Passages: Pablo Neruda

Here is your early Valentines Day poem, courtesy of Pablo Neruda and his book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair:

In my sky at twilight you are like a cloud

and your form and color are the way I love them.

You are mine, mine, woman with sweet lips

and in your life my infinite dreams live.

The lamp of my soul dyes your feet,

my sour wine is sweeter on your lips,

oh reaper of my evening song,

how solitary dreams believe you to be mine!

You are mine, mine, I go shouting it to the afternoon’s

wind, and the wind hauls on my widowed voice.

Huntress of the depths of my eyes, your plunder

stills your nocturnal regard as through it were water.

You are taken in the net of my music, my love,

and my nets of music are wide as the sky.

My soul is born on the shore of your eyes of mourning.

In your eyes of mourning the land of dreams begins.

We should just rename Valentines Day as Neruda Day and be done with it. Nobody writes love poetry like the Chilean maestro. He is the bard of what comes after the first night together, when the doors are all being opened and the wonders of the two of you are ready to be explored. It’s the kind of love that can burn out quickly or, if you are lucky, reduce to a long simmer that lasts for years, flaring up at unexpected and delightful times.

This is from a poem in The Captain’s Verses:

Lovely one,

with a nest of copper entangled

on your head, a nest

the color of dark honey

where my heart burns and rests,

lovely one.

Lovely one,

your eyes are too big for your face,

your eyes are too big for the earth.

There are countries, there are rivers,

in your eyes,

my country is in your eyes,

I walk through them,

they light the world

through which I walk,

lovely one.

There are writers whose works can make you feel smarter, sexier, funnier, stronger, better, more loveable and more worthy of love. Neruda is one of them. You should have at least one of his books and know at least some of his poems by heart. If you don’t, these two books are great places to begin.

Passages: Fritz Leiber

From “Bazaar of the Bizarre,” a short story by Fritz Leiber, collected in Swords Against Death:

“The Devourers are the most accomplished merchants in all the many universes — so accomplished, indeed, that they sell only trash. There is a deep necessity in this, for the Devourers must occupy all their cunning in perfecting their methods of selling and so have not an instant to spare in considering the worth of what they sell. Indeed, they dare not concern themselves with such matters for a moment, for fear of losing their golden touch — and yet such are their skills that their wares are utterly irresistible, indeed the finest wares in all the many universes — if you follow me?”

Fafhrd looked hopefully toward Sheelba, but since the latter did not this time interrupt with some pithy summation, he nodded to Ningauble.

Ningauble continued, his seven eyes beginning to weave a bit, judging from the movements of the seven green glows. “As you might readily deduce, the Devourers possess all the mightiest magics garnered from the many universes, whilst their assault groups are led by the most aggressive wizards imaginable, supremely skilled in all methods of battling, whether it be by the wits, with the feelings, or with the beweaponed body.

“The method of the Devourers is to set up shop in a new world and first entice the bravest and the most adventuresome and the supplest- minded of its people — who have so much imagination that with just a touch of suggestion they themselves do most of the work of selling themselves.

“When these are safely ensnared, the Devourers proceed to deal with the remainder of the population: meaning simply that they sell and sell and sell! — sell trash and take good money and even finer things in exchange.”

Ningauble sighed windily and a shade piously. “All this is very bad, My Gentle Son,” he continued, his eye-glows weaving hypnotically in his cowl, “but naturally enough in universes administered by such gods as we have — natural enough and perhaps endurable. However” — he paused — “there is worse to come! The Devourers want not only the patronage of all beings in all universes, but — doubtless because they are afraid someone will someday raise the ever-unpleasant question, of the true worth of things — they want all their customers reduced to a state of slavish and submissive suggestibility, so that they are fit for nothing whatever but to gawk and buy the trash the Devourers offer for sale. This means of course that eventually the Devourers’ customers will have nothing wherewith to pay the Devourers for their trash, but the Devourers do not seem to be concerned with this eventuality. Perhaps they feel that there is always a new universe to exploit. And perhaps there is!”

“Monstrous!” Fafhrd commented. “But what do the Devourers gain from these furious commercial sorties, all this mad merchandising? What do they really want?”

Ningauble replied, “The Devourers want only to amass cash and to raise little ones like themselves to amass more cash and they want to compete with each other at cash-amassing. (Is that coincidentally a city, do you think, Fafhrd? Cashamass?) And the Devourers want to brood about their great service to the many universes — it is their claim that servile customers make the most obedient servants for the gods — and to complain about how the work of amassing cash tortures their minds and upsets their digestions. Beyond this, each of the Devourers also secretly collects and hides away forever, to delight no eyes but his own, all the finest objects and thoughts created by true men and women (and true wizards and true demons) and bought by the Devourers at bankruptcy prices and paid for with trash or — this is their ultimate preference — with nothing at all.”

Early in his career, Fritz Leiber received the benediction of no less a luminary than H.P. Lovecraft, in an unsent letter found after his death:

Young Fritz (twenty-five, a University of Chicago graduate, and entering his father’s profession) has one of the keenest minds I have ever encountered . . . His understanding of the profound emotions behind the groping for cosmic concepts surpasses that of almost anyone else with whom I’ve discussed the matter; and his own tales and poems, while not without marks of the beginner, shew infinite insight and promise.

Not a bad start for a writer of imaginative literature! Too bad the acquaintance was cut short, for Lovecraft would have benefitted immensely from prolonged contact with Leiber’s prose, which right from the start was several cuts above his peers and kept developing right up to Leiber’s last works.

One of my favorite opening passages in any story is this sixty-word rule breaker from “Gonna Roll the Bones,” a 1968 novella about dicing with Death that should be the basis for Tim Burton’s next animation project:

Suddenly Joe Slattermill knew for sure he’d have to get out quick or else blow his top and knock out with the shrapnel of his skull the props and patches holding up his decaying home, that was like a house of big wooden and plaster and wallpaper cards except for the huge fireplace and ovens and chimney across the kitchen from him.

As a bonus, the story also has one of my favorite closing lines:

Then he turned and headed straight for home, but he took the long way, around the world.

Leiber’s straight science fiction work, such as The Wanderer, has dated pretty badly. His metier was pure fantasy in all its modes, and his best work of all was in heroic fantasy, for which Leiber himself coined the term “sword and sorcery.”

In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, when it seemed the bulk of fantasy writing was either a Conan knockoff or a slavish Tolkien imitation, the stories of Fritz Leiber were in a class by themselves. Urbane and witty where so much heroic fantasy is broad and clunky — only Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories come close to matching it — Leiber’s work remains a lodestar for writers like Neil Gaiman, who owe him a debt of thanks for showing how even a cootie-laden genre like sword and sorcery can stretch to encompass the humor and alertness of the best writing.

As the above passage shows, Leiber also had a taste for amusingly barbed satire — something not often seen in such a humorless genre.

Though he worked in a genre that sprang more or less complete from the forehead of Robert E. Howard, Leiber’s heroes were conceived as a human-scaled alternative to Conan and the platoon of brawny supermen who followed in his train. Fafhrd, a strapping northern barbarian, and the Gray Mouser, his diminutive comrade-in-arms, were instantly more believable and engaging than the standard run of fantasy heroes. Leiber took care to show their personalities forming and developing over the course of the seven Nehwon books, and one of the pleasures of Swords Against Death (the second in the series) is Leiber’s readiness to pause for interesting character touches. Late in “The Jewels in the Forest,” after a particularly vicious battle with a band of competing treasure-hunters, Fafhrd comes down from his berserker rage by laughing, then weeping over the blood he has shed; the Mouser, meanwhile, feels “worried, ironic, and slightly sick,” aware that his own emotional reaction will not come for some time. Imagine Conan experiencing such complex feelings after a bout of violence.

Their travels across the alternate universe of Nehwon always took them back to the fetid city of Lankhmar, a superb creation in its own right. Though the darkened streets and alleys read as an overlay of all the great, dangerous metropolises of history — think Rome at its most decadent, or Constantinople during the reign of Justinian — Lankhmar was at bottom a lovingly detailed cousin of Manhattan, squatting next to a great salt marsh passable only by an elevated road, choked by smogs and smokes, with streets and place-names that amusingly echoed and inverted their equivalents in the Big Apple. Read a couple of the Nehwon volumes (all but one of them were short story collections, which best suited Leiber’s muse) and you could quickly locate Cheap Street, the Plaza of Dark Delights (derived from Times Square in its viciously seedy, pre-tourist days) and Thieves House, with its front door always left ajar to taunt anyone foolish enough to attempt unauthorized entry.

Most . . . well, pretty much all heroic fantasy reads like the work of teenagers and boy-men whose experience of the world runs the gamut from ogling at the shopping mall to copping a few feels at the high school dance. Leiber, son of a Shakespearean actor who led his own touring company, had clearly been around and it showed in his fiction — particularly his characterization of the Gray Mouser, whose dealings with women ventured into pretty louche territory for a genre where the apex of sexuality was Conan yelling for more mead as he swatted the backsides of barmaids. Leiber was also an accomplished swordsman, which knowledge he put to good use in the fight scenes.

Leiber’s Nehwon stories are also unique in the range of moods they encompass. The adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser cover everything from straightforward swashbuckling action to horror to slapstick comedy. Swords in the Mist, the third Nehwon collection, opens with a straight-up chiller called “The Cloud of Hate,” then takes a left turn into “Lean Times in Lankhmar,” a cross-breed of Robert E. Howard and Bertolt Brecht, in which the heroes part ways for separate careers when their money runs out. The Mouser becomes a hired thug for a local crime boss, while Fafhrd cuts his hair, forswears wordly goods and becomes a servant to the priest of a lower-tier god called Issek of the Jug. Though Issek has previously been pretty much a laughingstock deity, Fafhrd’s charismatic devotion (and the fighting skills he uses against shakedown artists) raise Issek’s stock in the public eye, bringing more donations and making it inevitable that the crime boss will demand his own cut — thereby bringing the two companions into conflict.

“Bazaar of the Bizarre,” the concluding story in Swords Against Death, was Leiber’s personal favorite and it’s easy to see why: within the space of a single short story, Leiber packs in social satire, weird fantasy, swordplay and comedy. As it happens, I agree with him, and while I would recommend the story to anyone wanting to venture into Lankhmar for the first time, I certainly wouldn’t recommend stopping there. If there’s one American writer badly overdue for rediscovery, it’s Fritz Leiber.

Passages: Alan Lomax

From The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax, an account of the folklorist’s song-hunting travels through the American South. This passage is about the field hollers sung by convicts in levee camps and work gangs:

In this anonymous world of the pentientiary, every man is given a distinctive moniker that ticks him off in an apt and sometimes cruel way. This nickname, once slapped on as a joke by a guard or another inmate, can last as long as the convict’s sentence, even for life. A fine-looking young mulatto might be teasingly nicknamed “Yaller Gal” and then have to fight off sexual attacks for the rest of his sentence. Our friend Tangle Eye was painfully cross-eyed, but completely accustomed to the guards yelling, “Come up, old Tangle Eye.” The Texas singer James Baker was christened Iron Head after a live oak fell on him and he never lost a stroke of his ax or a phrase of his chopping song. The great Leadbelly won his name because of his fabled endurance in the fields as “number-one man in the number-one gang in the Texas pen.”

We set down a sheaf of these fanciful black convict names, each one a humorous or a witty assertion of the deathless singularity of an individual in the seething anonymity of the prison farms. Each nickname helped to shield a personality from extinction, maintaining the man’s privacy by keeping his real name out of prison currency. For these hard-pressed exiles, all dressed alike in striped clothing and herded like animals by guards on horseback, the nicknames asserted and underscored their identities in the darkness of the penitentiary. Moreover, each man also had his own self-composed, self-identifying musical signature.

You could hear these peronal songs — sometimes no more than a few notes long — coming from far away across the fields. These so-called hollers, which belonged to the same family as the levee-camp songs, were pitched high out of a wide-open throat, to be heard from far off. A convict, by raising his holler from time to time during the long day of toil, could announce his existence and fend off the crushing anonymity of prison anonymity. His signature song voiced his individual sorrows and feelings. By this means, he located himself in the vast fields of the penitentiary, where the rows were often a mile long and a gang of men looked like insects crawling over the green carpet of the crops. Listening to a holler, some con would say, “Lissen at old Bull bellerin’ over there — he must be fixin to run” or “That’s old Tangle Eye yonder. He’s callin on his woman again.”

My father and I recorded scores of these old “field hollers’ or “old corn songs” or “levee camp hollers,” as they were variously called. They were thickest in the river-bottom country, south and west of Memphis all the way into the river lands of Texas. Most of those we found in the Southeast had been imported from the Delta. you can recognize the Delta hollers because they have have a shape different from the majority of black folk songs, which tend to be short-phrased, to conform to a steady beat, and to be performed by groups. By contrast, Delta hollers are usually minory solos, sung recitative-style in free rhythms, with long embellished phrases, many long-held notes, lots of slides and blue notes, and emphasis on shifts of vocal color. They are impossible to notate and very difficult to sing.

As a youngster, I tried to sing whatever we recorded, with varying success, of course, but I could never do a “holler” to my own satisfaction. Then came a moment when a holler spontaneously burst out of me. It was the evening of the day I had just been inducted into the army. On this first endless and awful twenty-four hours in a huge army reception center, when I had been yelled at, examined, put down, poked at, handled like a yearling in a chute, I drew KP. It was a sixteen-hour assignment, in which we KP’s helped to set the tables for several hundred me three times a day and then clean up afterward. Along about eight o’clock that evening my feet seemed to be on fire, every muscle in my body was complaining, stinging perspiration was running into my eyes, and my arms were deep in greasy, boiling dishwater. I had never been so miserable in all my life, and there were still two hours to go. At that moment, without thinking, I let loose with a Mississippi holler. Loud and clear, my levee-camp complaint rang through that hellish army kitchen:

Well, I asked my captain what time of day,

What time of day?

And he looked at me, good pardner,

Threw his watch away,

Ohhhhhh, threw his watch away.

A couple of guys looked up, but thank God most of the others were too unhappy to notice. I went on hollering and the sound got better. I got to feeling good. All those years and finally those Delta blue notes were coming out of me. Suddenly, the black KP sergeant appeared. I kept whooping and washing dishes. I felt sure I’d be condemned to another day of KP. But all the black sergeant did before he walked off was to say in a kind of nice way, “Hey, man, you sound like you from down home.”

Among blues fans, or anyone with an appreciation for American music, Alan Lomax is an irreplaceable figure. He was the first to record great musicians like Leadbelly, Son House and Muddy Waters, who as soon as he heard himself singing, decided “I can do this!” and headed for Chicago to make his name as the king of electric blues.

That’s part of the story, anyway. I recently acquired two recent books that shed new light, not all of it flattering, on Lomax’s work. Lost Delta Found claims that Lomax relied heavily on the work of a team of black scholars from Fisk University, only to downplay their contributions when he wrote his ow recollections of his song-hunting excursions. America Over the Water is Shirley Collins’s account of her romance with Lomax, which led to her accompanying him on a song-hunting trip that culiminated in the first recordings of “Mississippi” Fred McDowell.

Lost Delta Found apparently accuses Lomax of all but burying the work of competing scholars in order to keep himself in the spotlight. I’ll have to finish the book before I try to reach any conclusions.

But while I’m perfectly ready to accept the idea that Lomax may have been a bit of a shitweasel in his dealings with others, a check of some of the comments on the book’s Amazon page leave me wondering if he isn’t going to be the new Sam Phillips. Though Phillips, the head of Sun Studio in Memphis, was a blues nut in love with the sound of Howlin Wolf, there’s been an apocryphal phrase attributed to him — “If I could find a white boy who sings like a nigger, I’d be a millionaire” — that is a vile slander on the man’s character. A man who could listen to Wolf and say “This is where the spirit of man endures” would never say such a thing.

Was Lomax a credit hog? Could be. Is the story more complicated than that? Could be. For now, all I can say is that the man whose uncondescending love for blues and black American culture suffuses every page of The Land Where the Blues Began – a love he communicated to me, back in the early 1990s, sending me back to the blues after a long time away — deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Passages: Joan Didion

From “Rock of Ages,” a short piece in Joan Didion’s 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

Alcatraz Island is covered with flowers now: orange and yellow nasturtiums, geraniums, sweet grass, blue iris, black-eyed Susans. Candytuft springs up through the cracked concrete in the exercise yard. Ice plant carpets the rusting catwalks. “WARNING! KEEP OFF! U.S. PROPERTY,” the sign still reads, big and yellow and visible for perhaps a quarter of a mile, but since March 21, 1963, the day they took the last thirty or so men off the island and sent them to prisons less expensive to maintain, the warning has been only pro forma, the gun turrets empty, the cell blocks abandoned. It is not an unpleasant place to be, out there on Alcatraz with only the flowers and the wind and a bell buoy moaning and the tide surging through the Golden Gate, but to like a place like that you have to want a moat.

I sometimes do, which is what I am talking about here.

Didion’s book was published a year before a group of American Indians occupied the island for 18 months in order to make a statement about self-determination and Indian titles to unused federal lands. If she’d gone afterward, she would have seen what I did: red spray-painted fists making a power salute on many of the walls, painted over white but with the red fist still showing through.

The first Didion collection I read was The White Album, which has some excellent pieces in it — I particularly recommend “Bureaucrats,” which shows the arrogance of California engineers conceiving “diamond lanes” for traffic, those horrors that would later be inflicted on New Jersey — but too many of the pieces seemed to justify the criticisms I’d always heard about her: chiefly the jittery self-regard, the equation of personal problems with greater public malaise, as though an inability to find someone to do decent bathroom grout means the gyre is widening and the center of civilization will not hold. There was also the essay about her migraines, which seemed to go beyond self-parody.

I put Didion aside for a few years and came back to her via Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I picked it up because I’d been interested in the prison island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay ever since I saw the film Birdman of Alcatraz as a boy. The passage above, and the sentence about sometimes wanting to live in a place with a moat, not only summed up why I’d always been fascinated by the idea of a fortress island in the middle of one of the world’s busiest ports, it also showed me I was probably a little more simpatico with Joan Didion than I might have thought.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains one of my favorite books; together with George Orwell’s selected essays, it is essential reading for anyone who writes nonfiction. Though it shares many preoccupations with The White Album, I think of it as more probing, less glib – The Day of the Locust, where The White Album is more like Hotel California. 

Passages: Jacob Bronowski

One of my early intellectual heroes was Jacob Bronowski, whose magnificent series The Ascent of Man aired in the early 1970s on PBS. (It and the original series of James Burke’s Connections rank high on my list of reasons why public television remains valuable and should be defended.) In that pre-VCR era, I was glad to discover that the book drawn from the series was pretty much a direct transcript, which changes made mostly to compensate for the absence of a clarifying image. It remains a great introduction to the works of this remarkable writer and philosopher.

Years ago, during my first visit to Los Angeles, I puzzled some friends by saying the landmark I most wanted to see was the Watts Towers. That’s because one of the segments of The Ascent of Man, “Grain in the Stone,” dealt with the development of architecture through the ages; after a dazzling voyage across empires of time that took in everything from the workmanlike Roman arch to the gaudy splendor of the Gothic cathedrals, Bronowski ended with the Towers and the story of their builder, Simon Rodia. Watching the show as a young teenager, I promised myself I would visit those unlikely monuments as soon as possible. A decade or so later, I was able to make good on that promise, and when I did, I could hear Bronowski’s words again, clear and strong as ever.

There is a philistine strain in many otherwise intelligent people that holds science accountable for atrocities such as the mechanized savagery practiced by Nazi Germany. Bronowski, with great eloquence and a strain of poetry that belied cliches about scientific dryness, defended science against the charge and went on to argue, commandingly, that the endlessly questioning and probing nature of science defies such evils — that it is, in fact, humanity’s best defense against them. In the tremendously moving close to the series, Bronowski stood by a pond behind the Auschwitz death camp and spoke of the real source of the dehumanization that made Auschwitz possible. Via one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers, you can watch the YouTube link and see it for yourself.

The need for uncertainty was a thread binding all of Bronowski’s writings and speeches. He returned to the theme many times, often with great epigrammatic wit:

“It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.”

“Has there ever been a society that died of dissent? There have been several that died of conformity in our lifetime.”

“Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.”

“Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.”

“Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.”

One of the most disturbing books I own is an old catalogue of torture implements used by the Spanish Inquisition — part of a touring exhibition sponsored by human rights groups. In it you will find out about such devices and techniques as the twisting stork, the expanding pear, squassation and the Judas Cradle, as well as the specific heresies and offenses they punished. I’m not suggesting you seek it out — in fact, you might want to cherish your ignorance. There have been a few occasions when I wondered if I was better off knowing exactly what the inquisitors did.

But these awful tools are the fruits of certainty, forged and tested in an era when the bodies of men were viewed simply as the envelopes containing their souls, and that the cleansing of the soul (and, by extension, state and society) justified the infliction of horrible pain and injuries on the fleshy container.

The devices in the catalogue show torture at its most grotesquely refined, but they are based on brutishly simple principles that can be carried out with the means at hand. We see the principles at work in the appalling photographs from Abu Ghraib; we hear echoes of their justification in the words of the lickspittle pundits who prate about “moral clarity” and justify torture by telling us that ideas about human rights and values are only conveniences, ready to be tossed over the side in times of peril. Maybe we’ll go back and clean them off and restore them to use when times are better. Maybe we won’t.

“Faith” is an interesting word. It implies that one is willing to accept something on the basis of no evidence beyond the fact that many people before you have also accepted it. There can be no questions about faith, which is why I put my faith in questions.

So did Jacob Bronowski. That’s why his work is more relevant than ever, at a time when the people in charge of America are unwilling to accept any questions, or allow any questioning of their own certainties.

Passages: Robert Hughes

From Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays On Art and Artists by Robert Hughes. This is from his short piece on the Spanish artist Francisco Goya:

[Goya's] The Second of May is a fine painting but not a great one, renovated Baron Gros with its heroic rocking horse but without the French etiquette of violence, and more abandoned in expression. The Third of May is not renovated anything. It is truly modern and its newness seems to have ensured that, although it was a state commission, it remained in storage for the first forty years of its life. The surface is ragged, for Goya is suppressing his fluency in the interests of a harsher address to the eye. Occasionally the signs of that fluency break through; one is the saber and sheath of the French soldier closest to us — a mere scribble, but what a scribble, of burnt umber, lightened by a swipe of yellow that begins in a round splotch at the tip of the sheath and swings right up the form. Elsewhere the improvised bluntness of his painting is tragically expressive, even — or perhaps especially — down to the blood on the ground, which is a dark alizarin crimson put on thick and then scraped back with a palette knife, so that its sinking into the grain of the canvas mimics the drying of blood itself: it looks crusty, dull and scratchy, just like real blood smeared on a surface by the involuntary twitches of a dying body. The wounds that disfigure the face of the man on the ground can’t be deciphered fully as wounds, but as signs of trauma embodied in paint they are inexpressibly shocking: their imprecision conveys the sense of something too painful to look at, of the aversion of one’s own eyes.

Signs of past art are there . . . above all, there is the man about to be shot, whom we saw dragging the Mameluke backward off his horse on May 2. There he now stands, facing martyrdom in his clean white shirt, throwing out his arms in a gesture that irresistibly recalls the Crucifixion. It is a gesture of indescribable power: it takes the spread arms of the passive crucified victim and makes them active, a flinging out of life in despair and defiance. Indeed, he has a face — coarse, swarthy, dilated in its last moment of vitality. All his fellow victims have faces too. By rendering them as notional portraits — the faces of the pueblo, the Spanish people — Goya grants the living their individuality right up to the edhe of the mass grave. The landscape, however, is featureless: a bare hill and bare rocks. And so are the soldiers, whose row of backs still strikes you as the first truly modern image of war because it is the first to register the anonymity, the machinelike efficiency of oppression. Nothing personal.

As an art critic, Robert Hughes was the right man at the right time — the time being the go-go 1980s, when high rollers flooded the art market with cash as they searched for the Next Big Thing to invest in. All kinds of stumblebums and phonies were being hailed as new giants: Julian Schnabel and his canvasses encrusted with pieces of broken crockery; Jeff Koons and his kitsch that dared you to call it kitsch; “graffiti artist” Jean-Michel Basquiat and his childish scrawlings. Hughes strode into this weird barnyard and immediately set feathers flying with his highly readable combination of pugnacious writing grounded in thorough research and a lifetime of interest in the greatest artists. As another writer once said of Dwight Macdonald, Hughes was very much a rebel in defense of tradition.

He was also a hard-living, well-traveled man, as his newly published memoir Things I Didn’t Know apparently makes clear. Judging from the interviews, Hughes may well be the only man in history who can claim to have caught the clap off Jimi Hendrix — albeit with Hughes’s first wife, a sexual adventuress in the swinging sixties, acting as intermediary.

Though I am usually eager to read anything Hughes publishes, I have no interest in this book. For one thing, who needs a memoir when Hughes’s own art criticism has already put us in touch with his life and personality? His long study Goya, his attention-getting survey of modern art called The Shock of the New, his history of the founding of his native Australia, The Fatal Shore, and his combined travelogue/art history lecture/ political rumination Barcelona are where the interesting and important Hughes can be found. 

Passages: Robert Bolt

From Robert Bolt’s 1960 play A Man for All Seasons:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

I trust the contemporary relevance of this passage needs no explanation. Principles exist to guide us when times are tough. That members of Congress should be “negotiating” with the President over what kinds of torture are permissible — and that the “negotiations” should prove to be sham posturing on the part of all participants — is disgusting and demeaning to us all.

Passages: Karle Wilson Baker

From The Garden of the Plynck, a 1920 novel by Karle Wilson Baker:

Has any mortal but Sara ever seen Avrillia? Certainly there never was another fairy so wan and wild and beautiful. When Sara caught sight of her she was leaning over the marble balustrade, looking down into Nothing, and one hand was still stretched out as if it had just let something fall. She seemed to be still watching its descent. Her body, as she leaned, was like a reed, and her hair was pale-gold and cloudy. But all that was nothing beside Avrillia’s eyes.

For she turned around after a while and saw Sara, and smiled at her without surprise, though she looked absent-minded and wistful.

“It didn’t stick,” she said.

“What didn’t?” asked Sara. Her words may not sound very polite; but if you could have heard the awe and wonder in her little voice you would have pardoned her.

“The poem,” Avrillia said. What was it her voice was like? Sheep-bells? Sheep-bells, that was it. Sheep-bells across an English down — at twilight! Sara had never seen more than three sheep in her life; and those three didn’t wear bells; and she had never heard of a down. And yet, Avrillia’s voice sounded to Sara exactly as I have said.

Moreover, it drew Sara softly to her side. Her dress smelled like isthagaria, and it was very soft to touch. For Sara touched it as confidingly as she would her own mother’s. At that Avrillia seemed to remember her. Sara saw at once that Avrillia never remembered anybody very long at a time. She was kind, and her smile was entrancingly sweet; but her mind always seemed to be on something else. Probably on her poetry, Sara decided.

Now, however, she remembered Sara, and asked, “Would you like to look over?”

“What’s down there?” Sara could not help asking.

“Nothing. Would you like to see it?”

Sara drew nearer the balustrade, full of awe, and uncertain whether she wished to look or not. But presently curiosity got the better of her, and she leaned over the balustrade and looked down into Nothing. It was very gray.

Do you throw your poems down there?” she asked of Avrillia, in inexpressible wonder.

“Of course,” said Avrillia. “I write them on rose-leaves, you know –”

“Oh, yes!” breathed Sara. She still thought that she had never heard of anything that sounded lovelier than poems writen on rose-leaves.

“Petals, I mean, of course,” continued Avrillia, “all colors, but especially blue. And then I drop them over, and some day one of them may stick on the bottom –”

“But there isn’t any bottom,” said Sara, lifting eyes like black pansies for wonder.

“No, there’s no real bottom,” conceded Avrillia patiently, “but there’s an imaginary bottom. One might stick on that, you know. And then, with that to build to, if I drop them in very fast, I may be able to fill it up –”

“But there aren’t any sides to it, either!” objected Sara, even more wonderingly.

Avrillia betrayed a faint exasperation (it showed a little around the edges, like a green petticoat under a black dress). “Oh, these literal people!” she said, half to herself. Then she continued, still more patiently, “Isn’t it just as easy to imagine sides as a bottom? Well, as I was saying, if I write them fast enought to fill it up — I mean if one should stick, of course — somebody a hundred years from now may come along and notice one of my poems; and then I shall be Immortal.” And at that a lovely smile crossed Avrillia’s face.

Karle Wilson Baker spent just about all of her adult life in Texas, writing poetry, essays and novels, and I wonder if she didn’t occasionally feel like Avrillia, dropped her writing into the big Nothing and wondering if any of it would ever be noticed. Of course, some of her rose-petals landed in places like The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s and Yale Review, and her 1925 children’s book on Texas history was adopted as a school text, so her writing life did not lack for recognition and reward. She died in 1960 after a career that earned her the title “First Lady of Texas Letters.”

I don’t recall how old I was when I first walked into the Plynck’s garden, but the experience stayed with me in a half-remembered way until a friend told me about Theodore Sturgeon, a writer who also remembered the book from his childhood and constantly lamented that it was out of print. He devoted at least two articles to his search for the book, and while he didn’t remember the author’s name very well (he had it as Karl Baker) he did have a great memory for some of the better passages, including the one above. Now that the book has lapsed into the public domain, you can download it for free through Project Gutenberg or buy a copy that includes Florence Minard’s illustrations, which really do belong with the story.

Shortly after college I found a very good copy of the 1920 Yale University Press hardcover, which may be the oldest book I own. I was happy to see the story held up very well, though I had forgotten about one of the characters — a chocolate man named Yassuh who rolls his eyes and opens a mouth colored “the lovely violent red of certain jelly-beans.” Baker was a woman ahead of her time in many ways, but when it came to minstrel comedy she was very much in steo with the white herd. Like the spear-shaking African who mars the splendor of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, Yassuh doesn’t spoil the story for me, but he does root Sara’s journey to meet the Plynck, unlike Alice’s encounters in Wonderland, in a very specific period.

It’s a charming book, as whimsical and formal as Lewis Carroll and as pun-crazy as Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, a better-known icon of my childhood. There are two kinds of people in this world: those who groan and mime shooting off guns whenever they hear a good pun, and those who laugh and whack the ball back over the net with a pun of their own. Karle Baker was a member of the first camp in good standing, I’m happy to say.

There is a surprising toughness underlying the charm: The first chapter has a startling moment in which the heroine Sara, briefly enraged by a condescending remark from her mother, imagines doing something that Alice never would have dreamed even of considering. But the moment passes, and Sara — who has been complaining about her lack of a playmate — decides to go inside her own head. There she finds the Plynck, a sort of peacock with a woman’s face, who sites in the branches of a tree and gazes down into a decorative pond where her reflection, called Echo, carries on a pretty active life of her own. There is Schlorge the Dimple-Smith, the poetic fairy Avrillia, and the Strained Relations, who pass back and forth through a picket fence, getting fainter each time.

A recent post from Joe inspired me to take the book down for a look, and while I wouldn’t put Sara in the same class as Alice as a literary heroine, she rules a patch of literature that’s worth visiting. Now that I’ve printed out the Gutenberg version, I’ll try it out on Dances With Mermaids and she if she, like her dad, learns to stop and read the rose-petals wherever they might fall.

Passages: Oriana Fallaci

From the introduction to Interview With History, Oriana Fallaci’s 1976 collection of (sometimes belligerent) interviews with notable figures of the time:

Those who determine our destiny are not really better than ourselves; they are neither more intelligent nor stronger nor more enlightened than ourselves. If anything, they are more enterprising, more ambitious. Only in the rarest cases did I have the certainty of finding myself face to face with a person born to lead us or to make us take one road instead of another. But these cases involved men who were not themselves in power; in fact, they had fought it, and fought it at the risk of their own lives. As for those whom I liked or who charmed me in some way, the moment has come to confess that my mind remained reserved and my heart dissatisfied. Deep down I was sorry that they were sitting at the top of the pyramid. Since I was unable to believe them as I would have liked, I could not judge them innocent. So much the less as traveling companions.

Perhaps it is because I do not understand power, the mechanism by which men or women feel themselves invested or become invested with the right to rule over others and punish them if they do not obey. Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon. I may be mistaken but the earthly paradise did not end on the day that Adam and Eve were told by God that from now on they would work by the sweat of their brows and bring forth children in sorrow. It ended on the day that they realized that they had a master who tried to keep them from eating an apple, and, driven out over an apple, placed themselves at the head of a tribe where it was even forbidden to eat pork. Of course, to live in a group requires a governing authority; otherwise there is chaos. But the most tragic side of the human condition seems to me precisely that of needing an authority to govern, a chief. One can never know where a chief’s power begins and ends; the only sure thing is that you cannot control him and that he kills your freedom. Worse: he is the bitterest demonstration that absolute freedom does not exist, has never existed, cannot exist. Even if it is necessary to behave as though it existed and to look for it. Whatever the price.

I feel I should warn the reader how much I am convinced of this, and also that apples are born to be picked, that meat can even be eaten on Friday. Still more to remind him or her that to the same degree that I do not understand power, I do understand those who oppose power, who criticize power, who contest power, especially those who rebel against power imposed by brutality. I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born. I have always looked on the silence of those who do not react or who indeed applaud as the real death of a woman or a man. And listen: for me the most beautiful monument to human dignity is the one I saw on a hill in the Peloponnesus. It was not a statue, it was not a flag, but three letters that in Greek signify No: oxi. Men thirsting for freedom had written them among the trees during the Nazi-Fascist occupation, and for thirty years that No had remained there, unfaded by the sun or rain. Then the colonels had eliminated it with a stroke of whitewash. But immediately, almost magically, the sun and rain had dissolved the whitewash . So that day by day the three letters reappeared on the surface, stubborn, desperate, indelible.

There has been a great swell of tributes to Fallaci since her death. Ironically, the Internet is glutted with praise from conservatives who, a few decades earlier, would have been pronouncing anathema on her for being so skeptical and combative in her talks with leaders like Henry Kissinger. But because she became a militant and rather bigoted critic of Islam in her later years, Fallaci was praised by the likes of David Horowitz, who would otherwise have denounced her as a leftist firebrand.

Reading Interview With History as a teenager, I was electrified by Fallaci’s fearlessness, her utter refusal to bend the knee to the powerful.

While prospecting for links to Fallaci’s books, I noticed that used copies of Interview With History are now going for over thirty bucks apiece on Amazon. No doubt the price will keep rising. A lot of people who never heard of Fallaci are realizing they missed something important. Fortunately, they can now catch up.

Passages: Herman Melville

From Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, an account of some of the labors that followed after a whale was killed and brought alongside the whaling ship:

When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a’lee; and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes well. But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it. nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw. Queequeg no care what god made him shark, said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.

I read somewhere that William F. Buckley Jr. finally worked his way through Moby-Dick after decades of dithering. When he finished, he told friends: “To think I might have died without reading it!” I know exactly what he meant. This is one of the most unjustly maligned books in American literature. If you are reluctant to try it because of a bad experience in high school English class, all I can say is: Get over it.

By an interesting coincidence, while I was poking through the book again, blogger and historian Eric Alterman ran this excerpt from E.L Doctorow’s new book Creationists, a collection of essays, many of them about American writers and performers:

I can claim a personal relationship to Melville and his works, having read MOBY-DICK three and a half times. The half time came at the age of ten when I found a copy in my grandfather’s library — it was one of a set of great sea novels all bound in green cloth—and it was fair sailing until the cetology stove me in. I first read the book in its entirety, (and TYPEE, OMOO, BILLLY BUDD and the ENCHANTADAS, and BENITO CERENO and BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER, for that matter) as an undergraduate at Kenyon College. Then, as a young editor at the New American Library a mass paperback publisher, I persuaded a Kenyon professor, Denham Sutcliffe to write an Afterword to the Signet Classic edition of MOBY-DICK, and so read the book again by way of editorial preparation. And now on the 150th anniversary of its publication (and after too many years) I have read it for the third time. The surprise to me, at my age now, is how familiar the voice of that book is, and not merely the voice, but the technical effrontery, and not merely the technical effrontery, but the character and rhythm of the sentences…and so with some surprise, I’ve realized, how much of my own work, at its own level, hears Melville, responds to his perverse romanticism, endorses his double dipping into the accounts of realism and allegory, as well as the large risk he takes speaking so frankly of the crisis of human consciousness, that great embarrassment to us all that makes a tiresome prophet of anyone who would speak of it . . . Literary history finds a few great novelists who achieved their greatness from an impatience with the conventions of narrative. Virginia Woolf composed Mrs. Dalloway from the determination to write a novel without a plot or indeed a subject. And then Joyce, of course: Like Picasso who was an expert draftsman before he blew his art out of the water, James Joyce proved himself in the art of narrative writing before he committed his assaults upon it.

The author of the sterling narratives TYPEE and OMOO precedes Joyce with his own blatant subversion of the narrative compact he calls MOBY-DICK. Yet I suspect that, in this case, the subversion may have been if not inadvertent, then only worked out tactically given the problem of its conception. I would guess that what Melville does in MOBY-DICK is not from a grand preconceived aesthetic (Joyce: I will pun my way into the brain’s dreamwork; I will respect the protocols of grammar and syntax but otherwise blast the English language all to hell.) but from the necessity of dealing with the problem inherent in constructing an entire 19th century novel around a single life and death encounter with a whale. The encounter clearly having to come as the climax of his book, Melville’s writing problem was how to pass the time until then — until he got the Pequod to the Southern Whale fisheries and brought the white whale from the depths, Ahab crying “There she blows — there she blows! A hump like a snow hill! It is Moby-Dick!” She blows, I note, not until page 537 of a 566 page book – in my old paperback Rhinehart edition.

A writer lacking Melville’s genius might conceive of a shorter novel, its entry point being possibly closer in time to the deadly encounter. And with maybe a flashback or two thrown in. A novelist of today, certainly, would eschew exposition as far as possible, let the reader work out for herself what is going on, which is a contemporary way of maintaining narrative tension. Melville’s entry point, I remind myself, is not at sea aboard the Pequod, not even in Nantucket: he locates Ishmael in Manhattan, and staying in scene every step of the way, takes him to New Bedford, has him meet Queequeg at the Spouter Inn, listen to a sermon, contrives to get them both to Nantucket, meet the owners of the Pequod, endure the ancient hoary device of a mysterious prophecy…. and it isn’t until Chapter 20 which begins “A day or two passed” that he elides time. Until that point, some ninety-four pages into the book, the writing has all been, a succession of unbroken real time incidents. Another ten pages elapse before the Pequod in Chapter 22 “thrusts her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves.”

I wouldn’t wonder if Melville at this point, the Pequod finally underway, stopped to read what he had written to see what his book was bidding him to do.

This is sheer guesswork of course. I don’t know what Melville himself may have said about the writing of MOBY-DICK beyond characterizing it as a “wicked book.” Besides, whatever any author says of his novel is of course another form of the fiction he practices and is never, never, to be taken on faith.

Perhaps Melville had everything comfortably worked out before he began, though I doubt it. Perhaps he had a draft completed of something quite conventional before his writer’s sense of crisis set in. The point to remember is the same that Faulkner made to literary critics: they see a finished work and do not dream of the chaos of trial and error and torment from which it has somehow emerged.

No matter what your plan for a novel — and we know Herman was inspired by the account of an actual whaling disaster (the destruction of the ship Essex in 1819) and we know how this was a subject, whaling, he could speak of with authority of personal experience abetted by research, and we know he understood as well as the most commercial practitioner of the craft, that a writer begins with an advantage who can report on a kind of life or profession out of the ken of the ordinary reader — nevertheless I say that no matter what your plan or inspiration, or trembling recognition for an idea that you know belongs to you, the strange endowment you set loose by the act of writing is never entirely under your control. It cannot be a matter solely of willed expression. Somewhere, from the depths of your being you find a voice: it is the first and most mysterious moment of the creative act. There is no book without it. If it takes off, it appears to you to be self-governed. To some degree you will write to find out what you are writing. And you feel no sense of possession for what comes onto the pages — what you experience is a sense of discovery.

My own discovery of Moby-Dick came through the back door of Hollywood. John Huston’s film version turned up on television seemingly every other month when I was a sprout, and it took a long time to shake Gregory Peck’s bizarre performance as Captain Ahab — Peck was the only guy who could overact woodenly — out of my mind. I remember being surprised when I first looked at the novel — from what I remembered of the movie, it didn’t seem there could be enough going on to fill several hundred pages.

That’s because Huston and all the other filmmakers who’ve gone sailing after Melville’s whale chuck out the book’s soul. That means the philosophical ruminations, sure, but it also means the odd music of the passages describing whaling lore and gear, and the herculean labor of taking the body of a creature that was often as long as the whaleship itself and reducing it to barrels of oil and meat. I think it’s safe to assume that most modern readers find the idea of whaling repugnant, but even the most dedicated Greenpeace member could leave this book impressed by the sheer physical courage demanded by whaling.

Mystic Seaport in Connecticut just held its annual Moby-Dick Marathon in honor of Melville’s birthday, so you’ll have to wait another year to participate in that. If you’re impatient, another marathon reading takes place every January at the New Bedford Whaling Museum to mark the anniversary of the day Melville himself set out on the whaling ship Acushnet. And the BBC has a fine Web site devoted to the story of the whaleship Essex, which may have inspired Melville to write Moby-Dick.