Category Archives: reviews

joseph mcelroy, “night soul and other stories”

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Joseph McElroy
Night Soul and Other Stories
(Dalkey Archive, 2011)

Having attended most of Joseph McElroy’s readings in New York since the release of Actress in the House, it feels a bit strange to be reading this volume of short stories, his first: I’ve heard a good number of them aloud before seeing them on the page, one twice. Some of them seem, in memory, to have been presented differently: what’s here called “Mister X” was read, I think, as part of Cannonball, a short novel; “Character” was an excerpt from Voir Dire, another novel. I don’t know what’s happened to those books; perhaps they’ll be published some time soon. The long-promised water book is evidently finished; an English version of Exponential could be assembled; and looking through the list at his site, it seems like another volume as large as this one could be assembled of uncompiled short stories. There’s a great deal of Joseph McElroy’s work that doesn’t exist in book form in English: this is frustrating, of course, but it’s also reassuring: there’s more of his work to come.

The oldest of the stories in Night Soul go back to 1981: “The Unknown Kid,” published in TriQuarterly then was originally part of Woman and Men, while “The Man with the Bagful of Boomerangs in the Bois de Boulogne,” which feels almost of a piece with Lookout Cartridge, appeared in the Partisan Review in 1984. But seven of the twelve pieces here were written after 2000: most of this is fairly recent work. And though the pieces are separated across time, atemporal groupings can be recognized in the repeated themes: sets of fathers and sons; characters from the city in the rural environment of New Hampshire in the past; disparate characters in New York in the present or near-present. The eponymous protagonist of “Mister X” asks questions of his acupuncturist:

Could Qi flood you? he asked. It was not really like that – a river, she said. His eyes closed, he dismantled the adjacent daybed opening the damn thing stretching the material. (Was Qi a two-way street? And why “daybed”? Why Leonardo? (pp. 73–74)

The reader of this book recognizes this confluence of rivers and Leonardo: hinted at is his plan to move a river for strategic purposes, mentioned in “No Man’s Land”:

Da Vinci those call him who think that was his name, said uncle, who confirmed that Leonardo had set out to move a river. Nomads would not do that. They would cross it. (p. 14)

McElroy’s precision with names is, of course, a subset of his precision with words. In “The Man with the Bagful of Boomerangs in the Bois de Boulogne”:

. . . I wanted to (as Baudelaire says) “accost” this boomerang man. (p. 38)

Later, in “Night Soul,” a man listens to the vowel sounds (“ah,” “eh,” “uh”) his sleeping son makes (sounds also mentioned at the end of “Particle of Difference”) and tries to attach meaning to them:

So to the man it meant, what you found; while the next, the eh , as in “again,” stops what you found and holds it to what it is: accosts it, accosts what? the moon moving? a knife of reflected light cut by the ceiling beam? or a memory you can’t have all by yourself? (p. 283)

Baudelaire isn’t mentioned here, but it can be surmised that he stands behind the accosting. Each of these stories works separately; but placed together, there’s a resonance, and one wonders if all of McElroy’s work might be put together into a giant roman fleuve, “”a memory you can’t have all by yourself,” a record of consciousness greater even than Women and Men.

There are outliers, of course. “The Campaign Trail” and “The Last Disarmament But One” are more overtly fabulist than anything else in the book, science fiction of a sort, though not quite in the same realist mode as Plus. “The Campaign Trail” imagines the 2008 Democratic presidential primary much like a Matthew Barney film of the subject might: unnamed figures representing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ceremonially confront each other in a wild area of what once was Canada (seemingly the Burgess Shale, where some of the oldest fossils in North America can be found). It’s clearly a political allegory, but the meanings are hazy: what does it mean that they kill a wolverine-like beast eating a fawn? “The Last Disarmament But One” is similarly opaque: a neighboring country disappears completely overnight, leaving a crater. Connections are made between physics and children’s drawings; one senses America of the present in there somewhere, as well as, perhaps, the trace of Julian Gracq’s The Opposing Shore, but McElroy has made of this amalgam science fiction of a strange sort:

Not recently heard from, the once distinguished particle geologist with a crater in him turned to the harvesting of stained-glass minerals. Some How scientists became Whats overnight and claimed that the interesting work was now interdisciplinary. My own attachment to the great event, the loss of that neighbor nation, I one day saw confusingly and not clearly but chokingly, was like when I lost the mother of my child and heard her voice for months as on an interdisciplinary telephone or as only a function of my own deafness, and was glad I had spoken to her so often before she died. (p. 210)

This voice in this paragraph suggests Don DeLillo, who took a few tricks from early McElroy; but what McElroy is doing here seems a ways away from DeLillo’s recent work. Science fiction here is useful shorthand: writing in that mode allows one to use the phrase “the once distinguished particle geologist with a crater in him” with impunity. This is explained in context, as are the Hows and Whats; but three reads in I still haven’t understood with McElroy’s doing here. 

Here and elsewhere in the book, McElroy shows that he’s still deeply interested in trying to understand the worldview of the scientist, perhaps in a lonely attempt to rebut C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures. (See also a piece from a few years ago, where he observes a neurosurgeon at work.) Scientists and engineers, usually men, wander through McElroy’s fiction, wondering about how to understand and approach big problems: again and again, he’s interested in how they think, and how they engage with ideas. The technician, for McElroy, might be an image of the writer.

jules renard, “nature stories”

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Jules Renard
Nature Stories
(translated by Douglas Parmée) 
(New York Review Books, 2010)

This is an edition of Jules Renard’s Histoires naturelles translated by the late Douglas Parmée and with illustrations by Pierre Bonnard. Parmée died in 2008; his introduction to the book gives the impression of having sat on the shelf for a while. NYRB presumably took advantage of the good feeling engendered by Tin House’s republication of Renard’s Journal in 2008 as an excuse for publishing this volume; another version of this book seems to be out from Oneworld Classics in the translation of Richard Stokes with illustrations by Lucinda Rogers. I haven’t seen that version, though I’d like to; Parmée’s introduction indicates that he selectively reworked Renard’s text to work better in English, and the NYRB edition is much longer than the Oneworld version. Two earlier editions of this book appeared in English in 1966: George Brazilier published a translation by Elizabeth Roget in 1966, and the Horizon Press published one by Richard Howard; both featured illustrations by Toulouse-Lautrec and seem to have largely vanished. What inspires such bursts of publication is unclear to me. But even among this year’s crop of translations, the Parmée and Stokes translations aren’t, for what it’s worth, the most interesting edition of this book; that would be a limited Italian edition with illustrations by Luigi Serafini, the existence of which has the unfortunate side effect of making this particular edition seem rather cheaper than it should.

This book consists of 84 short pieces, most describing a single animal, most around a page long. Some are as short as a few words; others almost form short stories of a couple pages. Occasionally Renard strays from the animal world to describe a forest, rain, autumn leaves, a sunset; a few pieces describe human action: looking at the wild, waiting with a gun for an animal to appear. Many of the animals are domestic; most are encountered in the wild, and one section describes animals seen in a zoo. Though the book is ostensibly about nature, he and his family recur throughout as characters: in a longer piece, about the death of a family dog, there’s a sharp description of their reaction that might be from another sort of book entirely:

Out of a sense of decency, to avoid admitting that we’re so upset by the death of a little dog, we’re thinking of all the human beings whom we’ve already lost, those we might be going to lose, all those dark, icy, mysterious things impossible to understand. (p. 27)

For most of the book, however, Renard isn’t so explicit. Nature Stories is almost contemporaneous with Jean-Henri Fabre’s Book of Insects, and though Renard isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a scientist he often ends somewhere similar. In both, the natural subjects are anthropomorphized to a degree, though they can’t usually be usefully roped into allegory: they are, fundamentally, strange, and while their ways can be observed and understood, there’s always a distance between the observed and the observer, as pointed out by his preface to his description of “a miserable sunrise”:

The sun doesn’t rise twice in the same place and in the same way. There are as many suns as there are impressions of them, which would cancel each other out. Anyway, it’s very nice to see one a year and you’re quite likely to miss it the first time. All it needs is for the sky to be closed down. The following day, are we likely to be less keen? It’s possible that on the third day, we’ve given up trying to see such a capricious sight or that the sun rises only in our imagination and the reader is still not deprived of a stylish page of fiction. (p. 76)

Like Montaigne or Joseph Joubert, Renard’s focus is as often as not on himself as observer. But in Renard’s work we might also see the genesis of Francis Ponge’s attempts to come to terms with objects. Renard’s work doesn’t generally qualify as prose poetry, though sometimes the shorter pieces suggest this: here, for example, is the entirety of “The Spider”:

A little hairy black hand, tensely poised on yet more hair. (p. 72)

Or “The Cockroach”:

Black and clogged up like a key-hole. (p. 70)

though the concision here suggests nothing so much as Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1913). It’s occasionally that Renard focuses as exclusively on his subjects as in these cases. The individual pieces aren’t dated in this edition; so when we come across “The Green Lizard” in the middle of the book, which reads:

Beware of the paint, (p. 56)

it’s hard to tell how we should read the trailing comma. Is this unfinished? Is this an editorial mistake? (My edition is an uncorrected proof.) Or is it possible that Renard intended this for publication? As printed, this can be read as poetry; it’s much harder to read this as prose. Knowing Ponge, we can read this Renard as a precursor; but it’s not clear to me that this is what Renard would have intended. 

Renard’s naturalism is distinctly a nineteenth-century version: he is very much a hunter, albeit one who seems to recognize the cruelty inherent in most of humanity’s interactions with the natural world. He empathizes, but to a point; there is, for Renard, a natural order in the world, and he is a part of that order. Here he is shooting partridges:

This couple of young birds has already started living together on their own. I come on them one evening at the edge of a ploughed field. They were so tightly joined, one wing on top of the other, so to speak, that the shot which killed one dislodged the other one.
     The female didn’t feel anything but the male just had time to see his bride dead and to feel himself dying beside her.
     The two of them have left, in the same place, a little love, a little blood, a few feathers.
     So, with one shot, you’ve managed a double: go and tell your family all about it. (p. 128)

Though it isn’t necessarily clear from this quote, the birds have almost certainly been shot by the narrator himself: he sees what he has done and anthropomorphizes in the name of empathy. But it’s the last line here that might count: the narrator seems to be upbraiding himself for his hubris, for he’s only really managed to kill two birds at once by accident. The conflict is what makes this book interesting; it’s not the achievement that Renard’s Journal is, and this edition leaves something to be desired, but it’s a pleasant and entertaining book.

florine stettheimer, “crystal flowers: poems and a libretto”

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Florine Stettheimer
Crystal Flowers: Poems and a Libretto
(edited by Irene Gammel & Suzanne Zelazo) 
(BookThug, 2010)

This is a bit unexpected: an edition of the poetry of Florine Stettheimer, best known as a painter, from BookThug, a Canadian press new to me. Over the summer I read her sister Ettie’s novel and became aware of Florine’s poetry, a first published after her death by Ettie in 1949 in a compilation called Crystal Flowers. This turns out to have been impossible to get ahold of because it was published in an edition of 250. This edition, new in November, presents those poems, three additional ones, and the libretto for a ballet; it also wraps them in a fantastic editorial apparatus, with a lengthy introduction, extensive textual notes, a glossary of abbreviations and allusions, and a chronology of her life. Perhaps Florine Stettheimer still isn’t tremendously appealing to the masses: this new version exists, says a note on the text, in an edition of 500, a number that’s painfully small (and perhaps why this isn’t being published by an academic press). But even though not many people will see it, this is still a tremendously useful book, and it deserves some attention.

Florine might be the best-documented of the Stettheimer sisters: it turns out that there are a couple of biographies of her, most recently that of Barbara J. Bloemink in 1995, coinciding with a retrospective at the Whitney, but also one from 1963 by Parker Tyler, whose Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew still sits mostly unread on my shelves. Irene Gammel, one of the editors of this book, wrote a biography of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven which I’m always meaning to pick up. This discussion of biography aside, this book is particularly useful because it’s an edition of Florine’s poetry: and while it is well supplemented by biographical elements, this is, first and foremost, a volume of poetry which can finally be read as such.

Gammel and Zelazo’s edition of Crystal Flowers follows Ettie Stettheimer’s original arrangement of the poem, adding three uncollected pieces at the beginning and adding a short ballet libretto at the end. The poems are grouped into thematic sections: “Nursery Rhymes,” “Nature/Flora/Fauna,” “Things,” “Comestibles,” “Americana,” “Moods,” “People,” “Notes to Friends,” and finally “As Tho’ from a Diary,” a sequence of autobiographical poems. Sequence is important here: the initial poems seem to be self-consciously doggerel in the style of Edward Lear. The first untitled poem:

My neighbor
The Cat
Sat
On a mat
Her mouth
Like a trap
With eyes
That snap
She smiles
At a Rat
And now
She is fat
That’s
That!

This isn’t the most auspicious beginning; and one wonders if Florine Stettheimer would have wanted this published at all, though it seems like the sort of thing that might have been sent to friends: perhaps Ettie’s edition of 250 was as intended as a keepsake rather than a literary production. Turning to the notes, however, we learn that “My neighbor” was Ettie’s emendation for Florine’s original “My daughter-in-law”, which creates a poem of entirely different feeling. There’s no obvious biographical antecedent to take away the strangeness: Carrie, Florine, and Ettie lived with their mother until her death and never married – although their often forgotten older siblings, Frank and Stella, did leave the maternal fold and marry. Gammel and Zelazo’s introduction suggests that comparison might be made to Emily Dickinson; this might be stretching it, but after the run of nursery rhymes, the poetry opens up and becomes more interesting. There’s the suggestion of the influence of H.D.’s imagism in her nature poems, like this tiny one:

Today
The breaking waves
Look like
Ruffled-edge petunia leaves

The poems are unfortunately not dated; it’s hard to tell when they would have been written, and though the Stettheimers would probably have been in the same social circles as William Carlos Williams and Mina Loy, it’s hard to say what Florine would have been reading. The easy sense of rhyme remains a constant through most of her poetry: these aren’t the most rigorous poems, though they’re not as unthinking as the first section might suggest. With “Things” and “Comestibles” the poems become decidedly strange, as the narrator inhabits other consciousnesses and uses riddle-like forms. Here, she becomes a canvas:

I was pure white
You made a painted show-thing of me
You called me the real-thing
Your creation
No setting was too good for me
Silver – even gold
I needed gorgeous surroundings
You then sold me to another man

This isn’t quite as tight as it might be – the third line doesn’t quite work – but there’s still a kick to the last line, forcing the reader to go back. Stettheimer was fond of the second person, which blooms in the “Comestibles” section, where she imagines herself to be various types of food:

You stirred me
You made me giddy
Then you poured oil on my stirred self
I’m mayonnaise

Here one does think of Dickinson: this is undeniably a good poem, and it’s hard to think of anything quite like its terse application of a cheerfully insane metaphor to personal relations. Again the last line kicks, almost anticlimactically in its simple declaration; but it doesn’t solve a riddle so much as start asking questions. This approach isn’t always the one she takes: some of these poems are simply about food, seemingly without a personal component. She starts a poem from the perspective of a pig (“You called me hog”) though her perspective shifts and she seems to end empathizing with a piece of ham: “You changed me completely / Even my name / You called me Ham”. What matters here isn’t that the ham was once part of a pig; it’s the ham’s status as an object, something that can be held in thrall by naming. 

The final sections of poems, “People” and “Notes to Friends,” might have the most immediate interest: the Stettheimers inhabited an artistic sphere, and many of their friends turn up here: Carl Van Vechten, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp. The editors’ notes are useful here, pointing out who people referred to by first names and initials are likely to be. The notes don’t take up the temptation to overstretch themselves, however. “A relatively long poem that begins “We Flirted” is left opaque: it tells of a transatlantic flirtation carried out over time, until the narrator says:

“Let’s celebrate
This faithful
long flirtation
give a fête
invite many
They shall give us
Crystal things
Diamonds
Venetian glass
Perhaps
we could accept
Sapphires
Perhaps
we could build
a treasure house
all of glass.”
His glasses
strangely
dulled
his eyes
They became
an opaque barrier
on which
Our flirtation
Shattered
In a thousand
Splinters.

There’s a temptation to read this as being about Marcel Duchamp, who arranged for a retrospective of Florine Stettheimer’s work at the Museum of Modern Art soon after her death. Duchamp, though he led a transatlantic existence, doesn’t seem to have worn glasses while Florine was still alive: but like her, he was very taken with the idea of glass: “a treasure house / all of glass” could describe either of their work.

dore ashton, “the new york school”

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Dore Ashton
The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning
(The Viking Press, 1973, originally 1972.)

My art history is the capricious one of the autodidact: I’m not sure that I’ve ever read a proper history of the abstract expressionists in New York, though I’ve read the obligatory work of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, and I’m reasonably familiar with New York before and after them, and the Surrealist work taking place alongside them. The abstract expressionists seem so big and cartoonish that actually reading a history of them almost seems beside the point: everyone knows the stories. My first roommate in New York was a painter taught by a (considerably elderly) painter who’d been taught by Hans Hofmann; we went to the Cedar Tavern and I heard about how the original location must have been so much better. It’s hard to muster up desire to go see the big show now up at MoMA: we’ve seen even revisionism many times over now.

Dore Ashton’s The New York School is, for me at least, a useful corrective. Ashton’s work is a cultural history: not so much a study of art but a study of the conditions in which art happens. This, it turns out, is interesting: we tend to forget how things have not always been the way they are now. Early in this book (in a section on the history of the WPA) the state of the arts in the United States in the early twentieth century is pointed out:

The Hoover administration did allocate some funds to states that initiated their own programs, although President Hoover himself, like most of his fellow citizens, gave no weight to the arts. Henry Billings, an artist on the mural project, regards the Roosevelt regime as the first to be even faintly aware of the arts as a necessary part of civilization, and points out that when Hoover answered an inquiry by the French government for an exhibition to include American art, he said that as far as he knew there were no decorative arts in the United States at this time. (pp. 44–45)

This book is as much a history of philistinism as it is one of art: and that’s really what makes it interesting to me. (One might pair it with Martin Duberman’s history of Black Mountain College, which it complements nicely; though with a handful of exceptions – Cage, Rauschenberg, Richard Lippold – there’s not a lot of overlap in the cast of characters.) History is written by the winners; after a century of that, it’s not hard to immediately think of a couple of major artists (Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe, say) active in the 1920s; MoMA would have just opened in its first incarnation. One forgets, however, that the position of the arts in this country has always been embattled, and Ashton does a fantastic job of tracing this out, closing with the description of a loft party in 1961, names carefully removed:

Many of the old restless spirits were present, but then, so were some 800 others, including collectors, dealers, museum officials, and assorted functional members of a greatly enlarged art world. They were there by written invitation and checked carefully at the door by armed Pinkerton men. Once upon a time, a famous poet remarked, Pinkerton men had been used to chase disreputable elements such as artists. Now the artists do the chasing. It is not easy to understand what had happened. How had this extravaganza come to be, and why? Partly the answers were circumstantial. Ten years before there had been only about thirty respectable art galleries in New York. By 1961 there were more than 300 managing between them to stage close on 4,000 exhibitions a year. This unprecedented growth had blurred the outlines of an art community and caused confusion in the ranks. ((p. 229))

The political undertones here aren’t accidental: Ashton’s politics are made abundantly clear in the book. This is a book written in the early 1970s, when it seemed like things could conceivably change for the better if the lessons of the past were understood. Ashton understands, however, that the forces capable of acting in a small group of unknowns are very different from those of a fully commercialized community. The abstract expressionist explosion happened in part because the core group was small and relatively isolated from outside pressures: this is classic evolutionary theory. If no one’s going to buy your paintings, you can paint whatever you want: it’s not a recipe for success, but it does make it possible. 

Ashton’s book does seem dated in certain respects: while she seems to have relied on Lee Krasner for material, she doesn’t really pop up as a subject; women in general are almost entirely missing. Maybe it’s the time she’s covering – Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, and Joan Mitchell wouldn’t really come into prominence until later in the 1950s and 1960s – but that absence seems jarring. Edwin Denby, Rudy Burkhardt, and Frank O’Hara lurk in the margins of the book, and one senses that Ashton would have liked to bring them further forward – the first photograph of the book is a full-page Burkhardt photo of Denby – but this is mostly a book about straight white men. But I speak with the hindsight of thirty-seven years; on the whole, Ashton is more right than not, and a lot that we’ve forgotten is in this book. The description of how Joe McCarthy went from real estate to being a reactionary, for example, seems eerily prescient:

Old reactionary tactics were revived, and a zealous, ambitious politicians called Joseph McCarthy saw the value of renewing the red scare that had been used before to stave off social reform. It is significant that McCarthy got his start in the field of real estate. Those who had hoped to institute a new era with good public housing and liberalized city-planning were the natural enemies of speculators. McCarthy consciously climbed to political prominence by attacking government housing projects. His first target, in fact, was the Rego Park Housing Project, containing 1,424 units for veterans. He visited the project in 1947 and then called a press conference to denounce it as “a breeding ground for Communism” (at that time he represented the pre-fabricating industry). It was brought to his attention that public housing was not a good issue for him in view of the veterans and the housing shortage, and so he moved into greener pastures, such as the universities, Hollywood, and the cultured classes in general. (pp. 174–5)

w. n. p. barbellion, “the journal of a disappointed man”

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W. N. P. Barbellion 
The Journal of a Disappointed Man & A Last Diary
(The Hogarth Press, 1984; originally 1919)

W. N. P. Barbellion was the pen-name of Bruce Cummings, a British entomologist who died of multiple sclerosis at the age of 30 in 1919. “Barbellion” he chose because it sounded grandiose; “W. N. P.” stood for “Wilhelm Nero Pilate.” His complete works can be found in very readable format at Ray Davis’s pseudopodium.org; best-known is The Journal of a Disappointed Man, packaged here with a sequel, A Last Diary. Barbellion has fallen into the public domain; there are innumerable shoddy print-on-demand editions of his work on Amazon; but the one I read was properly printed by the Hogarth Press in 1984; it includes a useful biographical introduction by Deborah Singmaster, though it doesn’t include his older brother’s useful preface to A Last Diary. I don’t know anything about the Hogarth Press in post-Woolfian incarnations, but they did publish the copy of Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve in English that I have, also from 1984, titled By Way of Sainte-Beuve, in the same format as this one. I find it odd that it’s so hard to find a copy of that book by Proust in English; but I’m inclined to look warmly on anyone who’s publishing it. Looking online, it seems like Chatto & Windus bought Hogarth in 1946; Random House UK bought out Chatto & Windus in 1987, which might be why both of these books seem to languish in publishing limbo at the moment. There seem to have been a few editions of his work since 1984, but they’re hard to find. A second collection, Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains seems to be even more vanishing.

The Journal of a Disappointed Man is composed of edited extracts of Cummings’s journal, starting when he was thirteen (when he reports that he has “abandoned the idea of writing on ‘How Cats Spend their Time’”) and ends in October of 1917, when he was twenty-eight; the final sentence in that book, seemingly intended to be facetious, declares that “Barbellion died on December 31,” although actually Cummings lived until June of 1919. The Journal records his life, first as he struggles to educate himself enough to become a zoologist, eventually ending up with a mostly thankless job as an entomologist at the Natural History Museum in Kensington. Barbellion has never been in the best health, however; his health worsens as the book continues. In a moment of respite he marries and has a child; his interests turn increasingly to music and literature, and the journal (in its edited form) becomes increasingly a creative rather than a documentary project: in February 1916, for example, he is reading the Goncourts’ Journal. His illness is diagnosed as what would come to be called multiple sclerosis, but the fact is hidden from him; he discovers that before his marriage, his family took his wife-to-be aside and informed her of this. 

The Journal of a Disappointed Man is thus something of a familiar form: the record of a man who knows he must die trying to find the most honorable way to prepare himself. This might lend itself to the bathetic; but Barbellion’s work mostly escapes this, perhaps because of the time it was written in: after Darwin (and perhaps Thomas Hardy, who can be felt her), religion has been tossed out as a method for understanding the world. Barbellion’s approach to his predicament has an almost clinical feel, as this excerpt from an entry from January 20, 1917 suggests:

I am over 6 feet high and as thin as a skeleton; every bone in my body, even the neck vertebræ, creak at odd intervals when I move. So that I am not only a skeleton but a badly articulated one to boot. If to this is coupled the fact of the creeping paralysis, you have the complete horror. Even as I sit and write, millions of bacteria are gnawing away at my precious spinal cord, and if you put your ear to my back the sound of the gnawing I dare say could be heard. (p. 274)

Although it’s a powerful image, bacteria don’t actually eat the spine in multiple sclerosis; perhaps that was a valid theory at the time. Despite this jaundiced view – and perhaps patches of depression, though the conscious editing makes it hard to tell – Barbellion takes life as it is and enjoys it: disease is a part of the natural world. The progress of the disease lends an inexorable narrative arc to the book – a possible treatment is mentioned a single time, but there’s a war on & it’s clear that it’s going to be terminal. This progression is modulated by the inclusion of A Last Diary, which stretches from March 1918 to June 1919: this book actually was published posthumously, and it records the progress of the Journal (being championed by H. G. Wells) through the presses. The Diary serves to give something of a happy ending to Barbellion’s story: while the disease grows ever more agonizing, the success of the Journal will allow him to provide for his widow and child, and his literary endeavors have been appreciated. 

For its subject, Barbellion’s work isn’t as dark as it might be: the naturalist’s curiosity never leaves him, even though he eventually tires of the institutional structures in which he is made to work. The penultimate entry in A Last Diary captures this:

Rupert Brooke said the brightest thing in the world was a leaf with the sun shining on it. God pity his ignorance! The brightest thing in the world is a Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun. This is a bit of a secret, for no one knows about it save only the naturalist. I had a new sponge the other day and it smelt of the sea till I had soaked it. But what a vista that smell opened up!—rock pools, gobies, blennies, anemones (crassicorn, dahlia—oh! I forget). And at the end of my little excursion into memory I came upon the morning when I put some sanded, opaque bits of jelly, lying on the rim of the sea into a glass collecting jar, and to my amazement and delight they turned into Ctenophors – alive, swimming, and iridescent! You must imagine a tiny soap bubble about the size of a filbert with four series of plates or combs arranged regularly on the soap bubble from its north to its south pole, and flashing spasmodically in unison as they beat the water. (pp. 382–3)

I don’t think Stanley Elkin, a very different writer who also suffered from multiple sclerosis, ever wrote about Barbellion’s work; I hope I’m wrong.

robert walser, “answer to an inquiry” / franz kafka, “blumfeld, an elderly bachelor”

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Two small books this time: the first, an illustrated edition of a short Robert Walser piece, the second, an illustrated edition of a long short story by Franz Kafka. The Kafka came out last year though I only recently found a copy; the Walser is from this year, and it’s a new translation, unlike the Kafka. In terms of purely textual content, there’s not much here that the devoted reader of either author wouldn’t already have in some other form; but both of these small books take short pieces and stretch them out to book length, forcing the reader to slow down, an impulse that I find interesting.

Robert Walser
Answer to an Inquiry
(trans. Paul North; illustrated by Friese Undine) 
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010)

There seems to be a lot of recent Walser projects: I still have a copy of Microscripts on the pile of things to be read, and I know of a couple of other projects in the works. But this little book was near the counter of the St. Mark’s Bookshop last night; I generally like Ugly Duckling if I don’t follow them as obsessively as I might. This is a small book – 64 pages, the majority of the book is illustrations – short enough to be comfortably read on the subway. The text of this book is Walser’s “Answer to an Inquiry” from 1907; it’s followed by an essay by translator Paul North of about the same length. The text felt familiar; Golden Rule Jones points out that it’s previously been translated (as “Response to a Request”) by Christopher Middleton as part of Selected Stories and The Walk. In those editions, the text takes less than three pages: it’s also the lead-off piece in those collections, where it’s presented as a short story. It’s a fine piece, and one can understand why it would be presented first: before so many other stories, though, it’s likely to be forgotten by most readers.

Here it’s primarily expanded through Friese Undine’s illustrations. Walser’s story, as its title suggests, is in the form of a letter; illustrated and given enough room to stretch out (a sentence every two pages), it becomes a sort of handbook; or perhaps a strange expressionist children’s book detailing how to live in an unforgiving world. Undine’s illustrations, which might be pencil drawings, seem to depict a theatrical production put on by bureaucrats; but the characters are ever-changing, and the production leads to the world: satellites circle the earth, a library full of anguished people, a bar, a mother with a homely baby. Screens (television, computer, outdoor advertising) are everywhere; and finally, things begin happening which shouldn’t be happening in the theater: a snake wriggles from a man’s mouth, another sticks a knife through his eye until it comes out his throat, at which point he smokes a cigarette. Walser’s text was published in early 1907; but the atrocities of the twentieth century seem to be predicted in this version of the book. “Whenever humans have progressed beyond the mere struggle for physical existence,” Undine writes in his brief introduction, “there has been theater and the drive towards self-destruction.” Undine finds Max Ernst (The Elephant Celebes) and Antonin Artaud in Walser: this Walser is full of coiled violence and seems newly foreign, different from the dreamy man we thought we knew. 

Franz Kafka
Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor
(trans. James Stern & Tania Stern; illustrated by David Musgrave) 
(Four Corners Familiars, 2009)

It’s easy to forget how enduringly strange Kafka is: he’s been canonized, and his fictional output was small enough that there’s the temptation to read it all at once. I don’t know that I’ve actually re-read The Castle and The Trial since high school; I’ve been better with the short fiction and Amerika. Expanding Blumfeld to book-length is an interesting idea: it’s not quite one of the canonical stories, certainly not in the English-speaking world, and as such Blumfeld is not as familiar a character as Josephine, Red Peter, or Odradek. “Blumfeld” is unfinished; there are no divisions in the text, but it seems to be the first two chapters, the first longer than the second, of a novel.

In the first, Blumfeld, who lives alone, though he wishes for a companion, is visited by a pair of animated balls: “two small white celluloid balls with blue stripes jumping up and down side by side on the parquet”. The magical element goes unnoticed by Blumfeld: “They are undoubtedly ordinary balls, they probably contain several smaller balls, and it is these that produce the rattling sound” (13). Blumfeld is slightly irritated by the dancing balls; they won’t leave him, and he wishes they would stop moving, or at least making noise. In the morning, the charwoman comes; Blumfeld is embarrassed of the balls, and tries to hide them from her. Leaving his apartment, he tries to pass the balls off to neighborhood children; for Blumfeld, the balls are something shameful, perhaps a sign of his status as a bachelor. 

In the second part (which starts on page 57 of this edition), Blumfeld goes to work in the linen factory where he works. There’s nothing magical about Blumfeld’s life: the details of work swell up to take all available air, and his position (below his boss Ottomar, above two subordinates who don’t have names) is clearly delineated:

But what worries Blumfeld more than this lack of appreciation [from Ottomar] is the thought that one day he will be compelled to leave his job, the immediate consequence of which will be pandemonium, a confusion no one will be able to straighten out because so far as he knows there isn’t a single soul in the factory capable of replacing him and of carrying on his job in a manner that could be relied upon to prevent months of the most serious interruptions. (p. 63)

The narrative loses itself in the intricacies of the bureaucracy, moving finally to the perspectives of Blumfelds’s assistants, lowest in the office food chain, who have misbehaved:

They obey at once, but not shamefaced or with lowered heads, rather they squeeze themselves stiffly past Blumfeld, staring him straight in the eye as though trying in this way to stop him from beating them. Yet they might have learned from experience that Blumfeld on principle never beats anyone. But they are overapprehensive, and without any tact keept rying to protect their real or imaginary rights. (p. 86)

The two assistants seem to mirror the two balls in the first part of the story; or perhaps Blumfeld treats the balls deferentially because he’s used to treating his subordinates in the same way. “Blumfeld” seems to have been written in 1915; it seems impossible that Kafka would have known Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” or “The Paradise of Bachelors, and the Tartarus of Maids,” though both are suggested here, as might be any of a number of Walser’s works. 

David Musgrave’s illustration of the story start with the endpapers of the book: blue and white vertical stripes interrupted by a circle of diagonal stripes, causing optical vibrations: one appears in the front of the book, one in the back, but it’s almost impossible to see both at once. Inside the book, glossy plates appear every eight pages: centered on the front and back of these are murky rectangular images that seem like they might be poorly reproduced photographs of archaeological relics. These images are small; they seem as if they might have accompanied an anthropological text of a century ago. (Samples of Musgrave’s work – I don’t think there’s any overlap with those that appear in this book, though they’re similar – can be seen at Luhring Augustine’s page for him.) The most recognizable seems to be a shark tooth with a stick figure of a person carved on it; but looked at more closely, it’s hard to tell if it’s actually a person at all, as it’s missing an arm, and the circle that should be a head is too big and vertically bisected. Others suggest animals, but aren’t quite recognizable; one feels that there’s an intelligence behind these relics, but it can’t quite be understood. If these were anthropological illustrations, they’re missing the necessary captions. 

sergio de la pava, “a naked singularity”

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Sergio De La Pava 
A Naked Singularity
(Amante Press/Xlibris, 2008)

Scott Bryan Wilson told me that I should pick this book up (he’s reviewed the book here), so I did, though it did sit on the shelf for a while. That it’s published by Xlibris rings warning bells, of course, especially a large (almost 700 pages) book, which makes one wonder about the editing without opening it. But one can’t in good conscience accuse the big houses of over-editing these days. And one has to like a book which has a promotional website with an “about the author” section that simply says “Sergio De La Pava is the author of A Naked Singularity.”

The book is narrated by one Casi (Spanish: “almost”; Italian: “cases,” not in the legal sense, but both are applicable here), last name left blank, a 24-year-old public defender in New York. Casi is something of a wunderkind, having maintained a perfect record; over the course of the book, he loses his first case and is brought low by the injustice of the world. The year is 2002; he lives in Brooklyn Heights with a set of college students who seem like they might be a television-mad version of the brothers Karamazov. His family is Colombian; a cousin has been put away for selling hot dogs without a license. The city is obsessed with a pair of seven-year-olds who have murdered an infant; there’s a blackout. A mentally impaired prisoner, failed by the legal system in every possible way, is on death row in Alabama. And there’s a heist, which doesn’t go according to plan: crime is imperfect. Through it all is interpolated a recent history of boxing, having as its center the career of Wilfred Benitez.

The work is meant to speak for itself; there’s something comforting about being back in this space, though the era of the anonymous author has all but vanished. A Naked Singularity, however, loses no time in making clear its antecedents. The book this most resembles is William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, similarly entangled in the legal system; that book’s celebrated first line (“Justice? – you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law”) might serve as a theme for this one. De La Pava also shares Gaddis’s knack for unattributed dialogue. There’s an early invocation of the Pynchon of Mason & Dixon: “Now several acorns had successfully flown their sorties, cutting through the frigid air to form interrupted parabolas, when I began to conceive the inconceivable.” (p. 56) Like Gaddis’s and Pynchon’s books, this one is bursting at the seams: court transcripts, letters, and all manner of legal documents find there way in. There are cartoonish names, like in Pynchon, but the clownishness never fully escapes. The language is hyperactive and breathless and might bear the stamp of David Foster Wallace: the word “television,” for example, is always capitalized. But Wallace’s imprint might be found less in the language and more in the book’s deep sense of morality: De La Pava shares Wallace’s concern with how difficult it is to live in a flawed world. Bartleby is invoked, not surprisingly; Dostoevsky is never quite mentioned, though his presence floats through the book (Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, as well as the aforementioned Brothers Karamazov).

It becomes clear to the reader that this isn’t an ordinary work on page 14, when Casi goes off on a two-page digression about the history of Miranda rights, culminating thusly:

The ACLU grabbed the case and 976 days later they were in front of the court that never gets overruled with John Flynn saying, and this is a direct quote (no it isn’t): “look dudes, and I refer to you thusly because this is way pre-O’Connor/Ginsberg, your Fifth Amendment deal is only protecting the rich and powerful: those who are brainy enough to know what their rights are or who have the dough to rent a lawyer.” The Warren Supremes actually agreed and, in the kind of decision that makes maybe five people happy, held that before future police could torment some illiterate sap who nobody cares about into confessing his sins, real or imagined, they would have to inform him of certain rights not covered in your average eighth-grade Social Studies class. (p. 15)

The voice here is what’s astonishing: informed but colloquial, flippant but engaged (there’s a tenderness in “some illiterate sap who nobody cares about”). We can tell exactly what the speaker thinks about the justice of the law (“sins, real or imagined”); but his approach is also pragmatic: this is the America that he has to live in. The breathlessness drives the reader on: while the book is long, it’s never imposing. But most important is the quality of empathy: Casi cares about the illiterate saps in a believable way. This is a book deeply concerned with the preterite: those who don’t have the resources to get themselves represented by others. It’s refreshing to find a recent New York novel that doesn’t bother to mention Williamsburg or Park Slope; the Upper East Side or Upper West Side might be mentioned in passing, but the Village, the East Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, the neighborhoods of New York that are seen in movies and literary fiction are absent from this book. There’s plenty left over; but we don’t usually read this.

And this also stands out in that it’s a novel of work: Casi is a public defender, and spends most of his time at his job. The job isn’t lionized here: the protagonist is actively trying to be a good man, but he is decidedly not a hero by virtue of his work alone: the other occupants of his office are noticeably flawed, as he is. The criminal justice system is deeply flawed, as are the people that Casi is given to defend; but it is what there is, and Casi does the best that he can with them. But the job has an inexorable impact on him. This knowledge of one’s own imperfection in the face of the world expands to take over the book: Casi might be any bright young person coming to grips with the world: the heartbreaking career of Wilfred Benitez is made to serve as a sort of parable for the dissolution of dreams. 

I’m also struck by how the book, comical as it often is, never has recourse to anything resembling magical realism, for my money one of Pynchon’s primary flaws. The world is often exaggerated in this book – as it well might be when described through a first-person narration – but the world described is always recognizably our own, with all of its horrific flaws. There’s a seriousness underlying this book’s comedy: the book draws its power from the outside world. The joking about the media circus around dead baby Tula that spans the book is funny because we know how sadly real this sort of thing could be. 

One can’t help wondering about the author: has he actually worked as a public defender as the abundant legal detail – to say nothing of the clear feeling for the job that comes through – suggests? The effusive acknowledgments page thanks the NYCDS; and a cursory search of Google suggests that someone of the same name was working in legal aid in New York around the time the book is set. A more important question, though: how did the publishing industry fail this book? Someone should be paying Sergio De La Pava for the right to publish him; that work of this caliber is being published by a vanity press is depressing. The publishing industry prides itself on being a filter saving us from the mounds of garbage that are annually written; but honestly, this book could advantageously be pitted against almost any novel published in the past ten years by the big houses – especially the endless raft of New York novels. This is a book that deserves to be read more widely; in a better world, people would be reading this rather than Freedom.

george & weedon grossmith, “the diary of a nobody”

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George & Weedon Grossmith 
The Diary of a Nobody
(Oxford World Classics, 1998; originally 1892)

Somehow I have always mentally confused this book with W. N. P. Barbellion’s Journal of a Disappointed Man, which isn’t really a confusion that makes any sense at all, except that they’re both British and diaristic, and the mental pile of British diaries is not something that I tend to think very much about for whatever reason. So I picked this up thinking that it would be like Barbellion, which of course it is not even a little. Being vaguely astonished at how I could have managed not to have read this book, I did; probably it is a book I would have liked more if I’d found it in high school. This particular edition is an Oxford World Classics; I found myself most interested in the copious selection of notes, which range from the banal:

101 Worcester sauce: a sharp, spicy bottled condiment.

to the thoroughly confusing:

113 Brooklyn Bridge: designed by John Augustus Roebling and largely built by his son, Colonel Washington Roebling, between 1869 and 1883. It is 1,595 feet long, and spans the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan Island, New Jersey.

One is reminded here of Kafka’s Amerika, where Boston is across the bridge from New York. Some of the other notes are, admittedly, useful; but one wonders who this particular edition is for: ignorant students who want to know about Victorian hijinks? Is this book assigned in class? I particularly like the Brooklyn Bridge note, which takes the opportunity of a mention in the text (a timid man, one character says, will never build a Brooklyn Bridge or an Eiffel Tower; the latter is dutifully footnoted as well) to hold forth on the history of the Brooklyn Bridge, ending, of course, in nonsense. I have a weakness for editorial apparatuses, especially when they seem to have slipped all control. 

I don’t know that I have anything particularly interesting to say about this book; it’s a satire of suburban British middle class life in the late nineteenth century, and those more knowledgable than I could discern what, exactly, the attitude that it takes is. Charles Pooter seems to be presented as a buffoon; but he is also, in his way, a solid citizen, and it’s difficult for me to know, at this distance, whether he was intended to be read positively or negatively. Part of my confusion is the problem of not knowing how the intended audience of this book was: it would make a difference, for example, if the book were intended to be read by the London smart set or if it was marketed to those who might be considered Pooter’s peers, whether the book was laughing at or with its protagonist. Here, for example, Pooter finds himself in a quarrel with one of his son’s friends, Burwin-Fosselton, who fancies himself a comedian and has been imitating a famous actor for the company’s amusement:

Once we had a rather heated discussion, which was commenced by Cummings saying that it appeared to him that Mr Burwin-Fosselton was not only like Mr Irving, but was in his judgement every way as good or even better. I ventured to remark that after all it was but an imitation of an original.
     Cummings said surely some imitations were better than the originals. I made what I considered a very clever remark: ‘Without an original there can be no imitation.’ Mr Burwin-Fosselton said quite impertinently: ‘Don’t discuss me in my presence, if you please; and, Mr Pooter, I should advice you to talk about what you understand’; to which that cad Padge replied: ‘That’s right.’ (p. 71)

How can this be unpacked? This is, of course, ostensibly Pooter’s diary; he is trying to present himself in the best possible light. Burwin-Fosselton has previously been established as ridiculous and pretentious (he insists on being referred to as “Burwin-Fosselton” rather than “Fosselton”) even outside of Pooter’s taste; Pooter doesn’t generally understand the humor of his son Lupin and his friends, which doesn’t seem to be of a particularly high caliber. Maybe the original remark of Cummings is a joke misunderstood by Pooter, who takes the suburban view that an original must be better than a copy; Cummings, of course, comes from exactly the same environment. Maybe youth have always tried to be edgy (advancing counterintuitive ideas) and always ended up sounding ridiculous. Pooter’s response isn’t especially clever, of course: he’s pointing out the obvious and assuming a consequence (that because a copy requires an original, the original must be better than the copy) that doesn’t have to follow (though it generally does). Burwin-Fosselton might sense the assumption but understands that it’s not worth arguing about. Logic is boring to the youth; they are impertinent. Nobody here comes off especially well: it’s a quarrel of idiots.

Pooter’s relations with his twenty-year-old son, who has ditched “William,” his given first name, for “Lupin,” his middle name, perhaps in an effort to rile up his father, are complex. Pooter is a straight arrow: he’s a solid citizen, well behaved, does his work as he’s supposed to. Lupin is rebellious and doesn’t do work he doesn’t like; he takes risks (he loses a great deal of money with poorly thought-through investments) and generally hasn’t turned out quite the way his doting father would have liked. Lupin is more thoroughly a capitalist than Pooter is: given a place at Pooter’s firm, he throws over stability for a chance at more money, which, at the end of the book, seems to have been a smart move. Lupin is reckless and stupid; Pooter notes this with chagrin. Lupin disregards Pooter’s judgment to his own gain: by being flippant, he ends up with a better job than his father has, and at the end of the book, Lupin seems to be about to marry up. Pooter’s way of life won’t work for him; but Lupin’s way seems wolfish, even when presented through his father’s rose-tinted lenses. The reader finds Pooter ridiculous; but given the alternative, we sympathize with him. 

charles macomb flandrau, “viva mexico!”

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Charles Macomb Flandrau 
Viva Mexico!
(introduction by C. Harvey Gardiner) 
(Illini Books, 1964; originally 1908)

Viva Mexico! is a book about Mexico from 1908 by Charles Macomb Flandrau, who was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, though he doesn’t seem to have lasted particularly well. His father, a Minnesota lawyer, merits mention in Wikipedia; the younger Charles Flandrau was briefly famous for his narratives of college life (Harvard Episodes, The Diary of a Freshman, Sophomores Abroad), which I have not seen, before writing this book about Mexico. His brother ran a coffee plantation north of Jalapa; Flandrau seems to have helped out, though exactly what he would have done is unclear from the book. A century-old American travelogue of Mexico isn’t particularly promising; I think I found a mention of this in Kenneth Gangemi’s The Volcanoes from Puebla, though I might be misremembering.

Eland Books put out an edition of this in the U.K. in 2004; there are countless print-on-demand editions available now, but this edition, from the University of Illinois Press in 1964, might be the most recent American edition, which seems a shame: with a new introduction, this would fit very nicely in the New York Review Books series. C. Harvey Gardiner declares at the start of his introduction that this “may well be the finest twentieth-century travel account of Mexico,” a bold claim to make with thirty-six years left in the century; but it’s defensible. Flandrau’s book is an odd one, and not what you’d expect an American to write in 1908, especially one well-to-do; there’s more resemblance than you might think to Eisenstein’s similarly titled ¡Que viva México!; it’s entirely possible that Upton Sinclair and Jay Leyda, involved in that project, would have known this book. Viva Mexico! probably betters D. H. Lawrence’s Mexican books; and it compares favorably to Sybille Bedford’s A Visit to Don Octavio. Gangemi’s book is better than all of them, for my money, but there’s an argument to be made for Flandrau.

Part of the appeal of this book is how Flandrau can float invisibly as an observer, not quite tourist – he seems to have spent nearly a decade in Mexico at the time he wrote this book – but clearly not a native. Tourism, he understands, is a dirty business which implicates everyone; after a discussion of the misbehaviors of American tourists (washing their hands in holy water in the cathedrals, cutting souvenirs of tapestry from the President’s palace) he ends with this passage:

Chiefly from constant contact with tourists, the cab drivers of the City of Mexico have become notoriously extortionate and insolent, and, for the same reason, Cuernavaca, one of the most beautiful little towns, not only in Mexico, but in the world, may soon – tourist-ridden as it is – be one of the least attractive. There, among the cabmen, the hotel employees, the guides, and the mozos who have horses for hire, the admirable native manner has lamentably deteriorated. Egged on by underbred Americans, many of them have themselves become common, impudent, and a bore. They no longer suggest Mexico. One might almost as well “see Naples and die.” (pp. 228–9)

There’s undoubtedly something patronizing about his seeing the “real Mexico” disappearing – this was written in 1908, after all – but it’s not as patronizing as one might expect. (Alberto Moravia’s book about Africa at the end of colonialism, the unfortunately titled Which Tribe Do You Belong To? also occupies this space.) There’s still truth in what Flandrau reports, though the details may have shifted: travel in the Yucatán, for example, which has a large tourism-based economy largely based on tourism, is considerably less pleasant than in Mexico City, mostly tourist-free. Ex-pats are as bad as tourists, if not worse – this book can’t have helped relations with his acquaintances:

It is not generally realized that the male inhabitants of Great Britain do not make a practice of wearing drawers, although such is the strange dissembled fact. Now, while the possession of underclothes is not necessarily indicative of birth and wealth, I have always assumed, although perhaps with a certain apathy, that the possession of wealth and birth presupposed underclothes. This, in England at least, does not seem to be the case, for my young friend, whose name is ancient and whose purse is well filled, announced to me in Mexico not long ago, with the naïveté that so often astonishes one in thoroughly sophisticated persons of his race: “I’ve knocked about a good bit and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s usually something to be said for the peculiar habits of different peoples even if you don’t know exactly what it is. Since I’ve been in this country I’ve noticed that everybody seems to wear drawers – even the peons. There must be some reason for it – connected with the climate very likely – and I’ve taken to wearing them myself. I don’t particularly care for the things,” he hastened apologetically to add, “and I dare say they’re all rot, but I’m going to give them a try. Why don’t you!” (pp. 262–3)

Flandrau was a sensitive observer; he was not, perhaps, very interested in organization, and the book moves from subject to subject almost at random, following what seems to be Flandrau’s consciousness. It’s a willfull book, and it’s hard to imagine what a contemporary audience would have made of it: Flandrau doesn’t seem to have been interested in satisfying anyone but himself. The book occasionally risks drifting into outright solipsism (in an extended passage about being along he confesses to occasionally doubting the reality of other people and cities when he’s not around to see them), but Flandrau’s grace is not exempting himself from his criticism:

I have grown rather tired of reading in magazines that “the City of Mexico resembles a bit of Paris”; but I have grown much more tired of the people who have also read it and repeat it as if they had evolved the comparison unaided – particularly as the City of Mexico doesn’t in the least resemble a bit of Paris. It resembles absolutely nothing in the world except itself. To criticise it as having most of the objectionable features and few of the attractions of a great city would be unfair; but first telling myself that I am unfair, I always think of it in those terms. In truth it is a great and wonderful city, and it grows more wonderful every day; also, I am inclined to believe, more disagreeable. (p. 280)

My quotations might give the impression of Flandrau as dour and disagreeable, which isn’t the case at all. He is a man resigned to his fate, which isn’t likely to be as bad as all that:

When the worst comes to the worst, as by an unforeseen combination of circumstances it sometimes does, and you are on the point of losing your reason or, what is much worse, your temper, the inevitable kind lady or kind gentleman, who is to be found in every country and who knows everything, always appears at the proper moment, asks if he can be of any assistance, and sends you on your way rejoicing. In any event, in provincial Mexico nothing unpleasant is likely to happen to you. (p. 193)

joshua cohen, “witz”

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Joshua Cohen
Witz
(Dalkey Archive, 2010)

Talking to someone reading Infinite Jest for the first time a few months back, I found myself remembering what it was like reading that book the summer of 1996: how it felt like one book might, just might, contain all the secrets of the universe. It’s a sensation I found again and again: in Gravity’s Rainbow, The Recognitions, back in Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Under the Volcano, even, falteringly, in something like Underworld; this list could go on. All of these were formative books for me: the big bulky masterpiece, which I read with the promise of gnostic enlightenment, an enlightenment that the preterite world couldn’t see or wouldn’t pay attention to. If they would only listen to this, I found myself thinking, and I forced these books on my friends, imagining that they would like to be enlightened.

I don’t find myself reading as many big books now, though a couple of them sit balefully on the shelves, awaiting attention: Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons, Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling, Against the Day. (For the past year, I’ve been reading at Finnegans Wake, but that seems another case entirely.) Instead, I tend to find myself reaching for shorter and shorter books, things I know I’ll get down quickly: right now Charles Flandrau’s Viva Mexico, the new Harry Mathews, Diary of a Nobody, Libyan guidebooks. This choice is partially one of time management: there are too many books, old and new, that I feel the need to read, more being published every week; and I have a finite amount of time to read these books in. This situation is one that every reader finds to be the case now; we are inundated with books. A long book is more of a gamble for a reader who tends to finish what he starts. But beyond this increasingly universal problem of logistics, I find myself with another problem, perhaps related: increasingly finding myself doubting the revelatory power of the encyclopedic. To an extent, this comes with having read a lot of very good books; to another extent, it’s a problem connected with the Internet, with the power of instantly having at your fingertips almost anything. It’s difficult for the individual voice to successfully counter the voice of the crowd, and I think the encyclopedia novel especially suffers from this: at the time, it was edifying to learn about the Herero genocide in Gravity’s Rainbow or Vaucanson’s duck in Mason & Dixon, for example, but it’s now very easy to go to Wikipedia and learn about these things in nauseating detail. One of the reasons we used to turn to this sort of book – revealing what had been obscure – has been superseded by the Internet, in the same way that newspapers no longer break news. 

(I’m not trying to suggest some sort of inner abdication of the long novel for the short story, though it might sound that way; I’ve always generally preferred the novel to the short story. Nor am I trying to suggest that fact should replace fiction; I still think lies are more interesting than truth.)

At the same time, of course, I find it increasingly difficult to get exciting about reading anything new when I could be re-reading Proust or reading The Death of Virgil for the first time: there’s a much higher chance that I’ll get something out of Broch than I will if I’m reading the novel du jour. At one point, all the smart people that I knew would have been talking about how dumb the latest Michiko Kakutani review is; I still know plenty of smart people, but they’re much more liable to be talking about whatever particular thing it is that they’re interested in at the moment than in any common literary touchstone. Those up to date with the books of the moment generally don’t have much to say about them that I find useful past what on the promo sheets. The margins are much wider than they once were; “literary fiction” increasingly seems a marketing construct, one focus group out of any number of possibilities. 

This preamble is merely to suggest the state of mind in which I found myself approaching Joshua Cohen’s Witz – a big book, dense and unyielding – with the question of why one might write a big novel now. I found Cohen’s two earlier novels interesting; with this one, however, he’s clearly aiming at something very different: there’s a polemic propping up this novel. This is a book I’ve put off reading for a while; my copy’s been unread in Illinois, California, Virginia, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, spent time under the seats of countless movie theaters, had a great deal of coffee spilled upon it. This post has been in the draft queue for a while.

* * * * *

That said: eventually one gets around to finishing things, and now I have read this book. Caveats need to be made about my incapacity to talk about this book: first, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Mr. Cohen has becomes something of a social acquaintance since I started reading his book, and at his request I wrote him a piece for an issue of a journal he’s editing; take that as you will. Separately, it should also be noted that I’m not Jewish: I hail from a town where the only Jewish family only bothered to point out that they were Jewish after they’d left. I have spent a great deal of time over the past fifteen years with Jews, a number of whom have been disappointed when it eventually came out that I wasn’t Jewish; but there you go. This is a book mostly about Jewishness; I can read with the Internet as a crib, but I’m essentially a tourist, and I’m liable to misread.

To start with the obvious: this is a big book in American tradition of the bookish big books. Near the beginning, the reader is immediately reminded of Gravity’s Rainbow, and later one can see pieces of V. poking through. Tristram Shandy is here, of course. The everlasting Xmas section reminds me of Ishmael Reed’s The Terrible Twos in tone. The Polandland section near the end seems reminiscent of George Saunders when he was interesting; but really it’s the logical extension of Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom. Elkin presides over the book as something of a tutelary spirit; it’s hard to imagine another writer capturing his voice better than Cohen does. Kafka’s here, of course, though pointedly not by name; the Kafka here is the weird maximalist Kafka of Orson Welles’s Americanized Trial, simultaneously gigantic and claustrophobic. Or the sword that the Statue of Liberty holds aloft at the beginning of Amerika, ready to strike Ellis Island. The Barthelme of The Dead Father is here; so is Philip Roth (The Breast). Even older dead white fathers are here as well: the Bible is a tangible presence, not only the Torah (in the first half) but also the New Testament (the second). 

But the Bible, like the big books, suggest a plethora of voices; and that is not exactly what this is. Until a few hundred pages from the end, this is a narrative largely told in a single voice. Not that this is necessarily a limitation: Cohen’s voice is one of the most compelling features of his fiction, an odd mixture of distinctly oral rhythm and literate diction that is entirely his own. A sentence at random from p. 268:

A scattering of vases with even their cracks chipped, their fill a handling of left umbrellas, corrupt caducei.

C sounds skitter through this sentences, modulated with vs in the first half, ls in the second, ths and ds serving as mortar. Has anyone ever said the word caducei aloud? It’s a distinct voice: but it’s this voice which overwhelms the book, without the interruption of quotation marks or even Joycean tirets. Witz isn’t as suffocatingly Bernhardian as Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto was; but it still requires the reader’s submission to that voice. This is a book to be read for its linguistic flights: it’s not as ingeniously plotted as, say, a Pynchon novel. Though the plotting is significantly more complex than Cohen’s previous novels, it’s not a selling point. I’ve said before that maybe Cohen should be writing poetry; I stand by that, though I am curious to see where he can go with fiction. The voices are modulated towards the end of the book: this is a book that improves as it progresses.

This is, at least in a sense, a book of eschatology. (A fine thesis could be written comparing and contrasting this book to the Left Behind series: this is left as an exercise for a reader who has the stomach for those books, which have an uncomfortable amount to say about where this country is headed.) But the end times depicted here are metaphorical, as, perhaps, end times always are:

But before our loss can be massed, given one face and voice, any name representation, an inviolate symbol – we’re asking you, wait up, langsam just a moment, will you, shtum: we all must stand ourselves, alive, aware, out on the far ice to reflect above the tide. Namely, that it’s the destiny of every individual, of even the symbol, even the ultimate, to think their time the end, to think their world the last – and this especially today, especially fastdeadly, with everything In the beginning again at the already begun, history eternally returning as always, as eternally as ever but rather quickly, evermore and more quickly now, with a precipitate urgency, an Apocalyptic insistence. Now the time in which you live the time to end all times and Time; now the Never again. In mourning, standing atop the furthest spur of frost above the deep, they mourn themselves, a little soon: their failure, their ill luck, the ruinous stars above with their frustrated mazel. It’s understood, which means it’s itself mourned, our knowing hope, our dreaming: howe we can’t all be prophets, we can’t all be priests, we can’t all be kinds; that despite what the scholars once believed, there’s only one Moses; that despite what the sages once bowed down to, there’s only our God; thinking, too, if everyone’s their own Messiah, what’s that worth, what’s in it for me. Better to unify, best to hold One indivisible. Nowadays, there’s no why to wonder who, admit it, who’ll make it, whose testimony, whose witness – that’s been long worked out and over, it’s suspected; already taken care of, chosen long before any of us were ever born to live down any death. A statement is forthcoming. (p. 306)

I worry, of course, that I’m not Jewish enough to fully appreciate this book: there’s something there, clearly, and I can get some of it, but I know that I’m not quite the audience for this book, as I don’t know enough to give it the reading it deserves. The book this might be the most similar to is a very different one, James McCourt’s Now Voyagers, from 2007: I stand outside that fantastically intricate book about New York’s largely vanished gay opera world in the same way that I am outside of this book’s Jewishness. In both, I can sense that I’m necessarily missing something. It’s doubly frustrating knowing how small the audiences are for books like this even were they not about a minority culture. Witz is a book about the disappearance of a certain sort of culture: Jewishness, here, is only really appreciated after it’s gone, which is a misguided project. Reading this book, I found myself wondering if book culture could be substituted in for Jewishness: this is a book about loss, mourning a literate world. The end of a section:

B spits on a finger to erase, a clean slate, saliva daubed with blood. A thumbprint’s trace. Upside-down, it doesn’t matter . . . I will write myself. (p. 564)

B is of course Benjamin Israelien, the last Jew, the novel’s protagonist; it’s hard to tell exactly who the I is: perhaps Israelien, perhaps the generally third-person narrator, perhaps Cohen himself identifying with Israelien’s lot. Whoever is writing, however, is writing for an audience that is no longer actually Jewish even though it might be pretending to be Jewish; just as the novelist writes for a world where the novel has lost its audience (save the masses of other would-be novelists) and seems increasingly irrelevant as a unit of culture. Or again, from a section near the end of the book, where a character futilely attempts to visit Kafka’s grave in a linguistic graveyard, part of a theme park:

Kaye graves his hands into his pockets, kicks a heel into the mud, turns from the gate only after his trainload’s dispersed: only after many have lifted themselves up on their tiptoes to peer over the low falling fence, a few attempting to decipher the inscriptions in an alphabet foreign, in a few alphabets equally foreign, abbreviated then acronymed to unintelligibility, dazzled into diacritics forgotten: acutes, graves, breves, carons, hooks and horns, dots and diaereses . . . it’s not that they’ll never understand, rather it’s that these invocations will always only make sense to the dead: a readership as obsolete as the language in which they’re left reading themselves – they’ll be literate in no time, give them a night. (p. 675)

It’s hard not to admire the precision here: a writer who knows that what are usually passed off as hačeks and umlauts are properly carons and diaereses in English. But there’s also the sense that something’s being lost here, just as English is slowly but ineluctably routing the languages of eastern Europe. Is there still a space for the encyclopedic novel? One can’t help noticing, while reading this book, that the word “Jew” never appears, an absent center. The Internet is almost entirely absent as well: there’s a random “online” and a stray “://” but only two occurrences in 817 pages set at the turn of the millennium in a book in which absolutely everything else appears suggests that this omission is pointed. Something isn’t being said.

I had the idea when I was younger that by reading an encyclopedic novel, if it were the right one, that I might suddenly understand the world, or at least culture. This is ridiculous, of course: I was hoping for a silver bullet which didn’t exist (and which would be, honestly, disappointing if it were possible). But this is a book that comes, I think, from that same urge, flipped around: the idea to encapsulate everything, the Joycean desire to preserve a day of Dublin in amber, even after Sterne, at the dawn of the English novel, had pointed out the folly of even attempting to capture a single life. I think, on the whole, that I’ve taken more from Sterne than Joyce; but I still admire the attempt.