George Tooker, 1920 - 2011

(The artist George Tooker died in Hartland, Vermont on March 27. The following is an abridged and updated version of a piece I originally posted in 2009. I've added a few images. The New York Times has an obituary as well as a slide show.)

In January 2009 I was able to visit the Tooker retrospective then on display at the National Academy Museum. It was my first visit to the relatively small Fifth Avenue institution, which at the time was struggling and in the news as a result of some controversial deaccessionings. Whatever the financial state of the museum, the fourth floor rooms devoted to the show were suitably homey and intimate. Tooker was an unassuming, private person; his canvases are on the small side and due to the demands of the egg tempera technique he employed his body of work is not as large as one might expect from a man who was active well into his eighties.

Although he has been sometimes categorized as a “magical realist,” that well-worn term seems particularly inappropriate in his case, for his work was “magical” or “fantastic” only in the most superficial way, and although he was a figurative painter he was no realist in the conventional sense. The show included early and somewhat strident paintings like Children and Spastics, Dance, and A Game of Chess, well-known works from the 1950s onward, like Government Bureau (below) and Waiting Room II, that give evidence of his political and social concerns, as well as more optimistic, religiously tinged works like Supper and Orant. There were several self-portraits and enough other works to represent the range of his artistic interests. An excellent catalog, edited by Robert Cozzolino, Marshall N. Price, and M. Melissa Wolfe, documented the show and provided biographical and critical illumination.


Much has been made of Tooker's formal conversion to Catholicism in the 1970s following the death of his longtime partner William Christopher, and of the ways in which that affected the course of his later work. (Tooker's mother was Cuban and the family had switched from Catholicism to Episcopalianism in the painter's youth.) It's true that after that time he executed several specifically religious commissions, in particular for the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Windsor, Vermont, but there is no clear division between his work before and after his conversion. In fact it is not always easy to say which of Tooker's paintings are to be regarded as evidence of alienation and which are to be regarded as expressing hope and communion with others.

A case in point is Landscape with Figures, which depicts, almost entirely in shades of reddish orange, what appear to be office workers sunk in a honeycomb of cubicles.


We look down over the horizontal array of boxes, but interestingly the perspective also evokes the vertical span of a skyscraper, with the tops of the cubicles functioning as windows. Most of the figures appear asleep or entranced, yet in the rows nearest to us there are several figures with eyes open who may be about to emerge from the corporate catacombs of the Organization Man.


In discussing Subway (above), which dates from 1950, Tooker used a combination of religious and mythological imagery:

I was thinking of a large modern city, as a kind of limbo. The subway seemed a good place to represent a denial of the senses and a negation of life itself. Its being underground with great weight overhead was important. I thought of the labyrinth of the Minotaur and the unreal perspectives of a Hall of Mirrors.

The painting has three vertical levels, linked by staircases, and the downward staircase could be regarded as leading into the underworld, with the staircase up to the street providing a possible route of ascent and escape (which, however, no one is making use of). The central plane would then be a kind of intermediate world, a Purgatory characterized by suffering but also offering the possibility of redemption to those who are able to break free from the conformity and isolation of modern urban life.

In Waiting Room (from 1957, not to be confused with the more explicitly political Waiting Room II from 1982) we look in on another bleak scene, this time of sullen, lifeless figures standing in what appears to be a combination locker room and waiting area.


The only face displaying any animation is the one depicted on the back cover of a magazine that one woman is holding aloft, obscuring her own face. The strong suggestion of the painting is that what is being awaited is death, a perhaps not entirely unwelcome end to hollow, unhappy, isolated lives. But there is one touch of tenderness: in one of the stalls a woman grasps the arm of a downcast man, perhaps as she says goodbye. The colors of the clothes the figures are wearing may indicate how close to death they are, as the more apparently vigorous figures are brightly dressed, the evidently moribund drably clothed; the woman in stall No. 114 seems to be slowly draining from one state to another.

There are many other aspects to Tooker's work, many of them admirably clarified by the exhibition catalog. His strong sympathy with the civil rights movement can be seen in a number of paintings that depict African-American or mixed-race figures, notably Supper from 1963 and Dark Angel from 1996, and there are several paintings that are simply splendid and beautiful, like his self-portraits from 1969 and 1994 and the lovely Girl with a Basket from 1987-88.


His work may convey a sense of mystery and otherworldliness, but in the end Tooker, dark or light, was an artist fully engaged with the human condition.

Ever Thus

Permutations of Mathews

The wealthy amateur Grent Wayl invited me to his New York house for an evening's diversion...

I picked up this volume in the Strand Bookstore in the mid-1970s, and it's been a favorite ever since. They had a stack of them that day, laid out on a table among the hardcover Cortázars and other good things that were being remaindered in those days, and I've always regretted that I didn't buy the whole lot and bring them home so that they could live together happily and maybe even multiply.

I don't believe I had ever heard of Harry Mathews at the time. It wouldn't have been likely; he wasn't part of any recognized "canon," not even an incipient "postmodern" one, and they certainly weren't writing about him in the book sections of the magazines I was reading. The cover looked interesting -- there was that wonderful Jim Dine illustration with a strangely animate pair of scissors whose blades seemed to be oriented in defiance of their intended purpose -- but I think I hesitated at first.

For one thing, there was the matter of the title. In addition to the obscure allusion to Kafka's equally obscure odradek, and the puzzling issue of how a stadium could "sink," there was the subversive notion embodied in the words "... and Other Novels." A "novel," at least a serious novel, was supposed to be "total," to encompass multiple levels of reality in some sort of approximation of life itself; it wasn't supposed to admit the possibility of being just one invention among several. The blurb on the back, though, was pretty promising:

For several years Harry Mathews has enjoyed a growing following among college students, artists, other poets and writers, and fans of the obscure who have never been able to buy his books. This volume is meant to satisfy their needs: it brings together his two out-of-print novels -- The Conversions (1962) and Tlooth (1966) -- and his latest fiction, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium. Mathews' work is virtually indescribable in brief. His is a genius of wild invention presented in a kind of meticulous deadpan narration that leaves the reader howling, amazed, and exhilarated. Beneath the brilliance of his elegant language and intricate constructions, Mathews is writing avant-garde fiction of starting originality. This omnibus volume gives ample evidence of Mathews' significance in the world of contemporary literature: it is time for a major assessment of his extraordinary work

"College students, artists, other poets and writers, and fans of the obscure" seemed to fit me fairly well (except for the "artists" part -- neither then nor now have I been able to draw a line) and I plunked down my two or three dollars and took the book home.


Harry Mathews is a bit better known today, having published two or three more novels (depending on whether you think My Life in CIA is fiction or not), several volumes of short stories and poetry, and various essays and the like, and he's even been the subject of a monograph in the Twayne's United States Authors series, but in spite of all that I suspect that even now most readers of "serious fiction" -- whatever that means these days -- still wouldn't know his name. To a degree that's understandable -- initially, at least, his novels can appear to be as disorienting as the cover of this book -- but it's also a shame, because at his best Mathews is a hoot, a master storyteller whose books are crammed with ingenious inventions, jokes, red herrings, anagrams*, and eccentricities but who is also just downright entertaining. "Meticulous deadpan narration" is right on the money; his narrators share a kind of tunnel vision diametrically opposed to the "realistic" psychology and self-awareness that have largely characterized the modern American novel. It is the reader, not the narrator, who undergoes development. Even the curious title of one of these novels -- The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium -- reveals something its epistolary narrators never learn.

Describing any of these novels in this space is a hopeless task; Wikipedia has brief summaries and Warren Leamon's Harry Mathews in the Twayne's series provides quite detailed ones. All three have to do with improbable quests of some kind, either for treasure, for knowledge, or, in the case of Tlooth, for revenge, but it is the diversions and digressions, the hidden pitfalls, that lay along the route that make them so enjoyable. I've read each of the three components of this volume three or four times -- The Conversions maybe six times -- and I'm still discovering things in them I never noticed before. Mathews' technique consists not of revealing secrets, but of constructing a labyrinth so intricate that even as we progress through it the presumptive "solution" to its enigmas only recedes further into the distance.


The Conversions first saw print in the pages of Locus Solus, a short-lived literary magazine Mathews published himself with money he obtained from an inheritance. It was then published in full** in The Paris Review (#27) and in book form by Random House in 1962. Both Tlooth and Odradek were also originally serialized in The Paris Review.


The omnibus edition from Harper & Row is long out-of-print. Carcanet in the UK put out individual editions in the 1980s, which have since been superseded by those published by Dalkey Archive Press. Reading the three novels together, and in chronological order, though not necessary, is still the best way to enjoy them.



The bibliography of writings by and about Harry Mathews is now quite substantial, but in addition to Leamon's dated but still-valuable critical study the book-length issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall 1987; Vol. VII, No. 3) devoted to Mathews deserves particular mention. The Paris Review (No. 180) featured an excellent interview with Mathews as part of its longstanding "Art of Fiction" series, and that interview can also be read online.


*To cite just one, the puzzling "Mundorys Lorsea" of The Conversions transforms into "Raymond Roussel," although I am also fond of the possibilities of "snarly dormouse."

** Not quite correct; some sections of the novel were summarized in the version printed in the Paris Review.

Notes for a Commonplace Book (8)

From an interview with Harry Mathews:

INTERVIEWER

Did Ashbery introduce you to any writers whose work you did read?

MATHEWS

Yes, thanks to John I began reading Raymond Roussel. Roussel had methodical approaches to writing fiction that completely excluded psychology. In the American novel, what else is there? If you don't have psychology, people don't see the words on the page. What was really holding me up was this idea that you had to have character development, relationships, and that this was the substance of the novel. Indeed, it is the substance of many novels, including extraordinary ones. But I had tried writing works involving psychology and characters and all that, and the results were terrible. In Roussel I discovered you could write prose the way you do poetry. You don’t approach it from the idea that what you have to say is inside you. It's a materialist approach, for want of a better word. You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

From "Harry Mathews, The Art of Fiction No. 191," interview conducted by Susannah Hunnewell. Print version in The Paris Review No. 180 (Spring 2007).

Pleasures of the Macabre

Thomas Ott is a Swiss artist and graphic novelist whose work consists largely of wordless images rendered with scratchboard and whose tastes run decidedly towards the gruesome. These images are from a work, "Recuerdos de México," that so far I've only seen on the web, although it has appeared in some collections in Argentina (in the wonderfully named comics magazine Suda Mery K.!) and in Europe. It is scheduled to appear in the US in Ott's collection R.I.P: Best of 1985-2004, which will be released in April 2011 by Fantagraphics Books.

The country that produced José Guadalupe Posada would seem like a natural source of inspiration for Ott, and these pictures bring to mind Octavio Paz's oft-cited and splendidly garish words from The Labyrinth of Solitude:

The word death is not pronounced in New York, Paris or in London, because it burns the lips. The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.

All of the above images are from El blog de la muerte, which has quite a few others as well.

Below are the covers from two of Ott's other books, both of which were also published here by Fantagraphics (although the Cinema Panopticum cover shown is from the French edition). Given a choice, I would start with Cinema Panopticum, which is a collection of several tales linked by a frame-tale, but both are worth exploring. There is more at Ott's website.

The Wanderer

"This singular being, whose nationality is unknown, converses with no one and wanders forlornly without a seeming motive, or definite object in life." -- Bristol (CT) Press, 1874

The nameless man in the photograph above wandered along regular circuits through western Connecticut and adjoining New York State from perhaps as early as 1856 until his death in 1889. Because of his handmade leather clothing he was popularly known as "the Leather Man," and to this day all the more specific identities that have been proposed for him have proved to be inventions. He spoke little and his first language may have been French, though accounts of his facility with English and his degree of literacy vary. Though homeless and "without visible means," he was generally regarded as inoffensive and allowed to continue on his way unmolested. He slept in caves and improvised shelters and survived on handouts -- in kind, as he refused money -- and on vegetable plots he planted along his route. Once, briefly and near the end of his life, an attempt was made to commit him to a hospital, but he refused to be admitted. His body was found in a rock shelter in Mt. Pleasant, NY in March 1889.

There are a surprising number of extant photographs of the Leather Man -- at least twenty-four, according to historian Dan. W. DeLuca -- and he was apparently not averse to posing. A number of the photos date from his last months, when his lip was disfigured by the cancer that eventually killed him, and those images are frankly painful to look at. The one above, however, seems to preserve his dignity intact. According to DeLuca the image was captured by F. W. Moore in 1888 and retouched by H. N. Gale in 1889.

For more information, Dan DeLuca's The Old Leather Man: Historical Accounts of a Connecticut and New York Legend is the best place to start.

Ithaca

He drove south in steady rain as night fell. The radio was staticky from distant lightning and when the station began to fade in and out he snapped it off. Somewhere off to his right, only a mile or so he guessed but hidden by a dark line of trees in their summer fullness, lay the deep, slender lake he had glimpsed a half-hour earlier. Strung along the road like beads were vineyards and well-tended farmhouses with lights on in the windows, but just as often he saw the hulks of silos and barns long abandoned to the overgrowth and missing so many planks that they were now barely more than skeletons. Here and there, at the unmarked intersections he crossed every few miles or so, he passed a bar with a neon sign and a few cars parked outside.

The bluff the road followed rose and fell gently and rose again, then bent a little to the right to begin a gradual descent through second-growth woods. A pickup roared past him and hurtled ahead but he kept to the same pace, steady but unhurried, silent and alert. The rain picked up; drumming down on the metal over his head it fell off the windshield in thick sheets as he switched the wipers to high speed. A gulley on his left had gone over its banks but he plowed through the overflow without slowing and continued on. There were houses here and there, tucked in the trees with mailboxes and cylinders for the local paper set out along the yew hedges, then as the road bottomed out and met the shore of the lake a line of cabins and boathouses appeared on the right. All were dark. There were canoes upended on the docks.

As he approached the outskirts of the city he turned off onto a cross street and began to climb a hill. The shoreline was now at his back, there were sidewalks and clapboard houses under the trees, and for block after block every parking space was filled. The rainwater coursed down between the tires of the dark empty cars and fell into catch basins, flowing through hidden channels until it gathered in the lake. He came to an intersection, braked to a halt, and waited, staring at the scarlet stains of the traffic light's reflection on the wet pavement.

Flying slowly

By now, the status of the airship as an emblem of a kind of alternative, softer version of modern technological development is a well-established cliché, found throughout contemporary steampunk and fantasy from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials to the TV show Fringe. Why do these lumbering craft provoke such nostalgia?


Over the course of the 20th century, the Futurist aesthetic embodied by the airplane -- sleek, fast, loud, and efficient -- would gradually lose its appeal, done in by the nightmares of Guernica, the Blitz, Dresden, and the Enola Gay. The airship wasn't entirely innocent of such possibilities -- zeppelin raids killed hundreds in Britain in the First World War, and Thomas Harris's novel Black Sunday imagined a blimp as what we would now call a weapon of mass destruction -- but for lethal efficiency it really couldn't compare. Nor, in the end, could it compete commercially. For a brief period the airship seemed to offer a kind of compromise between the genteel leisure of the hot-air balloon and the machine-age imperatives of speed and maneuverability fulfilled by the airplane, but the disaster of the Hindenburg doomed it to be forever confined to limited and special uses like hovering over football stadiums. A sad but probably inevitable end for the emblem of a less hurried kind of technological development that perhaps wasn't really ever going to be possible.


Artists, fortunately, are less constrained by such considerations, and there's something particularly pleasing and restorative about the sight of an airship poised above a landscape -- or an iceberg.


The above four images are all from the Eisbergfreistadt project by the artists Kahn + Selesnick. The first two are in the form of postcards; the latter pair are notgeld (emergency money).


The image above is by Donald Evans, an American artist who sadly died too young in a fire in the Netherlands in 1977. Evans's work consisted almost entirely of postage stamps, drawn actual size and appropriately perforated and often endorsed, of imaginary countries with names like Domino, Amis et Amants, Lichaam and Geests (Body and Soul), and Mangiare. (He also drew a fascinating set of zeppelin stamps for the country of Achterdijk, but unfortunately they are triangular in shape and too difficult for me to reproduce.) Willy Eisenhart's The World of Donald Evans, long out-of-print but not impossible to locate, is the indispensable collection.


Finally, above is one of a series of Little Nemo Sunday cartoon panels by Winsor McCay devoted to an airship tour of North America. This particular image is from January 15, 1911 and I rather like its conceit of Nemo and his companion Flip sweeping newly fallen snow off the deck. The whole series can be enjoyed online and at full size at The Comic Strip Library.

Of barricades, and dreams

Things seem to be happening so fast of late -- governments falling, state houses under occupation -- that it can be hard to know what to make of it, let alone what to say about it in a space like this, which has by intention never been particularly directed towards politics or news. And this at a time when, according to an article in today's New York Times, blogging is itself apparently passé in any case, displaced in the attentions of the young (though not those in my age bracket, I note) by services such as Twitter and Tumblr. As one adopter of the latter explains:

"It's different from blogging because it's easier to use... With blogging you have to write, and this is just images. Some people write some phrases or some quotes, but that's it."

God forbid you should have to write! -- but then the practice of teasing one's thoughts out of the written word isn't for everyone, as much as I remain devoted to it. (In fairness, I also use Tumblr on occasion, as an adjunct or when I have images to share about which I have nothing momentous to say.) Mindful of short attention spans (including my own), I tend to keep these pieces short, except when they insist otherwise. But in a world of Tweets perhaps even three or four paragraphs are too much to expect someone to read.

In one sense I don't consider myself a "political person," in that I don't get a thrill out of the sport of politics the way some people do from basketball or football. And yet I follow political events with some degree of attentiveness and even passion, when they touch on things that I think matter to me as a citizen. Other than voting and shooting my mouth off, here and there, about this and that (most of which comes down to preaching to the choir), I'm not particularly "active" politically. (There is one exception which I won't go into but which some people very well might not even recognize as activism.) But I do believe that as a citizen I have a responsibility to be informed about public affairs, to attempt to make reasoned judgments about what I see taking place, and, to the extent that I'm able, to take at least some small steps towards advancing the prospects of the kind of society I want to be a part of. To dismiss politics altogether is, in effect, to renounce part of one's self, because politics, for all its well-known sordidness, is nothing more nor less than the practice of arranging how we as human beings manage our interactions with each other. Pace Margaret Thatcher, there is such a thing as society, and most of us have no choice but to live in it. How that society is organized isn't something that just happens; it's something that is negotiated by its members. Some are stronger and exercise great influence; others are weak and exert barely none at all. But we are all affected, and we are all, in one way or another, implicated.

Nevertheless, I don't write a political blog, because, for one thing, many other people already do so and I'm not at all convinced that, however much attention I might devote to it, I have much to contribute in that format that isn't already being said better and with more assurance than I could. Also, frankly, because politics is not a particularly restorative avocation. I have sought in this space, quite selfishly, to create a small opening for things that I believe in that give me joy and that I think would interest the like-minded, things that might otherwise be lost in the noise (and there's plenty of that). So this blog remains my indulgence; with minor exceptions, its only political aspect is perhaps to imagine the vague tentative contours of what might be a better world if we ever able to lay aside our bad faith and trust each other enough to work in common instead of clutching desperately onto our own little piece. Whether, in the midst of all the upheavals and revolutions, what I do is of the slightest significance, whether I am what Katya Princip in Malcolm Bradbury's Rates of Exchange called "a character in the world-historical sense" at all, I leave to others to judge.

Illustration: Delacroix, Freedom at the Barricades

Supertest

Ganonoque, Ontario, 1940

Adele

She never knew her mother's family and had few memories of her father, none of them distinct. When she was four years old he had walked out of their rented clapboard house one morning carrying a suitcase. If there had been a fight or other preamble she must have slept through it, but in any case he never came back, and since as far as she knew her mother never inquired after his whereabouts she assumed that his departure had been at her invitation. Somehow her mother made ends meet until Adele was old enough to go to school and she could return to work and begin to bring in a little money. They moved with regularity, almost every year, usually in the summer, until her mother remarried. She didn't particularly care for her stepfather -- he was aloof and heavy-set and smelled like hair tonic -- but no longer having to be the one girl in her school without a father came as a relief. She suspected it was mostly her mother's fault when he too decamped, but Adele never forgave him anyway. When he appeared at the house, now and then, to visit her much younger half-brother, she usually managed to be out.

When she was sixteen she left home after a row with her mother. It wasn't really such a big deal -- they'd had worse -- but she was fed up with school and just didn't feel like going back. It was the sixties and it was what the people she hung out with were doing. She didn't exactly "run away." Her mother knew where she was living and Adele went home once a week or so when she wanted some of her things, but after she started traveling and later wound up on the West Coast eventually she just stopped coming home. She hated writing letters but kept in touch, at least sporadically. The years went quicker than she thought. She worked in a fish hatchery and a bar and a doctor's office and even in a factory once for a couple of weeks, then she got a GED and bought a camera and started taking photographs for a local weekly. She got to be good enough at it that after a year or so someone gave her a lead to some magazine work, and after that she was on the road a good part of the time. She sent her mother postcards. There were men in her life and they were decent guys for the most part but she somehow never wanted to settle and one by one they moved on or just stayed friends.

Her little brother, so unlike her in this regard, thrived in high school; when he was accepted to Stanford he came out to see her. They were all but strangers at first but he was a good kid and they wound up hitting it off. For a couple of years he spent part of the summers with her -- that is, in her house, as she herself was often elsewhere -- but when he graduated he went back east. When she returned for her first visit in twenty years she found her mother remarried again, older than she imagined, and not well. After that she made a point of coming back as often as she could get away, but when her mother entered her final illness she was in Mexico and didn't get word until it was too late.

Her mother's widower was a gaunt, quiet older man who treated her without reproach. She felt guilt-ridden and terrible but his kindness and her brother's affection and surprising level-headedness -- where had he gotten it from?, she wondered -- carried her through the week after the funeral. Her mother had left her a little money in her will. It wasn't much and she certainly hadn't been expecting anything, but the last maternal gesture touched her more than she expected. As a keepsake her stepfather offered her a photo album she barely remembered from her childhood. Except for a few pictures of a smiling Adele riding a hobby horse or building sandcastles all of the photographs were from the years before her mother first married; the few blank spots, Adele surmised, were the ghostly traces that were all that remained of her own father. The little album with its pale blue faux leather cover held a few score images, all of them black and white. There were a few images of typical if unidentifiable scenic New England vistas, but the rest were of Adele's mother, groups of smiling young women who must have been her friends, and a few shots of a stout older woman in white gloves, stiffly posing next to a man in a summer suit and boater. None of the snapshots had captions and Adele never could find out who any of them were.

Margaret and Alexander Potter

This Puffin picture book, which was published in the mid-1940s, is by the husband-and-wife team of Margaret and Alexander Potter. The human figures are almost unbearably crudely done (the cover is by no means the worst example), which is a shame because some of the colored spreads inside are quite appealing.

I don't know how the Potters divided their duties, but they were capable of sophisticated work, at least in terms of architectural draftsmanship (Alexander was an architect by profession). The following three images are from Houses (1948) and are reproduced from the page devoted to the Potters from Chris Mullen's web project called The Visual Telling of Stories.




Chris Mullen incidentally also has some scans from A History of the Countryside, but his images are evidently from a different, perhaps later printing, as they lack the background colors seen in the two-page spread below.


I rather like this layout, which is accompanied by a simple but intelligent discussion of urban planning. Here are close-up scans.



The Independent has an obituary of Margaret Potter, who died in 1984.

Chris Mullen reports that many of the early Picture Puffins, of which he reproduces a number of examples, were lithographed by the printing firm of W. S. Cowell of Ipswich. According to an interview he conducted with a former CEO of the firm, much of the Cowell archive was eventually discarded and burned.

Swedish Summer

While trying to scan some photographs from an old paperback I was having issues with pixelation. Rather than try to fix the problem (and not being especially adept at these things), I decided to roll with it instead. Using the Black & White setting, these images emerged.





The above, by the way, is the Gondolen restaurant in Stockholm, which is still in operation.


With apologies to Bertil Hultén.

The Coup

Just ahead of dawn the young sentry in the lobby of the interior ministry, bored and sleepy after yet another overnight shift alone, heard tapping on the plate glass door as he made his rounds of the long empty corridors. Startled, he adjusted the strap of the rifle that was slung over his shoulder, straightened his cap, and made sure his shirt was tucked in all the way around. Visitors were rare on his watch; most likely it was an inspector, and it wouldn't pay to be looking unkempt. He strode quickly to the main entrance and peered out through the glass at the plaza that surrounded the ministry, lit up by the spotlights along the building's exterior.

When he reached the door and saw who was there he stood panicked and puzzled for a moment. It wasn't an inspector at all but three girls, identically dressed in the uniform of the national university that occupied a bluff a half-mile away along the river. As soon as they saw him they began calling to him urgently. One, the tallest of the three, held aloft a large manilla envelope that appeared to have some kind of official stamp on it; the flap was open and several sheets of paper were protruding a bit, though he couldn't tell what kind of documents they might be. The other two girls, after a brief pause when they first caught sight of the sentry, began banging on the glass again, pleading with him to unlock the door.

He stared at them, then shook his head. Obviously it was against regulations to open the door until the ministry officials began to arrive for their morning office hours and he was relieved by the day shift. He nervously felt for his radio, but decided it wouldn't be wise to disturb the chief of the security detail, no doubt still asleep in bed with his mistress, for a trivial matter he could handle himself. Hadn't he once received a dressing down for calling an alarm, in the middle of the night, because he had heard what turned out to be windblown acorns bouncing against the side of the ministry? He shook his head at the girls again, emphatically this time, and gave them a dismissive wave of the hand to make them go away.

But they didn't go away. Instead, the one holding the manilla envelope, who seemed to be their leader, drew out some papers and held them up. She seemed very indignant. Perhaps she was the daughter of some official, dispatched to deliver urgent correspondence to the ministry, though the more he thought it over the more unlikely that possibility seemed. He shook his head one more time, looking as severe as he could, hoping the girls would understand that the matter was now settled and that further entreaties would be a waste of time, but he didn't resume his rounds.

The girls turned away from him, conferring by themselves, then the tall one pulled out a cell phone and punched a number. She gestured at the door and shook her head while she spoke into the phone; she leafed through the papers, then slapped them against her thigh in evident exasperation. In the meanwhile the other two girls had returned their attention to the door. They banged on the glass and beckoned to him; he couldn't make out what they were saying but he distinctly heard the word “idiot.”

The sentry tried to pretend he was ignoring them, but as this clearly wasn't having the desired effect he thought it over, reached for his radio again, then changed his mind. Instead he strode firmly to the door and demanded their business in a firm voice. The girl on the cell phone broke off the call, and all three began chattering at him at once, more frantically than before. They held up a sheet of paper; it looked official, but he couldn't catch its import from where he stood. Finally he reached to his belt for the key and inserted it in the door.

The girls rushed in all at once. One of them immediately darted to the bottom of the stairs. He yelled after her, started to follow, until he noticed that somehow, from out of nowhere, another cluster of students had appeared and were shoving their way through the half-open door. This group included some male students, as well as a couple of burlier, older men. Before he could react one of them had seized the rifle that still lay slung on his shoulder. He resisted but they pulled it away and subdued him, then pushed him aside.

Another cell phone snapped open, and within seconds a crowd was forming, a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty people, students mostly but not all, running individually or in twos and threes across the plaza between the oak trees, scattering or crushing the newly fallen acorns as they came. Swiftly, largely in silence, they made their way inside and swept up the stairs to the offices above.

Upstairs the corridors were mostly deserted, but the crowd barged into an office where a dozen startled men and women sat at desks, headphones on, cigarettes between their fingers. One of them drew a revolver and waved it around; the intruders swarmed past him and out of the room, hurrying down the hall towards the private elevator that led to the minister's office. The man with the pistol put it away and reached for the telephone. Then he noticed that his fellow-workers had all abandoned their posts and disappeared.

The door to the minster's office was locked. While the crowd debated how to proceed a guard rushed in and fired a pistol shot into the ceiling. At the sound the throng drew back, at first, but the force of new arrivals propelled them forward again, trapping the guard against the door for an uncomfortable moment, until word was passed back and the shoving stopped. A harried-looking functionary, bloodshot and tieless in a glum disheveled suit, foced his way through, unopposed. After a moment's parley he dismissed the guard and produced a key, then stood aside as the crowd burst into the inner sanctum of the ministry.

At the headquarters of the national broadcasting service, a little after dawn, the staff suddenly rose, seemingly as one, and stormed into the studio just as the morning newscast was beginning. The perplexed announcer froze, looked up at the crowd gathered around him, then took off his earpiece and yielded the microphone to one of his subordinates. The camera crew continued filming without a pause. A producer darted in from the control room, infuriated, yelling and threatening, but was soon subdued by an offer of immediate defenestration.

As the city woke up and the news began to spread the downtown districts filled with pedestrians, most of them hustling towards the presidential palace and the ministries that surrounded it. Traffic began to back up, as a tide of cars and trucks, all heading in the same direction, inundated the main avenues, tying up streets for hundreds of square blocks. By the time the army arrived the entire area was gridlocked. The lead tank tried to ram its way through, pushing three or four cars aside and riding over the top of another, but the situation was quickly understood to be hopeless, especially after the military vehicles became trapped, in their turn, by another wave of incoming traffic behind them. The soldiers abandoned their stalled vehicles and stood around in groups, shouting into radios and cell phones, until the crowds began to swell around them and they broke up, retreating on foot to their barracks or just heading home.

The president had slept in, as usual, and was shaving when he heard the commotion outside. He set his razor down, hastily grabbed a towel, and strode to the window in his sleeveless undershirt and shorts. The sight of the crowed stunned him; just then the phone rang. It was the minister of defense, calling from his home in the hills on the outskirts of the city. Had he heard the news? What were his orders? The president said he would call right back, then pulled on a pair of pants and rushed into the hallway, looking for his chief of staff. The offices around him were bustling like a hive; papers were being shredded, desks emptied out. His secretary breezed by him, securing her purse on her shoulder as she hurried off, giving him just a quick glance and a weak smile before she darted towards the elevator.

He went over to a window, hid himself behind a curtain, and peeked outside. The plaza was jammed with thousands of people; they seemed to be in the mood for celebration. He looked in vain for any sign of the police, or his personal bodyguard, but except for one police cruiser parked on the far edge of the crowd, its lights flashing, they were nowhere to be seen. He retreated into his private chambers, pulled down a briefcase and a plastic shopping bag, and began to gather his personal effects. When he left, walking in a daze down the hall towards the elevator as the transitional committee assembled in his office, no one even noticed him.

The above was first written in 2007. I am reposting it and dedicating it to all those in Egypt, Belarus, and elsewhere for whom it must, for now, remain only a fantasy.

Jules Shear: Between Us

Jules Shear has been around the music business for more than two decades, having composed several songs that became at least minor hits for other people, but were it not for this CD, which grew out of a series of concerts by songwriters that he hosted in the '90s at the now defunct Bottom Line in Manhattan, I most likely either wouldn't recognize his name or would confuse him with Jule Styne.

There seems to be general agreement that the biggest rap against Shear has always been his voice. (Typical: Jon Pareles, in The New York Times: "An exceptional songwriter will always have friends among musicians; a limited singer may need them. Jules Shear is both …") He's no Aaron Neville to be sure, though once you get used to it his singing has a kind of agreeable smokiness to it that I've come to be quite comfortable with. If you prefer your music with no seams showing you're not going to like Between Us, but I'm quite fond of it. Every now and then I dig it out and remind myself of how good a record it is.

Shear has recorded solo and as part of several fairly obscure bands (including one called Jules & the Polar Bears which if nothing else deserves some recognition for having a really cute name). On Between Us he shares vocals in a series of duets with some very good female singers (Paula Cole, Suzzy Roche, Amy Rigby, and others) as well as some male singers (Ron Sexsmith, Freedy Johnston, Curtis Stigers) whose chops are not necessarily out of line with Shear's own. There is one instrumental track, "Entre nous," a duet with bassist Rob Wasserman. Collectively the songs -- at least the ones that have lyrics -- anatomize a relationship that is evidently on the rocks, regarding it with varying proportions of whimsy, melancholy, and resignation. As with lovers since at least the troubadours, the truest evidence of his faith is in the depth of its disappointment.

The lyrics have an improvised, back-of-the-envelope feel to them, which is not at all to suggest that they aren't actually carefully crafted. The same can be said of the arrangements, which are mostly built around Shear's acoustic guitar (he is said to play it idiosyncratically upside-down) with some well-chosen guests on everything from mandolin and banjo to trumpet and sax. The style is eclectic, borrowing as much from torch song and chanson as from folk and country, with a good handful of theatricality thrown in. Shear writes breathtaking bridges, and almost every song here has a great one. It's hard to say how well any of these songs would hold up removed from their context, but taken together they work superbly well.

Almost every cut here has its little delights, in the melody and in the lyrics. One of my favorites is in the final verse of the last song, "You Might As Well Pray," which seems to hold out (if only then to whisk away) a vision of reconciliation:

it's no use backtracking
& wondering where we went
it's like watching where the dog
ran through the wet cement
there's no way in this world
we'll ever be content
so try to make it like the dream we had
the peaceable kingdom
where no one's betrayed
you might as well pray

you might as well pray
you might as well pray

(From 2008; reposted because I'm listening to it and because that's the kind of day it is.)

A Manhattan Mission

The Cremorne McAuley Mission, at 104 West 32nd Street near Sixth Avenue, New York. The engraving, which probably dates from around 1883-84, is from Jerry McAuley: His Life and Work (Second Edition), edited by Rev. R. M. Offord. The artist is not credited.

Judge on Trial

I first read this novel in 1993, the year it was published in the US by Knopf, but the copyright date of the Czech edition, Soudce z milosti, was 1986, and even that was for a reworked version. According to a review by the late Malcolm Bradbury, the book was originally written and circulated as samizdat in 1978. The events of the novel itself take place around 1972; that is, four years after the premature end of the Prague Spring in which Ivan Klíma, as the editor of Literární noviny, was an active participant. There are also several long digressions dating back to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia during World War II. The book remained unpublishable in Klíma's own country until the collapse in 1989 of the Czech Communist regime, which to the end of its days was one of the Soviet Bloc's most hardline members.

The protagonist of Judge on Trial is Adam Kindl, is a jurist assigned to hear the case of a man accused of the murder, by gas asphyxiation, of his landlady and her adolescent granddaughter. The incident wasn't political in nature but its consequences may be. The defendant faces a possible sentence of death; Kindl, though no dissident, had once incurred the displeasure of the Communist Party, years before, by writing an article calling for the abolition of the death penalty. The judge suspects that he has been assigned the case as a test of his loyalty. If he refuses to impose a death sentence he will lose his job and his decision will likely be overruled upon appeal anyway.

Except for the fact that its author is by profession a writer and not a lawyer, much of the book appears to be loosely autobiographical. Like Kindl, Klíma was born into a thoroughly assimilated family of Jewish descent and spent much of his childhood in a concentration camp. The details of the judge's family members, his affiliation and eventual disenchantment with the Communist Party after the war, and even his marital infidelities seem to echo the author's own background. The chapters dealing with the concentration camp coincide with many of the details of the story "Miriam," included in Klíma's My First Loves. (It will be interesting to see to what degree they will also correspond to Klíma's as yet untranslated memoirs.)

In contrast to much of the literature of the same period, whether from Eastern Europe or elsewhere, Judge on Trial is neither ironic nor phantasmagorical. Its manner is realist, its tone earnest. It presents no difficulties, in terms of following the action or interpreting the motives of the characters, but on the other hand it makes no attempt to amuse or divert the reader either. It's not particularly grim -- the deaths of the old woman and her granddaughter are left on the periphery, and the horrors of war and Stalinism are implied rather than described -- and Klíma is fundamentally a writer of moderation, of the prosaic and ordinary rather than the romantic and heroic, but there is no mistaking the fact that this is, in the best sense of the word, a serious novel.

As is the case with much of the literature of Eastern Europe produced between 1945 and 1989, the inescapable question is whether, now that the political situation has changed and an entire generation has come of age with no memory of life under Communism, the book still bears the same urgency. The specific conditions under which Kindl lives no longer exist, at least in what is now the Czech Republic, but I think the book is more than a historical document. Its underlying theme is the inescapability of moral choice, whether in a legal decision that is literally a matter or life or death or in choosing between one's wife and one's mistress. (Kindl's lover is the seductive but cruelly manipulative wife of a senior colleague.) Tyranny complicates the predicament because the regime recognizes only its own moral authority, and will relentlessly punish anyone who refuses to do the same. Kindl is therefore simultaneously compelled to make moral choices and constrained from doing so in a disinterested manner. Our own situation is very different, and it would be a mistake to romanticize it by likening it to life behind the Iron Curtain, but it seems to me that a little of Klíma's earnestness is something we could use.

The translation of Judge on Trial is credited to A. G. Brain, a pseudonym for Gerald Turner. I speak no Czech but his rendition seems fairly adept compared to other Klíma translations I've read. There are a few slang terms and Britishisms that may stick in American ears, but nothing that will interrupt the flow of reading. One curiosity: Kindl's mistress describes a book she has been reading by a Latin American writer, in which a group of characters revere an author they have never met, then wind up meeting him by chance after he is accidentally struck by a car. Though the book isn't named, it's clearly Cortázar's Hopscotch, a different section of which is also discussed by two characters in Klíma's My Golden Trades. It's hard to think of two authors less superficially alike, but perhaps at bottom there's a kinship after all.

Acrobats

Like Ivan Klíma himself, the narrator of the "The Tightrope Walkers," the fourth and final story in this 1985 collection, has spent part of his childhood in a wartime concentration camp. Though he survives physically, he isn't unscathed:

Perhaps it was a result of my wartime experiences or of a self-pity typical of my age, but I had never quite been able to surrender to pleasure or joy, or to relax. As if I never ceased to be aware of the connection between happiness and despair, freedom and anxiety, life and ruin. My feelings were probably those of a tightrope walker on his high wire. No matter how fixedly I was looking upwards I was still conscious of the drop below me.

As the story begins, the young man is en route to visit a classmate, Ota, who has a cabin in the country. Along the way he recalls an experience, a year or so after the end of the war, of seeing a traveling troupe of acrobats. While he had been waiting for their performance to begin, a young woman had approached him selling tickets, and though he never spoke to her he had been quite smitten by her. Later he had watched the same girl, now wearing a different costume, ascend one of the masts to take part in the show.

With Ota at the cabin is his girlfriend Dana, whom the narrator has never met. She too has painful memories: both of her parents were executed in the war, her grandmother has recently died, and she herself is still recovering from a serious illness. She and the narrator become friends, and later they exchange visits, books, poems, and eventually kisses. Finally, still loyal to Ota, she implores the narrator not to see her any more, then collapses and has to be brought to a hospital. Three days later, recovering at home, she sends him a letter, ardently declaring her love and informing him that she has broken it off with Ota. He hurries out to go to her, but on the way he is racked by second thoughts:

If only her letter hadn't been so totally urgent or her offer so unconditional. Did I even have the right to reject her after what I'd caused? But what feelings did I have for her? Did I have any feelings of the kind she wrote about?

Suddenly, on the way to Dana's apartment, he comes upon the acrobats again:

As I stood there in the crowd, gazing up at the celestial acrobat who, high above our heads, above the dark void, was invoking that vaster void with the starry face, it seemed to me that I was beginning to understand something of the secret of life, that I would be able to see clearly what until then I had been helplessly groping for. I felt that life was a perpetual temptation of death, one continual performance above the abyss, that in it man must aim for the opposite mast even though, from sheer vertigo, he might not even see it, that he must go forward, not look behind, not look down, not allow himself to be tempted by those who were standing comfortably on firm ground, who were mere spectators. I also felt that I had to walk my own tightrope, that I must myself sling it between two masts as those tumblers had done, and venture out on it, not wait for someone to invite me up and offer to carry me across on his back. I must begin my performance, my grand unrepeatable performance.

His resolution soon fades, however, and the story ends ambiguously, as he stands staring up at her window, still uncertain, suspended on the high wire.

(Translations by Ewald Osers, very slightly emended.)