MPorcius Fiction Log: Mann

Showing posts with label Mann. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence

He was obsessed. If he did not discover and make known to himself these delights, they might be lost for ever. He wished he had a hundred men's energies, with which to enjoy her. He wished he were a cat, to lick her with a rough, grating, lascivious tongue. He wanted to wallow in her, bury himself in her flesh, cover himself over with her flesh.

Front cover of copy I read

In an effort to justify my mother's complaints that I am a snob and my father's fears that I am a dangerous reactionary who is putting his good name at risk, I have been reading T. S. Eliot's earlier poetry and about the St. Louis native and London habitue's early life (basically up to 1922 and the publication of The Waste Land.) In Robert Crawford's Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land and in The World Broke In Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature by Bill Goldstein, mention is made of Lawrence's 1915 novel The Rainbow as a controversial book that was "suppressed for indecency." I've never read anything by D. H. Lawrence, and seeing that the novel was (apparently) full of sex and that the more famous Women in Love was a sequel to it, I decided The Rainbow would be a good place to start my D. H. Lawrence experience and tracked down a copy (Penguin 2007, edited by Mark Kinkead-Weekes) at the Baltigore County Public Library. For what it's worth, this edition claims to be the closest ever published to what Lawrence intended.

The Rainbow is the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, relatively prosperous owners of the farm known as the Marsh in or near the village of Cossethay on the border of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, a tale that runs from the mid 19th century to the first years of the 20th. After a brief look at his immediate ancestors, we spend 100 or so pages with Tom Brangwen as our main character. Though not the eldest, Tom succeeds to ownership of the Marsh, his older brother Alfred moving to Nottingham to take a job as "a draughtsman in a lace-factory." After an encounter with a foreign gentleman, Tom becomes fascinated with foreigners and aristocrats—one of the themes of The Rainbow is of people who yearn to be more, to grow into something different, something bigger, or to have children who do so These hopes are generally frustrated; for example, Tom's mother wanted her children to be educated, but Tom was a horrible student, "a hopeless duffer at learning," "a fool" who "had not the power to controvert even the stupidest argument...."

...and the back

Tom becomes enchanted with Lydia Lensky, a Polish widow with a little girl, Anna. Lydia, the daughter of a landowner, and her husband, a physician, were forced to leave Poland because they were patriots and got mixed up in a rebellion against the Russians--her husband died of illness in London, leaving her and little Anna penniless. Tom and Lydia marry, and we learn all about the joys and miseries of their marriage. Their marriage is contrasted with Alfred’s; Alfred cheats on his wife with an intelligent woman who lives in a house full of books with her father--Alfred and the woman read Herbert Spencer and Robert Browning together.

When Anna is eighteen, Alfred’s son Will moves near the Marsh to take up work himself as a draughtsman at a lace factory. Anna and Will, a sensitive sort who likes to visit churches and look at books of reproductions of church architecture and Christian paintings and sculptures (Ruskin has had a big influence on him), fall in love, and we get 100-something pages in which their marriage, the joys and miseries of which are even more extreme than that of Tom and Lydia's, is described in detail.

Lawrence’s book is focused primarily on psychology, on the characters’ inner lives and on their feelings, feelings mostly related to their sexual and family relationships. There is quite little description of people’s work or their relationships with other people in the community--we don’t get scenes of Tom haggling with customers over prices for his butter or beef or Will trying to get a raise from his boss, and we learn very little of the economics of managing a farm or the intricacies of designing lace patterns, we don't hear people's complaints about government trade or tax or foreign policy. Again and again the characters eschew the outside world, shutting themselves up in the family:

Anna continued in her violent trance of motherhood, always busy, often harassed, but always contained in her trance of motherhood....No responsibility, no sense of duty troubled her. The outside, public life was less than nothing to her, really.

....

And to him, as the days went by, it was as if the heavens had fallen, and he were sitting with her among the ruins, in a new world, everybody else buried, themselves two blissful survivors....

or themselves:

...she was always tormented by the unreality of outside things....she became hard, cut herself off from all connection, lived in the little separate world of her own violent will.

The descriptions of people’s family relationships, particularly relationships between spouses, ring very true and are very effective. Just like in real life, everybody’s feelings are ambiguous, equivocal, subject to endless revision, and Lawrence's character's emotions shift from one extreme to the other from one moment to the next. Lawrence addresses, in detail, many of the challenges faced by married people: you can't live without your wife, can't imagine a life without her, she is the center of your being, but at the same time that you adore her and desire her, you resent her because of her power over you. She makes fun of your hobbies, and it hurts so much you throw the woodcarving you've been working on for months into the fire! (When this happened to Will I was reminded of scenes in Kipling's The Light that Failed and in Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage in which women destroyed men's art work.) Your wife criticizes your religion, your deepest beliefs, and you begin to doubt. You love your husband and desire him sexually, but there is nothing more delicious than being alone at home while he's at work, and you can't get any sleep in the same bed with him, so you send him to another room every night. Lawrence goes into all these things at great length, as well as into Tom's relationship with Anna and Will's with his and Anna's first daughter, Ursula.

Lawrence's style is not subtle--when people are not overwhelmed by love or desire they are going into "black rages" and consumed by hate, usually for the person they were in paroxysms of desire for just two paragraphs ago, and will be equally in love with within a page or two. Lawrence's style is characterized by repetition. Lawrence will use the same short straightforward words and phrases multiple times in a single sentence, in a single paragraph, again and again throughout the book ("rage" and "black" are favorites):

All the blood in his body went black and powerful and corrosive as he heard her. Black and blind with hatred he was. He was in a very black hell, and could not escape.

....

Oh, Oh, the bliss of the little life sucking the milk of her body! Oh, Oh, Oh the bliss, as the infant grew stronger, of the two tiny hands clutching, catching blindly yet passionately at her breast, of the tiny mouth seeking her in blind, sure, vital knowledge, of the sudden consummate peace as the little body sank, the mouth and throat sucking, sucking, sucking, drinking life from her to make a new life, almost sobbing with passionate joy of receiving its own existence, the tiny hands clutching frantically as the nipple was drawn back, not to be gainsaid. This was enough for Anna. She seemed to pass off into a kind of rapture of motherhood, her rapture of motherhood was everything.

Lawrence will make the same points about a character and use the same metaphors again and again, in a brief space. One minor character is a Polish baron, Skrebensky, exiled to England where he has taken up the job of a vicar and marries an Englishwoman. On page 184 Lawrence tells us the Baroness has "the soft, creamy, elusive beauty of a ferret." On the same page we are told "She had real charm, a kind of joyous coldness, laughing, delighted, like some weasel." And at the top of the next page we find that Will "watched her with deferential interest as he would watch a stoat playing." (I was hoping Lawrence would whip out "ermine," favorite of all us Leonardo and Wyndham Lewis fans, but he limited himself to three of these weaselly ferrety metaphors.)

(Is repetition a hallmark of "literary modernism?" Linked to the interest of its practitioners in primitive chants and ancient ritual? Eliot certainly uses lots of repetition in his poetry.)

Almost halfway through our 450-page trek, and eight years into Will and Anna's marriage, Will goes to town and picks up a girl at a theatre; he gropes her in the dark corner of a park, but she won't let him go all the way. Back home Anna immediately notices something is different about him, but she is not necessarily offended:

She liked him. She liked this strange new man come home to her. He was very welcome, indeed. She was very glad to welcome a stranger. She had been bored by the old husband.

Will's infidelity triggers a revival, a revolution, of his and Anna's relationship, and they devote themselves to ferocious animalistic sex, sex bereft of love or tenderness, sex based on lust: "They abandoned the moral position, each was seeking gratification pure and simple...Their children became mere offspring to them, they lived in the darkness and death of their own sensual activities." It is hard to tell to what extent Lawrence is endorsing this kind of attitude towards sex, and to what extent he is condemning it.

Some publishers try to sell The Rainbow as a sex
novel--this is my favorite of the sexy
covers I have seen

I enjoy this kind of extravagant writing, when some guy is so hot for a chick he swoops down on her like a predatory bird and wants to devour her like a cat, and when he is so angry at her that he wants to take her in his hands and break her. The problem I began having with The Rainbow, however, was that Lawrence was doing this stuff again and again—there was no relief, no variety, it got repetitive, monotonous. It is hard to burn at a fever pitch for page after page without it getting stale, especially when the topic does not vary for over 100 pages. I thought of Proust, who also writes at length about love and sex and how they make people feel and act goofy, but he also writes about art, literature, social class, and politics, and includes many memorable images and even pretty funny jokes. (And Proust writes about more varieties of love and sex than Lawrence does here.) Fortunately, in the second half of The Rainbow, Lawrence expands his scope and his range of topics a bit, and tries to include arresting images, particularly featuring the moon and flowers. (I love to look at the moon, but, unfortunately, and despite the best efforts of my father, who cultivates a huge garden, my wife, who loves to decorate our home with cut flowers, and Bryan Ferry, flowers leave me cold and I have no idea what a rhododendron looks like without googling it.) More interesting, to me at least, are the characters' responses to political, economic and social issues.

Anna and Will's plunge into ecstatic and indulgent sex feels like the climax of the first half of The Rainbow. It is followed by a sequence in which Tom Brangwen, Anna's (non-biological) father and Will's uncle, is killed in a flash flood at the Marsh farm, drowned while drunk. Fred, Anna's half-brother, son of Tom and Lydia, succeeds to the farm.

Will and Anna's daughter Ursula is the main protagonist of the remaining 225 or so pages of the novel. Following the book's themes, Ursula is selfish and self-absorbed:

She was a free, unabateable animal, she declared in her revolts: there was no law for her, nor any rule. She existed for herself alone.

and wants to improve her status and go out and explore the world:

So even as a girl of twelve she was glad to burst the narrow boundary of Cossethay, where only limited people lived. Outside, was all vastness, and a throng of real, proud people whom she would love.

She often indulges in fantasies of being a rich aristocratic lady, helping others and otherwise flaunting her superiority over them. Lawrence includes lengthy descriptions of teenaged Ursula's grappling with religious questions. She, of course, wants to do the right thing, but she is unwilling in her squabbles with siblings and schoolmates to turn the other cheek and forswear self-defense and revenge, and though she is troubled by the parable of the camel and the eye of the needle, she is very reluctant to give up her superior status as the member of a relatively prosperous family or sell her fine things (among them a pearl-backed brush and mirror, silver candle stick, and a "lovely little necklace") and hand the proceeds over to the poor--in fact, the poor disgust her.

"Very well," she thought, "we'll forgo that heaven, that's all--at any rate the needle's eye sort." And she dismissed the problem.

(Lawrence fills The Rainbow with quotes from the Bible and Biblical references--Anne Fernihough furnishes this edition with fourteen pages of very good notes that help uneducated people like myself spot the less obvious ones.)

Ursula is a rebel who questions all she hears. Her first romance is with Anton Skrebensky, son of that Polish Baron turned vicar; Anton is an engineer in the British Army.

"But what would you be doing if you went to war?"

"I would be making railways or bridges, working like a nigger."

When he talks of why he is willing to fight for the nation and its people, the importance of maintaining order, and so on, Ursula insists that it is all nonsense, that she doesn't care about the Mahdi or Khartoum ("I don't want to live in the desert of Sahara--do you?") and attacks the very idea of a nation:

"But we aren't the nation. There are heaps of other people who are the nation."

"They might say they weren't, either."

"Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn't be a nation. But I should still be myself," she asserted, brilliantly.

Anton is sent off to fight the Boers. Ursula's second lover is a woman, Winifred Inger, one of her school teachers the last year she attends classes and a sort of feminist activist. As with so many relationships in The Rainbow, this one veers from ecstatic adoration to absolute detestation. Sick of her, Ursula sets up Winifred with her uncle Tom (Will's brother, son of drowned Tom) who, after travelling around the world a bit, has taken up the job of managing a coal mine. Ursula is disgusted by the colliery and the ugly town that has sprung up around the pit and the way the miners ("colliers") are forced to adapt to the industry--she thinks they would be better off living in poverty than toiling to produce the energy that powers the modern economy. Tom's role in the coal mining industry, and Winifred's interest in Tom (the two do end up married) makes them abhorrent to Ursula.

This cover, from a website offering
e-books, is the funniest I've seen

As I have suggested, Lawrence lays everything on pretty thick in this book, and he doesn't skimp when expressing how horrible--in Ursula's opinion, at least--the whole business of mining is, though he doesn't portray the colliers as slaves or innocent victims: they are volunteers who like the high wages they receive at the colliery. Lawrence paints everything in The Rainbow in bold (garish?) colors but at the same time he presents everything as ambiguous and equivocal.

Ursula is sickened by the idea of staying at home with her mother and all her many siblings--she wants to enter the world of work, the world of men (Chapter XIII is actually titled "The Man's World"), she wants freedom and independence, and so she takes a job as a teacher (her "matric" qualifies her for such work.) She has dreams of moving far away to teach among the beautiful people, but she ends up taking a teaching job nearby in a poor district, a job her father gets for her (so much for independence!) The kids are rebellious, and to keep her job Ursula must abandon her fantasies of being the kind sensitive teacher every student loves and become a ruthless taskmaster who beats down recalcitrant boys with a cane--like the colliers she must adapt, alter her personality, become a servant of the machine, to the school which feels like a prison and a system she finds "inhuman."

She did not want to do it. Yet she had to. Oh why, why had she leagued herself to this evil system where she must brutalize herself to live? Why had she become a school-teacher, why, why?

Ursula works as a schoolteacher for two years before attending college. This is probably the most interesting part of the book, as Lawrence gets into what it is like to be a schoolteacher at the turn of the 20th century and actually shows us a character developing in a logical way and not just changing his or her attitude on a dime, as Ursula has to learn to adapt to the challenge of teaching a bunch of kids who do not want to be taught and of appeasing her superiors, who are not exactly eager to help her learn the ropes. The minor characters in this portion of the novel are also interesting, the monstrous kids and the monstrous teachers who have to tame them if they want to be able to do their work. This chapter of The Rainbow offers the pleasures of a conventional plot--I found the scene in which Ursula defeated the most villainous of the students and asserted her control of the class and won the support of her colleagues to be cathartic and satisfying, and some of the students' antics amusing. I only wish we had gotten similar chapters on Will at the lace factory and Tom Senior managing the Marsh farm.

One of the recurring motifs of The Rainbow is people beginning new lives and entering new worlds, when they get a new job or meet a new lover or something like that. In the last one hundred pages of the book Will, Anna, and their legion of children, the summer before Ursula begins college classes, enter into a new life, moving to from the village of Cossethay to Beldover, a newly risen town of newly constructed houses, one of those coal towns Ursula detests, where Will takes up the job of art teacher. Ursula lives in this new house while attending college. At first she is thrilled by the college, seeing it as a temple of learning and the professors as priests of knowledge, but she is soon disillusioned--the teachers don't teach out of love of learning, but merely in order to receive a paycheck, and the students aren't there to drink in the ambrosia of knowledge, but to increase their value on the labor market!

This was no religious retreat, no seclusion of pure learning. It was a little apprentice-shop where one was further equipped for making money.

Ursula, who in high school loved the Romans (on page 310 she "with her blood...heard a passage of Latin, and she knew how the blood beat in a Roman's body, so that ever after she felt she knew the Romans...") finds she doesn't even like Horace! She compares Greek and Roman literature to the Chinese and Japanese "curiosities" for sale in antique shops, worthless gewgaws (page 403: "She was bored by the Latin curiosities....")

Anton Skrebensky, now a lieutenant, returns from South Africa late in Ursula's college career after serving down there for years; he has six months leave before heading to India. Sick of school, Ursula "wanted to run to Skrebensky--the new life, the reality." His time in Africa has turned Anton into a man, and Lawrence gives us some more animal metaphors: Anton is a leopard, then a lion, then a tiger. As they sit in the night by the river, Anton tells Ursula all about life in Africa:

"I am not afraid of the darkness in England....It is soft, and natural to me, it is my medium, especially when you are here. But in Africa it seems massive and fluid with terror--not fear of anything--just fear. One breathes it, like a smell of blood. The blacks know it. They worship it, really, the darkness. One almost likes it--the fear--something sensual."

Distracted by Anton, whose body thrills her, Ursula skips class, fails her exams, is denied her B.A. She and Anton get engaged, but after a tirade against England ("meagre and paltry...unspiritual") and democracy ("I hate democracy....Only the greedy and ugly people come to the top in a democracy....who are those chosen as best to rule? Those who have money and the brains for money") Ursula tells Anton she doesn't want to get married. (We later learn that she wants to experience other men--she loves and desires Anton, but he is the only man she's ever had sex with, and she is sure she could love and enjoy the bodies of other, different, men.) Anton bursts into tears, and she relents, but over the next weeks he also realizes they are not made for each other and he marries a more stable woman and brings her with him to the East.

The brief final chapter includes symbolic visions, one in which Ursula sees herself as a seedling growing from an acorn, a new living thing with no connection to the Brangwen family or Anton or anything from her past life, and another in which she sees a rainbow appear over the world and sweep away the new coal towns and usher in new lives for everybody. There is also a tedious dream-like scene in which Ursula is trapped in a wood by horses and has to climb a tree to escape the equines. She is carrying Anton's child, but falling from the tree induces a miscarriage. I think. This is the lamest chapter of the book, and compares badly with the visionary scenes in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain.

Of course, many publishers have
taken the safe and literal route

So, did I enjoy The Rainbow? Can I recommend it to people? Individual chapters and individual passages are definitely good, and as a failed PhD candidate in history the occasional insights into the lives and attitudes of the people of Victorian and Edwardian England held my rapt attention. It is noteworthy how much time and energy Lawrence devotes to women, to getting into their heads (for example, describing Anna's fulfillment as a mother as well as her evolving sexual feelings for her husband) and to exploring the problems and burdens faced by women in their relationships with men (Winifred moans that men are really mostly concerned with their work, be it in the shop, the pits or the office, and that their wives only get from their husbands what little is left over, "the bit the shop can't digest.")

However, after the first hundred pages or so, the novel's repetitiveness, the way Lawrence banged away at the same words over the course of a paragraph, the same ideas over the course of a chapter, and the same themes over the course of 450 pages, made reading much of The Rainbow more like a job than a joy, and I had trouble achieving my goal of reading fifty pages a day. The characters are not very sympathetic, and because they are all prone to radical attitude adjustments they lack definition and individuality--the book left me feeling adrift, with nothing solid to hold on to. I don't regret acquiring some familiarity with a famous and important author, but I'm glad this exploration is behind me and doubt I will read another novel by Lawrence any time soon.

In our next episode, another British novel from the same period.

Friday, August 4, 2017

Planet in Peril by John Christopher

Raven said to Charles: "Well, Mr. Grayner? Destruction or salvage? A corrupt and decadent world--do you destroy it or do you try to mend it?"

Charles stood in silence; he felt that his irresolution must be written all over him. Raven and Dinkhul were both looking at him--Raven with calm confidence, Dinkhul with the trace of a mocking grin.

He said: "I don't know--"

I can't actually remember any
pretty blonde ladies in the book

Like so many people, I found John Christopher's first three Tripod books entertaining. I liked No Blade of Grass when I read it a few years ago, and thought The Long Winter not bad when I read it before this blog first exploded into the public consciousness. (Joachim Boaz rated The Long Winter "Good" back in 2012.) So, when I saw the 1959 Avon printing of Christopher's Planet in Peril with the cool Emsh cover, I got it. As I announced to the world via twitter, which, despite my best efforts to create mesmerizing content like blurry pictures of the birds and graffiti I spot while visiting Akron, Ohio, is apparently in terminal decline, this edition is very fun, the book designer integrating elements of Emsh's cover illo onto the back cover and the title page. My copy was owned previously by a Michael Wachover; amateur handwriting analysis suggests it was some other owner who wrote "Good" on the inside cover along with a long cryptic string of characters. Mr. Wachover also wrote his nickname "Mike" on page 23, and that string of numbers (and letters?) appears a second time on page 11. This paperback has lived a long and eventful life!

Planet in Peril was first published in the United Kingdom in 1955 with the considerably more appropriate title The Year of the Comet and stars Charles Grayner, 21st-century scientist. Grayner is a sophisticated man--when he comes home and finds the cleaning lady has left the telescreen on the pop music channel, he switches it to the classical music channel. After a long day studying diamonds as a possible power source, a little Mozart is just what he needs! In the first ten pages of the book Grayner visits a used record store, where he runs into the guy who operates and stars on (as a kind of DJ or talk show host) the classical music TV channel, Hiram Dinkhul. Even though they have only met once before, this guy seems to know all about Grayner's career, including the fact that the diamond expert has just this very day learned he will be transferred from Michigan to sunny California!

Fellow SF fan
Michael Wachover,
we salute you!

Planet in Peril is set in a world in which almost nobody, even a sophisticato like Grayner, knows any history. Luckily Grayner and we readers have Dinkhul to handle the exposition duties for us. Following a cataclysmic 20th-century war, the Western world was rebuilt by and is now run by "managerials," the various pre-war business sectors (they have names like "United Chemicals," "Atomics," "Steel," "Agriculture," "Genetics Division," "Telecom," etc.) consolidated into monopolistic entities which act as independent states. These states are fascistic/socialistic, their citizens assorted into rigid classes and assigned their roles from above during their youth after psychological profiling. (We learn that at school Grayner was assigned to Squad D, "research and development work.") Like jobs, all goods and services seem to be distributed by the bureaucracy.

Outside this managerial system is "Siraq," a religious state (Dinkhul calls it a "deity-centered nation") that controls the "Near East." (Though Grayner and Dinkhul are Americans, they use British lingo--Dinkhul at one point talks of the paucity of students who "read History" instead of the American usage "study History," while Grayner tells Dinkhul that he "tipped down the drain" the "containers of mescalin" provided him by his managers for use on vacation.) While Westerners all smoke cigarettes, use "mesc" and engage in casual promiscuous sex (Grayner is said to frequent brothels), the Siraqis refrain, having what is said to be a "puritanical" culture. (Christopher never uses the words "Islam" or "Muslim," just like he never uses "socialism" or "fascism.")

Like the Siraqis, Dinkhul is critical of the managerial states and to some extent lives outside of them. His TV channel represents "one of the few remaining strands of capitalism in the modern world," he tells Grayner, and he complains that the society of the managerial states is decadent, pointing out the failure to colonize Mars and Venus though the technology to do so is available (Raymond F. Jones in The Cybernetic Brains also used the failure to explore space as a sign that a socialistic high-tech society had fallen into decadence.) We later learn that Dinkhul, besides being a broadcaster, is a bigwig in an underground organization trying to undermine the managerial system, The Society of Individualists. This group doesn't have a plan to take over, they just want to see the whole managerial system fall apart, assuming what comes next will be better.

I guess those are the Siraqis on their
diamond-powered flying machines

Grayner's managerial is United Chemicals, and his superiors transfer him to Cali to take the place of some other diamond expert, Humayun, who got killed in a boating accident. Grayner falls in love with Humayun's (now his) assistant, Sara Koupol. Koupol, like Humayun, is a political refugee who fled from Siraq; her father, a history professor, escaped Siraq with her. Sara thinks Grayner's predecessor was murdered, and when she disappears before Grayner can even get in her pants (damn her puritanical Siraqi upbringing!) her father purportedly commits suicide. Of course, Grayner and we readers think all these people have been kidnapped or murdered.

Much of the book consists of Grayner being cajoled or kidnapped by Dinkhul's Individualists or one managerial or another, all of them trying to convince Grayner to work for them. Again and again Grayner is liberated from captivity at one managerial by another managerial or by the Society of Individualists--in this book people are always getting put to sleep by gas or drugged drinks or hit on the head by blunt instruments and then waking up in the custody of some other faction. People in this book are also always putting on disguises, and members of one managerial keep turning out to be moles or turncoats who are in fact working for a different faction. When Grayner is "reunited" with Sara Koupol, Dinkhul, after some days, exposes this woman as an impostor (no wonder she was putting out!) This is the kind of book in which the protagonist is carried along by the winds of fate and manipulated by mysterious forces--until the very end Grayner doesn't make any decisions, figure out any mysteries, or defeat any foes; Grayner does not drive the plot in any way, he is merely its passenger.

Anyway, all the managerials want Grayner (and Humayun and Sara Koupol) under their control because everybody realizes that they are on the brink of figuring out how to turn diamonds into a super efficient power source and super powerful weapon--if one managerial gets this power before the rest it will be able to rule the world. Dinkhul, who I guess is like the book's conscience and Christopher's spokesman, tries to preserve Greyner's freedom to choose his own way while hoping Greyner will not stand in the way of a collapse of managerial society.

Loosely affiliated with the Society of Individualists is an underground cult of religious fanatics known as the Cometeers who think the appearance of a comet in the sky is a sign that managerial society is about to fall. (You probably know that comets are associated with the crisis of the collapse of the Roman Republic and the Norman conquest of England.) The managerials tolerate the Cometeers, and their revival-style meetings provide a cover for the Society of Individualists' own smaller meetings. In the last 30 pages of the 159-page novel Dinkhul leads Greyner on a country-wide tour of Cometeer groups, seeking clues about the whereabouts of Sara Koupol. As the puritanism of the Siraqis contrasts with the indulgence in drugs and promiscuous sex of the managerials, so the ecstatic Cometeers provide a contrast to the passionless managerials--on their faces Greyner sees "a concentration, a passion, which he never remembered seeing anywhere." Dinkhul and Greyner get kidnapped again, and this time taken to Siraq--it turns out the Cometeers are being financed by the Siraqis as a means of further undermining the managerials. We learn that Humayun, Sara Koupol and Professor Koupol have taken over Siraq in a palace coup, built the diamond-based super weapon, and are going to take over the world. Greyner has to decide if he will try to alert the managerials and save the (drug-addled, corrupt and static) West from the (semi-capitalistic, imperialistic and puritannical) East, or just settle down with Sara and live a happy life with her as a member of the world's new ruling class.

When I bought Planet in Peril, and when I started reading it, I had hopes it would be an exciting adventure story and/or a human drama. I was disappointed because it is a kind of satire of and meditation on modern Western life, religion, radicalism and conservatism. (I didn't realize it at first, but the character's names have an allegorical ring--Grayner, Ledbetter, Raven, etc. Is "Humayun" supposed to reminded us of "houyhnhnm?") Do I agree with Christopher that individualistic capitalist societies are more vital and productive than bureaucratic collectivist ones? Of course I do. Do I agree that while religion is a scam, it brings structure, meaning and even joy into people's lives? You bet. Does my agreement with what I think Christopher is trying to say here mean I loved this novel? No way.

Sad!

Planet of Peril's plot, characters, and tone are weak. The story conveys no emotion--all of the characters remain calm and detached, either gently ironic like Dinkhul or, even worse, cold fish like Grayner. Perhaps by design (to show how a technocratic society saps the life and emotion out of people), perhaps due to incompetence, Christopher's characters have no passion and the story develops no tension. We don't get any sense that Dinkhul really hates the static collectivist society of the managerials or that Grayner deeply or ebulliently loves Koupol or is bitter or angry about the way the various factions are manipulating him. The stakes feel low because the different factions don't threaten or bribe Grayner, and none of the characters gets shot at or risks death or maiming--looking back, I suspect that all the scenes of people getting knocked unconscious were played for laughs, though I didn't laugh. The lack of feeling and danger makes the book flat and boring.

The scene I quoted as an epigraph to this blog post, in which Dinkhul and Raven (head of Atomics) both try to sway Grayner, reminded me of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which a representative of modern liberalism and a representative of religious and communist radicalism compete for the soul of a bland middle-class guy. The book as a whole reminded me of Anthony Burgess's satiric The Wanting Seed, which I also found didn't inspire in me much feeling. Planet of Peril, however, suffers in comparison to The Wanting Seed because while Christopher is subtle (to be kind) or limp (if you want to be harsh about it), Burgess is loud, sharp, edgy. Burgess just comes right out and tells you homosexuals are disgusting and that English people are superior to Third Worlders and lays his theories about history and religion right on the table for you to see. This is a way to generate excitement, or at least interest, in your novel if it lacks human drama and tension. Christopher's Planet in Peril, unfortunately, though it has a provocative theme (Muslims armed with a super weapon are going to conquer the world, and we decadent Westerners should welcome it!) isn't stirring or captivating because it is too soft and too vague.

Barely acceptable.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (trans. Mayer & Brogan)

"My friend," I exclaimed, "Man is human, and the small amount of intelligence one may possess counts little or nothing against the rage of passion and the limits of human nature pressing upon him."

Copy I read this week

Close followers of this blog will know I recently read Mikhail Lermentov's "Princess Mary," an early 19th-century novella which I viewed as a piece of Russian Romanticism. This inspired me to borrow, from the local university library, one of the foundational texts of the Romantic movement, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. I read Werther in the 1990s, when I was working at a New Jersey bookstore for minimum wage, in a paperback Penguin edition that I believe I still own, but which is packed away in storage. The hardcover edition I read this week was put out in 1993 by The Modern Library, and presents a translation by Elizabeth Mayer and Louis Brogan that first saw light of day in 1971, the year of my birth. It includes on its back cover a quote from Thomas Mann that includes an anecdote indicating that Napoleon Bonaparte was a tremendous fan of Werther. Well, we won't hold against poor Goethe the fact that one of history's premier monsters was practically president of his fan club.

Think back, if you can, to the year 1771! The place, Germany! The Sorrows of Young Werther is, primarily, presented in the form of letters written by our title character, a sensitive soul who likes to draw, write, read Homer and look at mountains, and who apparently has enough money that he never has to do any work, has a servant, and is always throwing money to the poor. The letters in Book One (73 pages in this edition) are to Wilhelm, a friend of Werther's. Werther is spending the summer in some little country town to run some trifling legal errand for his mother (some aunt is trying to keep Mom from getting her share of an inheritance or something) and, it seems, to get away from some love triangle mess back home. "Poor Leonora! And yet I was blameless. Was it my fault that, while the capricious charms of her sister provided me with a pleasant entertainment, her poor heart built up a passion for me?" This whole book, from page one, is about people being carried away by their caprices and passions and causing themselves and others considerable suffering.

Out in this little town Werther meets and falls in love with a pretty girl, Charlotte, whom he calls "Lotte." Lotte is more than a pretty face--she likes the writers Werther likes and she is the picture of virtue, dutifully and lovingly raising her little brothers and sisters after their mother's death. But Lotte is not on the market! The girl of Werther's dreams is engaged to Albert, an honest, decent, level-headed and productive citizen! In the intro to this edition modern English poet W. H. Auden declares that Albert is a "square!" Werner spends all his time either hanging out with these two paragons or weeping his eyes out alone because Lotte will never be his.

A ringing endorsement from the Corsican Ogre

In Book Two of the novel (just 17 pages) it is autumn and winter, and Werner has left the country to take some kind of diplomatic or civil service job at court, working with an "envoy," a "Count," and a "Minister," drafting documents. In letters to Wilhelm and Lotte he complains that the people at court are obsessed with status and the rat race, and ruin every day with their bad attitudes. Due to an embarrassing faux pas at a party, in the spring Werther quits his job and moves back to Lotte and Albert's environs. In Werther's absence Lotte and Albert have married.

The last section of the novel, entitled "Postscript" and running 70 pages, is a conglomeration of documents written by Werther and narration by a nameless editor who has investigated Werther's last days. Werther hangs around Lotte, putting strain on her marriage to Albert, and he gets upset when some guys want to chop down some trees he likes and when a guy with whom Werther identifies, a component of one of the novel's ubiquitous love triangles, commits murder. Werther finally goes off the deep end and commits suicide with some pistols he borrows from Albert. (A friend in need....) This suicide is no surprise to the reader; not only has it been foreshadowed again and again, with Werther discussing suicide with Albert and writing to Wilhelm about committing suicide and even play acting suicide with Albert's pistols back on page 57, but after the "editor" baldly tells us on page 135 that Werther has decided to kill himself, we have to wade through 30 more pages before the deed is done.

I didn't enjoy The Sorrows of Young Werther as much as I had expected to. With the exception of a mind-numbingly tedious seven-page extract from James MacPherson's famous fraud The Works of Ossian (MacPherson wrote poems in English that he based very loosely on Gaelic sources and then claimed they were translations of centuries-old manuscripts he had discovered) the book is an easy read, but it is repetitive, extravagant, obvious, and fails to pull the heartstrings. There is no surprise, little ambiguity or depth, and surprisingly little insight into 18th-century life or thought. And who can care one way or the other about these goofy characters?

Among the elements I thought reflected "Romanticism" in"Princess Mary" was how the narrator waxed poetic about Nature, expressing his love of the trees and the dew and the sunlight and all that, and how all the characters acted irrationally, tossing reason and logic out the window and taking catastrophic risks because they are driven by passions for love, revenge, or honor. We see some of these same elements in Werther. There's lots of talk about how lovely mountains and valleys and sunsets and the rest are, and when he is mentally stable Werther blabs on and on about how much he loves Nature, but somehow the book fails to inspire any of these feelings in the reader.

The edition I read in
the '90s resembles this

More interesting to me was the recurring theme of how intelligence, education, knowledge and reason can be a detriment rather than a virtue, can make people less happy rather than more happy. Werther argues the charm of the classical poets comes from their ignorance: "You see, dear friend, how limited and how happy were the glorious Ancients! how naive their emotions and their poetry!" Werther later claims that true emotion, love in its purest form, is felt by "those people whom we call uneducated and coarse." Werther and Wilhelm have been diminished, not elevated, by their educations: "We educated people--miseducated into nothingness!" When Werther meets a mental patient who has been released into the custody of his family, the maniac asserts that he was happier when he was totally insane and chained up in an institution than he is now, free and partially cured.

At the same time that Werther's rhetoric denounces the intellect, suggesting that education and reason corrupt, or deaden, or sadden us, the actions of the characters, especially Werther himself, demonstrate that people do not act logically, are not guided by reason, but are instead driven by whims and irrational passions. It is hard to believe that Goethe is celebrating this emotionalism, even if the character of Werther is, because their passions drive the characters to destructive actions: among other disasters, we hear the story of a girl who committed suicide because of a love triangle, and the story of a man who committed a bloody murder because of a love triangle. Werther, in a debate with Albert and in response to the aforementioned murder case, claims that suicides and murderers should not be judged guilty or punished for their sins because the passions that drove them are like a disease, and we don't blame a guy for catching the flu! This surprisingly modern attitude towards mental health and crime (think of how nowadays we aren't supposed to look down on drunks and compulsive gamblers and junkies as irresponsible jerks with no values and no common sense, but instead to empathize with and support them as victims of a disease) is probably the thing in Werther that made the biggest impression on me this time around.

In my real life I have often been moved by the beauty and sublimity of mountains, oceans, sunsets, lightning bolts, birds and so on, and all too often I have acted stupidly over a woman or because I was angry about something. I should be a receptive audience for what Goethe is selling here. And yet I was not emotionally affected by Goethe's novel. Is Goethe to blame because the book is too extravagant, too repetitive, too poorly structured? Or could the translation be (in part?) to blame?

Don't be fooled by the cover of this kindle edition!

The only German I know is stuff I've picked up via pop culture that does not paint a flattering portrait of the German people, phrases like "Schnell! Schnell!," "Achtung, Spitfire!," "Judenfrei," and "schadenfreude." So I am in no position to criticize Mayer and Brogan's translation. But I still have some questions. When Werther causes confusion during a dance by making some missteps, he uses the phrase "everything was at sixes and sevens," which I always think of as a British idiom. Do Germans say this as well? Or is Werther making a clever joke related to the fact that the dance he screwed up was an anglaise? Or are Mayer and Brogan just translating some German cliche they fear their American audience won't get into an English cliche they are confident English readers will know? (I had similar questions when Werther used a variant of the phrase "It's all Greek to me.") I would have appreciated a footnote or endnote here, but this edition has no notes.

Several times I felt that notes would have been appropriate. Sure, I am familiar with The Vicar of Wakefield, but presumably some readers of this edition of Werther were not. And even though this is my second reading of Werther I had no idea what or who the Klopstock that Lotte and Werther are so excited over was, or what Emilia Galotti was all about, until I googled them.

Obviously, I don't regret reading a major novel by a major writer, but I won't be recommending The Sorrows of Young Werther to people with the enthusiasm with which I recommend other canonical novels, like Don Quixote, Moby Dick, or In Search of Lost Time.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Five 1963 stories by Thomas M. Disch

Long-time readers of this here blog will perhaps recall my praise of Thomas Disch's novel On Wings of Song, his fix-up novel 334, and some of his short stories. Followers of my twitter feed may remember that earlier this month, in South Carolina, a thousand miles away by Toyota Corolla from my Midwestern HQ, I purchased a 1971 copy of Disch's 1967 collection One Hundred and Two H-Bombs.

Besides the fine cover painting (presumably by Paul Lehr) this edition has an intro by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat and Eden fame. Harrison describes Disch's physical appearance in the early '60s, and gives a little capsule history of the "New Wave," which he says is a poor label for the phenomenon. As Harrison tells it, the science fiction field was in a "grey period" in the early '60s, but then a bunch of new writers, writers who had read widely of mainstream literature and travelled around the world (Disch and Harrison both spent time in London, Harrison reminds us) appeared on the scene. These new writers were a breath of fresh air that shook the old dinosaurs of SF, whom Harrison declines to name. According to Harrison, Disch is "about the best of this pack," a man who writes in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess, producing works that are "comic," but don't try to make you laugh out loud.

I think Disch is an exciting, challenging writer (I like his irreverent criticism as well as his fiction) and so I have really been looking forward to tackling some stories from One Hundred and Two H-Bombs. This week I read five stories from the collection, all of which appeared in 1963, in either Amazing Stories or Fantastic Stories of Imagination.

"Final Audit"

"Final Audit" appeared first in the July issue of Fantastic.

This is an ingenious and absurd fantasy story, set in the late nineteenth century, starring a bank auditor who has access to very specific but trivial occult information; inexplicably, he can see the figures he will write in one of his ledgers (the one covering the bank's postal expenses) 30 days before he writes them. He tries to use this very minor predictive ability to his advantage, but with no luck. In fact, focusing so much on this ledger stultifies his career and social life. When the ledger actually does provide valuable information (that the bank will burn down) the auditor is too obtuse to benefit by it, and, in a somewhat predictable twist ending, he causes the conflagration himself.

"False Audit" is well-written and well-constructed, and an effective spoof of or homage to stories about the ability to predict the future. Because the story is set in a bank Disch is able to include numerous attacks on the bourgeoisie of the kind that we find so often in fiction: the stockmarket is no better than gambling, businesspeople are all callous, corrupt, and greedy, etc.

I liked it.

"The Return of the Medusae"

"The Return of the Medusae" appeared with "The Princess's Carillon" and a third story by Disch in the August issue of Fantastic; isfdb lists all three together as components of the "Fables of the Past and Future series."

This is a clever story, less than two pages in length, that speculates on how the survivors would react if suddenly and unexpectedly everyone awake was turned to stone. Which statues would be left intact, even decorated with flowers by grieving relatives? Which would be smashed because they were ugly or simply in the way (think of people turned to stone while in the middle of a bowel movement)? Would artists chisel away at the doomed, trying to improve their looks, change their expressions? The story is convincingly written in the voice of an historian or art critic, living long after the event.

Good.

"The Princess' Carillon"

This is a farcical satire of welfare state liberalism, or of fears of welfare state liberalism, or both. A nine-year old white princess, an orphan, is physically and psychologically abused by the regent, her uncle, but the legislature supports the regent because of his well-administered welfare program. The little princess is sent to an integrated school, where she fears the black kids will kill her ("or worse.") A black boy tells her he is really a prince, and will return to his "proper form and color" if the princess kisses him. She kisses him, and he becomes a frog, whom she marries.

I tend to not like absurd satires, and I'm not getting much out of this one; there is no character or plot, no human feeling, and no point that I can really discern. It is only two and a half pages, so I can't really argue it is a waste of time, but I'm not willing to tell you that time reading it was well spent, either.

"The Demi-Urge"

There are words that I learned at one point, but, because they don't come up very often, whose meaning I tend to forget, so that every few years, when they do come up, I have to look up. "Defenestration" is one, and "demiurge" is another. Maybe this story will permanently imbed "demiurge" in my porous brain.

This story, three pages long, consists of two messages, each sent by a member of a survey team from a Galactic Empire back to HQ; this team is examining our solar system, during a time when Earthlings have colonized the entire system and are preparing to travel to the stars. One of the messages laments that the Terrans have become slaves to their Machines, and requests permission to liberate the Earth people by destroying all the Machines. The second message is from a dissenting member of the survey team. He asserts that those his comrades believe to be Machines are in fact the native Terrans, and those they wish to liberate the true Machines. This mistake has been made because the Galactic Empire itself is populated by Machines, created by a race long extinct, a fact forgotten for millennia and only now evident because the Empire has stumbled upon true living beings for the first time in recorded history. The revelation that the citizens of the Empire are not natural entities, but artificial constructions of an earlier natural race, will cause an inferiority complex that will shake the Empire's foundations.

Pretty good. "The Demi-Urge" first appeared in the June issue of Amazing and is now available at Gutenberg.org.

"Utopia? Never!"

Utopias and utopianism are common topics in science fiction--during the life of this blog I have read stories by Theodore Sturgeon and Edgar Pangborn which present utopias, as well as stories by Clare Winger Harris, R. A. Lafferty, and Tanith Lee that express skepticism of utopianism. I was intrigued by the title of this three-page story, curious to see how Disch would engage with the idea of Utopia in this short format.

I was a little disappointed; this is an entertaining story, but little more than a twist-ending thriller kind of thing. The planet of New Katanga (the name is a clue to what is going on), called "Utopia" by its inhabitants, has great wealth, because it exports the finest fleece in the galaxy. Due to a secret process, the "gobblers" raised on New Katanga have much better fleece than gobblers raised on other planets. This monopoly produces enough money for the Utopians to live lives of ease, dining on the finest cuisine in the galaxy, surrounded by beautiful architecture.

The overt theme of the story is voiced by a tourist visiting the planet, who declares that a utopia is impossible: "'There's always a fly in the ointment...Injustice is a part of human nature. A society can't do without it.'" This is the kind of pessimism we have every right to expect from the author of 334! Despite his skepticism, the tourist is enjoying his visit, and jumps at the chance to become a citizen of New Katanga. Then it is revealed how the Utopians produce such fine gobbler fleece--immigrants are fed alive to the gobblers! It is a diet of human flesh which makes the gobbler fleece of New Katanga so fine. The evil behind New Katanga is made explicit when we (and the tourist) discover that the gobblers are fed in a Roman-style arena, before rapt crowds of spectators.

Presumably this is yet another literary attack on successful businesspeople; the Katangans make their profits and finance their high lifestyle through monopoly and murder. It also reminded me of the dream sequence in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which scenes of a utopia are followed by a vision of human sacrifice.

An acceptable entertainment. "Utopia? Never!" first appeared in Amazing's August issue.

***********

A pretty good selection; 1963 was evidently a good year for Disch and his fans. "The Return of the Medusae" and "The Demi-Urge," in particular, are models of good "short-shorts;" they offer striking ideas and are imbued with emotional content and psychological insight. "Final Audit" and "Utopia? Never!" are well-put-together and entertaining. As for "The Princess' Carillon," well, you can't win them all.

More stories from One Hundred and Two H-Bombs in our next episode!

Monday, January 5, 2015

Future Corruption 1: Lupoff, Gloeckner, Goldin & Lafferty

The world is full of evil, I think we can all agree about that! (What we can't agree on is exactly who or what is evil; one man's courageous freedom fighter is another man's murderous terrorist, after all.) If the world is full of evil today, what can we expect to see in the future? Greater evil? Different evil? Let's get our pessimism on (the kids still talk that way, right?) with Roger Elwood and a bunch of scribblers the people in the advertising department call "science fiction's top writers" and indulge in some literary speculations about Future Corruption.

Future Corruption, unleashed on the public in 1975, has a gloomy Richard Powers cover (gorgeous reds and purples) that reminds me of Abraham Bosses's famous frontispiece to Hobbes' Leviathan, and text on the back cover that is meant to invoke Anthony's funeral oration from Julius Caesar. All the stories are new to this collection. All this is giving me a good vibe.

For fun, let's rate these stories not merely on whether they are entertaining or show literary merit, like we always do, but also on to what extent they further the supposed mission of the anthology, and on the magnitude of the evils they depict.

"Saltzman's Madness" by Richard Lupoff

I recently read Lupoff's novel Sandworld and gave it a mixed review. "Saltzman's Madness" is actually a decent horror story, but I'm not sure it really belongs in a book that aims to "explore the outer limits of our potential for evil" or "speculate on the spread of corruption" in the future.

This is a longish (over 30 pages), rambling story with quite a few characters. Basically, Saltzman is one of the lead computer programmers at a software firm that makes operating systems. Saltzman hates wasting time, is in fact with obsessed with using time wisely. He hates to sleep, he insists on working on documents while riding in the car, and so forth. One night in the bathroom (!) he has a sort of epiphany, and becomes convinced that there is a lot of time out there that we don't experience, that each minute is actually something like 100 seconds long, and each hour 100 minutes long, but beings from another dimension are using those extra 40 seconds and minutes.

Saltzman talks to a scientist who is doing research on tachyons, and to the office beatnik who talks about how marijuana, LSD and "speed" effect one's "time sense." Finally, Saltzman comes up with the idea that if he listens to Josef Rheinberger's "Organ Concerto in G Minor" through headphones, with the orchestral track and the organ track moving at different speeds, maybe he will be able to access all that extra time that is out there.

(I listened to the rendition of the Concerto at the link above while I wrote this, and have to admit I found it too high pitched; all those high notes pained my poor ears. Maybe the speakers on my laptop are to blame?)

H. P. Lovecraft-style, this experiment drives Saltzman insane and almost summons malevolent monsters to our universe from another dimension--or maybe not almost; could Saltzman's insanity in fact be possession by an alien creature?

Also Lovecraft-style, we know from the first page that Saltzman is in a government funny farm with some kind of multiple personality disorder; the story is almost entirely a flashback.

I enjoyed the story, but if someone complained that it was padded with overly long lectures on Einsteinian time-space theory and illegal drugs, and discussions of computer programming and high end hi-fi equipment, I would be hard pressed to disagree.

So, a thumbs up for "Saltzman's Madness," but a very low reading on the evilometer.

"Saltzman's Madness" Is the story good?: Moderately good. Evilometer Reading: Very Low

"Andrew" by Carolyn Gloeckner

Gloeckner has only four entries on isfdb, all for short stories published in the first half of the 1970s. Googling around suggests that there is a Carolyn Gloeckner who writes biographies of sports figures and adaptations of popular classics for kids, but I don't know if this the same individual. "Andrew," apparently, is her last published SF story.

"Andrew" reminded me of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice as well as episodes from Casanova's memoirs.

A black hole flies through the Solar System, destroying all the planets and exterminating the human race. Just in time, a space ship leaves Earth with less than 2,000 survivors. The captain of the ship is a homosexual, and the twenty page story is about how he uses his position as captain to seduce a beautiful boy ("His face was childishly rounded, but his features were those of a Greek bust-- classic, symmetrical, elegantly defined.") The boy moves from his family's spartan cubicle where they eat protein bars every day and into the captain's richly appointed quarters where he can drink booze and eat gourmet food. The captain fears that Andrew Garland's parents will object, but when they come to see him they just extort some extra rations out of him--they have essentially sold their son to the captain for use as a sex toy.

Before moving in with the captain, Andrew was recognized as one of the smartest pupils in the ship, and everyone expected him to become a high officer, even captain. However, access to alcohol and drugs absolutely corrupted him, and he abandoned his studies. Years later the captain realizes the selfish thing he has done, turning a promising young man, who could have had an exciting and productive career and done a great service to humanity as a leader in the ship, into a parasite.

This is a quite good story. All the human relations stuff is good, and all the SF stuff is good, and the story and all its scenes are just the correct length--Gloeckner conveys emotion and presents us a clear picture of life in the ship with the minimum amount of verbiage. And "Andrew" is actually about what this anthology is supposed to be about: corruption. The captain is corrupted by power and lust, Andrew's parents by poverty and greed, and Andrew by temptation. In a situation in which the entire human race is reduced to fewer than 2,000 people, all these characters, instead of doing their duty to a fragile society, selfishly pursue their animal desires.

"Andrew" Is the story good?: Good! Evilometer Reading: Moderate

"Prelude to a Symphony of Unborn Shouts" by Stephen Goldin

Recently I read a very short story by Goldin and thought it pretty good. Years ago I read one of Goldin's novels, A World Called Solitude, and also liked it.

One of the reasons I liked the Goldin short short referred to above is that it had characters, plot and emotion. Unfortunately, "Prelude to a Symphony of Unborn Shouts" has none of these. It is one of those stories (six pages long, in this case) which consists entirely of newspaper clippings and quotes from fictional pundits.

The topic Goldin is addressing here is overpopulation. (I guess he thinks it is evil to have children?Or more children than he has had?) Set in the 1990s, the newspaper clippings describe how governments react to an overpopulation crisis by encouraging people to use contraceptives and have abortions. Religious people resist these moves. The story is supposed to be funny (I think), and includes banal jokes from a fictional comedian. Here's one of the jokes:

"You know, if they really wanted birth control, they'd simply outlaw aspirin. Then the girls could have as many headaches as they wanted."

The clippings about religion paint the religious as violent goofballs, and the final clipping is about food riots that (presumably) resulted due to overpopulation, so it is clear where Goldin's sympathies lie. Maybe this story will appeal to militant atheists and people who are really worried about overpopulation. I'm a laid back atheist and I'm not worried about overpopulation, and the story is not interesting or amusing or persuasive, so I thought it was quite lame.

"Prelude..." Is the story good?: No. Evilometer Reading: Low

"Heart Grow Fonder" by R. A Lafferty

I've read a sizable amount of Lafferty stories since I started this here blog, and for the most part I have found his stories amusing and thought-provoking. It will be poetic justice if, after dedicated atheist Goldin laid that clunker on us, committed Catholic Lafferty can deliver the comedy goods.

Lafferty does not disappoint; "Heart Grow Fonder" is fun and entertaining and is all about temptation and the evils of deceitfulness, marital infidelity, thievery, and trying to be something (and someone) you are not.

Simon Radert is happily married and enjoys his work (apparently he is some kind of accountant or finance expert--Lafferty calls him a "paper pusher" and assures us he is well remunerated.) When some swingers, the Swags, move in next door Radert is initially hostile to them, calling them "creeps," but it is not long before he is coveting sexy Mrs. Swag.

We learn that Mr. Swag has the ability to swap minds and bodies with people, and he shifts his own consciousness into Radert's body for an hour at midday so he can have sex with Radert's wife. Mrs. Radert, at least initially thinking this is her own husband expressing renewed interest in her, is thrilled. Swag starts doing this every day at noon like clockwork, and Radert, in Swag's body during these periods, succumbs to temptation and starts having sex every noon hour with Swag's wife. (Swag's wife is aware another man is inhabiting her husband's body and responds with enthusiasm; she has many such liaisons every day!)

Radert not only succumbs to the temptation to betray his wife and marriage. Being in Swag's body provides him access to Swag's bank accounts and financial papers, and Radert begins shifting money from Swag's accounts to his own (as well as engaging in far more complex swindles.) Before the story is over Radert is even plotting Swag's murder.

"Heart Grow Fonder" benefits from Lafferty's jocular style, and moves briskly, but I found the end of the story, as various characters' duplicitous schemes collide, somewhat confusing.

Notable about the story is that Lafferty does not follow the paradigm set out by the text on the cover of the paperback, that the stories be about the future and science. (To be fair, in his introduction to the volume, editor Elwood does not lay out these "rules," and perhaps they were concocted just for marketing purposes after the stories were compiled.) This story is not about science or the future. Lafferty specifically informs us that the body switching as depicted in the story is not scientifically possible, and attributes it to supernatural means, mentioning the devil repeatedly, and implying that Radert is bound for hell thanks to his sins. Lafferty also argues, as we might expect a religious person to, that there are more ways to look at the world than the "scientific" way, and suggests that scientists are as susceptible to bias and error as anybody.

Like most of Lafferty's work, fun and thought-provoking.

"Heart Grow Fonder" Is it good?: Yes. Evilometer Reading: High.

********************

The Goldin piece was poor, but it was short. I enjoyed the Lupoff story, and the Gloeckner and Lafferty stories were even better and addressed issues of temptation and corruption in an emotionally affecting and intellectually engaging way. So far I'm really enjoying Elwood's anthology.

In our next episode, more corruption, this time with our old friends J. J. Russ, Bill Pronzini, and Barry Malzberg.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti

"Humanity is fickle. In general, I do not love it. Yet how gladly at that moment I would have joined with them. The mob brooks no jesting. Fearful is its vengeance...."

Growing up, then commuting to college and then work in suburban New Jersey, meant that for the first 25 years of my life I spent approximately 30,000 hours a week in an automobile. Then for over ten years I lived and worked in New York City, a blissful motor-car-free interlude. Four years ago I was driven by the black verdict of fate from that Eden, so I’m back on the 30,000 hours/150,000 mile a week plan.

As a kid, I loved to sleep in the car; similarly, as an adult, I loved sleeping on Metro North, the commuter train that travels between beautiful Grand Central Terminal and points north. I find the movement of the vehicle very soothing, the passing landscape hypnotic. Of course, I can’t go to sleep while crisscrossing the Middle West in the driver’s seat of my dented Toyota Corolla, so to stay awake I listen to the radio.

One black September night while I was barreling home at 70 miles per hour on Route 69 (or 65, I can’t keep these damn highways straight) John Batchelor, while talking to a scientist about monkeys, started running his yap about a Modernist novel called Auto-da-Fé by an Elias Canetti. It sounded pretty good, so I tried to find it at various nearby libraries, but had no luck. So I broke down and purchased a 1984 printing of the novel used, and this week read it.

Elias Canetti was born in Bulgaria, traveled Europe in his youth, and in 1981 received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Auto-da-Fé, published in 1935 in Germany under the title Die Blendung, consists of three parts and totals 464 pages in the 1947 English translation by C. V. Wedgwood, which Wedgwood did in collaboration with Canetti himself, who lived in the UK for some decades following the Anschluss.

In Part One, "A Head Without a World," we meet eccentric and reclusive genius Peter Kien. Kien is the world’s foremost sinologist, and resident in a German city with his library of 25,000 books. Kien has refused many offers of university chairs, and conducts his work in private, living on an inheritance. Thanks to his peerless memory, vast erudition and iron discipline, each of the few papers he produces is a work of seminal and revolutionary importance in its field.

Kien lives for his work and his beloved books—money, food, sex, friendship, these mean nothing to him. He recognizes a need for rest and exercise, so every morning he takes a walk around the city, carrying with him a briefcase full of books to keep him company. He carefully selects which books to carry each day, and holds the briefcase close to his body as he takes his constitutional.

One day, in a moment of weakness and delusion, 40-year-old Kien is tricked by his ugly 57-year-old housekeeper, Therese, into marrying her. An ignorant, greedy, domineering and stupid woman, in short order Therese destroys Kien’s life, rearranging his orderly and comfortable home and schedule, stealing his money, physically beating his frail body, and finally throwing him out of his own apartment and onto the streets.

Part One of the novel is full of memorable images (Canetti’s description of Kien’s book-lined apartment is quite fine), psychological insights (throughout the book we are privy to the characters’ fantasies and dreams), and compelling scenes. Many scenes struck a chord with me, reflective as they were of the difficulties some of us have living with another person. In one scene Kien is so disturbed by the sight of the new furniture his wife has introduced into his rooms that he takes to walking around the apartment with his eyes closed. Kien’s memory is so exact and his library so well-organized that even blind he is able to retrieve any book he requires from among their thousands. In another scene, while confined to a sick bed, Kien has the delusion that he has grown ear flaps with which he can stop up his ears and protect his mind from Therese’s repetitive and moronic chatter.

In Part One we saw evidence of Kien’s tenuous grasp on sanity—he gives a stirring speech to his assembled books, for example, and has long conversations with apparitions of Chinese philosophers—but in Part Two, "Headless World," Kien’s mental state deteriorates further. Having memorized all the books in his library, Kien figuratively carries his books around in his head. But Kien comes to take that phrase literally, and each night he pantomimes pulling the books out of his skull and piling them up in his hotel room. Kien even lays paper on the hotel room floor, so his noncorporeal books won’t get dirty, and hires a man, a hunchbacked Jewish dwarf, to help him with this task.

The dwarf, Fischerle, is a brilliantly realized and brilliantly funny character. Fischerle is an unacknowledged chess master with ambitions of moving to America and building himself a palace. He haunts a low class café where he pimps out his wife. Kien in the second part of the novel reminded me of Don Quixote, and Fischerle plays the role of his Sancho Panza, but a malevolent Sancho who takes advantage of Kien’s delusions, stealing the money that Therese didn’t manage to get her mitts on. Part Two climaxes with a long chapter that serves as an epic of Fischerle's hilarious adventures with Kien's money, which he uses in a tragic attempt to learn English, move to America, defeat the official chess champions and marry a millionairess.

In the third part of the novel, "The World in the Head," Kien totally, self-destructively, loses his mind, and we meet Kien's brother George, a psychiatrist who lives in Paris and is in many ways the polar opposite of Peter. Where Peter has abandoned humanity and lived a life dedicated to favor of books, George has abandoned books and embraced humanity. George comes to Germany to help his brother, and they find something to agree on when they have a learned discussion on how evil and disgusting women are, replete with scholarly references to Confucius, Buddha, Homer, and the Bible! George tries to patch up Peter's life, getting rid of Therese, installing Peter back in his apartment, and rescuing Peter's books from the state pawn shop, but he is too late; absolutely insane (or "crackers," as Fischerle puts it) Peter immolates himself and his unique library.

The elements of Auto-da-Fé that most appealed to me were those about tragic male-female relationships (and there are several such miserable relationships in the book), but on the back cover of my edition Salman Rushdie and the publishers imply the novel is a “terrifying” work “concerned with the horror of the modern world….” What does this mean? Presumably men and women have been treating each other shabbily and suffering from unrequited love since the dawn of time, so that horror hardly counts as “modern.”

In about the final third or so of the book Kien, after a fight with Therese and others in the government pawn shop (Therese has come to sell her husbands books to this institution, which Canetti condemns with some bitterness), comes under the power of crowds (the subject of Canetti's famous non-fiction volume) and of the state. These powerful forces are irrational, corrupt, and quite dangerous. The crowd is eager to play some role in the Kien-Therese conflict, but its attitude towards the couple changes by the second as its members exchange one wrongheaded idea for another. When the police bring the combatants in for questioning we find that the police inspector and his officers act just as badly as the fickle and ignorant mob. Both the police and the citizens who make up the crowd relish committing violence against the helpless, and embrace any opportunity to do so. Society, in Auto-da-Fé, as represented by the people and by the state, is an erratic and predatory monster.

Besides the horror of the urban crowd and of modern government, the talk of “horror” and “the modern predicament” on the back of the book is probably a reference to Auto-da-Fé being an attack on the importance of money and property in Western bourgeois society. With the exception of the Kiens, all the characters (and there are like eight or ten whom I haven’t mentioned) are motivated by a desire for money, and most try to obtain it through fraud. The characters often use the word “capital,” and Fischerle’s whore of a wife is called “The Capitalist” by the denizens of the café because she has a steady john who provides her a steady income. The dwarf calls his elaborate arrangements to defraud Kien of his cash his “firm,” calls Kien, the man he is robbing, his “business partner,” and calls his accomplices in this crime his “employees.” Similarly, a forger hired by Fischerle is obsessed with advertising his products to other members of the underworld. The narcissistic and obsessive police inspector has a seat cushion which he has labelled “Private Property” and which he permits none of his colleagues to use. In Auto-da-Fé business and remunerative work are synonymous with crime and predatory selfishness.

What are we to think of Kien, whom I have compared to Don Quixote? Some readers of Cervantes see Don Quixote as a figure to be admired, even though he is insane and commits many anti-social acts, because The Knight of the Woeful Countenance represents a noble spirit or humanistic ideology that is in contrast to the fallen world in which he, and we readers, live. Should we admire Kien in the same way? Kien is obviously insane, and quite anti-social, but perhaps Canetti expects us to admire his dedication to books and learning and his disdain for money, despite his contempt for the common people, repeated refusals to provide even the most meager aid to his neighbors, his fantasies of murdering Therese, and dehumanizing misogyny. Or is Kien an admonitory figure, directed at the intellectual and artistic classes, meant to dissuade them from or condemn them for turning their backs on humanity and using their gifts selfishly instead of for the betterment of society? Perhaps it is significant that Peter and George Kien, who are undoubtedly intelligent and highly educated, make boneheaded mistakes just like the crowds and police, misjudging people and misinterpreting clues. In my experience it is typical for academic types to look down on the uneducated common masses, and Canetti could be castigating them, pointing out that they are no better morally than those they despise, and are prone to the same mistakes.

I enjoyed Auto-da-Fé, and would definitely recommend it. I laughed at many of the jokes (best joke: page 337), and found many of the situations, images, and characters compelling. I have to admit to enjoying the first part (pages 9 to 166) and the end of Part Two (the saga of Fischerle, pages 326 to 366) the best; a few of the middle sections, such as the long sequence at the police station, felt a little slow and repetitive. The novel is long, but not particularly difficult; I thought it was an easier read than (to pick another novel by a Nobel winner) Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which I finished and can recommend, and (to pick another Modernist work) Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, which soundly defeated me after only a dozen pages or so. I guess I should warn that some may be offended by the depictions and treatment of women in the book, and perhaps by the Jewish dwarf character, whose long nose and hideous hump are used to absurd and comedic effect time and again. On the other hand, you could easily interpret the novel as an expose of how women and the underprivileged are abused by men and society; Auto-da-Fé is the kind of book which rewards criticism from varying angles.

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