Ivebeenreadinglately

The NYRB Classics Tumblr has alerted me to the news that Patrick Leigh Fermor has died. The death of a ninety-six-year-old tends to bring more appreciation than sadness, at least to those of us who knew the man only through his words. I've written about Fermor here quite a bit before; his travel writings are among the best of the genre, and for an unapologetic Anglophile like myself, Fermor epitomized a certain attractive strand of English upper-class intrepidity, a more benignly globetrotting twentieth-century version of the Victorian imperialist adventurer. If you've not read him, now's the time: as I wrote over at the Annex: Start with A Time of Gifts, the first leg of his lifelong journey, or In Tearing Haste, the collection of his correspondence with Deborah Mitford. And then don’t stop. When you’re done with it all, you can read W. Stanley Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight, an account of the time the author and Fermor kidnapped a German general.

A Fermor fan site is gathering links to obituaries, which will be plentiful and full of incident. For my remembrance, I'll turn to an unforgettable party scene that Fermor, a splendid raconteur and light-hearted enjoyer of good company, described in a letter of thanks to the host, his good friend Deborah Mitford, in a letter of July 26, 1990, collected in In Tearing Haste:

It was a marvelous and grand arrival there--the expanse of empty black-and-white check flor, then the great swoop of scarlet stairs, with your solitary triumvirate welcomingly halted half way up. . . . It was as if the whole house had transformed into a different element, half familiar and half unknown, like a fair, or an aquarium full of resplendent creatures and any number of friendly faces, starting with Henry's. The tented acreage--those steps and the normally outdoors reclining statue and dog being indoors gave a real through-the-looking-glass feeling. The whole thing, that array of people looking after us, everything being marvellous and on time, as though being painlessly managed with a magic wand--there were so many openings for things being held up, or going wrong. None did and, for me, the whole thing dissolved into one of those golden Turner radiances. . . . The great thing was that you and Andrew spread such a feeling of enjoyment and warmth and fun, that it seemed to affect everything else. It was only later that it occurred to me that I had told my entire life story to Madame de Vogue last time, the only one, I'd sat next to her, but it didn't seem to matter. Part of the previously golden Turneresque mist was that I lost touch with all nearest and dearest--couldn't find you or Robert, sat and had long chats with Coote and Billa. What was strange was that it seemed simultaneously to last for ever and to be over almost at once. Like Wellington's battle comparison. It all looked fantastic, driving away, looking back on bridge and river, the big tent, the full moon high up, a few decorative alabaster clouds floating discreetly, some people strolling under oak trees, and dawn beginning to break. It was still total glory. I'll never see anything like it again, nor will anyone, and many many thanks to you and Andrew.

And tons of love from
Paddy

If there's an afterlife, I hope that a Turneresque mist and some alabaster clouds, plentiful fine drinks and good company, and perhaps a little-noted footpath disappearing off into the woods, are what greet Fermor tonight. Rest in peace.

When the news of J. G. Ballard's death came across the wires, I happened to have just finished reading Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (1966), and it was only natural to find myself comparing Harrison's novel to the two Ballard catastrophe novels I've read, The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought (1964).

The difference was stark: Harrison's novel, which presents 1999 Manhattan, teeming with people and scrapping for resources, is perfectly fine science fiction, its occasional striking image--like the rusting hulks of the Brooklyn Navy Yard re-imagined as secret freshwater lagoons--balancing its structural problems and didacticism. But that's all it is: a fairly straightforward working-out of the problems that might face a 35-million-strong Manhattan in a world of depleted resources. Harrison's New York remains recognizably our own world, populated by people we know living lives we easily understand. Their environment has changed, even turned on them, but they remain fundamentally the same.

Ballard's catastrophe novels argue that there is much more at stake: where Harrison is content to imagine the physical consequences of changes in our way of life, Ballard wants to explore how those changes affect the very core of our being, how the radical alteration of society can't help but generate a radical alteration in the self. I wrote about the pair of novels last year for the New York Moon, so I won't go into great detail here. I think a couple of passages from The Drought will suffice to give a sense of the strangeness with which Ballard invests his dystopias.

First, because Ballard's landscapes were always lavishly--if coldly--described, here's a depiction of the coast in this future where rain has forsaken us:

Under the empty winter sky the salt-dunes ran on for miles. Seldom varying more than a few feet from trough to crest, they shone damply in the cold air, the pools of brine disturbed by the inshore wind. Sometimes, in a distant foretaste of the spring to come, their crests would be touched with white streaks as a few crystals evaporated out into the sunlight, but by the early afternoon these began to deliquesce, and the grey flanks of the dunes would run with a pale light.

To the east and west the dunes stretcehd along the coast to the horizon, occasionally giving way to a small lake of stagnant brine or a lost creek cut off from the rest of its channel. To the south, in the direction of the sea, the dunes gradually became more shallow, extending into long salt flats. At high tide they were covered by a few inches of clear water, the narrowing causeways of firmer salt reaching out into the sea.

Nowhere was there a defined margin between the shore and sea, and the endless shallows formed the only dividing zone, land and water submerged in this grey liquid limbo.

The precision of that description is what impresses me most, the way that Ballard offers not just the view, but a sense of its changes through the day, as salt crystals evaporate and "pale light" touches the dunes; the dunes are fully realized in space and time, to the point that you can immediately imagine trudging over them in search--you immediately assume--of the sea.

So we are prepared for the figures who soon come over the rise--but nothing could prepare us for their unsettlingly odd appearance and actions:

At this moment, a shout crossed the air. A dozen men rose from behidn the bank surrounding the lagoon and with long paddles of whalebone began to shovel the wet salt into the breach. Sliding up to their waists in the grey slush, they worked furiously as the crystals drained backwards towards the sea. Their arms and chests were strung with strips of rag and rubber. They drove each other on with sharp cries and shouts, their backs bent as they ladled the salt up into the breach, trying to contain the water in the lagoon before the tide turned.

Watching them from the edge of the bank was a tall, thin-faced man wearing a sealskin cape over his left shoulder, his right hand on the shaft of his double-bladed paddle. His dark face, from which all flesh had been drained away, seemed to consist of a series of flint-like points, the sharp cheekbones and jaw almost piercing his hard skin.

It's a chilling scene, one into which the reader is plunged with almost no foreknowledge, no guidelines with which to interpret the people or their actions, and the effect is frighteningly dislocating. If Harrison's book is a warning of what might go wrong, Ballard's novels are closer to reminders that, when something eventually does go very wrong, no warning is going to be able to help us.

I finished those two novels last summer determined to read much more Ballard, and the many tributes to his work--far more able than mine--that appeared last week have only strengthened my resolve. I recommend the one by Simon Reynolds at Salon and Martin Amis's in the Guardian; the reviews of Ballard that Amis collected in his The War Against Cliche are also well worth seeking out.

In the meantime, U.S. publishers take note: there's a lot of Ballard that's out of print and ripe for republishing . . .

From Nobody Runs Forever (2004), by Richard Stark

Parker kept climbing. There was no way to know how high the hill was. He climbed to the north, and eventually the slope would start down the other side. He'd keep ahead of the dogs, and somewhere along the line he'd find a place to hole up. He could keep away from the pursuit until dark, and then he'd decide what to do next. He kept climbing.

Donald E. Westlake himself warned us that this day was coming: the title of his twenty-second novel about Parker the heister, Nobody Runs Forever, serves as a reminder that even those of us who work in less risky occupations are nonetheless living on borrowed time. And what better use to make of that time than to sit down every single day at the typewriter and explore the vicissitudes of humanity, inventing characters and getting them into trouble just to see how they might get out of it? Do it long enough, do it well enough, and you just might create something that runs forever after all.

No bookie will quote you odds on forever, but I'll lay a bet that Westlake's creations will keep running for a long, long time. A master craftsman, he's known primarily for two very different series: the comic caper novels featuring hard-luck heister John Dortmunder and the hard-boiled heist novels featuring Parker, written under the name Richard Stark. I've written extensively already about the Parker novels; for now, suffice to say that if you love crime novels, or even just good, smart, meticulously crafted writing, you should grab a copy of The Hunter and clear your schedule for the night.

I'm proud to have been able, a year ago, to play a part in the decision by my employer, the University of Chicago Press, to begin republishing the early volumes of the series; watching the books find new readers has been a sheer joy. While I think Westlake was amused by the idea of Parker stalking the staid, respectable halls of a university press, I also know that he was pleased to have joined a list that includes one of his own favorite writers, Anthony Powell. And though I never met Westlake, in all the e-mail exchanges my colleagues and I had with him, we found him to be unfailingly kind, warm, appreciative, and witty--everything you want your literary heroes to turn out to be. The raft of other tributes that have appeared since his death paint a similar picture.

Late last night I got to thinking about the sort of afterlife that one ought to imagine for Donald Westlake. I initially pictured a world full of the heists of Parker's dreams, the ones that run like clockwork, where you don't even have to draw your gun and there's not a layabout, double-crosser, goofball, or incompetent in sight.

But would that really suit someone as interested in human foibles as Donald Westlake? We wouldn't want him to get bored, after all. So, whoever sets up the strings to knock off the heavenly vaults, you might consider tossing in a grifter, a hothead, or even an idiot once in a while. Don't worry: Westlake will know how to keep them in line.

George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, is dead at 82. Fraser wrote twelve novels starring the caddish Flashman, whose disreputable romps through the Victorian era offered readers constant displays of cowardice, arrogance, and unrepentant--though historically accurate--imperialism, racism, sexism, and general misanthropy. They were spectacular--if thoroughly disreputable--fun.

There are several full obituaries online, though my favorite is this one from the New York Times, if only because it informs readers that through the first nine novels, Flash had bedded 480 women (while being reliably cuckolded by his independent and lusty wife). That, it seems, sets a task for readers: time to log the conquests in the final three!

Ordinarily, for a writer I've enjoyed this much, I'd write a brief appreciation or pluck some appropriate lines from one of his books. But I don't think I can top the post I wrote a few weeks ago that offered a simple method for determining whether one ought to give the Flashman novels a try.

From The Book of Three (1964)

Taran wanted to make a sword, but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes. And so it had been horseshoes all morning long.

With those utterly straightforward, yet evocative lines--surely one of the best openings of any children's book--Lloyd Alexander began his Chronicles of Prydain, a five-book series aimed at young adults that wove the Mabinogion and other Welsh myths with Alexander's own inventions into a fantastic, heroic, exciting tale that's the equal of any children's story I know. Alexander died back in May at age 83, though I just learned about his death from Ed at the Dizzies, and obituaries are still appearing now. He leaves behind more than thirty-five books for children, the writing of which he described as "the most creative and liberating experience of my life."

Looking back, my discovery of Alexander in fourth grade seems perfectly emblematic of the experience of childhood reading. I bought The High King (1968), the final volume of the Prydain Chronicles, at a Scholastic Book Fair, seduced as much by the Newbery Medal logo as by the swords and monsters on the cover. I devoured it, astonished, then read it again while waiting for the remaining volumes to be sent to my local library through the regional library system.

When they finally arrived, they didn't disappoint. This was storytelling of a wholly different caliber than I, having previously subsisted mostly on the Hardy Boys, had ever encountered. There were real dangers in Prydain, real values--compassion, care, kindness, and, most of all, bravery and heroism--at stake, and there were real consequences to the characters' actions, good and bad. I think the Prydain Chronicles may have been the first books I read where all the members of the heroes' party weren't there to celebrate at the end. As Alexander's hero, Taran the Assistant Pig-Keeper, puts it in The Black Cauldron (1965):

"It is strange," he said at last. "I had longed to enter the world of men. Now I see it filled with sorrow, with cruelty and treachery, with those who would destroy all around them."

But even as Alexander was making that more clear than it had been to me up to that point, he never went long without a reminder of the good that also graces the world. Taran's worries lead his friend and mentor Lord Gwydion to reply:

"Yet, enter it you must," Gwydion answered, "for it is a destiny laid on each of us. True, you have seen these things. But there are equal parts of love and joy."

As fun and surprising as Alexander's inventive fantasy can be, it is that ability to mix sorrow with joy, excruciatingly difficult trials with moments of sweet fellowship, failure with success, that lifts the Prydain Chronicles to the highest echelon of children's literature; despite not explicitly teaching lessons or linking Taran's struggles to our own, the books cannot help but enlarge a child's understanding, empathy, and self-knowledge. Alexander himself hints at that in the last lines of his introduction to The Book of Three:

The Chronicle of Prydain is a fantasy. Such things never happen in real life. Or do they? Most of us are called on to perform tasks far beyond what we believe we can do. Our capabilities seldom match our aspirations, and we are often woefully unprepared. To this extent, we are all Assistant Pig-Keepers at heart.

Though the Prydain books were Alexander's crowning achievement, I read most of his other books multiple times as well. The Westmark Trilogy, a mostly realistic trilogy set in a vaguely eighteenth-century Europe, tells the dramatic tale of a revolt against corrupt monarchical and religious authority, along the way advancing arguments for individual liberty and the importance of being willing to fight for what one believes in. I checked all three out of the Carmi Public Library multiple times; the third volume, The Beggar Queen (1984), is the first book whose publication I remember anxiously awaiting.

Even some of Alexander's less ambitious, stand-alone novels are well worth remembering. One that I still recall fondly is Time Cat (1963), which undertakes to explain why it is that we attribute nine lives to cats. It turns out that cats are natural time travelers, allowed nine times in their lives to enter different eras and places--which also explains where cats are those many times when, despite turning the house upside down, you can't find them.

If you're looking for books to put in the hands of the kids in your life, you really can't go wrong with Lloyd Alexander. There's little higher praise in my book.

From Taran Wanderer (1967)

"I have the sword I fashioned," Taran proudly cried, "the cloak I wove, and the bowl I shaped. And the friendship of those in the fairest land of Prydain. No man can find greater treasure."

Melynlas pawed the ground, impatient, and Taran gave the stallion rein.

Thus Taran rode from Merin with Gurgi at his side.

And as he did, it seemed he could hear voices calling to him. "Remember us! Remember us!" He turned once, but Merin was far behind and out of sight. From the hills a wind had risen, driving the scattered leaves before it, bearing homeward to Caer Dallben. Taran followed it.

Rest in peace, Lloyd Alexander. Your tale is told. As the bards used to say at the close of each story in the Mabinogion:

And thus ends this branch of the Mabinogion.

From Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught everywhere from schools of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplements and women's magazines. My attack is not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or hairsplitting quibbles about fashions in design. It is an attack, rather, on the principles that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding.

Right after I moved to Uptown, I read The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It would be hard to overstate how brilliant it seemed. I was quickly growing to love the messy, unplanned, lively character of the neighborhood, and Jane Jacobs explained, clearly and convincingly, why it worked. From the organic, contingent development of successful city neighborhoods, she drew conclusions that, while flying in the face of development and planning principles of the time, seemed, when I read them thirty-seven years later, irrefutable. They described perfectly what I loved about Uptown.

Now, Jacobs's arguments for the value of multi-use, diverse, compact neighborhoods are nearly commonplaces. She didn't quite win the battle; the arguments over development, density, sprawl, and zoning continue. But she did fundamentally change the terms of the debate for the better. There aren't many people in any field who can say that.

Last night, before I knew Jacobs had died, Stacey and I saw a documentary at the Chicago Architectural Foundation about Alexander Caldwell, designer of some of Chicago's finest parks (including Promontory Point, the lily pond north of the Lincoln Park Zoo, and the entire lakefront between Foster and Montrose, where we spend countless summer hours).

In the cafe next door, an old man was reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities. When I'm his age, I'll probably still be able to find someone at the cafe next door to the Chicago Architecture Foundation reading Jane Jacobs, and learning from her. Books full of ideas are great, great things.

From "The Portobello Road," collected in The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark

I must explain that I departed this life nearly five years ago. But I did not altogether depart this world. There were those odd things still to be done which one’s executors can never do properly. Papers to be looked over, even after the executors have torn them up. . . . Sometimes as occasion arises on a Saturday morning, my friend Kathleen, who is a Catholic, has a Mass said for my soul, and then I am in attendance, as it were, at the church. But most Saturdays I take my delight among the solemn crowds with their aimless purposes, their eternal life not far away, who push past the counters and stalls, who handle, buy, steal, touch, desire and ogle the merchandise. I hear the tinkling tills, I hear the jangle of loose change and tongues and children wanting to hold and have.

That is how I came to be in the Portobello Road that Saturday morning when I saw George and Kathleen. I would not have spoken had I not been inspired to it. Indeed it’s one of the things I can’t do now—to speak out, unless inspired. And most extraordinary, on that morning as I spoke, a degree of visibility set in. I suppose from poor George’s point of view it was like seeing a ghost when he saw me standing by the fruit barrow repeating in so friendly a manner, “Hallo, George!”

From Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961)

What did [the word home] mean to me? Earth? I thought of the great bustling cities where I would wander and lose myself, and I thought of them as I had thought of the ocean [of Solaris] on the second or third night, when I had wanted to throw myself upon the dark waves. I shall immerse myself among men. I shall be silent and attentive, an appreciative companion. There will be many acquaintances, friends, women—and perhaps even a wife. For a while, I shall have to make a conscious effort to smile, nod, stand, and perform the thousands of little gestures which constitute life on Earth, and then those gestures will become reflexes again. I shall find new interests and occupations; and I shall not give myself completely to them, as I shall never again give myself completely to anything or anybody. Perhaps at night I shall stare up at the dark nebula that cuts off the light of the twin suns, and remember everything, even what I am thinking now. With a condescending, slightly rueful smile I shall remember my follies and my hopes. And this future Kelvin will be no less worthy a man than the Kelvin of the past, who was prepared for anything in the name of an ambitious enterprise called Contact. Nor will any man have the right to judge me.