Tag Archives: Summer 2023

American Midnight

The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis

Adam Hochschild
Mariner Books ($29.99)

by Robert Zaller

Adam Hochschild, the author of the acclaimed study King Leopold’s Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), has made a career out of unearthing the ghosts of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.  He might simply have made a single volume of that singularly bloody period, which saw the Western world’s hegemony collapse in two great wars and climaxed in the greatest atrocity in history and the most powerful weapon ever developed—a weapon that would soon prove capable of endangering human life on the planet.  But that story, in its broad outlines, is already familiar; in his work Hochschild has aimed instead to tell it indirectly and episodically—to do what a sequence of novels might do, but using the tools of a historian.

Like a novelist, Hochschild works with protagonists, but the consequential figures of history who lead his narratives are more than storytellers of particular events—to the author, it is the legacy of each that ultimately shapes them.  Leopold II is remembered for Belgium’s brutal colonization of the Congo, an imperial venture that set the pattern for Europe’s exploitation of Africa in the latter nineteenth century, including the precedent for German genocide in today’s Namibia.  His “ghost” is thus not merely what was done by him and in his name, but also what persisted until the collapse of Europe’s African empires fifty years after his death, which haunt the continent to this day.

The same spectral image defines Hochschild’s The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (Viking, 1994), which presents the Soviet dictator as an object of memory, defining the decades since his death for his nation as perhaps no other world personality has—a ghost now revived ominously in the figure of Vladimir Putin.  But dictators are an easy target, even if, as in The Unquiet Ghost, Hochschild is after a more multidimensional portrait.  In his most recent book, American Midnight, he fixes on the half-forgotten episode of a century ago colloquially known as the Red Scare, which he presents as a nadir of our history that has shaped it ever since. 

The Red Scare began with America’s entry into World War I, just as Russia’s ability to maintain a second front against Imperial Germany was in doubt.  Nominally neutral, the U.S. under President Woodrow Wilson had made extensive loans to the Western Allies, Britain, and France, which were unlikely to be repaid in the event of Allied defeat.  As Hochschild points out, this was a decisive factor in Wilson’s request for a declaration of war in April 1917—although, as he also notes, the enthusiasm for war in Congress mirrored that of the general population, for which war had partly the character of a great adventure and partly that of a natural extension of the position America had assumed as a Pacific imperial power at the turn of the century, as well as the world’s captain of industry. 

At the same time, Hochschild touches on the reluctance of many in the country to abandon George Washington’s long-held counsel to avoid foreign entanglements, and Wilson’s own boast, in his reelection campaign only months before, that he had kept the U.S. out of Europe’s war.  Some of the opposition to war, he notes, was ethnically based in the country’s large German population, and some in the only independent party of the Left, the Socialists. 

From the beginning, Wilson cast the war as a crusade, in his words, to make the world safe for democracy, even while privately admitting that it would mean “autocracy at home”—a marshaling of manpower and resources such as the country had never seen, and consequently a repression of dissent.  Wilson’s sloganeering would be, as Hochschild observes, a capstone for the idea of American exceptionalism that had developed in the nineteenth century and would define it in the twentieth and beyond.  In this, Wilson would shape American ideology profoundly, the personal tragedy of his failure to bring the U.S. into his postwar League of Nations notwithstanding.

To what extent Wilson expressed a hopeful idealism, and to what extent he was the partly cynical captive of his own rhetoric, is a subject that historians will long debate, and by foregrounding it Hochschild not only makes him the protagonist of this story but also places the legacy of our twenty-eighth president in a sharper light. As the war proceeded, Wilson’s rationale for it became broader and more grandiose.  It would be, he claimed, not only for the advancement of democracy but for the ultimate peace of the world.

Hochschild leaves us in no doubt of his conclusions about the cost of the war for American democracy, quoting the distinguished historian David Brion Davis: “The years from 1917 to 1921 are probably unmatched in American history for popular hysteria, xenophobia, and paranoid suspicion.” By June 1917, Congress had passed the Espionage Act, the broadest and most draconian restraint of free speech, activity, and assembly in the history of the country, and still in force today.  The government’s chief targets were home-grown socialists, whose leader, Eugene Debs, received almost a million votes in the presidential election of 1920 while imprisoned under the Espionage Act, while its largest union, the International Workers of the World (IWW), was crushed by mass arrests culminating in the largest civilian criminal trial ever held in the U.S.

The war itself, of course, had many consequential results, which Hochschild details.  The government assumed virtual control of the economy, enriching giant corporations while putting antitrust regulations to sleep.  The military draft upended millions of lives and cost 116,000 of them.  But the chief focus of Hochschild’s story is less about the vast redistribution of national wealth or the cost of battle, and more about what he regards as its ultimate price: the suppression of native dissent.  The Great War would prove not merely a pause in American democracy, but, despite the enfranchisement of women at the end of it, an enduring degradation.  The country would not again know a worker’s movement such as the IWW, or a political party as progressively committed as that led by Debs.  American public discourse, in Hochschild’s view, has been hobbled by this ever since.

Hochschild makes his points through a series of vivid portraits of antiwar radicals silenced or thrust into prison or exile—Alexander Berkman, W.E.B. DuBois, Marie Equi, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Hayward, Kate Richards O’Hare, and John Reed—as well as a lone voice of dissent within the Wilson administration itself, Louis F. Post.  Against these figures, he depicts those who abetted the war in their efforts to curtail the Left and civil liberties in general.  The best-remembered among them would be J. Edgar Hoover, then at the outset of his career but already a powerful force, but together, as Hochschild demonstrates, their work would help to make Wilson’s second administration one of the darkest and most lawless periods in American history.

As for Wilson, his desire to justify the war and his vision of America’s world leadership led him to promote the League of Nations that his fellow countrymen would soon reject.  The result was a paralyzing stroke that left Wilson himself the mere spectator of the last eighteen months of his presidency, and the witness of the vindictive Treaty of Versailles that virtually guaranteed the far greater war that followed it twenty years later.  Beyond that, Hochschild’s account of America’s long-ago “midnight” has much to tell us about the politics we have inherited in our own day.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

The Illuminated Burrow

A Sanatorium Journal

Max Blecher
Translated by Gabi Reigh
Twisted Spoon Press ($23)

by Rick Henry            

The heart of reality is so unfathomable and of such great magnitude and grandiose diversity that our imagination is only able to extract a tiny fraction, enough to glean a few lights and interpretations to weave its “thread of life.”
—Max Blecher, The Illuminated Burrow

Max Blecher was born in Moldavia, raised in Romania, and began studying medicine in Paris until, at eighteen, he developed spinal tuberculosis. For the ten years that followed, he published fiction and poetry (much of it written from various institutional beds where his condition was treated) and corresponded with writers ranging from André Breton to Martin Heidegger. His two published novels, which have been translated into English as Adventures in Immediate Irreality and Scarred Hearts, secured his international reputation.

This biographical sketch, of course, says little about the “thread of life” Blecher sorted through in his writing; to address that, we now have an English version of his sanitorium journal Vizuina luminată, here translated from the Romanian by Gabi Reigh as The Illuminated Burrow. The book is a meditation on the nature of significant moments, written as Blecher approached his own death in 1938 at the age of twenty-eight. In the afterword, Gabriela Glăvan suggests that this final prose work and Blecher’s two novels “comprise a vast narrative of physical suffering.” Yes—but his work covers so much more of the world as he navigates his suffering, his body, and his imagination.

In one particularly striking moment, a man is dying in the adjacent room while Blecher, post-surgery, is desperate for a sip of water that is forbidden and just out of reach. Death and thirst: “Every minute the momentous and the banal happen simultaneously,” he writes. This disconnection reappears in a moment of excruciating pain as his bandages are changed; the doctor is amazed that he didn’t “scream the whole sanatorium down.” Blecher could have, but he had been conducting an experiment based upon the observation that “while one particular nerve is assailed by pain, the rest of the body, including the brain, continues to function normally.” However excruciating it might be, pain is a highly localized “nuisance,” but ignoring it only makes the suffering worse. To attain even the semblance of control, pain must be given “unadulterated ‘attention’.”

The beauty of Blecher’s prose and the focus of his observations often pull the reader away from the depth of suffering, as does the variety of events he experiences as he grapples with the unfathomable. Some appear to be ordinary—he dines with other patients and goes to the cinema—but in the end, his experience is foreign and isolating. The dining hall is “where the patients ate their meals while lying on gurneys wheeled to the table by porters in this vast and seemingly ordinary room.” In the cinema, a row of gurneys occupied by patients lines the back wall. Amid these experiences are descriptions of hanging dogs, a “petite Parisian girl” smoking “a cork-tipped Craven A cigarette,” a gentleman checking his watch on his daily walk, and how what he sees morphs into light and shapes, colors and planes, such that “such episodes deeply shook my faith in a stable, coherent reality . . . as well as revealing the essential dreamlike quality of all our everyday actions.” Other moments examine those dream states, thoughts, reveries, and memories.

Blecher’s situation is also marked by dissociation: language, images, story, and ‘reality’ have little to which they can affix themselves. Unlike the surrealist project of making the world strange, Blecher finds the world is strange. At best, we are in a state of irreality: “we create our lives each moment through our imagination, and in that instant life makes sense, but only in that moment and only in the way our imagination contrives it.”

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Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses

Ronald Johnson
The Song Cave ($18.95)

by Ross Hair

First published in 1969, Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses, Ronald Johnson’s third book of poetry, consolidates the strengths of his earlier work while foreshadowing his epic poem ARK, which he began writing in 1970. The book is comprised of two parts; the first, “A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees,” consists of a selection of poems from Johnson’s 1964 debut volume of the same title, and the second, “The Different Musics,” collects poems Johnson wrote between 1966 and 1967. The title of Johnson’s book is taken from the Valley conjured in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Eleanora”—an idyllic place where, amidst its “thousands of forest trees” and “many millions of fragrant flowers,” the story’s narrator dwells with his cousin Eleanor and her mother.

Existing somewhere between scrupulously observed fact and visionary transmutation, the worlds evoked in “A Line of Poetry” are not only as luxuriant as Poe’s Valley, but also as utopic. “This is the Garden,” Johnson writes in “Shake, Quoth the Dove House,” “where all is a poet’s / topiary. Where even the trees / shall have tongues, green aviaries, / to rustle at his will”:

Here—

both lines of poetry, rows
of trees,
shall spring all

seasons
out ‘of the lust of

the earth,
without
a formal seed’.

In “Four Orphic Poems” we find the poet evoking Thoreau—one of several Transcendentalists that inform the poems in Johnson’s Valley—as they attempt to read the Book of Nature:

& I (like
Thoreau) sit here engrossed,

‘between a microscopic & a telescopic
world’,
attempting to read

the twigged, branchy writing

of frost, spider & galactic cluster.

As well as reading nature’s “green / script,” Johnson also reads what others before him (poets, botanists, painters, composers, scientists) have written about it. Thus, throughout the book he liberally quotes the words of others, plotting his transplanted material on the page with the care of a gardener who seeks “clear space // to cultivate // the Wild, Espaliered, Tangled, / Clipped // estate.” However, compared to the open field collage poetics of the Black Mountain poets, Johnson foregoes extemporization for a more proportioned, more serene approach to composition that circumvents the bluster his older peers could be prone to.

As much as the poems comprising “The Different Musics” continue Johnson’s fascination for the “sweet proportion / & order” of both micro- and macrocosm, they also more explicitly acknowledge the sensual, erotic forces—the “rude / & stammering / organs”—by which “NATURE CONSPIRES.” Whereas in “A Line of Poetry” we find sowers, including Johnny Appleseed, casting their seeds in dark fields, and sunflowers “heavy in the head, with / seed,” in “The Different Musics” propagation assumes more phallic proportions. This is evident in Johnson’s series of ekphrastic poems on the dream-like jungle scenes created by French painter Henri Rousseau. “The Snake Charmer,” for example, depicts Rousseau’s eponymous subject, a “flautist of the sinuous phallus,” amidst a lush amatory landscape wherein “two pale fox-gloves secretly erect themselves, // deeper within the thicket” and “soft, foliaceous / labials” suggest fellatio.

The erotic charge of “The Different Musics,” and the new perspective it brings to Johnson’s cosmopoiesis, recalls the transfiguration that the Valley in Poe’s “Eleanora” undergoes following the sexual awakening of the story’s young protagonists. “A change fell upon all things,” Poe’s narrator writes: “And life arose in our paths; for the tall flamingo, hitherto unseen, with all gay glowing birds, flaunted his scarlet plumage before us.” As the young lovers’ sexual awareness burgeons and grows, new strange flowers blossom on the trees in the Valley and “ruby-red asphodel” (an omen of morality) grows where before were only daisies.

In “The Different Musics” this correspondence between sexual agency and a heightened perception of “the great grassy world” is evident in “Letters to Walt Whitman,” a suite of ten poems that answer the poet’s Leaves of Grass. “But I have come O Walt,” Johnson writes in Letter III, “for the interchange, promised, of calamus, / masculine, sweet-smelling root, / between us”:

Calamus, ‘sweet flag’,
that still thrusts itself up,

that seasonally thrusts itself up for lovers.

This “interchange” often occurs via homonyms and double-entendres. In Letter II, for example, “the vast organic slough / of the earth, / the exquisite eye / —as myriad upon myriad of dandelions— // seeding itself on the air,” adumbrates the ejaculatory act implicit in the foregoing exhortation: “I have come O Whitman.” At the same time, such dissemination also speaks to “the intimate kernel,” the germinal life force, of the “ample prairie” that is Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “The intimate kernel putting forth final leaf // from The Valley Of The Many-Colored Grasses.” Here, “leaf” suggests both a “stalk of grass” and the page of a book: Whitman’s, Johnson’s, and Nature’s.

Johnson writes in “Letters to Walt Whitman” of having “lain in the open night // till my shoulders felt twin roots, & the tree of my sight / swayed, / among the stars.” A similar fusion is evoked in Johnson’s earlier poem, which quotes Henry David Thoreau’s elegiac essay “Autumnal Tints”:

            ‘When Men Will Lie Down
                        as Gracefully & as Ripe—

            with such an Indian-summer serenity
            will shed their bodies
            as they do their hair & nails’.

Fall leaves, Thoreau (dying of tuberculosis at the time) writes, “teach us how to die.” For, Johnson, however, who omits a portion of Thoreau’s original text—“One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully”—this image of recumbent men shuns the hubris of immortality for the more modest grace and fecundity of seasonal time and change; the “subtler harmonies, coming of growth /  & of death.”

The reclining figures in both of Johnson’s poems are repeated on the cover of this beautiful new edition of Valley, which uses a photograph by Johnson’s friend Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Meatyard’s multiple-exposure technique makes his male subject appear to fuse with (or dissolve into) the rocky terrain about him. If this recalls the way in which the poet in “The Different Musics,” searching the dictionary, humbly finds “among DUST / vapor, storm, breath, smoke: // ‘the earthly remains of bodies once alive— / a confusion— / a single particle, as of earth,’” it also reiterates the affirmation that Johnson expresses throughout his book for the largesse of life itself. To have this book finally back in print, and reminding us of such verities, is simply a splendid thing.

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The Past Flickers in the Present: An Interview with Youval Shimoni

by Marcus Pactor

Youval Shimoni is one of Israel’s greatest living novelists. His ambitious, cinematic fiction weaves together the machinations of his main characters with an impeccable eye for detail and a prodigious knowledge of history. The Salt Line (Crowsnest Books, $29.99), his latest novel to be translated into English, offers a multigenerational and multinational illustration of the varieties of human cruelty and their seeds; the story features Russian revolutionaries and pogroms, Israeli wars and dissolution, revenge caravans crossing the Indian frontier, and much more.  

Shimoni won both the Brenner Prize and the Newman Prize for The Salt Line. He is the senior editor at Am Oved Publishing House and a professor at Bar Ilan University.

 

Marcus Pactor: Many of your characters aim to sever themselves from their pasts, the world, and even history. But no matter how deeply Ilya Poliakov, for example, wanders into the desert, he cannot escape either his past or his influence on future generations. How much of this theme of history’s inescapability did you have in mind when conceiving the novel, and how much crystallized during your writing?

Youval Shimoni: You are correct; it’s a topic that has interested me from a young age. We see someone in a certain situation, and, for the most part, we are not aware of the baggage he carries within. He too, mostly, is unaware—at least as the situation occurs. At this moment I’m replying to you about The Salt Line with its publication in English, and at the back of my mind, as well as my heart, is the French translation of The Flight of the Dove—my first book—and the exaggerated expectations I entertained at the time. At a deeper level in time is the image of myself that occasionally flickers amongst the central characters there, a twenty-two-year-old experiencing first love with a French woman he met in Italy and with whom he lived for a while in an unfurnished apartment, after which he returned to Israel filled with hopeless yearning. There are moments when he seems minute, as if viewed through the opposite side of a pair of binoculars, and there are moments when I’m transferred there, in his place, and that adult of my age becomes blurred and small in the distance.

We all constantly carry layers of our past and buds of our future, and there isn’t a moment when the underside of the layer is not attached to the past while, on the top side, a future moment is already being formed. These layers are not firm like those of an onion or the rings of a tree trunk but dissolve into each other. At times the past weighs heavily like a sack of sand in a hot air balloon, and at times the future is oppressive with the realization that one will have to keep one’s feet firmly on the ground—a grey and heavy future like Parisian wintery skies, another sight from that layer of time.

In Israel one is not only burdened with voluntary or involuntary memory baggage, or factors stemming from genetic makeup and environment, but with the baggage of Jewish history from which there is no respite even in the established state here. This history is not only present in history books, but in the traumas transmitted from generation to generation to the present time. It is apparent in every household, and not only among its dwellers but in the house itself; not only in the present but in the future that awaits us.

The best illustration of the abnormal situation in Israel is our homes, in comparison to other homes in the world—and not from a design point of view. Here, to maintain a sense of security for all house occupants, walls and a roof are not enough. It is mandatory for each apartment in a new building to include a special safety area, a room constructed of reinforced concrete resistant to the bombing that is anticipated in one of the coming wars, whose outbreak is clearly inevitable to all. That’s from the side of a future Middle East reality, while from the other side, that of the past, a mezuza that encases biblical scriptures is affixed to the doorpost of the apartment to provide the occupants with divine protection. Missiles, radar, and anti-missile missiles on one side, biblical scriptures on the other.

MP: Any one of your plots—Poliakov’s involvement with Russian revolutionaries, Amnon’s experience in the Lebanon War, or the caravan’s journey to plant phony relics, to name only a few—might have formed the basis of a lesser writer’s novel. A similar expansive and ever-complicating impulse seemed to be at work in your earlier novel, A Room (Dalkey Archive, 2016). What, beyond predilection, is the root of this impulse?

YS: I find it difficult to perceive as a whole what to me is a part of something far more complex. You mention A Room, my second novel: In it, there is a room with a group of soldiers on an army base, where an inane instructional film is being shot for various army units. I could have dealt solely with the dynamics in that room—characters airing their views about the army, male and female soldiers flirting with each other, bickering and making up and so on—but what interested me were the different worlds that entered the room with them.

In 1990 I returned to Israel from a stay on an island in Thailand straight to the Gulf War. My mind still was still preoccupied with the strip of beach lined with coconut trees, the expanse of ocean, the hut I lived in from whose window I could see a local family, and the danger of coconuts liable of falling on one’s head—coconuts and not Saddam Hussein’s missiles. I was called up for reserve duty in a filming unit, and I could not but imagine what landscapes the others around me carried inside their minds from other times, what hopes and disappointments, loves and frustrations, totally unconnected to the film—it was if they had all been squashed into one room without any opportunity for self-expression. 

I attempted something similar, although in a different form, in my first novel The Flight of the Dove; that book has two parallel plots, one appearing on the left-hand page and the other on the right-hand page. The first tells of an American couple touring Paris who arrive at the Notre Dame cathedral, while the second tells of a French woman who decides to end her life by jumping from one of the cathedral’s towers. These stories could have been told in one narrative, but I was interested in the meeting point of the independent plots—only in the very last line of the novel are they conjoined, the one offering a different viewpoint of the other and changing the reader’s viewpoint of both.

MP: The novel’s overall length belies the multitude of its short chapters, many of which are fewer than ten pages long. The beginning of a new chapter often takes us to a different protagonist in a different place and time to either begin or continue a different plot. How did you come upon and manage this massive interwoven arrangement?

YS: True, time and again the reader is led to a different character, time, place, and plot, and for the same reason: The plots overlap, intersect, at times unraveling each other, at times unifying. Is that not, in fact, the way we live with those around us and the plots of their lives, though usually with a narcissistic preference for our own plot that tends to blur all the others? For the most part, there is nothing more important to us than ourselves. Reducing all this complexity into one purposeful succinct plot I find less interesting as a writer, though I can enjoy writing of that nature as a reader.

MP: On the other hand, you narrate the pogrom and sandstorm sequences—two of the finest set pieces I’ve read in some time—without any other plots intruding. What led you to shift your approach for them? Also, the term “set piece” allows me to ask you: How has your background in film influenced your fiction?

YS: These two scenes are close to my heart (as is the Lebanon scene) despite their harsh nature. Describing a caravan of camels in the desert in the middle of a raging sandstorm was a challenge—imagining what my characters might do in its midst, not being able to see in front of them and staying close to each other so as not to disappear in the sand. Describing a Russian pogrom was equally challenging—not to make do with depicting the violent cruelty of the rioters, but also those who hid from them, fearing to come to the aid of the victims, even in the case of a family member. I tried to understand the emotional mechanism in play beyond pure fear.

I read much about those times and places before I felt able to attempt creating a set piece based on their content. Such was the case with the 1905 Russian revolution and the Taklamakan camel caravan. I read dissertations, history books, and the diaries of revolutionaries and explorers to be secure in accurately portraying a village pogrom, an assassination of a minister, and a desert sandstorm.

These are indeed cinematic scenes and certainly hark back to my film studies (which I didn’t complete) and to my love for the media (which remains to this day). Despite the internal baggage of the previously mentioned characters, to me there is nothing more concrete than a scene that unfolds to the eye from one moment to the next. I also derive much pleasure from the direct and immediate manner by which characters are depicted, without their inner baggage and parallel plots. I’ve been told The Salt Line is well suited to a multi-episode series adaptation and would be delighted if someone would take up the challenge—as long as it’s not Netflix.

I myself actually did very little in film: During my first-year studies, I attempted an 8 mm adaptation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” filming it entirely from the low angle of the insect. Gregor’s mother, father, and sister all spoke to him facing the floor level camera. (At the time it seemed to me a unique idea but later learned others more talented than me had already thought of it.) Later, I made a 16 mm 40-minute film in which I placed a few central characters on a Tel Aviv bus among the passengers, and there too I was mainly interested in what each one brought to the journey rather than the goings on in the bus. It was an unfledged effort that received a tepid reception from its few viewers and deservedly received a single screening.

MP: Tenzin and McKenzie’s scheme to create a religion for revenge is the most memorable display of your characters’ general cynicism about the roots and uses of religion. But I was struck by Poliakov’s brooding over Akavya ben Mahalel’s line, from Pirkei Avot, about a man being a putrid drop. I sensed a more implicit reference to Jewish sacred literature in the recurrence of birds, which reminded me of the proverb, “Like a bird wandering from his nest, so is a man who wanders from his place.” How would you describe the influence of Jewish thought and sacred texts on your work? Do you see yourself as a Jewish writer, an Israeli writer, both, or neither?

YS: My attitude towards religion is not solely cynical; my cynicism is mainly aimed at the unwavering certainty of believers in the fundamental religious narrative and its truths. Cynicism is accompanied by no small fear of those who wish to implement that narrative by the letter and make it a reality. Here in Israel, more and more people wish to build the third temple even at the price of an Armageddon involving all the surrounding Arab states.

In contrast, I have great respect for the writers of the Bible—not only for the quality of the language, but also because of the influence it has exercised over millions of readers, in essence shaping their futures, for better or for worse. The Bible consolidated nomadic tribes or ethnic groups into one body by creating a forefather—Abraham—and by positing an apparently divine right to an already inhabited land. From that story two kingdoms evolved, and after they were destroyed, the story persevered in exile, preserving the Jews as a nation even when they were dispersed over different continents. But it also aroused violent hatred towards them. Faulkner writes about this in “The Bear”: “forever alien: and unblessed: a pariah about the face of the Western earth which twenty centuries later was still taking revenge on him for the fairy tale with which he had conquered it.”

In truth, this fiction shaped history for over two thousand years, and one cannot but be impressed by its power—and shudder at the damage it caused and is liable to cause in the future. Even before prophesying an Armageddon, it grants Israel an apparent license to continue to rule over conquered territories and for settlers to make their home there—to dispossess the Palestinians of their land, to initiate pogroms in their villages, to burn homes, to kill.

The answer to whether I see myself as a Jewish or Israeli writer lies in the fact that many of the central characters of my books are neither Jewish nor Israeli. The Flight of the Dove tells of an American husband and wife and a young Parisian woman; part two of A Room concentrates on three homeless Parisians, and part three, a mythical high priest in the far east. The Salt Line is peopled by a cuckolded English veterinarian, an Italian archeologist eager to make himself world famous, daring and less daring Russian revolutionaries, an Indian caravan-bashi, and many more characters on different continents spread over thousands of kilometers.

I write about what activates my thoughts, imagination, and emotions, for the most part in that order. I first try to understand something about my life at the point in time I have reached, or the path the world has taken up to that point as I see it. This understanding involves creating an alternative plot in the imagination, intensified and more concentrated than the one taking place in reality, and incorporating the emotion the entire process arouses in me.

True, my works have more than a touch of the Jewish and Israeli milieu into which I was born and live, but not everything is delimited by it. The world is somewhat larger than the state of Israel and humanity somewhat greater than the Jewish people.

MP: Windows recur in your work at least as often as birds. Through them, your characters witness events ranging from pitiful to horrific, and those events drive them to various heartbreaks and degradations. How are you able to use and reuse this seemingly mundane image so that, over the course of the novel, its power accumulates rather than declines?

YS: I wasn’t aware of that—Poliakov watching the pogrom with his mother from the attic comes to mind—but I wouldn’t be surprised if you found other windows. I am interested in the aspect of being an observer from afar or from the side and that of intervening in an event in order to stop it or change the order of things. There is a marvellous piece by Kafka, “The Men Running Past”; in it, a man runs towards us on a nighttime street while another man chases him, and only we see this—should we act or find all sorts of excuses to stand still until they disappear from our eyes? There’s never any shortage of excuses.

A totally different window comes to mind. I spoke earlier about the island I had been on in Thailand. I chose a beach during the period when tourists don’t visit, and the huts erected for them go unused. There was no electricity or water, the doors hung on one hinge, and large lizards had moved in. From my window I could see the Thai family that was supposed to look after the tourists and had been left idle. In the afternoon, the mother would delouse her daughters’ hair with her fingers and crack each louse between her nails. In the evening, under the open-sided shelter intended for the tourists who had not come, an oil lamp was placed in a bowl of water on a table. It was completely dark all around and the masses of insects attracted by the light were scorched by the lamp’s glass covering and fell into the bowl of water. The man would make the water move with all the insect bodies and gaze at it like a sound and light show. But everything that seemed exotic in the beginning appeared less so a week later: The concern and love of the delousing act did not seem any different to every western mother brushing out her daughters’ hair, and the hypnotic state of her husband induced by the sound and light show seemed no different to any television screen gazer. Small things soon became apparent: when the mother was angry at her daughters and when they came to appease her, each in her own way; when the wife was irritated by the husband who for most of the day did nothing, when he was so kind as to respond to her requests, and when delight was kindled between them.

The boundaries of my window became more and more unclear, and there were moments when I felt as if I was a guest at their table. Had I remained there longer, perhaps I would have crossed the distance between the window and the open-sided shelter; that is to say, had I also been a different person.

MP: Nachman’s research leads him to believe that “the perception of time … decided [religious believers’] attitude toward death and marked their death and marked the difference between religions.” Do you also share this idea of a connection between religion, time, and death?

YS: Nachman, the father of the main protagonist, dealt with a subject that I too dealt with in the past and on which I published a lengthy treatise called “To Dust.” My argument, which focused mainly on the Bible, was that the solution of every religion in regard to man’s awareness of his mortality is based on its perspective of time as laid out in its fundamental narrative.

The Christian narrative focuses on the birth, life and death of Jesus, and the explanation it offers for his crucifixion—dying for the sake of humanity—grants the Christian believer life after death. The Jewish narrative, in contrast, describes in detail the continuum of generations that creates a nation, and the eternity promised in the Bible is not that of the individual but of the entire nation for all its generations.

Abraham had been put in the position to make the terrible choice between his single son and the seed of generations, and only when he chooses the second and is prepared to sacrifice his son is a ram sent to replace Isaac.

In Hinduism the perspective of time is far, far greater: Its cycles of creation and destruction last 12,000 years and since each year equals 360 regular years, each cycle in fact comprises 4,320,000 years. And if that isn’t enough, 1,000 cycles form one kalpa – 4,320,000,000 years—which is just one day in the life of Brahma. In comparison to all that, a day of the Hebrew god is less than a blink of an eye: “For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past” (Psalm 90). In the immense Hindu perspective of time, with its endless reincarnations, man’s greatest aspiration is not to live for eternity, but to stop being reborn, to escape the cycles of birth and death.

MP: I think readers of both The Salt Line and A Room will experience time not as a linear but a simultaneous experience. That is, your characters seem to live their pasts, presents, and sometimes their futures over and over again, and all at once. How do you create this sense of simultaneity?

YS: Literary giants have preceded me in this. Threads from various times and levels of awareness merge in Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness; Beckett’s Krapp listens to tapes from previous decades of his life as Beckett predicts his future. Faulkner not only made the famous statement, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” but in a 1957 interview described the present stretching forward to 2057 and back to 28 B.C. His protagonists in The Sound and the Fury are subject to flashes from the past flickering in the present, searing and splitting it and sealing their futures. In The Salt Line the consciousness of the characters is mediated by the narrator, and the flashes are prolonged, giving them a scope that is at times much larger than the daylight of their lives. The sense of simultaneity you mention is in fact a sense that each one of us is meant to feel, but fortunately don’t, because doing so for a lengthy time would make living impossible.

While answering you, I recall the experience of first reading Faulkner years ago and the young man I was at the time, still dreaming of making films, as well as the house I lived in outside of Tel Aviv with its yard containing two tortoises, a male and a female, and the loquat tree visible from the window—here right now an ornamental tree with yellow flowers can be seen—at the very same time I’m wondering how this interview will be received and if it will help The Salt Line (I certainly hope so), and on my right is a cup of tea becoming cold as I formulate the answer, a Denby cup whose rim is slightly broken, and I still recall how angry my wife Ayelet was, because I hadn’t taken enough care with the gift she had given me, and twenty years since I have kept it.  All these times exist in this moment, but for me to be able to answer you—and to simply continue living—I have to put them aside.

MP: Is there perhaps some hope despite history’s inescapability?

YS: When discussing hope, I would like to differentiate between people living in Israel and those living in other places in the western world. I harbor a deep fear that Jewish history and its consequences are liable to once again create a trap from which there is no escape. The Biblical fiction, without which the establishment of the state of Israel in its present location would not have occurred, had already caused two exiles and two returns in the past: one before the common era and one in the last century. The two ancient kingdoms that arose here did not last long, but the Biblical narrative that persevered for thousands of years fed a never-ending yearning in exile.

We are now in a situation where Israel is threatened from without and from within; by the millions of Arabs in the surrounding countries and by the split that is now dividing Israeli society. The split is allegedly over matters of law and government, but beneath it, and together with the tension between ethnic groups that Netanyahu rouses in order to extricate himself from the court cases pending against him, lies the deep disagreement between those who hold the Bible as divine truth and those who fear the tyranny of its fiction with all its laws and values, between those whose futures are tied to the past by an apparent divine promise of a mythical latter days vision preceded by an Armageddon and those who wish to forge their own future by themselves; between those who believe they are the chosen people of a god waiting for them to rebuild his temple in the place where mosques now stand, and between those who reject this false belief and its claim of superiority and choose to focus on the holiness of human life—Jewish and Arab.

In Paris the French are currently demonstrating over pension reforms, while here masses of people are demonstrating over the future of a state not yet a century old, alongside which a Palestinian state should have been established a long time ago for the millions who live under Israeli occupation.

One should not give up on the possibility of hope, even here in Israel. In the discouraging march of history (not only in Israel—world disasters such as climate change and others loom for all), one should aspire and work towards making each grain of time as positive as possible, positive for us and those who live among us—not perfect, but as positive as is in our power. Our power is not great, and sometimes it’s easier to become despondent or lazy and find all sorts of excuses, but under no circumstances should the attempt be abandoned.

There is always a certain consolation to be found in literature and other art forms, because even when the situation is gloomy and they too are gloomy, they allow their creators to work with the stuff of reality in the manner they wish, putting their own stamp on events and recreating a world on the page. They make it possible for readers to feel the threat has been temporarily contained between the covers, to detach from it and return home and gaze at the tree in the window, the one with the yellow flowers. At that very moment, a cloud is above it and in a short while will continue on its way.

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Quarantine Highway

Millicent Borges Accardi
Flowersong Press ($16)

by Hilary Sideris

Quarantine Highway, the fourth poetry collection by the Portuguese-American poet Millicent Borges Accardi, was written in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when a group of thirty Latinx poets participated in a challenge organized by the organization CantoMundo—writing, reading, and riffing on each other’s poems for thirty days. Borges Accardi captures the sheer panic and magical thinking of that time when Covid was at its most mysterious and deadly, and she shows us a community coming together to document and process the absurdity (and, at times, the strange beauty) of pandemic life, taking comfort and inspiration from each other’s raw emotions and rough drafts.        

In the poem “Yes, It’s Difficult,” Borges Accardi lapses into nostalgia for the pre-pandemic world of unfettered travel and spontaneous shows of affection: “it was how we did things then, / dirty and up close and we breathed on each other / sighing air, sipping in fine water droplets.” The poet daydreams of travel in “She Can Do What She has to Do,” finding herself “in a café that I know does not exist, / on a corner in make-believe Paris,” where she watches people pass in the plaza. “Thank you,” she tells the imaginary garçon,

I would love a piece of cheese and some
bread. The drink is cool, so I feel as if
the story of my life can go on forever.

Not surprisingly, a reckoning with fragility and the monotony of living a cautious life dominates the collection. In “All It Takes,” the poet fights off an ant infestation, while outside, bodies stack up in refrigerated trucks. Borges Accardi’s gaze falls on a line of ants carrying their dead across her kitchen floor:

You drink cod liver oil and chant
Go home go home go home as the
ants pick up their dead and march
backwards to their queen.

Even as she attempts to ward off the invaders, the poet recognizes that they, too, are members of a community facing an existential threat. But the kitchen is also a site of hope: Cooking and baking are rituals that engage Borges Accardi in a sensual world where well-being is possible. “One Season, My Father Leases Land to Grow Fresno Sweet Red Onions” describes the pleasure of preparing a spicy Portuguese dish:

To be bright red is to want things to happen.
I know this and make Piri Piri, to be held
carefully, to be used later.
The nuances of honey and bitter, roll
about my tongue as I add the sauce to
our lives.                                     

The poem’s title, like quite a few other titles in this collection, is a line written by a fellow poet—in this case, Juan Luis Guzmán—during the month-long exchange that produced Quarantine Highway. This is a book that shows how poetry matters during a time of crisis, how we can keep writing and remember to breathe through a shared sense of culture and community.

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Old Love Skin

Voices from Contemporary Africa

Edited by Nyashadzashe Chikumbu
Mukana Press ($15.95)

by Mbizo Chirasha

Old Love Skin, a collection edited by the energetic griotic Zimbabwean poet Nyashadzashe Chikumbu, is a rainbow of vibrant African voices, a rainbow that rises Mandela from the royal caves of Qunu. It is renaissance that sings to the bones of Nkrumah waKwame sleeping saliently in the lush meadows of heavenly bliss; it is real poetry smoked by ancient ghosts and love angels upon the zenith of Kilimanjaro and fontanelles of Chimanimani mountains, real poetry of Chimurenga grandchildren watering the literary pastures with the rain of organic allegory. It is real poetry strangling ghosts of warlords in Nzere. It is real poetry floating with the gigantic spirit of Nefertiti in White and Blue Nile and Nzinga walking onto the beauty of pyramid rubbles, with Nyamhita Nyanda Nehanda strutting onto the spiritual podium of chimurenga gods. It is real poetry smacking the yellow-orange hypocritical faces of colonial mood and smashing the spiking python tails of post-independence African dictatorships wearing the sheep’s fair coat. It is the love of love and hate of love. And it is the hate of hate and the love of hate. Old Love Skin is a cousin of dramatic irony, satire maybe, or the grandchild of African paradox.

Alvin Kathemb’s poem “Contingencies” well represents the body politic of the collection:

She carries a condom in her purse in case of rape.
When I saw it, I asked, teasing?
expecting some joke or frisky comment—
“You never know when the craving will strike”—
something in that vein.

“Contingencies” depicts the modern trends of sex, population control, and the nausea of recolonization/mental slavery in the name of civilization and modernism. The poem is a graphic presentation of the erosion of ancient African morals that decried sex before the performance of matrimonial rites as exercised by the generations of the past in real Africa. Kathemb takes aim at today’s moral decadence and social rot in comparison to past cultural values and traditional rites, and by prologuing with three of his poems, the anthology sets up a discussion between modern problems and the puzzles of old Africa.

In the nerve-raving verses of “Gaana” by Henneh Kyereh Kwaku, the memory and psyche of the poet are twinned with the reader’s poetic ear. In this political/revolutionary volley presented as a Christmas/valentine present—what a dramatic irony—we see the reincarnation of old literary revolutionary voices such as Léopold Senghor, Jack Mapanje, and Christopher Okgibo, with their ironic/satiric yearnings for freedom during days of colonial madness when Africa was grinding under crude Anglo-Euro colonial iron fist rule. Yes, the African griot on the Old Love Skin podium sings to the current pseudo- revolutionary-tyrranical-autocratic African leadership that never repented from shenanigans of self-hate, greed, killing, war, and decadence. Kwaku, the young muse, recites raw resistance to the machinations of neocolonialism that has reared its unfriendly double heads unto Africa, sliding Africa into dire impoverishment, cultural adultery, and political discord:

I want to get a pet one day—a cat, maybe or a dog—& name it after my country, so each poem I write for it, is also for my country. I want a messy pet—a beautiful pet a pet that’s a metaphor for my country. That when I say my pet tore my life apart today, I also mean—my country tore my life apart. When I say my pet is beautiful, I also am saying—my country is beautiful. When it steals my fish, I say what I say. When it brings me fish, I know there’s a bargain—something taken, something I won’t know of. When it breaks my heart, I know it is my country & I cannot unlove it—when it kills me, I won’t know

Kwaku Dade’s “To Aluah I” is a powerful, painful, and erotic, but so lovely, love-nostalgic epistle. The poet is writing a memory, a long-ago letter to someone she/he knows, a love lost. Sometimes the lover is enjoying afterlife in heaven’s chambers or burning already in the merciless red-hot charcoal chalices of hell; otherwise the poet speaks to his mother who was swallowed by the untamed legends of the world on the day of his birth. Maybe the poet is speaking to a country lost in the decadence of war or the discord of political greed, a country with slums as its wounds and poverty as its boils, a country with a name but no longer living, a dead/lost country. And again, the poem is an elegy, a heart-thumping epitaph, an epistle of memories, a sad love story:

In my mind, you lurk about the house. You splash in the bathtub, tap on the ceramic, you are in the hall, in the kitchen, in the hallways. But the walls whisper to me that I am lying. I step into these your motions, and I find only a brush of cold under my skin. In our backyard, your hand touches mine, pegging clothes on the drying lines, and longings inside you transfer into me. But the passing breeze screams into my face that you are not here. In the sky, asperatus clouds form you, naked, in a bed of bubbles. You stare back at me with famished eyes with a hint of detestation. And sunlight pours through it all. And it rains. I remember us sleeping on our Tamale bed. Our son sleeps between us, and when the void of dreams takes him, I climb over to you; I brush my cheeks against the silk of your stomach

This anthology is also a display of bravery and resurrection of lost hopes. The verses within it are in sync with “old love skin”—how deep and broad the title is, though it is anchored by rims of precision and grids of literary simplicity. Pusetso Lame, the versatile genius of the land of Batswana, comes out with guns blazing; the crudity and the bravery in her verse is a portrayal of Africa believed, Africa disbelieved, Africa loved and hated, Africa hopeful and hopeless. Pusetso’s militant-but-logical verse is optimistic and thus reminds us that Old Love Skin is a revolution to replace the old with the new—or swap the rotten new with the sane/fresh old. Lame speaks to women’s fear of seeing their graves. She stands with/for the victims of violence, victims of fear, and victims of hate, and she wants them to rise. As usual, poets are dynamic perception-changers and life-savers, and Lame’s words offer a rebirth, a renewal, a rekindle, a resurrection, and an uprising:

When all you can see is a worthless being Trying to resurrect from a grave that keeps digging itself deeper and deeper Like rain droplets, I’d slowly but surely wipe away all the pains from yesterday’s rejections When all the doors before you have been closed even before your existence

Old Love Skin can be read as symbolizing a rebirth of the old wine skin adage, or maybe its replacement: the reincarnation, the memory, the rise of ancestors of letters or another literary revolution, a non-violent resistance with fistfights dressed in cloves of mushroom, bullets loaded in petals of roses or petals of blood—and iconic literary prowess.

Zimbabwean poet Energy Mavaza was born and bred in that land of contradiction, the land of embrace and bruises, the land of scenic beauty and political ugliness, the land that requires today’s corruption sanitizers as it needed yesterday’s colonial fumigators before the shrill of the cockerel in 1980. Mavaza, the new of the old Shimmer Chinodya (author of the award-winning novel Harvest of Thorns, a novel that predicted the colonial present of the country under siege and the future of a republic that was to greedily drink its own eggs of economic and political freedom), brings back to this poetic podium a searing verse :

That winters’ sun shone so bright, Thawed hearts in melanin delight. Hope swallowed in ballot box, Hope in Africa? What a paradox. For nature nurtures its own well. It adorns wild peppermints with green, Climbers scale up rocks and boughs Embracing the bush to keep the axe at bay. Landscape painted in scattered thistles in gloom-bloom as they shudder To the August gust. The firm rooted tastes November dew. Thistles appease in summer breeze, Whispering dry rumours to the prickly leaves. Roots ferret beneath for moisture but the ancestors stare licks our hope up. Zealous ploughers did much about nothing Silos awaited nocuous for stores but Dust, the response to what we sowed, Shrubs and thorns too. No one knows what they fed on We will reap what we did not sow Bountiful harvest of thorns We didn’t toil for

Old Love Skin is a theme-based display of poetic gems equalized by the sweet/slow/fresh/smooth flow of a young river pouring into the tired/sober/ harsh but motherly pigeon-infested old river. It is a unique African story told by brave-militant wordsmiths who divorced their play with androids and stereos and got initiated by poignant metaphor, crude pliers of irony, and sharp, double-edged razor blades of satire.

Some of these word-soldiers were trained in the style of Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka; others are great-grandchildren of Senghor and Mapanje; many of them copy the lyricism of Dambudzo Marechera; and still others drank Victorian and metaphysical poetics, maybe some African Canterbury Tales. Old Love Skin is a yearn for freedom, a rebirth, a resurrection, a revolution, a resistance of the bad old, and an embrace of the good new—as well as a chant against the rotten new and an embrace of the good old.

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Carnal Knowledge: Colette’s Chéri and The End of Chéri

Chéri and The End of Chéri
Colette
Translated by Rachel Careau; Foreword by Lydia Davis
W.W. Norton & Company ($28)

 

Chéri and The End of Chéri
Colette
Translated by Paul Eprile; Introduction by Judith Thurman
New York Review Books Classics ($28)

by Kevin Brown                              

Our Colette problem isn’t that there’s too little of her. The problem is where to begin. Did she write fifty, seventy-five books? Nobody knows. Most agree the Chéri novellas are a good place to start. Chéri and The End of Chéri, two novellas with recurring themes and characters, tell distinct but related stories about a complicated relationship between forever-teen Frédéric Peloux (“Chéri”) and aging ex-courtesan Léa de Lonval. Two recent translations of these works offer readers the opportunity to engage them anew.

1.

Chéri is Léa’s book. Like French classics such as Red and Black, Lost Illusions, Madame Bovary, and Swann’s Way, Chéri immortalizes one of fiction’s least forgettable women, and each of these books is as remarkable for what it has in common with the others, commonalities too numerous to be coincidental, as for what distinguishes it.

Adultery, for example, figures in all of these books, but they’re about more than cheating—they’re about corruption, seduction and betrayal. In Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Lost Souls, street prostitutes swarm the muddy arcade of the Palais Royal. The same is true of the town Rouen in Madame Bovary. As Chéri begins, the Eiffel Tower is new, and Léa is among the last of the courtesans, representing the end of an era dating back to antiquity. (Courtesans were less sex workers than stylish ladies “kept” by wealthy men who could blow a couple thousand francs a month to maintain them in style.)

Aging out from this profession, Léa has never lost her head until now. The façade Léa presents is that of someone who’s seen everything, but she’s kidding herself. Controlling though she is, Léa—like Charles Bovary, like Emma, like Swann—will play the fool for love. Sooner or later, everybody does.

Like Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust, Colette creates self-contained worlds crammed with material objects. Her characters are eccentric; Madame Camille de La Berche, whom translator Paul Eprile calls “the Baroness,” blurs gender boundaries; she’s as laconic as others are prattling, but when she does speak, she is blunt to the point of rudeness. Washing down snails with cheap white wine, she barks, brays, or whinnies. Hairs sprout from her nose, knuckles, ears, and upper lip.

On Thursdays, Fred’s mother Charlotte Peloux entertains guests like Léa. Flush with seventy-four-year-old brandy, they play card games and gossip. (“Colette’s militancy is limited to the boudoir,” as Judith Thurman says in her introduction to Colette’s The Pure and the Impure [New York Review Books Classics, 2000].) For people passing from youthful beauty to old age, “loosened up by a martini” (as translator Rachel Careau puts it in her version of Chéri), cat-spats help pass the time.

Léa is queen bee of the clique—but it’s unclear whether she has real friends or just deal friends. What’s very clear is that she keeps her enemies close. Léa makes a killing off December crude in the stock market, which brings out the competitor in Madam Peloux, a wily trader herself. Colette’s irony is hypodermically fanged. Léa’s observation of Ma’am Peloux, fidgety and prattling, a chicken head fluttering her chicken wings, is typically pitiless. Lolotte’s every utterance, her every “swoon and squeal,” is trumpeted at the top of her lungs. She “never repeated a truism less than twice.” Picture Jimmy Two-Times from Goodfellas, “who got that nickname because he said everything twice, like: ‘I’m gonna go get the papers, get the papers.’”

More interesting than what Charlotte and Léa say about Chéri is what they don’t say. Charlotte birthed him, but Léa informally adopted and practically raised him from the time his ribs were still showing. Léa scolds and coddles him, like an overprotective mother, saying things like, “Put on your overcoat, you might catch cold” or “quit picking at the little hangnails on your toe.” When Fred sulks or throws one of his little tantrums, Léa strokes his head as if he were a house pet: “There . . . there . . . What’s the matter?” Fred needs Léa as much as, if not more than, he needs his own mother, who knows it. Sex is almost beside the point.

The Chéri novellas are studies in what Julien Gracq, in his Afterword to Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, called power “fallen to the distaff.” Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was the daughter of a retired captain, but her mother Sido gave the orders. Lion cubs raised by prides like these will find the pattern easy to spot.

Madame Peloux arranges a lucrative marriage between Fred and Edmée, a teen who never makes a fuss; she “has a way,” mère Peloux tells us, “of swallowing affronts as if they were sweetened milk.” One month passes and Léa pretends she no longer cares but in her well-appointed world, things aren’t quite right. She loses sleep; she imagines Fred making love to Edmée’s perfect, youthful body. Little things begin to bother Léa, like the broken glass in a picture frame.

Six months pass. Fred can’t stop obsessing over his “Nounoune.” One midnight, as Léa’s wandering thoughts search out their slippers and ready themselves for bed, who on earth should ring the bell and bound up the stairs?

“I’ve come back!”

After the lovers consummate a final tryst, Léa dreams of the life they’ll escape into, the way a mother visualizes a nursery. Like Emma, like Mathilde de la Mole, Léa actually believes they’ll run away and live together happily ever after. It’s too late for that. Between that second slice of toast and hot chocolate, the love affair comes to an end. Fred, the boy who hasn’t yet become a man, has wrecked not one but two unhappy homes. As for Edmée, what will become of her?

2.

Chéri (1920) is Léa’s book. The End of Chéri (1926) is Fred’s.

*

“Colette in English,” says Judith Thurman, “has never sounded like Colette.” Until now. Careau gets granular, in an 18-page Translator’s Note, on the challenges of translating Colette into English, noting that the author belongs to the Generation of 1870, an era marked by Prussia’s military defeat of France, the Third Republic, and the French Union of 1946-1954, the year Colette died. Careau resists bringing Colette’s idiom up to date, but it should be noted this is a tactic, not a mistake.

Of course, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Careau uses the word “reticule” for what Eprile translates as “handbag”; very likely, she’s attempting to replicate in English what Michael La Pointe calls Colette’s “occasionally archaic diction.” A poet in his own right, Eprile resorts to different tactics; his “Damn!” is current usage so idiomatic it doesn’t draw attention to itself, whereas Careau gambles that “drat!” won’t seem jarringly antiquated.

As Lydia Davis has argued when speaking of her own acclaimed translations of Proust, sometimes “what one gains in exactness one loses in expressive power.” Careau’s fidelity to Colette’s “concision, subtraction, condensation” makes her version seem intentionally raw. In the context of World War I, for example, Eprile’s phrase “somebody who’s been mustard-gassed” has more immediacy than Careau’s “a gassing victim”; it actually speeds up rather than bogging down the text. Elsewhere Careau writes, “We’re purebred Parigots, we are!” and this is exactly what Colette says: “On est des parigots de race, nous!” But Eprile suggests that what Colette really means is, “We’re the real Parisians!”

On some occasions, Eprile hews closer to the original, preferring to leave untranslated a word that works better in French. For example, in The End of Chéri, a pivotal character with a smelly “matted crow’s nest of hair,” shuffling about in felt house-slippers and surrounded by the paraphernalia of her vices (tarot cards, snuff boxes, a revolver, etc.), is called by Careau “the Girlfriend”; Colette and Eprile both call her “La Copine.”

The half-dozen things Careau considers outright flaws in a translation are sometimes judgment calls or clarifications; living writers working with a translator will often consent to or even insist upon such changes. Substitution is not always wrong. In fairness to Eprile, alterations that might seem like embellishments or omissions are sometimes unavoidable. Things Colette leaves unsaid Eprile will explain by way of addition: The green-and-red ribbon Fred absent-mindedly fingers, for example, is specified as the Croix de Guerre, a medal of bravery. Consistent with her strategy, Careau prefers supplying useful endnotes, eleven pages of them, to paraphrase or otherwise explain these references.

Colette’s prose is reputedly hard to translate. Careful writers stack word-associations and the play of overtones as if they were musical chords, and Colette does this, scaling up and down registers, formal and informal, technical and slang. Her vocabulary is large because it consists of words—the botanical names of flora and fauna, a lush and nuanced color palette, specific foodstuffs and kitchen utensils, regional colloquialisms—which may not reflect the reader’s everyday usage, though a gardener or a gourmand might find them less strange. In short, Colette is a prose poet, and poetry is often challenging for casual readers because of its extreme compression and associative properties. Sensory confusion—synesthesia is the technical term—is one aspect of this; in Colette, cherry brandy smells like hydrogen cyanide, and she likens that rot-gut whiskey smell to “wet bridle leather.”

And while two new reappearances of the Chéri novellas may seem like overkill, it’s not Eprile’s or Careau’s fault that Colette should be translated for the umpteenth time by two different publishers in the same year while so many other writers languish in relative obscurity. Our Colette problem is a publishing industry problem: While some noteworthy presses (including the two who issued these books) are generating this kind of work, ever-fewer imprints promote ever-fewer writers from chronically under-represented parts of the Portuguese-, Spanish-, and even French-speaking worlds—to say nothing of languages less familiar to the average American.

Which brings up the economics of literary translation. Careau’s version is eighty-five production-cost pages longer than Eprile’s, and hews more closely to the original French publication. This makes for an aesthetically heightened experience: In terms of paragraphing and space-breaks, Careau mimics to great advantage the breathing room, section breaks, and overall musical sense of Colette’s prose rhythms. But neither translation renders the other superfluous; this isn’t a zero-sum game. Leave glaring mistranslations to scholars with native or near-native knowledge of French. There’s something for everybody to quibble over.

*

Like many classic French writers, Colette came to the capital from the provinces, seeking fame on the world’s biggest stage. Proust was the only one born anywhere near Paris, in Neuilly; Stendhal came from Grenoble, Balzac from Tours, and Flaubert from Rouen. Like Balzac, Colette pushed herself to the point of exhaustion and beyond, sometimes writing for ten hours a day.  She was also, as she says of Léa in The End of Chéri, “clear eyed, shrewd in the way of country folk.” As editor at Le Matin, she commanded Georges Simenon to leave all that literary stuff out of his writing, and she creates the illusion of having followed her own advice—but the Chéri books are read 100 years after publication for good reason.

That reason involves Colette’s creation of the narrative as a summa of sensory perception. Knowledge of self, carnal knowledge, aren’t bookishly arrived at in this tale. In her Foreword to the Careau translation, Lydia Davis suggests Colette may have been stereotyped by critics because her early books seemed to be about marriage, domesticity, and interpersonal relationships. Today, it’s obvious the Chéri novellas are those of a writer very much in the classical French literary tradition. Three classical elements of great writing are superabundant in Colette: (1) breadth of experience; (2) depth of insight; and (3) elevation of style. She can be lushly chromatic but also very precise, the way Ravel is said to be. Only rarely is she guilty of what Michel Leiris calls, in his dazzling Brisées: Broken Branches (as translated by Lydia Davis), “the evasiveness of lyricism.” Her prose is justly celebrated for its classical restraint and discipline.

Another way to come at this is to note that the Chéri novellas are composed, to a very intentional degree, of surfaces. There are soft-tissue surfaces (keratin layers of nails, hair, and skin sculpted into hollows of collarbone, forearms downed like cornsilk) and hard surfaces (the heavy décor of 1888, torpedo cars). The fundamental layers of interior design are all lush: color, lighting, line, patterns, texture, fabrics. Colette expends much narrative energy on sets and costumes, detailing, for example, how  “Léa went out with the determined gait imposed by certain shoes and certain homespun clothes on their wearer.” No less than Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust, Colette is entirely serious about the whims of fashion. One Careau endnote cites a longstanding milliner mentioned in Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life (2011), and this is not frivolous;  people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a morning coat at the races may remember historical events somewhat hazily, but they have elephantine recollections of the hat they wore at Del Mar on opening day in 1937. Surfaces, the relentlessness of details rooted in mundane reality, are how Colette conveys the interior life of her characters.

Colette is doing many (if not more) of the things her literary confreres are noted for as well.  She’s as creative as Stendhal in her use of point of view, which hummingbirds back and forth between omniscience and interior monologue. Her social canvas, from the demi-monde to the haut monde, is as deep and wide as Balzac’s. Her savagery is laugh-out-loud-funny, like Flaubert’s. Léa’s catnap is as convincingly experimental as Charles’s carriage dream in Swann’s Way. And, like Proust, Colette reveals that time is not a clockwise construct of past, present, and future, with measurably fixed durations; linearity breaks down in The End of Chéri because Fred’s sensory perceptions flow in such a way that his experience of a given point in time is almost indistinguishable from any other. Colette does all these things brilliantly, but with what Careau calls “extreme and seemingly effortless economy” because she jettisons many of her predecessors’ creaky plot conventions—ladders and forged letters, for example—while usefully retaining others, like spying and attempted bribery.

*

The End of Chéri

The End of Chéri is in some ways as much a post-World War I fiction as Mrs. Dalloway. Fred returns home from the Great War, as Stendhal had from the Napoleonic wars, but he doesn’t see himself as the frustrated hero Julien does. Rather, Fred suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder: He flashes back to trenches full of corpse-kids killed by shrapnel, reliving how he was nearly suffocated by bodies blown apart and raining down. Fred isn’t physically disabled, but he’s damaged goods, and those who knew him before the war worry. Fred doesn’t eat right; he loses weight; he neglects his appearance. Perhaps most tellingly he invents excuses—the late hour, a headache—to avoid having sex with Edmée.

In Colette, historical events and movements on the world stage don’t unfold as mere backdrops. They allow her characters to occur and recur from book to book, as they do in Balzac, but also to grow and change—as in Balzac they sometimes don’t. Careau devotes eleven pages of endnotes to Colette’s historical references. Americans are everywhere, as are African Americans and jazz. In Chéri, Edmée seemed a reticent young girl, but that’s really because boarding school and other forms of banishment from her jealous mother’s increasingly remote affections taught Edmée silence and cunning. Five unhappily married years and a World War later, head nurse Edmée practically runs the hospital for wounded veterans, where she works.

Mirrors are everywhere Fred looks, but there’s much he never sees. Like Julien, Fred is such a pretty boy that women’s “silent tribute” follows him through the streets.  He hardly notices. Fred can be cold and distant, but he doesn’t work at striking that pose the way Julien does. It just comes naturally. In neither novella does Fred gain sudden insight into who and what he really is; he doesn’t see himself through the lens of French history or society the way, without sermonizing, Colette reveals him. His growth is stunted—to what extent by Léa’s unofficial, six-year adoption, a “long adolescence under trusteeship,” it’s hard to say.

There’s a reason people treat Fred like he’s twelve years old. Six years younger, Edmée is in some ways typical of strong women whose dominance in the domestic sphere leads conceited, greedy, and entirely obtuse husbands around by the nose. She has become the adult in the room. Is Edmée having an affair with the hospital’s head doctor, or is she just trying to make Fred jealous? We cannot know for sure, but what’s easy to see is that she rules the roost with authority, and is faithful, at least, to keeping up appearances. Not that Fred cares—he’s too busy looking in the mirror to keep up appearances beyond it.

Fred’s distracted irritability, his sociopathic indifference toward the feelings of others, his extreme self-absorption, and his miserliness aren’t his most striking characteristics. Stendhal correlates Mme. de Rênal’s outer beauty with her inner goodness; Colette contrasts Fred’s beauty with his almost complete lack of moral compass. In The End of Chéri, he seldom laughs; he’s become such an unsympathetic character that even dogs and cats shun him. He seems especially perplexed by changing gender roles. During the War, women were driving supply trucks, hanging around auto-mechanic garages, smoking cigars, and talking politics. Now they want the vote.

Edmée has come into her own and lives, under the same roof, a life increasingly emancipated from Fred. Fred himself is not so circumspect. He has reached the point where he can conceive of nothing that interests him or motivates him to think beyond the present moment. With no real friends, only hangers-on who fear “the final hour of [their] prosperity has come,” Fred is someone who no one needs. He hires friends the way clients hire courtesans. Alienation, anomie, and boredom are overarching themes The End of Chéri shares with Red and Black.

And by the end of The End of Chéri, Fred doesn’t even pretend to love Edmée. Their marriage has deteriorated to the point where he loves jewelry-shopping for her—bracelets, headpieces—more than he loves her for herself. It helps him pass the time. He’s as repulsed by his wife’s perfect body as she is with his perfect face. He doesn’t dote on actual children, yet he asks if she wants to have a baby. “He wrung his past, squeezed out the remaining juices onto the desert of his present,” Colette tells us. Even before his last day, rigor mortis has begun to set in. Fred’s looking for a foxhole to die in. Fred is thirty years old.

*

Despite spending the last years of her life bedridden with crippling arthritis of the hips, Colette outlived Proust by thirty years or so, and published twice as many pages. Among those pages, Chéri and The End of Chéri have aged beautifully. These new editions prove without a doubt that Colette’s great novellas are brief, but they are not small.

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The People Who Report More Stress

Alejandro Varela
Astra House ($26)

by Eric Olson                     

Writers are nothing if not people watchers, but many would confess that attentiveness is a double-edged sword. In Alejandro Varela’s blisteringly frank—and equally funny—short story collection The People Who Report More Stress, eavesdroppers and overthinkers abound. Varela is as concerned with being seen as he is with seeing others, and this dichotomy accounts for his brilliance.

Varela rose to prominence with last year’s The Town of Babylon, one of three debuts named finalists for the 2022 National Book Award. Like that novel’s main character, Andrés, most of Varela’s short story protagonists are gay Latino men living in New York City. Varela asked in a recent Lit Hub essay not to conflate his characters with himself—“The critiques will be of me and not my work”—but these characters are markedly funny, and it’s impossible that their humor springs from anywhere but the author’s wry outlook.

Motifs are compiled with delightful urgency in the opening story “An Other Man,” in which the unnamed “you” takes to opening up your predictable marriage with the help of dating apps. “Once we have kids, this’ll all get more complicated,” urges your husband. “Might as well do it now.” Of course, dating apps are a breeding ground for anxiety, in particular when men compliment your “Ricky Martin vibe” and “everyone, it seems, has been at the gym for the last decade.” To boot, “Sidestepping white men proves an onerous task on a distance-based application in a hyper-gentrified neighborhood.”

In a 2022 Apogee interview, Varela revealed that growing up, “I was often the only one of me in most of the spaces I was in. I was the queer friend in the straight group of friends in college. I was the person of color in a white group of friends.” Again, we shouldn’t mistake the author for his characters. But a stark sense of otherness resonates in this collection, an estrangement rooted in compulsive thinking and self-doubt. Thankfully, the flipside of otherness is community, and when Varela steers his characters toward greener pastures—the arms of a husband, the bed of a lover, the invectives of a thoughtful leftist—fireworks ensue.

Throughout the collection, Varela documents a period of life where things threaten to settle but remain decidedly erratic. There are racial misunderstandings involving children, sexual escapades in the elevators of UN Headquarters, and struggles catching taxis as a brown man. Regardless of the situation’s immediate physical consequence, Varela maintains high stakes—after all, self-perception is everything for a protagonist. And we’re constantly reminded that it hurts to be profiled.

This paradigm comes to fruition in matters of sex, a preoccupation so central that it percolates into nearly every other aspect of the collection, politics in particular. The People Who Report More Stress is a motherlode of social criticism, made all the more poignant by its interwoven analysis of lust. This is perhaps most evident in “Comrades,” where a 41-year-old progressive looks to move on from his ex using a dating app geared specifically for liberals. “FUN FACT,” reads his profile, “Stress of inequality is leading risk factor for top 10 causes of death.”

Among this collection’s finest numbers, “Comrades” both pokes fun at and endorses unapologetic progressivism. “Is Israel the dom or the sub?” Varela’s lead asks over a martini. “It can’t be both at once.” The first dates in “Comrades” aren’t particularly successful, but neither are they out-and-out disasters. They’re merely what happens every day, all over the world, when politics and sex rub elbows.

Varela has admitted to experiencing impostor syndrome, which seems normal after an acclaimed debut. In literary terms, the author should take a measure of comfort in how his follow-up book reaches undeniable vernacular peaks, such as when he breaks the fourth wall to end “Grand Openings”:

Moral? There is no moral, but some observations about pleasure and monotony: they are powerful. They will make one do things they promised they would never do, and they will accelerate a train already in motion. At times they work in conjunction; sometimes they’re free agents. Pleasure will disrupt monotony, sure, but only momentarily. And the effort to maintain that disruption will, in most cases, lead to irreversible effects. Life continues. Until it doesn’t.

By turns tragic, rosy, and libidinous—but always thoughtful—The People Who Report More Stress relates the way in which desire both derives from and conforms to the expectations of others. Varela’s characters might not know what exactly they want, but they do know who they are. It’s the rest of the world that has trouble connecting

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Abuela, Don't Forget Me

Rex Ogle
Norton Young Readers ($18.95) 

by George Longenecker                      

In this book-length poetic memoir, Rex Ogle takes young readers on his journey from despair to hope. His narrative poetry, which explores how he persevered through abuse and poverty, is fast-paced, compelling, and appropriate for young readers.

Ogle’s grandmother is an island of calm in his mother’s storm of instability. She emigrated from Mexico, built a life in Texas, and graduated from college; her daughter, Ogle’s mother, moves from place to place and from man to man. The author’s father has left Texas; he has a new family and only sees his son during summer visits. Abuela takes young Rex in and encourages him to read. She takes him to the library for the first time:

Inside, white walls reach toward blue skies
seen through high glass windows
resting above shelf after shelf after shelf of
book after book after book.
My eyes grow wide, whites wider, pupils dilating
to take in all these stories
begging to be known

“Can I read them all?” I ask.
Abuela smiles.
“Yes.
If you work hard, you can do anything.”

For Rex, the library and books are his redemption from abuse and neglect. The backyard of his neighbor Jason, also a magical and safe place, appears in three poems: “We’re children / so the world is still beautiful / and war / still only a game.” The child’s point of view here comes with no small irony: Abuela is a war widow; her husband, Rex’s grandfather, died in Vietnam. 

For Rex, though, the real war is one his mother wages: “At times when no one sees me, / all eyes on my mom, shouting, ranting, screaming (again) / accusing others of this and that, / I run away.” He’s small enough to hide in a small kid-size closet and wait for it to end.  As he grows older, the abuse worsens. In one episode, “Mom grabs me by the hair / lets her fist fly, coming down again and again.” It’s at these times that his room at Abuela’s is a refuge: “At home, at night, /there is always noise, that keeps me awake. / At Abuela’s / there is only a soft hush.”

At school, Rex faces racist harassment and bullying from classmates. One day on the school bus, he has had enough, “and since Chris is sitting closest to the aisle// I punch him as hard as I can in the face. // It is not the first time / I have been in the principal’s office / for fighting // and it will not be the last.”

Despite his disciplinary record, Rex is a good high school student, excelling in multiple AP classes. Abuela is his inspiration. She works multiple jobs to support Rex and help her daughter out of financial messes. It’s a fast-paced narrative with a trajectory of hope; as the author makes clear in his foreword, “Abuela is the only parent I’ve ever known who showed me truly unconditional love, kindness, and support.” Her refrain to Rex is “Te amo siempre”—I love you forever. 

In well-crafted poetry, Abuela, Don’t Forget Me shows young readers that abuse cannot be forgotten, but it can be overcome. 

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A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again

Joanna Biggs
Ecco ($29.99)

by Ellie Eberlee

Evening, 1857. A thirty-eight-year-old Mary Ann Evans, later to achieve fame under her pen name, George Eliot, reads Jane Austen aloud. After decades of migraines, unrequited attachments, and the loss of her parents, Eliot is beginning to write fiction, and she seeks inspiration in Austen’s wry, imaginative prose. She also hopes to entertain George Henry Lewes, her lover and a member of the burgeoning London literati to which Eliot—an anonymous magazine editor—fervently aspires to belong.

A century later in 1964, the thirty-three-year-old divorcée Toni Morrison (née Chloe Anthony Wofford) accepts a job editing textbooks in Syracuse. A single mother supporting her toddler son and newborn after a fleeting marriage to a Jamaican-born architect, Morrison found the position listed among the New York classifieds. Fending off creative depression and loneliness, Morrison writes by night, packing and smoking a tobacco pipe in her poorly heated apartment before resuming work on an old manuscript (published in 1970 as The Bluest Eye).

What links these two women separated by time, an ocean, and circumstance? Eliot and Morrison led unconventional lives, encountering gendered, racial, and socioeconomic hurdles in their careers and relationships. Like many spirited, creative women before and after them, Eliot and Morrison fought fiercely for the right to live out to the limits of their talents and desires, pursuing writing as a conduit for making meaning as they did so.

These and similar battles form the backbone of Joanna Biggs’s joint autobiography and biography A Life of One’s Own. Examining “Nine Women Writers [who] Begin Again,” the book traces the writing lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. A senior editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work (Serpent’s Tail, 2015), Biggs casts herself as the unspoken ninth woman, starting anew following the dissolution of her marriage in her early thirties.

Initially, Biggs’s divorce spelled straightforward liberation. “I was free,” the author writes. “At first, I took my freedom as a seventeen-year-old might: hard and fast and negronied and wild.” Soon, though, Biggs yearned for a life she “would be proud of, that [she] could stand behind.” She wondered: how does a feminist reconcile drives toward independence and human connection? Does domesticity preclude a fulfilling writing career or intellectual life? Such questions “felt urgent as well as overwhelming. . . . I needed to remind myself that starting out on my own again halfway through life is possible, has been possible for others.”

Like many recent joint biographies of female creatives—for example, Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women (2018) or Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting (2020)—Biggs splits her exploration of women’s literary and personal re-beginnings into distinct, individually focussed chapters. The book observes a broad chronology, beginning in the eighteenth century with Wollstonecraft, whose landmark political treatises and epistolary travelogues Biggs admired as an undergraduate at Oxford. It ends with Ferrante, whose resilient energies drove Biggs’s brief venture into small press publishing, and whose Neapolitan novels continue to inform many of Biggs’s longstanding female friendships. Each section supplies a thoughtful tessellation of personal memoir, vividly recounted biography, and joyful analysis of the various writers’ major works. A prime example is the chapter titled “Zora,” which relates Biggs’s initial reading of the first professional Black woman author while undergoing a depressive episode; tracks Hurston’s involvement in the Harlem Renaissance, among other national movements; and offers a keenly observed, self-reflexive reading of Janie Crawford from Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Occasionally, the sheer celebrity of many of Biggs’s chosen biographical subjects threatens to detract from the immediacy and inventiveness of her narrative (Woolf and Plath’s extensively speculated-upon struggles with mental illness pluck especially familiar strings). Still, Biggs’s deeply felt connection to each writer revitalizes established literary lore, reframing each woman’s trajectory through personally resonant lenses of resurgence and rebirth. Her literary analyses, too, exhibit tender yet considered admiration. She avoids the detached, properly critical attitudes championed at Oxford while emphasizing the exquisite literary quality of each woman’s labors; it’s from their words, as much their lives, that Biggs draws solidarity and a sense of possibility.

If any lasting complaint might be lodged against A Life of One’s Own, it’s that the author’s considerable wealth of source material often obscures her own engrossing autobiography. At its end, readers may be taken aback to learn that seven years have passed since Biggs’s separation. What happened in the intervening period? Biggs offers glimpses: a brief stint on antidepressants, Ferrante-themed parties, apartment hunts, hot baths reading Hurston, relocation to New York, rediscovery of Woolf’s novels on the train from Brooklyn. But our sense of the author remains patchy at best, a partial sketch in a gallery of otherwise polished, skillful portraiture.

Ultimately, the book’s central thread holds tight. It’s gratifying, albeit slightly unsurprising, to arrive at Biggs’s conclusion that “there are many ways of doing good work and living a happy life, and that is more unusual for that to happen within the conventional set-up than you might imagine.” Of course, her reading of these eight women writers proves fundamental to that takeaway: “I never thought I could be Simone de Beauvoir,” she writes, “but I’ve always known she existed.” Put another way, Biggs finds anchorage in the drift of her literary mothers. Through revisiting their words—the complex, hard-won languages of hope, loss, and love each woman developed and left behind—she locates the confidence to carry her own messy liberation forward. By the book’s end, she lives and writes from a position figuratively analogous to the one Mrs. Ramsay temporarily occupies in Woolf’s masterwork To the Lighthouse—looking out over a sea of female creative inheritance, observing how her chosen women’s lives and literature have “silvered the rough waves a little more brightly,” and feeling, above all, that “It is enough! It is enough!”

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