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A Mere Jonah

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American Writer Henry Miller (1891-1980)

George Orwell got it right when, in 1940, he wrote an essay entitled “Inside the Whale.” About the rising American writer Henry Miller, all of whose books except one (The Cosmological Eye, which I am reading now) were banned in the United States and England, Orwell wrote:

Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.

Ever since I read his so-called “dirty” books in my youth—including Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn—I have loved Henry Miller’s work. He is a uniquely American writer, who could have appeared nowhere but in the United States, especially in Brooklyn, where he was born. He could be incredibly profound, as when he slams James Joyce in one of his early works:

Joyce is the lost soul of this soulless world; his interest is not in life, in men and deeds, not in history, not in God, but in the dead dust of books. He is the high priest of the lifeless literature of to-day. He writes a hieratic script which not even his admirers and disciples can decipher. He is burying himself under an obelisk for whose script there will be no key.

But then he could lapse into a goofiness all his own. Writing about film as art, he says, “It does not require millions to produce an artistic film; in fact, it is almost axiomatic that the more money a film costs the worse it is apt to be.” Then in a separate piece, a writes a film treatment with production costs that would exceed the gross Earth product (GEP?) in “Scenario.”

This is the first of two posts based on my reading of The Cosmological Eye (1939). The follow-up will appear tomorrow, God willing.

“Reading Books”

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Ancient Chinese Scroll

This is a delightful poem from Liu Tsung-yuan (AD 773-819) who was exiled by the Emperor to Yungchou in the 9th century for espousing unpopular opinions. Though it is more than 1,100 years old, it could have been written yesterday—especially in today’s political environment.

Reading Books

Living in obscurity I’ve given up current affairs
I bow my head in silence and reflect on the sage kings
the highs and lows of the ancient past
the ups and downs of countless paths
I laugh to myself when I’m pleased
when I’m sad I simply sigh
I take my books from their cases
I go through from front to back
despite the affliction of tropical diseases
I feel different than in the past
while reading I suddenly understand
when I’m done my mind is a blank
who can I talk with at night
if not these texts on bamboo and silk
I lie down when I get tired
after a good sleep I feel refreshed
I yawn and stretch my limbs
I read out loud to my heart’s content
I enjoy doing what suits me
not to please learned men
I shut up when I’ve said what I want
free of restraints I relax
the clever consider me stupid
the wise think I’m a fool
but reading as managed to make me happy
what good is working till you drop
cherish this body of yours
don’t use it to chase after fame

The translation is by Red Pine. The book is Written in Exile: The Poetry of Liu Tsung-Yuan, published by the Copper Canyon Press.

Gothick

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An Engraving of a Scene from Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho

Not too many years ago, I would have laughed to scorn the works of Mrs Ann Radcliffe and indeed the whole 18th century gothic novel. Since then, I have undergone a change of heart: I no longer eschew melodrama. Instead, I recognize that there are degrees of quality in the works ascribed to it and that it is a legitimate genre. To date, I have read four of Mrs Radcliffe’s five novels, having only The Sicilian Romance (1790) and a number of shorter works to read. I have just finished her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and found myself loving it.

Originally, I thought of the 18th century gothic novel as a failed attempt to create a horror novel. But then, in the closing paragraphs of Athlin and Dunbayne, its author explains what she is trying to do:

Virtue may for a time be pursued by misfortune,—and justice be obscured by the transient triumphs of vice,—but the power whose peculiar attributes they are, clears away the clouds of error, and even in this world reveals his THRONE OF JUSTICE.

In other words, unless there are numerous dank abbeys and castles in her work, there is no hint of the supernatural. She comes close to it in her most famous work, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), but is too devout an Anglican to fall prey to such dubious flimflammery. (That didn’t stop Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto (1764) from going whole hog, but then he was undoubtedly less devout, being a wicked Whig politician, and earl, and man about town.

The edition of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne which I read was published by Oxford University Press and contained a superb introduction by Alison Milbank on the subject of Mrs Radcliffe and the gothic novel. That didn’t prevent OUP from butchering her last name (by making it Millbank). Sic transit gloria mundi.

Ultimately Unknowable

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Ukrainian/Brazilian/Jewish Author Clarice Lispector

As much as I like her work, I think that Clarice Lispector is ultimately unknowable. Then why do I like her? Is it that I like living in her somewhat troubled (but ultimately sane) mind for several hundred pages? Her main character in <b>The Chandelier</b>, Virginia, is undistinguished. But she draws me in and makes me care for her. Her strange family, especially her brother Daniel and sister Esmeralda, her on-again off-again boyfriend Vincente—don’t really exist as persons outside Virginia’s field of vision, but Virginia, on the other hand, exists in spades.

At one point near the end of the novel, Lispector writes:

She’d always observed in old people something that couldn’t be summed up, that wasn’t exactly lack of desire, or satisfaction, or experience, ah, never experience—something that only the imponderable living of all the incomprehensible instants of sleep and wakefulness seemed to grant. So strange and imperceptible were the power and fecundity of the rhythm. Nothing would seem to escape the the continuous sequence, the intimate spherical movement, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling, death and resurrection, death and resurrection. Anyway everything was the way it was, she thought almost brightly, almost cheerful—and that was meaning her deepest sensation f existence as if things were made of the impossibility of not being what they were.

As I read the book, I felt mesmerized, inhabiting for a short while the brain of a likeable woman, of no particular intellectual attainment, but of an honesty that never fails.

“Untranslatable Sensations”

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Brazilian Writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

In August 2023 I wrote: “Clarice. I love her name. I love her high cheekbones and penetrating gaze. And most of all, I love the beauty of her thoughts and writings. She wrote in Portuguese, but she was born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector in Chechelnyk, Ukraine. To escape the horrors of the Civil War between the Red and White Russians, her Jewish parents fled with their infant daughter to Recife in northeastern Brazil. At an early age, it was discovered that she could write well enough to be published. And she became one of the great women novelists and short story writers of the 20th century.”

Now I am reading her second novel, The Chandelier (1944), which is strange, arresting, and beautiful by turns. Here is a paragraph. Its strangeness is very Clarician.

She was thinking untranslatable sensations distracting herself secretly as if humming, profoundly unaware and stubborn, she was thinking a single swift streak: In order to be born things must have life, for birth is a movement—if they said that movement is necessary only for the thing giving birth and not for the thing that is born that’s not right because the thing that gives birth cannot give birth to something outside its nature and thus always gives birth to a thing of its own kind and so it is with movements too—in this way stones were born that have no power of their own but were once alive otherwise they wouldn’t have been born and now they’re dead because they don’t have movement in order to give birth to another stone.

Bibliothecaphilia

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Stacks in the London Library

Books are a major part of my life. I am grateful that I discovered a love for books before all the digital simulacra have taken over the minds of the populace. Therefore I was delighted to discover this passage in a piece by Charles Lamb entitled “Oxford in the Vacation” in his Essays of Elia (1823). The word “Bodleians” is a reference to the libraries of Oxford University, about which more can be found by clicking here.

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.

I will keep these words in mind as I take the train downtown tomorrow to Los Angeles’s Central Library, which is celebrating this year its centennial at its present location.

Smoke and Mist

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I am three quarters of the way through James Lee Burke’s Rain Gods (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). It is one of the author’s Hackberry Holland novels set in Southwest Texas. I am also beginning to think that its author has exceeded the limits of the genre and approached the level of literature. The following quote is what goes through the mind of a strange mass murderer who calls himself the Preacher as he sits cradling a Thompson submachine gun on his lap.

He did not know the hour and never wore jewelry or a watch when he worked. He did not measure the passage of time in terms of minutes or hours but in terms of events. There were no vehicles on the county road. There was no sign of activity inside the house he was about to invade. There were no insomniacs or early risers turning on lights in the neighborhood. There was a fire burning in the grass, and horses were nickering in the darkness, the smoke providing a plausible explanation for their sense of alarm. The sky was booming with thunderous explosions; not those of dry lightning but the kind that promised serious rain, perhaps even the type of monsoon that gave back life to a desert. In spite of the acrid tinge of smoke inside the mist, the night was as lovely and normal as one could expect during the late summer in Southwest Texas.

Preacher stuffed his trousers inside the tops of his boots and up-ended his Thompson in one hand, the other gripping his cane, then began walking through a thicket toward the ranch house in the distance, his face as impervious as molded plastic to both the brambles and the rain.

A One-Man Band

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Did I say one-man band? Actually, he was a one-man symphony orchestra. Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was not only a poet, writer, translator, and philosopher. He was eighty poets, writers, translators, and philosophers. Born (and died) in Lisbon, Portugal, Pessoa wrote under approximately eighty heteronyms.

These heteronyms were like pseudonyms, except that each wrote in a different style. In a way, Pessoa constituted an entire literary movement. The work for which he is best known, The Book of Disquiet, is a collection of fragments in no particular order—and probably one of the greatest works of the Twentieth Century.

There are several editions of The Book of Disquiet. I have read the Penguin edition translated by Richard Zenith.

Today, while eating lunch at the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Mar Vista, I was reading an old New York Review of Books and came across this passage in a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa:

To say things! To know how to say things! To know how to exist through the written voice and the intellectual image! That’s what life is about: the rest is just men and women, imagined loves and fictitious vanities, excuses born of poor digestion and forgetting, people squirming beneath the great abstract boulder of a meaningless blue sky, the way insects do when you lift a stone.

I first learned about Pessoa when IO read José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984). It turns out that Ricardo Reis was a poet and prose writer, author of Odes and texts on the work of Alberto Caeiro. Interestingly, Reis and Caeiro were merely two heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa.

The man constituted an entire literary movement in his person!

Obviously, I had to get to know more about Pessoa. I plan to read more of his work if I had world enough and time.

DTLA in the Heat

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Los Angeles in the Year’s First Major Heat Wave

Today, for the first time in six weeks, I took the MetroRail E Train downtown to attend the Mindful Meditation session at the Central Library. The reason for my absence? In early June, I broke my collarbone; and it is only now that I feel well enough to attend.

And the weather for my first day back was a lulu. It was 90º Fahrenheit (32º Celsius), with the humidity making it feel even more sweltering. As I have no pituitary gland to control my adrenaline, I took extra hydrocortisone at breakfast and lunch and drank plenty of liquids, including a bill bowl of Vietnamese phó with filet mignon and noodles for lunch.

Usually, I check out three or four books from the library. Today, I didn’t check any books out, not wanting to carry a book bag with my recuperating right arm Instead, I looked at several travel guides to Cambodia and Laos before the guided meditation session began. (I’ve been reading a lot about neighboring Thailand lately.)

After I ate at the 505 Spring Street food court (in air-conditioned comfort), I trudged the three blocks south to the 7th Street Metro Center station at 7th and Flower Streets. As the elevator was out of service (again), I laboriously took the stairs down to the tracks and waited two minutes for the train to Santa Monica.

All in all, it was a positive experience. This first time back, I wanted to err on the side of caution; and I’m glad I did.

Romans Durs

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Author Georges Simenon (1903-1989)

He wrote hundreds of novels during the fifty years while he was active. There were 75 novels featuring Inspector Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire, plus 28 short stories. According to Wikipedia, he also wrote some 117 romans durs, literally “hard novels,” usually grittier than his Maigret works.

I have just finished reading Le destin des Malou (The Fate of the Malous, 1948) about the young heir of a bankrupt developer who must make his way in the world after realizing that most of his family are completely unsympathetic. In the end, his hero Alain reminds me of Honoré de Balzac’s Eugène de Rastignac from Père Goriot as he resolves to conquer Paris as he stands on the heights of Père Lachaise cemetery overlooking the city. It is nothing short of a masterpiece.

I’ve read approximately half of Simenon’s work—at least half of what he published in his own name. I couldn’t find a bibliography of what he published under various pseudonyms. Although much of his work could be classified as genre fiction, I am beginning to think that perhaps, in our time, the best fiction falls into that category.

In a letter to the author, André Gide compared his roman dur La veuve Couderc (Ticket of Leave, 1942) to The Stranger by Albert Camus, “In my opinion, your book goes much further, and without seeming to—which is the height of Art.” Maybe that’s why Simenon is sadly underrated as an author of mysteries and police procedurals. I like that expression “goes much further, and without seeming to.”

That’s why I am now considering Georges Simenon the equal of other great 20th Century authors. I love reading his works, sometimes even multiple times. I’ve been reading his work for half a century now, and I am deeply grateful that he was so prolific.