A label is half the battle

A Painter of Our Time, by John Berger

I’ve recently had to abandon two great books shortly after starting them. Long hours at work have killed my concentration and led to too little time to really get stuck in to serious (or even unserious) fiction.

Usually when I’m being killed at work I read pulp or sf. When you’re tired there’s a lot to be said for the security of a solid plot. This time though I had a craving for something different. Something challenging.

A little while back Verso Books kindly sent me two early John Berger’s for review. I don’t normally accept review books, but for John Berger I make an exception. I wasn’t sure I’d be up to the Berger any more than I’d been up to the Proust or the Farrell that I’d abandoned, but I’d had them a while and thought I’d try.

I wanted something to really engage with. I wanted to be forced to think (and not about work). I wanted to be made uncomfortable. I got all that. A Painter of Our Times is not an easy book. It’s not difficult to read. The language is lucid and skilful. The style is naturalistic. The challenge isn’t in how the book is written. The challenge is in its ideas.

Janos Lavin is a Hungarian artist living in London. It’s the early 1950s. Hungary is in turmoil. Janos is a dedicated communist, but has left Hungary behind to pursue his art. He is talented, but largely unrecognised and his work is out of fashion. The book opens with his friend John going to his studio. Lavin has vanished and John wants to find out why. He finds a journal filled with Lavin’s thoughts, and the book is that journal interspersed with John’s own comments and reflections on its contents.

Between Lavin’s own journal entries and John’s (usually longer) comments on Lavin’s life and the context of the entries a picture starts to form. Berger writes a portrait of Lavin: his work; his loves; his circle; and his struggle to reconcile his politics and his art.

Before he left Hungary Levin was a revolutionary. He fled, while others stayed and fought – in some cases sacrificing their own artistic ambitions in order to become servants of the new socialist state. Lavin believes in the socialist struggle. He is a committed communist. What though is he doing for communism while living in London making paintings that nobody wants to see?

That question runs right through this book. It is Lavin’s central dilemma. He is not troubled by his work not being popular. He’s comfortable with his own lack of success. His art though is not socialist art and he’s painfully aware that many in Hungary might even see it as bourgois.

The question Lavin faces then is what is the point of his art? For Lavin that question arises due to his politics, but for the reader it’s part of a larger question that this book asks. What is the point of art at all?

I’m at risk of making this sound dry and academic. It’s true that there are lengthy passages where Lavin writes about issues of Communist theory. To a modern reader much of this is as abstruse and as relevant as medieval theology. For all that though Berger isn’t a theoretician. Lavin convinces as a character. His problems with his wife, his varied relationships with his friends, all of this feels real.

At one point Lavin talks about how cubism lets the artist see from more than one perspective at once. How it allows an artist to show the hollow of a knee and the kneecap in the same painting. Berger does something similar here with Lavin. Through Lavin’s journal we see one perspective. Through his friend John’s comments we see another. A Painter of Our Time is in that sense a cubist novel.

Painter is also full of just plain good writing (unlike this sentence). I loved lines like these from a visit to a major collector’s country house:

We stood by the fireplace and made the usual kindling remarks.
…
It was a little like being shown round a rare garden: Sir Gerald standing in his pale grey suit beside each plant and knowing everything about it according to the catalogues;

Berger shines too in the actual depiction of painting as a craft. Here painting is not some act of inspiration. It’s work. Lavin’s journal entries show him grappling for months with his paintings. He encounters problems with his compositions. He finds that a choice of colour or line puts a painting out of balance. He discovers that one element seems untrue when next to others. Lavin pounds away month after month trying different approaches and combinations until he gets slowly to something he is actually happy with.

It is, quite simply, the finest depiction of the act of painting that I have ever read.

Lavin is aware that he isn’t a genius, though he doesn’t doubt that he’s good. He’s not the only painter in the book. He has two students: one a local butcher who paints in his spare time and the other a working class man he teaches at a local art school who shows genuine talent and soon starts to outsell Lavin himself. That student is categorised by critics as being one of the “New Young Realists”, and having a label to hang on his work helps sell it. Other more fashionable and successful artists also make their appearances.

None of them are geniuses. None of them are terrible either. The world Berger is showing here is one of talented artists working to do the best work they can according to their own visions. Perhaps the best reason to read this novel is the insight it shows into an artist’s life and work. Here Lavin writes in his journal about the importance of sketches:

A blank page of a sketch-book is a blank, white page. Make one mark on it, and and the edges of the pages are no longer simply where the paper was cut, they have become the borders of a microcosm. Make two marks on it of uneven pressure and the whiteness ceases to be whiteness and becomes opaque three-dimensional space that must be made less opaque and more and more lucid by every succeeding mark. That microcosm is filled with the potentiality of every proportion you have ever perceived or sensed. That space is filled with the potentiality of every form, sliding plane, hollow, point of contact, passage of separation you have ever set hand or eye on. And it does not stop even there, For, after a few more marks, there is air, there is pressure and therefore there is bulk and weight. And this scale is then filled with the potentiality of every degree of hardness, yieldingness, force of movement, activeness and passiveness that you have ever buried your head in or knocked it against.

The problem Lavin faces is one that he believes all artists of his time face. The world is being transformed by political struggles in which people are dying. In Africa and Asia people are starving. In Eastern Europe they are trying to create a new society and a new model of humanity. In London he paints landscapes and portraits rather than factories and workers’ collectives. How can he justify the luxury of painting what he wants? How can he justify the indulgence of art which expresses only his vision and which does nothing to advance the revolution?

Here he reflects shortly after finishing a major work:

I fill in the time. Only very seldom can we be sure what any one of our works communicates. So much lies behind each one. It is impossible for me to know exactly what The Games will mean for others. Anyway this will change. What is most striking about it today may seem irrelevant in twenty years’ time. This abundance of the artist’s intentions is what makes the problem of propaganda so complicated. Nevertheless, it is the problem of art of our time. There is one thing about myself of which I am sure: I am a modern painter, and I am so because I have lived all my life with the problem of propaganda – the problem of facing other men as a man. I would like to write about this some time. I know about it. But now we are going to the cinema.

I love that last line. Politics and art are all very well, but daily life doesn’t care much about either.

This is a novel which made me think. My wife asked me which side Lavin was on in the 1956 invasion. I don’t know. Berger here doesn’t provide much by way of answers. What’s the point of Art? Lavin has answers, but I’m not sure they satisfy him even though he says they do. At one point Lavin reflects:

The point from which politics starts for me is hunger. Nothing less.

I feel the same, and yet I consider art more important than politics. Does that mean I consider a Degas more important than a hungry child? Put like that, of course not. But would I take funding from the arts and transfer it to overseas aid? Probably not. What then are my real priorities? How can I justify them?

That’s what makes Berger so interesting. That’s what makes this challenging. I found myself thinking about my own political history and the choices I’ve made. I found myself thinking about what I consider important and whether what I value has value.

Lots of authors raise questions and explore answers. Berger does something more interesting. He raises questions and leaves the reader to explore answers. That’s about as challenging as it gets.

A Painter of Our Time

Keep cool, fool

The Real Cool Killers, by Chester Himes

I read (and wrote about, here) the first of Chester Himes’ Harlem detective novels back in March 2009. It was a larger than life portrait of 1950s Harlem that showed it as an absurdist abyss of poverty and violence. It was lively, funny and ultimately very angry. I liked it.

Himes didn’t just write genre fiction, in fact he didn’t even mostly write genre fiction, but it’s the Harlem detective novels for which he’s (not very well) remembered. That’s probably unfair, but serious works about the impact of racism on labour relations just aren’t as easy a sell as fast moving crime novels with oversized guns and frequently comic mayhem.

Well, it’s a year and a half later and here I am reading another of his genre novels, and I still haven’t read one of the serious ones. The funniest thing about The Real Cool Killers though is that for all it’s lurid excess and mordant humour it comes with a sucker punch. It’s hard hitting, exciting and grotesque but by the end of it all it makes real points about Harlem life. It’s a serious novel after all.

Here’s the setup. A white cola salesman named Galen is in a black bar in Harlem watching the locals dance to the jukebox. A black man takes exception to Galen’s presence and tries to cut his throat with a knife. The bartender protects Galen, and ends up cutting the knifeman’s arm off with a short-handled axe.

Galen leaves the bar, but outside gets chased down the street by another black man named Sonny who’s firing a pistol after him. Soon after, Galen is killed, shot dead in front of a teenage street gang called the Real Cool Moslems (none of whom are moslem). It looks like Galen was killed by Sonny, but Sonny’s pistol only fired blanks – he was high and looking to give someone a scare. That means there was at least a third person after Galen. It also means it really wasn’t Galen’s night.

By the time Harlem detectives Grave Digger and Coffin Ed turn up there’s a huge crowd gathered. Matters get out of hand with the teen gang. Coffin Ed opens fire and kills an unarmed gang member and shoots a bystander in the leg. It’s chaos, it’s Harlem in the 1950s and it sets the tone for a novel the entire story of which takes place in just one night.

It takes a while for the police to realise that Sonny’s gun wasn’t loaded, so when he escapes from custody they set up a dragnet over the whole area and start house to house searches for him. Nothing can get in or out. Meanwhile, Grave Digger carries out his own investigation using his local contacts and street knowledge. He has to work alone. Coffin Ed is under suspension for his two shootings and it turns out that might be for the best because as Grave Digger digs deeper he starts to realise that Coffin Ed’s own daughter may be somehow involved.

I have to admit, I rather groaned when I found out that Coffin Ed’s daughter might be involved. Even in the 1950s it must already have been a cliché. Thankfully it’s the only one and it’s at least used well.

The novel follows two main strands. One is Coffin Ed kicking down doors and beating up anyone who might know anything, determined to find out what went down. The other follows the Real Cool Moslems – black teenagers who dress up as fake arabs and who luck into hiding Sonny after he gets away from the police. Both strands get steadily darker as the night goes on. Coffin Ed finds out that there were good reasons for Galen to have enemies. Sonny finds that he might have been better off in police custody than the gang’s as their leader Sheik starts thinking of ways to amuse himself with his captive.

This is the opposite of the traditional cosy crime novel. Here the criminals aren’t cold blooded, they’re hyped up on drugs, furious or just plain malicious for the sake of it. They act on impulse and try to cover up afterwards and generally they’re not particularly competent. Grave Digger too is no Sherlock Holmes. He’s not stupid but his way of finding out whodunnit mostly involves beating people up until they tell him what they know. The whole picture is one of savage brutality and casual violence. The only white faces present are the police and the occasional visitor from outside Harlem come to enjoy an illicit thrill that they can’t get back in their part of town. Here, a white club goer complains about Grave Digger roughing up a witness in front of him, and Grave Digger responds:

“I’m just a cop,” Grave Digger said thickly. “If you white people insist on coming up to Harlem where you force colored people to live in vice-and-crime-ridden slums, it’s my job to see that you are safe.”

Grave Digger is no politer to other black men. Later that night he returns to the diner where Galen’s evening began. A couple of seats are cleared for him. The men previously in those seats object until they realise they’re dealing with a cop.

Both rose with alacrity, picked up their glasses and vacated the stools, grinning at Grave Digger obsequeiously.
“Don’t show me your teeth,” Grave Digger snarled. “I’m no dentist. I don’t fix teeth. I’m a cop. I’ll knock your teeth out.”
The men doused their grins and slunk away.

Grave Digger spends the whole novel angry. What’s fuelling that anger though is something more than the lies he’s told and the ugliness of what led to Galen’s death. What really makes Grave Digger angry is Harlem itself. It’s a place born of inequality, a place where he’s assured by someone that Galen wouldn’t have been killed for sleeping with a man’s wife because sleeping with a white man doesn’t count as infidelity – it’s just an easy way to bring some more money into the family home. Harlem is the zoo and the whites are keepers or visitors, all of them wondering why the animals behave so badly while making sure they don’t get out of their cages.

As the novel reached the end, the pointlessness of it all became inescapable. This is a book in which a fair number of people die and in which a lot of others go down for some serious time. It’s all meaningless. It’s just another night in Harlem and that’s the sucker punch I talked about at the opening of this blog entry. Everything that’s happens during the long Harlem night is exciting, it’s hardboiled, but it’s also futile and ugly and Himes wants the reader to know that. As dawn breaks the tone shifts and it’s suddenly apparent that all this adventure adds up to is some ruined lives and some ended ones. Crime novels are exciting to read, but Himes wants the reader to know that living in one isn’t nearly as entertaining.

Uptown in Harlem, the sun was shining on the same drab scene it illuminated every other morning at eleven o’clock. No one missed the few expendable colored people being held on various charges in the big new granite skyscraper jail on Centre Street that had replaced the old New York City tombs.

The Real Cool Killers

Its edge was bright as new chrome.

Burning Chrome, by William Gibson

William Gibson was made famous by his 1984 novel Neuromancer. Before that though he was already well known on the SF scene, and he’d had a number of short stories published.

1986 saw those short stories gathered together into one volume, Burning Chrome (also the title of one of the short stories). It’s an interesting collection to read today. Gibson’s short stories aren’t as good as his novels, but they are interesting historical documents and there is a certain pleasure to be had in seeing the seeds of the ideas that would later prove so influential when put in novel form.

The first story, Johnny Mnemonic, is probably the most famous of the collection, due to a frankly terrible film adaptation starring Keanu Reeves. Here’s the first couple of sentences from it, which give a good idea as to the style:

I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy.

Johnny Mnemonic is set in the milieu that would later be used for Neuromancer, and indeed Molly Zero who is a key character in Neuromancer makes her debut here. Already there’s casual violence, criminality and interestingly a brand reference – Adidas. In Gibson’s future brands matter and this will prove a recurring theme in these stories and in his work generally (most notably in the relatively recent Pattern Recognition). Gibson’s future was consumerist, and writing this in 2010 on that front he looks pretty accurate.

Johnny Mnemonic and Burning Chrome itself are both essentially crime stories. The characters may be hackers or have surgically altered brains, but in the end what they do and how they live would be recognisable to Chandler. These stories are fun and they’re interesting as a demonstration of how Gibson’s ideas were developing, but they’re not the best in the collection. The best oddly enough are those least typical of his later work.

In Fragments of a Hologram Rose a sleepless man contemplates a failed relationship and the debris of it remaining in his apartment and his memory. Published back in 1977 it’s a strangely elegaic work, about the impossibility of really knowing another person and the unreliability of recollection. There are elements of what’s to come later (“In the bedroom, Parker prods the brushed-aluminum face of his Sendai Sleep-Master.” – there’s those brand names again), but the mood is very different to what was to follow.

Other stories are more straightforwardly traditional SF. Hinterland is a solid tale of humanity’s first contact (of sorts) and of how alien aliens could be. It’s good stuff, but it’s not genre defining. Many feature what will later be almost standard Gibsonian elements such as capsule hotels, temperfoam slabs for beds. hostile corporate extractions and an awful lot of chrome (seriously, a lot of chrome). Again, most are fun but if it wasn’t for his later works these wouldn’t be remembered now.

There are exceptions though, and this collection includes what is probably my favourite story by Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum. Here’s the first paragraph:

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. While I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of an eye. There as that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot.

This is nothing like the other stories. Here there are none of the femme-fatales Gibson is so fond of (a lot of the stories feature women seducing men to get what they want then betraying them, Chandler again) and there’s no vision of the future. Well, that’s not quite right. There is a vision of the future but it’s not Gibson’s. It’s a previous generation’s vision of the future which now seems both absurd and vaguely threatening.

The Gernback Continuum is the story of a photographer in the then modern day who is given an assignment to photograph surviving remnants of the futuristic architecture of the 1930s. As he does so, he starts to see it around him for real – as if he’s falling into the shining future that was once imagined.

When I first read this story as a teenager I took it literally, as a tale of an alternate timeline intersecting with ours. It’s not though. Reading it as an adult it’s much more interesting than that. The photographer has clearly lost his grip on reality. He’s seeing the articles he’s read about his subject matter and their illustrations as if they were real. He’s seeing a future that never happened, something people once thought would be in place of the dull reality of what is.

It’s a great story, and there’s a huge irony in having it here. The Gernsback Continuum is a paean (and challenge) to an outdated form of science fiction and because it’s not about an imagined future (but about memories of a future that really was once imagined) it’s not dated at all. The other stories though feature Soviets in space, cold war politics continued, and now they’re as quaint as Edwardians with their dreams of frock-coats on Venus.

The only story in this collection which isn’t now a historical artefact is the one about how science fiction futures can become irrelevant and dated. There’s something splendid in that.

Otherwise, Gibson’s prose isn’t always stellar but it definitely has its moments. Gibson isn’t a master of dialogue and his characters are generally straightforward (though that’s often an issue with short stories). Gibson, like most science fiction writers, isn’t primarily interested in describing inner states.

What Gibson is interested in and where his real talent lies is creating and describing worlds. He writes in one story of “legless beggars with wooden bowls under animated holograms advertising French software”, and for me that captures the essence of the cyberpunk genre in one phrase. That right there is a whole brief literary movement in a part sentence.

Elsewhere, I liked a description of a holographic business sign being displayed “over a display of dead flies wearing fur coats of gray dust.” Gibson reminds us that the future is born of the present, and therefore unlike the perfection glimpsed in The Gernsback Continuum wherever we’re going will be much like now. It may have new machines, new vices and new crimes but it will still have rich and poor and in the end what will really matter will not be the technology but the people using it, and they will be much as we are now and much as we always were.

Gibson isn’t a psychological writer, but he doesn’t forget the human element. I think that’s a large part of why his fiction is outliving its period specifics.

Finally, while the part-sentence above encapsulated cyberpunk for me, there is one phrase which is generally seen as being the essence of the genre. It’s a phrase so classic that I used a variant of it for the title of my last blog entry on Gibson. It appears here for the first time, a harbinger of a literary wake up call that would shake the moribund SF scene of the late 1970s and introduce something new and much more interesting: “the street finds its own uses for things.”

Gibson’s stories here draw on a range of different traditions, some more successfully than others. The weakest are the most traditional, the best the least. In between are a handful where Gibson experiments with fusing crime genre concepts onto SF and it was those experiments which helped give birth to the cyberpunk genre (along obviously with writers such as Rucker and Sterling). This is where it began. If you’re not interested in what followed then the only story here worth seeking out is The Gernsback Continuum. If you are though it’s a fascinating insight into the shape of things then to come.

Burning Chrome