Naming the garden in The Story of the Stone - the pleasures of incomprehension

The older sister of Bao-yu, the boy, now a young teen, who was born with the jade stone in his mouth, is an Imperial Concubine, a high prestige slave of the Emperor.  She is likely herself still a teen when we learn, in Chapter 16 of The Story of the Stone, that she has been given permission to visit her family.  The family responds by planning an enormous party, thus the inventory of drapes and tablecloths I quoted two posts previously.  Thus the purchase of a dozen actors to perform a series of plays and musical numbers.  And thus the construction of a large, fantastic landscaped garden, full of adorable little pavilions and bridges and tiny “mountains.”

Two semi-digressions. 

First, all of this absurd expense is meant to, and does, as I understand it, pay off not just in prestige but in money, met or exceeded by gifts from the emperor.  The Buddhist fairy tale story floats in the background, but this is mostly a crass novel. 

Second, I do not want to say I understand the exact legal status of the Concubine, or those actors, who are definitely purchased, not hired, or of the many servants.  One servant openly discusses the possibility of returning to her own family if they could afford to buy her back, which they cannot.  She thinks her owners would just let her go free, forgoing payment, if she would just ask.  This is all quite interesting.

More artistically interesting, though, In Chapter 17, is a long scene where Bao-yu, his father and a bunch of lickspittle “literary gentlemen” tour the garden, assigning poetic names and epigrams to each rock and pavilion.  The father, who has barely been in the novel before, challenges Bao-yu to beat the scholars, then insults his son while secretly being proud of him.

“Yes,” said Bao-yu, “but [the classical allusions] are too contrived. ‘The Phoenix Dance’ is more fitting.”

There was a loud murmur of assent from the literary gentlemen.  [The father] nodded and tried not to look pleased.

“Young idiot! What can be expected of so feather-brained a creature?” (Ch. 17, 332)

We get this business eight times in twenty pages, at much greater length than the quotation suggests, almost exactly repeated: the feature is described, the literary gentleman provide names that are dismissed as terrible, and Bao-yu comes up with a better name and an accompanying couplet of poetry. My interest in this chapter was in its alien quality, in my complete lack of ground to judge what the heck was going on.  The Imperial Concubine visits in the next chapter, and its rituals – including a complete renaming of the garden features! – seemed just as arbitrary.

I was never really fussing over the “greatness” of The Story of the Stone, certainly not this early into the novel, but it is hard not to be curious, right?  Strong claims have been made, although I note that Kenneth Rexroth, who adored the novel, begins his Classics Revisited essay with “Its virtues are not as obvious. In fact, they are not obvious at all.”  Anyway, it was with the garden scenes that I realized how far I was from making any kind of judgment about the book.  It is, in parts, at least, much too strange.  I hope there are many more such parts.

I might contrast the Concubine’s visit with Chapter 21, which is set, more or less, in a teenage girls’ dormitory during a boring holiday, when even the servants, who are themselves teenage girls, have nothing to do.  There is some sexual friction as the story of the love triangle, or quadrangle including Bao-Yu’s chamber-wife, advances, but mostly the many characters spend the entire chapter getting on each other’s nerves.  An outstanding piece of psychological realism.  Honestly, it will take Western literature another 150 years to really discover the teenager as a psychologically distinct character.  Please see Colette’s Le Blé en herbe / Ripening Seed (1923) for a pioneering example.

The teenagers, massive numbers of servants in tow, have now moved into the fantasy garden.  My understanding is that much of the remaining two thousand pages of the novel takes place there.  One can visit a 32 acre replica of this garden, built in 1984, in Beijing (source of the Sun Wen painting up above).

Di at the Little White Attic happily put all of her many posts about The Story of the Stone, which she read in a Vietnamese translation, likely quite different than the book I read, in one place.

 

The Story of the Stone, fairy tale and realism - Not so wonderful, really, is it?

I left the characters of The Story of the Stone as they were buying drapes and tablecloths for a party.  I will rejoin the party planning momentarily.

The Story of the Stone is a massive domestic novel about an extended family.  The main plot is the teenage love triangle, but that story takes place among an enormous, sometimes baffling number of aunts, cousins, siblings, and servants, just an unbelievable number of servants.  Every teenage aristocrat has a complement of personal servants, many of whom are themselves major characters.

Anyone can become the protagonist for a chapter.  The structure often feels like that of a television drama, where each supporting character gets one feature episode per season.  At least that is how many dramas worked in the old days, the 1990s; how would I know how they work now.

The Story of the Stone is also a Buddhist fairy story.  It is at the same time a radically “realist” novel, innovative for Chinese fiction and nearly a century ahead of European fiction.  Yet it is also about a magical jade stone and the boy who was born with it in his mouth, the kind of Chosen One who is so popular in juvenile fiction today, but chosen for what, exactly?

The tension or mismatch between the stark domestic materialism of the novel and the dream-like fairy tale elements is unlike anything I have ever seen.  In a curious scene, the hero Bao-yu is visiting the family of Aroma, his chamber-wife (his servant and sexual partner – he is, what, 14 here, and she is 15?):

… she reached out and took the Magic Jade from his neck.

“Here’s something that will interest you all,” she said, holding it out to the others.  “You know how often you’ve spoken about that wonderful jade of Master Bao’s and said how much you’d give for a look at it?  Well, here it is!  Now you can look to your heart’s content.  There you are, that’s all it is!  Not so wonderful, really, is it?”

They passed it from hand to hand, and when it had gone full circle and all had examined it, she hung it once more around his neck.  (Ch. 19, 382)

Pure anti-climax.  What should be “wonderful” is just another bit of jewelry.  The jade does save Bao-yu’s life at the end of this first volume, when a magical monk last seen several hundred pages earlier uses it to remove a witch’s curse from Bao-yu and his mother.  I take, perhaps wrongly, the fortuitous appearance of the monk as part of the fairy story and the witch’s curse, purchased by an envious, villainous aunt, as part of the domestic realism.

As a sociological novel, a place to go for insight into Chinese culture, I have no doubt that The Story of the Stone deserves the label of “greatest.”  All of the little rituals and interpersonal relations, the hierarchies, the way the domestic world interacts with the outside world, the pettiness, the crass money-grubbing, the astounding clothes and furniture (the food is abundant but sadly not described) – of course all of this is highly interesting.  Is it artistically interesting, though?  One more post, back to the teenagers, back to that garden.

I borrowed another image from Wikipedia, this time one of a large album of scenes from the novel by late 19th century painter Sun Wen, one of those scenes where I wish I knew what they were eating. 

On the greatness of The Story of the Stone - it is in a vigorous, somewhat staccato style

Some notes on The Story of the Stone, Volume 1: The Golden Days (c. 1760 or maybe 1792) by Cao Xueqin, the first of the five volumes of the Penguin edition of the greatest Chinese novel.

I don’t like writing about a book before I have finished it, but in a sense I did finish a book, right, so why not.  I am keenly aware that the novel has another 94 chapters and two thousand pages to go.  Well, 92 chapters, since I have begun the second volume.

From this text, I would never guess that The Story of the Stone is the greatest Chinese novel or even guess the grounds on which the claim could be made.  I will expand on that a bit.

“To hear you talk, it doesn’t sound as if all your years of play-going have taught you much,” said Bao-chai.  “This is an excellent play, both from the point of view of the music and of the words.”

“I can’t stand noisy plays,” said Bao-yu.  “I never could.”

“If you call this a noisy play,” said Bao-chai, “it proves that you don’t know what you’re talking about…  That means, musically speaking, that it is in a vigorous, somewhat staccato style.  In fact the musical excellence of this piece goes without saying.  But apart form that, the libretto is good, too.”  (Ch. 22, 435)

All references are to the landmark 1973 David Hawkes translation.

The Story of the Stone is, in large part, a teenage love triangle set in a fairy garden, a so-called Young Adult romantasy.  The characters above, magically-born Bao-yu and the perfect Bao-chai, are two-thirds of the love triangle.  Aren’t they adorable, what with their literary criticism?  Tragically, although Bao-chai loves Bao-Yu, he loves the third side of the triangle.

What is “great”?  The Story of the Stone is written in the vernacular rather than classical register, and had a significant effect on literary Chinese language, perhaps, as I take it, like Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827 / 1842) had on literary Italian.  All of this is invisible to me.

Visual artists have looted the novel for illustrations.  The characters and scenes are famous from paintings, prints, and film and television adaptations.  I assume comic books, too.  Potentially visible to me.  I should see if there is a book of artistic responses to the novel.  Please recommend if you know of such a thing.  The Wikipedia entry for The Story of the Stone has many interesting examples, one of which I borrowed, although it depicts a scene from the second volume of the translation.

Those are two objective reasons, a step removed from the text, for “great.”

Cao Xueqin’s language, as Hawkes writes it, is vigorous and somewhat staccato, often plain with lots of dialogue and minimal metaphor and scenes that would not be written so differently if they were in a play.  Descriptions are elaborate but reserved for clothing, furniture, and an extraordinary garden.  Descriptions often resemble, or are, lists.  Or inventories:

“Curtains, large and small, in various silks and satins – flowered, dragon-spot, sprigged, tapestry, panelled, ink-splash: one hundred and twenty. – Eighty of those were delivered yesterday. That leaves forty to come. – Blinds: two hundred. – Yes.  They all arrived yesterday. But then there are the special ones. – Blinds, scarlet felt: two hundred.  Speckled bamboo: one hundred. [skipping more kinds of bamboo] – Chair-covers, table-drapes, valances, tablecloths: one thousand two hundred of each” (17, 333)

Not the sort of prose I call great, yet I read this particular chapter with fascination.  But look how long I am running.  More tomorrow.  The garden, the poetry, and more teenagers in love.  “Each night I ask the stars up above / Why must I be a teenager in love?”  That is Dion, not Cao Xueqin, although it would make a good epigraph for The Story of the Stone.

How Ivan Bunin and Vasily Grossman spent the war - He was in the countryside then for the last time in his life

Without planning it I recently read three books by Russian writers from three different strands of Russian literature: Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur (1929 /1972, tr. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) in the Gogolian and Dostoyevskian strand, Ivan Bunin’s Dark Avenues (1943/1946) following Turgenev and Chekhov, and A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army (2005, ed. and tr. by Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova) for a Tolstoyan.  I will save Chevengur for later.  The Bunin and Grossman books, however different, had one interesting thing in common.  They were both documents of how these great writers spent World War II.

Grossman spent the war becoming the greatest Soviet war correspondent, and also it turns out acquiring the experience and subject matter to become a great novelist.  A Writer at War would be of the highest interest – the Soviet war from the perspective of an outstanding journalist – if Grossman had never written Life and Fate, but this book would likely not exist without the later novels. 

Surprisingly, the text of A Writer at War is mostly not his published journalism, too filled with propaganda, but rather excerpts from his journals, filled with things that would have gotten him sent to the gulag or worse, whatever his fame, if the wrong people had known he was recording them.  A good chunk of the text, maybe 30%, is actually by the historian Beevor, providing the big picture and tying Grossman’s pieces together. 

As the Soviet army advances, Grossman also becomes a pioneering journalist of the Holocaust.  “The Road to Treblinka” (1944), an early masterpiece, if that is the right word, of its kind is excerpted in A Writer at War, although it is worth reading it in full in The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays (2010) if you can stand it, and no judgment from me if you cannot.

Ivan Bunin, in his early seventies, spent the war in southern France, impoverished, helping other Russian émigrés and prisoners as best he could, the 1933 Nobel money long gone, distributed to charities.  He also spent the war writing love stories, three dozen love stories, sensual, nostalgic, sad, beautiful.

Here is the first paragraph of “An Emerald,” a page-long story about a young couple’s attempt to articulate love:

The nocturnal dark-blue blackness of the sky, covered in quietly floating clouds, everywhere white, but beside the high moon pale blue.  If you look closely, it isn’t the clouds floating, it’s the moon, and near it, together with it, a star’s golden tear is shed: the moon glides away into the heights that have no end, and carries the star away with it, ever higher and higher.  (69)

That first sentence is ur-Bunin.  Colors upon colors, even “blackness” modified by another color.  The shorter pieces, sometimes only half a page, are close to prose poems.  “Her lips moving over her white teeth were blue-grey, the bluish down of her upper lip thickened above the corners of her mouth” (245), from “The Camargue,” a page of male gaze with only a hint of story at the end.

Longer stories are more in the line of Turgenev.  Lots of First Love.  But Dark Avenues is a “theme and variations” book, so there is a little bit of everything, jaded lovers, affairs that end in renunciation or violence.  They always end.  I think that is true.  The time is almost always before the Revolution, but not always.  One story, but only one delicate tale of young love, ends like this:

This was in February of the terrible year of 1917.  He was in the countryside then for the last time in his life.  (“Tanya,” 115)

This story is followed by “In Paris,” with the Revolution in the distant past.  There are lots of little connections between the stories.  The end of “In Paris” may be too sad to quote.

Some other last sentences:

Returning to his room, he lay down on the couch and shot himself in the temples with two revolvers. (15)

I don’t remember anything else.  There was nothing else… (183, ellipses in original)

He was beaten with lashes and sent to Siberia, to the mines.  (205)

In some sense Dark Avenues is a relentlessly miserable book.  In other senses, not.  It is an erotic book, explicit for its time, much more so than anything allowed in the Soviet Union at this period since Stalin was something of a Puritan, forgive the anachronism, about sex in art.  Perhaps that was something of a political statement by Bunin.

I have been referring to the recent (2008) Hugh Alpin translation of Dark Avenues, the first English translation of the entire Russian collection.  I have read some of the stories in other collections by other translators, but the Alpin version is the place to go to try to see this masterpiece as a whole.

Books I read in September 2024 - Boring books had their origin in boring readers

My reading took an interesting Russian turn that I will write about, soon, tomorrow, there, I said it out loud so maybe I will really do it.

November is Norwegian month at Dolce Bellezza.  I will be joining her by reading at least the first novel, The Other Name (2019), of Jon Fosse’s Septology, and polar explorer Roald Amunden’s memoir My Life as an Explorer (1927).  Please join in the alliterative fun.

 

FICTION

The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder (1925), Edgar Wallace – “The author of crime novels at one time so popular that every fourth book sold in Britain came from his pen” is how H. R. F. Keating introduces the extraordinary hack Edgar Wallace in Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books (1987, p. 31).  Can this possibly be true?  Exactly when, I wonder.  But it is true that although Agatha Christie won the war, Wallace won the early battles.  For a couple of decades in the detective novels of other writers, Edgar Wallace is the common reference, the mystery writer all of the characters apparently read, and the creator of all of the clichés that you won’t find in my novel, or if you do we can wink at them as deliberate Edgar Wallace stuff.

Wallace writes in a light, witty version of the 1920s British house style, simpler than Christie who is in turn simpler than Dorothy Sayers, not as funny as Wodehouse or Waugh, obviously, but with some good jokes in their line.  The crimes and solutions (this is a book of linked short stories) are nonsense but much more than those of many of his peers?  Not much more.  Easy, fun reading.

Passing (1929), Nella Larsen

Chevengur (1929/1972), Andrei Platonov – I’ll write about this one soon.  The quotation in the title is from Chevengur, p. 151.

Dark Avenues (1946), Ivan Bunin – This one, too.

The Remains of the Day (1989), Kazuo Ishiguro – For several years the contemporary writers who have attracted my attention have mostly been – see the next two books – conceptual art weirdos who are not necessarily trying to write great or perfect books.  But I still enjoy such things, like this one.  An intricate construction.  At times I almost – well, an experienced or jaded reader, I did not applaud or gasp, but I sure thought “Oh, good one, nicely done” or the equivalent.

Game of the Worlds (2000), César Aira

Half an Inch of Water (2015), Percival Everett – Short stories set in the Rocky Mountains.  Of a piece with his novels, except with more horses.

A Shining (2023), Jon Fosse – A single short story for some reason published as a book.  Minor.

 

POETRY

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (1948-62), Derek Walcott – Some apprentice work, I guess, absorbing the influence of many other poets, but getting darn good by the end (meaning 1962).  Who knows when I will follow Walcott into the 1960s and 1970s.

O Lovely England and Other Poems (1952), Walter de la Mare – His last poetry book, barely distinguishable from his first in 1902.  Fifty years of lovely England, lovely poetry.

Collected Poems (1953-85), Elizabeth Jennings – A British Catholic in the quadrant with Auden and Larkin, maybe.  “Art is not self-expression while, for me, ‘confessional poetry’ is almost a contradiction in terms” (13).  Lots of interesting poems about paintings and music, and, sadly, mental asylums.

Sonnets for a Missing Key and some others (2024), Percival Everett

 

ADVENTURE AND JOURNALISM

The Royal Road to Romance (1925), Richard Halliburton – Fresh out of Princeton, young Halliburton begins what will become a round the world tour.  His tramp through Europe has me wondering why I was reading this trivial book, but it gets more interesting once he gets to India, and his enthusiasm, his love of the “romance” of pure movement, never stops.  I am reading another book about a tramp across Europe just a few years later, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Time of Gifts (1977), and they are opposites, in style, purpose, and tone.  Halliburton’s book may now be more interesting as part of the history of travel writing, the creation of the celebrity traveler, now I assume found on Instagram, than for its own sake.

A Writer at War (2005), Vasily Grossman – Another I will write a bit about separately, I swear.

 

FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

Coral (1950), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – Sophia’s mythological seashore poems take a dark turn in her third book.

Pedra Filosofal (1950), Jorge de Sena – Abstract compared to Breyner Andresen, and more difficult for the poor language learner.

O Cavaleiro da Dinamarca (1964), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – The Knight from Denmark, a peculiar children’s novella which gives a little tour of European culture.  Portuguese children learn about Giotto and Dante and so on.  An oddity.  The other children’s books I have read of Breyner Andresen – and bless her, the Portuguese language learner says, for writing them – were about little children having magical adventures.

Mes Cahiers (1941), Colette – My Notebooks, a wartime scrapbook dump, of most interest for stories featuring early versions of her Cheri character.  But then there is some travel writing from the 1920s that is exquisitely written, almost abstract assemblages of form and color.

La Douleur (1985), Marguerite Duras – More notebooks, which the older Duras says she does not remember writing, about the events of the end of the war in Paris, like waiting for loved ones to return from camps, or the Resistance punishing collaborators.  Of high interest for the subject matter.  In English as The War.

 

Books I read in August 2024

My ambition this summer was to read extensively in Arabic literature.  Eh, I did all right, but I will have to save Ibn Battuta’s Travels and the second half of Leg over Leg for some other time.

 FICTION

The Arabian Nights (14th c.), many hands – In the great Hassan Haddawy translation.

I and My Chimney (1856), Herman Melville – Because I saw the actual chimney last month.  I thought it was made up.

I, Claudius (1934), Robert Graves – Is this a book for people who know Roman history, or is it a way to learn Roman history?  I suppose both.

Herself Surprised (1941), Joyce Cary – Classic mid-century British-adjacent novelistic eccentricity.  “I never saw Rozzie laugh right out in her life but once, and that was when she lost all her money and her left leg in the same week” (NYRB edition, p. 96).  Like I, Claudius, interesting in the ways it is a novel pretending not to be a novel.

Laura (1942), Vera Caspary – I was almost irritated by the voice of the narrator of the first third of the novel.  But then the narrator changes and there is a twist that completely changes the story - that moves me to an entirely different story - and everything was fine

The End of the Affair (1951), Graham Greene – Now that I have read it I do not understand the reputation of this novel, likely related to my puzzlement over that of Brideshead Revisited.  I mean, characters debate theism.  Am I supposed to take that seriously?

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), James Baldwin – An entirely different way to write a novel that is serious about religious belief.

Fountain and Tomb (1975), Naguib Mahfouz – Fragments, some of which almost amount to stories, which thirty years after Midaq Alley again depict life in one little corner of Cairo, this time largely from a child’s point of view.  Formally and sociologically quite interesting.  “But that’s how stories are told in our alley” (96).  Set in the 1920s, the book is of course full of gangsters.

Hurricane Season (2016), Fernanda Melchor – Perhaps the most disgusting book I have ever read, up there with Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God (1973), but where McCarthy aestheticizes the language, shoving signifiers of beauty against the appalling subject matter, Melchor lets the ugliness spill over everything.  I would like to think of the novel as a fantasy, a horror novel, but I am afraid it is also a Condition of Mexico novel – poor Mexico!  And the most outrageous, maybe the best, part was the last chapter, the last three pages, a travesty of hope.

Telephone (2020), Percival Everett – Every Everett novel I have read is some kind of balance or reconciliation of the postmodern and domestic novel, and this one leans the most to the domestic side.  It is the sad story of parents with a mortally ill child.  But it is also the most conceptually radical Everett book I have encountered, an art object that attacks the idea of a stable text.

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy in the Islamic World (2016), Peter Adamson

POETRY

Selected Poems (1851-1901), George Meredith

Poems by Emily Dickinson (1859-80) – A chapbook length selection sold at the Dickinson House in Amherst, well chosen by three of the amazing house guides.  It is worth going to the Dickinson House just to meet the guides.

The Music of Human Flesh (1966-77) &

Adam of Two Edens (1989-95) &

If I Were Another (1990-2005), Mahmoud Darwish

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

La vendetta (1830) &

La bourse (1832), Honoré de Balzac – I had read La bourse (The purse) in English, but La vendetta was new, #46 in my reading of the Comedie humaine.  Almost halfway!  I will never read them all.

Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), Louis-Ferdinand Céline – Some notes back here.  If only Céline could read that Melchor novel.

Dia do Mar (1947), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

Vou Mudar a Cozinha (2022), Ondjaki – I’m Going to Move the Kitchen, stories from Angola and elsewhere.

A Descoberta das Ilhas Selvagens (2024), José Pedro Castanheira – The second self-indulgent diaristic travel book I have read in two months by a Portuguese journalist, this time about a sailing trip to desert islands belonging to Madeira.  A great book for the Portuguese language learner, full of useful vocabulary with strong context and much repetition.  That is all I am asking for.  Yes, the book comes with its own bookmark.

You drool from it. You are happy. - Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit

Finally, I have finished Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), known in English as Journey to the End of Night.  That “end of night” is death.  The existence of death makes everything hateful and nullifies the value of anything else.  I gotta say that the ideas and satire in the novel are not exactly deep.  It’s all in the attitude, the language.

Le voyage c’est la recherche de ce rien du tout, de ce petit vertige pour couillons…  (274, 1952 Gallimard paperback, ellipses in original, how Céline loves ellipses)

The voyage is the search for this nothing at all, this little vertigo for imbeciles...  (tr., against good judgment, mine)

“Couillons” has stronger, more obscene possibilities.  The translations of this novel are feats.  It is the longest and most difficult French book I have ever attempted, 630 pages of informal, slangy French, much of it in the form of commentary or even rants.  Some earlier books, like Emmanuel Bove’s My Friends (1924), had pushed towards a less formal, less correct, literary French, but it was Céline who demolished the concept.  Surrealist semi-novels like Nadja (1928) and Paris Peasant (1926) look so well-behaved by contrast.

The influence of the novel is linguistic and formal.  Henry Miller scrapped his manuscript and rewrote The Tropic of Cancer (1934) from scratch as soon as he finished Voyage.  Jean-Paul Sartre completely rewrote Nausea (1938), not that he did anything half as radical.  Here is Céline’s narrator on Sunday mornings, a bit borrowed directly by Sartre:

An empty bus rushed towards the depot.  Ideas also end by having their Sunday; you are more stunned than normal.  You are there, empty.  You drool from it.  You are happy.  You have nothing to do, because nothing really occurs to you, you are too poor, you are disgusted with existence?  That would be the usual.  (377)

Poisonous pessimism, but from a narrator too passive to do anything about it.  The novel is structured like Candide (1759), with the narrator spending the first half of the book experiencing terrible things – the front line of World War I, colonial Central Africa, Spanish pirates (?), and the Ford Motor Company – and the second half observing terrible things happening to other people, in the role of a doctor in a working class Parisian suburb and later in a mental hospital.  Although by temperament Céline is over on Rousseau’s side of things, not Voltaire’s.

The ethos of Voyage is anti-war, anti-colonial, anti-American, and anti-industrial.  There is a chapter that is specifically against scientific testing of animals.  Based on nothing else, I would align Céline with the French left of the time, and my understanding is that the literary French left was fooled for a while.  But Céline was not going to be aligned with anyone, even if he had to prove it, a few years later, by becoming the most hysterical Jew hater in French literature. If there was a hint of anti-Semitism or any mention of any Jewish subject at all in Voyage I did not recognize it.

Crazy stuff.  I am glad to have finally read this missing link between Rabelais and Villon one the one end and Jean Genet and the anti-novel on the other.

Then they looked at me, he and Madelon, like they found themselves before a druggie, a victim of poison gas, a drooler, and it was not even worth the trouble of responding to me… (603)

What am I doing, I have no business translating Céline.  I do hope I will now remember his favorite vowels like baver (drool) and bafouiller (stammer).  Metaphysics, a vision of existence, expressed by verb choice.

Jeremy Denk plays Charles Ives and Blind Tom Wiggins - a pleasing conjunction of Wuthering Expectations stuff

More Massachusetts semi-literay adventures.

Last weekend I was at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, enjoying Jeremy Denk’s performance of insurance executive Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata (c. 1913).  It was a pleasing congruence of Wuthering Expectations themes.  I have nothing to say about it in particular, but I will, I guess, register that I was there.

I wrote about the Concord Sonata a decade ago, one of a number of posts of Little Women.  The piano sonata’s third movement, among the most beautiful in the piano repertoire, is “The Alcotts,” where Ives imagines the sisters, in particular Beth, the real Beth, but in this exercise what distinction is there from the fictional one, at the piano, wandering through Beethoven’s fifth symphony, hymns, Scottish songs, and whatever enters her head.  I included a link, still working, to Denk’s performance of the movement.

The earlier movements are “Emerson” and “Hawthorne,” the last the contemplative “Thoreau,” all with programs of some kind.  “Thoreau” is a day at Walden Pond; “Emerson” is, well “Emerson” Is a thorny one but let’s say an imitation of his thought, and “Hawthorne” is a collage of his stories, including “The Celestial Railroad,” which I wrote about fifteen years ago.

I’ll interrupt myself to note that it was a pleasure to me, certainly, to hear the “Hawthorne” movement in a performance space literally named after a Nathaniel Hawthorne book.  Did I ever write about Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys (1853)?  I sure did. 

Denk’s performance of the “Hawthorne” movement was astounding.  I believe it has evolved over time.  At one point in the piece, Denk reached for a wooden plank, which allowed, or forced, him to play an entire section of the keyboard.  All the notes, all the dissonance, that is what Ives wanted.  This is all in the score.

Denk opened the concert with the once massively popular “Battle of Manassas” by “Blind Tom” Wiggins.  I wrote about Wiggins long ago because an avatar of him appears in My Ántonia.  Cather readers should try to hear what Wiggins played.  His music is full of surprises.  “Manassas” is a tone poem made up a collage of popular songs and massive chord clusters that sounds avant garde for now but was somehow a crowd pleaser at the time.  I wondered if someone would have to tune the piano after Denk was done pounding on it.  Someone did.

Wiggins is also the central character of Jeffrey Renard Allen’s 2014 novel The Song of the Shank, almost objectively the fifth best book, at least, of the last twenty-five years.  The trombonist, composer, and musicologist George Lewis has written, with Allen, a “monodrama” of Song of the Shank, described here, which I would love to hear someday.  Lewis was sitting almost directly in front of me.  Based on his enthusiastic movement he also particularly enjoyed the “Hawthorne” movement.  After the show I thanked him for his own music, decades of it.  He did not seem to mind the compliment.  This week I have been enjoying his 1979 Homage to Charles Parker (on Youtube here and here), and if you just want to hear him play the hard stuff go straight to Anthony Braxton’s Creative Orchestra Music 1976.

If you happen to be in New York City on December 12th and enjoy noisy, dissonant, beautiful music, do not miss Jeremey Denk’s next performance of the Concord Sonata.

Books I read, and desks I saw, in July - hoping he might tell me, / tell me what the waves don't know

Right, July, July, so long ago.  I was on the road a little bit, making literary pilgrimages.  Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for example, to Herman Melville’s Arrowhead:

On this spot, not at this exact desk but in front of this exact window, Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, and The Confidence Man.  He wrote “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a story about a man with a window view of a blank brick wall, in front of this view.

Near Ithaca, New York, I crossed paths with Vladimir Nabokov and A. R. Ammons and many other great writers, looking at waterfalls they also looked at, although Nabokov would have spent more time up on the rim looking for butterflies.

And finally, back in Massachusetts to the Emily Dickinson house in Amherst:

On this spot, although not at this exact etc. (see above), Emily Dickinson wrote most of what she wrote.  I had not known that for almost her entire writing life – a pretty big chunk of her entire life – she went everywhere with a Newfoundland named Carlo, after a “minor dog in Jane Eyre,” to quote one of the many superb guides.  I guess I knew Carlo existed, but I did not understand that Dickinson’s dog was a Newfoundland, gigantic, shaggy, weighing more than her.  Imagine here at the little desk, writing whichever masterpiece you have in mind, while shoving a giant dog head out of her lap.  Changed my whole idea of the Dickinson enterprise.  And she did all that writing while sitting on a pine cone!

The guides – at times literally one per room – were devoted and full of interest.  “When Sir Andrew Motion visited, his first question was” – no, you will have to visit the house to learn Motion’s first question (it was – of course! – about Carlo).

I also read some books.

FICTION

The Road (1934-63), Vasily Grossman – a curious hybrid book, Grossman’s stories, plus “The Hell of Treblinka,” mixed among what amounts to a valuable little biography by Robert Chandler.

Mildred Pierce (1941), James M. Cain – about a woman who creates a successful fried chicken restaurant, one American art form about the greatest American art form.  I had not seen the movie, or for that matter read the book before, and had no idea that it would be perhaps the most purely melodramatic novel I have ever read.

Midaq Alley (1947), Nahguib Mahfouz – a classic “neighborhood” novel, a look in on the various residents of one Cairo block, sociologically interesting and full of good gossip.  The way we live now, for a specific we and now.  I read the book slowly, since there seemed to be no hurry, until the three-quarter mark when the story of one cluster of characters took a melodramatic turn and pushed me quickly to the end.

Ship Fever (1996), Andrea Barrett – High quality stories full of flattering, educational science.

American Desert (2004), Percival Everett – Maybe at some point I will piece together some thoughts about Everett.  I’ve read five of his books now and am beginning to imagine that I have thoughts.

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (2020), Yoko Tawada – what a title.  The novella, written in German, translated by Susan Bernofsky, is crammed with quotations and words from Celan’s poems.  Who knows what I might have missed, or seen.

POETRY

The Pages of Day and Night (1950-83) &

Mihyar of Damascus, His Songs (1961), Adonis – a selected poems and then a jump back to the breakthrough book, where Adonis creates the “Mihyar” persona, a mystical version of himself that pushes past his skepticism, allowing for a more original poetic voice, free from the endless, rich, but possibly stifling conventions of classical Arabic poetry.  The quotation in the title is from “I Search for Odysseus” (p. 24-5, tr. Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard).

Breathturn (1967), Paul Celan – After reading the Towada novel, and I at least took another look, at the Pierre Joris translation this time, which Bernofsky uses.

ANIMALS

The Soul of an Octopus (2015), Sy Montgomery – long time since I read a book about animals.  This one is also about people, with a local angle, the, what are they, fishkeepers and volunteers at the New England Aquarium in Boston, a place I should obviously go.

IN PORTUGUESE

Poesia (1944), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – Her first book, little lyrics about the sea, like she would write for her entire life.

Caminhos que faço meus (2023), Pedro Gil de Vasconcelos – My Pilgrimages, maybe, or My Caminos if I can use the Spanish, pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela.  Gil de Vasconcelos is a Portuguese journalist who has done many Caminos, so he can mix stories from the older ones into the current one, which is good since the current one is not all that interesting.  An book of high value for the Portuguese language learner since it is full of useful vocabulary that is constantly repeated.  I mean, it’s a long walk in the Galician mountains.  A glimpse of the trail is in the trailer (Youtube link) for the accompanying documentary, which I have not seen.

Ler, the Spring 2024 issue – To Read, or maybe Read! The Portuguese Bookforum, more or less. I read almost all of it.  An article about Spanish politics was too cryptic, and a throwaway where writers babbled about their most and least favorite words was too stupid. The feature article is about the current wave of young female writers from South and Central America and the interesting books they are writing. Nice to be able to read such a thing.

                                 

Books Read in June 2024 - "Why can't we steal the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted lives?"

Three weeks in Portugal meant less and different reading.

FICTION

Wolf Solent (1929), John Cowper Powys – among the most eccentric novels I have ever read, up there with his contemporaries D. H. Lawrence and Ronald Firbank!  I feel I should write about it; I feel I should read The Glastonbury Romance (1932) first!  See where he is going with this.  The exclamation points in puzzling places are one of Powys’s eccentricities.  The quotation in the title can be found on p. 356 of the 1961 edition.

Winter’s Tales (1942), Isak Dinesen – for all seasons.

Loving (1945), Henry Green – just perfect.

Brat Farrar (1949), Josephine Tey

Grendel (1971), John Gardner

High Stakes (1975), Dick Francis

I had both the Tey and Francis in Portugal with me as my light reading which was a minor mistake.  I knew that the Francis novel was obviously (see left) a horsey book, obviously, but I did not know that Brat Farrar was also a horsey book (see below – I guess I did not look too carefully at the cover), and two in a row pushed a bit past my threshold of interest.  But there I was.  

I enjoyed that neither book was in a hurry to turn into a mystery or thriller.  It was not until at least halfway through Brat Farrar when I saw that the book would indeed qualify as a mystery.  A third of the way into the Francis it was unclear if it had any story at all (it does).  None of this is meant as a complaint, since I enjoyed both books’ voice and characters and even horses and am frankly often happiest when the genre formulas are set aside for a while.

POETRY

A Treatise on Poetry (1957), Czeslaw Milosz – a survey of Polish poetry in poetry form.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Portuguese was mostly menus and worksheets.  French was neglected.

Douze petits écrits (1926), Francis Ponge – like a preface to Ponge’s next book, the 1942 masterpiece Le parti pris des choses.

Trente-trois sonnets composés au secret (1944), Jean Cassou – composed in his head, a half-sonnet per day, in a Vichy prison where he was being held for Resistance activities.  Kept in his head, too, since he had no means to write anything down until his release.  Beyond criticism, really, although I found a non-sonnet, a translation of a Hugo von Hoffmansthal poem, especially beautiful.  All published in 1944 under the name Jean Noir.  Poetry as heroism.

Three weeks in Portugal

I was in Portugal for three weeks in June.  Five hours a day for four days I was in this inlingua classroom in Porto, or one much like it:

The results:

B1 in Portuguese after about two years of fairly relaxed study – relaxed until those four days – which seems pretty good.  Maybe B2 in reading (standards defined here).  An enjoyable part of this visit to Portugal, my fourth, is that I could aggressively buy books:

And also:

And even moreso:

The Portuguese school curriculum includes an anthology of historic shipwrecks.

Still a while before I can, or I mean dare, read Saramago or Lispector in Portuguese, but I have plenty to read until then.

I strongly encourage anyone who does not overcome with anxiety at the idea of taking a language class to take an immersive class in the relevant place.  Cavilam in Vichy is pleasant, for example.  They give you a test and drop you right into a class.

I put a photo on Twitter every day, mostly adding to my collection of Pessoaiana.  Pessoa soap, Pessoa dish towels.  The Fernando Pessoa brand expands with Portuguese tourism, my puzzle being that so few people who did not go to a Portuguese-language school have any idea who he is.  Yet his image is everywhere, on everything.

A minor pleasure was this photo of a Pessoa board game, photographed in a museum gift shop, that went mildly viral, my only such experience.  At this moment, 481 likes, 37,000 views, whatever any of that means.  I wonder how many copies I sold.  The main use of Twitter is advertising, and turning  its users into marketers.  Still, it was amusing.

It was an extremely educational vacation.  Many thanks, as usual, to St. Orberose for his time and advice.  How sad that I cannot link to his blog anymore, but he is busy with his novel.

The Making of Americans as conceptual art - I have already made several diagrams

Sometime I will be able to make a diagram.  I have already made several diagrams.  I will sometime make a complete diagram and that will be a very long book...  (580)

I am going to write about The Making of Americans as conceptual art, art where how it is made is a central part of what the work is.  Art that, strangely, does not necessarily have to be experienced like less conceptual art (I do not think there can be such a thing as non-conceptual art, but there is a moreness and a lessness).  Books that do not need to be read to be understood, films that do not need to be seen.

A couple of works I had in mind while reading The Making of Americans, and while wondering why I kept reading it, were George Seurat’s monumental painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886) and Andy Warhol’s eight hour single-shot film Empire (1965).

Seurat’s painting can be experienced instantly by entering its gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago, and is full of delightful details worthy of more attention, but for the viewer interested in technique it is also a demonstration of what was once an innovation, pointillism.  After a year of preparation, much of Seurat’s time was spent mechanically filling in the grid.  I had the sense that Stein was doing something similar.  Not that the artist, or the viewer, cannot take pleasure in the work of the moment, the brushstrokes and sentences.  "There are some pretty wonderful sentences in it and we know how fond we both are of sentences" (letter to Sherwood Anderson, p. xiii of the Dalkey Archive edition).

I was also wondering why Stein’s book was so long, and why Seurat’s paintings were so large.  What would the difference be if  La Grande Jatte were 10% smaller?  What if Stein’s book were 725 pages rather than 925 pages?  Of course the case of Seurat is more poignant because he died at 31, meaning he spent four years of a short career producing two paintings.  If only there were a third. Heaven knows we have plenty of Gertrude Stein’s work.

Warhol’s Empire, by contrast, a single shot of the Empire State Building filmed for eight hours and five minutes, does not need to be seen at all for the concept to be clear.  A description and a still pretty does the job.  Like so many museum films, even those much shorter than Empire, there is no expectation that anyone watches the whole thing.

Not to deny anyone’s experience of these pieces.  I am just saying that the conceptual aspect, pointillism or repetition or stasis, is easily detachable from the work itself which becomes in that sense arbitrary.

The Making of Americans feels somewhere in between to me.  Anyone interested in how far the novel can be pushed should read some of it.  Ten pages somewhere in the middle?  Finnegans Wake is similar.  Reading a few pages, maybe the first few pages and the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section, quickly shows a lot of what Joyce is doing.  Not everything, but a lot, while Ulysses does not reveal itself in the same way.  Most readers of either book will quickly know if they want more or have had enough, thanks.

I guess The Making of Americans had just enough variation of style for me to keep going, or to feed my neurosis.  James Elkins has written a related piece about not finishing Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling (1965), a genuine descendant of Stein’s book, although longer and a full half-pound heavier.  I have seen a number of people on Twitter enjoying Miss Macintosh.  They will be ready for the Dalkey Archive reissue of The Making of Americans currently scheduled for September 2025.  Plenty of time to finish.  The William Gass and Steven Meyer introductions to the Dalkey edition are excellent, with Gass interested in style and Meyer in the process of creation.

I likely spent thirty hours reading The Making of Americans.  I could have watched Empire three times!  Or made it halfway through Fallout 4.  The recent marathon reading of the novel at Paula Cooper Gallery took 52 hours.

I will note that soon after Stein finished The Making of Americans she wrote Tender Buttons (1913), a radical move in the opposite direction, 78 little pages, compressed, filled with plain, material words.  “Cocoa and clear soup and oranges and oat-meal” (58), the words recontextualized, perhaps pushed towards nonsense and abstraction, but also inescapably things, or names of things.  Miss Macintosh appears to blend the concepts of the two books.  Maybe I will read it, or look at it more, someday.

 

Stein's style - Mostly no one will be wanting to listen, I am certain

Not many find it interesting this way I am realizing every one, not any I am just now hearing, and it is so completely an important thing, it is a complete thing in understanding, I am going on writing, I am going on now with a description of all whom Alfred Hersland came to know in his living.   Mostly no one will be wanting to listen, I am certain. (595)

The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress is built on gerunds and participles.  There are two just in that title.  People do not have “life” but “living,” not “existence” but “being.”  Poor David dies young, so he was “being a dead one” who was not living past “the beginning of his middle living.”  Stein’s novel is sometimes like an academic work with a specialized vocabulary.  What is the difference between “independent dependent living” and “dependent independent living”?  The terms are explored in some depth.  The influence of Stein’s teacher William James is visible.

The gerunds accumulate.  Or participles.  There are sentences whose meaning depends on figuring out the part of speech.

He was being living every day.  In a way he was needing to be certain that he was being living every day he was being living.  He was being living every day he was being living.  He was being living every day until he was not being living which was at the ending of the beginning of the middle of being living.  He was being living every day.  (862)

Etc.  Assume that every quotation is from a paragraph that goes on for a while longer. 

Stein is also attracted to other “-ing” words like “thing” and “something,” both for the assonance and the abstraction.  David, who is doing the “being living” above, is a sensualist compared to his siblings, interested in “feeling,” “smelling,” “eating” and so on as part of “being,” with never a hint of what he feels, smells, or eats.  Everything is subsumed under the gerunds.

To my surprise I found David’s death (the quotation above is pulled from several similar pages in some sense describing his death) somehow moving, at a fairly abstract level, in part because after 800 pages I had found a way to read Stein.  Close reading did not get me too far.  No, I found a voice, a kind of chant, helped by her ancestor Walt Whitman and one of her descendants, the composer Frederic Rzewski, particularly his 1973 “Coming Together” (the link goes to a recording of the piece) which takes a text by an inmate of Attica and builds Stein-like repetitions from it, with an increasing intensity of meaning.  Rzewski takes the title, gerund and all, from the prisoner’s text, but also I now see from Stein:

This coming together in them to be a whole one is a strange thing in men and women.  Sometimes some one is very interesting to some one, very, very interesting to some one and then that one comes together to be a whole one and then that one is not any more, at all, interesting to the one knowing that one, that one then is shrunken by being a whole one, some have not that happen to them by being a whole one, some are richer then, all are solider then to those knowing them when they come together inside them.  It is very strange this coming together to be a whole one.  (382)

Tomorrow I will dodge the question of why I read, or finished, this book by rambling about conceptual art.

everything in a being is always repeating - reading Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans

Since I actually read the thing for some reason I will write some notes on Gertrude Stein’s enormous The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (1925).  It is a monster.  Why did I read it?  No, that is not the right questions.  There are good reasons to read it.  Why did I read all of it?  Let me defer that question.

The Making of Americans is 925 big, big pages of avant garde novel-adjacent text.  Stein wrote it over several years, mostly after Three Lives (1909), when it quickly evolved from a relatively conventional family narrative with a plot and characters and the usual thing into a more purely stylistic work of conceptual art.  It is a bit like James Joyce’s move from Dubliners to A Portrait of the Artist to Ulysses to Finnegans Wake, each time paring away more of what is conventional to fiction and emphasizing what is stylistically new.  Except that Stein’s started with Portrait and moved straight to Finnegans Wake, all before Joyce published anything.

Stein finished writing, and Alice Toklas finished typing, the beast in 1911, but no one wanted to publish any of it until Ernest Hemingway brought some of it to Ford Madox Ford in 1924.  The world had caught up with Stein; Modernism had happened.  Not too much later Stein would write a big bestseller.

The Making of Americans is nominally about three siblings, Martha, Alfred, and David Hersland and the people around them, parents, spouses, and friends.  Here Stein begins a new section, about Alfred Hersland and his wife Julia Dehning:

I have been giving the history of a very great many men and women.  Sometime I will give a history of every kind of men and women, every kind there is of men and women.  Already I have given a history of many men and women.  Sometime I will be giving a history of all the rest of them.  This is now pretty nearly certain.  I have been already giving the history of a very great many men and women, I will now be giving the history of a number of more of them and then of a number more still of them and then still of some more of them and that will be a long book and when I am finished with this one then I will begin that one.  I have already begun that one but now I am still writing this one and now I am beginning this portion of this one which is the complete history of Alfred Hersland and of every one he ever came to know in living and of many others I will be describing now in this beginning. 

On p. 479, halfway through, this passage was discouraging.  I have added some bold emphasis to aid skimming.  Perhaps the important thing to note, aside from some evidence that Stein has a sense of humor about what she is doing, is that the repetition of words and phrases and even entire sentences is the basic compositional principle of the passage – of the entire novel – going far beyond the repetitionsfar beyond the repetitions of Three Lives.  The repetition is part of the metaphysics of the novel:

Always from the beginning there was to me all living as repeating.  This is now a description of my feeling.  As I was saying listening to repeating is often irritating, always repeating is all of living, everything in a being is always repeating, more and more listening to repeating gives to me completed understanding.  (291)

Maybe another thing to note is that, for all of the “many men and women,” the only character in these passages is the narrator.  She has a voice and an attitude; she has motivation.  She is arguably the only real character in the book, and the plot might be her writing of the book.  The only plot, really.  Martha Hersland marries a philosophy professor who leaves her for another professor.  Alfred and Julia divorce and he remarries.  David, the younger brother, dies young.  But almost all of this is presented abstractly.  I doubt there are ten pages in the book, more than one percent of it, made up of any kind of scene.  Five year-old Martha angrily throws her umbrella in the mud.  The specificity of this action, the time and place and presence of a material object, was a shock.  It is “repeating,” I guess, but psychologically.

That second passage emphasizes the aspect of the book I will save for tomorrow’s grammar lesson: the “-ing” words, the endless flow, or flowing, of “-ing” words.

Books Read in May 2024 – Some are certainly knowing what they are meaning, some are certainly not knowing what they are meaning.

A month without writing anything.  Plenty of reading, though.

FICTIONS

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), James Weldon Johnson

The Making of Americans (1925), Gertrude Stein – read over the course of months.  The quotation up above is from p. 783.  I will write about this book soon, if only to plant a flag on the peak.

All My Sons (1946), Arthur Miller

Dialogues with Leucó (1947), Cesar Pavese – a sequel to Ovid.

A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (1983), Ida Fink – terrible, in the “terror” sense, Holocaust stories, almost all about people who hid, or tried to hide, the camps in the distance.

The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), José Saramago – a romance novel.

Erasure (2001), Percival Everett – Is the Roland Barthes parody in the movie, somehow?

 

POEMS

Collected Poems 1930-1993 (through 1948) &

The Land of Silence (1953) &

In Time Like Air (1958), May Sarton – smart cosmopolitan formalism; not yet a Maine poet.

A Mask for Janus (1952) &

The Dancing Bears (1954) &

Green with Beasts (1956), W. S. Merwin – more smart cosmopolitan formalism.

Daylight (1953), Czeslaw Milosz – or whatever part of the book is in New and Collected Poems.

Grackledom (2023), Leslie Moore – a Maine poet and artist.  Just look at this book, irresistible.  I live about a quarter mile from a grackledom.

 

WORLD WAR II MEMOIRS

Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy (1978), Norman Lewis – Since he knew Italian, he was an administrator behind the lines.  Since he is a skilled British writer, his account of the post-war Italy is essentially comic, dark, dark comedy.

With the Old Breed (1981), E. B. Sledge – It occurred to me that I had read plenty about soldiers in Europe and nothing about the Pacific.  Sledge was an American Marine who fought in two nightmarish battles, on a coral island and on Okinawa.  Clearly written and open-eyed.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Journal (1943-9), André Gide

Les bonnes (1947) &

Le Balcon (1956 / 1960 / 1962), Jean Genet

Victimes du devoir (1953) &

Amédée ou Comment s'en débarrasser (1954), Eugène Ionesco

Portuguese study was all in class and in the textbook.  June’s study will be in Portugal itself.  Let’s see how that goes.