#88: Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk

Flights is an enigmatic book. It’s quite readable and even rather charming, and yet when you finish it you’re not quite sure what you just read. If you turned it upside and shook out its contents, you’d find about 10 longer stories, embedded within a substrate of shorter meditations, anecdotes, and philosophical reflections. What you would not find is a plot.

What holds the book together in lieu of a plot is a set of themes, subjects, and preoccupations, as well as a distinct personality, a hyperaware, mildly ironic, playful tone. Some of the shorter sections are in the first person, and so it’s easy to think you’re getting to know Olga Tokarczuk as you read the various meditations and anecdotes. I think it might be unwise to make such an assumption. What I know about Tokarczuk is that she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, also that Flights won the International Booker Prize. Her latest novel, just published in English this year (2022) is titled The Books of Jacob—it’s a 900-page affair depicting the life of an 18th century Polish Jew who claimed to be the messiah.

One of the longer stories in Flights is about a man who loses his wife and child while vacationing on a Croatian island. The two get out of the car for a bathroom break in the middle of nowhere and just disappear. He looks near and then far, eventually calls the authorities who comb every inch of the island, but they find nothing. Days pass. There is no logical explanation. Either they fell into a hole somewhere or managed to cross the island on foot and escape on the ferry. Or maybe they were abducted, or swam away and drowned. The man’s experience is akin to what it feels like to lose your keys and then search you house, checking the likely places multiple times and the unlikely places at least once. Your logical mind tells you they must be in one of these places, but nevertheless they are not.

Much further on in the book we find the sequel to this story: the man is now back home in Poland, and his wife and child are with him. We don’t learn exactly how or where they eventually showed up, but we understand that the wife has offered no explanation for their absence, refusing even to acknowledge that something extraordinary has happened. This proceeds to drive the man mad; he believes she knows exactly what happened to her and is just concealing this information from him. He tries haplessly to discover the truth—asking a child psychologist to hypnotize his three-year-old son, for example, or following his wife while wearing a disguise. This ends badly when she recognizes him as she turns an aisle in a clothing store. He has a hoodie pulled up over his head:

“What are you doing here?” she says. “Do you have any idea what you look like?”

Then her eyes soften, a moment later a kind of haze comes over them, and she blinks. “Jesus,” she says, “what is going on with you? What is wrong?”

Eventually the wife and child leave (this time in a more conventional way) and the man sets out to return to the island, his only clue the Greek word Kyrios (κύριος), which he had found scribbled in his wife’s notebook.

He looks the word up in a Greek-Polish dictionary. He believes it must hold a key to the mystery because what has happened must have a meaning, and it must be possible for him to discover that meaning by sifting through the available evidence.

The various definitions of Kyrios that he finds are vague and non-overlapping. For example: “in good measure, moderation, correct relations, attain an aim, overmuch, the appropriate moment, a suitable time, a nice moment, a convenient occasion, …” The list goes on and on; we read over the man’s shoulder, trying like him to find relevance.

The English-language Wikipedia entry for Kyrios is similarly long, complex, and multifarious. At one point is says that “Kyrios defined the relationship between Jesus and those who believed in him as Christ.” Does that help? No.

The word appears in another of the stories, in this case the final one, about an elderly scholar of Ancient Greek history and literature and his younger wife. They are touring the Greek Isles by ship. They have gone on this tour for five years running; the man is paid to deliver daily lectures on the places they visit. He is becoming senile but can still pull himself together to deliver rousing lectures. It’s a poignant and rather tender story. The wife is a scholar as well, and muses that she might take over the lecture gig after her husband passes:

Karen had come up with the idea, to talk about those gods who didn’t make it into the pages of the famous, popular books, those not mentioned by Homer, then ignored by Ovid; those who didn’t make names for themselves with drama or romance; who weren’t terrifying enough, cunning enough elusive enough, who are known only from fragments of rock, from mentions, from the little extant from burned-down libraries. But thanks to that they’ve preserved something the well-known gods have lost forever—a divine volatility and ungraspability, a fluidity of form, an uncertainty of genealogy. They emerge from the shadows, from formlessness, then succumb once more to looming darkness. Just take Kairos [i.e., κύριος], who always operates at the intersection of linear, human time and divine time—circular time.

This is all very provocative, and as we read it we think back to the poor husband riffling his wife’s purse and finding this word scribbled in her notebook. But is there a deeper mystery to uncover here? I don’t know, but the implication is that to work too hard to solve the mystery is a fool’s errand.

Several of the stories deal with scientists who specialize the preservation of human tissues, in recent centuries through plastination, which is “a technique for the preservation of biological tissue that involves replacing water and fat in tissue with a polymer (such as silicone or polyester) to produce a dry durable specimen for anatomical study.” (Stay with me here.) Tokarczuk does make the interesting point that the exploration of inner space, the identification of the various organs and the ways they work together, has been as important as the exploration of our planet’s nether regions, or of the stars and galaxies. It obviously has less appeal for most people because it involves the dissection of corpses. In Flights, this is not a problem.

One of the tissue preservation stories is told from the perspective of Philip Verheyen, who was an actual 17th century Flemish surgeon, anatomist and author. Tokarczuk highlights one of Verheyen’s claims to fame, which was the discovery and naming of the Achilles tendon. She also makes much of the fact that he lost part of one leg in early adulthood, and experiences severe “phantom pain” in this missing extremity. His anguish is both physical and metaphysical; he has preserved the amputated limb and in his desperation takes it out of its liquid preservative, lays it below the remaining part of his leg, and sticks pins in it to see if there is any correspondence with the sensations he feels. There is not.

As in the story of the Polish tourist, there is something missing which must be accounted for, but which nevertheless cannot be accounted for. There is also Greece again, in the person of Achilles. Various such threads are woven throughout Flights. The ship that the Polish tourist and his family take to the Croatian island is named Poseidon; so is the tour boat that the elderly professor and his wife are on. The word panopticon appears multiple times in the book. This word can be defined either as “a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed” or as “an optical instrument combining the telescope and microscope.”

Flights is the opposite of an Agatha Christie mystery, where the details are marshalled toward a specific revelation. The details here are like ants in an ant colony, each seeming directionless but forming a definite pattern. If you enjoy the journey—the wit, the erudition, the excursions into odd moments in scientific history, the weaving together of coincidence and paradox—then you will enjoy Flights, though there is, for me at least, a faint aftertaste of exasperation. Tokarczuk has a way of approximately juxtaposing details, characters, or events in such a way that the reader's mind tries to bridge the gap, the way an electrical pulse jumps from one neuron to another. Tokarczuk is interested in what meaning feels like, not in a particular meaning.

In closing, I would like to mention that one of the stories is about a ferryboat captain named Eryk who seems to speak entirely in quotations from Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab; the one that tipped me off was “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.” One morning Eryk veers from the monotony of his twice-daily crossing route and points his boat toward the open sea. The passengers are irritated at first, but then bemused. As the story ends, the narrator informs us that she herself was “on the deck of that ferry.” Call her Ishmael.

#87: Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

I might never have picked this book up if it hadn’t been for the title. Hamnet was the name of William Shakespeare’s only son, who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1585 and died there eleven years later. Nothing is known of Hamnet Shakespeare beyond these dates; indeed, little is known about the life of his father, either, beyond such administrivia as deeds, real estate purchases, and a lawsuit or two. We know that in his will he left his “second-best bed” to his wife, Anne Hathaway. We pick over these scant details because of the extraordinary impact of his writings—we speculate and extrapolate compulsively, and have been doing so for centuries. But the man himself is completely absent from his work. He creates people, inhabits them, but they are not him. This drives us a bit mad because we’re not comfortable with writers unless we can see the life and the work as two halves of a whole.

Maggie O’Farrell has written a book that plays off this unsatisfiable curiosity in a striking way. It fills the void, creating a story for the Shakespeare family in Stratford, but for the most part avoids the trap of trying to bridge the gap between Shakespeare’s works and his life.

The playwright is a secondary character in O’Farrell’s book, and neither his first nor his last name is ever mentioned. She designates him at various points according to his function in her story: first he is “the Latin tutor,” later he is “Agnes’s husband.” Shakespeare’s wife is in fact identified as Agnes in her father’s will, and O’Farrell might prefer this name because it disconnects her in the reader’s mind from the (presumably) older wife of the standard narrative.

Agnes is, in fact, the central character in the story. She comes from a prosperous family that owns a large farm just outside of town. The Shakespeares, by contrast, are a family in decline, owing to the disagreeable temper and unscrupulous dealings of the family patriarch, one John Shakespeare, a glovemaker. Agnes, with her “sizeable dowry,” might otherwise be beyond the reach of John Shakespeare’s son, except that she has a kind of taint, inherited from her deceased mother:

She has a certain notoriety in these parts. It is said that she is strange, touched, peculiar, perhaps mad. He has heard that she wanders the back roads and forests at will, unaccompanied, collecting plants to make dubious potions. It is wise not to cross her for people say she learnt her crafts from an old crone who used to make medicines and spin, and could kill a baby with a simple glance. It is said that the stepmother lives in terror of the girl putting hexes on her, especially now the yeoman is dead. … She is said to be too wild for any man. Her mother, God rest her soul, had been a gypsy or a sorceress or a forest sprite.

Agnes does, indeed, possess special gifts. She is able to look into the soul of a person by taking their hand and pressing her fingers into the muscle between the thumb and the forefinger. She can also see into the future, both her own and others’, though not flawlessly or in detail. She might know how a person’s story, or her story, will end, without know how the end will come about. These gifts do not make her fantastic or all-powerful, they just make her a bit different, a bit dangerous. She also has medical talents of a more conventional nature, being proficient in the use of herbs and plants.

In a way, we share Agnes’ gift of foresight, because we, too, know how the story will end, but not how this end will come about.

When Agnes first takes her future husband’s hand, she sees

…something of which she had never known the like. Something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town. It was far-reaching: this much she knew. It had layers and strata, like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents. There wasn’t enough time for her to get a sense of it all—it was too big, too complex. It eluded her, mostly. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them.

So there they are, the collected works, seen through a glass, darkly. By endowing Agnes with certain gifts, and by allowing this vague glimpse into the destiny of her future husband, O’Farrell has levelled Agnes up, made her as interesting and as powerful a character as the glover’s son. She is at the center of Hamnet, and holds the reins of the narrative. Her husband, of course, has an equal importance, an equal gravity, but it is occluded, present in the narrative largely by implication.

The fame and mystery of Shakespeare has allowed Maggie O’Farrell to write a book about an otherwise unremarkable family in small-town England in the latter part of the 1500s. She could have written about such a family without invoking Shakespeare, but it is unlikely that as many readers would have been drawn to it. And though O’Farrell doesn’t try to bring Shakespearean language into her story, or to draw parallels between events or themes in the plays and events and themes in her story, we are inevitably more curious about Agnes and her family than we would be if we didn’t know she was Shakespeare’s wife. It makes me think of certain Bible “epic” movies from the 1950s, like 'The Robe,' where Jesus is implied but never brought into view. I remember a scene where the main character, maybe Victor Mature or Charlton Heston, finds himself in a crowded street scene where we see the sandals of a man passing by, dragging a cross.

But while we at least we know some details of Jesus’ life and of what you might call his frame of mind, Shakespeare could have been any kind of person. O’Farrell’s Shakespeare is a decent, rather ordinary husband and father. The central event of the book is the death, from plague, of his son Hamnet. By this point, about two-thirds of the way through the book, we have come to know Hamnet as a lively, curious, but unremarkable 11-year-old. We have also come to know his twin sister Judith, his older sister Susanna, his grandparents, and his uncles and niece. These people are all in the historical record, but O’Farrell fills in their outlines, making them all unique and interesting.

Hamnet’s death is doubly a shock, both because it happens so suddenly and because it had been Judith who had first been stricken by plague, and thus had been the focus of everyone’s concern. For Agnes there is the further shock that she had not had any premonition of the event.

O’Farrell renders all the characters and events in Hamnet in simple, elegant language that evokes the everyday world of 16th century town life in England. She is particularly effective in rendering the effect of Hamnet’s death on the various family members:

The younger uncle, Edmond, had wept, tears blurring his sight, which was, for him, a relief because he found it too painful to look into the still features of his brother’s dead son. This is a child whom he has known and seen every day of his short life, a child whom he taught to catch a wooden ball, to pick fleas from a dog, to whittle a pipe from a reed. The older uncle, Richard, did not cry: instead his sadness passed over into anger – at the grim task they had been bidden to do, at the world, at Fate, at the fact that a child could fall ill and then be lying there dead. The anger made him snap at Edmond whom he thought wasn’t taking enough of the boy’s weight, not holding the legs as firmly as he should have done, by the knees and not the ankles, fumbling the job, messing it up.

I don’t consider myself a soft touch, but I felt a strong emotion as I read about how Agnes washed her son’s body and sewed him in a shroud (that is, bedsheet).

Inside Agnes’s head, her thoughts are widening out, then narrowing down, widening, narrowing, over and over again. She thinks, This cannot happen, it cannot, how will we live, what will we do, how can Judith bear it, what will I tell people, how can we continue, what should I have done, where is my husband, what will he say, how could I have saved him, why didn’t I save him, why didn’t I realise it was he who was in danger? And then, the focus narrows, and she thinks: He is dead, he is dead, he is dead.

I don’t know if O’Farrell was thinking of King Lear when she wrote this—I’ve been claiming that she doesn’t draw parallels between events or themes in the plays and events and themes in her story—but it’s hard not to think of Lear’s last speech, where he is trying to comprehend the death of his beloved daughter Cordelia:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.

Agnes’s husband is away with his acting company when Hamnet dies, and his return, early one morning as the family is preparing the body for burial, is another affecting scene. Because O’Farrell has presented the author’s marriage as a happy one (contradicting the conventional wisdom suggested by the “second-best bed”), she must give us a reason why the husband and wife have lived apart for so many years. For this, she invests her Shakespeare with a kind of claustrophobia of small-town life and family matters:

And the smell of leather, of whittawing, of hides, of singed fur: he cannot get away from it. How did he spend all those years in this house? He finds he cannot breathe the sour air here, now. The knock at the window, the demands of people wanting to buy gloves, to look at them, to try them on their hands, to endlessly discuss beading and buttons and lace. The ceaseless conversation, back and forth, over this merchant and that, this whittawer, that farmer, that nobleman, the price of silk, the cost of wool, who is at the guild meetings and who isn’t, who will be alderman next year.

It is intolerable. All of it. He feels as though he is caught in a web of absence, its strings and tendrils ready to stick and cling to him, whichever way he turns. Here he is, back in this town, in this house, and all of it makes him fearful that he might never get away; this grief, this loss, might keep him here, might destroy all he has made for himself in London.

And so, a few days after his son’s funeral, he returns to London. Agnes stays in Stratford. But this is hardly a satisfying way to end a novel, and so O’Farrell invents a final episode, which finds Agnes traveling to London for the first time in her life after she hears that her husband has had the temerity to write a play whose title is nearly the same as her deceased son’s name. She arrives at her husband’s lodging, but is told to look for him at the theater. There she joins the crowd entering the theater. The performance begins. She recognizes her husband through his disguise as the ghost of Hamlet’s father:

She thinks: Well now, there you are. What are you up to?

As if her thoughts have been beamed to him, from her mind to his, through the crowds – calling out now, shouting warnings to the men on the battlements – the ghost’s head snaps around. The helmet is open and the eyes peer out over the heads of the audience.

Yes, Agnes tells him, here I am. Now what?

Because of the circumstances of her arrival, she had not even known up until this point that the play she was watching was, in fact, Hamlet. Then the title character appears:

It is him. It is not him. It is him. It is not him. The thought swings like a hammer through her. Her son, her Hamnet or Hamlet, is dead, buried in the churchyard. He died while he was still a child. He is now only white, stripped bones in a grave. Yet this is him, grown into a near-man, as he would be now, had he lived, on the stage, walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice, speaking words written for him by her son’s father.

…

He has found this boy, instructed him, shown him, how to speak, how to stand, how to lift his chin, like this, like that. He has rehearsed and primed and prepared him. He has written words for him to speak and to hear. She tries to imagine these rehearsals, how her husband could have schooled him so exactly, so precisely, and how it might have felt when the boy got it right, when he first got the walk, that heartbreaking turn of the head. Did her husband have to say, Make sure your doublet is undone, with the ties hanging down, and your boots should be scuffed, and now wet your hair so it stands up, just so?

It's a brilliant and affecting scene, like so many in Hamnet. While still under its spell, I went and found my old Riverside Shakespeare and sat down with the text of the play, and was almost surprised to discover that Hamlet was about a million and one things, but that a father’s love for his dead child didn't seem to be one of them. It’s not that O’Farrell has given us a faulty interpretation of the play; rather, it’s that she’s given us an alternate universe where her interpretation is the only one that matters.

#86: The Master, by Colm Tóibín

The Master, by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, dramatizes various events from the life of author Henry James (1843 – 1916). The first chapter is titled “January 1895” and the last is “October 1899,” so Tóibín mostly shows us James as a man in his 50s, though in many chapters we find James thinking back on episodes from earlier in his life. The chapters could as easily have been titled according to the persons they concerned themselves with, from the author’s parents, to his siblings, to friends and relatives who played important roles in his life. So the chapter titled “March 1899” could as easily have been titled “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” as it mostly concerns the woman novelist who played an important but enigmatic role in James’s life just before the period of time covered in The Master.

As I started reading The Master, I’d half forgotten that I already knew quite a bit about the life of Henry James. In my graduate school days I’d taken a course focusing on his work, and in the years following, I’d tackled many of his novels and stories. My momentum was arrested as I began to realize just how much James had written—22 novels and over 100 stories, along with plays, autobiographies, and travel writings. I was never going to be able to swallow James whole. I had also started on Leon Edel’s five-volume biography of James, and had gotten through the first three volumes when I had a conversation with a friend and fellow student and informed her of this undertaking. Just then another student walked up and my friend said something like “He’s reading the five-volume biography of Henry James!” This was no doubt meant at least somewhat admiringly, but to my ears at that moment it was as though she’d said “He’s counting all the squirrels in Central Park!” I still haven’t tackled volumes four and five.

You might think that the life of a sedentary author who never married would not make for a good story, and certainly many people would agree with that assumption. Many of the same people would find James’s novels similarly lacking in dramatic content. Cormac McCarthy (who I have previously cited as disparaging “magical realism” in my post about Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666) has no use for writers who don’t "deal with issues of life and death," among whom he specifically mentions James and Proust (see Cormac McCarthy's Venmous Fiction. (Cranky guy, that Cormac.) Conversely, someone who does find James’ novels interesting might also find his life to be so as well. It has its mysteries, triumphs, and tragedies, like most lives; indeed, the scale of his triumphs and tragedies is more in line with the experience of the average reader. I think we want to read about both exceptional lives and ordinary lives; I do, at least. Maybe the ultimate accomplishment is making an ordinary life seem exceptional. In any case, many of the episodes that Tóibín depicts were as familiar to me as events from the news of bygone years. Here was the peculiar spiritual crisis of James’s father, Henry James, Senior: his so-called “vastation.” And there the tragedy of his brilliant and fearless cousin Minny Temple who died of tuberculosis at 24. Minny inhabits many of James’ heroines, most prominently Milly Theale from Wings of the Dove, with whom she shares her initials and her tragic early death.

One of my favorite chapters from The Master is the last one, in which James copes with an extended visit from his brother William (who was the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience and quite famous in his own right) and his wife and daughter. The brothers have never gotten along quite so well: William, the older, is judgmental and high strung, while Henry avoids confrontation but smolders with resentment at the “advice” his older brother frequently offers. It’s a very believable dynamic and quite relatable to those of us who grew up with siblings. William’s wife Alice helps to soothe relations between the brothers, and William’s daughter Peggy, age perhaps 11 or 12 at this time, delights her uncle as she discovers—and devours—the novels of Dickens during her stay, as well as her uncle’s best known novel:

…his niece suddenly asked him if he intended to write a second volume, a sequel, to The Portrait of a Lady. She told him that she had, less than one hour before, finished the book. Henry told her that he had written the book twenty years earlier and had long forgotten it: he did not think he would write a sequel to it.

“Why did she go back?” Peggy asked [referring to the book’s heroine, Isabel Archer, and her decision, at the end of the book, to return to her duplicitous husband].

…

“It is very difficult for anyone in their lives,” Henry began, “to make leaps into the dark. Isabel’s going to Europe from Albany, leaving all her family behind, and then against everyone’s advice and her own better judgement marrying Osmond, were leaps into the dark. Making such leaps requires us to be brave and determined, but doing so may also freeze any other possibilities. It is easier to renounce bravery rather than to be brave over and over. It could not, in her case, be done again. The will and the nerve needed for such actions do not come to us often, any of us, least of all Isabel Archer from Albany.

Apparently he had not completely forgotten the book. I doubt if any such conversation ever actually happened, but I certainly wish it could have. The internet doesn’t have much to say about Margaret (Peggy) James, except that she was born in 1887 and died in 1950.

Tóibín also does an excellent job of suggesting how James’s experiences in the world might have gotten his imagination started on various writing projects. Thoughts and ideas contributing to the composition of The Turn of the Screw, a ghost story and one of James’s best known and most frequently anthologized tales, originate in “a story he had heard (from the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less) about young children, left to the care of servants in an old country house, through the death, presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children: the children are bad, full of evil to a sinister degree. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions return to haunt the house and children.”

That’s actually a sketchy summary of the tale James eventually wrote. Crucially, it is missing the main character—the governess who is hired to take care of the children, and who can never quite be sure if the supernatural presences she witnesses are real or not. The reader shares the governess’s uncertainty and adds to it an additional uncertainty about the emotional and mental stability of the governess herself. She is a young woman all alone in a difficult and ominous situation. She is under strict orders never to contact the children’s father, under any circumstances. What a strange injunction—it’s like something you’d find in a Kafka novel. How could she not be under a tremendous strain?

The rest of the chapter where James hears the Archbishop’s story, titled “March 1895,” could have been titled “Alice James,” because it mostly has to do with Henry’s sister, who is also named Alice. The subject of much scholarly interest and of an acclaimed biography, Alice James was an invalid who died in her early 40s. Tóibín suggests that her malady was actually a kind of extended existential crisis, the result of being unable to engage her intelligence and force to the life choices available to a woman in the 1880s. It’s not that it couldn’t be done—witness George Eliot—it’s that it could only be done a very emotionally secure woman with the necessary support. Alice’s nervous susceptibility, her obligations to family, and other factors doomed her.

As James is developing his idea for a ghost story about orphan children, Alice has just died. Tóibín suggests that James has infused her spirit into the character of his governess, her sense of being alone against the world. The ghost story is a good one, but as originally conceived, the people in it are ciphers. Alice was a real person with a complex and tragic combination of traits. The skill of a novelist like James was to blend an interesting story with the essence of a real person.

Tóibín clearly admires James in many ways, but he sees one major flaw in his hero and illustrates it in multiple instances: it is James’ cowardice; specifically, his unwillingness or inability to come to the aid of people close to him in their hour of need. He does not answer the summons when his cousin Milly is ill with tuberculosis and expresses her wish that Henry could show her Rome. She had written him: “Think, my dear, of the pleasure we would have together in Rome. I am crazy at the mere thought. I would give anything to have a winter in Italy.” Henry chooses not to take the hint. Years later, he is visited by his old friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, who also knew Milly when they were young. Holmes probes James on the matter:

“Do you ever regret not taking her to Italy when she was ill? he asked. “Gray says she asked you several times.”

“I don’t think ask is the word,” Henry said. “She was very ill then. Gray is misinformed.”

“Gray says that she asked you and you did not offer to help her and that a winter in Rome might have saved her.”

“Nothing could have saved her,” Henry said.

Henry felt the sharp deliberation of Holmes’ tone, the slow cruelty of it; he was, he thought, being questioned and judged by his old friend without any sympathy or affection.

If only in his writing, James does take Isabel Archer, one of Milly’s avatars, to Rome, with dubious consequences. Whether that is by way of making amends there is no way of knowing.

He does not answer the summons on another occasion when his novelist friend Constance Fenimore Woolson is depending on him to visit her in Venice during the winter of 1894. Henry and Constance have shared a strange kind of intimacy, meeting in various countries and taking accommodations near each other from time to time. Their intimacy is characterized at least as much by what they don’t say as by what they do. They are both guarded to an extraordinary degree: she, Tóibín suggests, by an exquisite vulnerability, he by an almost instinctive shudder of horror at the notion of a romantic alliance, particularly with a woman. Henry agrees to meet her in Venice, but then is put off when letters from a mutual acquaintance in Venice suggest that Woolson has been alluding to some sort of alliance with James. He does not come, and Woolson, confronted by this desertion (among other factors) commits suicide by throwing herself from the balcony of her hotel. Henry receives word of her death in a telegram:

One afternoon in January he was working quietly when Smith put a telegram on the mantelpiece. Henry must, he later thought, have left it there without looking at it for an hour or more, being engrossed in his writing. It was only when he broke for tea that he moved absent-mindedly to the fireplace and opened the envelope. The telegram informed him that Constance was dead. His first response was to go to Smith and ask him calmly for tea; he then returned to his study and, closing the door and sitting at his desk, he studied the telegram which had come from Constance’s sister, Clara Benedict, in the United States. He knew that he would have to go to Venice and wondered now from whom he should enquire about the details of her death. He drank the tea when it was brought, and then he went to the window and frantically studied the street outside as though some distant detail there, some movement, a sound even, might help him to a full realization of what had happened or might erase such a realization as it slowly dawned.

Henry is as composed as ever during this episode, except for that single word, frantically, that somehow forces its way into the paragraph and serves to indicate the emotion he is trying to master. He knows that his decision not to go to Venice was at least in part intended to punish her for suggesting that an alliance between them has existed; he also knows that she understood this intent, and that she has found a way to punish him in turn.

These are not the only episodes in which Tóibín shows James dealing with a difficult situation by just not showing up. But they are the most prominent such episodes, and they also serve to demonstrate James’s aversion to even the idea of a heterosexual relationship, or any open display of emotion. The difficulty is that he does love both Milly and Constance. He just cannot show his love. Nor can he explain himself. So he writes their lives into his books instead, summoning the passion that is not available to him in real life.

#85: Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman

It’s kind of hard not to bring up War and Peace when you’re talking about an epic length Russian novel that deals with the experiences of a wide range of characters living in a nation contending with an invading army. But in this case we’re talking about a different century, a different writer, and a very different war. The centerpiece of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate is the battle of Stalingrad, and the events in the novel all take place in the Soviet Union during the fall of 1942. The State, capital S, isn’t a factor in Tolstoy’s novel, but it’s inescapable in Life and Fate. You might wonder: Would the oppressive bureaucracy, the surveillance, the paranoia of living in a totalitarian state abate somewhat while a country is fighting for its survival? The answer according to Grossman is: Yes, but not much. Different characters at various points make the statement “People don’t get arrested for nothing.” This statement indicates that the speaker has no idea why a particular person has been arrested, and suggests that there might not be a reason that could ever make sense to the speaker—or to the person arrested.

Stalingrad was the Nazi regime’s high water mark. To reach it, German armies had swept eastward a thousand miles in a little more than a year through the grainfields of the Ukraine to the banks of the Volga River. Just a little further east were the oil fields Hitler needed to fuel his war. After the Germans occupied the center of Stalingrad their advance slowed to a block-by-block attempt to drive the Russians out of the city and across the Volga. As the novel opens, their advance has stalled completely and the two armies are each dug into the foundations of ruined buildings in their respective parts of the city, hurling tons of metal at each other day and night. In proper Tolstoy style, Grossman presents the experiences of a representative sampling of the participants, from everyday artillerymen, to tank commanders, to the commanding officers, both Russian and German. The higher-ups are mostly real people, such as German Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus; the rank and file are mostly fictional. The most precariously positioned participants are the Russian men (and one woman) in the platoon holding “House 6/1,” which is exposed to the German fire and stands directly in the way of their advance. I think the appropriate military term is “strategic redoubt.” There really was such a house, which is today commemorated as Pavlov’s House. As the soldiers in House 6/1 survive from day to day, practically embedded in its ruins, they establish a kind of grim camaraderie. They treat the one woman in their midst, who was sent in as a radio operator (until the radio failed) with a charged courtesy. The commanding officer, one Grekov, finds himself in that rarest of all situations for a Soviet Russian: beyond the control of all political monitors. (It was interesting to note that every unit in the Soviet army had its political officer, its commissar, who acted as a liaison with higher ups, as a troubleshooter, but also as an enforcer of political orthodoxy.) Grekov isn’t exactly insubordinate, but he’s walking a fine line as the bullets fly all around him, and he fails to comport himself in the correct style when a superior makes the perilous journey through no man’s land to assess the situation in House 6/1.

But the war and the people actually engaged in it make up only about half of Life and Fate. Most of the remainder tells us about various members of the Shaposhnikov family. The figures at the center are two grown daughters, Lyudmilla and Yevgenia. These sisters live in different towns and meet only towards the end of the book. Mostly we read about their respective families, including their current and former husbands. It’s a very distributed group and the fact that they are all related to each other somehow seems largely a kind of pretext. I don’t think you would ever read about such a fragmented family in a nineteenth century novel. In essence we are reading about a dozen or so different individuals and their respective struggles to get news, get in touch with children and spouses, find places to live and food to eat, and just come to terms with the world they find themselves in. The “List of Chief Characters” at the back of the book runs to eight pages and I had frequent occasion to consult this list in order to understand who, for example, Yevgenia is thinking about when she thinks about Tolya (he is her son from her first marriage). Without this list I don’t think I could really have made sense of Life and Fate, at least not without making my own list as I went along.

Grossman is particularly interested in the affairs of Lyudmilla’s husband, Viktor Strum, who is a nuclear physicist and whose life and experience most closely match the author’s own. Viktor is the head of a government nuclear physics laboratory and early on he makes a rather important breakthrough. Naturally enough, he expects his professional status to be considerably enhanced by his discovery—there is even some talk of a Stalin Prize. But Viktor’s supportive superior is soon replaced by a party functionary, and Viktor finds that some of the people working under him are being let go and that some of the bureaucrats consider his work to be “too theoretical.” Viktor defends Einstein’s work in a conversation with one of these bureaucrats and of course that’s the real root of his problem: one Jew defending another. Viktor hears of a meeting where he is denounced by various bureaucrats and by some of his trusted colleagues, who dare not risk their own careers by defending Viktor. He stops coming to work and awaits his fate. If he’s lucky, he might be allowed to teach high school in a remote town. If he’s unlucky, his might be the short brutal life of a miner in Siberia. In fact, the resolution of Viktor’s crisis is entirely unexpected (at least by me) and rather fantastic. I have to admit that I identified with Viktor a bit. Out in corporate America, I also once assumed that the quality of my work shielded me to some degree from political machinations. My fate, unlike Viktor’s, was entirely predictable.

Much of what transpires in Life and Fate most certainly did happen. When Grossman describes the experiences of a group of neighbors from a Jewish neighborhood in the Ukraine, the historical record leaves little doubt that the events, in general outline, went exactly as he describes them. Details about particular individuals and moment-by-moment events are of course conjured from the author’s imagination, but they cannot be very different from what actual people saw, felt, and did. Grossman tells us about winners and losers—the terms are relative, because even the winners must live in cold apartments, queue up for groceries, and know that their every word is written down by someone somewhere. The losers are the various victims of the war and the Soviet regime—sometimes of both.

The more conventionally novelistic sections describe the relationships and experiences of various Russian men and woman struggling to make sense of the chaos around them. If this particular woman, trying to obtain a residence permit to live in the city of Kuybyshev and sharing a large apartment with half a dozen strangers did not actually exist, someone very much like her certainly did. If this particular man, commanding a tank battalion on the southern outskirts of Stalingrad and awaiting his chance to join in the offensive to surround the Nazi army, did not exist, someone like him did.

I don’t think there’s any better way to put yourself in a different time and place than a novel like Life and Fate. A less documentary novel, such as War and Peace, is less tightly coupled to its time and place such that most of its events and characters could be transposed to a different country at a different time. A film could deliver a lot more information to your brain in a lot less time than a novel, but it could not originate from within the time and place it depicts, nor could it fully reveal what things felt like to the people in the story. A factual history could give you all sorts of information, but, again, only piecemeal glimpses, gleaned from letters and oral accounts, of what things were like for the participants.

Despite the awful circumstances, Life and Fate is not a grim book. Grossman is a compassionate writer, with great empathy for the lives he describes. A passage near the end of the book captures this empathy quite well:

And here she was, an old woman now, living and hoping, keeping faith, afraid of evil, full of anxiety for the living and an equal concern for the dead; here she was, looking at the ruins of her home, admiring the spring sky without knowing that she was admiring it, wondering why the future of those she loved was so obscure and the past so full of mistakes, not realizing that this very obscurity and unhappiness concealed a strange hope and clarity, not realizing that even though neither she herself nor any of them could tell what was in store, even though they all knew only too well that at times like these no man can forge his own happiness and that fate alone has the power to pardon and chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour-camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store—hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp—they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man’s eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be …

#84: Bunk, by Kevin Young

Seventy-four million people voted for Donald Trump in November, 2020. This astonishing fact was in my mind as I read Bunk, by Kevin Young, and as I write this post.

Bunk (full title: Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News) was not the salacious romp I was expecting. Author Kevin Young has written 12 books of poetry, and his writing has the allusive, associative indirectness of poetry. Bunk is entertaining, witty, provocative, brilliant, but I do not think it was intended primarily as an entertainment. Rather, it is a book about how unreality stalks our lives and our nation.

Young isn’t equally interested in all kinds of fraudsters: he is particularly interested in people who deploy a false reality, usually by pretending to be someone they are not. So he is less interested in the Bernie Madoffs of the world than he is in the Clifford Irvings and JT LeRoys. (I realize the distinction is not absolute: Madoff was pretending to be a legitimate financial professional, but his biography was more or less as he claimed.)

Clifford Irving, for anyone under the age of 60, wrote an “as-told-to” biography of billionaire recluse Howard Hughes in the early 1970s. Except that he and a collaborator fabricated the book from information in the public record and their own imaginations. Knowing that Hughes at the time hadn’t appeared in public or given an interview in decades, they counted on the likelihood that Hughes would not step forward to refute their claims. Until he did—but only after Irving had been paid a huge advance and the book had been widely publicized.

JT LeRoy, a name previously unknown to me, published a series of books in the late 1990s and early 2000s describing a young man’s triumph over an “almost unspeakable childhood, including abuse and neglect and prostitution.” The real author, a woman named Laura Albert, employed various associates and street kids to meet with the numerous writers and admirers who flocked to her/his cause, or to actually appear on television as LeRoy.

The amazing thing about the two or three heads who made up JT LeRoy may be how well the tricks in his name worked, and for how long. The list of those caught up in the act, or by it, reads like a who’s who of a certain brand of American royalty: one writer calls LeRoy “the darling of a certain demimonde of the damned: Gus Van Sant, Courtney Love, Madonna, Winona Ryder, Marianne Faithfull, Tatum O’Neal and Garbage’s Shirley Manson were all whooping high hosannas about this damaged, cross-dressing naïf.” Writers like Mary Karr and Mary Gaitskill all appeared with LeRoy; Madonna, Faithfull, and other rock stars reached out to or wrote for him; fiction writer Dennis Cooper helped encourage LeRoy very early on, and O’Neal and Lou Reed would perform in his stead, JT being too shy to read. I too want only celebrities to read my work. Either aloud or to themselves—I’m not picky.

The last two sentence are Young being snarky. For him, there are two essential points. The first is that with a hoax there is always a discrepancy between what is real and what some portion of the population believes to be real. The second is that by taking the measure of these discrepancies we can make a kind of moral diagnosis of what afflicts our country. Young rejects moral relativism: most authors would admit to some admiration for the cleverness and ingenuity of an Irving or a LeRoy. But not Young. It’s hard not to fall under the spell of ingenious fraudsters: The actual author of the LeRoy books would sometimes accompany whoever happened to be playing LeRoy (most often an androgynous-looking woman named Savannah Knoop) as an assistant or hanger-on named Speedie. “Later on, newfound friends like Carrie Fisher would warn Savannah-as-JT in person—or unwittingly, Albert-as-JT over the phone—about the creepy hanger-on Speedie.” Young may delight in relaying such details, but he never lets you forgets what side he’s on.

Hoaxers and fraudsters succeed by telling you what your already knew—or strongly suspected. One thing that a majority of Americans believed without question through much of the 20th century was that the white race was the acme of creation, superior to all others. If you’d had any doubts about the matter, you could point to the work of distinguished scientists affiliated with prestigious institutions.

As detailed in volumes such as Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man, prominent nineteenth-century and even twentieth-century scientists … regularly falsified results and faked data to preserve notions of race and white superiority; to a man they may be said to have “[begun] with conclusions, peered through their facts, and came back in a circle to the same conclusions.”

2020 has been the year when many Americans have tried as hard or harder than ever before to disabuse themselves of racist notions. This is a kind of progress: we recognize injustices we were previously blind to and make an effort to see the world differently. But as always when a society updates its moral standards, there is an intense and determined reaction.

The effort to understand history and reality—or the history of what is understood to be reality—is ongoing, and it isn’t always enough to proclaim, as per numerous yard signs in my neighborhood, that “Science is real,” because science is created by humans and humans are imperfect. It will always be possible to unearth a scientist or two who will claim that global warming is not real, or that the white race is the pinnacle of creation. Never mind that membership in the white or any other race is a fluid concept: eugenicists a hundred years ago were almost as contemptuous of Italians and Jews as they were of blacks.

As an African-American, Young is highly attuned to the role that race has played in the history of American humbug:

I’ve come to realize the hoax regularly steps in where race rears its head—exactly because it too is a fake thing pretending to be real.

From 19th century side shows that exhibited people from Africa and Asia as “missing links” between apes and humans, to 20th century eugenicists, hoaxers have flattered the white masses by demonstrating, with elaborate scientific mumbo jumbo, that they are better than all the rest. The list of prominent public men who subscribed to eugenicist notions included Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. They may not have been the last to accept eugenicist notions, but they were the last to not see any reason to keep such beliefs to themselves.

Racism is a complicated and often baffling phenomenon that doesn’t always work the way you might expect. For example, what is it that makes white people want to impersonate black people—that is, what explains the strange appeal of blackface? Young cites numerous cases of white people masquerading as people of color, including Asa Carter, the Klu Klux Klan member and speechwriter for Georgia’s segregationist governor (and one-time presidential candidate) George Wallace, who wrote a faked memoir from the perspective of a half-white half-Indian child. Repackaged as a novel, The Education of Little Tree can still be found in many bookstores and school libraries. Also worthy of note is the case of Tom McMaster, a Georgia man who was behind the popular blog A Gay Girl in Damascus. What are the impulses driving such hoaxes? Self-dramatization and the desire for attention play a major part, but Young maintains that there’s also some sort of fetishization at work, the replacement of real people by effigies and masks of various types.

Bunk is a book that has to be read very carefully. It is a profound book that shows us what a weird and twisted hall of mirrors our culture is. For example, authors of fraudulent memoirs are “making stuff up,” right? So isn’t that the same thing as writing fiction? Isn’t there a creative side to a clever fake? Young will not have it:

Writing of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, scholar Ruth Franklin reminds us that there is in the memoir form—even in the Holocaust memoir—and element of artistic license and shaping. But this is not the same as untruth. “Like the translator who occasionally veers from the phrasing of an individual line for the sake of the work as a whole, the memoirist too must be at liberty to shape the raw materials into a work of art.” I couldn’t agree more—it should be clear that my concern is not with fiction but untruth. The hoax is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent too—hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art. The toxic presence of Holocaust deniers helps us realize how sophisticated those critics who write about Holocaust literature, including its fiction, must be; and how troubling an outright Holocaust hoax is. Besides the cost to truth, and to lived and lost lives, a collateral yet not insignificant cost is to the idea of fiction.

One of the authors Young indicts is Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird, the story of a Jewish boy managing to survive in the Polish countryside during World War II. The Painted Bird is a novel, but:

Kosinski let it be known to fellow Holocaust survivor and future Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel that the book was “in essence, autobiographical.”

I read The Painted Bird a while back, along with some other Kosinski novels. Young concedes that “what Kosinski stands accused of isn’t exactly hoaxing,” but in the context of Bunk it’s pretty clear that he finds the author guilty of deceit. Had I never read the novel, and had I not been reading the newspapers throughout the whole strange course of Kosinski’s fame and disgrace, which ended with his suicide, I might be willing to see him as just another rogue in Young’s gallery. But there is the fact that Kosinski certainly was a young Jewish boy, in Poland, during World War II. There is also the fact that The Painted Bird is a fine book. OK, that’s not a fact, it’s an opinion.

I recently listened to a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell titled “Free Brian Williams.” Gladwell’s claim is that news anchor Williams’ false claim to have been on a helicopter that was fired upon in Afghanistan is as likely to be a case of imperfect memory combined with wishful thinking as it is to be an outright lie. Gladwell brings in experts to testify to the fact that all our memories are imperfect, and that just because we might remember something happening in such and such a way doesn’t mean that that’s the way it really happened. No doubt, it would have been better for Brian Williams’ career if he had been on the helicopter that was fired upon. Alas, it turns out that he was in another helicopter entirely.

Young doesn’t have anything to say about Brian Williams, but if Williams’ case is not clear cut (at least in Malcolm Gladwell’s estimation), then how much more murky is Kosinski’s. If he told Elie Wiesel that The Painted Bird was in “essence autobiographical,” there are multiple levels on which that statement may be true or false. My take on Kosinski is that his entire life was like Brian Williams’ helicopter ride—that he himself wasn’t sure what in his life was real and what was imagined. It could hardly be otherwise given the circumstances of his early years. That he was able to write books like The Painted Bird, and like Being There, which is a sly and funny book that was made into a wonderful movie starring Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine, suggests to me that he aspired to do fine things, to make art out of the confused mess of his life.

If I am a bit of a Jerzy Kosinski fan, it seems plausible to assume that there might be some JT LeRoy fans out there in the American reading public, even now that the peculiar composite nature of that author, and the un-reality of his life, are public knowledge. Young notes how exposure is rarely the end of the road for plagiarists and fraudsters: the mea culpa phase can be just as lucrative as the initial fraud phase. There’s usually a market for memoirs describing “how and why I did it.” Frequently these books are also largely fraudulent. But the point is that un-masking isn’t likely to be the end of a fraudster’s career. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, a best-selling memoir exposed as largely fabricated, was just the first of eleven books published by Frey—so far.

From Young’s descriptions of the JT LeRoy books, I’m pretty sure I would not be a fan myself, but I’m not sure if the differences between Jerzy Kosinski and JT LeRoy are absolute or just a matter of taste or an accident of experience. It’s nice to think that you or I are smarter than all those celebrities who got on the JT LeRoy bandwagon, but I can’t really believe that Tom Waits is such a dummy.

Bunk is a very sophisticated and nuanced book, and while it’s fun to take issue with it in places, that is not to suggest that Kevin Young hasn’t understood how complex human beings are. He is like a judge who has taken on the task of distinguishing truth from lies. He knows he can’t be 100% right 100% of the time, but he does his best to disrupt our complacent satisfaction with the “humbugs, plagiarists, and phonies” around us, presidential pardons notwithstanding.

#83: Time Regained, by Marcel Proust

This is the final volume of In Search of Lost Time. It’s taken me over three years to work through all seven volumes; this will be my fourth Proust post. The three previous posts are:

#62: Swann’s Way
#64: Within a Budding Grove and The Guermantes Way
#72: Sodom and Gomorrah

I did enjoy the experience, despite the demands it occasionally made on my patience. If the first three volumes tended to be more of a chore than a pleasure, the balance tipped the other way for volumes four through seven. You come to know how the author works, to tolerate the parts you don’t enjoy so much and more fully appreciate the parts you do.

The great comic characters, such as Mme Verdurin and M. Charlus, began to stand out more in the later volumes. In the early volumes the narrator (or “Marcel,” as he identifies himself just once in over 4000 pages) mostly writes about himself—except for when he writes in the third person about the love affair between Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy, which section from Swann’s Way is sometimes published as a stand-alone book. Maybe “writes about himself” is imprecise: he describes his own consciousness, which is an inherently recursive thing to do: in describing his own consciousness he frequently dips into describing his own consciousness describing his own consciousness.

In Time Regained, Proust gives us the key to his unwavering determination to excavate his subjective reality, to avoid selecting or framing or sampling from memory and experience:

…the slightest word that we have said, the most insignificant action that we have performed at any one epoch of our life was surrounded by, and coloured by the reflexion of, things which logically had no connexion with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of them for its own rational purposes, things, however, in the midst of which—here the pink reflexion of the evening upon the flower-covered wall of a country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, the desire for women, the pleasure of luxury; … --the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand sealed vessels, each one of them filled with things of a colour, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one from another, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and our thoughts, are situation at the most various moral altitudes and give us the sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres.

This observation is intuitively satisfying: any memory we articulate is necessarily just something we have attempted to detach from the continuity of existence. When a paleontologist discovers a fossilized set of dinosaur footprints traversing what was once muddy ground, the value is less in any single footprint than in the surrounding context: the alignment, spacing, and so forth, of the footprints are what say the most about the ancient animals who made them. Perhaps there are also footprints of an immature animal present, or of additional species that might have preyed on or been preyed on by the first species. It would be impractical to excavate the entire site and bring it back to a museum, but that’s the kind of thing that Proust is trying to do. He isn’t actually interested in the taste of the famous madeleine; it’s a catalyst that he wants to use to revive the living moment when he tasted it. He believes he is able to do this—that he can on certain occasions obliterate time and actually be the person he was at some point in the past, without being obliged to select or frame or sample.

For most of us, I think, we come closest to this kind of experience through our sense of smell. One day we might get a whiff of something that we instantaneously know we first smelled when we were only a few years old—for example, the smell of the modeling clay we used to play with (a.k.a. Playdough: this was my experience), or of a forgotten food or place. Somehow, smell is not like sight or hearing. It’s a primitive sense, not conveniently available for voluntary recall. It’s almost impossible to categorize smells, to isolate their components or recall them at will. We cannot control smell. Taste is similar, but we know that taste is composed of discrete components: sweet, salt, bitter, and sour, and we can to some extent recall tastes at will, though not entirely: if you try to imagine the taste of maple syrup, and then sample some, you will instantly recognize the taste, and also have to acknowledge that you failed to adequately summon it from memory in advance.

Proust’s mission to capture the past and bring it back alive is ultimately futile: his dinosaur tracks traverse his entire life. Instead, he is trying to invent a technique whereby he can capture the flavor of those interludes when memory brings us back to an incident from long ago. Renaissance painters, like their predecessors, could only work in two dimensions. But they invented techniques that gave us the impression of three dimensions. Flat surfaces were made to suggest depth and distance to the eye. Proust is striving for something similar. He is only able to do this by applying ever more paint—that is, more words—to his surface, and in so doing he taxes himself and his readers to the limit. No writer is his or her right mind would try to emulate Proust today. It’s a wonder to me that the publishers and readers of a hundred years ago were up to the challenge. Proust was writing at the dawn of the electronic age, and it’s easy to assume that once radio and cinema were widely available, that nobody would be interested in trying to capture reality by writing or reading multiple volumes of endless sentences. In an alternate universe, where radio and cinema never existed, or where modernist literature had come along fifty years earlier, Proust’s way of writing might have had wider appeal and set more of a precedent. It’s like imagining what the world would be like if zeppelins and airships were the only kinds of flying machines that had ever been invented. In Search of Lost Time is like a mile-long zeppelin that’s as large and as elaborate as the most luxurious ocean liner. It’s got gardens and ponds and maybe even little cities spaced out on its various decks. It would have been obsolete before it had ever been launched.

= = = = = = =

The last half of Time Regained, about 300 pages, describes the events of a single afternoon. The narrator has been invited to an afternoon party at the home of the Princess Guermantes. (Two books that end with elaborate parties: In Search of Lost Time and Go Dog Go.) Except this isn’t the Princess Guermantes we know from the first six volumes—it is in fact the former Mme Verdurin, who has married the Prince Guermantes after the deaths of their respective spouses. How wonderful that this relentless striver has at a stroke achieved the exalted status she so strenuously pretended to have for so long.

Proust himself barely lived past his 50th birthday, yet in this episode he gives us the impression that he is reviewing his cast of characters, most of whom are in attendance, well into their declining years. Proust must know that most of his circle would outlive him by decades, but in the world of his novel he leaps decades into the future to review them in their 70s and 80s. How strange to consider that in 300 pages the story only advances by about six hours (the afternoon and evening of the party), yet gives us the impression that we have jumped ahead two or three decades. Literary critic A.C. Bradley wrote of the notion of “double time” in Othello. Halfway through the play, after a sea journey from Venice to Cyprus, it still seems to still be the wedding night of Othello and Desdemona, an affair which had begun hundreds of miles away in Venice. Yet just a few pages later, their marriage seems to be a long-established fact. Is Shakespeare deliberately weaving a kind of spell over his audience, such that we do not notice this manipulation of time, or is it just a detail that escaped his attention? Proust is up to something similar, but there is no doubt that his manipulation of time is deliberate.

= = = = = = =

Why should anyone invest 300 or 400 hours reading Proust? Most people, of course, don’t. To take it one step further, why spend time reading novels at all? When a person goes to a museum they’re likely to spend more time looking at the Rembrandts and Van Goghs than they do looking at these artists’ contemporaries. If you have educated tastes you might seek out different, less well-known artists’ works, but hardly anyone over the age of 10 would give every painting equal weight and bring no assumptions or priorities to the experience.

When I first saw a Rembrandt painting I was not able to “see” what made him special. His paintings seemed murky and indistinct. To this day I cannot see what makes Jackson Pollock so special. But I’m comfortable with the notion that he is special, and that someday I might be able to see why this is so.

You cannot “consume” a painting the way you can consume a book—you don’t ever come to the last page and close the cover. With a book, you come to the end and decide for yourself whether you consider it worthwhile or not. But that doesn’t mean you don’t bring preformed opinions and expectations to the act of reading a particular book. Sometimes this can be a distraction, when your experience of a book is at odds with what others have said and written about it. It’s work to really decide what you think about a book. It helps to know about the author’s life and times and goals, and also what others have written and thought, but the more you immerse yourself in this kind of information, the harder it can be to see a book for what it is. The objective should be to find the right mix of received opinions and subjective impressions. It’s often nice to read a recent book that has received hardly any publicity, so that your own opinion is pretty much the only one available. But I think it’s equally nice to read a book that’s been famous and celebrated for decades or centuries. In this case, there are likely to be multiple interpretations and opinions available. The ideal experience, if you’ve got the time and patience, is to read the book, read about it, and then read it again, so that you can construct your own idea of the book using both your subjective experience and the received ideas.

I’m not likely to use this approach with In Search of Lost Time—life is just too short. There is also the fact that Proust writes about the same things in the same way, throughout the seven volumes, so by the time you’re reading the latter volumes you are already re-experiencing what it was like to read the early volumes—especially if, like me, you spaced the experience out over a few years. Every time I started a new volume there was the sense of “Ah yes, this again.”

Nobody who hasn’t read Ulysses or Middlemarch or Madame Bovary is likely to want to tackle In Search of Lost Time. Similarly, nobody who doesn’t know something about modernism and Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and even Richard Wagner and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein and Nicola Tesla, is likely to be interested. You have to be attentive to how the world has changed over time and what people have tried to do in the various arts. You needn’t be an expert or an academic. But if you are somewhat grounded in these matters, and if you have the time, then it can be worthwhile to read Proust. He made his own way, he is wiser and shrewder than his neurasthenic protagonist, he is funny, profound, passionate and even courageous. He is also at time boring and fatuous. It’s hard to imagine how anyone, especially today, could ever be like Marcel Proust. Though he was writing just 100 years ago, the world he describes seems as strange and as distant as Shakespeare’s. Those moments when you are in synch with him, when you see what he sees and understand what he understands, are worth the effort of plowing through the whole thing. Or at least they might be.

#82: Mason and Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon

Charles Mason was an astronomer active in the second half of the 1700s. Jeremiah Dixon was primarily a surveyor, though at the time the two professions, astronomer and surveyor, seemed to overlap quite a bit. You were either out in the field with a sexton or a theodolite at night to measure the altitudes of various stars, or you were out with those same instruments in the daytime to take the elevation of the sun and thereby to establish boundaries between territories. Mason and Dixon worked together over a period of several years after 1760.

Most people probably know that “the Mason Dixon line” is shorthand for the cultural border between the southern and northern US; historically, it was an east-to-west line that was surveyed by Mason and Dixon in the early 1760s to establish the border between Pennsylvania (a colony where slavery was illegal) and Maryland (a colony where slavery was legal).

Most of Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason and Dixon deals with the adventures of the two astronomer/surveyors as they work their way westward from the tidelands of Delaware, past the Susquehanna River and across the Allegheny Mountains, from settled farmland to what was then primeval forest traversed by Indian pathways. But some space is dedicated to the earlier adventures of the two as they observed the Transit of Venus in 1761 from South Africa, and then to a peculiar sojourn by Mason on the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic (which is where Napoleon Bonaparte was to live out his final years a couple of decades later). A Transit of Venus is when the planet Venus passes in front of the sun. They are rare, and have always been of interest to astronomers:

Venus transits are historically of great scientific importance as they were used to gain the first realistic estimates of the size of the Solar System. Observations of the 1639 transit provided an estimate of both the size of Venus and the distance between the Sun and the Earth that was more accurate than any other up to that time. Observational data from subsequent predicted transits in 1761 and 1769 further improved the accuracy of this initial estimated distance through the use of the principle of parallax. [Wikipedia]

You can pick up a lot of information about what was going on in the late 18th century from reading Mason and Dixon: about the two principal characters first of all, but also about various scientists, politicians and adventurers of that time, and about America, England, South Africa, and St. Helena as well. For example, if you didn’t know about Admiral of the Fleet Sir Cloudesley Shovell and how he came to grief on the Scilly Isles off the southwest coast of England in 1707, you could find out by reading Mason and Dixon. Wikipedia makes a wonderful companion as you read the book—useful for determining where history leaves off and Pynchon’s imagination begins.

Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson all make appearances. But this is not an historical novel in the usual sense. Rather, the period and its people are the raw material from which Pynchon crafts one of his peculiar entertainments. Pynchon, it should be said, does not write realist fiction; but nor does he dispense with reality altogether. Reality, in fact, might be Pynchon’s true subject, and in the course of trying to take its measure he routinely crosses into and out of the territory that we would describe as realistic historical fiction.

Though the book has a reasonably satisfying arc, giving us convincing and engaging summaries of the lives of its two major protagonists—leaving aside the question of whether the personalities Pynchon assigns to them correspond with their actual personalities; given how well he has immersed himself in their diaries and correspondence, it seems likely that he has captured some of the essence of the two men—the great pleasure of reading Pynchon is in endless series of humorous, fantastic episodes he presents. To begin a new chapter of Mason and Dixon is to wonder what sort of surreal amusement the author has in store.

Consider the matter of the missing 11 days. In 1750, England switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The problem with the Julian calendar was that it failed to align perfectly with the earth’s annual rotation around the sun; by 1750, the progression of the seasons had moved 11 days ahead of what the calendar indicated. This was beginning to interfere with agricultural planning—planting and harvesting were occurring just a bit too late. There was also the fact that other countries were making the switch and it would be inconvenient to have to set your watch forward or back by 11 days depending on what country you happened to be in. In switching to the Gregorian calendar, Parliament decreed that the 11 days must be made up, such that the day after Wednesday, 2 September 1752 was decreed to be Thursday, 14 September 1752.

To the great majority of the population (likely not up to speed on the astronomical niceties of various calendar types) it was obvious that 11 days were being stolen from their lives; moreover, it seemed quite possible that the 11 days might have been stashed away somewhere for the private use of certain persons—September 3 could not just vanish. What if it was your birthday?

What’s more real—the sun and the earth, or the calendar on the wall? The latter is supposed to be a perfect reflection of the former, but on this occasion, at least, it wasn’t. Here’s Pynchon’s riff on the matter, in the faux eighteenth century prose style he maintains throughout Mason and Dixon:

Mason for a while had presum’d it but a matter of confusing dates, which are Names, with Days, which are real Things. Yet for anyone he met born before ’52 and alive after it, the missing Eleven Days arose again and again in Conversation, sooner or later characteriz’d as “brute Absence,” or “a Tear thro’ the fabric of Life,” – and the more he wrestl’d with the Question, the more the advantage shifted toward a Belief, as he would tell Dixon one day, “In a slowly rotating Loop, or if you like, Vortex, of eleven days, tangent to the Linear Path of what we imagine as Ordinary Time, but excluded from it, and repeating itself, – without end.”

Mason goes on to relate that he, himself, has in fact stumbled into this displaced raft of time:

…the fact is that at Midnight of September second, in the unforgiven Year of ‘Fifty-two, I myself did stumble, daz’d and unprepared, into that very Whirlpool in Time, – finding myself in September third, 1752, a date that for all the rest of England did not exist, – Tempus Incognitus.”

Mason describes a world vacant of all other human life, his to roam for “the better part of a Fortnight”; Dixon wants to know: “Were there yet Horses about?” Mason elucidates:

“Animals whose Owners knew them, made the Transition along with them, to the fourteenth. ‘Most all the Dogs, for example. Fewer Cats, but plenty nonetheless. Any that remain’d by the third of September were wild Creatures, or stray’d into the Valley, – perhaps, being ownerless, disconnected as well from Calendars. I found one such Horse, a Horse no one would have known, as well as two Cows unmilk’d and at large.

The details, surreal yet specific, continue to pour forth. It’s a rabbit hole, in the Alice-in-Wonderland sense, and Mason and Dixon is a vast field of such absurd, comical holes.

Consider, for another example, the matter of Jenkin’s Ear Museum, on the island of St. Helena, as described in Chapter 17. There was in fact a Captain Robert Jenkins (not Jenkin, as Pynchon has it) who had his ear cut off when his ship was stopped and boarded by a Spanish privateer in 1731. Jenkins was later posted to St. Helena, but as far as I can tell, he did not bring the ear with him nor was it later displayed in a museum. But in Pynchon’s alternate universe, he did bring it,

…by then encasqu’d in a little Show-case of Crystal and Silver, and pickl’d in Atlantick Brine. … Eventually, at Cards, Mr. Jenkin extended his Credit too far even for Honorable John. There remain’d the last unavoidable Object of Value, which he bet against what prov’d to be a Cross-Ruff, whence it pass’d into the Hands of Nick Mournival, an Enterpriser of the Town.

And so this Nick Mournival, in the Pynchonian universe, opens a museum for purposes of displaying the celebrated ear. Mason encounters the museum in a somewhat remote corner of the St. Helena countryside. He is obliged to make a rather peculiar entrance:

Reluctantly at last he takes to his elbows and knees, to investigate the diminutive Doorway at close hand, —the Door, after a light Push, swinging open without a Squeak. Mason peers in. What Illumination there is reveals a sort of Ramp-way leading downward, with just enough height to crawl.

The proprietor has a rather elaborate presentation ready:

Mason: “Well,” brightly, “where’s the Ear then, —just have a look if I may, and be off?”

Mournival: “Dear no, that’s not how ‘tis done, I must come along to operate the Show.”

The show is elaborate and bizarre and involves something called a “Chronoscope.” Mason, increasingly desperate, is looking to terminate the episode, but “You ought not to leave, Sir, till you’ve spoken into the Ear. She’ll be a much better Judge of when you may go.” Mason is encouraged to whisper his “fondest Wish” into the ear, but reminded “that the Ear only listens to Wishes, —she doesn’t grant ‘em.”

In summarizing this episode I am skipping over pages of weird and wonderful detail—I have to restrain myself from retyping entire pages. The capper is that the ear is just slightly … animate:

All this while, the Ear reposes in its Pickling-Jar of Swedish lead Crystal, as if being withheld from Time’s Appetite for some Destiny obscure to all. Presently, ‘tis noticed by Mason, —he hopes, an effect of the light, —that somehow the Ear has been a-glow, —for a while, too, —withal it seems, as he watches, to come to Attention, to gain muscular Tone, to grow indeed quite firm, and, in its saline Bath, erect. It is listening. Quickly Mason grips himself by the head, attempting to forestall Panick.

Pynchon is often presented as an artifact of 1960s counterculture—a writer tainted by self-indulgence. Difficult in a way calculated to appeal to a certain kind of nerdy male reader (ahem). So when I reread Pynchon, as I do from time to time, I wonder if I’ll be disillusioned, if I’ll feel the need to repudiate my youthful enthusiasm.

Mason and Dixon, along with V and Gravity’s Rainbow, holds up. I would not care to defend Against the Day from 2006; Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, his most recent books, are fine, though they lack the intensity of the earlier books. Mason and Dixon bears the strongest resemblance, among Pynchon’s books, to his grand opus, Gravity’s Rainbow. I wonder if the author was challenging himself to see if he could write a second book with the density of erudition and wit of the earlier book? The major difference is that Mason and Dixon has a warmth and charm that the earlier book is largely lacking. Gravity’s Rainbow is a fierce book, as horrific as it is funny. During the course of it, its major character, Tyrone Slothrop, essentially disappears: his essence seems to gradually leak away. The book isn’t without emotion, but the love affairs are all doomed and no connection or alliance endures. The presiding science is Behaviorism, as per Pavlov and B.F. Skinner; conditioning, manipulation.

I’m not sure there is a similar presiding science in Mason and Dixon, though the book is permeated with scientific concepts: maybe just the idea of measurement, the notion of imposing a Cartesian framework upon the world. The concept of parallax comes up quite a bit. What’s noticeably different this time around is the attention Pynchon pays to relationships, particularly that between Mason and Dixon. They feel a connection with each other, and they “have each other’s backs,” as we would say today. But, like many career partnerships (not to mention life partnerships), their relationship is defined as much by low-level sparring as it is by harmony:

“Why am I doing this?” Mason inquires aloud of no one in particular. “—Damme, that is an intriguing Question. I mean, I suppose I could say it’s for the Money, or to Advance of Knowledge of, —"

“Eeh, , —regard thaself, thou’re reacting,” says Dixon. “Just what Friend Cresap here said not to do, —thou’re doing it…?”

“Whine not, as the Stoick ever says? You might yourself advert to it profitably, —”

“What Crime am I charg’d with now, ever for Thoo, how convenient?”

“Wait, wait, you’re saying I don’t take blame when I should, that I’m ever pushing it off onto you?”

“Wasn’t I that said it,” Dixon’s Eyebrows headed skyward, nostrils a-flare with some last twinkling of Geniality.

“I take the blame when it’s my fault,” cries Mason, “but it’s never my Fault, —and that’s not my Fault, either! Or to put it another way, —”

“Aye, tell the Pit-Pony too, why don’t tha?”

(It will be observed that certain rhetorical flourishes in this exchange have a distinctly 20th century ring to them. And certain authorial tics, such as ending bits of spoken dialog with an unexpected question mark are also much in evidence? Pynchon’s writing style is decidedly relaxed—it’s not that he’s trying to interfere with your suspension of disbelief, it more that he was never much invested in that suspension in the first place. And yes, there is, as always with Pynchon, a certain self-indulgence at work here.)

Mason is the senior partner, and the more serious of the two, a worrier. He is occasionally visited by the spectre of his dead wife, and he ruminates on episodes from his personal and professional history, worrying where he might have gone wrong. Dixon is a more unbuttoned character, more receptive to the strange notions of the various oddballs the two encounter. Scores of other characters, some historical, some fantastical, most mundane, intersect their course as they do their work. They get winters off: One year Mason goes south to Williamsburg while Dixon goes north to New York. The next year it’s Dixon who goes north, and Mason south. On all such journeys, strange thing happen.

Pynchon seems quite at home in the eighteenth century—the century of Tristram Shandy, Gulliver’s Travels, Johnson’s dictionary, and Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Empiricism was taking hold thanks to Newton and his ilk, yet a certain elusive antic madness also prevailed. You could tame the world during the day, write straight lines onto the uneven ground. But at night, who knew what visitor might decide to drop in?