In the visual arts, there’s Egon Schiele who died at 28, Seurat at 31, and the photographer Francesca Woodman, who leapt from a window of a Lower East Side building at just 22 years of age.

In literature, there’s Hart Crane. Chugging from Mexico to NYC on a steamship, the 32-year-old poet couldn’t help but hit on some handsome sailors, so got thrashed. Totally trashed days later, Crane keeled overboard. “Goodbye, everybody!”

Sylvia Plath was just 30 when she gassed herself. Her fatal despair also fueled her enduring collection, Ariel, with its fantastically deranged yet much celebrated poem, “Daddy.”

The German-born Otto Plath was a biologist who published Bumblebees and Their Ways in 1934. When Otto died in 1940, Sylvia was just 8-years-old. Although there’s no indication he had any Fascist sympathies, Otto transformed into an uber Nazi in Sylvia’s imagination.

This isn’t just fine but necessary, according to the Jewish critic Marjorie Perloff, “The Age Demanded a universal theme—the rejection not only of the ‘real’ father but also of the Nazi Father Of Us All […]”

Lauding “Daddy” as “the ‘Guernica’ of modern poetry,” the equally chosen George Steiner comments, “Sylvia Plath is only one of a number of young contemporary poets, novelists, and playwrights, themselves in no way implicates in the actual holocaust, who have done most to counter the general inclination to forget the death camps.”

(Far from being forgotten, George, it’s a permanent indictment of the entire West, a colossal hoax that can’t be challenged. Distorting and extorting society, the Holocaust is an insatiable Moloch.)

American letters’ biggest loss to an early death, though, is Breece D’J Pancake. While still a student at the University of Virginia, Pancake shot himself in the head, at age 26. His entire oeuvre consists of just 12 stories, but you’d hard pressed to find a finer batch.

Pancake’s story collection was published posthumously. Though he had joked to his mother that it should be called, “Bullshit Artist,” there’s no false note here. Pancake’s prose is always true and often startlingly fresh, and that’s because he observed and listened very attentively to his native West Virginia.

Stories matter because, at their best, they capture the texture of a place, and give us its inner life also. Beyond their plot or wisdom, they show us how people from a distant place and time really felt, thought and spoke.

Quotidian language is already creative, if not charming and amusing, but the fiction writer is not just a transcriber, of course. He must distill. Consider this exchange between two men, one much older, from Pancake’s “Trilobites”:

The girl brings Jim’s coffee in his cup, and we watch her pump back to the kitchen. Good hips.

“You see that?” He jerks his head toward her.

I say, “Moundsville Molasses.” I can spot jailbait by a mile.

“Hell, girl’s age never stopped your dad and me in Michigan.”

“Tell the truth.”

“Sure. You got to time it so you nail the first freight out when your pants are up.”

I look at the windowsill. It is speckled with the crisp skeletons of flies. “Why’d you and Pop leave Michigan?”

The crinkles around Jim’s eyes go slack. He says, “The war,” and sips his coffee.

“Pump,” “nail” and “skeleton of flies” are so deft and suggestive. Pancake delivers.

“Good hips” instead of “nice ass” is also a nice alteration, and the old man’s “You see that?” is comically authentic.

Of course, stemmed humyns are perked up by good hips, not cloaked up, and youth, as life, ever more life, always seduces, whatever the law. It’s only natural.

If not for this “sexism,” we’d have a society of dour dykes, seething incels and ghastly drag queens, like, well, right now, but I better not say that. It’s not correct.

In “Trilobites,” the narrator, Colly, is briefly visited by his old girlfriend, Ginny. Having moved from West Virginia to Florida, Ginny admits to having a new guy who’s “doing plankton research.”

Still, for old times’ sake, they have sex, and not very prettily, “I slide her to the floor. Her scent rises to me, and I shove crates aside to make room. I don’t wait. She isn’t making love, she’s getting laid. All right, I think, all right. Get laid. I pull her pants around her ankles, rut her.”

Again, the stark, nearly brutal language, but Pancake never allows us to laugh at any of his characters, unlike, say, with Flannery O’Connor. Pancake merges into each one, and through his artistry, we too suffer their desperation, shame and sorrows.

Unlike Ginny, Colly hasn’t been anywhere, “When I was a young punk, I tried to run away from home. I was walking through this meadow on the other side of the Hill, and this shadow passed over me. I honest to god thought it was a pterodactyl. It was a damned airplane. I was so damn mad, I came home.” That’s as close as he’s ever gotten to an airplane.

The dinette’s jailbait is also described as having “Hips and legs that climb steps into airplanes.”

Pancake’s implicit and suggestive style is indebted to Hemingway and his iceberg theory, of course, and his terse prose also betrays influence, but Pancake’s atmosphere, his climate, if you will, is clearly different. It is more grounded, often more trapped, and aches much more.

Further, Pancake’s characters speak with a surer poetry. The younger writer had the better ear, simply put.

Pancake is also more in-tune with the day-to-day grind of ordinary survival. In “A Room Forever,” what a beautiful title, a barge hand describes all the other lonely hearts on a New Year’s Eve, “I look around. All these people have come down from their flops because there are no parties for them to go to. They are strangers who play a little pool or pinball, drink a little booze. All year they grit their teeth—they pump gas and wait tables and screw chippies and bait queers, and they don’t like any of it, but they know they are lucky to get it.”

Get what? Anything, if you’re lucky.

Not knowing what to do with himself, the narrator wanders the superficially festive streets. Feeling mean and low, he enjoys the sight of a drunk bum trying to spread newspapers for his bed, in some cold alley, then he’s softened by the sight of an underaged whore, standing in a doorway, marking him.

They end up in his room, “The darkness is the best thing. There is no face, no talk, just warm skin, something close and kind, something to be lost in. But when I take her, I know what I’ve got—a little girl’s body that won’t move from wear or pleasure, a kid playing whore, and I feel ugly with her, because of her. I force myself on her like the rest. I know I am hurting her, but she will never get any breaks. She whimpers and my body arches in spasms, then after, she curls in a ball away from me, and I touch her. She is numb.”

When he suggests she could stay in this room for the month, get a job at Sears or Penny’s, then pay him back later, she tells him to “just shut-the-fuck-up.” Though he’s slated to ship out the next day, she doesn’t know that, so probably thinks he just wants free sex, but that’s for us to deduce. Pancake doesn’t spell everything out.

Leaving her john, the girl ends up getting plastered in a bar, before slitting her wrists, though without success. She’ll have plenty left to endure.

In Pancake’s story collection, there’s an introduction by James Alan McPherson, and two afterwords, by John Casey and Andre Dubus III. McPherson and Casey were Pancake’s professors at Virginia. Pancake didn’t live long enough to have many literary friends.

Flannery O’Connor

Though Flannery O’Connor didn’t live long, she left us some of the best stories ever written. It’s impossible to overpraise “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Displaced Person,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Good Country People,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and “Revelation.”

O’Connor’s liberal usage of the word “nigger” has always made many people uncomfortable, however, and considering today’s politically correct climate, she’s likely to have been canceled from most college syllabi.

Most damningly, there are passages from O’Connor’s correspondences that even her staunchest defenders can’t whitewash. On May 3^rd, 1964, just three months before her death from lupus, O’Connor wrote to Maryat Lee, “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly the new kind.”

So O’Connor allowed or forced herself to think one way, but felt otherwise. On May 21^st, O’Connor elaborated to Lee, “About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too […] If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute.”

Negroes shouldn’t philosophize, prophesize or pontificate, you see. It’s a white thang.

O’Connor’s disdain and condescension towards blacks don’t show up in her fiction, however. Integrationist by principle, she’s not a racist against blacks in her art.

In O’Connor’s stories, blacks are generally dignified and likable, unlike her idiotic, freakish or criminal white trash. When O’Connor’s blacks transgress, it’s rather harmlessly, like stealing a turkey. They’re not smug idiots, confidence tricksters or murderers, like her white trash.

Unlike the one-armed white trash in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” O’Connor’s blacks don’t steal your car and abandon your deaf daughter at a roadside diner, miles from home. Unlike the three coolly depraved white trash in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” they don’t shoot your grandchildren, including a baby, before finishing you off.

In “The Artificial Nigger,” a brainless rural white trash, ironically named Mr. Head, takes his grandson to Atlanta, to teach him an important lesson, “Mr. Head meant him to see everything there is to see in a city so that he would be content to stay at home for the rest of his life.”

To Mr. Head’s dismay, the boy, Nelson, was doggedly proud to have been born in Atlanta. An orphan, Nelson had spent his first six months there.

Even on the train there, Mr. Head behaved moronically. Rudely waking other passengers, he read aloud everything on his ticket. Later, Mr. Head declared the name of each passing building, forcing Nelson to hiss, “Hush up!” The boy had more innate dignity than his grandpa.

At home, Mr. Head had stressed to Nelson that Atlanta was “full of niggers,” and since the boy had never encountered one, he was totally unprepared for this nightmare. Now on the train, three blacks appeared.

O’Connor, “A huge coffee-colored man was coming slowly forward. He had on a light suit and a yellow satin tie with a ruby pin in it. One of his hands which rode majestically under his buttoned coat, and in the other he held the head of a black walking stick that he picked up and set down with a deliberate outward motion each time he took a step. He was proceeding very slowly, his large brown eyes gazing over the heads of the passengers. He had a small white mustache and white crinkly hair. Behind him there were two young women, both coffee-colored, one in a yellow dress and one in a green. Their progress was kept at the rate of his and they chatted in low throaty voices as they followed him.”

Much classier than Mr. Head and Nelson, the blacks were headed for the dining car. Later, Mr. Head also took his grandson there, but only to look. They couldn’t afford it.

Shooed away after they had tried to poke into the kitchen, Mr. Head cracked a loud joke about cockroaches that got everyone laughing. Triumphant, they returned to their seats.

For lunch, Mr. Head had brought a paper bag with some biscuits and a can of sardine, but in their excitement to get off the train, they forgot all about it, so went hungry for the rest of the day.

Tossed into the swirling city, both of them were overwhelmed, but grandpa had a strategy, “Mr. Head was determined not to go into any city store because on his first trip here, he had got lost in a large one and had found his way out only after many people had insulted him.”

Walking along, they browsed stores and even inspected the sewer, for Nelson’s much needed edification. Soon enough, though, they were lost. The houses had become much shabbier, and there were blacks everywhere.

O’Connor, “There were colored men in their undershirts standing in the doors and colored women rocking on the sagging porches. Colored children played in the gutters and stopped what they were doing to look at them. Before long they began to pass rows of stores with colored customers in them but they didn’t pause at the entrances of these. Black eyes in black faces were watching them from every direction.”

In this “nigger heaven,” Mr. Head was too intimidated to ask for directions, so it was left to the boy to approach a woman.

During their brief exchange, the motherless boy was overtaken by a painful, deeply smothered yearning, “He suddenly wanted her to reach down and pick him up and draw him against her and then he wanted to feel her breath on his face. He wanted to look down and down into her eyes while she held him tighter and tighter. He had never had such a feeling before.”

Unaware of this turbulence, the sweet woman merely responded, “You can go a block down yonder and catch you a car take you to the railroad station, Sugarpie.”

Since Mr. Head had never taken a streetcar, they didn’t board one, but merely follow the tracks. When you’re so ignorant yet proud, everything is impossible. Too exhausted and hungry to go on, Nelson had to sit down on the sidewalk, and when he dozed off, Mr. Head had an inspiration.

O’Connor, “He looked at the sprawled figure for several minutes; presently he stood up. He justified what he was going to do on the grounds that it is sometimes necessary to teach a child a lesson he won’t forget, particularly when the child is always reasserting his position with some new impudence. He walked without a sound to the corner about twenty feet away and sat down on a covered garbage can in the alley where he could look out and watch Nelson wake up alone.”

Nelson’s latest impudence was to ask that black lady for help. He needed to be taught a lesson for showing up his grandpa. White trash on a trash can, Mr. Head waited for Nelson’s waking terror.

The boy slept on. Impatient, Mr. Head finally kicked the trash can to jolt Nelson awake.

O’Connor, “Nelson shot up onto his feet with a shout. He looked where his grandfather should have been and stared. He seemed to whirl several times and then, picking up his feet and throwing his head back, he dashed down the street like a wild maddened pony.”

Many literary classics you encounter too early in life, often as a class assignment in college or even high school. With almost no life experience, you can’t fully grasp their deeper meanings. Nothing prevents you from rereading them much later, however, and a masterful work should be revisited again and again.

I don’t know how secure Hemingway is in the contemporary canon, but if you’re over 35-years-old, say, you’re likely to have read, if only sloppily, his “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Let’s reexamine this story.

A high-society American couple, Francis and Margot Macomber, went to Africa to experience big game hunting. There, they’re guided by Robert Wilson, an Englishman.

The story begins with all three having lunch after killing their first lion. The mood is tense and subdued, however. Something is wrong. Even after it’s spelled out, on page four, that Francis has just “shown himself, very publicly, to be a coward,” we still don’t know what happened.

So we’re dealing with its aftermath, which includes Margot seeing Francis and Wilson in new lights.

Throughout the story, much is made of Wilson’s ruddy complexion. Margot noticed this with pleasure whenever she looked at him, and flirting with the man, remarked about this repeatedly, to the point where Wilson had to protest, “I say, you wouldn’t like to drop my beauty as a topic, would you?”

Unlike her husband, Wilson was a white man with big brown hands and a very red face, and one who could calmly handle savage dangers. At home in Africa and speaking Swahili, Wilson was a white man of color.

Taking a dig at her husband, Margot purred to Wilson, “And I want so to see you perform again. You were lovely this morning. That is if blowing things’ heads off is lovely.”

What’s wrong with Francis Macomber? Nothing, really. No worse than you or me, he’s likely a few grades better.

Hemingway, “Francis Macomber was very tall, very well built if you did not mind that length of bone, dark, his hair cropped like an oarsman, rather thin-lipped, and was considered handsome.” He’s not weather beaten, though, like Wilson. Francis had an “American face that would stay adolescent until it became middle-aged.”

More, “He was very wealthy, and would be much wealthier, and he knew she would not leave him ever now. That was one of the few things that he really knew. He knew about that, about motor cycles—that was earliest—about motor cars, about duck-shooting, about fishing, trout, salmon and big-sea, about sex in books, many books, too many books, about all court games, about dogs, not much about horses, about hanging on to his money, about most of the other things his world dealt in, and about his wife not leaving him.”

Though a renowned beauty, Margot was no longer young, and Francis was simply too rich.

Civilized and domesticated, Francis Macomber was simply out of his elements in the African bush. The night before the lion hunt, he heard the lion roaring somewhere nearby and was terrified. In the morning, this fear increased because it was almost time to confront this lion.

Hemingway:

“What’s the matter, Francis?” his wife asked him.

“Nothing,” Macomber said.

“Yes, there is,” she said.

“What are you upset about?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Tell me,” she looked at him. “Don’t you feel well?”

“It’s that damned roaring,” he said.

“It’s been going on all night, you know.”

“Why didn’t you wake me,” she said. “I’d love to have heard it.”

“I’ve got to kill the damned thing,” Macomber said, miserably.

“Well, that’s what you’re out here for, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But I’m nervous. Hearing the thing roar gets on my nerves.”

“Well then, as Wilson said, kill him and stop his roaring.”

“Yes, darling,” said Francis Macomber. “It sounds easy, doesn’t it?”

“You’re not afraid, are you?”

“Of course not. But I’m nervous from hearing him roar all night.”

Terrified, he’s reduced to a boy seeking reassurance and encouragement from his mom. He’d rather be somewhere much safer, it’s clear.

They went out to look for the lion. Finding him easily, it was time for Francis to shoot, except he didn’t want to get out. Ridiculously, he wanted to target the beast from inside the car, but Wilson said no to that. It’s just not done.

Out, Francis’ hands shook and his legs could barely move, but he managed to get into position, aimed and fired, yet nothing happened. He had forgotten to move the safety over. Finally ready, Francis fired three shots, with two hitting the lion, but not in optimal places. Infuriated, the hurt lion disappeared into some high grass to await his revenge.

Neither Wilson nor the black gun bearers were happy with this outcome. Now, they had to wait for the beast to weaken before pouncing on his hiding place to finish him off.

Dreading this, Francis absurdly suggested they set the grass on fire, send some boys in to flush the lion out, or just leave. Shamelessly, Francis even told Wilson out right, “I don’t want to go in there.” So don’t, Wilson replied, “That’s what I’m hired for, you know. That’s why I’m so expensive.”

This was no real option, however, because Margot was right there, just across the stream. Slinking back to her would crush Francis, but what ended up happening was even worse.

Hemingway, “Kongoni, the old gun-bearer, in the lead watching the blood spoor, Wilson watching the grass for any movement, his big gun ready, the second gun-bearer looking ahead and listening, Macomber close to Wilson, his rifle cocked, they had just moved into the grass when Macomber heard the blood-choked coughing grunt, and saw the swishing rush in the grass. The next thing he knew he was running; running wildly, in panic in the open, running toward the stream.”

Going back, Margot refused to look at Francis or even hold his hand. Instead, she leaned over the front seat to kiss Wilson on the lips, while cooing about “The beautiful red-faced Mr. Robert Wilson.”

Worse, Margot slipped into Wilson’s tent that very night. She craved more of his performance. Waking up at 3 in the morning to find his wife’s cot empty, Francis waited for her to return. Just as with the lion, Francis shrank from another challenge to his manhood. No confrontation, please.

Hemingway:

“Where have you been?”

“I just went out to get a breath of air.”

“You did, like hell.”

“What do you want me to say, darling?”

“Where have you been?”

“Out to get a breath of air.”

“That’s a new name for it. You are a bitch.”

“Well, you’re a coward.”

At breakfast, Francis only alluded to what had happened. Brushing it off, Wilson even warned the humiliated man to not “talk rot.”

On this second day, they hunted buffaloes. Performing marvelously, Francis started to redeem himself. He did so well, in fact, he seemed transformed.

Hemingway, “Look at the beggar now, Wilson thought. It’s that some of them stay little boys so long, Wilson thought. Sometimes all their lives. Their figures stay boyish when they’re fifty. The great American boy-men. Damned strange people. But he liked this Macomber now. Damned strange fellow. Probably meant the end of cuckoldry too. Well, that would be a damned good thing. Damned good thing. Beggar had probably been afraid all his life. Don’t know what started it. But over now. Hadn’t had time to be afraid with the buff. That and being angry too.”

Having Margot screwed by Wilson had helped to turn Francis into a man, so it was like a gift, the cuckoldry.

My illness is mostly over, I think. There’s still residual coughing, weak, tremulous breathing and difficulty sleeping, but I’ve been able to walk for miles each day, a restorative act that gets my blood flowing, and, of course, seeing people lifts my spirits. Here in Tirana, there are enough benches and green spaces to rest, and a strong sun has been out.

Although Tirana has almost no ornate buildings commonly associated with Europe, no fancy friezes, wrought iron balconies, fluted columns or caryatids, etc., Tiranians maintain southern European habits. Weather permitting, they prefer to be outside among their kind. Cafes and restaurants spill onto sidewalks. Yesterday, I walked by four old men playing domino, with a small crowd watching them. At another concrete table, there was a card game.

While there’s certainly collective grief, physical pain is always private, and once you’re afflicted with anything, all you can think about is escaping that condition. During the worst days of my illness, my small room suddenly appeared huge, simply because everything in it was so inaccessible. The distance from my bed to the bathroom door became a much dreaded challenge, often to be postponed for hours.

Though it was hard to think about anything, I thought of Fred Reed’s 2019 article about having 14 operations on his eyes, after they were injured in Vietnam. I was too much of a mess to reread it, however, but this morning, I finally revisited this unspeakably painful account, and the incredibly tough man who could endure such ordeals, though, typically, Reed downplays this aspect.

A 12.7mm round had gone through Reed’s windshield, “So I got choppered to the Naval Support Activity hospital in Danang with the insides of my eyes filled with blood, which I didn’t know because my eyelids were convulsively latched shut. An eye surgeon there did emergency iridectomies—removing a slice of the iris—so that my eyes wouldn’t explode. He also determined that powdered glass had gone through my corneas, through the anterior chamber, through the lens, and parked itself in the vitreous, which is the marmalade that fills the back of the eye. It had not reached the retina, though they couldn’t tell at the time, which meant that I wasn’t necessarily going to be blind. Yet.”

With calmness or even a weird sense of humor, Reed recounts one horrific operation after another, “The thing is, the patient can see all of this going on inside his eye. Really. It’s like watching shadow puppets. The microvit is clearly visible like a little rotorooter and you can see the snipping action of the cutter-part. Ms. Pacman, I tell you. I remember watching it go after a piece of black crud of some sort, snipsnipsnip, and eat it. It is a tribute to the efficacy of federal dope that the patient doesn’t leap up and run screaming from the room. You just don’t care. The whole business is dreamy, a sort of warm glowing Buddhist light show.”

Thinking about Reed’s enduring hell puts everything into perspective, all right, so whatever I have is no more than a minor bout of hiccups, and it’s almost over. Having cured myself, though, I can safely declare myself, with no immodesty, as a medical doctor, physical therapist and shrink. Fortified with this body of knowledge, I must send an urgent message to Joe Biden.

Listen up, Joe. What’s the point of having six million Jewish geniuses in your administration, if none of them can point out the obvious solution to this Covid crisis? Why hasn’t Rachel Levine, for example, whispered in your ears, “Mr. President, you must sign an executive order immediately, mandating butt plugs for all Americans.” Levine is already an expert at rearranging everything downstairs, even with the nastiest scalpels, so this is nothing but the gentlest of remedies.

There you have it. Why bother wearing three or four masks and keeping your social distance if the other end of your plumbing is exactly like a howling tunnel in the middle of a hurricane? Farting away, all the Covid-infected are gassing up America with a massive apocalyptic miasma of toxic viruses, so all you’re breathing in, night and day, is this evil exhalation.

You must lead by example, Joe. To reassure your anxious citizenry, you, and Kamala, too, must show everyone how it’s done.

Biden, “Good evening, my fellow Americans. Tonight, I have great news for everyone. After more than a year of collective suffering and collective sacrifice, not to mention collective loss of living, we’ve reached the end of the tunnel, and I mean this literally, as you shall soon see. Tonight, I’m signing an executive order mandating butt plugs for all Americans, even the newborn, and you must never take it off. With this easy, affordable and painless solution, Covid will finally be defeated.

“Many of you may not even know what a butt plug is. You may think, Doesn’t it sound rather pornographic? Not at all, my fellow Americans. It’s just a piece of rubber that you shove up your anus, like this,” and here Biden pulls down his pants, with admirable dignity, to show a snugly fitted and even stylish purple butt plug up his ass. “Kamala, will you show them yours?”

She readily complies. Her crimson butt plug is so huge, however, several journalists can’t help but gasp. They pull their pants up.

Biden, “They come in all sizes and colors, my fellow Americans, and many are quite cute, I must say. Even wholesome. X-ray scanners will be installed in all public buildings, including supermarkets, restaurants and bars, to ensure compliance. With this simple solution, our lives can return to normal, immediately!”

At the nadir of my sickness, I had basically one emotion, dread, so to warm up my soul again, I listened to Glenn Gould and watched John Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moskowitz and Woman Under the Influence, movies I hadn’t seen in more than 30 years.

Cassavetes’ films are characterized by long takes of people making each other uncomfortable, although this is almost never their intention. Many of them are just too self-absorbed, thus lost. Tension abounds, screaming erupts, and too often, there’s even physical violence. Almost never entertaining, his flicks are excruciating investigations into the hidden pains of being humans, especially American ones. You go along, endure these torturous scenes, because you recognize yourself, or should, in all these characters.

ORDER IT NOW

Minnie (Gena Rowlands) has a lunch date with Zelmo (Val Avery), an Armenian who oddly declares himself an Arab.

“You are?”

“No… I mean, I don’t look like an Arab. I don’t wear blankets like that and I don’t have any camel. How tall are you?”

Even with the “How tall are you?” there’s already an awkwardness between them, but Cassavetes’ characters blunder routinely, just like we do in real life.

Just this month, Kevin Barrett wrote about our cultural breakdown through the prism of Dostoevsky’s Demons. Also at Unz, Mike Whitney began his article about the Covid vaccines with a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost, “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep, Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide, To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”

These middle-aged gentlemen are a dying breed. With miseducation militantly pushed, there is no common heritage to ground any conversation, so forget Dostoevsky, Milton and all other greats.

A striking phrase, “myself am hell” evokes Swedenborg’s personal hells and heavens, as well as Sartre’s idiotic “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” Only a man in hell would think that’s witty. In Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” there’s this stanza:

A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—

Since language is everything, a civilization that sneers at its own is already dead.

Thinking about this, I started to reread W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. An odd masterpiece, it’s neither a memoir, novel, travel book nor history, though it has elements of all those genres. Inspired by Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk, it is a meditation on mortality, personal and civilizational.

Thomas Browne is not exactly devoured on park benches and subway trains these days. In the late 18th century, Samuel Johnson could already see his flaws, “This poesy may be properly applied to the style of Browne: It is vigorous, but rugged; it is learned, but pedantick; it is deep, but obscure; it strikes, but does not please; it commands, but does not allure: his tropes are harsh, and his combinations uncouth. He fell into an age in which our language began to lose the stability which it had obtained in the time of Elizabeth; and was considered by every writer as a subject on which he might try his plastick skill, by moulding it according to his own fancy.”

Despite all this, Browne persists. At the end of Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” he talks of tinkering with “an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne’s Urn Burial.”

The Rings of Saturn begins with Sebald in a state of collapse, “I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. It was then that I began in my thoughts to write these pages. I can remember precisely how, upon being admitted to that room on the eighth floor, I became overwhelmed by the feeling that the Suffolk expanses I had walked the previous summer had now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot.”

Like Gregor Samsa, Sebald painfully dragged himself to his small window just to make sure the world was still there, only to find “the familiar city, extending from the hospital courtyards to the far horizon, an utterly alien place. I could not believe that anything might still be alive in that maze of buildings down there.” Such is illness.

In the rest of the 26-page chapter I, Sebald talks about the lives and deaths of his university of colleagues Michael Parkinson and Janine Dakyns, and the disinterment and display of Thomas Browne’s skull, which leads to a discussion of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, with its desecration of Adriaan Adriaanszoon, a petty thief who has just been hanged.

Sebald, “The spectacle, presented before a paying public drawn from the upper classes, was no doubt a demonstration of the undaunted investigative zeal in the new sciences; but it also represented (though this surely would have been refuted) the archaic ritual of dismembering a corpse, of harrowing the flesh of the delinquent even beyond death, a procedure then still part of the ordained punishment. That the anatomy lesson in Amsterdam was about more than a thorough knowledge of the inner organs of the human body is suggested by Rembrandt’s representation of the ceremonial nature of the dissection – the surgeons are in their finest attire, and Dr Tulp is wearing a hat on his head – as well as by the fact that afterwards there was a formal, and in a sense symbolic, banquet.”

A German academic living in East Anglia, Sebald knew well the histories of all countries bordering the North Sea, and beyond, so throughout The Rings of Saturn, we get fascinating reflections on Belgium, the Netherlands and, of course, Sebald’s native Germany, although a certain reticence there is most telling.

Already wandering around, observant and attentive, Sebald struck up a conversation with a gardener in Somerleyton, “When he realized where I was from he told me that during his last years at school, and his subsequent apprenticeship, his thoughts constantly revolved around the bombing raids then being launched on Germany from the sixty-seven airfields that were established in East Anglia after 1940. People nowadays hardly have any idea of the scale of the operation, said Hazel. In the course of one thousand and nine days, the eighth airfleet alone used a billion gallons of fuel, dropped seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons of bombs, and lost almost nine thousand aircraft and fifty thousand men. Every evening I watched the bomber squadrons heading out over Somerleyton, and night after night, before I went to sleep, I pictured in my mind’s eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms setting the heavens alight, and the survivors rooting about in the ruins.”

When this gardener arrived in Germany as part of the army of occupation, he was curious to hear from locals what they had remembered of these horrific bombing raids, targeted specifically at civilians, “To my astonishment, however, I soon found the search for such accounts invariably proved fruitless. No one at the time seemed to have written about their experiences or afterwards recorded their memories. Even if you asked people directly, it was as if everything had been erased from their minds.”

When Sebald talks of his visit to Nuremberg, nothing is said of the infamous kangaroo trials, but only Saint Sebaldus, Sebald’s patron saint, “During the wedding night, the story goes, he was afflicted with a sense of profound unworthiness. Today, he is supposed to have said to his bride, our bodies are adorned, but tomorrow they will be food for worms.”

As losers, you’re not allowed to remember or speak, and this vindictive proscriptions are still in force today, incredibly, three quarters of a century later.

Even with the best intentions, however, nothing is ever adequately recorded. In Southwold, Sebald reflects on the Battle of Solebay in May 28th of 1672, Even celebrated painters such as Storck, van der Velde or de Loutherbourg, some of whose versions of the Battle of Sole Bay I studied closely in the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, fail to convey any true impression of how it must have been to be on board one of these ships, already overloaded with equipment and men, when burning masts and sails began to fall or cannonballs smashed into the appallingly overcrowded decks.”

Rather typically, Sebald wryly observes, “There were eye-witnesses who claimed to have seen the commander of the English fleet, the Earl of Sandwich, who weighed almost twenty-four stone, gesticulating on the afterdeck as the flames encircled him.” The twenty-four stone detail adds a touch of the ridiculous to this appalling scene.

We forget, misremember, clumsily misrepresent and often just lie, and what has taken centuries or millennia to build up, we’ve often erased in an instant.