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Doctor Destouches in Germany

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Doctor Destouches (aka Louis-Ferdinand Céline)

He will never win any humanitarian awards, or, for that matter, any awards, but Louis-Ferdinand Céline is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, an anti-Semite, a Nazi sympathizer, and probably a very decent human being otherwise. Born Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches in Courbevoix, France in 1894, Céline became a wounded war hero at Ypres in 1914

After the war, he became a physician and toured Africa and the Americas working for the League of Nations. In 1932, he published his greatest and most approachable novel, Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit). Unfortunately, in the early 1940s, he published several anti-Semitic books urging closer ties to Hitler’s Germany.

After the Allied invasion of France, Céline fled to Germany after having been identified by the Resistance and the British as a collaborationist. It was the beginning of a long and confused period escaping Allied bombing attacks and the Russian Army that was brilliantly described in his trilogy about being a guest of the Nazis as they were being pounded to pieces:

  • Castle to Castle (D’un château l’autre) 1957
  • North (Nord) 1960
  • Rigadoon (Rigadon) 1961

Years after reading the first two volumes, I have just finished reading Rigadoon and loving it. Céline and his wife are constantly being shuttled on trains from one bombed-out city to another. At one point, he escorts a group of eighteen severely retarded children from Hannover to Hamburg and manages to transfer them to a special Swedish Red Cross train taking them to safety. Unfortunately, the same train took Céline to Copenhagen, where he served a year in prison for his collaboration with the Nazis.

He died in 1961. Although his novels were a powerful influence on other novelists, Céline was never treated with the honor that his literary and medical work deserved. He spent his last years being a doctor treating poor patients in the slums of Paris.

So fair and foul a career I have not seen. I love Céline’s novels even as I detest his racial and political views. Life can be strange.

Inoculation

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I am currently reading William S. Burroughs’s The Ticket That Exploded, and what a ride it is! As Anthony Burgess wrote, “Burroughs seems to revel in a new medium … a medium totally fantastic, spaceless, timeless, in which the normal sentence is fractured, the cosmic tries to push its way through the bawdry, and the author shakes the reader as a dog shakes a rat.” Here is a little sample for your delectation:

In this organization, Mr Lee, we do not encourage togetherness, esprit de corps. We do not give our agents the impression of belonging. As you know most existing organizations stress such primitive reactions as unquestioning obedience. Their agents become addicted to orders. You will receive orders of course and in some cases you will be well-advised not to carry out the orders you receive. On the other hand your failure to obey certain orders could expose you to dangers of which you can have at this point in your training no conception. There are worse things than death Mr Lee for example to live under the conditions your enemies will endeavor to impose. And the members of all existing organizations are at some point your enemy. You will learn to know where this point is if you survive. You will receive your instructions in many ways. From books, street signs, films, in some cases from agents who purport to be and may actually be members of the organization. There is no certainty. Those who need certainty are of no interest to this department. This is in point of fact a non-organization the aim of which is to immunize our agents against fear despair and death. We intend to break the birth-death cycle. As you know inoculation is the weapon of choice against virus and inoculation can only be effected through exposure … exposure to the pleasures offered under enemy conditions: a computerized Garden of Delights: exposure to the pain posed as an alternative … you remember the ovens I think … exposure to despair: ‘The end is the beginning born knowing’ the unforgivable sin of despair. You attempted to be God that is to intervene and failed utterly … Exposure to death: sad shrinking face … he had come a long way for something not exchanged born for something knowing not exchanged. He died during the night.

Obscuridad Mexicana

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Mexican Novelist Fernanda Melchor

In this case, obscuridad is translated not as obscurity, but darkness. I toyed with the idea of calling this post “Noir Mexicana,” but I didn’t want to mix the two languages. I hope you get the general idea.

Fernanda Melchor is a very dark writer indeed. I have in the last few months read all three of her novels that have been translated into English:

  • This Isn’t Miami (Aqui no es Miami)
  • Hurricane Season (Temporada de huracanes)
  • Paradais

All three novels are about wasted lives in the vicinity of the author’s home state of Veracruz. Although short in length, all three are crammed with violence, superstition, and fear. In the background—or sometimes in the foreground—there are the drug cartels, with scenes such as Milton in Paradais being commanded to shoot and kill a pathetic old taxi driver who is begging for his life.

Reading Melchor is like reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline or the Jim Thompson of The Killer Inside Me. One is reminded that, in Mexico, it is easier to see the skull beneath the skin.

Halloween Reading

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Monster Brains Logo Created by Tom Cochien

For over a decade, I have tackled one or two works of horror literature during the month of October. In the past, most of these were collections of horror stories in the excellent collections put out by Dover Publications, but I am coming to the end of these; so I am branching out a bit.

This month, I have read two collections: Amelia B. Edwards¹s The Phantom Coach and Other Stories and Thomas Ligotti’s Noctuary. Ms Edwards (1831-1892) was not only an excellent teller of tales, but also a world traveler, journalist, and—to add a touch of the weird—an early Egyptologist of some note. I have downloaded her book A Thousand Miles Up the Nile from Amazon Kindle to read sometime next year.

Thomas Ligotti, on the other hand, is a contemporary, born in 1953. I had previously read two of his collections—Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works—and found them satisfyingly eldritch in every way. The same could be said of Noctuary, which I loved. In fact yesterday’s post on this blog site was a short short story entitled “One May Be Dreaming” from Noctuary in its entirety. Click on the link to check it out.

And, Happy Halloween!

One May Be Dreaming

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For Halloween, I’ve decided to excerpt as short short story in its entirety from Thomas Ligotti’s excellent collection entitled Noctuary.

One May Be Dreaming

Beyond the windows a dense fog spreads across the graveyard, and a few lights beam within hazy depths, glowing like old lamps on an empty street. Night is softly beginning.

Within the window are narrow bars, both vertical and horizontal, which divide it into several smaller windows. The intersections of these bars form crosses. Not far beyond the windowpanes, there are other crosses jutting out of the earth-hugging fog in the graveyard. To all appearances, it is a burial ground in the clouds that I contemplate through the window.

Upon the window ledge is an old pipe that seems to have been mine in another life. The pipe’s dark bowl must have brightened to a reddish-gold as I smoked and gazed beyond the window at the graveyard. When the tobacco had burned to the bottom, perhaps I gently knocked the pipe against the inside wall of the fireplace, showering the logs and stones with warm ashes. The fireplace is framed within the wall perpendicular to the window. Across the room are a large desk and a high-backed chair. The lamp positioned in the far right corner of the desk serves as illumination for the entire room, a modest supplement to those pale beacons beyond the window. Some old books, pens, and writing paper are spread across the top of the desk. In the dim depths of the room, against the fourth wall, is a towering clock that ticks quietly.

Those, then, are the main features of the room in which I find myself: window, fireplace, desk, and clock. There is no door.

I never dreamed that dying in one’s sleep would encompass dreaming itself. I often dreamed of this room and now, near the point of death, have become its prisoner. And here my bloodless form is held while my other body somewhere lies still and without hope. There can be no doubt that my present state is without reality. If nothing else, I know what it is like to dream. And although a universe of strange sensation is inspired by those lights beyond the window, by the fog and the graveyard, they are no more real than I am. I know there is nothing beyond those lights and that the obscured ground outside could never sustain my steps. Should I venture there I would fall straight into an absolute darkness, rather than approaching it by the degrees of my dying dreams.

For other dreams came before this one—dreams in which I saw lights more brilliant, a fog even more dense, and gravestones with names I could almost read from the distance of this room. But everything is dimming, dissolving, and growing dark. The next dream will be darker still, everything a little more confused, my thoughts … wandering. And objects that are now part of the scene may soon be missinfg: perhaps even my pipe—if it was ever mine—will be gone forever.

But for the moment I am safe in my dream, this dream. Beyond the window a dense fog spreads across the graveyard, and a few lights beam within hazy depths, glowing like old lamps along an empty street. Night is softly beginning.

“Sometimes They Sing”

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The following short short story is from a collection of Antonio Tabucchi’s short stories entitled Message from the Shadows. The author, an Italian who lives in Portugal, is known for his diverse points of view, In this story, we see humanity from the perspective of a whale.

Postscript: A Whale’s View of Man

Always so feverish, and with those long limbs waving about. Not rounded at all, so they don’t have the majesty of complete, rounded shapes sufficient unto themselves, but little moving heads where all their strange life seems to be concentrated. They arrive sliding across the sea, but not swimming, as if they were birds almost, and they bring death with frailty and graceful ferocity. They’re silent for long periods, but then shout at each other with unexpected fury, a tangle of sounds that hardly vary and don’t have the perfection of our basic cries: the call, the love cry, the death lament. And how pitiful their lovemaking must be: and bristly, brusque almost, immediate, without a soft covering of fat, made easy by their threadlike shape, which excludes the heroic difficulties of union and the magnificent and tender efforts to achieve it.

They don’t like water, they’re afraid of it, and it’s hard to understand why they bother with it. Like us, they travel in herds, but they don’t bring their females, one imagines they must be elsewhere, but always invisible.

Sometimes they sing, but only for themselves, and their song isn’t a call to others, but a sort of longing lament. They soon get tired and when evening falls they lie down on the little islands that take them about and perhaps fall asleep or watch the moon. They slide silently by and you realize they are sad.

Three Journeys West, 1859

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It was ten years before the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Just by chance, there were three notable journeys across the Plains to the West that year which were described in books that are still worth reading and readily available:

  • Mark Twain’s Roughing It is partly fictionalized but largely true, and it is still one of the funniest books ever written
  • Sir Richard Francis Burton’s The City of the Saints: Among the Mormons and Across the Rocky Mountains to California is mostly about a trip to visit Salt Lake City and Brigham Young, but includes the whole journey from East to West
  • Newspaper Editor Horace Greeley’s An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 is not as well known but equally valuable

If you are interested in the history of the Western United States, these three books together constitute a priceless snapshot of what it was like in one particular year.

El Dorado

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

I am currently in the middle of the riches of Van Wyck Brooks’s The Times of Melville and Whitman (published 1947), devouring each chapter slowly, mining it for information on obscure 19th century American authors. I am even paying close attention to all the footnotes, in which I found this excerpt of a letter from Edgar Allan Poe to F. W. Thomas written on February 14, 1849. The subject was why Poe wasn’t interested in joining the Gold Rush:

Talking of gold and temptations at present held out to ‘poor-devil authors,’ did it ever strike you that all that is really valuable to a man of letters—to a poet in especial—is absolutely unpurchasable? Love, fame, the dominion of intellect, the consciousness of power, the thrilling sense of beauty, the free air of heaven, exercise of body and mind, with the physical and moral health which result—these and such as these are really all that a poet cares for—then answer me this—why should he go to California?

In fact, Poe wrote a poem on the subject:

Eldorado

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old—
This knight so bold—
And o’er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow—
“Shadow,” said he,
“Where can it be—
This land of Eldorado?”

“Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,”
The shade replied—
“If you seek for Eldorado!”

If the poem sounds vaguely familiar, it was quoted in its entirety in a Howard Hawks Western made in 1967 called, suitably enough, El Dorado. The film starred John Wayne, James Caan, and Robert Mitchum.

Icelandic Mystery

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The Town of Akranes, Setting for Eva Björg Ægisdottir’s Novels

It’s difficult to think of Iceland as a “scene of the crime” involving murder. The entire nation has a population under 400,000, with approximately half living in or near the capital of Reykjavík. Yet I know of three mystery authors who write about more Icelandic murders than could have occurred within the last half century..

The writers, in the order that I discovered them, are:

  • Arnaldur Indriðason
  • Yrsa Siguðardottir (who also writes children’s books)
  • Eva Björg Ægisdottir

All three are excellent writers. Below are my favorites among their works:

  • Hypothermia and Reykjavík Nights by Arnaldur Indriðason
  • Ashes to Dust and My Soul to Take by Yrsa Siguðardottir
  • Girls Who Lie and Night Shadows by Eva Björg Ægisdottir

These are just some of my favorites, but I haven’t read a single stinker by any of these authors.

Long Story Short

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Writer Paul Theroux (b, 1941)

I have always been fond of reading collections of short stories by my favorite authors. For some writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Anton Chekhov, and Edgar Allan Poe, that’s pretty much all there is. But for great novelists like Henry James, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and William Faulkner the stories serve to fill out their work with an extra dimension of conciseness and sharpness.

Paul Theroux is for me a special case. I have been reading (and re-reading) his travel books for half a century, but it is only recently that I have turned to his fiction: both novels and stories. The following is a complete short short story from his collection Mr Bones: Twenty Stories. It is part of a microcollection of short short stories called “Long Story Short.”

A Real Break

Mother and Grace—let’s just say they weren’t best buddies. So as the elder daughter, and single, I began to look after Mother when she began to fail. And she was a wreck. Got confused in stores, left the oven on, real muddled about time. I made her stop driving, so of course I had to take the wheel. God, the hills. I wrote Grace that I was moving in with Mother. The big Polk Street house had been in Mother’s family for years; Mother was lost in it. Grace understood completely and said she was relieved. She had been in a Minnesota convent since taking her vows, though she sometimes spent extended periods in Nevada and Florida as a hospital worker, “and doing spiritual triage too,” on Indian reservations. We seldom heard from her, but Mother sent her money now and then. Because of the strictness of her religious order, she was never able to visit us in San Francisco. “And just as well,” Mother said.

It got so that Mother could only manage with my assistance. I resigned from my secretarial job, lost my retirement and my medical plan, and became Mother’s full-time caregiver. I updated Grace on Mother’s condition and mentioned the various challenges we faced. Grace wrote saying that she was praying for us, and she asked specific questions because these infirmities were to be specified in the prayers, or intercessions, as she called them.

About three years into my caregiving, Grace called. She said, “Why not take a few months off? My superior has given me special dispensation to look after Mom for a while. It’ll be a break for me. And you can have a real break. Maybe go to Europe.”

Mother wasn’t overjoyed, but she could see that I was exhausted. Grace flew in. It was an emotional reunion. I hardly recognized her—not because she had gotten older, though she had. But she was dressed so well and in such good health. She even mentioned how I looked stressed and could obviously do with some time off.

I went on one of those special British Airways fares, a See Scotland package. It was just the break I needed, or so I thought.

Long story short, when I got back to San Francisco, the Polk Street house was being repainted by people who said they were the new owners. Everything I possessed was gone. Mother was in a charity hospice. She had been left late one night at the emergency room of St Francis Hospital. There was no money in Mother’s bank account. Everything she had owned had been sold. I saw Mother’s lawyer. He found a number for Grace—the 702 area code, a cell phone. Nevada.

“I’m glad you called,” Grace said. I could hear music in the background and a man talking excitedly, a fishbowl babble, aqueous party voices. I started to cry but she interrupted me with a real hard voice. “Everything I did was legal. Mother gave me power of attorney. I never want to see you again. And you will never undo it.” Unfortunately for me, that was true.