#78: My Struggle, Book 6, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

And so after five years I’ve come to The End (which happens to be the title of the British edition of this work—the American editions just get numbers). Book Six leads off with 400 pages describing the author’s life in a cramped apartment in Malmö, Sweden, with three kids and a wife. The time is 2009 and Book One of My Struggle is about to be published. Karl Ove’s uncle, after viewing the manuscript, is claiming that the gruesome details about the death of Karl Ove’s father are lies. He threatens to sue. Karl Ove reacts by shrinking in terror and wondering if his uncle might actually be right. (Does everyone now hate me? Oh my god, what have I done?) The narrative ingredients for the section include trips to pick up the kids at preschool, obsessive checking of email to see the latest splenetic message from the uncle, reassurances from friends and family, and endless cigarettes on the balcony.

If you think of My Struggle as a single novel (rather than as six separate novels, assuming you even accept the premise that the work is in fact a novel), then you might consider how strange it is in the latter section of a novel to be reading about the public reception of an earlier part of that same novel. It’s even stranger to consider that the author, in writing Book Six, already knows exactly how his audience has reacted to the earlier volumes, and has, both deliberately and unconsciously, altered his project in response to those reactions. Knausgaard is trying to be radically honest about his life and circumstances, but at the same time he is unable to avoid playing metaphysical games with himself, his friends and family, and his readers. It isn’t necessary for him to be a devious person for this to be so: it’s an inevitable byproduct of the author’s mind and the nature of the enterprise. You could no more expect him to not exploit the metaphysical ambiguities of his work than you could expect a loaf of bread in a plastic bag not to develop mold if left out long enough. Another way to put it is this: Knausgaard’s life has been irrevocably contaminated by his book, and his book has been irrevocably contaminated by his life. The suspense is just in determining where his loyalties lie.

All of which makes it difficult for me to form anything as one-dimensional as an “opinion” about all of this. I’d already invested significant time and energy in Books One through Five, and now I’d committed to the 1150 pages of Book Six. Knausgaard certainly understand that anyone still reading at this point is very much a fish on the line—it’s as though we’d subscribed to the Knausgaard-Of-The-Month club, and he can deliver just about anything he likes at this point.

= = = = = =

Which opportunity he seizes by following the 400 pages of autobiographical minutae with 400 pages of philosophical musings, historical analysis, and literary theory. Sounds awful, perhaps, but I found it mostly informative and thought provoking, though I did wonder just how good Knausgaard really was at this kind of intellectual writing as compared to people who do it on a more regular basis and whose work I might tend to steer clear of. On the other hand, Knausgaard gives himself the license to take his musings anywhere they might lead him—he isn't constrained to stick to a particular thesis or subject. This allows him to make some surprising and interesting associations and connections.

The bulk of this middle section is devoted to the early life of Adolf Hitler, up to and including the composition of Mein Kampf. Hitler’s book, of course, has the same title as Knausgaard’s, though our author maintains that this provocative choice preceded any serious considerations of its implications. Knausgaard, I should make clear, is in no way an admirer of Hitler, but nor is he particularly intimidated by this third rail of modern culture:

The organization he [Hitler] was a part of building up in Munich in the 1920s, with its storm troopers, uniforms, and weapons, was an extension of the military, and the politics he put forward, with its starkly defined enemy and all its muscular aggression, was an extension of the war by other means. That his appeal should be so vast that he could draw many hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of people along with him seems unfathomable to us today; we read the arguments and the perils are plain to us, the idiocy, the sheer contempt for fellow human beings, yet it was not by arguments he won over the people, but by that very abyss that ran through his soul, or by what it generated within him, for what he thereby expressed, his inner chaos and his yearning for that chaos to stop, were curiously congruent with society’s inner chaos and its yearning for that chaos to stop. His chaotic soul strove toward the boundaries by which it was constrained, his hometown morality and the order provided by the military, which is to say the petty bourgeois and the Prussian or Wilhelmian, both belonging to the past, which in the hardships of the Weimar years was where the majority, Hitler among them, turned. What made Hitler so different, however, was the flame he ignited in all who listened to him speak, his enormous ability to establish community, in which the entire register of his inner being, his reservoir of pent-up emotions and suppressed desire, could find an outlet and pervade his words with such intensity and conviction that people wanted to be there, in the hatred on the one side, the hope and utopia on the other, the gleaming, almost divine future that was theirs for the taking if only they would follow him and obey his words.

Hitler’s defining characteristic, according to Knausgaard, and the defining point of contrast between Hitler’s struggle and his own, is that Hitler lacked the ability to emotionally interact with other human beings on a one-to-one basis. Hitler had no access to the “you”—no significant emotional attachments whatsoever. But he had a spectacular ability to establish a “we,” and so he poured all of his energy and emotion into conjuring this collective identify for those who constituted his chosen “we”—that is, ethnic Germans. The notion of a volk, a people, has ever since remained suspect at best in large part because of Hitler. Similarly, the concept of nationalism has been tainted ever since World War II because it divides the world into an “us” and a “them,” allowing little if any voluntary subscription to either camp. The worth of the people allocated to the “them” camp can then be devalued; in the case of the Nazis, it was reduced to zero. Growing up in America (or in many countries) in recent decades, it is a matter of principal that every human life has worth. Even people who violate this principal at least pay lip service to it. It was not always so. Nor is it safe to assume that this principal will always be respected.

Knausgaard, if I understand him correctly, is thoroughly, excruciatingly alive to the human beings around him, to the “you”; but hardly at all to the “we.” In this he is hardly unique. His life, his work, is an unending meditation on his friends and family. It’s as though he lives in a different universe from the one Hitler inhabited. The Groucho Marx line about not wanting to join any club that would have him as a member, well, that’s Knausgaard’s position as well. And if there is one club I’m sure he would not care to be a member of, it’s the club of Knausgaard admirers, the people who think they know him and can be his friend because they relate to his books.

The notion that “race” constitutes an empirical distinction between different groups of people in the world is a persistent one. I think most people today still accept this notion to some degree, though it is no longer entirely possible to get away with saying that one race or another is more one thing or another—more athletic or intelligent or advanced. You can believe it, you can even let that assumption be your guiding principal, but you should be careful about saying it out loud. Knausgaard notes that from the late 19th century right up through the middle of the 20th century, notions of empirical racial differences were one of the cornerstones of a pseudo-science known as eugenics. A recent book, THE GUARDED GATE: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians and Other European Immigrants Out of America, by Daniel Okrent, describes how prevalent and appealing (at least to members of the race that got to run the universities and write the books) this pseudo-science was. Did racism lead to eugenics, or did a sincere but incorrect set of assumptions, backed by faulty science, provide a warrant of credibility and objectivity to racists? It had to work both ways. In any case, both Knausgaard and Okrent note how much Hitler cribbed from American racists and their Jim Crow laws.

But Knausgaard has a lot on his mind besides Hitler. This passage got me thinking:

Charisma is one of the two great transcendental forces in the social world; beauty is the other. They are forces seldom talked about, since both issue from the individual, neither may be learned or acquired, and in a democracy, where everyone is meant to be considered equal and where all relationships are meant to be just, such properties cannot be accorded value, though all of us are aware of them and of how much they mean.

Hitler had a kind of charisma, of course, but what of Knausgaard himself? He could never say it, but what else but a kind of charisma could make it possible for an otherwise unremarkable middle-class Scandinavian to make his unremarkable life a literary sensation? I’m not saying that Knausgaard has some mysterious ability that is not the same as talent or insight, but rather that talent and insight are, in part, a kind of charisma that has been successfully channeled onto the page. Just as a charismatic person doesn’t have to worry about being charming and interesting, a writer with the right kind of talent can sit down and tell us about trips to pick up the kids, obsessive checking of email, and endless cigarettes on the balcony without worrying about whether readers will find it all interesting. Or rather, he may have worried—allright, he definitely worried—but he had the alchemical knack for turning everything, even this worry, to account.

The non-Hitler passages from the middle section of Book Six could easily be broken out as a set of essays, some long and some short. For example, Knausgaard gives us an excruciating forty-page line-by-line reading of a poem by Paul Celan. It’s an impressive exegesis, but it seemed endless. There’s also much about James Joyce, the Bible, the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, and (of course) Knausgaard’s father. How well it all hangs together, or whether it even needs to hang together, is up to the reader. For me, it was like auditing a class with a brilliant but eccentric professor. I didn’t ever have the feeling that it wasn’t worth my while.

= = = = = =

For the final 400 pages of Book Six we return to the apartment in Malmö. As we join the action, Books One and Two have been published, and our author is beginning to be famous, but so far just in Scandinavia. Knausgaard’s wife, the writer Linda Boström, is beginning to experience symptoms of the bipolar disorder that she had first experienced in early adulthood, perhaps jolted out of stability by having to read her husband’s erstwhile private thoughts about her and their marriage, just a few weeks before the rest of Northern Europe was to have the same opportunity. For several weeks she experiences catatonic desolation, then ascends through a relatively normal phase to a state of distracted ebullience. The depressive phase sounds awful enough, but Knausgaard’s account of her mania is devastating. As depicted, Boström is blithe and affable during this phase, but her affability seems to float above an abyss of terror and confusion. She can’t quite connect with the person she knows she was and which everyone, including her husband, expects her to be. It’s as though she were impersonating herself. She removes herself to a nearby mental hospital, where she befriends other patients and staff. After visiting home on two occasions she wanders off into town (instead of returning to the institution, as required) and meets people in bars. On another occasion, she shows up at their apartment to attend one of her children’s birthday party:

She rang the doorbell of the apartment at eleven.

She’d had a haircut and dyed her hair black. She wore heavy green eye shadow, a red skirt, purple tights, and high heels. She was smiling, but looked utterly drained.

“What do you think of my Frida Kahlo look?” she said.

“You look good,” I said.

“Shall we go and get some cake? And fruit?” she said.

“Can we have a cup of coffee first?” I said.

“Yes, of course,” she said.

I wondered how to tell her. After seeing her, I knew there was absolutely no question of her organizing the birthday at the school.

“How are you?” I said.

“I’m very well. A bit tired maybe.”

On one wrist she had an enormous watch.

“You bought yourself a new watch?” I said.

“Yes! I took the biggest they had to remind myself to be punctual. Otherwise I can’t handle it. They get so angry with me then.”

“And the green strap?” I said, nodding toward her wrist.

“That’s to symbolize that I’m totally free. Whenever I look at it I think about it. About being completely free.”

“Very nice,” I said. “Mm, Linda?”

“Yes?”

“It might be best if you don’t go to the school. It’ll be very intense, you know. And what you need is peace and quiet. It’s much better if I go, and then you can come in the afternoon and celebrate at home. What do you think?”

“Yes, it’d be wonderful not to have to go,” she said.

This is heartbreaking—this passage has come to mind often in the weeks since I first read it. My sense of indignation at Knausgaard’s seeming betrayal was somewhat tempered when I learned that Boström herself had made her disorder the subject of a radio documentary in 2005: Jag skulle kunna vara USA’s president, which translates as “I Could Be the President of the United States.” Knausgaard and Boström divorced in 2016, five years after the events described—and after a fourth child.

Knausgaard depicts his own behavior during this episode as sensitive and caring. Perhaps it was, but what a price to extract for that solicitousness. I can’t imagine what was going through his mind as he wrote this account—I feel I can know the man in the book to some extent, but as for the man writing the book, not so much. Some lines from Macbeth come to mind, though; a bit over the top, I concede, but here they are:

…For mine own good,
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

So yeah, Macbeth was killing people who interfered with his ambition and Knausgaard ... wasn't. But in the end, his greatest loyalty is to his writing project. It gave him the means to write himself right out of that apartment in Malmö and into a new life with a new woman, spent partly in London and partly in Sweden. I’ve read some of his more recent pieces, and they’re fine, if less riveting than My Struggle. It’ll be interesting to see if he ever ups the ante to such a degree again.

#77: The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

Some books just matter more than others—it isn’t something you grasp right away, but the more time I spent with The Master and Margarita the more I realized that it was a book that mattered a lot, to me and to the world. Bulgakov wrote the novel in Moscow during the 1930s. These were the years of Stalin’s terror, when a working writer could expect to either be executed, exiled to Siberia, or cowed into craven submission. These were also the last years of Bulgakov’s life, as he slowly succumbed to an hereditary kidney ailment. Bulgakov had had some success as a playwright during the 1920s, but after 1930 the censors would not allow any of his works to be published, much less produced. So, not a great situation, overall. But Bulgakov had at least one thing going for him: Stalin liked him, or at least tolerated him. The dictator had enjoyed one of the author’s early plays, and they had exchanged at least one phone call. So Bulgakov mattered to Stalin enough for Papa Joe to presumably be willing to strike his name from certain lists that would have been submitted for his review.

So here you had a talented writer, unable to make a living by writing, living in a country where fear and paranoia were the diet of ordinary life. Intense physical pressure produces diamonds, and intense psychological pressure helped produce The Master and Margarita.

It’s not a shapely or a particularly cohesive novel. It’s a tour-de-force in which episodes of finely chiseled realism share space with episodes that are straight out of a nightmare. It’s a vehicle for everything that Mikhail Bulgakov knew and felt during the last years of his life, but rarely fails to be entertaining: funny and profound in equal parts. You suspect at times that it’s overflowing its borders, sprawling out of control, but at the same time it’s so remarkable, so full of invention and humor, so gorgeous, that it doesn’t matter.

The edition I have was translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine O’Connor, with annotations and an afterword by Ellendea Proffer. The annotations were invaluable—they clued me in to all sorts of allusions and themes that I would not have caught on my own. The Master and Margarita might not be quite as complex as Ulysses, but like Ulysses it connects with all sorts of actual people and events in the city where it is set (Moscow), as well as with various literary themes and even, again paralleling Ulysses, with an ancient literary text—in Bulgakov’s case, the New Testament.

There are three interconnecting story lines. The first concerns the devil, who, for reasons unstated, has come to 1930s Moscow to put on a theater performance of “black magic,” but also to host his annual Grand Ball. Bulgakov’s devil, who goes by the name Woland, isn’t so much about destroying souls or opposing God—he’s more a kind of haughty, austere nobleman. His black magic show and other dealings with the citizens of Moscow work to expose the veniality of those citizens, and then to humiliate and punish them for it. He expresses no motive for his various pranks because the motive is really Bulgakov’s. The principal victims are editors, theater producers, and housing authorities—that is, the very kind of people who would have made Bulgakov’s life difficult.

In the first chapter, the devil, introducing himself as a foreign “consultant,” meets an editor and a poet in a park. They get to talking and the subject of predestination comes up. As if to just prove a point, the devil informs the editor that his death can be foreseen and that he will be beheaded that very day because “Annushka has spilled the oil.” Twenty minutes later the editor slips and falls under the wheels of an approaching streetcar and is duly beheaded because the sidewalk was slippery because etc., etc., etc. This unhinges the poet, who after witnessing his companions’s demise attempts to chase after the devil. The pursuit goes on for several hours and has a dream-like quality, as the poet follows the devil through the city, never managing to get any closer, but managing to lose his clothes and his mind in the process. By midnight, he finds himself in an insane asylum babbling about Pontius Pilate (more on him later).

The devil has a retinue of four very entertaining and raffish demons, consisting of:

• A tall shabby-genteel fellow named Korovyov. His principal trademark is a monocle with a shattered lens.
• A shorter grotesque fellow with a nasal voice, fiery red hair, and a fang, named Azazello.
• A large black mischievous cat named Behemoth, who can turn himself into a cat-like human as the occasion demands.
• A beautiful redheaded succubus named Hella, who is usually naked.

And this is Russian Literature, you say? Seem more in line with, say, Beetlejuice. But the annotations assure us that each of these demons is based on longstanding mythological precedent. Azazello, for example, is the “demon of the waterless desert or the ritual scapegoat, according to several mentions in the Old Testament; Satan’s standard bearer (in Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example); and, most relevant here, also identified as the fallen angel who taught men magic and women how to paint their faces.”

Throughout the first part of the book, there are assorted further encounters between various persons in the literary and theater world and members of the devil’s entourage. There is also a once-in-a-lifetime theater performance that sets all of Moscow talking. By the end of the first part, the local insane asylum, headed up by the wise and sympathetic Dr. Stravinsky (no relation), is at full occupancy as a result of these encounters.

The second part of the book takes up a separate story line, a romance between the otherwise-unnamed Master and the woman he meets and immediately falls in love with on the street one day: Margarita. We had met the Master briefly in the first part—he’s a patient at the asylum and tells his tale of woe to one of the victims of the devil’s pranks who has washed up there. He’s written a novel that has been rejected by the publishers. He falls into despondency and is then betrayed to the authorities (for writing a book on a religious theme) by someone who covets his nice apartment (actually a small cottage in the courtyard of a larger building). After a relatively brief spell in Siberia he ends up in the asylum, convinced that his hopes as a writer, as well as any future with Margarita, are gone.

But Margarita herself is not so resigned, and when she meets Azazello in a park and agrees on the spot to be the hostess of Satan’s Grand Ball, she is acting on a determination to make something happen, no matter how outlandish, so that she might someday find her way back to her missing Master. (Not that he is her master—he’s a master in the sense of being a master of his craft. No whips or chains.)

The details of Margarita’s services to Satan constitute the most fantastic part of the book—they are fairy-tale like. Bulgakov’s ability to invent strange and wonderful details helped, but these were not my favorite chapters. Trying to relate the specifics would be like trying to relate the details of a dream.

Now we come to the third and final story line, which has already been alluded to a couple of times (Pontius Pilate, New Testament). When the devil first converses with the editor and the poet, he takes issue with their assertion that Jesus was a made-up character and begins to relate a story in which Pilate, in his palace in Jerusalem, converses with Jesus before condemning him to death. If the outline of this story is familiar, the details are not. For one thing, Jerusalem is called Yershalaim and Jesus is Yeshua Ha-Notsri, which means Yeshua of Nazareth in Aramaic, the language that Jesus actually spoke. This linguistic exactitude gives us the sense that we might really be looking directly at an actual scene from 2000 years ago, and not viewing that scene through the distortions imposed by the intervening history and theology. By this point, any notion that we are listening to a spoken account has been dispelled—we are now reading a very different book from the one that we were reading just before and which we will be reading again afterward. It’s a calm, orderly narrative very finely drawn. Which is jarring after the hijinks of the first chapter. It would be strange enough to find a fantastical story embedded within a realistic one, but it’s even more strange to find a realistic story embedded within a fantastical one—like looking at a Picasso painting, and finding that within that colorful disorienting spectacle there stands an easel, and on that easel is a Vermeer—not a Picasso-fied Vermeer, but an actual Vermeer.

As the Biblical story begins, Pilate has requested that Jesus be brought before him for an interrogation. He has to determine whether to confirm the prisoner’s death sentence. Pilate is experiencing a migraine headache and is rather impatient and even exasperated during this interview. Bulgakov’s Jesus is soft-spoken and respectful and aware that his life hangs in the balance:

“Couldn’t you let me go, Hegemon?” asked the prisoner suddenly, and his voice became anxious. “I can see that they want to kill me.”

This Jesus asserts that “there are no evil people in the world.” Pilate asks “Did you read that in some book?” and Jesus replies “No, I came to that conclusion on my own.” Pilate asks “And that is what you preach?,” and Jesus replies “Yes.”

Jesus does not openly defy Pilate or the authority of Rome, but he says enough to seal his fate:

“Among other things,” said the prisoner, “I said that every kind of power is a form of violence against people and that there will come a time when neither the power of the Caesars nor any other kind of power will exist. Man will enter the kingdom of truth and justice, where no such power will be necessary.”

After this 20-page episode, we read nothing more of Pilate or Jesus for over 100 pages. When the Biblical story re-erupts into the extravagant story of the devil in Moscow, it is presented in the form of a dream that one of the characters in the asylum has, although it is unmistakably the next chapter of the narrative that the devil had begun in the park. This chapter shows us the execution of Jesus. Then another 100 pages of Moscow action before the final two Biblical chapters, which follow Pilate, but also Matthew and Judas, during the evening after the execution. In this third interpolation, the story is presented as the text of the Master’s novel, as it is being read one night by Margarita. Bulgakov has told us several times that the Master’s novel is about Pontius Pilate, but it is only here, two-thirds of the way through The Master and Margarita, that the connection is made explicit.

The ability to write a story in which another story is an element, and to give the reader both stories and to make them sufficiently different to give the impression that they are really from two different minds, is a rare and extraordinary skill, a feat of literary ventriloquism. Nabokov’s Pale Fire comes to mind, but it’s more typical that an author will tell us that such a secondary work exists, but not attempt to produce it, or produce only a brief fragment. Though the Biblical story in The Master and Margarita constitutes only four chapters out of 32, a total of maybe 60 or 70 pages, the story is fully realized with multiple characters and plot lines, and would stand on its own as a novella. Ellendea Proffer, who supplied the annotations and afterword for this edition, notes in the afterword that

The style of the Pilate chapters, with its majestic rhetoric and almost transcendental irony, is the skin covering the muscle of Bulgakov’s scholarship. These chapters are a tour de force, and represent Bulgakov the mystificator at his most dazzling, as well as the amateur historian. While Bulgakov sprinkles parodistic echoes from the Gospels throughout the Moscow narrative, he scrupulously strips away everything that can be called messianic or mythic from the Pilate chapters, leaving us with a pitiful yet compelling Yeshua, who is historically plausible.

I admit to having completely missed every such “parodistic echo” in the Moscow chapters, despite eight years of Catholic School, but it hardly mattered. This book is like a gigantic feast, and you’d have to spend quite a bit of time studying it before you could even begin to understand everything that Bulgakov is up to.

The last 50 pages of The Master and Margarita provide a series of “wrapping up” chapters that are vaguely anti-climactic. They’re very mythic—characters riding horses into the heavens and such—but they also have a kind of comic-book feel as well. I could almost imagine the page layouts and the four-color process. Bulgakov didn’t finish The Master and Margarita until just before his death, and you could almost feel him holding on to the novel for as long as he could, just as he might have held on to his life. It was not published until 1966, almost 30 years after the author’s death and is apparently quite popular in Russia to this day. The Russians have even attempted to film it a couple of times, which is a fool’s errand if ever there was one. But it’s not hard to understand why they would want to.

#76: The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez

The Friend is a one-sided conversation between Me and You. Me is a woman, perhaps in her 50s, who is a writer and also teaches writing to university students. The conversation is necessarily one-sided because You is deceased—a recent suicide. You was also a writer, male, a bit older and considerably more successful than Me. Me and You have been close friends for decades—she was his protégé, his soulmate, and, for exactly one night near the beginning of their relationship, his lover. You was married three times; his wives are identified as Wife One, Wife Two, and Wife Three.

We often organize our thoughts, explain ourselves to ourselves, by addressing them to an absent person; this kind of apostrophizing is almost inevitable when that person will be absent forever (https://literarydevices.net/apostrophe/). As Me recalls You, and addresses him, she draws on a lifetime of reading and learning that would have flavored real-life conversations between the two:

The intensity of your romantic life was not merely helpful but essential to your work, you said. Balzac lamenting after a night of passion that he’d just lost a book, Flaubert’s insistence that orgasm was a drain on a man’s creative juices—that to choose the work over the life meant as much sexual abstinence as a man could endure—these were interesting stories but, at bottom, silliness. If such fears were grounded, monks would be the most creative people on earth, you said. And after all, plenty of great writers were also great womanizers, or at least known to have potent sex drives. You write for two people said Hemingway, you said. First for yourself, then for the woman you love. You yourself never wrote better than during those periods when you were having lots of good sex, you said. With you, the beginning of an affair often coincided with a spell of productivity. It was one of your excuses for cheating. I was blocked and I had a deadline, you once told me. Not even half joking.

I’ve so far failed to mention The Friend’s other major character, the one pictured on the front cover. This would be Apollo, the 150-pound Great Dane that Me has inherited from You. Over lunch with Me, Wife Three has confided that You, before taking his life, has suggested that Me and Apollo might make a good match:

“I begged him to find someone else to take him, which is when your name came up.” [This is Wife Three speaking.]
“It did?”
“Yes.”
“But he never said anything to me.”
“That’s because he really wanted to keep the dog. And in the end he wore me down. But your name came up a few times. She lives alone, doesn’t have a partner or any kids or pets, she mostly works at home, and she loves animals—that’s what he said.”
“He said that?”
“I wouldn’t make it up.”

Me is more than a bit unworldly, a gentle soul and not prone to challenging things that people tell her, which may explain why she never seems to consider the obvious—that Wife Three did in fact “make it up.” We infer that Me’s devotion to You must have been an open secret in their circle.

Me is a soulful, warm, intelligent, and interesting person, and the pleasure of reading The Friend is sharing her company for a few hours. But that doesn’t mean that Nunez might not be having a bit of fun at Me’s expense. Consider, for example, how Me relates to us how Apollo begins to become solicitous of her:

One night I wake to find Apollo by the bed, apparently trying with his teeth to draw back over me the blanket I must have thrown off in my sleep. When I tell people about this they don’t believe it. They say I must have dreamed it. Which I agree is possible. But really I’m thinking they’re just jealous.

She also tells us that Apollo, in his unspeaking way, insists that she read aloud to him in the evening. It’s perfectly valid for us to take these assertions at face value. But it’s also valid to assume that she’s a bit credulous. For the most part, The Friend is a serious, even solemn work that deals with grief. It’s an emotional book, with the emotion expressed for the most part through musings and memories. I don’t think the grace and beauty of the book is at all diminished if our narrator is also on occasion revealed to be a bit soft headed. So yeah, I think Wife Three did make up the story about You wanting Me to have the dog.

Me is a writer and so her memories of You, and her account of living with Apollo, are intermingled with her thoughts on various writers and ideas. In The Friend she muses about J.M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel Disgrace, about a 2014 Hungarian film titled White God (“in which the dogs of Budapest rise up against the oppressor”), and about Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet from 1929, among various other things. The short descriptions of these works are interesting in and of themselves, but they also give us insight into Me’s mind and also comment in indirect ways on what’s happening in The Friend. Disgrace, for example, tells of the disastrous results of the affair a middle-aged literature teacher forces upon a young student. You was also a womanizer, though he did not meet a similar fate. Me never criticized him, but her recollections of Disgrace at least acknowledge that she might have had reservations about his behavior, as per the first quote from the book above.

Me has also been working with victims of sexual trafficking, helping them work out their trauma through writing. Me is not herself such a victim, but she wonders on some level if You has not taken advantage of her in different ways throughout their relationship, and if she is not in her own way dealing with a kind of trauma as a result, even as she mourns and misses You.

Nunez blends all of these ingredients—mourning, friendship, human/animal relationships, teaching, writing, abuse—in interesting and strange ways. Thoughts bounce between these various themes, and asides and random thoughts pop out of the text every now and then that refract them in unexpected ways. For example:

I have heard of a study according to which cats, unlike many other animal species, do not forgive. (Like writers, perhaps, who, according to an editor I know, never forget a slight.)

Most of us are to some extent victims of those more assertive and articulate than us, women no doubt more often than men. The Friend shows us how one particularly vulnerable individual copes with this kind of asymmetrical relationship with her friends and with the world: on the one hand by having such a rich inner life, and on the other by forming an intimate bond with a fellow creature that will never try to use words to control her.

#75: Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

This gigantic, intricately plotted novel revolves around a court case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which originated in an attempt to determine the proper heirs to an estate. We come to understand that this law case is a kind of black hole that absorbs the life force and sanity of all those who invest their time and energy in it. Dickens certainly had a sizeable axe to grind regarding the British legal system in the 19th century; presumably he sought to rally supporters to the cause of judicial reform. Two centuries and an ocean away, this aspect of the author’s mission is no longer compelling, but the weird destructive force at the center of Bleak House retains a definite metaphysical fascination. Dickens wisely steers clear of legal details, presenting Jarndyce and Jarndyce exclusively in terms of the psychological effects it has on people. In other words, we don’t see the case directly—we see it reflected in the people it concerns. In this regard it bears comparison to the mind-destroying force at the center of a much different gigantic novel—Infinite Jest. Parties to Jarndyce and Jarndyce who understand that the only safe policy is to ignore it completely go on to lead meaningful lives. Esther Summerson, a ward of the court, and John Jarndyce, a wealthy man who takes Esther into his household and makes her is housekeeper (and later, for a time, his fiancée), are among the ones who are wise enough to take this course. Richard Carstone, another ward, along with the elderly Miss Flite and a Mr. Gridley, are among the unfortunates who invest time and energy in the case. Their fate is madness, death, or both. Jarndyce and Jarndyce is like a medusa—to look at it straight on, to engage with it, is fatal.

Bleak House presents several dozen characters, great and small. Each has a role to play in moving the massive and intricate plot forward. This is much less confusing than it might be because Dickens invests each character with a distinctive characteristic, be it a catch phrase, a physical detail, or a mannerism. It also helps that the great majority of the minor characters are quite peculiar—grotesque even. Thus we get Mr. Turveydrop, the dancing master, whose only occupation and concern is his “deportment”—that is, his appearance and his manners. His son now gives all the lessons, leaving the senior Turveydrop free to pose before the world, like an oversized peacock. Then there is Phil Squod, a rather disheveled but goodhearted former seaman who, due to an unfortunate series of accidents, is disabled to the extent that he must navigate the world by sidling along walls and then pitching out into a room once he is near is destination, much like a ship tacking into the wind. Just reading about him induces a faint sense of vertigo.

As different sets of characters are brought together in a series of intricately plotted encounters, the reader gradually discover the secret at the heart of the novel, which has to do with a child abandoned at birth. Mother and child move separately through the story, at first unaware of each other; Dickens lets the reader guess the solution to mystery just a few hundred pages into the story—and a few hundred pages before it is “officially” revealed. The mother in question, Lady Dedlock, is the wife of a prominent aristocrat. She is a regal and heretofore unimpeachable presence; she fears that public knowledge of the child she bore out of wedlock would destroy her reputation, her marriage, and her husband’s position as the scion of an ancient and illustrious family. The extent to which this fear is warranted is difficult to know—Victorian England was not famous for its tolerance of such improprieties. Nevertheless, when Sir Dedlock does finally learn of the matter, we are glad to find that his only concern is for the well being of his wife.

I was watching Game of Thrones at the same time as I was reading Bleak House, and I could not help comparing them in my mind. One point of comparison is the way both works are able to keep such large casts of characters, and such complicated plots, moving so smoothly forward. Another is the notion that both are prime examples of the maximalist entertainment of their times, works that met their audiences in regular installments over months and years and whose success was a matter of great public interest. Game of Thrones throws hundreds or even thousands of people, millions of dollars, dragons, explosions, sex, incest, torture, just about everything it can at its audience. Which is not to say that the underlying story (which was, after all, created by a single individual with a word processor) isn’t compelling. Dickens had only pen and paper to work with. But he in his own way throws everything in his arsenal into his work: fantastically weird characters, a far-flung web of intrigue, good and evil in extreme manifestations. One character spontaneously combusts about halfway through the book. An additional parallel: both stories have at their centers a matter of concealed parentage. How this parentage is discovered, how its revelation is anticipated, and how it actually occurs are matters at the core of both works.

Dickens also deploys a command of language that frequently amazed me. Here, for example, is a passage where he describes how the great world responds to the news that a man has spontaneously burst into flame, leaving just a small pile of greasy ashes in his wake:

Out of the court, and a long way out of it, there is considerable excitement too; for men of science and philosophy come to look, and carriages set down doctors at the corner who arrive with the same intent, and there is more learned talk about inflammable gases and phosphuretted hydrogen than the court has ever imagined. Some of these authorities (of course the wisest) hold with indignation that the deceased had no business to die in the alleged manner; and being reminded by other authorities of a certain inquiry into the evidence for such deaths, reprinted in the sixth volume of the Philosophical Transactions; and also of a book not quite unknown, on English Medical Jurisprudence; and likewise of the Italian case of the Countess Cornelia Baudi as set forth in detail by one Bianchini, prebendary of Verona, who wrote a scholarly work or so, and was occasionally heard of in his time as having gleams of reason in him; and also of the testimony of Messrs Foderè and Mere, two pestilent Frenchmen who would investigate the subject; and further, of the corroborative testimony of Monsieur Le Cat, a rather celebrated French surgeon once upon a time, who had the unpoliteness to live in a house where such a case occurred, and even to write an account of it; —still they regard the late Mr. Krook’s obstinacy, in going out of the world by any such by-way, as wholly unjustified and personally offensive.

A quick Internet search reveals that readers questioned Dickens’ inclusion of this bizarre incident; he responded by stating that “he had studied the topic [of spontaneous combustion] seriously and had found there are about 30 cases on record, of which the most famous is that of the Countess Cornelia de Baudi described in 1731.” Who needs dragons?

Bleak House has aged well in most respects. The world still loves a great villain, and Bleak House provides a couple of prime examples: one is the inexorable, secretive lawyer Tulkinghorn, who discovers Lady Dedlock’s secret and tortures her by threatening to reveal it. Another is the nasty old Mr. Smallweed, a moneylender who is so physically decrepit that he must be carried everywhere in a chair and then periodically “shaken up” like an understuffed pillow when he settles to the bottom of his chair. Smallweed masks his ferocious rapacity behind a veneer of unctuous courtesy; he pretends that it is “his friend in the city” who is demanding immediate repayment of what his debtor had assumed to be a long-term loan. “You’ll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear,” comments one such debtor.

“My dear friend!” cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both hands to embrace him. “Never! Never, my dear friend! But my friend in the city that I got to lend you the money—he might!”

That Smallweed is able to so “squeeze” his clients this way is particularly galling considering that any one of them could easily squeeze the life out of his decrepit frame with one hand.

Dickens’ noble characters, on the other hand, have not aged quite as well. Sometime between 1850 and today we’ve lost our taste for excessively humble, virtuous heroes and heroines. Esther Summerson, who is in fact the daughter of Lady Dedlock, and through whose eyes much of the story is told, could give lessons in saintliness:

When my guardian left me, I turned my face away upon my couch, and prayed to be forgiven if I, surrounded by such blessings, had magnified to myself the little trial I had to undergo. The childish prayer of that old birthday, when I had aspired to be industrious, contented, and true-hearted, and to do good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could, came back into my mind with a reproachful sense of all the happiness I had since enjoyed, and all the affectionate hearts that had been turned towards me. If I were weak now, what had I profited by those mercies? I repeated the old childish prayer in its old childish words, and found that its old peace had not departed from it.

In Esther’s defense, she was raised as an orphan in the household of a rather miserable old hag, so she comes by her self-effacement honestly. At least she is ultimately spared the cringe-inducing prospect of marriage to her much older “guardian” Mr. Jarndyce. He has proposed awkwardly to her, asking in a letter if she will be “the mistress of Bleak House”; their mutual emotions run the gamut from respect to gratitude to, uh, admiration and trust. He calls her by such nicknames as “little woman” and “Dame Durden.” I don’t expect fifty shades of anything much from Dickens, but still. Fortunately in the final chapters, Jarndyce relinquishes his claim on Esther and hands her off to the younger, more virile Mr. Woodcourt. (Without first running the idea past Esther herself, it should be noted.) Perhaps Dickens’ original readers would have understood his mind and his world well enough to know that the Jarndyce/Summerson match was not meant to be. I knew that it was awkward and peculiar, but I didn’t understand Dickens and his time well enough to be confident that he wouldn’t go ahead with it.

#74: Sapiens; A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari

This is a strange book and for a while I didn’t know what to make of it. The early chapters describe how one of many species of early man (genus: Homo) outcompeted and likely exterminated numerous other human species, including Homo neanderthalensis. But up until about 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was just another Homo species, climbing trees and hunting with spears. Then something Harari calls the Cognitive Revolution happened. Harari believes that the Cognitive Revolution was triggered by a genetic mutation that enabled humans to use language for new conceptual purposes. He uses a provocative word to describe this new capability:

Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, “Careful! A lion!” Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, “The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.” This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.

Harari throws many of the hallmarks of our species into the category of “fictions”: religion, the use of money, social hierarchies, “tribal spirits, nations, limited liability companies, human rights,” and just about all the concepts that we use to live our lives. It’s a bold and daring way to hold a mirror up to our world, and I liked the way it made me think. So human rights “don’t really exist”? I don't think Harari is seeking to undercut these concepts, he’s just asking us to recognize that they exist by convention: we have to agree on such concepts for them to have validity. They are abstractions held in common.

Harari then goes on to describe a second great revolution in human history: the Agricultural Revolution. This one I’d heard a bit about before, but maybe not in the context of the “broad sweep of human history.” With agriculture, humans could give up nomadic living and collect in larger groups than ever before—i.e., cities. This led to more complex and formal social hierarchies, occupational specialization, and ultimately, writing, which was first used to track inventories of products and to record exchanges and debts. In the end, though, was it really an improvement for humanity? Harari thinks not.

The third (and final) revolution that Harari addresses is the Scientific Revolution. Again, this is not unfamiliar ground, but a summary of the latest thinking on this revolution, along with some of the usual provocative speculation, promised to be interesting.

But along the way something began to unsettle me about the way Harari was describing our species. The same boldness that impressed me in his discussion of the Cognitive Revolution began to seem a bit unrestrained, a bit ex cathedra. At one point he writes enthusiastically about the possibility of human immortality (or something close to it):

A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely).

Those “serious scholars” show up a few more times in the book, usually called on to testify to some piece of astonishing speculation. (I guess Harari wants us to keep in mind that he’s not talking about facetious scholars, who tend to pull our collective legs from time to time.) I tend to think that death is of a piece with birth and sex—that if you want to get rid of the former, you might eventually have to get rid of the others. Death—a key part of the process that causes new individuals to replace old ones—is kind of a key to evolution. I remember reading the third (less famous) part of Gulliver’s Travels, where Gulliver encounters the struldbrugs, a race of people who live forever but are listless and inert. The implication (for me, at least) is that life would lose meaning if people became a-mortal.

But to get back to Sapiens, it’s one thing for Harari to offer packaged summations of the early phases of human life, it’s quite another for him to tie the world around him and the world to come into such tidy packages. He never pulls back on his tone of certainty.

I was a bit baffled by this passage:

In traditional agricultural economies long-distance trade and foreign investment were sideshows. Consequently, peace brought little profit, aside from avoiding the costs of war. If, say, in 1400 England and France were at peace, the French did not have to pay heavy war taxes and to suffer destructive English invasions, but otherwise it did not benefit their wallets.

It wasn’t clear to me that Harari knew that in the year 1400, France and England were about two-thirds of the way through something we call the Hundred Years War, which involved copious heavy war taxes and destructive English invasions. Probably he did know, in which case I assume we are to understand this as a counter-factual hypothetical. And his point—that modern wars interrupt trade patterns where long-ago historical wars didn’t—is clear enough. But it’s sloppily made, and is “lack of cost” really such a different thing than “benefit”? I recently read a book that dealt in part with the Hundred Years War, and I certainly got the impression that the people who lived in France and England in 1400 would very much have preferred that their respective countries not be at war. I can’t imagine their situation would have been that much worse had the war interrupted extensive trade between the two nations.

Many of Harari’s pronouncements are what you might call “debatable,” though I suppose the debates would almost always be interesting. I got through the later sections of Sapiens by imagining that the book was a high-level brief prepared for the government of an alien civilization that wanted to know something about the dominant species on Planet Earth. In such a light, Harari’s done a commendable job, and if he oversimplifies or speculates recklessly on certain points, that can be written off as a consequence of his extremely high-level perspective.

Ultimately, I found Sapiens to be a cold book. Harari wants to purge himself of prejudices and assumptions about humanity. In places this approach works brilliantly—yes, civil rights are fictions, in that they don’t exist unless we agree that they exist. The word “fiction” drives the point home, even if it does seem to place him (and us?) outside the worthiness, the necessity, of that concept. And yes, to take another example, perhaps Nazism was a religion, in the sense that it was an ideological framework that explained to its adherents who they were and where they were going. But for all their faults, it doesn’t seem quite right to lump more conventional religions with Nazism. The aliens might see it that way, but we have more at stake.

#73: A Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchman

Barbara Tuchman would have us know that the second half of the fourteenth century was not the best of times in Europe. The bubonic plague first struck in 1350 and then reappeared every ten years or so thereafter. The initial episode eliminated about a third of the population of Europe. Incredibly, the plague is eventually upstaged in Tuchman’s book by the general bad behavior of the remaining population. It was a time of unending senseless violence and oppression. I had read A Distant Mirror many years ago and remembered being stunned by how swiftly and relentlessly the plague had cut down entire families, towns, and cities. But I hadn’t remembered the endless wars, feuds, battles, and campaigns that killed off many of the lucky survivors of the great pestilence. I think that must have been because the mayhem was so consistent, so widespread, so … ordinary. No individual or event stands out. Bad behavior is Tuchman’s great subject: people betraying, deceiving, and destroying each other. The plague stands out by contrast because it was not motivated by greed, treachery, or envy.

Ours is a more peaceful time because we have governments and laws that at least limit the amount of violence and brutality in the world. We may not feel that we live in the best of times, but consider how the great majority the world’s billions live their lives unmolested, with shelter and enough to eat. We have electricity and antibiotics. In the fourteenth century, Europe was transitioning to nation states, but was still controlled by royal families—and the Catholic Church. Thus you had various kings, dukes, popes, and cardinals plotting and making war against each other. To finance these campaigns, these worthies levied tax after tax on the merchant and peasant classes. The concentration of wealth was extreme, and much of it was put to use to ravage the very people who had funded it. Armies swarmed across the countryside, stealing the food of whatever towns and villages were in their path, and killing and raping many residents for good measure. In many ways, they treated their ostensible enemies better than they treated the townspeople who were unlucky enough to be in their way. High-ranking enemies were an economic resource who could be ransomed for substantial sums; many of them were likely blood relatives in any case and thus worthy of a certain deference.

Tuchman likes to give us lists, perhaps because this is the kind of information that makes up much of the documentary evidence that has survived for six centuries. Here is a short selection from a much longer inventory of the possessions of the Duc de Berry, a brother of the King of France and one of four such brother/dukes who controlled—or rather, owned—the majority of the country:

Berry was too absorbed in acquisition and art to be interested in war. He lived for possessions, not glory. He owned two residences in Paris, the Hôtel de Nesle and another near the Temple, and built or acquired a total of seventeen castles in his duchies of Berry and Auvergne. He filled them with clocks, coins, enamels, mosaics, marquetry, illuminated books, musical instruments, tapestries, statues, triptychs painted in bright scenes on dazzling gold ground bordered with gems, gold vessels and spoons, jeweled crosses and reliquaries, relics, and curios. He owned one of Charlemagne’s teeth, a piece of Elijah’s mantle, Christ’s cup from the Last Supper, drops of the Virgin’s milk, enough of her hairs and teeth to distribute as gifts, soil from various Biblical sites, a narwhal’s teeth, porcupine’s quills, the molar tooth of a giant, and enough gold-fringed vestments to robe all the canons of three cathedrals at one time. Agents kept him apprised of curiosities, and when one reported a “giant’s bones” dug up near Lyon in 1378, he at once authorized purchase. He kept live swans and bears representing his chosen device, a menagerie with apes and dromedaries, and rare fruit trees in his garden. He ate strawberries with crystal picks mounted in silver and gold, and read by candlelight from six carved ivory candle-holders.

It’s interesting to note how wealth in the fourteenth century took the form of discrete objects, rather than as a bank balance. When we read today that some software tycoon is worth a hundred billion dollars, it’s hard to relate that to what ordinary people have or to translate that into the objects that ordinary people want to buy: things like cars, houses, or boats. In this regard, Donald Trump, with his penchant for putting his name in gold at the top of buildings around the world, has more in common with the Duc de Berry than he does with Warren Buffet.

The underclasses who underwrote this extravagance were not unaware of how they were being exploited. There were frequent insurrections, against Berry and others like him. The people participating in these insurrections must have known that they would be slaughtered when they were put down, as they inevitably were. They participated because everything had been taken from them—there had nothing to put in the scales to balance their hatred. The Duc of Berry, at least, was less bloodthirsty than many of his peers: where they would set an example by burning or beheading defeated insurgents by the hundreds or thousands, he would spare the life of anyone who could afford to pay a hefty fine.

Berry is just one of a seemingly endless parade of bad people that Tuchman leads before us. An individual named Robert of Geneva provides a good illustration of fourteenth century realpolitik:

With the fury of a conqueror defied, Cardinal Robert determined to set an example by atrocity and found his occasion at Cesena, a town near the east coast between Ravenna and Rimini. When the Bretons who were quartered there seized supplies without paying for them, they provoked an armed rising of the citizens. Swearing clemency by a solemn oath on his cardinal’s hat, Cardinal Robert persuaded the men of Cesena to lay down their arms, and won their confidence by asking for fifty hostages and immediately releasing them as evidence of good will. Then summoning his mercenaries, … he ordered a general massacre “to exercise justice.” Meeting some demurral, he insisted, crying “Sangue et sangue!” (Blood and more blood), which was what he meant by justice. He was obeyed. For three days and nights beginning February 3, 1377, while the city gates were closed, the soldiers slaughtered. “All the squares were full of dead.” Trying to escape, hundreds drowned in the moats, thrust back by relentless swords. Women were seized for rape, ransom was placed on children, plunder succeeded the killing, works of art were ruined, handicrafts laid waste, “and what could not be carried away, they burned, made unfit for use, or spilled upon the ground.” The toll of the dead was between 2,500 and 5,000.

Robert of Geneva became known as the “Butcher of Cesena” and was later elected Pope Clement VII.

Wading through these decades of massacres, plagues, mad kings and debauchery was one Enguerrand VII, Sire de Coucy and Count of Soissons. Coucy was one of the richest men in France, and possessor of a mighty fortress 50 miles north of Paris. Skilled as both a soldier and a diplomat, Coucy was present at many of the century’s key events. For Tuchman, he stands in contrast to the general dementia of the time. Coucy was no saint, but he was intelligent and practical, qualities scarcer in the 1300s than saintliness. Most of the assorted dukes, princes, and counts of the day still put great stock by notions of chivalry that eschewed planning, prudence, and strategy. To their minds, a lord should always be at the front of the attack, the first into battle. This led to a lot of dead and captured lords—the King of France was even captured on one occasion by the English. What do you do with a captured king? You hold him for a king’s ransom, of course. Funds were raised by—what else?—new taxes.

I have not read other books by Barbara Tuchman, but I infer that a consistent theme for her is ironic contempt for the foolishness of powerful men. In The Guns of August, she wrote about the leaders of early 20th century Europe who started the First World War for no good reason. Another of her books is titled, plainly enough, The March of Folly. I think I would enjoy any of her books because ironic contempt, when done well, is extremely entertaining. But I suspect that just about any century, including the current one, could be savaged in this manner. Folly is everywhere, and in every one. We might not even be able to guess all the things about our times that will earn the contempt of our distant offspring, though we could at least get the list started for them.

Maybe a century like the 14th is what it takes to send civilization off in a new direction. Energy was no longer flowing effectively through the old channels—crusade, chivalry, feudalism. Church. Within a hundred years of the end of this century, ships would be sailing new oceans and both the Renaissance and the Reformation would be underway. I don’t know enough to draw the lines that connect the dysfunctional 14th century to the European rebirth, but I’m sure it can be done, in fact, it probably has already been done by somebody.

#72: Sodom and Gomorrah, by Marcel Proust

Reading Proust isn’t like reading anything else. It’s like having a roommate. And after reading the first three volumes of In Search of Lost Time last year, I was ready for a hiatus.

I wasn’t actually planning on reading the fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, just yet, but when I picked it up last month, I saw that Part 1 was just 45 pages long. (Part 2 was the remaining 700-odd pages.) So I thought I could commit to that much at least and then see how things were going. As it turns out, they were going fine and I read both parts straight through. So you could say that I’ve moved back in, if only provisionally.

I had come to expect Proust to be quite obscure on sexual matters, but in Part 1 we observe his narrator observing an interlude between Baron Palamède de Charlus, a member of the illustrious Guermantes family, and Jupien, a tailor who lives in the same building as the narrator. The narrator had been occupied with botanical matters, watching the courtyard through a staircase window, “peering through the shutters … at the Duchess’s little shrub and at the precious plant, exposed in the courtyard with that assertiveness with which mothers ‘bring out’ their marriageable offspring, and asking myself whether the unlikely insect would come, by a providential hazard, to visit the offered and neglected pistil. “ But his attention is diverted when he notices Charlus and Jupien retiring to the back of Jupien’s shop for their own variation on the mating act—“of course, here the word fertilisation must be understood in a moral sense, since in the physical sense the union of male with male is and must be sterile…”

We never do find out what became of the ‘precious plant,’ but Proust does a pretty amazing job of cross pollinating the notion of sex as a natural and spontaneous part of life in nature with the particular constraints and proclivities of homosexual love in early 20th century France. Without outing himself, he manages to make a very eloquent case for the rightness of gay love, which must have required more than a little courage 100 years ago.

It’s never easy to find concise quotes in Proust because his discussions tend to expand and ripen over several pages, but here’s a passage where he is discussing a marriage between a rather masculine woman and a rather feminine man:

It was said at the Ministry, without any suggestion of malice, that in their household it was the husband who wore the petticoats and the wife the trousers. Now there was more truth in this than was supposed. Mme de Vaugoubert really was a man. Whether she had always been one, or had grown to be as I now saw her, matters little, for in either case we are faced with one of the most touching miracles of nature which, in the latter alternative especially, makes the human kingdom resemble the kingdom of flowers. On the former hypothesis—if the future Mme de Vaugoubert had always been so heavily mannish—nature, by a fiendish and beneficent ruse, bestows on the girl the deceptive aspect of a man. And the youth who has no love for women and is seeking to be cured greets with joy this subterfuge of discovering a bride who reminds him of a market porter. In the alternative case, if the woman has not at first these masculine characteristics, she adopts them by degrees, to please her husband, and even unconsciously, by that sort of mimicry which makes certain flowers assume the appearance of the insects which they seek to attract. Her regret at not being loved, at not being a man, makes her mannish. Indeed, quite apart from the case that we are now considering, who has not remarked how often the most normal couples end by resembling each other, at times even exchanging qualities?

Proust, in his role as naturalist, goes on to provide examples of couples who have either exchanged their nominal gender characteristics, or merged their separate characteristics into a single exotic hybrid. I could almost hear David Attenborough.

Baron de Charlus is the presiding presence in Sodom and Gomorrah, and he is a remarkable creation. When we first met him in an earlier volume he seemed quite forbidding—he invited the narrator to his home after offering to be his guide to society but then, when he arrived, insulted and threatened him for no apparent reason. But by the present volume, the narrator has gained a better understanding of the baron’s changeable nature, and he has opportunities to observe him as he moves through society. For example, he observes the baron exchanging meaningful glances with other “inverts” at a society event, even as the gentleman maintains his ostentatious pretense of heterosexuality. When the Baron gets an eyeful of the attractive young sons of a certain Mme de Surgis, he engages her in conversation though she would not otherwise seem of sufficient social status to warrant his attention. The scene becomes comic as less perspicacious onlookers comment on the baron’s suave ability put the moves on an attractive woman, even as he maneuvers to keep the sons in his line of sight as he talks to Mme de Surgis. But nothing is ever quite so simple in Proust:

For if everyone was pleased to admire in her sons the regal bearing and the beautiful eyes of Mme de Surgis, the Baron could taste an inverse but no less keen pleasure in finding those charms combined in the mother, as in a portrait which does not in itself provoke desire, but feeds, with the aesthetic admiration that it does provoke, the desires that it awakens.

Later in the book, the Baron has made himself the sponsor of an attractive young musician, Morel. Here the humor works on multiple levels. On one level, we see the Baron strenuously maintaining his heterosexual pretense, even as by this point literally everyone around him knows exactly what he is about. One another level, we see him trying to convince himself, and everyone else, that he is master of the situation, even as we easily see that Morel is a completely unscrupulous character who has the mighty Baron wrapped around his finger. Proust is able to expose the ridiculousness of de Charlus even as he displays a great deal of sympathy and even affection for him. This is, of course, exactly what Shakespeare did for Falstaff, except that Shakespeare did not put himself into the story as an occasional confidante of Sir John.

Surprisingly, Sodom and Gomorrah is pretty funny throughout. The narrator returns to the coastal resort of Balbec for the second half of the book, where at first he is haunted by the ghost of his grandmother, who was his companion on his first sojourn there and has since died. Eventually, though, he begins to go out into society, where he visits the Verdurins, who have rented a house in the country, and the Cambremers, who, as it happens, are the Verdurins’ landlords. Nominally, the Cambremers rank higher in society than the Verdurins, though Mme Verdurin is so fanatically devoted to nurturing her “salon” of mostly preposterous and second- or third-rate artists and intellectuals that by sheer energy she manages to repeatedly outmaneuver and upstage the Cambremers.

Here, amid a maze of allusions and asides, is Proust’s description of M. de Cambremer’s face:

M. de Cambremer bore little resemblance to the old Marquise [his mother]. He was, as she used affectionately to put it, “altogether on his father’s side.” For anyone who had only heard speak of him, or even of letters from him, of a lively and apt turn of phrase, his physical appearance was a surprise. No doubt you would grow accustomed to it. But his nose, in order to come and take up its crooked position above his mouth, had chosen perhaps the one oblique line, out of so many, that you would never have thought of tracing on his face, one that denoted a common stupidity, made even worse by the proximity of an apple-red Norman complexion. It is possible that M. de Cambremer’s eyes had preserved in their lids something of that Le Cotentin sky, so soft on those beautiful sunny days when the stroller is amused to see, halted beside the road, and to count in their hundreds, the shadows of the poplar trees, but those heavy, rheumy, badly drooping eyelids would have prevented intelligence itself from passing through. And so, disconcerted by the thinness of that blue gaze, you turned back to the big, crooked nose. By a transposition of the senses, M. de Cambremer looked at you with his nose. This nose of M. de Cambremer’s was not ugly but, rather, a little too beautiful, too strong, too vain of its own importance. Hooked, polished, shiny, spanking new, it was quite prepared to make up for the spiritual insufficiency of his gaze; unfortunately, if the eyes are sometimes the organ in which intelligence is revealed, the nose (whatever their intimate solidarity and the unsuspected repercussions of one feature on the others), the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity exhibits itself the most strongly.

This nose is almost a character in its own right, a distant relation of the schnozz in Gogol’s story titled “The Nose” (what else?) and of the nose of the great leader in Woody Allen’s Sleeper.

I don’t ever tire of Proust’s social observations; it’s when he’s discussing his own love life that I have trouble. Throughout Sodom and Gomorrah, he’s in a relationship with Albertine, the “seaside girl” he first met at Balbec in volume two. In some ways, their relationship has become cozy, and it gave me a certain satisfaction to see them snuggling together at one point in a railway car. But romance for Proust is always a matter of shadow boxing with himself, and he seems at times almost determined to find a reason to spurn Albertine. There is always a kind of void at the center of the narrator’s romantic obsessions: he sees his own emotions, and he sees the time and place of an encounter, but he does not or cannot even imagine the inner life of the other person. Here he is confronting Albertine after an acquaintance has suggested that she has been conducting a lesbian relationship with another of the seaside girls, Andrée:

Albertine, even before swearing to me that it was not true, expressed, like everyone upon learning that such things are being said about them, anger, concern, and, with regard to the unknown slanderer, a fierce curiosity to know who he was and a desire to be confronted with him so as to be able to confound him. But she assured me that she bore me, at least, no resentment. “If it had been true, I would have told you. But Andrée and I both loathe that sort of thing. We haven’t reached our age without seeing women with cropped hair who behave like men and do the things you mean, and nothing revolts us more.” Albertine merely gave me her word, a categorical word unsupported by proof. But this was precisely what was best calculated to calm me, jealousy belonging to that family of morbid doubts which are eliminated by the vigour of an affirmation far more surely than by its probability. It is moreover the property of love to make us at once more distrustful and more credulous, to make us suspect the loved one, more readily than we should suspect anyone else, and be convinced more easily by her denials. We must be in love before we can care that all women are not virtuous, which is to say before we can be aware of the fact, and we must be in love too before we can hope, that is to say assure ourselves, that some are. It is human to seek out what hurts us and then at once to seek to get rid of it.

This is about the extent of the “Gomorrah” side of things in Sodom and Gomorrah. There’s something quite profound in the way that Proust follows this convoluted psychological thread, but along the way Albertine is left in the dust. She is a necessary catalyst for his meditation, but a closed book to him nonetheless. The last line of the book gives us this declaration (spoken to the narrator’s mother): “I absolutely must marry Albertine.” This after he has been considering breaking off the affair altogether. To say that the factors contributing to this decision are obscure is an understatement. No telling how the matter will turn out, but I’m not anticipating that he’ll follow through on this intention.

* * * *

At times when reading the earlier volumes of In Search of Lost Time, I’ve found it difficult to understand why Proust should rank with Joyce, Woolf, and the other high modernists. But Sodom and Gomorrah has made me a believer. This book is unsurpassed in its own peculiar way, language and thought are melded together such than neither can be thought of as separate from the other. This is why quoting Proust is so difficult. No idea or thought is discrete, everything flows along like a wave that changes but never quite resolves. Proust’s writing is quantum in the sense that it is made out of discrete bits: words and ideas, yet it appears to the reader as something indivisible.

Amid such imaginative force, it was astonishing at a single moment in the book to discover the author undisguised, sitting in his dark room. The glimpse is uncharacteristically brief:

I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knows nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness.

#71: The Long Ships, by Frans G. Bengtsson

The Long Ships is a great read—it’s like a great adventure movie, except that you get to know a lot about everyday life in 10th century Scandinavia. Reading this book immediately after reading The Odyssey, it belately dawned on me that both books are about sea-going adventurers in long-ago times.

The Long Ships was more purely entertaining because its author understood the minds and expectations of 20th century readers. Frans G. Bengtsson was writing in Swedish in the early 1940s. His book is about the fictional life and experiences of an individual named Red Orm. Orm (the “Red” is just for formal occasions) grows up on a farm in what is now southern Sweden, but is shanghaied by a Viking raiding party and quickly earns the trust of the sailors and becomes a full-fledged member of the ship’s crew. He sails with them to Spain where they are captured by Moors and then serve as galley slaves for a couple of years. Orm has a knack for making the best of situations—his full moniker could easily be “Lucky Orm.” By taking advantage of his opportunities he works his way up to being a member of a high-ranking official’s private bodyguard. In this capacity he participates in a raid on the Spanish town of Santiago de Compostela, then in Christian hands, where he ultimately finds himself in possession of a boat, a crew of compatriots, and a very large bell taken from the town’s cathedral. Recognizing his opportunity, Orm and his compatriots abscond with the bell, sail north, and eventually present it as a gift to King Harald Bluetooth of Denmark. A little digging around on the web reveals that the high-ranking Moorish official was a real person (Almanzor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almanzor) and that he did in fact lead a raid to Santiago during which the cathedral’s bells were captured. They were then melted down to make lanterns for the Great Mosque of Cordoba. The historical record says nothing about a Viking crew making off with the largest bell, but you almost expect to discover that that happened too. That’s how deftly Bergtsson weaves the experiences of his fictional hero into the actual events of 10th century Europe.

Orm goes on to have several additional adventures that I will not summarize here. He is a shrewd and wily fellow—like Odysseus—but he is also just an average guy who makes the most of his opportunities. He falls in love (with one of King Harald’s daughter, as it happens), makes friends, and deals with people and situations as best he can. Bengtsson shares Orm’s thoughts and feelings with the reader, and as a result we feel as if we know him. So we root for him and experience his victories and defeats vicariously. Because that’s how novels work.

Thinking back on The Odyssey, we never have any opportunity to get so chummy with Odysseus. His author (who may have been but was probably not an individual named Homer) is as much an advocate for his hero as Bengtsson is of his, but he has no interest in humanizing him, making him seem like a regular guy. This is neither a defect nor a choice—Homer was writing before the kind of characterization that Bengtsson employs had been invented.

This is not to claim that The Long Ships is a better book than The Odyssey. It’s a bit like the difference between a fine antique and a high-end reproduction of a fine antique. The original item ultimately has greater value, but the knock-off is probably preferable for everyday use. Your enjoyment of the newer object is not complicated by a need to appreciate its originality or understand something of the circumstances in which it was created.

But as different as these two books are, there are also similarities. Both Odysseus and Orm live in worlds without formal laws or government. When dealing with adversaries, they rely entirely on their own resources.

Odysseus needs to rid his home of the 108 suitors who have grown accustomed to whiling away their days in his palace. He doesn’t have the option of obtaining an eviction notice or a restraining order; nor can he just evict them single-handedly.

Orm’s domestic crisis occurs when a renegade force attacks his homestead while he is away on an expedition, killing several of his associates and making off with his daughter and his livestock. Orm is fortunate that he returns to his home the very day after this attack. Like Odysseus, he gathers a group of trusted allies, and with them he plans to track down the assailants and recover what is rightfully his. He plans a three-pronged attack with the primary thrust coming from the enemy’s flank—like Odysseus, he must take care to not be predictable.

It’s very satisfying to imagine dealing with those who have offended or harmed us in such a way. Think of all the movies, starring John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, where circumstances conspire to leave the hero with no other option than to make his own justice, with copious violence. The difference is that John Wayne and Clint Eastwood live in worlds where there should be a legal authority they can appeal to; typically (and, for the sake of the story, fortuitously) these authorities are absent, or turn out to be corrupt or ineffectual. On some level the implication is that relying on laws, lawyers, and law enforcement is for weaker, lesser mortals. Doing what other people tell you to do, obeying the damn government, constraining your own rights and priorities to accommodate due process of law, well, to hell with that.

In the worlds of Odysseus and Red Orm, there are neither governments nor laws, at least not written laws. We admire them because they refuse to be intimidated, but also because they are stronger and smarter than their adversaries.

Who can say if there were really such contented Vikings as Red Orm? Or if their contentment would be like his. We might as well ask what kind of jokes Charlemagne would have liked. We know lots of things about long-ago people, but we don’t know their everyday attitudes or what their interpersonal relationships were like. Because that wasn’t the kind of thing that those people thought it was important to record for posterity. So maybe the best policy is just to read The Long Ships because it’s such a great adventure story, and not too much about exactly which century Orm belongs in.