Of empires and dreams

At first glance, the life of Roger Casement, the British diplomat turned Irish nationalist who was executed for treason in 1916, might not seem an obvious subject for a Peruvian novelist, even one as cosmopolitan as the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature. But after narrating, in the first third of what is at times as much a novelized biography as a biographical novel, how Casement's investigations of atrocities in the Congo led to the unraveling of Leopold II of Belgium's empire in Africa, Mario Vargas Llosa begins a new chapter and a likely explanation emerges:

When, on the last day of August 1910, Roger Casement arrived in Iquitos after some seven weeks of exhausting travel...

Iquitos, where Casement, after the conclusion of his mission to the Congo, was dispatched by the Crown to investigate similar abuses and atrocities on the part of a British-incorporated rubber company, is of course familiar territory for Vargas Llosa, who set parts of several of his earlier novels in that hub of the Peruvian Amazon. But though the chapters devoted to Casement's activities in Peru make up the longest section of the book, they don't overshadow the rest. Tying the novel together, and alternating with the narration of Casement's activities, in the Congo, South America, and Europe, are scenes from Casement's last days, as he awaits execution in a cell in a British prison and reflects on the events of his life.

Born to an Irish Protestant family (his mother retained Catholic sympathies and secretly baptized Roger in the faith), Casement shipped out to Africa as a young man and worked for a time alongside the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Over the course of the twenty years he spent in the Congo he became increasingly disturbed by the ruthlessness with which Leopold's colonial enterprise was being conducted. Ostensibly in the name of civilization and Christianity -- but in fact almost entirely in the service of greed -- the African inhabitants of the Congo Free State were subjected to a pattern of kidnappings, forced labor, savage whippings, amputations, and outright murder, all to ensure that the flow of rubber continued unabated. The number of victims, directly or indirectly, of Leopold's reign is reckoned in the millions. Casement's report to the British government, published in 1904, was instrumental to the successful international campaign to wrest the Congo from the king's control.

Subsequently posted on routine consular duties to Brazil, Casement was soon sent to Iquitos to verify reports of atrocities committed by the Peruvian Amazon Company. During his mission he traveled to remote areas of the Amazon basin that lay well beyond the reach of the government in Lima. His investigations revealed not only abuses at times more horrific than those in the Congo, but also a pattern of official collusion and of persecution of those few journalists and officials who were brave enough or foolhardy enough to try to document the atrocities. As Casement began to name names his own life began to be at risk, and during his second visit to Peru he was dissuaded from venturing into areas that were effectively under the Company's control.

If Casement had withdrawn from public life after presenting the findings of his Peruvian report to the Crown, he would probably be universally regarded as a hero of the anti-colonialist and human rights movements. But there was one more chapter in his eventful life. Increasingly identifying himself with his heritage, he retired from the British Foreign Office and was drawn into the Irish nationalist movement, becoming a friend and ally of militant leaders like Patrick Pearse and Eoin MacNeill, and when war broke out in 1914 he was dispatched by the nationalists as an emissary to the Kaiser's Germany. After attempting with little success to organize a corps of pro-independence soldiers from among the ranks of Irish POWs, he arranged for the delivery by Germany of a shipload of guns and ammunition intended for use during the Easter Uprising of 1916. Infiltrated into Ireland by a U-boat just before the uprising, Casement was quickly captured by the British and subsequently convicted of treason and hanged. His remains were buried in an unmarked grave within the prison grounds, and only repatriated to Ireland in 1965.

Any novelist or biographer depicting Casement's life must deal with the vexed question of the "Black Diaries," ostensibly in Casement's hand, portions of which were revealed by the British government as he awaited execution. The diaries, which describe a series of furtive sexual encounters with other men, were used to help discredit Casement at a time when a number of British and Irish intellectuals (among them George Bernard Shaw, but not Casement's old friend Joseph Conrad) were urging clemency. The controversy over whether or not the diaries are genuine has never been fully settled; Vargas Llosa takes a compromise position, suggesting in an Epilogue -- and perhaps not entirely convincingly -- that though the diaries are genuine some of the events that they narrate may not be.

My own impression -- that of a novelist, to be sure -- is that Roger Casement wrote the famous diaries but that he didn't live them, at least not entirely, that in them there is much exaggeration and invention, that he wrote certain things because he wanted to but could not live them.

El sueño del celta ("The Dream of the Celt," "the Celt" being a nickname given by some of Casement's friends because of the passion he came to develop for Irish history and culture) has just been published by Alfaguara. As the novel would seem to pose no major obstacles to translation (unlike some of the author's earlier works), an English-language version can probably be expected in a year or so.

The telegraphist (II)

At the beginning of the seventh week all communication with Z---- was broken off again, this time for three days. It resumed promptly and without explanation on the fourth morning at 0600 hours, but two days later it ceased and did not resume. A slave to protocol, he submitted no daily reports, since none had been requested. To break the monotony he began to make his morning rounds in a counter-clockwise direction. He was struck by how different an aspect the oasis revealed when examined in this fashion, but after a few days the novelty wore off. He began to alternate, walking clockwise one day and counter-clockwise the next, and this seemed to be the most tolerable arrangement.

After the second full week of silence he caught himself softening his steps, listening for the engines of the relief party that by now was overdue. He heard none, nor were there any unexpected visitors, suspicious or otherwise. The worst of the heat of the dry season, suffocating and blinding, lay upon the desert, and he spent as much time as he could asleep with wet rags over his eyes. Scarcely animate, the lethargic mule stared at him from its stall with unblinking and (he half suspected) unseeing eyes, and barely summoned the energy to eat.

He was writhing on his cot in a semi-delirious state, somewhere between night and morning and between sleep and waking, when the alarm rang. He leapt up and rushed to the telegraph. It wasn't the operator at Z---- but the outward post, and the message, as ever, was incomprehensible:

Ba bara sabara rebapara azera ba STOP Sarabara berisa seribisarabisa serata bezera razara ra STOP Berisol sorisoriso bazara sarisarasarisab STOP

He transcribed this seeming gibberish into his logbook, returned an acknowledgement, then relayed the message to the operator at Z----. There was no response.

The following day, at around the same hazy hour of dawn, another message came down:

Saraba barisaserisab azarasaraza bazirazep STOP Azirasora sarizap borisoq qrabba oraseraborisep prebanamarasarasap STOP Azapep STOP

Again he acknowledged, transcribed and forwarded the message, and received no response from Z----. To his surprise, however, an hour later an identical message arrived. Perplexed, he carefully compared it with the previous one and acknowledged it, but almost immediately a third came, and then a fourth. He duly forwarded each transmission, but when the fifth and sixth arrived he held back. Clearly the operator in the hinterlands was not receiving his acknowledgments and was repeating himself in the mistaken belief that his messages were not getting through. There was no point in annoying the authorities at Z----, if they were indeed listening, with obvious repetitions. For several hours the wires carried message after identical message, dozens, scores, eventually hundreds. He transcribed each one, for a while, then simply gave up, walking away and returning every hour or so to see if the incoming transmission was the same as the others. It always was.

The messages trailed off in late evening, then sputtered to a halt. He was awakened once during the night, then again around 0500, and after that the pace began to pick up again until the incoming transmissions had become a virtually continuous stream of characters. He walked away from his desk and went outside. The wind had gathered and a sandstorm was obscuring the horizon, but the heat was as relentless as ever. The mule stood motionless and he wondered whether it had died standing up during the night and had simply neglected to fall. He threw it some hay regardless.

When he went back inside the telegraph was still chattering. He recorded a few lines, then threw his chair back in a huff and started to walk away, rage rising within him. On the verge of losing control completely, he was about to smash the instrument and put an end to his torment once and for all when he caught himself, finding that a greater fury was welling up inside him, and coldly and meticulously typed out a message to the operator on the other end:

Raberaparabep barabap parabarabagarap garap baregatarat top barop roparaoparop bererep qrabab STOP Garep arepabap gop STOP

These syllables, though they meant nothing to him, he transmitted without a single pause. To his surprise, the machine did not pick up where it had left off. Instead there was silence for a few moments, then a brief acknowledgment, and then it lay still.

No further transmissions arrived until late that evening. He was dozing in the cot, his spoon rattling in the empty can of beans beside him with every labored breath, when the alarm woke him and a message trickled out:

Garabarep farabara barana marabap amar raba raba barabaramop STOP Garabananana badarap badar badar badarap bada STOP

He wrote out the message, then tore it roughly out of the logbook and paced the room, reading it over and over. He had been instructed in the making and cracking of basic ciphers during his initial training, but this fit the pattern of nothing he had ever seen. He leafed through his logbook, carefully examining old entries. There seemed to be too few unique letters, too much obvious repeated filler, for the messages to contain any but the most rudimentary communication. No doubt there was a key, known to the operator on the other end and also at Z----, or maybe not even there, maybe the transcriptions were referred to another operator at some distant headquarters, perhaps even all the way to the home country, to some intelligence officer in the national palace, who perhaps decoded them for the eyes of M. le Président himself. One way or another it was clearly beyond his ken.

While he was considering this the alarm sounded again, and another string came through, this one identical to the last:

Garabarep farabara barana marabap amar raba raba barabaramop STOP Garabananana badarap badar badar badarap bada STOP

And then it seemed to wait, patiently, expecting an answer. He put his hand on the key and tapped, hesitantly at first, then fluently:

Morarerabap aramara marabeparepamar berererapap STOP Beraqraba garab megaraba babap babap babap ma garabarap STOP Serabep arbaraba barapep a pep perapebabep merera baramabap STOP

A brief acknowledgment followed, and then nothing for the rest of the night.

(To be continued.)

The telegraphist (I)

He was the last one left. Just before decamping the legionnaires loaded up the barrels of gunpowder that remained onto carts, piled on all the old carbines and anything else that was portable, and blew it all up at the edge of the desert. The shock wave whipped the overhead wires that hung slack between the weatherbeaten poles and blew out two windows of the command post, but the adobe walls held firm. The little generator in the next room, after skipping a single beat at the initial concussion, resumed its steady chugging, brushing off the aftershocks that echoed, ever more faintly, for the better part of an hour.

They left him a mule and some fodder, a rifle and cartridges, and enough fuel and food and water for two months, three if he was careful with it, and not very much rum at all. By the time his provisions ran out, if he was lucky, he would be relieved; in the meantime his presence would be essential to communication along the line, sporadic though it might be. In the absence of the lieutenant, who had never returned from a reconnoitering expedition the year before and was assumed to be among the casualties of war, the sergeant formally transferred his authority in a brief ceremony several times interrupted by boisterous outbursts on the part of his subordinates, all of whom were in varying states of drunkenness and immune to the sergeant's halfhearted rebukes. They wished him good luck, embraced him one by one in turn, and clambered into the back of the hulking, wheezing truck just as the driver, who perched alongside the sergeant was by no means the soberest of the lot, ground on the gears until he managed to cajole the reluctant vehicle into lurching forward, blowing up clouds of dust and sand as it lumbered haltingly to the edge of the oasis. He watched them drive off for a moment, waved his cap three times over his head, and returned to his desk.

During the first few weeks his duties kept to their normal routines. He slept in a cot in the office within earshot of the alarm. Each morning, at precisely 0600 hours, the office at Z---- would transmit an identical message inquiring for his report. He would respond that all was well and await instructions. A few moments later the machine would jigger into life again, with a one-line order to expect a further communication at 1800 hours. After breakfast and coffee he would make a brief circuit of the immediate environs of the command post in order to stretch the kinks out of his legs, he would feed and water the mule, and then go back to sleep until evening, when there would be a similarly terse exchange with the operator on the other end. He would warm up a few more spoonfuls of canned rice and beans, knock back a single precisely measured shot of spirits, and call it a night. On rare occasions and at unpredictable hours a brief message came down from further up the line, transmitted by an operator in some even more isolated and woebegone outpost. When that happened he tapped out an acknowledgment and promptly relayed the information; as these messages were usually encrypted and he had not been entrusted with the key this entailed the careful replication of a string of apparently meaningless syllables, a task for which, he decided, he was particularly suited.

Only twice did he see any sign of life other than the vacant and imperturbable mule. One morning, during his constitutional, he discovered the faint traces of hoof prints across his path. That the marks were visible at all, considering the incessant drifting of sand over every square inch of the oasis, proved that they had been made the previous night, perhaps just before dawn. He traced their origin back as far as the last palms, but no further, then reversed course and followed them to the point at which they trailed off into the desert. He determined that there had been three camels, that their riders had never dismounted, and that they had found nothing of interest to detain them or even to cause them to veer from their course. A week later, by chance, on one of the few relatively windless days, he spied a small caravan -- twenty riders or so, from the look of it -- very far off, but it never approached and he lost sight of it, even with his binoculars, after an hour. His report of each incident was duly noted and acknowledged, but nothing more was said of either one.

It was somewhere near the end of the fourth week, or perhaps the beginning of the fifth -- he had become increasingly indifferent to the calendar -- that his orders failed to arrive on schedule for the first time. He wasn't alarmed by this. Interruptions along the line, due to downed poles or balky generators, weren't particularly unusual or unexpected. The lack of communication posed no imminent danger, as the front lines -- to the extent that those could be defined in a guerrilla conflict in inhospitable and poorly charted terrain -- lay hundreds of miles off, and even the odd raiding party, should it by chance happen to break through, would have no reason to venture into a region that offered little in the way of opportunities for pillage. The telegraph remained dormant through the evening, but when at 0600 the next morning the alarm sounded and the operator at Z----, making no reference to his silence of the previous day, inquired for an update on local conditions, the telegraphist neither sought an explanation nor gave it a second thought.

Night piece (North)

Possibly it's the end of the world, she's not the one to say, but if so as luck would have it the end of the world finds her in a city far from where she was born, where they speak a different language she never quite masters though no one seems to mind, where it's lovely along the lake in summer but winter comes hard and fast. She meets a man who has many friends but no ties and before long they find they are bound by love and she moves her things into his apartment three flights up and two blocks down a crooked alley from the center of town. In the evenings, when they come home from their jobs, he browns stew meat and onions on an old gas stove and she settles into a chair in a corner underneath a lamp where she can continue to draw after the sun goes down. He leaves the radio on while he cooks, too low for her to decipher the words but she likes the music, the strains of accordion and fiddle that bend around the singers' voices. After dinner they disconnect the phone, sometimes they put a record on and dance slowly and silently for a while but mostly they just sit by the window. In the beautiful chill night, above the muffled sounds of the city, the vault of heaven is filled with uncountable stars.

Abocurragh

Until about ten days ago I had no idea that Andy Irvine had a new record in the works, and now here it is, whisked over the seas from Ireland to drive away the oncoming November chill. Andy jokingly refers to Abocurragh as "the album of the century," meaning it's his first solo album since Way Out Yonder, which was recorded in 1999. Old friends are on board -- Dónal Lunny and Liam O'Flynn from Planxty, Bruce Molsky, Nikola Parov, and Rens van der Zalm from Mozaik -- but there are some new sounds in the mix this time (new to me at least), including Hardanger fiddler Annbjørg Lien and guitarist Lillebjørn Nilsen from Norway.

Andy's in fine mettle and voice and the selection of songs is a strong one, maybe his best solo set except the wonderful Rain on the Roof. There are no strictly instrumental tracks this time (three of the ballads segue into instrumentals), but as you would expect there's some great mandola and bouzouki playing by Andy and plenty of support from his mates on accordion, uilleann pipes, fiddle, and guitar, not to mention Nikola Parov on more exotic instruments like the nyckelharpa and kaval. No record from Andy would be complete without a couple of rousing songs about the Wobblies of the IWW, and this one has two, of which "The Spirit of Mother Jones" is more successful than the Balkan-flavored "Victory at Lawrence" (though the latter piqued my curiosity enough to induce me to dig out my copy of Bruce Watson's Bread and Roses). The heart of the album, though, is in the ballads, both original and traditional. Andy's got a wry sense of humor, so it's no surprise if the lyrics here stray a bit into unexpected territory, whether the eventual outcome is tragic or comic. (In both cases, there seems to be a common cautionary theme about the dangers of picking up strange women!)

The final cut, "Oslo / Norwegian Mazurka," is one of Abocurragh's best, with some delicious Hardanger fiddle by Annbjørg Lien and some earthy, off-kilter humor. The song narrates the events of an excursion through Norway some years back, after which, Andy says:

I was completely knackered when I got home to Ireland and decided to write a song about it. Unfortunately I could remember nothing, so this may or may not be true! No one will ever know.

True or not, the story is hilarious and provides Andy with a chance to spin some of his best lyrics:

In the Dubliner we played a gig, though we were all a bit hungover
A man got up and tried to dance a jig it looked more like a Bossa Nova
I had some beers and I began to flirt
And very soon I was on blonde alert
You're too late you know, thirty years or so,
she laughed and went home to her mammy

The song's best lines come later on, and concern the origin of clouds, but for that you'll have to buy the record.

Abocurragh, which is expertly produced by Dónal Lunny, is probably not available in stores in the US but can be ordered directly from Andy through his website or through various online sources.

Entre Julios

The copyright page of this little book, which consists of fifteen paintings by Julio Silva accompanied by texts by Julio Cortázar, suggests that it was first published in the 1970s, though the Alfaguara edition shown is from 1996.


Cortázar's brief one- or two-page prose sketches, reminiscent of his earlier Cronopios and Famas, tease whimsical vignettes out of Silva's gently surrealistic artwork, describing a world whose endearing though sometimes cantankerous creatures dwell in the perpetual childhood we all secretly long for, whether we admit it or not. I can't get scans of the interior art, so these images are lifted from Patria Grande, which also has some of Cortázar's texts for the book (in Spanish). As far as I know no selections from the book have appeared in English to date, though it's been translated into Polish and other languages. Where are ye now when we need ye, Paul Blackburn?


What good would it do to get angry at the creatures of Silvalandia? They are shapes, colors, and movements; at times they speak, but above all they allow themselves to be looked at and they enjoy themselves. They are blue and white and they enjoy themselves. They accept without protest the names and deeds that we imagine for them, but they live for themselves a life that is yellow, violet, green, and secret. And they enjoy themselves.




Silvalandia's two creators, Cortázar who died in 1984 and Silva is who still with us, were longtime friends and fairly regular collaborators. Among other things, Silva was responsible for the cover of the original Spanish-language edition of Rayuela (Hopscotch). He was also the designer of Cortázar's wonderful collage-books La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos and Último round, neither of which has appeared in its entirety in English, although a nice selection of their contents was translated by Thomas Christensen and published by North Point Press some years ago as Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. Unfortunately Christensen's translation is now out of print.

Sakhalin Rock

A couple of footnotes to my last post, on Kayano Shigeru's Our Land Was A Forest.

Kayano devotes one chapter of his memoir to his work with an older scholar named Kindaichi Kyōsuke, with whom he collaborated for several years on the transcription of Ainu yukar (epic poems). Although I didn't at first make the connection, this Kindaichi must be the same as the Kyōsuke Kindaiti who contributed the volume on Ainu Life and Legends to the Japanese Government Railways Tourist Library series. (The Tourist Library volumes use an alternate system of Romanization for Japanese names, which is why the spelling of his name is different.)


While some of Kindaichi's comments in that 1941 volume may now seem condescending towards the Ainu (whom he reported were rapidly striving to assimilate into Japanese culture) there's no question of his importance as a scholar, and Kayano remembered him fondly. Here, from Our Land Was a Forest, is a picture of the two of them together.


Below is an interesting video, "Sakhalin Rock," from a group called the Oki Dub Ainu Band.



Although I don't understand the lyrics (other than the few snippets that are in English), it's fairly clear what this is about. Now part of Russia (though it has also been at various times under Japanese control), Sakhalin Island was once part of the Ainu world, but the remaining Sakhalin Ainu were forcibly deported to Japan by the Soviets after the end of World War II. The video includes snippets of a map of the island, archival photographs, Ainu artifacts and designs, as well as, towards the end, images of what appear to be Russian women. It serves as a useful reminder that cultural memory is not always passed on in the ways that outsiders and preservationists might choose.

The traditional instrument Oki is playing is called a tonkori, no doubt the same instrument illustrated in the woodcut below from Ainu Life and Legends, where it is described as "a kind of harp."

From a Green World (Kayano Shigeru)

About all I knew about this book when I bought it was what was implied in the title: Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir. The author, Kayano Shigeru, turns out to have been an extraordinary individual, and his modest autobiography, written in Japanese and translated by Kyoko and Lili Selden, is well worth reading.

Born in 1926 in the tiny village of Nibutani on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō, Kayano grew up amid dire poverty and severe social discrimination, left school at 15, and supported himself for many years by felling trees in the island's forests, yet somehow, inspired by a tireless passion to preserve the artifacts and culture of his people, before his death in 2006 he wrote or compiled scores of books, founded a number of schools and at least one museum, and became the first member of his nation to serve in the Japanese Diet. Throughout his life, as both an amateur scholar and an activist, he struggled to defend the rights and and record the traditions of the people who once held sway over the whole extent of the island they call Ainu Mosir as well as in the Kurile Islands and Sakhalin to the north.

Kayano's memoir beautifully evokes the pride, the sadness, and the occasional bitterness of an ancient people struggling to survive.

The Ainu have not intentionally forgotten their culture and their language. It is the modern Japanese state that, from the Meiji era on, usurped our land, destroyed our culture, and deprived us of our language under the euphemism of assimilation. In the space of a mere 100 years, they nearly decimated the Ainu culture and language that had taken tens of thousands of years to come into being on this earth.

Though the count of the remaining Ainu population is disputed, the number of speakers of the language has dwindled to the point that its continued existence as a living tongue is unlikely. Kayano's efforts, and those of his fellow Ainu and a handful of scholars from outside, came not a moment too soon.

Cortázar: A Manual for Manuel

Cortázar's last novel, assuming one doesn't count A Certain Lucas, and his last book for Pantheon, appeared in the US in 1978. The wording of the title (the original being simply Libro de Manuel) was Gregory Rabassa's idea, Manuel's Book and The Screwery having been considered and discarded. The book, Cortázar's only overtly political novel, presented some special publishing difficulties, as the text includes newspaper clippings and other documents in Spanish that had to be translated and mocked up into authentic-looking English versions. I haven't read the book in nearly thirty years (it's on my list), and it may read very differently now when the images evoked by the idea of secretive cells of urban guerrillas have shifted considerably.


The jacket design is by Bob Cuevas, the author photo above by Anne de Brunhoff. As far as I know there was never a paperback edition in the US, and as of this writing the translation is out of print.

As early as 1975 Cortázar had broached the subject of changing publishers with Rabassa, who was by now his agent as well as his chief translator. He complained that he had never really been happy with the house, although his positive relationships with editors Sara Blackburn, Paula McGuire, and Jean Strouse had made the situation tolerable. He specifically mentioned Knopf, who in fact became his primary American publisher after A Manual for Manuel. Rather than continue exhaustively with the remainder of his output, including posthumously published editions (he died in February 1984), I think I'll consider that a logical endpoint for this series of posts, and maybe add a couple of sidenotes at my leisure another time.

Cortázar: All Fires the Fire

I think this is the best of the Pantheon Cortázar jackets. The designer is again Kenneth Miyamoto, who had created the jacket for 62: A Model Kit, but the painting on the cover is Paul Klee's The North Sea. The way the central swath vanishes in the distance always makes me think of "The Southern Thruway," one of the eight stories included inside, even though it's an empty beach rather than a superhighway jammed with vacationers returning to Paris.

The back cover features that wonderfully over-the-top Neruda quote:

Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a grave invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who had never tasted peaches. He would be quietly getting sadder, noticeably paler, and probably little by little, he would lose his hair. I don’t want those things to happen to me, and so I greedily devour all the fabrications, myths, contradictions, and mortal games of the great Julio Cortázar.

Gregory Rabassa was once again the translator. This edition was published in September 1973, the same month that Salvador Allende was overthrown in Chile and the same month that Neruda died.

Cortázar: 62: A Model Kit

This dust jacket is so similar in style and lettering to the one used for Hopscotch that you'd think it would have to be by George Salter as well, but Salter was long dead and this dazzling design was in fact by Kenneth Miyamoto. If you didn't look closely you might miss the suggestion of a cityscape with mountains in the distance. The superimposed geometrical forms below the title are actually appropriate, since the novel is set in several real European cities but also takes place in overlapping dimensions ("the City" and "the zone") that are organized more by systems of affinities than by geography. This is Cortázar's strangest novel, and it took me a couple of tries to penetrate its mysteries. The first thirty pages or so are slow going the first time out, but once you get past that it's a book like no other, aptly described by Carlos Fuentes as "an ironic, sentimental journey through a city plan drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an assist from Bela Lugosi." The reference to Lugosi isn't gratuitous; there's vampirism in the book, among many other things. The title alludes to Chapter Sixty-Two of Hopscotch, in which a prospectus for a novel -- or rather an approach to the writing of a novel -- is set forth. Almost everyone in the book is in love with someone, usually someone who's interested in another person entirely, who in turn... It all ends, sweetly and sadly, with dead leaves (actually a character named Feuille Morte, who has a pet snail) and insects circling a streetlight. The American edition, from 1972, is jointly dedicated by Cortázar and translator Gregory Rabassa to "Cronopio Paul Blackburn," who had died the year before, and bears these lines from Jorge Manrique's "Coplas por la muerte de su padre":

y aunque la vida murio, nos dexo harto consuelo su memoria

Cortázar: Cronopios and Famas

Paul Blackburn and Cortázar were exchanging correspondence about the translation of this book of whimsical stories and fables as early as 1959, three years before the book appeared in Spanish.

Paul, your translation is formidable. I've read it twice, making note in passing of the observations that I have to make to you, and they're minor details. You've managed the spirit of the thing, that way of writing that I used with the cronopios and that comes out beautifully in English (at times it makes me think a little of Damon Runyon, whom I've always admired a great deal). I congratulate you, and I give you a big hug (with one arm only, because the other one is still all messed up).

A subsequent letter refers to a reading Blackburn gave in New York City that included several of the pieces, apparently with great success.

You don't know how happy this makes me. Did you make a tape recording? How I would have liked to hear your voice reading your translations, it would be fabulous. Many thanks for scattering my cronopios in the cafés of 9th Avenue. They must have eaten all the hamburgers, I imagine, and then left without paying. Deplorable conduct of the cronopios in New York.

Blackburn did eventually send Cortázar a tape, whether from that reading or another. As it turned out, the cronopios, famas, and esperanzas had to wait their turn until 1969, after Pantheon's publication of two novels and one book of short stories. Dave Holzman did the artwork for this jacket. My copy is a paperback reprint. A Journey Round My Skull has the hardcover version.

Cortázar: End of the Game

The idea of translating selections from Cortázar's work must have been in Paul Blackburn's mind at least from April 1958, when the Argentinian wrote him a friendly letter, in the course of which he outlined the books he had published to date and mentioned that he had just completed a long story, "El perseguidor" ("The Pursuer") based on Charlie Parker. Blackburn seems to have turned his hand first to Cronopios and Famas, although that book wouldn't appear in its entirety until 1969. By 1962, Cortázar was writing to Sara Blackburn (Paul's wife, and Cortázar's US editor) about a translation of "Las armas secretas" (apparently just the title story, not the entire volume) by Hardie St. Martin:

It seems formidable to me. It's very faithful, very precise, and it has all of the atmosphere of the original. I marked two or three little things that can be corrected without great effort... I would be delighted if someone would be moved to translate "The Pursuer" and the other stories in the book, but above all "The Pursuer."

I'm not sure what became of St. Martin's translation, but in 1967, after Pantheon had already published The Winners and Hopscotch, End of the Game appeared, containing Blackburn's translations of most of the contents of Bestiario, Las Armas Secretas, and Final del Juego, including the Parker story, "Axolotl," "The Idol of the Cyclades," and twelve other pieces. By then Antonioni's film Blow-Up, which is loosely based on Cortázar's "Las babas del diablo," was about to appear, and so the story was retitled "Blow-Up," a felicitous change as the original title translates to something like "the devil's spittle." When the Collier Books edition appeared a year later the title of the entire volume was changed and a still from the movie became the cover art. In the late '70s or early '80s a Harper paperback edition restored the original title, but the subsequent Vintage edition that remains in print is once again Blow-Up. The original surrealist-derived cover art from the hardcover edition is credited to one Hoot von Zitzewitz, whose identity appears to be a bit mysterious. In a letter to Paul Blackburn and his wife Sara (who was his editor at Pantheon), Cortázar wrote:

Dear Sarita, many thanks for the copy of End of the Game, which is very nice. I have the impression that we have chosen the sequence of stories well, and that some critics will say some interesting things about them.

The same letter also alludes with regret to Sara's decision to leave Pantheon. By 1969 she and Paul Blackburn had divorced and Paul had married for a third time. (Translations are mine, from the three-volume Alfaguara edition of Cortázar's Cartas.)

Cortázar: Hopscotch

In the final paragraph of a letter to Paul Blackburn written from Vienna in September 1961, Cortázar shared a bit of news with his agent and friend. "Last week I finished La Rayuela (Hopscotch, you know). It is, I humbly believe, a very beautiful thing." Blackburn must have expressed puzzlement, because two weeks later the author explained: "La Rayuela is a novel, Mr. Agent. Of about 650 pages." And so it was. It was published in Buenos Aires in June 1963, although the American edition would not appear for another three years. During that time Pantheon's chosen translator, Gregory Rabassa, then a novice at the craft, worked closely with the author, struggling to devise creative solutions to the sometimes nightmarish obstacles the book posed. Years later, Rabassa recalled:

Hopscotch was for me what the hydrographic cliché calls a watershed moment as my life took the direction it was to follow from then on. I hadn't read the book but I skimmed some pages and did two sample chapters, the first and one further along, I can't remember which. Editor Sara Blackburn and Julio both liked my version and I was off and away.

When not busy translating One Hundred Years of Solitude, Paradiso, Conversation in the Cathedral, and dozens of other books, Rabassa went on translate five more of Cortázar's, the last being A Certain Lucas in 1984. His memoir, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, was published by New Directions in 2005.

Cortázar, who was himself an experienced multilingual translator, was delighted with everything about the American edition -- except for this colorful jacket by George Salter, which he claimed to have removed and thrown in the wastebasket as soon as his author's copy arrived.

Cortázar: The Winners

The first of Cortázar's books to appear in English, The Winners (Los premios) was published by Pantheon in 1965 in a translation by Elaine Kerrigan. The jacket is by Muriel Nasser.

I really like the JACKET, Sara. Say so to Muriel Nasser, who I hope is not related to that other Nasser. Or is it the same Nasser who works for you under a feminine pseudonym? You never can tell.

I put the jacket on another book, and it looked wonderful. I like it very much, you know. I've never seen such a large photo of me. How young I was when it was taken! In this last three years I've aged a lot; now I can't read for more than two hours in one sitting, and at times I have rheumatism. But the heart is still young, as the bishop said to the actress.

Excerpts from a letter to Sara and Paul Blackburn, December 17, 1964, from Cartas 2: 1964-1968, published in 2000 by Alfaguara. Sara Blackburn was Cortázar's editor at Pantheon; her husband, the poet Paul Blackburn, translated several of his works as well as being his American agent and good friend. The translation of the excerpts is my own, but the portions in italics are in English in the original.

We can figure this out

Damn, he thinks, what a firetrap this place is. They must have paid somebody off for sure to let this club open at all, a flight of narrow iron stairs below street level with a crowded restaurant above. He's sitting in a corridor offstage, leaning his back against a stack of wooden crates full of empty, sour-smelling bottles of beer, waiting to go on, trying to keep his feet and his guitar case out of the way of the waitresses who have to step past him on their way back and forth from the kitchen. He's keeping half an eye on the emergency exit at the end of the hall, wondering if he could make it out in time if a pot on the stove suddenly went up in flames. The floor, which isn't level to begin with, is covered in some kind of sticky black rubberized mat, specked with cigarette ash and smears of food and beer and ripped to shreds in a couple of places, so the waitresses have to step carefully to avoid tripping as they pass by heaving trays. He comforts himself with the thought that if he got to his feet quickly at least he'd have one good shot at the door before the panicked crowd tried to rush through to safety.

The act he opened for is back for the last night of a three-night stand. He knows them by now, a little; they gave him a nice shout-out when he finished his set, an obligatory courtesy for musicians to be sure but appreciated all the same, better than he deserved, really, but what the heck. They're a real band, with tour support from an actual label and reviews in the Village Voice, not just some guy with a few songs and a crap guitar with pickups. They have cassettes laid out on the table by the door, they've been driving up and down the east coast for two months in a van parked around the corner. Right now they've paused for a minute, they're adjusting mics and retuning while the leader banters with the crowd a bit to gain time. He'll go back on later, to give them a break, then he'll hang around and just listen for a while, maybe make it home by one. They'll slide him a beer or two on the house at the bar, and if the guy who owns the club is in a good mood he'll slip him a couple of bills on the way out, a little grocery money for the week ahead, better than nothing.

One of the waitresses comes by and gives him a quick smile as he catches her eye. She's pretty -- he thinks she must be a student, about his age, maybe a year or two less -- short dark hair, dark eyes, she's got a trace of an accent, maybe, like she's from Eastern Europe but maybe not, he hasn't really heard her say that much but she seems friendly enough. She's been working there for a few weeks; he heard them call her name once -- Laura or Lori or maybe it was Lauren, he's not sure. He wonders if she's got a boyfriend, and decides she probably does. He thinks maybe he ought to hang around a bit later and start a conversation, nothing to lose, right?, but on the other hand lurking around a club in the small hours when nobody gives a damn that you're there can get old pretty fast and a good night's sleep would do him good, though it'll be lucky if he can fall asleep at all with the sound of the band still ringing in his brain.

They're starting up now, the music reverberating through the concrete wall between him and the stage. What they're doing is so simple, why can't I do it?, he wonders. It's just one guitar lick, repeated hypnotically for a few bars, then the singer jumps in with some lyrics that are rudimentary but at the same time dead-on perfect. A verse or two, no solos, no real chorus even, just a one-line refrain, then it circles back to the same lick, the percussion pounds and the singer chants

We can figure this out
We can figure this out

but he can't figure it out, no matter how he tries. It isn't craft, exactly, though clearly these guys are pros; he doesn't know where it comes from. You either have it or you don't and he knows he doesn't, won't ever have it, not that he doesn't maybe have something of his own, some little fleck of a gift maybe, but still, not this, this he doesn't have and he never will. He'll have to find something else -- but he has no idea what that something else will be or how to find it. Anyhow he's definitely not going to find it tonight. The band on the other side of the wall is playing a song in the real world, but somehow where he is, just a few feet away, is someplace else entirely, though he's not sure exactly where it is or even if it's a real place at all.

The song throbs to a close. The dark-eyed girl steps in from the crowd. She stands in the opening for a minute and looks back inside, wiping the sweat off her hands on her apron, peering through the cigarette haze and the dust and the glare of the spotlights. Bottles are clinking around the tables but everyone's set for the moment, nobody tries to catch her eye, they're clapping and laughing and talking loudly as the guitarist and the bass player fuss with the tuning yet again. A couple more songs and he'll unpack his own instrument and step outside, away from the noise, to tune it up the best he can. As he's thinking to himself that probably nobody will notice in any case even if he's not in tune he notices that the girl is standing next to him, and when he looks up she smiles and leans down in her white blouse and asks him if he wants a beer and he says sure, that'd be great, thanks.

(Apologies to the Vulgar Boatmen.)

Mary

Her father was an immigrant from Austria and never shook his accent, though he would never speak or read German again from the day he set foot in Iowa. Her mother's people had been in the country longer, moving further west every other generation or so, until finally they crossed the Mississippi and stayed put. There wasn't much to the town except farms, but her father was no tiller of the soil. He opens a general store, starts a newspaper (which fails after a year), then a car dealership (which thrives), but he dies at forty and the depression wipes almost all of it away.

When she is twenty, in a moment of weakness, she allows a man in his thirties to love her. By the time her son is born he has gone elsewhere, never to return; as the years go by she decides that his departure, in sparing her the prospect of marrying him, is the best thing that ever happened to her. After two long years of cold stares from neighbors and uneasy silences from her family she packs a suitcase, bundles up the boy, and buys a train ticket to New York City, because she's always liked the pictures of the skyscrapers in the magazines and because it's the farthest place she can think of. Factories are hiring women and she finds a job in the Brooklyn Navy Yard within a week, soldering wires into radios and switches, and putting the boy into day care nearby. Some of her co-workers are the first black people she has ever spoken to, though she never comes to know them socially.

When the war ends and many of the women leave the factory she moves instead into a secretarial position. She's good at her job and is well-liked; her boss is meticulous and hard-driving but respects her conscientiousness and intelligence. On the job she becomes friendly with one of the foreman, an electrical engineer demobbed from the Navy, a wiry, quick-witted man of thirty-five whose wild years are behind him. When he learns she has a child he at first assumes that she's a war widow. She explains the truth but he doesn't mind; he says that everyone is allowed to make one really bad mistake in their lives and that he's made at least that many. After they marry he adopts the boy and two years later they have another son. She stops working for good and they move into a row-house on the edge of the city. It has a little yard in the back and it suits them until the boys start needing more room to roam. They take a drive into the suburbs -- he can afford it now -- but in the middle of the ride she starts to cry, she can't explain it but somehow she feels intimidated, exposed. Instead they find a more comfortable house closer to home.

He works for twenty years and then retires. The Yard is shutting down soon but it's his health, and a two-pack a day nicotine habit, that have let him down. After two heart attacks he never really gets his strength back and a third one, a year later, kills him. Her older son, who is now in the Navy himself, comes back from California and stays a week. The younger boy finishes high school, tries a year at City College, then joins his brother on the West Coast. Both will settle there permanently.

She takes a part-time job as a secretary again -- not because she needs to, just to have something to do -- but her heart isn't in it and she quits after a few months. Not long afterward she puts the house on the market and when it sells moves her things back to Iowa, deciding that the one thing she has missed during all the happy years in the city was the silence. She takes one ride through her old town -- she recognizes some of the names on the mailboxes, but mostly not -- and then rents a small house a safe hour's drive away. In a town where the definition of a stranger is someone who doesn't go to the same church as yourself she remains, to the end, steadfastly unaffiliated. Her one regret is that she knows she won't be buried next to her husband, but she decides he would understand.

Aventura

At first sight these selections from the Aventura series ("the Vintage Library of Contemporary World Literature") may just seem like particularly nice examples of 1980s paperback cover designs. They certainly were that -- the designer was Keith Sheridan, with various artists supplying the artwork -- but there's a bit more than that going on here.


These books were published during the waning years of the Cold War, when much of Europe and Latin America languished under one variety or another of tyranny, and six of the seven writers represented here are from countries in which it would have been risky or impossible to write and publish freely at the time they were written. (Timothy Mo, born in British-ruled Hong Kong, is the exception.) These images are not a completely representative sampling -- the Aventura list also included authors from Italy, France, Japan, and elsewhere -- nor were all of the books political in nature, but on the whole the titles reflect the values of the Western intelligentsia at a time when its political position was defined largely in opposition to Communism on the one hand and right-wing military dictatorships on the other. (Another notable example, from a few years earlier, was Mark Strand and Charles Simic's anthology Another Republic: Seventeen European and Latin American Writers.



There are still many places where writers are censored or persecuted for their work or their opinions, but the end of the Cold War has shifted the terrain and on the whole appears to have pushed literature to the sidelines. The day when writers could seem emblematic figures in a global struggle for democracy appears to be over, at least for now. How many times in the last decade has the New York Times Book Review -- or for that matter the New York Review of Books or the Nation -- reviewed a novel by a current political exile?




Most of the Aventura titles were reprints of books that had been published earlier in hardcover. One Day of Life, an exception, was a paperback original. Some of my copies have French flaps and others don't; I suspect this feature was abandoned to cut costs. The Aventura imprint seems to have been allowed to lapse at some point in the '80s. Here's the most complete list of titles I've been able to find:

Vassily Aksyonov, The Island of Crimea
Manlio Argueta, One Day of Life
Thomas Bernhard, Correction
Julio Cortázar, We Love Glenda So Much and A Change of Light
Maria Dermoût, The Ten Thousand Things
José Donoso, A House in the Country
Ariel Dorfman, Widows
Fumiko Enchi, Masks
Shusaku Endo, The Samurai
Jiří Gruša, The Questionnaire
Jamaica Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River
Tadeusz Konwicki, A Minor Apocalypse
Camara Laye, The Guardian of the Word
Earl Lovelace, The Wine of Astonshment
Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet
Elsa Morante, History: A Novel
Goffredo Parise, Solitudes
Manuel Puig, Blood of Requited Love
Darcy Ribeiro, Maíra
Samana Rushdie, Shame
Wole Soyinka, Aké: The Years of Childhood
Michel Tournier, The Four Wise Men

I read and enjoyed five of the books pictured, though the only one I've ever returned to is the Cortázar. I bogged down halfway through Widows (the briefest of the bunch) and I'm not sure I ever really started A Minor Apocalypse.

Update: here are two more cover scans:

"Manuscripts don't burn"

In 1562 Diego de Landa, a Franciscan monk resident in the Yucatán, gathered together all the Maya codices and images he could locate and burned them, ceremoniously, in a vast auto da fé. According to his own report the act caused the Maya "much affliction," as well it might, since Landa's bonfire betokened not only the irreversible loss of manuscripts whose cultural and historical importance was -- literally -- inestimable but the death knell of a good part of the culture itself.

Landa, a man of considerable determination and formidable intellectual resources, largely achieved his objective. The number of surviving pre-Columbian Maya manuscripts can now be counted on one hand, and whatever was consumed in the fire -- history, religion, folly, or knowledge as it may have been -- is now irretrievably lost. (In a bizarre irony, Landa's own careful notes on the Maya glyphs, rediscovered centuries later, would assist modern scholars in deciphering the Maya writing system.)

Today the burning of books is under discussion once again, but with a difference. The proponent in this case is a small man, not ordinarily worthy of notice, a cartoonish publicity-hound, though he is, sadly, no more than an extreme exemplar of currents of intolerance, ignorance, and anger that swirl around us.

If the Rev. Terry Jones decides in the end to stay his hand, as reports now say he will, then no doubt someone else, eventually, will step into the breach. There is no longer a line today that someone isn't crazy enough to cross, and there's no act so petty and absurd that it can't be captured and instantly disseminated around the world, with consequences that are all too predictable.

"Manuscripts don't burn," Mikhail Bulgakov famously wrote. His statement, baffling on its face, only made sense because the documents he was referring to were stored inside his head, the better to evade the prying eyes of Soviet authorities. The fact is, though, that Korans don't burn. There must be hundreds of millions of paper copies in existence, but in any case the book -- like any number of other human artifacts -- is now virtually infinite, since it can be accessed essentially anywhere, instantly, online. That's why the proposed burning, as even Jones must have known, would have been utterly pointless. You can't kill a book, not any longer. The act would have been strictly symbolic, a deliberate provocation, an affront meant as an opening salvo in a war that would never end or achieve a purpose. But we ourselves, sadly, don't share the immortality of our ideas; in fact in the replication of our unique identities we haven't managed even the revolution of Gutenberg, let alone that of the World Wide Web. Like manuscripts we are irreplaceable, vulnerable to fire, to sanctimonious parsons, and to fools.

The lake

For a while after I retired from teaching one of my former colleagues invited me back once a year to give a guest lecture at a summer seminar he ran. I had moved to the city by then, but as it was an afternoon class and I was an early riser I usually took back roads because they were quieter and because I liked the drive along the Housatonic. When my talk was over my host would invite me to dinner -- we were both widowers and I at least was past the age where I thought there was much likelihood of my marrying again -- and we would reminisce for a while over a stew and a glass of wine before I headed home.

It was on one of these evenings that I took a wrong turn in the dark somewhere on the way back to the city. The students had seemed a bit unresponsive earlier in the day and I was mulling over the question of whether they were the ones to blame – as any academic can tell you, some crops of incoming students are more promising than others -- or whether I had just been doing this for so long that other people were catching on to the fact that I was maybe getting a bit tired of it by now. My colleague had seemed a bit subdued as well; he hadn’t mentioned retirement but I suspected that the eventuality probably wasn’t far from his mind. There had been rain as I drove up but it had ended by late morning; the sun had steamed the moisture off the lawns but a few puddles still remained in the low places. I don’t know how I mistook my course, a moment’s inattention I suppose, as I knew the roads in that part of the Berkshires well and made a point of never drinking enough to affect my judgment. It was a darker night than usual, with no moonlight and little traffic, and maybe a sign had been knocked down or removed since the last time I drove that way. There aren’t many landmarks on the back roads, just miles of green woods broken by cornfields and the occasional mailbox, and so it was a while before I realized that I had gotten off my regular route. I was a little annoyed at myself but not alarmed; I had a full tank and I figured that eventually I’d come to a town or an intersection I recognized.

I was only doing about forty-five at this point. There were a lot of twists and turns and ups and downs in the road, and there was always the chance of a deer blundering out of the woods. After five miles or a bit more the gloom of the overhanging woods began to thin out on my left side, and I realized that I was driving along the edge of a body of water – not just a pond but a good-sized lake from the look of it. My headlights picked up the brown rippling of waves along the surface. I vaguely remembered there being a lake on the map in the area – it had a long Indian name I couldn’t come up with -- though it was off the main drag and I didn’t think I'd ever actually seen it before. I knew it was long but quite narrow from east to west, and that if I just skirted its shore I would come out into familiar territory in due time. I passed a tiny hamlet – really just a gas station and bait shop, set in a cluster of four or five clapboard houses, all with darkened windows -- and a mile beyond that the road split. There were no signs; the apparently less traveled thoroughfare – I was no Frost fan but the inevitable allusion popped into my head nonetheless – lay off to the right and up an incline, and I quickly dismissed it as a secondary road and bore to the left, keeping to the shore. It was only after driving another three or four miles, as the roadway seemed to narrow and the weeds on the shoulder grew more and more obviously untended, that I suspected I had been mistaken, and that the road I chosen led out to some uninhabited peninsula I didn’t remember from the map.

The barrier appeared suddenly, just around a bend. Luckily I had just slowed, having that moment determined to turn around and backtrack to the fork in the road, or I might have struck it. It was just a couple of wooden crosspieces, painted with black and yellow stripes and set on steel posts sunk in concrete disks; there was a single dangling battery-operated lantern, not that it cast much light. The road surface beyond seemed drivable enough, though creepers had begun to encroach on the edges and a few weeds poked through. I suspected there might be a bridge further on that had been dismantled or condemned as unsafe, never to be rebuilt for lack of funds or just because it was no longer deemed to be worth the trouble. It struck me there was something about the scene I didn’t like. It seemed to resuscitate memories from an impressionable period of my childhood, of watching war movies with roadblocks manned by grim helmeted soldiers who rode motorcycles with sidecars, things like that. I stopped the car and got out – the truth was that at this point I needed to empty my bladder – but left the engine running and the lights on, figuring that since I hadn’t seen another car for at least twenty minutes there was little danger of being rear-ended.

I stepped around the barrier and saw that there was a little path leading down to the shore of the lake, which I had lost sight of in the woods moments before but which now lay just twenty paces off. Above the lake there was a patch of lawn on an artificial embankment, though there was no sign of a house or any other building nearby, and I rested there for a moment. The air was warm and calm; on the far side of the lake there were some distant lights, but not many. A bullfrog bellowed not far away, then another, and I heard what sounded like falling water a little further down the shore. I picked my way in that direction, climbing over dead branches, mossy stones, and brambles, until I could get a better view. A few yards further out the lake's edge was bordered with a crescent of neatly dressed stone. Glowing faintly in the night, it topped a spillway through which the lake overflowed; to my great surprise I saw a lone human figure – it was a man, I could see, in spite of the darkness -- standing at the exact center of the crescent, his back turned toward me. He was about my height and I thought about my age, and wore a fedora and a brown coat that was much too heavy for the time of year, even at this hour. He was staring down into the stream that flowed out of the bottom of the chute some twenty feet or so below him. He hadn’t noticed my approach – or gave no sign of having done so – but just as I saw him begin to lean – too far for safety – over the edge of the spillway I shouted at him and he started and turned in my direction.

Though I couldn’t quite make out the man's features, what I did see filled me with terror. I won’t attempt to describe the lifeless, inhuman horror that peered out from under the brim of that dark felt hat, but I can see it in front of me now as clearly as I did at that moment, and will bear that awful memory to my grave. The figure took first a tentative step then several determined strides towards where I stood. I backed away, shaking with fear, and was about to turn and make a run for it when something called out of the dark waters of the lake.

When I say that it called I don’t mean to say that I heard it; there was no sound, at most there was only the opening of a hollow in the silence where a sound might have been, but the figure bearing down on me heard the summons, as if beckoned by a lover, and instantly froze in his tracks. He cocked his head towards the lake and listened; the call was repeated and he turned sharply and walked down to the water’s edge. To my astonishment, instead of stopping there he kept going, striding forward at the same pace, until the water rose up around him and he leaned into it and began to swim. For a moment or two, as he swam out towards the deepest part of the lake, I could make out the sound of his limbs breaking the surface; then there was utter stillness except for the burping of the frogs.

I don’t know why I didn’t immediately run back to my car, but somehow I knew the danger was past. I stood on the shore for a while, staring out into the blackness above the lake, until I thought I heard something moving at my feet. I knelt down; it was the man’s fedora, being gently nudged ashore by the lapping of the waves. I left it where it lay.

I turned my car around, eventually found the main road, and returned home without further incident. That winter my colleague passed away unexpectedly after a brief illness. His replacement was a younger man I had never met, and I was never invited back to campus to speak to his class.

Things Gone & Things Still Here

The pieces in this little volume have all been republished in subsequent collections of Bowles's stories, but I still prefer to read them as they first appeared, in an edition published by Black Sparrow Press in 1977. Four of the stories -- "Allal," "Mejdoub," "The Fqih," and "The Waters of Izli," form a natural group, both in style and setting. "Istikahara, Anaya, Medagan and the Medaganat" and the title story, though also set in North Africa, stand somewhat apart as they take the form of historical anecdotes rather than fiction. All take place in a Moslem Maghreb in which European influence is felt only distantly, if at all. Women are hardly present, and when they are they're generally up to no good. "Afternoon with Antaeus" is a mythological jeu d'esprit, and only in "Reminders of Bouselham" do Europeans share the stage with Maghrebis. "You Have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus," a description of an outing with some Buddhist monks in Thailand which may be either fiction or travelogue, is the only piece not set in North Africa.

The narratives are not much concerned with interior states, and descriptive detail is kept to a minimum; the unraveling of the tale is all, with each step provoking the next by inexorable fate -- "everything is decided by Allah." If the stories convey anything beyond fatalism, it's a sense of the impossibility of penetrating the consciousness of another, especially across cultures. This is so even in the one story, "Allal," where identities are literally exchanged, in this case between a young Maghrebi and a snake, under the influence of kif paste; the transaction ends in the destruction of both parties.


I miss John Martin's Black Sparrow Press. Back in its heyday, in the '70s and '80s, these colorful, matte-surfaced books were a refreshing alternative to the glossy trade paperbacks that were the standard in the publishing world. (There were also hardcover editions with acetate jackets and paper spine labels, but I could never afford them.) A lot of bookstores wouldn't touch them -- I'm not sure Martin really pushed their distribution all that much -- but they were always on prominent display in places like the Gotham Book Mart.


Much of the Black Sparrow list was devoted to writers like Charles Bukowski and lesser-known Beat poets I wasn't all that interested in, but it also included people like Bowles who had kind of fallen between the cracks of the publishing business at the time. (Bowles, by the way, firmly disavowed Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno's statement that he had complained of never being paid royalties for the Black Sparrow editions of his work.) Martin also put out a series of numbered pamphlets, entitled Sparrow, usually showcasing excerpts from the full-length books. He sold the bulk of his list to David Godine when he retired in 2002, the balance (Bowles, Bukowski, and John Fante) going to Dan Halpern's Ecco Press, which also had a long relationship with Bowles.


All of these books have colored endpapers and all except Midnight Mass below (perhaps because my copy is a second edition) have colored title pages as well. The designer was Barbara Martin.

The Boatmen, rowing on

Drive Somewhere: The Saga of the Vulgar Boatmen, Fred Uhter's hour-long documentary about what Robert Christgau reportedly once called "the best band you'll never hear," is finally finished. For those who are unfamiliar with the story of the Boatmen, it's a rather complicated tale spanning 30 years and involving something like 28 band members, a more than ample amount of good music, and some typical record business screwery that torpedoed the group just as they appeared to be on the verge of breaking out. The group's two principal songwriting partners, Dale Lawrence and Robert Ray, neither of whom was involved in the band at its inception, lived and worked in different states and collaborated by exchanging cassettes (remember those?) through the mail. (Ray is a fairly well-known professor of film studies; Lawrence, in his pre-Boatmen days, was a member of the Indiana punk band the Gizmos) As for the music itself, think Buddy Holly filtered through the Velvet Underground and you'll be on the right track, though saying so doesn't give the group proper credit for how original they were. And did I mention the viola?

The Boatmen cut three records (not counting some limited-release cassettes and a compilation, Wide Awake), two of which, You and Your Sister and Please Panic, seem to be available; their final effort, Opposite Sex, has never been released in the US. Robert Ray and the Gainsville, Florida branch of the group threw in the towel years ago, but Dale Lawrence and the other members of the Bloomington, Indiana contingent continue to perform, at least occasionally. Fred Uhter's documentary, which has a nice mix of archival and concert footage and interviews, can be downloaded from NewFilmmakers Online.

Notes for a Commonplace Book (6)

According to several ancient accounts, in a temple on a remote peninsula on the Gulf of Messenia there once stood a statue that possessed the curious property of displaying more than one likeness depending on the vantage point of the viewer. Approached from the west, it bore the appearance of a girl entering the first flower of womanhood; seen from a few steps to the north, an indomitable warrior suddenly came into view; and so on as one proceeded around to the east: here a tyrant scowled severely down, only to be supplanted by a weathered crone with weary eyes — the authorities part company on exactly how many figures there were in all. The transformation from one likeness to the next was instantaneous and absolute, and no matter how closely one examined the contours of the stone it was impossible to determine through what means the illusion was effected.

Pausanias, who claims to have visited the site, reports that the statue sustained minor damage in an earthquake and thereafter lost its remarkable qualities, but he neglects to say which of its various forms — if any — was left frozen in the marble thereafter. The ruins of the temple have not been identified.

The lost army

It's been raining since morning. The day broke gray and cold, and the overnight mist off the lake, instead of burning off quickly as the sun gained strength, slowly but steadily gathered into a forlorn, gusting, incessant storm. It must be raining high in the mountains too, for the little streams that irrigate the fields on the city's edges, normally placid and clear, are swollen and lead-colored and seem to be straining ahead in their long transit to the sea. You'd think the city itself would break up and melt away, but it won't, and the wooden bridges, built by experienced hands for storms worse than this, arch securely over the swell, bearing pedestrians who cross the solid timbers without delay but with no shiver of fear.

I've been watching the streets from this high window. The inn must be half deserted, tonight; now and then I hear bustling below but no one seems to have taken the other rooms on this floor, and it's late enough that in all likelihood no more travelers are to be expected, unless the odd straggler, perhaps delayed by washouts along the road from the hills, makes it in time to the city gates. There's a faint smell of barley and vinegar coming from the kitchen, but the rain has dampened all of my senses and most of the time I scarcely notice. The ghosts are coming out, and are beginning to flow, unnoticed, into the current of pedestrians, keeping to the edges of the crowd when they can, their heads bowed, though not against the rain like the others, no, it's the shame that keeps their heads cast down, their faces concealed. No one around them sees them but I see them, I know their names, each of their names. They'll wander the streets all night, searching for a destination they won't find, and with the first touch of morning they'll withdraw once more into the crawlspaces below buildings, into the runnels between paving-stones, into stagnant pools left behind by the flood, into the weathered beams of sad houses soaked by the steam of boiling laundry and the sweat of endless, unendurable toil. They'll never emerge to see the stars or the moon that casts its milky light on the lake, no, only when it rains like this and all hope is lost, only when despair walks abroad, will they feel their way, tentatively at first, out of their hiding-places and dare to walk the streets, seen only by their general, their commander in iniquity, in this high room, from this window through which light never shines.