that was actually served better by loose, poetic language than it ever could be by straight talk. That was deeply satisfying!

Ammons’ poetry was also satisfying in itself. It was, at its best, a deep and analytic exploration of the kind of thought and experience that I found sympathetic in that long silent film of eddying water and swirling smoke I wrote about last year. His subject matter is mostly nature, observed with extreme care and precision, but the real subject is the same as his technique: meditation on the world. Which is where my mind goes when I meditate on nature – back in on itself, or down to the underlying forms – so I felt very much at home with these. When I understood them.

Of course they’re not all “good” in the sense of deserving isolated attention – there are hundreds of poems in here, most of them seemingly unrevised trains-of-thought – and that was actually reassuring and freed me to enjoy them more naturally. Reading the whole collection also meant gradually growing accustomed to the particulars of his semi-private language. The intended resonances of certain words within his language, such as “saliences” and “suasions,” only slowly became clear. I was okay with that; it was satisfying to know that I’d done it and gotten more fluent at it as I went, just as it’s satisfying to observe oneself getting better at any repeated task.

The poems are assembled in chronological order, but without identifying the original collections that are compiled here. The first 50 pages or so were less pleasurable early work in a different, more mannered style. That, ultimately, wasn’t a problem either – watching that style evolve and fall away over the years, as Ammons grew more and more comfortable just writing stuff down, so to speak, was in itself satisfying to observe.

One last thing I took away from this. There is art designed expressly to communicate with outsiders, and then there is art produced simply as a function of the artist, as a process. Outsiders are welcome but no special accommodations have been made for them. I have generally frowned at the latter; cutting the audience out of the equation seems selfish or at least self-centered. But having read this work, which was far closer to “mere process” than I am usually comfortable with, showed me that I shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss art just because it seems oblivious to me and I’m implicitly expected to run out to meet it. Passing through these 400-ish pages was more like very casually strolling out to meet the artist by following the sound of his typewriter, somewhere near a suburban window in the late 60s, and finding, when I got there, that I approved of what he was doing after all. So there’s a moral there for me to take away.

Everyone always likes sample poems, right? I typed up this one even though it’s hardly one of his finest and isn’t totally characteristic either. But when I first turned to it in the book was one of the moments when I took the time to articulate some of the stuff above to myself. It’s a poem about lines, or rather about perceptions of lines. That I could nod at it and think, “yeah, he nailed it, lines are like that” struck me. There was absolutely no way to paraphrase in rational terms what I had nodded at – I was nodding at the recognition of the shared sub-rational mind. Ah-ha!

Lines

Lines flying in, out: logarithmic
        curves coiling
toward an infinitely inward center: lines
    weaving in, threads lost in clustral scrawl,
        weaving out into loose ends,
wandering beyond the border of gray background,
    going out of vision,
        not returning;
or, returning, breaking across the boundary
    as new lines, discontinuous,
        come into sight:
fiddleheads of ferns, croziers of violins,
    convoluted spherical masses, breaking through
        ditchbanks where briar
stem-dull will
    leave and bloom:
        haunch line, sickle-like, turning down, bulging, nuzzling
under, closing into
    the hidden, sweet, dark meeting of lips:
        the spiralling out
or in
    of galaxies:
        the free-running wavy line, swirling
configuration, halting into a knot
    of curve and density: the broken,
        irreparable filament: tree-winding vines, branching,
falling off or back, free,
    the adventitious preparation for possibility, from
        branch to branch, ash to gum:
the breaker
    hurling into reach for shape, crashing
        out of order, the inner hollow sizzling flat:
the longnecked, uteral gourd, bass line
    continuous in curve,
        melodic line filling and thinning:
concentrations,
    whirling masses,
        thin leaders, disordered ends and risks:
explosions of clusters, expansions from the
    full radial sphere, return’s longest chance:
        lines exploring, intersecting, paralleling, twisting,
noding: deranging, clustering.

And now down here I want to recount one more thing. One day while I was reading this one on the subway (occasionally wondering what I would think of any other person that I saw reading such a thing), and half-musing about “what is poetry really” and “what kind of relationship can I or anyone else today really have with poetry” a guy with a sales pitch walked into the car and right in front of me started talking to us all by saying loudly, “Who here likes reading poetry?” Which seemed to me like a very strange coincidence, and for a second I considered holding out my book and saying, “look, I do!” But I didn’t. Nonetheless it seemed like what he was about to say was meant especially to encourage me that poetry was still alive and well. He continued, in a practiced stream of oration:

If you like reading poetry, you should check out my book, “Corner Stores in the Middle of the Block.” That’s my poetry book, that’s me on the front – and that [shifting his wares] is my novel, that’s me on the back. [on the front was a sexy lady] It’s called “Pretty Ugly.” You can get them from me or they’re also on the line at “Poetry Is A Live” dot com. That’s my book, there’s 38 poems in there. I have a poem that’s not in the book, and it goes like this: “If America became a cashless country / what would bums beg for?” I have another poem that I wrote for my sister, and it goes like this: “The difference between a pretty girl and a ugly girl is / ugly girl’s a better cook.” I have another poem, and it goes like this…”

and so on. If you go to “poetry is a live dot com” you can, oddly enough, see video of the guy bouncing around on the subway platform – i.e. more or less what I saw.

The only point of this anecdote is that at the exact moment that I was wondering whether poetry was, for want of a better word, alive, someone amazingly showed up to give me seriously mixed messages on that very issue.

* Maybe “de-personalized” or “de-humanized” would be a better way to say it – except those sound so bitter!

by Albert Camus (1913-1960)
translation into English (1948) of La Peste by Stuart Gilbert (1883-1969).

Next roll: 1304. That’s The Plague by Camus. The first listed work by Camus, at position 1303, to which I would normally fall back, is The Stranger, but ha HA! I’ve actually already read The Stranger! Even by my most self-critical standard, I’ve read The Stranger – I read it only last year (since this site started!) and remember it well. In general, anything I read prior to graduating from college is going to be considered suspect, which means there are only a very few great books I’ll be able to check off this list. But this is one of them, and I got to it on only the 7th try.

Furthermore, a copy of The Plague, seen above, had already been sitting on my bookshelf, having been given to me for my birthday last year by my grandmother, after hearing that I had read and enjoyed The Stranger, which she had given me previously. And my roommate, helping himself to my books, had very recently read my copy of The Plague and strongly recommended it to me. And then the magic-number machine spat it out for me. Think of that. Which is lucky, since apparently I’m more likely to listen to random.org than to my grandmother or my roommate.

The Plague was excellent, a masterpiece. Very powerful.

This sincere praise is pretty bland compared to my elaborate whining about books I liked less, but that’s the way it goes.

The Stranger impressed me as an intelligent, memorable, well-conceived, well-controlled piece of work. But this was monumental in a way that the earlier work wasn’t – it felt important, which is a word I generally don’t feel comfortable applying to a piece of art. In this case I feel comfortable. The sense of moral purpose behind this work was intense, and the depth of thought justified that intensity.

It’s a commonplace to say that the function of art is to show us things about life, about the real world, but often this seems to be a bland justification after-the-fact for art that, in practice, feels like it has some other kind of aspirations. This was art that felt like it wanted to show me something about the real world, like the author was aware of the full scope of what he as a writer might try to accomplish morally – and was attempting it. I felt, in reading it, that the book wanted to convey a moral content more than it wanted to be, say, “intelligent” or “fine,” and that it only was those things – which it very much was – because they contribute to the power of the work as a whole. The ultimate purpose of which is moral.

It’s been hard for me to write anything here about the book in part because I felt obliged to summarize that moral content, and found that I wasn’t quite sure how to articulate what had nonetheless struck me as vital and coherent in the reading. But – it is also a commonplace (common, anyway) to say that one writes a poem rather than prose because the specific intended “meaning” can only be expressed as a poem. And I think the same could apply here. The philosophical content of this book has been expressed as a novel because the novel conveys a whole that would have to be fractured to be expressed more prosaically. Inherently philosophical though that whole may be. The book is a vision rather than a message.

That said, there is at least one facet of the moral content that I can articulate (and I see that it again relates to the general philosophical line I’ve found myself on recently). That being: Life is meaningless and all our values, emotions, institutions, customs, etc. are illusions, flimsy constructions. And the clarity of this knowledge is of course a kind of horrible, inescapable, deadening sobriety for those who attain it. But, NONETHELESS, despite life’s being meaningless, we must continue to do good for one another. That it is possible to know that only we ourselves imbue all things with meaning, and still, in all clarity, believe that these meanings deserve to be honored.

I think this is about as vital a philosophical message as could be conveyed to modern times. The elephant in the room of our contemporary culture is that everybody already knows that ultimately everything is meaningless. Camus describes a society that resists and resists this knowledge as it is gradually worn down by indifferent nature (only his most intellectually inclined protagonists already know it). The society I live in, far safer and more affluent, nonetheless is much closer to the philosophical precipice at all times. It’s just sort of in the air, and we’re all pretty much braced to wince at – or shrug at – or in some cases, try to drown out by protesting – the sad but unsurprising news that we’re evolutionarily programmed to believe everything that we believe and feel everything that we feel, and that the indifferent universe discovered by science is the real bottom line. We would love to turn back from this knowledge to a time of real beliefs, but we can’t in good faith, because the arguments that got us here can never be erased and will always be rational. So we’re stuck here, and I think this new philosophical reality is, at some level, responsible for most of what ails the world today – because nobody can quite figure out what we’re supposed to do when we know that nothing is important important, “in the scheme of things.” But Camus, 60 years ago, was already showing us characters who are at that precipice, or over it, and who are driven to do good anyway. They believe that the meanings that we share, even though we invent them and know that we do, can still be worthy. This is a next step for all of us, a step that the human race as a whole must gradually take. It’s something that we can all nod at, but to feel it in the gut of the culture will take a long time.

I assume this is what is meant by the quote on the back cover, from the New York Times: “Of such importance to our time that to dismiss it would be to blaspheme against the human spirit.” That’s strong stuff but by the end I recognized the sentiment. I didn’t, by the way, think that this book about death and meaninglessness was “depressing.” Like I said, these days we’ve all kind of got that in our veins, between the lines of everything.* What was far more striking to me about The Plague was the fact that it knew this and was still hopeful, human-affirming. A grim and sober kind of hope – a mournful kind of hope – but extremely clear-eyed and thus more affecting than anything sentimental might have been.

I don’t always want all this in a book, and there are many sorts of things I often want out of a book that this did not provide, or provided only feebly. But what it was, it was with great force. Definitely one of the two or three best books I’ve ever read.

* Notice how I shrugged off The Floating Opera even as it said this seemingly shocking stuff, simply because it wasn’t well-written enough – nihilism itself gets a yawn, and trumping nihilism with more nihilism is just doodling.