Six of the best

Well, from a quick count it looks like I’ve read around 56 books this year, I should add a couple more before the new year yet though.

Still, that’s less than I’d have hoped, quite a lot less actually, but so it goes.

Anyway, I thought I’d make a short post linking to what were for me the discoveries of the year. To be a discovery it has to be something a bit obscure, not so well known. That’s not because obscurity equates to quality, it doesn’t, I just figure the better known books are less likely to need recommending.

So, these are my five six suggestions for books easily missed that are well worth checking out, even if they’re not what you’d normally read. They’re in no particular order:

First up, Jarmila, by Ernst Weiss. This was one of my definite finds of the year. A wonderful novella, really a masterclass in the art of that form. It’s an exquisitely crafted work that unpacks its meaning and symbolism long after you finish reading. Really, a masterpiece.

Next, Fraülein Else, by Arthur Schnitzler. A technical tour de force, it’s also gripping and beautiful. I’ve read another Schnitzler since, and have a third waiting at home that I hope to get to early in the New Year. A superlative author, and underappreciated I think.

Balthasar’s Odyssey, by Amin Maalouf. A wonderful novel about writing, humanity, superstition, the creative impulse and why we continue even when there seems no point to doing so. Astonishingly humane, and often very funny.

A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter. Salter shouldn’t be obscure, people have heard of him, but my impression is that he’s not nearly as widely read as he should be. Salter is an extraordinarily talented writer, anything by him is worth a visit. The Hunters, to be fair, may be a better place to start though than this particular novel (but I didn’t read The Hunters this year, so it’s not eligible for this post).

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery was another exceptional find, though not actually by me (it was a present from my wife). Beautifully written, eloquent and evocative, and full too of a profound empathy.

Lastly, Three to Kill by Patrick Manchette. French noir, expanding the crime genre by mixing it with Marxist theory and creating an indictment of a whole way of life. A fascinating novel, a shame Manchette’s better known The Prone Gunman wasn’t for me as interesting. Originally this post was going to be five recommendations, but I didn’t have the heart to leave out the Manchette.

Otherwise, I’ve read some excellent crime, but mostly fairly well known stuff. My big reading project of the year of course has been the Anthony Powell’s, that’s taken a fair bit of my reading time (and has been more than worth it). Where I’m a little surprised is how little SF I’ve read this year, I think not having read as much as I’d have liked it just got squeezed out, SF titles routinely run to 5-600 pages or more, which if you’re time-pressured can be a bit offputting.

Anyway, there’s lots here I haven’t mentioned, the Yates’ novels for example that I read this year, but both are very well known and hardly needing me to promote them. I wasn’t sure if Jean Rhys counted as obscure really, but whether she is or not she’s well worth reading. And on a less serious note, Somebody Owes Me Money was one of the more fun reads of the year. All that said, if I had to pick one well known book of the year that unexpectedly blew me away, it would be The Crying of Lot 49. I loved this work, and given how many people bounce off Pynchon I think it’s a shame more don’t try it, instead of leaping directly into Gravity’s Rainbow.

And, if you read this in time, Happy Christmas!

Every route had its traps and only the regular carriers knew of them

Post Office, by Charles Bukowski

Most authors don’t write about what it’s like to have a job, possibly because all too many of them haven’t really had much by way of jobs. They’ll write about what it’s like to be a struggling author, there’s an ocean of novels covering that territory, but there’s not much about life as most people actually live it.

Well, that’s a hideous exaggeration of course, there’s the marvellous Something Happened by Joseph Heller; there’s What was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn; Microserfs by Douglas Coupland; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe; arguably one could even say much of Revolutionary Road. Still, it’s not territory most authors are that comfortable in.

Charles Bukowski’s an exception. His (apparently largely autobiographical) 1971 debut novel Post Office has a lot to say about work, about the sheer grind of clocking in, day in and day out. It’s the story of his alter-ego, Henry Chinaski, and his twelve or so years working at the US post office, first as a substitute mail carrier (mailman in other words) and later as a sorting clerk. It includes absurd bureaucracy, idiot rules, petty and malevolent supervisors, banal inhumanity. It’s very well written, often extremely funny, and desperately sad.

Chinaski is drunk and a womaniser, he plays the horses (generally winning, for a while he makes a living at it), he cheats on his live in girlfriend (whom he refers to as his “shackjob”, because he shacks up with her) casually and without thought. He’s a man who on being presented for the first time with his new born baby assesses the nurse’s figure. He’s lazy, has an attitude problem and hates all his jobs, he keeps up with them just because the women he’s with expect him to make an honest living (rather than one at the tracks) and because he can’t generally be bothered to quit and do something else.

Bukowski clearly understands Chinaski’s world, given he lived it I guess he should. He’s tremendous at bringing to life the stupidity and sometimes downright insanity of the public, with their dogs and demands and random aggression. I’ve worked retail, as a student, and I still remember people asking me as I worked the pick’n'mix if they could both pick and mix, I remember the guy who held up two bottles of water, one in each hand, and asked me which one was colder. People individually in my experience are ok, the public though are insane. Bukowski knows this:

The voices of the people were the same, no matter where you carried the mail you heard the same things over and over again.
“You’re late, aren’t you?”
“Where’s the regular carrier?”
“Hello, Uncle Sam!”
“Mailman! Mailman! This doesn’t go here!”
The streets were full of insane and dull people. Most of them lived in nice houses and didn’t seem to work, and you wondered how they did it. There was one guy who wouldn’t let you put the mail in his box. He’d stand in the driveway and watch you coming for 2 or 3 blocks and he’d stand there and hold his hand out.

For the record, Catherine O’Flynn captures the experience of working in retail better than anyone else I’ve read, Chinaski of course is a public servant, if anything that’s even worse. It comes with additional feelings of entitlement on the part of the public.

Chinaski works for sadistic supervisors who take pleasure in making his life miserable, assigning him impossible routes in brutal conditions and denying him work when he answers back. Employees are expected to look up to old timers whose lives have plainly been ruined by the job, men of stunted horizons whose every interest and spark of life has been crushed under years of repetition. When these figures break, as they do, they are discarded like old machine parts, and never spoken of again.

As the novel continues, Chinaski moves from woman to woman, sometimes hitting it lucky, sometimes not so much. He leaves his job as a mail carrier, but later returns to the post office, now as a sorter. It’s an indoor job, better money but lacking the challenge of making difficult routes on time in bad weather. That said, it is secure:

After swearing us in, the guy told us:
“All right now, you’ve got a good job. Keep your nose clean and you’ve got security the rest of your life.”
Security? You could get security in jail. 3 squares and no rent to pay, no utilities, no income tax, no child support. No licence plate fees. No traffic tickets. No drunk driving raps. No losses at the race track. Free medical attention. Comradeship with those with similar interests. Church. Round-eye. Free burial.

Security here is the trap. The post office offers a good job, good conditions, decent pay, it’s hard to get fired (Chinaski routinely turns up drunk and takes time off without permission). There’s constant chivvying, tasks to be performed in times calculated by external consultants who’ve never done the job, penalties for going to the bathroom or getting a drink of water outside your allotted ten minute break, requirements as to how you sit on your stool while you sort, but if you can put up with all that you could spend decades with the post office. Those who do put on weight, sag and spread, but they’re secure. To Chinaski, it’s a form of death, a way of losing your own life.

Bukowski doesn’t just write about work, Chinaski is popular with women, despite being described by more than one character as looking like a wino. He’s obviously got some charisma, some charm, and although he generally treats women like convenient objects there’s a level at which he remains aware of their essential humanity. At times, there’s even a tenderness:

The blankets had fallen off and I stared down at her white back, the shoulder blades sticking out as if they wanted to grow into wings, poke through that skin. Little blades. She was helpless.

Chinaski just doesn’t connect that humanity, that vulnerability, with any implication that maybe he shouldn’t sleep with the next woman who’s available as soon as his current one is off to work.

Post Office is full of damaged people. Workmates who shout and boast of sexual conquests they’ve clearly never had. People who break down, crying in the locker room as they become too old to still sort post as fast as management requires. Chinaski’s world is a brutal one, supervisors care only about delivery targets, institutions are faceless and indifferent to those they employ, people are messy and drunk and needy but their society requires them to be none of those things. Chinaski inhabits the world of those who slip through the cracks, the people who stop coping, who maybe could never cope, the people who get old and never made enough to create a cushion that could make that bearable:

She got a job as a waitress, then lost that when they tore down the cafe to erect an office building. Now she lived in a small room in a loser’s hotel. She changed the sheets there and cleaned the bathrooms. She was on wine.
…
She went back to her room and put on her best dress, high heels, tried to fix up. But there was a terrible sadness about her.

This is a plotless novel. Stuff happens, but there isn’t really a story arc. Chinaski gets a job with the post office, leaves it and does some other stuff for a while, then returns to the post office. He has relationships, few friendships, he spends a lot of time drunk. That’s about it. What it is though is a portrait of what it’s like to be part of the itinerant underclass, the people in lousy jobs on poor wages, seen as unreliable by bosses who neither understand nor care about the chaos of their lives. These people start out with dreams, ambitions, desires like all of us. But along the way they get crushed, and Post Office in part shows us how:

I don’t know how it happens to people. I had child support, need for something to drink, rent, shoes, shirts, socks, all that stuff. LIke everyone else I needed an old car, something to eat, all the little intangibles.

It’s no surprise to me that Post Office had the impact it did. This is a great novel. It’s ugly, vulgar and crass. It contains a lot of block capitalised shouting. It’s characters are unpleasant, mad, pathetic, often cruel, sometimes downright repugnant (including Chinaski). But it’s true, and for me truth is the essence of good art. This is good art.

Post Office

Being the temporary king is what matters

Temporary Kings, by Anthony Powell

Temporary Kings is book eleven of A Dance to the Music of Time, it’s exceptional. It’s now the 1950s, Nick and his friends are at the peak of their careers, the new establishment, they’ve made their money and reputations (to the extent they’ll ever make either) and they’re enjoying both, but in the knowledge that neither will last.

The title is a reference to the practice in the ancient world (according to some sources, anyway), of appointing kings for a brief period, at the end of which they would be executed. Nick and his friends are temporary kings, rulers of the world, but not for long.

The novel takes place largely in Venice, I didn’t know that when I started it and if I had I might have left it a bit longer, having just finished two books about the place. As it was though, it worked quite well, and the fading grandeur of the city works as an unobtrusive metaphor for the characters themselves – glittering but perhaps no longer at their prime. Many earlier characters recur, Mark Members for example – the “coming man” of Nick’s university days, as well as new ones such as the entertaining academic Dr. Emily Brightman. At its centre though is Pamela, who continues to behave with an utter disregard for propriety and convention, often acting from sheer malicious impulse. Pamela is a spiritual sister to Patrick Hamilton’s Netta, a monster of sorts, though she is far from the only one.

The difficulty with writing about this volume is avoiding spoilers for earlier ones, a remark about what somebody is doing or who is married to whom could give away a major development in an earlier book. I’m going to avoid then talking too much about the plot, save to say that as with each previous volume it focuses on a number of episodes in Nick’s life (a conference in Venice, a visit to a palazzo with a Tiepolo ceiling of unusual symbolic significance to the characters, a visit to an artist’s studio, a visit to Bashaw’s new home, a charity concert) and that as ever it’s not really what happens that’s important as what it tells us about the people it happens to.

Powell is still very funny, dryly so, and yet what seems a joke on first encounter often turns out to foreshadow darker developments later. This quote comes from page two:

To exhibit themselves, perform before a crowd, is the keenest pleasure many people know, yet self-presentation without a basis in art is liable to crumble into dust and ashes.

It works because it’s true, and when first encountered it’s just a throwaway line. As the novel continues though, it becomes obvious just how true it is (particularly for some of the characters) and it ceases then to be funny at all.

The experience of aging runs through this novel. Nick meets Polly Duport, daughter of his former lover Jean Duport. Polly is now a successful actress, her own career blossoming. It’s clear that Nick and his generation are being replaced. Earlier in the novel, while wandering Venice, Nick reflects on the Futurists and it’s hard not to see their hopes and fate as that of almost every generation:

At the beginning of the century, Marinetti and the Futurists had wanted to make a fresh start – whatever that might mean – advocating, among other projects, filling up the Venetian canals with the rubble of the Venetian palaces. Now, the Futurists, with their sentimentality about the future, primitive machinery, vintage motor-cars, seemed as antiquely picturesque as the Doge in the Bucentaur, wedding his bride the Sea, almost as distant in time; though true a desire to destroy, a hatred and fear of the past, remained a constant in human behaviour.

Vintage cars are a key running element in this volume, a metaphor for the passage of life, for the major characters themselves who are now antique and yet are still valuable, though not perhaps running for much longer. Like the Futurists, they too once wanted to make a fresh start, as every generation does, now they too increasingly are antiquely picturesque. Interestingly, Debray in Against Venice made much the same point of the Futurists, but then their fate is peculiarly ironic (and perhaps fitting given some of their more unpleasant views).

The characters in Books do Furnish a Room mostly continue here, Ada Leintwardine (who “arrogated to herself all the world’s gossip, sources other than her own a presumption”) is increasingly a figure of note, Baghaw is now successfully working on television, X Trapnel is the subject of a biography and so continues to be a sort of presence. As well, some much older characters return. Mrs Erdleigh for example, that seemingly ageless mystic and fortune-teller. She discusses the now deceased Dr Trelawney with Nick, referring to his passing not as something so vulgar as death but rather as when the soul “hearing secret harmonies” ascends. As the series draws to its close, more of the characters are starting to hear those secret harmonies, and given the title of the next and final volume it’s likely that more of them will yet. The reign of a temporary king is brief.

Generally, this is a volume which draws together the themes of the whole cycle. The importance of personal mythology recurs. I mentioned that Bagshaw is now a success, with that he has settled down and now has a wife, family and house of his own:

There was no reason why Bagshaw should not possess a house, nor in general be taken less seriously than other people. No doubt, for his own purposes, he had done a good deal to encourage a view of himself as a grotesque figure, moving through a world of farce. Come to rest in relatively prosperous circumstances, he had now modified the rôle for which he had formerly typecast himself. Dynamic styles of life required one ‘image’; static, another.

Like Trapnel, like so many others, Bagshaw creates a role for himself. He performs before a crowd, as we all do, and the performance changes with his circumstances. How he sees himself, what happens within his own thoughts, is unknown and unknowable.

And of course that’s another of the key themes, the impossibility of really knowing other people. We make friends, enemies, lovers, but at the end of the day our own motivations often escape us. The motivations of others, the secrets of their lives, really we have no idea. Dance doesn’t show characters changing so much as it shows their circumstances changing and with those new circumstances new aspects of them coming to the fore. Who we are depends on where and when we are, and who we are may anyway be nothing more than a fiction we present.

The most unknowable thing of all is other people’s relationships, the truths inside them. We can guess, we can swap gossip, but ultimately whatever happens within a relationship is known only to those inside it. By its nature, others can never really understand its nuances. As Moreland says (here more specifically about sex):

‘All other people’s sexual relations are hard to imagine. The more staid the people, the more inconceivable their sexual relations.’

Temporary Kings has a definite feel of the dance drawing to a close. The recurrence of older characters (I saw an online comment referring to them as making curtain calls, which is about right), the tying together of storylines and the reminders of long running character arcs and themes of the series, all of it is building towards the conclusion. Along the way, there’s a great deal of consideration of myth, antiquity, art and the creative process. This is a rich and complex novel (though still easy to follow), but it’s also very much the penultimate work of the series. It’s hardly original to compare Dance to a symphony, but I will anyway. Here the instruments are coming together in unity and purpose, earlier motifs (major and minor) are worked back in and the whole orchestra is coming together in a way that couldn’t have been foreseen and yet is absolutely right.

A Dance to the Music of Time is a masterpiece. This is a strong volume, hugely entertaining, filled with comedy and melancholy, and ultimately a fair degree of tragedy. Characters die, and with some of them it is only when they die we realise how much they mattered to Nick (as often, it’s only when people die in real life we realise how much they mattered to us).

Powell often references the classics (the first novel opens with a classical reference), and the plot of this novel turns on the classical scene depicted in a Tiepolo ceiling. It’s no coincidence that I find myself reaching for terms like comedy and tragedy, part after all of what Powell is saying is that the ancients may have died, but so will we, and in the end although the surroundings may change human experience really doesn’t all that much.

Temporary Kings

Test post, please disregard

toasting the Chinese at the Florian

Against Venice, by Regis Debray

I mentioned in my recent post on Paul Morand’s Venices that I was reading Regis Debray’s 2002 book Against Venice (published by Pushkin Press, with an afterword by the author and translated by John Howe). In fact, I only bought Venices because I was already planning to buy the Debray and knew it referenced the Morand.

Well, I enjoyed the Morand, even though I hadn’t really expected to and was seeing it almost as homework before the Debray. Naturally then, I didn’t enjoy the Debray as much as I hoped. That’s not because it’s bad, it’s not – it’s very well written – perhaps it’s just because I agreed more with Debray than I did with Morand.

So what is it exactly? Well, it’s about 70 pages of argument against Venice, or more to the point against the idea of Venice and the way it’s held up as a cultural touchstone. It’s a mixture of insight, exaggeration, wit, sly dig, rant and cri de couer. It’s also (and this is part of its charm) exasperating, unreasonable, unfair, sometimes quite irritating, and by the end unexpectedly serious. If you can, it’s best read in one sitting, it’s just more enjoyable when Debray is given space to get up a decent head of steam. There’s a definite feeling at times that he knows he’s being absurd, but he’s not going to let that stop him.

Debray knows his territory, he knows the city but more importantly he knows its tourists, he understands the lure of the place. At times, he’s very funny and cruelly accurate. If you’ve ever been to Venice you’ll probably recognise this:

“You’ll see,” murmurs the tourist in his trattoria, furtively lowering his voice, “on this route, you won’t see a single other tourist.”

Like most people who love Venice, I want to see the city, I just don’t especially want to see other people seeing the city. There’s an allure to the idea of finding the real Venice, but of course the tourist Venice is the real Venice.

Debray contrasts Venice with Naples, one of my favourite cities on Earth. I studied Italian in Naples, staying in the Spaccanapoli, and I love the place. I love its noise, its chaos, its grandeur so differently faded to that of Venice. Debray loves it too, and he uses it as an effective counterexample, the living versus the preserved, the populist versus the elite:

THE ISLAND CITY with its little finger genteelly stuck out, used as a drawing room by the whole planet, is a place where “people of quality” display common behaviour. While in the volcano town, shrieking with vulgarity, the common people portray an air of distinction.
This does not prevent the lagoon from being ten times more frequented by tourists than Posilippo. The ones who do cross Naples scuttle through with lowered eyes, petrified of scippo, of pickpockets and bag-snatchers, heading as quickly as possible for that direst of school impositions, Pompeii. The popular town repels the populace, the snobbish one attracts it. An overwhelming majority for the adulterated and dressed-up. As usual.

Every section opens with a few words in block capitals by the way, there’s no significance to it (no obvious one, anyway).

There’s a subtlety to Debray’s argument at times, an underlying thread which only really becomes apparent as you go on. It’s the issue of whether it’s a good thing to be a monument, a cultural treasure, whether perhaps it might not be better to be less refined but more alive:

It is possible to weep hot and bitter tears in Naples, city of extravagance, for the same reasons that hearty laughter is normal there; people do not sob in Venice, city of autumn, city of evening, for the same reason that Venetian gaiety must content itself with a thin smile. It is a polite place, where people get depressed but stop short of suicide.

Another element of Debray’s argument (there are several) is the way Venice affects artists. Debray isn’t at all hostile to Morand it turns out, he tweaks his nose a bit but of the four or so references to him most are pretty positive. What he hates is Morand-lite, people who write of the city in the most romantic terms, but who lack Morand’s sheer skill and so just become banal:

For one quicksilver Morand, for one mandolin pizzicato from Fauré, how many boating songs are there, how many serenades and other pieces of gondolier kitsch (a word, incidentally, that seems to come from the wrong country?).

Debray also mocks the heirarchies of tourism. The cultured wander about clutching their abridged copies of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, looking down on backpackers, people on cruises and those doing eight cities in eight days (or whatever):

The sight of two broke, bare chested trippers with “structuralist beards”, gulping grappa out of the bottle, was enough to send Paul Morand into a deep depression described in the closing passage of his post-1968 work Venises.

Actually, it didn’t. What Morand objected to was someone drinking his grappa and not saying thanks, it was the lack of gratitude that depressed him, not the appearance or the gulping.

For Debray, it’s almost impossible now to engage with Venice. The whole place has been so written about, there are so many novels and guidebooks and histories, so many films too and photographs and received stories, that we struggle to see it at all. We see it through a prism of others’ experiences, we know so much before we arrive we risk inhabiting what others said about it, not what we see ourselves.

We ourselves are afloat on a raft of references, every glimpse of the landscape releasing, like a conditioned reflex, this or that association with some paragraph, picture or sequence.

Still, he understands its charm, the pleasure of walking through its streets devoid of cars, its history and architecture, its theatricality. He loves the place, he despairs of convincing anyone, even himself, of his argument. After all, it’s Venice isn’t it? It’s an easy place to love.

For Debray though, ulimately, there is a tragedy to Venice and it is that it is no longer a living city. He contrasts religion in Naples, fervent, impassioned, almost pagan, with its absence in Venice where the churches are places for mass tourism and the paintings and statues objects of cultural appreciation rather than devotion. He is particularly scathing about the practice of having coin-activated lights which briefly illuminate some particularly highly regarded artwork for the paying public:

In the mini-Babylon of the cultured, a glance at the angels may no longer bring salvation, but that does not prevent it from being lucrative.

As Against Venice draws to its close, the real issue emerges. Could Venice be a mirror that shows us Europe’s future? As he says

I seem to remember that in the period of its greatness – the iron-willed “triumphant city” was not loved. When it still had military strength and rights of veto, in the Lepanto era, nobody praised its mysterious grace or its cats slumbering between embroidered cushions. Its power – nuclear, industrious, restless and confrontational – was feared, not contemplated. “Sweet and magical clarity” is a thin recompense for inventing a world.

If Venice can become a theme park, why not Paris? Why not London? Madrid? Arguably, much of Britain has already gone down that route, a service economy serving more vigorous civilisations elsewhere. Venice once ruled, it was a power, now other powers send their tourists to visit it and praise its charms and there are hardly any Venetians left.

Debray is not Morand, I felt here no racism, no resentment of other cultures rising to their own day in the sun. That said, he’s not ready for Europe’s day to be over just yet, and for him Venice is essentially a museum while Naples is anything but. Venice is beautiful, yes, but Naples is the better place to live.

Against Venice makes a perfect companion with Venices. It’s definitely enjoyable to read them in order as I did, Venices then Against Venice. Debray is serious and joking at the same time, no small trick, and there’s a brio to it all which is hard not to admire. There’s a scene in the Patrice Leconte film Ridicule, the Abbé de Vilecourt is making a speech proving the existence of God before the court of Versailles, entertaining the King with the fluency of his logic and rhetoric (before boasting that he could prove the opposite just as easily). Debray reminds me of the Abbé in that part of that scene, at the height of his powers and in full enjoyment of them.

Before I go, it’s worth noting that Nicholas Lezard at the Guardian did a combined review of Venices and Against Venice here. It was his review that partly helped put me on to these works, and it’s well worth reading.

Against Venice

I threw myself upon Italy as if on the body of a woman

Venices, by Paul Morand

I recently purchased Against Venice, by Rene Debray (I’m reading it at the moment in fact). It’s a sort of diatribe against Venice, and more to the point against those who romanticise it. I love Venice, and I trust Pushkin Press and they published the Debray, how could I resist?

Before I bought the Debray, I had a look online for reviews, and the only one I found mentioned it was written in part in response to Venices, by Paul Morand. I’ll come back to that when I write up Against Venice, but the temptation of reading an argument and counter-argument was too much for me, and I bought Venices too.

Venices is also published by Pushkin Press, with an excellent translation by Euan Cameron. It was written back in 1971, when Morand was in his eighties, and it’s a rather melancholy work as a result. It’s a contemplation of his life, of the things he has seen and the people he knew – all of it tied to his recollections and experiences of Venice over the years. Venices then is not really about Venice, or at least is only in part about Venice. Rather, like Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Stars it’s a sort of meditation. As Morand says:

Venice has not been my entire life, but she constitutes a few fragments of it that are otherwise disconnected; her tide marks fade away, mine do not.

The difficulty with this sort of work is it’s only as enjoyable, as interesting, as it’s well written (not true of all books, as Stephen King will attest). Debray, in his book, refers to Morand as “quicksilver”, which isn’t far off. Morand is often witty, clever, sometimes even rather beautiful if always a little detached. However, there are times when the prose seemed to me simply overwrought, when I grew tired of his constant namedropping, when he simply annoyed me. In the end, I enjoyed it, but not without reservations. Here’s the opening two paragraphs:

All of our lives are letters posted anonymously; my own bears three postmarks: Paris, London and Venice; fate, often unwittingly, though certainly not thoughtlessly, has decreed that I should have settled in these places.

Within her restricted space, Venice, situated as she is in the middle of nowhere, between the foetal waters and those of the Styx, encapsulates my journey on earth.

That second paragraph is, for me, a précis of what can be infuriating about this kind of work. In what possible sense is Venice situated next to the waters of the Styx? Clearly, Morand is being poetic, but even so does this actually make any sort of sense? I’m not personally persuaded it does, and it’s not the only passage of that nature by any means.

Coupled with that, Morand uses on two separate occasions the repugnant phrase “the white race”, regretting the lack of a peace treaty between France and Germany in 1911 and later complaining of the loss of what he regards as the old pride that helped Europe fight the Turks. His view is that Europe is declining, that he is passing into old age but that the civilisation of which he formed part has preceded him, perhaps is already the grave. It is an ugly element, and given Morand’s service in the Vichy regime (the period following June 1939 until 1950 is noticeably absent from a text that otherwise largely proceeds in chronological order, year by year) and an apparent sympathy for fascism it makes him in some ways a rather uncomfortable travelling companion.

So, I’ve accused Morand of namedropping, occasional pretension, of racism and fascist sympathies, I should add that he’s also a huge snob and a man who while claiming his family not to be exceptional makes sure to include sufficient anecdotes to make it plain quite how refined, wealthy and connected they in fact were:

… occasionally, in the evening, I would hear [my father] say to my mother: “I’m going to the opera, in Mme Greffulhe’s box; put some money (he never counted in louis d’or, that was mundane) in my waistcoat pocket, in case she asks me to take her to supper at Paillard’s.”

On top of all that, he rarely fails to illustrate how brilliant he himself is, noting that as a child he learned nothing from school and scorned the classic authors, instead discovering for himself Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans (and mentioning, by the by, that his father translated Hamlet for Sarah Bernhardt).

And yet, and yet. He has insight. He points out how much his schools did not attempt to teach, how vast some of the gaps they left were. Like him, I was not taught in school about Byzantium (I don’t think it was ever mentioned), or of China and the far east, I wasn’t taught economic geography or the history of art, my education like his and like that of most of us was patchwork and many of the gaps are essentially ideological. To include in an education a history of the Kings and Queens of England, but to leave out the history of the gold standard, is to make a political choice. Suddenly, Morand has me thinking.

As the book continues, it improves. Once Morand has established his background, he reaches the 1920s and his days with some of the brightest (and most fashionable) minds of Europe. He is not quite gossipy, but he is proud of what he sees as a flowering of greatness and is always happy to share details of who he spent those days with. His descriptions are well written, illuminating, often again exasperating (did Morand know nobody in trade? Of course not, he knew artists, actors, thinkers, the consequenceless rich), but his tone kept me reading. Morand sees himself as a forerunner of modern (1971) youth, an avant-garde of the teenage entitlement that was to follow, he rather approves of the young of the age he now finds himself in, with their insistence on the importance of leisure and their desire to live according to its own terms. All he truly objects to is their age, which he envies, and their occasional lack of manners.

Morand is conscious of quite how much history he’s seen, how much he’s lived through and seen fade away. To pass time with this book is to pass time with an elderly man, one in full command of his faculties who has lived through remarkable events and wishes to tell you of them. Not all he has to say is palatable, or even interesting, but this was real and it is fascinating to hear of it and to share the perspective of someone who has outlived his world. It is that awareness that gives the book its elegaic tone, Morand’s world died with the second world war and he knows that, he knows it’s not coming back. Worse, his prejudices make his present bleaker than perhaps it truly was, Europe today continues and isn’t doing too badly, for Morand it was finished. The final chapter ends with a description of Morand selecting his tomb, viewing the site and speaking of where he “shall lie, after this long accident that has been my life.” It is not an ending written by a man who continues to have hope in the future.

Still, there is no sense Morand resents those who follow him. He simply sees this as our world now, not his, he is saddened by the loss of what was but he does not blame us for being what we are (in the main, anyway, there is the odd bout of irritability – he is distinctly ambivalent on the changing role of women for example).

Structurally, Venices is an unusual work. Each chapter is simply a date and some observations. Sometimes a whole chapter consists of just one paragraph, sometimes it runs on for pages, at times he just brings the past to life as here just after the war:

On the quaysides, French officers were sampling long virginia cigarettes that were perforated with straws; in the Red Cross lorries, wounded Senegalese soldiers sitting side by side with Neapolitans in their hospital gowns mingled with bersaglieri, shorn of most of their feathers, with Austria prisoners of war, Tyroleans wearing grey-blue uniforms, and with carabinieri who had exchanged their cocked hats for a helmet rather like Colleone’s; Russian prisoners who had been returned by the Austrians were sweeping the docks with brooms made from leaves of maize; on walls, menacing posters ordered deserters from the Caporetto to rejoin the 4th Corps or risk being “shot in the back”.

At others, he comments directly on how he sees the world, as it was or as it is now:

These Leicas, these Zeiss; do people no longer have eyes?

And then, sometimes, he writes simply and beautifully about the city he loves above all others, as here:

1970

An overcast October sky this morning; an opaline grey, the colour of old chandeliers, so fragile that they sell marabou feathers with which to dust them.

I was in Venice this weekend, and the sky was that colour. I looked up from the book, and it was there.

In an afterword, the art critic Olivier Berggruen describes Venices as leaving the reader with a sense of “melancholy, elegance and poise”. He’s right. What I would add is that on occasion Morand is also funny, generous, thoughtful and genuinely challenging. Yes, he’s an elderly racist and was a wartime collaborator, but he writes with unusual skill and much of what he says is worth hearing. I enjoyed this book, I often felt that I shouldn’t, but I did. I’m glad I read it.

I’ll be buying more Morand. I doubt I would have liked him, he was a bigot and a snob, and I doubt he particularly would have liked me, but for all that his book deserves its translation and its native acclaim and if you can separate the man from the work (peculiarly hard with a work of this nature, which is after all about the man) then it’s fair to say it’s a remarkable achievement. It’s beautiful, despite its many blemishes, and it is profoundly human. It’s just a shame that Morand lacks Saint-Exupery’s gift of seeing the humanity in everyone else, not just in one’s social equals.

Art does not make a man good, it is no guarantee of virtue in the artist, rather it is simply a good in itself. Venices is good art, even though Morand was not a good man.

Venices

Morand on Dos Passos

I just finished Paul Morand’s book of recollections and observations, Venices (published by Pushkin Press), which I shall post about later today or tomorrow.

Venices includes Morand’s reflections on a number of celebrated people he knew over the years (he’s a terrible, perhaps more accurately an accomplished, namedropper). Among them was John Dos Passos.

Dos Passos died while Morand was writing Venices, prompting Morand to add the following footnote in reference to him. I repeat it here in its entirety, be warned, it’s a touch depressing:

October 1970. Sheltering from an autumn storm in the Cafe de la Fenice, I perused the newspapers; I learned of the death of Dos Passos: : “My ambition is to sing the Internationale”, Dos Passos used to say, as a young man; he was then the equal of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and Faulkner; Sartre considered him the best novelist of the time. From 1930 on Dos Passos opposed the “New Deal”; he considered the Second World War to be a catastrophe. “We can only regret that such an accomplished literary technician should have adopted such a narrow viewpoint and that the brilliant constellation of 1920 now shines so dimly …” (Herald Tribune, 29 September 1970). “In 1929, Dos Passos unleashed a virulent critique of capitalist society; his work had a considerable impact. The Second World War was to bring about a true conversion in the writer…. At the same time as he altered his political views, Dos Passos seemed to lose his creative powers.” (Le Figaro, 30 September 1970). Yesterday evening, on France-Inter, I listened to Le Masque et la Plume: “How can Ionesco still go on telling us about his death? He’s been dead for ten years.” I’m not very lucky with my friends who have advanced opinions.

Fascinating, that a writer’s talent could be so intertwined with his politics. Perhaps Dos Passos needed the anger given him by socialism in order to be a great writer, perhaps with the loss of one he lost the other, or perhaps his later books were simply less fashionable. Not having read them, I can’t entirely comment, but if anyone reads this and has read his later works I’d be interested in any thoughts they might have.

Rejoicing City That Dwelt Carelessly

Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos

I was introduced to John Dos Passos by Kerry’s blog Hungry like the Woolf, here. Before that, I’d heard the name, but wasn’t familiar with the work. Kerry piqued my interest, and a recent trip to New York seemed the perfect opportunity to give Dos Passos a try, starting with his 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer (published the same year as The Great Gatsby, but taking a very different approach to grappling with the issues of the day).

Manhattan Transfer is a panoramic novel, it starts in the late 1890s (not that this is made explicit, but to a contemporary reader it would have been obvious), and then sweeps on through around three decades of New York life. It seeks to show the reader the city as a film might, a sweeping vista in which all its life is made apparent and the metropolis’s intricate mechanisms are laid bare.

To an extent, it’s a fairly unsympathetic portrait. New York is a vast machine that processes people, absorbs them and shapes them – but without regard to their own hopes and fears. The city is a monstrous engine of capitalism, indifferent to the small lives of its citizens and driven by impersonal forces to its own blind ends. The novel was written at a time when socialism was a live force in American life, hard as that is to imagine now, and a socialist current runs through it with the workers’ struggle and the prospects for class revolution concerning several of the novel’s varied cast. Of course, revolution never happened, and as a naturalist novel it doesn’t arrive here either, some may dream of a better world but Manhattan Transfer doesn’t make that world seem all that attainable.

Stylistically, Manhattan Transfer is a little unusual. Each chapter opens with an indented impressionistic passage in a smaller font than the normal text. The following passages are the opening paragraphs of the novel, the first of the two properly should be in a six or eight point font but sadly I haven’t worked out how to achieve that in WordPress so I’m afraid the effect this has in the actual book is a bit reduced here:

Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds, spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bow as the ferry, skidding on the tide, crashes, gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly into the slip. Handwinches whirl with jingle of chains. Gates fold upwards, feet step out across the crack, men and women press through the manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the ferry-house, crushed and jostling like apples fed down a chute into a press.

The nurse, holding the basket at arm’s length as if it were a bedpan, opened the door to a big dry hot room with greenish distempered walls where in the air tinctured with smells of alcohol and iodoform hung writhing a faint sourish squalling from other baskets along the wall. As she set her basket down she glanced into it with pursed-up lips. The newborn baby squirmed in the cottonwool feebly like a knot of earthworms.

What’s noticeable in that first, indented, passage is that it’s not a classic piece of descriptive prose. Rather it’s a collage, a series of images which together create an impression. Here the result is fairly straightforward, in some chapters though it can take concentration to even work out what’s being described, the point isn’t accuracy, it’s sensation (but not to be fair sensationalism).

What’s also I think immediately noticeable is the strange compound words used in those two paragraphs. The novel is filled with them: orangerinds, manuresmelling, cottonwool. Words here mash together, sometimes to create an apparently more meaningful whole, but sometimes just colliding as if the sheer velocity of the prose has pushed them into each other. Equally, the imagery is often repulsive, inhuman. A newborn baby is like “a knot of earthworms”, men and women arriving on the ferry for their day’s work are like “apples fed down a chute into a press.” The whole effect is slightly dizzying, jarring, and that for me made this an often challenging read. The language is dense, clever, tricky in its deliberate ignoring of the normal rules of grammar (and indeed spelling, dialogue is often written as pronounced rather than as spelled). Kerry’s blog speaks to Dos Passos’s stylistic approach in some detail, so I won’t repeat that too much here, but I will say it means that I had to pay attention to read this novel, it requires a little dedication.

Manhattan Transfer is impressionistic in other senses too. Each chapter consists of a number of, often very short, passages dealing with different characters. Out of work men new to the city hoping to find work, ambitious lawyers, immigrants, actresses, Bowery bums, business tycoons, journalists, bankers, seamstresses, everyone is here. The novel dips into these lives a few paragraphs, rarely more than a couple of pages, at a time. Characters recur, their lives develop and sometimes intertwine, but overall the effect is of skimming from life to life with people meshing together as small cogs in a a huge city brimming with ambition, failure, potential, passion, despair, humanity.

There is a cost to this approach, characters’ internal voices are often extremely similar. Spoken dialogue varies a great deal (though often more in terms of dialect than content), but internal monologues not so much. Equally and inevitably, some characters are far more developed than others, many remaining essentially just a representative type. This isn’t really a character driven novel, and if one approaches it looking for acute psychological insight then that isn’t really here to be found.

But of course, that’s not the point. The individual this novel focuses on isn’t Jimmy Herf or Ellen Thatcher (to take the two most developed characters), it’s New York City itself in all its splendour and inhumanity. As a portrait of any given individual, this novel isn’t a great success (save perhaps for those two I just mentioned), as a portrait of a city and an age though, it is.

One of the advantages of Dos Passos’s huge cast is the number of viewpoints it affords us, from the Upper West Side to tenement apartments where upstairs neighbours carry out illegal abortions and snooping landladies mean young couples with no money can have no privacy at all. Money comes with societal expectations that control your life, poverty with a lack of opportunities that mean your fate is just as circumscribed. The only people in the novel who seem at all free are those who live on their own terms, without compromise, those who accept the city’s terms are bound by them and live for it rather than themselves. Even so, that breadth of viewpoints means we see the city’s rich and poor, the struggling middle classes, the upwardly and the downwardly mobile, we see it all.

At times, it’s rather funny, I particularly liked this conversation between some newly arrived immigrants:

‘Eh bien you like it this sacred pig of a country?” asked Marco.
‘Why not! I like it anywhere. It’s all the same, in France you are paid badly and live well; here you are paid well and live badly.’

There is part of me that thinks eighty years later that comment still holds up pretty well.

More importantly though, as this is not a comic novel, is the quality of the writing. Dos Passos can write. I’m quoting the following passage in full because it gives a good feel for Dos Passos’s style, but look out for the line “… the hunched shoulders of men asleep, faces crumpled like old newspapers pillowed on arms”, which I think is simply wonderful.

Joe Harland had slumped down in his chair until his head rested on his arms. Between his grimestiff hands his eyes followed uneasily the lines on the marbletop table. The gutted lunchroom was silent under the sparse glower of two bulbs hanging over the counter where remained a few pies under a bellglass, and a man in a white coat nodding on a tall stool. Now and then the eyes in his gray doughy face flicked open and he grunted and looked about. At the last table over were the hunched shoulders of men asleep, faces crumpled like old newspapers pillowed on arms. Joe Harland sat up straight and yawned. A woman blobby under a raincoat with a face red and purplish streaked like rancid meat was asking for a cup of coffee at the counter. Carrying the mug carefully between her two hands she brought it over to the table and sat down opposite him. Joe Harland let his head down onto his arms again.

Equally, this short passage packs a great deal into very little space, and with considerable elegance:

They had to change at Manhattan Transfer. The thumb of Ellen’s new kid glove had split and she kept rubbing it nervously with her forefinger. John wore a belted raincoat and a pinkishgray felt hat. When he turned to her and smiled she couldn’t help pulling her eyes away and staring out at the long rain that shimmered over the tracks.

There is a restless energy to Manhattan Transfer. In an excellent (and extremely well written in its own right) introductory essay by Jay McInerney, there is a comment that the characters are trying to seek the centre of the city, to find the heart of things, as summarised here by Ellen Thatcher on taking her job at a fashion magazine:

‘… what you want to do is make every reader feel like Johnny on the spot in the center of things.’
‘As if she were having lunch right here at the Algonquin.’
‘Not today but tomorrow,’ added Ellen.

The centre though is unattainable, indeed there isn’t one. There is just the city, a vast ant farm in which the individual is swallowed up, a machine in which each person is processed and absorbed. McInerney’s main criticism of the novel, a valid one, is that in showing how capitalism robs people of their humanity, their meaning, Dos Passos perhaps does the same thing. As he says: “The rapid-transit, discontinuous narrative brilliantly captures the pace of the city, the sense of brief, promiscuous contact with other lives. The metallically impersonal narrative voice carries the hard-edged din of the city at the same time that it keeps us at a distance from the residents; though it may swoop down from the smoky Manhattan skies from time to time to inhabit one of the characters, we are never long in the presence of a sympathetic consciousness. The danger with this method is that the victims of oppression are damned along with their chains.”

Manhattan Transfer is a difficult novel in some respects, I had to consciously push myself through it and it took me far longer to read than I expected. It comes together at the end, however, in a very rewarding fashion which for me really made that effort worthwhile. There are novels that are let down by their endings, and novels (like Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay) where the ending redeems the novel changing the experience from irritation to enjoyment. Manhattan Transfer never irritated (though Dos Passos does share Huxley’s fondness for dropping in bits of dialogue in untranslated foreign languages, a habit I dislike), but it wasn’t easy and if like me at times you find it hard going then it is rather marvellous to reach the end and find it brought together into a coherent artistic whole that as a completed work is intelligent and rewarding. It’s not flawless, but it is excellent for all that.

My final comment would be that if you are to read this, it may be worth just spending twenty minutes or so first reading up on early twentieth Century history on Wikipedia. I mentioned at the start of this blog entry that to a contemporary reader the period details would be obvious. To a modern reader that isn’t necessarily the case, and early on I got quite confused as to exactly when things were happening, what period I was actually in. A very basic grasp of what to a contemporary reader would have been common knowledge will help keep the chronology straight, this isn’t historical fiction with that genre’s helpful explication and Dos Passos didn’t seek to help out future readers whose recollections of to him recent events such as the Russian-Japanese war might perhaps be less than the novel assumes.

Manhattan Transfer