A Common Reader

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters

2012-01-27T03:57:00.000-08:00

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters
Translated and Edited by Michael Hofmann
W. W. Norton & Company, Hardcover, 512 pages
ISBN-10: 0393060640 / ISBN-13: 978-0393060645

Albert Einstein to B. W. Huebsch
(24 February 1935)

Esteemed Mr. Hübsch,
I am truly grateful to you for sending me this consoling book [Job] by a real mensch and great writer. As I read it, I was able to share the pain of a clear and kindly human soul, inflicted upon it by the callousness and spiritual blindness of the present age, and felt myself strangely shriven by the sort of objective invention of which only an artistic genius is capable.

Friendly greetings from you [A. Eisntein]

P.S. Please forward this note to the respected author. You have my permission to use it to publicize the book in any way you see fit.
(Letter 328)

What emerges from these letters is a man constantly on the edge during troubled times. In many ways Roth reflects the turbulence of civilization coming apart at the seams. I’ve included a lot of excerpts from the Roth’s letters (and some to him) in the links below, trying to provide a flavor of his life as he described it. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, Roth was a very complex, flawed, gifted, and troubled man. Even if he exaggerated some of his troubles in these letters, it’s a wonder that his novels were written under such circumstances. The troubles he foretold for Europe, though, were often accurate. Roth’s life, reflected in these letters, shows the price of being an émigré, not just from a country but from the world at large.

Posts on Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters:

Some inks to excerpts from the book
1911 – 1924
1925 – 1927
1927 – 1932
1933
1934 – 1935
1935 - 1939

Books mentioned by Roth and Hofmann that I have queued up to read:
George Letham: Physician and Murdered by Ernst Weiss
The Thibaults by Roger Martin du Gard

Update:

Review by Tess Lewis in The Wall Street Journal

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters: 1935 - 1939

2012-01-26T15:55:00.000-08:00

From Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hofmann.

The last few years of Roth’s life saw many of the same themes as already posted, and some extended thoughts on these subjects:

• A lot of talk of politics and how many, especially “those who embodied the ‘word’s conscience’ were themselves mute and expectant” for so long and “lost all credit.” (Letter 349)

• His poverty and the need to provide for his extended family. Despite all of his begging, Roth proves to be generous to others, too (see Letter 353, for an example)

• His drinking: “Don’t worry about my drinking, please. It’s much more like to preserve me than destroy me.” (Letter 358)

• One area that received more attention in the letters from this period was the film business and whether novels were “filmable” (Letter 386). I guess he got over his opinion that the cinema was evil (see Letter 270).

• Another area receiving more attention centers on Roth’s escape through writing: “I write every day, simply so as to lose myself in fictional destinies.” (Letter 386 and see 371 below)

• Roth’s lack of acrimony to this point has made his rants and pleadings palatable, but his resentment, not just at the world situation but with his own fate seems to increase, something he clearly recognizes: “Forgive me my bitterness, I would tone it down if I could.” (also in Letter 386)

• While his despair in previous letters seems to be an act, at least to some degree, there seems to be more and more basis for Roth’s despair as we move through this time period.

• Family matters weighed heavily on him, with the burden of financing his wife institutionalization and his companion (Mrs. Manga Bell) and her children taken care of taking their toll. Letter 405 to Blanche Gidon has Roth unloading on both Mrs. Manga Bell (for steadily refusing “to adapt to the rules of my life”) and the children (now of legal age, his anger focused on their ungrateful nature in calling him boche).

• There are few letters in the book between the annexation of Austria by Germany (March 1938) and his death (May 1939). A couple of the letters reference his attempt to help some of the émigrés (“I am overloaded with Austrian matters, refugee committees, and the like” in Letter 450).

Excerpts:

Letter 347 to Stefan Zweig (24 July 1935) on his Jewishness and his predictions :

My Jewishness never appeared as anything else to me but an accidental quality, like, say, my blond mustache (which could equally well have been brown). I never suffered from it, I was never proud of it. Nor is it the fact that I think and write in German that bothers me now—but the fact that 40 million people in the middle of Europe are barbarians. I share this sorrow with quite a lot of other people, including most of the remaining 20 million Germans, inasmuch as these things can be quantified. I believe in a Catholic empire, German and Roman, and I am near to becoming an orthodox, even a militant Catholic. I don’t believe in “humankind”—I never did—but in God, and in the fact that mankind, to whom He shows no mercy, is a piece of shit. … I will do all in my feeble power to bring about a Habsburg return. … Mine is not hatred, but righteous fury. And I will be proved right, because Hitler won’t last more than another year and a half, and then, slowly but surely, we shall have a new German Empire. … The Habsburgs will return. Please don’t deny what’s all too evident! You see I’ve been right thus far. Austria will be a monarchy. I’m right. I foresaw the madness and excess of Prussia. Because I believe in God. And you, you didn’t see it, because you believe in “humankind,” a concept so unclear that by contrast with it, you could think to meet God on the nearest street corner.

Roth upbraids Zweig in Letter 350 (19 August 1935) for his tardiness in understanding what was happening in Germany and his feeble proposals:

We’ll protest: fine! Another protest. A good protest! And people will sit up and take note. And then what? What is it we want to achieve? You underestimate or ignore a couple of major things:

1. the urge to humiliate Jews didn’t begin yesterday or today; it’s been part of the platform of the Third Reich from the very start. Everyone knows that. Streicher is no different from Hitler, and you didn’t need to wait for Streicher to make his way from Nuremberg to Berlin! The founding principle, so to speak, of National Socialism, is none other than contempt for the Jewish race! Why did it take you this long to grasp that? How come you didn’t get it 2 years ago? 2 ¾ years ago? That bestiality [a word Roth used almost from the beginning when describing the Nazis and their actions] was there from the start. It didn’t suddenly set in a couple of months ago, the vilification of Jews. We were insulted and humiliated from Hitler’s very first day! Why is this protest so tardy?

2. … But do you really think a manifesto can do something so late in the day?

Letter 352 to Stefan Zweig (27 August 1935) encapsulates Roth’s outlook very well:

I am not in a tizzy about the letter from […]. In view of the approaching end of the world, it’s no big deal. But even then, in the trenches, staring death in the face 10 minutes before going over the top, I was capable of beating up a son of a bitch for claiming he was out of cigarettes when he wasn’t. The end of the world is one thing, the son of a bitch is another. You can’t put the son of a bitch down to the general condition of things. He’s separate.

Letter 360 to Stefan Zweig (17 November 1935):

The way in which you seek to connect God to my writing is inadmissible. Writing is a terrestrial thing, and, from a “metaphysical” vantage point, is in no way different from shoemaking. Say. … You may say to me that it’s my duty to serve literature. I don’t serve literature. Literature is a terrestrial matter; it’s my job.

Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth in Letter 366 –I’m sure this went over well with Roth:

My dear good fellow, don’t forever by arraigning the times and the wickedness of other people, admit that you bear some responsibility for your state, and help us to help you.

Roth, in Letter 371 to Stefan Zweig (17 February 1936) sounds the theme mentioned above that writing was an escape from his unordered and pressure-filled life, although the deadlines and the need to receive advances provide their own tensions:

I think I can only understand the world when I’m writing, and the moment I put down my pen, I’m lost.

Roth, again to Stefan Zweig, Letter 390 (11 May 1936):

Landauer wants to publish the new novel in summer, he claims it’s a good time, and then I could hope to get another contract in the autumn. There are supposed to be German Jews abroad then buying books they won’t find at home.
(Hofmann’s note: I don’t know what’s more striking here—to be so reduced, or still to be calculating.)

Letter 393 to Stefan Zweig (29 May 1936) gives details on Roth’s physical condition. While he always grumbled about his health in general, he begins to include more specifics on his ailments. While complaining about his poverty, he makes clear his priorities:

I am very feeble, and barely able to walk. There’s no particular illness. Every day brings with it different symptoms. If I don’t vomit spleen and blood, then my eyes are inflamed, or my feet are swollen. Palpitations, heart pain, shocking migraines, teeth falling out. It sometimes seems to me that nature is kindly afterall, because it makes life so rotten that you positively long for death. [Roth would live for another three years] … I managed to get the price for the room down to 1 gulden today, but there’s nothing more I can do. I have to drink wine now, no more schnapps for weeks now.—My room looks like a coffin; but a bottle of wine costs a gulden. I own 2 suits and 6 shirts. I wash my own handkerchiefs. I’ve never learned to iron shirts. I look completely dreadful.

Letter 417 to Stefan Zweig (10 July 1937):

You already have a clear notion … of the inadequacy of all human idealisms that you bathed in from the time of your youth, and in which you have steeped yourself. You’re bound to be disappointed. The nonviolence of Mahatma Gandhi is just as unhelpful to me, as Hitler’s violence is detestable.

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters: 1934 - 1935

2012-01-25T10:19:00.000-08:00

From Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hofmann.

Once again I provide too many excerpts, but I'm finding Roth a fascinating figure. The uprising by the Social Democrats in Austria (12 February 1934) and the resulting Dollfuss dictatorship discourages Roth in a manner more than he had been in previous years. Politics, as well as world events, poisons many letters in this section. The émigrés have to walk a tightrope in their behavior since every action is put under a microscope. Roth references “the shriveled arena that’s all we’re still allowed to address in our language” (Letter 308), a “wonderful and terrible phrase for the German readership of these writers in exile—on average, 5 percent of the previous editions.” (Michael Hofmann’s note). As Roth demonstrates, his personal life reflects the political landscape of the day: “Don’t be upset if my letters are full of impatience and even irritations. It so happens I live and write in a continual state of confusion.” (Letter 332)

Hofmann notes after a letter from Roth to Stefan Zweig that “Zweig and Roth were both (rightly) of the view that Zweig was not a tenth the writer that Roth was. Zweig—to do him credit—was quite open about it… . In JR it takes the rather tortuous form of combining (as here) excessive praise of the whole with copious criticisms of details to appease his—unappeasable—literary conscience. … It seems to me that Roth—always needy, always manipulative—plays Zweig like a big fish he’s not quite sure he wants.”

Hofmann highlights Roth’s engagement in a “systematic mystification regarding his birth”, in one case saying he was born in Szvaby in order to sound more German rather than admitting he was born in Brody, a miserable place associate with Jews. In other instances he lies about his birthplace to support whatever claim he wants to make at the time. His father is also heavily mythologized.

Roth has many obsequious passages or letters in this section (although it’s similar to other timeframes, too)—begging forgiveness for real or perceived slights, constant groveling for money from friends, sycophantic thanks to other writers for their positive comments, etc.. These passages become painful to read, especially since they come so often in his correspondence. From his descriptions of his life, or at least how he paints it (and I have no reason to doubt it was bad or that it weighed heavily on his mind), it’s easy to see his inspiration for The Legend of the Holy Drinker. I read my short description of that novella again and see Roth writing an allegorical and mythologized biography.

Roth is unforgiving on others’ perceived mistakes on sensitive topics, yet he is constantly begging forgiveness for his real offenses or slights, painting them as mistakes (in translation, perception, etc.). His temperament, dependent and fawning, is almost unbearable yet at the same time he shows he is willing to help those he views as worse off than him. Roth proves to be a very complex, flawed, gifted, and troubled man.

Excerpts from the letters:

Roth states in Letter 236 (12 January 1936) to Klaus Mann, “There is, so to speak, a politics of the literary emigration.” He makes the issue clearer in a subsequent letter. From Letter 238 to Klaus Mann (16 January 1934) and the editorial board of the Sammlung (an exile magazine):

[B]ut for me and many others, standing outside, there is a straightforward equation between [Ernst] Jünger and Goebbels. If out of woolly-mindedness or boneheadedness or stupidity he [Jünger] has supported or prepared the ground for the bestial ideology of National Socialism—and apart from that remained a decent human being—it’s completely ridiculous, in an émigré journal, a journal of his direct or indirect victims, to give him six pages of space, even if it finally comes down against him.

From letter 270 to Stefan Zweig (14 June 1934)—I wonder how much he’s influenced by the American cinema treatment of his book Job (released as Sins of Man, which I’ll review soon):

Film is not just a contemporary phenomenon. It may make people happy, but the devil sometimes does that. I am unalterably persuaded that the devil shows himself, so to speak, in living shadow play. The shoadow that speaks and acts is what Satan is. The cinema marks the beginning of the twentieth century. It ushers in the end of the world. Please don’t underestimate that. Telephone, radio, aeroplane, are nothing in comparison to it: the separation of the shadow from the man. It’s a turning point in human history, more significant that the Russian Revolution with its so-called liberation of the “proletariat.” (If only it had freed people instead! But of course it couldn’t do that.)

Letter 271 to Stefan Zweig (22 June 1934)—a sample of the self-effacement and debasement he often presented in his letters:

It might not be easy for you—or pleasant—to hear all the acts of folly I perpetrated since you left Paris—all under the pressure of repulsive experiences. I know how difficult it is even for a great understanding to cope with a small derangement. But I still beg you to continue to think of me as a sensible person subject to occasional fits of madness but broadly in control, and as a conscientious friend who only writes like this in hours of clarity. I have debased and humiliated myself. I have borrowed money from the most impossible places, despising and cursing myself as I did so. And it was all because never in my life have I had anything like a secure financial base, never a bank account or savings. Nothing, nothing, just advances—expenditures, expenditure, advances, and until the Third Reich, I had publishers. … I feel obliged to come before you quite naked, my dear friend. Whatever you do, you cannot judge me more harshly than I do myself. I abuse you too, with the desperate selfishness of someone putting the life of his friend in danger by clinging to him like a drowning man clinging to his rescuer. … I have drunk nothing while writing this to you. I am stone-cold sober.

Letter 280 to Stefan Zweig (13 July 1934) puts Roth’s sometime petulant temperment on full display. After whining about how he has been wronged by others (and begging for money), we see the “I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue” Roth:

And you have no right to distrust my insight as if it were with some grocer’s. Oh, what do I care! Just tell me you don’t like getting letters from me. I know the process. Gooancz doesn’t want to antagonize Heinemann [both publishers]. The Anarchist could be a success! They don’t want to step on each other’s toes. Solidarity! You withdraw your offer and call a man of honor a cheat. Not with me you don’t!

I DON’T WANT YOU going through my affairs with a publisher. Believe me or don’t believe me. See for yourself! And while you’re going through my affairs, just set aside for a while your preconceptions regarding my character [if anyone knew Roth’s character without preconceptions it waw Zweig]. Don’t you worry, I’m as clever as your Huebsches, your Gollanczes, your Henemanns and your Landauers!

I was just lazy, and easily decived. I’ve had it anyway. In my will I will write down the names of all those I mistrust. (I’ll send you a copy) None of my tormentors will take any pleasure in my end. … It won’t be any good for anyone if I die. … Write to me straightaway, and tell me you wash your hands of me. Go with God. I am very fond of you. I embrace you.

Stefan Zweig, in Letter 284 (later in July 1934) offers advice he knows will be ignored. After scolding Roth for mucking up negotiations, he tries to reason with him and asks him (yet again) to sober up, not just physically but also in his outlook:

I’ve been imploring you for years, adjust to the reality that as a German Jewish author nowadays you’ll only be lucky enough in certain exceptional circumstances to earn money, and that the writer’s life is historically a pretty unprofitable one. Don’t try to force an income for yourself that’s impossible, that’ll only get you into warped contracts, tangles, and these unceasing difficulties!

Michael Hofmann’s note to Letter 290, to Stefan Zweig (20 July 1934):

Roth tends to have it in for Czechs and Hungarians most of all—see his later outburst against Budapest… because he blames them for the breakup of the Dual Monarchy. Villains in his books are very often Hungarians.

Letter 309 to Klaus Mann (6 October 1934):

Fifth, you make comparisons [of Russia] with Germany. Don’t make comparisons with Germany. Only hell is comparable. Everything, everything evil in the world, becomes noble by comparison with Germany. Germany is accursed, you have to learn to get out of the habit of comparing anything at all to this German shit.

(For Amateur Reader) From Letter 315 to Carl Seelig (11 November 1934), about writing The Hundred Days, which Roth tended to call “a historical novel”:

I’ve found in the material a way of expressing myself directly. And I’m in the worst pickle: I despise the low modes of the historical novelist, and become lyrical, in the way of the novelist. It’s difficult, but it tempts me, perhaps in the same way it seemed tempting once to write a Salammbô.

Letter 319 to Blanche Gidon (27 December 1934), presaging The Legend of the Holy Drinker again:

There are miracles in my life, poor little miracles, but miracles just the same—only fair for a poor little believer like myself.

Letter 326 to Stefan Zweig (15 February 1935) on his living situation and his state of mind:

I’ve moved, after various complications, without Huebsch’s money it would have been impossible. You were quite right, I’m not cut out for apartment life. It’s the last time I’m going to let myself be drawn into foolish experiments lite that. … I’ll start the second part [of his novel] over again. I have the courage of desperation. (I have only the courage of desperation.) … I need to know that I will certainly be able to stay alive for another 3-4 weeks, to be able to write. This horrible book—I wish I’d never embarked on that wretched story—must be brought to an end quickly. And I’m so slow! And on top of my slowness, there’s my crippling fear, slowing me down.

Letter 329 to Blanche Gidon (27 February 1935) encapsulates where he lays political blame:

I have the right to speak frankly about the Jews—who have introduced Socialism and catastrophe into European culture, “novarum rerum cupidissimi”[Roth uses the same expression in his essay The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind]: that’s the Jews for you. They are the real cradle of Hitler and the reign of the janitors.

Letter 333 from Stefan Zweig (March 1935) tries once again to accept the reality of the market, this time in Austria, for writers in a world burdened by the constant tension of war and fiscal depression:

One thing, Roth, don’t name figures to anyone but me. You have no idea on what tiny amounts people get by here, and how much resentment it causes when (to them) fantastic amounts are referred to deprecatingly. The newspapers pay 20 schillings for a feuilleton, and people come to blows over royalties.

Roth expresses his frustration on finishing The Hundred Days in Letter 338 to René Schickele:

I am horribly busy and even weighed down with my stupid book. This is the first and last time I’ll ever tackle anything “historical.” Devil take it—in fact, I think it was the Antichrist in person who got me into it. It’s improper to want to form existing, historical events all over again—and it’s disrespectful too. There is something godless about it—only I can’t quite say what.

Letter 342 to Blanche Gidon (17 June 1935) highlights the turmoil in his personal life, a concise comment on the situation for émigré writers. He ends reaffirming his stance of no compromises in outlook to Germany:

I have a ghastly thing going on in Vienna, over my wife. I have taken steps to start to divorce her, which is horribly difficult, like everything in that area. … It’s like a hornet’s nest, this agitation among the “émigrés,” these letters, this noise, this tittle-tattle. … And I mean to do all I can to remain just as unyielding as hitherto, and to fight those others who want to “understand everything,” basically because they’re cowards, JUST COWARDS, with their “profound humanity.” In fact, it’s profound cowardice.

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters: 1933

2012-01-23T04:20:00.000-08:00

From Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hofmann.

I’m including too many excerpts from this year but it seems to mark a clear change in Roth, or perhaps an acceleration in his downward spiral tied to his despair. He was perceptive on the dangers Nazism posed for Germany and Europe. Roth shows how sadly humorous it can be when someone who’s own life is a mess can accurately identify the discord in others. In his despair, he comments “We all overestimated the world: even me, an absolute pessimist.”

From Michael Hofmann’s introduction to the section covering the letters from 1933 to 1939:

“On the morning of 30 January 1933, the day Hitler was appointed chancellor, Joseph Roth boarded the Berlin-Paris train, and never set foot in Germany again.” (page 229)

“Eventually there is nothing that Roth will not write; a letter, in his hands, is an instrument of necessary terror. The extremity of his situation justifies it. Anything less is the waste of a stamp.” (page 230)

“Soma Morgenstern describes his friend in these terms:
As he took a sip of cognac to recover from his coughing laugh, I studied him closely. The changes to face and form staggered me. He was not quite forty-three years old, and—my heart won’t forgive me for saying so: he looked like a sixty-year-old alcoholic. His face, once so animated and alert, with its prominent cheekbones, and short jutting chin, was now puffy and slack, the nose purple, the corners of his blue eyes rheumy and bloody, his head looking as if someone has started plucking it and given up part way, the mouth completely covered covered by heavy, dark red, Slovak-style drooping mustaches. But when summoned to the telephone, he slowly hobbled away with the aid of a stick, his thin legs in narrow old-fashioned pants, his sagging little paunch at odds with his birdlike bones, the east Galician Jew made the impression of a distinguished, if somewhat decayed, Austrian aristocrat—in other words, exactly the impression he had striven all his lfe to give, with every fiber ofhis body and soul, by means both legitimate and illegitimate.
This understands—as it is important to understand—the balance between tragedy and dignity in Roth, sadness and success. (pages 232-233)

Letter excerpts:
Letter 176 to Stefan Zweig (18 January 1933):

Be on your guard. You may be smart, but your humanity blinds you to others’ wickedness. You live on goodness and faith. Whereas I have been known to make sometimes startlingly accurate observations about evil.

Letter 178 to Félix Bertaux (9 February 1933):

I’m tired of all these things, because of the goings-on in Germany I’m incapable of settling the least personal matter, and I feel completely downtrodden.

Letter 182 to Stefan Zweig (February 1933):

It will have become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe. Quite apart from our personal situations—out literary and material existence has been wrecked—we are headed for a new war. I wouldn’t give a heller for our prospects. The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.

Letter 193 to Stefan Zweig (26 March 1933):

You understand, the difference between 1933 and 1914 is roughly that between a sick animal like Goering, and Wilhelm II, who at least kept vestiges of humanity. Obviously, fools perpetrate folly, and beasts commit bestiality, and madmen commit mad acts: all of them suicidal. But it is not all obvious that our equally sick and confused surroundings discern stupidity, bestiality, and madness. That’s the difference.

Letter 206 to Stefan Zweig (20 July 1933), indicative of Roth’s style of living (out of a suitcase):

Dear esteemed friend, would you happen to have a copy of my novel Zipper and His Father? Or can you manage to get hold of one? If so, then please send it to A. Corticelli… . He wants to publish it, and will pay me for it. It’s shocking, I have no copies of any of my books.

Letter 218 to Stefan Zweig (9 October 1933):

In this world it’s a matter of absolute indifference—unfortunately—what is written about us or by us. There’s a handful who know, and they know everything. All the others are blind or dear. Haven’t you go that yet? The word has died, men bark like dogs. The word has no importance any more, none in the current state of things.

The November 7, 1933 letter to Stefan Zweig (#223) shows a judgmental Roth trying to help his friend Zweig understand the new dynamics in German political life:

It used to be that you were happy to deny that you were Arnold Zweig. What you’re doing today, with the least association with Germany, is denying that you’re Stefan Zweig. (A reader of yours came up with that.) You have so much to lose: not just your personal dignity, but your literary—and world-renowned—bearing. To thousands who think of Germany the way I do, not you, you were a prop, a pillar of faith. In the war you stood at the side of Roman Rolland. And now, now that things are at a worse pass than they ever were then, you’re writing anxious little letters to the Insel [Zweig’s publisher]. … Everything is the fault of your shilly-shallying. All the badness. All the ambiguity. All the stupid newpaper comments on you. You are in danger of losing your moral credit vis-à-vis the world, and not winning anything in the Third Reich either. Put practically. And in moral terms: you’re repudiating your personal principles of 30 years. And why? For whom? For a business partner. … It’s the hour of decision, not just in the sense that it’s time to take the side of mankind against Germany, but also in that it’s time to tell every friend the truth.
[From the postscript, written the next day] I’ve just read over the letter I wrote you yesterday. Lest you be in any doubt: I did not write it while intoxicated. .. I am, further, quite clear about the fact that it constitutes an act of crass presumption to approach you with rules for conduct. I apologize. I have probably made a mess of my own life. But I still think I can see the life of one dear to me perfectly.

Part of Stefan Zweig’s response, from Letter 224 (November 1933):

[W]hat I am concerned about is getting control of my own work again and not (my nerves wouldn’t be up to it) having to go to court over it. But it couldn’t be done violently, the way you imagine it. Why won’t you give someone you’ve known for many years a few weeks’ grace, and not shout “Treason!” right away where you don’t understand something (as with Thomas Mann too, a highly principled man, who as an Aryan has no need to share the fate of Jews). You can’t rub out the seventy million Germans with your outcry, and I’m afraid the Jews abroad are in for more disappointment, it’s quite possible that a pact may be concluded over their heads, diplomacy is capable of any sort of datardliness, and politics of the wildest leaps, we will have to bear a lot of disappointment in the time to come: how crazy to rage against each other now!

When someone says they are just kidding, you know they aren’t. And when Roth says it isn’t personal in Letter 230 (30 November 1933), you know it is. But he’s only getting warmed up at that point:

He’s a plebian (just like his wife, whom I met once. She looks huge, but only sitting down. A stumpy-legged plebian.) (You know my intentions with all this stuff are not personal.) …
Wherever they oppress us, in Russia, Italy, Germany, is a TOILET. It stinks there. It’s not true to say that Communism has “transformed an entire continent.” Like fuck it has. It spawned Fascism and Nazism and hatred for intellectual freedom. Whoever endorses Russia has eo ipso endorsed the Thrid Reich.

Letter 232 to Stefan Zweig (22 December 1933)—Roth never lacked in self-awareness, just restraint:

I got to Amsterdam by borrowing 100 francs. I sat in the American Hotel for 3 days, without eating anything. My. Querido [his new publisher] was, for the first time in his life, confined to bed.—Little tricks of the devil, things I’m pretty much used to by now. In the end I was able to secure 1,000 fancs from Mr. Landshoff. Then I began to drink. I had a supper invitation from Mr. de Lange, for which I turned up completely drunk. Now, Mr. de Lange is a mighty drinker, and he wasn’t sober either. But something happened that I thought would never happen to me. For the first time in my life I experienced a complete blackout. My recollection of the evening is absolutely nonexistent. It’s possible I’ve wrecked my chances with de Lange. You know, he’s a sort of Junker type really. He knows from somewhere that writers drink, but in his imagination or experience it doesn’t stretch to their actually being drunk. He can only have had a very approximate sense of me [before the meeting]. I was a “literary name” to him, little more. He was very nice, but I’m afraid I’ve messed up my chances. For the first time I felt a real sense of weakness. My dear friend, it’s possible that my “self-destructive instinct” put in a major appearance; even though, in physiological terms it’s easy enough to explain how a man can get very drunk if he hasn’t had anything to eat. I’m still rather shocked at myself. For the first time. … Maybe it’s a sign for me to stop. But believe me: however much I believe that my muse is the muse of separation, I know perfectly clearly that she is driving me to suicide. … I can’t historicize myself. But nor can I continue to convert this intrusion of private grief into my “true,” unliterary life into literature. It’s killing me. And believe me, never did an alcoholic “enjoy” his alcohol less than I did. Does an epileptic enjoy his fits? Does a madman enjoy his episodes?

From Letter 235 to René Schickele (end of 1933 or early 1934), a comment that reflects part of The Radetzky March, and more. Hofmann notes this letter includes Roth’s “tremendous tirade against all ethical relativism.” A taste:

”Mess spirit” I took to be the splendid training of young officers (at least in Austria) to respond to an insult with an insult back, and to prefer death to disgrace. That is a clear human quality. … You may forgive and you may love. You are even instructed to do so. But you may not move the absolute line between good and evil because it suits you. A vile act is a vile act—there’s no more to be said about it.

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters: 1927 - 1932

2012-01-21T13:41:00.000-08:00

From Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hofmann.

The letters from this period covers much of the same material as in the previous post. During this period he wrote The Radetzky March, although how he did so in his circumstance is amazing—taking care of his sick wife, scrambling for money, physical infirmities taking their toll, an affair with a 20-year old girl, lawsuits hounding him, an affair with another woman with two kids, and more problems he doesn’t fully confess in his letters. During this time period, Roth tries to move from journalist to novelist while playing publishing houses against each other. He often references his liver, “flushed with calvados”, or admitting “I’ve been full of cognac since morning.” Roth demonstrates that he earned the comment that he was “a ferocious, gifted, principled, and implacable hater.” In his letters he loves to give advice, much of which he ignores in his own situations. On to some quotes...

Footnote to letter 43 (14 June 1927) to Ludwig Marcuse—I loved Hoffman’s note on the recipient’s wife:

[David] Bronson [biographer of Roth] tells the lovely story of how they met: Marcuse was upset after being dumped by some other flame, Roth reminded him that the world was full of attractive women, and pointed to the waitress in the bar in Berlin where they were sitting. This was Erna, who, a little later, became Sasha when Marcuse told Roth that he loved her dearly, but found her Berlin speech full of embarrassing solecisms. Roth’s solution was to dub her Sasha and claim she was a Russian princess; his policy with Friedl, his own wife, was not dissimilar, but much less successful.

From letter 52 to Benno Reifenberg (1927):

I’m finished with the Saarland. … I have visited factories and a mine. For half a day I worked as a salesman, got drunk at night, and slept with an ugly hotel chambermaid from sheer wretchedness.

From letter 61 (17 January 1928):

I finally got to be introduced to [André] Gide. He Olympian. I merely snotty.

From letter 79 (27 February 1929) to Stefan Zweig:

The only reason I work though is material. I must succeed in producing the minimum from my existence, without regularly writing articles that undermine my health. So that my life isn’t too grotesquely abbreviated, I should like to find myself a free man in a year’s time. And for that to happen, I have to write every day. But that’s a change. It’s impossible to fix myself. I have no such thing as a stable literary “character.” I am not stable in other respects either. I haven’t lived in a house since my eighteenth year, aside from the odd week staying with friends. Everything I own fits into three suitcases. It doesn’t strike me as odd at all, either. What is odd, though, to me, and even romantic, is a house, with pictures on the walls, and so on and so forth. In a fit of mindlessness, I took on the responsibility for a young woman. I need to keep her somewhere, she is frail, and physically not up to a life at my side.

From letter 89 (20 January 1930) to Rene Schickele:

Being an author is actually no help at all. That may be my official designation, but privately I’m just a poor wretch who’s worse off than a tram conductor. Only time and not talent can provide us with distance, and I don’t have much time left. A ten-year marriage ending like this has the effect of forty, and my natural tendency to e an old man is horribly supported by external misfortunes. Eight books to date, over 1,000 articles, ten hours’ work a day, every day for ten years, and today, losing my hair, my teeth, my potency, my most basic capacity for joy, not even the chance of spending a month without financial worries. And that wretch literature!

Letter 98 is to publisher Gustav Kiepenheuer on his fiftieth birthday (10 June 1930). The famous “Kiepenheur letter” ends with this section:

There must be some secret connection between us somewhere. Because sometimes we do agree. It’s a though we each made concessions to the other, but we don’t. Because he doesn’t understand money. That’s a quality we share. He is the most courtly man I know. So am I. He got it from me. He loses money on my books. So do I. He believes in me. So do I. He waits for my success. So do I. He is certain of posterity. So am I.

Letter 113, emphasizing the mounting toll (in addition to the monetary cost) of taking care of his wife—to Jenny Reichler (his mother-in-law):

I don’t think there’s anything to be done about my sadness. I’m through with life, for good. I can’t wait around any more for miracles. I have become an old man, and have gotten used to the absence of joy. In my own life, that is. If Friedl pulls through, I will be far older than she is.

Letter 114, to Stefan Zweig (23 October 1930), highlighting his sensitivity to politics. Also interesting because it is a month before his first mention of The Radetzky March:

Europe is killing itself, and in a peculiarly slow and horrible way, because it is a corpse already. This ending is devilishly like a psychosis. It’s a psychotic’s suicide. The devil really is in the saddle. But it’s the two extremes I don’t understand, for that I’m too much the contemporary of Franz Joseph, I hate extremism; it’s the most fiery and disgusting tongue of the flame.

From Letter 118 to Stefan Zweig (31 January 1931):

There is nothing more important than being a private person, than loving your wife, taking your children on your lap as you did when we came for you. Public affairs are only and ever shit, whether it’s the nation, politics, the newspaper, the swastika, or the future of democracy.

From Letter 128 to Stefan Zweig (13 May 1931), after his affair with the 20-year old has ended:

Life is so much finer than literature! I feel sorry for literature! It is a SWINDLE!

Letter 143 to Freidrich Traugott Gubler (8 October 1931):

[S]ometimes I’m egocentric enough to suppose that it’s me and my success that have sparked off the world financial crisis. Certainly, every one of the laws of this horrible world had to be overturned for me to have a success.

Letter 150 to Freidrich Traugott Gubler (Spring 1932):

I am unhappy, confused, wholly unable to leave the four walls I’ve thrown up around me and the book [The Radetzky March], though it feels more like a mountain range in which I wander about in terror. One day, everything comes off, the next day it’s all shit.

From Letter 154 to Stefan Zweig (7 August 1932):

National Socialism will strike at the core of my existence—apart from the fact that the booksellers are terrorized, inasmuch as they’re not Nationalists themselves, and want nothing to do with writing that strikes them as “cosmopolitan” or western European, and so on and so forth. I’m convinced nothing will befall the cheeky chutzpah-Jews, but the conservatives will suffer—never has it been as true as now: dog will not eat dog. … It’s meaningless, everything’s become meaningless! I have the strong sense that for me personally there is no future.

Michael Hofmann’s note to Letter 156 to Ernst Křenek (10 September 1932), the composer:

Professor Brecht, with whom Roth studied in Vienna before World War I, believed in and advanced an idea of Austria not as a corrupt and negligible appendage ripe for a tacit or explicit Anschluss, … but as an older, better form of Germany, “the land of the older form of German culture, a culture that has preserved many ancient German traits…a land of the soul and the spirit, full of tolerance, protean, rich and colorful, eluding definition, yes, opposed to definition, like the Middle Ages, like the life of the Catholic Church.” … Without this Austrocentric, in excelsis Austria creed in mind, it is difficult to make sense not just of JR’s tone to Křenek here, but of his overall faith in Austria, his opposition to Germany, perhaps even his late upsurge of Royalism.

Letter 157 to Stefan Zweig (18 September 1932), just after The Radetzky March was released in book form. In the next letter, dated the same day, Roth credits Zweig with shaping or providing scenes in the novel:

Any friendship with me is ruinous. I myself am a wailing wall, if not a heap of rubble. You have no idea how dark it is inside me.

Letter 164 to Blanche Gidon, French translator (11 October 1932):

Where the Radetzky March is concerned, I’ve never doubted that publishers of all nationalities are businessmen. What annoys me is that they’re bad businessmen, and that, particularly in France, foreign books are badly paid for, badly translated, and badly sold. I care too much about words for me to be able to look on while my words are twisted and mutilated—merely because a publisher won’t give up the false vanity of continuing to bring out foreign books, nor admit that he doesn’t have deep enough pockets to do it with dignity. When I look at the revolting literary “scene”: … these snobberies and cliques, prepared to genuflect before each “novelty”, the incomprehensible Joyce, the latest postwar epsilon out of Germany, well” it makes me shudder!

From Letter 165 to Hans Natonek, journalist and novelist (14 October 1932):

And a few personal eizes [Yiddish for tips]:
a. Read more of the greats and the immortals: Shakespeare, Balzac, Flaubert!
b. No Gide! No Proust! Nor anything of the sort!
c. The Bible. Homer
d. Don’t distrust the “reader” too much!
e. Try to keep yourself clear of journalism.
f. Try to keep yourself clear of journalism at heart.
g. No interest in day-to-day politics. They distort. They distort the human.
h. You have sufficient means—thank God—that there’s really no need for you to write para-feuilletons! Fuck them. All they’re good for is a hat for the wife and a dress for the girlfriend.

Letter 168 to Otto Forst-Battaglia (28 October 1932):

The most powerful experience of my life was the war and the end of my fatherland, the only one I have every had: the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. To this date I am a patriotic Austrian and love what is left of my homeland as a sort of relic.

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters: 1925 - 1927

2012-01-18T18:14:00.000-08:00

From Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hofmann.

Michael Hoffman makes the observation that Roth “in those days was like an open knife, a mixture of prophet, revolutionary, and sociopath”. The bluntness he exhibits with his friends shows an honesty that often wanders into just being a jerk. Major topics recurring throughout these letters include
• the uncertainty of his newspaper job and his feeling of not being appreciated (not to mention the constant lack of money),
• the deterioration of German life on all fronts, although he doesn’t always feel he belongs in France,
• his assignment in Moscow,
• the care and sickness of his wife, and
• political and social movements (the percentage of names he mentions that end up becoming exiles is depressing).

There are even mentions at this early stage of his life of his rapidly deteriorating liver (although his claim about its demise is premature). There are several references to his writing, but many of these books I haven’t read yet (so I’ll file these away for when I get to them). OK, now to some quotes.

From letter 21, to Benno Reifenberg (boss and friend), in which he shows he can be as hard on the France as he is on Germany. There’s also the toll of taking care of his wife (August 1925):

I have seen a bullfight for the first time in my life. If you’ve never seen anything like that, then you can have no conception of the gruesomeness of it. I know of no French writer who has written about—much less against—these Provençal bullfights. Not Daudet, not Mistral either, to the best of my knowledge. I think they’d be ashamed, and they’re scared. They’re happy to write about the wind, the sky, the people, the riders, the women. Tell me why a great writer isn’t duty bound to accuse his country instead of praising it. They all write as though they wanted their personal monument.
…
[Writing from Marseille]There are 700 vessels in the port. I’ve half a mind to suddenly take one of them. My wife cries every day, if it weren’t for her, I’d be long gone. It’s the first time I’ve had a feeling for the presence of my wife. It’s only in a port that you know you’re married.
…
Inevitably, the Germans and the French are going to intermarry. They are both desperately short of what the other have.

From letter 22, to Benno Reifenberg (August 1925):

Fast is the only way I can write well. The Germans write even literary books scientifically. Their feeling is scientific. That’s why the write slowly. The slow working of someone like Flaubert is based on completely different grounds: laziness, namely. You must remember from your schooldays that it’s possible to slog away all day with the greatest laziness inside you.

From letter 23, again to Benno Reifenberg (September 1925):

At the time Emperor Franz Joseph died, I was already a “revolutionary,” but I shed tears for him. I was a one-year volunteer in a Vienna regiment, a so-called elite unit, that stood by the Kapuzinergruft as a guard of honor, and I tell you, I was crying. An epoch was buried.

From letter 25, to Bernard von Brentano (friend and protégé—December 1925):

You say something about some woman or other you claim to be in love with. This condition is known to be delusory, and ends in bed, just as pink elephants go away when you have a drink. Just call a spade a spade and I’ll understand you better. If you want to sleep with her, don’t come telling me you’re in love with her. I might have believed it from Clemens Bentano [Romantic poet that was Bernard’s ancestor], but not from Bernard. That’s “literature”—i.e., unworthy of a writer. You must never take a woman as seriously as, say, mounting debts. Only the latter can make us lose a night’s sleep. I am sufficiently old-fashioned as to hold marriage—not that I overestimate that either—in higher regard than “love.” In marriage, coition isn’t the be-all and end-all, rather it’s a whole string of intercourse, which may as much take the form of looks and conversations, as that of so-called physical union. I appreciate thatit’s upsetting not to have one’s way with a woman. But a fat man put on a diet by his doctore is much more upset, and with far more substantial reason.

From letter 27, to Bernard von Brentano:

I am becoming dangerous to ordinary decent people because of my knowledge of them. It makes for an atrocious life. It precludes all of love and most of friendship. My mistrust kills all warmth, as bleach kills most germs. I no longer understand the forms of human intercourse. A harmless conversation chokes me. I am incapable of speaking an innocent word.

From letter 34, to Benno Reifenberg (April 1926), where he spells out his professional situation while providing his political outlook:

You can’t write feuilletons with half a mind or one hand tied behind your back. And it’s wrong to write feuilletons on the side. It’s a bad underestimation of the whole profession. The feuilleton is just as important to the paper as its politics—and to the reader it’s even more important. The modern newspaper is made of everything else in it before it’s made of politics. The modern newspaper needs a reporter more than it needs a leader writer. I am not an encore, not a pudding, I am the main dish. Why won’t people stop kidding themselves that a fancy-pants article on the situation in Locarno will grip readers and win subscribers. If Mr. Sieburg is to write mainly feuilletons, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t equally well have remained your Paris correspondent. … But the firm persists in thinking of Roth as a sort of trivial chatterbox that a great newspaper can just about run to. Wrong. I don’t write “witty glosses.” I paint the portrait of the age. That ought to be the job of the great newspaper. I’m a journalist, not a reporter; I’m an author, not a leader writer. …
Spain is journalistically uninteresting. Italy is interesting, Fascism less so. I take a different position on Fascism than the newspaper. I don’t like it, but I know that one Hindenburg is worse than ten Mussolinis. We in Germany should watch our Reichswehr, our Mr. Gessler, our generals, our famous compensation program to landowners. We don’t have the right to attack a Fascist dictatorship while we ourselves are living in a far worse, secret dictatorship, complete with Fememorde[“an antrhopoligical label from the Dark ages for these political killings that appear in a list of shameful manifestation in the Weimar Republic”], paramilitary marches, murderous judges, and hangmen attorneys. My conscience would never allow me, as an oppressed German, to tell the world about oppression in Italy. It would be a rather facile bravery to report behind Mussolini’s back, and keep my head down in my homeland, and go on subsidizing the thugs of the Black Reichswehr with my taxes. …
There is so much going on in Russia, one doesn’t have to write about the Communist terror. The presence of so much new life springing up from the ruins will give me a lot of unpolitical material.

From letter 36 (June 1926):

I am carrying none of the ideological baggage of the sort that most literary visitors to Russia have carried with them in the last few years. Unlike them, as a consequence of my birth and my knowledge of the country, I am immunized to what goes by “Russian mysticism” or “the great Russian soul,” and the like. I am too well aware—as western Europeans are apt to forget—that the Russians were not invented by Dostoyevsky. I am quite unsentimental about the country, and about the Soviet project.

From letter 37 (August 1926)—sadly Roth is right, there is a new world about to be born although it’s clear he doesn’t know how terrifying it will be:

There’s no doubt that a new world is being born in Russia. For all my skepticism, I am happy to be able to witness it. It’s not possible to live without having been here, it’s as if you had stayed at home during the war.

From letter 38 (September 1926), funny to read after his complaint and claim in letter 36:

I feel as though I’ve been gone from Europe for six months. I’ve experienced so much here, and all of it strange to me. … It’s a boon I’ve come to Russia. I should never have gotten to know myself otherwise. … The issue here is not politics, the issue is culture, religion, metaphysics, spirituality.

From letter 39, to Benno Reifenberg (October 1926), working on a self-description :

Everything we say about it [Russia] is mistaken. I read Lenin and Victor Hugo alternately, political authors both, chance purchases, cheap, secondhand editions. … Lenin is a great dialectical brain, Victor Hugo a great dialectical heart, and he writes a better style.

From letter 42, to Benno Reifenberg (April 1927):

I am slow, thorough, full of fear that I might see something wrong, my so-called style is based on nothing but an exact understanding of the facts—I write badly without that—like Sieburg in the Easter issue. I don’t have “ideas,” only understanding. I am incapable of vacuous writing.

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters: 1911 - 1924

2012-01-15T15:28:00.000-08:00

I finally had some time to start Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hofmann. The young Roth sounds so…so…young, something that doesn’t come through in any of his work I’ve read so far. I’ll quote from some of his letters as they strike me, even if they are as inconsequential as what follows.

This letter struck me because I couldn’t help but compare it to the Trotta’s Sunday lunch in The Radetzky March. From letter no. 6, to his cousin Paula Grübel (1916, Vienna):

There is something of Venice in the air today, as there sometimes is on summer days, and I am in a mood as if after lunch I were going by gondola to some wharf. … I am going to have my lunch soon, and am looking forward to it. Today we are having something cheesy and prosy, but the Venetian element in the air today will ennoble and Italianize it, and I will eat nothing cheesy or prosy, but macaroni. And then I really will go out on a gondola, past the Ring and the Volkgarten, and I will encounter a pretty Venetian girl, and will accost her thus: May I bore you, Signorina? And the pretty Venetian girl will reply in purest Viennese: See if I care. And for all that, I am in Venice today. Today, today only, I am the doge of Venice and an Italian tramp rolled in one, but tomorrow, tomorrow I will go back to being the dreamy German poet, art enthusiast, and 3rd year German student studying under Professor Brecht. …

Lunch wasn’t good, because firstly, my neighbor beat his wife with a broomstick. Secondly, the macaroni weren’t proper macaroni at all. And thirdly, Auntie Rieke ate cheese off the point of her knife. Just as well Aunt Mina confiscated my revolver in Lemberg, otherwise I might have committed tanticide.

A few more quotes from the young Roth’s letters:

From letter no. 5, also to Paula (1915 or 1916); ironic given his later experience (both in doing what he says he would and what he wouldn't):

What do you think about money? I don’t think it’s worth bothering about. If I had it, I would chuck it out the window. Money’s the opposite of women. You think highly of a woman until you’ve got her, then when you get her, you feel like chucking her out (or at least you ought). Whereas money you despise as long as you don’t have it, and then you think very highly of it.

Also from letter no. 6:

The fair-haired boy, the dog, and I—we are the only decent people in the whole building.

From letter no. 7, again to his cousin Paula, this time from his field post during World War I (24 August 1917). Again, ideas from The Radetzky March appear as well as some beautiful lines:

I am currently in some Augean shtetl in East Galicia. Gray filth, harboring one or two Jewish businesses. Everything’s awash when it rains, and when the sun comes out it starts to stink. But the location has one great advantage: it’s about 6 miles behind the lines. Reserve encampment.

Materially, I’m not so well off as I used to be. Our newspaper is failing, and once the aura of reporter has faded away, there’ll be nothing left of me but a one-year volunteer. And I’ll be treated accordingly.

But for the likes of me that doesn’t really matter. The main thing is experience, intensity of feeling, tunneling into events. I have experienced frightful moments of grim beauty. Little opportunity for active creation, aside from a couple of lyric poems, which were more out of passive sensation anyway.

Bear

2012-01-13T10:09:00.000-08:00

World War I Centennial: Countdown to Catastrophe (bumped...a post in process)

2012-01-13T09:49:00.000-08:00

I wanted to mention a series starting at mental_floss that will look at the upcoming centennial of the start of World War I:

The First World War was an unprecedented catastrophe that killed millions and set the continent of Europe on the path to further calamity two decades later. But it didn’t come out of nowhere. With the centennial of the outbreak of hostilities coming up in 2014, mental_floss will be taking a look back at the lead-up to the war, when seemingly minor moments of friction accumulated until the situation was ready to explode.

Posts to date in the series:

November 4, 1911: The Treaty of Berlin
January 1912: Councils of War
January 1912: The Socialist Menace

I take a quick look through the books I’ve written about over the past two years and there are quite a few where World War I was a central component of the book: Parade’s End, The Good Soldier Švejk, The Radetzky March, The Road to the Open, Debits and Credits, and The Guns of August come to mind immediately. Not to mention others where the war, whether through its impact or in foreshadowing, has a major role.

While you could start at any point in the lead-up to World War I, I’m glad they are at least starting now. Today’s opening post is on the Treaty of Berlin signed on November 4, 1911. I may add future centennial posts here as updates and will add any other sites that focus on events leading to the centennial of the war’s outbreak.

Also in process, leading to the centenary: Europeana Collections 1914-1918 will create by 2014 - the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War - a substantial digital collection of material from national library collections of ten libraries and other partners in eight countries that found themselves on different sides of the historic conflict.

I have many bookmarks on World War I but I have not congregated them in one place. I think I'll use this post to do just that. As always, if you have a link you'd like to see added to this list, history or literature related, let me know in the comments. This will be a work in process...

Links to World War I material:

Diary of EW Manifold
The war diary of blogger zmkc's grandfather, who served with the British Army in World War One.

A sampling of British poetry from the war. For a more detail and examples, see the University of Oxford's The First World War Poetry Digital Archive.

Stephen Pentz has many posts about World War I at his blog First Known When Lost.

Wikipedia's entry on World War I literature has many links to the works listed (as well as having a separate entry on popular culture, including art).

Rats, Gas & Shell-shock was a class blog for students of "English 342 - British Literature to 1945" and focuses on World War I literature at Simon Fraser University (from spring/summer 2006). Description is taken from the heading--see the opening post for a different course number and more detail on the class.

Trench Literature – Reading in World War I is an article at abebooks.com written by Richard Davies, Udo Goellmann & Sara Melendre.

Yale University's World War I - Documenting the First Total War of the 20th Century has plenty of topics and links to explore.

My post on color photos from the war.

Spartacus Educational's First World War digital archive provides a good overview of the war.

Tim Kendall's blog War Poetry isn't limited to World War I but it is well represented, plus there are plenty of helpful war poetry links.

For more offbeat items on World War I, be sure to check out the war's entries in Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog. My favorite entry looks at War in Dollyland (A Book and a Game), by Harry Golding and illustrated from photographs by Albert Friend.

Earlier poems from Siegfried Sassoon have been unearthed, showing a different side to one of the more famous war poets. Another article on the same subject.

(I'm still going through my links--feel free to let me know of sites you like)

Just arrived: The Letters of Joseph Roth

2012-01-11T13:12:00.000-08:00

I know what I'll be leafing through at work today. I'm sure I'll be posting some excerpts over the next week.

If you're interested in Roth, be sure to check out the book excerpt at The New Yorker, which includes ten letters from the book.

Paul Raymont at Philosophy, lit, etc. has more links at the end of this post, as well as several more posts on Roth over the years.

A manuscript page from Joseph Roth’s 1932 novel The Radetzky March
Picture source

The Adventures of Sindbad

2012-01-08T10:34:00.000-08:00

Biography of Gyula Krúdy

I discovered Trevor at The Mookse and the Gripes has reviewed this and another NYRB Classic I started, so I’ll be sure and link his posts. While there will be some overlap in our reviews I’ll try to focus on additional topics in Krúdy’s work.

Translator George Szirtes provides a helpful introduction to this compilation of stories, informing the reader that “In Hungary, the terms ‘Krúdyesque’ and ‘the world of Krúdy’ have a currency which extends beyond books and conjures an experience comprised of the nostalgic, the fantastic and the ironic.” Szirtes’ description provides a framework to understand the tales but Krúdy’s stories have to be read to appreciate the mystical world he creates. Although ‘mistical’ might be a better term since so much occurs in a misty netherworld, including a healthy amount of dreams and ghosts.

First, the name: we find out in the first story that Sindbad “selected his name from his favourite book of stories, The Thousand and One Nights, for in those days, it was still fairly common for knight errants, poets, actors and passionate scholars to choose names from themselves.” The name proves appropriate—rarely satisfied with his lot, Sindbad wanders often and far. Sindbad, though, is an adventurer of a different sort, his attempted conquests of a carnal nature instead of financial gain. While the original Sindbad never let shipwrecks set him back, so the more recent version won’t let death keep him from his goal—to live on in the memory and dreams of the women he seduces.

Relations between men and women follow a script: men are supposed to try to take a woman’s virtue, using every means at their disposal. The women are supposed to know the men lie and hold out…well, at least hold out longer than they do. In “The Secret Room”, as in other stories, falling in love is the same as imprisonment, longings are ruined by their realization, and familiarity breeds boredom. As explicitly stated in another tale, “what would be the point of dreaming if dreams came true?”

In “Escape from Women”, Sindbad’s appraisal of women proves to be harsh but generous while laying out a game scripted in advance:

‘The strange thing,’ he thought to himself, ‘is that women tend to behave better than one has a right to expect. Poor things, giving their all, their kisses, their dreams and sighs, smuggling my name into their evening prayers—I’d be surprised if the angels didn’t wonder at times what my name was doing among the usual company of aged faters, mothers and tiny children… They were very good indeed, poor creatures. From now on Sindbad will teach the young to cherish women, as they do flowers, as indeed they do so many odd, weak, cheated, robbed, often tortured beings…Is it not touching that for all the times they have been disappointed, the hours they have wept and mourned, nothing continues to engage them so intensely as the serious subject of love. Love is everything to them: the air they breathe, the water they thirst for, the miracle they marvel at. They talk of love as though it were something that had independent existence, something so solid it might be grasped. Though it is true that the subject of fashion runs a close second to love in their thoughts.

‘God bless you then, dear good women—virgins, countesses, women of affairs, half-crazed Jewesses—all who listened with trembling lips, skeptical smiles and with desire and astonishment in your hears when Sindbad favoured you with softly spoken, delicately enunciated lies that filled your heads and souls, that heightened your colour and your mood, and gave you something to think about…For his part, Sindbad would go on to leap from the windows of cursed castles and cry his eyes out for some other woman. At other times, in a complete daze, wholly undiscriminating, he would reach out to pluck one of you, almost anyone—a tea-rose or a roadside thistle—and would have forgotten your name by morning. Forgotten names and voices, voices into which whole lives were poured, your endless self-sacrifice, the dangers into which your passions led you, and the peculiar, precious vows which Sindbad managed to extract from you with the skill of a practised father-confessor—all forgotten. You were all happy to forswear yourselves in the hour of love…Really it hardly mattered that not one of you ever kept her vow.
(Ellipses in original)

[Skip to the end of the story] As the years went by there were messages from far away. Women wanted him to come back: they were bored, they felt nostalgic; they wanted to laugh, cry, cackle, fret and be happy. But Sindbad did not go back because he kept account of the lovers that had succeeded him in their affections. The subsequent pain and bitter disappointment prevented him ever forgiving their unfaithfulness. He was a rogue: in the Middle Ages he would have gone the rounds of the prisons where he would have been shorn, first of his nose, then of his ears. Furthermore, he always believed he was speaking the truth and one can ask no clearer proof of a man’s wickedness. He could never forgive women. He thought he perceived miraculous qualities in them, a combination of the fidelity of the saints with the virtues of the martyrs. And how he would rage when one of them took up with another man though it was he who had done the leaving.

Let us therefore close the file on Sindbad’s not altogether pointless and occasionally amusing existence.

A few comments on Krúdy’s tales, which at times read like nostalgia while at the same time rejecting the past. The living and those in the afterlife both appear melancholy, the line between their worlds of existence blurred or nonexistent. The dead can appear and interact with the living, while at other times they provide the living’s subconscious. Desires held during life carry over into the afterworld. If nothing changes, what is the point of life and death?

Sindbad would often sit down to consider how it was that an entire world, a world that was supposed to have disappeared some time ago, could so resurrect itself before him. It was as if Hungarian village life had remained unchanged over the centuries. The people had changed but they had they had been replaced by others precisely like them. As if birth, death and marriage were all part of some curious joke.

Fortunata and Jacinta

2012-01-06T07:10:00.000-08:00

Ramon Casas
"La Madeleine" (1892)

I seem to have misplaced a week of my life...probably the combination of a brutal head cold and long stressful work days. In trying to get caught up on what others have posted I found The Neglected Books Page's comments on Fortunata and Jacinta by Benito Pérez Galdós, calling it "The Greatest Novel You’ve Never Heard of". Well, now you've heard of it--read the comments at the above link for a good overview.

In another online life I had a personal finance blog, although I included anything I found interesting. About six years ago I started reading this book and enjoyed it so much I had three posts on it. I still think it has one of the most memorable introduction of a character I've ever run across. If you're looking for a good meaty novel to read this year (I'm especially thinking of those that tackled The Maias recently), I highly recommend Fortunata and Jacinta. I can't speak to the different translations other than to say I have the Agnes Moncy Gullón version and it is as lively as advertised.

I'll repost two excerpts from my earlier posts on this novel to give an additional flavor of Galdós' style. The setting for the first quote, as I initially wrote about it: the following takes place as Juanito Santa Cruz and Jacinta return from their honeymoon. During the trip, Jacinta has badgered Juanito (nicknamed ‘the Dauphin’) to reveal details of his pre-marital tryst with Fortunata. Juanito grudgingly reveals facts little by little until one night, extremely drunk, he pours out everything that happened between them.

Jacinta let herself be caressed. She wasn’t angry. But in her soul, a phenomenon very new to her was taking place. She felt two different feelings shuffling, superimposing themselves, one, then the other. Since she adored her husband, she was proud that he had scorned the other woman for her. This pride is primordial and will always persist, even in the most perfect of beings. The other feeling stemmed from the virtue underlying her noble soul, and it inspired her to protest against his having abused and pitilessly abandoned the unknown woman. Try as he might to deny it, the Dauphin had abused humanity. Jacinta could not pretend that he had not. The victory of her vanity didn’t prevent her from seeing that underneath the trophy lay a crushed victim. Perhaps the victim did deserve it; but whether the woman deserved her fate or not was not Jacinta’s concern, and on the altar of her soul there was a tiny flame of compassion burning.

The second excerpt stands on its own:

Dona Lupe matched the image in her nephew’s mind perfectly: she was sensible, reasonable, she cast a somewhat skeptical eye on human weaknesses, and she was capable of forgiving insults and even abuse; but as for a debt, she never forgave a debt. There were two different people in her, the woman and the money lender. Whoever wanted to be on good terms with her and enjoy her friendship had to be sure to keep her two natures separate. A mere promissory note, made out and signed in the most cordial manner conceivable, was enough to convert the friend into a mortal enemy, the Christian into an Inquisitor.

This lady’s dual personality had an external mark on her body, a fatal sign and a work of surgery which in this case was an accusing and just science. One of Dona Lupe’s breasts was missing; it had been removed because of a tumor while her husband was alive. Since she took pride in her good figure (she even wore a corset around the house), she substituted for her missing part a well-made ball of raw cotton. Fully clothed, she appeared to have a nice figure, but underneath her clothes only half of her bosom was flesh and blood; the other half was insensitive, and a dagger could have been driven through it without causing her any pain at all. Her heart was just the same—half flesh, half cotton. The type of relationship she had with a person determined which half would predominate. When a promissory note was not involved, dealing with that lady was a pleasure, but whoever was forced by circumstances to owe her money had something in store for him.

Outlining The Tree of Life

2011-12-30T09:44:00.000-08:00

Picture source

A King At Night at biblioklept.org has done a terrific job piecing together the story within Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Or maybe one of the stories within the movie. It’s funny to read the post and realize how slight a storyline can end up as such a powerful film. I also found it ironic that I had recently read Baroja’s The Tree of Knowledge, but that’s grist for another post.

The most disturbing part of the movie for me was how much I identified with Brad Pitt’s character. Don’t call Child Protection Services…not the abusive manner but some of the sources driving his behavior. The one thing from parenthood I least expected was how much you learn about yourself, both the good and the bad. Fortunately, as Malick’s film continually points out, grace and love are transcendent, mitigating factors for the rest of what we do.

I’ll continue to recommend the movie, even if I can’t always answer “What was it about?”

I Served the King of England

2011-12-26T08:25:00.000-08:00

From the back cover of the New Directions edition:

First published in 1971 as a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I served the King of England is a comic novel telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a German woman athlete just as the Nazis are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition by building his own hotel. He becomes a millionaire; but with the arrival of communism, he loses everything. Sent to inspect mountain roads, Ditie comes to terms with his dreary circumstances, his place in history, and the inevitability of his death.

Well, yes, but it’s so much more. The height of Ditie’s ambition is his wish to be accepted and respected, especially by other hotel owners. He earns his million and develops his hotel visited by famous guests but never attains the acceptance or respect of other hotel owners. The owners visit his hotel but ignore Ditie and the hotel’s most fabulous attractions. Later, when millionaires are rounded up for jail, Ditie takes offense that he is excluded from their ranks. But the book is about so much more than his ambition. In the background lies the history of Czechoslovakia under Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, the German occupation of Bohemia, German atrocities during World War II (including the destruction of Lidice), and the communist takeover early in 1948.

Everyone longs for something in the book but Ditie moves beyond trying to fulfill physical pleasures and seeks his place in the world, during life and death. He initially learns to “read” people as a pupil of the headwaiter at a Prague hotel, who perceptively understands each patron and his desires. When asked how he correctly analyzes a customer and knows so much in advance, the headwaiter responds “I served the King of England.” Ditie’s experience highlights how meaningless such an honor can be—after serving the Emperor of Ethiopia (accidentally at first, then by the Emperor’s choice) Ditie is suspected of stealing a gold spoon. His honor in ruins, he unsuccessfully attempts to hang himself.

Underneath the comic and dramatic events lies a dark aspect of man. Ditie does not evaluate his acquisition of wealth through the theft of valuable stamps from the Jews until bad things happen to him. He doesn’t think twice about abandoning his autistic son, the product of approved coupling by the Third Reich, until haunted by the boy’s talent. The millionaires’ prison receives Hrabal’s special scorn. Despite describing the behavior in the running of the prison as “real comedy, beyond Chaplin’s wildest imagination”, there lies a depressing aspect of man willing to forego freedom for a soft life. Ditie gives up his freedom because he wants to be accepted as one of the rich (this after his humiliation in order to marry a German woman). Hrabal’s scorn is balanced when Ditie’s work assignments take him to the border, where he begins to understand his place in history. Ditie earns more knowledge of human nature than the headwaiter claimed to have from serving the King of England. Ditie’s knowledge, though, comes through solitude and reflection and demonstrates that the unbelievable really can true.

The moment I looked out and saw, to my surprise, how high the snow had reached, I saw my cottage with the animals in it suspended on a chain hung from heaven itself, a cottage banished from the world and yet full to the brim, just like those mirrors with their buried and gorgotten images, images that could be summoned up as easily as the images I put in the mirrors, as the images I littered and lined my road with, covered now by the snow of the past, so that memory could find it only by touch, the way an experienced hand feels the pulse under the skin, to determine where life had flowed, flows, and will flow. And at that moment I began to be afraid, because if I died, all the unbelievable things that had come true would vanish, and I remembered that the professor of aesthetics and French literature had said that the better person was the one who expressed himself better. And I longed to write everything down just as it was, so others could read it and from what I said to myself paint all the pictures that had been strung like beads, like a rosary, on the long thread of my life, unbelievable beads that I had managed to catch hold of here as I looked out the window and marveled at the falling snow that had half buried the cottage. And so every evening, when I sat in front of the mirror with the cat behind me on the bar, butting her little head against my image in the mirror as though the image were really me, I looked at my hands while the blizzard roared outside like a swollen river, and the longer I looked at my hands—and I would hold them up as though I were surrendering to myself—the more I saw winter ahead of me, and snow. I saw that I would shovel the snow, throwing it aside, searching for the road, and go on, every day, searching for the road to the village, and perhaps they would be looking for a way to get to me too. And I said to myself that during the day I would look for the road to the village, but in the evening I would write, looking for the road back, and then walk back along it and shovel aside the snow that had covered my past, and so try, by writing, to ask myself about myself.
(From the translation by Paul Wilson in the New Directions edition)

Highest recommendation.

For additional excerpts from the novel:

It was a magnificent sight

Worthy of inseminating an Aryan with dignity

A match saved with his energetic whistle

I’m going to skip reviewing the movie version of the novel (there are many changes from the text, often to good effect) directed by Jiri Menzel, other than to recommend it—very enjoyable.

I Served the King of England: a match saved with his energetic whistle

2011-12-24T12:54:00.000-08:00

A Christmas Eve entry in the series of excerpts from Bohumil Hrabal’s fantastic tale, where the unbelievable routinely comes true. At times the plot feels like a rickety framework on which to hang anecdotes such as the following…not that I’m complaining.

While in the prison for millionaires (more on this in the next post), Ditie reminisces about experiences and acquaintances. As the absurd becomes routine, Ditie’s memories focus on events that make sense to the (mildly) insane. This quote starts with a vision of Zdeněk when he was the headwaiter of the Hotel Tichota:

On our day off we’d gone for a walk, and in a grove of birches we saw a small man darting among the trees, blowing his whistle, pointing, holding the trees at arm’s length, and shouting, You’ve done it again, Mr. Říha. One more time and you’re out of the game. Then he ran back and forth among the trees again. Zdeněk found this amusing, but I couldn’t figure out what was going on. That evening Zdeněk told me the man was Mr. Šíba, the soccer referee. At the time, no one wanted to referee a Sparta-Slavia match, because the crowd then always insulted the referee, so Mr. Šíba said that if no one else wanted the job he’d referee the game himself. He went into training for it in this birch grove, running about sowing confusion among the birches, reprimanding and threatening Burger and Braine with expulsion, but mostly yelling at Mr. Říha, one more time and you’re out of the game. That afternoon Zdeněk took a bus full of inmates from an asylum for the mildly lunatic who had permission to go into the village because it was fair time, and they could ride on the merry-go-round and swing on the swings in their striped clothes and bowler hats. Zdeněk went into a pub and bought them a barrel of beer and a spigot, borrowed some half-liter glasses, and took them to the birch grove, where they broached the barrel and drank while Mr. Šíba ran among the birch trees blowing his whistle. The lunatics watched him for a while, then, figuring out what he was doing, they began to shout, cheer, and yell out the names of all the famous players for Sparta and Slavia. They even saw Braine kick Plániček in the head, and they jeered until Mr. Šíba threw Braine out of the game. Finally, after the referee had warned Říha three ttimes, there was nothing he could do but toss him out of the game for fouling Jezbera. The lunatics cheered, and by the time we’d polished off the barrel of beer they weren’t the only ones shouting, because I too saw the striped uniforms and the red-and-white uniforms instead of birch trees as the tiny referee Mr. Šíba blew his whistle. When it was over, the lunatics carried him off the playing field on their shoulders for doing such a beautiful job of refereeing. A month later Zdeněk showed me an article in the paper aabout Mr. Šíba, who had thrown Braine and Říha out of a game and thus saved the match with his energetic whistle.

(From the translation by Paul Wilson in the New Directions edition)

An Edison Christmas

2011-12-24T09:49:00.000-08:00

Two Edison Studio productions for the season:

Edison Motion Picture Collections at the Internet Archive:
1891 - 1898
1899 - 1902
1903 - 1922

Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)

2011-12-23T11:06:00.000-08:00

I’m late in posting about Vaclav Havel’s death but I didn’t want it to go unremarked at this blog. (I also wanted to link to Sheila O’Malley’s moving tribute at her blog.)

There are two movies I recommend if you have a chance to see them (not to mention there is a long list of films based on his works, but I haven’t begun to explore yet):

The Power of the Powerless traces Czechoslovakia's post-World War II history through the Velvet Revolution. The trailer can be viewed here, and

Citizen Vaclav Havel Goes on Vacation follows Havel around Czechoslovakia as he visits friends and confronts the secret police. A clip of the documentary can also be found at YouTube.

Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless”, part of an attempted Polish-Czechoslovak project, continues to resonate today. A copy of it can be found at his website (be sure to poke around while you’re there). Here is the fourth section of his essay:

Between the aims of the post-totalitarian system and the aims of life there is a yawning abyss: while life, in its essence, moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, aud self organization, in short, toward the fulfillment of its own freedom, the post-totalitarian system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline. While life ever strives to create new and improbable structures, the posatotalitarian system contrives to force life into its most probable states. The aims of the system reveal its most essential characteristic to be introversion, a movement toward being ever more completely and unreservedly itself, which means that the radius of its influence is continually widening as well. This system serves people only to the extent necessary to ensure that people will serve it. Anything beyond this, that is to say, anything which leads people to overstep their predetermined roles is regarded by the system as an attack upon itsel^ And in this respect it is correct: every instance of such transgression is a genuine denial of the system. It can be said, therefore, that the inner aim of the post-totalitarian system is not mere preservation of power in the hands of a ruling clique, as appears to be the case at first sight. Rather, the social phenomenon of self-preservation is subordinated to something higher, to a kind of blind automatism which drives the system. No matter what position individuals hold in the hierarchy of power, they are not considered by the system to be worth anything in themselves, but only as things intended to fuel and serve this automatism. For this reason, an individual's desire for power is admissible only in so far as its direction coincides with the direction of the automatism of the system.

Ideology, in creating a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system and the aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the work ing class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of in formation is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial intluence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

Upcoming at Reading Odyssey: Homer's Iliad

2011-12-19T16:40:00.000-08:00

First up in 2012 at Reading Odyssey is Homer's Iliad. Based on my experience with The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander this year, I highly recommend exploring the Iliad through Reading Odyssey. The conference calls proved to be exceedingly informative (see this post for a sampling of the Arrian calls) and the discussion questions provided a helpful framework to read the book. Like any other worthwhile endeavor, you'll get out of it what you put into it (yes, I just turned into my parents...again) and I found the group helped maximize both sides of that equation.

Follow the opening link for registration information. If you have any questions about my experience with Arrian, feel free to leave a question in the comments or email me.

Update: From the reading group email:

Just a reminder that Reading Odyssey is forming reading groups for Homer's Iliad (Stanley Lombardo translation). We will hold three conference calls from January to March and cap it off with a special "visit" by Paul Cartledge. If you are interested, please look for more information on the Reading Odyssey website.

I Served the King of England: worthy of inseminating an Aryan with dignity

2011-12-17T08:28:00.000-08:00

Bohumil Hrabal’s fantastic tale takes a dark turn as World War II begins. Ditie loses his job in Prague when he falls in love with a German. Even as Hrabal describes an absurd setting, an ugly edge creeps in with his humor. I’m providing another long excerpt to give an idea of his blending the two. In this scene, Ditie has proposed to his German girlfriend. Before he can accept, Ditie must get her father’s permission, which also includes a state blessing:

And so the unbelievable came true, because in Cheb I had to undergo an examination by a Supreme Court judge and I submitted a written request in which I listed my entire family, going back beyond that cemetery in Cvikov where Grandpa Johan Ditie lay, and with reference to his Aryan and Teutonic origins I respectfully requested permission to marry Elisabeth Papánek. According to the laws of the Reich, I also had to request a physical examination by an SS doctor to determine whether I, being of a different nationality, was eligible under the Nuremberg Laws not merely to have sex with someone of Aryan Teutonic blood but actually to impregnate her. And so while execution squads in Prague and Brno and other jurisdictions were carrying out the death sentence, I had to stand naked in front of a doctor who lifted my penis with a cane and then made me turn around while he used the cane to look into my anus, and then he hefted my scrotum and dictated in a loud voice. Next he asked me to masturbate and bring him a little semen so they could examine it scientifically because, as the doctor said in his atrocious Egerlander German—which I couldn’t understand, though I got the gist well enough—when some stupid Czech turd wants to marry a German woman his jism had better be at least twice as good as the jism of the lowliest stoker in the lowliest hotel in the city of Cheb. He added that the gob of phlegm a German woman would spit between my eyes would be as much a disgrace to her as an honor to me. And I knew from reading the papers that on the very same day that I was standing here with my penis in my hand to prove myself worthy to marry a German, Germans were executing Czechs, and so I couldn’t get an erection and offer the doctor a few drops of my sperm. Then the door opened and the doctor came in with my papers in his hand, and he’d probably just read them and realized who I was, because he said to me affably, Herr Ditie, was ist den los? And he patted me on the shoulder, handed me some photographs, and turned on the light. I found myself looking at pornographic snapshots of naked people, and whenever I’d had this kind of picture in my hands before I’d always turn stiff right away, but now the more I looked at them the more I saw those headlines and the stories in the papers announcing that so-and-so and four others had been sentenced to death and shot, and there were more of them every day, new ones, innocent ones. And here I was standing with my penis in my hand and pornographic snapshots in the other, so I put them down on the table, because I still couldn’t manage to do what I was asked. Finally a young nurse had to come in and after a few deft strokes of her hand, during which I didn’t have to think about anything anymore, she carried off two beads of my sperm on a piece of paper, and half an hour later they were pronounced first-class and worthy of inseminating an Aryan vagina with dignity. And so the Bureau for the Defense of German Honor and Blood could find no objection to my marrying an Aryan of German blood. With a mighty thumping of rubber stamps I was given a marriage license, while Czech patriots, with the same thumping of the same rubber stamps, were sentenced to death.

(From the translation by Paul Wilson in the New Directions edition)

I Served the King of England: It was a magnificent sight

2011-12-14T21:03:00.000-08:00

I wanted to pass on this extended quote from Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England because it captures the element of his comic madness. Ditie, a (short in stature) waiter-in-training at the Golden Prague Hotel and Restaurant, asks a traveling salesman representing a tailoring firm from Padubice why he cuts strips of parchment with measurements written on them for the suit jacket. The salesman tells Ditie about the “revolutionary technique” his

boss invented, the first in the republic, maybe even in Europe and the whole world, and it’s for officers and actors and the kind of person who doesn’t have a lot of time on his hands, like yourself, sir. I just measure them and send the measurements to the workshop, where they take those strips and sew them together on a kind of tailor’s dummy with a rubber bladder inside it that’s gradually pumped up until the parchment strips are filled out, and then they’re covered with fast-drying glue so they harden in the shape of your torso. When they remove the bladder, your torso floats up to the ceiling of the room, permanently inflated, and they tie a cord to it, the way they do to babies in the maternity wards so they won’t get mixed up, or the way they tag the toes of corpses in the morgues of the big Prague hospitals. Then when your turn comes, they pull your torso down and try the dresses, the uniforms, the suit coats, or whatever’s been ordered, on those mannequins, and they sew and refit, sew and refit, unstitching the seams and sewing them again, without a single live fitting. Since it’s all done on this inflated stand-in, of course the coat fits like a glove, and we can mail it out postage-free or C.O.D. with confidence, and it always fits, unless the client gains or loses weight. If that happens, the salesman can simply come again and measure how much you’ve lost or gained, and then the mannequin is taken in or let out at the appropriate places, and the clothes are altered accordingly, or a new coat or tunic is made. And a client’s mannequin is up there among several hundred colorful torsos, until he dies. You can find what you’re looking for by rank and profession, because the firm has divided everything into sections—for generals and lieutenants colonels and colonels and captains and lieutenants and headwaiters and anyone who wears formal dress—and all you have to do is come and pull on the right string and the mannequin comes down like a child’s balloon and you can see exactly how someone looked when he last had a jacket or a tuxedo made to measure or altered.

How does Ditie react to this absurdity? With even more silliness:

All this made me long for a new tuxedo made by that company, and I was determined to buy one as soon as I got my waiter’s papers, so that I and my mannequin could float near the ceiling of a company that was certainly the only one of its kind in the world, since no one but a Czech could have come up with an idea like that. After that I often dreamed about how I personally, not my torso, was floating up there by the ceiling of the Pardubice tailoring firm, and sometimes I felt as though I were floating near the ceiling of the Golden City of Prague restaurant.

Ditie orders a tuxedo from the tailoring firm and goes to pick up the suit in person, asking where his

inflated figurine, my torso, was. The boss of the place was as short as I was, and seemed to understand that I wanted to be taller, and how important being up there among the other torsos near the storeroom ceiling was for me, so he took me there to see it. It was a magnificent sight. Up near the ceiling hung the torsos of generals and regimental commanders and famous actors. Hans Albers [the German actor] himself had his suits made here, so he was up there too. A draft from an open window made the torsos move about like little fleecy clouds in an autumn wind. A thin thread bearing a name tag dangled down from every torso, and the tags danced gaily in the breeze, like fish on a line. The boss pointed at a tag with my name and address on it, so I pulled it down. It looked so small, my torso. I almost wept to see a major general’s torso beside mine, and Mr. Beránek the hotelkeeper’s, but when I thought of the company I was in I laughed and felt better.

So far the plot is almost an afterthought, a loose framework for yarns like this one. The spirit of Hrabal’s anecdotes leads the reader to accept the quirky and fantastic as possible.

(Quotes from the translation by Paul Wilson in the New Directions edition)

For another take on the fantastic as possible, watch this scene from the movie version under Jirí Menzel's direction (which takes some liberty with the book, mostly by understating the waiter's reaction):

Loving

2011-12-12T13:57:00.000-08:00

I finished Loving by Henry Green yesterday and my opinion on it seems to change each time I think about it. I enjoyed the novel but at the same time I got the feeling I was being had or duped. The abrupt, fairy-tale ending only added to that feeling. At the same time, though, I couldn’t help laughing at the absurdity in the story, which would make the ending a perfect fit.

I’ll mention the links post on Henry Green and Loving since it contains several good descriptions of Green’s style and notes on the novel. Green’s comment about the novel captures some of the satiric flavor:

“The British servants in Eire while England is at war is Raunce's conflict, and one meant to be satirically funny. It is a crack at the absurd southern Irish and at the same time a swipe at the British servants, who yet remain human beings. But it is meant to torpedo that woman and her daughter-in-law, the employers.”

Mrs. Tennant, "that woman" and the owner of the Irish castle, and her daughter-in-law Violet are “torpedoed” often in the novel through their own actions and comments. Mrs. Tennant’s self-absorption is on full display in when she talks about the difficulty keeping up the castle in neutral Ireland during World War II:

“But in a way I regard this as my war work, maintaining the place I mean. Because we’re practically in enemy country here you know and I do consider it so important from the morale point of view to keep up appearances. This country has been ruined by people who did not live on their estates. It might be different if [Éamon] de Valera had a use for places of the kind. Why he doesn’t offer Ireland as a hospital base I can’t imagine. Then one could hand over a house like this with an easy conscience.”

Green still allows Mrs. Tennant to “remain a human being” as she deals with her isolation, not just in widowhood but in the distance she (accurately) perceives in her many relationships. There is plenty of ambiguity in Loving, where Green’s style mirrors his message—despite revealing a lot about his characters we never really get to know them.

The hired help of the castle provide the life and vitality of the novel. Whether they are concerned about family members in London during the bombing or filching peacock eggs for beauty treatments, their worries run the gamut from real to absurd. It turns out many of them have perfected a racket to squeeze extra money out of the household or get ahead in some manner. The resentment and devotion that the help exhibits, often at the same time, toward Mrs. Tennant and her family encapsulates their struggle with their own stations in life. Mrs. Tennant longs for order but the recurring scandals, big and small, demonstrate that such a desire will never come to fruition. Charley Raunce, the head footman who assumes a rise in stature after the death of the butler, provides a sort of stability for the other help yet he undermines it often enough with his enmity toward the head housemaid, his nervousness around his love Edith, and his failing health. My favorite character, Paddy, is not given a direct quote since his thick Irish brogue has to be deciphered and translated. Absurdities such as this continue to pile up as the story progresses (if progressing proves to be the appropriate term).

John Updike’s introduction captures several of the reasons I enjoyed Loving:

“W. H. Auden once called him the finest living English novelist. But no need exists to set up a competition; his writing generation has passed on, and his novels are sufficiently unlike any others, sufficiently assured in their perilous, luminous fullness, to warrant the epithet incomparable. And they have become, with time, photographs of a vanished England. Their substantive content, in human psychology, in social mores, in what can be seen and heard by a man alive in a place and time, is as rich as their formal design in intricate, rounded, and pleasing. … Green’s human qualities—his love of work and laughter; his absolute empathy; his sense of spendour amid loss, of vitality within weakness—make him a precious witness to any age. … With upper-class obliquity he champions the demotic in language and in everything. … They [his novels] live, in short, and like all living feed on air, the invisible; the spaces between the words are warm, and the strangeness is mysteriously exact, the strangeness of the vital.”

The warmth and vitality may seem slight at times but they are there. At the same time, I understand many of the criticisms of, or more often the disappointment in reading, Loving. Only near the end of the novel did I feel things click in place for my enjoyment, a moment where I laughed out loud at the ridiculous world Green created. I don’t think my wife will let me live that one down any time soon.

Awkward silence

2011-12-10T11:46:00.000-08:00

Awkward silence: an uncomfortable pause in conversation, causing tension or unpleasant feelings.

Example

Me: "I just found out today one of the guys at work had a prominent role in a TV show a few years ago."

Family: "Really? What show?"

Me: "To Catch a Predator"

awkward silence

In place of a 2011 recap

2011-12-09T10:13:00.000-08:00

We were finally able to announce that the company I work for is being acquired. Thanks to regulatory rules, the long nights and weekends I worked pre-acquisition are only a warm-up for the fresh hell of the next two months. Instead of a recap for the year I want to look at my recent discoveries that have my highest recommendation for your consideration, whether to give as gifts to or in planning for your reading next year.

I’ll start with a series of books instead of an author: The Landmark Ancient Histories. For anyone wishing to discover and explore ancient history writers, you won’t do much better than this series. Last year I re-read Herodotus’ The Histories, this year I tackled Thucydides and Arrian, and I plan to read Xenophon’s Hellenika soon. The series is remarkable, providing maps, annotations, and appendices that allow you to delve into as much detail as you’d like on any or all of the works. In a conference earlier this year, series editor Robert Strassler said the upcoming editions of Polybius, Julius Caesar, and Xenophon’s Anabasis may be in the works for a while but should be released fairly close to each other.

Joseph Roth: I don’t believe I can sing the praises of The Radetzky March enough. Its complex analysis of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is told in beautiful prose and wry humor. The Legend of the Holy Drinker is a fun read (and I recommend the movie version, too), and I look forward to exploring more of Roth’s sparkling work soon.

Vasily Grossman: Life and Fate is a sprawling look at good and evil within man and the choices he makes. Set during the Battle of Stalingrad, Grossman provides an unflinching appraisal of fascism and communism, their similarities in restricting man’s freedom and perverting his spirit. Even in such a bleak setting Grossman emphasizes hope as long as “what is human in human beings” exists, weakness as well as strength, is allowed to flourish. If you get a chance to listen to the BBC4 Radio dramatization of Life and Fate, do so—it’s a notable adaptation. It may be a while before I get to more of Grossman’s work but I definitely intend to explore.

Bohumil Hrabal: Too Loud a Solitude was a fun romp with plenty to chew on regarding the role of literature in life, censorship and its consequences, and the joy of subversion. Hrabal defies easy categorization because of the book’s uneasy ambivalence about the role of man in the future. I already have I Served the King of England on hold and plan on reading more of his work next year.

If you're looking for additional ideas on books or authors, feel free to scroll back for more of my recommendations or click the blog links in the sidebar (and don't forget their links)--you'll find plenty to choose from in many different styles, formats, and genres.

J R audiobook

2011-12-08T10:41:00.000-08:00

I finally finished the audiobook of William Gaddis’ J R and thoroughly enjoyed it. I recommend it, especially for anyone that has wanted or tried to read it and felt overwhelmed at keeping so many unattributed conversations straight. Narrator Nick Sullivan provides distinctive voices for each character. Think of it as the color-coding Faulkner wanted to use for The Sound and the Fury. In addition, The Gaddis Annotations should help as does Gaddis’ interview in The Paris Review.

Speaking of which, the annotations (and almost everyone else that talks about J R) highlight the opening line of the novel “- Money...?” as the major theme of the novel. Scarcer (I originally said ‘never’ but I now see Frederick R. Karl mentions it in his introduction to the 1993 Penguin edition) is any focus on the closing lines. J R’s plaintive eleven-year-old voice issues from a dangling phone receiver: “So I mean listen I got this neat idea hey, you listening? Hey? You listening…?” Karl touches on the irony that a novel of voices has a surprising lack of communication. The Recognitions was similar when it came to the inability to connect but, thinking back on it, I would say the failure to communicate (sorry…I couldn’t resist) dwelt more in the struggle of the characters to express themselves. In J R, though, the conversations aren’t incomplete but interrupted. Everyone talks past each other, with the opening scene between Coen the lawyer and the elderly Bast sisters providing a hilarious, perfect lead-in to this attribute.

Highly recommended.

Related:
That is where he would have done it
Point is...
A landmark indeed

Some rocks are involved

2011-12-05T11:31:00.000-08:00

Posted for no other reason than I watched "Seven Chances" with the family last night and the boys wanted me to replay this scene (when they could speak between laughs, that is). TCM had Buster Keaton as their feature star a couple of months ago and the boys became huge fans. As zrsio, the uploader of this clip says, "Some rocks are involved."

Four minutes that should add a smile to your day.

Henry Green links

2011-12-03T10:05:00.000-08:00

In his own words: The Paris Review interview with Terry Southern in 1958.

INTERVIEWER: I'd like to ask you some questions now about the work itself. You've described your novels as “nonrepresentational.” I wonder if you'd mind defining that term?

GREEN: “Nonrepresentational” was meant to represent a picture which was not a photograph, nor a painting on a photograph, nor, in dialogue, a tape recording. For instance, the very deaf, as I am, hear the most astounding things all round them which have not in fact been said. This enlivens my replies until, through mishearing, a new level of communication is reached. My characters misunderstand each other more than people do in real life, yet they do so less than I. Thus, when writing, I “represent” very closely what I see (and I'm not seeing so well now) and what I hear (which is little) but I say it is “nonrepresentational” because it is not necessarily what others see and hear. … People strike sparks off each other; that is what I try to note down. But mark well, they only do this when they are talking together. … I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: “Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.” I saw the book in a flash.

…

INTERVIEWER: In your work I believe this reached such a high point of refinement in Loving as to be indiscernable—for, with all the critical analyses that book received, no one called attention to the absurdity of one of the basic situations: that of English servants in an Irish household. Now, isn't that fundamental situation, and the absence of any reference to it throughout the book, intended to be purely absurd?

GREEN: The British servants in Eire while England is at war is Raunce's conflict, and one meant to be satirically funny. It is a crack at the absurd southern Irish and at the same time a swipe at the British servants, who yet remain human beings. But it is meant to torpedo that woman and her daughter-in-law, the employers. As to the rest, the whole of life now is of course absurd— hilarious sometimes, as I told you earlier, but basically absurd.

James Wood on The Leonard Lopate Show. In the twenty-minute segment Wood highlights many of his points in his essay on Green in The Times Literary Supplement (“The Last English Modernist”), which was included in his book The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (the chapter “Henry Green’s England”). Wood seeks to rescue Green from the “soft obscurity” into which his works have settled.

Jeremy Treglown's biography on Henry Green: Romancing - The Life and Work of Henry Green is a short article on the contrast between a writer and his work. A review of the biography can be found here.

Edward Champion’s entry on Loving in the Modern Library Challenge. Edward makes it clear that the book (or maybe its pace) doesn’t resonate with everyone, as Grant Faulkner makes clear, too.

Update (5 Dec 2011): "The Double Life of Henry Green: The 'Secret' Vice of a Top British Industrialist is Writing Some of Britain's Best Novels" by Nigel Dennis. From the August 4, 1952 edition of Life magazine (check out the ads, too).

The Physics of NASCAR

2011-12-02T11:02:00.000-08:00

The Physics of NASCAR: How to Make Steel + Gas + Rubber = Speed
by Diandra Leslie-Pelecky
Foreword by Ray Evernham

A few Saturdays ago I was sitting in the library while my boys were deciding on which books to check out when I saw this book in a science display. After leafing through a few pages I thought it might be a fun read (something I needed) and checked out the book.

Over forty-six years ago, Tom Wolfe wrote about the attraction stockcar racing held for its fans. In a couple of places in the article, Wolfe describes some of the intuition and seat-of-the-pants experimentation by drivers and their crews to gain an edge. In-depth scientific and engineering studies have replaced the haphazard approach in order to improve every aspect of a racecar. Leslie-Pelecky, a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Dallas, breaks down the science behind why NASCAR and race teams do what they do.

The book begins with concentrated looks at various components that come into play in racing—many of the concepts and particulars will already be familiar to anyone that has watched more than one race or has taken chemistry and physics classes. The level of expertise and prodigious amount of work that crews do off the track is impressive and several topics get down to the atomic and molecular level. When Leslie-Pelecky moves the story to the track for practice, qualifying and a race, the book comes alive and shows how all the parts work together (or often don’t). Like many fans of the sport, she realizes she has gone from objective observer to a member of the race team she follows.

With so many standardized and regulated features on the cars, small changes in the dimensions crews have freedom to vary can make a big difference. In addition to covering many topics on how to increase speed, the book also has several chapters on the evolution of safety features of the car and the track. After all the precise measurement and exact preparation for a race, though, deciding factors in a race can boil down to instinct, experience, and luck. As Leslie-Pelecky points out (usually in looking at different materials but it applies to almost every aspect) every choice comes with a trade-off, something being sacrificed in order to improve another area.

My only real complaint is that I wish several of the topics had been more in depth. Fortunately Leslie-Pelecky has set up a website that provides additional information on topics not included in the book as well as links to educational material and videos.

Overall a fun read that explains the physics and chemistry in relatively easy terms. And if it makes it sound like I know what I’m talking about when the boys ask a question about racing, so much the better.

An Iliad

2011-11-28T15:08:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Sheila O'Malley at The Sheila Variations for posting on the stage play An Iliad, playing at The Court Theatre in Chicago. There are more video excerpts on YouTube (see the links shown at the end of the clip) about the play, definitely worth checking out.

Sheila links to a review by Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune:

And thus this Poet makes very clear that while he is talking about one specific, 10-year conflict, the reason for such fights does not change with the passing years. "Helen's been stolen," he says, setting up his big tale. "And the Greeks have to get her back. There's always something, isn't there?"

Indeed there is always something. Usually some kind of personal affront. And just in case you still don't get that point, Kane's Poet rattles off a bravura list of pretty much every major war in the world from Troy to Afghanistan (Crimean, Mexican War of Independence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera). In that moment — by far the most remarkable of a consistently fascinating evening — Kane's lips start to move as if he were in the middle of an exorcism.

Too Loud a Solitude

2011-11-27T08:14:00.000-08:00

After seeing glowing reviews of the works of Bohumil Hrabal, I thought I would read one of his books. Expect to see several more posts on his works over the next few months—I thoroughly enjoyed Too Loud a Solitude. Welcome to the world of Haňtá, a trash compactor in Prague, turning out compressed bales of paper for the last thirty-five years. Haňtá reveals that his two loves in the world are books and beer, items he feels are necessities for his work and his learning. It’s questionable at first whether he understands the books he rescues from the compactor and takes home to read. It becomes clear that he not only understands the books, they have become part of him, leaving a mark on his soul. No longer able to tell which “thoughts come from me and which from my books” (page 1) he sees himself as a bale of compacted thoughts he has received from his books. Haňtá makes use of his learning to add to his unique way of looking and acting in the world around him, although his subtle subversion, born of a naiveté despite the self-scholoarship, sets him apart from others.

Haňtá hopes that the books he saves from the compactor will tell him more about himself. His apartment becomes so filled with books that he can barely maneuver around the many stacks. He has added shelves everywhere, including above his bed where the weight of his books would crush him in his sleep if they happened to fall. Haňtá accepts whatever comes his way with unquestioning gratitude, highlighting a tension between his ideals and what he is willing to do to obtain them:

I don’t like baths even though we have a shower room right behind the boss’s office, because if I had a bath I’d be sure to come down with something. I have to go easy on the hygiene, working with my bare hands: I can’t wash them until night, because if I washed them several times a day my skin would crack. But sometimes, when a yearning for the Greek ideal of beauty comes over me, I’ll wash one of my feet or maybe even my neck, then the next week I’ll wash the other foot and an arm, and whenever a major religious holiday is in the offing, I’ll do my chest and both feet, but in that case I take an antihistamine in advance, because otherwise I’ll have hay fever even if there’s snow on the ground. (pages 25-6, all quotes from the Harvest Book/Harcourt, Inc. edition, translation by Michael Henry Heim)

Hrabal’s condemnation of censorship saves the most bite for its indoctrination of others to participate. Haňtá believes “inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.” (page 2) The paper trash he receives to compact regularly includes books, but they are mostly discarded works (although the works from the Royal Prussian Library proves to be a special exception). Not until he visits a new powerful compactor does he see organized censorship—entire runs of books, still in their packing boxes, fed into the machine. Hrabal’s picture of the visiting schoolchildren, hurting themselves while enthusiastically ripping apart the books to be fed into the compactor, is disheartening. Even so, Haňtá scurries home and tries to mimic the bigger, more efficient machine. He has seen the future and tries to maintain his place in such a changed world, regardless of the cost. The joy of the early pages and his fond reminiscing has been replaced by gloom. Haňtá’s abandons turning his bales into works of art (he used to place a book in the middle of the bale opened to a particular page, then cover the bales with posters of art masterpieces) in favor of increased volume, leading to a predictable, but still powerful, ending.

Along the way we meet many wonderfully drawn characters as colorful as Haňtá:

- Haňtá’s uncle, retired from the railway, who installed a signal tower and rail line in his backyard, (shades of Tristram’s Uncle Toby) where his friends can play with a secondhand locomotive and get just as lubricated as the engine.

- Marie, one of his early loves, who can’t seem to escape disastrous run-ins with feces.

- The Gypsy girl who briefly moved in with him, afraid that Haňtá’s kite would fly away with her. (Hrabal draws very affectionate portraits of his Gypsy characters in this book.)

- Haňtá’s old friend, who celebrates getting his boss in trouble through a two-day sobriety by getting drunk.

- The mice, whether in his work basement or in the sewers in the city. Haňtá views them in the same relationship as God views humans.

Highly recommended and as I mentioned earlier I plan to read and post more on works by Hrabal. Here are some links for those interested in exploring more about the author and his books:

James Wood’s article on Hrabal

Article by Mats Larsson, with excerpts from different works

Adam Thirwell on Hrabal (focusing on I Served the King of England but covering his work in general)

The 2007 film adaptation, using puppets, of the novel--not a comprehensive treatment of the book and some liberties are taken to explicitly highlight the political aspects of the novel. I enjoyed it even with the changes.

Point is...

2011-11-26T17:20:00.000-08:00

Richard at Caravana de recuerdos had a post last week on Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann. I've mentioned I'm listening to the audio version of William Gaddis' JR and as luck would have it I heard a brief mention of the story the same day I read the review. I love coincidences like that, with the added bonus of hearing an explicit mention of the Faustus legend in JR since it underlies a major part of Gaddis' The Recognitions.

I know the excerpt won't do it justice. You will have to imagine a drunken slur as Jack Gibbs unsuccessfully tries to make a point to Beamish, the lawyer of Schramm's estate (he recently hanged himself), about Schramm's manuscript and his experience in World War II. Tom Eigen supplies the interruption as Gibbs tries to make a point about the lie a general told to protect himself for leaving Schramm alone while protecting his retreat during the Battle of the Bulge:

- Trying to hurry Beamish…the cup came up for a long pull and he reached for the papers. – point is Schramm wasn’t just trying to write another God damned war book, whole God damned point in Faust the Lord has everything laid out for Faust to win but he won’t tell Faust, what the hell do you expect Faust to do? Lord staying above the God damned battle letting him break his God damned neck fighting for what was planned for him all the time what the hell do you…

- Jack, shut up! We’ve got to …

- Look how the hell do you expect me to read this whole God Damned thing to Mister Beamish without filling him in on the facts, ever see Schramm’s Western Beamish? Wrote a Western didn’t even have his name on it, point is he’s out there hanging on waiting for orders to fall back that never came from the Lord and this God damned general radioed him was a God dmaned lie, comes out saying he won the bet and…wait what the hell are you doing, expect me to read this whole thing to Mister…

(page 391 in the 1993 Penguin paperback edition)

Yeah, it loses a lot in carving it from the whole...hopefully the take on the Faustus tale still comes through.

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T20:59:00.000-08:00

Given how things are going right now I need to remind myself, per Steven Riddle, William Michaelian and other wonderful book bloggers...I need to remind myself to take time out to enjoy and appreciate the wonders around me. This includes the pleasures from books...

Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

- Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude (translation by Michael Henry Heim)

Augustus by John Williams

2011-11-19T08:35:00.000-08:00

There are so many wonderful things to say about John Williams’ Augustus and the few online reviews I’ve skimmed do a good job of going into detail about many of its strengths. In this post I want to highlight a few aspects of the book I found enjoyable.

The novel is full of tensions and tradeoffs, such as public versus private obligations, mind versus body, city versus country, choice versus foreordained, permanency versus temporary, cost versus benefit. The last point is stressed often and summarized very nicely by Nicolaus of Damascus (page numbers refer to the Vintage International paperback edition—see this post for an index):

Octavius Caesar has brought peace to this land; not since Actium has Roman raised sword against Roman. He has brought prosperity to the city and the countryside; not even the poorest of the people wants for food in the city, and those in the provinces prosper from the beneficences of Rome and Octavius Caesar. Octavius Caesar has brought liberty to the people; no longer need the slave live in fear of the arbitrary cruelty of his master, nor the poor man fear the venality of the rich, nor the responsible speaker fear the consequences of his words.

And yet there is an ugliness in the air which, I fear, bodes ill for the future of the city, the Empire, and the reign of Octavius Caesar himself. Faction is ranged against faction; rumors abound; and no one seems content to live in the comfort and dignity which their Emperor has made possible. These are extraordinary people…. It is as if they cannot endure safety and peace and comfort. (246-7)

The genesis of the book, relayed by John McGahern in the introduction, comes from the conflict between public requirements and private yearnings. The cost in resolving these conflicts proves to be high:

While they were talking casually about the book, [Morton] Hunt told him [Williams] about the story of Augustus, who had a daughter, Julia, whom he loved, but he exiled and imprisoned her in order to save the State because she had broken the laws on adultery that he had enacted. This fascinated Williams and he started to read about it. Discovering that Julia had been effectively written out of the histories, the more he read the more he was engaged by what he describes as ‘the ambivalence between the public necessity and the private want or need’ which is at the novel’s core. (Introduction, x).

While I can’t argue that the “public necessity and the private want or need” lies at the novel’s core, there is another tension I found equally compelling, and possibly more central to the novel—the tension between reality and ideals.

What you seem so unwilling to accept, even now, is this: that the ideals which supported the Republic had no correspondence to the fact of the old Republic; that the glorious word concealed the deed of horror; that the appearance of tradition and order cloaked the reality of corruption and chaos; that the call to liberty and freedom closed the minds, even of those who called, to the facts of privation, suppression, and sanctioned murder. We had learned that we had to do what we did, and we would not be deterred by the forms that deceived the world. (62-3)

Augustus grasped the discrepancy between ideals and reality quickly, learning to master his emotions in order to achieve his ultimate goals. As his closest friends learned, that might mean protecting enemies in order to first consolidate power. He lived long enough to doubt that the compromises he made, personal and political, were the right choices.

”Father,” I asked, “has it been worth it? Your authority, this Rome that you have saved, this Rome that you have built? Has it been worth all that you have had to do?”

My father looked at me for a long time, and then he looked away. “I must believe that it has,” he said. “We both must believe that it has.” (237)

The first two books of the novel draw an outline of Augustus through letters, journals, and other documents but we don’t see into his thoughts until the final book. Williams’ portrait of the aged leader is one of a beneficent, enlightened despot, looking back on his achievements and their cost while also looking into Rome’s future after he is gone. It’s a beautiful section, full of guarded optimism tempered by practical insights. He consoles himself on things he has missed out on or only experienced briefly, such as friendship and love, by noting their fleeting limits. Occasionally he turns his attention to more permanent things, such as literature or the idea of Rome:

Rome is not eternal; it does not matter. Rome will fall; it does not matter. The barbarian will conquer; it does not matter. There was a moment of Rome, and it will not wholly die; the barbarian will become the Rome he conquers; the language will smooth his rough tongue; the vision of what he destroys will flow in his blood. And in time that is ceaseless as this salt sea upon which I am so frailly suspended, the cost is nothing, is less than nothing. (310)

Highly recommended.

An "ambivalence about the nature and purpose of foreign policy"

2011-11-14T08:42:00.000-08:00

In which I continue to use my blog as a personal notebook...

A link to an outstanding article on and review of George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis.

His fluency in German and Russian, as well as his knowledge of those countries’ histories and literary traditions, combined with a commanding, if contradictory, personality. Kennan was austere yet could also be convivial, playing his guitar at embassy events; pious but given to love affairs (in the management of which he later instructed his son in writing); endlessly introspective and ultimately remote. He was, a critic once charged, “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”

For all these qualities — and perhaps because of them — Kennan was never vouchsafed the opportunity actually to execute his sensitive and farsighted visions at the highest levels of government. And he blighted his career in government by a tendency to recoil from the implications of his own views. The debate in America between idealism and realism, which continues to this day, played itself out inside Kennan’s soul. Though he often expressed doubt about the ability of his fellow Americans to grasp the complexity of his perceptions, he also reflected in his own person a very American ambivalence about the nature and purpose of foreign policy.

Update (2 Dec 2011): From a review of the same book by Frank Costigliola:

Though he captures much of the man’s complexity, Gaddis’s depiction of Kennan is ultimately clipped and flattened. Perhaps the problem is trying to frame within “an American life,” as the subtitle has it, the biography of someone who mused that even his friends did “not know the depth of my estrangement, the depth of my repudiation of the things [the American public] lives by.”17 As compared to the portrait in the biography, the personality revealed in Kennan’s diaries and letters—even the figure who emerges from the transcripts of Gaddis’s interviews—was more irreverent as a collegian, more deeply identified with Russian culture as a fledgling diplomat, more ambivalent about his marriage, more alienated from American life, more inclined to concealment, and more tortured by the limitations of old age. The Kennan of the letters and diaries is far less conventional and more complex and elusive than the person we encounter in Gaddis’s biography.

Update (1 Jan 2012): For another good review of the book, see James Piereson's review at The New Criterion.

An index for Augustus

2011-11-11T08:43:00.000-08:00

I started reading John Williams' Augustus this week and promptly ran into a problem—finding a particular section in an epistolary novel told from many sources could take quite a while. Since there was no index I thought I would create my own and share it here. (Any misspellings are due to a chronic lack of sleep.) I have only started the book but can highly recommend it at this point.

While there are many online resources for the life and times of Augustus/Octavius, I wanted to point out the Annotated Guide to Online Resources for him at virgil.org.

Update--A few additional links on Augustus, which provide many more links:

Some links on Augustus and the Roman Revolution by Jim O'Hara, George L. Paddison Professor of Latin at The University of North Carolina

An Augustus primer at the Roman History Reading Group

Reading Odyssey's conference calls on Arrian

2011-11-08T10:04:00.000-08:00

I participated in the Reading Odyssey's reading of Arrian's The Campaigns of Alexander this year and wanted to gather all the conference calls in one place. Reading Odyssey "is a partnership between scholars and readers" aiming "to reignite curiosity and lifelong learning." I enjoyed participating in this program and highly recommend future programs. The listed programs for next year as currently listed:

- Homer's Iliad beginning January 2012,
- Homer's Odyssey beginning May 2012, and
- Herodotus' Histories beginning September 2012.

The Campaigns of Alexander conference calls (2011):

Introduction
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Books Four and Five
Book Six
Book Seven

No shadow, no stars, no moon, no care

2011-11-02T14:07:00.000-07:00

November is proving it will be a rather rough month so I'm going to take a break from any scheduled posts. Lots of forthcoming news that will interest no one else, but nothing I can share yet. Hopefully I'll still find time to read and make the occasional post this month, although I've only read 4 pages in Augustus so far.

I'll leave you with a link I found in The Economist on the correspondence and friendship (of a sort) between T. S. Eliot and Groucho Marx. Some letters have appeared in The Groucho Letters, but reading about the relationship between the two men still makes me smile.

The Campaigns of Alexander summary

2011-10-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander
Edited by James Romm, Series Editor Robert B. Strassler, Translation by Pamela Mensch, Introduction by Paul Cartledge

If you haven’t noticed by now, I am a huge fan of the Landmark series, created by Robert B. Strassler. If you haven’t picked up a volume in the series, check out these sample pages from various parts of The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander. The introduction by Paul Cartledge provides an excellent introduction, especially with his focus on the sources. The appendices, many by editor James Romm, provide context for various aspects of Arrian’s work and Alexander’s time.

Arrian’s work covers Alexander III of Macedon’s reign from his ascension to the throne until his death in Babylon in 323 BC. This twelve-year reign saw remarkable achievements that earned him the moniker “the Great.” Arrian wrote almost five hundred years after Alexander’s reign, his admiring portrait (with an occasional finger wag) meant to be “for the benefit of mankind.” His task was all the harder because it is almost impossible to discover the historical Alexander—the propaganda and myth-making began during his reign with his own appointed historian. Arrian spells out his approach to his subject and his book in his two prologues, both of which provide an important framework to keep in mind when reading and assessing the work.

As I noted early in Arrian’s work, the reading of Alexander’s life would be a study in contrasts and that carried through to his death. Because of the many facets of Alexander’s life he could be a poster child for the adage that each generation writes its own history—depending on which side you emphasize you get a very different portrait. Arrian, to his credit, focuses on Alexander the person (most of the time), a complex man taking every advantage of what was provided and overcoming what wasn’t. A. B. Bosworth’s comment that “The study of Alexander…is in large part the study of Arrian, who provides the constant thread against which the rest of the tradition must be assessed” shows how influential Arrian has become in evaluating the ruler. (From Arrian to Alexander: Studies in Historical Interpretation. New York, Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1988). In addition to being a history, Arrian’s work has to be evaluated as a literary work. For example, the speeches provide Arrian with an opportunity to “invent” the Alexander he wants his readers to see, following in the footsteps of Herodotus and Thucydides (among others) in using this rhetorical device in their histories.

The following links will give you a flavor for the book, which I hope anyone with even just a passing interest will explore. Highest recommendation.

Posts

Resources
Online resources
A series of weekly conversations between historians James Romm and Paul A. Cartledge at Forbes.com
The link to Reading Odyssey, Inc., which hosted a reading group of the book
A mini-review of James Romm’s Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire
The Reading Odyssey's 2011 conference calls on the book

Book One
Alexander and the Triballoi
A study in contrasts, part one
A study in contrasts, part two
I am the greatest, at least by association (a look at Arrian’s prologues)
Loyalty and betrayal
Granicus: “Thou art invincible”
Granicus: “Except for the Spartans”
Book One conference call

Book Two
He firmly refused to suspect his friends and had the strength to face death
Leadership and legend
Address yourself to me as the king of Asia
Siege, wrath, and amnesty
A look at Arrian in his text (so far)
Destiny

Book Three
The oracle of Ammon
Alexander, the great administrator?
Gaugamela
Burning down the house

Books Four and Five
Link to Books Four and Five reading group questions
How Books Four and Five fit in with Arrian’s prefaces
They “do not remain there entirely of their own will”
The good, the bad and the ugly of Books Four and Five
Speeches in Books Four and Five

Book Six
An overview of Book Six

Book Seven
Be gone, all of you!
Consider who you are in comparison to Alexander
For the benefit of mankind

Miscellaneous
Clips from the 1968 TV movie “Alexander the Great”, filmed in 1964 and starring William Shatner as Alexander and Adam West as Cleander
Excerpt from Robert Lowell’s "Death of Alexander"

Map of the Macedonian Empire under Alexander and his journeys
Picture source

The Campaigns of Alexander, Book Seven: For the benefit of mankind

2011-10-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

Though I have myself had occasion to find fault with some of Alexander’s deeds in the course of my history of them, I am not ashamed to admire Alexander himself. If I have condemned certain acts of his, I did so out of my own regard for truth and also for the benefit of mankind. That, after all, was my purpose in embarking on this history, and I, too, have been favored with help from god.

- 7.30.3, The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander, translation by Pamela Mensch

I mentioned in the opening post for Book Seven that Arrian inserted himself quite liberally in Book Seven and I thought I should give some examples. I have focused on Arrian’s “appearance” in some earlier posts, especially in his two prologues and how they influence Arrian’s presentation in Books Four and Five. Another example was calling attention to himself in Book Two (not to slight the other Books where he does this, too).

The opening paragraphs of Book Seven prove to be some of Arrian’s most confused writing, where he alternates between Alexander’s ambition and “a better way of thinking” from Indian sages. The sages promote contentment with what one has instead of longing for more, obviously not Alexander’s strong suit. Arrian seems to believe Alexander would have been better off if he had followed the Indian sages’ advice, yet Arrian also admires all he accomplished. As footnote 7.2.2a points out, Arrian tries to have it both ways in these paragraphs, following contemporaneous writings that explored “the contrast between eastern quietism and western imperialism”.

I will skip the premonitions, prophecies, and foreshadowing of Alexander’s death even though they provide plenty of opportunity for Arrian to step from behind the page. Arrian’s assessments on Alexander’s life and death are some of Arrian’s most forward passages. During comments on the oracles of Bel, Arrian opines

And perhaps it was better for him to depart at the high point of his fame and of the world’s longing for him, before any of the calamities of man’s lot befell him—the kind of calamities that, in all likelihood, prompted Solon to advise Croesus to look to the end of a long life and not to declare any human being happy until then.

"Perhaps" allows a lot of leeway in judging this quote. Not to mention Arrian had hindsight of seeing the empire disintegrate after Alexander’s death, seeing the calamities that befell many of his inner circle.

Arrian saves some of his most scathing comments for Kleomenes, satrap of Egypt. Calling the official “a despicable man” and “a villain”, Arrain doesn’t hold back on his judgment (7.23.6, 8), which proves to be humorous since these comments come during Arrian’s judgment on Alexander’s overwrought behavior following Hephaistion’s death. Pointing out the waste of time and effort on trivial matters to honor Hephaistion, Arrian also deplores Alexander’s leniency to Kleomenes.

Arrian sums up his subject at the end of Book Seven by assessing Alexander’s character. Arrian begins by praising Alexander’s for his body (including his self-control!), his mind, and his military genius. Given his admiration it's not surprising Arrian finds Alexander’s actions mostly honorable as was his concern for benefiting others. Arrian pauses to look at some of the criticisms leveled at Alexander, starting with the excesses of action, claims to divine parentage, and his blending of Macedonian and Persian customs and troops. Arrian views these as methods to either reinforce his authority or inspire his men. I quoted the first part of the final chapter in the previous post, where Arrian warns average men to refrain from judging someone superior. Arrian closes with the opening quote of this post, but I want to note previous section since Arrian believes Alexander may have had some divine component:

I suppose there was no race of men, no city at that time, no single person whom Alexander’s name did not reach. I therefore assume that a man unlike any other in the world would not have been born without the intervention of the gods. Oracles are said to have indicated this at Alexander’s death, as did various apparitions that were seen and dreams that were dreamt, the honor in which Alexander has to this day been helf by mankind, and the memory of him, which surpasses the merely human. (from 7.30.2)

There’s another way Arrian inserts himself in the text, or rather he inserts Roman reputation and influence in Alexander’s empire. Arrian speculates on Alexander’s travels had he remained alive, exploring the claim that “he was already unsettled by the Romans’ growing renown.” (7.1.3) Later in the Book, Arrian quotes other writers saying the Romans sent an embassy to Alexander while on his way to Babylon and he “spoke prophetically about the Romans’ future power, as he had observed that their people were orderly, hardworking, and free, and he had also learned about their constitution.” (7.15.5) Although Arrian believes the embassy from Rome unlikely he still includes the story in his narrative.

Despite pointing out disapproval for occasional acts of Alexander, Arrian remains an enthusiastic admirer of the ruler. His delivers his criticism with a light hand, usually providing excuses or putting a positive spin on events. Arrian makes clear in the last chapters that there were things to reproach about Alexander but that his success in so many other areas outweighs the negatives. I think Arrian has no doubt he succeeded in his implied claim in the second prologue that he has provided a worthy publication of Alexander’s epic exploits.

The Campaigns of Alexander, Book Seven: consider who you are in comparison to Alexander

2011-10-26T03:15:00.000-07:00

Anyone who reproaches Alexander should not simply cite those deeds that deserve to be reproached. Instead, after collecting in one place all of Alexander’s qualities, let his critic then consider who he is and what sort of fortune he has had that he reproaches Alexander, a man who became so great and attained such a peak of human success as the undisputed king of both continents whose name reached every land—whereas he is a lesser man, toiling at lesser things and not even handling them with any ability.

- 7.30.1, The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander, translation by Pamela Mensch

Compare to the excerpt from Robert Lowell’s "Death of Alexander" from History (1973):

No one was like him. Terrible were his crimes—
but if you wish to blackguard the Great King,
think how mean, obscure and dull you are,
your labors lowly and your merits less...

The Campaigns of Alexander, Book Seven: Be gone, all of you!

2011-10-25T03:03:00.000-07:00

”I was now going to send back those of you who are unfit for war, to be envied by those at home. But since you all wish to go, be gone, all of you, and report, when you get home, that Alexander, your king, who conquered the Persians, Medes, Bactrians, and Sacae, who subjugated the Ouxioi, Arachosians, and Zarangians, who acquired the lands of the Parthians, Khorasmians, and Hyrcanians as far as the Caspian Sea, who crossed the Caucasus beyond the Caspian Gates, and Oxus, the Tanais, and the Indus, too, which none had ever crossed by Dionysos, and the Hydaspes, the Akesinos, and the Hydraotes, and who would have crossed the Hyphasis had you not shrunk back, and who burst into the Great Sea by both outlets of the Indus, and who traversed the Gedrosian desert, which none had crossed with an army, and along the way acquired Carmania and the land of the Oeitae, the fleet having already sailed from India to Persia—tell them, why don’t you, that when you returned to Susa you abandoned him and departed, turning him over to the safekeeping of the barbarians you had conquered. Such a report may win you renown from men and will, no doubt, be holy in the sight of god. Now go!”

- 7.10.-5-7, The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander, translation by Pamela Mensch

This may prove to be my favorite Book in Arrian’s work on Alexander even though Arrian inserts himself quite liberally in the text (and that may be some of the appeal). With this post I want to look at Alexander’s increasingly erratic behavior and the mounting tension between him, his officers and his troops.

The replacement of many satraps (and execution of some) drive home Arrian’s point that Alexander had “become quicker to accept accusations as wholly trustworthy and to impose severe punishments on those who were convicted even of minor offenses, on the assumption that in the same state of mind they might commit serious ones.” (7.4.3) We are a long way from the trust Alexander placed in Philip of Acarnania’s medical advice (2.4) despite charges from other trusted advisers. Did Alexander hope to make these satraps and their abuse of power an example? The high-profile exception to this distrust was Alexander’s leniency toward the Egyptian satrap Kleomenes. Alexander looked away when Kleomenes’ enriched himself at the expense of Greece and other areas (see footnote 7.23.6b), and offered to fully pardon him if Kleomenes appropriately honored the dead Hephaistion.

The troops appear to distrust both Alexander and his officers—at several points the tension between the levels of command surface in this Book. Alexander attempts the generous gesture of paying off his soldiers’ debts but they do not trust him—they believe, given his recent behavior, that the offer is a test to find out who was extravagant or living beyond their means. Only when Alexander changed the procedure so that monetary help was anonymous did most of the soldiers take advantage of the offer. Commissioning thirty thousand adolescents from non-Macedonian areas, training them in the Macedonian arts of war and calling them the Epigonoi (“offspring”, implying replacements) isn’t going to win Macedonian supporters to your cause. Such moves left Macedonians feeling vexed and distressed at the perceived slight. (7.6.1-3) Just like Alexander’s adoption of Persian court symbolism, the resentment over the introduction of the non-Macedonian troops was going to cause plenty of friction.

Alexander appears to have known his actions would be contentious but part of the reason for the direction he followed seems to include winning support of the Persian upper classes. The “fifth hipparchy” he created contained a division of the sons of Persian nobles as a way to win their support, whether through providing favors or holding their sons hostage (or some combination of the two). When decommissioned troops are to go home to Macedonia, he orders that children of any mixed marriages (Macedonian soldiers and Persian wives) are not to go home with them (7.12.2), an acknowledgement that Persian arrangements would “introduce strife into Macedonia”.

At Opis, instead of accepting decommission of older and unfit soldiers, the Macedonian troops revolt and call for immediate release of all Macedonian soldiers so Alexander can “wage war by himself along with his ‘father’” (7.8.3), a mocking reference to his proclaimed descent from Ammon. A common theme for the Macedonian veterans has been the feeling of disrespect from Alexander…but they haven’t seen anything yet. Alexander wades into the crowd and orders thirteen of the ringleaders executed. Following that up, Arrian gives Alexander his greatest speech in the book. Alexander calls their bluff and says they are free to leave if they want to but wants them to keep in mind a few things. First Alexander praises his father Philip and what he did for them, civilizing them and training them to master those around them. Alexander’s praise of his father stands in marked contrast to his reaction of the taunts of Kleitos (back in 4.8) but then Alexander claims his accomplishments trump those of his father. Alexander lays out some of the accomplishments but says they were all for his people—he hasn’t benefited any more than they have. He highlights the wounds he has received and reminded the soldiers of his generosity, then closes with this post’s opening quote.

By itself the speech might have shamed his men into compliance, but Alexander spends the next three days alone and then accepts only Persian officers into his presence, compounding the Macedonians' sense of alienation. This is too much for the Macedonians, who end the Opis revolt by rushing to the palace and begging forgiveness. The tension between Alexander and the troops appears to have been resolved, at least temporarily. Right before Alexander’s death, though, the mistrust between soldiers and leaders surfaces again. The men do not trust the reports of Alexander’s sickness from the top officers (just as they had not believed their messages after Alexander’s punctured lung in India), forcing their way into the palace to see him as he is dying. As pointed out here and other summaries of this period, the mistrust does not bode well for troop cohesion after Alexander’s death.

Even with the increasing tension and mistrust between troops and leaders and Alexander’s erratic or impulsive behavior, his plans and accomplishments show a continuation of his previous achievements and underscore a mature view of what it would take to govern and protect the empire. Upon the return to Persia, Alexander subdues some of the surrounding tribes that had not submitted to him. Up to the days before his death he pushes ahead with an invasion of Arabia. His engineering projects in the area were meant to simultaneously improve the empire while providing increased military advantage. The plans for establishing permanent sea routes show some of the ways Alexander intended to maintain and run his empire.

Unfortunately Arrian does not include major events fitting in with the increased tension between leader and subjects (although there are some missing passages in Arrian’s text that may have discussed these events). During this period, Harpalos, Alexander’s friend and treasurer, returns to Greece with a sizeable fortune. Harpalos had fled earlier, although was reconciled at Alexander's prodding, so he may be viewed as flighty (pun not fully intended). Why flee after the return of Alexander to Persia? Was he seeing a change in Alexander, especially after the purge of satraps? Or was he simply escaping before Alexander found out about his profligate lifestyle during his absence? Also missing is mention of the Exile’s Decree that increased animosity with the Greeks, which would prove to be an animating factor (along with Harpalos’ money) in Greek revolts after Alexander’s death.

The Campaigns of Alexander: Book Six

2011-10-24T03:49:00.000-07:00

Alexander's return from India
Picture source: section 3D

In an attempt to get back on track with Arrian and the Reading Odyssey book group I’ll do a post for Book Six on Arrian’s The Campaigns of Alexander. With so much material, one post obviously won’t cover everything but I’ll highlight a few things I found interesting.

The first topic occurs in the opening paragraph, where Alexander was planning to sail down the rivers feeding the Indus: “Since he intended to sail down the rivers to the Great Sea, he ordered the preparation of ships for that purpose. The ships were manned by the Phoenicians, Cyprians, Carians, and Egyptians who were accompanying the army.” (6.1.6, all quotes from The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander, translation by Pamela Mensch). Alexander had dismissed or left many men behind on his campaigns—why did he keep people known for naval expertise and shipbuilding skills? As pointed out in a footnote, “Arrian’s language here seems to imply that Alexander had brought naval crews with him into India, perhaps anticipating that he would eventually reach Ocean by marching eastward.”(Footnote 6.1.6b) This would be consistent with his speech to his officers after hearing of the troops’ discontent at the Hyphasis River (5.25.3-5.26). In that speech he claims he wants to “show the Macedonians and their allies” that he could sail from the Indian gulf to the Persian gulf all the way to the Pillars of Herakles, making the entire earth their empire as they do so. I found it interesting to see possible confirmation that these might have indeed been his plans.

As Alexander marches/sails down the rivers feeding the Indus it’s impossible to ignore the slaughtered bodies and razed cities in his wake. He knew he was leaving India, so what did he hope to accomplish with this carnage? Several local leaders he trusts enough to leave in charge end up revolting (much to their detriment), and Arrian points out a couple of times Alexander cannot find a local guide, hinting that the local population fears him too much to help him. In all this body count I also have to question Alexander’s targeting of Brahman holy men in the territory of the Malloi (6.7.4-6) and the slaughter of the Brahmans taking part in a revolt further down the Indus (6.16.5). Alexander has shown a high degree of religious tolerance to this point (and Arrian will point out more respect for Indian holy men in Book Seven) which makes these crackdowns stand out for their cruelty.

The punctured lung Alexander receives during the attack on a Malloi city receives a lot of attention in any write-up on Alexander and I’ll spend time with it, too, focusing on how his troops react. These are the same troops that cried tears of joy after Alexander concedes in their refusal to go any further than the Hyphasis River (at 5.29.1).

While Alexander remained there to be treated for his wound, the first report to reach the camp from which he had set out against the Malloi was that he had died of it. At first, as the news passed from one to another, the entire army raised a wail. But when they had ceased wailing, the troops grew disheartened and perplexed as to who would command the army, since a great many officers were held in equal esteem by both Alexander himself and the Macedonians … . (6.12.1-2)

Arrian stresses the troops' concern on returning home safely since they were surrounded by hostile people and some of the so-called friendly people would revolt upon hearing of Alexander’s death. Upon seeing Alexander alive the troops “sent up a shout, some of them lifting their hands to the sky, others toward Alexander himself; many even wept in spite of themselves at the unhoped-for boon. (6.13.2) They were “disheartened and perplexed as to who would command the army” even though the officers are esteemed--it's clear the men know none have the presence or ability of Alexander.

The march across the Gedrosian Desert also receives a lot of attention because of the brutal toll it takes on Alexander’s army. Often portrayed as Alexander’s revenge for his army’s refusal to continue the campaign, there are other considerations that are highlighted in footnotes to the text.

6.20.1a The improvements ordered at Patala [in the Indus River delta]… show that Alexander was planning to make this an important naval station, facilitating shipping and communications with the center of the empire. The land route into India, across the Indian Caucasus/Paropamisos (modern Hindu Kush), was arduous in summer and impossible in winter, so a sea route had to be develop if India was to be integrated with the other Asian territories. This goal does much to explain the otherwise irrational march through Gedrosia… .

...

6.20.4a Nearkhos’ ships, like most ancient sailing vessels, were not designed to carry large quantities of supplies, they were expected to put to shore each night to resupply themselves. Digging wells was thus the principal mission of Alexander’s land army during this march. Without them the fleet had no way to keep itself watered.

The march mentioned in the last note was a preliminary expedition before the main trek across the desert but fits in nicely with the picture of the troops headed through the desert, in part to provide short-term support for Nearkhos’ ships as well as establishing infrastructure for sea routes. Of course, that doesn’t mean Alexander wasn’t getting back at his troops but it does provide additional reasons for the arduous and costly journey. Another factor, which Arrian mentions here and Alexander mentions in his speech at the Opis revolt in Book Seven, is that no other army had crossed the desert. Accomplishing something that had never been done before seems to play no small part in Alexander's motivations.

Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire

2011-10-20T06:43:00.000-07:00

Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire
by James Romm
Knopf, 341 pp., $28.95

This book covers in gripping detail the events that began on June 1, 323 B.C., when Alexander the Great became ill with what would be a fatal fever, and ended seven years later with the death or imprisonment of his two surviving heirs. It follows the machinations of the half-dozen generals who grappled for the right to succeed Alexander as commander of the army, as well as the dynastic intrigues that played out among the royals who had sole rights to the throne. For those intrigued by how Alexander won his empire, this book tells the equally compelling story of how that empire was lost, fragmenting into the rival blocs that would dominate the Hellenistic world for centuries.

- from James Romm's website

The power vacuum after Alexander’s death was filled with everything listed above and more. The tumultuous week after his death saw a temporary solution headed by Perdiccas that began to disintegrate almost immediately. Romm’s book goes into detail of the many theaters of plotting and conflict that followed Alexander’s death. Here’s one of my favorite quotes, summing up some of the divisions occurring in the first four years of the internecine struggles :

Civil war, already raging in Alexander’s overseas conquests, was about to find its way to the Macedonian homeland. The pattern of mitosis that had beset the empire since Alexander’s death seemed to be recurring without end. First the royal army had split into two factions and designated two kings to take Alexander’s place; then the designs of Perdiccas had become split between two wives; finally all of Asia had been split by the falling-out of Perdiccas and Antipater, and by the war those two had handed down to their surrogates, Eumenes and Antigonus. Now Macedonia was splitting as well, between Cassander and Polyperchon, and with that split would come a division of the Greek world over which Macedon held sway. (page 205)

Anyone following this blog knows that I have been part of Reading Odyssey, Inc.’s book group that has been reading The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander, edited by James Romm over the last few months. Even though I had been immersed in all things Alexander for a while, I couldn’t wait to read this book because I find the subject matter fascinating. Most biographies on Alexander I’ve read condense the demise of his empire, hinting at additional events and intricacies that cannot be conveyed in a few pages. Another factor is that I enjoyed Romm’s book on Herodotus in the Hermes Book Series and his epilogue in The Landmark Arrian, titled “The Breakup and Decline of Alexander’s Empire”, the latter leaving me wanting more detail on the extraordinary events.

The elements in the breakup can be extremely complex but Romm does a good job presenting the major and minor ones, the combination of which, or sometimes the absence of which, lend or deny power to the characters in the history. Off the top of my head, here are a few elements that helped determine how the action unfolded:
- Location: where were the generals / satraps / bodyguards at the time of Alexander’s death and what was their sphere of influence.
- Leadership: how bold or clever were they? How much authority did they really wield? How did their personality come into play? How did they handle their enemies?
- The backing a leader had, in bodies and money, proved crucial,
- The loyalty a leader commanded played out in many different ways, whether in looking at the generation (Philip II vs. Alexander), country (Macedonia vs. Greece vs. others), from which strand of the Argeads they descended, or some other division that played out. Even loyalty within a unit, such as those soldiers called the Silver Shields, would sometimes trump everything else.
- Legitimacy, or at least the appearance of legitimacy, proved to be a tangled web with many possible components. Leaders would grasp at anything tangible (Alexander’s signet ring or even his corpse) or intangible (relations or nationality) to back them up in their claims.
- Fortune or fate: sometimes events seem to be above anyone’s control.

Over all the events that occur looms the ghost of Alexander, figuratively and at times literally. The vacuum in leadership, that no one claimant was able to completely fill, reinforces just how powerful a leader and personality Alexander proved to be. Alexander bequeathed fighting forces that had overrun much of the known world but they would also prove to be extremely deadly when fighting each other. The empire without borders and without nationality that Alexander dreamed of was shredded by his family and closest companions. I highly recommend Romm’s book for those looking to understand the turbulent and bloody transition of Alexander’s short-lived empire to “a multipolar world marked by rivalry, shifting alliances, and long-running small-scale conflicts”. (page 282)

I want to add a few words about the style of the book that I would think would prove useful for members of the reading group moving from The Landmark Arrian to this book. The cast in these events numbers several dozen while the settings for the conflicts and intrigues occur throughout Alexander’s vast empire. Keeping track of all the names and places can be difficult—I was already familiar with many and still got turned around at times. Romm does a good job of occasionally stepping back and summarizing the storyline to date which is helpful in keeping the overall picture in focus given his chronological approach, relaying events in bite-size chunks and moving around the empire as events happen. I also found helpful his way of “reintroducing” characters that not been mentioned in a while, helping me recognize or remember their role so far. Even so, a “cast of characters” broken down between royal family, military leaders and political actors would have been helpful. It’s a minor quibble and something I easily compiled to assist in keeping everyone straight. The bibliography is presented by subject matter, which I think will prove more useful than the standard method for non-scholarly readers like me. Also in the bibliography is a list of translated primary sources available on the internet--wonderful for geeks like me!

Update (2 Nov 2011): James Romm can be heard talking about his book online on the The Leonard Lopate Show.

That is where he would have done it

2011-10-19T09:18:00.000-07:00

Thanks again to The Neglected Books Page for last year's mention of the release of two of William Gaddis' works, J R and The Recognitions, on audiobook. I have just started listening to J R and I'm captivated by Nick Sullivan's performance. Oh yes, the book, too. I can't recommend both of these performances by Sullivan enough--they are outstanding.

While listening to J R I was reminded of the line from Educating Rita (the movie, I haven't seen the play) that seemed appropriate: "In attempting to resolve the staging difficulties in a production of Peer Gynt I would present it on the radio because, as Ibsen says, he wrote it as a play for voices, never intending it to go on in a theater. If they had had the radio in his day, that is where he would have done it."

Previous comments on the audiobook version of The Recognitions can be found here and here.

“Only one era and one small group of writers”

2011-10-13T02:59:00.000-07:00

In the colonists’ use of classical literature, for example, “their detailed knowledge and engaged interest covered only one era and one small group of writers”: Plutarch, Livy, Cicero, Sallust, and Tacitus—those who “had hated and feared the trends of their own time, and in their writing had contrasted the present with a better past, which they endowed with qualities absent from their own, corrupt era.”

- The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States, Gordon S. Wood, (The Penguin Press: 2011), pages 46-7.

Wood’s quote comes from Bernard Bailyn’s study of Revolutionary pamphlets, but I’m not sure the claim survives Wood’s next essay/lecture (“The Legacy of Rome in the American Revolution”). I post it here not to attempt to support or refute the claim…simply to note it to keep it in mind as I read through more of the literature of the founders as well as highlight it for other readers.

Wood’s book looks at the importance of ideological origins in the American Revolution, weighing how easy it is to place too much or too little emphasis on ideas in shaping the course of that history. For the record, from Woods’ afterword to the Legacy lecture:

No doubt the classical world was an important part of the political memory of the Founders. We might even say that the relationship between the Founders and the classical past was similar to our present relationship to the Founders. Just as we use the Founders, such as Jefferson and Washington, to get our bearings and reaffirm our beliefs and reinvigorate our institutions, so too did the Founders use antiquity, especially republican antiquity, to help shape their values and justify their institutions.

…

We borrow what we need from the ideas of the past, and in the process we inevitably distort those past ideas. Of course, the Founders’ use of classicism was different from the classicism of antiquity, just as our use of the ideas of the Founding bears little resemblance to the thinking of the eighteenth century. … Yet by questioning whether the ideas of antiquity were determinative of the Founders’ thinking, I do not mean to suggest that the classical past was unimportant to them. Ever if ideas of an earlier era are not determinative of later thinking, it does not follow that these earlier ideas were simply ormentation and had little influence. I believe that the classical past was much more than illustrative of the Founders’ thoughts. Earlier ideas can, as I tried indicate in the essay, influence and affect behavior.

- (pages 78-9)

Life and Fate summary

2011-10-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

I saw the unflinching force of the idea of public good, born in my country. I saw it first in the universal collectivization. I saw it in [the purges of] 1937. I saw how, in the name of an ideal as beautiful and humane as that of Christianity, people were annihilated. I have seen villages dying of starvation; I have seen peasant children dying in Siberian snow; I have seen trains carrying to Siberia hundreds and thousands of men and women from Moscow and Leningrad, from all the cities of Russia — men and women declared enemies of the great and bright idea of public good. This idea was beautiful and great, and it has mercilessly killed some, disfigured the lives of others; it has torn wives from husbands and children from fathers.

…

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

- Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, translation by Robert Chandler (New York Review Books), pages 406-7, 410.

While the Soviet characters fight against Fascist enemies, Grossman juxtaposes both governments’ ability to restrict or take away an individual’s freedom. Grossman’s indictment wasn’t limited to direct restrictions imposed on man but included the perversion of man’s spirit. Ideologies or movements will always meet resistance, according to Grossman, when they attempt to crush “what is human in human beings” and he provides many moving examples of those struggles. He also shows people losing some of those struggles—after all, weakness is part of what makes us human, too.

Grossman celebrates the Soviet victory in Stalingrad unironically as a triumph of freedom over oppression. Yet he foreshadows later Soviet crackdowns on freedom in his appraisal of communism's similarities with fascism. The bottom line for Grossman lies in our humanity and our ability to flourish under freedom, without which we experience spiritual entropy.

Highest recommendation—as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, it is a difficult book and not just for its length or number of characters. The subject matter can be dark, but Grossman’s constant emphasis on hope buoys the book and the reader.

Posts:

Links for Grossman and Life and Fate

Life and…fate?

Chekov, kindness

More on fate and life

How was this possible?

“Good day, comrade Shtrum”

BBC4 Radio dramatization

Life and Fate: “Good day, comrade Shtrum”

2011-10-11T03:25:00.000-07:00

But an invisible force was crushing him. He could feel its weight, its hypnotic power; it was forcing him to think as it wanted, to write as it dictated. This force was inside him; it could dissolve his will and cause his heart to stop beating; it came between him and his family; it insinuated itself into his past, into his childhood memoires. He began to feel that he really was untalented and boring, someone who wore out the people around him with dull chatter. Even his work seemed to have grown dull, to be covered with a layer of dust; the thought of it no longer filled him with light and joy.

Only people who have never felt such a force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it. Those who have felt it, on the other hand, feel astonished that a man can rebel against it even for a moment—with one sudden word of anger, one timid gesture of protest.

- Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, translation by Robert Chandler (New York Review Books), page 672.

The person being figuratively crushed is Viktor Shtrum, a Soviet physicist exploring the workings of the atom. Crushing him is the power of the state, directly and indirectly. He has made a remarkable breakthrough in atomic studies and, instead of being hailed, the council at the scientific institute blackballs him. Grossman then provides a deus ex mechina—a call to Viktor from Joseph Stalin who praises his work and asks if Viktor has what he needs to continue his research.

Despite Life and Fate’s dark subject matter, Grossman provides plenty of humor. With that short phone call, Viktor is welcomed back in the fold of the laboratory as if nothing had happened. Viktor’s indignation toward the people he called Stalin’s bootlickers softens now that Stalin’s beneficence helps him. Even so, he realizes how he has compromised his beliefs:

He was still as appalled as ever at the cruelty of Stalin. He knew very well that life hadn’t changed for other people simply because he was now Fortune’s pet instead of her stepson. Nothing would ever bring back to life the victims of collectivization or the people who had been shot in 1937; it made no difference to them whether or not prizes and medals were awarded to a certain Shtrum, whether he was called to see Malenkov or was pointedly not invited to a gather at Shishakov’s.

And yet something had changed, both in his understanding and in his actual memory of things. (823)

Viktor’s “spiritual entropy” does not stop with the end of his ostracism, as he fully realizes when he is asked to sign a letter that denounces innocent doctors as well as reinforces the denouncement of many high-profile figures in 1937. Earlier, when Viktor had been an outcast and felt he had nothing left to lose, he had held fast to his beliefs. After the call from Stalin he compromises his conscience because he has something to lose. Grossman treats Viktor gently though, probably because he had been in the same situation and had signed a similar letter. Viktor realizes what he has done, vowing

Every hour, every day, year in, year out, he must struggle to be a man, struggle for his right to be pure and kind. He must do this with humility. And if it came to it, he mustn’t be afraid even of death; even then he must remain a man. (841)

Grossman provides a hopeful final chapter that mirrors much of the book in which you can “hear both a lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself.” (871)

Life and Fate: the BBC4 Radio dramatization

2011-10-10T10:47:00.000-07:00

I mentioned it in earlier posts so hopefully you downloaded the podcasts of Life and Fate from the BBC site before they were deleted last week. My reaction to their production is similar to the reaction I had with the book—a few minor quibbles but extremely impressed with what was accomplished. How do you turn an 850 page book into an 8-hour radio show? Easy answer—very carefully. Fortunately that’s just what they did.

The amount of characters has been pared down so it will be easier to keep up with who is talking and what is the relationship to other characters. Having just read the book I found it generally easy (but not always, especially where changes to the book were made) to keep up. For those that haven’t read the book, I can see where this might be a challenge. BBC4 Radio provided a
character map that should be helpful, both for the radio program and the book.

From an interview with Kenneth Branagh, who plays Viktor Shtrum:

“I think Grossman wanted both [Viktor as a flesh-and-blood character and a political metaphor]. He makes Viktor a kind of poet-scientist who is interested in the beauty of maths and the beauty of physics; for whom the truth, the scientific truth, is all.

“But at the same time he gives him an obsession: a sort of rather weakening and yet very recognisable obsession with the wife of a colleague. Grossman makes him very flawed and very human.”

I don’t have many weak points to highlight. There are some parts of the book I wish received more attention than others, but that’s more of a personal feeling since I don’t believe the overall message of the book was weakened. The same goes with decisions made on what to include—when you’re limiting yourself to 8 hours you have to be ruthless at times in your cuts while working to include as much as possible to convey the overall feeling and meaning. The annoying part of the broadcast for me was the choice of accents and slang—whenever a setting involves foreign characters there has to be a choice on how to have them speak and the language they use. I don’t really care on the final choice as long as it’s consistent. I know it’s a minor point but I found the hodgepodge of accents and inclusion of so much British slang in mouths of the Russian characters distracting.

For anyone who downloaded it but hasn’t listened to it yet, I would provide a caveat: if you are planning on reading the book before listening to the podcasts, I recommend finishing Part Two in the book before starting to listen. Grossman presents only a few chapters at a time on any character or setting while the radio program chooses anywhere from one to a few characters to follow and present all of their sections in a linear fashion. For example, the first episode focuses on the Shtrum family in Kazan and Moscow which takes you to the middle of Part Two of the book.

There are many areas I found extremely well done. The intensity from the book, disturbing and harsh at times, was maintained. It’s not an easy book to read, even when ignoring the size and structure, and this production includes many of the unsettling details Grossman provided. One of the strong points of the radio production’s structure was the “pairing” of character storylines in the early episodes: Viktor and Lyuda, Krymov and Zhenya, Vera and Lt. Viktorov. Since these are scattered throughout the book, pairing characters in one episode helped bring out the emotional component of Grossman’s novel. I’ll limit myself to one more strong point of the radio production: by Part Three in the book the reader has most of the storylines fairly well established but connections between characters can be easily forgotten. Listening to the radio episodes helped keep the connections clear for me—anything that helps reinforce the intricacies of Life and Fate should be recommended on that point alone.

Along with Grossman’s book, highly recommended. If you haven't read the book the names and settings may be a little confusing, but I think it won't take long to understand each part and put it into its place in the overall story.

~~If you missed downloading the podcasts, I burned them to CDs—I’ll be happy to mail you my copy of the discs (my email address is in my profile).~~ (The CDs have been spoken for)
I would love to see other bloggers posting on this book and program.

A few video clips about the program:

Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant on Life and Fate (Part One):

Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant on Life and Fate (Part Two):

The TV ad for the series that highlights the arrest of the novel:

Life and Fate: How was this possible?

2011-10-10T03:22:00.000-07:00

How was this possible? The Germans knew about these troop movements. It would have been no more possible to hide them than to hide the wind from a man walking through the steppe.

Any German lieutenant, looking at a map with approximate positions for the main concentrations of Russian forces, could have guessed the most important of all Soviet military secrets, a secret known only to Stalin, Zhukov and Vasilevsky. How was it then that the Germans were taken by surprise, lieutenants and field marshals alike?

Stalingrad itself had continued to hold out. For all the vast forces involved, the German attacks had still not led to a decisive victory. Some of the Russian regiments now only numbered a few dozen soldiers; it was these few men, bearing all the weight of the terrible fighting, who confused the calculations of the Germans.

The Germans were simply unable to believe that all their attacks were being borne by a handful of men. They thought the Soviet reserves were being brought up in order to reinforce the defence. The true strategists of the Soviet offensive were the soldiers with their backs to the Volga who fought off Paulus’s divisions.

The remorseless cunning of History, however, lay still more deeply hidden. Freedom engendered the Russian victory. Freedom was the apparent aim of the war. But the sly fingers of History changed this: freedom became simply a way of waging the war, a means to an end.

- Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, translation by Robert Chandler (New York Review Books), page 488.

Grossman uses the example of the Soviet soldiers in House 6/1 as an example of both the freedom and the fanaticism necessary for the successful defense of Stalingrad. The men (and woman), temporarily exempt from Party oversight, experience an unexpected freedom because of their situation. Commissar Krymov’s appearance threatens that freedom in ways the men could intuit but couldn't fully understand because of the second requirement—fanaticism. This isn't a fanaticism for state or ideology, but the flip side of freedom and part of man’s nature. The soldiers in House 6/1 were fighting as much for the love of fighting, of killing as many Germans as they could, as they were in conscious defense of their country.

I highly recommend this tribute to Grossman I included in my links post because the speakers address the defense of Stalingrad and the use of the word “freedom” in his novel. Grossman uses the word often and the speakers highlight the many meanings he layers into the word (similar to several levels of meaning for “fate” I’ve looked at in some posts).

Ikonnikov, the holy fool, wrote “Kindness is powerful only when it is powerless”, extolling kindness for its own sake. In his view, ideologies, no matter how well intentioned, would use and pervert kindness to advance their goals. Grossman, by extension, believes that man increases in power when what he has to lose decreases. The opening quote is sly in its juxtaposition: History did not change the aim of the war but only unveiled what was there all along. Just like the German’s unwillingness to see the Soviet troop build-up as a new offensive, people refused to recognize that the shackles they wore were little different from their enemy. Grossman focuses on the equivalence between Fascism and Communism, not in their methods but in their outcome. The stripping of freedom for others' aims strangles man’s capabilities, which Grossman highlights in his paean to the short-lived moment when ideology was muted:

Every epoch has its own capital city, a city that embodies its will and soul. For several months of the Second World War this city was Stalingrad. The thoughts and passions of humanity were centered on Stalingrad. Factories and printing presses functioned for the sake of Stalingrad. Parliamentary leaders rose to their feet to speak of Stalingrad. But when thousands of people poured in from the steppes to fill the empty streets, when the first car engines started up, this world capital ceased to exist.

Life and Fate: more on fate and life

2011-10-07T14:18:00.000-07:00

I just realized I had not mentioned I was using the New York Review Books edition of this book with translation by Robert Chandler.

For good summaries and analyses on Vasily Grossman and Life and Fate, I highly recommend the links in this post—I’m slowly working my way through them and they capture a lot that is good and disturbing about this book. Since so much of what I intended to post on is covered so well in these links I decided to do a short series of posts on subjects I thought were absent or underrepresented in the articles.

In my initial post I looked at the title…why did Grossman pair life and fate? The obvious reason, and what Grossman emphasizes the most, highlights the contrast between passively yielding to fate and actively engaging life. In that same post I also looked at one of Grossman’s definitions of fate—the difference between stumbling through life, existence, and living with freedom and meaning. Grossman also shows characters making decisions which put them on a path where they feel they are at fate's mercy. This meaning of fate, where a character feels helpless because of their choice, occurs more frequently as we get deeper into the novel. As quoted in the previous post, “A man may be led by fate, but he can refuse to follow.” (537)

There are a lot of examples that could be chosen to highlight this meaning; in fact, it may sum up much of what we’re looking at in many of the Soviet characters. Do they play along with the absurdities foisted upon them by official party narrative, believing they have no choice? Or do they stand up for what they believe is right despite the potential consequences? As he shows characters' decisions, Grossman highlights the strengths and weaknesses of man.

Some of the people in the German concentration camps make choices that lead them to what they view as fate. The director of one complex, Kaltluft, sees himself as the plaything of stronger forces:

If, on the day of judgment, Kaltluft had been called upon to justify himself, he could have explained quite truthfully how fate had led him to become the executioner of 590,000 people. What else could he have done in the face of such powerful forces—the war, fervent nationalism, the adamancy of the Party, the will of the State? How could he have swum against the current? How could he have swum against the current? He was a man like any other; all he had wanted was to live peacefully in his father’s house. He hadn’t walked—he had been pushed. Fate had led him by the hand…And if they had been called upon, Kaltluft’s superiors and subordinates would have justified themselves in almost the same words. (536)

Grossman is having none of that argument, though. A few sentences later he makes the comment from earlier in this post about refusing to follow fate as well as this one: “But every step that a man takes under the threat of poverty, hunger, labour camps and death is at the same time an expression of his own will.” Or lack of one.

Grossman highlights these characters so we can look at how man reacts in extraordinary circumstances, how he justifies his behavior, and how his choices follow him. Man, according to Grossman, can be at his most powerful when he is completely powerless. Even at his lowest moment there are choices he can make. Some of the Jews in the concentration camp are offered a choice: help in the death camp or die. Sofya Levinton, a doctor who could have stepped out of the condemned line chose to stay and comfort a little boy (and fulfill her wish for motherhood, however brief). Others chose to live a little while longer and Grossman asks, I think honestly and not ironically, about their chosen fate:

How can one convey the feelings of a man pressing his wife’s hand for the last time? How can one describe that last, quick look at a beloved face? Yes, and how can a man live with the merciless memory of how, during the silence of parting, he blinked for a moment to hide the crude joy he felt at having managed to save his life? How can he ever bury the memory of his wife handing him a packet containing her wedding ring, a rusk and some sugar lumps? How can he continue to exist, seeing the glow in the sky flaring up with renewed strength? (540-1)

Life and Fate: Chekov, kindness

2011-10-06T03:42:00.000-07:00

Continuing with some of the lesser points in Life and Fate…see my links post for Vasily Grossman and Life and Fate for reviews that cover both very well.

Many of the links in that post mention Grossman's love for Anton Chekov's work and some similarity in style. Several authors are mentioned in Life and Fate, but Grossman consistently has his characters praise Chekov:

"Chekov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness—with people of every estate, every class, ever age…More than that! It was as a democrat that he presented all these people—as a Russian democrat. He said—and no one had said this before, not even Tolstoy—that first and foremost we are all of us human beings. Do you understand? Human beings! He said something no one in Russia had ever said. He said that first of all we are human beings—and only secondly are we bishops, Russians, shopkeepers, Tartars, workers. Do you understand? Instead of saying that people are good or bad because they are bishops or workers, Tartars or Ukrainians, instead of this he said that people are equal because they are human beings. At one time people blinded by Part dogma saw Chekhov as a witness to the fin de siècle. No, Chekhov is the bearer of the greatest banner that has been raised in the thousand years of Russian history—the banner of a true, humane, Russian democracy, of Russian freedom, of the dignity of the Russian man. …

Chekov said: Let’s put God—and all these grand progressive ideas—to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man—whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual—or we’ll never get anywhere. That’s democracy, the still unrealized democracy of the Russian people.” (283)

I don’t know that I would totally agree with Madyarov’s assessment of Chekhov but it clearly advances Grossman’s message that kindness not only makes us human but is the highest achievement of our soul. Ikonnikov, called a holy fool by other Soviet prisoners-of-war, pens a tract emphasizing the need for kindness, looking for

The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good. (408)

Does Ikonnikov’s tract represent Grossman’s viewpoint? I think to a large extent it does. Grossman highlights human weakness, especially when faced with the strength of the state, whether fascist or communist. But he also shows man’s strength to stand up to “the colossus of the state” through several of the characters, including Ikonnikov, who is executed because he refused to work on construction of an extermination camp. As the tract describes kindness, so it is with Ikonnikov—he is at his most powerful when completely powerless. Or, in describing a different character’s struggles, Grossman points out “A man may be led by fate, but he can refuse to follow.”

Grossman’s style has also been compared to Chekhov and while not delving into that assessment I will say that many of his chapters would make wonderful short stories. If you find yourself in a bookstore and see a copy of Life and Fate, read Part One Chapter 44 or Part Two Chapter 41. Each chapter is around two pages in length but each provides great insight and power in those few pages.

Life and Fate: Life and...fate?

2011-10-05T04:47:00.000-07:00

Scanning through the links I posted on Vasily Grossman and his book Life and Fate I see the reviews do an extremely good job summarizing the book and covering his life. Instead of restating the same points I’ll post on a few topics in the book most of those reviews did not cover (probably for good reasons, but I won’t let that stop me).

I’ll start with the title since it puzzled me. Why is “Fate” paired with “Life” in the title? Grossman uses the word “fate” in the book with a variety of meanings. In the most common usage, characters use it in the expected manner—a predetermined course of action or results they are unable to influence or change. Grossman also uses it when looking at decision points and the cascade of events after it, some predictable while others are unforeseen (more on this another post).

Then there’s the meaning in Chapter 43 of Part One, the first chapter with Sofya Osipovna Levinton and the journey to the gas chamber. He starts out with a fairly standard description of fate while also laying groundwork for another meaning: “The most fundamental change in people at this time was a weakening of their sense of individual identity; their sense of fate grew correspondingly stronger.” (196) Grossman builds on this: “What saves people when their bovine melancholy, their mute fatalism yields to a piercing sense of horror—what saves people then is the opium of optimism.” (198) The reader knows the outcome for many of the characters as soon as we meet them. While reading Life and Fate and viewing characters’ optimism, it’s easy to understand why Hope was in Pandora’s jar with the evils of the world since it can provide a harmful element when there is no foundation for it. Hope remained in the jar, though, proving to be beneficial at times—the “opium” of hope allows humans to carry on after the foundations for life have been extinguished.

We're now at Grossman's additional meaning of fate: “Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely.” (199) Existence, or fate, can mean a person stumbling through their remaining days after freedom has been denied. Instead of bowing to her fate, Sofya finds a new meaning in life—to be a mother to little David for the short time they have left. The human spirit, what separates Life from existence or fate, proves to be a current running through the novel.

There are several themes providing unity to the book but one thing provides a physical unity—the Volga River. Many of the settings are either on the Volga or on one of the tributaries that is part of its watershed: Stalingrad (now Volgograd), Astrakhan, Moscow, Ufa, and Kazan. The Volga provides a symbol during the siege of Stalingrad—while the Soviet soldiers keep the Germans from reaching the river before the counterinsurgency begins, they retain hope. The river provides a common element for many of the characters—something providing safety or signifying danger.

The Volga River watershed
Picture source

The reason I’ve been stressing the need to visit the BBC site and download their dramatization of the novel is because there is a time limit on availability. I have listened to five out of the total eight hours and recommend it but I plan on a separate post to note some context and caveats.

Links: Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman

2011-10-04T05:32:00.000-07:00

The Europe of Vasily Grossman, the founder of a second tradition of comparison, was one in which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were at war. Grossman, a fiction writer who became a Soviet war correspondent, saw many of the important battles on the eastern front, and evidence of all of the major German (and Soviet) crimes. Like Arendt, he tried to understand the German mass murder of the Jews in the east in universal terms. For him this meant, at first, not a critique of modernity as such but a condemnation of fascism and Germany. Just as Arendt published her Origins of Totalitarianism, Grossman was liberated from this political framework by the personal experience of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. He then broke the taboos of a century, placing the crimes of the Nazi and Soviet regimes on the same pages, in the same scenes, in two novels whose reputations only grow with time. Grossman meant not to unify the two systems analytically within a single sociological scheme (such as Arendt’s totalitarianism) but rather to relieve them of their own ideological accounts of themselves, and thereby lift the veil on their common inhumanity. …

As one of Grossman’s characters exclaims, the key to both National Socialism and Stalinism was their ability to deprive groups of human beings of their right to be regarded as human. … From Arendt and Grossman together, then, come two simple ideas. First, a legitimate comparison of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union must not only explain the crimes but also embrace the humanity of all concerned by them, including the victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and leaders. Second, a legitimate comparison must begin with life rather than death. Death is not a solution, but only a subject. It must be a source of sidquiest, never of satisfaction. It must not, above all, supply the rounding rhetorical flourish that brings a story to a defined end. Since life gives meaning to death, rather than the other way around, the important question is not: what political, intellectual, literary, or psychological closure can be drawn from the fact of mass killing? Closure is a false harmony, a siren song masquerading as a swan song.

The important question is: how could (how can) so many human lives be brought to a violent end?

- from Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder, (Basic Books, 2010), pages 386-7.

While I had heard of Vasily Grossman's books, I really wanted to delve into his work after reading Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands. The BBC's radio dramatization of Life and Fate determined which book I wanted to read first. Despite the book's size, I plan only a few post about Life and Fate, so I'll start with some links about Grossman and the book.

There are plenty of posts and links regarding Grossman and Life and Fate but I want to highlight a few that look interesting. I'll include links specific to the BBC adaptation in a post on their podcasts.

First up is Sarah J. Young's post dedicated to Grossman. Judging by what I see in the post, I'm sure some of our links will overlap.

Leon Aron's extended article in Foreign Policy looks at Grossman and Life and Fate. For an overview of Aron's essay, Soctt Horton has a summary article at Harper's Magazine.

Robert Chandler's introduction (“Speaking for Those Who Lie in the Earth”, The Life and Work of Vasily Grossman) in the New York Review of Books edition. A good introduction to Grossman and this book. (Note: in the table of contents there is a "List of Chief Characters" which is extremely helpful in understanding characters straight.)
For another article on Grossman by Chandler, see After Life and Fate: Vasily Grossman’s last stories.

Sam Sacks' essay at The Quarterly Conversation: "Life is Freedom: The Art of Vasily Grossman".

Books reviews:
John Lanchester at the London Review of Books
Martin Kettle at The Guardian

The transcript of Fate, Life, and Freedom in Vasily Grossman, a tribute to the author held at Columbia University last year. (Link isn't working for some reason--copy and paste http://www.crossroadsculturalcenter.org/storage/transcripts/2010-04-19-Life%20and%20Fate.pdf)

Update (10 October 2011):
Study Center for Vasily Grossman

The summary for A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945, translated and edited by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova.

Crito: age, epic and tragedy

2011-10-03T03:17:00.000-07:00

In the Crito Socrates repeatedly refers to doing what is right as compared to doing what is expedient or what will placate others. The point he arrives at in his reasoning for following the laws provides an early example of a social contract, but he deliberately avoids examining possible conflicts (such as a concern he raised in the Apology) between obedience to the state and care for the soul. Before I leave the dialogue I wanted to look at a few additional topics.

Socrates constantly mentions his age, both during his defense in the Apology and in the Crito. Plato’s Socrates does not use his age as the reason for wishing death but he say it is all right for him to die now. But what if Socrates were younger? Would he have antagonized the jury in the same manner he did in the Apology? Would he have stayed in Athens after his death sentence? By the reasoning he follows in both dialogues the answer would be yes to both questions, but with the constant reference to his age he introduces some doubt.

During his conversation with the personification of the laws, Socrates imagines the state would tell him he was attempting to destroy both the laws and the city by nullifying the verdicts of the courts. (50 a-b) Socrates makes it clear he cannot use the excuse that the decision reached was incorrect since the laws were just. Socrates seems to be the only man intent on upholding Athens’ flawed justice system. During the Apology he pointed out that citizens, even members of the jury, avoid guilty sentences because they weep, beg, or parade their families before the jury. The underlying reason for the Crito—it is cheap and easy to escape from jail—highlights additional problems with Athens' justice system. Socrates stands out because he submits to the laws and the sentence, making him an odd, or maybe a new type of tragic and epic hero.

Socrates alludes to Achilles in both the Apology and the Crito, but the allusion seems laughable on the surface. Achilles’ choice of fates was between going home and living a long, forgettable life or winning glory at the cost of an early death. Socrates can escape his sentence of death but he makes it clear that whatever city he goes to he won’t be able to engage in conversations like he did in Athens, plus he is “likely to live but a short time more”. Or he can stay and die, defending…what exactly? His integrity? His concern for the state of his soul? Plato paints Socrates as winning honor and glory on the scale of an Achilles for doing just those things. Socrates’ odyssey involves staying in one place and asking questions—Plato has given us a new type of epic hero (to be continued in the Phaedo), one based on philosophy. He gave us a new type of tragic hero, too, one condemned to death not because of his flaws but because of the tragic flaws of the jury and the city. The men that condemned him will have a “vengeance will come upon you immediately after my death, a vengeance much harder to bear than that which you took in killing me.” (Apology 39c)

I’m going to end my discussion of the Crito here so I can move on to other works. The non-plan for the next few weeks includes posts on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (and the BBC’s dramatization—download now, comrades!), Book Six of Arrian’s The Campaigns of Alexander, and Plato’s Phaedo.

(Quotes are from translations by G.M.A. Grube)

Creepiest book moment

2011-09-30T06:56:00.000-07:00

A break from regular posting...

So a while back (OK, over 20 years) I had the day off for jury duty. As I’m heading out the door, I grab a book I recently bought at a used bookstore to have something to read during the wait. No jury was empaneled that day so I went home. Bagdad Cafe was on one of the movie channels so I decided to watch it while I finished reading the book I had taken to jury duty. 43 minutes into the movie I see the scene above...

Not only was I reading the same book, I was reading the same edition of the paperback Debby (actress Christine Kaufmann, probably best known in the U.S. as Tony Curtis’ second wife) is holding. A shiver ran down my spine and I glanced behind the chair, looking for…hell if I know. Allen Funt? Without a doubt, it was the eeriest moment I have ever had involving a book.

Addendum: I guess I should follow up with one of the funniest moments I've had with a book, although it sounds too much like a joke. So David Byrne walks into a bar/laundromat and sees me reading from a Library of America volume of Melville and says...yeah, too much like a bad joke...

Crito: that part of ourselves that must remain unnamed

2011-09-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

There are several areas in the Crito I highlighted in the previous post that I plan on discussing in additional posts like this one. For this post I want to look at the conflict between Socrates’ conclusion of the Crito that he must obey the laws with the following statement he made in the Apology (from this post):

- Socrates says he would break a law if it were at odds with what he understands to be his directive from the god. (29 c-d) From Socrates’ defense speech:
[I]f you said to me in this regard: “Socrates, we do not believe Anytus now; we acquit you, but only on condition that you spend no more time on this investigation and do not practice philosophy, and if you are caught doing so you will die;” if, as I say, you were to acquit me on those terms, I would say to you: “Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy….”
At times it seems Plato wrote the Crito to walk back from this claim and show Socrates as a law-abiding citizen. (All quotes from the translation by G.M.A. Grube)

How to reconcile the conclusion of the Crito and the claim in the Apology? Can they be reconciled? I think they can, at least to a certain extent, since Socrates’/Plato’s inability to use a particular word in the Crito provides a clue on how to look at the two. During the discussion on the opinion of many men versus an expert, Socrates establishes that the opinion of an expert (doctor or trainer) would be most beneficial over the opinion of many men for an athlete. When Socrates asks what part of the athlete would be harmed by ignoring an expert and listening to the ignorant many, Crito responds “Obviously the harm is to his body, which it ruins.” This is the perfect set-up (of course) for Socrates’ next point. He expands the discussion beyond athletics, focusing on the matter at hand—whether to escape or not—which involves “actions just and unjust, shameful and beautiful, good and bad”. If, Socrates notes, we do not follow the advice of an expert (if one exists) in these matters “we shall harm and corrupt that part of ourselves that is improved by just actions and destroyed by unjust actions.” OK, that a long description for one word, but maybe he’s just making a point by spelling it out. Socrates still cannot name “that part of ourselves” when he and Crito agree life is not “worth living for us with that part of us corrupted that unjust action harms and just action benefits”. They further agree that “that part of us, whatever it is, that is concerned with justice and injustice,” is more valuable than the body. (47c-48a)

Why doesn’t Socrates or Plato use the word “soul” here? They describe it several times without actually using the word. They can’t say it because “the best possible state of your soul” was part of Socrates’ defense in the Apology (see 29e and 30b for a couple of uses of the phrase). Socrates would ignore any ruling keeping him from practicing philosophy because doing so would be contrary to the oracle and the care for his soul. Following the law, the conclusion of the Crito, becomes a general rule of thumb rather than an absolute directive. To be fair, Socrates seems to think following the law and caring for the soul would lead to the same action or conclusion most of the time. His dance around the word “soul”, though, makes it clear he believes there can be a higher law than that promulgated by the city.

If this is a correct reading, then the next question revolves around the real reason Socrates stayed in Athens. The reasoning he went through with Crito could form part of his motive to stay. Or his arguments in the dialogue could be intended mostly for Crito so he could respond to the opinion that he valued his own money over his friend. In either case, Socrates did stay and did die. Given the emphasis on following the law in the Apology and his separation regarding the justness of the laws (as compared to the justness of his verdict) in the Crito, Socrates seems to think obedience to the laws are important, maybe not as important as the care of the soul, though. But there seems to be something else going on, on his own part and/or through Plato. Ah, well, I'll take a look at some of the other problem areas in another post and see if anything could help explain the reason for staying...

Crito: an overview

2011-09-28T15:05:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in this procession the "Socratic Revolution" takes place: the warrior ethic of Achilles at Troy is superseded by the civic ethic of Socrates in Athens.

--from Grand Strategy: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order by Charles Hill (Yale University Press, 2010), page 32.

I had planned on a series of post about the Crito that would look at it a few paragraphs at a time because of its density—for a short dialogue it is packed with many levels of meaning. After starting a few of these posts I realized I was obscuring the overall flow of Socrates’ reasoning and arguments. It’s possible to cover both detail and the structure but that would take up more time and posts than I would like to spend…so I’m going to start with an overview of the dialogue and the arguments made. I have a few additional posts in mind on points I’ll highlight in the discussion.

I will mention one excerpt as an example of the richness of meaning in the dialogue. Socrates explains to Crito he had a dream which implied that the Athenian state ship would not arrive that day, delaying his execution. The dream involved a “comely woman dressed in white” that said: “Socrates, may you arrive at fertile Phthia on the third day.” (44 a-b, all quotes from the translation by G.M.A. Grube) The quote echoes Achilles in Book Nine of the Iliad where he tells Odysseus he will sail in the morning and reach home in Phthia on the third day. The meaning implies that Socrates’ soul will reach its “home” on the third day but takes on an ironic twist in a few pages when Crito suggests that Socrates escape to Thessaly (where Phthia is located). The dream could indicate either death or escape. Throw in the comparison, just as in the Apology, between Socrates and Achilles and this brief passage takes on multiple possible meanings.

The dialogue:

Crito tries to convince Socrates that he should escape before his execution date, laying out several reasons: Crito will be deprived of his friend, many people will believe Crito valued money over friendship (by not bribing the jailors to allow Socrates’ escape), the monetary damage (in fines or bribes) are not burdensome, Socrates’ actions are not just since he could save his life, and he betrays his sons by leaving them prematurely.

Socrates broadens the problem to declare that they must “examine whether we should act in this way or not, as not only now but at all times. I am the kind of man who listens to nothing within me but the argument that on reflection seems best to me”. (46b) The only argument of Crito that Socrates’ initially addresses focuses on the “opinions of men”. Both men agree that there are good opinions and bad opinions and that the good opinions are the ones to be valued. The two men also agree that good opinions are to be valued over bad ones, highlighted by Socrates’ example of a man in physical training—should he listen to the “opinion of any man” or to an expert, such as “a doctor or trainer?” (47b) There are some ancillary points occurring here that I want to note because they will be important later in this post and in future posts. One discussion focuses on the harm to the body done by not listening to the trainer (future post). Another point notes that there may not be an expert (later in this post).

Socrates changes the discussion in order to examine what such an expert on the laws (if one existed) would say regarding “justice and injustice…and the truth itself.” (48a) The men agree that “the most important thing is not life, but the good life…and that good life, the beautiful life, and the just life are the same”. (48b) In other words, if acting unjustly means escaping instead of being put to death, Socrates has not lived (died?) rightly or justly. The men also agree that “one must never do wrong”, which includes not inflicting “wrong in return” to being wronged. “Doing harm to people is no different from wrongdoing.” (49b, c) One last premise focuses on the rightness of keeping an agreement one has made. (49e)

From these premises, Socrates asks if people would be harmed if he left the city without permission as well as breaking an agreement? Crito claims not to understand so Socrates examines a hypothetical dialogue between himself and the personification of the laws of Athens. This personification accuses Socrates of attempting to destroy the laws, and thus the city, by nullifying the laws of the city (more on this in a separate post). Socrates draws the distinction between the laws of the city, involving an “agreement” between Socrates and Athens which is just, and the verdict that the city gave him. If the verdict was a ‘wrong’, then Socrates (following one of the premises) should not commit a wrong in return.

Socrates continues with his imaginary dialogue with the city/laws, which lectures him on how “your country is to be honored more than your mother, your father, … that you must worship it, yield to it and placate its anger more than your father’s”. (51 a-b) Continuing, the laws lecture Socrates that he had a chance to persuade them to change if he did not like them, yet he failed to try. The laws’ description of the relationship with Socrates to this point has been that of a master to a slave or father to a son since, as the laws state, they beget, nourished, and educated Socrates. As the conversation continues, the laws point out through Socrates’ actions–continuing to live in Athens after reaching his majority, having children while in the city, rarely leaving the city, and choosing death over exile at his trial—he has formed an agreement or contract, affirming his dependence and submission to the laws. By leaving now, Socrates would commit an injustice against the laws by breaking that agreement.

Socrates does not stop the laws’ conversation after it has considered the justice of escape but continues with examining the goodness of such an action, thus drawing (but not exploring) a distinction between the just and the good. The laws look at the burden Socrates’ escape will put on his friends as well as himself, concluding “Do not value either your children or your life or anything else more than goodness, in order that when you arrive in Hades you may all this as your defense before the rulers there.” (54b) We’ve gone from justice and goodness to the divine, with hints that Socrates will go on trial again after he dies and that earthly laws are related to the afterlife.

In a way we have come full circle in the dialogue and Socrates addresses the initial fears of Crito that he ignored when addressing only the concern about the “opinions of men”. Crito may claim that the sacrifices he and his friends make would not be a burden but Socrates points out such actions would not be for the good. In another sense we have returned to that earlier point of the dialogue since Socrates had said it would be wiser to follow the opinion of an expert over the opinion of the many, assuming such an expert can be found. Socrates has already cast doubt on the ability to possess true wisdom in the Apology, but here he does not even address whether there is an expert on what is best for the city except through the personification of the laws. Socrates’ argument seems to be constructed to imply that there is no such expert so we must rely on the “opinions of men” as expressed through the laws.

Exactly what position the laws and Socrates' personification of "the Laws" holds seems unclear but I think it safe to say they are not given divine status. They are shown on a higher plane than man, though. It’s a fun little dialogue that flows quickly (despite the density I mentioned) but it does have its problems. I realize I have glossed over several important points and ignored others completely, but I hope to fill in some of those gaps in looking at a few of these problematic points.

Crito: the last temptation of Socrates

2011-09-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

As the beginning of the Phaedo relates, Socrates did not die until a month after his trial, which followed by a day the sailing of the Athenian state galley on an annual religious mission to the island of Delos; no executions were permitted during its absence. Crito comes to tell Socrates of its anticipated arrival later that day and to make one last effort to persuade him to allow his friends to save him by bribing his jailers and bundling him off somewhere beyond the reach of Athenian law. Crito indicates that most people expect his friends to do this—unless (dishonorably) they value their money more than their friend. Socrates, however, refuses. Even if people do expect it, to do that would be grossly unjust.
…
Unmoved by the claims of justice grounded in his private relationships to friends and family, Socrates appeals to the standards of civic justice imbedded in his relations as a citizen to the Athenian people and to the Athenian system of law. He claims that a citizen is necessarily, given the benefits he has enjoyed under the laws of the city, their slave, justly required to do whatever they ask, and more forbidden to attack them than to violate his own parents. That would be retaliation—rendering a wrong for the wrong received in his unjust condemnation—and retaliation is never just. But what if he chose to depart not in an unjust spirit of retaliation, but only in order to evade the ill consequences of the unjust condemnation for himself and his friends and family? As if recognizing that loophole, Socrates also develops a celebrated early version of the social contract—a ‘contract’ between the laws or the city and each citizen, not among the citizens themselves—with the argument that now, after he is condemned by an Athenian court and has exhausted all legal appeals, he must, in justice to his implicit promise, abide by the laws’ final judgment and accept his death sentence.

--from the introduction to Crito by John M. Cooper in Plato: Complete Works (Hackett Publishing Company)

Plato combines drama and philosophy (despite their quarrelsome nature) in his works so that the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo can feel like a three-act play covering the trial and death of Socrates. On the drama side of the equation, Plato creates a new hero, supplanting epic and tragic heroes with the ideal of Socrates, a hero whose journey and triumph is philosophical. At the same time he gives us tragedy without a tragic hero. Socrates makes it clear in both the Apology and Crito that it is all right for him to die, qualifying it with variations of “at this time”. The tragic flaw lies not in Socrates but with the people of Athens that convicted him and sentenced him to death.

In the Crito, Socrates looks at a citizen’s duty to the city by following its laws. I thought it might be helpful to look back at a few of Socrates’ comments in the Apology about the laws during his trial and sentencing. All quotes will be from the translation by G.M.A. Grube.

- Socrates says he would break a law if it were at odds with what he understands to be his directive from the god. (29 c-d) From Socrates’ defense speech:

[I]f you said to me in this regard: “Socrates, we do not believe Anytus now; we acquit you, but only on condition that you spend no more time on this investigation and do not practice philosophy, and if you are caught doing so you will die;” if, as I say, you were to acquit me on those terms, I would say to you: “Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy….”

At times it seems Plato wrote the Crito to walk back from this claim and show Socrates as a law-abiding citizen.

- (32 b-d) Socrates relays his experience of serving on a trial of the ten generals from the battle of Arginusae for failure to

pick up the survivors of the naval battle. This was illegal, as you all recognized later. I was the only member of the presiding committee to oppose your doing something contrary to the laws, and I voted against it. Theorators were ready to prosecute me and take me away, and your shouts were egging them on, but I thought I should run any risk on the side of law and justice rather than join you, for fear of prison or death, when you were engaged in an unjust course.

Socrates continues his defense by pointing out he ignored the orders of the Athenian oligarchy (when they were in power during 404-3 BCE) because it would have been unjust or impious. His wording provides a link between laws, justice, and piety. This exception to following the orders of oligarchy will be made clearer after going through the Crito.

- Odds and ends: At the end of his defense, Socrates notes that he has not performed “pitiful dramatics” in order to influence the jury’s decision, pointing out that the jury’s duty is to judge according to the law (35c). Socrates implies he approves of the law in other cities requiring a capital trial should last longer than one day (37b). Why has he not advocated a change to Athens’ laws? Survival—his daimonion prevents him from “taking part in public affairs” since a “man that really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time.” (31d – 32a).

After I return from a short trip I’ll begin a walk-through of the Crito.

The Campaigns of Alexander: Speeches in Books 4 & 5

2011-09-22T05:46:00.000-07:00

Thus, even wholly trustworthy writers who kept company with Alexander at the time do not agree in their writings about events that were public and known to them personally.

- From 4.14.3, all quotes from The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander, translation by Pamela Mensch

Arrian seems to give the game away on his history—how much can you rely on him given this admission? If public events cannot be trusted because of disagreement between writers, how much can we trust anything else, including the speeches?

I’ll start by looking at Kallisthenes’ speech opposing Alexander's requirement for proskynesis, the Persian custom of prostrating before the king. Editor James Romm notes that “There is no consensus as to how closely the speech that follows reflects Kallisthenes’ actual words. It contains much that could have been easily invented, but nothing that obviously has been. … Clearly Arrian wanted to give full play to the themes developed here … .” (footnote 4.11.2a) Kallisthenes begins by confirming that Alexander deserves to be honored as a human but he should beware of claiming divine honors. There are some echoes of Kleitos’ earlier speech (which ended in his death at Alexander’s hand) reminding Alexander he is the son of Philip and that “Even Herakles himself did not receive divine honors from the Greeks during his lifetime”. But then Alexander seeks to attain things Herakles did not achieve.

Kallisthenes ends his speech by pointedly asking Alexander how he intends to be greeted once he returns to Greece or Macedonia. Will he “compel the Greeks, the freest of men, to bow before you, or will you keep your distance from the Greeks but impose this dishonor on the Macedonians?” (emphasis mine) This assumes Alexander intended to return home, although as I explored in a previous post this might not be a valid assumption. In addition, there is an undercurrent in the speeches by Kleitos and Kallisthenes when they remind Alexander of his mortal parentage. Why did they feel the need to remind him that Philip was his father? Was it something to do with his behavior after the visit to the oracle of Ammon in Egypt?

Alexander’s rousing speech in 5.25-26 to his officers after learning of the weary troops' discontent about pressing the campaign across the Hyphasis River demonstrates a masterful spin on what he hopes to accomplish. Of course it may be a fabrication or a mixture of fact and fancy, but it is a stirring read. Alexander begins by saying he itends to persuade the officers to continue the campaign or be persuaded by them to "turn back" (again note that doesn't mean go home). He lists their conquests and how much they control. Hitting the high points of the remainder:

- Alexander says that there is not much more land to conquer as they are near the Eastern Sea,
- As long as the empire has borders they run the risk of attack and rebellion,
- This labor will add to our glory and immortal fame, and
- I fight with you to increase your wealth.

The final paragraph of the speech contains that last point and more:

”Certainly, if I had led you into toils and dangers without incurring these myself, I would understand it if you lost heart before I did, since you would have borne the toils alone and reaped their rewards for others. Bus as it is, we have shared the toils, and have shared just as much in the dangers, and the prizes are there for all of us. The country is yours, and you govern it as satraps [he is addressing only his officers]. As for treasure, the larger share is already coming to you; and when we have completed the conquest of Asia, then by Zeus, when I have not merely fulfilled byt exceeded your hopes of wealth, I will send home those who wish to return to their own country or will lead them back myself, and make those who remain here the envy of those who depart.” (5.26.7-8)

Once again, maybe I’m reading too much into some of these speeches but there seems to be a constant theme of being worshipped or revered or considered non-mortal while alive. Arrian then gives Koinos, later described as one of Alexander’s most trusted Companions (intimate friends in war, society, and politics), an equally remarkable speech. Koinos says he speaks not for the officers, since they are there and can speak for themselves, but for the average soldier. Koinos paints a bleak picture for those soldiers that have followed Alexander since the beginning of the campaigns, saying most of them have been wounded, killed, taken ill, or left behind to populate cities far from their home. Koinos frames his arguments as best for Alexander—return home, get new, young, fresh troops (unafraid of war…I like that touch) to conquer the rest of the world. When we show them how wealthy you have made us, they will make eager soldiers. The ending has several barbs: “Finally, sire, nothing is so honorable as self-restraint in the midst of good fortune. For while you are in command of such an army we have nothing to fear from our enemies, but it is not in men’s power to anticipate and thereby guard against what comes from god.” (from 5.27.8) Not only does he target Alexander’s increasing lack of self-restraint but it also recalls Solon’s advice to Croesus in Book One of Herodotus’ Histories (no man can be called truly fortunate until he is dead since bad things can happen at any moment).

These speeches in Books 4 & 5 are the longest in Arrian’s history, probably included because they fit nicely with some of the themes Arrian wanted to advance about Alexander, including his lack of self-restraint and wanting to be viewed as divine (among other themes). Arrian makes sure we see that the speeches are argued in order to appeal to the desires and well-being of their target. The ultimate irony resides in the results—those arguing for something fail to benefit from the speeches:

- Kallisthenes is soon after put to death, and while Alexander backs off his demand for Macedonian/Greek obeisance, the initial requirement has damaged his relationship with his friends and troops,
- Alexander’s troops still insist on going home, frustrating his desires for an unlimited empire, and
- Koinos dies shortly after his speech (although not presented as suspicious by Arrian), and
- the troops will pay a terrible price for their lack of support in Alexander's desires.

Parade's End on TV in 2012

2011-09-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

I felt happy while downloading the BBC podcasts of Life and Fate (more on this in *intended* upcoming posts) but this notice makes me giddy. Well, at least what I imagine giddy feels like after plowing through too much stress.

Tom Stoppard at the BBC's site:

The BBC came to me with the idea of adapting Ford's novel for TV two years ago. I had never read it and I fell in love with it. Parade's End has been my main pre-occupation since then. The title covers a quartet of books set among the upper class in Edwardian England, mostly from 1911 to the end of the Great War. I spent about 18 months on the dramatisation of the novel into five 60-minute episodes, working with the BBC producer Piers Wenger and with Damien Timmer of Mammoth, the independent production company. I confess I feel a bit proud of it, and now that Susanna White [as director] has come on board to direct Parade's End I'm thoroughly excited about it."

More on the cast can be found at IMDb.com as more people join the project. Many thanks to Debra Murphy at Catholic Fiction for posting this information. I'm excited to see how this adaptation works.

Of course, I would have loved to have seen Judi Dench as Valentine Wannop. But this will do nicely...

Update (10 October 2011): see the comment from not Bridget for a link to an interview with screenwriter Tom Stoppard and producer David Parfitt.

The Campaigns of Alexander: The good, the bad, and the ugly of Books 4 & 5

2011-09-18T21:31:00.000-07:00

Alexander and Porus, Charles Le Brun (1673)
Picture source

I wanted to highlight a few of the good, bad and really bad things that happen in these pages. If pointing out Alexander’s dark side makes me “mean, obscure and dull”, so be it.

The Good
Alexander solidifies his reputation for military genius in many different and difficult circumstances. Through his actions Alexander reinforces his contention at Gaza that “the harder the conquest, the more it should be attempted” (quotes come from The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander, translation by Pamela Mensch). The difficulty in capturing impregnable fortresses such as the Sogdian Rock and the Aornos Rock demonstrates his determination to succeed at the impossible. His plan and his troops’ execution against the Indian king Poros at the Hydaspes River battle highlights Alexander’s cleverness in set-piece battles. Unlike the three battles against Darius’ army, Alexander did not have the older generals Parmenion (killed by an ordered assassination) or Kleitos (murdered by Alexander’s hand) to rely on, thus putting his own distinctive stamp on this battle.

The Bad
Alexander proved himself a master of propaganda and troop morale but his touch fails him at times in these books. His insistence on the ritual of proskynesis, following the Persian ceremony of bowing before the king, grated on the Macedonians and Greeks in Alexander’s retinue. Such a ritual would be offensive to Hellene sensibilities, seeing the adoption of a barbarian custom as well as appearing to ask followers to revere a human instead of a god. To this point Alexander’s leadership has been skillful so a misstep this simple, ignoring the religious implications in requiring this social act, hints at ... something. Kallisthenes’ reproof highlights the religious implications and the average Macedonian response to it, meaning Alexander would not be blind to future reactions to his request for divine recognition. It’s easy to wonder at what point his close friends acknowledged the changes in Alexander (as we’ll see in the remaining books).

Since Alexander seems to take enemy resistance as a personal affront, the public rebukes by Kleitos and Kallisthenes all but sealed their deaths. Koinos’ speech at the Hyphasis River, and the soldiers’ reaction to it, makes it clear that that Alexander’s men still support him but not his desires—they want to go home. The trend we see with Koinos, Kleitos, and Kallisthenes speaking out against Alexander appears to mark a change in Alexander and his relationship to his men. Even Arrian, a dedicated apologist for Alexander, feels the need to either speak against him or tortuously defend him.

The Ugly
This category has many possibilities: the mutilation of Bessos, the murder of Kleitos, the massacres at Massaka and Aornos Rock are a few possibilities. Arrian’s formula for Alexander shows generous behavior when vanquished foes behave honorably, such as Khorienes (provisions Alexander’s army) or Poros (noble behavior on the field of battle and in defeat). For any person or group of people that terribly vexes him, though, no mercy is shown. The massacres at Massaka and Aornos Rock, despite Arrian’s excuses, appear as a calculated act of political terrorism. Alexander’s dark side, which seems to be increasingly on display, is just getting warmed up for the marches down the Indus River valley and across the Gedrosian desert. And more.

The Long Room Hub Associate Professor in Hyborian Studies and Tyrant Slaying

2011-09-17T11:50:00.000-07:00

He completed his PhD, entitled "To Hear The Lamentation of Their Women: Constructions of Masculinity in Contemporary Zamoran Literature" at UCD and was appointed to the School of English in 2006, after sucessfully decapitating his predecessor during a bloody battle which will long be remembered in legend and song. In 2011/12, he will be teaching on the following courses: "The Relevance of Crom in the Modern World", "Theories of Literature", "Vengeance for Beginners", "Deciphering the Riddle of Steel" and "D.H. Lawrence".

Unfortunately the Trinity College Dublin professor's page has been taken down, but the cached version can be seen here.

(Found at The Guardian)

The Campaigns of Alexander: They “do not remain there entirely of their own will”

2011-09-14T17:21:00.000-07:00

We had a lively conference call on Arrian’s The Campaigns of Alexander Monday evening and once again I will recommend participating in the Reading Odyssey programs, even if it is only to listen to the conference calls (which you can do with the latest one at this link). In this call we had an interesting “side topic” discussion on people left behind to populate and garrison certain cities.

Many times in Arrian’s text Alexander leaves mercenaries, injured and old soldiers, and trusted companions to man and control a city. During the soldiers’ revolt at the Hyphasis River, Koinos highlights the disappointment or resistance against this forced action (from 5.27.5): “Of the other Greeks, those who have been settled in the cities you founded do not remain there entirely of their own will”.

We’ll never know all of Alexander’s intentions when he left Macedon, including how far east he intended to go in subduing Asia. My guess about his quest for an unlimited empire developed as circumstances drove him east, first to capture Bessos and then to subdue the eastern regions of Persia…but it can only be a guess.

Arrian never gives us the reaction of the people left behind, although many must not have liked it--hints of Alexander's death leads many of them to leave Bactria and Sogdiana. Not to mention how quickly these men in certain regions revolted or deserted after his real death. It’s clear the troops expected to return home at some point if Koinos’ speech was representative of their feelings. One factor that muddies the water was Alexander’s disposal of most of the royal property before leaving Macedon. From Plutarch’s Life of Alexander (translation by John Dryden):

However narrow and disproportionable the beginnings of so vast an undertaking might seem to be, yet he would not embark his army until he had informed himself particularly what means his friends had to enable them to follow him, and supplied what they wanted, by giving good farms to some, a village to one, and the revenue of some hamlet or harbour-town to another. So that at last he had portioned out or engaged almost all the royal property; which giving Perdiccas an occasion to ask him what he would leave himself, he replied, his hopes. "Your soldiers," replied Perdiccas, "will be your partners in those," and refused to accept of the estate he had assigned him. Some others of his friends did the like, but to those who willingly received or desired assistance of him, he liberally granted it, as far as his patrimony in Macedonia would reach, the most part of which was spent in these donations.

There are several ways to spin this disposal in addition to the surface explanation of leaving finances in order before departing. Alexander may have expected to return with the Persian treasury so anything wanted could be reacquired. He may not have intended to return, setting up his rule in Persia, but would allow soldiers to return if they so wished. Or some other option or combination. In any case, the revolt at the Hyphasis River included the request of the soldiers to return home. Alexander would provide them with an example of being careful what you wish for.

Note: Cross posted at Reading Odyssey, with changes. Check out the main site and programs for 2012, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as well as Herodtus’ Histories.

Explain the logic one more time...

2011-09-13T17:59:00.000-07:00

Bust of Alexander the Great
Picture source

Robert Lowell, in "Death of Alexander" from History (1973):

No one was like him. Terrible were his crimes—
but if you wish to blackguard the Great King,
think how mean, obscure and dull you are,
your labors lowly and your merits less...

The Little Tragedies

2011-09-12T03:39:00.000-07:00

I finished Alexander Pushkin's The Little Tragedies, an e-book translated by Alan Shaw. The pieces included are "The Miserly Knight", "Mozart and Salieri", "The Stone Guest", and "Feast During the Plague".

I have posted on "Mozart and Salieri" earlier:

Pushkin does a wonderful job of embodying two disparate views of art in his characters. Salieri places art on a lofty plane, able to justify murder in order to “save” it. Mozart’s quote above is in direct contrast to everything Salieri has worked for and the esteem he desires. Pushkin also pushes the idea of the sacred accessible through the profane. Salieri’s asceticism in his personal life carries over to his music. His repugnance of all things corporeal limits his reach for something higher. Mozart wallows in his humanness, enjoying life and obtaining something Salieri recognizes as divine. ... [H]ighly recommended for happy idlers.

There is a marvelous recording of the play that uses Alan's translation in a five-part YouTube series.

The other three pieces don't consistently achieve the same level as "Mozart and Salieri" but they do have plenty of enjoyable moments. "The Stone Guest" presents a version of the Don Juan legend. As Alan points out in his Afterword (an extremely helpful analysis of the stories) lust is not the driving force of Don Juan as he is "lured by the thrill of the chase" instead. Pushkin goes out of his way to highlight Don Juan's excitement in illicit pursuit. The 'stone guest' turns out to be the statue of a lover's husband who was murdered by Don Juan. Just as the statue's physique exaggerates the physical attributes of the dead husband, Don Juan's mythology has likewise grown over the years. Pushkin's enigmatic Don Juan reflects some of the expected parts of the myth but adds some interesting twists as well.

"Feast During the Plague" might be the slightest of the stories but there remains plenty to chew over regarding its meaning(s). Well-to-do city dwellers attend a feast, enjoying their apparent exemption from the death that occurs around them. Walsingham, presiding over the feast, rebukes a priest as he seems to celebrate life. His outlook, though, appears to come at a cost. Walsingham's hymn to the plague is the high point of the piece, a moving celebration of life and all it entails:

All, all that threatens to destroy
Holds for the mortal heart a joy
Of inexplicable delight,
That seems to pledge eternity;
And happy he who in his plight
Has tasted that discovery.

"The Miserly Knight" is my favorite story after "Mozart and Salieri". The humorous opening scene, focusing on the poverty of the erstwhile knight, is followed up by a wonderful scene focusing on the knight's father in his money vault. While the son debases the ideal of a knight, his father mocks it with his language. The key to a money chest is compared to a sword, where sliding it into the lock gives as much pleasure, supposedly, as a knight plunging his sword into an opponent.

Alan has put together a wonderful publication. These may not be listed as part of Pushkin's major works but the additional information and context provided by Alan elevate their enjoyment. Highly recommended.

Upcoming movie: The Story of Temple Drake

2011-09-10T20:26:00.000-07:00

I want to mention the scheduled showing of The Story of Temple Drake (1933) on TCM at 8pm (Eastern) on September 14. Based on William Faulkner's Sanctuary, which he described as a "potboiler" (although how much he meant that is debatable), I'm anxious to see the version TCM will show. The movie, filmed pre-Hays code, was supposedly altered for release and again post-code.

I've never been a big fan of Sanctuary but I probably need to revisit it--my memory of reading it almost 30 years ago was that it was a warm-up for Light in August. The movie, though, can be hard to find at times which is why I wanted to highlight this airing.

I Lose My Breath (bumped and updated)

2011-09-09T14:17:00.000-07:00

Driving home yesterday I heard singer Melanie O'Reilly do a song titled "I Lose My Breath", inspired by Molly Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses. Instead of using Molly's words directly (and avoiding Kate Bush's 20+ year odyssey), O'Reilly turned to The Irish Book of Invasions for lyrics.

If interested in the song, you can hear it at this link. The intro starts around the 1:31:50 mark. (Note--this "audio archive will be available until Saturday, September 17th 2011".)

Update:
I contacted Melanie because I was interested with the tie-in with ancient Irish stories and received this nice reply from her:

Our song "I Lose my Breath " first came from an idea that Sean O Nuallain had; having researched a lot on James Joyce's own inspirations for Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, Sean found that Joyce himself was very inspired by the mythically derived Irish stories - The Book of Invasions and The Voyage of Bran.

Sean gave me a lot of pointers, and so for the Molly Bloom inspired piece, I looked at a piece within The Voyage of Bran, which Joyce actually relates to Molly Bloom's soliloquy and then I created my own song lyrics from that. And Frank Martin (Bay Area pianist and another Bajaban!) co-wrote the music with me. A creative process!

We give credit to Sean for the idea and scholarly research, and of course to Frank Martin for co-writing with me.

The Campaigns of Alexander: Arrian’s prefaces and Books 4 & 5

2011-09-08T14:19:00.000-07:00

I tried to keep both prefaces in mind when reading Arrian’s book because they frame everything that follows. Arrian defends his reliance on Ptolemy and Aristoboulos in the opening preface but the disagreement between their reports as well as discrepancies with additional sources stand out in this section. Arrian highlights these differences, lays out several reports and offers his belief on what happened in a Herodotean fashion. These differences question the veracity of the sources while dovetailing nicely with the claim Arrian made in the second preface (1.12.2-5)—Alexander did not have someone like a Homer or a Xenophon to record his great achievements until Arrian's account. Books 4 and 5 provides many examples in Arrian’s hagiography of Alexander such as praising his foresight, magnifying his achievements, and highlighting the minimal cost (to the Macedonians).

Not only does Arrian sound like Herodotus when explaining his reasoning on what happened but also during the digressions of these books. The first digression, 4.7 – 14, allows Arrian to appraise Alexander on a moral basis. With the murder of Kleitos, the experiment in Persian ceremony, and the murder of Kallisthenes, Alexander’s moral failings regarding temperance and moderation come to the foreground. Even when rebuking these actions Arrian sounds subdued, blaming Kleitos and Kallisthenes for being the main cause of their own deaths. The brief mention of Alexander’s behavior toward Darius’ wife, coming immediately after these murders, serves to reestablish Arrian’s reverential tone toward Alexander and highlight some of his good moral points. Book 5’s opening digression about the origins of Nysa by Dionysus accentuates myth building and Alexander’s willingness to see the works of “his ancestors” in his travels. Arrian uses the geographic discourse about India to expand the magnitude of Alexander’s accomplishments in terms of the amount of land conquered, number of rivers forded, and height of mountain ranges crossed.

While adding another contradiction about Alexander to examples I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, Alexander’s lack of moderation in personal matters, presented as a moral failing by Arrian, proves to be the trait Arrian believes makes Alexander great. His dream of unlimited expansion runs counter to his men’s desire to return home, though. As many other commenters have noted, Alexander’s trek was stopped not by foreign armies but by his own men and their lack of the same ambition as their leader. There are hints of abominable weather but Arrian simplifies the comparison between Alexander’s desires and those of his men.

I have highlighted some thematic and stylistic topics in this post at the expense of Alexander’s substantive acts such as his impressive military victories, the murders of Kleitos and Kallisthenes, or the remarkable speech at the Hyphasis River (all of which I hope to review). I mentioned some similarities with Herodotus in the digressions and manner of presenting conflicting report, but Arrian also echoes some of his language as well as that of Thucydides—hopefully I’ll have time soon to expand some of these observations into posts, too.

Arrian and Alexander...more to come, at a limited level

2011-09-05T22:19:00.000-07:00

Due to a loss in the family, posting will be sporadic this week. I wanted to go into detail about Books 4 and 5 of Arrian's The Campaigns of Alexander but I may only have time to post on thematic and stylistic points in this section before the book discussion call on September 12.

I constantly mention this and will do so again--I encourage anyone interested in exploring more about Arrian or Alexander to participate in the Reading Odyssey's book discussion calls.

Movies: Walker Percy and Ayrton Senna

2011-09-04T07:52:00.000-07:00

No, not together, or on film together...although that might be a fun concept.

I have mentioned Win Riley's documentary on Walker Percy a few times. Despite thinking the movie thin in a few places, I highly recommend watching it when it will be shown on PBS on October 4, 2011. Here's the trailer:

Speaking of movies, if you have the chance to see Senna, the movie about Formula One driver Ayrton Senna, I highly recommend it. It comes with a bias (how could you not regarding the Senna/Prost battles?) and I wish certain areas were better developed. Even so, I have no hesitation in recommending it.

Pushkin’s Little Tragedies

2011-08-31T20:41:00.000-07:00

I have mentioned Alan Shaw a few times in relation to Alexander Pushkin and will do so again. His translation of The Little Tragedies is now available as an e-book. He graciously sent me a copy and I'm enjoying it a lot. Contents include "The Miserly Knight", "Mozart and Salieri", "The Stone Guest", and "Feast During the Plague". After the texts Alan includes helpful resources for anyone interested in further exploring the works. (Thanks Alan!)

Also be sure to check out Alan's blog at his Spoken and Sung site.

Debits and Credits: The Changelings and Sea Constables

2011-08-31T04:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve started Debits and Credits by Rudyard Kipling and I’m impressed once again by Kipling’s storytelling power. Not to mention I’m at a loss as to why I haven’t heard more about this collection since it has some of his best writing. But then I’m only a few stories into the collection. We’ll see how it goes over the next couple of weeks. So what’s in Debits and Credits? Nineteen poems, fourteen stories, and two scenes from a play (unfinished).

The combination of the poem “The Changelings” and the short story “Sea Constables” is the first look at the collection I want to highlight. First, the poem “The Changelings”:

Or ever the battered liners sank
    With their passengers to the dark,
I was head of a Walworth Bank,
    And you were a grocer's clerk.

I was a dealer in stocks and shares,
    And you in butters and teas,
And we both abandoned our own affairs
    And took to the dreadful seas.

Wet and worry about our ways---
    Panic, onset, and flight---
Had us in charge for a thousand days
    And a thousand-year-long night.

We saw more than the nights could hide---
    More than the waves could keep---
And---certain faces over the side
    Which do not go from our sleep.

We were more tired than words can tell
    While the pied craft fled by,
And the swinging mounds of the Western swell
    Hoisted us Heavens-high...

Now there is nothing---not even our rank---
    To witness what we have been;
And I am returned to my Walworth bank,
    And you to your margarine!

To say the poem takes a dark turn may be a misstatement since the opening two lines telegraph what the banker and grocer’s clerk will see during World War I. Nothing fits in this scenario—not seeing more than the waves or night can hide nor returning to the pre-war life after witnessing such horrors. The last stanza contains a disturbing twist as well—“To witness what we have been”. Not “seen”, which would come close enough to fit the rhyme, but “been”. It’s light verse that becomes more disturbing every time I read it.

The story that follows the poem, “Sea Constables: A Tale of ‘15”, fits the same disturbing pattern. The structure of the story is simple---four men eat at a luxury restaurant in a London hotel while comparing experiences of serving in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Their conversation focuses on a blockade runner that several of them dealt with recently. The meal they eat and the wine they consume (yes, I’m jealous on this point) are exceptional, leading to a physical numbness that mirrors the moral detachment in their stories.

It helps to understand the background of the story, where the British employed private yachts for a ‘soft’ blockade of ships to or from Germany, although the context can be figured out from the story itself. As a couple of the diners tell their experience in dealing with the declared neutral party, they make it clear there is no such thing as neutrality for oil-runners like “Mr. Newt”. But Kipling also highlights the moral cost and degradation possible in war through the actions of several members in the party. Will they be able to go back to selling groceries or work in the bank after what they’ve been? The most disturbing part of the story may be that they think so.

He’s dead, Alexander

2011-08-26T03:04:00.000-07:00

I wanted to pass on a couple of links I found through Rogueclassicism recently.

The first is a paper on the death of Philip, linked through History of the Ancient World. It’s an intriguing read by Amalia Skilton, written a few years ago when she was a student at Tempe Preparatory Academy. The pdf version can be found here:

This paper will answer the question of Philip’s murder with attention to both ancient authors’ claims and their sources, as well as to the arguments of modern writers. It will ultimately lay the blame for Philip’s assassination on the shoulders of Amyntas, Philip’s nephew and the son of King Perdikkas II.1 However, it will disregard neither the motives of the assassin himself, Pausanias, nor the possible complicity of other groups in the crime.

I don't know that the paper "answers the question", but it does present a compelling story.

The second link resurrects a fun TV movie: “Alexander the Great”, filmed in 1964, eventually released in 1968. The reason for watching it? William Shatner as Alexander, Adam West as Cleander, and starring Joseph Cotton and John Cassavetes (other names for movie buffs: John Ducette and Cliff Osmond, among others—see the IMDb.com page for more) The best part? Go to this article for YouTube clips of the movie. Honestly…it can make your day. It did mine.

”It was so long ago,” Shatner said of the fizzled project, which started life as a 1964 television pilot but was shelved before it reached the air. “It was great fun to make. It was a pilot that was monumental for ABC just before I went and did ‘Star Trek.’ And I was deeply, deeply, horrendously disappointed when this series didn’t sell and then the following year or so I started work on ‘Star Trek.’”

The pilot depicted the Battle of Issus with a then-unknown Shatner as Alexander leading his Macedonian army in triumph and less-than-famous West as his compatriot, Cleander, who enjoyed a good party as much as a good fight.

Yes, before they took on their iconic roles on “Star Trek” and “Batman,” actors William Shatner and Adam West worked together on a buddy project called “Alexander the Great” that never aired – maybe no show was big enough to hold those outsized on-screen personas.

“It was so long ago,” Shatner said of the fizzled project, which started life as a 1964 television pilot but was shelved before it reached the air. “It was great fun to make. It was a pilot that was monumental for ABC just before I went and did ‘Star Trek.’ And I was deeply, deeply, horrendously disappointed when this series didn’t sell and then the following year or so I started work on ‘Star Trek.’”

The pilot depicted the Battle of Issus with a then-unknown Shatner as Alexander leading his Macedonian army in triumph and less-than-famous West as his compatriot, Cleander, who enjoyed a good party as much as a good fight.

“Bill was a very good Alexander and as the general Cleander I was the wine, women and song, Errol Flynn kind of guy,” West said. “However, just between us, it turned out to be one of the worst scripts I have ever read and it was one of the worst things I’ve ever done. We had wonderful people involved like John Cassavetes and Joseph Cotten and Simon Oakland in the cast.”

Shatner said he had high hopes that the show would find an audience for its spirit of adventure – it was made just eight years after Richard Burton’s big-screen turn in writer-director-producer Robert Rossen’s “Alexander the Great” – but it was destined to occupy a far different place in pop culture.

Watch the first clip and then continue with the “Up Next” clips. Keep an eye out on how to command from the captain's....that is, king's...chair.

“I came to put an end to wars forever.”
“We cannot conquer the world!”
“Then we shall build a new one. For Greece, and for all she stands.”
“We shall build a graveyard instead.”

Returning to Alexander: reading group discussion questions

2011-08-25T11:44:00.000-07:00

It will be a few days before I have time to read anything so I'll take an opportunity to post a few things I've been meaning to mention about Arrian and Alexander. (On a side note, I'm listening to a few lectures on Arrian's teacher Epictetus...funny how things tie together at times.)

Reading Odyssey's next conference call will be on September 12 to discuss Books 4 and 5 of Arrian's The Campaigns of Alexander (see this post for the schedule). Our discussion leader posted a series of questions that will be helpful when reading these books. Here is the summary for these books and the first two topic areas listed:

Books IV & V include Alexander’s campaigns in Central Asia and the Indus river valleys in India spanning the years 329-326 B.C. Book IV begins at the Tanais/Iaxartes river on the western side of the Indian Caucasus mountains and ends with Alexander reaching the Indus River on the wastern side. Book V involves Alexander’s campaign on the river plains of five rivers that merge into the Indus, a campaign which is his farthest east.

1. Between the Scythians and Spitamenes [4.3.6-4.6.5, pp. 156-160]
As Alexander continues to subjugate and, to some extent, colonize the northeast corner of the former Persian empire, he finds himself dealing with rebel tribes as well as intervening incursions from the Scythians. His most pressing moment at the beginning of Book IV comes when “Alexander suddenly faces two new difficulties: Scythians threatening his northern frontier and an uprising led by Spitamenes against his troops in Marakanda” (p. 156, side note). Why does Arrian decide to include the anecdote about the omen in connection with the Scythian battle? How does Alexander manage to rout the Scythian cavalry given that he has a river to cross and that the Scythians on the other side are famous for their mobile cavalry? How does Alexander manage to chase off Spitamenes and his forces? What do these two very different encounters have in common when it comes to Alexander’s strategy and planning?

2. Alexander and the limits of power [4.7.3-4.14, pp. 160-172]
Alexander’s mutilation of Bessos raises some very pressing questions for Arrian and for us. How does Arrian assess Alexander’s decision making at this point? Why does Arrian compare the Bessos episode with a later episode that involves Alexander killing his fellow officer and friend Kleitos? What important issues does the altercation between Alexander and Kleitos raise in terms of Alexander’s overall mission? or his ability to lead? How does the episode of Kallisthenes and Alexander’s concern for his image relate to the previous anecdotes? As Arrian relates the “Pages’ Conspiracy” against Alexander, what does Hermolaos say that resonates deeply among the Macedonian officers? Is Kallisthenes’ ultimate punishment the result of paranoia or cruelty on Alexander’s part? or is it rational and practical?

I highly recommend the Reading Odyssey's reading group format--the calls have been fun, fast-flowing and informative. It's not too late to sign up (link to do so can be found in the "Welcome!" post at their site) and enjoy Arrian's history of Alexander!

A Living Thing

2011-08-23T20:40:00.000-07:00

A note here to encourage you to check out William Michaelian's tenth anniversary authorized print edition of A Listening Thing. My comments on the book, such that they are, can be found here.

Congratulations William. I couldn't resist one last laugh with the title of this post (which is how I listed the book before I actually read it)...

Also, check out William on Facebook. His goal is to know everyone possible via the internet and is well on his way!

Apricot Jam and Other Stories—It seemed that we had been filled to overflowing, yet there was still more to come

2011-08-22T22:46:00.000-07:00

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Apricot Jam and Other Stories
Counterpoint, Hardcover, 375 pages
ISBN: 1582436029 / ISBN-13: 9781582436029

Comments on the first five stories can be found here. This post covers the last four stories in the collection, the first three of these translated by Kenneth Lantz, “No Matter What” translated by Stephan Solzhenitsyn.

“Zhelyabuga Village” is a first person narration of an incident in a western district of the USSR during World War II. The narrator commands a sound-ranging battery setting up in a forward position in order to pinpoint German batteries. He starts by detailing the procedures, considerations, and pressures that go into such an operation. I found it fascinating to look at the technological techniques and problems that had to be addressed. As in the previous story, we see a political officer hanging around” the battery, offering nothing useful. Despite some repetitions in technicalities, I found the “war” part of this story powerful because of the no nonsense way the narrator looked after both his job and the sixty soldiers (and inadvertent civilians) under his purview. Solzhenitsyn describes an impromptu birthday party, full of fatalistic rhetoric and an elevated feeling of community. “Over this war you could have counted the number of such days on one hand. Our spirits soared. It seemed that we had been filled to overflowing, yet there was still more to come.”

The narrator skips ahead fifty-two years to describe an official visit to Oryol “for the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Victory Day.” Characters muse about the changes in and differences of the place during the elapsed years: “It was a different world, one we had never seen before.” We meet the beauty that had been trapped in the cellar with the troops, two yellowed teeth left in her head and the hint of rape as she declares she forgets “what I need to forget.” A minor protest erupts as village women block the delegation's caravan to protest their treatment—they gave their all in WWII and they feel ignored. After empty promises from those in charge, the old women get specific with their charges: “Never a holiday, never a day off, never a bit of leave. And what did they tell us then? Your labor will be our victory; it will help us end the war quickly and bring some peace to the country. So why have you forgotten those who toiled away, tell me that?”

“Times of Crisis” follows the life and career of Georgy Zhukov. Solzhenitsyn seems to admire Zhukov because of his love of the motherland, at least to the extent that he puts results for his country ahead of personal fame or wealth. Solzhenitsyn has shown this level of empathy with Soviet officials in other works, such as Stalin in “In the First Circle.” The first section of this story covers Zhukov’s growth and development in the Red Army fighting against separatists and bandits. The steps taken by the state against the peasants in the area take an increasingly intimidating and oppressive approach. Zhukov admires these tactics: “No great commander can manage without harsh measures.” In both sections, Solzhenitsyn seeks to understand Zhukov by imagining his inner thoughts and desires.

The second section has Zhukov writing his memoirs, looking back on his career during World War II and later. Because of his position he directly oversaw some of the USSR’s major war accomplishments, directly interacting with Stalin during many of the campaigns. Zhukov brushes aside the faults and failings of Stalin, not able to conceive that the empire's leader could be anything other than human. Or competent. While he is adept at military matters, Zhukov flounders when it comes to political wrangling. He fails to comprehend anyone that places personal advancement over the well-being of the motherland. Shunted aside to an imposed retirement, Zhukov eventually decides to write his memoirs. The first problem he encounters revolves around presenting his experiences his relationship with other people, in particular Stalin (both ellipses in original):

It was precisely here that he saw the biggest obstacle to writing his memoirs. (Maybe he should just give up the whole thing…?) How was he, a general who had had long and close contact with Stalin during the Great War and who had seen his many moods and who had even become his closest deputy, to write about the man who was the head of government, the general secretary of the party, and soon the Supreme Commander of the armed forces? As a veteran of that war, he could scarcely believe how the Supreme Commander had since been dethroned and how a few dimwits were trying to stain his reputation by telling cock-and-bull stories—how he “commanded the front lines by looking at the globe…” (It’s true, he did have a large globe in the room next to his office, but there were also maps on the wall, and he would lay out other maps on the desk when he was working. The Supreme Commander would pace from corner to corner, smoking his pipe, and then go to the maps so as to understand clearly the report he was being given or to indicate what he wanted.) Just now they’ve thrown out the biggest windbag of them all [Meretskov], kit and caboodle. And maybe, little by little, they’ll be able to restore proper respect for the Supreme Commander. Still, some irreparable damage was done.

The second problem comes when party officials find out Zhukov is writing his memoirs, who then bring in overseers to insure his book tells the story they want told instead of what really happened. Though Brezhnev eventually approves the book, Zhukov feels empty, as if he has lost a battle because he didn’t take advantage of certain moments given to him. The book was a fight he could never win.

“Fracture Points” is an interesting look at the changes in Soviet business from World War II through the 1990s. Part one follows the rise and development of Mitya Yemtsov as he develops a successful business model that bucks the government appointed system. He grasps what is needed over the years, including the changes of the 1980s (even though “privatization” becomes a frightening word). He sees that the forced governmental interlocking parts will fail since certain sectors could not sustain their business independently. Solzhenitsyn has always been a vocal critic of unbridled capitalism, but he shows his wrath for Russians playing at democracy and capitalism without realizing all that it entails: “You rushed off to elect some self-style democrats, most of them former instructors of Marxism-Leninism, some economists, ivory-tower professors, and journalists… Who elected them?”

Part two tracks the professional career of Aleksi Tolkovyanov, a promising physics student who finds himself in the Russian army in the late 1980s just as history reaches one of its "fracture point." The army changes him in the sense that he loses his love of science but he takes advantage of the loosened restrictions to pursue other goals. He and some friends set up a bank, providing a front for unsavory businesses. “The buy-and-sell era had already begun.” While disgusted that they have to deal with shady people, Toklovyanov hopes that the climate will change and they can restrict their business to only legitimate deals. An attempt on his life (a bomb blast in the lobby of his apartment building) destroys that hope for him. A faint light of hope persists, though, and he turns to the backer of his bank, Mitya Yemtsov. The old businessman demeans the younger generation even though they display the same sort of adaptability he did years ago. And, of course, Yemtsov intends to make a profit from their work.

Part One of “No Matter What” starts with an incident in World War II in which Lieutenant Pozushan catches members of the mess detail cooking stolen potatoes. After explaining the situation to the major, his superior admits “You cannot change human nature even under socialism,” suggesting the lieutenant allow the men to finish cooking the potatoes. The inevitability of human frailty leads to an acceptance of subversive actions.

Part Two follows a deputy-minister as he tours a section of the Angara River (probably during the 1990s) as he listens to complaints from locals about the government’s and private industries’ destruction along the river. A timber company and a series of dams spell disaster for those left along the river. Despite getting a hearing, it’s clear nothing will change: “If a decision is adopted, and even reconfirmed, there is no changing it anyway, no matter what. All will proceed according to plan.” Thus we see another thing that cannot be changed, whether it occurs under socialism or capitalism.

So how do I feel about the overall collection of stories? If I haven't made it clear, I enjoy much about Solzhenitsyn’s writing, fiction and nonfiction, so don’t expect a completely unbiased review (even though I think he's wrong in certain aspects of his overall framework). The strongest work in these pieces focus on life under communism. The stories on World War II appear to include personal experiences, which I found interesting but I realize such stories aren’t for everyone. Solzhenitsyn struggles in the stories (or parts of stories) set in the post-Soviet age—it’s clear he is unhappy about many things but his focus doesn’t consistently have the same bite. Which isn’t to say they aren’t good stories. It seems he was still working on how to evaluate and express his feelings on the changes in Russia, those for the good as well as for the bad. While there are no consistent themes across all the stories the feeling that a bad decision…such as missing an offered chance…lies at the heart of many unhappy or unfulfilled situations whether it be with individuals, groups, or the country. Literature, and the use/abuse of it by the Soviet system, comes in for its fair share of exposure but not to the same extent as the look at pivotal moments.

I recall seeing some announcements of this book saying this collection of stories would be a good introduction to Solzhenitsyn. If you’re looking to avoid his longer works for such an introduction, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich would be a much better choice (although I want to put in a word for the longer works, too). I have no hesitation in recommending the first four stories of this collection to the general reader looking for a sample of Solzhenitsyn general style. The remaining stories gave me various levels of enjoyment but I realize not everyone has the same interest in the writer as I do. Solzhenitsyn has some characters in the 1920s express hope for the change in the direction the country was taking, hopes we know, without having to read further, will be dashed. Fewer characters in stories set in the 1990s express similar hopes as a result of recent changes. Their path still unfolds, but Solzhenitsyn didn't seem to think the results will be much different.

The stories employing a structure Solzhenitsyn called binary tales—two parts related by something tangible, a continuation of the same story but set years later, or simply two unrelated stories with a similar theme—can be uneven but when they click, such as the opening “Apricot Jam”, this approach adds to the story’s impact.

Apricot Jam and Other Stories: there is queer small substance to this heroism

2011-08-18T10:04:00.000-07:00

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Apricot Jam and Other Stories
Counterpoint, Hardcover, 375 pages
ISBN: 1582436029 / ISBN-13: 9781582436029

As I mentioned in this post, I ordered this collection of Solzhenitsyn’s short stories and now that I’ve finished the first five (of nine) I better get my thoughts down on paper before I confuse the stories. From the book jacket:

These groundbreaking works—inter-connected and juxtaposed using an experimental method Solzhenitsyn referred to as “binary”—join Solzhenitsyn’s already available fiction as some of the most powerful literature of the twentieth century. With Soviet and post-Soviet life as their focus, these stories weave and shift inside their shared setting, illuminating the Russian experience under the Soviet regime.

The first story, “Apricot Jam,” uses the so-called binary style. Part one of the story is a letter from a kulak (a relatively well-to-do peasant) serving a hard labor sentence to a famous Soviet writer responding to the writer’s claim that “the purpose and meaning of life” as “labor in a communist society” (Kenneth Lantz translated the five stories in this post). “To that I reply that there is queer small substance to this heroism and this labor because it comes from driving people like us nigh to we drop.” The peasant goes on to explain the loss of the family farm to collective agriculture and his current plight—nearly starving to death. He begs the writer for a food parcel while recalling the apricot tree in the orchard and the jam his mother made from the crop. Part two focuses on the famous writer in his posh dacha as he entertains a couple of guests, one a department head at the state publishing house. The writer and department head rival each other in praising socialist realism with such statements as “Creating an art of world significance—that is the task of the writer today. The world is waiting for examples, for architectonics from our literature.” The writer complains that other authors fail to use “the language Russians have been speaking for a thousand years” which he discovered when reading confessions coerced from torture. The writer, after flattering himself with the claim that “When I write, I can comprehend my reader through my imagination, and I can see exactly what he needs”, comments on the peasant’s letter. The writer swoons over the language in the letter but ignores the writer's plea. The symbolism of the apricot jam at the dacha reinforces the disconnect between the writer and his claims.

“Ego” and “The New Generation” look at what it takes for someone to sell out their principles. (“The New Generation” can be found online.) Physical threats are effective for some, not for others, but threats to family prove very effective in both of these stories.
Elif Batuman goes into more detail about a few intriguing features of "The New Generation".

Another “binary” story,“Nastenka,” follows the difficulties of two different women with the same name of the title. The first Nastenka has a rough life as she tries to eke out an existence as a librarian. Raped often by the men in her life, she takes control of her sexuality and uses it to become the mistress of a war hero with access to material comfort she didn't know was possible. The second Nastenka trains to be a literature teacher. While she guards her sexuality, she witnesses the rape of literature in the name of the common cause. Never quite sure what texts are approved or not, this Nastenka feels gratified when the students respond in an inspired fashion to propaganda. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t need to comment on the insipid poem, just as he didn’t have to remark on a literature student’s passionate harangues decrying the literature of the past.

“Adlig Schwnkitten: A Tale of Twenty-Four Hours” covers a day in the life of a forward artillery brigade as it invaded Germany on January 25-26, 1945. The brigade, extending too far from the main force, is ambushed by the Germans and successfully retreats with minor casualties. In addition to the excitement of the operation, Solzhenitsyn provides a glimpse into the political workings of the army. Political officers from SMERSH (the wartime counterintelligence agency—the book has a handy glossary for many terms, names and agencies) accompany the forces and military leaders would defer decisions on troop movements to them. For political reasons, records of officers contained unexplained gaps and records of brigades ignore heroism shown by commanders. General directives, such as 'no retreat', make sensible options off-limits for officers. How much of the story is a chronicle of Solzhenitsyn’s experience remains uncertain (to me), but I do know that as a commander of a sound-ranging battery he was encircled near Liebstadt and he was able to break out with few men lost.

I hope to get to the final four stories this weekend…

The Legend of the Holy Drinker (movie)

2011-08-17T08:34:00.000-07:00

Imagine my surprise to find that there is a marvelous movie version of Joseph Roth’s novella The Legend of the Holy Drinker (IMDb link). Rutger Hauer does a wonderful job as Andreas and director Ermanno Olmi allows the story to unfold at a natural pace, letting the viewer see the impact on Andreas of the minor miracles and his deterioration from his failings and the abuse from others. There are minor changes from Roth’s story but they do nothing to detract from the power of the tale. Trivia—Robert De Niro was interested in playing the role of Andreas but Olmi went with Hauer. Highly recommended.

This clip shows the opening scene where the distinguished gentleman provides the first miracle, a scene where Andreas hallucinates seeing St Thérèse de Lisieux, and most of the ending in a café (although stopping short of the final scene) where he mistakes a young girl for Thérèse.

Life on the Mississippi (audiobook): great Scott!

2011-08-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

Reading (or in this case, listening to) Mark Twain proves to be a challenging task for me. I don’t mind the multiple layers of irony and ambiguity…in fact I find that one of his most enjoyable features. There are sublime moments in his writing, such as the passage I quoted in the previous post regarding the cost of experience. Many times, though, he follows such engaging passages with something grating.

Twain’s dislike of Walter Scott animates many fine passages in his work and sometimes an entire book. If nothing else, Twain was a consummate hater and could channel that into some fine work. Occasionally the hatred is laid bare which deliberate hyperbole can’t soften. A couple of passages from Life on the Mississippi:

Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the Capitol building; for it is not conceivable that this little sham castle would ever have been built if he had not run the people mad, a couple of generations ago, with his medieval romances. The South has not yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his books. Admiration of his fantastic heroes and their grotesque 'chivalry' doings and romantic juvenilities still survives here, in an atmosphere in which is already perceptible the wholesome and practical nineteenth-century smell of cotton-factories and locomotives; and traces of its inflated language and other windy humbuggeries survive along with it. It is pathetic enough, that a whitewashed castle, with turrets and things--materials all ungenuine within and without, pretending to be what they are not--should ever have been built in this otherwise honorable place; but it is much more pathetic to see this architectural falsehood undergoing restoration and perpetuation in our day, when it would have been so easy to let dynamite finish what a charitable fire began, and then devote this restoration-money to the building of something genuine.

(from Chapter 40)

But wait, it gets better:

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner--or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it--would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person.

(from Chapter 46)

As I said...consummate.

Life on the Mississippi (audiobook)

2011-08-15T08:16:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in a previous post, I found the audiobook version of Life on the Mississippi very enjoyable.

Narrator Grover Gardner does a wonderful job of capturing the home-spun charm of Mark Twain’s fictionalized experience with the river. The book has two general storylines—Twain’s training to be a steamboat pilot and his taking a steamboat trip on the river two decades later. There are many diversions along the way, but I loved the first storyline which goes through about Chapter 17 (this corresponds in large part with Old Times on the Mississippi, a series of articles Twain wrote for The Atlantic Monthly). This section contains some of Twain’s best writing, at least in my enjoyment of it, and I wanted to spend a minute passing it on to others.

After a few chapters about the history of the Mississippi River, Twain launches into the story of how we was trained to be a riverboat pilot. Like other of Twain’s works such as Innocents Abroad or Roughing It, the first person narrative recalls embellished or created events hanging loosely around what really happened. Twain makes his younger self the butt of jokes so the reader can laugh at him as well as with him. But there is something deeper going on in the early section of Life on the Mississippi that makes it endearing, maybe because it is a “coming of age” story. The general lessons Twain learns from the pilot during his education about the river can be also be applied to life.

The theme that I found most moving in this section centers around a loss of innocence during his education. Twain approaches this theme several times, but the following excerpt proves to be moving—his knowledge of the river has forever blocked the beauty he knows is there. From Chapter 9:

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark.

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease. Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?

Down where the drunkards roll

2011-08-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

While reading Joseph Roth's The Legend of the Holy Drinker I had this song stuck in my head and it won't go away even after I finished the novella. So I'll share it in hopes that it will eventually go away. Richard Thompson, Suzanne Vega, and Loudon Wainwright III perform the old Richard & Linda Thompson song:

The Legend of the Holy Drinker

2011-08-11T21:16:00.000-07:00

There is really nothing that people get used to so readily as miracles, once they have experienced them two or three times. Yes! In fact, such is human nature that people begin to feel betrayed when they don’t keep getting all those things that a chance and fleeting circumstance once bestowed on them. People are like that—so why should Andreas be any different? He spent the rest of the day in various other establishments, and was soon quite reconciled to the fact that the age of miracles he had lately experienced was now, finally, at an end, and that the preceding age had resumed. And so, with his heart set on that slow decline for which a drunkard is always available—and which no sober person can possibly understand!—Andreas took himself back to the banks and bridges of the Seine.

The Legend of the Holy Drinker by Joseph Roth is a sparkling novella about Andreas, a drunkard (translator Michael Hofmann uses the wonderful term 'clochard') living under the bridges of Paris. Andreas experiences a host of minor miracles, starting with a generous gift from a devotee of St Thérèse de Lisieux. Andreas promises to repay this gift to the chapel of the devotee’s choosing. The only things as consistent as Andreas’ lucky breaks are the obstructions, usually self-induced, that prevents Andreas from successfully repaying the gift. As Andreas demonstrates through his actions, though, he has a good soul despite his reduced state. While some of the obstructions come from his generosity, many of the obstacles come from his carnal desire or less than generous behavior by others.

The novella taps into themes such as generosity of spirit, possibility of redemption, and nobility in the downtrodden, any of which have the possibility to turn ponderous or preachy but never reach that point in Roth’s skillful hands. Andreas’ constant memory lapses, caused by alcohol, reinforce his live-for-the-moment philosophy. His drinking becomes a self-induced remedy to lose his sense of self. A theme in The Radetzky March I didn't develop as much as I should have was a sense of estrangement, which Andreas exhibits physically and spiritually. It turns out Andreas is really a Pole staying in Paris despite his work papers long expired. In addition, it seems there is little use for a flawed saint, who will not be prayed to but exists to be preyed upon by others. Highly recommended.

The Radetzky March summary

2011-08-10T21:12:00.000-07:00

From my first post on the book:

Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March traces the history of the Trotta family across three generations. The grandfather, Joseph, saved Emperor Franz Joseph’s life at the Battle of Solferino, an act that helps and haunts the family across the years. The novel parallels and intertwines the connection between sons and fathers in the Trotta family with the relationship between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its subjects. In both cases, the head of the family/empire becomes a symbol that proves to be wildly overblown, causing members on both sides of the relationship to struggle with unrealistic expectations.

Roth proves to be a little heavy-handed at times but usually he displays a deft and humorous touch. Roth takes a complex look at causes leading to the disintegration of the empire—while he finds fault with the codes of honor of the older generations, Roth highlights the greater danger from the lack of values in his own generation. Roth’s view of the empire adds to the ambiguity in the novel. Roth recognizes that the empire requires a monarchy with a strong personality in order to unite its disparate nationalities, but that is not the same as endorsing such an arrangement. Such a recognition points to reasons for the dissolution—weakness from above combined with increasing disunity and rot from below. Pressure from outside the empire is certain to destroy it since the empire has been hollowed out, the weakening of a common vision or purpose the catalyst to its collapse.

My ratings are loose at best, but I give this novel my highest recommendation (which doesn’t explain why it took me eight years to get beyond the first ten pages of it—I bought it in the San Francisco airport in August 2003).

I’ll have to apologize for the slow, scattershot writing about this book (well, worse than usual) but other events have been demanding my energy and focus.

A look at some quotes from two translations are here, The Overlook Press edition with translation by Joachim Neugroschel and Granta Publication’s edition with translation by Michael Hofmann.

Posts about and excerpts from The Radetzky March:

Part One

Each died a soldier’s death for the honor of the regiment

Part Two

A feeble attempt to click his heels under the blanket

A lovely secret in a ruinous castle

His own holy mission to die for the Kaiser at any moment

Part Three

Between lightning and thunder, eternity itself was crammed in

Tears wept by his brain

Twenty or rather fifteen years ago

For an alternate take, or rather supplemental data, on the popularity of Joseph Radetzky and the march named after him, see Vienna-Life.com. Contrary to the article's claim that the anecdote might explode "the solemnity of the novel's theme", the story and alternate lyrics support Roth's point about the divisiveness within the empire.

The Radetzky March, Part Three: between lightning and thunder, eternity itself was crammed in

2011-08-10T09:16:00.000-07:00

Most of these orders pertained to the evacuation of villages and town and the treatment of pro-Russian Ukrainians, clerics, and spies. Hasty court-martials in villages passed hasty sentences. Secret informers delivered unverifiable reports on peasants, Orthodox priests, teachers, photographers, officials. There was no time. The army had to retreat swiftly but also punish the traitors swiftly. And while ambulances, baggage columns, field artillery, dragoons, riflemen, and infantrists formed abrupt and helpless clusters on the sodden roads, while couriers galloped to and fro, while inhabitants of small towns fled westward in endless throngs, surrounded by white terror, loaded down with red-and-white featherbeds, gray sacks, brown furniture, and blue kerosene lamps, the shots of hasty executioners carrying out hasty sentences rang from the church squares of hamlets and villages, and the somber rolls of drums accompanied the monotonous decisions of judges, and the wives of victims lay shrieking for mercy before the mud-caked boots of officers, and red and silver flames burst from huts and barns, stables and haystacks. The Austrian army’s war had begun with court-martials. For days on end genuine and supposed traitors hung from the trees on church squares to terrify the living. (317)

(All quotes and page numbers are from the translation by Joachim Neugroschel.)

Roth intensifies the theme of deterioration, whether of individuals, families or empire, in Part Three. When looking at families and individuals there is an incapacitating weakness in each, often causing people to abandon their future to fate (the exceptions stand out even more because of this malaise). Weakness shows itself in many ways: increase in drunkeness, overindulgence in gambling, or shirking all responsibilities, personal or professional. Some characters, such as Lieutenant Carl Joseph von Trotta and his inheritance as the grandson of “the Hero of Solferino”, come to the realization that they have failed, not just to live up to an ideal held before them but even with more modest goals. “Not only did he have a thoroughly wicked character, but his mind was tired and foolish. In short: he was an utter failure.” (251) Carl Joseph’s father, Baron Fritz, while not sinking to the same depths as his son, realizes “how hard it is to be helpless yet maintain one’s dignity.” (267) The father and his generation usually receive the most sympathy from Roth. Their world was supposed to apply a rigid code inherited from their parents, yet such absolutes don’t seem to apply anymore. Roth provides ambiguous support for these codes of behavior, though. These codes can lead to honorable action but they also insist on mindless violence or taint future generations as well as the empire:

That lost era, which was virtually buried under the fresh grave mounds of the fallen, was ruled by very different notions. If someone offended the honor of an officer of the Imperial and Royal Army, and that officer failed to kill the man apparently because he owed him money, then that officer was a misfortune and worse than a misfortune: he was a disgrace to his progenitor, to the army, and to the monarchy. (266)

While the Trotta family realizes the benefits from their grandfather’s heroic action in saving the emperor, the legacy carries disadvantages, too, as I hope I’ve pointed out in previous posts. Roth hammers home the difficulty in choosing such a code to live by when Carl Joseph carries out selfless acts, only to find his actions lead to his financial ruin and ultimately to death. The imagery of worms feasting on the dead, appearing throughout the novel, highlights the fate of all of us. But was a similar fate unavoidable for the Austro-Hungarian Empire?

Roth conveys a sense of inevitable doom for the empire throughout the novel. At a discernable point, Baron Fritz von Trotta loses faith in the empire and simply goes through the motions when doing his duties, although it could be argued he went through the motions prior to that point since he was unable to understand the danger posed by “revolutionary” individuals or groups. The distance and friction between ethnic groups within the empire mirror the distance and friction between generations. This lack of cohesion is called out directly, in particular by the younger Nechwal (231), as well as by Roth during the summer festival held at Chojnicki’s house (296), where a laundry-list of ethnic groups argue after Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. Parts of Roth’s novel read like a sober Hašek (irony intended) or, even more perversely, a combination of Hašek and Barbara Tuchman (I’m thinking of The Guns of August here). The shadow cast by history is felt by the empire and the emperor to the same extent it helps/burdens the Trotta family.

A few sidenotes before I finish posting on The Radetzky March:

- Roth’s use of nature can be heavy-handed at times, such as the looming storm before the summer festival. The agitation of the pending storm mirrors the conflict about to spread across Europe, where “between lightning and thunder, eternity itself was crammed in.” (294) At other times, though, he shows a humorous touch that conveys several points in a deft manner. “He [Baron Fritz von Trotta] looked gaunter than usual, reminding his friend Hasselbrunner of the exotic birds at the Schönbrunn Zoo—creatures that constitute Nature’s attempt to replicate the Hapsburg physiognomy within the animal kingdom. Indeed, the district captain reminded anyone who had seen the Kaiser of Franz Joseph himself.” (275) Everything in nature, not just the emperor’s subjects, exists to serve or mimic the Hapsburgs.

- One motif within the novel focuses on the ability to see things clearly before death. At the summer festival Carl Joseph begins to pierce the fog of alcohol, history, expectations, and delusion. In Part One Dr. Demant has a miraculous improvement in his vision immediately before his duel. Carrying this motif a step further, Chojnicki accurately predicted what was going to happen. Actually seeing it unfold, however, drives him mad.

- As I mentioned in this post, music plays a role in the novel, which is fitting given the title. Part Three adds another example of this role during the summer festival. After Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination, the crowd calls for Chopin’s Funeral March. The earlier summer performances outside the Trotta home, with the elder Nechwal directing “The Radetzky March” and insisting musicians precisely follow the score, stands in marked contrast to this performance, highlighting how much has changed:

Men in uniform or in mufti escorted ladies. Their feet unsteadily obeyed the macabre and stumbling rhythm. For the bands were playing without scores, not conducted but accompanied by the slow loops that the black batons traced in the air. Sometimes one band lagged behind the other and then tried to catch up with the hastier one by skipping a few measures.

The guests walked in a circle around the empty, mirrorlike parquet floor. They circled round and round, each person a mourner behind the corpse of the one in front of him, and, at the center of the room, the invisible corpses of the heir apparent and the monarchy. (299-300)

Conspicuous for excellence, solidity, thoroughness, neatness

2011-08-09T15:00:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi during my commute and thoroughly enjoying it. Presented without comment is a section I heard this morning on the Vicksburg National Cemetery:

The grounds are nobly situated; being very high and commanding a wide prospect of land and river. They are tastefully laid out in broad terraces, with winding roads and paths; and there is profuse adornment in the way of semi-tropical shrubs and flowers,' and in one part is a piece of native wild-wood, left just as it grew, and, therefore, perfect in its charm. Everything about this cemetery suggests the hand of the national Government. The Government's work is always conspicuous for excellence, solidity, thoroughness, neatness. The Government does its work well in the first place, and then takes care of it.

The Radetzky March: tears wept by his brain

2011-08-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

Continuing some short quotes until I have time for more...

The heart of The Radetzky March focuses on the relationship between fathers and sons, expanding that connection when looking at similar associations like emperor/subject or soldier/orderly. Onufrij, a peasant from the eastern border, is Carl Joseph’s orderly in pre-World War I Austria-Hungary. Onufrij’s devotion lies only to Carl Joseph and does not extend to include the army or the empire. For Carl Joseph, though, Onufrij will do almost anything. When the lieutenant finds himself hopelessly in debt, Onufrij travels to his nearby home to dig up his savings from the garden and to mortgage his land…all without hesitation or regret. Such sacrifice is hardwired into Onufrij and he performs it without flinching.

What causes Onufrij agony? From Part Three, translation by Joachim Neugroschel (page 263):

And Beniover [a local “banker”] opened a huge book. This book indicated that Onufrij owned four and a half acres of land. Beniover was prepared to lend him three hundred crowns on that.

“Let’s go to the mayor,” said Beniover. He called his wife, told her to mind the store, and he and Onurfrij Kolohin went to the mayor.

Here he gave Onufrij three hundred crowns. Onufrij sat down at a brown worm-eaten table and began writing his name at the bottom of the document. He removed his hat. The sun was already high up in the sky. It managed to send its burning rays through the tiny windows of the peasant hut where the mayor of Burdlaki officiated. Onufrij was perspiring. The beads of sweat grew on his low brow like transparent crystal boils. Every letter that Onufrij wrote produced a crystal boil on his forehead. These boils ran, ran down like tears wept by Onufrij’s brain. At last his name was at the bottom of the document.