Passages: from Embers, by Sándor Márai

“What we swore to uphold no longer exists,” says the guest very seriously as he, too, raises his glass. “Everyone has died, or gone away, or abandoned the things we swore to uphold. There was a world for which it was worth living and dying. That world is dead. The new one means nothing to me. That’s all I can say.”

“For me, that world is still alive, even if in reality it no longer exists. It lives, because I swore an oath to uphold it. That’s all I can say.”

“Yes, you are still a soldier,” replies the guest.

(p. 93)

If You Don’t Want to Read My Books, Just Tell Me

No one is dying to read my books, though a few have died to avoid reading them. I sent Jonathan Spence an advance copy of my first novel, in the hope that he would contribute a cover blurb, but I didn’t hear back from him, and I learned later that he was ill. Soon he died. 

I asked John Barth to blurb my second novel, so he died.

My high school English teacher was someone who I was sure would devour what his star pupil had written, but he put off reading Southern Rain, due to its foreign setting. I assured him of the Americanness of its theme, yet he too breathed his last, before I could bring him around.

Meet Me at the RASCAL I dedicated to my father, but (in a new twist) he went blind around the time it was published. My mother promised to read it to him, at which he passed.

The Joy of Self-Recogniton

During college, there were a couple of occasions when I learned that parties I’d attended had turned into orgies after I’d gone home. Maybe they weren’t real orgies – they were more like spontaneous adjournments to the shower – but I think I would have enjoyed them. Over decades of regretful recollection, I blamed my early bedtime: Ten thirty or eleven was when I was ready to head back to the dorm to go night-night – just at the time a party starts to get interesting. Curse my body clock!

More recent ruminations, however, have convinced me that blaming my body clock is overly generous. It’s not that the parties turned into orgies after I left: The parties turned into orgies because I left. That’s how orgies work, with the real swingers lurking in the shadows, waiting for the shmendricks like me to clear out. My departure is a signal for the real party to get started.

When I lived in New York, I was typically isolated. If by some miracle I ever found myself having lunch with someone, man or woman, I would be overcome with gratitude and begin enthusing along the lines of “Wow, I’m really glad I met up with you. I don’t get out very often,” to which my lunchmate would invariably respond with a “Whoa,” sometimes accentuated by a raised pointer finger. “This lunch is a one-off,” he’d inform me. “I don’t usually have time to get together like this. Besides, we’re not friends or anything.” Mulling over such experiences, I concluded that I was coming on too strong for New York. You could get away with the presumption of companionship in a low-stakes environment like Baltimore, but not in the Big Apple, where space and time are at a premium. My roommate once told me, “I don’t have time to be your friend,” to drive home the point.

It has finally occurred to me, now in advanced middle age, that the problem was neither space nor time but hierarchy, which, as I failed to recognize when I resided in Gotham, is the governing principle of life there. Hierarchy, alas, holds few advantages for me, so of course I never had a chance. The message had always been clear enough: “I don’t usually have time to get together like this” meant “I don’t usually have time to get together like this with someone like you”; “I don’t have time to be your friend” meant “I don’t have time to be your friend.” Now I get it.

While doing research in Beijing, I once visited a dance club near the University. The music was playing, and the beat was heavy, but the floor remained open, for all of the copious young people in attendance stood lingering at the periphery, watching and waiting. My assessment of the situation was perchance a bit racist: “Chinese people are too shy to have a good time. Good thing Captain America is here to break the ice. Leave it to me.” I strode to the center of the space and commenced gyrating and frugging in my inimitable manner, expecting to trigger a like motion from the natives. But the song ended with no dance support. Another number went by, and then another. I was twisting all alone, with none of Beijing’s youth inspired to join me. After fifteen or twenty minutes of flying solo, I gave up in disgust. “You people are hopeless. What more can I do for you?” I sat down on a bar stool, at which the entire body of clubgoers promptly swarmed onto the floor and began dancing individually, in couples, and in merry clusters. It was one of the most humiliating occurrences of my life, and I slunk out of the club and trudged home in disgrace, too defeated to retrieve my bicycle.

Apparently, I’m a schmuck in Beijing too. 

When a Two-Shot Isn’t a Two-Shot

Woke up at three, obsessing about the confessional snow scene in Norwegian Wood, wondering for the umpteenth time why the director would leave so much empty space on one side, which no high school film student would be careless enough to do; and then it finally occurred to me that the empty space stands for Naoko, just as the eerie soundtrack of the following scene seeps into this one, likewise obtruding her presence or absence therein.

How I Wrote Meet Me at the RASCAL

First, I created the basic text by translating into English parts of the Chinese anecdotal source “Yushan yao luan zhi” (“Treachery at Yushan”), by Feng Shu (1593-1645). Here are two sentences from this basic text:

True to what her cousin had told her, Chief Eunuch Wei Zhongxian was then at the height of his influence. On Tiger Hill, in Suzhou, the Puhui Shrine was being built in his honor.

Next, I transplanted the basic text to contemporary and near-future America, resulting in the Baltimore text, named for the city I chose to be the main characters’ American hometown (although not all the action takes place there). Here is the Baltimore version of the two sentences shown above:

True to what her cousin had told her, the current Director of the FBI, a eunuch called King Kong, was then at the height of his influence. In Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, King Kong Coliseum was being built in his honor.

Then, I subjected the Baltimore Text to a process called larding, meaning that I inserted one new sentence between every two sentences already there. Larding is one of the many literary exercises favored by the Oulipo coterie of experimental writers. (See Harry Mathews’ Oulipo Compendium for a full description of larding.) I larded the Baltimore text a total of three times. After the first round, our two sample sentences were now three, and they looked like this (the inserted sentence is italicized):

True to what her cousin had told her, the current Director of the FBI, a eunuch called King Kong, was then at the height of his influence. Eunuchs like King Kong had capitalized on the great demand for their employment in both the private and public sectors, where they reduced the risk of costly sexual harassment lawsuits. In Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, King Kong Coliseum was being built in his honor.

After the second round of larding, the resulting five-sentence passage (with the inserted sentences italicized) read as follows:

True to what her cousin had told her, the current Director of the FBI, a eunuch called King Kong, was then at the height of his influence. He had, in fact, just been named person of the year by Time Magazine. Eunuchs like King Kong had capitalized on the great demand for their employment in both the private and public sectors, where they reduced the risk of costly sexual harassment lawsuits. The trendsetter in this regard had been media scion Pharaoh Weinstein, whose self-castration on live MeToo TV had inspired young Kong (then known by his rapist name of Mahatma Montessori) to choose the gelded path to power. In Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, King Kong Coliseum was being built in his honor.

With the third round of larding (again highlighted in italics), RASCAL assumed its final density, as shown in our sample:

True to what her cousin had told her, the current Director of the FBI, a eunuch called King Kong, was then at the height of his influence. The name King Kong would later figure prominently in accounts of America’s decline, but during his own time he commanded respect and no one deemed his rise improper. He had, in fact, just been named person of the year by Time Magazine. His autobiography, More Balls Than Most, sat immobile atop the New York Times bestseller list, where it dominated both the political and inspirational genres. Eunuchs like King Kong had capitalized on the great demand for their employment in both the private and public sectors, where they reduced the risk of costly sexual harassment lawsuits. (The final liquidation of the Catholic Church in a class-action settlement served as the wake-up call.) The trendsetter in this regard had been media scion Pharaoh Weinstein, whose self-castration on live MeToo TV had inspired young Kong (then known by his rapist name of Mahatma Montessori) to choose the gelded path to power. Kong’s career, in a few short presidential administrations, led him to his current commanding position in the Bureau.

In Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, King Kong Coliseum was being built in his honor.

By the numbers (according to textfixer.com): The Baltimore text contained 371 sentences, which grew into 729, then 1407, and finally 2777, with each round of larding. Between every two sentences of the Baltimore text, there are seven in the completed RASCAL.

Stylistically, the hardest thing about larding is that each new sentence will separate two sentences that belong together, so that the effect on the text is damaging. A writer seeking merely to mitigate the damage would labor to make each new sentence a general nullity, so that nothing of substance is interposed between the ideally consecutive sentences of the original. On the other hand, if the writer, accepting the challenge of the experiment, wishes to transform the damage into an improvement, then he must craft each new sentence to contain either amusing embellishment or wholly new material that follows naturally from the previous sentence while leading seamlessly to the following one. The new sentence, therefore, loops off in a (hopefully) interesting direction before returning to the original thread of the text. The Oulipo exercise of larding is like being forced to use an extension cord to plug in a lamp that is already right next to the electrical socket. One can try to hide the extension cord (or in this case seven extension cords), or one can make it artistically pleasing enough, perhaps by tinkering it into a string of Christmas lights, to count as an important part of the overall décor.

Passages: From The Evening of the Holiday, by Shirley Hazzard

“He was pleased to be in these beautiful places, which he had known all his adult life, with someone who gave them a new sense of being enjoyed.” (p. 62)

“When the storm began, they were all glad of the interruption. There was quite a lively conversation about storms in general. Darkness, in this long, large room lined with furniture and dim paintings, drew them closer together.” (p. 81)

“It was as if she had taken leave of her senses – or come into their full possession at the expense of her reason; as if she had no capacity to consider her actions in light of their consequences, as if she thought it could go on forever, this disregard for the eventual course of her life, and his.” (p. 110)

“‘What a lovely dress,’ he suddenly said to her. Her beauty had seemed to him so remarkable as they sat at table that he could not keep from making at least this indirect reference to it. She was wearing a simple dress of a splendid color, the sort of dress that might turn up in one of his memories.” (p. 112)

“Since his nostalgia for her was inevitable, he preferred to embark on it as soon as possible – even in her presence.” (p. 114)

He was like someone who, at the close of a beautiful day, constantly shifts his chair to enjoy the last of the light.

She said: ‘Don’t be anxious to find a reason.’

He had forgotten what they were saying. She saw that, and added: ‘To come to the end of this.’ (p. 115)

Book Review: The Fawn, by Magda Szabó

This book is about Eszter, the daughter of an aristocratic family fallen before the advent of communism, and her lifetime hatred for Angéla, who passes seamlessly from the old aristocracy to the new.

Angéla the convener of seminars, the constant presence at the orphanage, forever improving herself, her eyes glued to the copy of Karl Marx in German…and buying all the latest books on Party ideology. When people were turned away from the butcher’s because there was no meat to be had, she opened her eyes wide in astonishment and the tears flowed down her cheeks, and when she got home she took an economics book off the shelf to find out why there was nothing for sale….She had been just the same as a child, so self-sacrificing…she would always take on other people’s problems and shoulder all sorts of impossible burdens…because she always had the time and the means; she had no other business than to be the benefactor of mankind. (p. 185)

Book Review: Seraph on the Suwanee, by Zora Neale Hurston

“Putting food on the table” is what both husbands and wives do. In traditional marriages, however, the husband does it figuratively while the wife does it literally. The separateness of these two modes of devotion leads both husbands and wives to feel that they are laboring alone, and both grow resentful.

In Seraph on the Suwanee, the husband, Jim Meserve, makes clear from the outset that his view of marriage is not as an equal partnership. As he conveys “in so many words” to wife-to-be Arvay Henson, “‘Love and marry me and sleep with me. That is all I need you for. Your brains are not sufficient to help me with my work; you can’t think with me. Let’s get this thing straight in the beginning.’” (p. 35) Indeed, Jim’s idea of connubial sex is quite explicit: “‘Sure you was raped, and that ain’t all. You’re going to keep on getting raped.’” (p. 57)

As Arvay is Seraph’s protagonist, the course of her resentment at this type of marriage forms the main thread of the narrative. What’s surprising – or perhaps unsurprising, given a grasp of human nature in all its irony – is how much Jim resents it too:

‘I feel and believe that you do love me, Arvay, but I don’t want that stand-still, hap-hazard kind of love. I’m just as hungry as a dog for a knowing and a doing love. You love like a coward. Don’t take no steps at all. Just stand around and hope for things to happen out right. Unthankful and unknowing like a hog under an accord tree. Eating and grunting with your ears hanging over your eyes, and never even looking up to see where the acorns are coming from. What satisfaction can I get out of that kind of love, Arvay?’ (p. 262)

Adding complexity to this story of resentment is its symbolism, with the “cracker” Arvay representing the Old South and the hustling Jim standing for the New. Perhaps the former, sullen and parochial, can only be dragged forward by the latter, enterprising and propulsive; and perhaps this dragging does not allow for much collaboration or consultation. It’s certainly ironic that a progressive development  – the modernization of the South – should be depicted here in the context of an unprogressive marriage: Arvay finds her liberation in submission, and if any beneficial readjustment of marriage roles takes place, then I must have missed it. It may be that Hurston prizes the social and economic improvement of the South over the raising of the status of women…

…or maybe her point is that the South hasn’t quite changed enough. Otherwise, it’s very strange for Hurston to have painted Jim as such a know-it-all of a husband, only to admit in the end that hubby really does know best.

Dream: My Life as a Trespass

…I am not alone in the woman’s apartment upon my arrival, because she maintains an entourage of young fashionable people. One of them is an arrogant hippie. He serves everyone a dish of bread pudding with syrup, everyone but me. When I ask him about it, he replies that I am being punished for the rudeness of my initial greeting. He’s right: I had been a little aloof.

“OK, then,” I declare, with token defiance, “I’ll just fetch myself a glass of water.” I repair to the kitchen. However, the flat is very well fitted out, and I’m afraid of breaking something expensive, simply by my presence. I find a plastic cup, which I manage to extricate from a cabinet without causing a glass avalanche. I hold the cup under the faucet and turn on the cold water, but nothing comes out of the tap. Instead, an immaculate column of electrolyte-enhanced eau filtrée begins pouring out of a countertop purifier and splattering cacophonously upon the marble-tiled floor. 

I search in vain for a schmatte to wipe it up.