Thirst

The neighborhood where I grew up was built on a hill overlooking a small artificial lake, and at the summit of the hill, tucked into the woods, stood an old wooden water tower that stored drinking water pumped up from the lake. According to the kind of legend that kids make up and only tell each other, a creature lived inside the tower. What kind of creature it was wasn't made clear — an enormous serpent, a furtive carnivorous mammal, or some beast unknown to zoology — but most of the time it minded its own business, emerged nocturnally if at all, and posed no threat. One summer there was a terrible drought, the lake shrank to a stagnant pond, and the water tower went dry. It was then, one heard, that the creature emerged at night to slake its desperate thirst, and the hideously dessicated corpses of squirrels, cats, and other animals were found in the woods nearby. I'm not sure how it ended. Did a group of men from the neighborhood open the tower and evict its occupant, or did the creature resume its unseen existence when the rains came? The tower must be long gone by now, but I haven't been back.

Peculiarities

There's a curious disclaimer on the copyright page of the Dalkey Archive Press reprint of Vincent O. Carter's book about his experiences as an African-American expatriate in Switzerland. The Bern Book, written in the 1950s in part to explain the obvious question — Why Bern? — was published in 1973 by the John Day Company (a copyright date of 1970 is also listed), and sank with barely a trace. Carter died in 1983, leaving one unpublished novel, Such Sweet Thunder, which finally came out twenty years later. This Dalkey Archive volume, with a Preface by Jesse McCarthy, was issued in 2020 amid growing appreciation for Carter's work. The disclaimer states that "There are peculiarities of style in this book, which we decided to keep from the original edition."

It's not clear exactly what "peculiarities of style" the publisher had in mind, or why they would have even considered altering the book, but of course they made the right decision in not doing so. The Bern Book is unique, to be sure, but little on the Dalkey Archive list counts as conventional, and the book poses no major challenges to a reasonably open-minded reader. I half-wondered whether "peculiarities of style" was a euphemism for "offensive material," but there's no more of that in the book than in the writings of any other frank African-American writer of Carter's day.

It's true that once or twice Carter seems to lose track of a thought in mid-sentence, but that could only have been fixed in consultation with the author, and in any case the muddles are barely noticeable. The Dalkey Archive edition, which in general is commendable, seems to have introduced a few minor typographical eccentricities in the form of superfluous hyphens that were presumably line-breaks in the first edition, and because of an apparent OCR error the name of a Swiss architect appears alternatively as Brechbühler and Brechbiihler [sic] on the same page. But this is trivial.

I suspect that Carter himself may have slipped up at the beginning of this lovely paragraph:

I had seen the city at four A.M. and six A.M. I had heard the first streetcar rumble down the street and beheld with wonder from the center of the Bahnhofplatz the last magical moment when all the streetcars stood in the station filled with the homebound who had been to the movies and to the tearooms or dancing or to choir rehearsal, strolling or working late, huddled in a tight little group under the shelter when it rained, and ranging freely, leisurely, under the strain of a pleasant fatigue when the moon shone and a warm breeze wafted them on: waiting—having boarded now the streetcars, paid and pocketed their transfers—for the signal, a short blast of a whistle. It blew! as the bell in the tower of the Evangelical church rang, and all the cars moved silently in the eleven directions from the heart of the city, while the buses coughed and whined through the shifting crowds of pedestrians which dispersed like sparks of fire before the wind.

Carter perhaps meant to write "at four A.M. and six P.M.," but the Dalkey Archive editors, if they noticed the issue at all, were right to respect the original reading.

Vincent Carter apparently spoke only rudimentary German at the time he wrote the book, and while he was familiar with the writings of Goethe and Kant he implies that he hadn't read much contemporary Swiss literature. One writer I suspect he did not know was his fellow flâneur Robert Walser, whose death came, as it happened, during the years that Carter was writing the book. In spite of their very different backgrounds, there is a not-too-distant kinship in the mixture of innocence, formality, and irritability evoked in this passage:

One day I encountered a young man upon the street who approached me in a very familiar manner, addressing me by my first name, which I found a little uncomfortable because I did not recall ever having made the gentleman's acquaintance. He presented his card and asked me if he might speak to me. "Oh, I guess so," I replied, and we went into a rather pleasant café, which was near at hand, where he ordered coffee, over which he suggested that we might speak more comfortably. And when he made it clear to me that he was paying for the coffee I relaxed in my chair and gave the young man my undivided attention, for, as you can well imagine, I was a little curious as to the nature of his business.

The appalling comic outcome of the anecdote, however, would not have happened to Walser: the young man represented a chain of supermarkets and wanted Carter, as the one black resident in Bern, to provide publicity for the opening of a new branch by donning a colorful uniform and selling bananas. Needless to say, Carter declined the offer.

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025)

It's a fool's errand to try to be succinct about Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday. Does one talk about the "giant" of literature that he indisputably was (both the BBC and the Guardian use that word in their obits) or about the increasingly grotesque political stances he came to adopt in the name of free-market "liberalism," an ideology that seemed to blind him to the fascist tendencies of Latin American figures of the extreme right like Javier Milei and Jair Bolsonaro? Does one talk about his spirited advocacy for other writers, including those — like his friend Julio Cortázar — who were firmly on the left, or engage, as some have done, in ad hominem attacks on his family life? For better or worse, there has been no comparable figure in the US. He was an inexhaustible novelist, literary and cultural critic, essayist, and — notably — candidate for president of Peru. (As much as I differ politically with Vargas Llosa, it's hard to believe that he would have been a worse president than the man who defeated him, Alberto Fujimori.)

I took a quick look on my shelves this morning and counted about thirty volumes of his work, in Spanish or in translation or both, including a few major books that I've never quite gotten around to (La casa verde, for one). Some I have no inclination to re-read, but nothing can change my opinion that Conversation in the Cathedral is one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, a work so ambitious in conception and sophisticated in technique as to be nearly impossible to account for. Few funnier novels have come out of Latin America than Pantaleón y las visitadoras, and even a relatively late work like El sueño del Celta (from 2010) shows an admirable humanism and mastery of narrative. Perhaps now that he's dead we can leave the unhappy aspects to his biographers and appreciate the excellence of his best work for what it is.

Lillebjørn Nilsen (1950-2024)

For the last week or so I've been revisiting Lillebjørn Nilsen and Andy Irvine's Live in Telemark CD, which I bought soon after it first came out in 2021 (original post here). I was enjoying it enough (again) to look up Lillebjørn Nilsen and see what he was up to these days, and now I find that not only is he dead, but that he died more than a year ago and that the news somehow escaped my notice. (So much for instant news and social media!)

Nilsen was a beloved and important figure in his native Norway, but he wasn't widely known outside of Scandinavia, so I can't really be surprised that virtually no English-language sources seem to have carried the news of his death. One exception is the NewsinEnglish.no website, which has a full obituary. Nilsen did have American connections, though; he apparently spent some time in Chicago, and memorialized it in this song, which (according to the Live in Telemark liner notes) is about a chance meeting in a pub with a fellow expatriate, a Norwegian au pair.

Nilsen was a fine singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. The Telemark concert with Andy Irvine was recorded in August 1994, and although Andy mentions having been very nervous, the performance captures their joy and comradeship as musicians whose backgrounds were different but whose temperaments and talents were congenial and complementary. Nilsen apparently stopped recording new material around that time, though he remained somewhat active. His health had reportedly declined in the years before his death.

Live in Telemark can be ordered, in digital and CD versions, from Bandcamp. There is a brief documentary tribute to Nilsen (in Norwegian) here.

Guy Fleming, Revisited

There is now a website (link here) dedicated to the life and work of Guy Fleming, the artist and book designer responsible for, among other things, the dust jacket art for the first American edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I was delighted to recognize some book art I hadn't realized was Fleming's, including this handsome trio of Willa Cather covers for Vintage Books.

In addition to his book jacket designs, the website features a bio of Fleming and reproductions of his paintings and other artworks.

Related post: "Guy Fleming Jackets."

Stonewalking

I'm sure an oceanographer or geologist who had thought about the matter could come up with an explanation for why most of the stones on one stretch of beach would be rough and irregular while a few hundred yards away, just around a little rocky spit, there would be a collection of smooth and sometimes strikingly symmetrical cobbles, but I'm happy just to take it for granted. Some of these stones look like they could have been shaped by human hands; others look like bird's eggs (and you can see why some shore birds have evolved to lay eggs that look like stones).

After a stretch of cold weather and an accumulation of snow, yesterday the weather was fine and we went for a walk when the tide was out. A wide expanse of sandy flat came up from the water's edge, with a band of stranded seaweed at its upper margin, and then the ridge of stones where only the highest tides reach. I picked up a couple of the smaller and more perfect ones to bring home as paperweights or curios, but they were best appreciated in situ.

I spotted one well-worn brick that had undergone the same process as the natural cobbles and had long since lost any trace of the markings of its maker. And although most of the shapes were abstract, the stone below, which melded two different types of rock, reminded me of a ram's head in profile.

Eventually these stones will erode away or will be buried deep in the sand, never to be seen again, mixed in with twisted scraps of broken lobster pots, gull feathers, and the empty carapaces of crabs. But for now they seem to offer a quiet witness to something, though what it is isn't clear or lies beyond our ability to understand.

Ogreweed Day

Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the artist and author Edward Gorey. As it happens, I can pinpoint my first encounter with Gorey's work quite exactly. It was June 1974, I was graduating from high school, and two friends and I went to a local stationery and book store in search of a collective teacher present for a woman who was not only a favorite teacher but also the mother of three friends of ours. (As it happens, I would later work in the same store, but that was several years in the future and another story.) We spotted an oversize book with an inscrutable title — Amphigorey — and upon opening it found a collection of amusing, vaguely Victorian drawings, mostly in black and white, accompanying a series of tales and rhymes, sometimes droll, sometimes sinister, but generally both. The book included an assortment of relatively clean limericks (some in French), an abecedarium cataloguing various horrible deaths suffered by small children, a poem narrating the abduction and ritual sacrifice of one Millicent Frastley at the hands of giant insects, a wordless, enigmatic story set in the west wing of an enormous mansion, and on and on. I at least had never encountered anything like it, nor had I heard of its creator. We bought the book and presented it, and as far as I know it was a success.

I didn't know at the time that Edward Gorey was a well-known figure in the book trade, that his slim individual volumes were avidly collected, and that he had illustrated children's books and created paperback book cover art for Anchor Books in its heyday. In time I would learn all that and come to keep an eye out for his distinctive style whenever I was browsing at a book sale or in a library. I saw him in the flesh at least twice, once browsing in the old Gotham Book Mart, with which he was closely associated, and once striding impassively up lower Fifth Avenue in his familiar fur coat, being cajoled by a young woman who was apparently assigned to capture him for a photo shoot. His theatre designs, his opening sequence for the old PBS Mystery! series, and his illustrations for Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats would eventually bring him at least a modest bit of renown, but I don't think he cared much for any of that. He died in 2000 and his house on Cape Cod is now a museum dedicated to his work.

There isn't much, outside of Mexico perhaps, that can compare with Gorey for innocent delight in the macabre. There's no sadism in his work, but neither is there any tolerance for sentimentality or piousness. (Nor does he smirk.) If the Beastly Baby meets a beastly end (he explodes), that's only as it should be, and even the ghastly fate of inoffensive Millicent Frastley is more satisfying than disturbing. I don't think anyone who can appreciate Edward Gorey can ever be capable of real harm.

Every winter, when the nights get long, I break out a jigsaw puzzle of his book cover art. The silly title of this piece, by the way, is my feeble tribute to Gorey's fondness for anagrams of his name. I have, for instance, a little flip-book autographed by "Dogear Wryde."