Pourquoi Lire?

First of all, I just have to mention to whom it may concern that the French literature section of the library needs some attention – eventually. But there’s no hurry; absent its current state of breathtaking disarray I’d have missed the happy hazard of picking up Charles Dantzig’s 2010 book Pourquoi Lire?. There I found it, carelessly crammed in face down on top of other books, not far from the gap once ostensibly occupied by the book I’d gone there to find, Dantzig’s Encyclopédie Capricieuse du Tout et du Rien (Capricious Encyclopedia of Everything and Nothing). And while clearly something should be done, I’m not altogether ungrateful for the mess. Pourquoi Lire? answers its own question by ranking among the most purely enjoyable books I’ve read this year.

A book with this subject almost inevitably invites a kind of one-off approach, as the author’s task here is fairly straightforward: muse about the many aspects of books and reading; season generously with personal likes, dislikes and displays of erudition; and serve warm. Conceived by a less adept and versatile mind (and there are more than a few lesser books on the subject floating around out there), Pourquoi Lire? could have become a negligible bagatelle. But Dantzig belongs undeniably to that international union of “grands lecteurs” for whom his book will echo down the long, disarrayed stacks of their own reading, someone who reads widely and deeply, has strong opinions, and presents them with exceptional charm, insight, humor, and even, on occasion, a sober and moving depth. 

I had a passing familiarity with Dantzig as a result of another chance encounter, having been given, a few years ago, his enormously ambitious and physically enormous (nearly 1,000 pages) Dictionnaire Egoïste de la Littérature Française. An American friend, knowing my interest in French literature, picked it up on impulse while in Paris. I’ve read it piecemeal, dipping into it at random; it’s one of those books that lends itself to such haphazard reading (and thus has found a more or less permanent place on the insomniac’s bookshelf next to my bed, along with assorted poetry collections, The Thurber Carnival, Vincent and Mary Price’s A Treasury of Great Recipes, and naturalist Donald Peattie’s lenitive, gently soporific A Natural History of Western Trees, with its sylvan, ensorcelling Paul Landacre woodcuts).  

Dantzig’s response to his ostensibly simple question – through 75 plus brief essays, many of which come off as new elaborations on similar entries in his idiosyncratically entertaining Dictionnaire - begins by noting his own accidents, those he causes by literally (literarily?) bumping into people while reading as he walks. While not all of us read quite this dangerously, a great deal of what Dantzig writes about will resonate with anyone who appreciates literature. While a few of his observations seem altogether obvious to any bibliophile, others appear familiar only in the sense in which surprising discoveries are sometimes those lying about in plain sight.

Dantzig’s dissections of various aspects of reading range from the almost predictable (Reading the Classics, Reading to Learn, Reading for Consolation, Reading to be Articulate), to others a bit more unanticipated (Reading to Make Friends, Reading Bad Books, Reading for the Titles, Why Not to Read), to quite a few – wading deeply into Dantzig territory here – far more decalé (Reading to Get Past the Half-Way Point of the Book, Reading for Discovering What the Writer Didn’t Say, Reading for Masturbation, Reading Like a Flower, Reading So As to No Longer Be the Queen of England). 

A genial, palpable passion for literature in its many manifestations infuses these essays, which address not only the reading of novels, but also such topics as reading aloud, reading interviews and dramatic works, and literature’s survival in the age of the electronic text. Through the lens of reading, Dantzig offers up opinions on contemporary culture both high and low, from the facile vacancy of much contemporary text/image art to “neither good nor bad, just blah” consumerist literary products like the Twilight vampire books of Stephanie Meyer, to the threats to literature posed by the ascendency of anti-intellectual, semi-literate political reactionism fronted by figures such as “clownesse” Sarah Palin.  Dantzig also playfully incorporates a number of images into Pourquoi Lire? – photos, cartoons, paintings – including a moving chapter on various artistic and photographic depictions of persons reading (and not reading), and another, with less charitable before-and-after photos, on reading facial wrinkles.

One of Dantzig’s more pointed mélanges of the familiar and the unexpected is the chapter Reading on Airplanes, which presents a by now completely standard and tiresome catalogue of complaints about the malaise of air travel – the indignities of security queues, the absurdity of spending almost as much time at the airport as in the air, the banality of airplane interiors, the obsequious adult infantilism of in-flight service – followed by a strikingly resonant symbol for the devolution of the glamour of air travel (at least for those of us of a certain age who first visited New York during a certain epoch). After discussing several literary works that concern the romance of flight, Dantzig continues:

There wasn’t even a need for books. The names of the airlines themselves were poetic enough: UTA, BOAC, TWA, Pan Am. Pan Am! In New York there was the Pan Am Building, planted behind Grand Central Station, its famous logo way at the top symbolizing the glory of commercial air travel. Since it’s became the property of as joyless an entity as an insurance company, no one obtains any pleasure by raising his or her eyes towards The MetLife Tower; in fact, one experiences a kind of shame in reading those words, as though, I imagine, one felt shame at reading German words on the signs of occupied Paris during the Second World War.

It almost goes without saying that there’s a particularly French angle to Dantzig’s book, perhaps one reason he has remained - unjustly - untranslated. Some of the writers he discusses and quotes, such as Paul Léautaud and Jules Barbey d’Aubervilly, may be familiar chiefly to those with a background in French literature. However, most are household, international literary names, and Dantzig’s observations tend towards the universal, making Pourquoi Lire? appealing beyond its slight franco-centrism (though it’s also clear that Dantzig’s literary tastes tend to the fairly traditional and canonical; while the book makes no pretensions to thoroughness, there’s an almost shocking absence of attention paid to emerging writers or writers from outside of Europe or North America).

One element that enhances Pourquoi Lire?’s charm and appeal is Dantzig’s engaging and conversational narrative voice, at once an invitation into a commonality of readers and an acknowledgement of an almost ready-made conspiratorial intimacy among bibliophiles and lovers of literature. Additionally, piquantly noting that “the reader goes to bed with her reading,” Dantzig maintains, throughout Pourquoi Lire?, an acute focus on that creature with two backs represented by the integral interaction of reader and book:

We read selfishly, but we arrive, involuntarily, at an altruistic result. In reading, we’ve brought back to life a thought in deep sleep. What is a book, if not a Sleeping Beauty? What is a reader, if not her Prince Charming, even though he wears glasses, has a bald spot, and is 98 years old? A closed book exists, but it’s not alive. It’s a rectangular parallelepiped, probably covered with a fine coat of dust, empty like a box can be empty. Each act of reading, one might say, is a re-creation. Mallarmé exaggerated when he maintained that each reader was the creator of the poem. “Re-animator” would have sufficed. We’re big enough people to admit that, as important as the role of the reader is, he isn’t the one who created the work.

In the end, through this focus on reading as an act of love and reanimation, Dantzig succeeds in distilling the essence of the importance of reading to its near total impracticality, that its value lies exactly in its serving for nothing. Or rather, the reading of literature serves for nothing other than as a bulwark and act of resistance against the forces of ignorance, anti-intellectualism, anti-relativism, incuriosity and vacuity, and, ultimately, as a check on our final simplification, through its capacity for restoring life’s “adorable complexities against the marionettes of death.”

At one point in Pourquoi Lire?, Dantzig notes (while discussing Stendhal, clearly a favorite writer, as he is in the Dictionnaire, and reason enough for my finding Dantzig such a sympathetic guide) that gaiety – particularly when it comes with an acid point - is a rare commodity in literature, that for this reason such books should be venerated like treasures. Veneration might be a bit too strong a word in this case, but Pourquoi Lire? - gay, engaging and delightfully pointed - should have little trouble cozying in on the shelf among the literary treasures that helped inspire it.

(Pourquoi Lire?, by Charles Dantzig, Editions Grasset, Paris, 2010, unfortunately not yet translated into English; translations above are my own).

Jan Křesadlo: Gravelarks

Czech émigré writer Jan Křesadlo (Vaclav Pinkava), an unexpected interlude in my reading – and another fascinating example of an Eastern European author emerging to prominence after the fall of the literary Iron Curtain - came to my attention by mention of him on a forum concerning literature that contributors wished to see translated into English. In fact, one of Křesadlo’s novels – Mrchopěvci (English title: Gravelarks) – has been translated, in a bilingual Czech-English edition by Mata Press of Prague with black and white illustrations by Křesadlo’s son, Oscar-winning animator Jan Pinkava (two items in this edition that fit my book publishing wish list: attention to binding, with quality paper and a ribbon bookmark, and the courtesy - understandably extendable only to short works - of including the original language version to accompany the translation). Reproduced in the book is a 1987 letter from Josef Škvorecký heaping praise upon the novel - which Škvorecký’s own publishing-house-in-exile, Sixty-Eight Publishers, issued in Czech in Toronto in 1984 - and soliciting interest for an English translation. Alas, it took another 12 years for one to appear, this 1999 Mata edition, which then apparently vanished like a comet. My search of on-line booksellers turned up zero available copies, not even from Mata in Prague, so I was happy to find it in my local library.

Gravelarks, a wild, blackly funny work of biting protest and deceptively light-hearted sarcasm aimed at communist rule in Czechoslovakia - “after the year 1948, but still long before the period of the ‘thaw,’ as in so many other émigré novels” - takes its title from the occupation of its main character, an ordinary young nobody named Zderad who, having fallen out of favor with the dominant Stalinist political paradigm, must support his wife and infant son by singing dirges at funerals along with other “gravelarks.” It’s a gray existence, unleavened by the coffin-shaped apartment he inhabits with his family in a grimy part of the city and by the ostracism he experiences as an outcast from the state. But, as the narrator repeatedly observes with Candidean optimism, it still isn’t (quite) “the worst of all possible worlds.” One day after singing for a funeral, Zderad finds himself suddenly plunged into a greater, more nightmarish humiliation when confronted by a tall, pale stranger who produces a photocopy of an anti-Stalinist bit of doggeral Zderad wrote - in Greek - while still a grade school student. Under the oppressive paranoia of the time, however, even such an innocuous little poem would signify “practically a death certificate for its creator,” and the stranger is able to coerce Zderad into a crumbling tomb in the cemetery and subject him to sexual blackmail.

As the blackmailer demands new and increasingly florid encounters, Zderad’s situation is further complicated not only by his diverse attempts to uncover his exploiter’s identity but also by his awareness of a psychosexual power dynamic in which he obtains both profit (he’s paid for his “services”) and an embarrassing element of pleasure:

The cruel mental pleasure of unspeakably obscene power over the horrible blackmailer fused with the sepulchral lover’s revolting but effective caresses, spiced with his muffled sobs and grunts. The posterior of the stinking mandrill, which is incredibly obscene, offends the more sensitive visitor to the Zoo, yet it shines with a symphony of delicate and pronounced hues of greens, reds, blues and purples. Metallic shining flies for example of the genus Calliphora which revel in excrement and carrion, are of a similarly glorious coloration, as are many species of dung beetle. Thus the radiance and glory of Being permeate all its levels. Uninfluenced by the spectacle it was illuminating, the flame of the candle burned with a beautiful and glorious brightness, and, at the same time, Zderad’s lust also flared up in spite of himself. Pulsating, it glowed colourfully with ever greater strength until it finally exploded into a cosmic firework.

The novel follows Zderad’s various attempts to unyoke himself from this sordid exploitation, find inner courage and identity, and rediscover the moment of romantic tranquility and happiness he’d experienced years before when he first met his wife while swimming at a lake in the countryside. Křesadlo’s narrative takes the reader on a picaresque journey through the vicissitudes of Stalinist rule, recounted by a charming, lively, self-interrogating émigré narrator, acutely conscious of his role as storyteller and of his obligation to avoid falling into typical literary pitfalls such as those of the emerging genre of “Easterns,” which of necessity contain “secret policemen, blackmailers, whores and other typical characters” just as “Westerns” contain common elements of “guns, horseriding and the odd bit of cattle ranching.” What results is a freewheeling, anything goes narrative punctuated by bits of musical score and phrases in Greek, propelled with a rocketing narrative velocity that can nonetheless stop on a dime for the narrator to interject his own views or question his own narrative style, even shift gears entirely by suddenly inserting, as an “Intermezzo,” a brief parable in order to more thoroughly (and grotesquely) get across a point.

Křesadlo’s contempt for the communist regime infects the novel at every turn; it’s spiked with scathing references to dogma and institutionalized politics; to the “Youth Unions,” “Joyful Corrective Centers” and other statist institutions with Orwellian names; to the “consumers” who “got out” and turned their backs on those left behind; to acquiescent intellectuals in the West; and in general to the “radishes” (red on the outside, white on the inside) who constituted “most of the contemporary population of Czechoslovakia.” The narrator reserves special scorn for state-supporting intellectuals and for the dreadful state of Czech literature of the time (in a somewhat performative self-interview Křesadlo wrote in the 1990's, his distaste for Milan Kundera was apparent):

…a desert…almost total…the better writers of the future were at that time still in a state of embryonic latency. Some, but not all of them, were writing and publishing true and honest byzantine odes to Stalin, only in the Czech and Slovak languages, of course…

Commenting further on the severity of the literary drought, the narrator notes that the only other books still to be found were those in antiquarian bookshops, “remnants of eliminated ethnic groups” to “be had for next to nothing, because, comrades, who’d want to read them?”

If there’s one element I found slightly bothersome in Gravelarks, it’s Křesadlo’s use of “sexual deviance” as a metaphor for communist corruption (Křesadlo held a degree in psychology and worked for years as a clinical psychologist at the mental hospital affiliated with Charles University, specializing in sexual aberrations). As though there are not already in literature enough homosexual characters portrayed as monsters, Křesadlo appears to go even one better by referring quite simply to Zderad’s exploiter as “the Monster.” But at the same time, the character is so utterly over the top – what starts as a altogether ordinary sexual act blossoms into an astoundingly baroque variety of sexual obsessions and pathologies, both homo-and hetero-sexual, and increasingly monstrous, incorporating even kidnapping and murder – that it’s next to impossible to take him seriously as anything other than metaphor.  It’s abundantly clear that by rendering Stalinist communism as a grotesquerie of sordid sexual depravity, Křesadlo mocks the brightly polished, seamless moral certitude of the state’s self-congratulatory self-image. And to be fair, Křesadlo - who, during his lifetime, was instrumental in efforts to decriminalize homosexuality in Czechoslovakia - provides another, far more sympathetic homosexual character as a foil. Still, while this may simply reflect a weariness of such depictions on my part, not to mention the American cultural lens through which I couldn't help but view the book, the device struck me as uncomfortably close to the manner in which, for example, religious fanatics expediently and routinely assign blame for all of a country’s woes to “sexual deviance " (of course, we've all seen what lies beneath that particular brand of polished, seamless moral certitude...). 

  

In the end, though, Křesadlo’s evident talents trumped whatever slight misgivings I had regarding his choice of metaphors. I found myself frequently laughing out loud while swept along by his glittering, barbed, ebullient, acrobatic prose and delighted by the sheer dexterity and breadth of his language, his frequent use of outlandish, comical imagery, and the occasional descriptive gem (i.e. “The sky was as mild as a cow’s eye”). One can only hope that Gravelarks will return to print in English, and that more of Křesadlo’s works will be made available to allow English readers to explore further this remarkable novelist / poet / scholar / composer / linguist / activist. I would be especially interested to see a translation of what is purported to be his magnum opus:  “Astronautilia,” an epic science fiction poem modeled after Homer’s “Odyssey,” running to more than 6,500 lines, and written entirely in classical Greek, with Czech translation on facing pages.


This revised review (July 12, 2011) corrects some errors and misperceptions that appeared in the original posting.

Autumn Night at West Lake

While I’m still in the afterglow of a short trip to China, here’s a favorite Chinese poem (despite its being not quite the right season for it). A friend and I discovered this poem years ago in an elementary school reader while exploring the old schoolroom in the marvelous Chinese settlement of Locke, California, in the Sacramento River Delta region. The poem was given no authorship or translation attribution in the reader, and despite much looking I’ve been unable to find it reproduced anywhere else. It’s clearly about Hangzhou’s famous West Lake, but that’s all I know about it (and would be deeply appreciative should anyone happen to have additional information on the poem’s source).

AUTUMN NIGHT AT WEST LAKE

Su Dike goes sidewise;

   Pai Dike stretches crosswise.

It’s like a rainbow sidewise;

   It’s also like a rainbow crosswise.

The moon is misty from the Rainbow Bridge.

   The bridge is like a bow;

   The moon is like a bow.

Shadows of two green hills fall to the east of the bridge –

   A high peak in the south,

   Another high peak in the north.

In the haze of autumn the two peaks are vague –

   It is vague in the south.

   It is vague in the north.

The Spirit of the Human Verb, Darked and Stupyfied

My previous post on Chinglish brought to mind a favorite poem from Robert Graves, who clearly appreciated a good bit of mistranslation:

¡WELLCOME, TO THE CAVES OF ARTÁ!

“They are hollowed out in the see coast at the municipal terminal of Capdepera, at nine kilometer from the town of Artá in the Island of Mallorca, with a suporizing infinity of graceful colums of 21 meter and by downward, wich prives the spectator of all animacion and plunges in dumbness. The way going is very picturesque, serpentine between style mountains, til the arrival at the esplanade of the vallee called “The Spider”. There are good enlacements of the railroad with autobuses of excursion, many days of the week, today actually Wednesday and Satturday. Since many centuries renown foreing visitors have explored them and wrote their eulogy about, including Nort-American geoglogues.” From a Tourist leaflet.

Such subtle filigranity and nobless of construccion

   Here fraternize in harmony, that respiracion stops.

While all admit their impotence (though autors most formidable)

   To sing in words the excellence of Nature’s underprops,

Yet stalactite and stalagmite together with dumb language

   Make hymes to God wich celebrate the strength of water drops.

¿You, also, are you capable to make precise in idiom

   Consideracions magic of ilusions very wide?

Alraedy in the Vestibule of these Grand Caves of Artá

   The spirit of the human verb is darked and stupyfied;

So humildy you trespass trough the forest of the colums

   And listen to the grandess explicated by the guide.

From darkness into darkness, but at measure, now descending

   You remark with what esxactitude he designates each bent;

‘The Saloon of Thousand Banners’, or ‘The Tomba of Napoleon’,

   ‘The Grotto of the Rosary,’ ‘The Club’, ‘The Camping Tent’.

And at Cavern of the Organ there are knocking streange formacions

   Wich give a nois particular pervoking wonderment.

¡Too far do not adventure, sir! For, further as you wander,

   The every of the stalactites will make you stop and stay.

Grand peril amenaces now, your nostrils apprehending

   An odour least delicious of lamentable decay.

It is some poor touristers, in the depth of obscure cristal,

   Wich deceased of thier emocion on a past excursion day.

Cool Translations of Exquisite Article

Here are a few “Chinglish” discoveries from my recent trip through southern China (plus a couple from an earlier trip), offered in the spirit of celebrating not only fine translations but the occasional poetic joys to be found in inadvertently poor ones (as well as to commemorate humbly my disastrously poor Mandarin in an impromptu speech I found myself having to give while there):

“Welcome, so do you! Your journey is more interesting.”

“Warm Prompt: This elevator has been disinfected.”

“Warm Suggested: Caution Wet Floor.”

“Protecting tree, please not shinning.”

“No explosive. No weapon. No pet. No balloon.” [Posted at the entry to a railway station]

[Items on a restaurant menu in Kunming]:

“Cook in Soy Sauce Pig Hand”

“Tingle and Hot Crisp Fish”

“Mountain Pepper Pomegranate Flower”

“Sheet Iron Bullfrog”

“The Shredded Ginger Fries the Meat”

“The Frog Embrace the Jade Pillar”

“Red Meat Insid Snow”

“The Old Adopted Mother Bitter Vegetable Flower”

“Fuck Fris Potato Silk”

“Cool Mix the Vegetables and Big Hot Pepper”

“Fuck to Fry of Small and Yellow Fish”

“Fragrant Frailty Hair Belly”

“Have a Happy Reunion the Cool Vegetables of Exquisite Article”

And finally, from an astonishingly lengthy set of rules for a hotel in a small city in Jiangxi:

“Bibulosity, bustup, and hullabaloo and other behavior which will disturb other are prohibited by the Hotel.”

(In closing - a thoughtful article on Chinglish):

http://q-pheevr.livejournal.com/2008/07/23/

A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven

“And it’s a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions…Nothing is ever finished, everything just goes on and on, there are no boundaries, not even between the living and the dead, even that zone is quivering and unclear.” – Karl O. Knausgaard, A Time for Everything

Russian mathematician George Gamow, who counter-intuitively defined different sizes of infinity, might have considered an additional definition that could take into consideration the fact that, as a purely practical matter of our mortality, the world’s writers offer an inexhaustible abundance of riches. Still, on occasion I read a work that abruptly creates an event horizon in this infinitude, proves capable of bending the light that literature gives off to such an extent that most other novels suddenly seem - relatively speaking – dim and diminished.

I’ll risk this: Norwegian author Karl O. Knausgaard’s novel A Time for Everything (translated by James Anderson, Archipelago Books, 2008, initially published in hardcover under the title A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven) is the most breathtakingly original and subversive contemporary novel I’ve read in years. It’s also the most unusual, with a conceit I normally would have found utterly off-putting were it not for the inextricable pull of the first page.

I fear betraying the novel by being in any way reductionist, as A Time for Everything, like most great literature, defies encapsulation. It commands both the reader’s attention and pace, offering profound pleasures and challenges that crackle along the edges of consciousness and occasionally explode into it. There is nothing cheap in Knausgaard’s novel.

The skeletal outline of A Time for Everything appears anything but promising, and in fact sounds like the melodramatic quasi-religious mystical muddle one might find in a Dan Brown book: a treatise on - of all things – angels, incorporating retellings of biblical stories interspersed with the metaphysical speculations of a fictional 16^th century Italian theologian.

A number of strands tie A Time for Everything together including, as the underlying foundation, a biography of this fictional theologian, Antinous Bellori. As a young boy lost one evening in darkening woods, Bellori experiences a startling, life-changing encounter with two wraith-like angels, caught mid-meal as one of them sinks its sharp teeth into a fish plucked live from the water (this wildly imagined scene, one of the novel’s most unforgettable, rivals anything I’ve read in any literature for sheer impression and impact). Transformed, Bellori pursues a life-long obsession with these mesmerizing entities through an intellectual and theological inquiry that eventually results in publication of his obscure treatise, On the Nature of Angels – a book all but lost to time, like any number of those dusty volumes that line the endless shelves of Europe’s old libraries. The narrator identifies Bellori as belonging to that new race of early modern intellectuals like Pascal, Descartes, Bruno and Newton, whose solitary, tormented pursuit of knowledge opens the world while at the same time expanding its sense of loneliness and revealing “the horror” of reason’s “step into infinity,” that, once taken, reveals “no way back.”

A Time for Everything leads us exactingly through Bellori’s philosophical exploration into the nature of angels and their curious appearances in scripture. Who are they? What are they? Why do they suddenly appear without explanation in the Bible? What relation do they have to God and to humanity? Are they living or dead? Material or other? Are they perhaps a kind of negative of human beings? Direct representations of God or separate celestial colleagues? Emanations of God’s volition or independently-willed creatures? Why do they only reveal themselves when they do, and why only to certain persons? Rather than allowing these questions to come off as ponderous (or for that matter, ridiculous), Knausgaard manages to make Bellori’s line of inquiry engrossing not simply in its application of an empirical approach to biblical accounts (that A Time for Everything occasionally inspires a sense that one might be reading a peer-reviewed study of angels is enough to pull one out of Knausgaard’s seductive prose for a blinking moment of rational re-orientation), but also in its rigorous lesson in critical reading, using that bestselling text in the western world, the Bible – more specifically, its various, curious mentions of angels, seraphim, cherubim, and the like. These Knausgaard plumbs deeply and reconstructs into daringly imagined stories. What at times appears to be a theological inquiry – and it does, on that level, raise broadly stimulating, provocative questions about the relationship between the divine and the human, the immanent and the corporal, God’s omniscience and omnipotence, and the multivariate modes of human inquiry – is also a daring plunge into the glaring lacunae of the biblical accounts.

When the narrator abruptly departs from Bellori’s biography to lead us into the first of these retellings – of the story of Cain and Abel  - what appears in the Bible as a tale tossed off in a mere two lines is spun out into a hundred pages of narrative, the first page of which finds the brothers inhabiting a wide valley ringed by snowy mountains and boreal forests. Someone is wearing black trousers, a white workshirt, red spats. What’s going on here?

We appear to be in Norway, perhaps in the 19^th century. We’re most certainly not in ancient Mesopotamia. Why, given such a careful reading and questioning of the inconsistencies, contradictions and narrative holes in the Book of Genesis, are we suddenly thrust into a retelling so manifestly incongruous with anything suggestive of the Old Testament Middle East?

Knausgaard prods us to flesh out the biblical scene – cognizant that in order to do so one is almost wired to use his or her own referential context and that, in any case, one of the powers of myth is its ability to reconstitute itself in new guises. The biblical version gives us so little to go on – asks us to accept a story on great authority with almost no evidentiary detail while “cloth[ing] everything beyond the immediate in anecdote” – that to envision such a story as grounded in the actual lives of human beings demands a far greater accounting, a filled out context for being able to make sense of the divine Word in concrete human terms. To do this, Knausgaard takes the charge and runs at light speed. These retellings are stunning in their richness of detail, their vivid rendering of the characters, and in the astonishing vitality with which he relates these tales, which are full of glints of light, shadowy movements among the trees, the rush of rivers and the lavations of rain, of gestures, glances, intimations, the myriad ephemeral elements that mark and hold the present in glorious abeyance for an instant. Picking up A Time for Everything and opening it at random, one finds this numinous sublimity of the present throughout:

He turns and glances over toward the houses lying beneath a hill on the side of the field, and he sees that the figures, at this distance little bigger than beetles, will soon be home…And it’s as if they’ve held him captive, for only now, now that they’re no longer there, does the landscape he’s been in all day long reveal itself to him…The undulating cornfield with its grayish, dusty surface glimmers almost golden in the sunshine. The lush crowns of the trees that grow between the field and the encircling mountains on the opposite side of the valley form one single band of green, on the slope close to him one could pick out individual species: aspen, alder, oak, willow, pine, spruce. The small unique habitats they each support. The jutting ledge beneath the pine covered in places with dry, green moss, in others bare and bluegray, everywhere carpeted in yellow pine needles. The blooming rose-hip thicket that nestles close, the air above it heady with bumble-bees and wasps. Its roots reaching serpentinely across the mountain only to disappear into the earth nearby. The straight pine trunk blushing in the glow of the evening sun, the shadow it throws cross undergrowth and bushes, up across the hillside. The grassy bank below still flecked with wintry yellow, the barely year-old saplings that grow there, delicate and seemingly uncertain, as if they’ve ventured onto an ice that is so thin that they don’t dare to go on, or have the courage to turn and retreat to the safety of the forest, but must simply stand there motionless and wait until someone comes to rescue them.

Fiction can obviously do what a religious text like the Bible cannot, and as literature, the passages in the Bible that provide material for A Time for Everything come up embarrassingly short compared to Knausgaard’s luminous, expansive incarnations (A Time for Everything should find a secure place in those standard undergraduate course offerings on “The Bible as Literature”). But to imagine that A Time for Everything is a book specifically about this religion or this holy book would, I think, be to miss its larger scope. It is not simply an attempt to reinvigorate biblical tales, which it nevertheless does astonishingly well while pushing beyond the way that, for example, Roberto Calasso revived Greek and Hindu myths. Neither is this one of those works like East of Eden that employ biblical elements to add depth and mythic resonance to a contemporary tale. Nor does Knausgaard take a mere deconstructionist approach to these stories. If anything, his is what might be called a supraconstructionist approach, taking the grain of these tales and causing them to effloresce, spinning from the thin strands of their DNA a whole living world. Recapitulating biblical myth - by extrapolating, from these familiar tales told in the Bible via a few cursory and authoritarian bare-boned lines, lengthy narratives with flesh - is nothing new (as anyone who’s ever been to a Sunday sermon at an AME church can readily attest), but this is no evangelically-motivated attempt at enrichment. I can recall few novels that offer anything approaching the unexpectedness in Knausgaard’s reinventions. His retelling of the story of Cain and Abel is not simply an imagining of it in a humanly comprehensible setting, but a profound questioning – in completely unexpected directions - of murder and transgression. His retelling of the story of Noah and the ark likewise spares nothing in his insistence that we be charged with envisioning the reality represented by the myth: the crazed eccentricity of Noah’s obsession, the geological and ecological impact of a world covered in billions of tons of water (oh, and about those creatures of the sea?), and the heartlessness with which Noah had to have abandoned those left to drown, depicted in a scene made powerfully incarnate by the matter-of-factness with which the waters’ rising around a mother and child is recounted. Despite its flirtations with the immanent, A Time for Everything is a strikingly physical, body-centered novel. Knausgaard fleshes out these stories literally; their flesh-and-blood grounding involves occasionally shocking attention to the body.

Taking instances of angels’ appearances in the Bible and examining them in the manner that science has treated of physical phenomena, Knausgaard brings rationalism to bear on an ostensibly irrational phenomenon, approaching spiritualism head on with rationalist tools - not to dismantle it, but to establish a line against which it must be argued. A Time for Everything subverts fundamentalism by making a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible impossible in light of the empirical, in light of the evidence provided by the Bible itself. A question never far away is these tales is: how do we know what we know? When Noah’s sons see their father for the first time following his discourse with God, the narrator asks of one of them, “What was he actually seeing when he looked at his father?” This is a question that runs throughout Knausgaard’s novel: what are we actually seeing when we look at a character? When we read a text? When we accept as sacred a religious book like the Bible?

It is almost as though Knausgaard has set out to turn these religious founding documents on their head, and by so doing perform a sort of exorcism of fundamentalism. The radicalism of A Time for Everything lies in its firm insistence on the precariousness of rationalism, that at the dawn of the Enlightenment modes of inquiry into science and into religion (a treatise on angels, for example, in the case in point) were on a more or less equal footing, and that, given different circumstances, the latter might easily have dominated the former, leading to a completely different world. In one particularly engaging scene, the young Noah (envisioned as a precocious albino savant who cannot withstand the sun) tries nightly to work out a system for categorizing the world, a kind of rudimentary scientific method that harkens back to Knausgaard’s observation at the beginning of the novel that the world might easily have chosen to prioritize a religious inquiry such as Bellori’s theories of angels over the scientific method that gave us the Age of Reason. A warning about the fragility of human systems is implied, that the Dark Ages might well have continued and can always return (a not insignificant point in a world where religious fundamentalists and fanatics continue to attack inquiry and openness through denunciations, fatwahs, censorship, general anti-intellectualism, and even violence and terror).

Given the ambitions of A Time for Everything, it’s somewhat surprising to find, in place of ponderousness, a consistently scintillating narrative replete with wry humor, never condescending but at times almost teasing, good-naturedly pointing out contradictions and raising common-sense questions about biblical tales more often than not taken for granted (when they’re not in fact being taken literally). For example, when the angels arrive in Sodom, they are met by Lot, obsequiously waiting at the city gates like a typical tourist tout to entice visitors to lodge at his home. The scene as presented by Knausgaard has an element of hilarity to it:

The dust swirls about his feet. Even though he holds his robe above his knees with one hand, he’s so eager that he almost trips several times. And when he throws himself on the ground before them, he’s so out of breath that at first they can’t make out what he’s saying.

“Yoo-hoo, sirs, yoo!” Is what it sounds like. ”Yoo-hoo, sirs, yoo!”

At the same time, one never gets the impression that Knausgaard is baiting his readers; his encyclopedic knowledge of not only the Bible but also a whole range of Judeo-Christian theology makes that nearly impossible. He’s grounded as a good scientist is - in empirical inquiry refined into assertions that set a new bar for being challenged – yet never loses sight of the fact that he is first and foremost engaged in a literary enterprise, and an exceptionally rewarding one both in terms of the breadth and the captivating liveliness of his imagination.

The novel ends on a note of deliriously high humor – or almost. Reaching the last line of the novel I wished there had been a blank page inserted between it and the subsequent, deeply confounding “Coda,” which, left unread, would make A Time for Everything a different book than it is. In fact, in choosing to provide a coda to a story that ends as it does, Knausgaard provides us two novels, one for romantics and another for realists. This pointedly troubling section is a radically bracing departure from the rest of the novel (readers may be advised to pause before continuing with it). From one point of view, the coda – in which we encounter the book’s anguished contemporary narrator, a writer seeking solitude on a barren, isolated island off of Norway’s coast - seems entirely superfluous and unnecessarily complicating. In addition, despite the narrator’s vow to eschew self-absorption, the coda has the effect of being full of just that, almost a way of drawing attention to the struggles Knausgaard himself must have gone through in order to produce this rich, meticulous and vastly researched book (and if  A Time for Everything offers irrefutable testimony to the novel’s not being dead, it also resurrects the long dormant figure of the tortured artist). But from another point of view the coda provides the novel its most trenchant meaning, identifying at last its narrator and situating him in the contemporary world where angels have devolved from the incandescent entities they once were through various diminishing stages of incarnation into a form that has pretty much nothing to offer to anyone anymore, where the role they played in the stories of the Bible, as powerful intermediaries between God and humankind, no longer has meaning, and where even an attempt at awakening as extreme as the writer’s self-inflicted desecration of his own body (as though he could inscribe directly into the flesh a sense of significance) reveals him in a state of torment, bereft of the richness of meaning and assurance the world of faith and belief once provided, left only with the raw struggle to create.   

A Time for Everything is not a difficult novel, but it demands patience and careful attention. While the retellings of the biblical stories in which angels appear unwind with the delicate, measured pace and exquisite attention to detail that mark the best kind of storytelling, the interstitial explorations of theological questions require more diligent reading. However, Knausgaard’s forays into philosophy and theology in his ambitious work keep a steady, artist’s eye on the fact of A Time for Everything’s being a work of fiction. And as novels go, it is daring, thrilling, infinitely rewarding fiction of the highest order, playing among the angels where they themselves might fear to tread.

Thieves Like Us

The cover of Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Stealth (2007, translated into English by Hosam Aboul-Ela, Aflame Books, London, 2009) features a slightly chubby boy of perhaps six years old, wearing an ill-fitting blue sweatshirt and shorts, looking expectantly at the camera. Behind him, almost indistinguishable from the dingy, monochromatic background, stands a middle-aged man – the boy’s father - wearing a fez, his thick mustache beneath sharply downward-sloping cheekbones. Each appears to look into the camera with independence, as though being photographed alone rather than together. This photograph is described within the pages of Stealth, an autobiographical portrait of the relationship between Ibrahim and his father, and captures the flavor of the novel perfectly: an image marked by time, a worn, threadbare atmosphere suggesting poverty barely kept at bay, a sense of distance between child and adult, the child looking forward with hesitant anticipation, the adult receding into the background with a stern expression in which pride and resignation mix. Photos appear frequently in Stealth, and Ibrahim’s novel itself develops like a Polaroid photograph, gradually emerging from obscurity into the superannuated color and definition that capture a fleeting moment, now past.

Set in Cairo in the early 1950’s, but with a telescoping sense of time that ranges from the father’s youth to the present, Stealth impressionistically covers a brief period of the writer’s childhood. Through powerfully atmospheric and intimate vignettes it unveils the quality of this relationship between father and son. In italicized flashbacks - memories of the boy prompted suddenly through the alchemy of association - a picture also begins to emerge of the child’s absent mother and of the reason for her absence. Ibrahim masterfully suggests details here and there that begin to accrete into a fuller back-story of an intelligent, defiant, and afflicted young woman whose life has been circumscribed by obligation, marriage and cultural expectations.

Ibrahim’s (rather, his translator’s) wonderfully apt title choice underscores children’s means of appropriating information about the mysteries of the adult world. The unnamed boy learns of this world by stealthy observation – peering through windows, doors left ajar, skylights, keyholes, glimpsing around corners into rooms where adults interact, furtively exploring the contents of drawers and closets, eavesdropping on conversations and unfamiliar noises. By means of these stolen glimpses, the child inquisitively gains burgeoning knowledge of adult behavior and relations, and in particular intimations of his father’s loneliness, declining health and fortune, frustrations with women (who come and go through the home as housekeepers, potential new spouses, and surrogate mothers), his religious practices, relations with friends and relatives, political beliefs, and hints of his conflicting emotions around being a single parent. Stealth also employs the prism of the central father/son story to refract light onto a whole set of cultural phenomena and a history of mid-century Egypt, lending the novel a depth and relevance beyond the simple familial relationship it describes. Along the periphery of the child’s grasping vision, the reader catches glimpses of the corruption of Egyptian politicians and businessmen; reaction to events of politics, war, terror, and scandal; rituals and practices of holiday celebration; the difficult and limited options faced by women; the imprisonment of those targeted unjustly for their political opinions; the passing popularity of certain songs, films and fashions.

The child’s fractional understanding of this adult world is emphasized by a fragmentary, almost cubistic aesthetic in describing his manner of apprehension, in which only parts are grasped, and not the whole:

I open the door carefully and look behind me. Father is deep into his nap. I go out to the living room. I walk softly to the door of the constable’s room. It is shut. I put my eye to the keyhole. The end of the bed. Four bare feet over it. The feet are all tangled and they’re not moving. I go over to the skylight and have a look at the window of Um Zakiya. It is open. The side of her bare arm is showing. I go around the table. I notice a mouse running towards the bathroom and the kitchen. I go back to Mama Tahiya’s room. I hear moving inside, so I hurry back to our room.

The sensual details of Ibrahim’s recollections provide the novel an astonishing richness and immediacy invested with a child’s selectivity and impressionability: a wooden wardrobe that has only three ball feet, the fourth replaced by a piece of wood that causes the left door to always remain open a crack; old train tickets used as domino pieces, the destination on one side and hand-drawn dots on the other; a black-clad woman on a tram “whose thighs hang over the edge of the seat a little;” a cup of rusty nails by the bedside that the child’s father fills with water each night. One can almost smell the fenugreek cooking (without ever even having actually experienced the cooking of fenugreek). The vividness of these details recreates a complete world, immerses one in the mysteries of a child’s perceptions, through which life is learned as often as not via stolen glances snatched from the interstices where adults aren’t looking.

Stealth is an extraordinary portrait of childhood and an affecting appreciation of a father – and by inference, an even more poignant elegy to a missing mother.  It’s also an intimate and penetrating glimpse into Egyptian culture and history. And, in its stealthy way, it is also about the origins of the impulse to become a writer, from one who has become among Egypt’s most prominent and compelling.  As that country now enters a significant new chapter in its history - and as Ibrahim’s latest novel, Turbans and Hats, has just been published last month in Europe and is beginning to garner praise as a turning point in Arabic literature - one hopes that Ibrahim will finally find the world audience he deeply deserves. 

The Stories of Harold

The entry for George Selden Thompson in the multi-volume Dictionary of Literary Biography runs 12 pages long, detailing Thompson’s contributions to literature in the form of 17 novels for children, a couple of books on archeology and the classical world, and some credits for theatrical and film scripts. Thompson’s best-known work, states the Dictionary, written under the truncated name George Selden, is the award-winning, perennially popular children’s classic, A Cricket in Times Square - a story I loved as a child.

But the Dictionary makes no mention of what is arguably Thompson’s most singular contribution to literature, a now out-of-print 1974 novel entitled The Story of Harold, written under the pseudonym Terry Andrews. I knew nothing of the Thompson/Selden/Andrews connection when I picked up The Story of Harold last year after reading an article in the Guardian UK in which Edmund White recommended it as “one of the strangest” books he’d ever read. But some 30 or so pages into my reading of the book, captivated by its novelty, I sought to know more about the author.

I don’t know that I’ve ever had quite this experience: discovering, as an adult, an adult novel (and it is an adult novel) that engaged and impressed me to the equal degree that a children’s book, written by that same author, had when I was a child. I found The Story of Harold exceptional, absorbing, and unexpected, among the most tender, brave and deeply honest of post-war American novels.

Told in diary form, Terry Andrews’ The Story of Harold concerns a children’s book author, also named Terry Andrews, who has written an immensely popular children’s book, also entitled The Story of Harold - a contemporary fairy tale featuring a small person who wakes each morning with a sense that “Something is wrong!” and goes off to remedy the problem by supplementing his own efforts with a limited bit of magic at his disposal. Within these concatenated stories and shifting boundaries between truth and fiction are more stories within stories. And Terry Andrews - writer of popular children’s tales - is also a polymorphously polyamorous bi-sexual adventurer who lives for “the bliss that derives from oblivion” he finds in orgies, with pick-ups from bars and street corners, with swinging couples, in sado-masochistic homosexual encounters and in more anodyne, cerebral sex with a woman friend – a panorama of consensual sexual behavior ranging from the extreme to the transcendently subtle (he sternly warns his readers that “those of you who don’t recognize [sex] when it happens outside the flesh can leave the room right now”).

If this sounds like a novel written for shock value, eager to push buttons, one can rest assured that it is anything but. The cultured, inquisitive Terry - lover of opera, art and all things New York - is simply not the kind of author, narrator and protagonist to indulge in anything quite so puerile. In addition, despite its careful deployment of the tools of fiction, The Story of Harold conveys a palpable impression of searingly honest autobiography (alas, the Dictionary of Literary Biography is of no help in throwing light on this conviction). The seriousness underlying Terry’s story is underscored by this honesty as well as by a question at the book’s core: is life worth living?

For The Story of Harold is also a novel about suicide. From the first line, in which Terry states “Again last night, for a little while, I was able not to be alive,” readers are invited into a lengthy suicide note. Despite Terry’s wild sex life, he finds himself coming up repeatedly against relationships that fail to supply what he needs to feel happy or even alive; the frustrations of love offered to those who either can’t reciprocate or whom he fears won’t be able to embrace his complexity; an inadequacy in human contact (he even seeks warmth in subway seats just vacated by others). Fulfillment takes on the appearance of “the Impossible.” His frustration has reached a turning point just prior to the diary’s first entry, when a self-loathing and masochistic partner, Dan Reilly (“the brute with the damaged child inside”) manages to secure Terry’s promise to help Reilly fulfill a S & M fantasy of being burned alive, presenting Terry ample excuse for his own eventual suicide. He makes his purpose explicit to readers: an invitation to serve as witnesses to the case he makes for his suicide and as judges of its legitimacy.  By all rights, The Story of Harold could join what’s almost become an industry of confessional American narratives of dysfunction and be a depressing, sordid slog towards its narrator’s self-extinction. But far from dragging his readers into unrelenting misery, Terry promises, in his invitation to the voyage, to make the journey entertaining: “Come with me…We will have a lot of sex. You are going to laugh a great deal – people have no idea how blithe a suicide can be!”

The ensuing pages deliver on that promise, taking the reader through an often sharply funny and humane cavalcade of sexual and emotional feats of daring, a high-wire walk involving “the vertigo of those beyond repair” (this phrase Jean-Paul Sartre used in reference to Jean Genet came to mind repeatedly as I read the book), propelled along by Terry’s surpassing wit, acute intelligence, and gentle charm. Another buoyant force is the sheer exuberance of his writing, which at times bubbles beyond the confines of prose into song and poetry – mostly humorous little couplets, but occasionally intimate odes to those he loves, as gracious and moving as any communication any of us might ever hope to receive from a loved one. Equally piquant are Terry’s myriad delightful and piercing observations, as when he spies Jacqueline Onassis one night at the opera and describes her as, “A deity of sweet sadness – blithe, smiling, blinding mere mortals with legends of pain – still gowned in the aura of gorgeous disaster: an effigy of lovely grief…" - then adds, in typical Terry fashion, "Well, I hope I never meet her. She too must be a human being. And as in the case of all swans, beneath that graceful gliding there must be a pair of madly paddling flat feet.” Similarly lancing observations capture certain New York experiences, making The Story of Harold a memorable New York novel as well. Terry’s voyage towards his terminal goal makes frequent stops along the way to opine on New York’s landmarks (I’ll never be able to look at Lincoln Center the same way again) as well as its more pedestrian glories.

But some unanticipated complications occur along that voyage: a growing, unreciprocated love for a favorite S & M partner, Jim Whittaker, a handsome, happily married doctor with six children – one of them blind, all of whom are wild about Terry’s books; an on-going sexual relationship with Terry’s closest female friend, a recently widowed single mother, Anne Black; and, above all, the unwitting intrusion into Terry’s life of a seven year old “lump of a little boy” named Barney Willington. Barney’s well-meaning but obtuse mother, emerging from divorce, enlists Terry’s aid - a demand to which he acquiesces with grudging dread - in trying to help Barney adjust to the divorce and to a new father he’ll have once an impending new marriage is finalized (unsurprisingly, sending the child to a psychiatrist has been of no help). The story follows these compartmentalized, discrete threads of Terry’s life as the tension surrounding his planned suicide is enhanced by his unavoidably deepening relations to the people around him, particularly Barney. Out of Terry’s irrepressible generosity as well as his identification with the child (Terry too being the child of a neglectful parent), he takes on the task of getting through to this “glum little troll,” this “gob of underdone dough.” And Terry’s chief means for accomplishing this is through the telling of stories – more specifically, new, extended elaborations on Barney’s favorite book: The Story of Harold.

As Terry takes Barney out for walks in the park, to museums, and to the gym, these new tales increasingly serve to draw Barney out of his bovine docility; at the same time, they allow Terry a means of articulating his own inner angst by encoding, in the stories he weaves, the events unfolding in his own life. This is done so thinly at times that I immediately rushed to reread The Cricket in Times Square to see if it contained an encrypted adult reading; it does not, at least not obviously (some of you frowning parents may be relieved to hear), other than a blissfully tipsy little animals’ party…

I’m not sure there exists a better or (perhaps paradoxically) more innocent American novel about storytelling. The Story of Harold fundamentally illuminates the urgency of stories, their life-affirming and even life-saving “magic.” It recognizes, spectacularly, their psychological underpinnings, how myths and children’s tales float upon a foundation of psychosocial and psychosexual conflicts, work on resolution of those conflicts, and provide a means for negotiating life (the novel appeared, I might note, a few years before works by figures like Bruno Bettelheim and Jack Zipes on the secret lives and coded psychology of fairy tales, what Bettleheim termed “the uses of enchantment”). One of the key challenges for Terry is maintaining enough storytelling magic to keep Barney engaged and to draw him out into life. His elaborations on the adventures of Harold offer enchantment and structure to help Barney psychologically navigate his own capacity to cope with life. I need hardly add that these improvisations are delightfully entertaining, witty and inventive in themselves, and often cut around psychological wounds with surgical precision; it’s not for nothing that George Selden Thompson is recognized as one of the finest American authors of children’s books.

What’s perhaps most striking about The Story of Harold is its refusal to indulge in simple ironies and expectations. For one thing, it defies American Puritanism not through typical reactionism, but by postulating a world antipathetic to it and disentangling sexuality from the muddled morass of American morality - one of the only examples I can think of in American literature that does this successfully. In place of a reactionary response is an empirical experiment with truth: what if, in lieu of the mask of normalcy worn by American culture as regards sexuality, one simply tells the truth – that behind the façade of placid American sexual conservatism there’s a largely unspoken wide wild world of experience? The Story of Harold pulls off in macro the micro experiment that Terry, invited by Jim to dine with the whole Whittaker family one night, imagines would happen if one “simply stood up and tapped the glass, and spoke…a fact of total truth” to “encounter…the lies we all live.”  By this candid catalysis - “like matter meeting antimatter” - Terry manages to make manifest what is normally latent in American life. I know of no novel that succeeds so well in daring this transgression (though a criticism one might level is that the book’s tangible urgency to express Terry’s truth at times makes its diary aspects strain its novelistic ones). This is a work that could have been written nowhere but in the United States; it brings into the light both our national self-image of innocence and the latent content - not only sexual - that lies beneath it. In so doing, The Story of Harold offers readers the visceral impression that some essential dynamic in American life is being uncovered.  

I also don’t know that I’ve read an American novel of the period that seemed so deeply honest and so decent in a moral sense. Terry’s protectiveness of others, his conscientiousness in putting their care (and their stories) foremost, keep them insulated from his own frequent bouts of inner rage and despair. The most memorable elements in The Story of Harold are not its granular descriptions of sexual behavior or inventive treatment of storytelling, or even the question of whether Terry will carry through on his plan, but its emphasis on the fragility and strength of relationships. The most affecting scenes display an extraordinary respectfulness and tenderness in Terry’s relations with those he loves, his ability to pick up on fleeting nuances of emotion and vulnerability in others, his remarkable ability to make simple human communication meaningful: a literature of aspects of love. A deep appreciation for friendship (noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of George Selden Thompson’s chief themes in his children’s books) also pervades The Story of Harold, a work in which, to paraphrase a line from Stephen Benatar, friends serve mercifully as God’s recompense for having families.

Edmund White characterized The Story of Harold as a “period piece,” but I think this characterization – though understandable from the point of view of looking back to the period of pre-AIDS sexual exploration in the gay world – misses the mark. Taken as a whole, The Story of Harold seems no more a period piece than does The Portrait of a Lady, and has as much to say about human interactions now as it did then. A few details place the action historically, but the book is surprisingly unfettered by these, notable given that scope of Terry’s diary – October 1, 1968 to March 21, 1969 – falls in the midst of the Vietnam War (“that arbitrary abyss of useless misery”) and includes the election and inauguration of Richard Nixon (“the most unlikely and depressingly inevitable of Presidents”). There’s little overt reference to these events, though there is a telling comment, early in the novel, regarding writers whose works are too fixed in the present, as well as some assurance that Terry is not completely oblivious to what’s unfolding outside his own “interior Vietnam.” Nonetheless, Terry’s aloofness from the movements of his time reveals a surprisingly apolitical, even conservative streak, with an impatient reference to the “Militant Hobbits” of the time, a tone that softens slightly when, in a scene near the novel’s end, he has a tryst with a young soldier facing deployment and expresses astonishment that such young people are actually being shunted off to war.

For all the daring and entertaining terrain The Story of Harold travels, what it may leave to many contemporary readers is a dispiriting sense of the relatively cautious and contracted quality of the times in which we now live. The heady, liberated view of sexuality taken by Terry seems wistfully grand in a world in which categories of sexuality are diced into ever-extended acronyms and those marginalized in this culture by their sexuality seek inclusion (albeit rightfully) in an institution as medieval as marriage. But viewed through this lens of contemporary concerns, The Story of Harold implies as strong an argument as any to underscore that the sexual orientation and private, consensual behavior of adults has nothing to do with their fitness to be responsible caregivers to children, and to put to rest the absurd lie that those whose sexuality doesn’t fit into heteronormative constraints can’t be wonderful guardians and parents.

And this, quite apart from these contemporary issues, is perhaps the central concern of The Story of Harold: the ways in which society treats its children, the importance of the care and feeding of young minds and hearts. It speaks in myriad and mature ways to the manner by which children – those embodiments of possibility - can have the life squeezed out of them by inattentive, unimaginative, even well-intentioned adults (who are today as likely to send them to the pharmacy as to therapy).  It’s a testimonial to how stories can help mitigate this outcome and provide all kinds of people – from misfit children to adults struggling with despair – with tools to navigate a life. And in this, The Story of Harold is a kind of American classic, a startlingly honest, moving, funny, inventive, playful and serious novel of psychological chiaroscuro that deserves a coyly revered spot in post-war American literature.

The Story of Harold was published by Holt Rinehart Winston in 1974. A paperback edition (with cover illustration by Edward Gorey) followed in 1975, and the book was again reissued by Avon in the 1980's. Although not easy to find in good condition, these books do resurface frequently on second-hand book sites – albeit usually at prices few can afford.