Eve L. Ewing's 1919 (#poem)

or does it explode

July 27 was hot, 96 degrees, or fourteen points above normal. It was the culmination of a series of days with high temperatures around 95 degrees, which meant that nerves were strained. (11)

man it was so hot

how hot was it

it was so hot

you could cook an egg

on that big forehead of yours

 

you a lie

 

man i tell you it was so hot

 

how hot

 

it was so hot

i dropped a tomato in the lake

and made campbell's soup

nuh uh

it was so hot

the sun tried to get in the swimming pool

and everybody else had to get out

boy that's hot

who you tellin

that day was so hot

how hot

it was so hot

our dreams laid out on the sidewalk

and said 'never mind, we good'

-Eve L. Ewing

On July 27th, 1919, a race riot broke out in Chicago. The beaches of the south side were de facto segregated, and a seventeen-year-old Black boy strayed too close what was thought of as a White beach. He may have been struck by a stone--stones were thrown--or he may have been afraid to come into the White beach when his strength ran out, but in any case he drowned. The police, on the scene, took no action, and a riot started that engulfed the city. Twenty-three Black people were killed and fifteen White people in addition to numerous injuries and enormous property damage.

In the aftermath, a committee was appointed by the governor of Illinois to investigate; it consisted of six White people and six Black people. They produced a report: The Negro in Chicago, a Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot, that came out in 1922. The report sounds (by the standards of the time) balanced enough; the epigraph to the poem above comes from that report.

Eve L. Ewing is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, as well as a poet. (She also writes for Marvel Comics!) In the course of her academic research, she was reading the report and was inspired to write this short book of poems in reaction. The title of this poem of course alludes to Langston Hughes' Harlem, sometimes known as A Dream Deferred. ("What happens to a dream deferred?/.../or does it explode?"--in this case it exploded.)

As a Chicagoan, I knew the basic outlines of the story but not as many details as I now know after finishing the book, which also includes a historical overview. I did not know for instance that Mayor Daley (the first Mayor Daley, Richard J.) was likely a rioter, though he refused to talk about it and it was never definitely proven. This is shocking...though also not. He would have been seventeen at the time of the riot.

 

Anyway, a fascinating short volume and one I'm glad my library was able to supply.

Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen (#Norway)

MRS. HELSETH: But children don't cry at Rosmersholm, Miss.

REBEKKA  (Looks at her): Don't cry?

MRS. HELSETH: No. As long as people can remember, children have never been known to cry in this house.

REBEKKA: How very strange.

MRS. HELSETH: Yes, isn't it? It runs in the family. And then there's another strange thing. When they grow up, they never laugh. Never--as long as they live.

REBEKKA: Why, how queer--

MRS. HELSETH: Do you ever remember hearing or seeing Pastor Rosmer laugh, Miss?

REBEKKA: No, I don't believe I ever have,...

Rosmersholm is Henrik Ibsen's play of 1886. Rosmersholm is the ancestral family home of the well-to-do Rosmer family, whose current head is Johannes Rosmer, a pastor 45 years old. But he's a pastor who has lost his faith and has just given up his pastoral role, not least because his wife committed suicide and he's still in grief. Was her death the result of mental illness, or was he in some way responsible? He can't decide.

In addition to Johannes Rosmer, living in the house are Rebekka West, who'd arrived as a companion for Beata Rosmer, but stayed on after Beata's death, and Mrs. Hesketh, the long-standing family maid. Over the course of the play three visitors come, each more than once. Andreas Kroll, Rosmer's brother-in-law, is the first; there are also Peder Mortensgaard, publisher of a left-wing newspaper who has a history with Rosmer, and Ulrik Brendel, Rosmer's former tutor, but now a drunk.

His three visitors all want something from Rosmer. Kroll hadn't visited since his sister's suicide; the grief he and Rosmer share meant they couldn't bring themselves to talk to each other. (The inability to express emotion is a theme.) But now the left has won the last election in Norway and Kroll, a staunch conservative, expects Rosmer to stand up for the forces of good, as he sees them, church and crown and all that. Kroll is organizing a new newspaper advocating conservatism and wants Rosmer to be the editor. But Rosmer thinks the left might have some arguments on its side.

Mortensgaard wants Rosmer to stand up for the left in his paper, but only if he's still a proper Christian: he's got plenty of atheists already in his stable. But when Rosmer's unwilling to lie about his new (lack of) faith, Mortensgaard says he has no use for him, and will be forced to consider him an enemy.

Brendel wants a clean shirt, a jacket--and money--so he can throw it away at a local bar. He's a bit the comic relief, but we also learn some of Johannes Rosmer's back story from their conversations.

Why did Beata Rosmer commit suicide? Though modern diagnoses are perhaps suspect, everyone does assume she was depressed, without quite using the word. But also she had learned she was not able to bear children; so, unless she died, she would mark the end of the Rosmer line and Rosmersholm would no longer have a Rosmer. And, before she dies, she sends a letter to Mortensgaard claiming her husband is in love with Rebekka West.

Was he? Maybe a little. It was in conversation with Rebekka West that Rosmer moved to the left politically; now, during the course of the play, do we see their interactions as perhaps a bit too friendly for an unmarried man and woman? Certainly Kroll does. Can a man and a woman just be friends? It's not always an easy question now, and it was much more loaded in 1886. Kroll at first assumes there's nothing between them, but then begins to wonder; he's the first to suggest that maybe the two of them should get married. He also rather rudely (and inaccurately) suggests to Rebekka West she's a gold-digger.

 

The idea really hadn't occurred to Rosmer before (did I mention repressed?) but once it's suggested, he decides it's a good one and proposes to Rebekka; she turns him down. 

How does all of this get resolved? Ibsen did write one or two comedies, it seems; I've never read or seen any of them, and this isn't one either...

A local troupe (Crow's Theatre) did the play in October and we went to see it. I hadn't read or seen the play before, and I decided to be surprised. (Other than my general sense that Ibsen's prose plays are mostly tragedies.) Then I read it afterwards in a different translation. The stage version said it was an adaptation, by Duncan Macmillan; the translation I just read (quoted above) was by Eva La Gallienne. There was one bit in particular I wondered if it was in the original.

Rebekka West won't marry Rosmer because she says she can't bring the purity to the marriage he deserves. That almost certainly implied she was not a virgin and was being fastidious. For a play set in Victorian times that's not improbable and I think that's what Ibsen intends us to think. Rebekka West believed herself an orphan with a father she'd never met; she was raised by a foster father, Dr. West, after her mother died; it's from Dr. West she gets her education and intellectual interests. She clearly worshipped him. Kroll believes, and goes on to 'prove', though his evidence is mostly circumstantial, that Dr. West was Rebekka West's biological father. She's shocked by the suggestion, says it can't be true, she's not illegitimate, but she begins to believe it.

In the production I saw, the actress curled up in a corner of the stage and half-whimpered her lines; it was a very powerful moment, and the clear implication was that the person she'd lost her 'purity' with was, in fact, Dr. West, her foster father, and she hadn't known he was her biological father. And that's what I wondered about. Ibsen was famously frank about sex for his time, but was he really willing to put even a mention of father-daughter incest on stage in 1886? The Macmillan version did say it was an adaptation.

But as far as I can tell without both texts in front of me, the 'adaptation' was pretty close to a translation, and La Gallienne in the introduction to her translation (from the 1950s; her father, a journalist, had interviewed Ibsen at one time) thinks the incest is implied. So the answer may be, yes, Ibsen was willing. But I do think the text sufficiently ambiguous the play could be staged without suggesting incest, if the director wanted to.

 

Rebecca West, the writer, author of Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, was born Cecily Isabel Fairfield, and took her name from the character in this play. That was a bit shocking. Rebekka West was a pretty admirable figure in the play, but I might prefer a pen name from somebody who had more luck in life myself...

Piet Hein's Grooks (#poem)

 

Nothing is Indispensable

(Grook to warn the universe against megalomania)

The universe may

be as great as they say.

But it wouldn't be missed

if it didn't exist.

Those Who Know

Those who always

know what's best

are

a universal pest.

Problems

Problems worthy of attack

prove their worth by hitting back.

 

The Road to Wisdom

The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain

and simple to express:

Err

and err

and err again,

but less

and less

and less.

-Piet Hein

 

Piet Hein (1905-1996) was a Danish polymath (theoretical physics, city planning, inventor of the Soma Cube puzzle...) and like all Scandinavians, but especially the polymathic ones, was perfectly fluent in English. He wrote short, aphoristic poems he called grooks (gruk in Danish), a word he made up in both languages. The English versions were done with the assistance of Jens Arup. Martin Gardner in his Mathematical Games column was a huge fan, but do I remember reading about him in Scientific American when I was a nerdy eight-year-old? Not really...but I could have! (Since I was a nerdy eight-year-old, who got a subscription to Scientific American every Christmas.)

They often come with pictures:

Not all of these come from Grooks 2. There were at least six volumes in English (and more volumes in Danish) in the sixties and seventies.

One last...

 

What Love is Like

 

Love is like

a pineapple,

sweet and

undefinable.

-Piet Hein

Two Novellas (Kushner, Algren) #NovNov

Rachel Kushner's The Mayor of Leipzig

So, I was putting my name on the list at my library of Kushner's new novel Creation Lake (I'm currently 256 and my library has 127 copies) but then I saw there was this book The Mayor of Leipzig that came out in 2021. Where did that come from? I never heard about it. Send me that! 

They did. Conveniently, it turned out to be novella length.

An unnamed woman artist, forty-five years old, based in New York, tells her story. She goes to Germany. She meets her gallerist in Cologne and from there travels on to Leipzig, where she will have an exhibition. "After lunch I went to the exhibition space where I would have my show and that part gets technical, so I'll spare you." We're given some speculation on art, learn about her artist friends, about her analyst, whom she doesn't see any more.

We also learn that her story is being ghostwritten by Rachel Kushner, who "probably understands less about me than you will, after you read this." Amusingly the protagonist accuses Rachel Kushner of being art groupie, though based on The Flamethrowers, maybe she is.

We also learn about Spencer Schlosnagle, the mayor of Friendsville, who's a real person. Google him, the protagonist says, and I did. A strange enough story.

There may be a ghost involved--our protagonist says she ought to talk to her analyst about it, but then she's not seeing her analyst anymore--and then there's the 'Mayor' of Leipzig, who's probably not the mayor, but is like Spencer Schlosnagle in Spencer's other famous feature.

Interesting enough, occasionally amusing. It's not The Flamethrowers and I assume it won't be the equal of Creation Lake either. 

70p., but it's large print with lots of white space. It's short for a novella, maybe more long short story instead.

Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make

I'd wanted to read this since I read the biography of Nelson Algren in summer. (Well, I'd probably wanted to read it before then, but had half-forgotten.) My library didn't have a copy, but I found one when I was in Chicago recently.

It comes out in 1951 and it's Algren's personal history of Chicago until that time. Or maybe it's a prose poem. "By its padlocked poolrooms and its nightshade neon, by its carbarn Christs punching transfers all night long; by its nuns studying gin-fizz ads in the Englewood Local, you shall know Chicago."

Algren is interested in the underside of Chicago life, and likes the people who also care about the downtrodden. Jane Addams and Richard Wright are heroes in the book; the first edition was dedicated to Carl Sandburg. He doesn't like the rich and the powerful and the righteous, and goes after them hard.

It's pretty fascinating, even if it's more atmosphere than actual information. You probably want to get the edition shown, and I don't just say that because I went to high school with the editor Bill Savage. 😉But the notes (by Bill Savage and David Schmittgens) are nearly essential. I grew up in Chicago, I know who Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin were (shady Chicago politicians, are you surprised?) but even I found the notes hard to do without.

130p in this edition, with those notes, a fun introduction by Studs Terkel, and a somewhat sour afterword from the second edition by Nelson Algren himself, who'd become a bit of a grump by the sixties.

This book is the source of the famous description of Chicago:

"Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real."

 It's Novellas in November!

 

 

Charles Causley's Eden Rock (#poem)

Eden Rock

They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:

My father, twenty-five, in the same suit

Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack

Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress

Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,

Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.

Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

 

She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight

From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw

Of paper for a cork, slowly sets out

The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.

 

The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.

My mother shades her eyes and looks my way

Over the drifted stream. My father spins

A stone along the water. Leisurely,

 

They beckon to me from the other bank.

I hear them call, 'See where the stream-path is!

Crossing is not as hard as you might think.'

 

I had not thought it would be like this. 

-Charles Causley

One more Charles Causley and I'm done with the book for now. This is likely his most famous poem; at any rate it's the one I first saw anthologized and made me want to read more. It comes from his final book of poetry for adults, which came out when he was 71, though he lived on fifteen years after and wrote several more books of verse for children.

Non-Fiction November: My Year (so far)

 

Time to look over my year in non-fiction! It's hosted by Based on a True Story. My non-fiction reading was about 20% of what I've read, which is a fairly normal number for me, maybe a little on the high side.

Themes and Highlights

Mostly books about books, which is pretty common for me. Some standouts:

 

Brian Dillon. Dillon is a contempoary Irish writer. I read two by him this year: Objects in This Mirror and Affinities. Affinities is his most recent (2023); Objects in This Mirror is from ten years ago. Dillon, in addition to writing about books, was the editor at an art magazine, and both these books have a lot of art criticism.

 

Guy Davenport. Davenport was a poet and classicist who died in 2005. His book The Geography of the Imagination, which first came out in 1981, was reissued earlier this year with an introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan. It was pretty great.

Carlo Levi. An Italian writer and painter. Christ Stopped at Eboli is his memoir of internal exile during the Fascist era. After protesting against Mussolini, he was sent to live among the peasants in Basilicata. I read it just before going to Italy in the spring. (Yay!)

Konstantin Stanislavski. My Life in Art is the autobiography of the great Russian theatre director from 1924. It was my spin book for the first Classics Club spin of the year.

Mary Wisniewski. Algren: A Life is a biography of the great (but depressing!) Chicago writer best known for The Man With a Golden Arm, made into a movie with Frank Sinatra in the title role. A well-done biography.

 

A link to all the non-fiction that made it on to the blog this year.

Upcoming

Well, I have several books from the library which I hope to read soon, but the next non-fiction book will be Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make, which I managed to find while on a recent trip to Chicago. It's also novella-length. 😉

Which look fun to you?

Etienne Jodelle's I Love the Laurel Green (tr. Charles Causley)

I Love The Laurel Green

I love the laurel green, whose verdant flame

Burns its bright victory on the winter day,

Calls to eternity its happy name,

And neither death nor time shall wear away.

I love the holly tree with branches keen,

Each leaflet fringed with daggers sharp and small,

I love the ivy, too, winding its green,

Its ardent stem about the oak, the wall.

I love these three, whose living green and true

Is as unfailing as my love for you

Always by night and day whom I adore.

Yet the green wound that stays with me more

Is ever greener than these three shall be:

Laurel and ivy and the holly tree.

-Etienne Jodelle (tr. Charles Causley)

 

Well, it's not winter yet, but we've reached that time when most of the greens have changed to red and yellow and are fast disappearing; all the green that's left are those three.

 

Étienne Jodelle (1532-1573) was a French poet and dramatist, one of the members of that group of poets known as La Pléiade. Joachim du Bellay, the founder of La Pléiade, showed up on the blog in a translation by Richard Wilbur. This lovely translation is by Charles Causley and is from his book Secret Destinations. 

 

I looked up the French, just because...

J'aime le verd laurier

J'aime le verd laurier, dont l'hyver ny la glace

N'effacent la verdeur en tout victorieuse,

Monstrant l'eternité à jamais bien heureuse

Que le temps, ny la mort ne change ny efface.

J'aime du hous aussi la toujours verte face

Les poignons eguillons de sa fueille espineuse:

J'aime la lierre aussi, et sa branche amoureuse

Qui le chesne ou le mur estroitement embrasse.

J'aime bien tous ces trois, qui toujours verds ressemblent

Aux pensers immorteles, qui dedans moy s'assemblent,

De toy que nuict et jour idolatre, j'adore:

Mais ma playe, et poincture, et le Noeu qui me serre,

Est plus verte, et poignante, et plus estroit encore

Que n'est le verd laurier, ny le hous, ny le lierre.

-Étienne Jodelle

It's archaic now, of course, but it didn't actually seem that difficult, at least once I learned the words for ivy and holly...

Kurban Said, Lev Nussimbaum, and Tom Reiss

A while back I read the first novel Ali and Nino by Kurban Said and found it delightful. Time for a book bender! My library delivered.

The Girl From The Golden Horn

The second (and last completed) novel by Kurban Said is The Girl from the Golden Horn. It came out in German in 1938 and was translated into English by Jenia Gramm in 2001. 

Achmed-Pasha Anbari with his daughter Asiadeh have left Constantinople for Berlin. He was a higher-up in the Ottoman administration and with the fall of the Ottoman monarchy at the end of World War I, he no longer feels welcome in Atatürk's Turkey. He does what he can in Berlin to scrape up enough money so his daughter can get an education; she's studying Comparative Turkish philology at university. She's the Girl from the Golden Horn.

While there still was an Ottoman empire, Asiadeh was promised to an Ottoman prince before she was of age. But what are the Ottomans now? Where even is her prince? She sends a letter to the Turkish consulate to forward on to the prince, asking him to either claim her or relinquish her. He chooses to relinquish.

That's fine because in the meantime she had a cold and met the university's doctor, Alex Hassa. She's in love, and Hassa, an unhappy divorcé, loves her back and needs her. They marry, go on a honeymoon, and settle in Vienna where Dr. Hassa starts a practice.

Then the prince shows up and now he wants to marry her. 

In Ali and Nino before politics intervened, the difficulties between the two were cultural: he was Muslim and she was Christian. This novel turns on similar lines except she's the Muslim and he's Christian. She doesn't wear the veil now. Does she miss it? Do girls really need to be educated? Hassa as it turns out is short for Hassanovič, that is the son of Hussein, and Dr. Hassa's family before they converted were Muslim. Does that help?

I don't think the novel was quite as wonderful as Ali and Nino, but still it was good. Asiadeh has to figure out what she wants and how to get there with her dignity intact. She does.

The Orientalist

In that post on Ali and Nino  I discussed the mystery of Kurban Said a bit. It's a pseudonym, but for whom? The likeliest candidate was Lev Nussimbaum, born in 1905. He was a Jew, and grew up in Baku, Azerbaijan. Tom Reiss wrote an article for The New Yorker on Nussimbaum, and then expanded it into a book in 2005.

Lev's father was Abraham, a well-to-do oilman in Baku; his mother died when Lev was 6, likely a suicide because she'd been detected in revolutionary politics. During World War I, Lev and his father fled to Persia when there was violence in Baku; later they return to the short-lived Republic of Azerbaijan, but are forced to flee again when the Bolsheviks arrive, this time through Georgia and then Constantinople. They finally pitch up in Berlin, where Lev attends a high school for Russian emigres. (With the sisters of Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Nabokov! Lydia and Elena, respectively. Elena is considered quite the beauty.)

And somewhere along the way, Lev Nussimbaum converts to Islam and changes his name to Essad Bey. 

As Essad Bey he becomes a best-selling writer of non-fiction in the 20s and the first half of the 30s, writing close to a book a year as well as becoming the Eastern Europe and Middle East expert for the magazine Die Literarische Welt, which also published Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Döblin. (Think New York Review of Books, Reiss says.) Busy, but they needed the money, especially after it became clear that the Bolsheviks weren't going away, and any claims Abraham had still in Azerbaijan were going to be valueless.

Nussimbaum got married, to a Bata shoe heiress, and divorced. The divorce was covered by gossip papers on both sides of the Atlantic.

He was a controversial figure: Was he Jewish, was he Muslim, where was he really from? Nussimbaum claimed he was born on a train between Zurich and Baku, but he was given to romanticizing, so who knows? With a background like that it's unsurprising he was a staunch anti-Bolshevik. His anti-Communism and his conversion to Islam helped after the Nazis came to power for a while; his books still could be published in Germany until 1935. But he was on a lecture tour in 1933 and doesn't return to Germany, but stays in Austria. When Anschluss looks likely he wangles a contract to write a biography of Mussolini and moves there. (That biography never materialized.) By then his health is poor; he has a severe case of Reynaud's syndrome, which leads to gangrene and the amputation of his toes. To deal with the pain he's become addicted to morphine. He dies in Positano, Italy, in 1942.

And did he write those Kurban Said books? The evidence Reiss offers is pretty strong and Reiss thinks they were entirely Nussimbaum's work. But Nussimbaum was willing to co-author and I think it's impossible to rule it out. The books were copyrighted under the name of Baroness von Ehrenfels of Austria. Did she help write or did she just help by being the front person for German publication? I don't suspect we'll ever know for sure.

Nussimbaum is a fascinating figure and Reiss has got a hold of a good topic. I do think the expansion to a book shows signs of haste: Reiss writes about the Freikorps and Walter Rathenau; interesting topics, but they don't have a whole lot to do with Nussimbaum. He writes about G. S. Viereck, the American Nazi sympathizer, who was an acquaintance of Nussimbaum,  but he kind of repeats himself. Still, a good read. And now I want to find Essad Bey's Blood and Oil in the Orient. It was the story of the Nussimbaum's escape from Baku when the Bolsheviks marched in. It was marketed as non-fiction when it came out; Reiss says it's half-fiction, but it still sounds pretty thrilling.

Reiss later went on to write The Black Count, about Alexandre Dumas' military father, which got pretty good press when it came out. I was interested in it at the time, but didn't read it, but that may change.

Both these books march around Europe, so pick a country. "The ideas you have!" said Hassa. "Nobody ever goes to Belgrade on their honeymoon." Serbia's tempting, but I'll go with Bosnia, which that honeymoon also included. A crucial scene takes place in Sarajevo, where Dr. Hassa's family is from. When Dr. Hassa and Asiadeh first meet:

"There was an Anbari who was the governor of Bosnia."

"Yes," said the girl. "That was my grandfather."

For The Orientalist, I'll say Turkey, since I've already used Azerbaijan for Ali and Nino. It was Constantinople was where Lev Nussimbaum became Essad Bey.

Charles Causley's 'The Dancers' (#poetry)

The Dancers

To a clearing

in the foyer

at the Gallery

of Art,

and a chatter

of spectators

waiting for the show

to start,

five young men, black,

naked, dotted

white, and daddy-long-

legs thin

out of forty

thousand years of 

dreamtime came lightfoot-

ing in.

    Ssss! hissed the dancers from Arnhem Land.

 

And a primal

stillness fell as

when arose the earl-

iest sun,

each dancer an

emblem painted

on rockface, or scored

in stone.

With an unpre-

meditated 

seemliness they took 

the floor,

staring sightless

as is lightning

through a bronze by Hen-

ry Moore.

    Ssss! hissed the dancers from Arnhem Land.

    

To an insect

buzz of music,

snap of sticks, high nas-

al whine,

touched with brown and 

saffron ochre,

and their teeth a yell-

ow shine,

five young men came

barefoot, dancing--

the sun halting in

its climb--

effortlessly,

forwards, backwards

through the littoral

of time.

    Ssss! hissed the dancers from Arnhem Land.

 

Beaded and in 

feather bracelets

to the hoarse-voiced didge-

ridoo,

they were emu

and echidna,

swirling snake and kang-

aroo;

razoring this and

that way sharply,

swifter than the bush-

fire flame,

each a demon,

each an angel,

each a god without

a name.

    Ssss! hissed the dancers from Arnhem Land.

 

Suddenly the 

dance was ended,

clocks took back the Mel-

bourne day,

and it was as

if the dancers

melted like a mist

away.

In the restaur-

ant I saw them,

serious, and at smil-

ing ease:

five young men in

T-shirts, jeans, with

pavlovas and five

white teas.

    Ssss! hissed the dancers from Arnhem Land.

 

-Charles Causley

 

One of a series of poems in the volume about traveling in Australia.

Charles Causley was a British poet from Cornwall who died at the age of 86 in 2003.

 

 

Arnhem Land is an area in the north of Australia near Darwin with a majority aboriginal population. I lifted this picture from Wikipedia, though the individual (Timmy Burrarwanga) in the picture isn't quite 'daddy-long-legs thin'.

The Winner Is... (Classics Club Spin #39)

 

This spin's winning number was 3.

Which means for me, it's the Thebaid, Statius' Latin epic about Thebes, Odysseus, Eteocles, Polynices, Ismene, and Antigone. It's in twelve books (like the Aeneid) which is about 350 pages in my edition, translated by Jane Wilson Joyce.

I read Joyce's introduction (very good) to get started. Not much is known about Publius Papinius Statius. He was born between 40 and 50 A.D. in Naples and probably died before 96 A.D. His father was also a poet, though in Greek, and taught Greek and rhetoric. One of the father's pupils was Domitian, the future emperor. The younger Statius in addition to the Thebaid, wrote occasional poems collected as the Silvae, and had started an epic about Achilles when he died.

Statius was more read in the Middle Ages than he was in classical times (or now, I suspect,...😉). Dante was a fan, and Statius is an important character in the Purgatorio section of the Divine Comedy. Joyce's introduction was enthusiastic and I'm feeling fired up.

And so I'll be reading this by the 18th of December.

Did you spin? Did you get something fun?

Gwendolyn Brooks' Family Pictures (#1970Club)

 

Speech to the Young

Say to them,

say to the down-keepers,

the sun-slappers,

the self-soilers,

the harmony-hushers,

"Even if you are not ready for day,

it cannot always be night."

You will be right.

For that is the hard home-run.

Live not for battles won.

Live not for the end-of-the-song.

Live in the along.

-Gwendolyn Brooks

Paul Robeson

That time,

we all heard it,

cool and clear,

cutting across the hot grit of the day.

The major Voice,

the adult Voice,

forgoing Rolling River,

forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge

and other symptoms of an old despond.

Warning, in music words

devout and large,

that we are each other's

harvest:

we are each other's

business:

we are each other's

magnitude and bond.

-Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks' short volume of poetry Family Pictures came out in 1970. Two years earlier she had been appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois, a title she held until her death in 2000. She was also the Poet Laureate of the U.S. for the 1985-6 term. She was a lifelong resident of Chicago. Gwendolyn Brooks has always been a favorite of mine.

I'm not sure exactly which song of Paul Robeson's she's thinking of--by 1970 Paul Robeson's health was poor and he wasn't performing anymore. The poem suggests he's moved on from Ol' Man River, and it's true that Paul Robeson became much more political. (Not always in admirable ways.) So here's Paul Robeson singing "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill," the union organizing song:

Philip K. Dick's Our Friends From Frolix 8 (#1970Club)

    "You're married, too, you have a wife, and you have two children. Is your respon--" Again his tongue failed to function properly. "Where's your first loyalty? To them? Or to political action?"

    "Toward men in general."

In the year 2135, Nick Appleton works at a lower class job, as a tire-regroover. On this future earth, your status is set by a supposedly meritocratic exam you take as a young teen. But when his boy Bobby, whom Nick knows is bright, fails the exam, Nick begins to question the whole system.

What is the system? There's a world dictator, picked from one of two parties, the New Men and the Unusuals. Willis Gram, an Unusual, is the current world dictator. New Men are those that have tested brilliant; Unusuals have uncommon powers: they're precogs, telepaths, telekinetic. (Gram is a telepath.) Ordinary people are known as Old Men. There's a rebel movement, known as the Undermen. And we learn, on the fifth page of our story, that yes indeed, those supposedly meritocratic tests are rigged.

Some years ago, Thors Provoni flew off into space to find a powerful alien to help him overthrow this corrupt system and now he's on his way back. With an alien? So he claims. Should your loyalty be to your wife, child, that pretty girl you just met, your party, the corrupt but functioning system, the oppressed, the human race (maybe) under attack by aliens?

Now this novel isn't, as far as I can see, on anybody's list of best Philip K. Dick novels, and well, it shouldn't be... 😉 But I was surprised how good it was. It does come from the middle of a major period for Dick. The flawed or corrupt characters represent most of those choices about loyalty, and even the worst choices are somehow given space to feel true for a moment. It's true, though, that Dick's prose rarely rises above functional, and in this one, maybe not at all. The ending is a little rushed. Still, a pretty fun read.

Yesterday's Macanudo strip. Timely!

Sure it may all take place in 2135, but in its heart of hearts, it's a 1970 novel. Drug dealers, souped-up cars, and is that Bob Dylan guy really any good?

J. G. Farrell's Troubles (#1970Club)

"In those days the Majestic was still standing in Kilnalough at the very end of a slim peninsula covered with dead pines leaning here and there at odd angles." [5]

The opening of J. G. Farrell's Troubles. Those days are 1919, and the Majestic is a grand old hotel in Ireland, by then fairly dilapidated. The hotel was bought by the Protestant widower Edward Spencer some years before; the vendor told him the hotel attracted a regular clientele, but what he didn't tell Edward was that very few of that clientele had money to pay their bills.

Edward has four children, the oldest Angela, a son Ripon, and teenage twin terrors, Faith and Charity. Angela has her Major, who arrives in Kilnalough at the start of the novel.

"In the summer of 1919, not long before the great Victory Parade marched up Whitehall, the Major left hostpital and went to Ireland to claim his bride, Angela Spencer. At least he fancied that the claiming of a bride might come into it. But nothing definite had been settled." [7]

Major Brendan Archer had met Angela in Brighton when on health leave in 1916. They'd kissed once, he'd returned to the trenches, and ever after he was receiving letters from "your loving fiancée, Angela."

Brendan is particularly hapless at the business of romance:

"Until now, incredible though it may seem, the Major had never considered that love, like war, is best conducted with experience of tactics." [253]

When the Major gets to Kilnalough, Angela avoids him. She was tubercular the whole time. ("I thought you knew.") 

There was another prospect, but the Major hadn't even realized: she writes that he hoped he didn't mind, but after waiting, she eventually married someone else. "She oppressed him, though, by the intensity of her feeling for him, and that was the principal thing he now remembered about her. She had had a tendency to hug him violently, squeezing the air out of his lungs--it's distressing to be squeezed very hard if you are not trying to squeeze the other person back. One feels trapped." [255]

And there's a third girl he's attracted to: Sarah, but she's Catholic. After Angela dies he allows himself to fall completely in love, but just like with Angela, the Major barely talks to Sarah. After a year of aimless loitering, he bumbles out a proposal: 

    "Look here, I want you to be my wife."  He could say no more. He could not move. He stood there waiting like a pillar of salt. He could see, though, that it was no go...

    She said crossly, "Oh, I know you do, Brendan." [349]

Hapless!

All the while Brendan Archer is loitering in Ireland, and not getting married, the Majestic continues to fall down or is pulled down by desperate or angry Catholics; its owner, Edward Spencer is going mad in his attempt to hold up some sort of Protestant Irish standard. Major Archer, Edward Spencer, the Majestic hotel--almost a character in itself--are all of a piece: decaying, under attack, committed to vanishing and misguided standards, Anglo-Irish, ineffectual. If you're a symbol-spotting kind of person, the Majestic hotel is definitely a stand-in for the last years of the Protestant Irish Ascendancy.

The book ends with the arrival of the Irish Free State in 1922; the Protestants flee and the Majestic burns to the ground.

The book has a blurb on the back from The Guardian: "Sad, tragic, also very funny." Sad and very funny both are abundantly true; the tragic, though, is a bit more of question: it depends on whether you think they're so hapless, they deserve what's coming to them. And they might! 😉

J. G. Farrell wrote three novels in the 70s--this was the first--called the Empire trilogy, The remaining two are The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and The Singapore Grip (1978). Troubles won the Lost Booker for those novels that came out in 1970 and due to a rules change weren't eligible for any Booker Prize. The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker for its year as well. All three are great. All three focus entirely on representative members of the Empire; the subject populations--Irish, Indian, Malay or Chinese, respectively--are anonymous, nearly invisible. Did Farrell not want to appropriate the stories of the oppressed? Did he simply not know those people as well? (Farrell was born in Liverpool, but came from a Protestant Irish family of colonial administrators.) Or did the stories of hapless English in colonial settings just seem funnier? I suspect the last myself.

John Banville in a well-done introduction calls this Farrell's masterpiece. Could be, though I'd plump for The Siege of Krishnapur myself. Funny as this is, Siege is even funnier. It's also shorter and would make a better introduction if you haven't read any of them. But they're all three great and I suspect I'm going on to reread the other two as well.

It's the week of the 1970 Club, hosted by Simon & Kaggsy! Isn't that a cool logo?

My organizing post for this fall's club is here, with links to a few books from 1970 already on the blog. (Tony Hillerman, Brian Moore, Shirley Hazzard.)

Also:

"...how incrediby Irish it all is..." [24]

This is my trip to Ireland for this year's European Reading Challenge.

 

Page numbers are from the New York Review of Books edition shown above.

I'm hoping to get a couple more in this week. Are you reading something for the 1970 Club? Any favorites from that year?

Classics Club Spin #39

It's time for another spin! The rules are here. Mine's an all-over-the-map kind of list, and the only organization is chronological:

1.) Apollonius Rhodius/Argonautica (3rd century BC)

2.) Lucan/On the Civil War (Pharsalia) (65 AD)

3.) Statius/Thebaid (90s AD)

4.) Luiz Vaz de Camões/The Lusiads (1572)

5.) John Ruskin/Unto This Last (1860) 

6.) Elizabeth Gaskell/Wives and Daughters (1864-1866)

7.) Robert Louis Stevenson/An Inland Voyage (1878)

8.) Machado de Assis/Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881)

9.) Benito Pérez Galdós/That Bringas Woman (1884)

10.) Knut Hamsun/Hunger (1890)

11.) R. Austin Freeman/The Red Thumb Mark (1907)

12.) E. Philips Oppenheim/The Great Impersonation (1920)

13.) Andrei Bely/Petersburg (1922)

14.) Mikhail Bulgakov/Heart of a Dog (1925)

15.) Dawn Powell/A Time to be Born (1942)

16.) Eudora Welty/Delta Wedding (1946)

17.) Halldor Laxness/The Fish Can Sing (1957)

18.) Harry Mark Petrakis/A Dream of Kings (1966)

19.) Ismail Kadare/The Siege (1970)

20.) Robert Pirsig/Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

 

I'm kind of keen on 1, 4, or 19 at the moment, but really I expect any of them to be a good read--I didn't put anything terribly challenging on the list. (I think?) Next month there's a Norwegian literature event so 10 would work, too.

Which have you read? Which look good to you?

Upcoming! #1970Club Prospects

The beginning of October means it's time to start on Simon and Kaggsy's 1970 Club.

I've piled up some candidates:

Will I manage to read them all? Of course not! That's (from right to left):

Studs Terkel's Hard Times

My copy of Terkel's interview history of the Great Depression dates from 1970. As with most of his books, it's a series of short interviews with people both famous and not. I will have read some of it before, but not, I think, all of it.

Philip K. Dick's Our Friends from Frolix 8

One of the lesser-read from Philip Dick that I've never read. It could be time!

Robertson Davies' Fifth Business

The first in Davies' Deptford Trilogy, which is definitely his masterpiece.  It's set in the fictional small town of Deptford somewhere in southwest Ontario.

Ngaio Marsh's When In Rome

A late Roderick Alleyn entry from Marsh, which I haven't read. It's actually set in Italy.

Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave

The first of Mary Stewart's books about Merlin and Arthur. I will have read this some time in the 70s, but not since. But it was pretty fun as I remember.

J. G. Farrell's Troubles

Troubles is Farrell's great novel about Ireland in the immediate aftermath of WWI, (1919 and following). I read it twenty years ago, but I've lately been thinking it's time to reread Farrell's whole Empire trilogy about British imperialism. (This, The Siege of Krishnapur, and The Singapore Grip--all great). It won the Lost Booker for 1970.

and... 

John D. MacDonald's The Long Lavender Look

Another book I haven't read since the 1970s. Despite the Pink Panther's enthusiasm, this one is probably the least likely. It's from the middle of MacDonald's Travis McGee series--I've been idly thinking I should reread the series from the start...

There's three books already on the blog from 1970:

The Blessing Way. Tony Hillerman's first detective novel, set in the Four Corners area and featuring his Navajo detective Joe Leaphorn. It's a great start to the series.

Fergus. Brian Moore's novel of 1970 about a scriptwriter in LA who sees ghosts. Or something. I read it in 2021 for Brian Moore at 100 readalong. Not my favorite Moore, but a good one.

 

The Bay of Noon. Shirley Hazzard's novel is set in Naples in the post-World War II period. Jenny, needing to get away from home, takes a job as a secretary for the United Nations. A romantic quadrangle among diplomats and artists. It was short-listed for the Lost Booker that year.
 

 

 

 

Which look good to you? As of today, I think Troubles is likely candidate number 1, but the club runs from the 14th to the 20th. That's almost two weeks away yet! I can't think that far in advance...😉

Sholem Aleichem's Wandering Stars

   "See how the stars are falling," said Reizel, her voice trembling, her heart beating rapidly.

    Leibel laughed. "Don't be afraid," he comforted her like an adult, although in truth she was a year older than he. "What is there to be afraid of? Stars don't fall--stars wander."

Reizel Spivak and Leibel Rafalovitch are teenagers in the (imaginary) village of Holeneshti in the Russian province of Bessarabia. She's the daughter of the town's cantor and he's the youngest son of the richest man in town. Though Leibel goes to the cheder (Hebrew school) run by Reizel's father, in the normal course of things the two of them would never meet.

But when the Yiddish theater comes to town, it's no longer the normal course of things, and they get happily squeezed together on a bench in the theater. (Normally the Rafalovitch barn.) 

Leibel befriends Holtzmach, the troupe's main comic actor. He steals food and cigarettes for Holtzmach, is caught and punished.

Reizel spontaneously bursts into the show's tunes, is overheard by the theater's manager Shchupak, and, since she's the cantor's daughter, she's got a beautiful voice. But when Shchupak proposes that Reizel go on the stage, her mother absolutely forbids this, and she's no longer allowed to go to shows. (Her father is intrigued, but it's not him who runs the house...)

What are a couple of fifteen-year-olds to do under such oppressive provocation? Run away, of course. When the theater leaves town, they'll join up and leave, too. But they'll have each other, and though it's a little early for them to formulate the notion, they're in love.

Did I mention they're both ridiculously good-looking? No? Ah, well they are.

The troupe decides to head for the nearest border, which is Romania, but Shchupak learns his ex-wife is now in Romania and threatening to sue. So his coach, with Reizel, changes course for the Austro-Hungarian border. But the coach with Leibel and Holtzmach makes it into Romania, and eventually Bucharest, only eventually realizing they're the only ones there. But Holtzmach figures he can manage Leibel, good-looking and with a good speaking voice, and make him into a successful (and lucrative) star; he's got no need for Shchupak any more. Shchupak has come to more or less the same conclusion with Reizel. There's going to be a lot of wandering for our heroes on their way to becoming stars. Czernivitsi, Lviv, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, and eventually New York. (Reizel passes through Chicago, too!) 

She becomes Rosa Spivak and he becomes Leo Rafalesco. Various troupes grow up around our heroes, hers complete with a genius violinist (male) and his with a ravishing leading lady. Various comic managers and hangers-on try to get the two of them married but never to each other. Aleichem is a little coy about dates, but it must be at least ten years that they wander before they're both again in New York. There's letters and pastiche press releases. It's funny.

On the way they both take their art seriously, apprenticing themselves to real-ish artists of the time. Rosa studies under Marcella Embrich; there's a celebrated real-life Polish soprano, Marcella Sembrich. He studies under Sonnenthal, that's Adolf Sonnenthal, who later had a von added to his name for services to the Viennese court theater. Their art moves from vaudevillean to serious. We see a fair amount about wandering theatrical troupes--think Nicholas Nickleby but even poorer and in Yiddish.

The ending, in New York, is both surprising and satisfactory.

Wikipedia tells me the novel was originally serialized in a Warsaw Yiddish paper from 1909 to 1911. The novel's been translated into English twice, in an abridged version by Frances Butwin in 1952 and the version I read by Aliza Shevrin in 2009. (With a pretty useless forward by Tony Kushner. The best thing about it was he correctly suggested you read it after.) While this was certainly fun, I didn't think it was as good as In the Storm, which I read a couple of years ago, and certainly not as good as the most famous things, such as the Tevye stories (the basis for Fiddler on the Roof) or the stories about Motl, the cantor's son, which I read pre-blogging. Shevrin was the translator for In the Storm and a collection of the best-known stories. This came out twenty-five years later, and while I have no way to compare with the original, the translation of the earlier work felt more convincing to me. But it's also possible this novel is somewhat slack in the original.

The Russian province of Bessarabia is now the country of Moldova, which makes it my visit there for this year's European Reading Challenge:

"Ach, what can compare with our Bessarabian summer nights? One at a time the stars light up like candles in the sky."

Addendum, November 2024:

I got Jeremy Dauber's biography of Sholem Aleichem back from the library (I'd read it a couple of years before) to look up anything about Wandering Stars. It turns out there were two versions published, the New York Yiddish version, and the Warsaw Yiddish version. Sholem Aleichem preferred the Warsaw version; the New York version changed the ending to be more sentimental. (Shades of Great Expectations.) The Warsaw version started its run in 1909, but the paper (The New World) printing it was going broke and couldn't pay, so Sholem Aleichem stopped supplying pages. It was only in 1910, after some time passed, that a new paper Moment was formed and finished publication.

Also there was a film version made in Soviet Russia in 1927, Sholem Aleichem's works were popular with the Soviet film board, but this one wasn't: the subject matter was considered too bourgeois and it was withdrawn.

Anna Seghers' The Seventh Cross (#ccspin)

"The National Socialist state relentlessly prosecutes anyone who commits an offense against the national community; it protects that which is worth protecting; it punishes those who deserve punishment; it destroys that which should be destroyed."

Or so says Commandant Fahrenberg of the Westhofen concentration camp. But he's just had a breakout of seven prisoners from his camp, and it's a big black eye to his leadership. Will he recapture them all? Is the National Socialist state that powerful?

No. We already know from the prologue that one (but only one) will make it to freedom. It's a novel with thrills and narrative drive. But not just that.

We spend most of our time with George Heisler, the one who makes it safely to Holland, but we see all seven as they attempt to escape the Nazis. One is killed just outside the camp boundaries, another is betrayed, a third despairs and turns himself in, the next to last to be found can think of nothing but revenge against the fellow politician who framed him.

But it's not only the escapees who feature in the novel: it's also the people who help him and hinder him, family, friends, strangers. Also the SS and the SA troopers who pursue him. He escapes one checkpoint because he's so beaten down by his years in the concentration camp he no longer matches the picture that's distributed. George steals a gardener's prized jacket to cover up his prison clothes; the gardener  at first wants George caught, but then starts to think of George as 'his' escapee and lies about the jacket when it's found, sending the searchers astray. In a letter of 1938, cited in the afterword, Seghers writes of her novel that it's 'a tale, then, that makes it possible to get to know the many layers of fascist Germany through the fortunes of a single man.'

That one man escaped gives the resistance, both inside the prison and out of it, hope. It only seems that that the state is all-powerful whatever Fahrenberg may say in that opening quote. It's not true. A childhood friend Paul Roeder, one of the key figures in helping George to escape says, "But they are not the slightest bit all-knowing. They only know what you tell them." And you don't have to tell them anything.

Anna Seghers herself was arrested in 1933 after Hitler came to power. She'd married a Hungarian Communist and was involved in Communist organizations. Once the Nazis felt solidified in their power, she was released, but she was of Jewish extraction and felt it safer to leave the country, first for France and then later for Mexico. Her mother was killed in a concentration camp in 1942.

This novel was written in 1938-9, and is set in 1937 or early '38. [Heisler while on the run picks up a discarded newspaper which discusses the battle of Teruel in the Spanish Civil War.] The novel came out with a German emigré press in Mexico in 1942, but was quickly translated into English and became a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection. In 1944 it was made into a movie with Spencer Tracy as George, and Hume Cronyn earned a Best Supporting Oscar nod for his role as that friend. 

A couple of years ago I read Seghers' subsequent novel Transit and thought it also was very good. Both novels turn around a suspenseful plot of escape from the Nazis, but both novels also have ambitions larger than simple suspense.

Seghers was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize, though she didn't win, and based on the now two novels I've read of hers, I'd have to say she would have been a good choice. After World War II, she returned to Germany, eventually pitching up in East Germany, where she died in 1983.

It was my spin book, and while I thought I might read it last month for Women in Translation month, I didn't get around to it. But it was pretty great whenever I read it. Did you join in the Classics Club spin this time? Did you have a good read?