Category Archives: reviews

marcel allain & pierre souvestre, “the silent executioner”

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Pierre Souvestre & Marcel Allain 
The Silent Executioner
(trans. unknown) 
(Ballantine, 1987)

This is the second Fantômas book, originally titled Juve contre Fantômas: here in a cheap Ballantine paperback distinguished by an Edward Gorey introduction. It’s unclear who translated this edition from the French; the copyright page has a notice saying that “Revised translation © 1987 by William Morrow and Company, Inc.”; Gorey, in his introduction, also seems confused by this as well. Penguin reissued the first Fantômas book a few years ago with a John Ashbery introduction, which I liked well enough. Having just acquired the Louis Feuillade Fantômas series on DVD, I thought it was time to go back and read the other books, which can be found used for practically nothing. Maybe it would be nice to have a Fantômas collection, but I don’t know.

A great deal happens in this book. In its rough outlines, it’s similar to the Feuillade film; the action in the book, however, is considerably more labyrinthine. The book will not particularly illuminate the film (which, for the record, I saw before reading the book); the film, with its simplifications, might make the broad outlines of the book more comprehensible than they might otherwise be: this is tremendously episodic writing, the chapter being the operative unit. 

The text of this volume isn’t quite as nice as the text of the first Fantômas, maybe because the language seems to have been updated for a mass-market audience of the 1980s. Nevertheless, one does occasionally find a sentence like this, after Fanômas and his cronies have wrecked a train for no appreciable reason:

Then cries of terror rose in the night as the frantic passengers fled from the luxurious train.

The “luxurious” makes this sentence for me; it could almost come from a Grand Guignol version of The Young Visiters, a fine thing to imagine. A few sentences later, still in the train wreckage, this passage presents a rare moment of humor:

The driver held out his two broken arms.
     “Give me a hand, for God’s sake! (p. 70)

Maybe this captures the appeal of the book. When Fantômas kills a bunch of people with a train, seemingly capriciously, it isn’t understood by the reader as an immoral act; carrying out evil deeds is just what Fantômas does, and it doesn’t seem like he can help it. This isn’t quite a detective book, because Juve and Fandor will not capture Fantômas, at least not for long; their struggle with him is almost an ouroboros, because even if they stop him from carrying out some act of villainy, he will certainly strike again. (One wonders, offhandedly, whether the citizens of Paris might do better if Juve and Fandor were not trying to stop Fantômas and simply acceded to his rule. Every generation gets the Fantômas it deserves.) The pleasure of this book is at least in part in transgression: evil for its own sake. Since re-reading Proust, Lucretius’ reflection on the pleasure of watching the misfortunes of others has been on my mind: one enjoys a book like this because it is nice to see what terrible things Fantômas will get up to. Maybe this reflects poorly on us as moral beings; but it is a response that’s there, and it’s hard to get around it entirely.

This edition is lurid in the right way; the reader couldn’t discover from the book itself when exactly this was written (Wikipedia says 1911), a subterfuge which one suspects was perpetuated by the marketing people at Ballantine in the hope of attracting a mass audience. There is a brief “About the Author” (sic) at the end of the book, which notes that after Souvestre’s death Allain married his widow. The cover, unattributed, shows a masked man on a stairwell with what appears to be a rubbery tail coming out of the bottom of his cape; possibly he is holding a non-descript snake behind his back. (A snake, though not a non-descript one, does play a role in the plot; there is, however, no scene where Fantômas elegantly hauls around a snake.)

*     *     *     *     *

A self-referential interjection: for the past year, I’ve been working under the constraint that I need to write a non-trivial amount about every book that I read that isn’t being discussed in some other way, i.e. those things that I read for book groups or that I read for work. Categorizing these posts as “reviews” is misleading to a degree: what’s intended isn’t quite the same as a review, rather the need to respond. This is largely motivated by a need to re-examine why exactly it is that I’m reading what I’m reading; it’s also being done under the supposition that in the changing environment that the book finds itself, the role of the reader – specifically the reader who is more than just another consumer of a book – is one of growing importance. The flip side of this, of course, is the suspicion that not all reading is of the same value; and this ineluctably influences the books that I choose to pick up. I suspect that I would find myself reading more things like this book – light, not requiring much investment on the part of the reader – were I not concerned that I didn’t have as much to say on certain books. I can find something to say about this Fantômas book, for example, in part because I can talk more generally about the series as a whole; however, it would presumably be harder for me to find something substantial to say about a third volume in the series. I don’t know whether this is specifically good or bad; rather, it points out that the rules we live under, examined or not, do tend to dictate a particular form of reading. A book might be useful to a reader even if it doesn’t immediately have a use in the way that I’m defining use; maybe there are other criteria that I need to discern.

jorge luis borges, “doctor brodie’s report”

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Jorge Luis Borges 
Doctor Brodie’s Report
(trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni & Jorge Luis Borges)
(Bantam Books, 1973)

Continuing my re-reading of Borges: this is the original translation of his penultimate volume of short stories, here published as a lurid paperback while he could still be referred to on the cover as “one of the world’s great living writers.” It’s odd, somehow, to think of reading Borges while he was still alive, especially when he could have been read in paperback; it seems like Borges has always been dead, his corpus of works petrified and preserved, a feeling encouraged by generally seeing him now in the context of his complete fiction, which one tends to assume is a consistent whole. Borges in paperback seems like something different: this collection of short stories can be judged as a book. It’s strange to realize that, chronologically, the religious fantasia of “The Gospel According to Saint Mark” is might be seen as reminiscent of Gaddis’s The Recognitions rather than the other way round. It’s also odd to realize that at the point in time when this was published Cortázar was publishing better collections of Borges-influenced short stories.

The two stories that I remember from this are the title story and “The Gospel According to Saint Mark,” which I think I re-read a couple years ago for reasons I do not remember. Those two, as it turns out, are the standouts of this volume; as with The Book of Sand, this is decidedly minor Borges. The majority of the stories here do not come off as especially Borgesian, something those in The Book of Sand would actively attempt: here, there’s little preoccupation with paradox, and most of these are almost straightforwardly realistic, albeit depicting an imagined Argentina (and Uruguay – there’s a lot of Uruguay in this book) that may or may not have existed. There’s a great deal of knife-fighting, and if you’re not interested in knife-fighting much of this book may be lost on you. In his introduction, Borges notes that he was attempting to mimic the late short stories of Kipling, which I haven’t read; maybe some brave soul out there is making the case for Kipling today, but this seems like a strategy not likely to win many admirers. These stories of Kipling, he declares in his preface, “doubtless surpass” those of Henry James and Kafka; they are “laconic masterpieces” conceived when young but written when old. Henry James, meanwhile, is explicitly pastiched in “The Duel”; but the characters in the story, ostensibly about two female painters in Argentina of the 1960s, seems ludicrously unbelievable, as might perhaps be expected to be the case for a blind man writing about contemporary art. This might not be so bothersome if the story weren’t so mundane and the characters didn’t seem like they could have been borrowed, without changes, directly from James: perhaps Borges is trying to claim that Buenos Aires in the 1960s was the same as Boston or London in the 1880s, which seems bizarre to the point where this reader, at least, lost faith in the writer. 

What might be most interesting about this particular book is the translation: this is the original translation of this book, which is out of print. Penguin evidently brought out a version of this; they’ve replaced it with the Andrew Hurley version from the Collected Fiction. This is something of an odd choice, given that this particular edition was translated with the collaboration of Borges: it includes a forward cosigned by Borges and di Giovanni, as well as an afterword by Borges that don’t appear in the Collected Fiction; I assume they don’t appear in the new Penguin Brodie’s Report. The foreword explains how this volume came to be:

One difference between this volume and the last lies in the fact that the writing and the translation were, except in one case, more or less simultaneous. In this way our work was easier for us, since, as we were always under the spell of the originals, we stood in no need of trying to recapture past moods. This seems to us to be the best possible condition under which to practice the craft of translation. (p. viii)

It’s odd that this translation should appear to be deprecated; as a translation, I think it’s substantively better than the Hurley version. (As I don’t have a Spanish edition, I can’t make any arguments about which is more correct; but given Borges’s seemingly direct involvement in this one, it seems like it would be difficult to argue that the earlier translation swerved from Borges’ intention.) Compare the final paragraph of “The Gospel According to Mark,” first in the Hurley translation:

The three of them had followed him. Kneeling on the floor, they asked his blessing. Then they cursed him, spat on him, and drove him to the back of the house. The girl was weeping. Espinosa realized what awaited him on the other side of the door. When they opened it, he saw the sky. A bird screamed; it’s a goldfinch, Espinosa thought. There was no roof on the shed; they had torn down the roof beams to build the Cross. (p. 400 in Collected Fictions.)

Here’s di Giovanni:

The three had been following him. Bowing their knees to the stone pavement, they asked his blessing. Then they mocked at him, spat on him, and shoved him toward the back part of the house. The girl wept. Espinosa understood what awaited him on the other side of the door. When they opened it, he saw a patch of sky. A bird sang out. A goldfinch, he thought. The shed was without a room; they had pulled down the beams to make the cross. (p. 13)

Neither of these is without its infelicities: I don’t entirely understand why di Giovanni would use “mocked at him” rather than “mocked him”; “Bowing their knees” is a little strange; and “the back of the house” is better than “the back part of the house.” But on the whole, the di Giovanni seems much better to me: the “of them” in the first sentence seems extraneous; “stone pavement” is better than “floor”; “mocked” is better than “cursed”; “shoved” better than “drove”. “The girl wept” seems better than “The girl was weeping” as it brings to mind “Jesus wept.” The italics for Espinosa’s thought is unnecessarily distracting, and di Giovanni’s handling of these two phrases works better. Goldfinches don’t “scream,” they “sing.” And the capitalization of “Cross” makes it seems like a machine to be “built” rather than something made by human hands. 

There are numerous differences between these two editions, some seemingly more serious than others. In the Preface, for example, “The Gospel According to Mark” is attributed to “a dream of Hugo Rodríguez Moroni” in the di Giovanni but “Hugo Ramírez Moroni” in the Hurley; a Google search reveals Spanish hits for both, and a note in Hurley suggests that he hasn’t found an antecedent for this Moroni; in the next paragraph “Paul Groussac” in the di Giovanni” turns into “Paul Grossac” in the Hurley, which makes one wonder. David Brodie, protagonist of the title story, loses the “D.D.” that he’s given in the di Giovanni translation; perhaps Hurley decided that he wasn’t a real doctor. In the same story, a book is cited in di Giovanni as “one of the volumes of Lane’s Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (London, 1839)”; in Hurley this becomes “the first volume of Lane’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights (An Arabian Night’s Entertainment, London, 1840). A few sentences later in the story suggests the difference in tone – first the Hurley:

Their food is fruits, tubers, and reptiles; they drink cat’s and bat’s milk and they fish with their hands. They hide themselves when they eat, or they close their eyes; all else, they do in plain sight of all, like the Cynic school of philosophers. (p. 403)

Di Giovanni’s version of the same:

They take their nourishment from fruits, root-stalks, and the smaller reptiles; they imbibe the milk of cats and of chiropterans; and they fish with their hands. While eating, they normally conceal themselves or else close their eyes. All other physical habits they perform in open view, much the same as the Cynics of old. . . . (p. 135)

I like di Giovanni’s version much better, not least because he uses “chiropterans” rather than “bats”; but his version feels more like the ersatz nineteenth-century document that this story purports to be. Perhaps it’s less accurate; but it reads much better than the current translation. I don’t think this is an essential volume of Borges, but if it is to be read it deserves to be read in the original translation.

gabriel josipovici, “writing and the body”

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Gabriel Josipovici
Writing and the Body
(Princeton University Press, 1982)

I stumbled across this in the stacks of Schoen Books last week, where I was also assured by its previous owner that it was fantastic. I don’t know if I’ve ever actually seen a copy of this book before (as far as I can tell, this hardcover edition is the only release this book had, though I certainly could be wrong); but his books are interesting enough that I buy them when I find them. This is a small book: it’s composed of four lectures, given at the University of London in 1981, which don’t seem to have been reworked for publication. Each lecture is around 32 pages, or a long essay; as they were originally given over four weeks, each builds on the previous. There’s the feeling of a work in progress: these lectures feel more like attempts at understanding a problem, rather than clearly defined arguments; this was, Josipovici writes in his brief introduction, his intent. It’s an interesting project, almost thinking aloud; it won’t appeal to everyone, but I like it.

The problem that Josipovici is considering here stems from his own career as a novelist: that to write the writer must remove him or herself from the world; writing thus might be seen to be in opposition to living. Here’s how he puts it in his preface:

While one is at work on an extended piece of fiction (and I imagine it is the same with painting and music) one has no desire to see anyone or to read anything. Everything seems to be an intrusion. It is not so much that one is afraid the book might be damaged by such contact – though that comes into it – as that nothing interests one except what one is working on. This total absorption is a blessing. But it is also a tyranny. As one nears the end of such work one longs for other voices, for the company of one’s friends, of books. One feels one has been away from the world too long and one want to integrate oneself with it, to ‘live’ again. But this is very curious. One leaves the world because one feels the need to write in order to come fully alive, and then one is glad writing is coming to an end because in the later stages it was starting to feel more like death than life. Does the act of making on which the artist is engaged bring him more fully in touch with his real self and with the world, or does it take him further away from both? (p. xiv)

This subject expands or shifts slightly to encompass the relating of writing to the body, and then to the problem of how the maker understands what’s being made while it’s being made. The first essay makes its way through Tristram Shandy, an obvious place to start thinking about the subject, but always a rewarding text to return to: here we find the beginning of the problem taken up more recently by Harry Mathews in The Journalist or Tom McCarthy in Remainder, the problem of reproducing something (a life, a memory) while still living. Sterne doesn’t get very far in relating Tristram Shandy’s life as a biography; but, Josipovici points out, he inscribes his life in the text, using similar strategies:

And just as Tristram’s nose is put together by Dr Slop with ‘a piece of cotton and a thin piece of whalebone out of Susannah’s stays’, so the book is contrived out of an old sermon of Sterne’s, the name of a character who is already only a skull in Shakespeare, some typographical tricks, and bits and pieces out of a variety of sixteenth and seventeenth century authors. (p. 7)

Tristram Shandy is a narrative of failure; but the book, Josipovici argues, does not fail itself because a novel can take failure as a subject. An interesting bit of Lévi-Strauss is pulled in:

[T]he horse does effectively give birth to the horse, and . . . through a sufficient number of generations, Equus caballus is the true descendent of Hipparion. The historical validity of the reconstruction of the naturalist is guaranteed, in the last analysis, by the biological link of reproduction. On the other hand, an axe never engenders another axe; between two identical tools which are different but as near neighbours in form as one would wish, there will always be a radical discontinuity, which comes from the fact that the one has not issued from the other, but both from a system of representations. (p. 10)

The book, Josipovici points out, is like the horse in that it does issue from biological life: it includes, especially if it is a book like Tristram Shandy, a record of its own making. But it’s also like the axe, a cultural product. Writing a book takes time; reading a book takes time:

The writer who senses the possibilities of his craft is in control of the reader of his book; he can play with time in it, stop, move off in a different direction, turn round suddenly and pounce on the reader from behind. But even as he does that time is passing. It cannot be spoken, for to speak it is to deny it; it can only be felt. (p. 29)

From Tristram Shandy in the first essay, Josipovici moves on to Shakespeare and a consideration of how time works in Othello in the second. The third essay wanders, starting with Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, spending time with Doctor Faustus, Proust, and T. S. Eliot, on through Dante, Borges, and Picasso. In this essay he wonders broadly about the question of quotation: how words can be (and, in a sense, have to be) borrowed from others. Language comes from others, like Lévi-Strauss’s axes; the modernist problem is partially one of finding one’s own voice in a sea of others. In the novel, this becomes the problem of separating the voice of the characters from the voice of the author:

But today, because we have at last realised that a work of art is not natural, like a horse, but part of a system of representations, like an axe, we can see that this notion of an artist or an author was a myth, perpetuated by a whole ideology of the subject. We know now that the artist is a maker. He puts his material together for the sheer pleasure of it, and any relation it may have with the real world is purely coincidental. A fortune-teller needs to know what the cards mean, says Robbe-Grillet, a bridge-player only how they are used. The artist is a player. (p. 91)

But Josipovici is uneasy with this definition and suggests a refinement:

What I have been suggesting today is that the modern artist, recognising the impossibility of speaking in his own voice, is indeed a maker; but what is important about his work is not that he makes an object, or plays a game, but the sense he conveys of the act of making itself. (p. 91)

The final essay, “A Bird was in the Room,” deals with Kafka’s final notes, texts that might not be linguistically interesting, but which the reader finds compelling because they are written by a man who was soon to die: we can’t help but impute meaning into gnomic statements like “A bird was in the room” or “A lake doesn’t flow into anything, you know” when put in that context. The notes possess authority because they are last statements: the death of the author gives them meaning.

This is a beautiful book, not so much because it makes an argument but because it’s a record of careful thinking which should be returned to. Trust is on my bookshelf; probably I’ll read that before getting to Whatever Happened to Modernism, descendent, in a sense, of this book.

john crowley, “the girlhood of shakespeare’s heroines”

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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.

alice b. toklas, “what is remembered”

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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. 

jorge luis borges, “the book of sand and shakespeare’s memory”

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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.

james r. mellow, “a charmed circle”

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James R. Mellow
Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company
(Praeger, 1974)

I dug this book out of the basement of the Strand where the literary criticism now lives; I felt like maybe a proper bio of Gertrude Stein was in order, and everyone seemed to like this one. It’s a pleasant book: it’s hard for me not to like reading about Gertrude Stein & the old familiar story of how Modernism happened. Having just spent time with the later David Markson books, it’s entertaining to find a number of his anecdotes about Stein in very similar wording here: there’s always a frisson at the feeling of walking in another’s footsteps. Markson doesn’t seem to have liked Stein for whatever reason; I do, though I wonder how much her life gets in the way of her work. Going to the biography isn’t the best response to that, but maybe it’s a way in.

Mellow’s reading of her work is almost entirely biographical: figures and events in her life that can be mapped to her work are. Conversely, more abstract texts seem to largely not figure in Mellow’s reading; this book is first and foremost a biography, not an overview of her work. The Making of Americans, for example, gets short shrift, except in how it can be read as a Stein family history. Mellow can be most usefully read against her autobiographies: he finds and notes inconsistencies with the historical record. One starts to wonder then why Stein had her start as a fiction writer: was it simply that fiction was the easiest way into being “literary”? That poetry could be too easily ignored? Stein would seem to be read far more often as poetry than as fiction now; but here she is most often cast as a cryptic autobiographer. 

As familiar as her life is, there are still occasional surprises: her plan to co-author a biography of Ulysses S. Grant with Sherwood Anderson, for example. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was evidently translated into Italian by Cesare Pavese, who also translated Moby-Dick: is it possible that Pavese was so little known in this country in 1977 that his name should be misspelled twice? (My copy is the original hard cover edition; presumably this was corrected in reprintings.) And it’s odd to think of Matisse visiting New York, though I must have known that he had been in this country to install his murals at the Barnes Foundation. Buckminster Fuller, it appears, showed up to the premiere of Four Saints in Three Acts in his Dymaxion car. Carl Van Vechten proposed a film version of the Autobiography.

But beyond trivia, Gertrude and Alice are, of course, fantastic characters; that accounts for a great deal of my interest in reading about them. This could almost be lifted straight from Two Serious Ladies if the names were changed:

Gertrude was to display certain peculiarities as a driver; she could go forward admirably, but she shunned reverse. This necessitated an uncompromising attitude in the matter of parking – which frequently meant directly in the path of other parked vehicles. It was on the question of parking and refusing to back up that Gertrude and Alice had their only violent arguments on the subject of driving. There were those, however, who maintained that even Gertrude’s forward driving could present certain hazards. She had the habit of conversation, and to her passengers it often seemed Gertrude did not pay sufficient attention to the road. This frequently made riding with her invigorating; her brisk turns could sometimes be hair-raising. She did not like to drive at night but often was obliged to because she did not always believe in road signs and thought road maps and predesigned routes hampering to her freedom of action. She preferred trust to instinct. (p. 228)

Most of the characters in this book are fairly familiar: first, from Stein’s accounts, which in style make the biographer’s task more difficult, but also from Malcolm Cowley in Exile’s Return, Robert McAlmon & Kay Boyle’s Being Geniuses Together, William Carlos William’s autobiography, Samuel Putnam’s Paris Was Our Mistress, Hemingway’s thing. I still haven’t gotten around to Matthew Josephson’s memoirs, though I probably should. There are more, of course. American ex-pats in Paris have been covered exhaustively. We know how Gertrude and Alice behaved. It’s the character of Leo Stein here who’s most weirdly intriguing; Leo Stein is so ignored that his poorly-edited Wikipedia entry makes it sound like he was living, and then had a “romance-induced conflict” with his cousin Fred. He’s also distinguished there from “Leo Stein (writer)“, which would smart were he still alive. Leo seems roughly analogous to the figure of Harry Crosby at the end of Exile’s Return, the figure with enormous potential who couldn’t settle on one thing long enough to make a mark, always thought of as smart but jealous of his little sister’s success. One doesn’t feel sorry for him particularly; but it’s a chastening narrative. After Gertrude makes it with her Autobiography, he becomes a heel: “Practically everything that she says of our activities before 1911 . . . is false in fact and implication, but one of her radical complexes, of which I believe you [Mabel Weeks] know something, made it necessary practically to eliminate me.” (p. 356) After that, no more is heard from until he dies. 

A puzzling question that isn’t directly addressed by this book is exactly what happened to Gertrude Stein later in life: how her taste seems to falter late in life. Her right-wing politics before World War II maybe aren’t that surprising : but it’s still astonishing to see the New York Times interview from May 6, 1934 where she explains that Hitler should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her lasting friendship with Bernard Faÿ, who would become a collaborationist, also puzzles: what exactly was the appeal of the man? His introduction to the abridged Making of Americans sells her short; it’s odd that she kept him on, especially when she was breaking with so many other friends. Her later taste in artists confuses as well; some of this can be seen from reading Everybody’s Autobiography against Alice B. Toklas. Thornton Wilder isn’t quite Hemingway or Fitzgerald. She starts liking Francis Picabia precisely at the point where most people stop liking him; she takes up, and drops, Pavel Tchelitchev and the Neo-Romantics, who are probably in need of a critical reappraisal anyway. Why in the world did she like Francis Rose? Here he’s only introduced after the first Autobiography; evidently he wrote a memoir of his own, which might be worth looking into, but why Gertrude Stein, seemingly alone in the world, should like Francis Rose’s paintings is entirely unclear. Her later writing doesn’t drop off, at least to my mind; but there is something odd about this, perhaps the subject for another book; maybe Leo Stein comes into that book, though probably not.

steven moore, “the novel: an alternative history”, 1

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Steven Moore
The Novel: An Alternative History
(Continuum, 2010)

Moore’s introduction to this book is offputting. Part of the problem with Moore’s approach is that he’s treating what he’s terming “the novel” almost as if they were a set of artifacts devoid of cultural context: when you wrap this text in a book and set it next to this text in a book, you can find similarities, even if they’re separated by 2000 years. (A similarly maddening, if perhaps more fashionable, version of this might be John D’Agata’s project of describing many things as “lyric essays”. For D’Agata, almost everything is a lyric essay, even if the authors weren’t smart enough to understand this; for Moore, many of the same texts are novels.) The problem with Moore’s taxonomy is that it’s Linnean, based largely on morphology and how similar things look, rather than an evolutionary one; to Moore, a novel seems to mean a fictional narrative, though both of those words are similarly fuzzy.

An analogy might be drawn to the Metropolitan Museum, which contains a great many things (coffins, desks, jewelry, clothing, twentieth-century paintings) under the guise of “art.” The creator of a Mayan death mask, or the members of the society in which it was created, almost certainly did not see that object the same way that a Cezanne painting would have been seen by Cezanne or his contemporaries, or by the way we see that painting now. Certainly commonalities can be drawn – workmanship, originality, for example – but the reason that both of those objects appear in the same museum is historical contingency as much as anything: audiences saw that Cezanne was beautiful, and then realized that the Mayan mask was as well; in the nineteenth century, the Mayan mask would have been in the natural history museum. The art museum as it currently exists is a historical construct. 

To go back to taxonomy: Moore is a lumper rather than a splitter. If something looks like a novel to him, it is; even if Nathaniel Hawthorne labeled some of his books “romances,” they’re still novels (p. 5), while Gertrude Stein’s self-labeled “novels” are also novels (p. 32). This is partially a problem of his belief that while the word “novel” is unwieldy, it can be given a single definition if that definition is his. But there’s a weirdness to his use of terminology: consider his note at the bottom of p. 32:

The “antinovel” is associated with postwar French novelists – Sartre used to describe a novel by Nathalie Sarraute – but the term was actually coined by the experimental novelist Charles Sorel in 1633.

Both Sartre and Sorel would have spoken of “l’anti-roman”; but what they would have mean by it is almost certainly different. Sartre’s introduction to Portrait of a Man Unknown uses the word with reference to Nabokov, Waugh, and Gide. This is glossed over: for Moore, all anti-novels seem to be the same anti-novel, and the possibility that the same word could be used to mean different (or contradictory) things doesn’t seem to bother him.

A larger problem with Moore’s introduction is his us-vs-them argument. “Us” is the progressive novel with a long history; “them” is the Dickensian novel. “Them” is more specifically B. R. Myers, Dale Peck (for his review of Rick Moody), and Jonathan Franzen (primarily for his terrible Gaddis piece in the New Yorker) who wish that modern novels would stop being so modern. There’s an anti-academic slant as well, as if the academics had been hiding a secret history from the masses; but it seems like what Moore is doing is trying to simply change the places of the elites and the preterite. The problem with their canon seems to be that it isn’t his canon. John Ashbery is denigrated twice for being not with it enough to like the Velvet Underground; certainly Ashbery was from an older generation (presumably Gaddis didn’t like the Velvet Underground either), but casting him as an enemy of the progressive novel doesn’t actually make sense: Ashbery championed Roussel and Kenneth Koch’s The Red Robins among plenty of other notable instances of the avant-garde novel. Unfortunately, this makes a mess: I don’t know that battle lines are that carefully drawn. 

A major problem with his book is his neglect of how the market shapes our perception of which fiction is entertainment and which is avant-garde: the common history of the English novel rising with Richardson and Defoe is directly tied to the availability of mass-market editions of their work; until the mid-twentieth century, the novel was a major cultural force, at which point it was supplanted by film, television, and the Internet. The cultural function of the novel changes when other media arise; it probably isn’t coincidence that cries for a return to the values of Dickens in fiction started appearing soon after the Internet rose to prominence in American life. When the novel moves away from the cultural center, the way it’s used changes (becoming more than ever a signifier of the high-brow, or the old high-brow); similarly, long-form narrative before Gutenberg would have functioned entirely differently than a novel would have. 

There’s a sense in which this maybe the argument in this book is perhaps from another time. Does it still make sense to argue about what constitutes the canon in an age when so many books are instantly available? It doesn’t seem impossible to like Ashbery, Gaddis, and the Velvet Underground all at once; however, just because Rick Moody once wrote interesting books (which seems a very long time ago now) doesn’t mean that he’s always worth defending, especially when there may be more interesting work out there. The failure to acknowledge the market hamstrings the argument as well: right now, there are plenty of self-described “avant-garde” fiction being written by MFA writers primarily for an audience of other MFA writers; the avant-garde risks becoming just another marketing genre. How avant-garde these writers might actually be is certainly up for debate; but they certainly don’t align with the lines Moore is trying to draw: being an artist in the age of accreditation is a different sort of beast. Probably there are more avant-garde novels being written now; certainly, there are more bad avant-garde novels being written now. Given this present, returning to the canon starts to seem more desirable. What’s wanted more than ever is discernment: but that’s not Moore’s project here.

kristin hersh, “rat girl”

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Kristin Hersh
Rat Girl: A Memoir
(Penguin, 2010)

The first time I would have heard Kristin Hersh’s music would have been sitting in a station wagon in a dark parking lot somewhere in rural Illinois waiting to pick someone up. Occasionally in the car you could pick up the modern rock stations from Chicago, and what they played was more interesting that the omnipresent classic rock stations, with their monotonous diet of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bad Company, Rush, occasionally mixed in with whatever new music might be masculine enough to fit in (Candlebox, maybe Pearl Jam). NPR was occasionally interesting, but not predictable; all in all, it was a frustrating state to be in when it was clear from whatever media did seep in that things were happening elsewhere, happening without you. It’s a state that wouldn’t exist a year later, when I went east to college & the Internet came along; but that’s how things were in 1994, near the end of something though I didn’t know it at the time. That was the environment in which I first heard Throwing Muses’ “Bright Yellow Gun,” the single off University: the song and then the record sounded like a transmission from another world. Faux-surrealism was stock in trade for rock lyrics at that point in time; but Kristin Hersh sounded more like she meant it than most: there was an awkwardness that wasn’t contrived, and the imagery couldn’t easily be resolved into standard adolescent concerns: something else seemed like it was happening.

Early artistic impressions can be hard to shake off; most of what one accords value when young is embarrassing in hindsight, especially when growing up in an environment of cultural deprivation. Throwing Muses were, as it turned out, one of the first bands I saw after arriving at college, a free show on the Esplanade in Boston in front of a crowd of drunken fratboys who clearly didn’t like them, validation in my eyes. It was easy, around that time if you were a certain sort of young person concerned with pop music, to get bogged down in Baudrillard and interminable arguments about fake authenticity; but Throwing Muses seemed to somehow be outside that argument. 

Writing about pop music is almost invariably awful, and this is only intended as background to my reading of this book. I don’t love memoirs; it’s a form that too often lends itself bad writing because of too easy recourse to the truth: the truth about most people’s lives is not art, even if it may be diverting. The rock memoir promises to be the worst of all possible books. But there are exceptions; and this might be one of them. Rat Girl is a memoir of Hersh’s 18th year, when her band was playing regularly in Providence and Boston, when she was ostensibly attending college, when she was diagnosed as being bipolar, when her band was signed to a British record label and recorded its first album, and when she unexpectedly wound up pregnant. What I like here is how much is left unexplained: the overtly Freudian title, an epithet that Hersh uses to describe herself throughout the book; how the members of the band appear to be living as homeless while Hersh seems to maintain a reasonably close relationship with her parents; how she came to be friends with Betty Hutton; how she came to have a baby in the first place. All the obvious questions that a journalist would like answered about Hersh’s early life are entirely disregarded in this book.

What remains is a record of experience; a note at the front explains that it’s based on a diary of the year, but nothing of that diary remains, and it’s difficult to imagine what might be in it. Hersh and her band seem to live like savages or baby rabbits, crashing in abandoned apartments, falling asleep whenever they stop moving, using a language that seems to be their own. There’s a strangeness here that can’t quite be classified. A sequence early in the book between Hersh and her drummer, who’s just brought in some trash to use as percussion:

Sitting up to admire his garbage, I notice that he’s wearing a coat. I’m stunned. “Dave . . . what the hell?”
     Dave and I always believed that coats were for wimps who couldn’t handle seasons: “coat slaves.” Geez, people, get a grip! Seasons happen! And that vision was for wusses: people who couldn’t hack the rough-hewn, fuzzy life we lived – slaves to their glasses – when we could play entire shows without seeing anything. It was the only thing we were smug about, really, our ability to live blind and cold.
     Then, a few months ago, he showed up at our attic practice space wearing glasses. I felt betrayed, but he was transformed. “Trees have individual leaves, even when they’re far away!” he insisted, his eyes and new lenses shining. (p. 62)

This isn’t the only point in this book where one thinks of Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. What’s most interesting is Hersh’s relationship with her songs: something that started, she says, when she briefly lived in an apartment she calls the Doghouse:

. . . by the time I raced out the door . . . it was too late. I was branded; tattooed all over with Doghouse songs – each one a musical picture etched into my skin.
     I know that when my band plays these ugly tattoos, people can see them all over me, but I don’t care too much. I mean, shy people are generally not show-offs, but the burning that the songs do, the fact that I’m compelled to play them, makes me think they . . . matter? Maybe that’s not the right word. That they’re vital. And I respect that. I can feel sorry for myself without judging the music. (p. 12)

This is also a memoir of mental illness: hit by a driver while on a bicycle when young, Hersh’s songwriting seems to be related to her bipolarity:

A few days later, lying in my hospital bed, I heard my first song: a metallic whining, like industrial noise, and a wash of ocean waves, layered with humming tones and wind chimes. Intermittent voices talked and sang. I thought it was the TV in the next room. The TV never shut up, though; nobody ever turned it off or even changed the channel. I started to worry that the patient next door had died or slipped into a coma. (p. 76)

Hersh doesn’t valorize her bipolarity as the source of her creativity; it’s simply something that’s there that has to be lived with, much the same attitude she has later when she discovers that she’s pregnant:

I really didn’t mind getting hit by a car, though – it was interesting, and probably my last chance to fly through the air in nonjudgmental fashion. I think if I got hit by a car now, it’d bug me, but before we learn to by whiny about our existence and how comfortable it isn’t, we’re still open to being thrown around, even if we bust our faces when we land. So what if sudden contact with the street makes your teeth fall out, maybe snaps off a foot or two? At least you know what that feels like. (p. 78)

There’s something very likable about this book: it’s not for everyone, and certainly my relation to it is going to be charged by personal experience. But it’s far more interesting than writing about music, than a memoir should be.

aram saroyan, “coffee coffee”

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Aram Saroyan
Coffee Coffee
(Primary Information, 2009; originally 1967)

Coffee Coffee is a book of poetry consisting of 65 words – that is, if four occurrences of the syllable “ly” can be said to count as words and the two words of the title are discounted. It’s a small book, 40 leaves of paper; the versos are blank, and most rectos consist of a single centered word, though in some cases up to eight words appear, similarly centered.

There’s a rhythm that appears as one flips through this book, sounding out the words: generally three or four pages with a single word will be followed by a single page with four words: “hard / lookout / guarantee / oh / bird bird bird”. The three birds are stacked on top of each other: the reading speeds up after getting to them, especially after the slowness inherent in “oh”: looking at the word on the page, the reader slows down further: why does the word need an “h” to make a long “o” sound? Giving the words space to breathe makes all of them strange: “lookout,” for example, must be functioning as a noun, though given a single space it could become a command. The arrangement also bears scrutiny: hard seems more closely related to guarantee than it does to lookout; lookout, in turn, might be connected to bird bird bird.

The words function as signifiers as well as graphic shapes: early on, the reader encounters a page with four letters in two lines: “o r / o r”. The four letters form the corners of a square: a + of white space appears between them. We could read them as “or or”; we could almost as easily read them as “oo rr,” “oror,” or simply “o r o r”. What we’re looking at is four markings on a page: we give them meaning. Because previous pages have words on them (some multiple stacked words), we assume these should be two words as well. But it’s the act of reading that’s making them “or or”. 

Words existing on their own invite the reader to slow down and savor the sound: the “v”s that move through the final four words, “heavy / crying / velvet / favor”, the missing “v” in “crying” making the double “v” in “velvet” seem more luxuriant. Graphically, the words “sleep” and “sheer” aren’t very far apart; but they sound very different and bring out very different responses in the reader. In the middle of the book, a stacked “cigarette / cigarette / cigarette / cigarette” makes me think of Harry Mathew’s novel Cigarettes, where he points out that the sound of a train is almost exactly “cigarette, cigarette, cigarette”. 

The original version of this book was published as a stapled 8.5” x 11” book in 1967; it seems to have been created on a typewriter and then mimeographed. An excerpt from this book appeared in issue 2 of Vito Acconci and Bernadette Meyer’s 0 to 9; and a couple of these poems appear in the misleadingly titled Complete Minimal Poems that Ugly Duckling put out a few years ago. An online version of this book can be downloaded at the Eclipse archive; there you can find both a scan of the original edition as well as a reading copy, where the text has been reset, as is the case with the poems that appeared in the Ugly Duckling edition. 

Format is something that’s extremely important when dealing with visual poetry: a photograph of a piece of paper is not the same thing as a piece of paper, even though the words might be identical. Correspondingly, a great deal of care has been taken in the production of this book. There’s one major difference from the original edition: the size is much smaller, meaning that there’s less white space around the words. The text appears in text that appears to be typewritten; this isn’t hard to do on a computer, of course, but it appears to have actually been created with a typewriter. Looking closely at the page where “cigarette” appears four times, it becomes clear that these words are not actually identical in the way that a computer-generated page would tend to be: the loop of the “g” in each word is distinct. It appears that the original version was scanned into a computer, to be turned into a polymer plate for letterpress printing: moving one’s finger over the book, one feels the imprint of a printing press. There’s the temptation to think that impression is the impression of the author’s typewriter: but the original edition, mimeographed, would not have such an impression. 

It’s hard to get around thinking about aura with something like this. Sometimes looking at an old print of an old photograph – this happened to me most recently at the Muybridge show in Washington – one gets the feeling of continuity: of looking at what the photographer saw. Light reflected off the scene the photographer saw made a chemical impression on the film; that negative was chemically transformed, and when we look at it we see something that “saw” something that “saw” what’s being depicted in the photograph. This is an abstraction, of course; but it’s not quite as high-level an abstraction as the one involved in digital photography and reproduction, which we can never entirely get around. Because we’re enmeshed in the digital, earlier mechanical reproduction appears more real, more connected, even when it was deeply part of the technology of its day. But when we look at this, we think we can see the impress on the page made by Saroyan’s fingers. We do, sort of: maybe it’s possible to see where he would have hit the keys harder, leaving a darker impression, although presumably when making a copy for reproduction he sought to make the most normalized page possible. 

Reproduction thus becomes a tricky issue. Saroyan’s poetry straddles the fine line between text and the visual arts, as does all visual poetry; in Dick Higgins’s term, it’s an intermedium. We think of Saroyan as a poet rather than as a visual artist, and thus his poetry is read in books; however, Carl Andre, generally thought of as a sculptor, has similar typewriter poems displayed in vitrines at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa. Both presentation models might be seen as appropriate, though they have their drawbacks. An edition of Saroyan’s poems that deviates from his original presentation (even one that deviates as minimally as this one) loses something; but resetting the poems gets us away from the problem of venerating them as art objects. I like this edition: even though it’s well done, it’s cheap. A large part of the reason for visual poetry’s general lack of impact is the inaccessibility of the original works; it’s hard, for example, to find a copy of Emmett Williams’ and La Monte Young’s 1967 Anthology of Concrete Poetry for under $100, and I suspect that most of the copies that still exist are not being read. Primary Information is doing valuable work in making this available; I hope they continue to do similar work.