And I am a doggerel bard - some Bab Ballads

W. S. Gilbert hardly used any nonsense at all, so it is entirely appropriate to include him in Nonsense Week.  He used it once in a while.

Of Agib, who amid Tartaric scenes,
Wrote a lot of ballet-music in his teens:
    His gentle spirit rolls
    In the melody of souls –
Which is pretty, but I don’t know what it means.  (“The Story of Prince Agib”)

For many people that describes poetry, not just its nonsensical version, but never mind that.

In the early 1860s, young Gilbert discovered a talent for light verse and crude illustration, and thus became a regular contributor to a magazine with the oppressive title of Fun.  His poems were collected as The Bab Ballads in 1869 and rearranged and reprinted many times.  This is all over a decade before he began his theatrical collaborations with the composer Arthur Sullivan.  Long before he was part of Gilbert and Sullivan, he was Bab.

Gilbert was more of a satirist than Edward Lear, a creator of characters who were types and behaved ridiculously yet within their social role.

"Your mind is not as blank
    As that of HOPLEY PORTER,
Who holds a curate's rank
    At Assesmilk-cum-Worter.

"He plays the airy flute,
    And looks depressed and blighted,
Doves round about him 'toot,'
    And lambkins dance delighted.

"He labours more than you
    At worsted work, and frames it;
In old maids' albums, too,
    Sticks seaweed — yes, and names it!"  (“The Rival Curates”)

The curates are rivals in mildness.  I can imagine the Monty Python game show – “Welcome to England’s Mildest Curate.”  Gilbert  blows up his types to absurd proportions.  He is not so interested in wordplay.  I am comparing him to Thomas Hood, the previous generation’s master of light verse, who used far more puns and punchlines than Gilbert, more jokes.  Although Hood had his share, Gilbert is more violent, with lots of jolly beheadings, murders, and cannibalism.

Last year, during Ghost Week, I put up a bit of a Gilbert poem, “The Ghost to His Ladye Love,” that I thought was splendidly imaginative.  Few reach that height.  “Emily, John, James, and I: A Derby Legend” comes close, ordinary in content but ingenious in form:

EMILY JANE was a nursery maid –
    JAMES was a bold Life Guard,
And JOHN was a constable, poorly paid
    (And I am a doggerel bard).

A very good girl was EMILY JANE,
    JIMMY was good and true,
And JOHN was a very good man in the main
   (And I am a good man, too).

Rivals for EMMIE were JOHNNY and JAMES,
    Though EMILY liked them both;
She couldn't tell which had the strongest claims
    (And I couldn't take my oath).

Every fourth line is a parenthetical from the narrator, the most intrusive of all intrusive narrators, who even intrudes on the action at a crucial moment.

Gilbert is a bit hard to excerpt, I realize to my regret, since his poems are almost all narrative and almost all a couple of pages long.  Much of the Fun, honestly, is just seeing how he turns this silly stuff into verse.

I have borrowed the illustrations from this Gilbert and Sullivan archive.  They are arranged as they struck my fancy, aside from the curate with the sheep.  My text is the complete, exhausting 1980 Belknap Press edition.

Some Edward Lear - When they screamed in the nest, he screamed out with the rest

César Aira makes a perfect transition to mid-Victorian nonsense.  Samples from the Golden Age of Nonsense.  Three authors – Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and W. S. Gilbert – are surely enough for a Golden Age.

I am using the word “nonsense” loosely.  Nonsense is only one of Carroll’s many modes, and Gilbert’s Bab Ballads are only rarely nonsensical.  Only Lear provides his nonsense uncut with satire or riddles.  Nonsense and nothing but.

Lear’s 1846 A Book of Nonsense, a collection of 112 illustrated limericks, one after the other, hypnotic and numbing consumed in bulk, stood by itself for 25 years, when in 1871 Lear published Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets – a no-nonsense title, isn’t it? – which was soon followed (1872 and 1877) by two more little books with similar contents.  More limericks, of course:

                There was an old person of Crowle,
                Who lived in the nest of an owl;
                When they screamed in the nest, he screamed out with the rest,
                That depressing old person of Crowle.

But also, thankfully, longer, varied poems like “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” a brilliant bit of nonsense cookery (“Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of window as fast as possible”), a couple of story-like texts, and the startling botanies:

                                                    Piggiawiggia Pyramidalis

I find the latter have, like the limericks, a cumulative effect.  I also find that I ask myself questions like “Why am I laughing at this?” and “Why is this funny?”  There is sometimes so little to Lear.  The Nonsense Cookery has recognizable jokes of an absurdist type.  The cartoons are obviously essential.  I can imagine that owlish fellow screaming, and his screams make him even more owlish, so I laugh.  Something like that.

Lear is a bit easier to dissect in prose.  A bit of "The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went around the World":

‘It does not quite look like a human being,’ said Violet, doubtfully; nor could they make out what it really was, till the Quangle-Wangle (who had previously been round the world), exclaimed softly in a loud voice, ‘It is the Co-operative Cauliflower!’

And so in truth it was, and they soon found that what they had taken for an immense wig was in reality the top of the cauliflower, and that he had no feet at all, being able to walk tolerably well with a fluctuating and graceful movement on a single cabbage stalk, an accomplishment which naturally saved him the expense of stockings and shoes.

I will defer on jokes, but it seems that the last one does nothing, a cute joke for the kiddies, but that otherwise we see three fundamental types of nonsense here.  The reversal “softly in a loud voice” is an undermining of the meaning of words.  The business about using the stalk to walk misapplies rhetoric.  And the Co-operative Cauliflower itself is freely inventive, but a peculiar kind of invention where the game is to defeat every imaginative expectation of the reader, no matter how unreasonable.

As you can see, my goal for the week is to kill all of the fun in these writers.

The episode ends, by the way, with a remarkable and sublime sight.  The Cauliflower “suddenly arose, and in a somewhat plumdomphious manner hurried off towards the setting sun…  he finally disappeared on the brink of the western sky in a crystal cloud of sudorific sand.”

I borrowed Lear’s illustrations from the fluctuating and graceful nonsenselit.org.

There are many things a novel does not say - The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira

November and December 2013 is the perfect time to sample the Argentinean Literature of Doom, says Ricardo de la Caravana de Recuerdos.  Why, I do not know, but I did it, enjoying one of last year’s César Aira translations, The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, originally published in 1998.

The title is well-chosen.  It warns readers of the contents – CAUTION: Contains meta-fiction.  The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira turns out to be about fiction.  The Miracle Cure is fiction.  Dr. Aira is César Aira.  Or all of this is a trick to encourage such a surface interpretation by a shallow reader like me.  The other César Aira translation from last year, the 2002 Varamo, was also about the fiction of César Aira.

I know there are readers who loathe this sort of thing, who are instantly bored by it.  In this case, fair warning, I say.

Dr. Aira performs Miracle Cures.  He is fifty, though, and thinking that it is time to finally write a book about his methods, published in installments of “four or eight” pages, “no more than that” (42), amounting to “the penning of an Encyclopedia of all things from all times” (39).  In other word, one of my favorite literary curiosities, the omnibook.

Dr. Aira’s method is not that of César Aira, but it is related.  He has thousands of manuscript pages which he plans to assemble into a collage.

He could start anywhere; no introduction was necessary because the subject was already well defined in the collective imagination…  The same thing was happening here: life, death, illness – there’s nobody who doesn’t know what they’re all about, which would allow him to create small, delightful variations that would seem like inventions even if they weren’t (thereby sparing the author the exorbitant effort of inventing a new story).  (37-8)

In the first chapter, Dr. Aira is asked to perform a cure but refuses.  In the second, he theorizes about his cures, as above.  In the third and final, he is asked to perform a cure and does.  So Aira does not cheat on this aspect of his conceit, as I suspected he might, since given his method he may well have launched the novel without knowing exactly where he was going.

The Miracle Cure applies the omnibook to reality, something like an application of the memory palaces of Giordano Bruno, and not so far from the central conceit of John Crowley’s Aegypt books, and of course akin to this and that infinite bit of Borges.  It is even more like an application of the power cosmic by the Silver Surfer or Thanos, the ludicrous yet god-like space-faring characters from Marvel Comics.  Aira scholars should figure out which comic books he read.  Here is a Spanish reviewer who is way ahead of me: “without doubt,” he says, Aira grew up with the bizarre and inventive comics of the DC Silver Age, which explains a lot.

There are many things a novel does not say, and this absence makes it possible for action to take place within its restricted universe.  Hence, the novel is also an antecedent of Miracles, precisely because the events the novel recounts can happen as a result of what it excludes.  (67)

Each Cure destroys and then replaces the universe.  This is the most Doom-like part of the Miracle Cures.

I have avoided describing the first chapter because it is the funniest piece of extended Aira I have yet read, wonderful Monty Python stuff.  The metafiction-hating reader could enjoy it and skip the rest of the book.

Katherine Silver translated this one.  Fun gig.

Michael Drayton's Idea - time calls me to relate \ My tedious travels

Michael Drayton, a contemporary of Samuel Daniel, skipped the anagram.  He did not hide the Ideal behind Delia or the idea behind Délie, but addressed his sonnet sequence directly to “Idea.”  Oddly, or perhaps this is the ironic point, Drayton’s sonnets often feel more like they could be addressed to an actual woman than the poems of Daniel or Scève.  He is best known – I think this is true – for the sonnet “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part” (1619), which I glanced at almost six years ago.  It’s a stunner.  As good as Shakespeare.  And even with the turn to allegorical figures in the last six lines, it has the erotic charge of a great love poem.

Unlike this one, also from the 1619 Idea:

Like an adventurous seafarer am I,
Who hath some long and dang’rous voyage been,
And called to tell of his discovery,
How far he sailed, what countries he had seen,
Proceeding from the port whence he put forth,
Shows by his compass how his course he steered,
When east, when west, when south, and when by north,
As how the pole to ev’ry place was reared;
What capes he doubled, of what continent,
The gulfs and straits that strangely he had passed,
Where most becalmed, where with foul weather spent,
And on what rocks in peril to be cast.
Thus in my love, time calls me to relate
My tedious travels, and oft varying fate.

The conceit completely takes over.  Taking the “I” as something real, we see in the first line that he is life a seafarer, after which the next the next eleven lines describe not the real “I” but the purely metaphorical seafarer.  Since “I” is like the seafarer, by logic the poem is simultaneously describing “I,” but who does not lose that thread by the twelfth line?

Drayton is more direct than Daniel, but the elaborate, playful extension of the metaphor is the purpose of the poem, which in the closing couplet turns out to be not a love poem but a poem about writing love poems.

Look at the seventh line, “When east,” etc.  As prose, as argument, it is filler – we know how a compass works – but it is pleasant to say aloud and pleasant to read in its surroundings, where ordinary ideas become poetry.

Drayton thinks, and therefore is.  One cannot have an Idea without “I”:

Nothing but No and I, and I and No,
How fals it out so strangely you reply?
I tell yee (Faire) ile not be answered so,
With this affronting No, denying I.
I say, I Love, you sleightly answere I:
I say, You Love, you peule me out a No:
I say, I Die, you Eccho me with I:
Save mee I Crie, you sigh me out a No;
Must Woe and I, have naught but No and I?
No I, am I, if I no more can have;
Answere no more, with Silence make reply,
And let me take my selfe what I doe crave,
    Let No and I, with I and you be so:
    Then answere No and I, and I and No.

This, from 1594, is an unusually rapid sonnet, mostly monosyllables, when read aloud verging on nonsense.  Adding quotation marks helps sort it out.  The poem is as usual more learned than it looks – the “Eccho” line refers to Philip Sidney’s echo poem “Fair rocks, goodly rivers, sweet woods…” at the very least.  But at heart it is a joyful manipulation of words, poetry as pure play.

Samuel Daniel's Delia - beyond his power to a farre happier flight

The fact is that we have been corrupted by Shakespeare and the Romantic poets into thinking that early modern poems are artistic forms for emotion and personal expression rather than entries in an erudition contest meant to express neo-Platonic humanist commonplaces in as intricate a way as possible.  Shakespeare is to blame because his sonnets can be read as if they were Romantic or Modernist or whatever you want – they really are extraordinary – but anyone who has turned to his “Venus and Adonis” or “The Phoenix and the Turtle” know that he had submitted some poems to the prestige competition, too.

Samuel Daniel was a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, a member of the circle of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke.  His 1592 sonnet sequence, fifty poems long, modeled on Petrarch’s Canzoniere, is titled Delia.  If Maurice Scève’s Délie is also L’Idée then Delia is also Ideal.  There is some speculation that Daniel’s poems are addressed to Mary Sidney, herself a fine poet, but, come on, “Ideal,” we know how this game is played.

All of this of course takes place during the Great English Sonnet Craze inspired by Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, two hundred years after Petrarch had died.  England was a backwater.

Sonnet XLV
    Care- charmer sleepe, sonne of the Sable night,
Brother to death, in silent darknes borne:
Relieue my languish, and restore the light,
With darke forgetting of my cares returne.
    And let the day be time enough to morne,
The shipwrack of my ill-aduentred youth:
Let waking eyes suffice to wayle theyr scorne,
Without the torment of the nights vnturth.
    Cease dreames, th’ymagery of our day desires,
To modell foorth the passions of the morrow:
Neuer let rysing Sunne approue you lyers,
To adde more griefe to aggrauat my sorrow.
      Still let me sleepe, imbracing clowdes in vaine;
      And never wake, to feele the dayes disdayne.

Delia is in the background here, the cause of the poet’s sorrow.  The call for sleep as a relief from suffering, and the congruity between sleep and death, are ancient ideas, hackneyed even.  I am not sure that there is a single original idea in Daniel.  He is, rather, an expert at poetic adornment.  He is likely as much read now for the 1603 essay A Defence of Ryme, an argument for ornament, constraint, and form: “Ryme is no impediment to his conceit, but rather giues him wings to mount and carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight” (138).  Our imagination is “an vnformed Chaos without fashion, without day.”  Poetry extracts beauty from chaos.

So if I find little in this poem besides the musical pleasure of “Relieve my languish and restore the light” or the last couplet, where the dream imagery becomes more interesting (“embracing clouds”), I have found plenty.

In a poem titled “To the Reader,” Daniel makes the usual claim for immortality:

    I know I shalbe read, among the rest
So long as men speake english, and so long
As verse and vertue shalbe in request
Or grace to honest industry belong  (4, ll. 59-63)

He did not predict he would be read a lot.

I have been using the old University of Chicago Press edition of Poems and A Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague,  as my text.  Who knows what hideous errors I have introduced in my transcription.  In Defence of Standard Spelling, Daniel should have written that essay, too.

Maurice Scève's Délie - Its deep, & divine excellence \ So stunned my Soul

The Góngora post went all right.  I’ll try another tough one, the Délie of Maurice Scève, a collection of poems published in 1544 in the most pleasant city in France, Lyon, then the innovative center of French publishing.  The poems are mostly dizains, ten lines of ten syllables each, little poetic boxes, 449 of the little suckers.  There exists an unpublished doctoral dissertation that translates them all, but otherwise, to remain sane, everyone picks out favorites.

My choice this time was Emblems of Desire, the 2003 translation by Richard Sieburth, reissued in 2007 by Archipelago Books.  The poems were originally accompanied by allegorical emblems, and Sieburth includes a number of them (please sample them at the Archipelago site – click “Extras”) along with the sixty or so poems he translates.  I will ignore those.  What is more tedious than early modern emblems.

Poems  aside, Scève is most famous as the discoverer of the tomb of Petrarch’s Laura, a phony publicity stunt, but relevant here since Délie is although not a sonnet sequence an imitation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere.  Délie is Scève’s Laura, his poetic love object, but rearrange the letters to L’Idée, “the idea”, to get a better idea of what is going on.

I lived at liberty in the April of my life,
My youth exempt from every care,
When my eye, unschooled in strife,
Was caught by that presence fair
Which by its deep, & divine excellence
So stunned my Soul, & common sense
That the cruel archer of her eyes
Took my freedom as his prize:
And from that day on, without cease,
In her beauty lies my death, & life. (6)

And then this goes on for hundreds of poems, with minute variations in imagery and ironic effect, mostly lamenting the absence of this idea or possibly woman.  The poems are hardly as elaborate as Góngora, but that cruel archer is a buried classical reference, although an easy one, and “April of my life” is a clear reference to a Petrarch poem – clear once Sieburth points it out in a footnote, I mean.

One by one, they do not necessarily seem like much, and I would not argue for a cumulative effect, either.  Rather the art of Délie lies in the subtle emotional shifts as words and images are repeated and varied.  And this with a selection, and in translation!  But with Sieburth’s help I can piece it together.

Here is a dizain that does stand on its own.  Again, Scève is riffing on Petrarch, a poem where the poet says he is like a ship that is adrift.  Scève makes a big change:

Like a corpse adrift on the open Sea,
Plaything of Winds, & pastime of Waves,
I floated astray in this bitter Abyss,
Buoyed by the ground-swells of my woes.
    Then, O Hope, you who arise
From the vain mirages of my mind,
In the name of her, you wake me
From the deeps in which I died:
And my ears staggered by this sound,
I was at a loss to fathom who I was.  (164)

Sieburth includes the early modern French, which is something to see:

Commes corps mort vagant en haulte Mer,
Esbat des Ventz, & passetemps des Vndes,
I’errois flottant parmy ce Gouffre amer,
Ou mes soucys enflent vagues profondes.

And so on, easier to convert than early modern English, certainly.

So, more early modern puzzle poetry, but a different kind of puzzle, and one, for the poor sap stuck with English, missing eighty percent of its pieces.

Luis de Góngora's Solitudes, perhaps forming letters on the pellucid paper of the heavens

Today I revisit to an old favorite of Wuthering Expectations, the baroque genius of the Spanish Golden Age, Luis de Góngora.  I last mentioned him here when a fragment of Los Soledades, in English The Solitudes (ca. 1613), appeared in The Hudson Review, newly translated by Edith Grossman.  I finally got around to reading the whole thing, a Penguin Classics edition from 2011.

A “shipwrecked youth, one scorned and desolate,” washes ashore.  He comes across goat herds who are having a party for a wedding.  That covers the first canto or solitude.  In the second, the castaway joins a group of fishermen who take him to an island, where he meets more fisherman, and some comely fisherwomen.  Then they all go bird watching.  Apparently two more solitudes were apparently planned but never written.

This sounds like nothing.  It is close to nothing.  All that matters is the elaboration, the imagery, the metaphors, and the complex classical references.

And so they all passed by, and in good order
as at the equinox we see furrowing
    through oceans of open air
    not flights of galley ships
    but flocks of swift-sailing cranes,
moons perhaps waxing, perhaps on the wane
    their most distant extremes,
perhaps forming letters on the pellucid
   paper of the heavens with
   the quill feathers of their flight.  (601-610)

“They” are just the shepherds, walking in formation, like ships, no, cranes; the cranes are like the moon in certain aspects.  In the most fanciful touch, Góngora writes, quill in hand, that the metaphorical birds may also be writing with their quills, which almost logically transforms the sky from water (“oceans of open air”) to paper.

The entire poem is written in this fashion.  Rabbits are “ignorant of fulminating lead (del plomo fulminante, 281-2),” meaning bullets, “the saliva of mute stars” (293) is dew, the Atlantic Ocean is

                      Fortune’s theater,
    the voracious, the profound
    graveyard thirstily drinking
from goblets of fir all that the New World
– I mean the tributes from the Americas –
pays in mausoleums of short-lived spume.  (394-9)

Góngora thought this was so obscure he had to explain it.  Sometimes he gives the answer to the riddle, other times not.  Turning a ship into a goblet is nuts, unless you are thinking at the right mythological scale.

The range of reference in The Solitudes is the greatest mystery to me.  I recognize, broadly, Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses are the source of many of the transformative substitutions so necessary for Góngoran metaphor.  But I have no idea how much actual outside text is woven into the poem, how many images or phrases or key words are borrowed from Horace or Petrarch or earlier Spanish poets known to me by name if I am lucky.

The whole thing is an elaborate, sophisticated 400 year old poetic riddle.  The reward for solving a piece of it is a little burst of delight.  How kind of Edith Grossman to help us marvel at this preposterous object.

I hope Grossman continues translating Golden Age poetry.  She cannot be doing it for the money.

The thinking-dreaming-recall-chant of Allan Gurganus

D. G. Myers wrote a review of Local Souls, the new Allan Gurganus book, that was so convincing I actually read the book, a rare thing for new American books, although less rare, I see as I check my notes, for books recommended by Myers (e.g., Christopher Beha, Dana Spiotta, Jean Thompson).  Please see Myers for a proper review.  I just want to make some notes.

Local Souls contains three novellas set in the same little North Carolina town.  The main thing they have in common, the main virtue of the book, is voice, each narrator’s exuberant, excessive blare of words:

Honestly, if it had been left to us, all Mabrys would yet sit fly-swatting on some hot rental porch midfield.  We three would still be right out there rocking tonight, comforted by roosting chickens’ late-day placement squabbling, studying someone else’s tobacco acreage.  Such land’s main beauty was the horizon where – for our inexpensive sidelined entertainment – an entire sun set nightly.  (245)

This almost counts as plain style for Gurganus.  No italics, no puns.  But “an entire sun” – the book is stuffed with that kind of thing.  It can be too much; it can be great.

I am always attracted to first person narration that identifies what it is – writing, speech, or what?  Authors have done so many clever things with the idea.  But frankly most first person narration is meant to be an amalgam of thought, speech, and wordlessness turned into words unknown outside of fiction.  No one speaks like that, or writes like that, or thinks like that, not for as long as it takes to tell this story, but the first person convention is so useful and easy to accept that we happily ignore the logistics.  Gurganus perfectly names the mode:

During my whole life I’ve never said so much at once as in this thinking-dreaming-recall-chant, last thing.  (338)

In context, as that narrator’s story nears its end, this is even almost logical – all is made clear – but that label should be used more generally.  “Thinking-dreaming-recall-chant” covers a lot of first person fiction.

Myers puts Gurganus in what is now a long tradition of small town fiction following Sherwood Anderson.  You might think from the title that Gurganus is also invoking Dead Souls.  in some small sense.  The protagonist of the first novella, “Fear Not,” loves Chekhov and gets a degree in Russian literature.  “Given her unsettled girlhood, the Russians’ sense of Fate had spoken to her early” (51), but her unsettling begins with witnessing her father’s decapitation by motorboat engine and gets worse from there.  That’s Southern Gothic, not Chekhov (“eventfulness in fiction did not bother her”).

Now, here’s a stretch.  The hilarious second novella is titled “Saints Have Mothers,” narrated by the mother of the saint.  The final story is also about a saint, a too-perfect town doctor.  Gustave Flaubert’s Trois Contes (1877) is a collection of three novellas about saints.  I had not thought of that first heroine as any kind of saint, but now I wonder.  There is scene where she is costumed as angel, shouting “Fear not”!  There are scenes where she receives premonitory visions.  Maybe not such a stretch.

Myers says the last story, “Decoy,” is “worth the price of the entire collection.”  I had planned to write about that one, not this other stuff.  It is about the destructive power of art.  Duck decoys, in this case.  Never make art, whatever you do.

Thanks for the tip, Prof. Myers.

Alexander Herzen is saved by statistics

The section of My Past and Thoughts about Alexander Herzen’s childhood, I covered that, more or less, just great, and I brushed against the romance that ends the novel, Herzen’s love affair and marriage conducted against what should have been the insuperable obstacle of his political exile.

There is a short piece of that section that shows the downside of a memoir being written like a novel.  Herzen has, or moves toward, an affair with a married woman – this is before he realize how important his cousin, his future wife, is to him – the story of which is told in a series of clichés borrowed from a Balzac novel.  From Balzac if I’m lucky.  Probably something much worse. 

I embraced her and pressed her firmly to my breast.

‘My dear… but go!’  (II.21, 326)

And on that like, although not for too long.  The scene is a curiosity in a book that is otherwise well-written.  Herzen’s imagination fails him, so he finds help where he can.

Most original is Herzen’s account of his arrest, his time in prison, and his exile, written at the distance of twenty years.  At the university Herzen and his friends become radicalized anti-Czarists, opponents of the oppressive Nicholas I.  Their opposition is more intellectual than revolutionary, but that is more than enough to get them into trouble – followed by the secret police, arrested for trivial or false infractions, imprisoned without trial for months (nine months in Herzen’s case), and punished with capricious sentences.  Herzen’s was exile to Russia’s border, not quite to Siberia but as close as possible, to serve as a clerk under a provincial petty tyrant.

The exile was as bad as Herzen had feared.  He was saved by statistics, and by mindless bureaucratic imperatives.

The Ministry of Home Affairs had at that time a craze for statistics: it had given orders for committees to be formed everywhere, and had issued programmes which could hardly have been carried out even in Belgium or Switzerland; at the same time there were all sorts of elaborate tables with maxima and minima, with averages and various deductions from the totals for periods of ten years (made up on evidence which had not been collected for a year before!), with moral remarks and meteorological observations.

All, of course, unfunded.  Herzen turns out to be a master of bureaucratic nonsense, able to quickly write up meaningless statistical gibberish from scratch that is learned enough to sound important but vague enough to avoid trouble.

This passage, however timeless, is a relatively trivial example of the way Herzen uses his own story to address his political concerns.  His own troubles are always small stuff against the other crimes of the autocratic Nicholas and his allies – executions, torture, corruption.

What monstrous crimes are buried in the archives of the wicked, immoral reign of Nicholas!  We are used to them, they were committed every day, committed as though nothing was wrong, unnoticed, lost in the terrible distance, noiselessly sunk in the silent sloughs of officialdom or kept back by the censorship of the police?

Herzen is writing from London, in voluntary exile.  The next volume of the memoirs will tell me how he made that decision.  There should be a lot of good writing along the way.

Herzen writes characters - the chapter on his father - "For people he had an open, undisguised contempt – for everyone."

Herzen’s father was a living example of Turgenev’s literary creation, the Superfluous Man, educated and Westernized to a point that alienated him from his own country (“they [these types of men] were a sort of intellectual superfluity and were lost in artificial life,” 75).  Perhaps.  A page later:

For people he had an open, undisguised contempt – for everyone.  Never under any circumstances did he count upon anybody…  He was convinced beforehand that every man is capable of any evil act; and that, if he does not commit it, it is either that he has no need to, or that the opportunity does not present itself… (76)

One wonders to what extent Russian superfluity was cultural and to what extent it was temperamental.  His relations with other people are characterized by “[m]ockery, irony, cold, caustic, utter contempt” (77) which make him a trial to be around but an outstanding literary character, as Herzen demonstrates in Part I, Chapter 5 (“My Father”) of My Past and Thoughts, perhaps the finest example in this first volume of the memoirs of Herzen’s literary abilities.

The father spends his day according to a rigid schedule, in open combat with his servants who are robbing him at every opportunity, and with his guests, who he thinks are idiots, and to a lesser degree, thankfully, with his family.  Herzen’s chapter recreates the household of his youth in all its coldness and inflexibility which he presents as, from a distance, comic.  He often resembles, to my surprise, Proust, as in this description of an occasional guest:

Pimenov’s chief peculiarity lay not in his having once published books that no one ever read, but in the fact that if he began laughing he could not stop, and his laughter would grow into fits of whopping-cough, with explosions and dull rolls of thunder.  He knew this and therefore, when he had a presentiment that something laughable was coming, began little by little to take measures; he brought out a pocket-handkerchief, looked at this watch, buttoned up his coat, hid his face in his hands and, when the crisis came, stood up, turned to the wall, leaned against it and writhed in agony for half an hour or more, then, crimson and exhausted by the paroxysm, he would sit down mopping the perspiration from his bald head, though the fit would keep seizing him again for long afterwards.  (87)

Given this, Herzen’s father cannot resist provoking Pimenov to laughter as much as possible, for his own amusement.

Pimenov could be one of the Mme Verdurin’s circle.  That is the side of Proust I am thinking of, the woman who dislocates her jaw from laughing too hard.

Herzen writes that it was only during his imprisonment and exile that he understood there was anything more to his father, by which time it was too late – “his callous heart did not crave for reconciliation; so he remained on hostile terms with everyone on earth” (91).  Or almost everyone.  Herzen ends the marvelous chapter with a glimpse of his elderly father in “his study where, sitting in a hard, uncomfortable, deep armchair, surrounded by his dogs, he was playing all alone with my three-year-old son,” perhaps giving him a “rest from the incessant agitation, conflict, and vexation in which he had kept himself, as his dying hand touched the cradle.”

Alexander Herzen's memoirs, some introductory fuss

Alexander Herzen almost makes me want to break my guideline against encyclopedism.*  Meaning the bio and political views and the historical importance, summarizing introductory material or Wikipedia.  But you by definition have the internet yourself, so what is the point, and even though I have been reading his memoir which is about Herzen himself of course I have no interest in writing about Herzen himself but rather about Herzen’s book, something else entirely.

And anyway I have only read a third of the memoir, or a quarter, so what do I know.

The title of the memoir, My Past and Thoughts, is accurate.  Some of it is about Herzen’s past; some of it about his thoughts.  In this volume, the titles of two of the three parts summarize the story:  “Nursery and University 1812-1834”; “Prison and Exile 1834-1838.”  The third part is about his wife, her childhood, their romance, and eventual elopement.  She died just at the time he began working on this material and is treated with great love and tenderness.  The last part is a bit like a romance novel.

Each section is a fine example of its genre, actually.  The first section, the childhood memoir, is one just one of four major examples from Russia in the 1850s (some of which are fiction):  Sergei Aksakov’s A Russian Schoolboy and Years of Childhood,** Leo Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, and the “Oblomov’sDream” section from Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov.  What was going on in Russia in the 1850s?  Why so much interest in the subject?  I have no idea.

Herzen’s memoirs are often compared to the novelists who were his contemporaries, to Turgenev and Tolstoy.  At the level of the scene, the comparison is accurate, and with some of the character writing, too.  I will save the characters for tomorrow.  And the scenes.  And the politics, and the writing, and everything else, I guess.

It’s a great memoir.  I plan to read the whole thing.  It is close to 1,500 pages, that is all, so I will take breaks when the opportunity presents itself.

* I do enjoy encyclopedism about the text.  Herzen wrote his memoir, along with lots of other journalism and commentary, in pieces in the 1850s for the Russian émigré magazines in London.  The articles were turned into a multi-volume memoir published between 1861 and 1866.  Constance Garnett brought My Past and Thoughts into English in six volumes from 1924 to 1927.  She was not human.  Her translation was revised and annotated by Humphrey Higgens in 1968.  This is the edition I read.  Amusingly, it has four layers of footnotes (Higgens, the Soviet editors, Garnett, and Herzen).  The edition includes a long, useful essay by Isaiah Berlin that I assume is more or less the piece that is in Russian Thinkers.  I should check.

**  I used the same conceit when I wrote about Aksakov.  Eh, who will ever know.

A Ming Dynasty magic fox cautionary tale - don't steal books from foxes

“Divine Foxes Lose a Book at Small Water Bay” by Feng Menglong, a story published in Constant Words to Awaken the World in 1627, translated by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang in Stories to Awaken the World: A Ming Dynasty Collection, Volume 3 (University of Washington Press, 2009).  Constant Words to Awaken the World is not much of a title, so I can see why it was changed.  “Divine Foxes Lose a Book at Small Water Bay” is an unsurpassable title.  Its only problem is that it overpromises.

Ricardo de la Caravana de Recuerdos was asking forfavorite short stories several months ago.  Amid the usual suspects, commenters supplied many curiosities, none more curious than “Divine Foxes,” suggested by humblehappiness aka Cleanthess, who I am pleased to say also visits Wuthering Expectations on occasion.

The narrator begins with an old story about a man who saves an injured bird and is rewarded by the bird with good fortune.  Everyone knows this story in some form.

Why even bother to tell it?  Well, dear audience, I did so because I plan to move on to a story about a young man who also hit nonhuman beings with slingshot pellets.  But, unlike the one who repented after having hurt the bird, this young man ruined his family’s considerable fortune as a consequence of his action and became an object of ridicule.  (117)

The young man who errs, Wang Chen, “had only a slight acquaintance with the classics and histories and barely knew the rudiments of writing,” which is what makes his sin especially serious when he comes upon “two wild foxes talking and laughing” who “were discussing the book that one of them was holding in its hand” and injures them both with his slingshot just to get a look at the book.  What does he care about books?  And then it turns out that it is “printed in ancient tadpole-like characters completely unknown to him” (119).

For the rest of the story, the foxes, who have magic powers mostly related to disguise, try to get their book back.  Wang Chen keeps it from them out of nothing but peevishness.  Eventually, the foxes succeed through a scheme that seems unnecessarily complex, in the process not exactly ruining Wang Chen, but causing his family to lose half of its wealth.

The narrator occasionally inserts poems and italicized commentary, such as this one at the end (Wang Zai is Wang Chen’s brother:

(What did Wang Zai do to deserve such punishment?  The foxes were wicked enough.  That’s why they don’t get reincarnated as humans, after all.)

A glimpse into another ethical world appears there, almost as strange as the central mystery of the story, the book that the foxes were discussing so intensely.  What could be in it?  The true catalog to Borges’s Library of Babel; the key to all mythologies.  Something like that.  Or perhaps just the Tang Dynasty fairy fox equivalent of George R. R. Martin, stolen before either fox had reached the end.

Book bloggers will sympathize with the foxes.

I guess this counts as a kind of Halloween story.  Magic Chinese foxes instead of ghosts.

Of the 2,800 pages of Feng Menglong that has been translated, I have only read “Divine Foxes.”  Cleanthess – what’s the wise thing to do next?

A scary ghost story from Thackeray - HE, I promise you, won't stand any nonsense

I almost forgot to do my Halloween reading, but then I remembered, so tonight’s text is “The Notch on the Ax” by William Makepeace Thackeray, published in 1863 the Cornhill Magazine.  In two parts, I guess, since this is in the dead center of the story:

At this moment the clock (after its previous convulsions) sounded TWELVE.  And as the new Editor of the Cornhill Magazine--and HE, I promise you, won't stand any nonsense--will only allow seven pages, I am obliged to leave off at THE VERY MOST INTERESTING POINT OF THE STORY.

Can you imagine the suspense of the original readers?  I have not said anything about the story, so I suppose not.

This story has everything:  ghosts, Freemasons, mesmerism, Bluebeard, table-rapping, Mary Queen of Scots, artificial limbs, silly accents, a guillotine, a woman named Blanche de Bechamel.  On second thought, there is a lot it does not have.  Thackeray meets an ancient man who tells him a ghost story.  That is the action, more or less.  I read the story in a collection archived at Gutenberg.org which had a prefatory note telling me that “the style of each principal sensational novelist of the day is delightfully imitated.”  The sensation novel had been invented only three years earlier by Wilkie Collins, so this sounded like fun, although I wondered if Collins had a strong enough style for me to recognize a parody, much less that of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, much much less that of some voguish bestseller whose name I do not know.

Who is the writer, for example, who always disguises the names of the “real” characters with dashes – “(of course I don't mention family names)”?  As in

'Captain Brown,' I said 'who could see Miss Sm-th without loving her?'

Or

As he said "Ha!" there came three quiet little taps on the table--it is the middle table in the "Gray's-Inn  Coffee House," under the bust of the late Duke of W-ll-ngt-n. 

Even going so far as to disguise the exact relationship between people:

As I live, he here mentioned dear gr-nny's MAIDEN name.  Her maiden name was ----.  Her honored married name was ----.

"She married your great-gr-ndf-th-r the year Poseidon won the Newmarket Plate," Mr. Pinto dryly remarked.

Maybe this is not meant to be anyone in particular and is just a good gag.

Later, as the part of the story related to the title finally got moving (i.e., why does the little guillotine have a notch in its blade, why does the headless ghost seem so upset with the old man), to my surprise I did recognize the parody.  A fugitive is hiding in a convent in Paris – a clue right there – and is forced (by hypnotism) to leave it.  Lists begin to appear, and paragraphs composed of single sentences, short ones.  Some puzzling precision intrudes.

"And he came to No. 29 in the Rue Picpus--a house which then stood  between a court and garden--

"That is, there was a building of one story, with a great coach door.

"Then there was a court, around which were stables, coach-houses, offices.

"Then there was a house--a two-storied house, with a perron in front.

"Behind the house was a garden--a garden of two hundred and fifty French feet in length.

"And as one hundred feet of France equal one hundred and six feet of England, this garden, my friend, equaled exactly two hundred and sixty-five feet of British measure.

"In the center of the garden was a fountain and a statue--or, to speak more correctly, two statues.  One was recumbent,--a man.  Over him, saber in hand, stood a Woman.

"The man was Olofernes.  The woman was Judith.  From the head, from the trunk, the water gushed.  It was the taste of the doctor:--was it not a droll of taste?

I stop here because this is where I finally figured it out – this is V-ct-r H-g-!  Thackeray is having fun with Les Misérables, which had been both published and heroically translated into English only the year before.  I had not thought of Les Misérables as a sensation novel, but in the English context of course it is.  “If the fashion for sensation novels goes on, I tell you I will write one in fifty volumes” Thackeray promises at the end of the story, but sadly he died later that year.

For somewhat scarier public domain stories, see the Little Professor’s Halloween Horde of Horrible Happenings.  She has been blogging as the Little Professor for ten years now, longer than I have been alive.

These impressions will remain for my whole life - Dostoevsky the magazine writer

I found “The Crocodile” in a volume of short stories first published in 1919, the results of Constance Garnett grinding her way through Dostoevsky.  What, I thought, paging through the book, is this stuff?

“The Heavenly Christmas Tree”?  “A Novel in Nine Letters”?  An entire novella, 150 pages, titled “Uncle’s Dream”?  I’d heard of “Bobok,” and even read “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” but this other stuff.  Not that whether I have heard of something means much.  Still – what is this stuff?

I know how to find out.  I read the two shortest ones, both cheery holiday stories.  In “The Heavenly Christmas Tree,” a hungry little boy’s mother dies on page two, then he freezes to death on page five, all of this on Christmas Eve.  In between, he enjoys the dolls in a Christmas display at some kind of store.

And at first the boy thought they were alive, and when he grasped that they were dolls he laughed.  He had never seen such dolls before, and had no idea there were such dolls!  And he wanted to cry, but he felt amused, amused by the dolls.

But soon enough he is admiring Christ’s Christmas tree along with the other frozen orphans and famine victims.

Here we have another neglected side of Dostoevsky – Fyodor the sentimentalist, the tear-jerker.  The story is nothing but pathos.  I would never have guessed this was Dostoevsky.  Change a few details and I would not have guessed it was Russian.

One more thing.  The mother has dragged her son to St. Petersburg for some unknown reason, so he contrasts its lively, well-lit Christmas it with home, where “there was no one to be seen in the street after dusk, all the people shut themselves up in their houses, and there was nothing but the howling of packs of dogs, hundreds and thousands of them barking and howling all night.”

This is the one really bizarre detail in the story, those thousands of dogs.  The child’s exaggeration?  Garnett’s error?  The recollection of an actual nightmarish town where Dostoevsky spent one miserable, sleepless night?

No idea when “The Heavenly Christmas Tree” was written.  By internal evidence, “The Peasant Marey” is from 1877 or so.

“It was the second day in Easter week.”  The prisoners have been given a holiday, which they spend drinking, gambling, and beating on each other – “knives had already been drawn several times.”  Dostoevsky is describing his time in prison, explicitly remembering it:

Perhaps it will be noticed that even to this day I have scarcely spoken in print of my life in prison.  The House of the Dead I wrote fifteen years ago in the character of an imaginary person, a criminal who had killed his wife.  I may add by the way that since then, very many persons have supposed, and even now maintain, that I was sent to penal servitude for the murder of my wife.

Trying to evade the brutality of the prison, Dostoevsky for some reason comes upon a memory from when he was nine years old.  He is in the woods.

And there is nothing in the world that I loved so much as the wood with its mushrooms and wild berries, with its beetles and its birds, its hedgehogs and squirrels, with its damp smell of dead leaves which I loved so much, and even as I write I smell the fragrance of our birch wood: these impressions will remain for my whole life.  Suddenly in the midst of the profound stillness I heard a clear and distinct shout, “Wolf”!  I shrieked, beside myself with terror, calling out at the top of my voice, ran out into the clearing and straight to the peasant who was ploughing.

This is the title character, the peasant Marey.  He comforts the little boy, convincing him that he imagined the what he heard.  It is just an ordinary act of kindness, but the later Dostoevsky, the prisoner remembers it as something more – “he could not have looked at me with eyes shining with greater love.”  The prisoner finds himself forgiving and pitying his drunken fellows.  The author finds himself turning the experience into a piece for a magazine.

Now this is Dostoevsky, even if the return to childhood and the countryside is surprising.

Dostoevsky the magazine writer, that is who I have been reading the last couple of days.  I feel that I have successfully and significantly increased my ignorance of Dostoevsky.

"The Crocodile" - Dostoevsky as Woody Allen

Mr. Mel U of The Reading Life reminded me that I have been meaning to read Dostoevsky’s story “The Crocodile” (1865) so I did.  In the story, a man is swallowed by a crocodile.  The creature is a bit more like a boa constrictor than a crocodile, a minor detail.   The swallowed man is not harmed in any important way, although he does lose his glasses.

This appearance and disappearance of a still living human head was so horrible, but at the same – either from its rapidity and unexpectedness or from the dropping of the spectacles – there was something so comic about it that I suddenly quite unexpectedly exploded with laughter.  (Ch. 1, tr. Constance Garnett)

Here we have, whatever the specifics of the situation, a self-description of the grotesque, Gogolian side of Dostoevsky, the comic Dostoevsky I have been encountering recently.  The essential Dostoevsky, I will claim, is comic, although a hundred and fifty years of earnest social reformers, existentialists and mystics have tried to prove otherwise.  But then the novel is an essentially comic form, both from its reliance on incongruity and from the dropping of the spectacles.  Comic, but not necessarily funny; that is something else altogether.

Some of the humor of “The Crocodile” is, I fear, satirical, even allegorical.  The crocodile, owned by Germans who thankfully are not obviously Jewish, represents Western investment in Russia, which will swallow any Russian who gets near it.

“Here we are, anxious to bring foreign capital into the country – and only consider: as soon as the capital of a foreigner, who has been attracted to Petersburg, has been doubled through Ivan Matveitch, instead of protecting the foreign capitalist, we are proposing to rip open the belly of his original capital – the crocodile.  Is it consistent?  To my mind, Ivan Matveitch, as the true son of his fatherland, ought to rejoice and to be proud that through him the value of a foreign crocodile has been doubled and possibly even trebled.”  (Ch. 2)

The value of the crocodile has doubled because it is now famous.  The victim turns out to be happy to be swallowed, because he too is famous:

I have long thirsted for an opportunity for being talked about, but could not attain it, fettered by my humble position and low grade in the service.  And now all this has been attained by a simple gulp on the part of the crocodile.  Every word of mine will be listened to, every utterance will be thought over, repeated, printed.  And I'll teach them what I am worth!  They shall understand at last what abilities they have allowed to vanish in the entrails of a monster.  (Ch. 3)

You want relevance, there it is.

There is more, too, more gags, more absurdities.  The swallowed man has a beautiful wife who immediately becomes the (willing) target of every lecher in St. Petersburg.  Dostoevsky mocks newspapers, Westernizers, economists, Germans, etymologists:

“Crocodile – crocodillo – is evidently an Italian word, dating perhaps from the Egyptian Pharaohs, and evidently derived from the French verb croquer, which means to eat, to devour, in general to absorb nourishment.  All these remarks I intend to deliver as my first lecture in Elena Ivanovna's salon when they take me there in the tank.  (Ch.3)

The speaker is the fellow inside the crocodile.  Is this Fyodor Dostoevsky or Woody Allen in The New Yorker?  “All night long I could dream of nothing but monkeys,” as the narrator says.

I wonder what reformers, existentialists, and mystics do with “The Crocodile”?  Pretend it does not exist, is my guess.

I tried to be as irrational as possible on purpose. - bursts of Dostoevsky

The things Dostoevsky characters say.  They reinforce my stereotypes sometimes.  My stereotypes about Dostoevsky characters, I mean.  The narrator of The Gambler is a close relative of the Underground Man, of Raskolnikov, of Prince Myshkin.  His gambling, and the ecstatic state it brings on, replaces Myshkin’s epilepsy or Raskolnikov’s – how does Raskolnikov work himself into a frenzy?  I have forgotten.  Regardless, that out-of-context line I put in the title, from Chapter 7, is perfect.

The problem with The Gambler is twofold; first, that the governing conceit of gambling, although interesting for its own sake, is a poor substitute for ax murder, and second, the soap opera that I am plunged into in that remarkable first paragraph is not all that interesting for its own sake.  Will the General marry the demi-mondaine; will the virtuous step-daughter marry the neurotic narrator, the decadent Frenchman, or the steadfast Englishman?  The narrator plans to win his bride at the roulette table, while everyone is waiting for the wealthy Granny, back in Russia, to die.  Then they can divvy up the estate and make whichever matrimonial mistakes they please.

Honestly, who cares?  I am not convinced Dostoevsky cared too much.  A little over a third of the way in, he jerks the novel sideways.  I suppose this counts as a surprise in the plot, but I tell you, it is the best reason to read the book.  A new guest appears at the hotel, waving for the narrator, a “woman sitting in a big armchair”:

who had arrived with her own servants and with so many trunks and boxes, and had been carried up the steps in an invalid-chair, was seated – Granny!  Yes, it was she herself, the terrible old Moscow lady and wealthy landowner…  the Granny about whom telegrams had been sent and received, who had been dying and was not dead, and who had suddenly dropped upon us in person, like snow on our heads.  (Ch. 9)

Granny is an invalid, so she must be carried all over the spa in her armchair.  She communicates by “shouting in a loud, peremptory voice and scolding every one.”

The narrator takes her to see her heir, the General, “immensely delighted at the thunderbolt we were launching at [him].”  The soap opera has turned into a farce. 

If Granny had remained silent for a few seconds longer, he would, perhaps, have had a stroke.

“How on earth what?  I got on the train and came.  What’s the railway for?  You all thought that I had been laid out, and had left you a fortune?  You see, I know how you sent telegrams from here.  What a lot of money you must have wasted on them!  They cost a good bit from here.  I simply threw my legs over my shoulder and came off here.”

Granny is a great invention.  She allows Dostoevsky to pour comic energy into the book, even before she takes to roulette and becomes a gambler herself. She completely takes over the middle third of the novel.  It is worth reading the book just for this section.

Then as a bonus, after more melodrama the next to last chapter is a hilarious Balzac parody (“What shall I say about Paris?  It was madness, of course, and foolery”).  I won’t go into it.  No, one line:

Bored and dispirited, I used to go nightly to the Château de Fleurs, where regularly every evening I got drunk and practised the cancan (which they dance so disgustingly there), and acquired in the end a kind of celebrity.  (Ch. 16)

Now that is a line I never would have guessed to be Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky’s method lends itself to episodes, bursts that allow the restless author to focus, to create units that make sense on their own however strangely they fit in the novel.  The Gambler features two great ones.

Maybe I will return to some of this when I finish The Idiot.

They were expecting Mezentsov - The Gambler begins

Copious notes, soon abandoned; writing in a rush; the result sent off as soon as finished – no wonder I am so interested in Dostoevsky’s method of composition.  It is mine.  I cannot pace about like he did, but I would if I could.

Dostoevsky is in a hurry.  If he does not deliver his new novel in time, he loses the publishing rights to all of his work, decades of writing.  No time to waste.  Get writing. Opening paragraph:

At last I have come back from my fortnight’s absence.  Our friends have already been two days in Roulettenburg.  I imagined that they were expecting me with the greatest eagerness; I was mistaken, however.  The General had an extremely independent air, he talked to me condescendingly and sent me away to his sister.  I even fancied that the General was a little ashamed to look at me.  Marya Filippovna was tremendously busy and scarcely spoke to me; she took the money, however, counted it, and listened to my whole report.  They were expecting Mezentsov, the little Frenchman, and some Englishman; as usual, as soon as there was money there was a dinner-party; in the Moscow style.  Polina Alexandrovna, seeing me, asked why I had been away so long, and without waiting for an answer went off somewhere.  Of course, she did that on purpose.  We must have an explanation, though.  Things have accumulated.

Talk about starting in the middle.  Who are these people?  Seven characters, including the narrator and the Englishman and the little Frenchman, with no hint of any relationship.  Polina turns out to be the General’s step-daughter, and the narrator, along with most of the other men, turn out to be in competition for her hand.

The narrator is just the family tutor.  How will he ever be able to marry her?  By winning money at the roulette table.  Thus the title, thus “Roulettenburg,” a German spa town with a casino.  The one thing I knew about the book before reading it was that it contained a plausible and recognizable depiction of gambling addiction.  Everyone plans to solve their money troubles by gambling.

At that point I ought to have gone away, but a strange sensation rose up in me, a sort of defiance of fate, a desire to challenge it, to put out my tongue at it.  I laid down the largest stake allowed – four thousand gulden – and lost it.  Then, getting hot, I pulled out all I had left, staked it one the same number, and lost again, after which I walked away from the table as though I were stunned.  I could not even tell what had happened to me…  (Ch. 4)

So gambling takes the place of the mysticism or manias of so many other Dostoevsky works.  Perhaps infected by my own clinical age, I find the idea passable as fiction but thin, although plumper than the absurd soap opera into which Dostoevsky plunges the tutor and through his narration the reader.

I will glance back at the opening paragraph.  The narrator’s absence is never really explained.   The sister, Marya Filippovna, departs the novel after doing nothing at about the one-fifth mark.  The money of course fits the gambling theme.  And then there is Mezentsov, the great Mezentsov, who not only never arrives but is never mentioned again.  Never hinted at.  Dostoevsky’s Godot.

Sloppiness?  Haste?  A joke?  A mistake?  Whoever he is, he has achieved immortality as the strangest part of the strange opening of The Gambler.

I read The Gambler in Constance Garnett’s translation, as found in Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky's creative method

Fyodor Dostoevksy has surprised me again.  I find myself enjoying two of his books in a row, actively enjoying them, and not just for their eccentricities.  Perhaps, after much effort, I have become a better reader of Dostoevsky, more sympathetic to his purpose.

No, I fear that my effort has gone for nothing, and that by chance Dostoevsky has become more sympathetic to my purposes.  Thus he wrote The Gambler (1866) and Part I of The Idiot (1868-9) as comedies, or they are, compared to some of his other works, more obviously comedies.  After the intense and profound labors of Notes from the Underground (1864) and Crime and Punishment (1866) Dostoevsky needed a light-hearted laugh.

That is not at all what happened.  Dostoevsky was writing The Gambler and Crime and Punishment simultaneously, racing against an impossible deadline in a thumbscrew contract.  Amazingly, with the help of “one of Russia’s first stenographers, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina,” Dostoevsky beat the clock and found his signature method of composition.  He soon married Snitkina, one of the behind the scenes heroines of literature.

The quotation is from the introduction, written by William Mills Todd III, to the Penguin Classics edition of The Idiot, tr. David McDuff, p. xix.  Dostoevsky’s method, as described by Todd explains so much about the author’s art, such as it is.  Dostoevsky

would work late into the might over his notebooks, jotting down ideas.  Then he would dictate passages to [Snitkina], and she would transcribe them and promptly return them neatly copied for editing.

He dictated while pacing, always pacing.  “From this time on, the rhythm of the Dostoevskian sentence may be defined as a walking movement, where the breath of the spoken word is marked in the written style.”  This is Todd quoting Jacques Catteau, from his 1989 study Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation.  I have doubts that much of the sentence-level rhythm can make it into English, but some larger structural features are visibly the result of the method.

Two things amaze me.  First, after spending late hours making notes, Dostoevksy would scrap it all while dictating.  In other words, Dostoevsky’s fiction is mostly improvised.  This is as close to a typical jazz method as I can remember.  Dostoevsky was like the musician who practices for eight hours during the day than plays completely different music at the club for two sets.  The performance was recorded, by heroic Anna Grigoryevna, but still ephemeral in the sense that it was almost immediately dispatched to the publisher for serialization.  Mistakes were permanent.  So the writer created works where they did not matter.

So the second stunner is that Dostoevsky was capable of improvising eight hundred page novels of the complexity of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.  No wonder large chunks of his novels are clumsy, fragmented, repetitive, or incoherent, that core ideas and characters are so unstable.  Would I want John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins to play the same way every night?  Dostoevsky, what a showman.

How few writers, even of the highest caliber, could do such a thing.  How few would want to, they would say, and at heart I agree, but here we have one measure of Dostoevsky’s genius.  I guess in this way I have become more sympathetic to Dostoevsky – blow, Fyodor, blow!  And if he has an off night, eh, Bird* had off nights.

I will turn to The Gambler tomorrow and transcribe a solo or two.

*  I am such a fan of jazz that I refer to Charlie Parker by his nickname, as if I knew him, but I did not. 

Marías doing his thing - “I’ve seen one glaring error already.”

No, I was wrong when I wrote that I that I did not know how The Infatuations was a Javier Marías novel until one of the characters started talking about Balzac on page 131.  I mean, aside from the words “Javier Marías“ on the cover.  This is just a metaphor.

No, it was on page 76, when the narrator first meets her future lover Javier, who is accompanied by, who else, Professor Francisco Rico.  “I knew Professor Rico’s face well, he often appears on television and in the press, with his wide, expressive mouth, immaculate bald head, which he carries off with great aplomb, his rather large glasses,” and so on.  Later she says he “Was wearing a charming Nazi-green jacket” with a “melon-green” tie.  The Professor is pompous, vulgar, and loud; he takes over the next twenty pages of the book.

“Who else,” I say, because I have read the chapter about Professor Rico, Cervantes expert, “laboriously disdainful, insolent in his vanity and congenial in spite of himself,” that runs from pages 47 to 62 in the Marías novel – for the sake of argument – Dark Back of Time (1998), which chapter is entirely about the appearance of Professor Rico in various Marías novels, in disguise or, as he actually wants, as himself:

“I’ve decided I don’t want to appear in this little novel of yours as Professor del Diestro or what-have-you or anything else.  If I’m in it, I want to be in it as myself.”

At first I didn’t understand.  “Yourself?  What do you mean?”

The professor grew impatient.  “Myself, Francisco Rico, under my own name.  I want Francisco Rico to appear, not a fictional entity who acts like him or parodies him.”  (DBoT, 57, tr. Esther Allen)

Marías argues that a fictional Rico is not actually Rico, but the professor is not dissuaded.  Marías uses “real places and institutions,” no?

“Yes, there’s the United Nations and the Prado, and…”

“Well, there you have it,” he said.

“Have what?”

“There you have it: I want to be like the Prado.”

Rico ultimately buys his fictional appearance with an unspecified favor.  And here he is again, fourteen years later, like the Prado.  After this one scene, Rico never appears again.

His last words worry me. He sees an edition of Don Quixote on the shelf, not his edition (“How can anyone possibly own this edition when they could have mine?”).  Taking it down,

[h]e opened the book at random, cast a quick, disdainful eye over the page and stabbed at one particular line with his index finger.  “I’ve seen one glaring error already.”  Then he closed the book as if there were no point in looking any further.  “I’ll write an article about it.” (99)

If this were a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, I know what this would mean.  Somewhere in the novel there is a deliberate error that if discovered and corrected by the reader will upend the meaning of the text.  At least one clue is provided right here – “glaring,” or maybe “article.”

Nabokov never did this as far as I know.  Has anyone?  This would be a great trick.  I do not know what Marías means by it.  The incident itself is so intrusive – glaring – that is what worries me.  Someone should write an article about it.

As a little bonus, the protagonist of the Marías novella Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico appears later in The Infatuations.  I have not read that one.  Someone else will have to explain the joke.

If I were to write more about The Infatuations, I would work on the Balzac business.  And Dumas, too, Marías also pulls in the most horrific parts of The Three Musketeers.  And I would write about the narrator and her deep hatred of the publishing industry in which she works (“back to the idiotic world of publishing” she says at the novel’s close, p. 336).

But I think I will move to something else.

The Infatuations by Javier Marías - a musical instrument that does not transmit meanings

A couple of days of notes on the newest Javier Marías novel, The Infatuations (2011), translated with panache by Margaret Jull Costa.  Marías has his narrator, a woman who works in publishing, describe his own novel:

He had a marked tendency to discourse and expound and digress, as I have noticed to be the case with many of the writers I meet at the publishing house, as if it weren’t enough for them to fill pages and pages with their thoughts and stories, which, with few exceptions, are either absurd, pretentious, gruesome or pathetic.  (131)

So Marías is still working in the style he adopted* for the Your Face Tomorrow novel or novels back in 2002.  I would not mind if he knocked it off.  Excess is cheaper than restraint.

He, and she, then says how he (just he) would like me to take the novel:

… I didn’t mind his digressions…  I couldn’t take my eyes off him and delighted in his grave, somehow inward-turned voice and the often arbitrary syntactic leaps he made, the whole effect seeming sometimes not to emanate from a human being, but from a musical instrument that does not transmit meanings, perhaps a piano played with great agility.

Now this is actually the narrator describing the way her boyfriend talks, but anyone who talks or speaks or writes this way when telling a story – “arbitrary syntactic leaps” – is awfully inward-turned herself.  I enjoy the voice Marías uses here quite a bit, his piano attack, to extend his metaphor – why else would I read his book – but I share his doubts about meaning.

The boyfriend rephrases the concern further on in the book:

But Díaz-Varela was in no mood to discuss Balzac, he wanted to continue his story to the end.  “What happened is the least of it,” he had said when he spoke to me about Colonel Chabert.  “It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten.”  (276)

Truer words was never spoke.  Marías here justifies my usual practice of ignoring the plot of the novel in favor of the memorable parts, like the discussion of Balzac.  No mood to discuss Balzac!

About a third of the way in, Marías begins a long** summary and exegesis of Balzac’s 1832 novella Colonel Chabert, one of his best works, I think.  The boyfriend, Javier, is doing the exegeting while the girlfriend, María, the narrator, asks questions.  I know, Javier and María, very funny.

Mookse Trevor says that at this point he “had a devil of a time getting through about thirty pages of it,” so fair warning, although it was exactly at this point (p. 131, after the quotation up above) that I began to find the novel interesting.  A man María knows by sight is murdered by a madman; she meets the wife; through the wife she meets and begins an affair with Javier.  So little in 130 pages, but see above: discourse, expound, digress. 

The matter includes the narrator’s insight on, for example, the strange ways people are connected or the process of mourning, as on page 74, where the narrator imagines the debris, once meaningless and now poignant, left behind by the murdered man, “the novel with the page turned down, which will remain unread, but also the medicines that suddenly have become utterly superfluous and that will soon have to be thrown away,” in other words the kind of thing that has appeared in a thousand novels and that I have read a dozen times myself.  The legitimate stuff of fiction, certainly, but when, I wondered, is The Infatuations going to turn into a Javier Marías novel?

Then: thirty pages on Balzac.  Finally.

That will give me something to write about tomorrow.  Or I will just catalogue some of the novel’s best jokes.

*  I am guessing.  The novel previous, Dark Back of Time (1998), is not written this way, nor is All Souls (1989), nor, for that matter are the newspaper pieces in Written Lives (1992).  I originally found Marías attractive for his lightly Nabokovian precision.  He seems to have come to distrust the idea of precision in language.

**  Long is relative.  In Your Face Tomorrow, the Balzac discussion would have lasted a hundred pages.