Andrey Platonov's "Soul" - the universal happiness of the unhappy

I read Andrey Platonov’s novel Chevengur (1929) not too long ago and the collection of stories Soul (1935-46) last month.  Here we will have some notes.  These are the Robert and Elizabeth Chandler translations (four additional translators assist with Soul).  Those dates are for the completion of the writing; publication was always a complex story for poor Platonov.

Platonov was a rationalist and engineer but also a mystic.  He was a true believer in the, or let’s say a, Soviet experiment, but also fully understood, for rationalist and mystical reasons, that the experiment would always fail.  He had a great writer’s imagination but – no, this should be “and” – had lifelong trouble adapting himself to Soviet censorship.  He was hardly alone there.

I think I will stick with the Soul collection today, and quote from the novella “Soul,” “published” in a single proof copy in 1935, in censored form in 1966, and finally complete in 1999. Which is also when the Chandlers published their English version.

“Soul,” like much of Platonov, is mercilessly grim:

He foresaw that it would probably be his lot to die here and that his nation would be lost, too, ending up as corpses in the desert.  Chagataev felt no regret for himself: Stalin was alive and would bring about the universal happiness of the unhappy anyway, but it was a shame that the Dzhan nation, who had a greater need for life and happiness than any other nation of the Soviet Union, would by then be dead.  (75)

Ambiguous phrase there, "the univeersal happiness of the unhappy."  Chagataev is a young engineer, tasked with leading his “nation,” a nomadic tribe subsisting, barely, in the deserts and marshes between the Caspian and Aral Seas, to Soviet civilization.  Which he does, eventually – happy ending!

The entire Dzhan nation was now living without an everyday sense of its death, working at finding food for itself in the desert, lake and the Ust-Yurt Mountains, just as most of humanity normally lives in the world.  (108)

An unconvincing happy ending given what happens along the way.  Platonov foreshadows the environmental destruction of the Aral Sea and the demographic decline of Russia (the nomads, by the time Chagataev returns to them, are almost all elderly, somehow living off grass and hot water).  Horrible things happen to everyone for many pages.  Chagataev is almost eaten by carrion birds.  But only almost!

Chagataev felt the pain of his sorrow: his nation did not need communism.  It needed oblivion – until the wind had chilled its body and slowly squandered it in space.  (“Soul,” 102)

Animals are treated terribly in “Soul,” and in other stories, no worse than the human animals, but still, the reader sensitive to such things should beware, and in particular get nowhere near the story “The Cow” (written 1938, published 1958) which is like an entry in a “saddest story ever written” contest.  Possibly my favorite thing in “Soul” is a few pages on a flock of feral sheep:

And for several years the sheep had lived in the desert with their sheep dogs; the dogs had taken to eating the sheep, but then the dogs had all died or run away in melancholy yearning, and the sheep had been left on their own, gradually dying of old age, or being killed by wild beasts, or straying into waterless sands.  (62)

“[D]ying of old age” is remarkable; the “melancholy yearning” of the absent dogs is a superb Gogolian touch.

The other stories in the Soul collection are also good if you have the emotional strength to read them.

Chevengur tomorrow.

the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted lives - John Cowper Powys's trees - wuther-qoutle-glug

Wolf Solent has pressed his beautiful young wife against an ash tree, presumably as a prelude to sex, but he begins rubbing the bark:

‘Human brains! Human knots of confusion!’ he thought.  ‘Why can’t we steal the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted lives?’ (Wolf Solent, “’This Is Reality,’” 356)

I have learned that it is just when writers, many writers, write the strangest things that they really mean it.  John Cowper Powys has, like any good novelist, has a strong sense of irony, but he also has a fantastic, visionary mode that pushes past it.  As with his trees.

To step back for a moment.  The first page of A Glastonbury Romance introduces three characters.  They are:

The First Cause, which passes “a wave, a motion, a vibration” into the soul of

A “particular human being,” John Crow (name on the next page), a “microscopic biped” who is leaving the third-class carriage of a train, returning to his home town just like the protagonist of Wolf Solent.  He is not especially affected by

The sun, which is experiencing “enormous fire-thoughts.”

On the next page, another character is added, “the soul of the earth.”

John Crow turns out to be not the protagonist of A Glastonbury Romance but one of many, which is how Powys gets to 1,100 pages.  But the other characters or sentient metaphors or whatever they are recur occasionally.  Powys is, among other things, a fantasy writer, even aside from his use of the King Arthur and Holy Grail stories.  His landscape, his cosmos, is full of sentience, of which he occasionally gives me a glimpse.  For example, the old trees that are in love with each other:

As a matter of fact, although neither of these human lovers were aware of this, between the Scotch fir and that ancient holly there had existed for a hundred years a strange attraction.  Night by night, since the days when the author of Faust lay dying in Weimar and those two embryo trees had been in danger of being eaten by grubs, they had loved each other…  But across the leafless unfrequented field these two evergreens could lift to each other their subhuman voices and cry their ancient vegetation-cry, clear and strong; that cry which always seems to come from some underworld of Being, where tragedy is mitigated by a strange undying acceptance beyond the comprehension of the troubled hearts of men and women. (AGR, “Conspiracy,” 786, ellipses mine)

My single favorite passage in Glastonbury is also about the language of trees:

The language of trees is even more remote from human intelligence than the language of beasts or of birds.  What to these lovers [lovers again!], for instance, would the singular syllables “wuther-quotle-glug” have signified?  (“The River,” 89)

John Crow, one of the lovers, has just uttered a phrase – “It is extraordinary that we should ever have met!” – that “struck the attention of the solitary ash tree… with what in trees corresponds to human irony” because this is the fifth time in a hundred and thirty years that the tree has heard the exact same phrase.  Powys gives me the details – an “old horse,” a “mad clergyman,” an “old maiden lady” to her long-dead lover.  “An eccentric fisherman had uttered them addressing an exceptionally large chub which he had caught and killed.”

All this the ash tree noted; but its vegetative comment thereon would only have sounded in human ears like the gibberish: wuther-quotle-glug.

That chub, or its descendant, appears again about 700 pages later as a prophetic talking fish.  I believe the last talking fish to appear on Wuthering Expectations was the trout in John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981).  The talking chub is in the most Crowleyish chapter, “’Nature Seems Dead,’” about the night the of the powerful west wind, “one of the great turning points in the life of Glastonbury.”  Crowley has put a magical, history-changing west wind into a number of his books.

I thought about writing about a marvelous antique shop Powys describes early in A Glastonbury Romance, but I will instead finish with one line of the description, a description of his own novels.

But it was a treasure-trove for the type of imagination that loves to brood, a little sardonically and unfastidiously perhaps, upon the wayward whims and caprices of the human spirit.  (“King Arthur’s Sword,” 345)

Wolf Solent and A Glastonbury Romance - Both the two great forces pouring forth from the double-natured First Cause

Last summer I read John Cowper Powys’s novel Wolf Solent (1929) and recently I read A Glastonbury Romance (1932), not his first novels but the first that anyone noticed.  Wolf Solent is a plump 600 pages, and Glastonbury a monstrous 1,100.  Powys was 56 when the first was published, and 59 for the second, a mature writer, a seasoned weirdo.

These novels are genuine eccentrics, in ideas and style, as odd as D. H. Lawrence or Ronald Firbank.  Powys, like Lawrence, is a direct descendant of Thomas Hardy, at least that is clear, not just writing about the same part of England but employing a Hardy-like narrator (although Powys’s narrator works with his characters rather than against them) and using explicitly fantastic devices.  In Glastonbury he pushes the fantasy quite far.  I’ll save that idea for tomorrow.

Writing about these books has been a puzzle.  I am tempted to just type out weird sentences.  Maybe I will do that after a tint plot summary.  Wolf Solent – that, surprisingly, is the name of the main character – “returns to his birthplace, where he discovers the inadequacy of his dualistic philosophy.”  I am quoting the anonymous author of the novel’s Wikipedia entry.  That is, in fact, the plot of the novel, although it does not seem like it so much while actually reading, thank goodness.  A Glastonbury Romance earns its 1,100 pages by expanding to a large cast and many stories.  A mystic uses an inheritance to jumpstart the tourist industry of historic Glastonbury.  Many things happen to many people, murders and visions of Excalibur and the Holy Grail, all kinds of things.  Lots of sex, in Wolf Solent, too.  Powys is as earthy as Lawrence, if not as explicit, or not as explicit as Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), but also abstract:

Both the two great forces pouring forth from the double-natured First Cause possess the energy of sex.  (AGR, “Tin,” 665)

This is nominally the thought of an industrialist leaving a cave where he plans to establish a tin mine.  Or it is the philosophical narrator floating along with him.  Hard to tell.

And the ecstatic quiver of that great cosmic ripple we call Sex runs through the whole universe and functions in every organism independent of external objects of desire!  (666)

That exclamation point is a Powys signature.

‘Walking if my cure,’ he thought, ‘As long as I can walk I can get my soul into shape!  It must have been an instinct of self-preservation that has always driven me to walk!’  (WS, “Ripeness Is All,” 601)

The characters use the exclamation point; the narrators love them.  Sometimes I can sense the need for emphasis, and other times I am puzzled.

Powys’s characters are great walkers, that is true.  These two novels are fine examples of the domestic picaresque.  Powys can organize close to the entire plot just by having characters walk around, dropping in on each other’s homes, varying the pattern with “party” chapters like “The Horse-Fair” (WS) and “The Pageant” (AGR) where Wolf Solent can just wander around the fair, bumping into and advancing the story of every single character in the novel in whatever arbitrary order Powys likes.  A brilliant device; use it for your novel.

Powys has the true novelist’s sense, or let’s say one of the kinds of true senses, in that he always knows where his characters are in relation to each other, in town, in a room.  If a character walks this way he will pass these houses in this order, and is likely to meet these characters.  He can over do it, as at the pageant – “At the opposite end of the sixth row from where Mrs. Legge and Blackie were seated were Old Jones and Abel Twig” (AGR, “The Pageant,” 560) – but he actually uses this kind of detail when the show begins.  He has it all in his head.  Or he made a diagram, I don’t know.

Those are some aspects of these particular Powys novels.  They are original enough that I can see how readers can develop a taste for, or be repelled by, their strong flavor.

Tomorrow I will write about Powys’s trees.

What I Read in February 2025 – All human minds are in touch with a dark reservoir of our race’s psychic garbage.

One of these books is 1,100 pages long.  It was just by chance that I read two genuinely disgusting books at around the same time.

FICTION

A Glastonbury Romance (1932), John Cowper Powys -  I will write a bit about this beast, soon.  That line in the title is from Chapter 25, p. 798 of the Overlook edition

Claudius the God (1934), Robert Graves

A Buyer's Market (1952), Anthony Powell – The second novel in a series of twelve.  I will write about this, too, but I do not know when.  Each time I read one in the series I think, just one more, then I will know what I want to write.

Giovanni's Room (1956), James Baldwin

Dispatches from the Central Committee (1992), Vladimir Sorokin – Actually from the early 1980s, mostly, but unpublishable, real antinomian anti-Soviet gestures.  Sorokin had two main tricks, first, to begin in a conventional vein but suddenly interrupting the story with something disgusting or otherwise awful, and second, to suddenly switch rhetorical modes, say from realism to bureaucratic nonsense to grotesquerie to surrealism.  The suddenness is always the key effect.  In a sense the stories are satire but by the end I took it more as a kind of protest literature.  The book includes perfectly suited, disgusting new illustration and is well produced, not always true of Dalkey Archive books.  I guess it could be full of typos but given the nature of the text how would I ever know.

POETRY

Auroras of Autumn (1950), Wallace Stevens

17 Poems (1954) &

Secrets on the Way (1958), Tomas Tranströmer

Scattered Returns (1969), L. E. Sissman – The great Boston cancer poet.

MEMOIR

Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz (1950), József Debreczeni – Debreczeni, a Serbian-Hungarian journalist, passed through Auschwitz but was mostly imprisoned in labor camps and eventually a bizarre hospital camp, the “cold crematorium,” thus the curious, accurate subtitle.  Debreczeni emphasize the disgusting side of life in the camps, not exactly a neglected aspect in other accounts but I have never seen so much direct focus on it.  But again, that hospital camp, boy.  Please see Dorian Stuber’s review for more detail, if you can stand it.  As many Holocaust memoirs as we have now, it is a shame that this one did not appear in English until 2023.

The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins (2024), Sonny Rollins – Full of notes about fingering and the effects of his diet on his blowing, this artifact is for fans only, but this is Sonny Rollins, a titan.  Become a fan!

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Claudine à l'école (Claudine at School, 1900), Colette – Young Claudine has a crush on her almost as young new (female) teacher, who is perhaps having some sort of affair with the only slightly older (female) school principal.    Colette later said that all of the (barely) lesbian stuff was forced on the novel by her odious husband Willy, which is plausible given that Colette abandons the plot – all plot – about halfway through for a long long long section about taking the bac, the final exams.  I found all of that fascinating and wish I had read the novel long ago.  But it was for some reason the lesbian stuff, not the test-taking, that gave Colette her first bestseller.

Poesia, te escrevo agora (Poetry, I Write You Now, 1950-84), João Cabral de Melo Neto – The major works of Cabral de Melo Neto, including full versions of his great long poems like “The River or On the Course of the Capibaribe River from Its Source to the City of Recife” (1953) in one handy book. Recommended to the Portuguese language learner – easier than they first look, and highly rewarding.  I assume, and hope, that the English translations are good.

Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart - When she spoke, she invented crazy, crazy!

My subject is Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart (1943), her first novel, and the only book of hers I have read.  I read Alison Entrekin’s English translation because 1) I did not have a Portuguese text handy and 2) I figured it would be too hard for me, which I think is right.  I had enough trouble with the book in English.

When she spoke, she invented crazy, crazy!  (162)

For 90 pages, Lispector alternates scenes of Joana’s childhood and the beginnings of her marriage.  Then we get a hundred pages of the marriage falling apart.  The husband has, for example, a pregnant girlfriend, although that is more of a symptom of the collapse.  The real cause is that Joana is psychologically, hmm hmm hmm, unusual.

How many times had she tipped the waiter more than necessary just because she’d remembered that he was going to die and didn’t know it. (101)

That is maybe the strangest clear thought she expresses.  Joana’s stream of thoughts are generally much more abstract.  Entirely abstract.  Here is the ending of one abstract paragraph moving into the beginning of another.

Eternity was not an infinitely great quantity that was worn down, but eternity was succession.

Then Joana suddenly understood that the utmost beauty was to be found in succession, that movement explained form – it was so high and pure to cry: movement explains form! – and pain was also to be found in succession because the body was slower than the movement of uninterrupted continuity. (36)

Joana’s thinking, outside of the childhood scenes, if often unconnected, or just barely connected, to a scene, or anything material at all.  A lot of this:

How was a triangle born? as an idea first? or did it come after the shape had been executed? would a triangle be born fatally? things were rich…  Where does music go when it’s not playing? (164, ellipses mine)

I would describe passages like this as philosophical if I understood how Joana moves from one thought to another, which I generally did not.  Sometimes I felt a move toward Surrealism, although without the playfulness or materiality I enjoy in Surrealism.

The man was a child an amoeba flowers whiteness warmth like sleep for now is time for now is life even if it is later… (165, ellipses in original)

This is Joana falling asleep, so here I did know what Lispector was depicting.  I could, in this section, draw a connection between my own perceptions of what I call “reality” and Lispector’s representation of an aspect of reality, the process and psychology of falling asleep.  But mostly I found that hard to do.

Another possibility is that Joana is meant to be a pathological case study, repellent to understanding.  Or that she is meant to be entirely normal, a version of the way Lispector sees the world, however nuts she looks to me, the kind of mismatch I often bounce off when reading D. H. Lawrence, where I think I am reading about someone who is psychologically unusual and begin to think, oh no, he thinks everyone is like this.

Yet another idea is that the novel is full of nonsense and anti-rationality, again like Surrealism, something I usually enjoy a lot.  I could have used more, I don’t know, jokes, I guess.  Surrealism is fun.  And material, too, not abstract.  Paris Peasant is about walking around in the mall.

Benjamin Moser, in the introduction, suggests that Lispector’s “project was less artistic than spiritual… not an intellectual or artistic endeavor” (xi), a good clue about my difficulties with Near to the Wild Heart.  Beyond a couple of the childhood scenes I never found a hook into the art of Lispector’s novel.  It is the biggest mismatch of a book with my taste that I have bumped against in quite a while.

Tony Malone liked the novel more than I did but his response, section by section, looks similar to mine: “the internal monologues were a little too abstract at times,” were they ever.

Someday I will try another Lispector novel, perhaps one from the 1960s, and see how that goes.  Perhaps I will try one in Portuguese.

What I read in January 2025 - You must understand that truth is fiction, and fiction truth.

Farewell to The Story of the Stone and a valuable browse in Chinese literature.  I’ll do it again someday.

FICTION

The Peony Pavilion (1598), Tang Xianzu – written up back here.

The Story of the Stone, Vol. 5: The Dreamer Wakes (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin & Gao E – some notes here.  The quotation in my title is from p. 94.

Naomi (1924) &

Quicksand (1930), Junichiro Tanizaki – and these are over here.

Calamity Town (1942), Ellery Queen – A very lightly metafictional mystery.  Not only does the detective share his name with the book’s actual “author,” itself a fiction, but he is a mystery writer who at times seems to be generating the crime within the novel so that he will have something interesting to write about.  But not quite doing that, unfortunately.  That novel would have been more interesting.  The actual novel was fine.  This is one of those mysteries where every instance of clumsy plotting is in fact a clue.

A Question of Upbringing (1951), Anthony Powell – I think I will write something about this book once I have read another volume of the series.

Damned If I Do (2004), Percival Everett – short stories.  A perfect Everett title.  It is all his characters need since it doesn’t matter what will happen if they don’t.  They always do.

On the Calculation of Volume I (2020), Solvej Balle – a Groundhog Day story told with more philosophy and less humor.  A good fantasy on its own terms, but the puzzle is that the series has six more volumes, two of which have not been written yet.  The whole thing will be at least 1,200 pages long, for all I know more.  This first volume is reasonably complete, so I have no idea where the series might be going.

 

POETRY NOT IN FRENCH OR PORTUGUESE

Selected Poems (1968), Zbigniew Herbert

 

TRAVEL, MUSIC HISTORY

Tschiffelly's Ride (1933), Aimé Tschifelly – a Swiss English teacher rides a pair of Pampas horses from Buenos Aires to Washington, D. C., just for fun, and writes an equestrian classic.  Lots of emphasis on the horses and horse-riding.  My geographical knowledge of South and Central America has greatly improved.  I have only been to one of the countries Tschifelly passes through.  Peru gets the largest number of pages; Mexico second.

Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (2023), Jeremy Eichler – Before I finished The Emigrants in 1996 I knew that Sebald was going to be an important writer.  I knew that people were going to want to do what he was doing.  That was the only time I have been right about that, really, and I did not predict how much Sebaldian visual and musical art would follow, nor that there could be Sebaldian music history, which is what classical music critic Jeremy Eichler has written.  Lightly Sebaldian – he includes uncaptioned photos, yes, but always says, somewhere in the text, what they are.  The book is about World War II memorial pieces, built around Schoenberg’s A Survivor in Warsaw (1947), Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945), Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and several Shostakovich works.  Highly recommended to anyone who likes this sort of thing.

 

IN  FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

Odes et Ballades (1828), Victor Hugo – young, young Hugo.  I had read the first half several years ago; now I finished it up.  He sounded like himself from the beginning, but he would not become the greatest French poet until, well, almost immediately after this book.

Les songes en equilibre (1942) &

Le tombeau des rois (1953) &

Mystère de la parole (1960), Anne Hébert – Lovely dream and childhood poems from a Quebecois poet.  I have not read Hébert in English, but I will bet there are some good translations.  Her Catholic poems did not do much for me.  If you have opinions about her fiction, please share them.

Éthiopiques (1956), Léopold Sédar Senghor – One would not – I would not – guess that he would be President of Senegal four years later.  I have visited his childhood home.

Post-Scriptum (1960), Jorge de Sena

Flores ao Telefone (1968) &

Os Idólatras (1969), Maria Judite de Carvalho – I do not remember exactly how this book was recommended to me by a soon-to-be distinguished Portuguese author.  “If you like sad stories about depressed people, these are good.”  Carvalho has a place in Portuguese literature and feminism perhaps a little like Edna O’Brien in Ireland or Grace Paley in the United States, sharply ironic domestic stories, although without O’Brien’s sexual explicitness or Paley’s humor.  Culture hero Margaret Jull Costa is bringing Carvalho into English and is presumably working right now on these books, recently published in Portuguese in Volume 3 of Carvalho’s collected works.  Of course with that recommendation I had to buy a copy.

Two poisonous Tanizaki novels, Naomi and Quicksand - the same as a fruit that I’d cultivated myself

Two Junichiro Tanizaki novels from the 1920s for Japanese Literature Month over at Dolce Bellezza.  Always interesting to see what people are reading.  Thanks as usual.  18th edition!

The two novels I read, Naomi (1924) and Quicksand (1928-30), are closely related.  Both are about dominant and submissive sexual relations, an obsession of Tanizaki.  Both were serialized in newspapers.  How I wish the books had explanations of how the serialization worked.  Both novels are written in, or at least translated as, plain, sometimes even dull prose, perhaps a consequence of tight serial deadlines.

Both have narrators who may well be playing tricks on me, although if so I did not see the signals, and believe me I am alert to the signals, well-trained by Pale Fire and The Tin Drum and Villette and so on.  Maybe Tanizaki’s tricks are different.

Naomi is narrated by a creep of an engineer who picks up – grooms – a 15 year-old waitress who he finds especially “Western.” 

… most of her value to me lay in the fact that I’d brought her up myself, that I myself had made her into the woman she was, and that only I knew every part of her body.  For me Naomi was the same as a fruit that I’d cultivated myself.  I’d labored hard and spared no pains to bring that piece of fruit to its present, magnificent ripeness, and it was only proper that I, the cultivator, should be the one to taste it.  No one else had that right.  (Ch. 18, 161)

Pure poison.  By this point in the novel Naomi has taken power, well on her way to complete control, crushing her groomer, who is likely, it turns out, happier crushed.

Much of the novel is set in the modern, Westernized Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo, before the terrible earthquake that obliterated the dancehalls and movie theaters.  I found all of that detail quite interesting, as it was in Yasunari Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929-30).  One more piece of bad luck and Naomi might have become one of the homeless teen prostitutes in The Scarlet Gang.  Too bad Naomi does not have the innovative linguistic interest of Kawabata’s crackling novel.

The Japanese title of Quicksand is a single character, the Buddhist swastika, a perfect representation of the content of the novel, which is a four-way struggle for dominance among the narrator, her girlfriend, her husband, and the girlfriend’s boyfriend.  Some of the weapons in the struggle are pretty crazy, like a scene where the narrator and the girlfriend’s lunatic boyfriend swear a blood oath.  Eh, they’re all crazy.  The narrator is the eventual winner, obviously, I guess. 

Maybe she is making it all up.  Quicksand has a lot in common with Ford Madox Ford’s devious The Good Soldier, another four-way struggle, but as I said if Tanizaki’s narrator is a tenth as tricky as Ford’s I sure couldn’t see it.  She seems more unreliable in theory than practice.

One technique that is interesting and may hold clues: Tanizaki and the narrator return to key scenes, describing what happened from different perspectives, yes, like in Akutagawa’s “In a Bamboo Grove” (1922), except everything is filtered through the narrator, which does have the appearance of what I am calling a trick, a technique of emphasizing and controlling unreliability.  How newspaper readers followed this over two full years baffles me, but my understanding is that the lesbian aspect got the attention.

I have trouble imaging the literary world where these were newspaper novels.  Naomi was in fact too shocking and was booted from the newspaper, with Tanizaki completing it in a magazine.

Should I give an example of what I mean by dull prose?  Is it worth the tedium of the typing?  I mean that there is a lot of this:

“Were you still asleep, Mitsu?”

“Your phone call wakened me!”

“I can leave anytime now.  Won’t you come right away too?”

“Then I’ll hurry up and get ready.  Can you be at the Umeda station by half-past nine?”

“You’re sure you can?”

“Of course I am!”  (Quicksand, Ch. 15, 98)

And this is nominally supposed to be the narrator telling her story to Tanizaki.  Serialization filler?  Maybe you can see why I am not in a hurry to solve the puzzle of Quicksand.  The appeal of both novels, for me, was exploring the psychology of the believably awful characters and seeing how their less believable awful schemes work out.

Anthony Chambers translated Naomi; Howard Hibbett did Quicksand.

Reading The Peony Pavilion with the teens in The Story of the Stone - That garden is a vast and lonely place

The teens living in the garden in the YA romantasy The Story of the Stone spend a lot of time reading forbidden books, much older YA romantasys.  These books are all famous classical Chinese plays.  Cao Xueqin gives a couple of chapters early on to their reading, including a list of titles.  I figured I’d better try one of them.

How about The Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu, written in 1598, an exciting time in English and Spanish drama, too.  The play is really an opera, partly sung and partly spoken, a monster, eighteen hours long in a complete performance, a wild mix of stories and tones.

An attempt at the story: beautiful young Bridal Du begins her education with a tutor.  The explication of four lines of 2,500 year-old Chinese poetry, the limit of her education, are enough to make her curious about the outside world.  She goes for a walk in an artificial garden where, in the title’s Peony Pavilion, she falls into a dream where she meets and has sex with a stranger, an experience so powerful that after waking she soon dies.  This is one-third of the way in.

Luckily the lover is real and stumbles across the garden.  After an idyllic period of ghost sex, he figures out how to resurrect Bridal Du, launching the final third of the play which is full of bandits, severed heads, mistaken identities, and heroic test-taking.  There is a scene I have never encountered in dramatic form before, Scene 41, where the test examiners grades essays:

Every kind of error:

what a bunch of blockheads

grinding their ink for nothing,

not one brush “bursts into flower.” (230)

What could be more dramatic than watching a teacher grade papers?

The Peony Pavilion also has comic scenes in Hell, songs about manure, comics scenes with a couple of slapstick servants, and a comic scene with a pompous government inspector.  I thought this scene must be one of the most cut – the entire opera has been performed rarely, or perhaps never before 1999 (!) – but no, it is one of the most performed, historically, often performed on its own at village festivals.

The text is full of quotations and lines and entire poems from two thousand years of Chinese poetry, all identified, as above, by quotation marks and occasionally by footnote identification, but there is so much quotation that the editor gives up on identifying the authors by page 5.  The quotations are sometimes turned into dirty jokes or elaborate poetry games much like the kids play in The Story of the Stone.

It is all the most amazing thing, is what I am saying, one piece of craziness after another.  Someday I will have to read more of these things, and maybe a book or two about how to read them.  Cao Xueqin clearly learned more about writing his novel from these plays than from earlier Chinese novels.  “It’s very pretty in the garden” but “[t]hat garden is a vast and lonely place” (Sc. 11, 54).

Oh, why are classical plays forbidden to the 18th century youth?  One, kids are not supposed to be wasting their time with romantasys but instead reading the Five Classics and practicing calligraphy; second, the plays will give young ladies corrupting ideas about falling in love and marrying who they want rather than the dud or monster chosen by their parents.

Cyril Birch is the translator.  Page references are to the Indiana University Press 2nd edition.

The image is from the 1998 Peter Sellars production of The Peony Pavilion.  How I wish I had seen it. Tan Dun’s music for that production (the album is titled Bitter Love) is worth hearing.

Finishing The Story of the Stone - What a blessing this is, to return to the scene of my childhood dream!

How I wish all long novels were published in sensible multi-volume editions.  I have finished The Story of the Stone, 2,500 pages in five volumes, the last two translated by John Minford.  Cao Xueqin and his posthumous editor Gao E again share credit for authorship.  Chapters have become shorter and a few episodes seem abbreviated, but otherwise I have no sense of who did what.  Perhaps Minford smooths everything out for me.

In the last 22 chapters and 380 pages the novel necessarily narrows.  Necessarily if it is going to have an ending, which in this case it does.  A series of catastrophes strike the family began hitting the family at the end of the last volume, and they only accelerate.  Disgrace, crime, debt, deaths, so many deaths, some of them expected for a long time, some real surprises.  One shocked even jaded ol’ me.  There is some resemblance to the occasional contemporary event of the Chinese billionaire who suddenly falls from party favor and is arrested for corruption.

The garden, scene of so many teenage poetry games, is abandoned, a haunted ruin:

The Garden’s caretakers saw nothing to be gained by staying.  They all wanted to leave the place, and invented a whole series of incidents to substantiate the presence of diabolical tree-imps and flower sprites. (Ch. 102, 72)

In the next paragraph a minor character dies suddenly, perhaps as the result of sexual assault by one of those flower sprites, more monstrous than their name suggests.

Subplots resolve amidst the disasters and funerals.  Story elements abandoned for 2,000 pages return.  The architecture of this novel has some long, long arcs.  Eventually, the story narrows back to Bao-yu, the boy born with the jade stone in his mouth, who had “degenerated into a complete idiot” (109, 79) to the point where I was beginning to wonder how he could continue to function as a protagonist.  But the magical monk, seen rarely but at key moments previously, returns to take our away from the earthly plane into the Daoist fairy realm.  More or less.

“I know I’ve been somewhere like this before.  I remember it now.  It was in a dream.  What a blessing this is, to return to the scene of my childhood dream!” (116, 286)

Bao-yu is here in a complex dream chapter paralleling one that was well over 2,000 pages earlier, pulling together all of the major teenage female characters, dead and alive, like a last farewell to them before Bao-yu himself exits the novel just slightly ahead of the reader.

But not before he – I am giving away an important part of the story – so skip ahead if this bothers you – but seriously you probably want to know this one, it is so good – not before saving his family from disgrace by getting a high score on a test.

The Chief Examiner presented the successful candidates’ compositions to the throne, and His Majesty read them through one by one and found them to be well-balanced and cogent, displaying both breadth of learning and soundness of judgment…  His Majesty, as a consequence of this information, being a monarch of exceptional enlightenment and compassion, instructed his minister, in consideration of the family’s distinguished record of service, to submit a full report on their case.  (119, 351)

So most of the characters, if they made it this far, get a happy ending of one kind or another.  It is not so much that The Story of the Stone is the greatest Chinese novel but rather that it is the greatest Chinese novel.

“What is truth, and what fiction?  You must understand that truth is fiction, and fiction truth.” (103, 94)

This from another (or perhaps the same) magical monk.  The words “truth” and “fiction” are puns on the names of the two branches of the novel’s family.  Bao-yu is on the fiction side, and to the extent that Cao Xueqin is his double so is the author.  The great paradox of the novel, from beginning to end, is the contrast between the materialistic, dangerous “realistic” world of the adults with its budgets and corruption and the idyllic, fantastic world of the kite-flying, poetry-reciting teenagers in the garden, both ephemeral compared to Daoist eternity.  What then, was Cao Xueqin doing, who does not become a monk but rather writes a monumental realistic (and ant-realistic, and unrealistic) novel based on his early adolescent moment of happiness?  He finds an alternative immortality.

“So it was really all utter nonsense!  Author, copyist, and reader were alike in the dark!  Just so much ink splashed for fun, a diversion!”  (120, 375, almost the last words of the novel) 

Read and To Read, in 2024 and 2025

What did I read in 2024?

The best book I read last year was Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE).  Best books, really, in translations by Arthur Golding and Charles Martin.  My “best book of the year” answer will never be interesting.  America’s librarian Nancy Pearl asked, somewhere on Twitter, if people thought they had already read the best book they would ever encounter.  The answers were, by far, that they had not, which is even possible, for them, but I have read The Odyssey and King Lear and Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and so on, a lot of books, a lot of great, great books.  The odds are low.

Maybe the best book of 2025 will be The Odyssey.  It has been a while.  My favorite book, maybe.

I kept up on my French, and learned a lot of Portuguese.  A week of intensive French in a classroom in Porto helped a lot.  I could use some more of those.

I read some long books: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (1110), Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), the first 2,200 pages or so of Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (c. 1760) and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1931), barely over six hundred pages but in such difficult French that I am counting it, am I ever.

I built little projects around several books, piling more Persian books around Shanameh and Chinese literature around The Story of the Stone.  I did the same thing during the summer with Arabic literature while reading The Arabian Nights (13th c.) in Husain Haddawy’s great, not especially long, translation, adding modern poetry by Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish and a novel and book of stories by Naguib Mahfouz.  My kind of fun.

Let’s see.  I read nine Percival Everett books, including James (2024) just a bit before everyone else read it.  How odd it felt to have read anew book that so many other people were reading.

The best contemporary book I read, though, was easily Judi Dench’s Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent.  It is “Dench and her interviewer friend working through every Shakespeare role she ever did, all of which she still has memorized,” enormously pleasurable for those of us who enjoy such things.

What will I read in 2025?

Some more long books, I hope.  I have barely over a hundred pages of The Story of the Stone left.  I enjoyed John Cowper Powys’s eccentric Wolf Solent (1929) last summer and will try A Glastonbury Romance (1932), preposterously long, any day now.  Then what – The Tale of Genji?  Another of the big Chinese monsters?  Maybe Vassily Grossman’s Stalingrad?  Someday, anyway, with luck.

If Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75) counts as one novel, which it does not, that will be one of my long ones.  Brad “Neglected Books” Bigelow is hosting a year-long readalong, one short novel per month.  I just finished the first book, A Question of Upbringing (1951) and will tag along for a while.  Unfortunately discussions will be on Zoom but what are ya gonna do, who wants to write anything anymore.

Speaking of which, in the spirit of reading the Greek plays, I would like to begin a Not Shakespeare project, let’s say next fall, where I read and write about not all but many of the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.  Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, The Spanish Tragedy, those folks, not that one could not also read some Shakespeare along the way.  A play every two weeks maybe?  If anyone is interested in joining in, please let me know.

The WPA poster can be found at the Library of Congress site.  I have put it up before.  It is full of truth.

The books I read in December 2024 - From her earliest youth she had discovered a fondness for reading

A different kind of month with a different category of reading.

CHINA

Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (5th-13th cent.), tr. David Hinton – The teenagers in The Story of the Stone play various games based on their memorization of massive amounts of classical Chinese poetry.  I revisited an arbitrary sliver of it, the “mountains and rivers” school, in David Hinton’s Buddhist-leaning translation.  It made the Qing games look artificial and perhaps decadent.  But it also emphasized a difficulty, or pleasure, of the vast length of the Chinese tradition.  English-speaking children in the 18th century, or today, could not memorize and play games using thousand-year-old English poems.  No such thing, no such language.

The Story of the Stone, Vol. 3: The Warning Voice &

The Story of the Stone, Vol. 4: The Debt of Tears (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin – Please look here and here for notes on these books.

Selected Stories (1918-26), Lu Xun – The Chinese literary tradition must have been oppressive in some ways, but here a young modern writer revitalizes the Chinese short story using the same tools that European and American writers were using: Turgenev and Chekhov.

Love in a Fallen City (1944), Eileen Chang – And here is another writer fully aware of her own tradition – one story even has what sure looks like a parody of a bit of The Story of the Stone – while pulling in every outside influence available.

Cold Mountain Poems (1958) &

Riprap (1959), Gary Snyder – The other direction, an American poet immersed in Chinese poetry.  The first little book is a translation of Cold Mountain, the most “outsider” of the great “mountains and rivers” poets, while Riprap is Snyder’s absorption of the sensibility into his own voice.

Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor, Bondservant and Master (1966), Jonathan D. Spence – He uses a different orthography, but Ts’ao Yin is also Cao Yin, the grandfather of Cao Xueqin, author of China’s greatest novel.  Chinese scholars, in search of the actual characters and the actual teenage fairy tale garden, had tracked down every scrap available about Cao Xueqin’s family history, giving Spence the material to write a dissertation on the social history of the period focused on one figure.  Cao Xueqin’s grandfather was analogous to today’s Chinese billionaire, managing companies in close cooperation with the state but part of a power structure distinct from the government bureaucracy.  Spence explained a lot of my puzzles about the background of the novel.

MFA Highlights: Arts of China (2013) – Presumably an author or authors are involved but I could not figure that out.   Because of its maritime wealth, Bostonians have given their Museum of Fine Arts has an outstanding collection of Chinese art, some of it on display here.  If you are reading The Story of the Stone, do not hesitate to visit your nearest Asian art collection.  The ceramics and clothing, in particular, were a big help.  For example, the silk robe pictured uses a peacock-feather-wrapped thread that is featured in a heroic sewing scene in the novel.  Useful to see that in person.

 

FICTION

The Female Quixote (1752), Charlotte Lennox – Please see this post.

The Crucible  (1953), Arthur Miller

Nights at the Alexandra (1987), William Trevor

Every Arc Bends Its Radian (2024), Sergio de la Pava – His last novel packed with American football, I wondered if this new novel was some kind of compromise with his agent, since it is, for a while, a detective novel.  But no, it goes off – actually literally gets on – the rails and turns into another novel entirely, one likely to bore and mystify mystery fans.  Some of it bored me.  But I enjoy de la Pava’s voice and intelligence, and he seems to be writing the books he wants to write.

 

IN  FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

La fleur de l'age (1949), Colette – More little bits of Colette.  Back to the music hall and so on.  A theme of love among the aged, there in the title, is new.

Fidelidade (1958), Jorge de Sena

Becket (1959), Jean Anouilh