New Directions in the 1940s

James Laughlin started his career as publisher in 1936 with the first New Directions in Prose & Poetry, but in addition to the flagship anthology he soon branched out into other projects, some small-scale, others remarkably ambitious for a small press (the family's steel fortune was put to excellent use). By 1941 the New Directions annual was well over 700 pages and encompassed writing by Bertolt Brecht, Delmore Schwartz, Julien Gracq, Franz Kafka, John Berryman, Ezra Pound, and many others.

The following year, well ahead of the celebrated Latin American literary “boom,” the house issued a similarly hefty bilingual Antología de la poesía americana contemporánea / Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry. Edited by the classicist Dudley Fitts, the anthology included poets like Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Pablo Neruda, and Cesar Vallejo, all of whom would remain largely unknown to the American literary audience for another generation.

But New Directions didn't just think big; it also thought small, and in fact Laughlin experimented with a variety of formats, from chapbooks to subscription publishing to limited editions. Some of these experiments didn't work out and were quickly abandoned; others became long-running series with lasting influence on both publishing and literature.

The Poets of the Year series, begun in 1941, was one early New Directions series. According to Laughlin, writing many years later,

I hit on the idea of a series of 32-page pamphlets of poetry, each one printed by a different fine printer, an artist of design. It seems incredible now but I was able to sell these for fifty cents, or $5.50 for a boxed set to subscribers.

Though Laughlin was enjoined by the Book-of-the-Month Club from calling the series “the poet of the month,” the chapbooks were in fact issued on a monthly basis for the first three years (1941-1943); in 1944, the final year, wartime paper rationing caused a reduction to six issues, including the one shown here.


Once again Laughlin was ahead of the curve: Alberti, a Spanish poet then living in exile in Argentina, would remain otherwise relatively little known in the English-speaking world until the appearance of Ben Belitt's rather poor translation in the 1960s and Mark Strand's much better one in 1973. This particular volume was printed for New Directions by the Press of Henry G. Johnson; the other volumes in the final year of the series were Selected Poems of Herman Melville, “designed by” Margaret Evans; Thomas Merton's Thirty Poems, printed by the Marchbanks Press; The Soldier by Conrad Aiken (the George Grady Press); A. M. Klein's The Hitleriad (the Samuel Marcus Press); and A Little Anthology of Mexican Poets (the Printing Office of the Yale University Press). The last of those was edited by Lloyd Mallan, who also translated the Alberti. The latter is a saddle-stitched paperback, with a removable dust jacket; the books were also published hardbound, for a dollar an issue.

Below is the fourth (and final) number of a short-lived New Directions periodical called Pharos, from 1947. The version of Confucius it contains is by Ezra Pound, a New Directions mainstay from almost the beginning of the house. Not having seen the other numbers I can't be sure, but its possible that in this instance the poet's name was left off the cover (but not off the title page) because its appearance on bookstore shelves so soon after World War II might have touched a raw nerve, given Pound's flirtation with Fascism.


The text ends on page 53 (page 49 is mistakenly paginated 39), and is followed by eleven pages of ads, including a full-pager from the Gothan Book Mart. (As in the early issues of New Directions in Prose & Poetry, the ads are arguably as interesting as the editorial matter.)

According to an editor's note inside, Pharos was being phased out in favor of Direction, an example of which, from 1949, appears below:


Unlike Pharos, which was wrapped in something resembling blotter paper, the volumes in the Direction series were jacketed hardcovers, retailing for $1.50 each. This particular one is in a “pocket-size” format, roughly 4 ½ x 6 ½. Although they were available on a subscription basis, they have now crossed the line from magazine to book. Other selections listed on the jacket include Albert Guerard's Joseph Conrad, Cyril Connoly's The Rock Pool, and Nabokov's Nine Stories. Although he isn't credited, I think the jacket design may be by Alvin Lustig, who did many covers for New Directions, in particular for its successful New Classics line.

Next is a bilingual anthology that wouldn't seem like the company's typical fare; in fact you could easily miss the fact that it was a New Directions book at all, since the only place that it's identified as such is at the bottom corner of the front flap of the dust jacket.


The jacket itself is unusual, having been made of some kind of transparent plastic, possibly acetate. The lettering you see is not on the boards but on the acetate (if that's what it is); the illustration, however, is on the book. According to the colophon, “three thousand copies of this book were printed in April MCMXLIX by the University Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” There are some nice illustrations inside, and the spine is ornamented with a decorative motif. It sold for $7.50, rather pricey at the time.

Finally, a more enduring literary monument (if an ambivalent one), sized to match. Here is an early (but not first) printing of Pound's collected Cantos, published in 1948.


The book, which sold for $5.00, is confusingly paginated, as each succeeding section starts the numbering afresh, and there's no table of contents. In later editions, at least since the 1970s, the dust jacket has been changed to a reddish-orange color, the typography has been redone, and the drawing of the poet (by Gaudier-Brzeska) no longer appears.

In my experience, innovative literary presses tend to follow a certain generational pattern. Companies like New Directions, Grove Press, Black Sparrow, the Ecco Press, or the original North Point Press — each of them closely identified with one or two innovative founders — find a niche in the marketplace with some fresh ideas, publishing authors and kinds of books that aren't being represented by the mainstream houses. A decade or two later the ideas are widely imitated or just don't seem that interesting anymore and the house, if it survives, gets absorbed by a major publisher or just settles into tame old age.

By most standards, New Directions under James Laughlin had a longer run than most. By the time I started reading New Directions books, in the early 1970s, the press had settled on the handsome and serviceable look of the New Directions Paperbook line.


It was a superb series in many ways, but the kind of experimentation with format the house conducted in its midcentury heyday was mostly in the past. Today, after Laughlin's death in 1997, New Directions continues to uphold a fine publishing tradition but it's no longer groundbreaking in the way it was in its first decades.

Update (January 2009): When I wrote the above I was not aware of Geoffrey Connell's translation of Alberti's Sobre los angeles (Concerning the Angels), which was published by Rapp and Carroll in 1967 and which also appeared, apparently in full, in — where else? — New Directions 19 in 1966.

Update (December 2013): New Directions is now revisiting some of its innovative marketing ideas, in the form of poetry and prose chapbook subscriptions. Hats off to them.

Beach read

I picked up this thin volume of stories, the cover of which is now rather yellowed and soiled, in the Strand Bookstore sometime in 1976 or 1977, after hearing the author read selections on WBAI radio. All I knew about Glenda Adams (until recently, when I read that she had died about a year ago) was what it said in the author bio on the back cover, that she was born in Sydney, Australia in 1939, was the Associate Director of something called Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and that she lived in New York City with her daughter. Adams went on to publish several other works of fiction, one of which, Dancing on Coral, won the Miles Franklin Award in 1987, but I've never happened across any of them.

Australia always seems to have more than its share of venomous creatures, and these stories fit in quite nicely. In most of them someone has something decidedly nasty done to them by someone else. Adams's view of family life and relations between men and women is unsparingly bleak, and after reading stories like “Wedding” and “The Circle” it's not surprising that her bio says that she lived “with her daughter” and not “with her husband and their daughter.”

In what may be the most pointedly feminist story in the book (and also one of the best) a woman is given instructions in how to behave “like a princess,” which is apparently what she is. After having been elaborately dressed by several attendants, she is brought before a man who is to serve as her tutor. He teaches her the precise rules of etiquette of the three languages (high, low, and middle) and three conversations (host, guest, and in transit) she will need to comport herself properly, and then is put to a series of tests.

In the first test, she must shake hands with thousands of people and converse with them, “using the host conversation in the high language.” Only at the end does she notice that her hands are badly swollen from so many handshakes. She feels no pain, and she has not cried out: she has passed the test.

For her next challenge she must undertake a long journey by train, in a carriage jammed with passengers. She travels incognito, because “it would make other people uncomfortable and ashamed” were she to travel as a princess. The only concessions to her true status are the rings on her right hand, which she keeps carefully concealed, and her earrings. Only after she arrives at her destination does she discover that during the overnight passage thieves had sliced off her earlobes to steal the earrings. She had felt nothing. Once again, she has passed the test.

Finally she takes another journey, this time by sea, and arrives at a small island with a hill in the middle. At the end of the story she sits on the hill, gazing at the ground.

I now found that my body was hollow. And inside myself I discovered a small amount of room, a private space in which to move.

But in the best story in the volume, “Sea,” the young narrator is not a passive victim but a destroying angel. From the very beginning it's clear that her arrival does not bode well, at least for the male members of her family.

I was born within the sound of the waves, in a house on a sandstone cliff. It was the hottest night of the century.

The night I was born my father went swimming. It was the last time he ever went into the water.

Well, not quite the last time, as we shall learn. But on that night her father, a strong and avid swimmer, goes for a swim in the ocean and soon finds himself heading farther and farther away from shore. Miles out, he is finally pulled from the water by a fishing boat, despite his protestation that he is not tired and intends to swim on to New Zealand, “and if possible Chile.” He is turned over to the police, put under observation, then released to the family a day later.

After that, my father would go only to the water's edge. He refused to wear, or even own, a bathing suit, nor would he wear shorts or go without a shirt on summer days. Sometimes he took off his shoes and socks and rolled his trousers above his ankles and walked along the beach or around the rocks, letting the sea lap at his feet.

I never saw any part of his body except his head, his hands and his feet.

After the narrator is born a son follows. The two children have little in common. The boy is bronzed, good-natured, and a good swimmer; the girl is pale, taciturn, and has no interest in the water. She also has a way of unnerving people, particularly her father:

My father often stood by the window and watched the sea. Some mornings he went to the phone box at the terminus down at the bay and called his office to say he was sick. Then he would stay by the window all day watching the sea, frowning.

I, too, watched the sea, and I was able to stay very still beside the window for long periods of time.

My father never liked me to come near him, especially when he stood by the window. I had to choose a window in another room for myself. If I refused to leave him alone, he would slam out of the room and often right out of the house, leaving rattling floors and doors behind him.

On occasion, however, he became so consumed with watching that I was able to move quietly into the room and remain near him for hours without his hearing or feeling me.

People often remarked that it was most unusual for a child to be able to stay still and quiet for more than a minute or two. People said I was an unusual child, and they were always very glad to turn to my little brother.

One morning the two children go down to the sea, where the narrator's talent for storytelling leads to a horrific outcome. Wrapped in an old bedspread to shield herself from the sun, she asks him how long he thinks the longest story is. He says an hour or two at most, and she tells him that she knows “a story that lasts until the sun goes down.” When he doubts this, she agrees to tell it to him — but only after he promises to listen to the entire story from start to finish.

He lay down on the sand beside me on his stomach. He lay rigid and attentive.

And I closed my eyes and told a story that contained one sentence for every grain of salt in the sea.

I opened my eyes when my father grabbed my shoulders and shook me and slapped me many times over the head.

“You've gone and killed your little brother,” he said. “Is no one safe with you?”

The shadow of my sunhat stretched out in front of me and was long enough to be almost touched by the water. The sun was on its way behind the houses on the hill behind the beach.

My brother lay on the sand beside me. His body was swollen and had changed from nut brown to deep red. His mouth had fallen open and sand was clinging to his lips and tongue. But he was not dead.

For two weeks my brother lay on his stomach in bed. The doctor came every day to treat him for sunstroke and dress the burns on his back.

When the wounds began to heal, it became clear that the sun had left behind dark brown spots and scars, all over his beautiful back.

After he recovers, the boy gives his sister wide berth. As soon as he is old enough he leaves school and moves out, sending an occasional postcard home. In time the family moves inland, away from the sea. The narrator, older now, meets a boy with a car, and sometimes comes home late at night. This leads to a sudden, yet inevitable, ending.

“What do you think you're doing,” he screamed, “staying out till all hours?”

I said nothing. “You should be thinking of your studies and your exams,” he said, “not boys.”

I smiled at him.

He strode over to my bed and shook me.

I only smiled.

He kept on holding my shoulders.

“You're enough to drive a man out of his mind,” he said.

He moved his hands to my neck. He touched my ears and my head. Then he put his hands over his face.

“I don't know why I try to keep on living,” he cried.

“So why do you?” I asked.

He drowned three weeks later.

Lies and Stories was published by the Inwood Press, which I'm sure is long defunct. My copy has a little “Review Copy” slip laid in, with the publication date of October 15, 1976.

Las fases de Severo

The following discussion of a Julio Cortázar short story was written in 1980 as part of a longer project. At some point in the future I may post other sections as well, but this one seemed, with a little re-working, to be self-contained enough to post on its own. Were I writing this now I might choose to explore additional avenues, including the symbolic employment of moths in Cortázar's work, and some affinities with some scenes in Harry Mathews' novel The Conversions. The translations were almost certainly my own, as they don't exactly match the official version by Gregory Rabassa which was published that same year in the collection A Change of Light.

“Las fases de Severo” (“Severo's Phases”) is a relatively brief and simple story that nevertheless manages to be irreducibly uncanny. Said to be inspired by the paintings of Remedios Varo (to whose memory it is dedicated), it takes place in a house in Argentina, where the friends and relatives of a man named Severo have gathered for what appears to be his wake, or more accurately, his death-watch:

Como a las once de la noche habíamos llegado con Ignacio, el Bebe Pessoa y mi hermano Carlos. Eramos un poco de la familia, sobre todo Ignacio que trabajaba en la misma oficina de Severo, y entramos sin que se fijaran demasiado en nosotros. El hijo mayor de Severo nos pidió que pasaramos al dormitorio, pero Ignacio dijo que nos quedaríamos un rato en el comedor; en la casa había gente por todas partes, amigos o parientes que tampoco querían molestar y se iban sentado en los rincones o se juntaban al lado de una mesa o de un aparador para hablar o mirarse.

Around eleven at night we had arrived with Ignacio, Bebe Pessoa, and my brother Carlos. We were practically part of the family, especially Ignacio who worked in the same office as Severo, and we came in without anyone taking particular notice of us. Severo's oldest son asked us to go into the bedroom, but Ignacio said we would stay a while in the dining room. In the house there were people everywhere, friends or relatives who didn't want to get in the way either and who were sitting down in corners or gathering by a table or a sideboard to talk and regard each other.

After a while Severo's brother appears and announces the beginning of la fase del sudor, the sweating phase. In the bedroom to which everyone now repairs, Severo is seen sitting up in bed, his hands on his knees. The congregants gather around the bed to witness the unfolding events:

A diferencia de otros que según Ignacio tendían a impacientarse, Severo se quedaba inmóvil, sin siquiera mirarnos, y casi en seguida el sudor le había cubierto la cara y las menos.

Unlike others who according to Ignacio tended to become impatient, Severo remained still, even without looking at us, and almost immediately sweat had recovered his face and hands.

This sweating phase is the first in a series whose order is not completely fixed but which is apparently familiar to the onlookers and not unique to Severo's case. When it is over the narrator and some of the others step out of the room while Severo is dried off and changed. Word then comes that the next phase is beginning, “the leaping phase”:

Ignacio se bebió el café de un trago … Fue de los que se ubicuaron cerca de la cama, con la mujer de Severo y el chico menor que se reía porque la mano derecha de Severo osciliaba como un metrónomo … Severo dio el primer salto y quedó sentado al borde de la cama … Los saltos se sucedían rítmicamente: sentado al borde de la cama, sentado contra la cabecera, sentado en el borde opuesto … Cuando la mujer de Severo anunció el fin de la fase, todos empezaron a hablar al mismo tiempo y a felicitar a Severo que estaba como ajeno …

Ignacio drank the coffee in one gulp … He was one of those who took a place by the bed, with Severo's wife and his youngest son who laughed because Severo's right hand was oscillating like a metronome … Severo made the first leap and remained seated on the edge of the bed … The leaps passed rhythmically; sitting on the edge of the bed, sitting against the headboard: sitting on the opposite edge … When Severo's wife announced the end of the phase we all began to talk at once and to congratulate Severo, who seemed as if he wasn't there …

When it's clear that the phase of the moths is about to begin the ceiling lamp is turned off and an acetylene lamp is brought in. Moths flock into the room and begin circling around the lamp. One large moth breaks away, flies to Severo's bed, and alights on his cheek, followed by the rest of the moths, who cover his hair and face; only one moth still circles the lamp. For the relatives and friends watching it is a moment of great tension:

Sentí que los dedos de Ignacio se me clavaban en el antebrazo, y sólo entonces me di cuenta de que también yo temblaba y tenía una mano hundida en el hombro del Bebe. Alguién gimió, una mujer, problamente Manuelita que no sabía dominarse como los demás …

I felt Ignacio's fingers digging into my forearm, and only then did I notice that I too was trembling and that I had a hand sunk into Bebe's shoulder. Someone screamed, a woman, probably Manuelita who didn't know how to control herself like the others …

When the final moth flies up to Severo's face a general shout rings out, someone turns on the ceiling light again, and the moths fly out of the room. Again there is a general exodus while Severo is washed and prepared for the next phase; the narrator and his friends drink grapa. There is a brief exchange between the narrator and Ignacio, who seems to be particularly knowledgeable about these matters:

— Si la última polilla hubiera elegido — … empecé. Ignacio hizo una lente señal negativa con la cabeza.

“If the last moth had chosen … ” I began. Ignacio shook his head slowly.

In the next phase, “the phase of numbers,” Severo, sitting up, his hands in the pockets of his pajamas, looks at each person in the room and addresses each in turn, pronouncing a single number:

Mirando a su hijo mayor dijo: “6,” mirando a su mujer dijo: “23,” con una voz tranquila y desde abajo, sin apurarse.

Looking at his oldest son he said: “6,” looking at his wife he said: “23,” with a tranquil voice, from below, without hurrying.

The narrator is assigned the number two. Eventually the number one falls to a quiet woman, probably a distant relative. A few more numbers are given out after this, but in contrast to the hushed anticipation with which the earlier ones had been received they are no longer given much attention. Another bit of conversation outside the room afterwards assures us of the importance of the numbers without telling us in so many words exactly just what they portend:

— Por supuesto es una cuestión de tiempo — me dijo Ignacio cuando salimos del dormitorio — Los números por sí mismos no quieren decir nada, che.

— ¿A vos te parece? — le pregunté —

— Pero claro, che — dijo Ignacio — Fíjate que del 1 al 2 pueden pasar años, pónele diez o veinte, en una de esas mas.

— Seguro — apoyó el Bebe — . Yo que vos no me afligía.

“Of course it's a question of when,” Ignacio said to me as we left the bedroom. “The numbers themselves don't mean anything, friend.”

“You think so?” I asked.

“But of course, friend,” Ignacio said. “Understand that from the 1 to the 2 years could pass, ten or twenty maybe, sometimes more.”

“Sure,” Bebe concurred. “If I were you I wouldn't get upset.”

The actual significance of the numbers depends, we are told, on the final phase, “the phase of the watches.” Again Severo speaks to each person in the room, informing each in turn that their timepieces are, in their respective cases, either fast or slow by a certain number of minutes. Severo's youngest son — the same one who had laughed earlier — does not understand when Severo speaks to him, and he laughs again. His mother removes his watch to change the time for him:

Sabíamos que era un gesto simbólico, bastaba simplemente adelantar o astrasar las agujas sin fijarse en el número de horas o minutos, puesto que al salir de la habitación volveríamos a poner los relojes en hora.

We knew that it was a symbolic gesture, it was enough to simply advance or turn back the hands without noting the number of hours or minutes, because once we were out of the room we would put the watches back on the correct time.

The narrator is told that his watch is slow. This constitutes “an advantage,” a potential extenuation of the inauspiciously low number he had received in the previous phase.

The phase completed, there is another exodus, more grapa, until word arrives that “sleep is about to come.” Severo lies in bed, looking up, “motionless and indifferent.” Eventually he closes his eyes and a daughter lays over his face a handkerchief into which she had previously sewn four coins. Severo's wife closes the vigil saying, “And now he will sleep … Now he's asleep, look.” The room empties except for a few close family members, and the participants in the vigil begin to leave. Severo's youngest son, the one who had laughed during the phase of the leaps, walks outside with the narrator and his friends:

— ¿No juegan mas? — me preguntó …

— No, ahora hay que ira a dormir — le dije — Tu mamá te va a acostar, ándate adentro que hace frio.

— ¿Era un juego, verdad, Julio?

— Sí, viejo, era un juego. Anda a dormir, ahora.

“Aren't they playing anymore?” he asked …

“No, now it's time to go to sleep,” I told him. “Your mama will put you to bed, go on inside, it's cold.”

“It was a game, wasn't it, Julio?”

“Yes, old man, it was a game. Go to bed now.”

The adults walk down the street together for a while, smoking, then separate to take their ways home.

It's perfectly clear, from the preparations, from the gathering of friends and relatives, from the end of the evening in Severo's “sleep,” that “Las fases de Severo” is about death, and yet at no time does anyone use the word. The narrative is oblique; the nature of the phrases, the significance of the numbers given out, are things that are assumed to be understood, not things that are to be revealed. We aren't told what happened to Severo, or why he is going through the process on this particular night.

The evening's events have the character of ritual, in the coins sewn into the handkerchief (for Charon), in the purely symbolic advancing or turning back of the watches, in the details of the phases themselves. Yet the phases contain both natural and conventional elements. (The distinction between the two must be something only those — like the reader — who do not participate in the ritual attempt to make.) The complicity of the moths, the apparent oracular possession of Severo, the voluntary changing of the sheets and switching on and off of lights by the attendants, all are elements of a whole. It is a scene from primitive religion, yet the setting is urban Latin America, presumably Buenos Aires, and the narrator seems like an ordinary middle-class city-dweller of the 20th century.

The questions posed by Severo's little son at the end of the story show that he hasn't yet been initiated into the mysteries of the ritual of the phases, that he doesn't understand its significance and accept it in the way the adults do. To him it's all a game. But whose view of the ceremony is correct: his, or that of his elders? On the one hand the boy clearly doesn't yet understand the gravity and horror of death, doesn't understand that his father has been taken from the family forever. And he hasn't been socialized into what the adults accept as a given, that the bizarre ritual of the phases is a natural ceremony, or at least (to take a phrase from another story about ritual, “Con legitimo orgullo”) a ceremony that it “has its reason for being.” Yet there is something unsettling, and demystifying, about the boy's questions, as if the ritual were in fact merely an elaborate make-believe in which everyone, Severo included, only pretends to have faith.

Like all mourning customs, the ceremony of the phases is an attempt to domesticate death within the bounds of an social framework, in this case one that includes the participation of natural (or supernatural) actors. The boy challenges that domestication, and in so doing he shakes the underpinnings of the adults' carefully constructed defenses against death. The ending of the story is decidedly uneasy, as the adults walk away smoking cigarettes, sin hablar mucho — without talking much — and when the narrator gets home he gives an excuse for not going to sleep that is distinctly unconvincing:

Yo subiría a mi pieza y pondría a calentar la pava del mate, total no valía la pena acostarse por tan poco tiempo, mejor ponerse las zapatillas y fumar y tomar mate, esas cosas que ayudan.

I would go up to my room and put the mate kettle on, in the end it wasn't worth the effort to go to bed for such a little time, it was better to put on my slippers and smoke and drink mate, these things that help.

His lingering unease is evidence of the frailty of the elaborate charade in which the narrator and his fellows have just participated. In the end death eludes every effort to tame it.

Young Perceval

One day when I was in my late teens, while wandering in my local library I found a copy of Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz's The Grail Legend, which had been published (in a translation by Andrea Dykes) by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1970. I had no particular familiarity with or interest in Jungian psychology (and still don't), nor, as far as I can remember, did I have any previous exposure to the medieval romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and the other Grail chroniclers. I don't think I had even heard yet of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the priceless travesty of Arthurianism that I would eventually heartily enjoy but which hadn't at the time been released. The words “holy grail” were just a cliché one heard; that there were actual literary works of merit concerned with the Grail was not something I had been taught in high school.

The Grail Legend was thick with psychoanalytic jargon and references to obscure works that were untranslated or buried in scholarly libraries, but I was quickly hooked. For the next couple of years I haunted libraries and bookstores in several cities looking for editions of Grail romances and secondary works, at times searching for volumes that I wasn't even sure existed. In those pre-digital days, and with no proper bibliography at hand, I searched through haystacks like Books in Print and The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, dealing with such frustrations as the fact that the names of the author of the oldest known Grail story, Perceval, le Conte du Graal, and the author of the German Parzival could each have been alphabetized in at least three different ways, assuming that there was consensus on how to spell their names at all, which there wasn't always (Chrétien is occasionally spelled Chrestien).

In truth there really wasn't much out there to find. Though Perceval was Chrétien's most famous work it wasn't even included (presumably because it was never finished) in the Everyman's Library edition of Arthurian Romances that collected his other poems, and I had to settle for the version in the Modern Library College Edition of Medieval Romances, edited by Roger Sherman Loomis and Laura Sherman Loomis, which I remember as lacking in notes and explanatory material. I read Jessie Weston's fascinating if unreliable From Ritual to Romance, which had influenced T. S. Eliot, found the existing paperback editions of Robert de Boron, the Mabinogion, and The Quest of the Holy Grail, and of course Wolfram's wonderfully entertaining Parzival, in the Vintage edition translated by Helen M. Mustard and Charles E. Passage. (I never got around to Sir Thomas Malory, who seemed too much of a latecomer to be of interest.)

Most frustrating of all was the absence of any accessible translation — maybe of any translation at all — of the Continuations to Chrétien's romance composed by several hands in the years following his death. Today there is at least one edition of part of the Continuations, Nigel Bryant's Perceval: The Story of the Grail, (which I haven't seen), but at the time all I could turn up, on the shelves of a university library, was William Roach's multi-volume The Continuations of the Old French 'Perceval' of Chrétien de Troyes, which was expensive and in any case only included the original text, which I wasn't enough of a scholar to benefit from. Although they are generally considered by scholars to be inferior in both inspiration and craft to Chrétien's fragment, the Continuations, at least the portions summarized in the Jung and Von Franz volume, sounded particularly intriguing to me at the time. Here for instance, is The Grail Legend's paraphrase of a portion of the Gautier Continuation:

Instead of going directly to the Fisher King's castle, Perceval first visits another castle which he has seen not far from the river. He rides into the courtyard through the open gate. Two tall fir trees grow there, but no inhabitants are to be seen. He dismounts, ties up his horse, leans his shield against the wall and goes into the great hall. There he sees lance holders, a pack of hounds and, in the centre of the hall, a magnificent ivory couch. In front of it stands a chessboard, fashioned of gold and azure, the pieces, encrusted with precious stones, set out as if inviting a game. Perceval seats himself and makes a move, whereupon the figures on the opposing side begin to move of themselves and soon checkmate him. The chessmen then set themselves out again and the game starts once more, with the same result. Perceval is mated three times running. Furious, he sweeps up the pieces into a corner of his cloak and is about to throw them out of the window, into the water below, when suddenly a young woman rises from the depths and restrains him. She is wearing a red dress strewn with shining, twinkling stars, and is of an enchanting beauty. Emerging as far as the waist, she upbraids him for wanting to throw her chessmen into the water. He promises not to if she, in return, will grant him her company. She agrees and allows him to lift her in through the window. When she presses against him his heart behaves so strangely that he begins to sigh. When she asks what is troubling him, he kisses her and would have desired still more had she not told him that if he would win her love he must first hunt the white stag in the nearby park and bring her its head. Then she will give herself to him. He should take her small white hound, which the stag would certainly not be able to escape, but he must not lose it or forget his weapons.

And so on. There seemed to be an endless amount of this kind of material. Perceval and the other Grail hero, Gawain, wander through forests, from castle to castle, through a landscape that seemed to be half Unicorn Tapestries and half J. G. Ballard. As the continuators crank out thousands of lines (dwarfing the scale of Chrétien's own work) the innocent, straightforward charm of the original narrative has been left behind, and the Grail itself seems to have been reduced to just one wonder among many, but in compensation there are any number of uncanny marvels, an apparently inexhaustible outpouring of inventions derived from who knows where, folklore or Celtic religion or Christian hagiography or the fancy of the continuators. As good Jungians, of course, Jung and Von Franz tried to fit all of it — Chrétien's graceful educational romance, Wolfram's boisterous comic novel, the work of the continuators, and more — into a logically structured psychological framework. This was interesting if not entirely convincing, but in any case it was beside the point. It was the bounty of story, unaccountable, irreducible, inherently uncompletable, that I was drawn to. The fact that I could only read the Continuations themselves second-hand and in fragments only increased their fascination.

At one point I toyed with the idea of writing my own Grail story, of which I wrote a few fragments before abandoning the idea. (Though not entirely; many years later elements of Perceval's tale found their way into a novella which had begun its life in an entirely different vein.) In time, though, I moved on to other obsessions, and stored my Grail library away in boxes in the cellar.

Chrétien's Perceval, is, of course, the perfect tale for a young man making his way into the world, especially if that young man is also a bit of a naïf. Its hero, though of knightly pedigree, has grown up in the forest, cared for only by his mother. He takes the instructions she offers him at their parting so much to heart that he commits one gaffe after another. He kisses a woman who is promised to another and steals her ring, provoking the fury of her paramour; he commits multiple infractions against knightly protocol; and worst of all, he fails, through his silence, to pose the questions that would heal the wounded Fisher King and restore the Grail lands to their rightful glory.

The enigmas of the Grail itself, whence it came and who is served by it, have never seemed to me to be as interesting as Perceval's own progress, for mysteries once resolved soon lose their allure. The later Grail romances, in which the story of the Grail is integrated into an explanatory narrative stretching back to Joseph of Arimathea, seem to me far less appealing than such crude oddities as the Welsh Peredur, in which the Grail itself has been forgotten, to be replaced by a severed head.

We don't know why, at the end of his career, Chrétien left Perceval unfinished, although the most obvious explanation is that he died or became ill before it could be completed. To the modern mind, though, conditioned by Kafka's curious trail of suspended masterpieces, it is tempting (if improbable) to imagine that he left it unfinished because he didn't want to reach the story's end.

The young man, as he heads out into the forest, expects that when he arrives at the place where the trees thin out and a castle appears from out of the mist he will find there the answers that will provide him with the resolution to his quest. The older he gets and the more he wanders, the more he hopes that the castle will never appear, or that if it does it will prove to be not what he had been looking for after all.

Notebook

Last night I drove with my daughter to a club to hear a musician and singer whom I've long admired and whose visits to this country are few and far between. Though it was a bit of a drive — about an hour north — I had never seen perform him live and didn't want to pass up the chance, not knowing whether the opportunity would be repeated since neither of us is getting any younger.

As it turned out, the show itself was a bit of a letdown, thoroughly professional as one would expect but lacking fire. I had the feeling that he felt obliged to play but didn't really want to be there, didn't quite have his heart in it. It was particularly disappointing because he has always had a reputation for being a charismatic live performer. Too many years on the road, too much water under the bridge, I guess.

After we left I got lost and wound up taking a road home I had never been on before. It ran along the shoreline, and even at that hour there were people coming up from the beach, getting in their cars and heading home. The great suspension bridge soared out over the bay as we approached.

As I drove I became increasingly alarmed by the realization that I couldn't remember the latter part of the show. In fact I had no memory of the half-hour before we left the club at all. The time had simply vanished. Eventually I was able to recall getting up and leaving when it was all over; there had been a pancake buffet, on the house, but we had elected not to stay. Of the performer's encores and farewell I could remember nothing.

It's true that I'd been drinking, but only a single bottle of Guinness, surely not enough to cause me either to fall asleep or to black out a portion of an evening I had been anticipating for years. I wondered about the state of my mind, whether this was a harbinger of worse things to come.

It was only later, with great relief, that I realized that the entire sequence of events — the ride, the concert, the gap in time — had never taken place at all. I lay in bed, enjoying the sweetness of concern dispelled, for now.

Cortázar: Hopscotch cover art

The first edition of Julio Cortázar's novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) was published by Editorial Sudamericana in Buenos Aires in June 1963. During the planning of the book the author and his publisher, Francisco Porrúa, had extensive discussions about the cover art, documented in a series of letters that are reproduced in the first volume of the Alfaguara edition of Cortázar's letters.

The idea of using a drawing of a hopscotch grid as part of the design apparently originated with Porrúa. In a letter of October 8, 1962 Cortázar wrote that he planned to visit bookshops in search of, among other things, a book of Brassaï photographs that Porrúa had indicated might contain a picture of such a pattern. He also promised to send his publisher a sketch, photo, or plan that could be used as a model for the cover art. Later (March 13, 1963) he sent a photograph, and also sketched out in his own hand a rough plan in which the hopscotch game would be laid out horizontally across the front, back, and spine of the book, with the title superimposed across the portion that appeared on the front. He also mentioned that a friend and compatriot, the painter Julio Silva, was working on a mock-up, which Cortázar promised to forward to Porrúa when it was ready.

Porrúa suggested that the rayuela be rotated ninety degrees so that it would appear full-length on the front cover. Cortázar responded at length on April 1:

And now we're going to put the cover on the book. So you've been studying the thing with Esteban and, for one brief moment, thought that the hopscotch would be better standing up? Enormous cronopios, I started out that way as well and I had it standing up for along time until the poor thing's Earth got tired. No, my friend, I don't think that will work. It won't work, as you have seen very well, because that front cover has its other side, and I would prefer if possible that it not have a front and a back. You detect an unfortunate implication in the Heaven on the back of the book, and it's true, but there's more to it than that. Very briefly, imagine that, making a praiseworthy sacrifice, you have just purchased a copy of Rayuela, and without wasting a moment you have immersed yourself in reading it. If you are a normal person, you will hold the book with your left hand, while your right hand will occupy itself with turning the pages, while going back and forth with your pipe, alternatively taking sips of the Mariposa brandy that your wife has served you, and from time to time you will make a signal of admiration that stirs the air in your home. Fine, so here we are with your left hand holding the book. Part of your palm and the base of your fingers are resting on the cover, that is to say, on Earth. But the most spiritual part of your hand, the fingertips, the thirst and desire that dwell in your fingertips, will be on the other side searching for Heaven, perhaps grazing it even, briefly entering it. Can you picture it? Your hand is reading the book as well, with that extra-retinary vision of which the sages speak, and which in reality is another attempt to grasp that which, inside the book, your eyes are seeking for. Facile symbolism? Maybe. But I have always been sensitive to book covers, and at times I have found in them things that are curiously linked to the text, unless that is they are published by Santiago Rueda. All joking aside, I think that my “unreasons” will be reasonably understandable … So that, to the extent that it's doable, I take my stand for the idea of the reclining hopscotch, and now let's go to battle. I hope to be able to send you the mock-up as soon as possible; I will immediately issue a ukase to Silva, who has gone totally silent on me in Paris.

A week later Cortázar gave in:

Julio Silva just sent me from Paris the plan that I am enclosing. You will note, among other errors, that the title of the book includes an article that must be suppressed. You will note (and you will enjoy it if you read my last letter) that Silva also stood the hopscotch up like you and Esteban did, but in order to make me a little happier, he repeated it entire on the spine, which strikes me as magnificent. You already know my sensitivity to the matter of the spine, and really a little hopscotch showing out in a bookstore somewhere would be quite nice, don't you think?

I, personally, continue to believe in the reclining hopscotch, but Aurora tells me that it's enough to take one look at Silva's mock-up to understand that it's much more effective if the reader sees the whole hopscotch when he picks up the book, and that the drawing should not squirm like a worm around the book. I think that you and Aurora are pretty much right, and of course I accept the idea. …

One thing that I like is that on the front cover the Earth and Heaven are replaced by the names of the author and publisher, but on the spine, which is the most sacred part of the book, Heaven and Earth shine forth as they ought to. Don't you like that?

In later correspondence Cortázar devoted much attention to the question of the colors of the lettering of the cover. Silva's mock-up was mishandled en route, but eventually turned up, and was evidently used as the basis for the final cover treatment. When he received the finished book Cortázar expressed to Porrúa his great satisfaction with the finished product.

The image at the top of the page here, which was culled from the web, shows a first edition of Rayuela that was sold at auction recently. My own copy, a later reprint from 1973, bears only yellow lettering on the face, the multiple-color arrangement having been abandoned, no doubt for reasons of economy.


George Salter, a well-known graphic artist, designed the Pantheon edition shown above, issued in the United States in April 1966 in a translation by Gregory Rabassa. The title and author's name are hand-lettered. Salter made use of a hopscotch drawing very similar to the one on the Sudamericana cover, but tilted it at an angle, and then underlaid it with a series of colorful diagonal bands. (It was a bit of a cliché at the time for American publishers to use striking colors for books with Latin American themes.) The pattern continues onto the spine, but the back cover is taken up by a photo of a very young looking Cortázar. I'm quite fond of this cover, perhaps because I first read the novel in this edition, but Cortázar firmly disliked it. When he received the advance copies he told Porrúa “the dust jacket is horrendous, but as soon as you toss it in the trash the rest is a wonder of a book.”


This Signet edition of the novel was the first American paperback publication, in December 1967. I don't know if the cover art depicts an actual George Segal sculpture or just an imitation of his style; in any case the book credits neither the designer nor the artist. It's a fairly generic piece of art; perhaps the salient point is that the woman is naked and lying in bed, as the publishers were apparently eager to punch up the erotic angle of the book. The words above the title read LIFE | LOVE | SEX, which I suppose is one way of summing up what Rayuela is about. In case anyone missed the point it's spelled out again on the bottom of the back cover: “Hopscotch / a game of / LIFE, LOVE, SEX.” The blurbs are pretty hilarious: Harvey L. Johnson of the Houston Post promises “Sexual bouts, drunken orgies … escapes into hallucinations and trances, emphasis on sex, unmindful frankness … shocking and sordid … crude or amusing … Hopscotch will not soon be forgotten,” while the Baltimore Sun simply promises that it “leaves you limp.”


The Avon Books edition, first issued in 1975, is another story entirely. The entire Bard series of Latin American literature was elegantly and imaginitively designed, and this one, which was created by Roger Stine, is one of the better ones. As with the rest of the series, the title, author, and front blurb are separated from the illustration, printed in block letters, and hence very easy to read, even from a distance. I'm not sure whether the man looking down — who bears a rough resemblance to Cortázar — is meant to literally have one foot in Paris and the other in Argentina (which would make perfect sense), or whether the whole night scene is supposed to be Paris. (The artist has included the Eiffel Tower in the background, just to make sure we know that part of the book is set in Paris.) On the pavement, which may be cobblestone, is the familiar hopscotch grid, along with a young boy in short pants who is probably meant to represent a younger version of Horacio Oliveira. That last detail may be a little of a mistake; one thing Oliveira does not spend much time doing is reflecting on his childhood. But the boy is appropriately placed on the Earth of the hopscotch, looking ahead at Heaven or at his own future. The interplay of darkness and illumination is very appealing, particularly on the man's sweater, which seems to be lit by a flickering glow.


Above is the cover treatment used in the edition of the De Oro Library of Latin American and Latino Literature imprint of the Book-of-the-Month Club. The design is by Monica Elias; the painting is by the Argentine painter Xul Solar. It's a fairly handsome cover, though why it would be chosen for Hopscotch rather than for any other random modern novel that happened to be in need of a cover I'm not sure. One possible clue: the painting is called Homme des Serpents; a little nod, perhaps, to the novel's Club de la Serpiente?


Finally, above right is the current US edition in the Pantheon Modern Writers Series, which shares the same clean but rather drab design as the other volumes in that series. I suppose the woman in the photograph is meant to represent la Maga or Talita, but if so she seems miscast. Maybe she's Pola or Gekrepten.

(All translations from the Alfaguara edition of Cortázar's letters are my own.)

A village in the distance

1.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the first chapter of Three Dollars a Year (Delphic Studios, New York, 1935) by G. Russell Steininger and Paul Van de Velde:

San Pablo Cuatro Venados, a small and somewhat inaccessible Mexican village, hangs on a slope of the high western Sierras. It is a curious and primitive community the inhabitants of which are Zapotecan Indians. Life offers them little. Their lot is both meagre and hard — a situation that seems not to distress them in the least.

The natural setting of San Pablo is one of majestic but tortuous grandeur. Mountains overlap and tower above mountains. Their sides drop precipitously into deep barrancas only to rise again, sheerly and suddenly, into more formidable and gigantic ranges. The tremendous scale of this scenic background is intensified by the almost dwarf-like stature of the natives — a physical characteristic reflected in the low doorways of their houses.

San Pablo sprawls over the mountain side and in appearance is merely a collection of thatched-roofed huts tucked here and there on an occasional patch of level ground. The whole is dominated by a twin-towered church of little merit. Throughout the five or six hundred years of the pueblo's existence comparatively few foreigners have trod the steep winding trails which serve as village streets.

For centuries however, in either nearby mine or distant market place, the San Pableños have known the white man and his ways. Christian teaching and European methods followed swiftly on the heels of the Spanish Conquest. Despite these alien influences old customs and habits still persist and the current life of the San Pablo Indian is essentially the same as that of his forefathers.

The fate of the San Pableños was sealed centuries ago. They perhaps do not realize that their institutions and activities — that they themselves — are the inevitable result of ancient causes which they are almost powerless to modify. In their present position they are encompassed by futility and should they desire to better themselves, which plainly they do not, they would have no choice but to abandon their village. Fear and physical geography have determined their history, their psychology and their economics. A long-standing and unending feud with the neighboring pueblo of Cuilapam and an impoverished soil make this a certainty. The direct route from San Pablo to the market place in Oaxaca leads through Cuilapam, but this road the San Pableños dare not take. Instead they trudge another five miles for the sole purpose of avoiding enemy territory. The crushing force and mounting burden of adverse circumstances seem to indicate that, in the long run, these Indians are bound to lose out and that, within the course of time, their village may disappear.

The history of San Pablo can be summarized as a series of escapes. From the very beginning of its existence the inhabitants have endured the constant menace of extermination. Blood has flowed and continues to flow: the blood which has forever been a symbol of Mexico from pre-Conquest sacrifices to recent revolutions. San Pablo was established as a Zapotecan Indian military outpost, a buffer settlement representing the advance guard of one warring tribe against another, and accepted the dangers, privations and sufferings which always accompany such a role. The warriors of this encampment incessantly watched the activities of their enemies — Mixtecan Indians who lived in Cuilapam, at that time a small village nestled at the foot of Monte Albán.

November 25, 1521 was a crucial day in the affairs of the little Indian garrison of San Pablo. It was then that the Spaniards, bent on conquest and captained by Francisco de Orozco, entered the Valley of Oaxaca. For the San Pableños the arrival of Orozco and his band practically constituted a miracle and had the Spaniards not appeared exactly when they did it is probable that today San Pablo would not exist. When the Conquistadores reached the valley a bitter civil war was in progress. It was a war of revenge and a fight to the finish. The Mixtecs had determined to conquer the Zapotecs beyond any hope of recovery and were on the point of achieving complete success when a common foe — the white man — arrived. The Indians temporarily dropped their grievances and united against the invaders. San Pablo was saved.

Time however has increased the hatred of original enemy tribes and their descendants are now hereditary foes. Not so long ago the entire population of San Pablo deserted the village and fled to the mountains, fearing complete annihilation at the hands of the Mixtecs. Intervention on the part of Paul Van de Velde and of the Mexican authorities undoubtedly prevented a catastrophe and the San Pablenos are again back in their homes, at peace for the moment but not knowing how long it will last.

Caught in this whirlpool of fear and hate and condemned to an unending struggle with a topography angular and stubborn, the San Pablo Indians should be a morose and sullen lot. Certainly life for them is often little less than a mere existence. Food and clothing frequently fall short of actual necessities. But here is the paradox. Notwithstanding a life of seeming misery and bare sufficiency — often extreme poverty — these Indians are fundamentally happy and contented.

2.

According to the Editor's Note at the beginning of the book, Three Dollars a Year was based on the researches of Paul Van de Velde, a Belgian scholar who was a member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística and various other scholarly organizations, and who was the author of a number of works on Oaxaca and its environs. The book was actually written by G. Russell Steininger, a landscape architect from Reading, Pennsylvania who had assisted Van de Velde in his researches. As far as I can tell it was Steininger's only published work. Though the book is a bit disjointed and marred by its condescending manner and confident assurance that the San Pableños are satisfied with their lot in life, it contains a number of evocative photographs and some interesting material on the customs, history, and material life of a small village in the Sierras.

The authors make it clear that the centuries-old animosity between Zapotecan San Pablo Cuatro Venados and the nearby Mixtec village of Cuilapam (now more of a town, and generally spelled Cuilapan) was one of the central facts of life in San Pablo. The animosity could be traced in competing maps, surveys, and legal actions, as well as in violence. According to an appendix, in just one brief period in the 1920s and early '30s the murders or disappearances of fourteen citizens of San Pablo as well as two Cuilapeños were attributed to the feud. The backwardness and isolation of San Pablo appear to have been exacerbated by its unfortunate location. Trapped between hostile Cuilapan and the rugged terrain of the Sierra Madre, the villagers were forced to work marginal agricultural lands. The “three dollars a year” of the title refers to the average annual income of the San Pableños, a meaningless figure for people who hardly belonged to an economy wider than their village boundaries at all.

It would be easy to assume that the description of San Pablo in the book is now completely out-of-date, and perhaps it is. But one aspect apparently remains unchanged: the occasionally violent feud between San Pablo and its lower-lying neighbor continues unabated. In 1929, in arbitrating a boundary dispute between the two localities, the Mexican Supreme Court had granted 522 hectares to San Pablo and 3,112 hectares to Cuilapan. That ruling was upheld by a presidential decree in 1970, but the San Pableños rejected it and continued to squat on land granted to Cuilapan. In 2001 another court returned 1,565 hectares to San Pablo. And just in the last few days (February 2008) there has come a report of yet another outbreak of hostilities. What follows is a rough translation:

There were tense moments in the municipios of Cuilapan de Guerrero and San Pablo Cuatro Venados, where residents of the two communities were on the point of a confrontation yesterday morning as a result of the dispute over communal lands in El Cucharito and Acapixtla districts, where the sound of gunfire was even heard. Fourteen inhabitants of San Pablo, among them Wenceslao Sánchez, president of Bienes Comunales, were detained by a group from Cuilapan as a means of pressuring (the San Pableños) to abandon the 400 hectares that they had invaded and deforested indiscriminately, in addition to diverting the course of the Río El Valiente, which supplies water to both communities.

It all began at 6:00 AM, when residents of Cuilapan, most of them women armed with sticks and machetes, set up blockades on the highway to San Pablo, first in San Pedro Acapixtla and then in El Cucharito, which is identified as the zone in conflict.

For his part, the Secretary General of the government issued a call to avoid bloodshed and to seek ways to solve the problem, which is more than 200 years old.

So even in an era of globalization — or perhaps especially in an era of globalization — ancient local conflicts over land, water, and tribe continue to flare in the Sierra Madre.

3.

I've never been to San Pablo Cuatro Venados, but I may well have stared at it from a distance. The village is barely a dozen miles from the major pre-Columbian archaeological site of Monte Albán, which were constructed by the distant Zapotec and Mixtec ancestors of the warring villagers. The ruins, which I visited in 1980, occupy a plateau above the city of Oaxaca and provide an excellent prospect in all directions of the surrounding valley and the mountains beyond. Somewhere out there, to the southwest, is San Pablo, though I didn't know it at the time.

The undoing

He caught sight of the girl on his way out, in the late afternoon heat and haze. For an hour or so, after the last bell, he had marked up a week's worth of essays — never an edifying task, these days — and when he was finished he had packed up his briefcase, cleaned the dust off his desk the best he could, sipped the last lukewarm coffee in the office pot, and started out across the nearly deserted parking lot to his car. She was sitting by herself on the stone wall that marked the limits of the school grounds, just a few yards in from the road to town. Dressed in a faded lime-green T-shirt and jeans, with her backpack on the wall beside her, she sat dangling her knees, head bent down, apparently deep in thought but more likely, he suspected, just lost in space.

Her name was Kelly Hinther. She was a ninth-grader, and he knew her because she had been in his English class the year before. Like most of the kids in the valley she had family problems. Her mother had done time, a couple of years back, for meth possession, and was now in a halfway house somewhere; her father was out of the picture and from what he'd heard about him that was just as well. She lived with her grandmother, who was a bit of a train-wreck herself with a drinking problem but who did at least care for the girl and tried to keep her fed and clothed and out of trouble. Kelly had difficulties with reading and even more with attitude but he had a hunch that somewhere deep down she was actually relatively bright. She had surprised once him by reciting, from memory and verbatim, a couplet from an Andrew Marvell poem that he had recited to the class a few weeks earlier on a whim, never expecting the lines to sink in:

But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near

That kind of thing didn't help her on her exams, particularly — she had barely passed the course — but he had the impression that, in another time and place, where she wouldn't have started out in life with concrete blocks sealed around her feet and headed downhill from there, she might actually have blossomed into something approaching a responsible adult citizen, able to take care of herself and maybe even live a productive life. She was a handful, though, no question about that, always being punished for some minor infraction: smoking, cursing, goofing off. No doubt that was why she was sitting there: detention, again, and hadn't caught the late bus home.

He called to her and asked her if she wanted a ride. She stared at him blankly for a moment, then muttered “yeah, okay,” slipped down off the wall, and half-carried, half-dragged her backpack to his dusty Subaru compact.

Officially this was frowned upon. Two years before there had been an incident. A young teacher at the school, someone from away, had made the mistake of assuming that one of his students, another dirt-poor girl from a rough home, wouldn't be likely to complain to the authorities if he attempted to take a few liberties. The girl blackened his eye with an impressively pugilistic right jab and raised holy hell. The teacher was summarily dismissed the next morning, and by evening he had cleaned out his apartment and left town for good. His haste was understandable: nearly everybody in the valley owned a gun, and word had its way of getting around, even if that kind of thing would be kept out of the tame little weekly that was the valley's only official source of local news. At a staff meeting shortly afterwards policies were clarified; even the appearance of improper intimacy with a student was to be carefully avoided. Giving an unaccompanied minor a ride was a bit "gray area," but he'd taken Kelly home before — she lived on a bluff, outside of town, on his way — and the grandmother didn't seem to have a problem with it. In any case, he knew there was a good chance that the old lady might well already be three sheets to the wind and in no condition to drive. Even if she could be reached on the phone it would be a half-hour trip to school, an hour before Kelly got home.

She slung the backpack into the back and took a seat in the front beside him, carefully buckling her belt, an operation which he knew perfectly well was for his benefit only. He started the ignition, gave the windshield a squirt, and flicked on the wipers to clean away the grime. As he pulled onto the highway the car began to quiver gently, shaken by a small tremor coming from the pavement beneath. Involuntarily the girl's eyes widened and she drew in a breath, but it was over in a second. Nothing to get excited about: sometimes there were dozens of quakes a day, and this wasn't even one of the bigger ones, the ones that could go on at times for a full minute or more, in a kind of slow shuddering and churning of the earth that would be followed by a terrible, anxious stillness, something like the beginning of a migraine or that last uneasy moment before you started to throw up.

The geological disturbances had begun a few months earlier. In the valley, the first inkling had come when a couple of boys hiking in the woods had noticed something unusual in the waters of the little creek they were wading across. It was like a kind of miniature vortex, just a yard or so in diameter. The water was behaving as if some invisible force were bending gravity down. You could put your hand on the surface of the creek and feel the pull, even though there was no visible rupture in the creek bed beneath or anything else that might have accounted for the effect. The earthquakes followed, not long after. At first they were few and far between, and didn't hurt anyone or do any real damage, but within a few weeks they had grown in frequency and power until they had settled into a pattern of sporadic major tremors and almost continuous aftershocks. A number of older buildings in the valley had crumbled into ruins, and objects left overnight — even parked cars — were sometimes displaced long distances by the vibration by the time morning came. For months now the sky had been shrouded with an ominous russet tinge; a powdery grime the same color covered everything, leaving a bitter, gritty residue in the mouth and lungs.

The anomalies were worldwide in scope: hundred-year floods on the Gulf Coast, unprecedented landslides in the Andes, choking dust storms across huge swaths of Africa and Australia. There was much talk, in the churches and elsewhere, of the Last Days; news reports spoke darkly of some kind of tear in the fabric of space, a singularity. The teacher wasn't a believer and he didn't get the physics, but in any case the scientists themselves didn't seem to really know what was happening or where it might lead, though it seemed to be getting steadily worse.

They drove along the valley floor for a few miles, between fields of withering alfalfa, then turned off to the right. The county road they were now travelling on didn't connect with anything, it just went up and into the hills, and so the dust on the pavement was like new snow, unmarked by tires. They passed a few gray, abandoned shacks and tobacco sheds, and one shuttered farmhouse, but then nothing until they began to climb out of the valley, up to where the real rednecks used to live until a couple of decades back. Here and there dirt tracks spurred off, now to the left, now to the right, disappearing into the scrub, but he didn't know any children from those roads, or if any of the houses that might have once stood along them were still occupied. As far as he knew only hunters — and maybe the occasional illicit horticulturist — spent any time there now.

The ridge where he and the girl both lived was higher up, at the edge of the deep pines, and as they reached its crest a prospect of the valley below opened out on their left, its contours softened by the haze that hung over it. Usually the air was a few degrees cooler up here, where a stiff wind rippled year round, but as they drove along they felt instead that it was becoming suffocatingly hot. He rolled his side window down a bit further to let in some more air, even though the dust was nearly blinding him.

On the right ahead, on a small bluff, her house appeared, with the dilapidated, listing garage beside it. He signalled — out of habit rather than need, as they had passed no traffic since leaving the main road — and pulled into the unpaved driveway. As the car rolled to a stop the earth began to rumble underneath them again. Ten seconds later, just as the tremor seemed to be about to subside, there was an awful, tearing noise and a major quake began. The car rocked on its shocks for sixty seconds. It wasn't the worst he had felt, he thought, but it came close. Beside him the girl was pale, her lips tight, her hands locked on the dashboard and her gaze fixed out the front windshield as if she thought she could stop the earth's motion by will alone.

When the quake was over she unhitched the seatbelt, got out, gathered her things from the back, and closed the door. She looked up at the house uncertainly for a second, then turned back towards him and leaned her head into the passenger window, her eyes cast down. He watched, waiting for her to speak, but she didn't seem able to form words. He wondered if Kelly might be epileptic and was having a small seizure or if she just needed to get her land legs back.

“Kelly—?,” he started to ask, but at once she spoke, distinctly and firmly:

“Mr. Kursoe, do you think it's the end of the world?”

For a second he hesitated, thinking that the girl just might be strong enough to handle it if he gave her an honest reply, but then he changed his mind — he couldn't do it to her.

“No, Kelly,” he said, in as reassuring a tone as he could muster, then quickly added, “no, I'm sure not.”

He watched her step slowly away, up towards the house, then he turned the wheel and urged the car down the driveway and onto the road. He had driven no more than a few hundred yards when the haze suddenly worsened. He slowed to half speed, struggling to see through the windshield, navigating as much by the sound of the tires on the gritty asphalt as by sight. The dust blowing in through the windows was choking, lacerating his face, stinging his eyes beneath his glasses. Stones and debris covered the road, and as the tires ground over it projectiles kicked up, colliding with the sides and undercarriage of the car.

A few miles short of home he braked, at first tentatively, then urgently, then he lifted his foot up and let the car creep forward. As he accelerated again he was surprised to note that he could no longer feel the friction of the tires. Instead, the whole roadbed appeared to be moving laterally, in the direction of the valley; rocks and mud tumbled across it, and a terrible deep roar seemed to be coming at him from all directions at once. In terror he clenched the steering wheel, fighting to keep the car on the road even as the road itself seemed to be about to dissolve into nothingness. For an instant he blacked out, though without releasing his grip. When he came to he realized that his foot was no longer on the gas pedal, but that the car was still moving, faster now, falling through a cascade of rubble into fathomless space.

Work in progress (II)

The first time he turned to look back towards the harbor, ten minutes later, he could make out nothing of the town except a water tower and a couple of derricks; a few minutes more and these were gone as well. A stiff wind and cold spray were blowing across the deck, and the ferry was rolling in the swells. He stayed out as long as he could; then, when the chill became too much, he went below decks and found the lounge. A scattering of passengers were sitting on the benches by the windows: couples, lone men, a family with two small, excited boys, and the woman in the yellow slicker, who was reading a newspaper. The snack bar smelled of grease and had limited offerings, but he was beginning to feel hungry and bought a sandwich and fries and sat down.

They were soon out of sight of land. The two boys had fallen asleep, one on his mother's lap, the other sprawled on the bench beside. Two men played checkers quietly in a corner, observed by a third who stood over them until he grew bored and went to sit by himself, nursing a cardboard container of coffee. The woman in the slicker had finished her paper and now sat motionless, her hands folded in her lap, sunglasses on.

He stepped outside to the rail and found the air warmer in the afternoon sun. He went around to the stern, where two of the crewmen were killing time. They nodded as he approached, then resumed their conversation. He climbed the stairs to the upper deck and back to the wheel-house again. The captain, standing at the controls and talking into the radio mike in his hand, gave him a friendly wave but kept an eye on him, as if deciding if he looked like a jumper. He sat down on a bench and began to feel drowsy; he had drifted asleep when he heard tapping on the window and looked up. The captain pointed off to starboard. At first he didn't see the pilot whales, then he spotted them, a dozen or more, swimming parallel, black and sleek, their heads breaching the water at every trough. They kept up with the boat for twenty minutes, then veered away.

As the afternoon waned they came by land in the distance on the port side, and the first fishing boats appeared. The ferry skirted the coast for another hour, then turned as night fell. He saw lights alongshore, and the blinking of beacons, as it slowed. There were hotels and homes on both sides of the dock, and people out walking, even in the off season. The captain reversed the engines and the ferry inched up to the landing and came to rest, rocking gently with the waves beneath. The crew secured it fast, then dropped the chains to let the cars go through. He saw the couple with the little boys pull away in a dented blue sedan, the boys jumping up and down in the back seats and peering out at the sights. The woman in the yellow slicker went ahead of him into the waiting room and was greeted, rather coolly he thought, by an older woman in a drab wool overcoat. They stepped out to the street, got into a waiting car whose driver he couldn't see, and drove off.

He found a bed and breakfast a few blocks from the water, a narrow three-storey brownstone with chrysanthemums in windowboxes. One wall of the lobby was occupied by a cage full of tiny finches; they hopped restlessly from perch to perch twittering while he registered with the white-haired man at the desk — the owner he supposed, retired from some other life. Most of the rooms were vacant, and he asked for one on the top floor in front so he could look out at the town. He took the key, climbed the stairs, and went in. The room was small and bare, but adequate. The mattress on the four-poster was a bit high up but not too soft, and the single cast-iron radiator under the front window appeared up to the task. As he stood by the window he suspected he would be hearing traffic noises through the night, but this seemed more likely to ease his sleep than to disturb it. The streetlights would be more of a problem, as the curtains were pale and barely met, but he would manage.

He locked up again and went out to the street in search of a meal. There was a dark bar with a neon sign and a dining room, and a fish and chips, but he kept going, walking the main drag until he came to an Italian place that looked tiny from the street but opened out into an ample room, now largely deserted, once inside. He was shown to a table looking out on the water by a black-vested waiter in his thirties who spoke gently and with barely a trace of a foreign accent. He ordered bread and soup and a plate of clams with spaghetti on the side, and a glass of wine, and ate slowly, in silence, finishing it all as he watched the few boats that were still moving at that hour and season tie up along the docks and unload. When he had paid the bill and exchanged an amicable buona sera with the waiter he stepped into the street again. There was live music coming out of a basement storefront a few doors down but he wasn't in the mood. He found a bench in a little park by the water, under an aspen, and sat for a while until the last of the stragglers from the waterfront had moved on and the chill was starting to invade his bones, then he retraced his steps, bid the man at the registration desk goodnight, and went up to his room. He undressed and lay down, turning his back to the window, and was asleep the moment he shut his eyes.

(Never completed.)

Work in progress (I)

He stood alone. The treeless plain stretched out around him in all directions, cold and dry and monochrome. The brown earth was stoneless, windswept, dotted with dead grass long beyond its season. Whatever blew onto the plain — grains of sand and rust, bits of leaf, splinters of bone — would whistle along for miles until it was caught in a patch of turf and held fast, there to remain until the next rain, months off, caked it in with the soil forever. To the north, a few miles off, the ground rose sharply to a broad plateau, as barren as the plain beneath. He thought it might have been the stranded coast of a sea whose waters had long ago drawn back, but he didn't know.

The mid-morning sun, its glare muted by a high, thin haze, had driven off the chill of night, but the air was still cool and flicked with breezes. A few dark birds wheeled above the horizon, very far off, but never approached.

He began to walk. He walked at a steady pace, without hurry, bearing south. As he travelled the exertion warmed him, and he soon shook out the last of the cold air from his coat. The mist on his breath grew lighter, then disappeared for good. He never looked back. After a few miles his boot struck a stone, just a milky white pebble the size of a knucklebone, and sent it skipping away; it was the only one he encountered. A kestrel crossed above, not hunting but moving quickly to the west. He watched its shadow pass in front of him, a perfect dark reflection of the silent bird, speeding towards an unseen convergence.

It was near evening when he sighted the flock. He heard the bellwether first, before they came in sight, a muffled low chunking that arrived and dimmed with the wind, the direction of its source undeterminable. When he came upon them at last, immense and eerily white in the twilight, they paid no attention to his passing and only shied at the last moment, when he reached out a hand to graze their backs. Silent but for the bell, they drifted around him in clusters of six or eight or a dozen, nosing at the turf. He thought they seemed like ghosts, and looked for the ghostly shepherd sure to be nearby, whistling for his spectre hound, but there was none.

The terrain began to slope down, in fits and starts, over little dips and rises, runnels trickling here and there in the gaps. Lacking a staff, he stepped carefully across the slick, broken ground, planting the lower foot first, bending his knees. In a while he smelled the first peat fire, borne for miles perhaps in the damp night air. He found a stream and a well-trod path and turned to follow it.

At the first settlement they gave him shelter in the barn, a loaf and a steaming bowl of mutton broth. There were three men, soft-spoken and remote, the one he supposed the father of the other pair. The woman, slight and leathery — she might have been the mother but he thought her too young — seemed glad of his company, though she spoke little and retired at the end of the meal. When he rose in the morning she was the only one about; she gave him bread and a blessing for the journey and he departed. He took the wagon-path along the rim of a narrow, fog-shrouded gorge until he reached the paved road. He read the name of the village on the sign at the turnoff and made a note of it.

It was drizzling and still when he caught a ride. The driver of the van smelled of tobacco and wool; he chattered over the radio, pointing out what sights of interest lay along the way without waiting to be prompted. They passed a little clapboard church, a convenience store, and miles and miles of grazed-over fields, dotted with little ponds, dilapidated sheds, and mothballed machinery. At the first intersection there was a traffic light but not a soul in view; the driver breezed through without slowing.

As the neared the coast the drizzle became fog, then drifted away suddenly, revealing the shoreline and the freighters in the offing. As soon as they had skirted a little point the port came into view. Its buildings were sullen and anonymous: silos and storehouses, processing plants and canneries, pipelines and cranes. A scattering of mud-daubed cars, nearly all of them white or black, were parked in the lanes and lots between, and a few gaunt men, in caps and white coats, stood outside smoking on their break.

The driver left him off near the ferry dock and drove on. He found the station, which was nearly deserted, and bought a one-way passage from the woman at the window, and a soda and crackers from a vending machine. He glanced at the newspaper someone had left open on the bench, but didn't know the language. When he had warmed sufficiently he went outside and watched the gulls and the splashing of the waves on the pilings of the pier alongside. The ferry took nearly a half-hour to reach its berth, from the time he first spied it; its wake, even at low speed, drove up under the dock and shook it to its foundations. With the clanging of bells and the shuddering of machinery it bumped to a halt and lowered its gate, discharging a fuel truck, a score of cars, a pair of motorcycles, and a handful of shivering pedestrians. The crew came ashore for a few minutes, entered the station to get back their land legs and chat up the ticket-agent, then went back onboard.

When they dropped the chains and began to board the lined-up cars he stepped up to the deck. The crewman took his ticket affably and said something to him, but he couldn't make it out. A woman in a yellow slicker, her head swaddled tightly in a scarf, was the only other traveller by foot. She stepped away from him, not meeting his eye, and quickly made for the warmth of the cabin. He instead climbed the iron stairs to the upper deck, just outside the wheel-house, and found a seat on a bench where he could overlook the harbor, hands in his pockets, the collar of his coat turned up, as the ferry began to pull away from shore.

Notes & Queries (Gabriel García Márquez)

A brief but evocative passage from Gabriel García Márquez's Cien Años de Soledad is missing from Gregory Rabassa's US translation, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The affected passage, which can be found on p. 282 of the 2003 Contemporanea / De Bosillo edition of the original novel, and would have appeared on p. 240 of the Harper & Row hardcover had it been there, is set during the period when the first Yankee banana plantation has been established in the vicinity of Macondo, and concerns the unearthly young woman García Márquez calls Remedios the Beauty, whose extravagant charms — and disinclination to wear much in the way of clothing — are suspected by the inhabitants of Macondo of having potentially lethal effects on the men in the community. The original reads:

La ocasión de comprobarlo se presentó meses después una tarde en que Remedios, la bella, fue con un grupo de amigas a conocer las nuevas plantaciones. Para la gente de Macondo era una distracción reciente recorrer las húmedas e interminables avenidas bordeadas de bananos, donde el silencio parecía llevado de otra parte, todavía sin usar, y era por eso tan torpe para transmitir la voz. A veces no se entendía muy bien lo dicho a medio metro de distancia, y, sin embargo, resultaba perfectamente comprensible al otro extremo de la plantación. Para las muchachas de Macondo aquel juego novedoso era motivo de risas y sobresaltos, de sustos y burlas, y por las noches se hablaba del paseo como de una experiencia de sueño. Era tal el prestigio de aquel silencio, que Úrsula no tuvo corazón para privar de la diversión a Remedios, la bella, y le permitió ir una tarde, siempre que se pusiera un sombrero y un traje adecuado.

The US text reads as follows:

The occasion for the proof of it came some months later on one afternoon when Remedios the Beauty went with a group of girl friends to look at the new plantings. For the girls of Macondo that novel game was reason for laughter and surprises, frights and jokes, and at night they would talk about their walk as if it had been an experience in a dream. Such was the prestige of that silence that Úrsula did not have the heart to take the fun away from Remedios the Beauty, and she let her go one afternoon, providing that she wore a hat and a decent dress.

On a close reading, the translation does not quite make sense: what novel game? what silence? The problem is that the second and third sentences of the Spanish original have been skipped, an easy mistake to make because, as one reads along the page, the beginning of the fourth sentence is so similar to the beginning of the second. With those sentences restored, the English text would read (loosely) like this:

The occasion for the proof of it came some months later on one afternoon when Remedios the Beauty went with a group of girl friends to look at the new plantings. For the people of Macondo it was a recent amusement to wander the humid and interminable avenues lined with banana groves, where the silence seemed to have been carried from somewhere else, still unused, and was for that reason less reluctant to transmit the voice. At times you couldn't hear something that was said from half a meter away, which was, nevertheless, perfectly comprehensible on the far side of the plantation. For the girls of Macondo that novel game was reason for laughter and surprises, frights and jokes, and at night they would talk about their walk as if it had been an experience in a dream. Such was the prestige of that silence that Úrsula did not have the heart to take the fun away from Remedios the Beauty, and she let her go one afternoon, providing that she wore a hat and a decent dress.

Since the passage does not fully make sense except in its complete form, the longer version is almost certainly not the result of authorial second thoughts after the book's original publication; since it contains nothing controversial or obscure, the omission in the translation must have been unintentional. The two sentences had to have been present in their entirety in the original manuscript or in a version prior to publication. I have not been able to examine an early edition of the original text to see if the error began there and was subsequently corrected in later Spanish-language editions such as the one I have at hand, or whether it was overlooked by the American translator or compositor. The omission was carried over into the Avon paperback edition (which is differently paginated) and is retained in what I believe is a QPB paperback edition, bearing the Harper & Row imprint and apparently directly reproduced from the original plates.