Books
Films
Exhibits
John Crowley
The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines: A Story
(Subterranean Press, 2005)
So I am slowly working my way through the back catalogue of John Crowley, and having read most of the major things, now I’m mopping up the rest. This is a short book, barely a novella; the text was originally published in Conjunctions 39, but this is a beautiful edition from the Subterranean Press, hard cover with a silver-foil stamped boards: it’s hard to resist picking up such a book, and I generally don’t. In Amherst for a few days, I bought too many books; this is the one I turned to first, though there are others I should be reading.
I like John Crowley’s work in part because it’s not quite clear how to pigeonhole him. Most obviously, a case could be made that Little, Big and the Ægypt books are fantasy, but an equally strong argument could be made for the opposite. This is usually discussed whenever Crowley’s work is discussed; maybe it accounts for his odd place in the literary firmament. In this book, another of Crowley’s characteristic traits appears: it’s nostalgia-inflected and there’s a layer of sentimentality, something that can also be found in the bigger books. Sentimentality, of course, is generally banished from serious literature as the enemy of rigorous thought. Crowley here (and elsewhere) seems to be deploying it as a tool in his arsenal: it’s an odd trick, with interesting results.
The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines starts out apparently as a nostalgia trip: recalling a fictitious Indiana Shakespeare Festival from the late 1950s when the narrator would have been in high school. Doing the math reveals that the narrator’s age would seem to be approximately the same as Crowley’s; but put that aside. The narrator is a young Shakespeare enthusiast; he is clearly going to fall for Harriet, another young Shakespeare enthusiast whose youth is also described. Things risk becoming precious: the narrator is a dreamer who gets the idea from library books that he would be able to create a Greek theater in his backyard. Fourteen pages in, however, we are jerked into the present moment: Harriet is 38, the year is apparently 1981, as a Bulgarian has attempted to assassinate the Pope. Harriet and the narrator are not, apparently, together. Harriet is a photographer, and the description of her method suggests that something else is going on:
But these photographs don’t disappoint that way. The happiness they give is a little pale and fleeting – half an hour to set up the camera and make an exposure (hurry, hurry, the earth’s turning, the light’s changing) and an hour or two to make a true print: but it’s real happiness. Since they’re made from paper negatives rather than film, they seem to Harriet not to have that look of being stolen from the world rather than made from it that most landscape photographs have; they are shyer and more tentative somehow. Not painting, no, but satisfying in some of the same ways. (p. 16)
This comes after a discussion of the disappointment of painting: Harriet painted what she saw, but the next day found the resulting paintings not to accurately reflect the world. But there’s a lot buried here: this consideration of how art fits into the world doesn’t mesh with the youthful idealization of Shakespeare-as-great-artist in the previous section. Something has happened, it’s clear; and we’re sent back to the Indiana Shakespeare Festival, where blooming young love pushes the middle-aged present of the protagonists to the background again.
Complication sets in with the arrival of a man, nameless, who delivers a lecture to the young Shakespeareans on how Shakespeare could not have written his plays; he suspects that Francis Bacon is the likeliest candidate. The speech goes on in detail: it seems to be an introduction of doubt. Young love blossoms; the bookish young narrator goes to the library and discovers the voluminous works of those who have doubted Shakespeare’s authority, starting with Delia Bacon and continuing through to the present. And then the book changes entirely: as the summer winds on, the narrator and Harriet are separately stricken with polio. The pastoral beginning can be read very differently, as the narrator sees the braces of the Baconian speaker from the present:
I’ve thought of those canes, since then, and those braces. I’ve wished I could ask about them. There are things in your past, preserved in memory almost by chance, that only later on, because of the course your own life takes, come to seem proleptic, to significant when other things don’t. (pp. 26–27)
Read a second time, this book functions very differently: it’s an account of the relationship of two people and a past that can’t be escaped. The festival’s production of Henry V, not the most obvious play, then makes sense, as does the follow-up of The Tempest. At the same time, there’s an aspect of the book – the anti-Stratfordian argument – which doesn’t quite fit with everything else. The narrator grows up to teach Elizabethan drama; he sidesteps the Shakespearean controversy, just as the academy does. Perhaps an answer can be found in the figure of Delia Bacon, whose quest to prove that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare seems quixotic, if perhaps predicated on a life that didn’t work out as she would have liked. There is a romance to the anti-Stratfordians: their belief that the past contains a secret that could explain the present.
This is not, finally, a sentimental book: what seems to be pastoral is actually very carefully controlled by the narration. The title comes from an older book, by Mary Cowden Clark, seemingly an attempt to create backstories for Shakespeare’s heroines, perhaps that their behavior in the plays might be more comprehensible. One looks to the past for explanation.
The interior design of this book suffers a bit from the strange decision to use Zapf Chancery for the headers, with the resulting effect that it looks like it springs from the halcyon days when the Mac, Truetype fonts, and desktop publishing were brand new, a syndrome that might also be noticed in the lettering on Kate Bush’s The Hounds of Love, which had a somewhat more legitimate claim to the aesthetic, being released in 1985. What might possess a book designer to revisit that period twenty years later is beyond me, especially when the covers, done by another designer, are so lovely. It feels weirdly amateurish, the sort of thing you’d see in a church cookbook; and in its way it makes Crowley’s writing seem to be overly sentimental. It’s also strange that such attention would be paid to the covers while so little seems to be given to the interiors, though I guess that’s increasingly less surprising.
(David Markson’s list of the rejections of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, from the back of the program of the memorial service at NYU’s NY Institute for the Humanities.)
Alice B. Toklas
What Is Remembered
(Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1963)
Back to Gertrude Stein: though I’ve read her memoirs-as-cookbooks, I hadn’t previously gotten around to this, Alice Toklas’s memoir-as-a-memoir. The voice here is strange: it seems familiar, of course, from Stein’s imitation of it in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas where she’s describing many of the same scenes. This feels almost like an echo: at times its hard to tell if what the reader is receiving is a memory or a memory of Stein’s book. But it’s hard to tell where this voice comes from: Stein’s has been inflected on it, and sometimes Toklas’s is almost indistinguishable from Stein’s. Here, for example, is the last paragraph of of a chapter where Alice casually dismisses her roommate Harriet Levy’s religious crisis:
Sarah Stein now told Gertrude of her giving up the spiritual case of Harriet. They thought David Edstrom should undertake the case. David Edstrom was a good-looking young Swedish sculptor. He had not known anything like Harriet before, though he had known many American women in Florence where he had lived for several years. He soon told Gertrude lively stories of Harriet’s spiritual life. (p. 39)
That comma presumably wouldn’t be in Stein’s version of this paragraph: but the narration in the simple past tense slightly modified (“now told,” “soon told”), the generally simple sentences, the parallelism that begins and ends it (“Sarah Stein now told Gertrude,” “He soon told Gertrude”; “he had not known,” “he had known”) and repetitions (“David Edstrom”) and variations (“spiritual case of Harriet,” “Harriet’s spiritual life”) are familiar enough that one might almost think of this paragraph as a pastiche. But then a few pages later something like this appears, a voice which seems entirely different:
The winter commenced gaily. Gertrude during this winter diagnosed me as an old maid mermaid which I resented, the old maid was bad enough but the mermaid was quite unbearable. I cannot remember how this wore thin and finally blew away entirely. But by the time the buttercups were in bloom, the old maid mermaid had gone into oblivion and I had been gathering wild violets. The lilies of the valley, forget-me-nots and hyacinths we gathered in the forest of Saint-Germain were more delicately colored than those of California, which were more robust and even more fragrant. (p. 44)
There are differences in emphasis, of course: Hemingway only appears glancingly here, and there’s more Matisse and less Picasso. There are less celebrities in general: this is largely about Gertrude. Tchelichev is dismissed a sentence after he appears; but she will admit to liking René Crevel. The appeal of Francis Rose isn’t really explained here either. (“Georges [Hugnet] spoke slightingly of Francis. One did not blame him, Francis was a very difficult guest.”) And we do learn that though Gertrude never met Jane Bowles, she did meet Alice in Paris after Gertrude’s death. There’s surprisingly little about Stein’s books, especially in comparison to Stein’s memoirs. The American trip, fretted over by Stein in Everybody’s Autobiography, is here a complete triumph; World War II passes quickly, and Toklas’s account is close to Stein’s, if not quite as breathless.
Things do leak out, of course, that wouldn’t be in Gertrude Stein’s account: she wouldn’t mention, for example, that Sarah Stein became a Christian Scientist. Arthur Cravan shows up as “Craven . . . a very handsome Englishman who wrote a pamphlet on the salon paintings that caused a scandal and who boxed for pleasure” (p. 76). And there are minor revelations, like the appearance of this telephone:
After only a week in Paris, Ada returned to London and I went to the plays of Bernstein in which Guitry père performed. In one of them I saw one of the first portable telephones. Before that, they had always been attached to the wall. The audience buzzed with excitement as the curtain went up and revealed it. The acting was as brilliant as the lines. (p. 46)
Presumably what is being described is a table-top telephone; though of course a telephone wouldn’t seem to be particularly functional in a play, at one point it must have been new enough to cause excitement, something which must have seemed impossibly foreign in 1963. An anecdote which seems like it has to be related to Duchamp, though there’s precious little context for it:
[Miss Blood] asked [Picasso] what he considered his contribution to painting. He said, Je suis le bec Auer, a gas mantle. (p. 55)
I will assume that some assiduous art historian has tracked down the provenance of this quote and whether or not it has anything to do with Étant donnés.
And occasional moments of a relationship stand out: here, for example, Alice is made extremely unhappy by the weather at Saint-Rémy:
But Gertrude had written so well there, and so happily, and so much, that I made up my mind I would behave and not complain. (p. 122)
Here as elsewhere in the book there’s an enormous fealty to the figure of Gertrude Stein. After a perfunctory recitation of Alice’s life before meeting Gertrude, What Is Remembered is less an autobiography than it is a memoir of Alice’s time with her. The book contains a number of illustrations of Gertrude Stein in a variety of formats; there are plenty of photographs of the pair together. Only two photos in the book are of Alice alone; the first is one of a pair by Carl Van Vechten of her and Gertrude, the second by Ettore Sottsass (!), is of her alone in the rue Christine in 1951. The book ends precisely at Gertrude’s death in 1946, though it was published in 1963. There’s not as much retrospective analysis here as one might hope: the title doesn’t overpromise. The book functions as a counterpart to Stein’s three autobiographies: it can be read against those, perhaps as a corrective, but Toklas here seems uninterested in talking about anything else. It’s hard not to psychologize: clearly, this is a gesture of love, but there’s a self abnegation that’s almost too much to take.
“And here, almost against his will, he had to look at the face of the corpse. It was as it had been in life; no sign was visible of the promised redemption; what the others had found in the machine the officer had not found; the lips were firmly pressed together, the eyes were open, with the same expression as in life, their look was calm and convinced, through the forehead went the point of the great iron spike.”
(Kafka, quoted in Gabriel Josipovici’s Writing and the Body, p. 114.)
Jorge Luis Borges
The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory
(trans. Andrew Hurley)
(Penguin Classics, 2007; originals 1975 & 1983)
One of the happy accidents of my youth was discovering the short stories of Borges, in the old Dutton editions translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in the Rockford Public Library. This undoubtedly had something to do with his name being near the start of the alphabet; still, good luck is good luck, and I made my way through all the Borges they had, as he’s exactly the kind of writer a certain sort of high school student could get extremely excited about. The books I remembered liking most were, for whatever reason, the late ones: The Book of Sand and the one that was then titled Dr. Brodie’s Report (now, having lost its rhythm, retitled Brodie’s Report). I’ve had a copy of the hardcover Collected Fiction for a while; but aside from dipping into that for reference from time to time, I don’t think I’ve really read Borges since high school. Seeing The Book of Sand displayed at a bookstore in Amherst, the first time, I think, that I’d seen a copy of the book on its own since first reading it, I bought a copy; it had been a long time, and I was curious whether there was something to be gained from re-reading Borges. This edition is, as it turns out, exactly the same as the text in the collected edition; it does add a seven-page introduction by the translator.
I don’t know. Re-reading Kafka a few years ago I was struck by how much I’d missed when I was in high school because I was so taken by the central conceits of his narratives: there are things that are more lastingly interesting than absurdity. The conceits of some of these stories are still familiar (others I’d forgotten entirely); while it’s nice to renew acquaintance, I found myself wondering about the execution, whether the concept of the story might not be more interesting than the story itself. Perhaps this is minor Borges: “The Other,” “The Congress,” and “The Book of Sand” seem to be fully fleshed out, but some of the others come across almost as Borges-by-numbers. Here’s a tiger; here’s a knife-fight; here’s a version of Gnosticism. It’s hard to tell what would have impressed me so much about this book when I was 15: read now, this seems very much like the work of an old man, an old man who comes across as a crotchety reactionary with some frequency. I don’t know that I’ve ever read the four uncollected stories in Shakespeare’s Memory before: “Blue Tigers” is pleasant enough, if not necessarily deep, but I don’t know that I’ve been missing out by not reading them before now.
I’m not sure about this translation; something seems off to me, and I can’t quite tell what it would be. The language doesn’t grab me as I remember it doing, and I wonder whether that’s due to the new translation or if it’s because I’ve changed as a reader; maybe it’s both. (I do find myself arrested by the first sentence of “The Other”: “The incident occurred in February, 1969, in Cambridge, north of Boston” – has anyone ever thought to explain Cambridge by saying it’s “north of Boston”?) I don’t love the language; a few times, I found myself confused about what was going on, though whether that was due to unwieldy syntax or a bus from Amherst with shoddy breaks I’m not entirely sure. I’d like to look at the di Giovanni version of The Book of Sand: but somehow that’s become bizarrely expensive: the cheapest used paperback on Amazon goes for $26, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. The new translation does seem to have had some machinations behind it, which might be hinted at by the fawning appreciation of Borges’s widow in the introduction, which doesn’t explain directly why a new translation was called for. A piece by J. M. Coetzee in the NY Review of Books explains some of this in diplomatic fashion, and points to problems with Hurley’s other translation of Borges. The two books here Coetzee dismisses: “There is much tired writing in them; they add nothing to his stature”; probably, when taking Borges’s work as a whole, this is true, though I’m not entirely willing to sign off on that.
I do wonder about the choices made in the notes: the notes explicitly set out to only notate what an Argentine reader would have known in the stories, but a great deal is thus left out. “Ulrikke,” for example, has an epigraph from the Völsunga Saga: it’s given as “Hann tekr sverthis Gram ok leggr i methal theira bert,” though it should be “Hann tekr sverðit Gram ok leggr í meðal þeira bert”: this is left untranslated, though the reader who goes to find out what exactly that means will find it does bear directly on the text, as does the reference to De Quincey at the start of “The Rose of Paracelsus” which Hurley does explain. Read with the Internet at hand, many of the unannotated references are easily explained (John Wilkins, for example, who comes up a few times); but one wonders why an editor didn’t do this. The lack of notes comes off as deliberate obscurantism: maybe that’s something that I would have liked when I was young, but it does little for me now.
It’s possible that what I liked about this book when I was younger was the sheer novelty: simply how different his writing was from anyone’s that I’d previously encountered. The idea that things can be entirely different from what you’re used to is powerful when you’re young; but that revelation isn’t necessarily one that leads to better reading. Paradoxes are exciting when first encountered: but when encountered again and again, as in a book of stories, the device loses force. There are some stories here worth going back to; read individually, they’d almost certainly fare better. I’ll track down a copy of the di Giovanni Dr. Brodie’s Report: I’d like to see how the old translation stands up.