Rock New Book Club

'2006' is a Slightly More Plausible Name for a Year than '2007'

2007-01-06T02:59:00.000-05:00

Mostly I'm busy with my 40-times-a day email checks, but in the wake of The Great Laptop Theft, I got deeper into print. This meant a burst in output--perhaps not last year's one book/week average, but up there.

My top 10 lists for my books of 2006 are forthcoming, but inspired by this post, I'd like to roll out something different: the top 10 books I didn't read.

10. Dave Eggers - What is the What
I've been a committed anti-anti-Eggersard since this DIARY OF THE INTELLECTUAL SITUATION came out, but I've long since decided that this doesn't bind me to actually reading his books, only defending them in the abstract. This got a lot harder to do when Dave went ahead and wrote an fauxtobiography of a Sudanese Lost Boy, but I'm still ready to throw down. Just not throw down $25.

9. The Wilco Book
Ever since that moment two years ago when I confused "that new Rilke book" for "that new Wilco book," I've been looking forward to reading the two back-to-back and making the ultimate comparison between Jeff Tweedy and Rainer Maria.

8. Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
I was recently informed that I have to wait until the summer--"when you can dangle a beer in your hand and fully enjoy dick jokes"--to get on this.

7. Don Delillo - Underworld
I think reading the first 150 pages of this actually qualified me for a doctorate, so I see no reason to pursue a further education.

6. Claire Messud - The Emperor's Children
Thankfully, my mother, who strenuously detected the similarities between my biography and that of the protagonist of Prep ('and before she went to Brown, she grew up in Indiana!') hasn't read this one yet. But when I inevitably move to Brooklyn...

5. Hannah Arendt - The Origins of Totalitarianism
200 or so pages in, I realized that 1890s anti-semitism--yes, even the Dreyfus Affair--was less relevant than I'd anticipated.

4. William T. Vollmann - Rising Up and Rising Down
But what could be more relevant than violence? This 3,300-page study of it should make a quick read some lazy Sunday afternoon. Vollmann admits that he allowed a one-volume summary to be printed "for the money," which somehow makes me want to read it very badly.

3. Anything by Naguib Mahfouz other than Midaq Alley
Mahfouz's prose reads like it died in the 19th Century, anyways (meant as both a compliment and a disappointment).

2. Most everything from the 19th Century
Does this sound ignorant?

1. Nir Rosen - In the Belly of the Green Bird
Out of all the Really Well-Researched and Heartbreakingly Sobering War Books, I think this one has the potential to be the best read, based on Rosen's articles. The Indianapols-Marion County Library is about to oblige.

The 48 Laws of Power

2007-01-03T18:27:00.000-05:00

Sometime after coming to college, reading became less of a pleasure than a regime imposed for self improvement, like running or writing thank you notes. Anxiety, ambition, and an unrelenting sense of my own mortality made it impossible to justify curling up with Calvin and Hobbes or Bill Bryson, like in the good old days. Books Worth Reading had to be endured, not enjoyed.

This winter break has been good for dissolving a little of that punishingly pretentious attitude. Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild" opened the the season, devouring all four hours of the train ride from Providence to 30th Street Station, Philadelphia. Two collections of graphic novels followed. Now, the downward slide, if you would call it that, is unstoppable. While my five volume edition of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" from last Christmas lies untouched on the shelf, my floor is covered with *gasp* non-fiction. My latest purchase is the worst, or decadently best, of the bunch: Robert Greene's "48 Laws of Power."

The irony, of course, is that anyone with the time and temperament to lust after a 400 page synthesis of the laws of power drawn from history and classical sources, seems an unlikely candidate for conquering Asia, bull-riding the stock market, or orchestrating a dictatorship. But it makes a gripping read!

Thanks to Matt for making this whole blog possible.

The Archives

2007-01-02T20:37:00.000-05:00

Rock New Book Club grows out of the efforts of the people who used to write for the Brown Review. Their writing was featured at BrownReview.com, which will soon stop existing. That site was designed by Cali Pfaff, and everything looked a lot prettier over there.

Here are the archives.

Fiction
Benjamin Carlson -- Natasya Filippova Barashkova

Essays and Reviews
Adam Delehanty -- Untitled
Claire Harlan-Orsi -- Take a Breath, But We Are Not Stopping Here
Claire Harlan-Orsi -- This is Not Your Mother's Museum
Chris Hu -- Useless, Brave, Long-Legged
Josh Lerner -- Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man
Matt Sledge -- The Catalan Cadence

Brown Review: Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova

2007-01-02T20:15:00.000-05:00

by Benjamin Carlson

Foster Scattergood graduated from Brown in 1951. An anthropologist, Scattergood devoted his life to the study of Finland’s Lappish folklore and customs. His work was grounded in the notion that texts are inherently derivative, drawing from a “well of common inspiration” rooted in “the insurmountable tension between man’s longing to be both God and subject, between these shackled impulses to be both master and slave.” In the 1980s he began a study of the Western canon, leading to further refinement of this theory. Eventually he came to believe that art was best described as “an endless stream of transformations flowing from static headwaters—that inexhaustible, inert grief of which we are the active substance.”

Scattergood’s ideas encountered a great deal of resistance and controversy in his lifetime. In 1984, he waged a campaign against “that most deplorable of tyrannical fictions, the fallacy of authorial ownership,” culminating in a series of experiments in which he submitted to publishers several famous novels as his own, changing only the names of places and central characters. Subsequent accusations of plagiarism ruined his name as a scholar and, upon orders at his death from pancreatic cancer in 1995, the Scattergood estate burned the unpublished manuscripts.

All that we have been able to recover of Foster Scattergood’s literary legacy is an early fragment he sent to a journalist for publicity. Numerous gaps in the manuscript attest to its unfinished state; nevertheless it offers a priceless glimpse of what must have been his most ambitious novel, a complete rendering of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Christian parable, The Idiot. In the interest of literary history, we offer this story to the reader as an intriguing artifact of an endlessly fascinating and infuriating, though strangely compelling mind.

--Benjamin Carlson, ed.

Natasya Filippovna Barashkova

by Foster P. Scattergood

Natalie Alexandra Dexter, like most haughty types, was not born well but was led with great pains and the most elaborate of conspiracies to believe she was, or at least enough to behave that way. Indeed, all the evidence of her surroundings—the high stone gates, parklike lawns, manicured hedges—lent weight to the story of her dignified origins. But if her mother Melanie had ever permitted her to know the truth, Natalie would have realized that the moment of her birth was occasioned not by a willful union but by the brutal indifference of a father who, though a doctor, considered his lover too insignificant to merit medical precautions and too powerless to otherwise resist; he cared so little for the possibility that Melanie could become pregnant, in fact, that Dr. Jonathan Dryer did not know of the child until the day he delivered it, and after finishing he did not linger long enough even to see the color return to Melanie’s face, let alone to learn the baby’s name.

Of course, Melanie never complained. She would not have known what to say in the first place, for the words had always belonged to Dr. Dryer, and second of all it did not even matter, for Melanie had got exactly what she wanted from the affair. Contrary to the frequent assertions of Dr. Dryer, Melanie was not an idiot, and she had observed the seasonal swelling of unmarried bellies around the estate and understood that the only condition Dr. Dryer placed on siring was a pretense of discretion and secrecy. In the fifteen years since the doctor had begun hiring single, abandoned women to tend the apple orchards of his one-hundred-acre North Carolina demesne, a herd of whelps bearing Dryer’s same hard smile and hooked nose had sprung up as fast as the trees, an invisible army in testimony to their studly chief.

Yet in spite of their sullied birthmarks, none of them—neither the children nor the mothers of Russet Hill—walked with the slightest hitch of shame or regret. Each woman down to the last long-limbed apple picker cherished her child as if it had been divinely granted and born in no less glorious circumstances than the lord’s own virgin birth. Loved, cared for, and granted a dram of desultory affection, these women came to see the ex-Yankee doctor as their savior—“For if God needed a doctor,” they told their children, “Dr. Jonathan’d be the only one who could tend him.” Outside the creeper-covered walls of the plantation, the world offered them nothing as fallen women. Inside they were given more than any of them could ask for—children from beyond the pale of normal society. Though Dr. Dryer refused to acknowledge any of the offspring as his own and offered nothing beyond annual bonuses that he insisted were rewards for hard work even during post-natal convalescence, in his workers’ eyes this arrangement was superior to any marriage: “Fine blood, fine pay, no man.” Unlike their properly genteel cousins, Dryer’s plantation brats had to deal with none of the social burdens incumbent upon their father’s rank.

The fact was, Dr. Dryer hated the obligation to behave well, even under pressing circumstances. Like most Southern blue-bloods of his generation, Dr. Dryer aspired to all the privileges but none of the manners of Yankee gentility, priding himself on churlish tastes and a mind he described as “coarser than a boar’s back.” He made no attempts at disguising this fact around his all-female staff. In this way, he made them his sole confidants, offering his emotional insecurities as collateral for their economic dependence.

However, even in the presence of the most disgraceful, scheming fruit peddler from town, Dryer’s demeanor immediately went rigid, like a fork encountering a foot in the field. Each fall, the pickers and peelers and washerwomen amusedly observed their generous but profoundly unrefined overseer submit to the humiliating niceties demanded by his reputation: to maintain an air of dignity, to reapply his suspenders, to wax the bristly blackness of his mustache, to nod gravely even at the most degrading fatuities and to reply above their capless, sunburned heads in a register suited to a man of his station—namely, that of the wistfully obsolete aristocrat.

In private, however, Dr. Dryer did not grant his affection so politely and submissively, and in fact maintained a strict hierarchy of favored partners. His preferences would wax and wane, drifting every five weeks or so from the lean rough-handed pickers who constantly kept their eyes averted out of habit from working in the sun to the chatty, soft-sided birds who clustered in the basement for peeling. Only rarely, when his insatiable tastes had been exhausted and the allure of novelty overpowered his loyalty to habit, did Dr. Dryer turn to the house staff.

Melanie belonged to this category of employees who, on the totem pole of plantation workers, lay disgracefully at the bottom—a situation that to Melanie seemed as ridiculous as “a bunch of blind people laughing at the ones who can’t see colors.” Yet, in the closed world of Russet Hill, even the smallest differences in background amounted to tremendous iniquity. Unlike the older, haughtier field hands who had led acceptably normal lives before losing their husbands and crossing that invisible line into damnation, the house staff was composed of women who had flirted with prurience their whole lives: Lucy, the cook, was famous to traveling businessman as the girl with the green shoes and parasol on the railroad platform ; Meredith, the house cleaner, still painted her eyebrows to reflect the color and shape of her mood; Melanie, the washer, had gripped Dr. Dryer’s arm on a street corner to offer herself in exchange for a meal and a place to rest her head the night. The others had come straight out of county holding cells, since by then most of the widows in Edgeville already lived on the workers’ corner of Russet Hill. Even Dr. Dryer, who prided himself on being a progressive boor, secretly despised them. He kept them in the house only because he considered such labor beneath any woman who retained even a shred of dignity in her body.

With this requisite, though crude, social ordering in place, Dr. Dryer’s fiefdom ran smoothly and undisturbed for ten years, leading him to believe that this arrangement had served everyone’s interests admirably well. He took a great deal of satisfaction from the fact that he had only stood in front of the county judge twice and only once as a defendant, to settle a boundary dispute with a scurrilous and quarrelsome neighbor. As it would any vain man, this apparent state of impunity fueled his arrogance, leading him to become brazen. With each new set of recruits, Dr. Dryer shortened the period of courtship, paying fewer visits to them in the fields and ceasing to offer the token compliments that had made the more brutish women so pliant. By the time he turned to the Dixon sisters—who had both married the same man and been abandoned by him three months later—the doctor announced his desires with a vulgar gesture and expected immediate satisfaction. Horrified, the sisters flew to town throwing accusations of licentiousness, bigamy, incest, and all manner of acts too lurid to be uttered before God. If not for the eminence of his name and the already dubious reputation of the Dixons in town, Jonathan Dryer would surely have been arrested, if not hanged. From then on Dr. Dryer would exercise more caution in initiating a tryst.

For that reason, it was very long before Melanie even realized that she had been under close observation. Indeed, the possibility that she had aroused the great, hard-mannered doctor’s attention did not even dawn on her until Melanie returned to her cottage to find a sullen messenger waiting for her. Laundry toppling over her wrists, Melanie recognized the pucker-mouthed delivery woman from the infrequent visits she made to the basement of the main house, when Melanie would bustle in quickly to collect the peelers’ aprons at the end of the month for an outdoor rinsing with the house linens. She had only seen her peripherally and could not remember much except for the impression that this austere woman held some status among the other workers. As usual, Melanie’s instincts were correct, for the insolent messenger standing before her had once been Dr. Dryer’s favorite pet, a woman of such generous proportions and appetites that Dr. Dryer was fond of murmuring while fondling her, “Making love to you is like having three women at once.”

Clearly hoping to leave as quickly as possible, the woman rose from under the shadowy eaves of the small house and brusquely handed Melanie the note. Melanie recognized the doctor’s abysmal scrawl and did not have to scan more than the first line to grasp the message: “Mel—please come for appointment tomorrow…” She had hung enough sweat-stained laundry to know what meetings in the doctor’s office entailed. Hiding a smile, she admired the doctor’s directness, knowing quite well the clumsy roundabouts sensitive men would take to advertise their desires in a way they believed was kinder and more appealing to women’s sensibilities. Melanie made up her mind in a moment, steeled with the grim resolution of chronic desperation and hopelessness, and began to prepare mentally for her rapidly transforming fate. Nodding at the messenger, she whispered “Yes. I will see him tomorrow.”

The next day, a particularly dreary and wet Tuesday, Melanie met Dr. Dryer in the soot-stained stairwell leading from the kitchen to the study. And, in the manner of such sexual initiations, Melanie entered into a private conspiracy of mutual exploitation in which Dr. Dryer vented his extravagant lust on Melanie in exchange for the progeny, security, and advancement denied her by the outside world. Melanie’s womb gave temporary harbor to his cravings, while his wealth (amassed from the sale of a mercury-based polio cure) secured the vicarious future of her purple, blinking baby.

All Natalie knew of her father was what she had gleaned from passing remarks dropped, with almost theatrical gravity, by Melanie. By the time she was eight Natalie could recite the story by heart: “Daddy was a soldier, he fought to protect the farmers. The rich President and his jealous coward friends got mad so they killed him.” In actuality, the full history was far more elaborate, for Melanie had rehearsed it every week with Lucy up until she had memorized it to perfection. Like Lucy and all the older mothers before her, Melanie had been left the task of explaining the absence of a father to her child—she could hardly forget the last words Dr. Dryer had spat at her before storming out of the makeshift delivery room: “Mention my name, and I send you back to the gutter.” They were hardly something to cherish, but she held on to his parting words as fondly as if they were the last souvenirs of an explosive affair that would always be remembered with great tenderness.

Melanie always prided herself on a rather uncreative pragmatism; therefore she felt no shame in opting for one of the more popular paternal legends circulating at Russet Hill. The stock myth of the idealistic Southern soldier-father held a great deal of appeal particularly among the younger mothers, who imagined him as a brawny, righteous sort of angel Gabriel. For the sake of plausibility, each women had to compose her own variation on this theme and only one child each spring was permitted to hear it, according to the unspoken bylaws of female society. Lucky from the time she was born, Natalie was chosen to receive the Civil War story when she entered the world one dew-soaked April morning. As a member of this elite group, Natalie came to believe she was the specially anointed paragon of a colony of exceptional veterans’ orphans.

As a beautiful child, of course, a boost of pride was the last thing Natalie needed. Her blond swell of curls, sharp cheekbones, geometric buttocks and livid green stare (“the eyes of a hussy,” her mother often thought) were an endowment already far beyond anything Melanie had sought for her. In fact, Natalie was exceptional in almost every way. Meredith, who gave the girl French lessons whenever Melanie took her place in house cleaning, recognized Natalie’s keen, aggressive intelligence, and if not for the girl’s willingness to listen to gossip Meredith would have upbraided her for insolence. “Look at you, smiling like you’re hungry for more!” she would marvel at the end of the afternoon sessions. “Now, don’t be greedy. It makes even a pretty face like yours look ugly.” Later in life, when surrounded by oil scions and suitors of the best breeding, Natalie would take a perverse pride in the shabbiness of her early education.

Enchanted by the persuasive and supernatural egotism of her daughter, Melanie made herself a martyr to the cause of shielding Natalie from the work requirements placed on all heads at Russet Hill. She took on double shifts at washing and devoted whatever spare time remained to supplying the girl with an education befitting her specious rank—whether by substituting for Melanie or doing the teaching herself. As a result, when she was not being tutored Natalie spent most of her days alone. The other children envied her as much as they admired her, and the only ones who ever paid visits to Melanie’s cottage were the rough little picker boys who leaned through the door frame leeringly, grimy tongues whistling at her to come and play. Natalie thus grew to see boys her age as crude, primitive things, and in the ballets she assembled on the kitchen table the boys were played by coarse felt goats.

These solitary habits fit in perfectly with Melanie’s dreams for Natalie, which, given her limited and pragmatic imagination, extended no further than finding a rich husband in town who could lift them permanently from disgrace. She encouraged Natalie’s isolation with little presents—hand-woven angels, knights, animals—and planted dreams of the outside world in her daughter’s head. She called the doctor a “miserly grouch” to cut short any tendrils of affection for the paternal figure, who in middle age had become reclusive and refused to see all but the select handful of dedicated women who served as his mouthpieces, messengers, and intimate companions. Melanie instructed Natalie to be polite nevertheless: “If he ever passes by,” she would tell her, “give a curtsy, but don’t say a word.” Of course, this only stoked Natalie’s fascination, and in the manner of those who realize their sexual powers in a suffocating environment, she was eager to test her full range on the only thing that could pose a potential challenge—that which was forbidden. Thus by all outward appearances, Natalie obeyed Melanie’s injunction, but in her heart, out of her possessive mother’s sight, she sheltered private fantasies and nurtured an idealized infatuation for the hoary patriarch.

By the time Natalie celebrated her sixteenth birthday—it had been an unseasonably cold October for North Carolina—Melanie was so weak from the perpetual exhaustion of daily punishments that she caught a serious draft of pneumonia and fell ill. Disregarding Melanie’s feeble protests, Natalie took on the mantle of mother-pamperer with the eagerness of an adolescent seeking to overthrow the tired patterns of childhood. She quickly proved that the boredom of isolation had made her a particularly apt student of domesticity: she boiled the chicken broth, opened the morning curtains, kindled the fire, and read Melanie passages from Luke until she fell asleep again before lunch: “And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” Unfortunately, her lack of experience in plantation grunt work left her incapable of filling in for Melanie at the house. When Melanie was still in bed two weeks later, a courier from the house served them an eviction notice.

Though hurt, Melanie was accustomed to rationalizing life’s injuries and made the best of it. “That doctor saved me the trouble of coming up with an excuse! I wanted to move back into Edgeville anyway,” she told Natalie. “Now’s the time for you to start looking for a husband, and I wouldn’t want you to end up with one of these filthy, buck-toothed field worms.” Packing what few belongings they could truly call their own into one handbag and a stolen apple basket, Natalie and Melanie visited the house one last time to bid farewell to Lucy and Meredith before making the long, grey walk down the carriage path through the molting trees that waved their harried, brittle leaves like salutary handkerchiefs. They met a cab just outside Russet Hill’s stone gates; Melanie had arranged for them to be taken to an apartment near the old Edgeville theater. For all her appearances of impecunity, Melanie had amassed a sizable savings from the unspent child bonuses Dr. Dryer sent to each mother until their eighth birthdays, and emboldened by her beautiful, blossoming offspring Melanie felt no shame about spending it like the patrician widow she pretended to be. Helping her coughing, blanketed mother into the carriage, Natalie felt a surge of excitement—less for the novelty of the transportation (though it was her first time not riding in the back of a wagon) than in anticipation of making the world a laboratory on which to test her fledgling powers. Eyes aflame and hearts brimming, they rattled away from the plantation at dusk.

Melanie died six months later on the first morning of spring, unable to withstand the onslaught of a winter that had been fiercer than any in Natalie’s short memory. Natalie comforted herself with the thought that her simple, practical mother had passed happily, having enjoyed the drama, lights, and clatter of people flocking to the theater across the street for the first time, all from the placid comfort of her quilted bed. She arranged for a quiet burial at the Unitarian church—the only one that would accept an unmarried corpse—and tucked her grief away to private quarters where it would not interfere with her rapidly burgeoning social life. In the last month of Melanie’s fateful convalescence, Natalie’s looks had won her invitations to three debutante balls, and it was no secret that the Hamilton boys and Dougie Richard (from a fourth-generation Carolina family) were prematurely vying for the privilege to be her escorts. Bewildered and electrified by all the attention, Natalie’s evaluation of herself ballooned rapidly as she attempted to reconcile her incredible celebrity with the fact that it came from people she once glorified. As her youthful illusions about the invincibility of wealth and power fell away like discarded fictions, Natalie became bored with the Southern gentry she felt she had vanquished. Drunk with arrogance, she took her old fantasies off the shelf and wondered how far she could trespass over childhood’s boundaries. In a sudden and violent way, half a year after she had renounced everything that he represented, Natalie returned to thoughts of Jonathan Dryer.

Touched again by the luck that would abandon her within the year, Natalie did not have to wait long to find fuel in reality for the tender images fluttering in her agitated mind. Dr. Dryer had made a custom of following the first cart of produce into Edgeville each August, and on one long summer Saturday, when the sky hung like a seething sheet over the brick post office, he made his usual grandiose entrance on the back of a chestnut stallion. He was preceded by a pile of tumbling cabbage heads that knocked and kicked against the sides of the wagon like desperate prisoners on their way to a public execution. As she walked out of the apartment for an errand, Natalie caught sight of Dr. Dryer in the saddle and stopped dead on the side of the road, watching him intently. When he glanced in her direction with the tall, imperious assurance of a dictator, she curtsied elaborately, keeping her eyes trained on his stubble, its salt and pepper color the mark of a graceful and undiminished vitality. “Good afternoon, missie.” The doctor smiled. Removing his hat, he motioned down the street, indicating that Natalie should follow him to Latham’s Drugstore, where he traditionally ended his ostentatious parades. Natalie put on a grin, nodded, and followed.

Their shadows stretched long in the afternoon sun on Main Street, giving them the appearance of theatrical caricatures, or souls made thin from longing. As the doctor tied his horse to the post outside Latham’s store, Natalie finally, in her slow and absolutely deliberate way, caught up with him. Looking up from the work of his hands, he asked: “Now, why would a pretty girl like you be wearing black?”

Natalie shrugged and said, “Well, sir, I guess it’s because I’m all alone.”

Brown Review: This is Not Your Mother's Museum

2007-01-02T20:13:00.000-05:00

by Claire Harlan-Orsi

Never has a title been less revealing of a book's contents. The Museum of Love sounds like someone's failed attempt at romance originality, a tale of innocence, heartbreak, and insinuating glances between the curves of a Duchamp statue at the MOMA. Come to think of it, that might actually be a worthwhile novel. But it is emphatically not The Museum of Love. A museum evokes a sanitized past, one ensconced behind glass, untouchable, somewhat unreal. Steve Weiner's first novel is the antithesis of these evocations. The first word that comes to mind to describe this novel is raw, perhaps a phrase like raw immediacy, something that might have become a critical cliche had this book been widely read, or remembered at all after the small furor of critical acclaim it received upon its publication in 1994. Weiner's novel is the strange and utterly compelling tale of a French Canadian boy named Jean-Michel Verhaeren's quests, both internal and external. Jean-Michel lives with his prison-guard father, former-nun mother, and saint of a brother in a heavily industrial Canadian town on the shores of Lake Superior. The novel follows his wanderings, to reform school after a enlightening act of arson, into the United States, in and out of love (mainly with boys; this book is called, bizarrely for me, a "Kafka-esque coming out novel" by a reviewer on amazon.com), and of course, to museums. In his travels at home and to the United States Jean Michel visits several museums, which may or may not be "real," although no one really cares, or should care, about their veracity. They are the Museums of Negritude, Religion, Love, and Death. Through the structuring mechanism of the museums, as well as interspersed first-person narration from the people Jean meets, Weiner creates a narrative of progression that both invites and frustrates attempts at drawing conclusions. The novel is both a Bildungsroman in the conventional sense and a novel that defies any categorization, particularly stylistically. And raw it is. Weiner takes the concept of a museum and turns it on its head, giving us prose that is graphic, obsessed, emotionally immediate, and most of all, supremely real.

The story seems to acknowledge in places that this reality forms part of the novel's claim to originality. When Jean gets sick during his brief boarding school stint, the school security guard Mr. Harold reads him a passage from a Victorian novel. They have this conversation when Mr. Harold is done reading:

"'What happened?' Mr. Harold asked. 'He came in her mouth,' I said. 'Why didn't it say so?' 'It's literature.'"

In a statement that is completely earnest on Jean's part but tongue in cheek on the part of the author, Jean implies that what people really do doesn't belong in "literature." Weiner plays with this notion of what is literature throughout the novel, giving us moments of lives so strange and grotesque that they belong firmly outside the realm of what used to be known as real literature. Although Jean here is referring to the status of the novel itself, for a novel written in the heyday of postmodernism's popularity with writers Weiner doesn't engage in much meta-commentary. He prefers to let Jean's story and the teenager's crazy narrative voice speak for itself. Somehow this voice manages to encompass the weird in a way that would be deemed magical realism had the novel not been so firmly grounded in the lurid quality of daily life. In many works of magical realism there is a certain separation from the otherworldly events being depicted, a tacit acknowledgment that their presence defies the notion of what life and the novel should be. This distancing device is crucial to magical realism tactics. Weiner, however, has no distance. His miracles come with the morning's cereal; they are honored as an integral part of the fabric of his characters' lives. They may be the doings of inexplicable powers, but these powers are firmly part of the world.

In another way, though, Jean's realm of being is otherworldly, in the sense that his semi-impoverished existence is one that is rarely seen in fiction, certainly never described in this manner. On a social and ethical level, it is the people who have a considerable distance from the working class that need to read this book, if only as a kind of counter to the sappy sentimentalism of the portrayal of the poor in bestselling books like Angela's Ashes. No one I've read has written with this much acuity about Catholic working class lives. I, like everyone else, have a strange museum of a family, a father who as an academic opted not to take the route of his brother and parents: work in a valve factory, mass every evening. Weiner has helped me see look at this, my own familial museum, not just to examine what class means to me but to honor in new ways my family's lives.

Once again, this portrayal of a literarily-marginalized mode of existence involves an engagement with the strange that is ultimately more real than any (too-common) attempt to get at the reality of the so-called "grit" of working class lives. In an evocation of the kind of strangeness you usually associate with an Isabel Allende novel, Jean's brother Ignace, a thoroughly detestable boy who convinces both himself and his mystical mother that he is a saint, foretells his own death by drowning early on in the novel. Jean's mother is visited by several saints during her illness. Weiner never questions the legitimacy of these divine interventions, choosing to portray them as if they are matters of course in his characters' lives, which indeed they are, however much that places them outside the bounds of "literature." Instead of the forced, sanctimonious earnestness that we too often see in novels about the working class, The Museum of Love gives us a heavy dose of fatalism and irony. "Our lives were blind, instinctive, Catholic," Jean says. The characters in Weiner's novel have honed their sense of fatalism through encountering death on a nearly daily basis, a level unimaginable to almost anyone. In this town of lingering snow banks and constant hunger, the accidental, gruesome, often industrially-related deaths of relatives are more common than Sunday mass. Echoing Vonnegut's world-weary "so it goes" epigram, each description of a death in the novel begins with the statement "it was a freak." Jean and his family learn to toughen themselves, almost from birth, against the constant onslaught of death. Their brand of Catholicism is one that encompasses tragedy with an air of resignation, a concept that was lost, among other times, in the debate last year over God's presence in the tsunami crisis. "Le bon Dieu shits on us," Jean's father says after an open truck carrying sewage is blown by a gale across the town. When Jean's mother tries to find a house in their town unaffected by death she is unsuccessful even in Protestant houses, death being as usual the great equalizer in the religious conflicts that plague this area of Canada. An intimate knowledge of death is part of being working-class, Weiner tells us; the morbid, grotesque arena that these characters inhabit is firmly and indelibly outside of the middle-class world.

Weiner started out his career as an animator with the surrealist pioneer group The Brothers Quay. This fascination with film and animation fundamentally informs Weiner's stylistic choices. He is a master of impressionism, of evoking a mood, a scene, a whole social milieu in one image. Monet if Monet were concerned with scaffolds, steel, sewage plants, conveyor belts, apparitions, and death, instead of haystacks and water lilies. Weiner's astute combining of evocations of the everyday and tangible (including the excessively grotesque), along with his snappy dialogue that never fails to engage serve to create scenes that look as if they were dashed off with the swipe of a paint brush but in fact were created far more carefully and intricately. With his animator's touch, Weiner moves from image to image, creating a succession of tiny bombs or flashes, places of extreme emotional impact. The pacing and emotional and intellectual intensity of this novel never let up, except in brief pauses for climaxes or anti-climaxes, usually effected through dialogue, usually imbued with a sense of fatalism or irony, as in this segment on the very first page:

Ed Gien had dug up women from the Lutheran cemetery, brushed them with resin and beeswax, and dressed them in his dead mother's shawls. He made ash trays of their joints and lampshades and upholstery of their skin. Vises held rotted women's limbs in steel ball-and-socket armatures. Hip, breast, hair and thigh twirled over our heads from black fishing wire. 'Woman,' my father whistled. 'Disassembled.'

A brief pause to catch our breaths after "disassembled," at once laughing at the father and feeling ourselves forcibly pulled into wry concordance with his statement, and then we're off again, with a description of the father's appearance ("an ugly man"), and of the food they're eating for lunch that carries us into the second page and into the swirling world of the novel. We're standing on the open back of a speeding truck on a windy day, breathless until we screech to a halt at the end.

Jean is inquisitive, relentlessly seeking and questioning, the true Bildungsroman hero-but what has he become by the end? One thing Jean needs is distance, distance from the oppressive strangeness of his town and family as well as from his own inner fears, and to some extent he attains this after his wanderings. In the course of his journey he has heard the tales of many lives, has heard the stories, which are interspersed within the main narrative here and there, of people whose lives exist on a plane that is not his own. In other words, he has been to many different museums. By the end of the book, when Jean has returned to his dying mother's apartment, he is working on his own museum: the Verhaeren Museum, complete with scrapbooks and paintings of characters major and minor in the life of the family. It is inconceivable that Jean would have been able to handle such a process at the beginning of the novel, enveloped as he was in the all-consuming needs of those in his family and town who dictated his own emotions. Adolescence, Weiner seems to be saying, is in part a process of getting outside yourself, of recognizing an outside world, and seeing yourself in relation to it. In other words, it is the space between the exhibit and the viewer, the struggle to become a part of the audience. Weiner implies that most people in Jean's family and town never make this transition; it is Jean's special fate, as is appropriate to the destiny of the protagonist, to have the ability to observe. As the reader, we can also observe, looking at the Museum that is this novel even as we are carried deeper into it, forming our own impressions of the peculiar work of love that is The Museum of Love.

Brown Review: Take a Breath, But We Are Not Stopping Here

2007-01-02T20:10:00.000-05:00

by Claire Harlan-Orsi

Miranda July’s movie Me and You and Everyone We Know, the toast of the indie film community this past summer, is nourishing to the spirit in a way that I, personally, have not previously noted in any film: the movie contains a title revelation. “Look,” Peter says to his brother Robby, showing him an elaborate computer printout of rows of punctuation marks he’s made, “there’s me, and there’s you, and there’s everyone we know.” This moment felt appropriate to me, not jarringly new in any way, but that’s because I had read it, not watched it, before. July has essentially taken the title revelation, a trope that is usually the property of the novel, and applied it to film. In doing so, she has caught on to the rarely acknowledged potential of these seminal moments to inspire delight in their audiences. The moment in the film, like all title revelations, is a tiny sanctuary washed clean of unwholesome ambiguity, pure literary soul-candy.

When done right, a title revelation can make you weep. From Fortress of Solitude: “For so long I’d thought Abraham’s legacy was mine: to retreat upstairs, unable or unwilling to sing or fly, only to compile and collect, to sculpt statues of my lost friends, life’s real actors, in my Fortress of Solitude. To see the world in a liner note: I am the DJ, I am what I play.” The sad part about quoting these lines is that there is no way they can make you weep, now. Although the authors who use title revelations rely on certain universal evocations these moments bring, at their core title revelations are an intensely personal experience. Most importantly, they are powerfully caught up in the individual reader’s experience of time. You would have had to slog through 500 (the revelation is on page 501) pages of Lethem’s text before you could get the intense emotional response you deserve. And title revelations are the ultimate meritocracy: they only give to those who truly deserve. If you have done the work, have wrung your system through the ups and downs of one writer’s emotional landscape, then, and only then, does the author give you the gift of the title. And it is truly a gift, a moment for you, no strings attached, no analytical head-scratching required. You, the reader, will unconsciously give the writer a little more leeway for cheesiness, perhaps even a tiny opening for a love that resembles the unconditional, when you feel this moment approaching. You relax into it, smile, and breathe calmly once more. It’s all part of the form.

Of course, only certain authors choose to use the revelation. It might be a shame that there are those who don’t, or their lack might be necessary to make the revelations that we do have special. For the purposes of this writing I went through the haphazardly-assembled and tragically incomplete mental library of books I’ve read, remembering those whose title revelations particularly moved me. There turned out to be no rhyme or reason to their selection, although just finding a titular moment, I discovered, was difficult enough. I soon made the obvious realization, going through this mental bookshelf and then checking it against obtained copies of the physical books, that a sure indicator of an interior revelation would be a phrase-title, or a part or whole sentence-title, whatever you want to call it, titles like The Effect of Living Backwards, or The Toughest Indian in the World. I began to catalogue these titles, trying to recall in each the feelings that key epiphany provoked.

It has to be the same for everyone: You know as you start reading the book, in some region of your mind that you don’t call to attention often, that equally deeply embedded in the book you’ve started this phrase will ring out like an incantation. You know it, and some part of you expects it, but some part of you also forgets that you expect it, and this is where the beauty lies. A novel is different from life in that meaning is constructed for you, neatly bound. Yet all the same you start out reading blind. When the title is given to you, when, in Brown Professor Forrest Gander’s words, you are “torn awake,” you realize it has been under your nose the whole time, that unnamable combination of words which is clearly the most namable of all, like a disease to which you desperately want the diagnosis.

A certain indicator that you won’t be given the gift of a title is an all-encompassing one or two words, usually the name of a protagonist or clearly the subject of the novel. Anna Karenina, Invisible Cities, The Brothers Karamazov, Black Boy. In these titles there is no real mystery; you must try for other mysteries within the content. Any one or two word title, though, that is not clearly the subject, whose origins are still uncertain, is fair game. Titles like Twilight, and Thirty-Three Swoons. Basically, in order for there to be a title revelation you have to be very uncertain, from the start, of what the relationship between the title and the text is. Otherwise, the enigmatic crisis that the title revelation must sustain throughout most of the book is lost. I don’t want to make any grand claims for the history of the novel, but the mysterious-phrase-title, and its companion, the title revelation, seem to be a fairly modern innovation. There may be some explanation for this. While earlier titles from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and previous are more concerned with naming the narrative, being separate from it, packaging it, later titles blur the line between cover and pages, between external and internal realities. In this way, the cover of the book is a part of the story itself, as Dave Eggers has so nicely demonstrated for us by starting the narrative of You Shall Know Our Velocity! right on the cover.

Egger’s, although he may break other rules, carefully follows all the narrative conventions of the title revelation. It is striking how set in stone these conventions have become, and how willing authors are to follow them, as if for just this one aspect of their novel they assume their readers will forgive them for sticking close to the rules. This works without fail. Because the moment of title revelation is the moment when the ontological self of the novel is exposed, when the novel is the most vulnerable, the most naked. Everyone loves vulnerability, and everyone sticks up for the kid who makes himself vulnerable, title revelations no exception. It helps, though, that both the reader and the author know the rules. These rules, without fail, are: Title revelation comes before the very end, after the climax, with about five or ten percent of the novel remaining, most of this taken up with denouement. It is almost as if a title revelation must be done the old fashioned way in order to work—with a painstakingly wrought climax and a suitably relieving coda. The Eggers revelation occurs on page 327 of a 350 page book:

‘But the Jumping People left this one message on the cliff above their village, carved it in for the conquistadors. This basically turned into the motto of the Jumping People, even though I don’t think it makes all that much sense. I mean, it does and it doesn’t. Raymond admitted that this has been translated from the original Jumping People tongue, into Spanish, and back again, and then into English, so who knows how accurate it is. There was another American scholar who polished the words, I guess, a guy at the University of Chicago, so at least it sounds like something you’d carve on a cliff over a village under siege, so your invaders would see it after you’ve left.’
‘Give me the fucking message.’
Hand took a breath and opened his palms, as if accepting the gift of rain. ‘YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY,’ he bellowed into the cold exhausted city.

This is nicely done. The humorous, tongue in cheek prolonging of the revelation seems to recognize itself as such. The phrasing of the title mimics the Old Testament style pronouncements we have been getting throughout the novel. And like all good title revelations, the moment couldn’t be any other moment than the moment that it is.
A title revelation is where the novel’s numberless different voices, attitudes, languages, cooking styles, whatever, are for one instant joined in a single authorial worldview. No matter how absent the hand of the author is throughout the rest of the book, it shouldn’t matter for the titular epiphany, which may be the one moment where the author must take his palm down from on high to squeeze the Playdough together. It’s a tall order, trying to unite the disparate languages (both verbal and emotional) of the book, even while acknowledging that they might just be flung back out again in their separate directions. Because of this need to unite, the author is challenged to create a phrase for a title that accurately encompasses the entire emotional scope of the novel. Chester Brown does this well in his comic-strip memoir, I Never Liked You. Even in a graphic novel my formula is true to form: the shouted “I Never Liked You!” comes towards the end, at the culmination of a climactic wrestling match between the adolescent Chester and a neighborhood girl. The visual intensity of Brown’s minimalist, silent panels mirrors the inarticulable feelings of the Canadian adolescents in the book, all of which in turn are reflected in the title, conveying as it does everything and nothing about the lives of these teenagers.

Why are title revelations so often shouted? Eggers and Brown aren’t the only ones; Primo Levi has his shouted in If Not Now, When?, and from outside of the bathroom walls we can hear Raymond Carver’s protagonist shouting, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Both of them are questions, both rhetorical in their own way. It seems fitting for a title revelation to be a question, as what is at all of our hearts is a question, just as it is fitting that it is not really a question at all. Carver’s title revelation, when read in context, sounds whiny and plaintive. A man finds out his wife cheated on him several years back, he stays out all night wandering the town in a drunken stupor, then he can find nowhere else to go but back home, to his children and the cracked vase of his marriage. His wife questions him, but, as in all Carver stories, the main character strives to not say much. His cry of, “Will you please be quiet, please?” reads like a resigned tribute to all that has been left unsaid in these stories (particularly as it comes as the last of his stories in the eponymous collection).

Primo Levi’s title revelation may be the most moving of them all. If Not Now, When? is an incredible title for a Holocaust narrative even without the added padding of a couple hundred pages of text. The title emphatically resists stagnation. Those four words convey an energy, a commitment to life that is unfathomable under the circumstances. You need to read the novel to know the circumstances, of course; just the evocations brought about by the word “Holocaust” are not enough. Mendel and Gedaleh are Jewish partisans fighting a tiny battle against the Germans at the very end of World War II. At two hundred and eighty six pages into the novel the partisans have already been liberated, technically, as the war is over, but Levi resists easy structuring of his narrative; where the end of a war might tempt a lesser writer to ski down a small slope to the end of the novel itself, Levi keeps his characters anxious and wondering. They want it all to be over, we want it all to be over, but we know at the moment of title revelation that there will be no such luck. It is not that the book goes on for all that much longer; true to revelation form, it ends soon after. Yet as Gedaleh and Mendel careen over the Eastern European landscape in their truck, alive and exhilarated, shouting “Don’t stop! Accelerate!” we know that in fact the novel will not stop. It will go on long after we are finished. This is what a title revelation says: Take a breath, but we are not stopping here. “If not this way, how?” Gedaleh shouts, “And if not now, when?” And with the repetition of that incantatory phrase we’ve been holding inside ourselves since the beginning we are released into a moment of ecstasy, a temporary happiness some might call spiritual.

I say spiritual because this all reminds me of when I used to go to Mass with my Dad as a kid. I remember the moment in the Mass where the priest would intone, “Say the Word, And I Shall Be Healed.” What word? I always wondered. With Jesus, there are no title revelations, unfortunately—it irks me that I’ll never know what that goddamn word is. But now I’ve found a way to have my communion wafer and eat it, too. Literary revelations, however secular, are infinitely more satisfying. Yes, I’m going to make the connection: the titular epiphany reminds me somewhat of the Word, revealed. I like to think that for a moment I’ve been let in on the mystery.

Brown Review: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

2007-01-02T20:08:00.000-05:00

by Josh Lerner

It was past midnight in the mountains of rural Vermont. I sat at the bar, tucked away behind the lobby of the lodge, singing “Hey Jude” with men and women I had met only an hour ago. There was the young, lean Russian man, who, in an act of drunken friendliness, had asked me to join him with my guitar: “We will sing songs!” There was his beautiful wife, also drunk, also Russian. An older woman—the man’s mother, or maybe his wife’s—sang along in a thick accent. Then there was the young boy, who must have been drinking for the first time. And there were a few others, mostly middle-aged, just buzzed enough to forget what they needed to forget in their lives.

We continued to sing Beatles tunes and Russian folk songs into the early hours of the morning, passing the guitar back and forth the way my friends and I used to do in high school. We egged each other on, jokingly, with commands to sing louder, or to pick better songs that we all might recognize. It was as if we had shared a happy history of late-night song singing in hidden bars. I had to remind myself that these people were strangers—strangers who would remain nameless to me, for, in the drunken excitement, we had skipped the formality of introduction. More meaningful than names, though, was the knowledge that, for only one night, some previously unknown men and women and I had shared the type of experience meant for good friends.

Morning came and I came to think of these characters as ghosts. I woke up to a cool morning and a Continental breakfast; but there was no Russian family, no inexperienced teen, no grizzled men. There was just me and my guitar and a memory. I packed up the car and moved on, leaving behind the absence of indelible acquaintances.

Fleeting experiences like this one, which is a mixture of barren aloneness and a camaraderie that reaffirms that we are never truly alone, fill the pages of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America. Published in 1962, it is the culmination of Steinbeck’s journey across America in 1960, undertakenwhen he was nearly 60 years old. The book is a tribute to the men and women he met across the country, from Salinas to Chicago, from St. Paul to El Paso. The premise is simple: Steinbeck sets out, bearded and incognito, from his Long Island home, in a camper named Rocinante, accompanied only by his dog Charley. (Charley is a French poodle, a little canine de Tocqueville, perhaps.) Steinbeck’s goal, admittedly grandiose, is to discover and describe the character of his country and its citizens. He acknowledges his career as a writer of American stories, but laments the fact that, ever since he has settled down in New York, he has not seen the whole of the country for over twenty-five years. So he reasons:
I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers…So it was that I determined to look again, to try to rediscover this monster land. Otherwise, in writing, I could not tell the small diagnostic truths which are the foundations of the larger truth.

His journey brings him in constant contact with new faces, but, from the start, Steinbeck tells us that being alone and being with strangers come together. We cannot separate one from the other, because one leads to the other. He does not fear traveling the country by himself, because he “knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost.” And that is the theme of this travelogue. It is a heart-warming assertion that puts some faith back into the idea that strangers need not fear strangers.

Take, for instance, his evening spent in Northern Maine, with a family of Canadian migrant farmers. Steinbeck parks his van by a lake, puts the coffee on to boil, and sends out Charley as his “ambassador”. Sure enough, when Steinbeck walks the perimeter of the waterfront, he encounters Charley at the family’s campsite. With the French poodle as his go-between, Steinbeck makes some preliminary conversation. In a few hours, the family is inside his van, sharing stories and sips of Cognac around John Steinbeck’s table. It turns out there are some things that never fail to connect strangers: sharing personal stories, showing genuine interest and empathy, drinking another round under the warm light of a kerosene lamp. The next morning, as Steinbeck exits the campsite and begins again his solitary life on the road, he drives past the sleeping family. He is careful, of course, not to wake them.

Steinbeck writes scenes like this one as he writes scenes in his previous novels—with hard, clean prose. It’s especially striking here, since this nonfiction memoir was, arguably, Steinbeck’s most ambitious project. The Joad and Trask families benefited from their author’s use of clear and simple writing; their 500- and 700-odd page stories conveyed big themes—social justice for the mistreated and oppressed, guilt and the importance of forgiveness in family—and were made clear and strong by rigid words and short sentences. But in Travels with Charley, Steinbeck faced not just the retelling of one family’s story, but the telling of every American family’s story. His clear writing gives these stories a strong and sturdy form. We do not get lost in all the characters; we meet them, get to know them, and move on as surely and as confidently as Steinbeck did. He divides his descriptions of entire regions of the country into many powerful little sentences; he tells his stories like children’s fables; he poses simple questions to the reader.

The clarity in his writing reveals the clarity of his moral, which is a deep respect for the strangers that surround him. When describing his night with the family of migrant workers in Maine, he writes of the “triumphant human magic that can bless a house, or a truck for that matter.” Then there are the short sentences. Again, about the migrant family: “I never saw them again. But I like them.” Later, using five words, he sums up his sympathy for a lonely man in a Chicago hotel: “I felt sad about Harry.” The last sentence of the book is as simple as these other short sentences; it uses only eight words, most of them monosyllabic. It might not have the religious allusion or moral weight found in the final words of The Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden, but, like Travels with Charley as a whole, its simplicity soothes me.

When I think of that other great American travel book—Jack Kerouac’s On the Road—I do not feel the calm I feel when I am with Steinbeck. Published only five years before Travels with Charley, in 1957, Kerouac’s book bristles with nervous excitement; that’s what it’s famous for. The men drink and shout; their car tires screech off into the night. At times, it takes Kerouac’s young travelers less than half a page to drive across more than half of America. Then they’re back at it again, off to find a new woman or an old friend.

I picture their cars racing along at 100 mph down Route 66. Meanwhile, I can picture Steinbeck lumbering up the steep dirt hill of a Montana campsite, in his messy camper, with Charley yapping in his ear. Whereas Dean Moriarty or Sal Paradise might be off again within an hour, chasing new adventures, Steinbeck is just putting the coffee on and sitting down to write a letter by lamplight. Or stepping outside for a smoke and a talk with some passersby.

As he traveled in 1960, Steinbeck was only eight years from death. He didn’t know it at the time, but Travels with Charley would become his end-of-life account of two journeys: one stretching from coast to coast, the other moving from birth to death. So maybe that’s what it comes down to: that image of Steinbeck as an old man. Kerouac’s men—the men of the Beat generation—were young, virile, drunk. Steinbeck, on the other hand, moves slower: he thinks about his country as he discovers it, state by state, road by road. He takes the time to elaborate his thoughts—his reflections on conversations with others, his meditations on solitude in nature—that Dean and Sal simply ignored in favor of finding more adventures.

If Travels with Charley comes across as too saccharine—the meanest we ever see Steinbeck is when he verbally accosts a racist and kicks him out of his van, but even this has obvious moral overtones, making Old Johnny the good guy again—then we can chalk it up to Steinbeck’s graceful maturity. What reasonable man would want to spend the last few years of his life carousing in a loop of indecency? No, better to go out with grace. Steinbeck is a dignified man, weathered by some sixty years of life, looking sweet but tired in his baggy cloth sweater. At least, that’s what his cartoon rendering looks like on the cover of my 1962 edition of the book. He has glorified the stranger and made him a friend, while giving us a calming example of what life can be like for a contented old man on the road.

At a mere twenty years old, I have spent this summer of mine chasing that feeling that Steinbeck perfected at triple my age. I wanted his love for mankind as I shared songs at the bar with those Vermonters. As I climbed mountains and strolled through Southern plantations, I envied his effortless repose in nature. Driving on Route 95 toward Virginia, I wished I could move slower, but I couldn’t help reverting to a kid again: wanting to just be there already. Forever searching for Steinbeck’s style, I’ve tried to see my own travels through his writings, but I’m not quite there yet. I suppose I’m caught in the middle, then—unable to escape the frenetic pace of Beat life, but hoping to one day find, like Steinbeck, a more graceful existence. I just might have to wait for the grace to find me.

Brown Review: Untitled

2007-01-02T20:07:00.001-05:00

by Adam Delehanty

1.

For someone with a history of persuading strangers—however irresponsibly—of his ability to read novels, I came to know Thomas Pynchon quite late. For as long as I can remember, when I heard the author's name—or that grisly adjective, "Pynchonian"—referred to in conversation, I'd put on a face and wait for more recognizable words: “truth", "whiskey", "collateral"—any of the ones I knew I knew. At the same time, the topic had always enticed me: Pynchon seemed to have a way of bringing people to use hushed tones, with which they'd address only those who'd also read him, as if the rest of the room had woken mid-day, missing the explosion. For whatever reason, I had ignored him for a very long time. So, when I happened upon the most recent issue of Bookforum some weeks ago and noticed "PYNCHON NOW" emblazoned on the cover, I jumped at the chance to learn more—and, quietly enough, my affair with Thomas Pynchon began.

The article in the magazine consisted of some prominent authors (Lorrie Moore, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides) invariably casting Pynchon as a hero, some kind of prophet, the author without whom they'd have stayed in retail. “Pynchon set the example for my generation of what an American novelist should be. His fiction made it clear that, if you wanted to write, you had to know everything,” wrote Eugenides; and DeLillo: "It was as though, in some odd quantum stroke, Hemingway died one day and Pynchon was born the next." For Richard Powers, reading Pynchon is "the closest thing I have to a private religious ritual. I do it to remind myself of the size of the made world, of what story might still be when it remembers itself.” These candid, reverential words, from authors I genuinely admired, astounded me: if these authors were to me so much less than Pynchon was to them, who was this monster, and could I ever be ready to read him?

What’s more, the authors—no matter how intimate their relationship with his writing—inexplicably spoke of Pynchon as if long deceased, as if he wasn't their literary contemporary. Yet he was still active, I read: he'd published his fifth novel, Mason & Dixon, in 1997, and his five novels continue to sell thousands of copies per month. Still, the Bookforum tribute dealt exclusively with his earliest work, from the 60s and early 70s, as if sprung from an era and an individual they could never understand. Why were some of our foremost writers so reticent about Pynchon the person? Hadn’t any of them ever met him?

Eventually, in reading the longest piece, by Gerald Howard (an editor at Doubleday), I came to learn some details about the author he called "Commandant" Pynchon—or, that is, I came to learn nothing at all: the last time Thomas Pynchon appeared in public, I read, was in 1963. That year, when an American reporter caught up with him in Mexico City for a photograph and interview in conjunction with the release of his first novel, V., Pynchon jumped out of his hotel room window, hopped a bus into the mountains, and stayed there for months, growing a long mustache and earning a nickname from the locals: "Pancho Villa." He has never been photographed or interviewed since. There is only the writing.

I had to learn everything about Pynchon. It was like a torrent, or something—something torrential—and I couldn't help myself. I had yet to read a word of his writing, but he was already in the room—opening cabinets, coughing up phlegm, squinting at the clock—or was he actually on the roof of the building!? He was! I saw him polishing a rifle, it seemed, but I couldn’t quite make out—was he screaming at the sky? Could Pynchon direct cloud-traffic? He couldn't: he was obviously inside the television, and on the cover of that comic book teetering on the edge of a countertop just above the trashcan, if for no other reason than because he could be. Because no one, it seemed—or at least no one willing to go public—knew who, or where, or what, he was.

His story—or, the absence of any story at all—piqued my curiosity much more than the prospect of reading the novels themselves. Somehow, he’d managed to disappear from public view right when it first viewed him—merely as a writer worth talking about—but since then, moored in obscurity, hehad all but redefined the boundaries of post-war fiction. Did the privacy somehow enable his writing? Or did Pynchon avoid public attention because there was something extraordinary to hide: illegitimate children, ferocious Athletes Foot, a history of violence? And most unnerving of all, might I already know him, or her, or perhaps the army of writers responsible for this literature? When those who’ve read Pynchon write about those who haven’t or don’t or won’t, they have a tendency to use words like “coward”. I wasn't a coward, though—I was much too frightened.

2.

My job at a university library provided ample opportunity to scour the stacks and internet for information—and I did, feeding what soon became an obsession, immersing myself in anything Pynchon, writing manic emails to distant friends about an impossible mystique, hypothesizing about the tiniest contours of a face no one recognized. Intoxicated, I decided that the story of this private man must be hidden somewhere, and if the anecdotes from the articles I read only skirted the edges, only circled around his mysterious person, if I wasted enough company time I could eventually peer inside such a circle—and give a head-nod.

And in so doing, at the start of my search, I happened upon a world (Pynchonia?) at once immense, unpredictable, and teeming with life: where fanaticism is the rule, and unbelievers do not persist. I might have been trembling that day I first typed “Thomas Pynchon” into Google; I didn’t know what to expect, but I assumed I could find an inordinate amount of something: he was Pynchon, after all, and he seemed to be able to be everywhere. He was. There are hundreds of websites devoted to him and his work, ranging from scholarly journals (he is a continual subject in 20th Century Literature) to quasi-scholarly journals (“Pynchon Notes" comes out twice a year) to well-organized collections of press, references, research, and personal reactions, to marginally-legit, tabloid-like sites devoted to making sense of his identity, gossip about ex-girlfriends, and the search for that one authentic, recent photograph.

Within this repository, I set out to learn everything I could about Pynchon's life prior to 1963, when he first fled from public view. And upon entering the Pynchosphere, I couldn’t help but begin to feel at home. The more I learned, the more I became convinced that my pursuit of the author wasn’t the stuff of an irrational mid-summer lust, but merely the serendipitous intersection of two young American egos: Pynchon and I, Adam and Tom, the space between us dwindling in size as the balloons between our hips ran out of air. The terror that marked my view of Pynchon the present-day writer was softened by a past I could relate to.

3.

Pynchon and I were born on the outskirts of New York City. When we were in high school, we satirized our local communities in the school newspaper (though Pynchon's pieces included words like "heretofore”, which I still don't know how to use). Pynchon attended Cornell University for two years before enlisting in the Navy; after his two-year service, he returned to school and changed his course of study from Physics to English. I have been at this school for two years but am on the way out, and though I've yet to make plans, they could very well involve both boats and guns; still, in the end, I'll probably end up crawling back to Providence to study English, as opposed to whatever I used to. Also, the annoyingly mid-centuryish names of Pynchon's two younger siblings are exactly the same as those of my parents: John and Judith. If one combines the hierarchies of our two families, then, Thomas comes above and before the two who reared me: he is my mother and father's Big Brother, an ultimate authority for their three children—and, somewhere along the way, the father of my cousins. I had taken Pynchon's word over my parents' from the beginning, but now it all made perfect sense.

There are never any photographs on the jackets of Pynchon's books. The last one made public was taken in 1955, upon the author's enlisting in the Navy. The one most often used in articles, though, was taken from his 1953 Oyster Bay High School yearbook—and what a striking resemblance his deep-eyed, small-mouthed, self-obsessed visage bears to the boy writing this paragraph. Indeed, the resemblance struck with such force that when I first encountered it, I tore upstairs to the kitchen where a few of my housemates were eating dinner: "I look more like Thomas Pynchon than anyone else in this house," I cried, forgetting, for the moment, that there was only one other white person livingat the same address. As I write this, Pynchon's face is taped to the wall beside my pillow, so that I can close my eyes and always remember.

And finally, there are birthdays: Thomas Pynchon was born on May 8th, 1937. My parents landed at whichever hospital very late in the evening of May 7th, 1985, and if the presiding obstetrician hadn't been such a greedy, hasty motherfucker, he wouldn't have ripped me out of my mother's swelling reproductive cavity so obviously early. He would have let me emerge as I was meant to emerge: just after midnight, the morning of May 8th, so that one could divide the distance between Pynchon and my own existence and come out with a round number. Damn him—damn the doctor—damn.

4.

And here, thankfully, finally, the fateful string of coincidences is cut. On returning to Cornell after time in the Navy, Pynchon studied under Vladimir Nabokov and devastated the undergraduate literary magazine withvicious prose; Nabokov's dead, and I've never devastated anything. There are few reliable quotes from those who profess to have known Pynchon in his fully-developed, post-Navy years; presumably, he’s retraced his steps since then and convinced nearly all former acquaintances to lock their doors when reporters come through town. One fellow Cornell student, though—whom Pynchon must have forgotten about—once wrote that he was "a constant reader” at the time: “the type to read books on mathematics for fun... one who started the day at 1 p.m. with spaghetti and a soft drink... and one that read and worked until 4 the next morning."

Upon graduating, Pynchon lived and wrote in Greenwich Village for a time, but quickly moved to Seattle to work for Boeing as an "engineering aide", helping to write technical documents. He then lived in California and Mexico while he finished V., published in 1963 to great critical acclaim: Richard Poirier called it "the most masterful first novel in the history of literature." Three years later came The Crying of Lot 49, perhaps the most widely-read of Pynchon's novels, and then, in 1973, the undisputed masterpiece: Gravity’s Rainbow.

I've yet to read it, of course, but those who have, or do, tend toward absolutes. When it was first published by Viking Press, the New York Times called it "bonecrushingly dense, compulsively elaborate, silly, obscene, pastoral, historical, inspired, horrific, bloated, beached, and blasted." For critic David Kipen, the book “mocked and savaged and pitied and generally made hay out of America”—and if he were to be stranded on a desert island with only two books, “I’d take two copies of Gravity’s Rainbow.”

Really, searching for the identity of Thomas Pynchon inevitably leads one into an unending catalog of academic—and more casual—literary criticism, wherein Pynchon's novels are seen as divine, the inscrutable code to which we all must abide. And the process of reading over so many magnificent—if also somewhat chilling and impossible—conclusions that countless writers draw is almost as invigorating as the manhunt itself. George Levine, for instance, writes that Gravity’s Rainbow presents “a world in which the primary fact is not thought or feeling or belief but energy itself." For Gerald Howard, the novel "took up residence in my head as the peak of post-humanistic achievement, a work finally adequate to the terror of a world utterly transformed by science and technology"—and reading these, depending on one’s brand of impressionability, he or she is either thrown toward the nearest bookstore or pulled away from Pynchon, trembling in fear.

5.

In truth, I fell into the latter category. My inclination to put down so many secondary sources and begin to read Pynchon's work itself was suppressed by warning after warning: first, when I went looking for Gravity’s Rainbow in a local bookstore, the novel had been flipped over on the shelf, so that its spine faced the wall. Why would someone do this but to specifically dissuade customers from finding it? (It is a common practice of an acquaintance of mine to flip over the collective work of Ayn Rand in the same way.) On returning home, I was eventually led to the computer, where I checked my email at Gmail.com—but my hands must have slipped, and I entered “Gamil.com”, instead. And there it was: a rocket, of all things, serving as the centerpiece of a website for Gamil Design (a graphic design firm). A rocket: the very same object which appears on the cover of Gravity’s Rainbow. Never had a typo shook me to the core: Pynchon had found a way into my fingers. And finally, just a few days later, having mustered enough strength to purchase the novel online, I received a phone call as I was entering in my shipping address. It was Ben, an old friend from home. His father had died, he told me over the phone. He was dead: it had been instant, he said; it had been a heart attack. At some point during our conversation I shut off my computer and left the room.

But there were other reasons I didn’t immediately begin reading Gravity’s Rainbow, and they have little to do with personal experience. Aside from having to take on hundreds of characters, a constant stream of words like "oneiric" and "antinomian," and navigate hundreds of pages devoid of any traditional plot-line, critics are relentless in emphasizing the breadth of knowledge that Pynchon’s work demands. Richard Poirier, widely considered the foremost Pynchon scholar still writing, repeatedly cautions "amateur" readers about Pynchon's unending complexities, but he also attempts to discourage what he calls an "overly literary" approach to the works. This is because Pynchon's frame of reference not only encompasses the history of literature, but extends into "science, to pop culture, to the traditions of analysis, and even to the orderings of the unconscious, to dreams themselves." Where most other writers, at least up until Pynchon's time, considered science and technology impositions upon a human consciousness best expressed through the written word, Pynchon recognizes and foregrounds how science and technology, the military-industrial complex, and the mechanics of a movie projector at the cinema are expressions of the human condition just as much as the literature, film, and music we create.

It is from this relentless—and supposedly terrifying—negotiation between cultural history and the history of science, technology, and government that the critics' most popular adjective for the author's perspective emerges: “paranoid”. "In Pynchon's world there is almost no trust, no human nurture, no mutual support, and no family life," wrote Richard Locke, in the New York Review of Books. There seem to be only victims and executioners—of sex and war, computers, the ocean, and everything in between—all structurally and inevitably connected through one system of exchange. "In Pynchon's novels," writes Poirier, "the plots of wholly imagined fiction are inseparable from the plots of known history or science." All of it is true, and none of it true, and everything is part of it; however, in order to understand this, the reader must be fluent in not only literature, but countless other disciplines (including pop culture), so as to "know just how masterfully and feelingly Pynchon reveals the destructive powers of all systematic enterprise"—which I indeed want to know, very very badly.

But not yet. I held myself back from Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49—actually skipping over passages from them in the middle of articles—and pursued instead that single history lying outside the breadth of Pynchon’s various perspectives: his own. Of course, this is an inevitably circular process, as most of the observations critics make about Pynchon the man come from his writing. This is acceptable, especially considering how the 1,200 page manuscript of Gravity’s Rainbow, as one old friend remembers, was written “in a cave-like room, where his only accessories were a cot, desk, and some homemade bookshelves upon which sat piggy banks, and one book about swine.” One can only presume, then, that he put perhaps a morsel of himself into the text.

And so, I found myself reading about an identity spawned from a literature thatdraws little or no distinction between fiction and reality—a negative space where only the most amazing judgments make sense. "Pynchon's mind is the steel trap of American literature: Nothing, large or small, has ever escaped it," writes Lorrie Moore. Richard Poirier goes further:

...Pynchon believes not only that history is in itself a form of repression, but so, too, is the human impulse to make or write history. If this is any proper reading of Pynchon then it should constitute a warning to any one of us who wishes to order or regularize his work by whatever plot, myth, symmetry or arrangement. And yet we persist in doing so, because, finally, it is nearly impossible to feel about our cultural inheritance the way he does. We don't know enough to feel as he wants us to feel.

Such assertions are almost plausiblewhen seen alongside remarks made about Pynchon’s personal character. Tom Maschler, London-based published of V., once wrote, "Pynchon's fantastically aware of everything around him... he'd been in London for two days and seemed to know more about the city than I did."

6.

One can rest assured that Pynchon’s intellectual—and sensorial—capabilities are of the highest standard. Still, as George Levine contends, what most astounds Pynchon’s readers it is not his wide expertise, or even his remarkably dense prose, with its "perverse and nauseating intensity”, but rather his ability to challenge “fundamental, usually unspoken literary and cultural assumptions”:

The assumption, for example, that order and unity are intrinsically valuable, that characters and objects are unequivocally distinguishable... that there are clear demarcations between fantasy and reality, between the physical and the metaphysical, that man's fate is in man's hands, and, perhaps, that there is such a thing as freedom.

And, to be sure, Pynchon’s own behavior perfectly complements this, causing readers to question our particular mode of distributing texts, in which the author’s identity is so explicitly central. Pynchon accosts his readership in silence: must we associate literature, or any artistic expression, or any expression at all, for that matter, with a face? Pynchon’s anonymity, which I was initially so disturbed by, might be seen as a deliberate effort to disturb the very way we go about our reading. It is, after all, a project toward which he put forty years of increasingly strenuous work: his own lack of a publicized story might serve as the sixth novel that never went to print. But what, exactly, would this novel be about? What might he be saying in his absence? I asked myself, and eventually found something—deep in the ruins of past semesters’ course reading.

Roland Barthes' landmark 1968 essay "The Death of the Author" inveighs against the modern—and, by extension, capitalistic—tendency of placing the author at the center of any literary consideration, as if a text “were always in the end… the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us." Such an approach lends itself to a model in which a book can be purchased, deciphered, conclusively interpreted, and then put aside, so as to make room for another. Also, this mode limits the scope of reading and critical analysis to "the task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is 'explained'". Barthes then argues that in order to free reading and literature from these constraints, one must consider a text not as putting forth one single "message” from the author, but as stemming from "a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture." Hence, most famously, the "birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”

In light of Barthes, there is perhaps no other contemporary author who so markedly defies our system of publishing and publicity while still drawing mass readership and critical acclaim. Indeed, the beginning of Pynchon's isolation, in the 1960s, coincided with the advent of the post-structuralist movement, from which Barthes' essay emerged. And at every turn since then, he’s limited his audience's ability to associate the five novels with a distinct personality, with an author whose personal history and perspective could provide some semblance of conclusive interpretation—he even asked his former middle and high school principals to make his files confidential. While Pynchon was supposedly shy even as a child, I believe his forty-year evasion of the public eye most likely stems from a profound personal integrity and respect for the medium of literature: he, unlike just about all of his contemporaries, lets the writing speak for itself.

7.

In many ways, then, my initial fascination with the character of Pynchon as opposed to the literature reveals a profound guilt: instead of ignoring Pynchon—a process he’s made rather easy—I pursued him, falling in line with the very mode of readership Pynchon would seem to loathe. In spite of the example set by Pynchon, however, mine is a literary tendency I think many others share, however shy we are to admit it. So often, it seems, it is not the text that captures our most heartfelt affections, but the author, or the idea of the author having experienced the story he tells, having endured, in some mythic way, the pooled emotions of all his characters. One does not hear, at the edge of parties, talk of The Sun Also Rises’ intertextuality; one hears (if literature even comes up at all) about Hemingway—the “bad-ass”, the storied drinker, the closeted homosexual—and his having supposedly re-written The Old Man and the Sea over one hundred times prior to publication. I know about these conversations because, for better or worse, I’ve had them.

Accordingly, in recommending a book, one is equally if not more likely to speak of the author’s life, perspective, and individual personality than anything relating exclusively to the text, as if the source of the story, that being who knew enough to put it on paper, and who might also have an address and a toothbrush and any number of consistently-adorable facial expressions, deserves all of the attention. J.D. Salinger’s famous words are hung on banners in however many Barnes & Nobles, reminding consumers to stay the course: "…what really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it," and it is the fulfillment of this desire which Pynchon's (and, ironically, Salinger's) reclusiveness so violently denies.

Today, as popular culture has focused more and more on the "real" lives of its celebrities, Pynchon's non-existence seems particularly arresting. One can imagine what would transpire if the author, emerging from an Arby's unisex bathroom, crossed paths with one Jessica Simpson—there would be an explosion (concluding, of course, with Pynchon unenthusiastically slipping the pop star's blackened, still-pumping heart into the outermost pocket of his knapsack, jotting down something in a notebook, and burping once, no, three times as her scattered, air-brushed remains trickled into the main dining room).

While Pynchon can serve as a shining example of walking the post-structuralist walk, my own celebrity-infused experience has not been in vain. During the last week, and perhaps as a result of my inability to talk about anything but Pynchon, my apartment, along with a few other friends, formed a Gravity’s Rainbow book club, and we are set to begin the book. Whether or not I'm able to detach my reading from everything I've learned, I have purchased the book and Pynchon—wherever he is—has probably been compensated, and Gravity's Rainbow will be something to talk about. So for me, as with countless Pynchon fans, the author's personal story eventually forged a way to the text. Nonetheless, many fans tell of how the novels provide so much that, thankfully, one's interest in the man subsides: you want him to do whatever he has to do to keep writing.

It was over, then: the end of the affair. Finally, I thought, having satiated my desire to learn about Pynchon, I could sit down with Gravity’s Rainbow. I had reason to believe that the book would be able to stand on its own, if only I'd be able to keep my memory out of the way. After quite a while, I seemed to have pinned down where exactly Pynchon had been: he was in the books... and there was nothing to worry about, and there would never be anything to worry about: I had been drunk on a man, I admit it, but this was the next morning—I was sure.

8.

Then I had a conversation. On a porch outside a friend's apartment some nights ago, I found myself sitting next to a recent Brown graduate, and we began talking. I will call him Stephen. He rolled his own cigarettes; he loved to talk about literature; he had a girlfriend, even. I asked him if he'd ever read any Pynchon: he had. In fact, Pynchon was probably his favorite author. I asked him which of the novels he most enjoyed: he liked Gravity’s Rainbow. I think I asked him why Pynchon was his favorite author, or perhaps I asked how he first came to know the author's work. He would answer: he would lean back, reminiscing. Stephen spoke about Pynchon as so many do—with reservation—but he appreciated my curiosity and quietly responded to the questions.

And then his eyes lit up. I had asked him what he thought of the author's reclusiveness. "He's not a recluse," he said. "Have you ever seen that photograph from 1997, the one on the sidewalk?" he asked me. "Right on the streets of New York City." I had not. (Apparently, as I've come to learn, a reporter tracked Pynchon down some years ago, intent on exposing his image to the public. Somehow, he found out not only that Pynchon lived in Manhattan, but his exact address. Camping outside the building, the reporter eventually spotted a man he assumed was Pynchon because upon being photographed, the man covered his face and ran away, cursing. It is, to be sure, not a revealing photo: Pynchon's face is out of focus—one can only note his apparent height, graying curly hair, and wardrobe: all black, with a hooded flak jacket. While the photograph can be found on the internet, Pynchon himself, along with his fervent devotees fought to keep the photograph from being published, and it can be found on the web only after extensive searching. But there he is, supposedly, caught by surprise at sixty years old, standing up straight, just between blinks. And there are the sidewalks of New York City, and there are the strangers in the street—they are there, it is certain—going about the business of a morning. They are so innocent; they are so oblivious. This is Thomas Pynchon’s neighborhood.)

And so, Stephen went on to tell me what happened to him some years ago when he went to buy Pynchon's Mason & Dixon at a small bookstore right here in Providence. I repeat it here, as I remember hearing it that night on the porch: "Having eventually found the book on the shelves, I went up to the cash register," Stephen began. "The woman who almost always worked there wasn't around, though, for some reason. In her place was a man I'd never seen there before, ever. When I put my copy of Mason & Dixon on the counter, the cashier took it up in his hands, flipping through the pages.

'Pynchon?' he seemed to ask me, though he sort of said it into the book.

'Yeah, he's one of my favorites,' I told him. 'Have you ever read any?'

'Not yet,' the man said. But it was odd: I caught the slightest little smirk forming on his mouth. And he looked so old, I remember thinking. What was he doing here? Especially on a Saturday, when it was so busy. He didn't seem especially adept at running the cash register, either. And he was so old, I thought.

“So the guy continued to flip through my Mason & Dixon, peering over once or twice to give me a look. Hard to say exactly what kind of look it was. 'But yeah,' I told him. 'I'm really looking forward to it,' I said as I put my cash on the counter. The guy took my money as I put the book in my backpack. 'Hey, enjoy,' he said, as I started to head for the door.

And then it all fell down. It was him; it was Pynchon; it was him, right here in the bookstore, right here in Providence. The graying hair, that angular face, everything I remembered from the photo I’d found on the internet. Everything was there, all the details. I charged the counter as the next customer piled her books in front of the man, stopping short just a few feet away.

'Are… do you work here?' I whispered. I don't even know what came out of my mouth, really. 'I mean, are...' I had trouble, but I tried again. Out of breath already, I’m sure, nervous as anything: 'Are you?'

I remember how the woman trying to pay gave both of us a really confused look. And then the old man winked, and I ran out of the store, and I ran all the way back to campus."

Suffice it to say, I haven’t started reading Gravity’s Rainbow yet.

Brown Review: The Catalan Cadence

2007-01-02T20:02:00.000-05:00

by Matt Sledge

George Orwell’s 1984 is not the only inoculation shot for all of our post-modern politics. There is a stronger medicine, because its truths, unfictionalized, have truer names. Homage to Catalonia, about Orwell’s service in the Spanish Civil War, is the undiluted essence of Orwell’s anti-Orwellianism. 1984’s very popularity makes it suspect, for its interpretable, malleable role in discourse is on par with that of the Bible. But in Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell uses neither pseudonyms nor a distant future to mask his targets. We cannot escape Orwell—he towers over our times like some sort of demi-god—and this is due in large part to the character exhibited so distinctly in his Homage.

The Spanish Civil War was Hitler’s testing ground, both for his weapons and for the will of the democracies. The spin that was being put on the Popular Front’s defeat even as it was transpiring was crushing, as fierce and unreasoning as anything the post-Jon Stewart incarnations of Crossfire can perpetrate. But unlike the pundits and the paid dust-stompers, Orwell was there. Spain for him was not a collection of words on a page to be manipulated and rearranged. It was a deadly truth, as immediate as the sniper’s bullet that shot through his neck. He had traveled to Barcelona as a journalist, and then quickly signed up for the militia of an anarchist group called the P.O.U.M. (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unifcation). What he didn’t realize was that the P.O.U.M. and other anarchist groups were at odds with U.S.S.R-backed communists and the mainstream liberal parties.

Those were dizzying days for Barcelona, the capitol of Catalonia. When the fascists had attempted to take over the city, the anarchist militias joined together to halt them and bring about what they had spoken of in heady tones in cafés for years, the revolution. Orwell writes, “The whole barracks was in the state of filth and chaos to which the militia reduced every building they occupied and which seems to be one of the by-products of revolution. In every corner you came upon piles of smashed furniture, broken saddles, brass cavalry-helmets, empty saber-scabbards, and decaying food.”

“Almost every church had been gutted,” but anarchist Barcelona was the polar opposite of Oceania’s totalitarian London. Tips were abolished, buildings were painted red and black, everyone sang revolutionary songs, workmen’s simple clothes were the silently acknowledged common uniform, and Orwell “recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.” By the time his militia marched out to the front, the spirit in the city had begun to wane. But it was preserved in his anarchist militia, where privates given the same respect as generals. Almost any order from above could be refused by popular sentiment. “The English had got into the habit of saying that this wasn’t a war, it was a bloody pantomime,” Orwell writes.

But back in Barcelona, “comrade” was no longer the standard title of address, and the Popular Front government, influenced by the communists, was beginning to suppress anarchist groups like Orwell’s P.O.U.M. While he was on leave from the front, he discovered that “the normal division of society into rich and poor, upper class and lower class, was reasserting itself.” Then came the explosion: the communists attempted to take over Barcelona’s telephone exchange.

Orwell could not accept the standard communist line—he would not abandon the anarchists out of a willingness to see a more unified effort against the fascists, and he believed their efforts at the front were noble. He had found that “the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like.” On leave from the war, Orwell had stumbled onto another battlefield, and he carried a rifle for the P.O.U.M. in the streets—a symbol of a fight he carried on for the rest of his life. In the end, the Popular Front, under the influence of the communists, moved troops in and brought the city under its total control.
The lies began immediately. The anarchists were, absurdly, painted as fifth columnists, allies of Franco who had attempted to sow discontent behind the lines. The fact that it had been the communists’ move to take over the telephone exchange was relentlessly obscured. Politics, Soviet-style, seemed cruelly surreal to Orwell. “It is as though in the middle of a chess tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is guilt of arson or bigamy.”

What hurt the most was that the libel was working. Back in Britain, the left-wing papers, afraid to give succor to the fascists, had parroted the official communist line. Homage in Catalonia is, in large part, an attempt to correct the facts. History has vindicated Orwell’s reportage, but what he realized at the time was that history will only find the truth if force does not obscure it. And he believed that that force, with whatever name—whether fascist armies or communist prisons—must be confronted immediately.

Maybe some veteran from the Sunni triangle will descend on today’s political and moral scene to provide a voice that feels as unaffectedly true as Orwell’s, but perhaps our politics of personal destruction prohibits it. Orwell’s warts—his treatment of women, for example—wouldn’t suit him too well. The sort of storyteller who shares a war story is both adventurous and foolhardy, noble and flawed. It’s hard to imagine that someone with this imperfect blend could long endure the constant scrutiny of paid character assassins. Nobody who consciously sets out to become Orwell’s successor will reach his promised land. His Homage was a magnificent accident in the midst of an ugly and untruthful 20th century—a gritty, breathing anomaly as brief and intoxicating as the Barcelona uprising.

Brown Review: Useless, Brave, Long-Legged

2007-01-02T19:39:00.000-05:00

Hemingway's Wartime Madrid

by Chris Hu

1.

The awkward adolescence spent in the pages of comic books, science fiction, and other assorted detritus of American popular culture—still celebrated, for example, in such works as Jonathan Lethem’s recent The Disappointment Artist—is a tiresome, shopworn commonplace in our nation’s postwar literary tradition. My youthful bookishness, in contrast, was always overtly political—I went from Tom Clancy straight to the Communist Manifesto and never looked back. By the age of 15, I was in the throes of a far more nerdy, or at least more uncommon, teenage obsession than anything American pop culture could ever conjure up: the Spanish Civil War.

In July 1936, a cabal of Spanish military officers led by General Francisco Franco rose against the democratically elected government of President Manuel Azaña. Franco’s coup failed in its initial attempt to swiftly topple the government, and instead sparked a fierce civil war which lasted until the rebels’ triumph roughly two and half years later. On the insurgent side were the traditional forces of Spanish arch-conservatism—monarchists, the Church, and rural landowners—in alliance with Franco’s military supporters and the pseudo-fascist Falange movement. The loyalist, or “Republican,” side, for its part, was a highly diverse assortment, comprised largely of the anti-fascist electoral coalition that had brought Azaña to power: liberals, socialists, Trotskyists, and Communists, as well as anarchists and conservative Basque and Catalan nationalists. An extreme example of the internal conflicts that ensued within the Republic—which ranged from mutual suspicion to outright warfare—is brilliantly rendered in George Orwell’s stirring description, in Homage to Catalonia, of the Communists’ May 1937 crackdown on their left-wing rivals in Barcelona.

In a strange way, I found this disunity profoundly alluring. Wrong was never in question, but right was delightfully, and often dangerously, up for grabs. Here in the United States, the Spanish conflict is regarded as a mere prelude to the Second World War; and the unfortunate consequence of this teleological habit is that the civil war’s truly unique spirit of political possibility and drama is lost. The struggle is flattened into one of strong-because-evil fascists versus weak-because-virtuous anti-fascists, when in fact things were far more uncertain and interesting. On top of long-running and bitter Spanish conflicts—over regionalism, land reform, religion, the direction of the labor movement—was added the fiery collision of the whole range of modern political ideologies, not to mention the exigencies of late 1930s European politics, which drew Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, as well as thousands of international volunteers, into the war—among them 3,000 Americans and thousands more Britons, who joined the Communist-organized International Brigades.

Thanks in part to this international involvement, there is a wealth of literary, autobiographical, and historical writing on the Spanish Civil War, much of it in English. Most American readers know the conflict—if they know it at all—through Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. No other English-language book on the war, Orwell’s Homage to Cataloniaincluded, has ever approached its level of saturation in American culture.

As it happened, the onset of my Spanish Civil War obsession coincided with the tail end of a more conventional pre-teen interest: the work of Ernest Hemingway. But against the odds, it was not in For Whom the Bell Tolls that I first encountered Hemingway’s fictional portrayal of the war, and it is not this novel which now remains etched in my memory as the most interesting American literary response to the conflict. Rather, this dubious honor belongs to an obscure and highly flawed oddity—The Fifth Column, Hemingway’s three-act play of espionage, machismo, and duty in loyalist Madrid. Such was my adolescent distrust of what I then saw as the frilly, apolitical genres of drama and poetry that The Fifth Column was the first play I ever read on my own outside of school.

2.

Several months after their military uprising, General Franco’s rebel forces overwhelmed loyalist strongholds in western Spain and advanced eastward on Madrid, the country’s geographical and political center. The rebels expected an easy victory, and with it a swift end to the war. Throughout November 1936, loyalist forces—reinforced by the arrival of the International Brigades that month—fought desperately to halt the advance of Franco’s troops. Against expectations, Madrid held, and the full-scale rebel assault was called off by the end of the month.

These front lines remained almost unchanged until March 1939, when the city finally fell to the insurgents. But this period was hardly a peaceful one for Republican Madrid. Having seized the western hills above the city, Franco’s forces, with the aid of German artillery, shelled it incessantly, hoping to sow disorder and demoralization among Madrileños. For nearly two and a half years, Madrid lived in a state of siege, its dogged resistance the bulwark of slowly fading Republican hopes.

This atmosphere set the stage for Hemingway’s three trips to wartime Madrid, where he reported on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Unsurprisingly, Hemingway’s perception of—and participation in—the politics of loyalist Madrid also provides much of the material for The Fifth Column, which is set in Madrid in the winter of 1937. Most of the play’s scenes, for example, take place in the Hotel Florida, a favorite haunt of foreign correspondents where Hemingway stayed during his time in the city.

The play takes its title from the insurgents’ claim that in addition to the four military columns threatening the city, their victory would be aided by a “fifth column” of pro-Franco sympathizers among Madrid’s civilian population. (I allow myself a smile of contempt when present-day conservative pundits, apparently ignorant of the term’s origins, use “fifth column” to describe the putative threat posed by the anti-war American left.) In the military impasse that followed the November 1936 offensive, this pro-insurgent element became crucial in undermining Republican resolve—among the most important of which was providing the rebel artillery with targeting information.

The loyalist efforts against these ‘fifth columnists’ serves as the backbone of the play’s political plot. Philip Rawling, an archetypical Hemingway male protagonist, is an American counter-espionage agent posing as a newspaper correspondent. Or, as he puts it, “I’m a sort of a second-rate cop pretending to be a third-rate newspaperman.” He is a member not of the International Brigades—whom he regards as noble but naïve—but of the Republican secret police. As such, Philip is charged with helping to track down and capture fifth columnists, who will then be interrogated and executed. Though not proud of his role in this often brutal process, Philip is sufficiently sustained by a sense of duty to the anti-fascist cause.

Philip lives at the aforementioned Hotel Florida, which is also home to Dorothy Bridges, a beautiful, ‘long-legged’ American journalist. Dorothy is innocent enough of politics, and well enough insulated in the bubble of her heated hotel room and imported food—this is a half-starving city in the midst of its second winter of war—to make no attempt at disguising her privilege. A typical line, uttered in response to the charge that “You never do work anyway”:

No, darling, but I always mean to. And I am going to finish that Cosmopolitan article just

as soon as I understand things the least bit better.

Dorothy, archly described as a “Vassar bitch,” soon falls for Philip, and he seems willing to entertain the relationship as a respite from his dangerous work. Hoping to tempt him away from his commitment to the war, she imagines a life for them together outside of its ravages and of the complications of politics altogether.

The impending conflict here is as obvious as one might expect. As Philip appears to be drawn closer and closer to Dorothy, he and his associate Max, a German Communist whose face has been disfigured by Gestapo torture, close in on a house full of saboteurs directing German artillery fire at the city. Dorothy gets a 14,000-peseta silver fox cape, infuriating Philip; Philip and Max get their men, whose forcibly extracted information leads to the arrest of a further 300 fifth columnists; and finally, Philip coolly decides to “break it off” with Dorothy, teasing her with promises of exotic vacations before cruelly denouncing her as lazy, foolish, and “useless, really.” Faced with this “love-duty” conflict, as some writers have called it, Philip’s unequivocal choice is duty—a commitment figured not as a fight for anything in particular but as an eschewal of frivolous attachments in the fight against fascism.

3.

The Fifth Column, first published in 1938 along with a collection of Hemingway’s early short stories, is virtually unknown today. Overshadowed by the prominence of For Whom the Bell Tolls, it also has the misfortune of being one of Hemingway’s most flawed literary efforts. This is mostly due to his lack of familiarity with, or even talent for, the genre: The Fifth Column is Hemingway’s only full-length play, as the back cover of the 1998 Scribner’s paperback edition is quick to point out, as if it to simultaneously advertise and apologize for its uniqueness.

The play had to be heavily modified before it was stage-worthy, and even then it was only produced at all because of the political value of The Fifth Column’s anti-fascist message and the weight that Hemingway’s reputation might lend to that cause. Harriet Felner’s 1986 Hemingway as Playwright—to my knowledge the only scholarly monograph written on the play—admits rather frankly that, contrary to what one might assume about the portability of the writer’s terse, evocative prose, “the dramatic quality of Hemingway’s narrative fiction was not necessarily a theatrical one.”

This is certainly true, for reasons that bear at least a brief explanation. The Fifth Column’s minor characters, an aspect of the play praised by many early reviewers, are flat and tiresome, particularly the sycophantic hotel manager whose broken English is supposed to be humorous but only serves to trivialize the Spanish role in a war that is, after all, being fought largely at the expense of Spanish lives. Aside from this, and the weakness of the plot—the capture of the fifth columnists is confusing, abrupt, and anticlimactic, and the outcome of the Philip-Dorothy relationship is never seriously in doubt—there are lines in this play which are truly cringe-worthy. Sentiments which might have found eloquent expression in Hemingway’s prose seem artificial and stilted in these unfamiliar surroundings, caught out on their own in the unforgiving light of dramatic dialogue.

In the middle of the play, there is a scene in which Philip and Dorothy, sitting on her bed, begin to kiss, but are interrupted by the sound of International Brigade soldiers singing downstairs. As the men run through a laundry list of revolutionary anthems, the lovers engage in clumsy melodrama:

DOROTHY: That’s a lovely song.

PHILIP: You’ll never know how fine a song that is.

...

PHILIP: You know this one?

DOROTHY: Yes.

PHILIP: The best people I ever knew died for that song.

...

DOROTHY: That’s the one they always play at funerals.

PHILIP: They sing it at other times, though.

DOROTHY: Philip, please don’t go!

PHILIP: [Holding her in his arms] Good-bye.

4.

But re-reading The Fifth Column now, nearly six years after I first picked up the play, I find myself strangely attached to it—and consequently, endlessly willing to find redeeming qualities in its apparent failures. The world of the Hotel Florida and Chicote’s bar is vividly rendered, perhaps all the more so because of its American-centric myopia. There is a rather frank treatment of the loyalist use of torture, and some refreshing cynicism about the idealistic young members of the International Brigades. Even the play’s patent shortcomings can be endearing—I find a certain perverse pleasure in seeing one of my boyhood favorites fall short. In The Fifth Column Hemingway’s talents, already constrained by his limited knowledge of the war and its participants, run up against a reminder of the power of genre over even the most distinctive of individual writers.

Finally, long after I’ve ceased to care about the political evolution of Hemingway himself, I remain fascinated by the figure of Philip Rawling—and specifically his role as a paragon of political commitment. It emerges in the course of Philip’s relationship with Dorothy that he is contemptuous not so much of her wealthy background as of her lack of interest in casting it off, as it seems he has done. In the final scene of the play, the travel fantasies with which he teases Dorothy are highly specific, betraying a more than superficial knowledge of Europe’s luxury resorts. She asks, excitedly, whether he really has enough money to pay for such things. “I did have,” he says, “Until I got into this business.”

But how, and why, Philip “got into this business” seems deliberately suppressed. He tells Max that, “We’re in for fifty years of undeclared wars and I’ve signed up for the duration. I don’t remember exactly when it was, but I signed up all right.” Yet one surely does not become a secret policeman in a foreign country, giving up considerable class privilege along the way, without a concrete reason. Philip’s is an intriguing and problematic commitment: he chafes at being called “comrade,” regards the young members of the International Brigades with jaded bemusement, and only once, and very briefly, expresses his revulsion at the rebel practice of shelling civilian targets. He is no Communist—he seems to have no firm political adherence at all—and his anti-fascism is but a grudging duty, something he “signed up for” and can’t escape. Yet he is nonetheless fully integrated into the loyalist military apparatus, his closest associates a disfigured German Communist and an anti-clerical Spanish socialist of an interrogator.

Philip’s ‘choice’ between love and duty, on which The Fifth Column’s plot rests, is anything but compelling. The true mystery of this play is rather the origin of this opposition: From whence does this ‘duty’ come, and what makes it worth forgoing Dorothy’s affections for? It could be that Hemingway is too inexpert a dramatist to sufficiently suggest the origins of Philip’s political commitment. But I’m more willing to stake the claim that this apparent lacuna, in a rather unexpected way, conveys the singularity of the Spanish Civil War—as a time and place in which the passage away from bourgeois apathy, because directed at the incipient menace of fascism, was in fact more common and frictionless, and hence literally unremarkable, than we can fully grasp today.

No such easy avenue towards ‘commitment’ exists today; indeed, the word itself seems the relic of a bygone era. If I’ve decided anything about the Spanish Civil War since I first read The Fifth Column, it’s that too much nostalgia for the heroic 1930s is a political dead end. Our own times are infinitely more ambivalent; it is difficult enough to agree on who, or what, the problems are, much less the solutions to them. Attempt to emulate Philip Rawling by hastily casting off bourgeois privilege in the service of a political crusade, and you’ll end up a brick-throwing Black Bloc protester or a latter-day John Walker Lindh—hardly productive examples to follow. Absent an easy cause to “sign up for,” we must learn to construct new alternatives to cynical detachment.