Tobias and T Coraghessan

This is so great: Rose Hoare, with whom I often have pleasurable encounters en déshabillé late on Sunday mornings, (well, okay, not really her, her Sunday Star Times articles), contributed a comment to last week’s post about “Bullet in the brain” with a link to a New Yorker online podcast with the novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle. When they asked him to choose a favourite story from the New Yorker archives to discuss and read aloud, he said, it took him all of 30 seconds to pick “Bullet in the Brain” -- about the same amount of time it took me to get the podcast going.

These things were fun: finding out what people call T. Coraghessan in person (“Hi, Tom”, “Hi, Deborah”); the moment when “Tom” declared “Bullet in the Brain” to be a perfect story; hearing him call Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver “Toby” and “Ray”; imagining them with this skinny frizzy-haired non-hunting guy who had changed his name to Coraghessan when he was 17 (at which age Tobias Wolff would have been in the Army, or just about to join, and Raymond Carver married with a kid, or about to be); listening to his reading, which was very very good, including the New York accent, which I realized three lines into the story was overwhelmingly right. And for free! Consider that where he lives, in Santa Barbara, people recently paid anywhere from 100 to 2500 US dollars to hear him read at a party.

And this thing was fantastic: getting then to the archive of past New Yorker monthly fiction podcasts, all with this same format of authors reading their picks from New Yorker fiction. They go back about two years and the names are all over the place, Mary Gaitskill reading Nabokov, Jonathan Lethem reading James Thurber, someone reading “The Lottery”, that monument to the “perfect short story” which I forgot to include in my list, and, at the bottom, from Christmas Day, 2006, Richard Ford reading John Cheever’s heart-breaking story “Reunion”, the one which starts “The last time I saw my father was in Grand Central Station.” Heart-breaking, that is to say, as John Cheever does heart-breaking: the father is a mean drunk. Lots of us have known one of these; John Cheever did, right side-out and inside-out, for it was he.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/podcasts/fiction

Tobias Wolff’s childhood memoir This boy’s life was something I’ve been meaning to read forever, since I saw the film version with Leonardo di Caprio as Toby and Robert de Niro as the mean stepfather. You could tell from the movie that the book would be really good. Last week, I finally got around to taking it home from the library to read, and it is.

It’s not just about the boxing match with his stepfather, in which they were always locked in one of those clutches the referee has to pry you out of, but there was no referee. That was the part the movie dealt with, but in the book there was also growing up in the 1950s in towns called things like Chinook, wanting to be called Jack instead of Toby, wearing white Ts, smoking, screwing up, and telling lies.

Consider the final lines of the dedication:

My first stepfather used to say that what I didn’t know would fill a book.
Well, here it is.

The world's fastest Hemingway

Anthony Hopkins is going to play Ernest Hemingway in a movie to be produced, written, directed and co-starred in (in the role of a Cuban fishing boat captain) by Andy Garcia. The news is out and also the puns. The best one is the title of The Risky Biz blog post which I believe is also the one which broke the news last week: “The Bell Tolls for Andy Garcia”. The Guardian’s “For Whom the Camera Rolls” is far behind, perhaps not even in the running.

Read the Risky Biz post. Read as far as the comments. As often happens, they are the funniest part, involving an actor -- actually an “author-performer”-- of that kind who uses three names, failing at self-promotion. I laughed out loud. Then I was trying to think of performers who were great enough to deserve three names but I couldn't think of any. I mean, I thought of George Bernard Shaw but I believe he was only a performer offstage. I tried asking my daughter if she could. She thought for a moment and offered “Robert Downey Junior?”

Bullet in the brain and other perfect short stories

A while back I picked up a ringing phone in our workroom and it was a man asking if we had a copy of Tobias Wolff’s new book of short stories, which he had read about in The Listener, that we could send out to Remuera Community Library for him. Our copies were all out, but here’s the thing, one of them was out to me. “Have you read it yet?” he asked me when I told him. Well, not really, not yet, just what fit in on the bus trip home.

“Did you read the one called “Bullet in the Brain” he went on. Umm, not sure, but it sounds familiar. “About a man getting shot during a bank robbery, he makes the robber angry by talking back and he gets shot.” I cast my mind about energetically but no Tobias Wolff stories about bank robbery appeared on the horizon. “The review says it’s one of the best stories ever written.” I started to feel on the spot. Everything was being crowded out of my mind by images of Bill Murray robbing the bank dressed as a clown in that genius film "Quick Change" and fragments of a Thurberian “battle of the sexes” joke in which a henpecked husband gets his wife shot during a bank robbery, told to me years ago by a retired Royal Navy Commander of that generation which did lots of crossword puzzles and told that kind of joke.

One of the best short stories ever written! I told him I'd bring it back the very next day and check it in and he'd have it by the weekend.. “Oh no, I wouldn’t want to do that, I can wait until you’ve finished it,” he protested. Don’t worry, I have plenty of books on my bedside table, I said. Come to think of it, one of them is another Tobias Wolff book. He acquiesced at that point, but I was pretty sure he didn’t get the full picture. Here it is. I made a record of it when I got home; it was too funny. There it is, fifth from the bottom, the library’s copy of Our story begins.

He told me he wasn’t a computer user, the man from Remuera, so he will never actually see the photo, which is all right, but I wish I could tell him that it turned out I actually had read “Bullet in the brain”, not in the new book, but in the other Tobias Wolff book, a military-coloured Vintage paperback which probably won’t show up in the photo, as my father’s name and the date – 1996 – in his handwriting on the inside flypaper never could.

I only realized it half way through re-reading it, because it is the final three pages of the story, past the robbery part, which knock the breath out of me. I agree wholeheartedly with The Listener reviewer, whoever it was. “Bullet in the brain” is a perfect short story. It is unbelievable how finely crafted it is, the symbiosis between the way the story is being told and what it is telling, the jerky preamble, the explosion, the suspension, accelerating to the sharp, sweet ending which reaches into the deepest part of us.

I asked myself what other perfect short stories I know. “A perfect day for banana fish” by JD Salinger; several of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories -- “The three day blow”, “Indian camp” and also “The Killers”, and “My old man”, which isn’t a Nick Adams story but still by Hemingway; “Goodbye my brother” and a couple of others by John Cheever. Joyce's "The dead" but also another story in Dubliners, the one about the man who desperately wants to leave work to go have a drink, and he can’t because they’d see that his hat isn’t hanging on the hat rack. I’d be really happy to get anyone else’s suggestions. I’m not really as much like Miss Jean Brodie as I sometimes sound (“Who is the greatest Italian painter, Rose?” “Leonardo da Vinci, Miss Brodie.” “No, it is Giotto. He is my favourite”).

Leonardo Sciascia: Just a stroke of the pen

Before leaving the books of Sicily behind I have to confess to Jo, who sent me an email on the day I posted the question “What is the great Sicilian Novel?” saying “Something to do with a large spotted cat?”, and to everyone else who was following the story, that there was a catch. The leopard is a great Sicilian novel, maybe the greatest, but not the Great Sicilian Novel, to my eyes. The idea of a great national novel – and yes, it is a bit of a game – is that it captures the spirit of a people, being written in their voice. Americans usually put forth Huckleberry Finn for theirs, although I’ve always leaned towards The sound and the fury myself. The leopard, as grand and tragic as you will, remains one man’s story, at the most one class’s story, and the story is one of abdication: “We were the leopard, the lions, and after us will come the jackals, the hyenas.”

Leonardo Sciascia is the writer you want to read if you want sicilianita’, as he called it, Sicilianness, life with the jackals. “All my books, in effect, constitute one book,” he wrote in a preface to one of them. “A book on Sicily that touches the sore spots of the past and the present and that unfolds as the continuous defeat of reason.” Especially for naming the Mafia as Sicily’s sore spot of the present, he was disliked by many Sicilians, who were forever claiming that the Mafia didn't exist or existed but not here.

His tired, bitter and insightful story The wine-dark sea nails this phenomenon in a few lines exchanged between an engineer heading to Sicily for work and a Sicilian sharing his train compartment. The Sicilian is extolling the virtues of his home town and has just lost his temper with his son who says the Sicilian ocean is the colour of wine. What is the matter with you, the father says. You know it’s blue. The son continues obstinately to claim it looks like wine, and then that it is wine. His parents are furious. And then:

 “Is there a local Mafia?” asked Bianchi. “Mafia?” exclaimed Micchiche’ with the same incredulity he would have displayed had he been asked whether the inhabitants of Nisima had webbed feet. “What Mafia? All nonsense!” 

The day of the owl could be my nomination for Great Sicilian Novel. This book, which our cousin visiting from Rome told me today she listened to being read aloud just last week on their equivalent of National Radio, and found it as bellissimo as ever, is a detective story, as many of Sciascia's novels were. He loved the mystery genre, and his novels - and the movies which some of Italy's best film directors made from them - are full of suspense and sharp images.

One of the most striking scenes in The day of the owl is the one when a group of illiterate brothers are called before the enlightened, Voltaire-reading carabiniere officer, Captain Bellodi, to testify about a Mafia murder. For them it means confronting "the terror of a merciless inquisition, of the black seed of the written word. 'White soil, black seed. Beware of the man who sows it. He never forgets' says the proverb."

For Sciascia, this is the key difference: the laws of the State are written, and permanent; by contrast, the mafia is only an oral culture and its "rules" - like vendetta, omerta' (the code of silence) etc - are just behaviours, passed down by word of mouth. "They behave like animals" he said, "erasing their footprints in front of their lairs."

And so they do. I have a terrible memory of a night when the Mafia exploded a car bomb ten blocks from my house, when I was living in Florence. It was meant to blow up the Uffizi Gallery, but they weren't able to park it close enough for some reason which I can't remember now, so that it only managed to damage the Gallery. It did, however, kill a family in a ground floor apartment close by, a husband who was a fireman and a wife who worked as the caretaker for the Georgofili Academy, an institution so old it had performed research for Napoleon's land reforms and which was located upstairs, and their two small children, the younger just two months old. The ground floor apartments are always where caretakers or portieri (the Italian version of the French concierge) live. Although in some more pretentious neighborhoods there are portieri who spend all day polishing their cars and sticking their noses into everyone's business, in the tiny medieval streets of the old centre it's just a regular old workingman -- or woman -- job.

We heard the explosion and went tearing out to see what it was, and if we could help. It was the middle of the night and there was no one about except for one man I caught sight of walking hurriedly in the opposite direction. A second later we hit Via dei Georgofili and saw the glass all over the cobblestones and people carrying bleeding people out the door. We didn't know if it was a gas main or what, we only found out the next morning that it was a bomb. Everyone knew it meant mafia. And that was when I thought of the weaselly little guy I had seen going in the wrong direction. What I kept remembering, and what I still remember, is that he was not quite, but sort of, smiling as he walked.

In the preface to Salt in the wound, his early book written when he was not yet famous about the year he spent as a school teacher in his hometown, Sciascia recalled how the people there used to say to him "It takes just a stroke of the pen" as if they were saying "It takes just a stroke of the sword".  He adds
"I would dearly love to have the strength to mete out some resounding strokes of the pen on behalf of the salt miners of Regalpetra, of the peasants, of the old people without pensions, of the children who are sent out to work. Of course like the poor of Regalpetra, I too have some faith in the power of writing."

Giorgio Bassani: All the life lived

Someone asked me about the line in my last post about sitting next to Giorgio Bassani, the author of The garden of the Finzi-Continis, on a bus. It wasn't meant to be cryptic. It was a conscious effort to avoid one of those infinite tangents that calculus and I am prone to. But having resisted once, I am happy now to share the story.

We were on our way to a conference about the need to defend European culture against American hegemony. He was one of the great names (another was Anthony Burgess, whom I remember circling in an apparently alcohol-induced buzz, a head taller than everyone else, with a red face and eyes that really were "like infected buttonholes I dare not meet in dreams" as Gore Vidal had viciously but funnily described them) and I was just a hostess - as in glorified secretary, not as in geisha - and an interloper as well, being American, but it seemed clear to me that the air of distance which he wore about him like a wisp of Po River valley fog was not from snobbery.

Years later, I opened the paper one day to find a terrible story about how his wife, with whom he hadn't lived for 30 years, was suing in court to take over his financial affairs because, she said, he had Alzheimer's and his companion was squandering his money. For her the defining moment of this financial mismanagement was when he and his companion -- an American professor with whom he had been living in Rome for 20 odd years – had sold his family home in Ferrara.

Me, I prefer to think that they were simply turning the stones into something which at that point he needed more. Care, perhaps, or concert tickets (he was a fine pianist who, like Anthony Burgess, had considered music as a career before literature), maybe out of season fruit or even fine whiskey, of which, according to his companion, he enjoyed "one or two fingers" every night before dinner, always bringing it to the table when it was two. Dementia sufferers travel light.

And anyway those stones of Ferrara will always be his, because of his books, all set among them, all in the same pre-World War II era, that is to say, under the shadow of fascism. In The Garden of the Finzi-Continis there is the stone wall which the narrator, who is pretty much Bassani, remembers climbing over as a boy to see the object of his desire, the beautiful, rich, sophisticated Micol, for whom none of these attributes will be of any use when one more attribute, Jewish, turns out to be enough for the Fascist racial laws. Neither of course is the wall around what they thought was their enchanted garden of any use. One out of three people in the Jewish community Bassani grew up in were deported under Nazifascism, about 100 people, and of those, 5 came back.

Giorgio Bassani liked this entry in Henry James's Notebooks: "Why does my pen not drop from my hand on approaching the infinite pity and tragedy of all the past? It does, poor helpless pen, with what it meets of the ineffable, what it meets of the cold Medusa-face of life, of all the life lived, on every side.”

A Dutch photographer named Susanne Stoop has made a beautiful book of photos called "The Ferrara streetbook: a walk in Giorgio Bassani's footsteps" with the creative publishing company "Blurb". Follow this link to leaf through a digital copy of the book. www.blurb.com/books/471228

The Leopard

The leopard, written by the Sicilian prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa almost exactly fifty years ago, is usually considered the greatest Sicilian novel. As often happens to me with great books, it is hard to choose what to say it’s about. I might do as the book does and say, the Leopard, or, Prince Fabrizio of Salina. Based by Tomasi on his great-grandfather, the Prince is an autocratic giant who bends silverware with his hands when he is angry without realising it, a lover of novels, and an amateur astronomer who, when he once discovered two small planets, named one for his estate and the other for his favourite hunting dog.

As the book opens, Garibaldi has landed in Sicily and the House of Bourbon, which rules Naples and Sicily, is tumbling down. The Prince, with his intelligence and his energy which "tends toward abstraction", as one of the characters notes, sees clearly that a whole way of life is dying, but is incapable or unwilling to do anything about it. “One of the world’s great lonely books” EM Forster called this book. All through the book, its wonderful, lyrical descriptions of Sicily's landscapes and rituals, its funny passages and its acute observations of human nature, the “sediment of sorrow” building in the old prince is a constant refrain.

Many people know about the book from the great movie Luchino Visconti made of it, which the library just recently purchased on DVD (my suggestion!). I took it home as soon as it arrived and watched it. It had aged well, maybe because it is very staged, very magnificent, like one of his opera productions -- 'natural' goes out of date very quickly, but rich and choreographed keeps its spell. Claudia Cardinale is as beautiful as I remembered as the alluring daughter the proto-Mafioso barters for power, but how did I forget how stunning Burt Lancaster was as the Prince?

The leopard was Tomasi di Lampedusa’s one book. He wrote it in only a few months but, his wife recounted after he died, he had been thinking about it for 25 years. It was learning he was terminally ill that decided him; he was able to just finish the fair copy and to have it rejected as unpublishable by the two major Italian publishing houses before he died. This last bit, which I learned today from the back cover flap of one of the three copies of The leopard we have in the fantastic Central Library basement, seems unbearably sad.

I also learned, this from the translator's preface, that when it did get published, by Feltrinelli in 1958 -- which would make it the same year they published Dr. Zhivago -- it was Giorgio Bassani, then an editor there, who chose the manuscript. Giorgio Bassani was from a Jewish family of Ferrara, the beautiful Renaissance city on the Po river delta in northern Italy, about as far and as different from Sicily as you can get. He later became a famous writer himself with The garden of the Finzi-Contini, The heron, and other books, and once I sat next to him on a bus: a kind and distant man in a hat and elegant belted coat.

The leopard was a bestseller and went on to be recognised as one of the greatest novels of 20th century European literature. Oh, and the other two copies in the Library basement stacks were both out.

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

You can read an excerpt from the first chapter of The leopard on our website
 
The last leopard: a biography of GIuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa by David Gilmour

Lair of the leopard: 20 artists go in search of Lampedusa's Sicily is based on an exhibition of paintings inspired by The Leopard at the Frances Kyle Gallery in London

Get the DVD of The Leopard directed by Luchino Visconti, starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon

From the just-returned shelves

The just-returned shelves at the Library always remind me of the great movie classic Grand Hotel, the shot of the bustling lobby and the revolving door, with the famous voiceover “Grand Hotel. People come, people go...” In the movie the people all turn out to be stories, and on the just-returned shelves the stories are like people. There are the return guests (Oh look, there’s On Chesil Beach back again!) and the new guests, from all over the world, accompanied by a reputation or maybe not. Like the Grand Hotel, the just-returned shelves are a cosmopolitan spot.

It was on the just-returned shelves that I recently picked up a little white book, started to leaf through as you do at the just-returned shelves, and was stopped in my tracks by the dedication, collector of fine dedications that I am. "To British Airways", it read. The book design was decidedly old-fashioned and for a split second I entertained the thought that perhaps the book dated back to some Pleistocene epoch of travel when British Airways might have been synonymous with glamour and adventure. Alas, no. In smaller type below the author continues, "I owe the illumination that led me to this novel to a delay in the Palermo-London flight of 2 September 2000."

She, the author, is Simonetta Agnello Hornby, a pipe-smoking Sicilian from the "lower aristocracy" -- her term -- who went to London to study, married Mr Hornby (no, not Nick) and worked as a children's lawyer until being inspired at Palermo Airport to write La Mennulara, "The almond picker", which became a bestseller in Italy. It's the story of a clever peasant girl who gets taken on as a servant by a rich family and ends up ruling the roost. There's also a mystery but it's not the real point of the book, whose little chapters with long names make up a series of miniature paintings of Sicilian village life, layered archaeologically back to feudal times.

I learned about the pipe from an article about her in The Independent (it's described as "Maigret-style"), which also contained these deathless lines: "As a young girl, one of her summer jobs was to 'beat the books' in her grandmother's library. Permitted to dust, but not to read the family's eclectic collection - which included her uncles' 'naughty books' - she confined herself to speed-reading the prefaces.”

The prefaces? Is this an error of translation? And why wasn't she allowed to read the books? Was the prohibition on literature in general, or because she might stumble on one of the naughty ones? What were they anyway? Fanny Hill, Ulysses? I put this to my Italian husband, who shared with his uncle a passion for Joseph Conrad, or Honrad, as it is pronounced in their Florentine tongue. “Well, careful,” he said. “At school our copies of The Iliad had a little skip where lines had been chopped out. Of course we went to look it up. It was where Hecuba rips open her dress and takes her breast in her hand to show Hector how she, who gave him her milk, will mourn him. That's all it was, the word 'breast'!"

One way or another, a sense of the power of words came through to the young Simonetta Agnello. Listen to this from La Marchesa, the sequel to La mennulara: "Amalia was trembling. Billowing, tender waves of pleasure possessed her, like the rollers that break on the rocks and caress them before ebbing back into the surf." What is Amalia doing? Amalia is sitting fully dressed listening to Don Paolo tell her the story of King Ferdinand I of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. All right, we have seen him lay his hand over hers, midway through his three-page story. But just a hand, I swear!

Next post: What is the great Sicilian novel?

The books: The almond picker and The Marchesa by Simonetta Agnello Hornby

What books? Papeete stopover

I love ports, I collect them like poets collect rivers or some women collect shoes, but they have to be working ports, none of those docks redeveloped into shopping malls for me. I want cargo ships, dirty water slapping on wood pylons, the smell of tar. Papeete, where I was lucky enough to have a stopover this week on my way back from a California Christmas, has always been one of my favourites. I love its gorgeous inhabitants, its slightly shabby air, the sidestreets with the dimly lit haberdashery shops run by incredibly old Chinese couples and bars exuding French pop ballads, the rusting iron work of the waterfront balconies, the market with its tables of pies and rows of pig heads in plastic sacks, bedecked with tinsel now for the holidays.

Whenever I go to another country, I always buy a local paper to read over my first coffee. This can drive people who are with me crazy, for instance if the newspaper is in Greek and they have to listen to my enthusiastic etymological detective work. On this trip, I stopped in Papeete both coming and going, so on my return leg, having already read up on the fisherman who got bitten in the face by a shark and the Tahitian boy who won the French National Under 10 Chess Championship, I went out hunting larger prey. And reader, I found it. La Maison de la Presse, with its natty storefront advertising Tabac-Cigars, Curios-Photos and so on, down to the intriguing Press-Wines.

Inside, behind the calendars and souvenir cigarette lighters, were two stands of very dusty books. Incredibly, it was a Papeete version of the Take 5 promotion we have going at the library over the holidays, where you check out a bundle of 5 books and see what surprises you get. In La Maison de la Presse the books were all tied together in pairs with string. In Take 5, we like to tempt readers with a theme, like “Great love stories”. I couldn’t tell what strategy lay behind these bundles. I noted Gide’s Les Caves du Vaticane tied to Post Mortem by Patricia Cornwell, Treasure Island tied to a Victoria Holt novel; and Voyage au bout de la nuit, Celine’s dark masterpiece, tied up with Rendezvous a New York by someone named Veronica Bald (if I read my scrawl correctly), a “danseuse francaise” who according to the back cover, had made the bad choice to take risks "that had nothing to do with the professional". Celine loved a couple of dancers; in fact, "Voyage to the end of the night" is dedicated to one. Was this intelligent design?

I asked the French shopkeeper sweeping the footpath outside if I could take a picture of the books. “What books?” he said. It was like the “What hump?” moment in Young Frankenstein.Those interesting books over there, I said, pointing. “Oh no no no” he said, clicking his tongue. “Go to Vaima (the big shopping centre in Papeete, where I have never set foot) if you want to take pictures of books”. I thought, what am I not getting?

A few things, I guess, here and there. “Did you go to a porn shop in Papeete?” asked my husband looking at my just downloaded photos on my return. I went to look over his shoulder. It was a photo I’d taken of the back room of another dusty little tabac-curios shop further up the street, where two blond female mannequins trapped in plastic boxes were stacked one on top of the other. I snapped it because it looked so surreal, a parable for token wives or sports girlfriends. In the foreground, unnoticed by me at the time, loomed a cardboard box bearing the words “Exciting love cushion”, complete with bright red illustration. And all I had been looking for was a pack of tissues to deal with the congestion the vicious airplane air conditioning had brought on.

The best part is that I had thought "Isn't it lucky I remembered the word "mouchoirs" so I don't have to mime it". Who knows what I might have been offered. Anyway the mouchoirs were great, folded origami-like in tiny cubic packs. "I love travelling" I thought, and bought two.

Hamish Keith's artistic crush

Hamish Keith will be at Central Library tomorrow evening to present his memoir Native Wit. I really enjoyed reading this book. As you would expect, it’s got great style that carries you right along; and as you would also expect, it’s full of wonderful stories. The one I’m about to share comes from when he was in art school in Christchurch. It follows a paean to the old Penguin paperbacks which touches on the literary crush, and involves instead the artistic crush:

My first artistic passion was for Amedeo Modigliani. Not a great leap forward from the leggy nymphs of Petty and Vargas, but at least his nudes had pubic hair. I suspect that I was as much attracted by the little I could glean about his life as I was by his painting. He seemed to have much more fun than Gulley Jimson and was entirely more sexy. Had my sleep-out had the Mecca Dairy mirror, I might well have tried out a few Modigliani routines and adopted his arms-akimbo stance as my own. I rather fancied I did look just a little bit like him. (If I had had his corduroy suit I could have really pissed my father off.) I adopted the one aphorism of Modigliani I had read as my own: une vie brève mais intense (a short but intense life). What a wanker!

Just before the Library’s bargain book sale last month I was trying to find some books that I could donate to the sale to make room on our shelves for the books piled all over our window seat, where by now only the cat can fit, and only if curled up. I spotted an old, hardcover biography of Modigliani which I hadn’t looked at for years, and I thought I might have found one – already a great success rate for me. But as soon as I opened it I knew it would never go. All I had to do was reread the death scene, the two death scenes, actually, because his lover and model Jeanne Hebuterne threw herself out of a window the next morning at dawn, nine months pregnant.

Jeanne Modigliani, their first child, is the author of the book, which from a look at the dates might have been published just after Hamish Keith had had to make do with gleaning the odd aphorism. He would have known so much more, like the fact that if for him “une vie brève mais intense” was a laudable stand against monotony, for Modigliani dying young had always been the only possible outcome; he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis when he was only sixteen. This is not to say that his lifestyle (a friend drops in near the end to find him and Jeanne in bed, surrounded by empty wine bottles and open sardine tins) helped, but maybe this is where the intensity comes in. Jeanne the daughter recalls how her grandparents always mentioned Modigliani's drug use, rather than his drinking, she thinks because they rather admired Baudelaire.

So last night upon reading that passage in Native wit I got the book back down and there as a frontispiece is the photo in the corduroy suit! What a suit it is. It brings to mind the dress Scarlett O’Hara makes out of her green velvet curtains. Three piece, thick, the ribs gleaming, worn over a light-coloured necktie and a white shirt with a Peter Pan collar. The chair leg rests on a piece of rubbish, the hand dangles a cigarette. The gaze is lovely dark and deep.

I’m hoping tomorrow evening to get a chance to show the book to Hamish: yes, the library has a copy, just as old and yellowed as mine, down in our marvellous basement stack. It’s called Modigliani: man and myth.

Hamish Keith on “Hamish Keith: man and myth” is tomorrow evening at Central Library. Come at 5:30 PM for a glass of wine thanks to Glengarry Wines; the talk starts at 6:00. For more information, see our What’s on pages.

Let's be mad! Romantic heroes from Heathcliff to Zhivago

It’s been really fun to read the literary love confessions which people have been posting here, not least for the introductions to some romantic heroes I hadn't encountered, such as William, described by Wikipedia in its exhaustive way as "adventurous, imaginative, romanticising, irrepressible, optimistic, and lovable”. My only doubt is about the irrepressible, a fine character trait for a best friend but a bit worrisome in a soulmate you'd be planning to glue yourself to.

Yuri Zhivago was on a lot of people’s lists and he came to my mind as well, but I wasn't sure if I were in love with him or with his love story. “But to go to Varykino now, in winter, that would be madness. But why not, my love, let’s be mad if there is nothing but madness left to us!” I quote this line from memory so cannot vouch for it exactly, but this is what it is all about. Revolution, civil war, the lovers' desperation, the snow, always the snow, the candle flame.

Heathcliff was another name which came up, problematical as always. Not long ago I read, I think in the TLS, someone's opinion that Wuthering Heights is the only instance of "L'amour fou", mad love, in English literature. In notes on Abismos de pasión, Bunuel's fantastically named film version of the novel, Kevin Hagopian tells how what fascinated the surrealist was precisely this, the book's portrait of mad love, “a tempest of rage and self-indulgence.” Despite the call to madness, Dr. Zhivago is not about mad love which leaves devastation in its wake. It is the world which is mad, and which devastates the lovers.

Boris Pasternak made his name in Russia as a great poet during the first World War. At the time of the Revolution, he was 27 and optimistic about its idealism, unlike Anna Akhmatova who, just a year older but evidently tougher, was “neither young enough to believe in it nor old enough to justify it”, as Joseph Brodsky put it with his usual acumen. Forty years on, in 1957, there was Dr Zhivago.

Knowing it could not be published in Russia, Pasternak had the manuscript delivered to Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, an Italian publisher who is still famous today in Italy for defying pressure from Russia and being the first to publish this great work, as well as for dying while setting explosives on a Milanese electricity pylon in guerilla warfare against the Italian state in the 1970s.

In the midst of all this, a book came in on reserve for me which I have no recollection of having requested. It’s about Russia’s poets of the Silver Age: Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, and the rest. The author, Elaine Feinstein, is a poet and a translator of Tsvetaeva, and her grandparents were Russian Jews, as were so many of these writers, including Pasternak. She goes to St. Petersburg to write this book, "for the ghosts" she says.

She tells the story of Pasternak's anguish over the Nobel Prize, which he at first accepted and later refused, possibly under threat of exile. He was a somewhat Hamlet-like character, as was his hero Yuri Zhivago. When he had to look for something else to do during the Stalin years, not a good time for poets, he translated Shakespeare. His banned poem Hamlet, included in Dr. Zhivago, was recited by his friends at his funeral.

HAMLET

The rumbling has grown quiet. I walk out on the stage.
Leaning against a door jamb,
I try to catch in a distant echo
What will happen in my lifetime.

At me is aimed the murkiness of night;
I'm pinned by a thousand opera glasses.
If only it is possible, Abba, Father,
May this cup be carried past me.

I cherish your stubborn design
And am agreed to play this role.
But now a different drama is underway;
This time, release me.

But the order of the acts has been determined,
And the ending of the journey cannot be averted...


The books:

Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

The Russian Jerusalem by Elaine Feinstein

Literary crushes

The other day I came across a great post from Alison Flood in The Guardian books blog. Having heard about a petition launched in Japan to allow people to marry cartoon characters (hey, don't laugh, Fox News is convinced Donald Duck could vote in the US Presidential Election), she was inspired to think about what fictional character she would marry. A few, it turns out, from Georgette Heyer heroes to Jay Gatsby, by way of Gilbert from Anne of Green Gables. Who are your literary crushes, she asks?

This is the kind of question that could probably keep me alive a few extra days while waiting to be rescued at the bottom of a ravine. Say I was precocious, but when I was still being read aloud to I can remember hanging on my mother’s words as she read to us about mysterious, one-armed Freckles in Girl of the Limberlost. Although, since I remember that the other high point of the book for me was the description of Elvira’s lunchbox with its cunning little compartments, maybe I wasn’t that bad.

Later – that would be puberty – there was the Louisa May Alcott book Eight cousins and its sequel Rose in bloom, about an orphan named Rose and her seven boy cousins, one of whom she is of course destined to marry. The main players are the oldest cousin, Archie, the natural-leader type; Charlie, nicknamed “Bonnie Prince Charlie”, talented, charming and fatally flawed; and bookish, absent-minded Mac. I think I was a little bit in love with all of them -- well, maybe not Archie!

I was pleased to see just now on The Literature Network site that readers are discovering and gushing over this sweet, romantic and proto-feminist book in 2008.

In high school I fell in love with Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun also Rises and spent many nights picking out a sophisticated, androgynous one-syllable name that I would change my name to as soon as I moved out of my parents’ house. With my best friend, I shared a crush on Mercutio, the melting point being established in Franco Zeffirelli's film version of Romeo and Juliet. And of course there was Dean Moriarty.

But my biggest literary crush of all is my high school Honours English teacher. He had beautiful blue eyes, a romantic limp, a passionate soul and he interpreted poetry so sublimely. The day he read us "Ode on Melancholy," when he got to the part about he whose strenuous tongue can burst joy’s grape against his palate fine, I was, if not his, John Keats’s forever.

So, who are your literary crushes?

Bargain Book Sale

This month at Central Library we’ll be holding one of our twice-yearly bargain book sales, so be sure to come in and rifle through the hundreds of older items we take off our shelves every year to make room for all the new purchases. And a used book gave me an amazing book moment today, an unexpected post-script to last month’s post about Banned Books.

It happened like this. The announcement of the sale set me to remembering some of the secondhand books I’ve owned. I have an acute memory of a book I bought when I was nineteen, somewhere in Europe. I like to think a bookstall along the Seine and perhaps it was. This book, Les premieres illusions ("First illusions") by an unknown to me Michel del Castillo, I chose for the title but nearly as much for the cover, its blotting paper texture, the words in red capitals centered and boxed in the plain white field, so serviceable, so elegant. The classic Gallimard design, I realise now.

Reading this book turned out to be like diving into someone’s dream. It was a story of a childhood passed in a world in which it was impossible to know what was real and what was false, where the ordinary was extraordinary and vice-versa. I read it two or three times before it passed out of my hands somehow somewhere along the way.

Having never come across the book or the author again, I decided to have a look on the internet, expecting if I were lucky a listing on Alibris. Instead I was amazed to find that Michel del Castillo is still alive, has written twenty or thirty books (one on Amazon rated 4,723,410 in sales), has a website, a blog and a rare and intense biography.

He was a child living in Madrid with his mother Candida Isabel, a personality as extravagant as her name, when the Civil War broke out. Despite her bourgeois origins, she threw her lot in with the Communists, writing articles and transmitting as “Isabelita’ every night on Radio Madrid and having a couple of tragic liaisons with officers from the International Brigades etc. who would be killed in the war. Just before Franco’s troops entered the city, they fled Madrid for France, where they reunited with her French husband  (Michel's father), who “fou de rage” (crazy with anger) denounced her to the Commissariat as “susceptible de troubler l’ordre” (likely to disturb the order).

 It goes on and gets worse. His mother deserted him, he was deported and interned in Mauthausen until the end of the war, when he was repatriated to Spain where as the son of a "Red” he spends four years in a sort of penal camp.

And then I read this: “Four years of hell which he evokes in many of his books; but also, in this prison, there came the revelation which will transform his existence: Dostoevsky.”

Dostoevsky!

I go looking in his blog for more. It's Dostoevsky above all, but there's Miguel de Unamuno, Thomas Mann, Thomas Bernhard and also Celine, of whom he praises his “epoustouflante” inventiveness (I have to look it up in the dictionary. it’s… it’s ... “mind-blowing”? Are we sure?)

"Je n’ai pas d’autre biographie que les livres, ceux qui m’ont fait et ceux que j’ai faits."
 ("I have no other biography besides books, those which made me and those which I have made.”)

http://www.micheldelcastillo.com/
 
Yes, it is in French, for English (sort of) try this: http://www.speedylook.com/Michel_Del_Castillo.html