Through a glass darkly

More than most writers, the circumstances of Malcolm Lowry’s death are peculiarly relevant to a consideration of his work, since excess of every kind was both his method and his subject.Was it advanced alcoholism that eventually killed him? His great, tragic novel Under the Volcano, recounts the last day in the life of a drunkard, ending with his murder and the contemptuous disposal of his corpse into a ravine in Mexico. Lowry himself did not die in Mexico, like his protagonist in that novel, the consul Geoffrey Firmin. His passing was in a Sussex village with the unlikely name of Ripe, in 1957. (The exact date is unknown, it could either have been late on June 26 or very early on June 27.)

There are a few unexplained inconsistencies in accounts of how his death actually came about. He seems to have choked on his own vomit after an unrestrained bender, his powerful constitution already dilapidated after prolonged abuse – though at the inquest his internal organs were found to be in excellent condition.

There were rumours: a mysteriously emptied bottle of barbiturates – but we should not regard his demise as suicide. In an interview conducted in 1975, his first wife Jan Gabrial said this of Lowry’s death: “His own experiences, his own actions fascinated him as much as anyone else. So everything went down. So…there is no way that I can conceive of Malc committing suicide without there being … copious notes, letters, something to indicate why. He was not a man to slip away quietly into the night.” more…

Sören Kierkegaard and Existentialism

By Gerhard Rempel

The Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was hardly known outside of his native land at the time of his lonely death in a Copenhagen hospital. It was after his death that he came to exert a profound influence on philosophy, literature and theology first in Germany, then France and finally in North and South America. His is really not a philosophy in the technical sense, but rather theology-philosophy, or a religious philosophy, somewhat akin to the approach of Pascal or Augustine to these two related subjects. Frank Thilly says that his philosophy is theological in motivation, esthetic in its literary and poetic form, and ethical in its import. The religious orientation is combined with – and at times in conflict with – a literary and artistic sensitivity and this coupled with a highly romantic interpretation of human nature produces a highly imaginative, symbolical and poetic form of writing that results in ambiguity and at times confusion. Kierkegaard is hard reading!

Something must be said about his life and circumstances, because it had great effect on his thought and attitude. He was a sufferer. His father once cursed God, while in a storm out in the field and this closely guarded sin the father passed on to his son just before the former’s death. Sören took it as a sin that would result in a curse upon the family. He broke his engagement to Regina Olson, because he felt that marriage would hinder the mission which God had laid on his shoulder. The Danish Punch, Corsair, attacked his individualism and criticism of the established Lutheran Church. During his school days and university life, though gifted and witty, he had been made the object of mockery, partly due to his melancholy, individualism and seclusion and partly due to his polemical approach. He states that he was never a child, never young and never a man, that he had never really lived and that he enjoyed no “immediacy” or contact with other people. “I did not have immediacy, and have therefore, humanly understood, not lived; I have started with reflection… I am in fact reflection from beginning to end.” All this had a profound effect on him and his thinking. He never sought invulnerability, but he accepted his suffering, lived with it, and searched it to find some meaning in it for him and for “that solitary individual”, who was his audience and object of his mission. In his Journal he wrote in 1843: “The most important thing of all is that a man stands right toward God, does not try to wrench away from something, but rather penetrates it until it yields its explanation. Whether or not it turns out as he wishes; it is still the best of all.” He was a hard worker and in a short period of time (1842-1848) he produced a great amount of writing (Forty-three publications on aesthetics, philosophy and religion).

His writings have recently come into, what Heinemann calls, a “Kierkegaard-Renaissance”. For forty ears he has already influenced German thought and it has also been acknowledge, that he is the formative force upon the minds of such divergent thinkers as the German philosophers, Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger; as Karl Barth; as the lay Catholic thinker Theodor Haecker, the Jesuit Pryzwara and the Spanish philosopher Miguel Unamuno. His influence has also been great on such existentialist theologians as Jacques Maritain, Nicolas Berdyaev, Martin Buber and Paul Tillich. In fact, Kierkegaard is the fountainhead of contemporary existentialism. But, what is existentialism and why has it suddenly become so productive? F. H. Heinemann first coined the term “Existenzphilosophie” in 1929 in a book, Neue Wege der Philosophie. He understood “existence” as a new principle which seeks to overcome the one-sidedness of both the rationalist and irrationalist schools and instead of beginning with Descartes’ “cogito” as consciousness and thought begins with the subject standing in the threefold relationship with man, the Universe and God. Kierkegaard objected to Hegel’s all comprehensive World-Mind in which there is little room for the individual. He therefore introduces the category of the individual, by which he means “the single, finite, responsible, simple, suffering and guilty creature, who has to make a decision in face of God and who consequently is more interested in ethical questions and in salvation than in abstract speculations.”  more …

Anton Chekhov: Fragments of Recollections

by: Maxim Gorky

Once he invited me to the village Koutchouk-Koy where he had a tiny strip of land and a white, two-storied house. There while showing me his “estate”, he began to speak with animation: “If I had plenty of money, I should build a sanatorium here for invalid village teachers. You know, I would put up a large, bright building–very bright, with large windows and lofty rooms. I would have a fine library, different musical instruments, bees, a vegetable garden, an orchard. … There would be lectures on agriculture, mythology. … Teachers ought to know everything, everything, my dear fellow.”

He was suddenly silent, coughed, looked at me out of the corners of his eyes, and smiled that tender, charming smile of his which attracted one so irresistibly to him and made one listen so attentively to his words.

“Does it bore you to listen to my fantasies? I do love to talk of it. … If you knew how badly the Russian village needs a nice, sensible, educated teacher! We ought in Russia to give the teacher particularly good conditions, and it ought to be done as quickly as possible. We ought to realize that without a wide education of the people, Russia will collapse, like a house built of badly baked bricks. A teacher must be an artist, in love with his calling; but with us he is a journeyman, ill educated, who goes to the village to teach children as though he were going into exile. He is starved, crushed, terrorized by the fear of losing his daily bread. But he ought to be the first man in the village; the peasants ought to recognize him as a power, worthy of attention and respect; no one should dare to shout at him or humiliate him personally, as with us every one does–the village constable, the rich shop-keeper, the priest, the rural police commissioner, the school guardian, the councilor, and that official who has the title of school-inspector, but who cares nothing for the improvement of education and only sees that the circulars of his chiefs are carried out. … It is ridiculous to pay in farthings the man who has to educate the people. It is intolerable that he should walk in rags, shiver with cold in damp and draughty schools, catch cold, and about the age of thirty get laryngitis, rheumatism, or tuberculosis. We ought to be ashamed of it. Our teacher, for eight or nine months in the year, lives like a hermit: he has no one to speak a word to; without company, books or amusements, he is growing stupid, and, if he invites his colleagues to visit him, then he becomes politically suspect–a stupid word with which crafty men frighten fools. All this is disgusting; it is the mockery of a man who is doing a great and tremendously important work. … Do you know, whenever I see a teacher, I feel ashamed for him, for his timidity, and because he is badly dressed … it seems to me that for the teacher’s wretchedness I am myself to blame–I mean it.”

He was silent, thinking; and then, waving his hand, he said gently: “This Russia of ours is such an absurd, clumsy country.”

A shadow of sadness crossed his beautiful eyes; little rays of wrinkles surrounded them and made them look still more meditative. Then, looking round, he said jestingly: “You see, I have fired off at you a complete leading article from a radical paper. Come, I’ll give you tea to reward your patience.”

That was characteristic of him, to speak so earnestly, with such warmth and sincerity, and then suddenly to laugh at himself and his speech. In that sad and gentle smile one felt the subtle skepticism of the man who knows the value of words and dreams; and there also flashed in the smile a lovable modesty and delicate sensitiveness.

We walked back slowly in silence to the house. It was a clear, hot day; the waves sparkled under the bright rays of the sun; down below one heard a dog barking joyfully. Chekhov took my arm, coughed, and said slowly: “It is shameful and sad, but true: there are many men who envy the dogs.”

And he added immediately with a laugh: “To-day I can only make feeble speeches. … It means that I’m getting old.”

I often heard him say: “You know, a teacher has just come here–he’s ill, married … couldn’t you do something for him? I have made arrangements for him for the time being.” Or again: “Listen, Gorky, there is a teacher here who would like to meet you. He can’t go out, he’s ill. Won’t you come and see him? Do.” Or: “Look here, the women teachers want books to be sent to them.” more…

Storyteller – Vargas Llosa

–”This is a story that often repeated itself,” Mario Vargas Llosa says. “If a father was a businessman, he was a man who had to be complicit with the dictatorship. It was the only way to prosper, right? And what happens is that the son discovers it, the son is young, restless, idealistic, believes in justice and liberty, and he finds out that his vile father is serving a dictatorship that assassinates, incarcerates, censors and is corrupted to the bone.”Mr. Vargas Llosa could have plucked this scenario from his personal recollections of living under dictatorial rule in Peru. But he tells this story to make a more universal point: Dictatorships poison everything in their grasp, from political institutions right down to relationships between fathers and sons.

When I meet Mr. Vargas Llosa in his home in Lima, I am not surprised to find that the world-famous novelist is a natural storyteller. He speaks to me in Spanish, gripping his black-rimmed glasses in his hand and occasionally waving them around for emphasis.

Mr. Vargas Llosa’s bold ideas and expressive language may make him one of Latin America’s finest writers–”Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” “The Time of the Hero” and “Conversation in the Cathedral” are just a few of his classic works–but those same traits didn’t necessarily serve him well at the polls. After running for president of Peru in 1990 and losing to Alberto Fujimori, Mr. Vargas Llosa decided to devote his full attention to writing. He now lives in Lima for about three months of the year, spending the rest of his time in Europe.
“I am not going to participate in professional politics again,” he says. And he doesn’t have to. Mr. Vargas Llosa has found an effective way to expose the destructive nature of dictatorships, while underscoring the importance of individual liberty and free will. He just picks up his pen. “Words are acts,” he says, echoing Jean-Paul Sartre. “Through writing, one can change history.”

During the 1990 presidential campaign Mr. Varga Llosa emphasized the need for a market economy, privatization, free trade, and above all, the dissemination of private property. He didn’t exactly receive a welcome reception. “It was a very different era, because to speak of private property, private enterprise, the market–it was sacrilegious,” he says. “I was fairly vulnerable in that campaign,” he continues, “because I didn’t lie. I said exactly what we were going to do. It was a question of principle and also . . . I thought it would be impossible to do liberal, radical reforms without having the mandate to do them.”

Now, almost 20 years later, the landscape looks very different. Mr. Vargas Llosa explains that he was propelled into politics when then-president Alan García, at the time a socialist and a populist, attempted to nationalize the banks. Today he is running the country again, but “now, the same Alan García is the champion of capitalism in Peru!” Mr. Vargas Llosa laughs merrily. “It’s funny, no?” more…

Dark Angel (Rainer Werner Fassbinder )

By Gary Morris

Few filmmakers lived their private lives more publicly than Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), and few have had those lives so relentlessly linked to their artistic output. Starting at age 21, this self-created enfant terrible made over 40 films in 15 years along with numerous plays and TV dramas, but he still managed to become a well-known habitue of New York’s leather bars in the ’70s, easily recognized and often photographed in his trademark leather jacket, dirty jeans, and perpetual scowl. His films were a fixture in art houses of the time, but his personal life, always well publicized, was riddled with gossip and scandal. Disgruntled actors recounted elaborate tales of his violent ways. Some, like the long-suffering Irm Hermann, claimed physical abuse. Writer Robert Katz quotes her: “He couldn’t conceive of my refusing him, and he tried everything. He almost beat me to death on the streets of Bochum …” Fassbinder’s name was frequently in the papers, sometimes in interviews bitterly denouncing his country: “Better a street-sweeper in Mexico than a filmmaker in Germany!” More notorious was the matter of his suicidal lovers: one hanged himself in jail after a murderous rampage, another was found dead in Fassbinder’s apartment. His repertory company was a volatile, literal extended family that included his mother and a seemingly endless string of former, present, and future male lovers, lovelorn women, and even a pair of frustrated wives, Ingrid Caven and Juliane Lorenz. Addicted to booze and drugs (particularly whiskey, Valium, and cocaine, which killed him), Fassbinder left this world in the same way as many of his cinematic creations: overworked, overwrought, and finally overdosed on life. more…