"Manuscripts don't burn"

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

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

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

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

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

The lake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things Gone & Things Still Here

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

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


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


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


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

The Boatmen, rowing on

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

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

Notes for a Commonplace Book (6)

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

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

The lost army

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

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

Conrad at Anchor

Joseph Conrad: These handsome uniform editions of Joseph Conrad with introductions by Morton Dauwen Zabel were published by Anchor Books in the early '60s, when that imprint, which under the leadership of Jason Epstein had pioneered the trade paperback format, was a legitimate competitor of Vintage and Penguin as a publisher of serious literature and non-fiction in paperback. The cover designs were by Diana Klemin, the art director for Anchor's parent company, Doubleday. The use of photographs rather than art works in several of these titles was, I think, a little unusual at the time.



In addition to these six there were two listed as being in preparation that apparently were never issued, at least in the same form: Tales of Conflict and Falk, and Other Tales of the Sea; Zabel's death in 1964 may have prompted their cancellation. Anchor published a number of other Conrad titles with different cover treatments as well, some of them featuring art work by Edward Gorey. Doubleday's association with the Polish-born Conrad was already at least a half-century old at the time. At some point in the cascading consolidation of the book industry the connection lapsed, although a number of Conrad titles remain available from Doubleday's sister imprints under the Random House umbrella.

The Fourth Floor

The woman in apartment 4A has been roasting a chicken, which is nearly done. She lowers the oven door, pulls the rack out halfway with a potholder, and lifts the glass lid of the casserole by the knob. As one hand tilts the casserole slightly the other spoons the liquid that flows to the opposite side over the golden bird. She pricks the breast with the tines of a fork, noting the color of the juices that run down the sides and sizzle into the pot below. She replaces the lid and slides the rack back in, shuts the oven door, and sets the utensils down on the counter by the sink.

Her husband is in the next room, sitting in a green armchair. He is facing the kitchen doorway but only his legs and feet and the top of his head are visible, as he's reading a newspaper held spread out in both hands. There's a cut glass ashtray on the little table at his side, next to a porcelain lamp, but it's been wiped clean. Beyond him the window is open and the shade, pulled down nearly to the sill, is fitfully rising and falling back again, making a barely perceptible sound.

In apartment 4B an older woman is sitting alone at a formica kitchen table. She is dressed to go out, except for her hat which along with her purse is close at hand on the table before her. She's reading a book, and with one hand is absently fingering the bookmark that she's moved to the back pages while she reads. There's a narrow bookcase in one corner of the room. Most of the books are cookbooks or her own notebooks of recipes that she has cut out or been given by friends. Lying on top of the bookcase are a phone book and a mail order catalog of equal size. Over the doorway hangs an ornately carved and painted wooden clock with a motto in German.

The couple in 4C have been making love. The young man remains in bed, still wearing his undershirt, half in and half out of the disheveled bed covers. He's picked up a magazine he found lying on the nightstand and is flipping through its pages indifferently. There's a dresser along the opposite wall. Above a lamp, a hairbrush, and a tray containing a jar of cold cream and a few perfume bottles is a large mirror in which the man can see only his own head on the pillow and the headboard behind him. The woman has left the room and can't be seen.

The single gentleman in 4D is sitting at the desk where he has been typing all afternoon. He's smoking steadily and keeps a glass of neat whiskey within easy reach. He taps awkwardly but steadily on the keys, rarely pausing to think, pushing back the carriage with a flick of his hand at the end of each line. There's a pile of correspondence and newspapers in one corner of the desk; the letters have been opened, roughly, but the newspapers are still as tightly folded as when they arrived. At his feet is a box of books, carelessly packed; the only one that is visible is a dictionary, thumb-indexed but missing its jacket. Behind him on the floor is a worn brown leather valise, festooned with paper tags and labels from several countries, some of them in the Far East.

Bad Guys

Jorge Luis Borges had already made a name for himself, at least in Argentine literary circles, as a poet and essayist years before he turned to the short fiction on which his broader international renown would largely come to be based. When he did so, like many an artist he began by borrowing from the masters, in his case with a volume of retellings and translations of tales gleaned from Mark Twain and the Thousand and One Nights as well as Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York, the Encyclopedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition), and other, less familiar sources. Most of the stories and anecdotes in Historia universal de la infamia deal with some kind of treachery or violence, usually both, and together they make up a little guided tour of a few of the lower precincts of Hell, the ones reserved for those whose crimes can't be easily ascribed to mere misplaced love or folly.

The only declaredly original story, describing the fatal dénouement of a confrontation at knifepoint at a Buenos Aires dance hall, is "Hombre de la esquina rosada," the title of which is here translated, felicitously if not entirely accurately, as "Streetcorner Man." Most of the pieces were originally published, in many cases pseudonymously, in Argentine literary magazines and supplements in the 1930s; one of the headings used for their appearance was "Museo" ("Museum"), which seems particularly appropriate. The arts of collecting and of presentation are here given equal footing with the art of creation. Borges scrupulously provides the source for each piece, and if a few of those attributions turned out, on closer examination, to be fictions, who was to know?

In the preface to the 1954 edition, written with nearly two decades of hindsight, Borges was fairly dismissive about the volume's merits, but, in contrast to his attitude towards several early works that he actively sought to suppress, he evidently managed to come to terms with its shortcomings (which may well strike the reader as no shortcomings at all).

The very title of these pages flaunts their baroque character. To curb them would amount to destroying them; that is why I now prefer to invoke the pronouncement “What I have written I have written (John 19:22) and to reprint them, twenty years later, as they stand. They are the irresponsible game of a shy young man who dared not write stories and so amused himself by falsifying and distorting (without any esthetic justification whatsoever) the tales of others. From these ambiguous exercises, he went on to the laboured composition of a straightforward story – “Streetcorner Man” – which he signed with the name of one of his great grandfathers, Francisco Bustos, and which has enjoyed an unusual and somewhat mystifying success...

The theologians of the Great Vehicle point out that the essence of the universe is emptiness. Insofar as they refer to that particle of the universe which is this book, they are entirely right. Scaffolds and pirates populate it, and the word “infamy” in the title is thunderous, but behind the sound and fury there is nothing. The book is no more than appearance, than a surface of images; for that reason, it may prove enjoyable. Its author was a somewhat unhappy man, but he amused himself writing it; may some echo of that pleasure reach the reader.

As Borges had remarked in the preface to the first edition, the stories are not, and do not try to be, psychological.

The di Chiricoesque cover painting of this edition, in which nefarious characters from various eras -- probably intended to represent specific antiheroes from the tales themselves -- lurk among the cracking pillars of a looming colonnade, is by Peter Goodfellow, who created several other Borges covers for Penguin UK in the 1970s. The translations above are by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, who had the advantage of working closely with Borges himself. Sadly, his translation is out of print, having been replaced by one commissioned -- largely, it appears, for pecuniary reasons -- by the author's widow.

Hora cero

This wasn't quite the version of this song I went looking for, but having found it I have to admit it's not half bad. Helio, a veteran powerpop band from Seville, covers Peter Case's "Zero Hour," originally recorded by the Plimsouls.

Semi-automatic

A man stands alone on a street corner — but to say he's alone isn't true, in fact he's surrounded by a swirl of pedestrians and onlookers, some of whom are also standing motionless at the moment, it's just that he happens to be on the corner for reasons of his own, which he shares with nobody else in the crowd, reasons which we, the witnesses of the scene in which he is the principal and in fact sole protagonist, are also not privy to — and it's not quite true to say that he stands either, he's actually half-standing, half-leaning, supporting himself against an ornate cast-iron lamppost that rises from the sidewalk, ascends over the man's head, and then curves down gracefully to grasp in one solitary iron-vegetable claw an opaque white globe, which is not illuminated at the moment because it is afternoon, and in fact the sun is steadily burning through the stagnant haze of dust and exhaust fumes that hangs over the city, and the office workers on their lunch hours have loosened their ties and opened their shirt collars to give them some small respite from the stifling heat — but the man isn't wearing a tie at all, just a beige short-sleeved cotton shirt buttoned all the way to the neck, with a single breast pocket which, however, is empty — and on the streetcar that is rattling past, tethered to overhead wires, the passengers are leaning out of the windows and exits trying to get a little air, fanning themselves with newspapers, and the men have removed their jackets and you can see that their shirts are soaked with sweat, but the man on the corner shows no sign of discomfort, in fact he's so at peace that he may have closed his eyes behind his dark glasses, not that he's sleeping mind you let alone passed out drunk, but clearly he hasn't been exerting himself or been shut up all day in some airless bureau where the spinning metal fans that are whirring on every desk, creating a drone like a hive of bees, do little to relieve the suffocating atmosphere, more likely he's been sitting by himself at a table in the corner of some dark air-conditioned bar a few blocks away, and the taste of the cool, sweet concoction he had been drinking — possibly having more than one — is still lingering deliciously on his palate along with the traces of cigarette smoke from the interior of the bar, though he, himself, doesn't smoke, and it may well be that he has closed his eyes the better to picture in his mind the woman he had been dancing with the night before, a woman of his acquaintance and possibly his lover but certainly not his wife because he isn't married, it's quite certain, he has the look of someone who isn't married, who will never be married, who perhaps one day when he is old and ill and childless will feel a brief pang of regret at his state but who will shake it off, because when all is said and done the memory of the taste of rum in your mouth on a hot afternoon leaves precious little room for regrets.

Swallows and Amazons

I'm not big on boating and I've never had much of an urge to read any of these children's adventure stories, although I confess I am intrigued to learn that their author, Arthur Ransome, may have been a Soviet spy. One of these days I really should at least give the first one a shot. I do love these covers though. Ransome himself was responsible for both the jackets and their interior art; some of the books say "with help from Miss Nancy Blackett," but that's the author's little joke, as "Nancy Blackett" is in fact one of the characters in the series. (Ransome also named a yacht after her.)


The Godine editions in the US, which used to be the only ones I had seen, employ different cover art, very handsome in its own way, but the original hardcover jackets are still available in the UK; the full set can be seen [link no longer active] on the website of the Arthur Ransome Society. Some of the colors are more subtle on my copies, which are from the 1950s, by which time the books had already been reprinted dozens of times.

Shakers, Bohemians, and a Cat in a Cage

Family in tow, Lew Ney (Luther Emanuel Widen), writer, printer, and tireless self-promoter, takes an excursion into the hinterlands and visits, among other local worthies, the Shaker community of New Lebanon, NY. From the Chatham (NY) Courier, Jan 9. 1930 (PDF).

Lebanon Springs is played (sic) host to three distinguished writers this week, with the coming of Charles Willis Thompson, formerly connected with the New York Times; his son-in-law, Lew Ney, self-styled mayor of Greenwich Village, whose real name is Luther Emanuel Widen, and his wife, a daughter, Ruth, of Mr. Thompson.

They are visiting Mr. and Mrs. C. P. Browning, and Mr. Thompson is recuperating from a recent nervous breakdown. Mr. Ney is rewriting his book, "Mad Man."

Mrs. Widen is spending the week end arranging the manuscript for a first book of poems by Eva S. Browning, probably to be called "Cyclone and Other Poems," to be published by the Parnassus Press on March 1.

The New York visitors are spending several days communing with the Shakers. They have been entertained by Sarah Collins of the chair shop and have met numerous of the 30 or so surviving members of what was not so many years ago the most flourishing religious community in the world.

Mr. Thompson's book on the presidents and near-presidents he had known (these last including Bryan and Hanna) was published by the Macmillans. He is a regular contributor to the Commonwealth, the American Mercury and other current publications of literary quality. He still is an unofficial member of the Times' staff, writing reviews of books particularly those dealing with political events and personalities. He was a great friend and admirer of [Theodore] Roosevelt accompanying him in the great campaigns. With Wilson in his book he deals rather caustically.

One of the best known of Mrs. Ruth Widen's published works in entitled "In Praise of Pain" which has enjoyed extensive vogue and still is popular. Mr. Widen has just published a six-verse poem entitled "Sister Corinne," written by Sister Grace Ada Brown in memory of Sister Corinne Bishop who passed to her spirit home December 3, 1929.

Mr. Widen, in planning to come to the Berkshire country, had equipped himself in accordance with his impressions of what would be needed in the way of apparel to resist the rigors of a highland winter and was astonished upon arriving to find a spring flavor in the air. His knee-high boots, heavy coats and wraps would have been supplanted by more seasonable garments had he only known. He had with him his typewriter, a couple of grips containing his stationery, Christmas cards and so on and a caged cat.

I was at first surprised at the Courier's blunt allusion to Charles Willis Thompson's "nervous breakdown," but perhaps in that set it was regarded as a badge of honor. A copy of Sister Grace Ada Brown's brief tribute, printed by Lew Ney, is in the Shaker Collection of the New York State Library. Eva Browning's Cyclone and Other Poems was issued in 1930 in an edition of 320 copies. As far as I can tell Ney never published a book called Mad Man; perhaps, since he apparently pronounced his nickname Looney, it was intended to have been autobiographical.

White and the River (Siv Cedering Fox)

And I am my father,
and I stop,
pull an orange from the pocket
and peel it,
throw the peelings in the snow,

pick up my gun
and ski back home,
hang my white killing
on a hook in the cellar
where bloodoranges lie

a crateful
of color
in winter.

Siv Cedering Fox, lines from "White and the River," from Cup of Cold Water.

When I was in my not yet jaded teens I came to know Siv Cedering Fox very slightly when she hosted a series of evening poetry workshops at a local library which I attended with a group of friends. At this point most of my memories of her are probably largely imaginary; in her mid thirties at the time, blonde, Swedish-born and speaking in a slightly accented English, she seemed to exude the mystique of both poetry and womanhood (a heady mix for me in those days), as well as wisps of the folklore of a not quite Christianized Scandinavia. For some reason I want to picture her wearing a necklace of white bones or fragments of seashells, but I'm fairly sure I'm just making that up.

Cup of Cold Water was published in 1973 by New Rivers Press, which still exists although the book is long out-of-print. It includes a number of black-and-white photographs, also by the poet. There was a vogue for that kind of thing in publishing for a while, but I think it has passed, no doubt because the market for poetry is no longer considered sufficient to justify the bother. Though I didn't know it at the time or had forgotten it, she was a painter as well.

"White and the River" is a poem in several sections, each told from the point of view of one member of a family. The section above, chosen because it works best self-contained, is the concluding one. The lines throughout are as crystal clear as the goblet on the cover, but the overall narrative is left somewhat enigmatic. I always more or less arbitrarily pair the poem with Glenda Adams's deliciously venomous short story "Sea." The two don't actually have much in common except that they deal with the mysteries of siblings, fathers, water, and death, but I must have read them first around the same time and the association has stuck.

Siv Cedering (she eventually dropped her married name) published a number of other books of poetry and children's books in English, as well as at least two novels in Swedish and a number of translations from one language to the other. She died in 2007.

Found in translation (Mark Strand)

Who cares if old age comes, what is old age?
Your shoulders are holding up the world
and it's lighter than a child's hand.
Wars, famine, family fights inside buildings
prove only that life goes on
and nobody will ever be free.
Some (the delicate ones) judging the spectacle cruel
will prefer to die.
A time comes when death doesn't help.
A time comes when life is an order.
Just life, without any escapes.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, lines from "Your Shoulders Hold Up the World." Translation by Mark Strand, from Souvenir of the Ancient World, Antaeus Editions 1976.


We shall drink from the traitor's skull,
we shall wear his teeth as a necklace,
of his bones we shall make flutes,
of his skin we shall make a drum;
later, we'll dance.

"War Song." Translation by Mark Strand, from 18 Poems from the Quechua, Halty Ferguson 1971.


You must look for them
under the drop of wax that buries a word in a book
or the name at the end of a letter
that lies gathering dust.
Look for them
near a lost bottlecap,
near a shoe gone astray in the snow,
near a razorblade left at the edge of a cliff.

Rafael Alberti, lines from "The Dead Angels." Translation by Mark Strand, from The Owl's Insomnia, Atheneum 1973.

The contents of the three books above, with some corrections and additions, were later collected in the omnibus edition below.


Looking for Poetry: Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rafael Alberti / Songs from the Quechua, Alfred A. Knopf 2002.

The Owl & the Pussycat

At daybreak they stopped at the ocean
Took a walk as they watched the sun rise
In the palm of God's hand
They rolled in the sand
As the lazy foam danced in the tide

Corinne West, "The Road to No Compromise"

Though it's only an EP of six songs*, one of them a cover, this record is full of little mysteries and illuminations. I've been an on and off fan of Kelly Joe Phelps since his first record; Corinne West's name meant nothing to me until recently, though she's released three earlier CDs. They met late last year and are now touring together; whether they're "a couple" I have no idea but musically their alliance seems to have benefited both parties, Kelly Joe by bringing him down to earth and smoothing out some of his eccentricities, Corinne West by giving her songs (all of which she has recorded before) the fire and momentum lent by Kelly Joe's guitar playing, which has never been less than brilliant even when, in the past, some of his own material tended to be a little opaque. Compare the fairly tame version of "The Road to No Compromise" on Corinne's first record to the one on Magnetic Skyline and you'll appreciate the difference. His playing here is driving and relentless but never obtrusive.

But give full credit to Corinne West for her songwriting. In the week or so since this record arrived I've given repeated listens to "Whiskey Poet," "Mother to Child," and the other tracks and I keep finding more things hidden in their depths; since some of them first appeared almost ten years ago when she must have been pretty young she clearly has a gift. Time after time some little detail leaps out, like the brilliant and unexpected last line of "The Road to No Compromise."

To the lost child the road is a cradle
For the outlaw the road's where you hide
Takin' you in
You travel again
'Till blindness becomes sight

As for the title of this post, it first struck me when I was listening to this song that some of the stanzas seemed to capture the deft touch and rhythms of Edward Lear's timeless nursery rhyme, which ends, for those who don't remember it from their childhoods or those of their children, as follows:

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Then it came to me that both compositions were, in the end, about lovers setting out together to find their place in the world, and even though Corinne West's song was written long before she and Kelly Joe Phelps met, Kelly Joe makes a very fine owl, though, things being different in our day, he's not the only one crooning over a "small guitar." I'm not a believer in metempsychosis, but I find appealing the idea that the wandering shade of Edward Lear, stranded in 21st-century California, might temporarily have made its abode in the body of a young woman writing a road song.

(By the way, kudos to the designer of the packaging, aprobertsarts.com, for the clever emblem containing the musicians' names. It's made to look like an old soda bottle cap; the back cover reproduces several antique bottle caps, made to appear as if they were affixed "magnetically" to a metal surface, possibly a weathered refrigerator magnet.)

*Soon to be expanded to a full album to be released by Tin Angel in the UK, reportedly in September 2010.

The Approach to the City (7)

It was nearing dusk as he descended the steps into the city, and in the distance he could see the first scattered lights coming on across the river. A storm moved through and thundered briefly, leaving the paving-stones damp and the air thick as rising steam before moving off to the north. Except for a few stragglers everyone seemed to be having dinner, either at home or behind the windows of the restaurants along the plaza. He wasn't hungry, though, and he wanted to make it back to the street of red bricked houses before nightfall.

There was a light on in the front window this time, and when he rang the bell he heard the shuffling of shoe leather in addition to the alarms of the dog. A tall, withered man just over the cusp of old age answered the door, holding a newspaper in one hand, and ushered him in. He brushed the cocker spaniel aside and nodded at the advertisement. As he led his visitor up the winding stairway he explained that he was a widower with no children, and that the room was more than he needed now. The rent was low and he implied without quite saying so that he wanted someone to be there to watch out for him. He was gentle and soft-spoken and seemed unlikely to meddle; for its part the spaniel soon lost interest in the newcomer and retired.

The room was large and open and the walls bare. There were windows on two sides, one pair looking up the hill and the other over the rooftops to the water. They were open a few inches at the bottom and the breeze was lifting the bottom of the thin white curtains. The wooden floor had recently been swept clean, there was a bed and a dresser and a rocking chair, and a small bathroom with a freestanding tub lay off to one side; the man said there was another chair and a nightstand that he could bring up from the basement. A large porcelain lamp on the dresser, topped with a faded but clean and intact shade with a fringe along the edges, gave evidence of a woman's taste, he thought, and he wondered how long the wife had been gone.

They shook on it. He offered a month in advance but the man said not to worry. As he went to go back downstairs he turned and ask if he'd eaten, then invited him for a sandwich when he learned he hadn't. He left him to settle in, which didn't take long. He hung up his coat, unpacked a few things, washed his hands, and lay on the bed for a moment to test it out, which he hadn't thought of doing before. It seemed adequate so he got up and descended to join his landlord.

The dog was sleeping behind the front door and barely lifted its head as he stepped past. He could see now by its muzzle that it was old, as advanced in its term of years as the man. There was a platter of cold meat on the table and a jar of horseradish. He took two slices of bread from a paper package, fixed the sandwich, and finally, at his host's urging, helped himself to a bottle of beer from the refrigerator.

The old man was sitting in an arm chair turned away from the window, a pile of newspapers in a basket by his side. He had been doing a crossword puzzle but set it aside and turned his attention to the sandwich in his lap. His tenant sat across from him on the couch, setting his plate on the low wooden table in front of him, and the two men ate, mostly in silence but entirely at ease, as the darkness filled up the streets around them.

(The above is the last section, for now, of what may become an ongoing project.)

Corinne West & Kelly Joe Phelps: "Amelia"

Not Joni Mitchell's tune from Hejira, but a very different song by Corinne West, performed here with Kelly Joe Phelps. The pair (are they a couple?) will shortly be releasing an EP of six songs (this one's not included); it's called Magnetic Skyline. There are two cuts streaming on Kelly's website, and so far I have to say I've liked everything I've heard.

The Man Without Qualities

Do certain books exist largely to remind us of our own intellectual inadequacies? If so, this one will do for me. So many writers I admire have raved over this novel that I long felt that it was practically my duty to read it, even back in the '70s when the only edition available in the US was the old Capricorn paperback that sneakily concealed the fact that it only contained a small fraction of the work Musil wrote.


I tried reading The Man Without Qualities three or four times over a period of years. Each time, after I had bogged down and given up, sooner or later I would come across another essay about the book that convinced me that it really was something I owed it to myself to finish. So I'd pick it up again, start from the beginning, and push ahead a little further than the last time, but in the end I never made it past the first section, "A Sort of Introduction." And that's as far as I'll go with it, I think. Either something's lost in translation or it's just too steeped in a fundamentally Central European sensibility for me to appreciate.


Anyway, back in the '90s I picked up the first two volumes of this Secker & Warburg set in a used bookstore. (As it happens, they were sold to the store by a friend of mine, whose name is still written inside them and who bought them in London in 1973.) I can't remember where I picked up the third -- probably at a book sale. The cover treatment on Volume 3, which was first published in 1960 and reprinted five years later, must be the original design. The earlier pair are reprints from 1966-67; the designer is Ian Miller and the figure in the cover photo, which looks like a still from some classic '50s or early '60s black and white British film, is unidentified but presumably not Robert Musil. There's a newer, more complete translation now, but I've never tried it.

The Approach to the City (6)

The city's elongated central plaza occupied a kind of plateau, partly natural and partly sculpted out of the hill by human hands. A park, shaded by oak trees and crisscrossed by carefully maintained brick paths, ran down its center, and there were three gazebos or small bandstands, currently deserted, at regular intervals. The downhill side was tenanted by a row of prosperous shops -- a goldsmith, a bookshop, a furniture store, and others he couldn't see from the corner -- while facing them on the far side of the park stood the towered municipal building, a bank, a library, and some modestly imposing white mansions that he took to be the homes of the wealthy. The pedestrian traffic here was the heaviest he had seen, and he had to keep a sharp eye out for bicycles, which veered through the crowd at alarming speeds.

He crossed to the municipal building, the lower storey of which was bisected by a broad flagstone arcade. He followed this until it intersected with another, perpendicular passage; here there was a little enclosed garden, a goldfish pond, and a bulletin board covered with a variety of notices, not all of them official. After giving the papers a cursory glance he continued on his way. Where the arcade emerged at the rear of the building there was another garden, this one planted with azaleas and rhododendrons, then a strip of green lawn, and finally the base of a long series of timber steps that zigzagged up to the top of the hill. The steps were slick and a little arduous to climb -- no surprise, then, that he was the only one using them that morning. The surrounding hillside had been terraced and planted with dwarf willows and Japanese maples, a little too fussily for his taste, he thought, but when he turned around and rested for a moment a magnificent view of the city and the river in the distance lay before him. He stood for a while even after he had caught his breath. The hills on the opposite shore were partially obscured in mist, but he could make out the far end of the bridge and the lot where he had left his car the day before.

It took him another ten minutes to reach the summit. As far as he could see from where he stood the undulating ridge had been planted with great beech trees surrounded by expanses of green lawn. A dirt path wound through, paralleling the river until it suddenly made a sharp turn inland and down a long gradual slope. He followed it until he came to a little pond, on which a dozen or so ducks and geese, and farther off, an aristocratically aloof pair of swans, were floating and dipping their beaks beneath the surface. There was a wooden bench by the pond and a petite young woman was sitting upon it, alone. He guessed her to be about twenty-four; she wore a dark floral print skirt, a white blouse, and a little open jacket that was, perhaps by intent, a size too small. She had a kind of little carpetbag next to her on the bench, and on her left shoulder perched a single white dove that swiveled its head alertly at his approach.

He stopped a few yards away and called out a good morning; she responded with a rather birdlike nod and a chirped hello, then immediately turned her attention away from him and began rummaging in her bag. After a moment she stood and held up five uniform light blue rubber balls; with a sharp snap of her hand she tossed first one, than another, than the rest into the air in quick succession. As the balls descended she caught them with quick, even motions and sent them aloft again; they rose, arced, and fell, she rolled them onto her shoulders and down the back of her arm, she crossed her hands and wove them around herself in intricate figures. After thirty seconds of this she took a deep breath and her face assumed a graver expression, then she suddenly closed her eyes and slowed her pace; impossibly, the balls found their way back into her hands again, time after time, without the slightest deviation from their circuit, like particles orbiting the nucleus of an atom. He stood astonished and motionless. Finally she opened her eyes again, seemed to reorient herself, picked up the pace once more, and in a final flourish whirled the balls into a pattern too intricate for him to make out until all at once they came to rest, all together, perfectly nestled in one outstretched hand. The dove had not moved.

She remained frozen for a second, until he began to applaud wholeheartedly and shouted "brava!" She executed a curt little bow, straightened again, shrugged her shoulders like a marionette, then, smiling shyly and barely glancing in his direction, she sat back down, stowed the balls in her bag, and began whispering something to the bird. He stood stock-still, debating whether to speak or what to say, but already she seemed to have broken whatever connection had briefly existed between them. There was no hat beside her or any other sign that she expected remuneration for her performance. After a moment he said "good day" again, she acknowledged it with a quick nod without meeting his gaze, and he walked slowly off, still spellbound by what he had just witnessed.