The exchange

This postcard of Stockholm was mailed from that city in 1903 by one Annie Sundberg and addressed to Mademoiselle Candelaria Benítez Inglott of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. My first assumption, due in part to the vaguely Nordic sound of "Inglott," was that the two women (or more likely adolescents) were either cousins or schoolmates, though precisely how the Spanish-Swedish connection would have come about was a mystery. On further reflection and with a bit of research, however, it now seems likely that they had never met nor even corresponded before Annie sent this card.

The tip-off is the brief message on the front: "Acceptez-vous l'échange" — "Do you accept the exchange?" Knowing no Spanish, and suspecting that the recipient in her turn would know no Swedish, Annie Sundberg posed the question in French, the one language that two educated women at the beginning of the 20th century might have been expected to have in common. Note too, that in writing to a complete stranger she uses the formal "vous."

As to the nature of "l'échange," it almost certainly alludes to the early 20th-entury craze for sending and collecting postcards, the more exotic the better. How Annie Sundberg obtained Candelaria's name is unknown; it could have been through a mutual contact, but it's also possible that Candelaria had advertised publicly for correspondents, a practice which was not uncommon.

Thus far I haven't been able to identify Candelaria Benítez Inglott, but she was almost certainly at least a distant relation of the same prominent Canary Islands family that produced Wenceslao Benítez Inglott (1879-1955), a scientist and admiral in the Spanish navy; Miguel Benítez Inglott (1890-1965), a lawyer, composer, and friend of Federico García Lorca; and Luis Benítez Inglott (1895-1966), a poet, journalist, and translator of Shakespeare. The far-flung Inglott line, which appears to be ultimately of English origin but was long established in Malta, probably came to the Canaries as part of a significant wave of Maltese immigration during the latter half of the eighteenth century.



The word written in on the top of the reverse appears to be "trycksak": printed matter. The street address in Las Palmas, which Annie Sundberg may not have had correctly, may be "López Botas, 9"; if so, that address is now a nursing home run by the Hermanos de la Cruz Blanca.

Recent photographs of the Strömgatan show an almost unchanged view, except for the addition of another bridge.

Re-reading Martin du Gard (III)

Much of La belle saison, the third part of Roger Martin du Gard's massive novel Les Thibaults, centers around the relationship between Antoine Thibault, a young physician, and Rachel, a young woman he has met while performing emergency surgery on an accident victim. Beautiful, intelligent, independent, and sexually uninhibited, Rachel seems like the ideal match for Antoine, who has previously satisfied himself with casual affairs with prostitutes. Rachel has had other lovers — a fact that doesn't disturb Antoine unduly — and one of them is a man named Hirsch, a shadowy character who spends most of his time in Africa. It is in relating her adventures with Hirsch that we — and Antoine — begin to discover her less admirable qualities.

Rachel has already told one appalling story of her time in Africa, about a woman who was buried alive with stones as punishment for bigamy. (Rachel, who had absented herself from the scene, reports that Hirsch, who had witnessed it, assured her that he did not participate.) One night, while she and Antoine are watching a documentary about the continent, she relates another incident, equally horrifying. During a hunting outing with Hirsch, she shoots an egret, which falls on the far shore of a river. Hirsch's "boy" (the word is in English in the original) is dispatched to swim across and retrieve it; while swimming, an unnamed animal (probably a crocodile) seizes him from below.

Hirsch was wonderful in that kind of situation. He realized, instantly, that the boy was lost, that he was going to suffer horribly: he put his gun to his shoulder, and pow! the child's head exploded like a gourd. It was better that way, no?

The next day, a porter is sent across for the egret, "and he had better luck than the boy." The bird is made into a hat, which she continues to own.

She enthuses over the unrestrained liberty — especially sexual liberty — that Europeans enjoy in their colonies:

In France, you see, we're stifled. One can only live free down there! If you only knew! The freedom of the whites in the midst of the blacks! Here, we have no idea what it's like, that freedom! No rules, no controls! You don't even have to fear the judgment of others! Do you get it? Can you possibly comprehend that? You have the right to be yourself, everywhere and all the time. You're as free in front of all those blacks as you are in front of your dog. And at the same time, you find yourself in the midst of these delicious beings, full of tact and nuances of which you have no idea. Around you, nothing but young, happy smiles, ardent eyes that divine your least desire...

She relates how she and Hirsch admired, without comment, two "fillettes délicieuses" belonging to a local caïd, and how the girls later appeared, unbidden, in their tent at night. "I tell you," she repeats, savoring it in her memory, "your least desire..."

You don't even have to make a signal. Your gaze rests on of one of those smooth faces, your eyes meet for an instant ... that's all, That's enough.

These disturbing episodes — and it seems clear that Martin du Gard intended them to be disturbing — offer a sharp critique of the moral status of European colonialism at a time when it was still in full flower. They also, perhaps, implicitly offer a bit of a rebuke to Martin du Gard's great friend Gide, who had described, in L'Immoraliste, exactly the kind of personal liberation by means of sexual tourism that Rachel celebrates so effusively.

Re-reading Martin du Gard (II)

Una novela de Galdós, qué idea. Cuando no era Vicki Baum era Roger Martin du Gard, y de ahí el salto inexplicable a Tristán L'Hermite, horas enteras repitiendo por cualquier motivo "les rêves de l'eau qui songe"... — Rayuela, Cap. 31 ¹

As far as I know this is the only reference to Roger Martin du Gard in Julio Cortázar's writings. There's no mention of the French novelist in the three-volume Alfaguara edition of Cortázar's letters (I haven't checked the five-volume revised edition), although Gide, whom he translated, is mentioned, favorably, several times. If one thinks of the difference between Gide's approach to fiction, at least in The Counterfeiters, and Martin du Gard's as roughly corresponding to the divide between the modernist and the positivist novel traditions, then it's likely that Cortázar, a second-generation modernist, meant Oliveira to be dismissive of, or at best bemused by, la Maga's choice of reading matter.

Cortázar, of course, would explode the very notion of the novel in writing Hopscotch, in which he also drew a notorious distinction between the lector-hembra or "female reader" ("el tipo que no quiere problemas sino soluciones, o falsos pro­blemas ajenos que le permiten sufrir cómodamente sentado en su sillón, sin comprometerse en el drama que también debería ser el suyo" ²) and the lector-cómplice or "accomplice reader" who "puede llegar a ser copartícipe y copa­deciente de la experiencia por la que pasa el novelista, en el mismo momento y en la misma forma." ³

The naturalist or positivist novel assumes that there is a nature of things, which by dint of diligent effort one can ascertain and describe. (The implicit irony in the notion of describing reality by inventing stories is an old one, with which Cervantes was as familiar as anyone.) Oliveira, the ultimate anti-positivist, has no faith that the nature of things is knowable; Hopscotch mirrors that, using a variety of techniques that force the reader to come to terms with the author's own manipulations. Where a novelist like Martin du Gard sought to be invisible, Cortázar makes the reader the co-author of an impossible work.


¹ "A novel by Galdós, what an idea. When it wasn't Vicki Baum it was Roger Martin du Gard, and from there the inexplicable leap to Tristan L'Hermite, whole hours spent repeating for no reason 'les rêves de l'eau qui songe.'" Benito Pérez Galdós was a Spanish realist, and Vicki Baum the author of the novel that inspired the 1932 movie Grand Hotel; François Tristan L'Hermite was a seventeenth-century playwright.

² "the person who doesn't want problems but only solutions, or false problems belonging to others which permit him to suffer comfortably seated in his armchair, without being implicated in the drama which ought to also be his own." Although referring to the lector-hembra, a term he later apologized for, Cortázar here uses a masculine noun (tipo) and the possessives that follow are actually gender-neutral.

³ "who is able to be a co-participant and co-sufferer of the experience through which the novelist passes, at the same time and in the same form."

Lost at Sea

Joseph E. Corrigan, the city magistrate who presided over the farcical legal proceedings reported in my last post, was a prominent New York City jurist who later rose to be chief magistrate and, in 1931, was named by Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt to be judge of the Court of General Sessions. The nephew of Archbishop of New York Michael Corrigan, he was born in 1874 and seems to have died in 1935. He presided over a number of celebrated cases, including at least one involving birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, waged a public campaign against crime and municipal corruption, and earned a reputation as an amateur athlete. (The New York Times of February 9, 1913, reports, however, that his baseball team, the Strong Arms, received a "drubbing" from Magistrate J. Frederic Kernochan's Wanderers in an indoor game played on a converted tennis court. Corrigan played third base.)

But more about Joseph Corrigan another time, perhaps. When I first looked up his name, one of the things that immediately turned up was a horrifying story involving the death at sea of his wife, Margaret Stone Corrigan, in January 1916. Mrs. Corrigan, aged 34, had been returning to New York on board the SS Rochambeau after an extended sojourn in Europe. Suffering from what the Times called "an attack of melancholia and continued ill health," she flung herself, unseen, into the waters of the Atlantic. A brief note, accompanied by a small sum of money to be divided among the ship's stewards, was found in her cabin; tellingly or not, the note gave instructions to contact, not her husband, but her parents, "if anything happens." Because of wartime regulations the ship had been prohibited from sending a wireless message ahead of its arrival to report the incident, so Margaret's parents were waiting for her on the dock when they learned of her fate.

The Corrigans' only child, a boy, had died a few years earlier, aged three, after an illness of several months. Margaret Corrigan had gone to Europe "to rest for three months," and was in Paris the day war broke out. She quickly volunteered to serve as a nurse (she had taken a course in nursing at Barnard), and later advised her husband "that she preferred to stay on at the hospital instead of returning to New York." The Times quotes Margaret's mother as saying that "Mr. Corrigan consulted [Margaret's] physician in this city, Dr. Finch, and he said that it would be an excellent thing for her to have something to occupy her mind and keep her from brooding over the loss of her boy." She goes on to say, however, that the strain of nursing wounded soldiers "must have broken her down." It's hard to say what else should be read between the lines of this melancholy story, which can be found in its entirety in the New York Times of January 30, 1916.

An Exterior Disarrangement

My next two posts will revisit two peripherally connected news stories, one comic and one tragic. The first is recorded in The Fourth Estate, a trade periodical devoted to the newspaper business, on February 19, 1921.

EDITOR TO LEAVE GREENWICH VILLAGE.

NEW YORK MAGISTRATE DID NOT QUITE APPROVE OF THE MATERIAL INSERTED IN THE VAGABOND AND SO HE DECIDED TO EXILE ITS EDITOR.

Luther Emmanuel Widen of 148 West Fourth street, New York, editor of the Vagabond and a well known figure in the faddistic [sic] circles of Greenwich Village, was before Magistrate Joseph E. Corrigan in the Jefferson Market Court Wednesday and the magistrate said at first he guessed he would have to send the editor to Bellevue Hospital for observation. After reading an issue of Widen's paper, Magistrate Corrigan expressed the opinion that "no sane man would put out work like this."

In behalf of Widen was Dr. Lindley Kasdy, who said the editor was suffering from exterior but not interior disarrangement.

He also said Widen had been in Bellevue before, but that it did him no good. The magazine was said by the doctor to be published without malice to any one. It is filled with bits of village news and gossip, in which initials are used instead of names. The two gems that brought forth Magistrate Corrigan's comment regarding the editor's sanity were: "Mrs. — has married a man from West Virginia, but she still has her friends," and an article about a woman who "still looked pretty without her paint."

"I am going to send you to Bellevue for examination," said the magistrate. "This is an unusual magazine."

"Why should I go to Bellevue when I can go elsewhere?" asked Widen.

"Where will you go?"

"Astoria," said Widen.

"Well," said the magistrate, "if you will promise to leave Greenwich Village and not publish the Vagabond, and do all that in forty-eight hours, you won't be sent to Bellevue."

"I'll go right now," said Widen. He bowed deeply, and looked sadly from the window. "Never, never, shall I return. Farewell, Greenwich Village."

Better known as Lew Ney and often styled (at least by himself) "the Mayor of Greenwich Village," Luther Emanuel Widen (his middle name is spelled incorrectly in the article) was well-known in New York's bohemian circles in the 1920s and '30s as a writer, publisher, journalist, prankster, and publicity-hound. The straight-faced looniness of the article, which is unsigned, makes me half suspect that he had a hand in writing it himself. The New-York Tribune also ran a story on the incident, much of which corresponds closely to the above, though it adds a few other details, including the fact that The Vagabond had all of forty-eight subscribers (which would explain why I've been able to find no other record of it). It also clarifies — if that's the word — the circumstances that brought Widen before a city magistrate:

He was arrested because of the suspicions which his psychological methods aroused in a detective who was trying to find out who had been stealing gowns and jewelry from Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney's studio at 147 West Fourth Street. Luther's "office" is next door, and in a neighborly way he tried to help the detective, and, in fact, told him the name of the thief, which he discovered psychologically.

The Tribune also reported that Widen said that he might, on second thought, go to "sunny California" instead of Astoria. In any case he remained in Greenwich Village and probably never had any thought of leaving.

Re-reading Martin du Gard (I)

At least thirty-five years ago I greedily devoured this 871-page translation of a novel by the 1937 Nobel Prize-winning novelist Roger Martin du Gard, and eventually went on to its even longer continuation, Summer 1914. Both volumes of Stuart Gilbert's translation are long out-of-print, and the author, when he is mentioned at all in the English-speaking world, is generally dismissed (unfairly, I think) as one of those Nobel laureates whose existence proves the utter irrelevance of the prize. He seems to have retained a bit more respect, or at any rate to have stayed in print, in his native France.

Be that as it may, after all these years I'm reading the book in French for the first time, intending to make it at least as far as La mort du père, the sixth of the novel's eight parts. (The final two correspond to Summer 1914.) Because of the book's length and my indifferent French I never had any intention of reading it in the original, but I changed my mind and am now steadily making my way through, dictionary and the translation in hand.

The first six parts of Les Thibault are essentially a family saga, set in the years leading up to the First World War. The paterfamilias is a well-connected Parisian Catholic autocrat, a widower with two sons. The elder, Antoine, is in training to become a physician as the book begins, while the younger, Jacques, a teenager, has just run away to Marseilles in the company of a friend, Daniel, with whom he is suspected (incorrectly, as it happens) of having a relationship of a forbidden nature. Jacques is eventually retrieved by his older brother, then consigned by his father to a reformatory as punishment, which is about where I am now, in Part Two, Le pénitencier.

In re-reading the narrative I'm surprised at how much of it I had either forgotten or misremembered, and mostly this is due, no doubt, to the length of time since I first read it and the immense size of the book, but I'm also getting the feeling, when I do need to refer to the translation to clarify a passage, that part of the problem is that Gilbert's translation is not simply dated but actually quite bad. Some of his readings are all but unrecognizable when compared with Martin du Gard's words. The passage below, which describes part of a conversation between the brothers when Antoine visits Jacques in the reformatory for the first time, provides both an example and, in part, a possible exculpation. First the French text, with Antoine speaking first:

— « Mais non, mon petit, c’est juré, je ne ferai rien contre ta volonté. Seulement, écoute-moi. Cette solitude morale, cette paresse, cette promiscuité ! Moi qui, ce matin, avais cru que tu étais heureux ! »

— « Mais je le suis ! » En un instant, tout ce dont il venait de se plaindre s’effaça: la monotonie des jours, l’oisiveté, l’absence de contrôle, l’éloignement des siens.

And now Stuart Gilbert:

"But of course, old man; I've sworn it! I'll do nothing you don't want me to do. Only, listen. Do you want to go on like this, frittering your life away in idleness, with no one of your own kind to talk to, in these sordid surroundings? And to think that only this morning I imagined you were happy here!"

"But I am happy!" In a moment all he had complained of fled from his mind, and all he now was conscious of was the languid ease of his seclusion, the somnolent routine and absence of control, not to mention his isolation from his family.

Even with my deficient French, I can see that parts of this translation are absurd. Gilbert not only expands a simple list constructed out of seven words — Cette solitude morale, cette paresse, cette promiscuité — into a long-winded rhetorical question, he also arguably butchers the sense of promiscuité, which probably has nothing sordid about it (although there are some sordid aspects to the boy's confinement) and only means "overcrowding" or "lack of privacy." But the interesting thing is in the next paragraph. In the French text, the point of the last sentence is that, a few moments earlier, Jacques had been bitterly bemoaning his life in the reformatory; but now, all of his complaints — the monotony, idleness, the lack of control over his own life, the separation from his family — have apparently been forgotten. Gilbert seemingly turns this around: Jacques forgets his earlier complaints, and reflects on how good he has it in the reformatory: he has a soft life, an easy routine, no one controls him, and he's away from his family (which is apparently a good thing). How could Gilbert have misconstrued the whole thrust of the sentence so badly?

But in this case, the translator is off the hook. As I discovered when I researched this passage online, Gilbert must have used a different version of the final sentence, one that reads, "En un instant, tout ce dont il venait de se plaindre s’effaça: il ne vit plus que les douceurs de sa réclusion, la monotonie des jours, l’oisiveté, l’absence de contrôle, l’éloignement des siens." Gilbert's translation more or less adheres to this version.

The words in bold are not in the edition I own, which bears the Gallimard imprint but which was printed in Canada in 1945. Every online text of the book that I've looked at (I haven't tried to be exhaustive) contains the highlighted words, and it's obvious that the edition Gilbert worked from must have contained them (or something similar) as well. Gilbert's translation was published in 1939, which means there are two possibilities:

1) Martin du Gard made revisions to the original published text (specifically, deleting the words in bold) that are reflected in the Canadian edition, but Gilbert worked from an earlier version.

2) Martin du Gard made revisions to the original published text (specifically, adding the words in bold), and Gilbert worked from that text, but the Canadian edition continued to reprint the earlier version of the text.

The situation is somewhat puzzling, as the longer version of the final sentence seems a complete muddle. But it was apparently the author's muddle, not the translator's. In any case, literary market conditions being what they are, I suspect that it's unlikely that Gilbert's translation of this massive novel will ever be replaced by a better one.

Lowry Hamner: American Dreaming

Lowry Hamner's an old friend, but since I hadn't heard that he was working on a new record it was an unexpected treat to find out about it just after the start of the new year. More than thirty years ago, Lowry fronted a band called the Criers that recorded two LPs before falling prey to typical record company screwery. Like many major label refugees, he went out on his own, and eventually released a solo album, Secrets of the Heart, in 1998. American Dreaming is his second CD.

A couple of the cuts here are songs that Lowry's been playing in gigs for a decade or more, and it's nice to see them finally on disc; at least one song ("The Breakdown," which has been covered by Willie Nile) dates back to the time of the Criers. The lyrics of another proudly promise, "I'm gonna wear my heart on my sleeve," and in fact there's nothing coy about Lowry's songs. They're all emotionally exposed in one way or another, though the spectrum of emotional weather runs from the decidedly sunny ("Hope and Love") to about as bleak as it gets. The latter is most evident in "Ballad of Samson," about a killing spree in Alabama. The song, co-written with the poet Jeanne Marie Beaumont, reminds us, even before Newtown, of the hard kernel of nightmare that's all too often wrapped up inside the American Dream:

He was a gun aficionado
But the townsfolk are still packing ammo
With factory jobs lost overseas
everyone feels ill at ease

A hail of bullets breaks the silence
another day of random violence
no reason, no explanation
shots ring out in a grieving nation

Musically the album ranges from hard-edged rock and blues to the tropical lilt of "Thief of Dreams," with maybe a bit of South African-influenced guitar on "Hope and Love." Veteran guitarist Jon Sholle and Clay Barnes (another Criers alumnus) are among the supporting musicians. The CD appears on the Alien Chants label and can be ordered from CD Baby.

Creation

Bruno Schulz:

My father never tired of glorifying this extraordinary element — matter.

"There is no dead matter," he taught us, "lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life. The range of these forms is infinite and their shades and nuances limitless. The Demiurge was in possession of important and interesting creative recipes. Thanks to them he created a multiplicity of species, which renew themselves by their own devices. No one knows whether these recipes will ever be reconstructed. But this is unnecessary, because even if the classical methods of creation should prove inaccessible for evermore, there still remain some illegal methods, an infinity of heretical and criminal methods."

The Hinterland

How do you write the history of something whose very nature consists of being unrecorded? How do you describe the pool of the unknown out of which the known is born?

"Once there are names, know that it is time to stop." — Lao Tzu

❋
Every language, every utterance of our ancestors ten thousand years ago has been irretrievably lost. We can't even classify the languages they spoke, except to give them vague, conjectural, labels like "Proto-Nostratic." Nevertheless, every language we speak today is a direct lineal descendent of those lost systems of meaning.

❋
"Mallarmé said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph" (Susan Sontag). In fact, we could equally well now say that everything, including every book and every photograph, exists in order to inhabit cyberspace. (How quickly the phrase "World Wide Web" has come to seem so limiting, so inadequate.) But what happens when signal becomes noise? Or is noise itself now the only signal?

❋
What happens when texture is reduced to surface? Where is the unknown that we don't know is unknown? What sherds are we ploughing under?

❋
According to one theory (Barry B. Powell), the Greek alphabet was invented, or rather adapted from its Semitic ancestor, precisely in order to record the Homeric epics. This is probably a minority view, but if not for that reason, then why? Why go to such trouble to invent something so sophisticated, just in order to scrawl graffiti and settle a few accounts?

The Mycenaeans had already developed at least one writing system (Linear B), but by Homer's time it had been forgotten, left for Ventris and Chadwick to decipher in the twentieth century. Nothing is more perishable than meaning. We congratulate ourselves for recovering the Epic of Gilgamesh from the sands of Mesopotamia, when in fact what we really have, as priceless as it is, is nothing but a husk.

Yet out of husks, strange transmutations are sometimes possible.

❋
"Pienso en esos objetos, esas cajas, esos utensilios que aparecen a veces en graneros, cocinas y escondrijos, y cuyo uso ya nadie es capaz de explicar. Vanidad de creer que comprendemos las obras del tiempo: él entierra sus muertos y guarda las llaves. Sólo en sueños, en la poesía, en el juego ... nos asomamos a veces a lo que fuimos antes de ser esto que vaya a saber si somos." — Julio Cortázar, Rayuela❋


❋❋

Out with the Old (2012)

The fourth annual retrospective of the year's postings at this address.

Money Home

The Rotograph Project

Two Group Portraits

News from Home

The Honest Badger Thief of Lubeck

Artist unknown (Views of Iceland)

In Suðarsveit

Reykjavík Blues

Oblivion

More Katazome

More Stasys

Stille Nacht

Postcard reproduction of a poster for Stephen and Timothy Quay's short film Stille Nacht I: Dramolet (1988). The letters "R. W." in the intricate calligraphy commemorate the Swiss writer Robert Walser, whose body was found in a field of snow on Christmas Day in 1956.

The Museum of Modern Art's special exhibition devoted to the work of the Quay brothers closes on January 7, 2012.

Sumargestur

A song by the young Icelandic musician Ásgeir Trausti. The title, I'm told, means something like "Summer Guest," and the song is addressed to a migratory bird.

12/14/2012

From today's New York Times:

Each slaughter of innocents seems to get more appalling. A high school. A college campus. A movie theater. People meeting their congresswoman. A shopping mall in Oregon, just this Tuesday. On Friday, an elementary school classroom.

People will want to know about the killer in Newtown, Conn. His background and his supposed motives. Did he show signs of violence? But what actually matters are the children. What are their names? What did they dream of becoming? Did they enjoy finger painting? Or tee ball?

All that is now torn away. There is no crime greater than violence against children, no sorrow greater than that of a parent who has lost a child, especially in this horrible way. Our hearts are broken for those parents who found out their children — little more than babies, really — were wounded or killed, and for those who agonized for hours before taking their traumatized children home.

President Obama said he had talked to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut and promised him the full resources of the federal government to investigate the killer and give succor to his victims. We have no doubt Mr. Obama will help in any way he can, for now, but what about addressing the problem of guns gone completely out of control, a problem that comes up each time a shooter opens fire on a roomful of people but then disappears again?

The assault weapons ban enacted under President Clinton was deficient and has expired. Mr. Obama talked about the need for "common sense" gun control after the movie theater slaughter in Aurora, Colo., and he hinted during the campaign that he might support a new assault weapons ban, presumably if someone else introduced it.

Republicans will never do that, because they are mired in an ideology that opposes any gun control. After each tragedy, including this one, some people litter the Internet with grotesque suggestions that it would be better if everyone (kindergarten teachers?) were armed. Far too many Democrats also live in fear of the gun lobby and will not support an assault weapons ban, or a ban on high-capacity bullet clips, or any one of a half-dozen other sensible ideas.

Mr. Obama said Friday that “we have been through this too many times” and that “we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”

When will that day come? It did not come after the 1999 Columbine shooting, or the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, or the murders in Aurora last summer.

The more that we hear about gun control and nothing happens, the less we can believe it will ever come. Certainly, it will not unless Mr. Obama and Congressional leaders show the courage to make it happen.

I have little to add to the above because there really is nothing there that can be disputed, nothing there that hasn't been known for years. Over and over the same kind of incident has taken place, and over and other in response we've heard the same empty verbiage from the NRA and its allies, the same tired list of reasons why we shouldn't actually ever do anything effective that might have a chance of preventing these atrocities from happening, atrocities that would set us on a swift path to war if they were perpetrated by a foreign country, but which we're seemingly willing to aid and abet at home. Enough is enough; it's time to draw the line. We don't need "a conversation" about gun control; we need gun control, the stricter the better, the sooner the better. And if you don't agree, don't waste your stale breath on me; try to square your consciences with the families of the victims.

For more information:

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence
Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence
New Yorkers Against Gun Violence
Violence Policy Center
Charles Blow: "A Tragedy of Silence"
Larry Alan Burns: "A conservative case for an assault weapons ban"
Gail Collins: "Looking for America"
Adam Gopnik: "Newtown and the Madness of Guns"
Bob Herbert: "War at Home" (link now broken)
Nicholas Kristof: "Do We Have the Courage to Stop This?"

Brothel, with Orchestra

I borrowed a copy of this brief study of the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti because I was curious to see what Mario Vargas Llosa would have to say about Los adioses, the peculiar, ambiguous novella that is the only Onetti of any length I've read. As it turns out, he devotes only a few paragraphs to it, and I'm going to put off reading the rest of El viaje a la ficción until I've had a chance to read more Onetti, but in the meantime I did dip into a few sections, including the book's somewhat eccentric twenty-page preface, in which Onetti is not referred to at all until the final sentence.

I also came across a few gossipy literary anecdotes, such as the one in which Onetti, while reading Cortázar's "El perseguidor," reportedly smashed a windowpane with his fist when he read of the death of Johnny Carter's little daughter; and the following, in which Vargas Llosa speaks of his own encounters with the Uruguayan:

Only in San Francisco did I have a chance to chat with him a bit, in the smoky, dark little bars in the vicinity of the hotel. It took some effort to provoke him to talk, but when he did it he said intelligent things, though impregnated with corrosive irony or ferocious sarcasm to be sure. He avoided talking about his books. At the same time, behind his gruffness and lapidary jokes, there appeared something vulnerable, someone who, in spite of his culture and his imagination, was unprepared to face the brutality of a life which he distrusted and feared. One night when we were discussing our working methods, he was scandalized that I worked in a disciplined manner and with a schedule. Working that way, he declared, he would not have written a line. He wrote in gusts and impulses, without forethought, on loose sheets at times, very slowly, word by word, letter by letter — years later Dolly Onetti confirmed that this was exactly the case, and that while he worked he sipped glasses of red wine diluted with water — in periods of great concentration separated by long parentheses of sterility. And then he pronounced that sentence which I would repeat many times afterwards: that the difference between us was that I had a matrimonial relationship with literature and he an adulterous one.

A footnote appends two briefer and possibly apocryphal anecdotes to the above. In one, Vargas Llosa writes that "when my novel The Green House won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1966, and [Onetti's] Body Snatcher was a finalist — two novels that centered around whorehouses — Onetti is said to have declared that it was to be expected that I would win, because my brothel had an orchestra and his did not." Onetti is also said to have told an interviewer for a French television program, who seemed fascinated by the fact that the Uruguayan had only one tooth remaining in his mouth, "At one time I had a magnificent set of teeth, but I gave them to Mario Vargas Llosa."

(The translations are mine.)

Update: A passage in one of Cortázar's letters supports the anecdote about "El perseguidor": "Speaking of Montevideo, I had one of the greatest rewards of my life: a letter from Onetti in which he says that 'El perseguidor' had him in a bad way for fifteen days (lo tuvo quince días a mal traer)." (Letter to Francisco Porrúa, August 14, 1961, from the 2000 edition of Cartas, Volume I.)

More Stasys

I don't know if these are actual covers for the catalog of the Vilnius Book Festival or just posters, but either way I am in awe. The artwork is by Stasys Eidrigevičius.

Notes for a Commonplace Book (11)

Leszek Kołakowski:

In short, the word “happiness” does not seem applicable to divine life. But nor is it applicable to human beings. This is not just because we experience suffering. It is also because, even if we are not suffering at a given moment, even if we are able to experience physical and spiritual pleasure and moments beyond time, in the “eternal present” of love, we can never forget the existence of evil and the misery of the human condition. We participate in the suffering of others; we cannot eliminate the anticipation of death or the sorrows of life...

There are, of course, people who consider themselves happy because they are successful: healthy and rich, lacking nothing, respected (or feared) by their neighbors. Such people might believe that their life is what happiness is. But this is merely self-deception; and even they, from time to time at least, realize the truth. And the truth is that they are failures like the rest of us...

Happiness is something we can imagine but not experience. If we imagine that hell and purgatory are no longer in operation and that all human beings, every single one without exception, have been saved by God and are now enjoying celestial bliss, lacking nothing, perfectly satisfied, without pain or death, then we can imagine that their happiness is real and that the sorrows and suffering of the past have been forgotten. Such a condition can be imagined, but it has never been seen. It has never been seen.

From "Is God Happy?," The New York Review of Books, December 20, 2012.

More Katazome

According to the label, these katazome (stencil-dyed) calendar pages were "made by Haruo Kuriyama in Kyoto" and distributed by Yasutomo Co. in San Francisco. The artist who designed them, however, is almost certainly Takeshi Nishijima. The page for February is missing from this set.

Click on the katazome label below for earlier related posts.

Re-reading Camus

I found revisiting The Plague as La peste considerably more difficult than re-reading The Counterfeiters as Les faux-monnayeurs. I sailed through the first seventy pages or so, then bogged down, though more so in the philosophical passages, some of which are quite long, than in the narrative and dialogue sections. When I referred to Stuart Gilbert's translation, which I kept at hand as a crib (though I mostly relied, heavily, on a dictionary), I was surprised to find that, although it reads well as the English-language novel I first encountered it as some thirty-five years ago, it diverges rather radically from the terse style of the original, even more so than Dorothy Bussy's dated but generally faithful rendition of Gide.

It's hard to read La peste today without very quickly noticing the curious fact that although the novel is set in a predominately Arab country (Algeria), there are virtually no Arabs in it. There are also very few women, and the few that do appear are either kept largely offstage (Rieux's wife) or reduced to entirely passive roles (Rieux's mother, who when not doing housework mostly sits silently with her hands folded, and who is probably based on the author's mother). The half-dozen characters of any consequence — Rieux, Tarrou, Rambert, Grand, Cottard, and Paneloux — are thus all males of European descent. To some extent these omissions are understandable, given what Camus set out to do, which was to write not a social novel but a moral and philosophical one in which the introduction of a social dimension might have been a distraction, although it still might be regarded as peculiar that Camus thought that he could only investigate moral and philosophical matters as they were refracted through one kind of lens.

In the end, however, even though Camus was in fact raised in Algeria and the lyrical passages in the book exude the particular ambience of the city of Oran, the novel is no more about Oran than Kafka's "The Great Wall of China" is about China. That La peste is, at least in part, an allegory about the German occupation of France during World War II has been widely noted, but one could be ignorant of that connection, or even ignorant of World War II, and still grasp the author's essential purpose, which was to consider how one might act in the face of a universe that is not made by us and does not operate for our benefit, but which accords us, or at least some of us, the freedom to make moral choices about how we will respond to that indifference.

Re-reading Gide

When I was in my late teens I went through an intense phase of devouring every single page of modern French literature I could get my hands on. In a fairly short period I read essentially everything that was available in translation by Camus, all of Sartre's novels and plays (but none of his philosophy), the major works of André Gide, and all 2,000 pages or so of Roger Martin du Gard's The Thibaults and Summer 1914, as well as various bits of Malraux, Cocteau, Artaud, Ionesco, and others I've no doubt forgotten about. (Did I actually read, or just own, a copy of Mauriac's Viper's Tangle?) Eventually I took two years of French in college, but I never got to the point of trying any of the literature in the original, and in any case by then I was moving on to other things, especially Spanish and Latin American writers. I read some Zola, Balzac, and Flaubert in and out of college, but after 1980 or so I pretty much went cold turkey on French lit. Over the years, as I needed to thin out my library to make room, I donated just about everything, only retaining The Counterfeiters, The Plague, and the doorstop-sized Martin du Gards, which had been out-of-print and devilishly hard to find in the first place. I put a lot of effort into reading Spanish and let my French go, convincing myself that I just didn't really like the language. As for the literature, the time when the century-old struggles between Catholics and positivists or gossip about the philosophical debates between Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir could be viewed as crucial cultural concerns seemed to be long past, and later movements in French letters, most of which appeared to be centered more around philosophy or psychoanalysis, didn't appeal to me.

I can't say that it was entirely chance that led me not only to revisit The Counterfeiters but to attempt to read it in French, even though it's true that I would not have done so had I not found an ancient Gallimard edition on a shelf in the foreign-language section of a used bookstore. The truth is, I'd been thinking about the book on and off, and I had also been thinking about testing out my French on something, which is why I had made a point of looking on that particular shelf. The Gide was, in fact, the only book there that would have been likely to appeal to me. It was fated, clearly; I bought the book home and put it on a shelf for a few weeks while I finished some other things. Then, with some trepidation, a paperback dictionary (which turned out to be excellent for my purposes), and a copy of Dorothy Bussy's translation to use as a crib as needed, I dived in.

I'll leave it to a psycholinguist to explain how one can neglect a half-learned second or third language for thirty years or more without losing it altogether; in my case I suspect that my Spanish, which I work at fairly conscientiously, may have supported the underlying grammar. That, and the fact that English is fairly permeated with French loan words, probably made the difference. Gide writes clearly and is not particularly slangy; I suspect I might have more trouble with a contemporary writer. But in any case, making it through the novel's nearly 500 pages was hard work, but it was rewarding hard work. I rediscovered the qualities that had given me a fondness for the book when I first read it in translation, and found nuances (and one or two excised passages) that deepened my appreciation. In short, a successful experiment, which I hope to repeat soon with La peste, which happens to be the only other novel I currently own in both English and French.

As to Gide's novel itself, although it is set no later than 1907 and was written in the 1920s, I found that it held up quite well. Gide's analysis of character is profound and plausible throughout (though perhaps slightly less so in the case of some of the female characters), and except for one conversation about psychoanalysis there is little in the book that now seems glaringly dated. The book's structural innovations, which apparently gave the author no end of trouble, still seem fresh and even daring after several generations of postmodernism. This is, after all, a book in which there is an omniscient narrator but much of the action is depicted through the journal of one of the characters, Édouard, and in which parts of the narrative are presented to us as flashback as the journal is read by someone else; it is a book in which that same Édouard is writing a novel, also called The Counterfeiters, which he is basing on the events that take place around him; it is a book in which Édouard reads aloud a few pages of a draft of that novel (complete with ridiculous personal names — Audibert and Eudolfe) to another character in part to find out how he will react so that he can include that reaction in the book he is writing. It is, in its final pages, a book whose violent climax — horrifying but not really surprising, since Gide has been pointing us towards it — so mystifies Édouard that he decides to omit it from his own novel, since he can make no sense of the motivation that lies behind it. The novel shifts focus radically but seemingly without effort; major characters at the beginning (Vincent, Lady Griffith) are ignored for hundreds of pages and then dispatched summarily, while characters seen at first only obliquely, like Laura, emerge into the spotlight only to recede again. Even Olivier and Bernard, the two schoolfellows with whom the book begins, become less important as the book winds on, while Édouard, whom we barely meet for the first hundred pages, becomes more and more the center of gravity. Somehow Gide manages to keep all these balls in the air and still pull it off without letting the machinery interfere with what is, in many respects, a solidly realistic, almost Dickensian, narrative.

As for Gide's influence, re-reading it now I see the traces of Les faux-monnayeurs where I would not necessarily have expected it. It almost certainly had an effect on Julio Cortázar, who translated L'immoraliste and speaks admiringly of Gide in his letters; Édouard's ruminations on the technique of the novel are echoed by the novelist-philosopher Morelli in Hopscotch. It surely influenced The Empire City, the messy but often brilliant novel by Paul Goodman (another admirer of Gide); and its erotic and family dynamics, as well as Vincent's descent into depravity in Africa, may well have influenced Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. And since then? Is Gide much read in the US today, outside of the academy? I honestly don't know. But I suspect that even after the hyperkinetic experimentation of Pynchon, Barth, and David Foster Wallace, this cagey novel still has lessons to teach.

Let the Wind Blow

Personally, I'm all for heading for the nearest high ground, but I do like this new song by Zachary Richard.

The CD version of this song (on Le fou) seems to be slightly different. Some of the "musicians" in the video are apparently actors.