Down and Out and Proud in Cairo

“The Café of Mirrors seemed to be a place created by man’s wisdom and set within the confines of a world doomed to sadness.” [photograph of Cairo’s Al Fishwary Café, a.k.a. the Café of Mirrors, by Hamad AlSarraf, used with his kind permission. More of Hamad AlSarraf’s photographs may be viewed at: http://www.hamadalsarraf.com/]

Egyptian-French writer Albert Cossery’s 1955 novel Mendiants et Orgueilleux commences with a scene unforgettable in its combination of squalor, grotesquerie, and gallows humor. One of Cossery’s principal characters, Gohar, is awakened in his derelict Cairo apartment by water swirling about the newspapers on which he makes his bed. When he at last identifies its source, it’s as though the water itself has metastasized into a symbol of the impoverished, sordid existence he leads and of the proximity of death. Not that he cares much, for the chief thing on his mind once he’s out in the deluge of activity in the streets is to find, as quickly as possible, his hashish dealer.

That the novel begins with a literal awakening is both an elegant literary device and perhaps a kind of joke, as wakefulness, for Cossery’s characters, is but a state where dreams and reality overlap. With a slightly somnambulant quality, his figures move through the world according to their needs, at times scarcely cognizant of a difference in value between life and death, alive to what’s around them yet each possessing a dream for a better future he perhaps knows that he’ll never attain. Yet within this conflicted space between dream and resignation, a fierce sense of pride and a constitutional determination to live free from the constraints of codes, laws, and material trappings exerts itself. Cossery’s “proud beggars” (the title chosen for a recently republished English translation) include Gohar, former professor and now ragged street poet; his supplier of daily hashish, the supplicating, scheming Yeghen; and their acquaintance El Kordi, a government functionary and sort of dandy whose vaguely revolutionary aspirations take a back seat to his love for a prostitute at the brothel to which all three are linked. It is here where the motiveless murder of another young prostitute has set in motion an inquiry, led by Cossery’s fourth main character, the depressive homosexual detective Nour El Dine.

While there’s a murder investigation in Mendiants et Orgueilleux, Cossery displays little interest in toying with the detective genre, or in any kind of literary gaming, for that matter. Sure, there’s a murder, but it’s practically incidental to the story, particularly since neither the killer - whose identity we know already from witnessing the murder - nor his companions seem to see anything terribly regrettable about the crime, with the inefficacy and moral vacuity of the police exposed as an even worse sort of indifference. Both crime and investigation seem an almost negligible, perfunctory set of events in this atmosphere of indifference and insolence, a minor and disposable tragedy in a world of more monstrous crimes that now possesses even the power to destroy itself - that one inhabits the lower depths of Cairo’s back alleys doesn’t prevent one from recognizing the criminality of the atomic bomb. And Mendiants et Orgueilleux is most certainly a novel of the lower depths, its pages populated with the poor and afflicted, from listless prostitutes to street children scrounging discarded cigarette butts, from a one-eyed policeman to a legless, armless beggar whose wife is jealous of other women given the earnings such a wretched state can bring in from the man’s solicitations.

As immediately evident in the arresting opening pages, Cossery’s sense of how to set up a scene is pitch perfect. Introducing his principal characters one by one in more or less separate scenes that unfold like set pieces, Cossery then brings them together in a culminating rendezvous in which the values of the street collide and co-mingle with those of authority in a black comedy quite literally of manners, since the extreme politesse of the meeting only amplifies its absurdity. Nour El Dine – sharing tea with his prime suspects in Cairo’s famous Café of Mirrors – finds his view of the world as something to be ordered coming up against beings who simply refuse to participate “in the destiny of the civilized world,” in any order whatsoever other than the exigencies of their needs and their dignity. The policeman is dumbfounded, for instance, at their suggestion that he dispatch his task by simply arresting one of them who has willingly admitted to the crime but who is clearly not the guilty party (the question of guilt or innocence seeming of little relevance). They take a polite but distinct pleasure in mocking the officer’s incomprehension and adherence to proper procedure:

“Does a motiveless crime fall under the purview of the law? Isn’t it essentially the same as an earthquake, for example?

“An earthquake doesn’t reason,” said Nour El Dine. “It’s a misfortune.”

“But man has become a misfortune to himself,” replied Gohar. “Man has become worse than an earthquake. In any case, he does more damage. Don’t you believe, Mr. Officer, that man has, for quite some time now, surpassed in horror the cataclysms of nature?”

“I can’t arrest an earthquake,” said Nour El Dine with comical assuredness.

“And the bomb!” said Yeghen. “Can’t you arrest the bomb, Excellency?”

“Again with this ridiculousness!” said Nour El Dine resignedly. “No, Mr. Yeghen, I cannot arrest the bomb.”

“Then you’re paid to do nothing,” said Yeghen, “Since, to me, arresting the murderer of a prostitute seems nothing compared to being able to stop the bomb.”

Despite these memorable characters, the real star of Mendiants et Orgueilleux is Cairo itself, which Cossery indulges with rich, unflinching description.  There’s a gravitational pull in nearly all of Cossery's scenes towards the street, as though the crowded alleys and trams and sidewalks were dense, inescapable black holes into which the characters were involuntarily drawn again and again. These repeated sorties among the crowds seem to serve as entr’actes between Cossery’s set pieces, plunging the reader into the coarse, animated world of Cairo through palpable sensational touches: the odor of rancid onions on a woman in a tramway; the dry, mealy texture of pastries in a cheap patisserie; the cracked facades of storefronts; shadows in the maze of alleys. One is acutely conscious of the city pressing in and down on the populace, though not in quite the way one might imagine: despite abundant misery and the daily struggle to survive, Cairo’s streets hum and buzz with life and even a kind of joy squeezed from this jostling crush of humanity.  

Amid this raw human cacophony, Cossery’s proud beggars find a degree of comfort shocking to bourgeois, materialist standards. They take their impertinent position in the lower depths as a point of pride and as insubordination to authority, which itself is portrayed as arbitrary and brutal, morally and spiritually vacant, devoid of the rich philosophy of the street. Rather than coming across as in any way polemical, this anti-authoritarian contempt reveals itself through the poetic wit (and street wits) of Cossery’s characters, whose indifference to power serves to undermine it. The strength of this subversion comes in part from Cossery’s refusal to reduce his characters to simple tropes: for all that Nour El Dine represents as an institutional foil to the others’ carefree defiance, he’s nonetheless a complex, even sympathetic character whose human faults plague him in much the same way that they seem to liberate others.

The novel’s final pages include a scene in which a simple gesture of humanity mixes compassion with abjection to produce the kind of pointed moral clarity one sees in Flaubert’s “The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitaller” when Julian crawls into bed with a horrifically afflicted dying leper. In the simple, matter-of-fact acceptance with which an unrepentant murderer administers aid to one of humanity’s most unfortunate members while one whose very job it is, ostensibly, to provide service and protection, looks on in horror and revulsion, Cossery delivers a caustic attack on the guardians of moral order - scoundrels all - who serve little more than “injustice and shadows” and a system designed to mask simple truths about power. But as Cossery suggests in this exceptionally rich, inimitable, ebullient, seamy, blackly funny and proudly democratic novel, even scoundrels wielding power are intractably stuck in the essential humanness with which we are all blessed and condemned.

Deglazing 2011: Favorites

Lisbon

“A few books I’ve just read sail by like schooners on the way to the Bermuda Triangle, where they will disappear without a trace.”

From “Start of a Late Autumn Novel,” by Tomas Tranströmer (Robert Bly, Translator)

I’m either incredibly fortunate with my reading choices or far less discriminating than Tomas Tranströmer (both, certainly), as I can happily say that few books I read in 2011 are likely to disappear into any Bermuda Triangle. Even if they did, one of my favorite stories from 2010, Frigyes Karinthy’s “Two Ships,” resoundingly affirms the value of venturing off the edge of the earth. Having started the year with more than 20 reading “projects” in mind, I see now that I accomplished exactly two of them. In place of the others, I read books stumbled upon in the library, mentioned in articles and reviews, a few from my to-be-read pile, a few from my already-read-pile, and many suggested by friends, strangers, and other bloggers. Never have I read so - wantonly.

But what a rewarding and wide-ranging year. Of the 80 or so books I finished, over half were in translation and another handful were in French (for me still a kind of translation), so I seem to be in line with The Observer ’s recent labeling of 2011 as “The Year of the Translator.”

2011 was also my first year of keeping a book blog. The transition from private log to public blog has not been smooth, and I’m only beginning to learn about how blogging works. But a great, unanticipated benefit of the shift has been expanded exposure to so many talented book bloggers, whose writing has been penetrating, inspiring, exalting, and humbling. For 2012, I can only hope to fail better at aspiring to write - and to read - so well.

2011 Highlights

One of the two projects I set out to accomplish and actually accomplished was to read the works of Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi thus far translated into English. Tabucchi won me over several years ago when I read his Rêves de Rêves in French translation, and then again last year when I read Requiem: Une Hallucination, also in French. He’s among my favorite living writers, not simply in his virtuosity and versatility (he has an uncanny ability to make each of his works seem entirely different from the others), but also in his activist role, having been at the forefront of defending a number of politically persecuted writers (most notably journalist Roberto Saviano) and having dared to expose, at great personal cost, corruption in Silvio Berlusconi’s government. The Tabucchi works I read this year include the novels Pereira Declares[1], The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, Indian Nocturne, The Edge of the Horizon[2], and the short story collections Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, It’s Getting Later All the Time, Letter from Casablanca, The Woman of Porto Pim, and The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico. Of these, I’d probably pick Pereira Declares and Indian Nocturne as my favorites, but all, without exception, count among my favorite books of 2011.

The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa (Richard Zenith, translator). The second of the projects I managed to accomplish. Tabucchi and Pessoa came as something of a package deal, since the work of the former owes a tremendous debt to the latter, whom Tabucchi has translated, taught, and written about critically, and whose presence infuses most of Tabucchi’s own work. Discussion of The Book of Disquiet is set for the end of March as part of the Wuthering Expectations Portuguese Literature Challenge.

A Time for Everything, by Karl Knausgaard (James Anderson, translator). The most impressive contemporary novel I read in 2011.

Season of Migration to the North, by Tayib Saleh (Denys Johnson-Davies, translator). A stunning and scathing novella so attuned to both large political forces and the impact of small individual decisions that after putting it down I sensed a dividing line between all that I had read before and everything I would read subsequent. I can think of few novels that have so abruptly made me feel how little I know and how critical it is to question one’s assumptions.

The Man in Flames, by Serge Filippini (Liz Nash, translator). A historical novel about heretical 16^th century philosopher Giordano Bruno, who comes across in French author Filippini’s deeply affecting work as one of the great figures of our time. I say our time, because more than 400 years after Bruno’s death we’re only beginning to catch up to him. Structured across Bruno’s last seven days in prison prior to his being burned at the stake, The Man in Flames takes a free hand in introducing fictional elements into Bruno’s story, but always in service of producing a powerful vision of his time and his fight against anti-intellectualism, superstition, fundamentalism, brutality and intolerance.

The Story of Zahra, by Hanan Al-Shaykh (Peter Ford, translator). If literature has an ameliorative function – if it can actually change people’s perceptions and deepen understanding – I might well choose The Story of Zahra as one of the works I’d most want to see read across the world. In its unconventional, unsentimental and revelatory depiction of a young woman growing up in war-torn Beirut, it overturned whatever stereotypical notions I may have had about women in the Middle East. Thanks to M. Lynx Qualey at Arabic Literature (In English) for leading me to this brave, intense roar of a novel.

Beautiful Days, by Franz Innerhofer (Anselm Hollo, translator).

Mendiants et Orgueilleux, by Albert Cossery. Egyptian-born Cossery’s radical coterie of “proud beggars” (the title used in the recent reissue of an English translation) in the alleys of Cairo is subversive, gritty, defiant, shocking, pungent, playful, and morbidly funny. This certainly won’t be the last novel I’ll read by this strikingly singular writer.

Stealth, by Sonallah Ibrahim (Hosam Aboul-Ela, translator). Ibrahim’s Amrikanli: Un Autumne à San Francisco is the novel I’d most like to see translated into English. I also read this year his first work translated into English, a short collection of stories entitled The Smell of It, the title story of which clearly lays the foundations for Stealth.

Rosa Candida, by Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir (Catherine Eyjólfsson, translator). Though I read it in French, an English translation has appeared under the title The Greenhouse. To write successfully about happiness requires some daring; to write successfully about transcendence and beatitude in a contemporary story about accidental parents requires utter fearlessness.

The Maias, by José Maria Eça De Queiros  (Margaret Jull Costa, translator). Though it made last year’s “Best of 2010” summary, it’s so good that I’m putting it on this “Best of 2011” list as well. Thanks to Tom at Wuthering Expectations for prompting me to read this marvelous novel for the second time in as many years.

Point de Lendemain, by Vivant Denon (also read in the English translation by Lydia Davis, No Tomorrow). A delectable, capricious caracole of a story that creates an elaborate, almost occult metaphor for initiation into the mysteries of erotic love in its depiction of the amorous and adulterous escapades of 18^th century libertines along the banks of the Seine.

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, by Javier Marias (Margaret Jull Costa, translator). I read Marias’ Your Face Tomorrow trilogy last year, and while Tomorrow in the Battle doesn’t possess the vast scope and ambition of that work, the conceit Marias presents on the novel’s first page – a man’s coming to grips with the sudden death of a woman during their one-night encounter – develops in such unexpected ways and takes off in such unexpected directions that I’d be remiss leaving it off this list.  

Notable other new discoveries include the unfairly neglected work of multi-talented Czech writer Jan Křesadlo in Gravelarks; fiercely imaginative contemporary Chinese writer Can Xue; the wildly entertaining 17^th century Chinese ghost stories of Pu Songling; Caroline Blackwood’s short, deadpan creations of unforgettable characters in The Stepdaughter and Great Granny Webster; Robert Greenfield’s superb biography of Frederic Prokosch; the gothic, Gorey-esque wit of Barbara Comyns in Who was Changed and Who Was Dead; further travels with the late Patrick Leigh Fermor in Mani: Travels in the Southern Pelaponnese and in his sole work of fiction, The Violins of Saint Jacques; Stoner, by John Williams, an American writer surely deserving of as much attention as his better known peers; Greek writer Margarita Karapanou, whose Kassandra and the Wolf should be a lesson to writers of confessional fictions of childhood as to how to go about it; Anna Kavan’s intense, genre-bending apocalyptic vision in Ice; the strikingly formalist historical fictions of Marta Morazzoni in Girl in a Turban (a book with so many open windows and doors that one could probably get home by using them the same way John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” used swimming pools); Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda’s unforgettably atmospheric story of poverty and redemption in Sardinia in Reeds in the Wind.

Works reread this year, in addition to The Maias, only deepened my appreciation for them: Joan Didion’s great Sacramento River Delta novel Run River and Terry Andrews’ The Story of Harold (I recently received as a gift Harold et le Rat, a French translation I did not know existed, and which will no doubt substantially amplify my knowledge of filthy French slang). I was also thrilled to re-discover, after hunting for many years for them without success, a trilogy of novels I’d read as a child but of which I had no recollection other than of a cover image. A chance mention of a book illustrator led to a cascading series of memories, and within days I had reread British science fiction writer John Christopher’s “Tripods” trilogy. I was delighted to find that although my tastes have changed, Christopher’s books were as entertaining as I’d remembered, the kind of expert fiction for young people that doesn’t condescend or eschew difficult situations and mature conflicts.

Finally, every year I leave some works unfinished, not always (or even often) because I don’t find them worthwhile. Though I did not finish Thursday’s Child, the autobiography of singer Eartha Kitt, Kitt’s stunning opening chapters, portraying her childhood in rural southern poverty and the sacrifices of her mother, recounted with searing, unsentimental clarity and force, are as powerful as anything I’ve read in American writing, and among the highlights of a terrific year of literary discovery.

---

[1] Also available in English under the titles Declares Pereira and Pereira Maintains, all three translated by Patrick Creagh.

[2] The Edge of the Horizon also appears in a British edition as Vanishing Point; both feature the same Tim Parks translation, though the latter also contains the short collections The Woman of Porto Pim and The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico.

2011 Round-Up: Poetry

I’m not an adept reader of poetry and am too often content to take refuge in those poems I know well already, but this past year (reader alert: here’s the first of what may be turn into a few late end-of-year posts), I read more collections of poetry than usual:

Hapax, by MacArthur “genius” award winner and classics translator A. E. Stallings - certainly among my favorite contemporary poetry discoveries of recent years. At a dinner the day after I’d finished the book, I annoyingly interrupted several times to exclaim, “Hey, I just read a great poem about exactly that [thing, whatever we all happened to be discussing at the moment].” Stallings’ penetrating observations, tremendous energy and wit rapturously rattle the cages of the neo-classical formalism of her poems, which traverse subjects as varied as arrowheads, sonograms, first love, mint, marriage, eccentric museums, insomnia, thyme, bats. Really? A fantastic poem about bats? I loved this book.

The Half-Finished Heaven and Other Poems by 2011 Nobel Prize winner, Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer (translated by Robert Bly). Tranströmer’s crystalline, philosophical and often highly moving poems that intimately touch on moments of critical decision and reflection made this poet another favorite new discovery.

The revelatory, free-form, often monumental poems of Syrian poet Adonis (a runner-up for the Nobel Prize) in his first major collection to appear in English, Adonis: Selected Poems (translated by Khaled Mattawa), which opened up a new and vast world to me. I’ve yet to finish this rich volume, which demands slow and patient reading, but am drawn to Adonis as I was to one of my old favorites, St. John Perse, whose poems Adonis, not coincidentally, was the first to translate into Arabic (thanks to M. Lynx Qualey at Arablit for posting on Adonis).

The overblown, internationalist mythos of Frederic Prokosch’s first book of poetry, Assassins – again, echoes of St. John Perse, but difficult to read with a straight face after exposure to Louise Bogan’s delicious parody in “Imitation of a Poem by Frederic Prokosch.”[1]

American nouveau-Beat poet (could I, should I call him that?) John Beer’s audaciously-titled and audaciously-constructed collection, The Waste Land.

The lean, graceful, homo-erotically charged “songs” of early 20^th century Portuguese poet António Botto in The Songs of António Botto, translated into English by his better known friend, Fernando Pessoa (thanks to Tom at Wuthering Expectations for alerting me to Botto’s poems).

She Says, by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, a ravishingly beautiful collection of densely surreal and opaque poems filtering Khoury-Ghata’s Lebanese background through expatriate life in France, and her Arabic through her French (and through translator Marilyn Hacker’s glittering English). I marveled at Khoury-Ghata’s daring, striking combinations of images, as well as at her ability to employ a dazzling surface opacity while exploring the disruptions of living suspended between two cultures and languages – and the complications of accessing, in exile, privileges that would have been denied to her as a woman in her native country.

Winning in the “Most Unusual” category: Gwyneth Lewis’ Keeping Mum (brought to my attention by Philip Gross’ brief mention in The Guardian in an article on “writing at the edge of silence”). Lewis also explores the perils of living between two languages. The title is an obvious play on words between the metaphorical meaning of remaining silent and the British shorthand for “mother,” clever for a work explicitly about Lewis’ relationship with her endangered mother tongue, Welsh. Lewis writes one book in Welsh which she then uses as a springboard for another in English, allowing such full play in the act of translating her own words that the English product differs almost completely from its Welsh progenitor (leaving only readers of Welsh privy to the differences). The pattern converges thematically in Keeping Mum, in which Lewis uses her English to interrogate her Welsh, quite literally (literarily) in that the collection becomes a sort of detective story about the murder of the Welsh language, starring a detective/translator, a kind of forensic psychiatrist, and a coterie of angels. Both playful and sober, and written in a variety of mostly formalist styles, Lewis’ poems pull together elements of criminal interrogation and psychiatry, disorders of language, the proximal bleeding across membranes of the languages one knows, the responsibility of the writer towards conserving and deepening language, and the complications of sourcing poetic inspiration by appealing to a kind of estrangement and disarrangement of the personality. I admired the overarching, novelistic conceit of Keeping Mum, since so many poetry collections lack a unifying element. My favorite line in Lewis’ book, though, came not from her poems, but from her introduction, in which she notes that revisiting the Welsh book that preceded Keeping Mum produced several “entirely new” poems in English that she refers to as “translations without an original text – perhaps a useful definition of poetry” - and perhaps a useful thought for anyone interested in translation.

Finally, “poetic” if not strictly “poetry,” I’ll include Ursula Molinaro and John Evans’ pastiche of elements found in a trash can and reassembled into Remnants of an Unknown Woman; Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch’s experimental collision between a microphone, two conversing friends, and the streets of Manhattan in Ten Walks/Two Talks (a peculiar, clever and fun book, but in my lowbrow response I couldn’t get out of my head Beavis and Butthead’s description of a Beck video as like something from “one of those dudes from the gifted class”); and Harry Mathew’s semi-poetic, joyful vision of a world in the ecstatic throes of masturbation in Singular Pleasures. Rounding out the year was Fernando Pessoa’s tremendous magnum opus The Book of Disquiet, a constant companion for two months. Though Pessoa himself addresses the distinction between poetry and prose, I couldn’t shake the sense that this complex, difficult to define work came across more as poetry than anything else. Let’s say “poeticized prose,” a term cribbed from translator Richard Zenith’s introduction. More about that towards the end of March, as part of the Portuguese Reading Challenge hosted by Wuthering Expectations.

---

[1] Imitation of a Poem by Frederic Prokosch, by Louise Bogan  (excerpted in Dreamer's Journey: The Life and Writings of Frederic Prokosch, by Robert Greenfield, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010)

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

“Nervous, incompetent, dowdy and shy.” Possessed of these self-descriptive and self-denigrating attributes, impediments to life of enjoyment or promise, Miss Guinevere Pettigrew, the heroine of Winifred Watson’s charming 1938 novel Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, wrestles with the unexpected events of a singular, transformative day that begins when she answers an employment announcement for a nursery governess – a last chance to save herself from the poorhouse.

Before I get to the meat of Miss Pettigrew (cooked precisely à point), I feel obliged to mention Persephone Books, a London-based publisher who has put out Miss Pettigrew plus some 90 other volumes, all but a handful by women, providing an invaluable service of rescuing from oblivion writers like Winifred Watson. These are lovely editions. Jorge Luis Borges, in one of his Norton lectures, “This Craft of Verse,” comes across, perhaps inadvertently, as dismissive of the physical book. I understand perfectly what he means, but since reading his essay I've held a quiet and unfair grudge against his omitting a nod to this craft of bookmaking (unfair, as he probably appreciated book arts as much as anyone, given his history of immersion in libraries). I like well-made books. I like the smell of them, the way they feel in my hands, the artistry involved in putting them together, and the work of a talented designer. And while I’m grateful to wonderful teachers, friends, reviewers and bloggers for showing me the way to many terrific works of literature, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also credit book designers - including the person who came up with the cover for the first English language paperback edition of Borges’ own Labyrinths (ah - her name is Gilda Kuhlman. Isn’t the Internet convenient? Thank you, Gilda.). Labyrinths was one of many cherished books of my adolescence that I picked up solely by judging their covers. So while indeed Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (and any other work of literature) may well live for more than a day regardless of the form of its presentation, I’m sorely tempted, whenever I write about a book, to include in my review, as did Paul Lukas in his now sadly defunct magazine “Beer Frame,” an assessment of the book’s physical attributes: the heft, the number of pages, the typeset, the quality of the paper, and perhaps most importantly in this physical realm, the quality of its cover design.

The high quality of the design of Persephone Books is noticeable immediately. They’re basically trade paperbacks, but the paper in these editions has a weight and solidly reminiscent of that one can find in pre-war books. Each volume also comes with a handsome grey minimalist dust jacket, discreetly hiding beautiful end papers drawn from old textile and wallpaper patterns. The one gracing the interior cover of Miss Pettigrew is a dress fabric dating from the year of the novel’s publication[1]:

Leaving aside these material attractions, Miss Pettigrew also won me over, even before I’d started reading it, by what must count as one of the great tables of content among all the works in my personal library:

Thus, one knows right away that the action of the book (at least up to the last chapter) unfolds in a single day. For all the certainty of this timeframe, the action is anything but determined, as it’s in fact built on one surprising adventure after another. These unexpected events allow for a flood of new experiences for Miss Pettigrew and new opportunities for Watson’s sharp observations on gender relations, class and social conventions, and the upkeep of appearances. They also draw out of Miss Pettigrew talents unknown even to herself, capabilities that - without, I hope, giving too much away (this is, after all, a classic ugly duckling story, so the direction of the plot, unlike the events that punctuate it, is fairly predictable) - begin their work of transformation by giving her greater confidence, self-respect, and liveliness.

“Liveliness” might describe the chief aesthetic quality of Watson’s writing. Though her novel is a something of a bagatelle, and takes minor faux pas in a few places (for example, elements in Miss Pettigrew’s interior monologues sometimes cross signals with the third person narrator, creating an unintended trick of narrative perspective that a magician might have trouble duplicating), the narrative sparkles, particularly in Watson’s whip-snap smart and crisp use of dialogue, which on occasion manages to incorporate so much unspoken communication that it comes across like a Mantan Moreland skit in which the characters know so well what one another will say that they don’t even need to completely articulate their thoughts.

That Miss Pettigrew calls to mind Hollywood is hardly accidental. Miss Pettigrew could, in fact, be considered a Hollywood novel despite its British setting and author. One need hardly learn that Guinevere Pettigrew’s chief source of amusement is the cinema to recognize that the novel is distinctly patterned after 1930’s screwball Hollywood comedies – like something penned by Philip Barry or directed by Howard Hawks or Leo McCarey - down to its star-like secondary characters and the glamorous life they lead in stark contrast to the banality from which Miss Pettigrew has suddenly emerged. And like the films on which it is patterned, Miss Pettigrew provides enough high-quality entertainment to allow one to live for a day – or at least for a few hours.

I loathe doing in a review what I’m about to do almost as much as I loathe finding in a book something like what I’m about to mention, but there’s a black mark against Watson’s novel, one of those faults so deflating as to impact one’s appreciation of the novel’s other eminently commendable qualities, and that is a perceptible anti-semitism made all the more unfortunate by its entirely gratuitous presence. It appears in only two brief instances, but one of them suggests a disheartening defense of racial purity. Given that the novel was written in 1938, three years after the Nuremburg laws and when the flight of tens of thousands of Jews from Germany was already well-known, the gratuitousness of this attitude is particularly galling. But this fault apparently didn’t keep Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day from becoming immensely popular upon its publication, and nor should a 21^st century sense of political correctness keep today’s readers away.  Aside from the poverty barely kept at bay in the novel’s opening pages, this reactionary element may be the one revealing glimpse - in this impossibly romantic, perceptive, tremendously entertaining comedy - of the darkness lying just outside the novel’s bright escapism.

---

[1] Apparently, Persephone has also released Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day in a “Persephone Classics” edition, which appears – from my squinting at the tiny image of it on the Persephone Books web site - to be marred by a prominent advertisement for the movie version of the book that came out in 2008.

Beautiful Days

Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian writer who, at his death in 1984, left instructions expressly prohibiting publication of his works in Austria for a full 70 years after his death, includes in his novel Correction a slightly less than flattering assessment of his homeland:

Austria, this most misunderstood country in the world, this country more problematical than any other in all world history…this state that was economically more decrepit than any other, which had nothing left, apart from its congenital imbecility, but its hypocrisy…once the center of Europe [Austria] was…no longer anything but a rummage sale of intellectual and cultural history, an unsold remainder of government merchandise…every Austrian is born to failure…his so-called homeland is actually, for him as for so many others, nothing but a horrible lifelong punishment for existing, for the blameless act of having been born in the first place…

This eviscerating passage might have served as an epigraph for the stunning short novel Schöne Tage (1974, translated into English by Anselm Hollo as Beautiful Days) by Bernhard’s Austrian contemporary Franz Innerhofer. Innerhofer may not provide quite as explicit a condemnation as Bernhard, but the picture he portrays of Austria works its way even more infectiously under the skin, a relentless catalog of recriminations that point an accusing finger at the “brutality and neglect” that mark the society Innerhofer depicts. It would be difficult to imagine a work with a more cuttingly ironic title.

Set in the economic wreckage of the years immediately following World War II in the farming country in Austria’s north, Beautiful Days, Innerhofer’s first novel and the first volume of a trilogy, begins with a curious opening line:

Torn away from the care of a childless woman, Holl suddenly found himself transplanted in an alien world.

Over the next few paragraphs, we are able to put the line in context, recognizing that Holl, Innerhofer’s vulnerable young protagonist, has in fact only recently been born (his birth coinciding approximately and symbolically with the end of World War II). Holl might as well not have come into the world, however, given what proceeds from his initial experience of being “torn away,” for the following pages depict an almost endless stream of abuses heaped upon the poor, illegitimate child. This initial separation from a “childless woman,” his caretaker for his first two years, is but the first of several wrenching dislocations. His next years are spent in wretched poverty with his mother, distinguishable from other adults chiefly by her being “the one who spanked him more often than any of the others,” and a neglectful stepfather, who has led “an unimaginably hard life from childhood on,” in Holl’s youth occupying the social status of disgraced former Nazi, “a pariah, full of inarticulate rage” (“inarticulate rage” is a recurrent phrase that characterizes the state of most of the adults in Beautiful Days). At age six Holl, essentially a welfare charge, is abruptly shunted off to live on Farm 48 in Haudorf in northern Austria with the father he’s never known, a brutish lug referred to in the novel only as “The Farmer,” and a cold stepmother, “The Wife.” Their identification by social role underscores his new guardians’ functional, passive-aggressive behavior towards Holl, whom they treat as little more than a nuisance and slave, and who seems to exist only “in terms of chores to be performed.” His new family simply replaces one set of abusive adults with another (Haudorf proves an apt name for the area in which Farm 48 is located, as the word’s root literally translates as “beaten down”). Holl is thrust into backbreaking farm work scarcely fit for an adult, let alone a mere child, and spends his long days in mud and manure, in fields and stables, valued beneath the livestock and, at home, berated and beaten into submission. The abuses Innerhofer catalogs in Beautiful Days brutalize the reader as well in both their individual occurrences and their cumulative effect, and it is only Holl’s inner resistance and instinctive sense of the injustice of it all – as well as Innerhofer’s tremendous talent as a writer - that makes the novel bearable in the least.

The starkly unsentimental, largely realist style of Beautiful Days leads the reader through Holl’s bleak daily cycle of bedwettings, physical and psychological abuse, hard labor, and unwelcoming home life, punctuated for the most part only by the oppressive heat of summer and the bitter cold of winter, by accident and death among the other workers and the livestock (calamities apathetically absorbed by the adults as though they were inevitabilities). Despite this gritty realism, Innerhofer also strings Holl’s tale onto a frame that allows his story to be seen as both particular and universal; Holl’s sufferings are not simply his own, but represent those inflicted by the failures of society as a whole. Innerhofer directs his condemnation of the treatment Holl receives not only at its immediate perpetrators but also at the institutions that allow such barbarities against children. Thus Holl’s anticipation that these institutions will intervene in some way to lessen his oppression meets with repeated disappointment. A burgeoning hope that mandatory schooling might provide an escape valve, that “homework…would liberate him from labor” (an almost certainly deliberate reformulation of the “Arbeit macht frei” of Hitler’s camps), evaporates as school quickly reveals itself as simply another piece of the machinery designed to keep children like Holl from attaining personhood, just another place where adults feel free to strike and degrade him. The church acts as an equally dehumanizing institution, designed to enforce ideology and conformity rather than provide solace or alleviate suffering. The ineffectual visits from child welfare officials, who fail to look beyond social surfaces carefully polished by adults eager to put the best face forward so as to mask the daily brutalities they inflict, reveal a welfare system abjectly derelict in its duties.

Innerhofer employs several remarkable narrative elements in Beautiful Days to enhance and deepen Holl’s riveting story. In his depiction of Holl’s earliest years, action is largely reduced to gesture, to a kind of high contrast, minimalist presentation of reality that reflects a young child’s frustrated efforts to make sense of a confounding world that values him for little more than his capacity for work and as the most handy target for the “inarticulate rage” vented by adults. Innerhofer’s stark, bleak descriptions, in his account of Holl’s early childhood, are strikingly minimalist and colorless, and his characters, in these first pages, seem almost silhouettes, as in the powerful work depicting scenes of American slavery by visual artist Kara Walker. But a brilliantly evolving narrative style develops along with Holl’s own growth in consciousness and self-awareness. The early monochromatic, silhouetted world gradually gives way to one richer in awareness and detail - albeit no less impoverished in quality of life. Holl’s sense of himself as self, as well as his initial stirrings of rebellion, long in coming, commence when the concept of suicide first occurs to him. His abrupt, stunned realization of this possibility of escaping his misery through his own agency is followed mere paragraphs later by the first instances of first-person narration to appear in the novel. A slow-motion explosion of self-awareness follows as the development of Holl’s young mind is paralleled by a perceptible increase in Innerhofer’s rendering of depth and detail as well as by periodic bursts of first person narration (that there are so pitifully few of these, however, only underscores Holl’s primary and anguishing sense of himself as an object). Despite the world’s coming into richer, more comprehensible focus, Holl’s miseries continue unabated, though the sharpening of his mind does provide him some minor triumphs in learning how to resist, neutralize, or exert some modicum of resilience over the abuses heaped upon him. However incremental, these small victories lead Holl to reject the option of suicide as it would only benefit his oppressors, who “could step over me and go on humiliating and tormenting people like me without hesitation.”

Innerhofer also employs an intensely effective kind of dialectic in the use of third person narration that juxtaposes and entwines simple, childlike sentences – “Every morning began in pain;” “It was still August;” “The train moved much too slowly;” “The train went much too fast” – with those of an omniscient narrator reporting and interpreting Holl’s life through adult retrospection. The result is a complex narrative style that allows a reader to be simultaneously inside Holl’s childhood world and outside it as a mature, almost clinical observer. An unusual tone is achieved through this variation, one that combines the straightforward simple storytelling of a children’s story or fable (one not entirely without humor) with the critical insight of a consciousness evaluating the fable as it’s being told.[1] Another notable narrative element is Innerhofer’s frequent use of italicized words and phrases. These serve to stress - like an insistent finger tapping the chest of the society Innerhofer charges with so many reprehensible failures - the fundamental aspects of Holl’s situation that could have been altered to make his life better. They’re used not so much to scold as to resolutely and with overwhelming force of conviction cast light on injustices and educate ignorance, serving as controlled, focused remonstrations without overt emotion but nonetheless brimming with indignation. At the same time, Innerhofer uses these italicized phrases to identify and dismantle the language of oppression, to take it apart at a linguistic level. For example, in Holl’s musing at the way the society characterizes suicide, one such phrase – that so and so “put an end to it” – becomes an expression Holl sees as a consensual, passive acceptance of suicide, as though it were an act completely independent of exogenous, societal influence, a failure of the individual having nothing to do with its social context.

One of Innerhofer’s great achievements in Beautiful Days is a careful balance between Holl’s particular, grim situation and its generalizability even beyond the period and its Austrian setting and institutions. The field labor in which Innerhofer’s characters are engaged might stand in for any kind of menial, coercive labor. The cruelties displayed by those around Holl could be found in other oppressive environments. And the indignation aimed at those responsible is leveled not simply at the malice of individuals, but at an entire society that expresses an almost autonomic neglect of its most sensitive and vulnerable members. The patterns of brutality and neglect so pervasive in Beautiful Days become a condemnation not only of Austria, and not only of the country’s noxiously acquiescent conformity perhaps most dramatically highlighted by its nearly unanimous support of Hitler’s Anschluss (references to historical particulars are certainly not absent in Beautiful Days, but are kept at a minimum), but of all societies that rest on their failure to rise above the most expedient social interactions and decline to treat kindness, generosity, and, especially, the care of children and cultivation of talent, as fundamental priorities. Innerhofer’s most severe criticism targets these failures across an entire society to exert agency and responsibility, to combat the accepted and the unacceptable.

There is a generous element in Innerhofer’s “lessons” (one that appears to distinguish it from Bernhard’s unmitigated wrath); it may not be forgiveness exactly, but there is at least a value placed on understanding that the cultures’ deficiencies descend from the contributions of poverty, institutional weaknesses, and a lack of education and opportunity. Part of the power of Beautiful Days derives from its acknowledgement of the psychology of brutality and neglect, its recognition of cycles of abuse and of economic and other factors contributing to the behavior of the society, at the same time refusing to allow these factors to absolve actors of their responsibility. One of the novel’s most breathtaking scenes involves the sudden appearance on Farm 48 of Helga, a no-nonsense worker who sees with piercing clarity, as does Holl, the injustices of the culture, but who unlike Holl has the fearlessness to refute them at every turn. Confronting The Wife one night, Helga smashes a bowl in an act both castigating and educating, forcing The Wife to recognize that human beings - who are not, after all, bowls to be shattered - should not be treated as though they were. Helga’s short stay at Farm 48 is the first genuine glimmer of hope in Holl’s miserable existence, the first real model for resistance that life has offered him, and a vindication of his own conviction that the behavior directed at him has been a matter of inexcusable injustice (as well as an austerely beautiful moment in the novel - Innerhofer acutely depicts the ability of children to know justice and injustice as a matter of the behavior around them while also recognizing their need for adult affirmation of these convictions). 

Beautiful Days leads the reader to a simple yet radical conclusion encapsulated in what is perhaps the most significant milestone in Holl’s personhood, his apprehension “that it could have been different, all of it.” With this brief line, this explicit rejection of the status quo, Innerhofer obliterates excuses and justifications, reorienting the wretchedly deficient adult world to a measure of morality like that asserted by Dr. Rieux in Albert Camus’ The Plague in Rieux’s refusal “to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.” I know of nothing quite like Innerhofer’s achievement in Beautiful Days, the clear-sightedness with which, in such a short novel, he is able to illuminate so vividly the unjust waste of years of a child’s life (that the novel is apparently largely autobiographical may explain much of the visceral realism of the scenes Innerhofer describes), while at the same time delivering a blistering reproach of an entire society’s participation in that injustice. One emerges from Beautiful Days wanting nothing less than to insure the reality of that ideal set forth by John Dewey, that what the wisest and best parent wants for his or her child is what the community should want for all of its children.

In the end, the caustic irony of Innerhofer’s title may be more complex than it at first seems. An incisive sarcasm is intended, to be sure, but at the same time the title also acknowledges the beauty occasioned by Holl’s rare moments of happiness and wonder, of hope and of humanity, in the context of his otherwise crushing, mean life. And it must surely celebrate, without irony, the path to liberated selfhood that a sudden opportunity provides to Holl, one that mimics, in its autobiographical element, Innerhofer’s own escape from an inexorable and laborious childhood to pursue his becoming a writer. Perhaps, too, the title may be a poignant and pointed acknowledgment of the writer’s essentially aestheticizing role in his alchemical transformation of difficult experiences into art, and a subtle reminder that behind the fiction, there’s a real world where such unconscionable behaviors take place. It’s shattering to learn that this author who lived as well as created such a defiant and resilient young character would, in 2002, submit to suicide. After reading Innerhofer’s indelible, devastating novel, one is hard put not to think of that as Austria’s failure - and as our own as well should we not aspire to make, of all of our days and for all in the wide scope of our care, something beautiful.

I read Beautiful Days as part of German Literature Month, kindly hosted by Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and by Lizzy of Lizzy’s Literary Life, and am grateful to them both for this opportunity to become familiar with Franz Innerhofer’s amazing work for the first time.

---

[1] Someone with a far better knowledge of Austrian literature than I might be able to determine whether this “anti-fable” is an intentional refutation of the romantic, moralizing work of Innerhofer’s Austrian predecessor, Adalbert Stifter; in both Beautiful Days and in Bernhard’s Correction one finds disparaging allusions to Stifter, something I might not have noticed had I not coincidentally read his Rock Crystal some months prior to reading Correction).