Surviving Transition

‘As I Lay Dying’ remains one of the most perplexing novels of the modernist canon

2018-07-18T16:43:00.000+02:00

To hear William Faulkner tell it, to write As I Lay Dying he “took this family and subjected them to the two greatest catastrophes which man can suffer – flood and fire, that’s all”. That’s all. And yet his 1930 tour de force, which he began the day after Wall Street crashed on October 24 1929, remains one of the most perplexing novels of the modernist canon.

As I Lay Dying is the third novel Faulkner set in his imagined Yoknapatawpha County, which is based on north-eastern Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. To some extent, the novel’s raw story is indeed simple. It narrates the cursed 10-day journey of the poor white Bundren family from their hill-country farm to the county seat of Jefferson to bury Addie, their wife and mother, in accordance with her wishes.

The novel is pervaded by the sweat, hunger and poverty that characterised the Depression-era South – and indeed much of the nation at this time. It also conjures the dialect, customs, characters and landscape of rural Mississippi as it deploys the region’s vernacular narrative forms such as the tall tale. We know, for instance, that Faulkner read and loved George Washington Harris’s 1867 collection of humorous tales concerning Sut Lovingood, that dialect-speaking “nat’ral born durn’d fool” whose influence we can trace forward to Anse, the Bundren patriarch.

The influence of George Washington Harris’s most famous caricature, Appalachian farmer Sut Lovingood, is evident in the character of Anse Bundren in As I Lay Dying. Photo Credit: Justin Howard/Wikimedia Commons When Cash, the oldest of the five Bundren children, breaks his leg in the disastrous river crossing, Anse decides to pour concrete over the damaged leg to form a cast. “Why didn’t Anse carry you to the nearest saw mill and stick your leg in the saw?” the local doctor asks Cash in stunned amazement. “That would have cured it. Then you could have stuck his head into the saw and cured a whole family.”

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of As I Lay Dying – and this is a feature that has caught the attention of so many readers and critics – is the frequent mismatch between character and speech. That is to say, the language – the diction, syntax and register – of the monologues is often incommensurate with the character who is doing the speaking or thinking.

Take, for example, eight-year-old Vardaman’s first monologue, in which he describes his brother Jewel’s horse:

It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components – snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a co-ordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is. I see him dissolve – legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames and float upon the dark in fading solution; all one yet neither; all either yet none.

These are surely not the words and thoughts of an uneducated farm boy. What is Faulkner up to here? Early critics faulted him for this apparent rupture in voice and character. They simply could not abide that his poor whites did not sound like poor whites. Had he, they wondered, simply made a mistake?

I would suggest that it is this very problem of narrative, language and representation – how to represent the interior life of someone like Vardaman? – that Faulkner is interested in, not only in As I Lay Dying but in so much of his fiction.

As the scholar Dorothy Hale has argued, Faulkner endeavoured to find ways to represent the private self – that is, a self radically removed from a public self bound by convention and common sense. So, because in Faulkner’s universe the deeply private self looks and sounds radically different from the public self, Vardaman can then talk or think about “the dark...resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components” – this is how his deeply private self just might style it.

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All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

2018-07-16T10:17:00.001+02:00

Here is a novel that could so easily have been loud. It is set among large events: the fight for Indian independence and the second world war. It features characters from history who enter the lives of the novel’s fictional characters, often to dramatic effect – the poet Rabindranath Tagore, the singer Begum Akhtar, the dancer and critic Beryl de Zoete and the German painter and curator Walter Spies. It has at its heart a young boy whose mother leaves him to live in another country, and whose father responds to this crisis by also leaving the child for an extended period of time, and who is later imprisoned for his anti-British activism. There are many reasons to turn up the volume dial.

But readers of Anuradha Roy, whose previous novel Sleeping on Jupiter was longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker prize, know that shoutiness or showiness is never her style. She is a writer of great subtlety and intelligence, who understands that emotional power comes from the steady accretion of detail. Amid all the great events and characters of history, she chooses as her narrator a horticulturalist known throughout by his nickname, Myshkin – “a man who chose neither pen nor sword but a trowel”.

Myshkin is nine years old when his mother leaves him and his father in the fictitious Indian town of Muntazir, and embarks on a new life with Spies. Muntazir is 20 or so miles from the Himalayan foothills, and its name means, in Urdu, “one who waits impatiently”. After his mother’s departure, Myshkin’s life is spent anxiously waiting – for her letters to arrive, for her to return. In later years, he compares that waiting to “blood being drained away from our bodies until one day there was no more left”.

The older Myshkin, a man in his 60s, narrates the story. He is the adult version of the child whose blood drained away, now living quietly, more at home among trees than people. In the course of this deliberately self-contained life, a bulky envelope arrives one day. It has something to do with his mother, he knows, and he cannot bring himself either to open it or to throw it away. Instead, his narration takes us back to his mother’s childhood, and then to his own childhood. He is a man seeking to understand why his mother, Gayatri, made the choice she did – and to this end he delves into the unusual freedom of her adolescence, compared with the rigidity and constraint of her married existence in 1930s India.

She was an artist and dancer married to a man who saw dance as scandalous and art as irrelevant, particularly when set against the great matters of history in which he chose to be involved as a member of an anticolonial organisation, the Society for Indian Patriots. Into her world steps Spies, bringing with him new possibilities. (It would be best for the unknowing reader not to search out biographical details on Spies – knowing them might detract from some of the surprises of the plot.)

But Gayatri’s own life and art and Myskhin’s memories of his parents’ marriage are not sufficient to explain to him why his mother did what she did. He looks for answers elsewhere, searching in literature for insight into the tensions between women’s desires and the world’s expectations of them. To this end, the novel gives some space to discussing the Indian poet Maitreyi Devi, who wrote about her early romance with the Romanian writer Mircea Eliade. It’s perhaps the only point in the book that doesn’t feel entirely well judged – Devi’s story could have done with occupying either far more, or less, space in the story, but even so it adds to our understanding of Myshkin’s quality of searching, the wound inside him that won’t ever heal.

Part of Roy’s skill as a writer is shown in her ability to reveal the awful consequences of Gayatri’s choices while retaining great compassion for those choices. This novel is not interested in condemning absent mothers. By contrast, Roy is refreshingly unimpressed by the anti-imperial activities of Myshkin’s father – who seeks freedom from being ruled while behaving like a tyrant in his own home. The world that rewards men for their public actions and forgives them their private cruelties, placing national politics above gender politics, is one that Roy slices through in her prose, though always obliquely.

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The Tragic Sense- Joseph Conrad

2018-05-27T21:21:00.004+02:00

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) remains the greatest English language novelist since Charles Dickens, and many of the best writers of the 20th century, including H.L. Mencken, Ernest Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot, paid homage to his excellence or came under his influence. And as one learns from the Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff’s new book, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, Conrad was a hero to William Faulkner, André Gide, and Thomas Mann. What’s more, “He has turned up in the pages of Latin American writers from Jorge Luis Borges to Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez. He’s been cited as an influence by Robert Stone, Joan Didon, Philip Roth, and Ann Patchett; by W.G. Sebald and John le Carré.”

A Pole by birth, for 20 years a merchant seaman by profession, a late-blooming novelist for whom English was his third language (after French and his native Polish), a spinner of yarns about seafaring ordeals and romances with dusky beauties, Conrad has been thought of by some as an exotic, a mere curiosity. Virginia Woolf denigrated his claims to high seriousness and—equally important in her snobbish milieu—to Englishness: his principal appeal was to “boys and young people,” he couldn’t properly speak the language he wrote in, and he had the “air of mystery” of the perpetual exile, a person of no fixed address.

But what Conrad really possessed was an imagination of global reach, a far departure from Woolf’s Bloomsbury insularity. His mind roved from the Congo in Heart of Darkness (1899), where a representative of pan-European moral genius encounters primitive savagery and discovers the darkness in his own heart, to Java and Borneo in Lord Jim (1900), where an English country parson’s son flees disgrace and finds a second chance at fantastic heroism; from a South American country of the author’s own invention in Nostromo (1904), where a native-born Costaguanero entrepreneur of English heritage, together with a San Francisco financier, a Parisian boulevardier, and an Italian stevedore fall under the fateful influence of a silver mine seemingly inexhaustible in its wealth and malevolence, to a seedy shop in the imperial city of London in The Secret Agent (1907), where idiot anarchists and socialists meet to plot their assault on civilization; from comfortable bourgeois Geneva in Under Western Eyes (1911), where an English expatriate struggles to understand the alien sensibilities of Russian expatriates connected to a political assassination in explosive St. Petersburg, and back again to Java in Victory (1915), where an itinerant Swedish businessman with a taste for fashionable nihilism believes he has found earthly salvation in a romantic misalliance with a traveling musician but runs up against incarnate evil.

Wherever the plot takes Conrad, the imagined world remains always distinctively his own: a place of darkness penetrated intermittently by shafts of heroic light, which tend to be extinguished in the end, for irony and tragedy set the terms of existence here, and any brighter spirits can last only briefly in this stifling atmosphere. The sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose 1924 bronze bust is the iconic rendering of Conrad, saw in his subject a tragic figure with a moral resemblance to his fictional heroes: “Conrad gave me a feeling of defeat; but defeat met with courage.” That is the best one can customarily hope for in Conrad’s world, the closest one comes to victory.

Conrad’s bleakness was his birthright; his courage was earned over a lifetime. (For the facts of Conrad’s life I have relied on Jasanoff’s book—strong on biography, lackluster as literary criticism—and on Jeffrey Meyers’s 1991 Joseph Conrad: A Biography.) Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in Berdychiv, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire (plus ça change…), he was welcomed into this world by a poem his father wrote, “To my son born in the 85th year of Muscovite oppression”:

Baby, son, tell yourself,
You are without land, without love,
Without country, without people,
While Poland—your Mother is in her grave.

Thus metaphorically orphaned and dispossessed at birth, Konrad, as everyone would call him, was blessed and cursed with a name resonant of nationalistic exaltation and sorrow. The Polish Romantic arch-poet Adam Mickiewicz, in the 1828 poem Konrad Wallenrod, sings of a Lithuanian knight’s vengeance on Teutonic oppressors, and in Mickiewicz’s play Dziady another Konrad beholds Poland “as a son would gaze / Upon his father broken upon the wheel.” So young Korzeniowski was thrust into the great world of history and political romance without asking for the privilege. He would dwell there, not exactly willingly, all his days.

His father, Apollo, a proud member of the Polish nobility, the szlachta—numerous as Saudi princes but not nearly as prosperous—felt duty-bound to lend his talents to the Polish independence movement. His talents were chiefly literary, and in 1861 he became editor of a Warsaw journal of politics and culture. But the national liberation underground allured him, and he joined the most radical revolutionary faction. Late one night came the inevitable knock on the door, and Apollo was frog-marched to the jail for political prisoners. Six months later, without trial, a military tribunal sentenced the insurrectionist and his family to exile. The fabled hospitality of Russia’s northeastern provinces awaited them. Konrad fell frightfully ill on the road, but the authorities kept them on the move despite the danger to the boy, with the encouraging reflection that “children are born to die.”

Desperate times ensued: the Russians beat down an ambitious Polish uprising in 1863, and both sides of Konrad’s family were ravaged by history’s violent imposition—a host of uncles and aunts killed or imprisoned or exiled. Unable to man the barricades, Apollo wrote in a torrential rage against tsarist autocracy that his son would inherit: “We [Poles] have perished by their sabres, bayonets, and guns. We are familiar with their truncheons, knouts, and nooses.” Despair gnawed at Konrad’s mother, Ewa, and there was little enough left of her by the time she died in 1865. Apollo sent Konrad to live with his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, the prudent member of the family, who had kept clear of the political tumult and was getting on nicely in Ukraine. A year later, the moribund Apollo, who had been granted a visa to leave the Russian Empire, took Konrad to Austrian Galicia, where the overlords tolerated Polish folkways more generously than in Russia. Apollo took an editorial job in Krakow, where he intended to raise Konrad, not as an adherent to any political faction, “but only as a Pole.” The idyll did not last long; Apollo died in 1869, when Konrad was 11. It seemed that all the Poles in Krakow, except for the wealthiest and most genteel, gathered to pay tribute to Apollo, and Konrad led the long funeral procession of Polish patriots honoring the faithful native son and martyr. Faithfulness to one’s calling and to one’s idea of oneself would be a prominent theme of Conrad’s writing; he saw it as the only effective stay against darkness, chaos, nothingness. As he explained himself in “A Familiar Preface” to the autobiography A Personal Record (1912), “Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity.”

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Spinoza’s philosophy of freedom

2018-05-03T17:57:00.001+02:00

The most original, radical and controversial of all early modern philosophers was born in Amsterdam in 1632. Bento de Spinoza was the middle son of one of the many families of Portuguese origin who, as Judaizing “conversos” fleeing the Inquisition, had settled in that tolerant Dutch city in the early decades of the century. He was raised and educated in an open (and non-ghettoized) Jewish community – quite rare in the seventeenth century – and entered the family’s importing business (dealing in dried fruit and nuts) after his father’s death in 1654. Bento (he would have been called “Baruch” in the synagogue – both names mean “blessed”) was, at this time and to all appearances, an upstanding member of the Sephardic congregation.

And yet, by the summer of 1656, something had changed. On July 27 that year, the following proclamation was issued by the parnassim (directors) sitting on the ma’amad (governing board) of Amsterdam’s Talmud Torah Congregation:

The Senhores of the ma‘amad make it known to you that they have been aware for some time of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, and that they have endeavored by various means and promises to turn him from his evil ways. But being unable to effect any remedy, and, on the contrary, each day receiving more information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about the monstrous deeds which he performed, and having many trustworthy witnesses who have reported and testified on all of this in the presence of the said Espinoza, who has been found guilty; after all of this has been examined in the presence of the rabbis, they [the members of the ma’amad] have decided, with their [the rabbis’] consent, that the said Espinoza should be banned and separated from the Nation of Israel, as they now put him under herem with the following herem:

With the judgment of the angels and with that of the saints, we put under herem, ostracize, and curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of Blessed God and with the consent of this entire holy congregation, before these holy scrolls, with the 613 precepts which are written in them; with the herem that Joshua put upon Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha cursed the youth, and with all the curses that are written in the law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not forgive him. The fury and zeal of the Lord will burn against this man and bring upon him all the curses that are written in this book of the law. And may the Lord erase his name from under the heavens. And may the Lord separate him for evil from all of the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law. And you that cleave unto the Lord your God, all of you are alive today.

The document concludes with the warning that “no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, nor provide him any favor, nor be with him under the same roof, nor be within four cubits of him, nor read any paper composed or written by him”.

It was the harshest writ of herem (ban or ostracism) ever pronounced on a member of the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam, and it was never rescinded. There is no evidence that Spinoza sought any kind of pardon, and good reason to believe that he had finished with congregational Judaism anyway.

Over three and a half centuries later, with very meagre documentary evidence at hand, it is all a bit of a mystery. We do not know for certain why Spinoza, only twenty-three years old at the time, was punished with such extreme prejudice. He had not written any philosophical treatises, and his fame (or infamy) was still many years away. That the punishment came from within the community that had nurtured and educated him, and that held his family in high esteem, only adds to the enigma. Neither the herem itself nor any document from the period tells us exactly what his “evil opinions and acts” were supposed to have been, nor what “abominable heresies” or “monstrous deeds” he is alleged to have practiced and taught. Spinoza never refers to this period of his life in his extant letters, and thus does not offer his correspondents (or us) any clues as to why he was expelled. All we know for certain is that Spinoza received, from the Amsterdam Jewish community’s leadership in 1656, a herem like no other in the period.

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Was Jane Eyre Written as a Secret Love letter?

2018-04-21T21:14:00.001+02:00

In the summer of 1846 Charlotte Brontë faced two crises. Both she wished to keep secret.

First: due to cataracts, her father was going blind. Why was this so calamitous?

As a Church of England parish priest Patrick Brontë enjoyed a small but permanent income, a large rectory that was home for his children, sister-in-law, and servants, and the social status that made him a leader in his community.

His children, now all adults, had enjoyed a happy and secure childhood living in the Haworth parsonage. Crucial to all four had been the constant writing of fiction and poetry. Virtually all of it remained unpublished. When they reached maturity, it was time for the young Brontës to find work to help support the family. In this they failed. Charlotte, when she was 19, and Anne, when she was 20, got brief jobs as governesses; Emily, at 20, taught for some months in a boarding school for girls; but all soon returned home. Branwell, also at age 20, tried being a tutor in the home of a clergyman, had a love affair with the lady of the house, and was expelled.

Now, all of them were threatened by Patrick’s blindness. If he lost his eyesight, he lost his post as parish priest, lost the rectory that was the family home, and lost his standing as a leader in the community. And with his children seemingly incapable of earning money, how would they survive?

This then was the family crisis. One laced with embarrassing details which proper, Victorian families would wish to remain secret.

As the oldest daughter, Charlotte felt responsible for rescuing the family. So for example she took it upon herself to care for her father’s health: finding him a specialist in Manchester willing to operate on his eyes and setting a date for the operation.

As Charlotte was managing this, she was experiencing a second, entirely secret, and intensely personal crisis. Several years earlier, in February 1842, hoping to win financial independence for the family by starting their own school, Charlotte and her sister Emily set off for Brussels to study French, thinking they could use this skill to attract students. There Charlotte, 26 years old, fell in love with Constantin Heger, the husband of the woman running the school. Returning home in January of 1844, Charlotte began writing passionate love letters to him, which first met with an alarmed and distant response, and then silence.

Haunted by “searing regrets,” Charlotte took her father to Manchester in August 1846. During the days and weeks following the operation, while her father rested his eyes in an adjoining darkened room, she started writing the novel that would become Jane Eyre.

How might she have hoped this new fiction could address the two crises? What could she have hoped for?

Certainly money, to fulfill her responsibilities to protect and sustain her family. Though not necessarily something to trumpet publicly either in the small town where the family lived or even in the great world of London and its literary elite.

The other hope? The further reason for writing? The secret letters to Constantin Heger probably ended in November of 1845. The unstated fantasy driving the writing of Jane Eyre, which she began drafting nine months later, was in all likelihood to create a novel of romantic love that would achieve—through imagination—the fantasy fulfillment of an adulterous passion that was never to be hers. It would be a letter to him. At least in a novel, Brontë could have the heroine voice her own feelings, addressing them not to Heger but to the fictional Fairfax Rochester: “All my heart is yours . . . and with you it would remain were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.” Jane’s words, but Charlotte’s defiant message. Here, certainly, was an even stronger reason for Brontë to maintain what soon became her fierce insistence to her closest friends that she had not written a novel.

And so it appeared with a title page reading: Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. Edited by Currer Bell.

And yet, given her limited experience of life and of people, what else did Charlotte have to draw upon as she desperately began to write? Indeed, she later confessed herself lacking that “knowledge of the world, whether intuitive or acquired” enjoyed by the “eminent writers” of the day. How was she to create the highly detailed world of this novel, with its story of dangerous and passionate love, and its spiky, independent-minded, risk-taking heroine? She turned inward. Ironically, Jane Eyre became, as the seemingly mysterious title page proclaimed, an autobiography, drawn both from Brontë’s personal experiences and a rich and long-standing fantasy life.

She was well aware of what she was doing. In a letter dated November 6, 1847, using her pseudonym “C Bell,” she describes for G. E. Lewes, who was preparing a review of Jane Eyre, the two sources she had used for her novel. She begins, “You warn me to beware of Melodrama and you exhort me to adhere to the real,” and she notes, “When I first began to write, so impressed was I with the truth of the principles you advocate that I determined to take Nature and Truth as my sole guides and to follow in their very footprints.” And for this reason she carefully “restrained imagination, eschewed romance; repressed excitement . . . and sought to produce something which would be soft, grave and true.” But, she continues, she soon began to worry that to write this way constantly, to be an unremitting realist depending solely on her own experience, particularly given that this experience was “very limited,” not only risked the danger of tedious repetition, but also that the writer might become “an egotist.”

Here we see Brontë’s key anxiety. She doesn’t wish to push herself too much into the foreground. She knows how much of her past life is in her novel and how that could possibly lead to exposure, which she feared. And so, rather teasingly, she moves to the second source for her book: not experience, but imagination; not realism, but fantasy. She concedes that a new demand emerged. “Imagination is a strong, restless faculty which claims to be heard and exercised, are we to be quite deaf to her cry and insensate to her struggles? When she shewes us bright pictures are we never to look at them and try to reproduce them?” Here Brontë alludes to the many crucial and powerful moments in Jane Eyre that depict not those things she had experienced, but rather the “bright pictures” of those things she longed for. It’s telling, and significant, that Brontë gives imagination a feminine gender. It is she who is strong and restless, who cries out and struggles to be heard. For Brontë the answer to her rhetorical question is clear: the dreams of desire have their own rights.

The success Jane Eyre enjoyed from its earliest days is owing to Charlotte Brontë’s conscious awareness of the strategies of “secret history;” that, from the start, this is how she will work: Truth and Imagination, realism and fantasy each given their proper function in the creation of the whole. Both are intensely personal for her: the truth of her experience—much of it derived from a past life of shame, exclusion, and frustration—and the emotionally dominant claims of her imagination. And both, as she could not say to Lewes, are far too intimate for her to admit that they are hers. While she insisted that her invented protagonist had little relationship to her own life, in fact just about everything that the novel reveals about Jane comes from Charlotte’s experience. Indeed, the title page is—perhaps intentionally—quite accurate: this is “An Autobiography,” but one transformed into a novel.

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'The Moonstone' Is A Hidden Gem Of A Detective Novel

2018-04-10T16:29:00.001+02:00

I was about 12 when I first encountered The Moonstone — or a Classics Illustrated version of it — digging through an old trunk in my grandfather's house on a rainy Bengali afternoon. I loved the Classics Illustrated series (the graphic novels of my youth that simplified famous novels for children), presenting us with swashbuckling plotlines, and heroes and villains that were unmistakably, unashamedly, what they were supposed to be.

The Moonstone was all I could have hoped for. A mysterious, cursed jewel, wrested from India, only to be stolen later from a great British mansion. Enigmatic, dangerous priests who follow it across the ocean in hopes of wresting it back. A young, beautiful, rich and courageous heroine (who in my mind looked very like me). Deaths. Disappearances. Romance. Bungling policemen. A smart butler. And enough twists and turns to keep a reader on tenterhooks until a highly satisfying ending is delivered. I devoured it in a day, and thought back on it with pleasure over the years.

So when I came across a copy of The Moonstone recently in a used bookstore, I picked it up at once — but surreptitiously. As a student of post-colonialism, I knew Wilkie Collins' portrayal of an exotic India (temples, turbaned priests, curses, magical jewels) was suspect. As a teacher of creative writing, I was dismissive of books that hinged upon plot. As a reader I was afraid that I would be disappointed this time around, that the magician's amazing powers might turn out to be a scarf hidden in a sleeve. And I knew the punch line — the criminal's identity — already.

But I was surprised and delighted to discover a whole new set of pleasures in The Moonstone. As a writer, I was struck by how masterfully Collins pulls together the different strands of a complicated plot. T.S. Eliot called The Moonstone "the first, the longest, and the best of the modern English detective novel." I could see why. Reading the book was a little like seeing the Wright brothers maneuvering their first aircraft, except there was no awkward bucking, no crashes.

Many conventions of the detective novel that we take for granted — a mysterious crime that is systematically unraveled through a process of inquiry, a detective with unusual powers of analysis, the surprise when the criminal turns out to be someone unexpected — are being used by Collins for the first time.

The plot with its hairpin twists held my interest and invited me to happily suspend disbelief, but it did not overwhelm the characters. The heroine, Rachel Verinder, complicated and stubborn, is unlike the "legless angels" popular in Victorian literature. The dilemmas she faces remain significant today: Should we marry where our passions lead us, or choose a life partner whose values are compatible with ours? If the person we love turns out to be a criminal, should we turn him in or allow someone else to be blamed?

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Kierkegaard’s Muse

2018-03-28T18:12:00.002+02:00

This biography would not have been written if the woman portrayed, Regine Olsen (1822–1904), had not been loved and jilted by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), who went on to devote a massive body of philosophical work to her. Kierkegaard courted Regine for a year, then broke it off when he realized his aloof, melancholic disposition made him unfit to be a good husband. When she fought his decision, even going so far as to say she would be willing to live in a cupboard in his apartment—for she was a small woman, but loving, fiery, intelligent, sardonic—he acted like a rogue to try to make her hate him enough to accept their separation.

He never quite succeeded in convincing her he was a rogue. For six years Regine saw Kierkegaard on walks and at church; they would smile and sometimes nod at one another but they never spoke. In the meantime, Fritz Schlegel was courting her. One Sunday in church, Regine smiled and looked questioningly at Kierkegaard; he nodded back. What he did not know was she was asking if he approved of her marrying Schlegel. Since they never spoke, it was a bit unfair of him to be as alarmed as he was at their marriage. Biographer Joakim Garff (University of Copenhagen), describes Fritz Schlegel as, “practically the exact opposite of Kierkegaard: stable, harmonious, healthy, un-ironic, and patient...thus made for marriage.”

These words comes from Garff’s earlier effort, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, a 867-page tome published in Denmark in 2000 and in English in 2005, which was both an account of Kierkegaard’s life and a reading of his philosophy. Since Kierkegaard’s life and work were one and since this life-work was devoted to Regine, there was much of Regine in the biography. However, one summer, during the writing of this biography—he mentions it in the book—a “well-preserved elderly couple” asked if Garff would be interested in correspondence between Regine and her sister Cornelia from the five years Regine lived in St. Croix after Fritz was appointed governor there. The elderly woman was the granddaughter of Cornelia. Garff was amazed at his good fortune.

Garff uses Regine’s letters as jumping-off points to comment on Kierkegaard and his work, of course, but also Danish colonial history and West Indian history in general. The whole colonial world was based on the slave trade. The Danes bought slaves in Africa, shipped them to the West Indies to work on the sugar plantations, then filled the empty holds with sugar for the voyage back.

At first Regine looked down on the slaves as little more than big children; some of this attitude, besides pure prejudice, was due to the recent freeing of the slaves after a violent uprising, and the government’s failure to make that freedom real. Later though, Regine turned a blind eye to the food disappearing from her larder. “There is indeed no conspicuous turnaround [in her attitudes toward the blacks], but the imported prejudices seem to give way to a more humane and sympathetic attitude,” Garff writes, “that, on several occasions, led to Regine’s overstepping traditional class distinctions and forgetting her status as First Lady of the West Indies.” She and Fritz lived a double life, themselves not really caring for island intrigues and gossip, but still acting the roles of “courtly hosts.”

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The Life and Opinions of Laurence Sterne: the first unapologetic literary celebrity

2018-03-18T10:09:00.003+01:00

Either you love it, or you really have missed something. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, to give it its full title, is one of the most inventive, idiosyncratic, funny and deliciously conversational novels ever written. Its author, Laurence Sterne, died 250 years ago on Sunday. An entirely obscure Yorkshire clergyman, known locally for the wit of his conversation and of the sermon that he occasionally gave in York Minster, he burst onto the literary scene in 1760, in his late 40s, with the first two volumes of this book (he added another seven volumes at intervals over the next seven years).

Tristram, its narrator, tries to tell the story of his life but keeps being diverted by the need to describe the quirks of his utterly eccentric family. He starts at the moment (and I mean the very moment) of his conception, and then finds himself working backwards in time to explain the chains of events that made him who he is. Like all of us, he is the “sport of small accidents”, minutely and comically detailed. The book employs every kind of visual trick (blank pages, strange dashes and asterisks, diagrams, marbled pages, a waving line tracing the flourish in the air of a man’s walking stick).

This 18th-century novel makes much post-modern gimmickry look thin stuff, but rather than perplexing its Georgian readers, it delighted them. Sterne became perhaps the first unapologetic literary celebrity, relishing the smartest company offered by London and Paris. “I write,” he said, “not to be fed, but to be famous.”

When he died, Sterne had just completed the first part of his second novel, the equally droll A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. He only got as far as France, leaving his narrator, Mr. Yorick (another alter ego) in a delicate situation, forced to share the only available room in an inn with a lady and her fille de chambre. They hang a sheet across the chamber to preserve modesty, but in the night the maid silently gets out of bed, “So that when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre’s—”

So Yorick’s hand stretches out forever, and Sterne leaves us with an interruption and a suggestive joke. It is a characteristic ending, for Sterne’s fiction is a singular mixture of subtlety and bawdy. And it is all interruptions. His novels do justice to the way that, while we try to make coherent narratives of our lives, something is always interrupting us. Which is why, as Tristram says, “my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time”.

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“No Longer the Person I Was”: The Dazzling Correspondence of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès

2018-03-07T17:29:00.002+01:00

ON THE MORNING of June 6, 1944, the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy. That same night, Albert Camus and Maria Casarès landed in bed together. Though the latter event did not amount to a hill of beans to those unfolding on the French coast, Camus and Casarès would never again be the same. Nor will they ever be the same for those who read their correspondence — 865 letters (at more than 1,000 pages) stretching from the summer of 1944 to the winter of 1960.

By the summer of France’s liberation, Camus was a household name in France. Two years earlier, the twentysomething Algerian-born author had galvanized the French literary scene with the publication of his novel L’Étranger (The Stranger). In 1943, he joined the resistance newspaper Combat and quickly became its editor in chief. Faithful to the newspaper’s watchword — De la résistance à la révolution (From resistance to revolution) — Camus announced, in fiery language, that resistance was simply a first step. The goal was not just to liberate, but also to reinvent the nation. The men and women who had fought to free France, he declared on August 24, “will not agree to the return of the forces of resignation and of injustice in any form.”

This affirmation happened to echo a line he had written just a few weeks before: “I have refused resignation my entire life, choosing what to me seems essential and holding fast to it.” Camus’s audience for this personal declaration was not Combat’s readers, however, but his lover Maria Casarès. She, too, had become a household name in Paris. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Casarès’s father, prime minister of the doomed Second Spanish Republic, had sent her to France. Still in her teens, Casarès studied theater and philosophy in Paris — the same subjects Camus had pursued as a student in Algiers, French Algeria, a decade earlier — and, by 1944, was electrifying audiences at the city’s renowned Théâtre des Mathurins. (Those who have seen Casarès in Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise [1945] or Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus [1950] understand why.)

Indeed, the Mathurins set the stage for her relationship with Camus. In the still-occupied city, Casarès had been cast in a leading role in his 1944 play Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding). Though opening night was a disaster — sneers and snickers, catcalls and cries punctuated the performance — Camus was not terribly disappointed. The play, perhaps, had not been ready for prime time. But, far more important — as he wrote in his journal — he had “received on the occasion of the staging of this play the greatest joy an author can receive: that of hearing his own language borne by the voice and the soul of a marvelous actress in the exact register one dreamed for it.”

Yet that same summer marked, or so it seemed, his parting of ways with that voice and soul. When he told Casarès that he had refused resignation his entire life, Camus did not mean resisting the occupation by the Germans, but resisting the temptation to divorce his wife. Camus had married a fellow French Algerian, Francine Faure, four years earlier — a commitment he refused to break. “I know too well that all I need to do is say certain words and turn my back on this part of my life. But as I gave my word, these are words I will not say and there are engagements I cannot break.” The die seemed cast: in a letter he wrote a few days later, Camus tells Casarès that “I will try to make Francine happy.”

As his letters reveal in searing detail and shimmering language, Camus mostly failed at this task. In large measure, he failed because his separation from Casarès also failed. Four years after their initial breakup, their paths accidentally crossed — once again, remarkably, on June 6 — on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. This time, though they were often separated by professional and family duties — hence the frequency of their letter writing — their paths remained joined until Camus’s death 12 years later.

This path leads us to a man we thought we knew, but find we did not, and a woman most of us never knew, and are richer now that we do. Camus’s early letters surge with the lyricism we recall from his youthful essays. From Provence in southeastern France, he tells Casarès that he had made a wish as he watched shooting stars lace the night sky. “Should you raise your eyes towards the sky tonight,” he whispers, may they “fall like rain on your beautiful face reminding you of my love.” For her part, Casarès revises her understanding of their earlier tryst. “I was too young when I first met you to fully grasp everything that the word ‘we’ represents. Perhaps it was necessary that I had to bang my head against life in order to return with an insatiable thirst for you and for meaning.”

In 1944, Camus confessed to Casarès his “absurd” desire that she always remain at his side, even though Francine remained on the other side. Reunited four years later, Casarès returns to this “absurdity,” the most existential of words. Yes, their relationship might well be “stupid,” as Camus insisted, since he remained not just married, but also the father of young twins. Et, alors? (So what?) “Everything is stupid, if you prefer. But since this is how matters stand and we cannot change them, let’s try to manage them as best as we can and not risk spoiling everything by demanding too much from a life which is … absurd?”

The absurdities came in many shapes and sizes. In 1951, there occurred the dramatic break between Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, sparked by the publication of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (The Rebel). In this brilliant, though sometimes blurred analysis of communism and totalitarianism, Camus fingered the useful idiots on the French left who had turned a blind eye to Stalinist crimes. Inevitably, The Rebel revolted Sartre, France’s most celebrated fellow traveler. When Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes issued a scathing review of the book, Camus replied with a long letter that was often sharp and, at times, self-pitying. Sartre’s caustic and deeply personal response devastated Camus. In the grips of a “curious depression,” he told Casarès he no longer had “the desire to live.”

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A Day at a Time - Christa Wolf’s life under surveillance.

2018-02-23T19:46:00.003+01:00

There are many mechanisms of expression more private than a diary. Thinking is invisible, and talking is impermanent. A diary, however, has public aspirations: All writing is to some degree expectant of an audience. The preface to One Day a Year, the meticulous yearly record that the East German writer Christa Wolf maintained from 1960 until 2011, concedes this point. At first, Wolf claims that her notes represent “pure, authentic” life with “no artistic intentions.” But only a few lines later, she admits that “the need to be known, including one’s problematic characteristics, one’s mistakes and flaws, is the basis of all literature and is also one of the motives behind this book.” We amass days, Wolf suggests, in the secret hope that someone else will witness and redeem them. The price we pay for our exhibitionism is a life conducted under observation.

One Day a Year was inspired by “One Day in the World,” a project devised by the socialist-realist writer Maxim Gorky. At the First Congress of Soviet Writers, Gorky proposed that authors from around the world contribute descriptions of an ordinary day, collectively capturing a richly heterogeneous moment in global history. His suggestion resulted in One Day in China, compiled in 1936, and One Day in the World, published in Russian in 1937. But Wolf’s take on the project was much more personal. Her efforts chart not many lives at a single moment but a single life at many moments, memorializing not a shared world but a viciously divided country that was, by turns, ferociously nationalistic, war-torn, optimistic, disillusioned, and, finally, uneasily unified. Her chosen day was September 27, and she faithfully observed her annual ritual for more than five decades, mapping her ascent to literary prominence with the 1968 publication of her best-known work, The Quest for Christa T., and the 1983 publication of her daring novel-cum-essay Cassandra, a feminist reimagining of the story of Helen of Troy that doubled as a critique of East Germany (officially the German Democratic Republic).

Throughout, Wolf’s journals bear moving witness to the personal and political landmarks that constitute the bulk of her life: her struggle to come to terms with communism’s quick devolution; her despair over the gender inequalities that belied the GDR’s promise of egalitarianism; the marriages of her daughters, Annette and Katrin (“Tinka”); her tenderness for her husband, Gerhard (“Gerd”), who was her most devoted reader and so her harshest critic; and the shocking revelation, in 1993, that she’d served as an informant for the Stasi, the East German secret police, from 1959 to 1962—a collusion that she claimed she’d forgotten or suppressed.

Long before the publication of One Day a Year’s first volume, Wolf predicted that her tendency toward self-observation would warp her private life. “This entire observed day falls under the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It is deformed by my constant viewing of it,” she worried as early as the late 1970s. Even in her diaries, Wolf was induced to spy on herself.

Wolf grew up under surveillance. She was born in 1929, in the then-German city of Landsberg an der Warthe, and her youth was carefully standardized. Her father joined the Nazi Party, and Wolf became a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, in her early youth. The title of her lightly fictionalized memoir Kindheitsmuster (1976) emphasizes the violent regimentation that defined her infancy. Muster means “pattern,” as in the pattern for a dress, a template that prohibits deviation or difference. Kindheitsmuster presents just such a model: It describes the brutal homogenization that Germans faced under the Nazis and Wolf’s subsequent struggle to recover the individuality she’d forfeited. “Statistics are too coarse for your purpose,” she writes of herself in the second person. “Even in the face of exact figures, you’d still want more information, and it’s unobtainable in this world.”

The information that Wolf sought was unavailable in part because Landsberg an der Warthe, the site of her childhood recollections, no longer existed; it had become the Polish city of Gorzów Wielkopolski. What remained of Germany was scarcely more recognizable. Wolf and her family fled the Red Army and found themselves in Mecklenburg, a province in what would shortly become East Germany. In Kindheitsmuster, the narrator’s daughter recoils from understanding “how one could be there and not there at the same time, the ghastly secret of human beings in this century.” It was a secret that colored much of Wolf’s life as she passed from one authoritarian regime to the next, shuttling from one country to another without ever settling into a more situated self.

Wolf wrote to locate herself more completely, but she rarely succeeded. What emerged instead were ill-fated efforts to extricate a single person from the tangle of an intrusively collective world. The Quest for Christa T., an experimental work about the precariousness of identity under fascism, examines Wolf’s desperation to lay claim to the word “I.” The book’s bereaved narrator is devastated by the premature death of Christa T., a character roughly modeled on Wolf’s childhood friend Christa Tabbert. Christa resists posthumous recovery because she failed to recover herself, and the narrator rifles through her friend’s journals and writings to no avail. “Among her papers are various fragments written in the third person,” the narrator complains. But she sympathizes with Christa’s confusion, in which she recognizes echoes of herself: “I understand the secret of the third person, who is there without being tangible and who, when circumstances favor her, can bring down more reality upon herself than the first person: I.” She continues in a broken staccato, as if gasping or stuttering, “The difficulty of saying ‘I.’”

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Zadie Smith’s Varieties of Individuality

2018-02-21T16:13:00.004+01:00

“If I have any gift at all,” Zadie Smith admits in one of the essays in Feel Free, “it’s for dialogue—that trick of breathing what-looks-like-life into a collection of written sentences.” Smith does voices. Sometimes literally: an audio recording of her reading her story “Escape from New York,” includes the treat that is impressions of its three characters, Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, and Elizabeth Taylor. Her fiction, of course, is full of voices, but the rendering of this familiar trio and their escape occupies that fertile gray area somewhere between entirely real and entirely fabricated. It isn’t mimicry, which leads nowhere, but a curious sort of imaginary impersonation, which leads everywhere.

Imaginary impersonation sounds like a purely fictional mode, yet it’s the way she approaches all writing, which brings together “three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.” It is these three, she tells us in her introduction, that constitute writing “(for me)”. The parentheses are important because it’s the final category that’s the real kicker. Selfhood—other people’s—is what she returns to again and again, through what else but her own shifting and brilliant subjectivity. So it is that instead of a straight “introductory essay for a book of Billie Holiday photos,” Smith writes a bravura monologue, a virtuosic act of ventriloquism. Tellingly, it’s in the second person: Zadie-as-Billie-as-“you”.

“I did try to write an essay about Billie,” Smith admits in a glum little shrug of a footnote, “but every angle seemed too formal or cold.” When your subject presents herself to you with the intimacy of a first name, and when that “you” identifies as a “sentimental humanist” it would only be a travesty to respond with the detachment of cool appraisal.

Smith’s great fascination with selfhood rests in its contingency. In an essay on the artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who paints anonymous, elegant black figures, Smith quotes the painter Chris Ofili. Responding to the intimacy of the paintings, Ofili had marveled at, “the tightness of her bun. The size of his ear. She knew so much about so little about him. She said so little he heard so much.” “Exactly,” Smith enthuses, taking up where Ofili left off. “Here are some paintings of he and she, him and her. They say little, explicitly, but you hear so much.” Ofili, in these elliptical sentences, leaps from small, specific and personal details, to some felt, relational truth, and this is very much Smith’s mode as both fiction writer and critic.

Noting the New Museum show’s red walls, a color that strikes her as being redolent of “the calico covers of nineteenth-century novels,” Smith proposes that the color “has the effect of bringing a diverse selection of souls together, framing and containing them, much like a novel contains its people, which is to say, only partially.” It’s this partial containment, the generosity it grants, that appears to yield this next impression. The paintings “seem to have souls—that ultimate retrogressive term!—though by “soul” we need to imply nothing more metaphysical here than the sum total of one person’s affect in the mind of another.”

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The Heart of Conrad

2018-02-16T19:20:00.003+01:00

Joseph Conrad’s heroes were often alone, and close to hostility and danger. Sometimes, when Conrad’s imagination was at its most fertile and his command of English at its most precise, the danger came darkly from within the self. At other times, however, it came from what could not be named. Conrad sought then to evoke rather than delineate, using something close to the language of prayer. While his imagination was content at times with the tiny, vivid, perfectly observed detail, it was also nourished by the need to suggest and symbolize. Like a poet, he often left the space in between strangely, alluringly vacant.

His own vague terms—words like “ineffable,” “infinite,” “mysterious,” “unknowable”—were as close as he could come to a sense of our fate in the world or the essence of the universe, a sense that reached beyond the time he described and beyond his characters’ circumstances. This idea of “beyond” satisfied something in his imagination. He worked as though between the intricate systems of a ship and the vague horizon of a vast sea.

This irreconcilable distance between what was precise and what was shimmering made him much more than a novelist of adventure, a chronicler of the issues that haunted his time, or a writer who dramatized moral questions. This left him open to interpretation—and indeed attack. In the mid-1970s, two of the most prominent novelists of the age, V.S. Naipaul and Chinua Achebe, set their sights on Conrad, the first in an essay called “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine” and the other in “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”

Naipaul’s problems with Conrad are essentially stylistic and formal, arising from Conrad’s “unwillingness to let the story speak for itself, this anxiety to draw all the mystery out of a straightforward situation.” Naipaul sees no great virtue in Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, or Victory: “A multiplicity of Conrads, and they all seemed to me to be flawed…. The Conrad novel was like a simple film with an elaborate commentary.” As he contemplates some of Conrad’s fiction, Naipaul writes witheringly, “I had read other stories of lonely white men going mad in hot countries.” Thus, he continues, the story of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, “the upriver ivory agent, who is led to primitivism and lunacy by his unlimited power over primitive men, was lost on me.”

In his essay, Naipaul invokes Conrad as “a writer who is missing a society…. Conrad’s experience was too scattered; he knew many societies by their externals, but he knew none in depth.” And then he laments:

The great societies that produced the great novels of the past have cracked…. The novel as a form no longer carries conviction…. The novelist, like the painter, no longer recognizes his interpretative function; he seeks to go beyond it; and his audience diminishes. And so the world we inhabit, which is always new, goes by unexamined, made ordinary by the camera, unmeditated on.

However, Naipaul begins to connect moments in Conrad with aspects of his own experience and memory of childhood and his view that he, as someone born in Trinidad, has had no densely structured society to dramatize:

It came to me that the great novelists wrote about highly organized societies. I had no such society; I couldn’t share the assumptions of the writers; I didn’t see my world reflected in theirs. My colonial world was more mixed and secondhand, and more restricted.

He finds that his feelings about this were exactly caught by Conrad in a passage from a story that ended:

It appeared to us a land without memories, regrets, and hopes; a land where nothing could survive the coming of the night, and where each sunrise, like a dazzling act of special creation, was disconnected from the eve and the morrow.

Since Naipaul cannot detach himself as a writer from “the corruption of causes, half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made,” he finds “that Conrad—sixty years before, in a time of a great peace—had been everywhere before me.” In rereading The Secret Agent, he discovers characters and phrases that strike him as “real” in a way they had not before. He notes a phrase—the “exasperated vanity of ignorance”—about one of the terrorists in the book who “took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of sinister impulses which lurk in the blind envy and exasperated vanity of ignorance.”

As Naipaul grows to appreciate that phrase he sees something essential in Conrad: nouns that seemed muted or throttled by their adjectives, as though the impulse were merely to make a fine-sounding phrase or add impressively to the mystery, can, in fact, if studied carefully or read in a certain light, stand apart, become precise. He observes that Conrad, despite all his concern with ineffability, often meant business. “Words which at one time we disregard,” Naipaul wrote, “at another moment glitter.” Even though his “reservations about Conrad as a novelist remain,” still he cannot dismiss him: “Conrad’s value to me is that he is someone who sixty to seventy years ago meditated on my world, a world I recognize today. I feel this about no other writer of the century.”

Perhaps it is precisely the dilemma Naipaul outlines, the dilemma in which the novelist “no longer recognizes his interpretative function,” that makes Conrad so worthy now of close attention. For novelists who deal with isolation, solitude, hesitation, and the lone self, who are not comfortable trying to interpret the world with any confidence or assurance, Conrad’s strategies are instructive and his technical sleights of hand fascinating. The homelessness of his characters becomes spiritual as much as geographical. He is the great example to those of us who want to offer our characters a fully imagined solitude. And in the way Conrad handles time and action and obsession in Victory, or in the hushed voice and doubled presence in “The Secret Sharer,” or in formalizing the difficulty of handling story itself in Lord Jim, or in his characters’ inhabiting elusive spaces where the shivering self will not find peace, he remains our contemporary.

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Stronger than fiction - Charlotte Brontë

2018-02-08T19:39:00.002+01:00

On May 30, 1851, the London publisher George Smith, arriving home from work, stumbled on a strange scene in his drawing room. Charlotte Brontë, all of 4 feet 10 inches tall, was upbraiding William Thackeray, who towered over the diminutive novelist by at least a foot. Miss Brontë was furious at the way the author of Vanity Fair had recently introduced her to his mother, in the hearing of strangers, as “Jane Eyre”. How would Mr Thackeray like it, the fierce little woman wanted to know, if she referred to him by the name of one of his characters? She was enraged by Thackeray’s thoughtless unmasking of her in public as the author of the recent hit novel Jane Eyre. Against growing evidence to the contrary, she still clung fondly to the belief that her “Currer Bell” pseudonym was generally secure. But on top of that she was outraged – “white with anger”, said a chuckling Smith – at having her own identity elided so completely with that of her heroine.

You might have expected more of Thackeray. He was a professional author, not a credulous reader, and he knew the amount of skill and sweat that went into creating characters so vital that they seemed to step off the page and into real life. And yet there was something raw and untouched about the narrative voice of Jane Eyre; it really did read, as the frontispiece suggested, as if it were “an autobiography” that had been lightly “edited” by Currer Bell. There is the direct address to “you”, the “reader” whom Jane co-opts into her consciousness. We are with the young child in the agony of the Red Room when she cries out “why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, forever condemned?”

Later, as the adult Jane enters Thornfield for the first time after a long, dark journey, we see through her eyes as she is shown into a room “whose double illumination of fire and candle at first dazzled me, contrasting as it did with the darkness to which my eyes had been for two hours inured”. Her “tears, hot and large” seem real, her “silent prayer” is faithfully conveyed, her “dread” registers as a sickening lurch in the stomach. And it was this authentic, urgent voice that Thackeray was hearing, as he bent down to catch the words of the quiet little woman who had exploded at his elbow into furious complaint.

All the same, you might think that on this occasion Thackeray would have held the boundaries a bit more firmly, given the history of tangled identities that existed between himself and Miss Brontë. In 1848 the Yorkshire authoress had unwittingly caused a furore by dedicating her second edition of Jane Eyre to “W. M. Thackeray Esq.” without realizing that the author of Vanity Fair had a mentally ill wife in permanent private care. The rumour quickly took hold that Jane Eyre had been written by the governess whom Thackeray employed to look after his daughters in their mad mother’s absence and was even, perhaps, his mistress. Yet now, three years later, instead of backing away from this blushing muddle between life and art, Thackeray had unaccountably plunged further in by loudly hailing Miss Brontë as “Jane Eyre”.

This conflation of Charlotte Brontë with her best-known character was further cemented in 1857 when the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell published a biography of her recently deceased friend which reads like a piece of fiction. Although Gaskell’s motivation had been to defend Brontë from the charge of “coarseness” – many critics had upbraided Jane Eyre as politically, socially and sexually disruptive – the unintended effect was to turn “the wild little maiden from Haworth”, into the heroine of a gothic melodrama that bore more than a passing resemblance to Jane Eyre. In Gaskell’s highly coloured and persuasive prose, the Parsonage becomes a brooding prison ruled over by a “half mad” father who has a penchant for throwing his children’s best boots into the fire in a bid to save them from vanity. (This fire motif naturally reminded attentive readers of the blaze that incinerates the fictional Thornfield.) Another anecdote in which the Revd Patrick Brontë makes his young children wear a mask in order to speak freely recalls the scene in which Rochester dons a fortune teller’s disguise to get Jane to reveal her love for him. Gaskell didn’t go so far as to suggest there was a madwoman in the attic at the Parsonage – although she dropped hints about the looming presence of the alcoholic Branwell, who had, indeed, once set his bed on fire. Instead of screams coming from above, there was the tap, tap, tap of the stonemason’s chisel from below, readying yet another headstone in the graveyard that surrounded the Parsonage “on all sides but one”.

So if Jane Eyre reads like fact (an autobiography) and Charlotte Brontë’s life reads as fiction (a gothic novel), it is no surprise that the two have long been conflated into what Umberto Eco termed an “intertextual archetype”. Despite, and sometimes because of, several revolutions in reading styles and critical practices in the twentieth century, readers both inside and beyond the academy have found it difficult to keep Charlotte Brontë distinct from Jane Eyre.

Instead, life and literature fuse to form a rich seam of art, poems, novels, music and performance pieces of all kinds. Glance at the programme for “Brontë 200”, which collates all the activities planned to celebrate the bicentenary of the Brontës’ births – from Charlotte in 1816, Branwell in 1817, Emily in 1818 to Anne in 1820 – to see the result. Here you will find information about everything from a film called Wings of Desire (which recreates the bird’s eye view of Emily’s hawk “Nero” as it flies over the Moors) to a talk in a series entitled “The Parsonage Unwrapped: A day in the life of a museum assistant”. Human lives, animal lives, physical space, institutional identities, textual entities and material objects are all magnetized in a way that allows them to come together in an almost infinite number of combinations under the always burgeoning sign of “Brontë”.

Such proliferation may sound exhilarating, but the resistance to marking the boundaries between these distinct elements may actually serve to reduce the range of possible readings. Nowhere are the limitations of conflating Brontë’s life and her most famous novel more in evidence than in John Pfordresher’s The Secret History of Jane Eyre: How Charlotte Brontë wrote her masterpiece. As far as Pfordresher is concerned, everything you need to know about the making of Jane Eyre is to be found by ransacking Charlotte Brontë’s lived experience. This isn’t just the usual matter of mapping Lowood, the ghastly charitable boarding school where Jane half starves, onto Cowan Bridge, the institution which Charlotte attended and where her elder sisters effectively lost their lives. Or suggesting that the roots of the scene where Jane is forced to cower in Thornfield’s grand drawing room while society ladies banter pointedly about governesses, were to be found in Brontë’s two unhappy stints of private teaching in affluent Yorkshire families. For Pfordresher, the correlation between text and context reaches even deeper. He reminds us that the thirty-year-old Brontë started to write Jane Eyre within months of realizing that she would never again receive a letter from Constantin Heger, the married Belgian teacher with whom she had fallen in love and pursued through a passionate postal correspondence. Shut up in dreary lodgings in Manchester while she waited for her father to recover from a cataract operation, Brontë sat down to relieve her torment by writing an alternative reality for herself in which a small, plain governess finds that her “master”, Mr Rochester, far from rejecting her with silence, refuses to stop declaring that she is the only woman who can make him happy. The first Mrs Rochester, running mad with wounded desire in the third-floor attic, stands both for Jane’s repressed desires and, very subliminally, for Claire Zoe Heger, Constantin’s wife, who had recently insisted on an end to the epistolary romance between her husband and the intense Englishwoman. The novel closes with a wish-fulfilling fire that removes Mrs Rochester for good and diminishes Mr Rochester sufficiently that Jane is able to marry him in something approaching a state of equality.

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Martin Amis, Style Supremacist

2018-02-02T18:12:00.004+01:00

Martin Amis has in his life generally toed what he calls “the Flaubertian line”—the belief that writers generate their boldest imaginative success by keeping things stable and routine at home. His novels contain little coziness and much mass murder, their daring perhaps leveraged by his own domestic regularity. Amis’s more serious tabloid brushes—over a change of literary agents, in the nineties, and a change in residence, from London to Brooklyn, in 2010—have been widely spaced and personally resented. He fights an inclination toward grudges (“acrimony pageants”) and, now and then, with weariness or exasperation, has had to cudgel back against charges of misogyny and, more lately, Islamophobia. (“What I am is an Islamismophobe.”) He remains needlessly concerned about “left-handedness”—the slackening that can happen “when writers of fiction turn to discursive prose.” His nonfiction books now number half as many as his novels, and the connection between both stretches of the shelf is organic and secure.

“The Rub of Time” (Knopf) collects two decades’ worth of Amis’s journalism, including a good deal of what he would call the “ludic” Amis—middle-aged Martin playing tennis or poker, watching football or its hooligans. The reporting pieces have a fair share of old chestnuts (the book-tour essay) and barrelled fish (a Republican Convention), but none is without its stinging pleasures: the “little Restoration” effected by Princess Diana’s death, or the corpulence of Las Vegas, where a casino-goer’s huge wheelchaired body “[seeks] the lowest level, like a domestic flood coming down a staircase.” Still, the inclusion of many such pieces points to a completist need that Amis himself once noticed in John Updike. (“It is hard not to be startled by a sixty-word citation to Thornton Wilder.”) A salute to John Travolta’s comeback is resurrected, trailing a new penitential footnote that apologizes for the author’s undue optimism about his subject in 1995, and a very dated piece on the pre-Pornhub porn industry grinds on, further distracting a reader from the book’s heart, which is its literary criticism, labor that allows Amis to realize his most comfortable and integrated self: a novelist engaged in the scrupulous appreciation of others’ style.

Closing in on seventy, he has by now spent decades outside Kingsley Amis’s fading shadow, but his literary psychology remains distinctly more fils than père. His deepest considerations and loyalties have all involved literary father figures. Most of those are now dead, but Amis, having sometimes reviewed their books while they lived, still tends and ponders their achievements through the posthumous appearance of letters or adaptations or previously unpublished works. By my count, adding up what’s in this new collection and three previous ones—“The Moronic Inferno” (1986), “Visiting Mrs. Nabokov” (1993), and “The War Against Cliché” (2001)—there are five takes on Philip Larkin; seven each on Saul Bellow and Philip Roth; nine apiece on J. G. Ballard and Updike; and ten on Vladimir Nabokov, the most baroque of all the statues in Amis’s personal pantheon.

Amis has always wanted to see Nabokov as someone resembling his own critical self—essentially, a “celebrator,” a man whose darkness and severities have been overstated. He marvels, for example, at the lambent, kinetic description of a train platform on the first page of “King, Queen, Knave,” where Nabokov seems to bless and improve a world engendered by God and man. In earlier essays, Amis took note of Nabokov’s disdain for sympathetic identification with fictional characters, and also of his belief that artistic effect was everything, the descriptor more important than the described. Nabokov’s declaration that “for me, ‘style’ is matter” remains almost fearfully thrilling to Amis. When writing about Bellow, whose Napoleon Street in “Herzog” feels to him as nourishing and electric as Nabokov’s railway station, Amis goes so far as to declare that style, being “intrinsic to perception,” is, finally, “morality.”

But Nabokov presents a peculiar moral difficulty. In 1987, writing about “The Enchanter,” Amis described “the nympholepsy theme” as being “no more persistent than Nabokov’s interest in doubles, mirrors, chess, paranoia.” By 2009, he is still using the term, but one can feel him struggling toward the concession he makes two years later, when it becomes “the pedophilia theme,” the “only significant embarrassment in the Nabokov corpus,” present as it is in six of the nineteen works of fiction. There is nothing horrified or rejectionist in the critic’s evolution, but there is a distinct and tentative adjustment of the awed appraisal. Still, the “master’s scandalous fecundity” has left much that’s yet to be published, and Amis’s output of Nabokov ruminations will certainly rise further into double digits.

The honoring of style over matter also entails putting art above the artist. In “The War Against Cliché,” the larger and entirely literary predecessor of this new miscellany, Amis almost never concedes a legitimacy to critical biography, more often registering disapproval of the enterprise, which he doesn’t see doing much for Jane Austen or Malcolm Lowry or, when Andrew Field is the biographer, for Vladimir Nabokov. John Carey reads the poems of John Donne “as if they were confidential memos to Donne’s confessor or marriage-counselor, or to some spectral Jacobean psychiatrist.” In “The Rub of Time,” Amis appears to be reading and reviewing the genre a good deal less than before.

Despite all this, he has relished what in-the-flesh hours he was able to spend with his literary fathers, and even with their widows. In the new book, he recalls his “only extended meeting with John Updike,” in the late nineteen-eighties, which allowed him to observe “those busy eyes of his, the set of the mouth (as if containing, with difficulty, a vast and mysterious euphoria), his turban-shaped hair still forcefully thriving, his hands on the tea tray so much firmer than my own.” Years after the encounter, with a sort of sad dutifulness, he wrote about a falling off in felicity that he had noticed in Updike’s late prose. He would not, he says, have published the piece had Updike still been alive, and he scolded his friend Christopher Hitchens for doing such a thing to the aging Bellow. The Updike essay, a delicately brief review of “My Father’s Tears and Other Stories,” is informed by Amis’s own new “urgent interest” in aging—proof, perhaps, that the biographical interpretations of which he remains wary have some relevance to the production of criticism as well as of art.

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Unripe fruit - Alexander von Humboldt

2018-01-29T15:17:00.003+01:00

Alexander von Humboldt must have met Reinhard von Haeften at the very end of 1793 or early the following year. In April, Haeften came to stay in Bad Steben and, about a month later, Humboldt let slip, in a letter to Carl Freiesleben, that in Bayreuth “everybody knows that I live under one roof with Lieutenant Haeften, who is always around”.

In November, another letter reached Freiesleben. Might he like to accompany Humboldt on a journey to Switzerland? They would be joined by a third party:

This person is a Herr von Haeften, Lieutenant with the local Grevenitz regiment . . . . This Reinhard von Haeften has for a year now been my only, and hourly company. I live together with him; he comes to visit me in the mountains [Bad Steben]. I have, to enjoy him the better, completely broken away from all other society.

A geological trip on which, as Freiesleben must have concluded, Humboldt’s attention would mostly be devoted to an unknown lieutenant, can’t have been an entirely attractive proposition. What followed is unlikely to have allayed his apprehensions:

He has – in spite of outward appearances, e.g. he speaks French and knows how to comport himself in any sort of company – enjoyed only an indifferent education. He is trying to make up for this shortcoming, and I am convinced that in two years’ time he will be very knowledgeable . . . . He loves me boundlessly, and he will love you too – he is already taking an interest in you, as I talk of you so often.

All in all, Humboldt concluded, “I mustn’t entertain any doubt . . . that you will come on the Swiss journey”.

For one who seemed to find great slabs of time to visit Humboldt in Bad Steben, Haeften, four years Alexander’s junior, led a complicated private life. At the time he got to know Humboldt, he was already involved with Christiane von Waldenfels – the wife of a Prussian officer – and had made her pregnant. Humboldt allowed himself to be drawn into his friend’s affairs with his usual reluctance to do things by halves, and without much thought either for possible damage to his reputation or, it seems, his own feelings. When Christiane gave birth to a boy, Humboldt was godfather, and he later tried to act as an intermediary when Karl von Waldenfels, the wronged husband, instigated divorce proceedings. Checking up on the progress of the case, in Frankfurt, and surprised by Waldenfels’s unexpected appearance in the city, Humboldt and Haeften effected a slightly dramatic escape by boat down the Main and then the Rhine. Through all of this, his own feelings for Haeften remained strong – “I know that I live with and through you, my dear, only R[einhard], and cannot be entirely happy except when I’m near you”, he wrote. He can’t have been unaware that the fulfilment of his friend’s happiness, towards which he was working, was hardly likely to align with his own.

At this time, Humboldt was still intensely absorbed in his experiments on nerves, muscle fibres and electricity, and aimed to write a comprehensive summary on all that was known about the nature of animal electricity. He had extended Galvani’s experiments and discovered that the nervous impulse existed, to some extent at least, independently of a specific animal body. Humboldt tried putting together parts of different animals, to see whether the nerve impulse could be made to jump the boundary from one animal body to another. He found that it could: “You can combine nerves of three different kinds of animals, warm- and cold-blooded, frogs and mice, with some of the elements turned back to front – the experiment always works . . . . Even a long mouse tail will serve as a conductor, as long as the hair has been scraped off.”

Humboldt’s instinct led him to go beyond the role of the uninvolved observer, and to dispense with intermediaries. “The experiments are, in part, on myself”, he reported. The motivation, clearly, was to gain a more direct, unadulterated insight. The scientific aspect aside, however, they had a distinct air of self-flagellation about them:

I raised two blisters on the deltoid muscles of my right and my left shoulder. A prepared frog rested on the left wound. The one on the right was covered with zinc. The frog jumped (in spite of being eight inches away from the metal) the moment it was linked to the zinc by means of some silver wire.

It is hard not to be struck by Humboldt’s apparent disregard for the pain engendered by his investigations. Perhaps pain was part of the point of what he was doing. It introduced a certain measure of objectivity: what was felt so strongly was definitely, undeniably there; pain, where it reached the limit of what was bearable, also pointed to a clear border – one that Humboldt seemed to feel a need to keep within sight. Another experiment was abandoned only when a doctor intervened, warning him that it would be dangerous to take things further:

Both blisters were cut open, and the secreted fluid was examined carefully . . . . I was able to dip my finger into the liquid and draw figures and names on my skin, which, even when washed off, showed up, red as blood, for several hours . . . they gained in intensity and size (up to two square inches) as we watched, so that the doctor, and even I, grew alarmed.

His involvement with Haeften was, in a way, not entirely dissimilar: he must have known that he could not fail to get hurt. But perhaps here, too, pain served as a measure. If love caused pain, that at least proved that it really existed. And if the degree of pain was in proportion to the importance of the thing that caused it, then, perhaps, trying to avoid it would be beside the point.

In February 1795, Count Reden was given a promotion: a desk job in Berlin. As a consequence, one of the most prestigious and covetable positions in the Prussian mining administration – that of director of the Silesian mines – became vacant. Friedrich von Heinitz, the minister in charge of the Prussian Mining Department, was quick to secure the post for his young protégé, and he offered it to Humboldt with the happy assurance that “adequate remuneration will not constitute a problem”. However, to Heinitz’s surprise and consternation, Humboldt turned it down. What was more, in his reply he told Heinitz that he was “about to change my situation entirely”, and to “lay down almost all public duties”.

Such a decision was difficult to explain, and Humboldt himself struggled to give a convincing account of his motives. What could outweigh such obvious advantages as establishing his career, boosting his, as he admitted, “not very plentiful” income and pleasing Heinitz? The explanation offered in his letter – “a journey . . . a not entirely unimportant cause” – was nebulous and unpersuasive. But he was serious about leaving: “it would be dishonourable to accept a new position, only to give it up again right away”. A little later, in March, he wrote directly to King Friedrich Wilhelm II, and asked him to accept his resignation.

Heinitz handled the situation with great tact, and managed to hold on to Humboldt for the time being. As a result, Humboldt found himself promoted to director of the Silesian mines. Heinitz granted him permission to visit Italy and Switzerland, no doubt hoping that, having indulged his longing for a journey, Humboldt would return to the fold, refreshed and somewhat more settled.

So in July 1795, Humboldt set off from Bayreuth, accompanied by Haeften. The objective of the trip, Humboldt had told Goethe, was “to see the Alps of the Tyrol, Lombardy and Switzerland”. Yet another perspective could be gained from a letter to Freiesleben, where Humboldt had explained that he had arranged the trip with Haeften “more for his sake than for my own”. Freiesleben seems to have taken the hint and had opted to forgo the leg of the journey involving Haeften. Even though the two overlapped only briefly, Freiesleben’s concerns seem to have been well founded – even months later, Humboldt was still making excuses for his friend: “you have to put much of the blame for his sullen manner on his situation at the time”.

From Munich, Humboldt and Haeften travelled south and finally arrived, via Innsbruck, in Italy. They stayed in Venice for two weeks (“I am not so keen myself, but Haeften will like it”), continuing via Verona and Genoa to Pavia, where they hoped to meet Alessandro Volta. Not finding him at home, they tracked him down to his country house near Lake Como – where many more frogs were being sacrificed to science. They mostly ended up skinned and dipped into wine glasses filled with water, “their torso in one, the thighs in the other glass”, as Volta demonstrated the fact that water was an effective conductor for nerve stimuli. Humboldt had suspected as much, but Volta proved it. From there they passed through Milan before crossing into Switzerland via the St Gotthard pass. They covered great parts of this last stretch on foot – though this was not why they arrived a few days late at the Golden Eagle inn at Schaffhausen, the agreed meeting point with Freiesleben: they had to make a detour via Constance, as, Humboldt explained to Freiesleben, that was where Haeften had left his suitcase.

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Milton's Morality

2018-01-22T16:26:00.002+01:00

In 2016, during the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, the Bard was feted by dozens of books, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, performances of his plays, lectures, and a Shakespeare Day gala attended by Prince Charles himself. The London Tube map replaced the names of its stops with titles of Shakespeare’s plays. Google, of course, did a doodle.

In 2017, it was all Jane Austen—the 200th anniversary of the novelist’s death. Like Shakespeare the year before, she was everywhere, not least in the pages of the New York Times, which ran some 20 articles on her, musing about everything from what she might tell us about Brexit to why the alt-right loves her so much. The Atlantic stated unambiguously that “Jane Austen Is Everything,” and it sure did feel that way. Her face now graces the U.K.’s new £10 note.

Pity poor John Milton. Last year also marked the 350th anniversary of the publication of Paradise Lost, the greatest epic poem in English and one of the greatest works of Western literature, and hardly a word was said about either the man or the work: just three books—William Poole’s Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost, John Carey’s The Essential Paradise Lost, and a collection of essays on the poet in translation—and a BBC Radio 4 documentary.

This rather paltry celebration of a great work and writer is all the more surprising considering the poem has been growing in global popularity. The editors of the recent essay collection Milton in Translation note that Paradise Lost has been translated more frequently in the last 30 years than it was in the preceding 300, mostly into non-Western languages. The book “demonstrates that around the world people are taking real interest in Milton,” Islam Issa, one of the volume’s editors, told the Guardian. But in Milton’s home country? Not so much.

How did a poem that was lauded even by Milton’s enemies as not only above “all moderne attempts in verse, but equall to any of ye Ancient Poets,” as Sir John Hobart put it in 1668, and that was translated in its entirety into Latin in 1690 and used in English-speaking classrooms to teach rhetoric instead of classical texts lose so much ground to both Shakespeare and Austen, particularly in Western countries?

One reason is that Paradise Lost is, well, a poem, and poems are not only more difficult to read than either prose fiction or plays, they are harder to put on a screen, the reigning medium of our day. There have been dozens of television and film adaptations of both Shakespeare and Austen, but very few of Paradise Lost. (A TV version produced by the British actor Martin Freeman is reportedly in the works, but if it ever gets made, don’t expect anything close to the original. “Paradise Lost is like a biblical Game of Thrones,” another of the producers has said.)

The other reason is that Paradise Lost is an unabashedly religious work. Early readers, Poole reminds us, shared Milton’s belief “in the truth of his subject”—that is, of God, angels, and demons. Like many readers in the 17th and 18th centuries, John Wesley read the poem devotionally. He even published a religious commentary on it in 1763. Today, however, “the vast majority of readers, both those who defend and those who attack Milton’s project,” Poole writes, look at the work as merely a “technical masterpiece. . . . This is our view today, and Milton would not like it.”

Milton began the poem sometime after 1652—the year he went completely blind and lost his first wife—and perhaps as late as 1658. He finished it in 1665 at the latest. While Milton’s nephew, Edward, claimed that Milton dictated the more than 11,500 lines of verse in nearly perfect form in groups of 10 to 30 at a time, Jonathan Richardson argued in another early account of the poet’s life that he would dictate 40 lines while still in bed in the morning and later cut them by half. However Paradise Lost was composed, it is a stunning piece of artistry whose scope and complexity have yet to be matched by a single work in English.

Milton’s lines can be both digressive and tight, packed with allusions and neologisms. An exceptional student of Latin and a gifted linguist, Milton coined more English words than Shakespeare, many of them first appearing in Paradise Lost (like “terrific,” “jubilant,” “space” to refer to outer space, as well as “pandemonium”). John Carey writes in his introduction to The Essential Paradise Lost that Milton’s long sentences, running over several lines of verse, often establish surprising points of comparison. Recounting his first moments of consciousness, for example, Adam notes how both his “heart” and creation “smil’d . . . with joy”:

By quick instinctive motion up I sprung
As thitherward endevoring, and upright
Stood on my feet; about me round I saw
Hill, Dale, and shadie Woods, and sunnie Plaines,
And liquid Lapse of murmuring Streams; by these,
Creatures that livd, and movd, and walk’d, or flew,
Birds on the branches warbling; all things smil’d,
With fragrance and with joy my heart oreflow’d.

Carey argues that it is “impossible to say whether all things smiled with fragrance and joy, or whether Adam’s heart overflowed with fragrance and joy. . . . What the subtle merging of meaning shows is that Adam is at one with nature. He does not . . . distinguish between what is happening in nature and what is happening in his own heart.” Over 1,000 lines later, Adam feels a “falt’ring measure” within himself. He goes to find Eve and sees her returning from the Tree of Knowledge with “A bough of fairest fruit that downy smiled” in her hand. The pulling of the branch from the tree evidently ruptured Adam’s heart even before he tastes its fruit.

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Joseph Conrad: Old man of the sea

2018-01-18T20:14:00.001+01:00

When Joseph Conrad began The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ in 1896 he had two novels to his name, and had recently concluded a twenty-year career as a British merchant seaman. His two earlier books, Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), were both set in the Malay archipelago; The Nigger was the story in which he turned directly to his experience as a mariner for inspiration. It is the tale of James Wait, a black sailor from St Kitts who is dying of tuberculosis on board the merchant ship Narcissus as it sails from Bombay to London. Wait’s illness elicits wildly different reactions from his fellow crew members: pity, suspicion, frustration, indifference; and the values they assign to his eventual death – coming just after the ship itself nearly sinks – are an index not just of their varying casts of mind but of their humanity. The racial slur in the title of the British edition (the book appeared in America as The Children of the Sea) is a crude reflection of the crew’s initial perceptions of Wait’s otherness, accruing layers of irony as boundaries come down: by the end of the narrative he has become “Jimmy”.

For Conrad, completing the novella was a valedictory moment. He announced in the preface that after finishing it, “I understood that I had done with the sea, and that henceforth I had to be a writer”. But of course Conrad wasn’t done with the sea; or rather, the sea wasn’t done with him. The monumental new Cambridge edition of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ meticulously traces his emendations to the text in its progress from manuscript to magazine and volume publication and is packed with contextual information – not least, a detailed exploration of its reception. As the editor Allan H. Simmons points out, far from being the farewell to things nautical that Conrad intended, the book marked his arrival as the definitive voice in maritime storytelling. In fact, it “made such an impact on his contemporaries that Conrad would never quite free himself from the ‘sea writer’ tag that its critical success encouraged”.

But what did seafaring mean for Conrad? And what, if anything, after the demise of the British maritime empire which he served, does his fiction have to tell us about life in an interconnected and self-conscious modern world? In The Dawn Watch, her lively and accessible study of Conrad’s life and milieu, Maya Jasanoff offers the important observation that for Conrad, one of the last of the generation to go to sea before the advent of steam, sailing a ship was first and foremost a “craft”. It’s no coincidence, as Jasanoff says, that this “sailor turned writer” conceived of sailing “as a form of art” – and writing, one might add, as a form of sailing. Here’s a test: which of the two pursuits is Conrad describing when he says that it has “the quality of a single-handed struggle with something much greater than yourself . . . the laborious, absorbing practice of an art whose ultimate result remains on the knees of the gods”? The answer is sailing, but you could be forgiven for thinking that he’s talking about his own novelistic labours. It’s also no coincidence that the closest thing to a literary manifesto that Conrad ever penned can be found in the preface to The Nigger, the only book he ever wrote about ordinary sailors. “Art itself”, he announces there, “may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect”, concluding that his task is “by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see!” And then, the resounding declaration: “If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm – all you demand; and perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask”.

The irony is that Conrad always fiercely resisted the title of genre writer, and hated being referred to as an author of “sea stories”. The interest of his books, he insisted, “was not exclusively maritime but largely human”. His objection to the label points to the instability of the very distinction between realism and romance. Like his fellow expatriate Rudyard Kipling, who invented India for English fiction, Conrad saw at first hand what would have seemed exotic in a London drawing room. Whereas naturalistic writers such as Émile Zola eschewed the lush and strange, Conrad and Kipling deliberately had recourse to these qualities, but they did so as eyewitnesses. Jasanoff gets right to the heart of the matter: “Stories set at sea were, for [Conrad], stories about life”. When Conrad wrote about the sea it was with the authority of a hard-won knowledge that few, if any, of his contemporaries could equal. Henry James marvelled at Conrad’s peculiar gift of persuasion, enthusing that “No-one has known – for intellectual use – the things you know, and you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no-one has approached”; a sentiment echoed by the journalist E. V. Lucas when he remarked of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ that it “should kill off the pasteboard ocean forever”. By restoring Conrad’s own textual preferences, the Cambridge edition reveals how painstakingly he achieved his particular form of literary impressionism through onomatopoeia (in, for example, documenting the sounds of the sea and shipboard life), by accurately reproducing the vernacular of ordinary British sailors, and by manipulating rhythm and sound patterns through a nuanced use of punctuation.

Yet Conrad, even at his most naturalistic, is clearly a very different sort of writer from the hyper-realistic Kipling (or from Robert Louis Stevenson, that other chronicler of life at the edges of empire). His fiction – linguistically complex, philosophically dense and often predicated on multiple, conflicting narrative perspectives – defies a straightforward reading. T. E. Lawrence, one of Conrad’s most perceptive literary friends, saw early on that his writing was “not built in the rhythm of ordinary prose, but on something existing only in his head, and as he can never say what he wants to say, all his things end in a kind of hunger”, adding astutely, “He’s as much a giant of the subjective as Kipling is of the objective”. An anguished apprehension of the unreliability of all narratives suffuses Conrad’s work: by that insistence on “truth” in the preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ he meant that he didn’t simply want to achieve a vivid surface verisimilitude, but to offer an insight into the radical instability of appearances themselves. Wilfred Chesson, the pubisher’s reader at Unwin who first recommended Conrad for publication, came closest to articulating the ontological insecurity underlying his writing when he observed that “‘The Nigger’ is not an episode of the sea; it is a final expression of the pathology of Fear”.

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What Life in Confinement Meant for Ezra Pound’s Work

2018-01-15T16:09:00.002+01:00

Perhaps no other poet in the 20th century presents more forcefully than does Ezra Pound the need to separate the life from the work — and the impossibility of doing so. Pound’s visionary role in leading poetry in English into the modern, after the etiolations of the late 19th century, seems incontestable. So do his generosity and loyalty as a critic and friend (to Eliot, Joyce and others), his tirelessness as a teacher, his unorthodox brilliance as a translator from multiple languages and above all, his supreme ambition for poetry, expressed in his long poem the “Cantos,” and in its animating conviction that poetry not only could but should guide the practical motions of society itself.

On the other hand, Pound was a sort of Antaeus. As long as his feet were on the ground that fed him with images and experiences, he was a giant. In the air, as a seer, a social theorist and a philosopher, he was notoriously vulnerable. He worshiped strong leaders; he indulged in a virulent anti-Semitism; and only slyly, belatedly, offhandedly did he take responsibility for mistaken actions and for detestable opinions that he expressed in writing. His life resists posterity’s best efforts to make it resemble a morality play. His arrogance, his ambition and his hopes for his country led him to record more than 100 radio broadcasts critical of the American government while he was in Mussolini’s Italy between 1941 and 1943. Indicted on a charge of treason during the war, he was eventually declared of unsound mind and spent almost 13 years confined at St. Elizabeths Hospital outside Washington, D.C. Upon arriving at Naples, Italy, in 1958 after his release, his first gesture was the Fascist salute. Yeats foresaw all of this when he met the young Pound in 1912: “He is a headlong ragged nature, is always hurting people’s feelings, but he has I think some genius and great good will.”

The latest contribution to the Pound conundrum is Daniel Swift’s “The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics and Madness of Ezra Pound.” Swift is not a literary scholar. Instead, he is a kind of literary-critical memoirist. His approach is to provide new insights into poetry by reconstructing the environment in which poems were written, incorporating his own experience into the text. His book “Bomber County” (2010) examined some poetry of World War II through an exploration of a relative’s service in the Royal Air Force. Now he seeks insights into Pound through biographical investigations of those who visited him over the years at St. Elizabeths and through other extramural research. Swift declares, “Wherever people speak of Pound, there I tried to go.” His strategy is intriguing but prone (as is memoir itself) to a kind of irrelevant narcissism. Declaring that previous biographies have sought to provide too unified a portrait of Pound, Swift suggests that he will “permit rival tellings to sing their discord” through a “style of telling — occasional, fragmented, in glimpses” not unlike the collage effect of Pound’s own poems.

Swift has done a certain amount of detective work here, though no doubt not enough to satisfy the Poundians, who are a fierce and demanding tribe. The names on those cartes de visite to St. Elizabeths constitute a roll call of major American poets: John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, W. S. Merwin, Charles Olson, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky and others. Swift reveals himself to be no deep student of American poetry, and he is occasionally given to unhelpful generalities, as when he declares that “tragedy, modernism, translation, collage: All are concerned with the great action of drawing together.” He reads the work of Pound’s visitors and those works of poetry, translation and prose that Pound created during his confinement. It is hard to identify Swift’s final judgment of the poetry; he declares that “the grand bad faith of the ‘Cantos’ — its pomposity, its anger — is a constant, running line after line,” but this is so instantly untrue that one wants to chalk it up to the spiteful impatience every reader has felt who has engaged deeply with Pound’s allusive and polyphonic poem and emerged occasionally inspired but also baffled and frustrated. Swift’s most useful discovery may be the extent to which Pound at St. Elizabeths became a kind of touchstone by which other poets — beginning with Olson, but including Lowell and Pound’s old friend Williams — sought “to take Pound in, incorporate him, shape him” for themselves. Captivity invites appropriation, and appropriation can take different forms, as for example when Eliot protectively sought to shape the perception of Pound in the world at large as a cold high modernist, rather than as an intemperate propagandist.

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Lady Chatterley’s Lover

2018-01-13T18:11:00.003+01:00

Six weeks after a London criminal court permitted the unexpurgated publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover on November 2, 1960, a forlorn rearguard action took place in the crimson and gold chamber of the House of Lords, then still a chamber of hereditary peers, profoundly conservative in a rural and military way. The sixth earl of Craven recounted an experience he had recently had at a bleak modernist café on a concrete bridge over the new superhighway from London to Manchester, itself a symbol of Britain’s modern age.

Describing D. H. Lawrence’s famous but overrated novel as “a book with a filthy reputation known to every schoolboy troubled by desire,” the noble earl recalled with dismay the scene he had witnessed. “At every serving counter sat a snigger of youths. Every one of them had a copy of this book held up to his face with one hand while he forked nourishment into his open mouth with the other. They held the seeds of suggestive lust, which was expressed quite blatantly, by glance and remark, to the girls serving them.”

He had seen the approaching doom of the world in which he had grown up. In nasty strip-lit eateries perched over growling lanes of traffic, lewd youths (no doubt wearing drainpipe trousers) freely perused filthy books, openly and cheaply bought, in which the crudest words in the language were lawfully printed . . . and while they did so, they forgot their table manners.

The earl’s extraordinary speech, which had no effect on anything at all, was a cry of pain. To read it now is like looking at pictures of extinct creatures on an Edwardian magic lantern, doubly distanced from us by both the contents and the manner in which they are displayed. Yet while it is risible, and even pitiful, I do not see why it should not be taken seriously, too. For it had not been so very long since the earl’s beliefs were supreme in the land, and uncensored versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been regularly seized by customs officers. King George V was even said to have confiscated a smuggled copy from Queen Mary. Is it possible that this trial really was a defeat for the forces of good and a victory for the forces of indifference? For it is the indifference of the lofty which we need to fear most. They are generally too wealthy and sequestered to understand the evil they visit on the poor, who live far away in their fatherless homes, noisy streets, and chaotic schools.

Most people know nothing important about either the book or the trial that led to its free publication. Though huge stacks of copies were sold in the months after the verdict, most of them were first greedily thumbed, then rapidly scanned, then laid aside. By the time I was first introduced to Lawrence’s writing in the late 1960s, compelled at school to study Sons and Lovers, his heavy, portentous style was fast slipping out of fashion. Even the promise of filthy words and rude passages (still rare in those days) never persuaded me to bother with Lady Chatterley.

As for the trial, everyone knows only two things about it. One is the question posed by the prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, to the jury: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” The other is Philip Larkin’s statement in his poem “Annus Mirabilis” that sexual intercourse, at least for him, began “In nineteen sixty-three, / . . . Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.” To understand the event you must read C. H. Rolph’s superb account, originally privately printed in 1961 and later more generally available, The Trial of Lady Chatterley.

From this work it swiftly becomes clear that there was scarcely a chance of the jury deciding that Lady Chatterley should stay banned, and almost everyone involved knew it. I regularly astonish people by telling them, for instance, that there were no prosecution witnesses at all at the trial, unless you count the policeman, Detective Inspector Charles Monahan, who obtained twelve copies from the publisher and testified to that effect. This merely established that the book had been published and so was subject to the laws of England. People also tend to be amazed that the publisher, Penguin, had printed 200,000 copies before the prosecution began. Surely, given the book’s history, they must at least have suspected that a prosecution could be heading their way. So why were they so confident?

Actually, they had good reason to be. The same book had already been part of a test case in the United States in July 1959, more than a year before. Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan, in a decision upheld as precedent by the Supreme Court, had ruled that, in the case of Lady Chatterley, “redeeming social or literary value” was a defense against obscenity charges. Even more important, a clever alliance of social and moral liberals from both British political parties had just changed the ancient English law on obscenity by cunning and determination. Their coalition, because it crossed Britain’s normally very rigid party lines, was unstoppable by the electorate, and would in the next twenty years completely transform the country. When elections came round, voters had no idea whom to punish for radical changes that had never featured in any party platform.

These reformers had done an astonishing thing to the obscenity law. Even if Lady Chatterley was found to be obscene, its publication would now be permitted “if it is proved that the publication of the article in question is justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern.” It would have been a poor lawyer who couldn’t show in that year of grace that a work by David Herbert Lawrence qualified on that absurd measure.

For Lady Chatterley’s time had come at last. Early 1960s London, blackened by soot and full of gaps left by bombs and rockets, still looked at first sight like an Edwardian capital. The English people of the time seemed underfed, repressed, and scrawny, while everything on sale, from clothes to food, was generally either gray or brown. Olive oil was only available in pharmacies, as a remedy for unlovely complaints such as blocked ears. Cooking was done with lard or beef dripping, thank you. Travel abroad was limited by a sternly enforced limit on taking money overseas. Many got round this rule by carrying tinned supplies with them so that they did not have to spend any money on foreign food.

It was, or seemed to be, puritanism without purpose, deferred gratification without a reward. An attempt to restore the pre-1939 world of class distinction and fairly strict Protestant morality was visibly failing. Thousands of marriages had been wrecked by the war and its separations. Many children had grown up without fathers. Crime was increasing, some of it involving guns (more or less unknown before then in England). Many wondered, as they paid their high taxes and made do for another year with clothes and furniture which were past their best, “Is this what we fought for?” After an interminable age in which the national slogan had been “mustn’t grumble,” they longed for some fun and relaxation. They probably thought that, after a while, the pendulum would swing back toward restraint, not grasping—as we do—that there is no such pendulum.

An intellectual class hugely influenced by the advanced ideas of forty years before now ran the BBC. As they seized control of the nation’s microphones and transmitters, these once-derided followers of Fabian socialism and Bloomsbury sexuality became rather bossy. Bloomsbury people, as Dorothy Parker noted, “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.” George Orwell had mocked the overlapping Fabians a few years before as fruit juice drinkers, nudists, sandal-wearers, sex maniacs, Quakers, nature-cure quacks, pacifists, and feminists. And now the followers of these people, after decades as outsiders, sat in charge of radio and television studios.

All this helps explain why this frankly rather terrible book was, for a few weeks, so important, and why, in a way, it changed the country forever. Just how terrible it was could not be admitted, for to do so would have destroyed the argument that its greatness justified its explicit crudity. The intellectual fashion of the time said that Lady Chatterley was a great work. And who would dare defy that fashion? Nobody. The prosecution failed to persuade any important British intellectuals, academics, or “experts” to testify that the book was either worthless or obscene. The days when academics were conservative in politics and morals were very much over. As in the U.S. the year before, when such lanterns of enlightenment as Edmund Wilson had declared Lady Chatterley admirable, all the clever people were on the same side. All? Almost. Only one respectable intellect could be found to condemn the work. But she was not in the courtroom. This was Katherine Anne Porter, an American writer who had written a thoughtful, relentless attack on Lady Chatterley in the February 1960 edition of Encounter.

Mr. Griffith-Jones brought this up while cross-examining the first defense witness, a Cambridge lecturer called Graham Hough. Mr. Griffith-Jones quoted Miss Porter’s article: “When I first read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, thirty years ago, I thought it a dreary, sad performance with some passages unintentional hilarious low comedy, one scene at least simply beyond belief in a book written with such inflamed apostolic solemnity.” Mr. Hough did not agree. Mr. Griffith-Jones pressed on, eventually reproducing Miss Porter’s merciless condemnation:

Nowhere in this sad history can you see anything but a long, dull, grey monotonous chain of days, lightened now and then by a sexual bout. I can’t hear any music, or poetry, or the voices of friends, or children. There is no wine, no food, no sleep or refreshment, no laughter, no rest nor quiet—no love. I remember then that this is the fevered dream of a dying man sitting under his umbrella pines in Italy indulging his sexual fantasies.

Mr. Hough did not agree with that, either.

What a tragedy it is that the prosecution did not persuade Miss Porter (no political conservative, by the way—she campaigned for Sacco and Vanzetti) to testify. Perhaps the earl of Craven and his fellow backwoods peers might have clubbed together to buy her a stateroom aboard the RMS Queen Mary, both ways across the Atlantic. For she was and is right, and nobody has yet put it better. Lady Chatterley is a dreadful, ridiculous book, and the claims of one witness that it is somehow puritanical are as nonsensical as the claims of another (a bishop of the Church of England, naturally) who said that Lawrence was “trying to portray the sex relationship as something essentially sacred” and “as in a real sense an act of holy communion.” How would all these experts and grandees have sounded, with their praise of four-letter words and their bloviations about purity and regeneration, if just one real writer had told them what they must have known to be the truth—that it is the product of a once-fine author’s sad decline, being used as a battering ram against restraint?

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Balzac’s Novel of Female Friendship

2018-01-11T17:06:00.000+01:00

Out of the more than ninety novels that make up the so-called Human Comedy of Honoré de Balzac, only a handful are still widely read or assigned in schools, at least in the Anglo-American world: Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Lost Illusions, perhaps Cousin Bette, the late novel from which I first learned to read French by dutifully looking up every other word. Yet Balzac was arguably the creator of the modern social novel, “the first and foremost member of his craft” and “the master of us all,” according to Henry James, who wrote about him again and again. His influence was pivotal for writers as varied as James, Flaubert, Zola, Dostoyevsky, and Dreiser, all of whom imitated yet rebelled against him. To his successors he was a rough-hewn genius with an immense appetite for life. “What a man he would have been had he known how to write,” said Flaubert. “But that was the only thing he lacked. After all, an artist would never have accomplished so much nor had such breadth.” They were awed by the scope and sheer abundance of his work, as well as his mastery of scenic detail. So were many social historians and radical writers, beginning with Marx and Engels. Marx lauded his “profound grasp of real conditions,” despite his self-proclaimed Catholic and monarchist views, while Engels felt he had written almost a complete history of French society from 1816 to 1848, novels from which Engels said he’d learned more than from any economist. For twentieth-century critics like Georg Lukács and Erich Auerbach, his work, with its intricate linkage between characters and their milieu, formed the very template of literary realism.

Balzac did not at first set out to write a portrait of his age. Always fluent and prolific, in the 1820s he churned out pulp and Gothic novels under pseudonyms before trying his hand as a printer and businessman. But inspired in part by the historical novels of Walter Scott, he became what he called the “secretary” of French society, the observer who cataloged its complex formations. In his 1842 preface to La Comédie humaine, the ambitious framework he now conceived for his work, he said he wanted to write “the history which so many historians have neglected, that of Moeurs [manners, morals].” On the model of a zoologist classifying animal life, he had become, as he saw it, a “painter of types of humanity, a narrator of the drama of private life, an archaeologist of social furniture, a cataloger of professions, a registrar of good and evil.” On this huge, multi-paneled canvas, which ultimately would include more than two thousand characters, many of them reappearing in book after book, he had hoped to “detect the hidden sense of this vast assembly of figures, passions, and incidents.”

While complete sets of Balzac’s work in English translation were once common, few contemporary readers have sought out many of his lesser-known books. Graham Robb concludes his prodigious 1994 biography of Balzac with the terse suggestion that “unknown masterpieces are waiting to be rediscovered.” The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, first published in 1842, is not exactly a masterpiece, but it’s a singular work, one of Balzac’s Scenes of Private Life, full of arresting detail yet cutting against the grain of his received image as a social realist. James himself wrote a long preface to a 1902 translation, but the novel soon dropped without a trace from the English-speaking world. It’s a gem of a book, occasionally florid and schematic yet engrossing, and this new translation by Jordan Stump makes for precisely the kind of rediscovery that Robb invited.

It’s not hard to see why the book has attracted little notice even in its own time. A novel like Père Goriot is a symphonic work with settings ranging from a faded pension to the great houses of Paris, with a broad spectrum of characters from naive to diabolical, a stark family drama with echoes of King Lear, and at its heart a coming-of-age story that exposes the whole fabric of a vicious, amoral society. The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, with only two main characters, is a small-scale chamber work, one of the last French epistolary novels, a mode that belongs more to the previous century than to the 1840s. It too is a coming-of-age story, but instead of the young man from the provinces who trades his innocence for vaulting ambition and lays siege to French society, it’s made up of the letters exchanged between two young women who leave a Carmelite convent before taking their vows, confronting the limited choices available to them in the wider world. Both spring from the minor aristocracy, their convent life the consequence of their social position, not any religious vocation. Despite the rights granted to women under Napoleon’s more egalitarian civil code, still in force after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, their inheritances were to be diverted to foster the fortunes of their brothers, the eldest sons who would carry the family title. In the convent they have developed a deep bond, a “secret inner life” that would be played out in their letters. At one level the novel would be a bold exploration of female friendship, surprising from so masculine a writer as Balzac, the titanic figure we know from Rodin’s sculpted image. The letters make up a rich tapestry of private life and feeling for women barred from playing any public role. They tell a story of the opposite paths the two of them take in love and marriage, mapping more intimate ground than the social novels for which Balzac has been most appreciated.

That intimacy, with its direct access to the inner life behind the social mask, is a hallmark of the epistolary novels on which Balzac modeled this work, especially Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748), the longest English novel, perhaps the first psychological novel, and its French offshoot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), two celebrated works centered on women, both of them among Balzac’s most cherished books. Falling in love with her tutor, an exiled, impoverished Spanish nobleman, one of Balzac’s protagonists, Louise, like Rousseau’s Julie, actually reenacts some of the medieval Heloise story, her forbidden romance with the philosopher and rising churchman Peter Abelard. Meanwhile, her bosom friend Renée quickly makes a marriage of convenience to the frail son of Provençal gentry, twenty years her elder. Both women embark on discreet missions of redemption, lending their strength to the damaged men they marry. The Spaniard Felipe, heir to a dukedom but deemed an enemy by Spain’s Bourbon king, has ceded to a younger brother both his title and the woman he loved. Repeatedly described as physically ugly, “an old young man,” he can’t imagine attracting another woman until he falls for the witty, vivacious, and passionate Louise. Renée’s husband Louis is even more needy, for he’s returned a broken man from Russian captivity in Napoleon’s wars. With support from her friend Louise, she deftly manages both his family life and his advancement to a title and a parliamentary position.

All this backstory is sketched in only briefly since the men in the book are dim figures, rarely heard from directly, seen almost entirely through the lens of the confiding women. Socially, these women take care to recede into the shadows, especially Renée, who is eager to maintain the appearance of a proper wife and mother. But the letters, free of any third-person narration, highlight their inner strength, their depth of feeling, and their starkly conflicting views of love and marriage. Louise is very much the romantic heroine, determined to live out a grand passion with the men she loves. Felipe himself is a figure out of romance, not only a Spaniard, hence broodingly grave and hot-blooded, but “the last Abencerrage,” descended from the fiery Moors who conquered parts of Spain from North Africa until they were expelled or Christianized toward the end of the fifteenth century. (Their legend had only recently been popularized on the stage and in an 1826 tale by Chateaubriand.) Louise’s second great love, even more intense and possessive, involves another romantic figure, barely realized, a stereotypical poet. With him she leaves Paris for a bucolic love nest, not far from the city, that excludes society altogether.

Renée, on the other hand, in her own deep provincial life, blends in effortlessly with both nature and society. Pragmatically, she accepts marriage to a man she does not love, a marriage of companionship, social ambition, and common interest. “My life may never be great, but it will be tranquil, smooth, and untroubled,” or so she imagines. She takes care to create a beautiful landscape, directs her passion toward motherhood and her busy mind to advancing her weakened husband’s position. When children do come, Balzac’s physical evocation of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and childcare make up some of the most astonishing pages in the book, written completely from a woman’s point of view. (Balzac saw himself as an androgynous figure with a “woman’s heart.”) Renée lives in her body, in her maternal feeling, while leading from behind. Her approach to marriage is thoroughly rational—though far too “calculating,” in the view of her friend—but her tormenting anxieties about the children, especially when one of them falls ill, parallel the anxiety Louise has about her lovers. The pangs of jealousy threaten Louise’s romantic dream and drive her to a theatrical, almost operatic denouement anticipated from the very first page of the novel.

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Li Qingzhao: The Approach of Happiness

2018-01-07T16:04:00.002+01:00

The wind has stopped,
the fallen flowers fallen
deeply.

Outside the window, their red petals,
heaped like snow,

the memory,
after-blooming,
of crab-apples—a time
when spring is wounded.

The wine is spent, the song
finished. The jade pitcher empty.

The bronze lamp flickers and dims.

I cannot bear
such secret bitterness,
or even one more cry
of the shrike.

Translated by Wendy Chen

The Ghost and the Princess - The correspondence of René Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia

2018-01-06T18:06:00.000+01:00

There is an “official theory” about the nature of minds that “hails chiefly from Descartes,” wrote Gilbert Ryle, an Oxford philosopher. According to the theory, each person has a mind that is a private, inner world. It has no spatial dimensions and is not subject to laws that govern physical objects, yet it is mysteriously connected to a material body during a person’s earthly life. Ryle dubbed this “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.”

People have not always thought of the mind and the body in this way. Homer’s heroes are not depicted as composites that are only partly physical. Their awareness, intelligence, and other mental activities are part of their bodily lives. And although the shades of the dead lurk in the Homeric underworld, these etiolated creatures are little more than fading echoes of the living. Some later Greek philosophers explicitly stated that the soul is made of physical stuff. For Democritus, it was tiny units of solid matter. For the Stoics, it was a mixture of fire and air.

Unlike Homer and the Greek materialists, Plato did believe in something like René Descartes’ ghost in the machine. A person has an inner rational self, according to Plato, which can escape its bodily imprisonment with its powers intact. Yet Ryle was right to single out Descartes even though parts of the “official theory” can be traced to Plato. Descartes sharpened the concepts of mind and matter, crystallizing ideas that took shape in the seventeenth century and giving us the modern form of the so-called mind-body problem.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641, Descartes announced that he was essentially a thinking thing: “Thought…alone is inseparable from me.” There is an outer world, which includes my body, but I could still exist even if it were all destroyed. And what exactly is a thinking thing? Something that is aware. Descartes explained that by “thought” he meant “everything that is within us in such a way that we are immediately aware of it.” This included sensation, will, intellect, and imagination. Thus Descartes made consciousness the distinguishing mark of the mental.

He also merged the concepts of mind and soul. The “mind” was “the principle in virtue of which we think,” and a person’s soul was his or her mind. This was a novelty since in medieval science and philosophy, the soul was largely regarded as what animates inert matter. If a body died, it was because its life-giving soul had departed. But for Descartes it was the other way around. If the soul departed, it was because its body had broken down.

What Descartes had to say about the body was as avant-garde as what he had to say about the mind. A keen dissector of animal carcasses, which he procured on regular visits to butchers, Descartes developed a comprehensive physiology that treated bodies as if they were machines. “I suppose the body to be just a statue or a machine made of earth,” he wrote in the early 1630s, in his Treatise on Man, one of two scientific works he chose not to publish after learning of Galileo’s conviction for heresy in 1633. He compared human bodies to “clocks, artificial fountains, mills, and other similar machines that…have the power to move of their own accord in various ways.” He drew particular attention to some fountains in the royal gardens of St.-Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris, in which the force of water drove various contraptions. Descartes explained that “a certain very fine wind, or…flame,” which he called “animal spirits,” courses through the nerves of the body, just as water flowed through the pipes of these fountains.

His account of the body was intended as an application of what would later be called the mechanical philosophy. This new science, mainly inspired by Galileo, saw nature in terms of matter, motion, and mathematical laws. Physical change was explained by the contact between objects and the size, shape, and motion of their interacting component parts rather than by the intrinsic qualities invoked by Aristotelian thinkers—whom the Galileans reckoned could not really explain anything at all. (Molière parodied such empty science in his play The Imaginary Invalid, in which a student attributes the soporific effect of opium simply to its inherent sleep-inducing quality, or “dormitive virtue.”)

After dealing mechanistically with digestion and the action of the heart, lungs, and other organs, Descartes’ Treatise proceeds to treat perception, volition, and memory along similar lines. Helpful diagrams are provided throughout. The brain’s pineal gland plays a crucial role in these mental activities, for it is here that the “rational soul,” or mind, has “its principal seat,” exercising its influence on the body and receiving messages from it via the animal spirits that course through the body’s nerves to and from the brain. Again exploiting his analogy with the hydraulic devices in the royal gardens, Descartes wrote that the soul “resides” in the pineal gland, “like the fountaineer, who must be stationed at the tanks to which the fountains’ pipes return if he wants to initiate, impede, or in some way alter their movements.”

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Du Fu: Ballad of the Ancient Cypress

2018-01-05T17:02:00.000+01:00

Before Kongming's shrine stands an ancient cypress,
Its branches are like green bronze, its roots just like stone.
The frosted bark, slippery with rain, is forty spans around,
Its blackness blends into the sky two thousand feet above.
Master and servant have each already reached their time's end,
The tree, however, still remains, receiving men's devotion.
Clouds come and bring the air of Wuxia gorge's vastness,
The moon comes out, along with the cold of snowy mountain whiteness.

I think back to the winding road, east of Brocade Pavilion,
Where the military master and his lord of old share a hidden temple.
Towering that trunk, those branches, on the ancient plain,
Hidden paintings, red and black, doors and windows empty.
Spreading wide, coiling down, though it holds the earth,
In the dim and distant heights are many violent winds.
That which gives it its support must be heaven's strength,
The reason for its uprightness, the creator's skill.

If a great hall should teeter, wanting rafters and beams,
Ten thousand oxen would turn their heads towards its mountain's weight.
Its potential unrevealed, the world's already amazed,
Nothing would stop it being felled, but what man could handle it?
Its bitter heart cannot avoid the entry of the ants,
Its fragrant leaves have always given shelter to the phoenix.
Ambitious scholars, reclusive hermits- neither needs to sigh;
Always it's the greatest timber that's hardest to put to use.

From: Du Fu English Translations

Another Side of Susan Sontag

2017-12-29T20:19:00.001+01:00

The last collection of Susan Sontag’s short fiction was published in 1977, under the title I, etcetera. Now a new volume called Debriefing is coming out, which collects the eight stories from I, etcetera along with three more: “Pilgrimage,” “The Letter Scene,” and her most admired story, “The Way We Live Now,” first published in 1986. Sontag’s fiction is a smaller oeuvre than her nonfiction, which has taken on such an inflated role in the culture that it is difficult to see around it. Meanwhile, Sontag the personality has grown so large in death that it threatens to eclipse her work: She is remembered as a narcissist, a pugilist, the enemy of Camille Paglia, and a genius. This new collection may not offer anything strictly new, but it does allow us examine a side of Sontag that is often obscured by those two pillars of her legacy.

Although Sontag never stuck to one line of thinking for long (The New Yorker’s obituary noted that, “as she saw it, she was entitled to frame bold opinions, and to change them as the world changed”), she defined American twentieth-century thought as much as Foucault or McLuhan. Notes on Camp (1964), Against Interpretation (1966), and On Photography (1977) are great and generous contributions to the project of criticism. Sontag wrote about politics and illness and mass media, and she did it properly.

Recall that line in On Photography about why great industrial nations (Germany, Japan, America) produce tourists who take photographs while on holiday: “Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they take pictures.” This is a tiny encapsulation of the best of Sontag: authoritative but unexpected and playful. She is not quite judgmental, but takes our temperature as though she is the pediatrician and we are the child.

Paglia’s two most famous put-downs capture the contradictory nature of anti-Sontagism. Sontag is “synonymous with a shallow kind of hip posturing,” Paglia wrote, but also she is a “sanctimonious moralist of the old-guard literary world.” These two epithets don’t blend easily, but if we force them together it makes a kind of sense: Paglia sees in Sontag a deep shallowness, a newfangled old-timeyness, a moralizing hipster. It’s the figure that prompted the writer Kathy Acker to quip, “Dear Susan Sontag, Would you please read my books and make me famous?”

Sontag’s short fiction is a rebuke to this stereotype. Not all of it is excellent, but it is all stylish. “Project for a Trip to China” is a list of aphoristic assertions about China—where the narrator has never been—that are more about the imagination than a real place. The piece is an investigation into Orientalist desire that takes apart its components, but does nothing more: “Myrna Loy China, Turandot China. Beautiful, millionaire Soong sisters from Wellesley and Wesleyan & their husbands. A landscape of jade, teak, bamboo, fried dog.”

Here, Sontag’s form invites the reader to understand desire as a patchy list of fragments that do not cohere, even on a sentence level. “I am interested in wisdom. I am interested in walls. China famous for both.” She presents a desire in detail, but it is an uninterrogated desire. This renders the form of the story interesting but its substance sludgy and disappointing. It is a basket of bad ideas laid out beautifully.

In “Pilgrimage,” the first person narrator (who seems very much like Sontag herself) recalls meeting Thomas Mann against her will as an adolescent. Her best friend Merrill has found him in the telephone book and obtained an invitation for Sunday tea. The narrator is deeply embarrassed by the occasion, which brings her favorite old-world writer slap bang into her dreary Californian life. She makes it through the ordeal—“…I remember I thought his mustache (I didn’t know anyone with a mustache) looked like a little hat over his mouth”—but hates every moment.

It’s a weird little story, structured more like a personal essay than fiction. It doesn’t really work unless we picture the narrator as Susan Sontag. Much better is “Baby,” which is told through a set of parents’ statements to some kind of family therapist, but jumbled up so that the child they describe is at once seven and in his twenties and a baby and a teen. Again, like “Project for a Trip to China,” “Baby” takes all of its force from its form. It’s an experiment, rough but overall successful, though you can tell that Sontag isn’t quite in control.

“The Way We Live Now,” in contrast, is a more successful marriage of form and content. It is about a man who is very sick with HIV/AIDS—more specifically, it is about his friends and their discourse around their ill friend. Instead of conversation with the man, Sontag gives us telephone calls, gossip about who knows what, the intimate fear that one is “jockeying” for the best spot at the bedside, wanting to be the most needed.

In her famous comment that white civilization is a cancer, and then throughout the books Illness As Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, Sontag worries at the nexus of bodily experience and language. She writes that “there is peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease,” which derives from psychology’s scientific flavor. Psychology is a “secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of ‘spirit’ over matter,” and it leads to our conception of cancer as an “evil, invincible predator, not just a disease.”

“The Way We Live Now” extends this analytical work into the way we speak, presenting the lived experience of HIV/AIDS as one that is mediated by both the community of the sick person and the sick person himself. In one long run-on sentence, Sontag shows the looping reciprocity of illness and language:

And it was encouraging, Stephen insisted, that from the start, at least from the time he was finally persuaded to make the telephone call to his doctor, he was willing to say the name of the disease, pronounce it often and easily, as if it were just another word, like boy or gallery or cigarette or money or deal, as in no big deal, Paolo interjected, because, as Stephen continued, to utter the name is a sign of health, a sign that one has accepted being who one is, mortal, vulnerable, not exempt, not an exception after all, it’s a sign that one is willing, truly willing, to fight for one’s life.

HIV/AIDS is at the heart of this sentence. Language and the sick body are perfectly coextensive. And the disease is wrapped in the tangled and frantic community of speakers who veer between loving the sick person and speaking on his behalf.

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Karl Jaspers and the language of transcendence

2017-12-21T11:55:00.004+01:00

In January 2015, after the massacre of twelve people at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, the words “Je suis Charlie” became a ubiquitous collective expression of solidarity. Inside Nazi Germany, as his Jewish wife Gertrud began to despair of the fate of her beloved homeland, the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers tried to console her with a similar phrase: “Ich bin Deutschland”.

Jaspers lived an extraordinary life, of which his experiences in the Third Reich were formative. He was born in 1883, with an incurable disease that was expected to kill him by the age of thirty – the same age at which he published his monumental psychiatric textbook, General Psychopathology. Remarkably, Jaspers lived until the age of eighty-six, which allowed him to pursue a second, philosophical career.

As a couple in what the Nazis called a “mixed marriage”, Karl and Gertrud became uncomfortably familiar with anti-Semitism. They bravely decided to remain together in Germany, surviving by restricting their lives and social circle. Although dismissed from his professorship at Heidelberg and banned by the Nazis from teaching and publishing his philosophy, Jaspers kept writing. As he would later reflect, “Germany under the Nazi regime was a prison”, but “the hidden life of thought” remained.

Philosophically, Jaspers can be viewed as the first of the great German existentialists, but his approach was more scholarly, responsible and historically informed than many of his colleagues’. Like all existential phenomenologists (students of the structures of lived experience), he was deeply influenced by the Kantian distinction between the world as it is in itself and the world as it appears to us. It follows from Kant’s insight into our imprisonment in appearance that we have no means of comparing reality as it appears to us with reality itself, so the “phenomena” of lived experience are what phenomenologists like Jaspers study. Jaspers wrote in a somewhat Hegelian, systematic form, but the content of his philosophical work strains against the limitations of such formal systems. His French colleague, Jean Wahl, described this “struggle” between form and content in Jaspers’s philosophy, which “always stands outside the system and breaks it”. As Jaspers’s restricted life inside Nazi Germany was a form of resistance to dogmatism, so too was his hidden life of thought.

“What we are accustomed to call Karl Jaspers’s philosophy,” wrote the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, “is in fact a description of the acutely and incurably painful human condition.” Reality as a whole, which Jaspers calls “the Encompassing”, has three modes: the empirical world, existence and transcendence. Human life spans two interdependent modes: existence and transcendence, neither of which are objects of knowledge. Together, they “encompass” the empirical world. Existence and transcendence are essential for understanding that world but, since they are not objects, they don’t explain it scientifically. Rather, in Kołakowski’s phrase, they “confer legitimacy on it”, give it meaning.

Jaspers defines human beings as displaying “possible existence”. Existence is what we evince when we define ourselves in terms of our radical existential freedom to decide on who we are and the nature of our engagement with the world. We could say that existence belongs to the “subjective” side of the Encompassing, whereas transcendence belongs to the “objective” side. But Jaspers insists on their interdependence: there is no existence without transcendence, and, as examples of “possible existence”, we realize ourselves only in the presence of transcendence. The subject–object split is a useful distinction, not a dichotomy.

It is impossible to provide a complete empirical explanation of the world, and there is no Supreme Being to help us explain it. In Jaspers’s thought, transcendence supplants the idea of God as a being. Unlike the god introduced by some philosophers to provide naive explanations for the existence and nature of the observable world, transcendence is not an entity among others. We cannot prove its reality scientifically, nor deduce it via logical arguments. The presence of transcendence is necessary to confer meaning on the human world, but we encounter transcendence beyond the limits of knowledge. The word “transcendence” evokes the ineffable. It refers to the concept of what, like the smell of coffee or the experience of seeing green, cannot in principle be captured or fully expressed in words. Yet we must keep trying to evoke it because the attempt is essential to human self-realization.

If transcendence isn’t an object and cannot be known or spoken of, how can we encounter it? Jaspers suggests several ways, but most importantly transcendence “speaks” to us – not like Yahweh out of the whirlwind and the burning bush, but in code, a system of signs called “ciphers”.

Ciphers are not symbols. Symbols are objects that represent other objects, objectifying them in a symbolic representation even though they may be fictional objects that don’t exist outside the symbol. An objective depiction of a skeleton symbolically represents another objective reality: death. But a cipher evokes transcendence, which lies beyond the subject–object distinction and is no representable object. A cipher can be quite mundane, serving as a point of focus revealing some inexpressible aspect of transcendence: a work of art, a religious myth, a ritual performance, a guttering candle. Ciphers make transcendence accessible to us the only way it can be, but they don’t reveal it the way it “really is” – since transcendence isn’t purely objective, there’s no such way. So, despite being made accessible, transcendence remains hidden.

This implies that literal interpretations of religious mythologies, for example, block us from reading them as ciphers of transcendence. Ciphers are available to everyone, but superstitious and dogmatic ways of thinking blind us to them. It misses the point to read the four (very different) Gospels as historical fact in the same way that it’s wrong-headed to view a painting as an accurate representation of a real event. Although paintings and biblical texts may be more or less factually accurate, their import lies elsewhere. Symbols can be be translated into a non-symbolic language, but this is not so with ciphers. It’s always possible to state, in other terms, what a symbol “really means”, ciphers are untranslatable. As Jaspers argued in his published debates with the New Testament theologian Rudolf Bultmann, religious myths are ciphers, not symbols. It’s impossible to “demythologize” religious myths (translate them into secular terms, as Bultmann attempted) without hollowing out their religious meaning, leaving only an empty shell behind. Ciphers can be experienced, but they remain indecipherable. It is precisely by remaining indecipherable that ciphers guard transcendence from all kinds of dogmatic misreading.

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