Miracles slip past us, Anne Carson

 

Lines

While talking to my mother I neaten things. Spines of books by the phone.

Paperclips

in a china dish. Fragments of eraser that dot the desk. She speaks

longingly

of death. I begin tilting all the paperclips in the other direction.

Out

the window snow is falling straight down in lines. To my mother,

love

of my life, I describe what I had for brunch. The lines are falling

faster

now. Fate has put little weights on the ends (to speed us up) I

want

to tell her--sign of God's pity. She won't keep me

she says, she

won't run up my bill. Miracles slip past us. The

paperclips

are immortally aligned. God's pity! How long

will

it feel like burning, said the child trying to be

kind.

 

-Anne Carson

 

This is from Carson's book of 2005, Decreation, in a section titled 'Stops', which includes several poems about her aging mother. The poem first appeared in The New Yorker.

 

I've been on a bit of an Anne Carson bender lately, mostly rereading, but not entirely. 

The Tragedy of Y

"Well, murder or no murder, all I can say is--thank God for the Mad Hatters!"

That's a reporter who's just been berating Inspector Thumm.

A couple of days before a trawler had fished up York Hatter's body in the New York Harbor. He'd disappeared from his house on Washington Square six weeks before, and from the condition of the corpse--fingers too battered for a fingerprint, face cut up beyond recognition--it seemed he'd been in the water the whole time. The identification was made from the clothes--and a suicide note on the body, in York Hatter's handwriting.

At this point, the dedicated mystery reader (and one anonymous New York reporter) will go, hunh, sure.

Still Thumm, one of New York's finest, unhappily lets it go as suicide until there's a clear murder attempt a month later at the Hatter household. Then he calls in Drury Lane, retired actor and amateur detective who had solved the earlier Tragedy of X. 

There are two more murders to come and one attempted before Drury Lane unwillingly reveals the culprit.

This has the clever conceit that there's a witness, Laura Campion, in the room when the first murder is committed, only she's blind, deaf, and dumb. What could she have perceived? How can she communicate it? 

I enjoyed this, and it shows up on lists of best mysteries, but it isn't as good as The Tragedy of X. I knew from Laura Campion's clue who had done it, and so the final explanation went on too long for me. Still fun! It's recently been reissued (with the cover shown) by Penzler Publishing as an American Mystery Classic.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1932). Spooky House. 

Douglas Dunn (#poetry)

 

Chateau d'If

Her photographs of white embrasures glow

Against impossible blue, the sea and sky

Contemptuous of how men fortify

The State's iniquity. I do not know

Exactly all we talked about or did.

I was wearing my blue jacket, my off-white

French slacks. She posed me as a blue vignette--

"Lean on these battlements, then turn your head."

I can't remember, but I can't forget

Our outing to the Chateau d'If, kept now

In these rectangles of a printed light,

Other than that she liked the day, and how

She said she'd read that book of martyrdom.

"Let's stay a while, then take the last boat home."

 

-Douglas Dunn

 

Douglas Dunn was a Scottish poet who died last Friday at the age of 83. I've featured him once before on the blog. This is from his book Elegies, which came out in 1985 and won the Whitbread Prize. The elegies were for his first wife Lesley Balfour Dunn, who died of cancer at the age of 37. She was an artist (not just photography--"infallible in art//That pleased her--water, oil, or lithograph" says another poem.)

 

Looking at an old photograph led Dunn to write this sonnet about a moment in their past. There are a number of other sonnets in the volume, though not all. Still most use some formal structure.

 

Chateau d'If is, of course, the prison/fortress in Marseilles' bay, where Edmond Dantes is sent early in The Count of Monte Cristo. Like Alcatraz, you can take a boat out to visit. 

 

 

 

It's only at the Chateau d'If moment that The Count of Monte Cristo is a book of martyrdom, but that suits the mood and the moment of the poem.

Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World (#1949Club)

"...this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering..."

Ti Noël is a slave on a plantation in Haiti twenty years before the Haitian Revolution. Due to his expertise in horses, he goes with his master to the town to select a new breeding stallion for the farm. There he sees wax heads in a barber shop representing the king and other nobility in a barber shop; next door he sees similarly garlanded wax heads of pigs at the butcher's shop. They look the same to him.

In the next chapter Ti Noël is leading the horse at the mill and his fellow slave Macandal is feeding in the sugar cane when Macandal's arm is caught between the millstones. Ti Noël stops the horse at once and cuts the traces, allowing him turn the stones back, but it's too late: there's nothing to be done but amputate.

But the symbolic violence of the first chapter and the accidental violence of the second are only precursors to real deliberate violence. Macandal leads an early and unsuccessful revolt; he is burned at the stake in 1758. Ti Noél later meets Bouckman, who brings news of the French Revolution, and who helps start what will be the successful Haitian revolution, though Bouckman himself is killed by French troops in 1791.

Alejo Carpentier was born in 1904 in Switzerland to a French father and a Russian mother, but the family moved to Cuba shortly after his birth where he was mostly raised. In 1927 he escaped Cuba after protesting the dicatorial government of the time, and settled in France. In 1939 he returned to Cuba. In 1943 he made a trip to Haiti where he saw the sites described in his novel. Again after the war he felt it safer to leave Cuba and settled in Venezuela until the Cuban Revolution when he returned once again. In 1966 Castro appointed him ambassador to France. In 1977 he won the Cervantes prize; he died in 1980.

During Carpentier's trip to Haiti, he saw what he named 'lo real maravilloso', the 'marvelous real' in the world, and encorporated it in this, his second novel. It's often considered a precursor to magical realism, and it does seem clear to me that Garcia Marquez was in fact reading Carpentier. One aspect of the marvelous real for Carpentier is voudou: we as readers don't doubt (mostly) that Macandal was burned at the stake, but we're teased, at least for a bit, with the thought that he transformed himself into something that could fly away, and this was widely believed at the time.

The Haitian Revolution was successful, resulting in the second independent country in the New World, but still maybe it was not a success. 

Ti Noël's owner flees the revolution for Cuba, but once there falls apart financially and psychologically and loses Ti Noël while gambling. Ti Noël eventually wins his freedom and decides to return to Haiti, where he is immediately re-enslaved by Henri Christophe, the black king of half of Haiti. Now an old man, Ti Noël is forced to carry bricks to a mountain top to build the Citadel Laferrière: 

 

The kingdom of Henri Christophe does not last and finally Ti Noël is free, but he does not live long himself to enjoy that freedom.

Macandal, Bouckman, Henri Christophe (I used the spellings given by Carpentier--spelling as you can imagine for the time, was not well-defined) are all historical figures. I had not realized that Pauline Bonaparte (Napoleon's younger sister) was in Haiti during their Revolution, but at the time (1802) she was the wife of Leclerc, the French general who was tasked by Napoleon with re-enslaving the Haitians. She and her husband both appear. 

The Kingdom of this World is novella lengath, and lyrically written, though still easy to read--I read it in a day in a translation by Harriet de Onís. There is apparently another later translation. The edition I read includes a useful introduction by Edwidge Danticat, the Haitian novelist and memoirist. I've read one other novel by Carpentier, The Chase, which I enjoyed, but this I thought a masterpiece. 

"In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasumch as there is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World."

It's the week of the 1949 Club! Hosted by Simon and Kaggsy. I have hopes of reading a second before the end of the week. If I'm very ambitious, I might reread one of (both great!) Nelson Algren's The Man With The Golden Arm or Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails.

 

"Yikes!"...Anne Carson

According to her agent, "Yikes," was her first word on hearing she'd won the Nobel Prize. More decorous than Doris Lessing's first words on the same sort of occasion...

Autobiography of Red (1998) is a verse novel about Geryon, the red winged cattle-herder slain by Herakles as the tenth of his twelve labors. The story was alluded to in the usual places: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book IX (the book about Herakles), or Hesiod's Theogony, but it was retold from Geryon's point of view by the poet Stesichoros (c. 630 - c. 555 BCE) in his Geryoneis, now mostly lost. It's this version that Carson retells, expands, adapts.

She begins with a short essay on Stesichoros. "He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet." Then come her tranlations of the fragments of Stesichoros that come from the Geryoneis:

XI. Right

Are there many little boys who think they are a

Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the

Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him

Joyfully

 

That's already less translation than adaptation, though there is a dog Geryon is fond of in the Geryoneis.

Then a few short 'appendices' about Stesichoros, mainly his more famous (but also largely lost) poems about Helen, culminating in the Palinode.

The main story is moved from archaic times to the present. It's told in 48 episodes.  

 

In the first couple of episodes, we've already learned Geryon doesn't like going to school:

 

V. Screendoor

 

His mother stood at the ironing board lighting a cigarette and regarding Geryon. 

---

Outside the dark pink air

was already hot and live with cries. Time to go to school, she said for the third time.

Her cool voice floated

over a pile of fresh tea towels and across the shadowy kitchen to where Geryon stood at the screen door

He would remember when he was past forty the almost dusty medieval smell of the screen itself as it

pressed its grid on to his face. She was behind him now. This would be hard if you were weak

but you're not weak, she said and neatened his little red wings and pushed him out the door.

 

That was picked a bit at random as an example, though it is one of the shorter episodes. They all work that way, with a single sentence to open, followed by an anecdote.

 

Geryon becomes a troubled gay teenager. His mother is roughly sympathetic; his older brother has no patience for him. He meets Herakles, with whom he has sex. "Geryon you know we'll always be friends." Not so in the original. He and Herakles travel to South America to see a volcano: 

We are amazing beings,

Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.

And now time is rushing towards them

where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,

night at their back.

 

That ends the main part of the story--Herakles has not killed Geryon--though there's a final interview with Stesichorus.

 

I was just writing about her later work Nox the other day and mentioned she was in the hunt for this year's Nobel Prize. I honestly didn't think she would win, but I'm pleased she did. (If I'd put a fiver on her at 33-1 I could have had a nice dinner out to celebrate...) I opined the other day that Autobiography of Red would be a good place to start with Carson, and having just reread it, I still think that's true, though she's written a lot of good books, notably Eros the Bittersweet or Nox.

  

September Wrapup

I've been reading plenty, but not blogging much. Oh, well... Here was my month's reading:

Thrillers

Hammond Innes/The Trojan Horse

Brits dueling with Huns in World War II. A great one, I thought. More here. 

E. Philips Oppenheim/The Great Impersonation

Brits dueling Huns in World War I. I was under the impression this was one of the greats, but just so-so for me. The politics are, of course, archaic, but I was expecting that. Maybe I read too many mysteries/thrillers/spy novels, but I also saw the final surprise twist a mile away.

My first Oppenheim. And I really wanted to like this one better because of the great George Starbuck poem:

Said

Agatha Christie to

E. Philips Oppenheim,

"Who is this Hemingway,

Who is this Proust?

 

Who is this Vladimir

Whatchamacallum, this

Neopostrealist

Rabble?" she groused.

 

Prydain

 

Lloyd Alexander/Taran Wanderer

Lloyd Alexander/The High King

Lloyd Alexander/The Foundling and Other Tales

Prydain is a disguised Wales. High fantasy for a younger audience. The High King completed the series of five and won the 1969 Newbery Medal; the stories came after. (I read the first three novels in the series earlier.) Based on Welsh mythology, with a strong dash of Tolkien, of coure; Taran is assistant pig-keeper for the oracular pig Hen Wen. He fights evil in the form of sorceresses, undead, and a dark king. Pretty fun stuff, with maybe Taran Wanderer being my favorite.

 

I could have read the series as a kid, but didn't know of it until I saw it on Lark's blog.

 

Poetry

 

Anne Carson/Nox

 

This may be more -ish than actually poetry. The genre is sort of undefinable. About the death of her brother and her half-failed attempt to translate Catullus 101, which was about the death of his brother. Just now I think this is her masterpiece, though I'd still start with Autobiography of Red. Lithub the other day quoted her odds of winning the Nobel Prize this year at 33-1. She'd be a good choice as far as I was concerned.

 

Shakespeare/Measure for Measure 

 

Saw a superb production of the play a week ago here at Crow's Theatre, and reread it before going. 

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice

That's either Claudio's idea of a Dantean hell, or an ordinary spring day in Toronto, I'm not sure which... 

 

Criticism

 

Philip Lopate/On Sontag

 

From 2009. Quite solid if you're interested in Sontag. He likes the things that are good and dislikes the things that aren't.

 

Lopate is a novelist and essayist. He's got a new book out about Washington Irving, and I was reading a review. That review said his new book was just OK, but to see Lopate really shine in literary criticism, you should read his book on Sontag. So I did.

 

Emily Eakin/The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory

 

Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Althusser, etc.  Eakin's book came out this year and is a good introduction to deconstruction and other French literary theoretical constructs. Her approach is mostly biographical rather than theoretical, and includes some autobiographical material about her own expericnce of Theory. Unlike quite a lot of actual French theory, it's readable.

 

She says she was influenced by Sarah Bakewell's At The Existentialist Café, and it shows. (Which I think a good thing.) If you liked Bakewell, you'll like this--it could be thought of as a sequel.

 

W. E. B. Du Bois/The Souls of Black Folk

 

My spin book was Du Bois' Autobiography, and this will show up in that upcoming post. This is on the Modern Library best non-fiction books of the 20th century, and deservedly so. 

 

Other Novels

 

Lidia Jorge/The Wind is Whistling in the Cranes

 

Jorge won the Camões Prize earlier this year--a lifetime award for writers in Portuguese, similar to the Cervantes Prize for Spanish writers. This came out in Portuguese in 2002. Sort of a three generation family novel, with a white property-owning family, and a black family of Cape Verdean immigrants, but told out of order. I tried to write about it but it didn't come together. It was interesting, but I didn't love it.

 

Martin Hansen/The Liar

 

A Danish novel that came out in 1950. The war is over but not forgotten or even forgettable. Johannes Lye is a schoolteacher on an island that is inaccessible in winter due to sea ice. Lye is not an accidental name; he's not to be trusted.

 

Qntm/There Is No Antimemetics Division

 

A sci-fi novel that came out this year that's been getting some buzz. I'm not much of a sci-fi reader, but I liked this pretty well.

 

This books still around the house:

 

 

Both The Great Impersonation and The Souls of Black Folk come from Project Gutenberg.

 

And next month? I've mostly finished my spin book, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois. There's also the 1949 Club coming up, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy. 

 

I'm looking at Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World, but, heck, that's still a week away, and everygthing could change... 😉