Month: February 2018

The Blood Oranges is my favorite of these three. I kept the other two partly because I love their appearance. Their wonderful New Directions covers have a nice patina–worn but not quite shabby. Also, DST and Travesty are skinny and don’t take up much shelf space. The Blood Oranges is thicker and for me  also more interesting. The story is said to take place in Illyria, which is the name that the classical Greeks used to refer to the relatively remote and uncivilized lands on the east coast of the Adriatic, which today would include parts of Albania, Montenegro, and Croatia. Hawkes once said that he “wanted to try to create a world, not represent it.” Like Nabokov, Hawkes is not writing directly about this world; the worlds of his novels are artistic creations. Hawkes calls his setting Illyria not because he wants to describe the east coast of the Adriatic for the benefit of potential tourists in the late twentieth century, but rather because he wants to evoke a classical Greek vision of a wild place, a strange place where strange things might happen. Shakespeare was doing the same thing when he used Illyria as the setting for Twelfth Night.

John Hawkes was born in Connecticut, graduated from Harvard, and spent most of his working life as an English professor at Brown. The three of his novels that I own were all published when he was in his late forties and early fifties and all of them feature sexual love triangles and quadrangles. The characters are mostly what we might call leisure class; their backgrounds and last names are usually unspecified. The stories feature twentieth century technologies–cars, cameras, and ocean liners–but there is no trace of contemporary history, politics, or popular culture.

The storyline of The Blood Oranges begins like this. A childless couple, Cyril and Fiona, are spending time in a rented a villa on a hill above the sea somewhere on the Illyrian coast. The weather is mostly kind and the existence idyllic. One day five more travelers arrive in the town: Hugh, Catherine and their three daughters. They rent a nearby villa and the two couples become friends. As they spend time together, a certain amount of sexual attraction begins to arise. One of the strengths of the novel is that the place from which the critical events begin–the jumping off point–is not all that strange; it’s not even unfamiliar. Hawkes knows this, of course. But he is creating, not representing, and this is Illyria, not Montenegro. So even at the beginning of their story, the atmosphere is not quite as simple as it sounds. What would happen, Hawkes is asking, if the four people involved were maybe a little different from you and most of the people you know? What if they were like Fiona and Hugh and Catherine and Cyril, all them interesting characters who have their own peculiarities?

It took me a long time to realize something that should be obvious, which is that Cyril, who is the first-person narrator of the story, has a sly but surely deliberate resemblance to the Greek god Pan.

Pan was the libidinous god of rustic music, of shepherds and flocks, and of wild mountain places. His instrument is a pipe made of reeds, called today a pan flute. Although Cyril doesn’t play an instrument, he often talks about how his way of life and the way he interacts with others is itself a kind of music. He says that it is a song that he sings. And then there are those odd references to his “thick” thighs, as well as the fact that he is certainly libidinous. And what better place to find Pan than in Illyria? And if Cyril evokes Pan, might Hugh evoke Hephaestus, the lame god who is the blacksmith and forger of weapons in the Greek pantheon? Maybe. In any case, this is the kind of story Hawkes wants to tell.

The language of the book is dense and poetic, languid and beautiful. There are no chapter or section headings. The book consists of dozens of self-contained passages of first-person reporting. Some are quite long; some are just a page or two. Taken all together they tell a story, but they are not presented in chronological order and the reader is left to figure out exactly where in the overall narrative the current passage fits. That’s a little difficult in the beginning, and two readings of The Blood Oranges are better than one. But the novel is in fact carefully structured and eventually all is revealed–all, that is, that can be revealed or known in the kind of world that the author creates.

The novel is infused with sex, but there are no depictions of it, no ‘sex scenes’ as we call them now. It is also deeply intellectual, but there is nothing muddy or difficult about it. There is a clarity of emotion, a generosity of viewpoint, an acceptance of both joy and pain. Hawkes presents us with a vision of the power and the beauty of sexual love and of the ugly and destructive forces that are sometimes inseparable from it. There is no simple moral to the story; we have to make of it what we will.

I admire people who can recite poetry from memory. The only lines of poetry that have ever stuck in my mind are a few fragments of wildly diverse origin. One such fragment is this couplet:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain                                                                    By the false azure of the windowpane

These are the first two lines of a long poem called Pale Fire, which occupies 26 pages of Nabokov’s eponymous novel. That novel has four parts: a forward, the poem itself in four cantos, a 160-page section that purports to be commentary on the text of the poem, and a final index section. The author of the poem is named as John Shade; the writer of the forward, the commentary and the index is said to be one Charles Kinbote. The primary conceit of the novel is that Kinbote, while claiming to be a devoted friend of John Shade and promising to produce a definitive edition of the poem following Shade’s untimely death, is in fact a highly unreliable narrator who attempts to hijack Shade’s poem and Shade himself for his own purposes. Kinbote is a wonderful character–preposterously self-involved, laughably obtuse, and thoroughly unprincipled. He is also bright, fluent, and entertaining.

One of the charms of the novel is how well Nabokov reveals Kinbote’s unreliability, given that the only voice in the book is Kinbote’s own. Sometimes Kinbote’s convoluted attempts to convince us that he is telling the truth have the opposite effect. At other times he gives himself away by obliviously providing us with telling details whose significance he seems to miss. And sometimes, we just don’t know whether he is telling the truth or not. We know, for instance, that he is obsessed by a certain version of how he came to be a college instructor at Wordsmith College in New Wye, Appalachia, but we are free to decide how much we believe of what he says. Nabokov is a genius in making nested and interlocking puzzles, filled to overflowing with fascinating and stylish detail. Readers are challenged to to tease out what “really” happened; once we feel that we have done so, we also feel entitled to be proud of ourselves.

Pale Fire is a pyrotechnical entertainment, with bright bursts of ideas shooting off in all directions, disappearing into darkness, and then suddenly reappearing in varying patterns and hues. And the book is hilarious. Compared to this, the Nathanael West stories are shapeless, colorless, and slow. Dorothy Parker called The Day of the Locust “a truly good novel.” That sounds like she thinks it’s a good story, an illuminating sequence of events brilliantly described and narrated. Compare this to what Mary McCarthy said about Pale Fire, calling that book “one of the great works of art of this century.” A great work of art is not the same thing as a really good story. A “great work of art” seems stronger in a way, suggesting that Pale Fire is worthy of comparison to Picasso as well as to Virginia Woolf. But another effect of this characterization is to de-emphasize the novel as a story of what happened and inch it toward the category of beautiful creations, a category that might also include Faberge Eggs and Tiffany lamps. According to Kinbote, the truth of creative art is that “…‘reality’ is neither the subject nor the object of true art, which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye.” This is almost certainly a restatement of Nabokov’s own view. It is almost certainly not West’s view. I think West wants to describe what’s really there, what the communal eye either does see or damn well ought to be seeing.

Pale Fire, taken as a whole, is an assembled thing. The forward is short and serves to set up the main conceit, that Kinbote is committed to presenting a definitive edition of his friend’s last poem. The poem itself is competent but hardly inspired. I’ve read it three times and other than the first two lines, I remember none of it. But the poem serves excellently its real purpose, which is to act as a supporting framework for a variety of entertainments that are contained in Kinbote’s very extensive notes. It forms the stage upon which Kinbote/Nabokov can dance his dance. That’s the sense in which it is a great work of art rather than a great story. It is, of course, full of great little stories and does have one overarching narrative relating to “real” life and “real” death. Put all that together, and it will keep your attention.

The problem with the meta novel, though, is the same problem as with metaphysics. Once you stray very far beyond observable physics or beyond the presumed reality of the events described in a story, there’s no particular place to go, or more accurately, no particular place to stop. Once we realize Kinbote’s unreliability, we can ask all sorts of intriguing questions. The wonderful thing about Pale Fire is how we readers can’t help asking those questions and then making our judgments about the things Kinbote says. Is it the truth? Is it a deliberate lie? Or is it a delusion? But since this is all just a fiction, what does it matter? The answer can only be that Nabokov has sucked us into his game and we’re all having a grand old time playing it.

So Nabokov is a master, but while I have respect and admiration for Pale Fire, I do not love it. Lovely coloratura and trickery, but what else? My favorite Nabokov novel is Ada or Ardor: a Family Chronicle. (Mascodagama!) I no longer have a copy of it since my old one disintegrated. Maybe, if I keep on living, I’ll find another.

 

This one’s hard to explain. Why would anyone, anywhere, keep copies of these bleak and unpleasant stories? I’ve read these two works three different times, once in in the Seventies, once in the Nineties and just now again in the Teens. I have to say that every time I’ve read them I’ve been disappointed. And yet I’ve kept my copy for forty-five years.

Both stories are mostly about ugly thoughts, ugly feelings and the ugly and depressing events in the lives of losers. As David Yaffe put it, writing in the Partisan Review, West’s stories show “a sweeping rejection of political causes, religious faith, artistic redemption and romantic love.” As for the American Dream, West sees it as a kind of irremediable sickness, its promise corrupted by rigged economics and spiritual poverty. It ain’t pretty and there’s no way out. This message was never really popular with the book-buying public.

Among critics, though, West found many distinguished admirers. Early on, Dorothy Parker, Malcolm Crowley, and Edmund Wilson were all big fans. And thirty years after it was first published, the prominent critic Stanley Edgar Hymen said that Miss Lonelyhearts was one of the three best American novels of the first half of the twentieth century, the other two being The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, is also a fan. He named one his own children Nathanael; and one of the most well-known characters in the world of television, Homer Simpson, bears the same name as the hapless hotel accountant in The Day of the Locust.

One component of my appreciation of and loyalty to Nathanael West has always been a certain snob appeal, a feeling that only really special people can appreciate his work and that I‘m one of them. Most people are afraid to face a truly radical critique of the ridiculousness and venality of our society, but not me. Most people don’t understand these books, but me and Dorothy Parker and Matt Groening–we get it. The critical thing about one’s collection of books is that it is a reflection of one’s personality; and if the collection contains only those books that the masses like, well, that’s a lot like having no personality at all. Can’t have that.

(But personality, like all possessions, is a burden.)

At the same time, West’s characters are vivid (vivid, that is, in their obscurity, banality, and cruelty) and many scenes are memorable. In The Day of the Locust I remember especially the endless, dreary party at Homer Simpson’s house, the re-enacted battle of Waterloo on the studio back lot, and the riotous crowd at the movie premiere, a scene full of real violence and at the same time empty of real meaning. And does anyone wonder what her supporters found to admire in the speeches of Sarah Palin? Listen to Tod Hacket, the protagonist of The Day of the Locust as he describes a similar speaker:

…The message he brought was one that an illiterate anchorite might have given to decadent Rome. It was a crazy jumble of dietary rules, economics and Biblical threats. He claimed to have seen the Tiger of Wrath stalking the walls of the citadel and the Jackal of Lust skulking in the shrubbery, and he connected these omens with “thirty dollars every Thursday” and meat eating.

Tod didn’t laugh at the man’s rhetoric. He knew it was unimportant. What mattered was his messianic rage and the emotional response of his hearers. They sprang to their feet, shaking their fists and shouting. On the altar someone began to beat a bass drum and soon the entire congregation was singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

I could go on, but let’s lighten up. Here’s Dorothy Parker’s take on life:

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,                                                                                                  a medley of extemporanea,                                                                                                               And love is a thing that can never go wrong,                                                                            and I am Marie of Romania.