Canaviais no vento

“All books are stupid, there’s never much truth in them, still I’ve read a lot over the last thirty years, I haven’t had much else to do, Italian books too, all in translation of course. The one I liked most was called Canaviais no vento, by someone called Deledda, do you know it?”

- Antonio Tabucchi, The Woman of Porto Pim (1982)

As a matter of fact, I did not know Canaviais no vento (1913) nor its author, Grazia Deledda (1871-1936), but a mention of any work of literature in a book by Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi almost inevitably sends me off to track it down – and bait like the above was completely irresistible. One seldom knows, however, when one writer mentions another writer so obliquely, whether or not a compliment is intended. In Tabucchi’s enchanting story the title is given in Portuguese (the original Italian title of Deledda’s novel is Canne al vento, rendered as Reeds in the Wind in the English translation by Martha King), as the speaker of the passage is a singer in a bar in the Azorean port city of Porto Pim who tells the visiting Italian writer an intimate tale of his youth, one with some relevance, it turns out, to the Deledda novel he so admires. Nonetheless, I took Tabucchi’s bait, and much to my surprise chomped down on a surprisingly lyrical, moving and unusual novel - authored by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1926) no less.

With a title as naturalistic as Reeds in the Wind - and indeed, the title refers to the main character’s assertion that people “are like reeds in the wind…We are the reeds and fate is the wind” - one might have reason to expect a banal slog through romanticized, deterministic peasant life, but from the first pages Deledda’s novel proves a humanistic and intensely lyrical work of intimate, strong emotions; intricate moral struggle; the complexities of caste, power and poverty; and the quest for meaning and redemption.

Set in a small village just inland from the east coast of Italy’s island paradise of Sardinia, Reeds in the Wind is largely a novel of the poor and the aged. The main character, Efix, is an elderly servant on what remains of what was once a large farm belonging to Don Zame and his four daughters, the Pintor sisters. We learn early on that one of the daughters, Lia, escaped the island many years before, leaving behind her three sisters and an enraged and shamed father who, during his search for his escaped daughter, had been found dead one morning, perhaps of a stroke, though a small mark on his neck suggests that something else – a malevolent island spirit, or perhaps a more human intervention – might have been to blame. Lia’s disappearance, however, has not been altogether complete; shortly after her decampment, a letter from mainland to her sisters had assured them she was well, and, as the novel opens 20 years after her departure, the sisters have received another letter announcing the imminent arrival in the village of their nephew, Lia’s now grown son, Giacinto. In a small and superstitious community like this, the mere receipt of the letter is enough to cause concatenating ripples. And as the novel unfolds, Giacinto’s visit – and his struggle between duty and dissipation - is recounted through the impact it has throughout the village and the devastating consequences it holds for the sisters and for Efix.

Deledda captures beautifully the overlapping of emotions built up over decades between people who live in tangential relations and who have a long history of buried feelings towards one another bespoken by only the most laconic of communications. As well, she captures the weight of such uncommunicated emotions and of the poverty that presses upon Efix and the Pintor sisters, who have seen their holdings decline steadily until they themselves are threatened with direst poverty. As though to mock their fall, the ruins of an ancient baron’s castle dominate the valley in which they live. Deledda’s characters are replete with human frailties and weaknesses, spiritually and psychologically deformed by the poverty, superstition, and guarded, buried emotions that mark their lives, bent like reeds before the wind by the vicissitudes of events that they see as beyond their control.

With its acute attention to the landscape and to the cultural practices of the inhabitants of the region, Reeds in the Wind might easily have slipped into a sort of anthropology of Deledda’s native Sardinia, and there are certainly strong ethnographic elements in the novel, especially in the various festivals and saint days that provide glimmers of joy in the villagers’ otherwise mean existence. Particularly fascinating are the various superstitions and spirits believed in by the inhabitants, who have managed to keep such beliefs alive despite a strongly superimposed Catholic faith (I was reminded immediately of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s observation of polytheism’s generous ability to welcome and absorb new religious traditions). But Deledda’s intentions are not so shallow as to simply give us a portrayal of village life in Sardinia. Her plot unfolds with constant surprises and unexpected turns of event, and levels its focus at the shifting attempts of Efix to establish meaning and free himself from guilt in a pitiable life circumscribed by poverty, loneliness, and neglect. Perennially well-intentioned, Efix’s most charitable efforts often lead to unintended calamities; on top of this his fundamental goodness holds a dark secret. Attempting to balance what little he has in life with a sense of his own inner worth (continually undermined by the sisters, who see him as a mere servant despite his being closer to them than anyone else in the village), his benign attempts to be heard, to be recognized as good in others’ eyes, lead him drifting into an untethered, almost picaresque, searching life implicative of Christ’s wanderings in the desert (though considerably more handicapped by the infirmities and indignities of age). That Efix is a Christ figure is altogether obvious, even from the cross that ends his name, but Deledda is far too humanistic and subtle a writer to allow this memorable character to be in any way diminished by his employment in symbolic service.

If human communication is constrained and sublimated in Reeds in the Wind, it seems to find its outlet in the rich manner by which the natural world is invested with imagination and life. What’s perhaps most evocative in Deledda’s novel is her obvious infatuation with Sardinia’s landscapes; everything is alive in this novel (an occasional, subtle shifting of tense from past to present helps enhance this vitality). The crepuscular light casts into sharp relief a world that is magical and mysterious, and not a little frightening. Each plant or flower seems imbued with spirit. Each shadow is alive. The night that sees the human world constrict and contract into safety behind doors also sees, in the world outside, a wild explosion of animation, beauty and mystery:

Efix remained motionless, waiting. The moon rose before him, and evening voices told him the day had ended: a cuckoo’s rhythmical cry, the early crickets’ chirping, a bird calling; the reeds sighing and the ever more distinct voice of the river; but most of all a breathing, a mysterious panting that seemed to come from the earth itself. Yes, man’s working day was done, but the fantastic life of elves, fairies, wandering spirits was beginning. Ghosts of the ancient Barons came down from the Castle ruins above Galte on Efix’s left and ran along the river hunting wild board and fox. Their guns gleamed in the short alder trees along the river bed, and the faint sound of barking dogs n the distance was a sign of their passing. Efix could hear the sound that the panas – women who had died in childbirth – made while washing their clothes down by the river, beating them with a dead man’s shin bone, and he believed he saw the ammattadore (the elf with seven caps where he hid his treasure) jumping about under the almond woods, followed by vampires with steel tails.

A more careful reader than I might, as an experiment, apply some basic astronomy to Deledda’s wanton literary use of the moon, which seems to leap full into the sky nearly every night to cast its eerie and encompassing glow over the countryside and sea.  I hope I don’t in any way diminish Deledda’s accomplishment by comparing this attention to the landscape to the early fabulations of quasi-anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, whose melding of fiction with fact in ethnographic treatment of practices of sorcery among the Yaqui Indians of Mexico’s Sonora desert contains, for all its obviously kitsch elements, a stirring and memorable evocation of landscape and light as almost living entities with hidden powers. The same sort of vital and mystical atmosphere pervades Deledda’s (mercifully) more sophisticated writing, and the world cannot but look different and more sentient to a reader emerging from her captivating descriptions.

In her introduction to the English translation of Reeds in the Wind, Sardinian ethnographer Dolores Turchi notes that Grazia Deledda wrote of her native Sardinia from a “veiled” nostalgic distance, and suggests that this distance provides a somewhat romanticized, fabulist vision of the island and its inhabitants. Turchi also notes the irony of Deledda’s retrospective affection for this community, which had always been “severe” in its judgment of her:

When barely launched on her writing career the harsh criticism of relatives and townspeople…had blocked her literary vocation for some time. Good girls did not write stories and novels to be published for all the world to read, whose characters could be cause for ridicule.

In order to write, Deledda left Sardinia at an early age for mainland Italy, ultimately settling in Rome, where she was to spend most of the rest of her life. It is difficult to absorb this history without seeing, in the escaped Lia, an image of the author herself in the story. Though taking place 20 years prior to the point at which the novel begins, Lia’s flight acts as the novel’s chief precipitating event, one that governs the subsequent actions of the novel’s characters.  Efix’s good-hearted, protective championing of her escape seems to make of Lia an unusual secondary main character, never present (at least not in the flesh – though she appears to Efix occasionally as a kind of trick of light and shadow) but constantly hovering above the novel like a kind of resonating overtone, an overarching presence. She appears to serve as a token of Deledda’s own courage in fleeing the island to carve out a life for herself as a writer, an unusually modernist autobiographical artifact inserted into the novel as an explicit, gentle and forgiving riposte to the community she lovingly depicts in the novel’s fatalistic and insular characters. Though the novel vividly communicates the psychological complexities of this community, it also expresses a distinctly self-reflexive awareness of the writer as observer, raconteur and servant to the articulation of the unarticulated. It’s easy to see how Tabucchi’s own raconteur might have come to value Deledda’s novel above all of the “stupid” books he’s read.

Of Violins and Volcanoes

The Violins of Saint Jacques, a 1953 novella of some 140 pages, stands out by virtue of its claim to fame as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s sole work of fiction. Those familiar with Fermor’s many outstanding travel books will know that this is true only at a slant; his other works, based in fact and rich in historical and cultural detail, include passages of prose capable at any moment of blowing up like splendid dust devils of imagination into whirls of fantasy and poetry that entwine with the fictional realm. As though an experiment in inverse manner, Violins weaves into its fictional narrative a wealth of factual and historical detail equal to that in any of Fermor’s non-fictional works, as though he’s chosen to use the mold itself rather than the model, providing us a kind of negative of his usual approach such that the fictional elements dominate. The result is a baroque confection of rare concentration, compression and color in which the fiction is created parallel to an actual historical event, such that the full force of the event itself – the catastrophic eruption of Mount Pelée on the Caribbean island of Martinique on May 2, 1902, which purportedly killed all but one of the island’s 30,000 inhabitants – resonates in a way that an actual historical account never could (or should).

Fermor uses a framing mechanism to tell the story: the novel’s narrator, while on the Greek island of Mythilene, encounters one Berthe de Rennes, an elderly, worldly traveler and amateur painter who eventually tells him the extraordinary tale behind one of her paintings, a depiction of a smoldering volcano dominating an island town where a grand ball is under way. Essentially, the tale Berthe tells is that of the Mount Pelée disaster, though Fermor has elected to shift the site of the catastrophe to the fictitious island of Saint Jacques des Alisés, imaginarily located to the east of Guadalupe, Marie Galante and Dominica, and the date of the catastrophe – while still in 1902 – to Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras). Berthe, while still a young woman, has quit the continent and moved to the island for adventure, welcomed as governess by a branch of her family, the Serindans, who own much of the island’s wealth. While the early part of the novel details Berthe’s installation and introduces the novel’s cast of characters, much of the narrative centers on the elaborate ball that takes place on the island the night of the catastrophe and which Fermor depicts in page after page of characteristically glorious Fermoresque description. This must surely rank among literature’s greatest parties, and includes a lovely passage summing up the experience that a great fête can convey:

A ball is almost a short lifetime in itself. Everything that happened beforehand retreats, for the time being, into a kind of pre-natal oblivion and the world waiting for you when you wake up next day seems as vague and shadowy as the eternity that waits beyond the tomb. Like somebody’s life, the ball goes on and on and the incidents stand out in retrospect like a life’s milestones against a flux of time whose miniature years are measured out in dance tunes.

The party presents a grand vision of the world in all its complexity, with all the island’s inhabitants participating whether landowner or slave, seafarer or farmer, wealthy scion or banished leper. Love affairs unfold; enemies reconcile; duels are arranged; and a great myriad of events large and small take place amid the night’s dancing, dining, theatrics and intrigues. Fermor’s tale unfolds with the skill of a born storyteller. One could be forgiven for mistaking The Violins of Saint Jacques for one of Isak Dinesen’s densely rich tales. As in those tales, the pleasure lies not so much in plot or outcome but in the manner of the telling.

As in his other works, Fermor frequently employs various elements of the epic, which in Violins lend the novella a grandness that its brevity might otherwise be unable to convey. Principle among these is the epic catalog, a favorite Fermor device, and one which he puts to extensive use here, including a genuinely hilarious vision of the room of one of the novella’s most memorable characters, the lively writer and commander of the sloop Beauséjour, Captain Henri Joubert, who inhabits, during his respites on the island, a veritable cabinet of curiosities gathered from across the globe and painstakingly cataloged by the narrator.  In like manner, Fermor delights in this wildly inventive list of names of guests invited to the ball (should anyone ever write a treatise on the list as literature, Fermor should surely merit at least a chapter):

…the Solignacs of Triste Etang, the Vauduns of Anse Verte, the Tharonnes  of Morne Zombi, the Vertprés of Battaka and Bombardopolis, the Chaumes of Carbet du Roi, the Cussacs of Ajoupa, the Rivrys of Allégresse, the O’Rourkes of Bouillante, the Kerascoët-Plougatels of Cayes Fendus, the Fains of Noé des Bois, the La Mottes of Piton-Noir, the Fertés of Deux Rivières, the Flour d’Aiguesamares of Sans Pitié, the Montgirards of Morne Bataille, the Chambines de la Forest d’Irvy of Pointe d’Ivry and the La Popelinières from the strange named acres of Confiture; Hucs, Dentus, Pornics, Médards, Vamels; here and there a visiting cousin from another island - a de Jaham or a Despointes from Martinique, a du Boulay from English St. Lucia…

That Fermor did not write more fiction is unfortunate, for The Violins of Saint Jacques more than proves his capacity for it, and the sheer delight he takes in language gives the novella an almost delirious atmosphere of exaltation that manages to overwhelm the horror of catastrophe (about which philosophy is kept to a respectful minimum). The island sinks beneath the seas, taking with it its glittering human world in the full flush of both celebration and the courageous or nefarious machinations going on in the shadows beyond, serving as a moral warning for human effort in the face of indifferent powers beyond human control (“as wanton as the blows and tramplings of some immense and muscular idiot”). While the novella comes across as more of an entertainment than a serious treatise on human impotence in the face of raging nature, the harrowing description of the volcano’s sudden explosion and the realization of all the human complexities that it sweeps away present a nonetheless sobering vision of the nothingness beyond death and of the fragility of humanity. In the end, Fermor’s fictional, disappeared island lives on primarily in the mariners’ poignant superstition that lends the novel its title, the sounds of violins and voices they claim sometimes to hear coming from beneath the expanse of water at the site of the disappeared island. There is, however, one other place where life on this fictional island continues, one that Fermor would most certainly have found amusing. In response to various on-line inquiries about the most beautiful place in the Caribbean, someone has posted, on numerous Internet travel forums, a response with which, after having read Fermor’s novel, one would find it difficult to argue. Without question, asserts this clever Internet poster, it is the magnificent Beauséjour Marina and Resort, located on the tiny private island of Saint Jacques des Alisés, somewhere vaguely in the vicinity of Guadalupe and Domenica. 

Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir: Rosa Candida

Improbably, Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir’s Rosa Candida (2007, French translation by Catherine Eyjólfsson, Éditions Zulma, 2010) is the third contemporary Icelandic novel I’ve read this year, following Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s lyrical and moving Heaven and Hell and Sjón’s (Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson’s) shaggy, showy, wildly poetic cabinet of curiosities, From the Mouth of the Whale. Both of those last books, as unusual and inventive as I found them, are novels of the sea, self-conscious riffs, at least in part, on folkloric fishing sagas of what I’ve come to think of, with nothing uncharitable intended, as the “god and cod” variety. As though announcing a deliberate departure from this staple of Icelandic writing, the beginning of Rosa Candida casually notes that Ólafsdóttir’s appealing narrator and main character, the 22-year-old Arnljótur (fondly referred to by his father as “Lobbi”) has just finished a stint working at sea himself, but is leaving all that behind, and in fact leaving Iceland behind, headed for warmer climes and an atypical, rather un-Icelandic career path: that of rose gardener.

It’s not a choice altogether encouraged by Lobbi’s kindly father, who doesn’t see it as an auspicious direction for a young man, and who would prefer not to lose the company of his son following the recent accidental death of his wife, Lobbi’s beloved mother, who instilled in her son his love of plants – particularly of the rare eight-petaled white rose species known as rosa candida. Lobbi himself seems to lack a clear idea of what he’s doing; nor are we, as readers, entirely privy to his motivations. Along with his bereft father and a mentally disabled twin brother, Lobbi also leaves behind a newborn daughter, the inadvertent offspring of Lobbi’s casual, one-time tryst with Anna, a woman who has told him quite explicitly that she needs and expects nothing of him in the way of paternal responsibilities. And so, with little left tethering him to home other than the telephone lines he uses to update his elderly father on his pilgrim’s progress, Lobbi quits Iceland and these few important people in his life, with no convincing assurance to the reader that we’ll see any of them again.

What subsequently unfolds is a simply told story recounting Lobbi’s journey to the continent to a remote monastery where he’ll occupy himself with the rehabilitation of its famous rosarium – and where, subsequently, the major life events he’s just lived through – his mother’s death and his incidental fatherhood - catch up with his impulsive and altogether innocent flight from them.

There is little that’s dazzling in the language of Rosa Candida, no ravishing lyrical passages or unforgettable lines or great pearls of wisdom, no innovative narrative structure or daring literary experimentation or overt concern with social or political issues of the day (in the monastic world that the novel circumscribes, the wider world’s great problems – war, famine, poverty, oppression – exist beyond the frame). Yet, there is something quite remarkable here in this quiet, luminous novel; the text exudes an inner glow, a radiance verging on beatitude (not a word one often associates with contemporary fiction) that works on the reader at considerable depth.

The linear narrative unfolds with unusual gentleness and measured pace, and with an attention to the quotidian that in less capable hands could have bogged down into a banal account of Lobbi’s every waking moment. But Ólafsdóttir’s touch is so light and so invested in the moment that one reads about Lobbi’s preparations, his journey by plane and car, his meals, his life at the monastery, his visits to the market, all the minor ceremonies of a day without finding them in the least bit tiresome (including what is certainly the first engaging description of the changing of a diaper I’ve encountered either inside or, for that matter, outside of a book). There’s a great deal going on in the margins and growing beneath the surface of this narrative. The deceptive simplicity of the story is ringed by death, accident, and coincidence, and more subtly by notions of foreignness and estrangement and the vagaries and difficulties of relation - and of translation - in their broadest sense. In the novel’s acute self-consciousness as regards departure from Iceland (I might add that all of the Icelandic literature I’ve read expresses an almost deliriously fervent and ruminative fascination with the natural landscape of the place that calls to mind that notion of a “nostalgia of the present”), it’s likely that the novel has a resonance among Icelandic readers that goes well beyond the usual elements lost in translation (I was particularly taken by Ólafsdóttir’s intriguing comment in an interview that “writers are foreigners to their mother tongue. Their job is to misunderstand language”[1]). Even more pronounced is the welcome and subtle sort of velvet revolution Ólafsdóttir performs with regard to gender and family roles, gently turning them about with the naturalness and matter-of-factness of a gardener tilling the soil, and presenting, in her image of a contemporary holy family, a remarkably appealing model for paternity (anyone so myopic and reductionist as to think of Rosa Candida as primarily a “feminist” novel, however, may leave the room right now). One of Ólafsdóttir’s great strengths is an ability to handle large questions and what could easily be ponderous religious and natural symbolism with great dexterity and etherealness; this is not a novel of surface effects. The novel exerts the organic irrepressibility and assertiveness of life and of growth, as though a kind of inner gravity drew all things towards unity, as towards the candida rosa of Dante’s “Paradiso,” the multi-foliate rose of divine love and redemption that marks the fulfillment of the poet’s journey. And while this may be an odd thing to say about a novel - even to say to myself - I had the sense of being “cleansed” by Rosa Candida. Stepping out of the house into the late afternoon light just after closing the book, I found the world noticeably altered, more sentient and vital, more astonishing.

Ólafsdóttir’s novel has been popular in Europe; it was awarded last year’s prestigious Prix de Page in France for best European novel of the year, and has received several other Icelandic, European and Canadian awards. An English translation of the book struck me as inevitable long before I’d finished reading the French one, as this seems one of the rare contemporary novels capable of standing up to literary critics and popular audiences alike. But, by a Rosa Candida-type of unlikely coincidence, I was amazed to discover that an English translation has in fact appeared today from Amazon Crossing (under the title The Greenhouse, and not The Offspring, the more literal title used in on-line English commentary about the book). The novel’s thematic elements of soul-searching, reconnection and the search for meaning will have wide appeal, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a film version of the book follow. But the delicateness of Ólafsdóttir’s accomplishment is evident in imagining just how easily a film version could transform the gossamer fragility of the work into sentimental pulp. One might also initially mistake Rosa Candida as yet another of those proliferating contemporary literary vehicles for tidy adult resolution of childhood conflicts that more often than not adopt the language of therapy (a friend has exasperatingly warned her book group that she’s had it with novels containing the words “Club,” “Memory,” or “Daughter” in the title). But sentimental pulp is one thing Rosa Candida is not. This is a highly accomplished, subtly vitalizing and ultimately ambiguous work written with confidence and depth. Among the three impressive contemporary Icelandic novels I’ve read this year, Rosa Candida takes the prize.

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[1] http://www.sagenhaftes-island.is/en/autor-of-the-month/nr/1233

The Life and Times of J.

Caroline Blackwood, photograph by Walker Evans

In the annals of sins of omission and unintended psychological cruelties, Caroline Blackwood’s early novel, The Stepdaughter, is one nasty little book. This epistolary novella takes place entirely within the correspondence of “J.”, a well-off New York divorcee (well, soon-to-be-divorcee) who, rather than communicate meaningfully with any real person, writes letters into the void (it’s a one-way correspondence in all but a metaphorical sense). This echo chamber finds its physical analogue in the luxurious high-rise apartment which serves as a cell from which J. spends her time peering out listlessly onto its breathtaking view of Manhattan and trying her best to ignore the impingements of the apartment’s other inhabitants: her four-year old daughter Sally Ann; Monique, the homesick French au pair sent over by J.’s former lawyer husband Arnold; and one very big, living, breathing problem, J.’s lumpish adolescent stepdaughter, Renata. These increasingly strident and desperate letters - which J. closes “Yours hopefully,” “Yours in a state of restless anxiety,” “Yours miserably,” and so on, in a disorder that mirrors her emotional condition - piece together for the reader how this menagerie of miserable females came to be, and read like searing, furious eruptions from J.’s incredulity at having arrived at such a state.

The unfortunate Renata, object of the novel’s title and undeserving target of all of J.’s unhappiness, is herself abandoned, with Arnold having decamped to France to pursue a nubile Parisienne and dumped on the unwitting J. this daughter from an earlier marriage (Renata’s mother, yet another unfortunate, is apparently confined to a mental institution in California). Shunned by the adults she’s known in her short life, and now sentenced to live with the latest one into whose neglect she’s been committed, the pudgy Renata spends her days padding back and forth between her room, where she does nothing but watch TV, and the kitchen, where she endlessly bakes and devours cakes from instant mixes “as if,” writes J., “she is hoping that in some camel-like way her body will be able to store them up and enable her to survive the desert future she fears must lie ahead.” J.’s obsessive letters reveal an unbearable, almost obscene tension between the sense of obligation she feels for Renata, whom she cannot see as anything but pitiable – an “ugly, untalented adolescent, whom no one wants” - and her own repulsion at this child who isn’t even hers and who seems to sum up, in her slovenly clothing and increasing girth, J.’s failed marriage and dimming prospects: “something even worse than my past: she is not only my present, she is also my future. That is why I find her presence in my apartment so intolerable.” Any care of J.’s own daughter, Sally Ann, has been relegated to the miserable Monique, who spends her spare time writing her own desperate letters of woe to friends and family in France, complaining of her awful employer and pining for the day her contract will at last come to an end.

The confined world that Blackwood depicts is nearly hermetically sealed off from the outside. J.’s letters to no one underscore the life that primarily unfolds within her own head. When at last she dares a moment of actual communication with Renata in an effort to rid herself of this unwanted burden, the result is nothing at all like the one that J.’s comfortable assurance has predicted, revealing Renata’s unhappiness as largely a projection of J.’s own and Renata as a perceptive child well aware of where she stands in J.'s world. J.’s solipsism takes a blow; the world delivers, in a single moment, a glaring, unexpected dose of reality out of sync with the ruminative narrative of J.’s own bitter thoughts, though in her quietly manic effort to tamp the world back down into something controllable and confined, she nonetheless wages a recovery.

The Stepdaughter might be an incredibly bleak depiction of psychological isolation, recrimination, and the banality of emotional neglect and cruelty were this wretchedness of female entrapment, rage and abandonment not leavened by the devastatingly dark humor of Blackwood herself. She’s such a razor sharp writer that one can’t help but laugh while simultaneously cringing at her perfectly-tuned formulations. As in the other Blackwood novel I read this year, Great Granny Webster, Blackwood proves a master of characterization (that she was once married to the late Lucien Freud, perhaps the world’s finest contemporary portrait painter, is an irrelevant bit of biographical trivia that’s nonetheless titillating to contemplate; in any case, Blackwood is at least every bit Freud's equal in the portrayal of human frailties, and certainly deserves as much renown as he). In both of these novels, Blackwood creates exquisitely drawn, almost archetypal characters one is unlikely ever to forget. Even minor characters are depicted beautifully with a few careful brushstrokes, as in the description of a cop summoned to J.’s apartment:

The police officer was one of those big, clumsy, bull-like men who move around very slowly and have tired little I-have-seen-it-all eyes. He had a scarlet neck which looked as if it had absorbed more experience than his face, and it came bulging over the collar of his uniform with every inch of its weatherbeaten surface decorated by the most unpleasantly elaborate lithography of deep cracks and creases, which were all overlaid by a feathery tissue of spider-web lines.

This talent for description and scathing, ironic humor makes The Stepdaughter’s nastiness almost bearable. To make the novel more palatable, I was tempted to imagine it as one of those histrionic Charles Busch plays, one of which I’d fortuitously read just prior to picking up The Stepdaughter. But for all the strident anxieties on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Blackwood's novel, The Stepdaughter is resistant to camp; her acute understanding of the moral psychology of her characters would make such a reading fall flat. One can’t help but feel for J., both victim and victimizer. Nothing in her emotional life is simplified or prettified. It’s as though Blackwood has stripped her down to bare her most hidden feelings in all their awful complexity, and what’s there is as honest as it is ugly. There’s an odd sort of bravery in that. But that those feelings remain, for most of the novel, transmitted only via these letters to no one, never to be sent, emphasizes in a piercing manner the complex tragedies born by a failure to communicate. This is a novel in which the characters have tenuous relations to begin with, but in the absence of communication they revolve awkwardly around one another like planets in a nebulous solar system without a sun, drawn and repelled only by their own gravitational forces. J.'s drawn out decision to speak to Renata, after so much time spent living among her own thoughts, leads to a conclusion not unlike a more high-pitched, post-Kafka version of the revelation of wasted life that occurs in Guy de Maupassant’s famous story “The Necklace.” There’s not a whole lot of consolation in learning the truth, but getting to watch it delivered with such psychologically incisive insight, crystalline clarity and caustic wit makes The Stepdaughter a deliciously horrible and haunting book.

Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Impecunious Expat

It’s easy to see why New Directions made such a tangible physical object out of Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp by showcasing it in a starkly bound hardcover edition, textured and black like iron; the texts it contains are like sand pouring through one’s hands, and leave the reader grasping desperately for something solid to hold. And as though to taunt the reader’s floundering, the back of the book carries a disproportionately large embossed quotation from Bolaño himself: “The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Antwerp.” Even taking into account that an artist’s assessment of his or her own work should usually be taken with a grain of morphine, when it came to Antwerp, the embarrassment – at least in terms of the book’s challenges to a reader - was all mine.

One knows quickly that Antwerp isn’t going to follow narrative conventions. This short work of “just loose pages,” compiled - “written” just doesn’t seem the right word - in 1980, when Bolaño still thought of himself primarily as a poet, but not published until 2002, comprises 56 linked vignettes offering up repeated signifiers that accrue into a kind of “novel” (his word, not mine). Did I write “vignettes”? That’s not quite the right word either, as its root implies a view onto something, whereas Bolaño’s texts are about as opaque as the dirty windows that recur throughout the book. Antwerp reads like a writer’s notebook: notes, fragments that might one day find their way into a novel (and indeed have, since certain elements will be recognizable to anyone who’s read Bolaño’s later works, thus Spanish critic Ignacio Echevarria’s frequently quoted observation that Antwerp represents “the Big Bang” in Bolaño’s literary universe). Even this is a somewhat optimistic assessment. While many episodes feature straightforward, coherent passages, these are interrupted by phrases and sentences that crowd upon one another without linearity or clear connectivity, at times as though William Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique had been scored for jagged glass and razor wire (indeed there’s reference to Burroughs on the first page of Antwerp). These ostensibly unrelated snippets of text clump together in inchoate clusters. Pronouns appear without identifiable referent. Certain phrases arise inexplicably within quotation marks as though snatched from overheard conversations or lifted from a screenplay. Nearly every attempt to logically bridge one free-floating element to another results in a plunge into an abyss. We’re adrift on a sea of disconnected texts – or rather, texts that imply connection due to the recurrence of certain ingredients, but, for all that, don’t point us towards a clear resolution of their relation. In this Rorschach test of a book, attempts at interpretation become nearly as atomized as the texts that beg them. A few phrases seem to play deliberately with the reader’s efforts to penetrate the opacity of the whole: “The hunchback is your guiding light.” Is he really? Are we supposed to be attuned to some significance outside the book? Should we think of Quasimodo? Is it Roberto Bolaño hunched over his desk in his cheap room at night? Might it be Lichtenberg? Regardless, should we really follow him, and if we do, where might he lead us - into or out of the forest of signs?

And what should we make of the David O. Selznick epigraph that graces the first text in Bolaño’s game of 56-card pick-up? “Once photographed, life here is ended. It is almost symbolic of Hollywood. Tara has no rooms inside. It was just a façade.”  Is Bolaño warning us that the ensuing texts will be simply a façade too, that behind them (as I once heard someone charmingly misquote Gertrude Stein’s quip about Oakland), “there is nothing there, there”? Nearly all of these texts feature a cinematic attribute – a reference to a shot, a perspective, a screen or projection. But what to do with this flickering zoetrope of spliced images, this jump-cut fragmentation? Even after blinkering through these disparate, suggestive pieces and bringing to bear our own empirical and imaginative responsibilities as readers (one of Bolaño’s favorite Lichtenberg aphorisms seemed humiliatingly apt to me in my own reading: "A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, don't expect an apostle to peer out"), how are we to put them together and give them a comprehensible form in a work that seems to be about form itself, the usual rules abandoned in an experiment in what can be done beyond or without them?

One tenuous foothold is provided by Bolaño’s 2002 preface, “Total Anarchy” (a title so hyperbolic that I felt inclined to treat it the way an Amy Hempel character treated her moving van being swallowed by a landslide upon her arrival in California by noting, “an omen that big can just be ignored”). Here Bolaño characterizes Antwerp as a book written “for myself…and of that I’m not even sure” and later as written “for the ghosts,” lines dashed off nightly in a sort of fever (Jack Kerouac writing The Subterraneans over three days without sleep came to mind). The epigraph from Blaise Pascal at the beginning of the book offers another meager purchase, with its astonishment at the fact of being alive at a particular moment and place in the eternity of time, “to see myself here rather than there; there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then.” And indeed Antwerp reads as though the boundaries between one moment and another, one space and another, have vanished, leaving a “total anarchy” of place and time.

Except that it’s not exactly total anarchy. There are no grammatically nonsensical phrases, no patches of moss or pieces of garbage or cauliflowers, no sudden eruptions of Chinese calligraphy or mathematical equations or doodles in the middle of a page (well okay, so there is actually a doodle). There’s a logic to Bolaño’s network of signs and a perceptible integrity to the episodes and to the work as a whole. While these texts at first seem haphazardly tossed together in a frenzy of creation, an accretion begins to form from the repetition of certain conceits, images, phrases, personages. Waiters walking along a beach. A forest by a highway. Violence. A nameless red-haired girl. Cops. Colors. Faces without mouths and mouths unable to speak. The hunchback. Dirty windows. Sand.

Phrases referencing the futility of words and language also proliferate, and the various origins of this fragmentation of language in Antwerp are suggested by consistencies within overlapping spatial and temporal planes: dreams, films, observations in streets and parks and campgrounds and stations, reflections regarding the process of writing itself: “Phrases appeared, I mean, I never closed my eyes or made an effort to think, the phrases just appeared, literally, like glowing ads in the middle of the empty waiting room…like news on an electronic ticker”… “Hands in the process of geometric fragmentation: writing that’s stolen away just as love, friendship, and the recurring backyards of nightmares are stolen away”… “All I can come up with are stray sentences, he said, maybe because reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences”…”There are no rules.”

For all its splintered jaggedness, what holds Antwerp together (loosely) is this tension between “total anarchy” and what we can see is surely not “total anarchy.” Bolaño feeds us just enough to keep us in a maddening state of doubt about the text. Is there an actual story among these shreds and scraps? Poring through them one gets glimpses of a story or stories amid the book’s several murders, malevolent cops, films being made and watched (many of these elements, particularly the suggestion of literature involving a kind of detective work, will of course reappear in Bolaño’s later novels).  

Why “Antwerp”? One of the 56 episodes bears that title and recounts a horrific accident outside that city in which a truck carrying pigs crushes a car and leaves the pigs dead, injured, or running off down the highway like Bolaño’s own piggly little insubordinate sentences.  Bolaño might have used any of the other 55 titles for the ensemble. But in picking this one, #49, distinguished by virtue of its geographical particularity and imagery, Bolaño succeeds in having the reader’s attention coalesce around it. Something is buoyed above the sea of other signifiers. But what, exactly, and why? The only other time the city’s name appears is in the penultimate text, which recounts the disappearance of an expat girl from the campground and implies her murder, foreshadowed – if that’s the right word – by earlier texts, including one that features an account of six young campers shot to death, perhaps by paramilitaries or police (one recognizes these young people right away – they group together across the globe as they have for years in parks and on beaches and in foreign places seeking meaning and solidarity and connection). In this  text, we also see the parents of the disappeared girl driving towards some European city - “On the way to Lyon, Geneva, Bruges? On the way to Antwerp?” – perhaps on the way to the girl’s funeral, perhaps oblivious to her death in a foreign land, with their trajectory loaned an ominous foreboding by the aforementioned absurd accident “on the death-doomed European highways” – another of the “sad stories” to which Bolaño refers repeatedly throughout the book.

But in the interstices of these linked signifiers and sad stories amid swarming stray sentences and disrupted spatio-temporality, one can see another glue holding Antwerp together: the motifs that suggest (as helpfully contextualized in Bolaño’s preface) something of the writer’s own predicament at the time of his writing the book. A montage, an abstract but discernible portrait of that life emerges – or at least of a life one can imagine Bolaño having led (there are never equivalences in this book, only intimations) - a life marked by youth, fear, loneliness, sadness, poverty, immaturity, vulnerability, loss, working odd jobs to survive, smoking and writing in cheap rooms, being a stranger in a strange land, glimpses of and proximity to violence, huddling with other young adrift expats, watching pornographic movies in theaters and b-films on a sheet strung between trees in a communal campground, having little but writing and the aspiration to be a writer to give one the courage to carry on. Some of these elements in the preface and the texts communicate a youthful sentimentality, pathos and even mild self-romanticization, particularly the last page, where Bolaño breaks through his fourth wall and tells us of the life-line of certain phrases and sentences capable of “grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I’m at the end of my strength.” Perhaps Antwerp was the one novel that didn’t embarrass Bolaño because it so honestly represented this time of youthful vulnerability and aspiration, its unmediated texts given permission to drift upward or downward at their wont and marking for him the fearful courage - to which he alludes in his preface with a forgiving kindness towards this early, obliquely autobiographical effort – of daring his transformation into an artist.

For this reason, Antwerp may primarily be of interest from the standpoint of Bolaño’s literary origins (Echevvaria’s “Big Bang” comment may represent the most compelling reason for reading the book). The curious last line of Bolaño’s preface - “Then came 1981, and before I knew it, everything had changed” - may denote some event to which we are not privy, or, more unlikely, may allude to a year of significant change in post-Franco Spain (where Bolaño lived at the time), or, more likely, may reference Bolaño’s recognition of his emergence as a fully committed writer. Or, it might simply mark the arrival of another year, another incremental step away from youth. Regardless, it asserts a conscious delineation, a line drawn in the sand from across which Bolaño could move on to grander things, with fragments of these loose pages trailing behind him.

This post was written as part of the 2011 Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge hosted by Rise at In Lieu of a Field Guide.

Warwickshire Death Trip

A writer will sometimes swim into my ken like a...like a duck swimming through an open window. A few of Barbara Comyns’ books had been paddling about the periphery of my attention during some recent bookstore shopping, and I felt particularly attracted by one title, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. If you too happen to have picked up this book, you’ll know that the first line indeed features ducks swimming through open windows, by way of casually introducing both the flood that starts the story and the affected home around which it revolves.

The flood is hardly the only misfortune to befall the Willoweed family and the small Warwickshire community in which they live. Before Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead comes to an end, other grave and not so grave challenges have impacted the family and the town, leaving some dead, and some, well, changed. I’ve already given away enough by mentioning the flood, so you’ll have to read the book yourself if morbid curiosity gets the best of you about what other afflictions lie in store. But even were I to recount the entire, short plot, you’d probably still be unprepared for Comyns herself, with her particular blend of sensitive, playful characterization, dark humor, and blithe tone of warm and genteel dread. Plus, she’s able to write sentences that are as original and resistant to imitation as the phrasing in a Frank Sinatra song.

This is a quite memorable a cast of characters for such a short novel. Each teeters on caricature - until he or she isn’t. Grandmother Willoweed comes across as a slightly more vicious, animated and purposefully hard-of-hearing version of Caroline Blackwood’s marvelous creation, Great Granny Webster. The father in the family, Ebin Willoweed, is an amiably obtuse but kind-hearted fatherly type. The story’s most central character, the eldest Willoweed daughter Emma Willoweed, through whom much of the novel’s gothic actions are filtered, provides a marginally heroic presence, despite possessing a kind of naturalistic fatalism: “I shall be just me, and nothing will happen at all.” A great cast of more minor characters, from Old Ives the gardener to Doctor Hatt the town physician, fill out the queer community that Comyns creates in her village microcosm. Despite Comyn’s portrayal of her characters with a notable lack of flattery that almost borders on cynicism, it’s a kind of cynicism so mild and warm-hearted as to deserve some kinder appellation. For kicks, I’ll invent one, and call it “cyncretism” – a striking ability to reconcile radically opposing elements in a radiant and tenderly cynical manner. Actually, Comyns does such a stellar job of hiding this cynicism under her magnanimous vision that she manages to emulsify it into the overall recipe. You end up believing that Comyns’ hint of cynicism is a bit of a put-on; she stands out as a writer of unusual depth and generosity of feeling, capable of plumbing ordinary and extraordinary horrors while spreading much love and affection over the moral and emotional faults of her characters.

Comyns’ novel has elements that would be horrifying (or more horrifying, I should say) were they not overlaid with this kindly sort of pastoral acceptance. Imagine one of those lovely, childhood-centered stories of Katherine Mansfield such as “Prelude” or “At the Bay” in a mash-up with Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies and you’ll get some idea of Comyns’ tone (it’s a very short jump from Comyns’ Willoweed family to Gorey’s Willowdale handcar). Yes, there are ducks contentedly quacking their merry way around flooded drawing rooms, but there are also drowned kittens, pigs with their throats sliced open, a scene involving a murderous angry mob so terrible that it might have given Shirley Jackson the shivers, and various cruelties playing along the whole keyboard of impression, in both major and minor keys (according to the preface by Brian Evans, not everyone initially found this placid juxtaposition of bucolic family life and Boschian horror appealing; the book was banned in Ireland when it came out in 1954).

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is a small novel that feels much larger than it is. It’s a story of exactly what the title (borrowed from Longfellow) suggests it is, but also an account of how people respond to calamity, both natural and human (including, perhaps foremost, the calamity of one’s own family). One senses in its geographical localism a tug on connecting threads that extend far out around the globe. The smallest tragedies recapitulate the largest ones, as the town baker Horace Emblyn seems to realize after a batch of ergot-contaminated rye bread gets out into the community: “He noticed a trap with a crushed mouse spread upon it. There was a bead of blood upon its mouth and he turned away for a moment and then forced himself to look at it. Who was he to turn away from a murdered mouse, when he was responsible for so many deaths?” Reading Comyns’ novel, my mind drifted to other writers and books, from the quirky characters of Jane Bowles to the darkly funny humor of Evelyn Waugh and Beryl Bainbridge. Curiously, though, no work came to my mind more frequently than Albert Camus’ The Plague, despite these two books being about as different from one another in tone and style as two books could be. There’s a deceptive lightness to Comyns that overlies a serious moral core: how does one live a good life? How should one react in the face of disaster or cruelty? Camus laid out a set of memorable characters who represented various responses to these questions.  Comyns inverts Camus; no one could ever mistake her characters for representations, as they are first and foremost fully-fleshed, idiosyncratic and extraordinary ordinary people, and only afterwards the decisions they make.

From the little I know about Comyns, I apparently have ten more of her novels to go. On the strength of Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, I’m eagerly looking forward to reading every one.

An Incredible Glacial Dream-Scene

Anna Kavan’s Ice certainly counts among the most singular – and intense – works of literature I’ve read. I struggled with it at first, alternately repelled by this intensity and by its abrupt plunges into “dream” states, and drawn back again and again to its hard-edged, glittering prose and phantasmagorical, bracing atmosphere almost as a need (few books this slim have taken me so long to read, but few that have taken so long to read have so repeatedly called with such insistence from the nightstand). Good taste should probably forbid me from describing the novel’s intensity as like that of the acute burning sensation one feels when touching dry ice, but as I’ve just done that, I’ll stand by it. This is a tremendous work of concentrated imagination and ambiance, with a contemporaneity and freshness scarcely betrayed by the fact of Ice’s having been written more than 40 years ago. But the magnitude of its force comes not simply from its dazzling winter lyricism and mood, but also from the seriousness that underlies it, which conveys a rawness that – even had I not learned some outline details of Kavan’s psychological crises and heroin addiction – would have nonetheless suggested a writer in full control yet on a razor’s edge.

The preface to my 1970 Doubleday edition is by science fiction writer Brian Aldiss, who knew Kavan and was the first to suggest to her that her work was a kind of science fiction, an observation towards which she initially expressed some surprise but came to accept (this lack of self-conscious science fictionality only adds to the book’s power). The plot of Ice, such as there is one, could be characterized simply: a man attempts to rescue a fragile and persecuted woman also pursued by another man, a kind of despotic figure, with the pursuit and rivalry among these nameless characters across northern landscapes and seaports set against the rapidly encroaching catastrophe of a new worldwide ice age and its attendant panic, deprivations and violence. But this synopsis only provides the barest branches around which Ice is formed. Its complexity of mood and impression also figures gender and sexual power dynamics, a psychology of victimhood and oppression, a vision of an apocalypse that humans have brought upon themselves (in addition to its explicit suggestion of nuclear winter, Ice may well be the among the first novels beyond conventional science fiction to resonate with the threat of climate change as we understand it in its contemporary context), and an overwhelmingly dream-like, sustained representation of struggle against an array of oppressive forces within a surrounding aura of menace. Kavan’s novel unfolds through contrasts of gaiety and destruction, of violence and immobility, of imprisonment and freedom, of power and helplessness, all overshadowed by looming, pulsing waves of imminent catastrophe. Linearity of narrative is broken and buffeted repeatedly; the metaphor of invading ice extends to the narrative style itself, which splinters, fractures, crashes, subsides and glows with a cold blue hue. Yet the actual ice in Ice obeys no recognizable physical laws; at the same time hypnotically attractive and frighteningly threatening, it waits along the horizon at times, rushes in like a tsunami at others, and rears up as though exploded out of nowhere at others – as does the narrative. Temporal continuity is repeatedly interrupted, thwarted. Unreal elements burst through the narrative as though heaved there by deep geological forces, as though the walls of consciousness have suddenly collapsed and invited an overwhelming rush of frozen sea.

A reviewer on Amazon.com has asked, “How can one not discuss Anna Kavan first when discussing her work?” I assume that this question refers to the writer’s psychiatric struggles and above all to her heroin addiction, since, armed with knowledge of the latter, one can’t help but also see Ice as a work about addiction. But given its date of publication (1967) and its narrative mélange of the real and irreal, one scarcely need know of Kavan’s drug use to perceive the novel’s drug influences. Until reading Ice, I’d never really thought much about the distinction, in terms of psychological phenomena, between hallucinations and dreams, though Ice’s irrealistic passages partake far more of an opiated dream-state, albeit an irruptive one, than of disjointed hallucinations. The narrator’s accounts possess the kind of convincing internal logic that dreams can have, with points of view that would be impossible in the physical world and equally impossible shifts of perspective that at times seamlessly transfer from observer to observed. There’s also an odd sort of performative rehearsal marking some of the scenes in Ice, in which an event will be described with one outcome and then re-described with another, as though the dreamer were trying on different versions of her dream.

Ice possesses a dazzling poetic and thematic magnification and resonance. Aesthetically, it’s like a massive wall of ice itself, with an indistinct and illusory surface of prismatic sparkles and glints, but also startlingly profound translucent glimpses into unfathomable blue depths. This enrapturing, stupefying blast-frozen imagery interweaves with Ice’s lowering mood of portent and peril:

With a threatening scowl, he went out, banging the door behind him. A silence followed, while she stood like a lost child, tears wet on her cheeks. Next she started wandering aimlessly round the room, stopped by the window, pulled the curtain aside, then cried out in amazement.

Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all round. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the tress, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour.

Kavan’s employment of imagery of forbidding winter – almost undoubtedly a metaphor chosen with the icy lowest depth of Dante’s Inferno in mind - is as multifaceted as it is relentless, and overlays the narrative like a controlled abstraction. Several times I found myself thinking of the novel’s aesthetic ordering as similar to that of a late Jackson Pollock painting, an elaborate, concentrated gesture in which one easily discerns a certain order, pattern and palette (I also could not shake a recurring thought of Pollock’s mysterious mid-career painting “The Deep,” with its wintry colors and illusory play of surface and depth; for some future edition of Ice it might make a fitting cover image).

Jackson Pollock, "The Deep" - 1953
Centre Pompidou, Paris

Thematically Ice is equally multifaceted. Its apocalyptic imagery suggests the threat of nuclear winter and environmental neglect, crystallizing into a weighty mass the atomic age fear of self-destruction of the planet. In its tale of men questing after a woman who doesn’t want to be found, Ice plunges into the psychology of patriarchal presumptiveness and rescue fantasies. In the woman’s seeming helplessness and passivity, it explores as well the notions of victimization and psychological paralysis. In its continual evocation of inevasible ice and snow, it loosely suggests, on a meta-level, an onerous struggle against addiction, but one that the addict has elected to recount via fascination with its absorbing psychological effects, rather than parlaying personal distress into a confessional warning.

And Ice is also an existentially courageous, starkly unsentimental story of coming to terms with death, the courage and generosity of Kavan’s story all the more remarkable for its having dared to stretch beyond a narrative of personal distress to suggest resistance against great systemic forces at work, and to situate the young woman’s suffering in a global context in which these forces – patriarchal, political, neglectful and presumptive in anything but a benign way - impinge from multiple directions. Were this a simple experiment in presenting addiction, Kavan might easily have made Ice an accession of her own struggle. But whatever personal aspects may underlie this deliberate, unique and impressive novel make little difference in the context of its mesmerizing dream-like lyricism, its disconsolate and poignant moods and complex, expansive themes. To read too much of the personal into Ice would seem little more than a disestimation to a writer who produced a novel as meticulously written and as aesthetically and thematically sui generis as this one, and that expands so eloquently far beyond the personal to address humanity’s common fate. 

Frederic Prokosch's Journey

That Frederic Prokosch’s literary star has all but vanished in the nearly 80 years since his novel The Asiatics exploded onto the literary world like a bomb presents a mystery that is at first almost as unexpected as one’s first reading of one of his novels. Here is a writer whose work, hailed as something completely new in modern literature, met with effusive praise from Thomas Mann, Graham Greene, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Maugham, André Gide, Thornton Wilder, Malcolm Cowley, Albert Camus, Issac Bashevis Singer, and scores of other towering figures of 20^th century literature. A few years ago, I passed on to two French friends, both of them “grands lecteurs” who had been regularly dismissive of American writers, a copy of Prokosch’s The Seven Who Fled. It had an immediate, paradigm-changing impact on their conception of American literature, as it had on mine when I read it some twenty years ago.

These first two “Asian” novels of Prokosch – stunning feats of imagination about places he’d never, in fact, visited - plunge one into a deep lyricism of mood and impression amid profoundly evocative and atmospheric landscapes, filled with danger and adventure and existentially adrift characters, wandering and seeking without knowing what it is they seek. At the time these novels were published in the mid-1930’s, there was nothing like them in American literature, not least for their geographical abandonment of the confines and comforts of the United States and old world Europe in favor of the mysteries of far-flung places (while British writers like James Hilton and W. H. Hudson may have toyed with exotic locales, their works capture nothing remotely like the degree of alienation in Prokosch’s characters, who are dwarfed in every way by the landscapes through which they move). Even today, the impression these novels initially provide a reader is of a thrilling, perilous and darkly fatalistic freedom extending to limitless, lost horizons.

None of the other books I’ve subsequently read by Prokosch has had quite the same sustained effect on me as The Seven Who Fled (though it’s possible that had I read The Asiatics first I might have written this sentence with the two titles interchanged, and I’m just now starting one of his stylistically different late masterworks), but he remains a writer I turn to with anticipation and admiration – even when his novels’ flaws provoke storms of exasperation. I recently discovered in a secondhand bookstore another of these lesser works, Nine Days to Mukalla, about a group of travelers attempting to traverse the forbidding Hanhramaut area of southern Arabia after a plane crash. Starting to read it I experienced again that initial Prokoschian thrill of feeling the foundations of the familiar world dropping out from beneath me as I entered Prokosch’s. His ability to plunge one instantaneously into an intimate, exotic geographical expansiveness is simply remarkable, like a sudden step off the edge into some spatial portal. The novel’s title derives from an empty reassurance, repeated day after day to the hapless travelers, that they’ll reach Mukalla in “nine days.” Alas, I too began to feel that, trapped in this eternal recurrence, I might never get there either, and by the end of the book had come to think of it as Two Hundred and Forty Nine Pages to Mukalla. That the novel so quickly turned sour did little, however, to mitigate the disorienting excitement of its opening. Rarely does a dividing line between reality and fiction seem so sharp as in the first pages of a Prokosch novel; he’s a modern writer who evinces little interest in blurring that line – odd, perhaps, for one whose personal life involved so much wanton misrepresentation of the truth. But as the seductive glow of the first riveting pages of Nine Days to Mukalla faded into the frustrating meanderings that would mark the rest of the book, my curiosity about Prokosch himself grew. So the next day I headed to the library to see what I might find in terms of critical works about him.

I was astonished to find little more than a book in German (this is a world-class library, after all), but was even more surprised to spot a recent Prokosch biography on the shelf. Robert M. Greenfield’s Dreamer’s Journey: The Life and Writings of Frederick Prokosch, had come out only about a year ago – and apparently rather quietly, too, since I’ve been unable to locate a single detailed review of it.  My arrival in Mukalla would be even further delayed, as I left the novel dormant while instead devouring Greenfield’s utterly compelling, deeply researched, tightly written and sensitive book. Greenfield’s uncovering of the enigma of Prokosch’s decline into obscurity is fascinating, and his examination of the writer’s unusual, complex trajectory provides an uncommon and invaluable angle from which to view 20^th century literature and literary figures, both American and, to some extent, international.

From the start, Greenfield makes clear that Prokosch – even putting his literary works aside – was a complicated, captivating and difficult figure. Readers will hopefully excuse the absurdity of my attempting to distill Greenfield’s formidably researched 400+ pages into a summary paragraph, but I’ll try to touch on some highlights without, I hope, being too wretchedly reductionist. Born in Wisconsin in 1906 to German/Bohemian emigrant parents, Prokosch and his siblings grew up under a doting mother and an almost tyrannically perfectionist father, an academic who moved through a series of university appointments around the U.S. as a leading figure in German language studies. Frederic (familiarly, “Fritz”) was taunted as an adolescent for his small stature, feminine mannerisms, and intellectual “Prokoschiousness,” but at university, the surprising imago that emerged from this rather unpromising pupa was a tall, handsome athlete - who went on to win numerous tennis and squash championships in the U.S. and Europe – as well as something of a sexually profligate homosexual, a factor that led to an enduring estrangement from his coldly disapproving father. Aspiring to become a poet, (and along the way obtaining a Ph.D. in literature), Prokosch in his initial literary forays met with repeated rejection, until, lying about in a hammock one summer, he wrote The Asiatics – a startlingly atmospheric tale of a young man’s capricious and directionless adventures as he drifts across Asia from Lebanon to Indochina (parts of the world that Prokosch had never, at the time he wrote the book, visited). Upon its publication in 1935 The Asiatics became an astonishing overnight success, garnering great critical acclaim. A book of poems, The Assassins, shortly followed and earned similar accolades for Prokosch’s poetry. Thrust into sudden literary stardom, Prokosch began frequent travels around Europe. After a second less popularly successful but still widely hailed novel, The Seven Who Fled, Prokosch entered a lengthy period of literary decline, with most reviewers dismissing his several subsequent novels, despite their flashes of lyrical brilliance, as little more than tiresome variations on The Asiatics containing poorly drawn characters subservient to thinly linked series of moods and impressions too detached from story – and from reality – to be readable. Following public indifference, disdain and even ridicule from some establishment poets, including W. H. Auden (Greenfield produces a bitingly satirical poem by Louise Bogan poking fun at Prokosch’s verses), Prokosch abandoned poetry altogether and spent much of the 1930’s traveling about Europe, though still churning out one flawed, unsuccessful novel after another. The rise of Nazi Germany and the world’s entry into the Second World War cast Prokosch in an unfavorable light. Having originally taken as his literary models such diverse authors as May Sinclair, Isak Dinesen and Auden, Prokosch adopted as one of his chief idols during this period the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine, sharing with Celine an admiration for fascism and, at least in the early years of the Third Reich, for Hitler’s transformation of Germany. While he later recanted these sentiments and spent much of the war working in the U.S. Army’s Office of Communications, serving for a time in the diplomatic corps in Stockholm (and boasting to have been involved in intelligence work and espionage), he seems to have initially viewed events leading up to America’s entry into the war as little more than intrusions into the sybaritic private life he led beachside in a Portuguese resort town. After the war, Prokosch’s literary efforts took a backseat to an intense social and promiscuous sexual life. He shuttled back and forth between Europe and the U.S., with erratic appearances among a crowd that included Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood, and other literary figures (Greenfield offers an amusing anecdote of an inquiry by Richard Wilbur as to Prokosch’s whereabouts, to which Stephen Spender replied, “He is doubtless in Europe somewhere, in a large car, out of touch with reality.”). For the most part abandoning the United States, towards which Prokosch felt increasingly deep disdain given his literary reception there, he settled in southern France and maintained a relationship with Jack Brady, a finance executive who – despite business concerns that kept him abroad for all but a few weeks of each year – would remain Prokosch’s closest companion for the rest of his life. In France, Prokosch experienced something of a resurrection of his literary talent (if not his career), putting out a few historical (and historically inventive) novels now critically viewed as among his best, including A Tale for Midnight, a fictional account of the Cenci family tragedy, and another, The Missolonghi Manuscript, detailing Byron’s final months. Prokosch then lapsed again into a frustrating and fruitless period during which he continued to write but failed to gain publisher interest in his work, which had taken a turn towards surrealist science fiction. In the 1970’s, Prokosch was implicated in an embarrassing and personally shattering forgery scandal, caught selling purported first editions of what have come to be known as his “butterfly books” – limited edition decorated pamphlets of his own and others’ poems, often with forged inscriptions and printed himself decades after the dates he ascribed to them.  A late burst of affirmative recognition would come upon publication of his critically and popularly received literary “memoir,” Voices (which turned out to be almost entirely fictitious) and with further respect from the European community, which bestowed upon him a number of high honors for lifetime literary achievement. Prokosch died at his home in Grasse, France in 1989 at age 83.

Central to Greenfield’s biography is his focus on the many ways in which Prokosch often served as his own worst enemy, maintaining throughout his life a narcissistic self-absorption that kept him at a remove from others as well as from the events of his time. He details Prokosch’s lifelong inclination towards self-promotion, exaggeration, manipulation and prevarication, which enraged many who crossed his path, including publishers, whom Prokosch played against one another to extract concessions and advances, and other writers, towards some of whom Prokosch ran, like a Scottish shower, unpredictably hot and cold. Greenfield does an impressive job of examining both the roots of this constant shadowy dance with the truth as well as its more innocent side, allowing us to see it as Prokosch himself may have seen it, a means of creating a kind of idyllic presentation of himself. This “packaging” is a motif that ran throughout his life, from the personalized slipcases he designed for his library of first editions, to the exquisitely prepared editions of poems that would later cause him such trouble, to his aggressive and often highly imaginative machinations in strategizing his career with publishers and others. Greenfield also handles Prokosch’s homosexuality with great sensitivity, offering revealing and sometimes surprising (and damning) glimpses of the subtle and not-so-subtle anti-gay bigotry displayed by several well-known writers and critics. In this, Dreamer’s Journey obliquely provides a fascinating and significant look at sexual attitudes in the mid-century American and European literary world. Greenfield only skirts the margins of this life Prokosch led “in the shadows,” although going any deeper would obviously have been a daunting task for any biographer, particularly one whose subject, in his seventh decade, said of himself:

I have spent my life alone, utterly alone, and no biography of me could ever more than scratch the surface. All the facts in Who’s Who, or whatever, are so utterly meaningless. My real life (if I ever dared to write it!) has transpired in darkness, secrecy, fleeting contacts and incommunicable delights, any number of strange picaresque escapades and even crimes, and I don’t think that any of my “friends” have even the faintest notion of what I’m really like of have any idea of what my life has really consisted of…With all the surface “respectability,” diplomatic and scholarly and illustrious social contacts, my real life has been subversive, anarchic, vicious, lonely, and capricious.

Greenfield uncovers and investigates in Dreamer’s Journey a remarkable wealth of sources, pulling out gems of biographical and historical detail. These include Prokosch’s lifelong interest in lepidotery; his remarkable ability to copy, convincingly, almost anyone’s handwriting, even while writing upside down and backwards; a welcome affirmation of something that in retrospect seems obvious in reading his early novels, that he’d spent much of his youth poring obsessively over maps; and his having finally made a voyage across Asia covering, in reverse, many of the places he described in The Asiatics (one of my sole disappointments in Greenfield’s biography is the brevity with which he treats this journey; should anyone be looking for a potentially stimulating subject for research, here’s one that’s ready-made). In addition, there’s a brief mention of a lengthy overland voyage in the late 1930’s from Vienna to Constantinople, which had me wondering whether Prokosch, while in Europe, might have somehow learned of the remarkable journey taken along this route slightly earlier by a young man named Patrick Leigh Fermor. Of particular interest are the synopses of the half dozen or so books that Prokosch could not get published, the manuscripts of which Greenfield unearthed in the archives at the University of Texas. His late unpublished novels flirt with magical realism, science fiction, and a sordid kind of horror (the wildly over-the-top plots of a couple of them, The Inn of the Wolf and The Mermaid, sound from Greenfield’s descriptions like something one might have concocted from an amalgam of And Then There Were None, The Exterminating Angel, and Salò).

Most fascinating to me about Greenfield’s book is its sidelong glance at Prokosch’s attempts to escape the existing parameters of American fiction and create an “international” literature, and at the differences between European and American literary cultures as viewed through their differing receptions to Prokosch’s work. Prokosch emerges as an especially intriguing figure, given his strong European roots, his returns to Europe throughout his life and his final choice to settle there, as well as the “internationalist” quality of his writing, which found him, as though craving escape from his immediate surroundings, repeatedly projecting his plots and characters into remote, forgotten corners of the globe. Prokosch’s own view of American literature as insular and shallow (a view that can still find a resonant echo, as in Nobel Prize committee secretary Horace Engdahl’s 2008 complaint that American writers fail to participate “in the big dialogue of literature”) led him farther and farther afield from American concerns (though he did briefly attempt to return to them in his late novel, America, My Wilderness). No doubt Prokosch’s nearly constant string of disappointments from American publishers, critics, and the reading public pushed him into an increasingly pronounced anti-Americanism, but this was an attitude formed early and only enhanced by these failures. Still, Prokosch’s best works are undeniably unique creations, and a more generous view of their “internationalism” might underscore a kind of valor in his effort to transcend literary smallness and provincialism (that he was admired by a writer with such strong social convictions as Sinclair Lewis is perhaps less surprising than it might at first appear). His best known work, The Asiatics, and the variations on it that followed, might well wither under the harsh light of some contemporary critical approaches (particularly, I’d imagine, from post-colonialists and others employing Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, who would likely make quick hash out of something like Nine Days to Mukalla, with its potpourri of hookahs, snake charmers, bejeweled prostitutes, mad camels, fiercely barbed and turbaned nomads, and other stereotypical Arabian rangelanda). But Prokosch’s more successful work certainly deserves more recent critical attention than it has received. He remains a singular, intriguing, and underappreciated American writer.

In the end one comes to see Prokosch as an immensely complicated and rather tragically lonesome figure, whose works spanned a range of quality from the nearly unreadable to a few unparalleled masterpieces, and who was at one time far from the marginal literary figure he is today.  While restraining himself from advocacy, Greenfield, in Dreamer’s Journey, makes a convincing argument that Prokosch remains one of the most enigmatic and unusual of 20^th century American authors, who left us at least a handful of brilliant books that deserve revisiting and perhaps some rehabilitation of a literary reputation that, until now, with the welcome corrective arrival of Greenfield’s superb biography, has been built on a glaringly incomplete picture.