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My Years with Gabo

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The Mayan Ruins at Chichén Itzá

The Mayan Ruins at Chichén Itzá

It was November 1975. For the first time in my life, I was outside the United States on my own. I always thought it was somehow significant that my first bid for freedom from those endless bad weather trips back and forth to Cleveland to see my parents was a two week vacation in Yucatán. When visiting the ruins at Chichén Itzá, I stayed at the old Hacienda Chichén, which contained the cottages used by earlier archaeologists. I was within walking distance of the ruins.

Back then, a road cut through the ruins. On one side was the Castillo and the structures best known to visitors; on the other, there was Old Chichén. By the side of the road, there was an open-air souvenir stand with thatched roof that sold the usual tourist junk. On the side, there was a book rack that happened to have a Penguin paperback edition of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). I had heard of the author before and was just beginning to wake up to that breakout generation of Latin American writers that included Borges, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez. Here in front of me was a grey-covered Penguin (“This edition not for sale in the United States”) that looked like an interesting read.

How could I not read a book that opened this way:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

That was my first acquaintance with the Colombian writer whose work was to become a lifelong pursuit with me. Ever since, I have rationed the books I read by him so that I didn’t run out too soon. Yesterday, I re-read Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which I last read thirty years ago in a magazine that had an illustration by Fernando Botero. (I forget which magazine it was.)

Since my first acquaintance with Colonel Buendía in 1975, I have gone on to read:

  • Leaf Storm (1955)
  • No One Writes to the Colonel (1961)
  • In Evil Hour (1962)
  • The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1970)
  • The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother (1978)
  • Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981)
  • Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
  • The General in His Labyrinth (1989)

Then, too, there were numerous short stories, which I will re-read in as many years as are left to me. Although we lost García Márquez in April of this year, his work will live forever.

 

American Muse

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Neal Cassady, “American Muse and Holy Fool”

Neal Cassady, “American Muse and Holy Fool”

He was the real hero of the Beat Generation. Variously called Dean Moriarty and Cody Pomeray by Jack Kerouac, Hart Kennedy by John Clellon Holmes, and in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1955), “N.C, secret hero of these poems.” It is almost as if the whole Beat moment were mainly about Neal Cassady (1926-1968), a petty criminal who served time in prison for car theft, shoplifting, and fencing of stolen goods. Although he never published a word during his lifetime, it was Neal who acted as a catalyst for his friends. As Jack Kerouac wrote in On The Road:

He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him…. Somewhere along the line, I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line, the pearl would be handed to me.

Kerouac described his friend’s influence on his writing style “as in a rush of mad ecstasy, without self-consciousness or mental hesitation.” You can see some of this in this YouTube interview at the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco between Cassady and Allen Ginsberg:

In a 1953 letter to his friend Jack, he wrote:

Well it’s about time you wrote, I was fearing you farted out on top that mean mountain or slid under while pissing in Pismo, beach of flowers, food and foolishness, but I knew the fear was ill-founded for balancing it in my thoughts of you, much stronger and valid if you weren’t dead, was a realization of the experiences you would be having down there, rail, home, and the most important, climate, by a remembrance of my own feelings and thoughts (former low, or more exactly, nostalgic and unreal; latter hi) as, for example, I too seemed to spend time looking out upper floor windows at sparse, especially nighttimes, traffic in females—old or young.

It is not so much a well-constructed unit of thought as an onrush, barely keeping on the rails.

And, in the end, it was the rails that did him in. He was in San Miguel Allende in Mexico in 1968 when he drank too much alcohol and took Seconal, then went walking along the rails on his way to the next town. That’s where he was found, unresponsive, dying in the local hospital. He could have died of an overdose or of renal failure or of “exposure.”

Beat

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It All Started as Friendship...

It All Started as a Friendship…

The so-called beat generation actually started as a bunch of friends who liked to get together to talk, drink, smoke marijuana, and—perhaps—even have some casual sex along the way. The only difference between Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, and millions of other groups of rambunctious youngsters was that some of them had talent.

Last month, I read Kerouac’s Big Sur; and I am now reading John Clellon Holmes’s Go. The original beats would probably think of me as some sort of stick-in-the-mud, but I admire their all-out pursuit of freedom, even when it leads—as it did for many of them—to disorder and early sorrow. In Big Sur, Kerouac turns to drink the way that most people turn to inhaling oxygen. In Go, the action is frenetic and endless, especially once Hart Kennedy [Neal Cassady] joins them:

Ben’s connection had not showed; the sweet cologne fragrance of benzedrine about him and the discoloration of his lips suggested that there may have been no marijuana connection at all, but somehow that did not matter. Continuance was what concerned them, and where to go next. After a number of improbable ideas (places that would not be open, people who would not be up), they settled on a friend of Ben’s, who lived on One Hundred and Twenty-third Street and Amsterdam Avenue, who would “surely have liquor.” Although at another moment this would have seemed unlikely to them all, now they believed it with bland innocence as though all discord in the universe had been resolved by their harmony, which, in any case, did not depend on such details.

Below is a photo of Jack Kerouac with Allen Ginsberg, who was probably the most talented writer of the lot:

Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac

Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac

In the months to come, I plan to read more works by this unique “band of brothers” who had an outsize influence on the middle of the Twentieth Century, even if, as the movies and lurid paperbacks above show, it was mostly misinterpreted.

“The Burning of the World”

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Béla Zombory-Moldován in His Early Twenties

Béla Zombory-Moldován in His Early Twenties

Two days ago, I posted a blog entitled A Hungarian Artist Goes to War about the experiences of a young Magyar officer who was called up for the First World War on the Galician Front. In that post, I concentrated on Béla Zombory-Moldován’s paintings. Today, I would like to reprint a review of his memoirs about fighting the Russians in 1915. Entitled The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914, his book was translated by his grandson Peter and released by the New York Review of Books. Here is an edited text of my review from Goodreads.Com:

When the wounded Béla Zombory-Moldován went by train through Eperjes (now Presov) early in 1915, my father was nearby, a toddler at the age of three. I cannot help but wonder if he heard the train go by, carrying the wounded officers and men of the Royal Hungarian Army after its defeat to the Russians at Rava-Ruska.

BZM, as I shall call him, managed to survive and, in fact, managed to live for another half century, becoming one of Hungary’s most beloved artists. But in The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914, we see only a tiny slice of that life. Would that it were more! Supposedly the remainder of his autobiography was hidden or destroyed by a relative for personal reasons.

Hungarian Soldiers at the Front

Hungarian Soldiers at the Front

We tend not to know much about the Galician Front in 1914-1915, except that the casualty rates for the monarchy’s forces were horrifying. In the first two weeks of fighting alone, the Austro-Hungarian forces lost some 400,000 killed, wounded or captured. The “butcher’s bill” rose to 850,000 by the end of 1914 and to 1,600,000 by March.

We meet young Béla at a seaside resort in Croatia (then part of Hungary) the day that war is declared. Then we follow him to Veszprém, where he is called up to report, and from there to Galicia, where he engages in the battles at Rava-Ruska and Magierov. Wounded, he returns to Budapest where he has a month to recuperate before returning to duty. During that month, he visits a village priest relative in the north of Hungary, and then returns for a while to the Croatian Adriatic.

During this time, BZM came to a realization:

Nature slumbered, seemingly indifferent. Everything moved forward in accordance with unchanging laws; sleeping or waking, every struggle, in accordance with its slow, gradual, hidden evolutionary laws. Nature flowed on its course, impervious to the absurd behavior of men, their mutual slaughter and assorted acts of wickedness. The whole world was manifestly indifferent in the face of the life-and-death struggles of men: it neither took their side nor opposed them, but simply paid no attention. Let them get on with it. Let them reap what they sow.

The Man Who Wanted to Change the World

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Aldous Huxley Pictured on Cover of One of My Books

Aldous Huxley Pictured on Cover of One of My Books

When I was a young man in my twenties and thirties, I regarded Aldous Huxley as one of my gurus. I read his novels and essays and treasured quotes from him, such as “I wanted to change the world. But I found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.” Then there was this one: “A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.”

In time, I found that Huxley was a very good novelist and an even better essayist. But he was a human being like all of us and, as much as he tried, turned out not to be the universal guru. One of the fun things about going back and re-reading his works is encountering my young self when I was most vulnerable: after my brain surgery in 1966 and in the twenty years that followed.

Last night, I finished reading Huxley’s short novel The Genius and the Goddess, about a young man, himself a scientist, who joins the household of a Nobel prizewinner, as I described in my Goodreads.Com review:

John Rivers is a young scientist who idolizes Nobel-Prize-winning scientist Dr. Henry Maartens, and jumps at the chance to not only work with him, but to join his household, including his Goddess-like wife Katy and children Tim and Ruth. Rivers puts Katy on a pedestal, but circumstances bring her to his bed when Maartens is ailing and the children are staying with a relative. Alternately crushed and ecstatic, Rivers finally comes out of his funk; and circumstances take an odd turn, leaving him to wonder at this early encounter late in his life.

I concluded my review:

I will continue to read Huxley and like him, but he is no longer the guru I once thought of him as being when I myself was equally torn and conflicted about love, wondering whether it would ever “happen” to me. It did, and continues to do so; but the experience is much more complex and mixed than I would ever have predicted.

On an entirely different note, I noticed a strange “separated at birth” coincidence based on the photo above. In it, Huxley looks almost exactly like George Bancroft, who played Marshal Curly Wilcox in John Ford’s masterpiece Stagecoach (1939):

George Bancroft

George Bancroft

The only difference is that Huxley was a bit thinner, but the faces are amazingly close.

It’s Good To Be King

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An Ode to the Carnie Lifestyle

An Ode to the Carny Lifestyle

After a lifetime of hating Stephen King—not that I ever gave him much of a chance—I picked up Joyland chiefly because I thought the cover illustration by Glenn Orbik (above) was hot. It showed a scene that was not even in the book: a red-headed Erin Cook (a co-worker of the book’s hero) screaming in fear while casually wielding a Speed Graphic camera which, if she had ever made a regular practice of doing so, would have left her with a forearm like Popeye’s.

So, what did I think? Actually, I liked the book. Partly because I am drawn to the whole carny world after reading William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, and partly because I thought King exercised admirable restraint in crafting the novel. I wasn’t quite sure about the action scenes at the end, and there were a couple of connections I never quite understood, but I liked the tone of the whole thing.

Devin Jones is a twenty-one-year-old college student who spends a summer working for a North Carolina amusement park called Joyland. He is a man who has been discarded by his apathetic girlfriend Wendy, who, once she parts from him, consigns him to oblivion posthaste. He likes the carny lifestyle, makes friends easily, discovers he has a talent for entertaining “zamps” (small children), and doesn’t object to some of the less desirable tasks around the midway.

He is drawn by the mystery of a young woman named Linda Gray who had been killed by an unknown assailant in the scary funhouse. In fact, he drops out of college and hangs on into the fall, when the only work is preparing the park for the next summer. During that time, he makes the acquaintance of a young mother with a severely disabled son—one who can foretell the future. You can bet this figures in the plot. Devin finally loses his virginity—to Annie Ross, the mother—and becomes a favorite of her son.

Stephen King

Stephen King

Finally, it all comes together for Devin. The killer is … someone Devin knows who calls him at home minutes after his discovery and lures him to the park, where King suddenly goes into overt mode. Perhaps one of the reasons I haven’t liked King all these years is that I thought he was too overt and not sufficiently psychological. But Joyland strikes a nice balance.

Also, I loved all the carny slang, which King took from this website. Maybe, I’ll read some more King: I always liked Kubrick’s film version of The Shining. Perhaps I’ll read that, or Dolores Claiborne, as suggested by my friend Lynette.

Strange Joy

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Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!

Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!

Every October, in honor of Halloween, I love to read classic horror stories. This last week, I read Hugh Lamb’s Dover collection of rare finds entitled A Bottomless Grave and Other Victorian Tales of Terror. Last year at this time, I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but this year I ventured on Shirley Jackson’s other famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, which is equally spellbinding. (What I do not bother to read are the Stephen King and Dean Koontz type of novels that go in strictly for crude shocks.)

Usually, haunted house novels like to go in for crude effects. In contrast Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is delicately nuanced. Does this haunted house really do any damage with all its noise and strange writing on the walls and apparent destruction of one lady’s wardrobe? Actually, it does only one thing: It recognizes in Eleanor Vance, a spinster who is one of the party investigating the house, a kindred spirit. And it wants her. Badly.

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965)

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965)

The real terror is not external, it resides within the human breast. Eleanor had spent her adult life as a nursemaid to her mother, who has died before the action of the story begins. She has, as the saying goes, no life of her own. The one line that keeps running through her mind during the course of the book is, “Journeys end in lovers meeting.”

For Shirley Jackson to see into the tortured heart of Eleanor Vance—and through all the flummery of haunted houses and planchettes—makes her one of the great writers of horror fiction. And this after Eleanor’s initial response to the house, which is one of horror and loathing. At the risk of giving the whole shooting match away, I will continue the quote that ends the last paragraph:

Journeys end in lovers meeting; I have spent an all but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine. I have been frightened half out of my foolish wits, but I have somehow earned this joy; I have been waiting for it for so long.

This book deserves on the same shelf with that other great psychological story of haunting, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.

Tarnmoor’s ABCs: Marcel Proust

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He Went As Far As One Could Go with a Cookie

           He Went About As Far As One Could Go with a Cookie

I was so very impressed by Czeslaw Milosz’s book Milosz’s ABC’s. There, in the form of a brief and alphabetically-ordered personal encyclopedia, was the story of the life of a Nobel Prize winning poet, of the people, places, and things that meant the most to him. Because his origins were so far away (Lithuania and Poland) and so long ago (1920s and 1930s), there were relatively few entries that resonated personally with me. Except it was sad to see so many fascinating people who, unknown today, died during the war under unknown circumstances.

My own ABCs consist of places I have loved (Iceland), things I feared (Earthquakes), writers I have admired (Chesterton, Balzac, and Borges); things associated with my past life (Cleveland and Dartmouth College), people who have influenced me (John F. Kennedy), and things I love to do (Automobiles and Books). This blog entry is my own humble attempt to imitate a writer whom I have read on and off for thirty years without having sated my curiosity. Consequently, over the months to come, you will see a number of postings under the heading “Tarnmoor’s ABCs” that will attempt to do for my life what Milosz accomplished for his. To see my other entries under this category, hit the tag below marked “ABCs”. I don’t guarantee that I will use up all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I’ll do my best. Today, we’re at the letter “M,” for Marcel Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time I am now reading for the third time.

There are many literary giants of the Twentieth Century—writers such as James Joyce, Fernando Pessoa, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Marquez, Graham Greene, G. K. Chesterton, Ryonosuke Akutagawa, Eugene O’Neill, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, Mikhail Bulgakov … the list stretches on and on. One who has had a particular role to play in my life is Marcel Proust. It seems I cannot let a year pass by without re-reading another installment of his massive In Search of Lost Time, which consists of seven full-sized novels:

  • Swann’s Way
  • In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (originally translated as Within a Budding Grove)
  • The Guermantes Way
  • Sodom and Gomorrah (originally translated as Cities of the Plain)
  • The Prisoner
  • The Fugitive (originally translated as The Sweet Cheat Gone)
  • Finding Time Again (originally translated as The Past Recaptured)

The first four volumes were completely edited by Proust during his lifetime. The last three received their final proofing from others (but are still great).

Quite frankly, it is not easy to read Proust. Some sentences seem to go on for pages. It requires intense concentration not to go astray, even within an individual paragraph. One old friend, who is a high school English teacher, abandoned Swann’s Way in the first section.

Why do I so highly regard a not-particularly-successful gay social climber whose world has so little in common with mine? For one thing, Proust writes about not so much memory as of the shimmering obsessions that monopolize so much of our attention yet, in the long run (the series spans decades), fall by the wayside as life goes on.

I have already had my fourth reading of Swann’s Way. When I return from Peru, I plan to re-read In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower for the third time. If God is good to me, there will be a fourth and—who knows—maybe even a fifth reading of the series in the time that remains to me.

Slipping Off the Pedestal

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Jorge Luis Borges Flanked by His Mother and His Wife Elsa

Jorge Luis Borges Flanked by His Mother and His Wife Elsa

It was bound to happen sooner or later: After worshiping the man for over forty years, I am finally beginning to have my doubts about Jorge Luis Borges the man. But not, by any means, of Borges the poet and writer of short stories and essays. I still think he deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature on merit alone, but I begin to understand why he cheesed off the liberal-minded Nobel Prize Selection Committee.

Perhaps my favorite translator of Borges is Norman Thomas di Giovanni, whose book Georgie and Elsa: Jorge Luis Borges and His Wife, The Untold Story has just recently been published. Di Giovanni worked closely with Borges during the 1960s, shortly after he married Elsa Astete Millán, and through the divorce. What Di Giovanni discovered was that Borges was fatally naive when it came to women, politics, and social life. In fact, he was incredibly feckless in many ways. Di Giovanni writes:

[I]n later years, he travelled to Chile to receive a medal from the hands of Augusto Pinochet. This was one of the worst decisions of his life. But, he maintained, in his digging-his-heels-in mode that no one was going to tell him what he could or could not do. I imagine that it would never have occurred to Borges to question and be horrified by Pinochet’s well-oiled programme of eliminating Communists and other left-wingers. Borges was so universally condemned for his action that I think he came to realize his colossal mistake. But to justify it and himself, when I mentioned his folly to him, he said, ‘But I thought the medal was a gift of the Chilean people.’

Equally, if not more disastrous, was Borges’s marriage to Elsa. Years earlier, he had mooned over her; but, typically, someone else married her. (“Georgie” was not prime marriage material, as he lived with his mother well into his old age.) Then, one day, he met her again and—discovering that she was now widowed—took up with her again. By now, Borges was a famous literary figure; and, Elsa, being a social climber, thought that she was now about to enter the high life.

Her behavior during visits to the United States was execrable. She would steal silverware and other “souvenirs” from Borges’s friends and associates. During a visit to the Rockefellers, she insisted in photographing every room and asking about all the furnishings. It got to the point that people stopped inviting Borges lest Elsa come along. When she accidentally left a nutria coat in Cambridge after one trip, she made the return of the coat into an international incident involving U.S. and Argentinian ambassadorial and consular staffs.

Not that Borges was an ideal husband. He was an elderly blind man who happened to be impotent (which Elsa had known earlier) and incredibly old fashioned, a sort of Anglo-Argentinian who was neither all one thing or all the other. Finally, with di Giovanni’s help, Borges divorced her. He later re-married, with Maria Kodama, who now controls his esate.

Di Giovanni’s book is mandatory reading to supplement all the hagiographical biographies of the author who never quite get at the man’s character.

 

 

 

Tarnmoor’s ABCs: Jorge Luis Borges

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Jorge Luis Borges in 1921

Jorge Luis Borges in 1921

I was so very impressed by Czeslaw Milosz’s book Milosz’s ABC’s. There, in the form of a brief and alphabetically-ordered personal encyclopedia, was the story of the life of a Nobel Prize winning poet, of the people, places, and things that meant the most to him. Because his origins were so far away (Lithuania and Poland) and so long ago (1920s and 1930s), there were relatively few entries that resonated personally with me. Except it was sad to see so many fascinating people who, unknown today, died during the war under unknown circumstances.

My own ABCs consist of places I have loved (Iceland), things I feared (Earthquakes), writers I have admired (G. K. Chesterton and Honoré de Balzac); things associated with my past life (Cleveland and Dartmouth College), and things I love to do (Automobiles and Books). This blog entry is my own humble attempt to imitate a writer whom I have read on and off for thirty years without having sated my curiosity. Consequently, over the months to come, you will see a number of postings under the heading “Tarnmoor’s ABCs” that will attempt to do for my life what Milosz accomplished for his. To see my other entries under this category, hit the tag below marked “ABCs”.I don’t guarantee that I will use up all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I’ll do my best. Today, we’re at the letter “J,” for Jorge Luis Borges.

Ever since I first learned about Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), I have been hooked. By now, I have read just about everything that has been translated into English, sometimes two or three times. He has guided my reading for over forty years: Without him, I would never have discovered Iceland or the works of G. K. Chesterton. Without him, I would never have gone to Argentina twice, once in 2006 and once in 2011. His City of Buenos Aires has become one of the ineluctable geographies of my dreams.

Of his works, I recommend most highly Labyrinths, Ficciones, Other Inquisitions, and, of course, his magnificent poetry. Below, from the recent Penguin anthology entitled Poems of the Night, I have excerpted one poem entitled “Sleep” as translated by Stephen Kessler:

SLEEP

The night assigns us its magic
task. To unravel the universe,
the infinite ramifications
of effects and causes, all lost
in that bottomless vertigo, time.
Tonight the night wants you to forget
your name, your elders and your blood,
every human word and every tear,
what you would have learned from staying awake,
the illusory point of the geometricians,
the line, the plane, the cube, the pyramid,
the cylinder, the sphere, the sea, the waves,
your cheek on the pillow, the coolness
of the fresh sheets, the Caesars and Shakespeare
and the hardest thing of all, what you love.
Oddly enough, a pill can
erase the cosmos and erect chaos.

Most people who know of Borges know only that he was blind. For the last half of his life, he was a kind of Teiresias. That’s why I wanted to reproduce above a photograph of the poet in his twenties. The other thing many people know is that he was singled out by the Swedish Academy to be passed over for the Nobel Prize for Literature, primarily because one member of the selection committee disagreed with his politics. This was supposedly because he accepted an award from Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. I do not care a fig if Borges’s politics are to the right of mine: All that counts is that he has had a benign, lasting, and ever growing influence on the person I have become.