Graham Greene walks through Liberia in Journey Without Maps - I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living.

Graham Greene spent four weeks in 1935 on vacation in Liberia, with a taste of Sierra Leone and Guinea, walking through the upland forests.  His account of the trip, Journey Without Maps (1936), is a peculiar book, misguided and innovative.  The journey, or the book, or both, were a turning point for Greene, or so I have read.  Greene had been steadily publishing books since 1925, but I have not read any of those (I haven’t read any Greene post-1950, either), so I don’t know what turned.  Still, keep reading; it may be visible.

Greene is looking for the aspect of Africa that “acts so strongly on the unconscious mind” (I.1.20), the part of Africa that creates whatever associations he has with the word “Africa,” and since he has to pick a specific spot, not an entire continent, he deduces or invents that these associations are to be found not in Egypt or Kenya but in West Africa, so having never left Europe before Greene picks Liberia.  I would have suggested Senegal, but I believe Greene wants to be near an English colony.

Also, Senegal would not have worked for the conceit of the title, which is that the Liberian forests were unmapped, allowing Greene to feel more like he was Richard Burton or Joseph Conrad or whoever.  Greene is , however, never near anything resembling wilderness, but rather in a long-settled agricultural region, with towns at most a day’s walk apart.  No heart of darkness here.  The region is, though, painfully, desperately poor.  The lack of a decent map was a bureaucratic failure of the Liberian government.  Greene is not an explorer, but a tourist; an adventure tourist, as we would call him now.

He hires guides and porters and walks from village to village for a month.  When I was an adventure tourist in West Africa, I hired guides and drivers, and was driven around, and was under no illusion that I was not a tourist.

As much as I enjoyed Journey, the journey itself often seemed pointless, or merely personally meaningful, which is enough for a good book, but still.  Dubious.  Several dubious ideas here, but Greene learns a lot, about Liberia, “Africa,” and himself.  He is a good traveler.

I suspect Greene wanted to write an innovative book, so although most of it is the usual chronological logistical account of the trip, Journey is studded with separate autobiographical chunks, like an earlier trip to Riga that somehow turns back to Greene’s childhood:

In Nottingham I was instructed in Catholicism, travelling here and there by tram into new country with the fat priest who had once been an actor.  (It was one of his greatest sacrifices to be unable to see a play.) (II.1.101)

Or the wild “dream” digression:

It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in…

It was only many years later that Evil came into my dreams: the man with gold teeth and rubber surgical gloves; the old woman with ringworm; the man with his throat cut dragging himself across the carpet to the bed.  (III.1.180-1)

The Portable Graham Greene excerpts these and other similar passages so cleanly that I had no idea, when I read them decades ago, that they were from a travel book about Liberia.

Here is the turning point, by the way:

The fever would not let me sleep at all, but by the early morning it was sweated out of me.  My temperature was a long way below normal, but the worst boredom of the trek [see below] for the time being was over.  I had made a discovery during the night which interested me.  I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living.  I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable.

It seemed that night an important discovery.  It was like a conversion, and I had never experienced a conversion before.  (III.4.213)

Some thoughtful skepticism follows, but now Greene sounds like a character in the kind of Graham Green novel I’ve read.  The next book is A Gun for Sale (1936), which I have not read:

It was another five hours’ march to Greh, by a track of appalling monotony.  I tried to think of my next novel, but I was afraid to think of it for long, for then there might be nothing to think about next day.  (III.2.195)

Journey without Maps is obviously a carefully shaped book, art, whatever else it might be.

Page numbers refer to the Penguin paperback.

Filling out the thumpety-thump with Nabokov, Waugh, West, and Wang Wei, the last of the "read in May" pile - “It’s a heartbreaking game.”

Well into June, the last four books I read in May, quickly dispatched.

Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark (1932), one of Nabokov’s Berlin crime novels, a nasty shocker.  It would be something of a parody of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) if the dates were reversed, so I suppose it is a parody of something else.  It has nothing Russian but plenty of interesting Berlin detail, including some German film industry scenes.  Some of the parallels to Lolita are interesting, too.

Still, this may be Nabokov’s most trivial novel, his simplest novel.  The prose and patterning seem simpler than usual.  Possibly I should blame the inexperienced translator, who may have simplified things.  It was his first translation.

In the evenings, there was dancing at the casino.  The sea looked paler than the flushed sky, and the lights of a passing steamer glowed festively.  A clumsy moth flapped round a rose-shaded lamp; and Albinus danced with Margot.  Her smoothly brushed head barely reached his shoulder. (Ch. 14, 116)

That moth, or its pal, visits the characters ninety pages later.

***

Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), a great American nightmare.  A newspaperman is having an existential crisis, a religious crisis.  The letters he gets for his advice column, full of real problems, are finally getting to him.  Maybe that’s it.  Here is some representative prose:

The  old man began to scream.  Somebody hit Miss Lonelyhearts from behind with a chair.  (end of “Miss Lonelyhearts and the Clean Old Man”)

Here is more:

His caresses kept pace with the sermon.  When he had reached the end, he buried his triangular face like the blade of a hatchet in her neck.  (end of “Miss Lonelyhearts and the Dead Pan”)

I should have read this ages ago, and what’s worse is that I knew it, and what’s even worse is that the book is only seventy pages long.  Maybe I’ll have more to say when I’ve read The Day of the Locust.

***

Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (1934), where the Bright Young People, a bit less young than in Vile Bodies (1930), meet Fate.  The passage, about halfway through, that interrupts the story and begins “Then this happened:” and ends “Everyone agreed that it was nobody’s fault,” is close to an attack on the usual functioning of the novel as a form.  Re-reading, the tragic accident turns out to be heavily foreshadowed, and I now see that one character, Mrs. Rattery, is a personification of Fate.  She literally falls from the sky and spends the aftermath of the tragedy playing cards, as in this curiously parenthesized paragraph:

(Mrs. Rattery sat intent over her game, moving little groups of cards adroitly backward and forwards about the table like shuttles across a loom; under her fingers order grew out of chaos; she established sequence and precedence; the symbols before her became coherent, interrelated.)

She and Fate and the author overlap.  As she says a page later, folding up the cards, “It’s a heartbreaking game.”

A Handful of Dust is as grim as Jude the Obscure, but played for laughs.  If anyone wonders why or how I often find Hardy so funny, I point you toward Waugh.

All of those quotes are from the “Hard Cheese for Tony” chapter, parts 5 and 6.

***

Eliot Weinberger & Octavio Paz, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (1987), the classic of comparative translation.  “Poetry is that which is worth translating” (p. 1).  A twenty character Tang Dynasty poem is presented as text, transliteration, and in nineteen versions in three languages, with Weinberger’s commentary and Paz’s commentary on the commentary, and on his own (two) translations.  Along the way, Weinberger writes a little history of 20th century translation practices.

As a critic, he is careful yet casual:  “Where Wang is specific, Bynner’s Wang seems to be watching the world through a haze of opium reflected in a hundred thimbles of wine” (11).  “Rexroth’s great skill is apparent in three tiny gestures” (23).  “The last line adds dark to fill out the thumpety-thump” (35).

Don’t miss the postscript, where Weinberger is credibly accused of “crimes against Chinese poetry” for his “curious neglect” of “Boodberg’s cedule.”

Woolf's Waves and Faulkner's stories - more books I read in May - I love tremendous and sonorous words

More books I read in May.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931).  A difficult book.  It pushes Woolf’s ideas about the representation of consciousness to a new, extreme position.  I wonder if it is a dead end.  It is a live novel.

Six friends describe or think about or experience their lives.  Childhood, school, and so on at roughly decade intervals, interspersed with a prose poem about light effects on the ocean.  The text, aside from the prose poem, is all in quotation marks, as if it is speech, except for “said Neville,” “said Rhoda,” like that, which I have to put in quotation marks here, which is confusing.  But the text is obviously not speech, but thought, and not direct thought, as in Mrs Dalloway (1925), definitely not stream-of-consciousness, but more like a summary of thought, or a retrospective description of thought.  All of it somehow “said.”

The first section, the childhood piece, is the most confusing, because I have no information besides names and gender (three boys, three girls), and, realistically, it is not clear how the childhood personality transfers to the teenager or adult.  Characters sometimes seem to blur into each other, too.  Later, I could tag Louis as the poetic sensibility, Susan as the motherly one, Bernard as the novelistic sensibility, and so on.  The six characters take turns for a while, which is a little mechanical (I think, okay, who is left, who has not “spoken” yet?), until the last section, which is a fifth of the book:

“Now to sum up,” said Bernard.  “Now to explain to you the meaning of my life…  This, for the moment, seems to be my life.  If it were possible, I would hand it to you entire.  I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes.  I would say, ‘Take it.  This is my life.’  (238)

Bernard the “novelist,” has taken over.  He has never written a novel (has he?), but it is possible that this text, or some refraction of this text, is his novel, the story of this group of friends.  Perhaps the whole thing is meant to be his.  “’I love tremendous and sonorous words’” he says, or thinks, or writes, much earlier in the book (32).  He sure does.

I assume, when I re-read The Waves someday, I will abandon everything I just wrote.

***

William Faulkner, These 13 (1931).  His first book of short stories; his worst title?  Faulkner occasionally rearranged his work, so this book has vanished, dissolved into Collected Stories (1951), but I wanted to think about the stories in their earlier context.

Four stories are about World War I, mostly pilots.  They are now  housed in “The Wasteland” in Collected Stories, almost by themselves.  Three stories are about Americans in Europe after the war, and are in “Beyond.”  The Italian stories in particular sounded more like Hemingway than I would have guessed possible for Faulkner, but perhaps I am being addled by the shared subject matter.

None of these are Faulkner at his best, but he did keep them.  They are not essential Faulkner, unless the question if “how did Faulkner become Faulkner”.

The other six are essential, good or bad.  They express the essence of Faulkner’s art circa 1930.  “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner’s first published story (!), the perfect distillation of “Southern Gothic”; “Dry September,” a clear-eyed lynching story; “Hair,” Southern Goofic, but the shared protagonist with “Dry September” shows how Faulkner’s Balzac-in-Mississippi concept works; and “That Evening Sun,” about racial incomprehension, and ditto on the Balzac thing except the characters are from The Sound and the Fury.

That’s only four.  “Red Leaves” and “A Justice” are about Chickasaw slave-owners and the history of Yoknapatawpha County before it was Yoknapatawpha.  Faulkner is mythologizing.  I only have a vague sense of what he is doing in these two stories.  A problem for later.

The enchanted novels of Sigrid Undset and Marly Youmans

About a year ago I read The Wreath (1920), the first volume of Sigrid Undset’s 14th century Norwegian domestic epic Kristin Lavransdatter.  Last month, I read The Wife (1921).  Maybe in a year I will read The Cross (1922) and finish up.

Our headstrong heroine Kristin married the man she loved at the end of the first novel.  For much of this novel, she manages her household, raises her children, and fights with her husband.  Maybe ten years pass.

I finally saw, in the first third of the novel, why Kristin Lavransdatter became, soon after its first English translation, a cult novel in the United States, a book that women passed from hand to hand.  Who in English in the 1920s, or for that matter much later, was writing so directly about difficult childbirths, or sexual conflicts between spouses, or simply the anxieties of moving to – taking over, managing – a new household for the first time?  These are ordinary problems, experienced by millions of young women who were not medieval Norwegians, and Undset writes about them clearly and without melodrama.

Maybe I also saw why the novel has receded, even with Tiina Nunnally fine recent translation.  Now there are lots of novels and films that tell these stories.

Undset’s best artistic move is to accumulate elements of more or less ordinary life into an extraordinary scene.  In The Wreath, the great scene was the long, complex wedding at the end of the novel.  This time, in The Wife, there were two, the death and funeral of Kristin’s father at the end of Part II, and Kristin’s pilgrimage, expiating her sins from the first novel, that ends Part I.  I was not surprised to learn that Undset readers still travel to St. Olav’s shrine in Trondheim to re-create Kristin’s pilgrimage – not the real pilgrimage, but the fictional one, which is kind of funny.  But it’s a beautiful, powerful sequence.  Undset’s prose is often quite plain, with occasional hints of bestsellerism, but the big, climatic scenes are artful.

Part III of The Wife turns into more of a Walter Scott novel, about Kristin’s husband’s political schemes, and did not seem that special.

Undset’s fictional, historical world is enchanted, in the sense that it is not disenchanted.  Religion, God, and darker things exist in this world, in the mentality and behavior of the characters.  By chance, I read a contemporary exercise in enchantment almost alongside Undset, Marly Youmans’s new novel Charis in the World of Wonders (2020), where the enchantment is visible in the title.

“For this is the world of wonders, an enchanted place of dreams, portents, and prodigies” – that’s the end of the first paragraph, when poor Charis, a young Puritan woman in New England, is awakened to spend the first long chapter fleeing catastrophe.  She spends the rest of the novel rebuilding a life, until she has to – chooses to – flee again.

The world’s “wonders” are its mysteries, whether beautiful or terrifying or in some other category, since the phrase is specifically evoked when Charis sees a moose, and I have trouble calling a moose beautiful; no trouble calling them wonders:

He lowered his head, crowned with new nubs of antlers, and began to lip at the foliage under the trees.  His breath ruttled as he blew outward and sent the plants to trembling. (216)

The voice, the action, and the ethos of the novel are all from the perspective of not just Charis’s faith, but her view of the world, a difficult thing to capture.  It is tricky. since no one at the time would write a first person account with so much dialogue, detail, or action.  The idea is to get close to the mentality of The Pilgrim’s Progress, the symbolic world, but not the form or the language.  Well, to some degree, the language.  Youmans borrows period language, wonderful archaic words, many of which we should return to use.  Nabbity, nattle, naughty-pack, nazzle, niffle-naffle, nightwalking, nittle.  The novel ends with a twelve-page glossary that I found readable and pleasurable on its own.  And I do not remember one time when I needed to turn to the glossary, since the vocabulary was always clear enough in context (e.g., ruttled up above).  The glossary is a bonus.

I should note that Youmans is a Friend of the Blog.  Marly, what a time to publish a novel!

the rest of my French reading in May - André Breton's war and Jean Giraudoux's peace

Two authors, aside from Kessel, filled out my May reading in French, André Breton and Jean Giraudoux.

Nadja (1928), Breton’s novel-like textual art object, some mix of the early history of Surrealism, art criticism, and a fictionalized encounter with a mentally ill woman who is perhaps what we now call an “outsider artist.”  Breton’s use of photographs – of his friends, his art collection, his favorite cafés, documents, scraps – is the most notable feature of the book, full of ideas.  I suppose I found all that more interesting than the central story about the woman in the title.

I read the revised 1964 version of Nadja, which seems to be the one in print in France.  The only English translation is of the original 1928 version.  So strictly speaking, whatever I read is not available in English.  My understanding is that there are some substantial differences in the texts, but I do not know what they are.  All of this was a surprise to me.

Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930).  The original Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) felt like a work of Surrealist art, while this one read more like an important historical document.  Breton fights with his enemies and also his friends, some of whom will be enemies soon enough.  Freud is diminished a little, Marx, or maybe more accurately Stalin, elevated.  Passages on the great Surrealist predecessors – Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Poe – were interesting, but this is not really a work of criticism.  A couple of later essays included in the same volume, written when Breton had some distance and was not getting in fistfights, have more insight into the artistic purpose of Surrealism.

Both Nadja and Second Manifesto were difficult texts, sometimes discursive and obscure.  An important aspect of learning a language by reading is to puzzle out words and phrases from context, but Surrealist writing often deliberately jerks the language away from the context.  That is much of its fun.  But perhaps the French language-learner should not spend so much time with Surrealism.  Yes, perhaps.

***

I read two Jean Giraudoux plays, Intermezzo (1933, in English as The Enchanted) and La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (1935, The Trojan War Will Not Take Place – I would add an exclamation point).

Intermezzo is about a young woman who has fallen in love with a ghost, and the small-town bourgeois officials (the mayor and so on) who try to save her.  Aside from the good comedy about the pompous, self-centered officials, I did not understand this play, “the point,” I mean.  I think I was all right with the language.  I have read two earlier Giraudoux plays, Siegfried (1928) and Amphitryon 38 (1929), both of which were about divided identities, or divided loyalty.  Intermezzo belongs with them, at least I can see that.

The Trojan War Won’t Happen! has a point that is clear enough.  Giraudoux's day job was in the diplomatic service, and this play is an outraged warning.  Paris has just brought Helen to Troy, and the Greeks are in pursuit.  Hector, the great warrior, and a few other characters do everything they can to stave off war, but we know that Cassandra is right, the Trojan War will happen, and poetry will pass from Troy to Greece, as she says in the last line.  The old men, hotheads, incompetents, and theorists will make sure of that.  The Trojans are the French, the Greeks the Germans.

The most audacious scene, I thought, features an expert in international law, who first argues that the law requires peace, then, just as easily and logically, that it requires war.  I think this is where I double-checked the date of the play.  No, this is 1935, not 1938, long before “peace in our time” and all that.  Giraudoux obviously saw what was happening, for all the good it did him.

Joseph Kessel's days of adventure - Abyssinia, Berlin, Barcelona, Kenya

Joseph Kessel was a real discovery for me when I was in France.  A journalist and novelist, he was a major French writer who barely exists, in terms of reputation or actual books, in English.  He is likely best known in English, if this counts as “known,” as the author of the novels on which the movies Belle de Jour and Army of Shadows are based.  But in France any well-stocked bookstore has numerous titles, scattered in different sections of the store, and any bookstore at all has one title, Le Lion (The Lion, 1958).  It is taught in junior high, although how often I do not know.  It was always there, and was one of the first novels I read in French.

The second-most common book in 2017 was En Syrie (In Syria, 1927), a book that had suddenly become relevant.  Kessel was as much a travel writer as a journalist, an old-fashioned “foreign correspondent” whose greatest pleasure was to drop into the middle of some new, dangerous place and have an adventure, telegraphing dispatches home, then, later, writing a novel about wherever he had been.

The book of his I finished in May is titled Les Jours de l’aventure: Reportages, 1930-1936 – The Days of Adventue, one of a series of seven volumes of Kessel’s journalism.  Kessel travels to Abyssinia and Djibouti in 1930 to report on – to track down – the African slave trade, to Berlin to witness the violent elections of 1932, to New York City in 1933 to see the Great Depression firsthand, and to Barcelona in 1934 to witness not the beginning of the Spanish Civil War but a preview, although he says that one was an accident, that he was on vacation when the shooting started.

Kessel’s idea of reporting on the Abyssinian slave trade was to see the trade for himself.  Nothing abstract for him.  He finds and follows the slave hunters; he follows a slaving caravan across the desert and then across the Red Sea.  Somebody else can write up statistics and international law.  Kessel is going out into the desert, even if it kills him.

His dispatches from this adventure were simultaneously published in Paris, London, and in the New York Times.  I wonder how common that was.  A little book was published, too; this stuff is in English.  In a horrible irony, fascist Italy used Kessel’s reporting as one of its justifications for the invasion of Abyssinia – to suppress the slave trade.

In between the sad, doomed German elections, Kessel spends a week hanging out with one of Berlin’s organized criminal gangs, operating somewhere between a mafia gang and a fraternal organization.  Highly recommended to anyone who enjoyed Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1928).  Very highly recommended to anyone who read Döblin but wondered if he was exaggerating.  Apparently, no.

That one Kessel novel I have read, The Lion, is about an eleven-year-old girl, the daughter of an English park ranger in Kenya, who has an uncanny rapport with animals, and whose best friend is an adult male lion.  Which is a bad idea, obviously.  Something terrible will happen.  This is one of several French books with child protagonists I have read that end with crushing disappointment and disillusion.

Anyway, I thought that two scenes were genuinely sublime, first, when the Kessel-like narrator watches the girl wander among the African animals at a watering hole, and second, when the girl introduces “Kessel” to the lion.  By genuinely sublime, I mean they were beautiful and also terrifying.

The Lion is available in English, in an old translation, and there was a Hollywood movie, but I do not remember ever coming across either, or any reference to them.

Representative Kessel trivia: he acquired the first visa to enter the State of Israel.

He was a combat pilot in World War I, and again in World War II, in the Free French Air Force, alongside Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Romain Gary.  Three great pilot-writers – that seems like a lot.

it may be fun to be fooled - Dylan Thomas, E. E. Cummings, Louis MacNeice

I am in the process of writing up what I read in May, much like I did in April.  Is this a good idea?  When I finished up April, I did not write another word until more or less now.  So I have doubts.  Yet here I am.

Last month I read Dylan Thomas’s debut, 18 Poems (1934); this month, Twenty-five Poems (1936).  Why did he change the representation of the number in the title?  Was it to make me look up the titles over and over again, never getting them right the first time?

Two years later, Thomas is marginally more coherent, with the sound-to-sense ratio moving a little ways towards “sense.”  His biological metaphysics is presented more directly.  “Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels” and so on, from the first poem, “I, in my intricate image,” where the poet is born.  A conceit of D. H. Lawrence is that we are all, we humans, just another species of animal, however much civilization we build around ourselves.  Thomas goes a step back on the phylogenetic tree, believing that animals, and thus all of us, are specialized plants.  “My images stalk the trees and the slant sap’s tunnel… / I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles” etc.  Not exactly the way biologists draw the tree now, but close enough for a poet.

These poems, like the last batch, are likely more fun to bellow than to read silently:

from Altarwise by owl-light, Stanza V

And from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel,
From Jesu’s sleeve trumped up the king of spots,
The sheath-decked jacks, queen with a shuffled heart;
Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades,
Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation’s bottle.

This Dylan is beginning to sound like that other Dylan.

***

E. E. Cummings, No Thanks (1935).  More Cummings poems, like he had been writing for a decade, but carpentered onto a complex frame of four sections, each section built out of sequences of three free poems capped by a sonnet.  There is a snow, star and moon quarter, and also one more that I could not figure out.

There is plenty of this kind of fun – how much do you like puzzles, or grasshoppers:

And as I now expect from Cummings, there are some earthy poems (see #24, “let’s start a magazine”) and some sex poems, divided into the sensual and the silly, as in this excerpt from #16:

(may I touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she

We all enjoy mocking Hemingway, yes?  That’s #26:

what does little Ernest croon
in his death at afternoon?
(kow dow r 2 bul retoinis
wus de woids uf lil Oinis

And look, #27 is an authentic Joe Gould poem.  Someone should publish a Joe Gould sourcebook.  The Joe Gould Saga.  If you do not know what I am talking about, I urge you to read Joseph Mitchell, “Professor Sea Gull” and “Joe Gould’s Secret,” or at least watch the 2000 movie.

Cummings wrote the book on a Guggenheim fellowship, but such were the hard times of the Depression that no one would publish No Thanks, thus the title, except for his mother, who paid to have it self-published.  Shoulda called it Thanks, Ma!

***

Finally, I read the first sixty pages or so of Louis MacNeice’s Collected Poems, roughly up to or just past his trip to Iceland with Auden.  Unlike the poems of Thomas, Cummings, Neruda, and all of those Spaniards, MacNeice’s poems are about concrete, material things, with scenes and settings, and they make rational sense.  I love them, but have nothing to say about them.  Maybe the next batch.

that voice in which the freshness of those days still breathes - more 1930s Spanish poems, from Vicente Aleixandre and Rafael Alberti

A pliable notion of “international surrealism” has helped me read a number of poets from the 1930s, but in Vicente Aleixandre I find the Spanish version of the real thing.  He was – today I would call him a corporate lawyer – who dabbled in poetry.  He fell ill and read the real Surrealists, the French ones, André Breton and that crowd, and their approved precursors like Rimbaud.  Aleixandre did not move to Paris and swear fealty to Breton; he was not a real Surrealist.  But his poetry, his life, permanently changed.

from Lightless

The swordfish, whose weariness arises first of all from its inability to pierce the shadow,
to feel in its flesh the cold unliving blackness of the sea bottom,
where there are no fresh gold seaweeds
illuminated by the sun in the first waters.  (tr. Stephen Kessler)

This one is from the early 1930s.  It is free verse, but coherent in its imagery and mood.  It is concrete but not really about its subject.  Aleixandre’s interests are psychological and interior.  That swordfish is inside the head, maybe in a dream.  In the last line, the unpierced shadow is identified as “where calm slime doesn’t imitate exhausted dreams.”  I don’t want to say I know what each element of the poem means, but I get the feeling.  Mostly.

In the 1950s, Aleixandre’s poems become more straightforward and exterior.  The poems are directly about whatever is in the title: “To My Dog,” “On the Way to School,” “My Grandfather’s Death.”  “On the Death of Miguel Hernández” – so many tributes to Hernández, to Lorca.  The poems are also about other things, but Aleixandre now gives his reader a form place  to begin.

from Who I Write For (from the 1950s)
For the bully and the bullied, the good and the sad, the voice with no substance
and all the substance of the world.

For you, the man with nothing that will turn into a god, who reads these words without desire.

For you and everything alive inside of you,
I write, I write.  (tr. Lewis Hyde)

The book I read is A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems (1979), translated by many hands, a curious and enjoyable feature of that period of publishing.  Robert Bly is always in there somewhere.

***

Rafael Alberti is more my kind of fun, more playful, more humorous.  I read Mark Strand’s translations, The Owl’s Insomnia (1973).  “Alberti’s poems number in the thousands,” Strand writes (p. ix), and this book contains exactly fifty of them, half from 1929 and 1930, so what do I know about Alberti.  But I enjoyed these.

Thirteen have the word “Angel” in the title, or hidden elsewhere in the poem; the angels seem to represent any number of beings, including schoolchildren:

from The Angel of Numbers

Virgins with rulers
and compasses were watching
the heavenly blackboards.

And the angel of numbers
was thoughtfully flying
from 1 to 2, from 2
to 3, from 3 to 4.

Or perhaps the angel is the personification of grade school education.  It ends the poem “lifeless, shrouded” – how sad.  See also the poem “The Grade School Angels.”

Alberti writes tribute poems not just to Charlie Chaplin (“Charlie’s Sad Date”), but to Buster Keaton (“Buster Keaton Looks in the Woods for his Love Who Is a Real Cow”) , and not just to Keaton but to Harold Lloyd.  Where, I ask, is Fatty Arbuckle?

from Harold Lloyd, Student

The Spring rains over Los Angeles
in that sad hour when the police
are unaware of the suicide of the isosceles triangles,
the melancholy of a Naperian logarithms
and the facial unibusquibusque.

Look, more angels hidden in there, more math.  The three poems about the great comic film actors are all pretty crazy, barely connected to their subjects as far as I can tell, and full of verbal (and numeric) play that give Strand something to do.

There is of course a Lorca tribute (“The Coming Back of an Assassinated Poet”).  There is a tribute to Vicente Aleixandre!

from The Coming Back of Vicente Aleixandre (1958)

Where are you, my friend,
where are you coming from, from what depth
of years do you come to me
this noon so far
from those other noons or those nights
in which I would meet you,
tall, trim, and blond,
as if you were already looking for what would give you
with time that voice in which
the freshness of those days still breathes?

I speak of things that exist - more of Pablo Neruda's Residence on Earth

Glancing at Pablo Neruda’s Residence on Earth, just the first part from 1933, I discussed the pleasures and difficulties of what I called “international surrealism.”  Sometimes it makes no sense, that is the difficulty.

Now I’ve read the second part, from 1935.  Does reading more Neruda help me find more sense?  Let’s look at a passage from the first poem, “Un Día Sobresale / One Day Stands Out” (tr. Donald Walsh):

From resonance come numbers,
dying numbers and dung-covered ciphers,
dampened thunderbolts and dirty lightningflashes.

This is a strange start.  The previous collection was also full of thunder and lightning.  “Resonance” is “de lo sonoro,” and the next stanza begins with the same phrase.  Now that is a clue.  Pay attention to the sounds, even if, as in the fourth stanza, they are “Fishes in sound, slow, sharp, moist.”  It also seems to be nighttime.  The poem is several pages long, with the beginnings of most stanzas including either “resonance” or “silence.”

Brusque shoes, beasts, utensils,
waves of harsh roosters overflowing,
clocks running like dry stomachs,
wheels unrolling on downcast rails,
and white water closets awaking
with wooden eyes, like one-eyed pigeons,
and their sunken throats
make sudden sounds like waterfalls.

Now Neruda has done it.  He has given me what I like, things, things I can take literally.  The sounds of shoes, roosters, clocks, and streetcars, the sounds of the toilets above and below and in the next room.  The poet is in a bedroom – a hotel room, is my guess, sleeping, dreaming, waking, likely earlier than he had planned as the city and the hotel awake around him.  A few of the concrete nouns are parts of similes, but the rest are part of the scene.  This must be one of the finest literary descriptions of a toilet.

A couple of stanzas later, the sun is up, “shadow recently fleeing / and drops that from the heart of heaven / fall like celestial blood,” the poem ends, and the book begins.  Up, poet, up!  But the next poem is “Only Death,” where “To resonance comes death” and death is “like a pure sound,” so I see why he wanted to stay in bed a little longer.

Images and individual words link the poems, allowing me to create a mood or perhaps even a narrative.  The sounds continue.  Sea imagery is everywhere, foam and waves and coffins with sails.  The poet is always alone, lonely.  “Do you want to be the solitary ghost that near the sea / plays upon its sad and sterile instrument” (“Barcarole”).  For a poet, that sounds bad.

This piece of Residence on Earth is in six parts, and each part builds its own structure of imagery.  I did not figure out a way in to each part, but I have a better idea of how to do it.  Part III contains the poems about sex, which felt like kitsch, and Part IV attacks my preference for things by loading “Three Material Songs” with the goofiest images, “hats of defeated bees” and wine that “walks its lugubrious hedgehogs” and that sort of glorious nonsense.  Those examples are from “Ordinance of Wine,” and I am happy to interpret the whole poem as a parody of the language of wine snobs.  But then how to interpret the previous material poem, “The Apogee of Celery”?

I speak of things that exist.  Heaven forbid
that I should invent things when I am singing!

That’s also from “Ordinance of Wine.”

Part V begins with a beautiful, direct, but uncanny “Ode to Federico García Lorca” – “Federico / you see the world.”  Neruda became friends with many Spanish poets while serving in the Chilean consulate in Spain.  Please remember that this is 1935, and there is no Civil War:

What are verses for if not for that night
in which a bitter dagger finds us out, for that day,
for that dusk, for that broken corner
where the beaten heart of man makes ready to die?

The last of my April reading - novels, stories, travel, a play - the winter evening was darkening into night and the image of buttered toast loomed large in the mind

The rest of my April reading.  Novels and stories and such.

Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund (1930) and Lao She, Rickshaw (1937), already covered.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930).  A titanic novel.  Some big changes in the history of the novel occur more or less here.  I read Michael Gorra’s Norton Critical Edition, which was itself outstanding.  The biggest surprise in it was how well reviewed – not merely positively, but with understanding – Faulkner was from the beginning, for all the good it did him.  Well, it worked out eventually.

The first Faulkner novel that made it into French was the next one, Sanctuary (1931), but the French saw what was going on immediately.  That is one of the big changes, maybe the first one.

I suppose it had been thirty years since I really read As I Lay Dying, really read it, not just looked into it.  I have read a lot more books since the last time.  Faulkner’s novel still appeared to be full of brand new things.

Frank O’Connor, Guests of the Nation (1931).  His first book, mostly stories set during the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War.  At some point, it occurred to me that the only precedent was Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (1926), although O’Connor is not as cold-blooded as Babel, and it was no surprise to learn that Red Cavalry was O’Connor’s direct inspiration.  Only two of the fifteen stories are in the 1981 Collected Stories, perhaps because they work well together, certainly not because they’re not good enough.

Somerset Maugham, Ah King (1933).  Six stories set in Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and the like.  I find Maugham more interesting for his subject matter, the odd British people who find themselves in the colonies, than his careful, casual storytelling, and with three books of stories left, he says these are the last ones from Asia.  What the heck is he going to write about?

A favorite bit from “The Book Bag,” where the narrator is distracted while being told a melodramatic tale of Byronic incest – I do like Maugham’s casual narration, just not as much as his subjects:

My eye was caught by a chik-chak, a little brown house lizard with a large head, high up on the wall.  It is a friendly little beast and it is good to see it in a house.  It watched a fly.  It was quite still.  On a sudden it made a dart and then as the fly flew away fell back with a kind of jerk into a strange immobility. (p. 795 in East of West)

Perhaps the Maughamish narrator is identifying with the lizard.

Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key (1931).  I’m still rooting around in crime novels, covering the basics.  Here we have more gangster nonsense.  The “detective” is a mob fixer in an utterly corrupt town, solving a murder mystery for the mob boss even if it ruins his life – the boss’s, or his own, or both.  It is all pretty nuts, but only maybe half as nuts as Red Harvest (1929).

So-called Nicholas Blake, Thou Shell of Death (1936).  Since Cecil Day-Lewis was a poet, I expected his prose to be a little better, even in a detective novel, and sometimes it is, but he seems just as happy with clichés.  The single best character who gives the novel a lot of energy is the main murder victim, and the second-best character gets clonked on the head soon after.  If you want to solve the mystery, just catalogue every moment where you think “Wait, that makes no sense.”  And maybe read The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), which is a good idea regardless.

I’ll try another “Blake” novel.  This is my kind of detective: “They talked for nearly an hour more, until the winter evening was darkening into night and the image of buttered toast loomed large in the mind” (Ch. VI).  He has his priorities straight.

César Aira, Shantytown (2001).  Another one of these, an Aira novel.

An adventure and a play:

Valerian Albanov, In the Land of White Death (1917).  An Arctic adventure, a trek across the ice to from a doomed ship to safety, notable especially because it is Russian.  Albanov’s only map, his great guide, was a copy of Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North (1897); I recommend reading Nansen first.

Mark Rylance, I Am Shakespeare (2007).  A play, brilliant, hilarious.  A “who wrote Shakespeare” nut accidentally summons the candidates, including Francis Bacon and Mary Sidney and, you know, Shakespeare (the actor) to his internet show.  Rylance does a terrific job undermining his premise,  but as much as I enjoyed the play and would love to see it performed, I loathe the entire subject.  I’m just sick of it.  But if you’re going to ask these tedious questions, I Am Shakespeare is the way to do it.

All right, that was April.

My April in Paris - Radiguet, Cendrars, and Janet Flanner - plus James Agee, who I forgot yesterday

I forgot a book yesterday, an odd bird.

James Agee, Permit Me Voyage (1934).  A few good lyric poems.  A weird prose dedication/manifesto.  Some perfect imitations of 17th century forms.  A lot of this book felt like the portfolio of a brilliant undergraduate. I suppose that’s what it is.  The sonnet sequence in particular is full of beauties.  A tribute to Hart Crane ends the book and gives it a title.

Agee was the Hot Young Poet for a couple of years because of this book; a perverse cuss, he immediately abandoned poetry for journalism.  Perfectly consistent with his strange career.  The only other book of his I’ve actually read is a collection of his movie reviews.

***

What did I read in French in April?

Henri Bosco’s novel Malicroix (1948) I covered earlier.

Blaise Cendrars, Vol à voile (Glide, maybe or Gliding, 1932), a short autobiographical prose piece about the time Frédéric-Louis Sauser ran away from his boring bourgeois Swiss home and especially his fat, sad father to begin his life of adventure and eventually literature.  It is probably mostly invented, fiction, which is fine with me.  The telling is enjoyably scrambled, with the story beginning on the Trans-Siberian railroad, where a Jewish merchant is telling Cendrars all about the functioning of the tea caravans.  Then back to Switzerland.  The last episode, is about Sauser / Cendrars applying for a job in a Munich piano store.  I don’t know how any of this really fits together.

Cendrars’s French is quite difficult.

***

Raymond Radiguet, Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel (The Ball of the Count of Orgel, 1924).  Another child star.  He wrote Le Diable au Corps (Devil in the Flesh, 1923) when he was seventeen.  It is about a teenage sociopath’s sexual affair with the young woman, barely older, whose husband is away at the front.  Even a teenage prodigy only has so much autobiographical novelistic material, so this next novel is an elaborate pastiche of classic triangle novels like The Princess of Cleves (1678) and Dangerous Liaisons (1782), updated to contemporary Paris.  I felt it should have been more fun than it was, more fizzy, more like Ronald Firbank.  One character, for example, is a Persian prince “with the largest car in the world” (“la plus grosse voiture du monde,” p. 38 in the original edition).  But there was only a little bit of that kind of jolly nonsense.

Radiguet, who died at age 20, spent his last year, whirlwinding literary Paris as Jean Cocteau’s boyfriend.  I will bet that would have made for a good novel.

Radiguet’s French is not so hard.

***

Joseph Kessel, Les Jours de l’aventure: Reportages, 1930-1936 (The Days of Adventure).  Journalism.  I want to save this one for its own post, when I finish the last adventure, The Snipers of Barcelona.

***

Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939.  Not in French, merely about.  Flanner was inventing her role as the New Yorker’s Paris dispatcher, and she becomes better at it – she becomes a better writer – as she figures out what she is doing.  The idea is to tell New Yorker readers what is happening in Paris, in politics and the arts and the crime report.  She becomes expert at sharp, short biographical profiles, often obituaries or some kind of anniversary piece, or covering a new celebrity, like Georges Simenon in 1931:

He is of Breton Dutch stock, is handsome, can write an excellent book in four days (one was started in a glass cage, for publicity’s sake), lives on a yacht in canals, and has used sixteen pseudonyms, of which Simenon (the signature of the latest dozen of his books) will probably become permanent. (77)

A writer could learn something from a sentence like that.  Flanner is never present in her pieces.  She is not like her successor.  No Gopnikizing.

Near the end of the book, Flanner’s job shifts.  Her columns often bear the ironic label “Peace in Our Time,” and she shifts to a different kind of journalism, until it becomes “War in Our Time,” and the book ends.

Random 1930s poetry in English - My wordy wounds are printed with your hair - Lawrence, Thomas, Wheelwright, Eberhart, Yeats

English-language poetry I read in April.

I’ve read a lot of D. H. Lawrence over the last few years, including all of his short fiction, all of his poems, and a few other books.  I have thought about some kind of Lawrence essay, since even at his worst he gives me a lot to think about and is worth reading.

Except for the books I read in April, Mores Pansies and Last Poems, both from 1932, a couple of years after Lawrence’s death.

Lawrence had created an unusual loose-lined form in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), a collection of poems that were full of his personality.  A perverse cuss, he then abandoned poetry for five years – in his life, an era – only returning to it in Pansies (1929) to, well, to complain.  To rant, whine, moan in doggerel, squibs, aphorisms with line breaks.  The second collection was titled Nettles (1930), which is about right.  Lawrence was sick and angry, and rightfully angry.  England had treated him badly, again and again.  But these are “books” of “poems” to be read, mostly, for biographical reasons.

The scraps in Last Poems show that Lawrence was also messing around with poetry.  It is a grim book.  He is looking directly at his own death.  This book is worth reading, or worth mining for a theoretical Selected Poems:

from The Ship of Death

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.

The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.

***

Dylan Thomas, 18 Poems (1934), Thomas’s first little pamphlet or chapbook or whatever it is.  Thomas was criticized for his sonorous gibberish:

from If I were tickled by the rub of love

If I were tickled by the rub of love,
A rooking girl who stole me from her side,
Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,
If the red tickle as the cattle calve
Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,
I would not fear the apple nor the flood
Nor the bad blood of spring.

This poem has seven stanzas and is entirely based on slant rhymes – string / spring is an exception – so it is a bit of a virtuoso piece, and of course it is not really gibberish, although like many of Thomas’s early poems it must sound like it when declaimed in the appropriate pub setting.  The apple and flood are pretty big clues.  The poet is being shaped from Eve’s rub, I mean rib, or perhaps has merely been born like everyone else.  Running through 18 Poems is what may even amount to an idea about the biology of life and death and man as a creature of nature, smart stuff given that many of the poems were written by a teenager.

Still, they must be terrific fun at poetry karaoke night.  “My wordy wounds are printed with your hair” and so on.  Even though the principles are different, I thought about E. E. Cummings – “Those aren’t poems – he’s just screwing around with his typewriter!”  Yeah, sometimes.

***

John Wheelwright, Rock and Shell (1933).  A true Boston patrician turned Modernist poet.  Published three little books then was killed by a drunk driver, age 43.  This one has a superb, bitter tribute, if that is the right word, to Hart Crane.  A subject for future research.

***

Richard Eberhart, Collected Poems, the first ninety pages or so.  When I got to the war poems I figured I was in the 1940s.  Eberhart is a curious creature, a death-soaked American optimist.  Positive and light-hearted, and his signature poem is about the rotting corpse of a groundhog.  “The Groundhog,” 1934.  A superb poem.  Another subject for future research, meaning reading.

***

William Butler Yeats, New Poems (1938) and the poems from Last Poems and Two Plays (1939).  A great end to a great life.

           Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Neruda establishes indefinitely sad clauses and Salinas lives in pronouns - some 1930s international surrealism

I’m going to try to grind through everything I read in April.  I have never thought I had to write about everything I read.  It is a valued luxury to have nothing to say, although I could just say that.  If I am lucky I will kill off some half-baked posts I feel I should write but never will.  Some of this will be a little more doughy in the middle than usual.  And it will be many posts, obviously, not one giant one.

Beginning in the 1920s and into the 1930s. I detect a trend I call “international surrealism,” by which I mean many poets, all over the world, not just those associated with French Surrealism, are experimenting with some combination of dream-like imagery, radical gaps or jumps between images, and non-referential obscurity, the latter meaning as opposed to the kind of difficult historical or literary references I associate with Pound and Eliot, a separate trend.

Complex, disconnected images with private meanings or with the logic of the meaning deliberately obscured – I do not understand a lot of the poems I have been reading.  That is what I am saying.  That is all right.  I am surveying the field.

A good example is the first part of Pablo Neruda’s Residence on Earth (1933), poems written when he was in the diplomatic service in Asia, not that I could have guessed that from the poems.  Let’s look at a fragment chosen almost at random:

from Dream Horse

Unnecessary, seeing myself in mirrors,
with a fondness for weeks, biographers, papers,
I tear from my heart the captain of hell,
I establish clauses indefinitely sad.  (tr. Donald Walsh)

I love that last line, especially, but as Neruda piles on the phrases – “superstitious carpets of the rainbow,” “the wasted honey of respect,” “a lightningstroke of persistent splendor” – I lose the thread, if there is one, and what if there is not?

One good way to learn to read a poet like Neruda is to read more Neruda, and Residence on Earth has three more parts (1935, 1937, 1947), so we will see how that goes.

A big part of my difficulty with international surrealism is my preference for the material, for things.  This poetry is often pretty abstract.  For example:  My Voice Because of You by Pedro Salinas (1933, tr. Willis Barnstone) which is a book-length poetic sequence about a love affair, so in a sense we have two characters, the poet and his beloved, and in a sense there (probably?) is a narrative as the affair unfolds, but Salinas is in search of essences:

from Poem 13

To live, I don’t want
islands, palaces, towers.
What steeper joy
than living in pronouns!

Just “I” and “you.”  The nouns are often presented plainly, but spin into strange conceits, like in Poem 19, where is all about, and against, math:

Let ciphers burst
and foul the calculation
of time and kisses.

Direct and intense, but also distant and misty if my concentration is not up for it.

The poems of Vicente Aleixandre would fit well here, too, but I read him in May.

At this rate – no, tomorrow I will blast through the British and American poets I fail to understand.

Sylvain Tesson's six months in a cabin on shore of Lake Baikal - I take eighteen bottles: three per month.

Since I was promised a book about solitude in Bosco’s Malicroix and did not really get one, I thought I would mention a real one that I read last year, Sylvain Tesson’s In the Forests of Siberia (Dans les forêts de Sibérie, 2011).  The book exists in English under the embarrassing title The Consolations of the Forest, I assume to attract some of the readers of that recent bestseller about trees.  The German one?  Am I imagining that?  “Bestseller about trees” does not sound plausible.

Tesson is France’s most prestigious travel writer, and France has an audience that takes its travel writers, living and dead, seriously.  He has developed a special interest in Russia, visiting the country in many books.  By chance, earlier today Kaggsy wrote about another of his Russian books, Berezina (2015), in which he recreates Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow on a Soviet motorcycle.

In Forests, Tesson sits still for a while.  He spends February through July of 2010 in a cabin (the one to the upper left) on the shore of Lake Baikal, where he can be alone with himself, watch the weather and the lake, climb the nearby mountains, read, and drink.  There is a human being in another cabin a day’s walk to the north, and a couple of people a day’s walk to the south, and that’s it, at least until the lake thaws.  I was surprised how many visitors Tesson starts to get when the lake thaws. By then, though, the neighbors to the south have given Tesson a pair of dogs, and the nature of Tesson’s “solitude” has completely changed.  Forests kinda turns into a dog book.

Still, there is as much solitude, or more, than he wants.  Why is Tesson performing the experiment, other than to write this book?  In the first paragraph, he is shopping in Irkutsk.  “I had already filled six carts with pasta and Tabasco.”  He has trouble with the ketchup, because there are fifteen varieties.  “I choose ‘super hot tapas’ Heinz.  I take eighteen bottles: three per month” (p. 21).  This, he thinks, “fifteen kinds of ketchup,” is reason enough “to leave this world” for a while.

He says he told people in France that he was isolating himself “because I had fallen behind in my reading” (32), and I am including the contents of Tesson’s box of books, to which he gives a lot of thought.  “List of Ideal Reading Composed in Paris with Great Care in Anticipation of a Sojourn of Six Months in the Siberian Forest,” is the label up above.

When one is wary of the poverty of his internal life, it is necessary to carry some good books: one can always fill one’s own void.  The error would be to choose exclusively from difficult books, imagining that life in the woods maintains in you a very high spiritual temperature.  Time passes slowly when one has nothing but Hegel for a snowy afternoon.  (32, all translations are obviously mine)

Some philosophy, some crime novels, of course Robinson Crusoe, of course Walden, lots of American nature writing, remembering that the French for some reason do not produce their own nature writing, although Tesson’s book counts.  I am just assuming that people wandering by Wuthering Expectations are more curious about what Tesson reads than what he sees when the seasons change, although that is awfully interesting, or heaven forbid what he discovers about himself, which will not surprise many readers.  But as usual I prefer a writer’s irony to his sincerity.  Anyways, lists of books, everyone like those.

Malicroix's mythology - white bulls, sun gods, east versus west - this evening, there is nothing in the east but night

It was the East-West motif that helped me solve the Malicroix puzzle.  Our hero Martial comes to the island that is at the center of Malicroix from the East, from Puyloubier.  His home in Puyloubier is Eden, or Arcadia, or Hobbiton, except matriarchal. The penultimate chapter of Malicroix is about Martial’s return to and renunciation of his home; it is filled with fascinating things, but I can’t write about everything in the novel.  Home is extremely familial and social.*  Anyway, it is East.

West is the old home of the Malicroix family is to the West, visible from the island where Martial is trapped.  The history of the family is to the West, in particular the pivotal moment when the patriarch killed the legendary white bull that was threatening his nude niece, Delphine d’or – Golden Delphine.

Martial cannot go West until he completes the first part of his quest.

That bull was hauled across the Rhône and buried under a cross, le Calvaire, which is also visible from the island.  This stuff is so odd that for much of the novel I thought I was misunderstanding the French.  Mais non!

The person who moved the bull – no, I won’t go into all of this.  Malicroix feature a blind ferryman, the sacrifice of a white bull, a revelation on December 25th, a ritual where a character is born or reborn from a rock, and another character who is an avatar of the sun god.  Bosco pulls in elements of Christianity and Greek mythology – Odysseus in the underworld, for example – but all of this stuff has a name, and it’s Mithraism.  Malicroix is a pagan fantasy novel where the hero must complete the ritualistic quest of his ancestor, but for the right reason, for redemption and rebirth rather than revenge.

Readers of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) will know all of this, although will perhaps be disappointed to learn that Bosco beat Gaddis to the full incorporation of Mithraism into fiction.  Bosco has the advantage that Mithraism probably has some genuine relationship to Catharism, and the novel’s setting is more or less in Cathar territory.

The hero, Martial, and the heroine, Anne-Madeleine, lovers who barely speak, directly discuss the East-West motif:

I would leave for the east in a few days.  That space was empty and my heart clenched.

“It’s from there that the night comes,” she told me.  “Let’s go back; I’m cold.”

“But the day also comes from the east, Anne-Madeleine.”

“That’s true; however, this evening, there is nothing in the east but night.” (296-7)

Anne-Madeleine is the avatar of the sun god(dess), and/or of Golden Delphine.  For a while I thought she might turn out to be some kind of ghost.  But no, just an avatar.  Here we see, in the pages before the hero successfully completes the long-deferred Mithraic ritual, the sun / Golden Delphine gives him her approval:

I went to bed and slept for a long time.  When I awoke, the sun was low.  A long finger of light entered through the half-closed shutters.  All gold.  (353)

Readalongists can help me, since I lost track.  Whose room is Martial in at that moment?

The Rhône river runs from north to south – please see the map from a couple of days ago – which with the east-west theme forms another cross, with Martial and his island and his little house in the center.  I have not mentioned but only implied the “four elements” theme.

I will not worry much about what all of this means.  It is enough that it exists.  It would not be quite true to say that there is nothing like it in French literature.  Alain-Fournier and Gérard de Nerval are clear antecedents.  But there is not much like it.

*  This chapter features the uncle who dreams all day, and then at night dreams that he dreams.  For a moment Bosco was writing a Lewis Carroll novel.  P. 329 in the French edition; I am not making this up.  Amazing things in this chapter.

but her true name, she hides it still - Malicroix's tricky narrator - "Breathe, sir, the exhalations of the sauce!"

I need to pin down the narrator of Malicroix first.  He is a first-person narrator in 1948, so I can assume in advance that he is unreliable, the question being exactly how.  He blames the fever that knocks him out halfway through the novel for his unreliability:

I have tried, as faithfully as I could, to rediscover and recompose my memories.  But a memory burnt by the powers of the fever does not offer a precise guarantee of the past.  Reason will not know how to pull the clear pictures, the legitimate visions.  My imagination, without my knowledge, to fill in the fatal gaps, has had to haul in some invented colors and shadows.  (224-5, tr., as always, mine)

Fitting the theme of silence in the novel, Martial frequently does not state information directly related to the story he is supposedly trying to tell, even when he knows the truth, or at least has an opinion.  He is writing in some kind of “present,” for example, and knows how the story ends.  He could tell me at any point, but does not.

He knows what happens after the story ends.  I know I had trouble catching the moments when Martial switched to the present tense, or to something like it as in the above passage.  With my French, it is an accomplishment if I get the verb right, much less the tense.  If I were to read the novel again, I would keep track of the tense shifts.

For example, during Martial’s fever, a new character appears, a nameless young woman who cares for him.  It takes a while – forty pages – for her to reveal her name:

Later, she told me her name, what she called her “earth name”; but her true name, she hides it still.

Quite a lot of “after-story” is contained in that last clause.  I wonder how much more I missed.

Anne-Madeleine’s refusal to reveal her true name returns me to the theme of silence in all its varieties, its “five songs,” whatever that means.  The true name is the magic name, the one that contains power.  Martial is so often silent or, at his noisiest, indirect, because saying the thing itself somehow breaks the spell.  Thus it takes Martial three pages to tell me that a sheep is, in fact, a sheep.  There is not so much magic in a plain old sheep.

Often he allows others to do the talking.  Martial is on the island because his great-uncle Malicroix has left it to him in his will, given magic spell-like conditions.  The lawyer Dromiols visits the island early in the book and does nothing but talk for fifty pages, filling in the entire back story of the novel and revealing that he is possibly Malicroix’s illegitimate son, and thus feels disinherited.  He is the novel’s villain, and his fatal weakness is that he talks.  It helps the reader, though.

I am wrong, Dromiols does more than talk.  While talking, he eats the most magnificent savory pie I ever hope to encounter in French literature.  Woodcock, plover, grouse, venison, rabbit, mushrooms: “Breathe, sir, the exhalations of the sauce!...  Breathe! Breathe!” (73).  Dromiols is trying to undermine Martial’s mysticism with his delicious materialism.

I don’t know why I promised yesterday to write about the mythology of Malicroix.  The narratology took longer than I expected, and then I got distracted by the pie.  Tomorrow for the mythology.  My point here is that the narrator is a mystic,  by temperament but also as a result of the events of the novel.  It is the mystic, post-novel, who is narrating the novel so the entire substance of the thing is mystical and mythical and esoteric.  Don’t tell the story directly.  The meaning of the story, of the world, is in the gaps, the silence.  The narrator, and the author, somehow have to use words to describe the gaps.

Henri Bosco's mystical Malicroix - the five other songs of silence

A translation of Henri Bosco’s mystical swamp-quest novel Malicroix (1948) recently appeared, translated by Joyce Zonanna, who fell in love with the novel when she was eighteen and has been carrying around her translation for decades.  Dorian Stuber suggested a readalong.  A number of people have been reading along.

All of the many readers of Malicroix have been building the above map in their heads, if they did not happen to come across it earlier.  It is based on Bosco’s own map of his novel.*  The scale is not to be taken entirely seriously.

I was delighted to find the map after I had finished the novel, since I read the book in French and heaven knows what errors that has made in my understanding of it.  But that map was the map I had constructed, element by element, which was reassuring.  I would make the entire west channel of the river more narrow – shift the entire island west a little.

The narrator and protagonist, young Martial Mégremut, spends most of the novel in the one main room of the little house right in the center of the map, in the center of the island in the Rhône.  For long stretches he does as close to nothing as is novelistically possible.  He sits in an armchair, stares into the fire, eats meals prepared by a servant invariably described as “taciturn,” although there is really only one character in the book who talks much, and goes to bed.  Sometimes he is joined at the hearth by an outstanding Briard shepherd dog.  It has become a cliché in contemporary literature to drop in “A dog barked in the distance” or something like it as color, I guess, but in this novel the line is meaningful.

Up to the middle of Malicroix, the novel could be described as “plotless.”

There is a major episode, for example, in which the servant, who is also a shepherd, brings a mysterious beast to the island.  It smells like wool, it has horns, it bleats – what could it be?

Near him, Bréquillet [a Briard shepherd dog], sitting in the grass, contemplated the scene and lifted his sensitive snout towards the moon.  The moon enchanted the clearing, Bréquillet, Balandran [the servant], the beast.  When a breeze touched them, the acid odor of wool crossed the woods. (168, tr. mine, don’t blame Zonanna for my clunks)

Did you guess that the beast is a sheep?  It is, I learn two pages later!  A ram.  This is the art of symbolic anti-climax.  “The next day winter came” (170).  Brought by the ram, in some sense.

Why does Martial spend months on this island with little human contact or other activity?  Some nonsense about a will.  He’ll inherit the island, and a flock of sheep, if he can stay on it for three months.  Psychologically, the interest is that he never quite decides to stay.  Sometimes the weather stops him, and at one point he is ill for quite a while, but even when he has the choice he prefers to let his unconscious mind do the work.  He is not passive, exactly.  He is a mystic.

Martial spends Christmas wandering around the island in blizzard-induced trance, falling deeply into the silence of the snow.  This is what he means by silence; this is what I mean by mysticism:

And wave [of solitude] succeeded wave, solitude succeeded solitude.  Sometimes, as if several chords had composed the inaudible song from it, a silence lifted itself from the silence, a silence more gentle, or more serious, or more pure.  And when the serious silence slid under the pure, the songs superposed from the secret waves called from the great chords the five other songs of silence, and all the snowflakes became stars… (178-9, ellipses in original)

My impression is that readers have been enjoying reading about solitude, watching the fire, and the weather, the wind and rain that keeps Martial from even going for a walk.  This is certainly part of the novel.  But the mysticism is central to what I take the novel to be, as is the quest story, which I am not seeing anybody mention.  Zonanna, in the article I linked above, describes her early reading of the novel: “Having grown up speaking French, I was able to make my way through it–but much of the novel, with its long poetic passages and mysteriously mythic plot–eluded me.”

The mythic plot was exactly what I was looking for, as I was working through the basic “What is this book?” question.  Tomorrow, I will push on to the magical white bull, the sun goddess, the scheming illegitimate son.  East versus West.  Real names versus earth names.  Malicroix is, in a sense, a strange, strange novel, a little bit crackpot.

Page references are to the original NRF edition.

* The map is from Geneviève Lévesque's Une écriture à l'oeuvre dans "Malicroix" d'Henri Bosco, p. 542, her 2010 PhD thesis, available here as a PDF.