Conrad’s sea change

By Michael Gorra in TLS

You don’t hear very much about gout any more. None of the meat-eating drinkers I know seems to suffer from it, you don’t read about it in the papers, and, unlike consumption or the pox, it doesn’t now appear under another name. You might almost think it vanished along with the rubicund gentleman in knee-breeches whom we imagine as its principal victims, and it therefore comes as a shock, in reading The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, to learn of the degree to which it afflicted that lean and grizzled figure. His attacks were frequent and severe, and though he didn’t have a diagnosis until 1898, when “gout or some other devil” so inflated his wrist that he was unable to write, his legs first began to swell soon after his return from the Congo in 1890. It punctuated book after book, it broke his rhythm and kept him in bed, incapable – or so it seemed to him – of writing anything but one letter of complaint after another. There were other illnesses too. He never fully shook off the malaria he caught in Africa; its recurrent fevers would leave him shouting in Polish. There was dysentery, influenza, angina eventually, and some form of depression almost always, with a full breakdown in 1910 after the completion of Under Western Eyes (published in 1911).

Both his children were desperately sick during the writing of The Secret Agent (1907), when Conrad – a critical but not yet a commercial success – was without enough ready cash to pay the doctor’s bills. His wife, Jessie, lived in constant pain that both necessitated and was exacerbated by a twenty-year series of operations on her knees. Their oldest son, Borys, would know the effects of gas and shell shock. The difficulties Conrad faced were real; however detailed his account of his symptoms, the novelist was no hypochondriac. In some way, though, he almost always managed to conquer them. In 1899, he wrote of lacking “the belief . . . to make me put pen to paper”, as though a year that included both “Heart of Darkness” and Lord Jim (1900) were somehow unproductive. In 1917 he described himself, in a letter to Edward Garnett, as feeling “broken up – or broken in two – disconnected. Impossible to start myself going impossible to concentrate to any good purpose. Is it the war – perhaps? Or the end of Conrad simply?”. He had written almost nothing in the previous year, and yet was soon productive once more; it hardly matters that his next novel, The Arrow of Gold (1919), would be his worst.

Last year was the 150th anniversary of Conrad’s birth, an occasion marked by John Stape’s new biography, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, a Penguin repackaging of Conrad’s major works, and the completion of the Cambridge University Press edition of all his surviving letters. Still, anyone reading the later volumes of his correspondence will have on their minds not his birth, but his death, in 1924. The seven years covered by Volumes Six to Eight are like a long slow fading of the light. From his last decade, only The Shadow-Line (1917) can stand with his best books, and by Volume Eight Conrad has reached a point at which he can merely hope to work; he mutters about the distractions of journalism, but remains too worn out for anything more sustained. In another sense, however, these are years of triumph, the years when Conrad found his largest audience and became in some measure a public figure. His 1913 novel, Chance, had become an unlikely bestseller. Marketed as “a sea story that appeals to women”, its narration was as maddeningly indirect as anything in his oeuvre. But it did at least tell a familiar story of romantic rescue, in which an upright sailor saves a troubled young woman from the tangles of her past. Ten thousand copies of the American edition went in the first week alone, and, once those readers had arrived, they stayed.

Later books did even better. In Britain, his last novel, The Rover (1924), sold 30,000 copies in not much more than a month, and the boom was accompanied by a growing demand for his earlier work. There were movie deals and theatrical adaptations; there was a collected edition for which Conrad wrote a set of gruff avuncular prefaces. His only visit to America was in 1923 for a publicity tour, a trip made just fifteen months before his death. He gave just one reading, at a private house in New York, but there were reporters on the dock when he arrived; he enjoyed being lionized, but took to his bed as soon as he was back home in Kent. Ramsay MacDonald offered a knighthood; Oxford and Cambridge honorary degrees; all were refused. Yet Conrad in his last years worked hard at tending his posterity, paying close attention to translations and doing his best to massage what his critics might say; he even revised an overview of his career written for the TLS in 1923 by his disciple Richard Curle. By then Conrad rejected, sometimes angrily, any identification as a “spinner of sea-yarns”, arguing that “the nature of my writing runs the risk of being obscured by the nature of my material”. The sea was a “biographical matter, not literary”. It would be some time before his readers took the point….

Alfred Kazin

For more than 50 years Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) was one of the best known critics in America. In 1934, at the age of 19, he started reviewing for the New Republic (under the literary editorship of Malcolm Cowley). In 1942, at only 27, Kazin published a masterly study of American literature, On Native Grounds. During the 1940s and ’50s he contributed to Partisan Review, Commentary and the Reporter, as well as a host of other magazines. Just as important, throughout these years he steadily debated politics and literature with Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, Lionel Abel, Newton Arvin, Cleanth Brooks, R.P. Blackmur, Leslie Fiedler, Mark Van Doren, Harold Rosenberg, Allen Tate, Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling. By the early 1960s he was, arguably, after Edmund Wilson, the country’s leading man of letters.

And yet. Look at the names in that paragraph. How many do you recognize? If you are under 50, perhaps a couple. How many have you actually read? Probably just one: Edmund Wilson. It is a sad truth that almost any poet or novelist has a shot at immortality, but a critic lives only as long as he keeps writing, keeps in the thick of the action. A decade after his (or her) death, a loyal publisher may bring out a “selected essays” that will prompt a few reminiscences and reconsiderations. After another decade, nothing.

Kazin, however, is luckier than most. While he scratched out a living by writing book reviews, teaching at various colleges and universities, and snagging grants (four Guggenheims, numerous other fellowships and regular visits to the artist’s retreat Yaddo), he also produced three wonderful works of autobiography, classics of the modern American experience:

A Walker in the City (1951) describes his childhood and education in New York‘s impoverished Brownsville neighborhood; it remains one of the great documents of Jewish-American immigrant life.

Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) recalls the ideological and literary battles of a decade racked by the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Hitler and the darkening shadow of Stalinism. Yet grim as they were, the 1930s were also as exhilarating as the 1960s, full of intellectual intensity and passion: Socialism would surely change the world.

New York Jew (1978) strikes a more elegiac tone, as Kazin offers pen portraits of many of the leading figures of the postwar cultural scene. But now the young rebels and hotshots have grown old, become the mainstays of the establishment, even turned to the right.

While Richard M. Cook’s excellent biography of Kazin does describe the genesis, character and reception of such books as On Native Grounds (1942), Bright Book of Life (1973) and An American Procession (1984), it also reveals a lonely, envious, restless man, riven by deep feeling and severe contradiction. Alfred Kazin was, by turns, an opportunistic hustler who could win visiting professorships to prestigious colleges and then proceed to alienate his new colleagues with his condescension or contempt; a husband who cheated on three successive wives; a socially awkward Brownsville boy who instinctively bristled at the patrician smoothness of the despised Lionel Trilling; and a “private reader” who felt out of step as much with the New Criticism of the 1940s as with the literary theory of the 1970s. Nonetheless, he could also be a superb guide to American and English literature. … more>>

Why Is Bach Ignored?

Bach is sometimes referred to as the father of Western music, not to suggest that there was nothing of substance before him (he didn’t spring full grown from the head of Zeus) but that the music after him has been profoundly influenced and shaped by his models. And surely the influences have been radical and vast, whether on the finale of Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony or the Grosse Fuge of Beethoven or the organ music of Mendelssohn or the Bachianas Brasileiras of Villa Lobos or (to acknowledge the present moment) La Pasión según San Marcos of Osvaldo Golijov. Who else could be the father of Western music? Bach is in the very chemistry of Western musical blood, like red cells, white cells, and platelets in our material plasma.

But if Bach is The Father, why hasn’t he fired the popular imagination? We have soppy movies about Mozart and Beethoven as well as proliferating biographies for the intelligent general reader, but nothing really comparable for Bach. If we sample the outpouring since the year 2000, the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, the “life and works” biographies are nothing if not weighty and serious, but these essentially scholarly volumes by Martin Geck, Christoph Wolff, and Peter Williams,[1] despite their generalist pretensions, are hardly readable by nonspecialists. We have fairly localizable “feelings” about Mozart because the personal letters producing those feelings are voluminous. We learn about Wolfgang as a circus freak driven by father Leopold, about the Mozart family’s obsession with “shit,” about Wolfgang’s castigation of Constanze for exposing her ankles, not to mention purported mysteries surrounding the uncompleted Requiem, perfect grist for the mills of pop culture. For Beethoven, again, many autograph materials providing insights into his “spiritual development” (to use the subtitle of an early biography) and his medical problems, his patrons, his financial independence, his nephew, his deafness, his “immortal beloved.” But what is the feel we get from Bach? In fact, who is this seemingly generic father and why has he failed to solidify as part of our cultural ethos? When we hear “Mozart” or “Beethoven,” we think of a person behind the music. When we hear “Bach,” we think of music only.

This turns out to be an eminently answerable question. Letters (in the usual sense of the word) in Bach’s hand are close to nonexistent, whether because he wrote very few or his recipients did not save them. There is little or no knowledge of Bach’s interior life, his relation to his parents or siblings, to his two wives, to his twenty children, or his professional outlook as seen by Bach himself. There are a few letters to an old school friend, but almost every other autograph document is a public statement, written to a church administration, a ducal or royal court, or a municipality, and retained as a record by the institutions in question (for our later enlightenment). As a result, the little firsthand information we have is skewed in favor of a picture of Bach as involved in a narrow range of day-to-day problems. Or as Peter Williams puts it in passing, “It could be that the frequency with which money and pay crop up in connection with him is a misleading consequence of his being represented today chiefly by formal documents and business letters.” This fact can hardly be overstated, because the picture derived from such constricting paucity is of an aggressive businessman whining about maltreatment and underpayment, whereas in fact he lived an astounding professional life with plenty of recognition, at least in Germany, if not quite as much or as widespread as Handel or Telemann in their own time.

Most of the actual data we have about Bach was provided by contemporaries or post-contemporaries writing about some particular aspect of his life: a few of his children; his composition, harpsichord, and organ students; newspaper reporters; official recorders of births, marriages and deaths; letters between other people, sometimes composers, commenting on Bach’s music. The most definitive intentional account of Bach’s life soon after his death in 1750 was written four years later by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel (himself becoming a distinguished composer) in conjunction with one of Bach’s students, Johann Friedrich Agricola. This “Obituary,” as it is generally referred to, while a starting point for most later biographies, is not completely trusted for accuracy. In fact, Peter Williams in his somewhat offbeat J. S. Bach: A Life in Music, the most recent learned account, uses sentences from the “Obituary” as chapter heads, which then become the basis for Williams’ own commentary, in the course of which he quarrels with Emanuel Bach about imprecise, sloppy data and faulty memory.

Given the sparseness of solid information, how has it been possible for scholars to write five- to six-hundred-page books one after another about Bach’s life and works, books that I hesitate to refer to as biographies in view of the phantasmal presence of their subject? Of course, the same question has been asked about biographies of Shakespeare, about whom there is even less solid information, which nonetheless has never stopped the Shakespeare Industry from producing more. In the case of Bach, if there is little primary information, there is a good deal of circumstantial information and most of it is collected in four German volumes known for short as the Bach-Dokumente, published in Germany gradually from 1963–79, a magic cornucopia for Bach scholars and biographers. Derived from this archive but more accessible to English-language specialists and nonspecialists alike is the brilliant compendium known as The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents,[2] an inexpensive 1998 update by Christoph Wolff of the original Bach Reader of 1945 produced by Hans David and Arthur Mendel. Looking through this richly informative book, one gets a clear picture of where all the basic Bach information has really come from and of what it actually consists. … more>>

He Was Nouveau When It Was New

THESE days, the name Robbe-Grillet doesn’t ring many bells. A new chateau perhaps, whose grand cru goes well with meat? A deputy minister in Sarkozy’s government? An up-and-coming couturier?

How times have changed. Starting in the 1950s, the novelist, filmmaker and literary theorist Alain Robbe-Grillet, who died last week at 85, had a profound impact on international taste. An originator of the Nouveau Roman, or New Novel, and the screenwriter for Alain Resnais’s 1961 cult film “Last Year at Marienbad,” Mr. Robbe-Grillet was the very model of a postwar avant-gardist. His attempts to wrest fiction free from 19th-century constraints like plot and character, and to wrest objects free from imposed meaning, were never entirely popular with readers but had a decisive influence on critical theory and on the art of the novel, as well as on film, art and even psychology.

Mr. Robbe-Grillet’s first four novels — “The Erasers” (1953), “Jealousy” (1957), “The Voyeur” (1958) and “In the Labyrinth” (1960) — are “really the finest thing in French fiction of the second half of the 20th century,” said the poet and critic Richard Howard, who translated most of Mr. Robbe-Grillet’s early work into English for Grove Press.

Mr. Howard recalled his first meeting with the novelist, who was also a trained agronomist, in the mid-1950s. “He came into someone’s living room,” Mr. Howard said. “There was a bowl of narcissus bulbs in a dish, not doing very well. He started poking around and rearranging them, removing the water and the dirt, and he said, ‘Now they’ll be all right.’ I think he wrote novels in that way, making the situation pregnant with circumstances that would reveal everything that the novel was meant to reveal.”

The novel, Mr. Robbe-Grillet contended, was a 19th-century form, epitomized by the rich, naturalistic worlds of Balzac and Flaubert. The 20th century, though, was characterized by fragmentation and existential doubt, and the novel reached “a degree of stagnation,” he argued in his essay “A Fresh Start for Fiction.” He called for a radical departure: anti-realist, anti-naturalist, anti-descriptive, apolitical. “In this future universe of the novel, gestures and objects will be ‘there’ before being ‘something,’ ” he wrote. “They will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own meaning.”

Mr. Robbe-Grillet and the other so-called New Novelists, including Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon, wanted to do in literature what others had done in art — just as Marcel Duchamp had deconstructed human motion in “Nude Descending a Staircase” and the Abstract Expressionists had valorized gesture, the movement of a brush stroke itself, over representation. Mr. Robbe-Grillet believed that writing should reveal the archaeology of its own construction, should depict a mind unfolding its thoughts over time.

His first novel, “The Erasers,” is an inverted detective story, while “Jealousy,” set on a Caribbean banana plantation, reads at turns like scientific observation and stage directions. (“The moment has come to inquire after Christine’s health. Franck replies by a gesture of the hand: a rise followed by a slower fall that becomes quite vague.”) The effect “was for many people sterile, for others exciting,” said Tom Bishop, a friend of the author’s and a French professor at New York University, where Mr. Robbe-Grillet taught every other year for 25 years. “He put the reader in a position where he had to be the central part of the novel.”

The literary theorist Roland Barthes was an early champion. “Robbe-Grillet is important because he has attacked the last bastion of the traditional art of writing: the organization of literary space,” Mr. Barthes wrote. The novelist was trying to destroy “the adjective itself,” he added. “The realm of qualification, for him, can be only spatial or situational.” … more>>

Brian De Palma: ‘Apparently, I’m a left-wing wacko traitor who should be horsewhipped’

Brian De Palma is facing another rough passage. In a career of storms and tempests, his latest film, Redacted, a multi- format examination of US soldiers’ savage behaviour in Iraq, has inevitably not proved popular back home. “In America, you cannot criticise the troops,” he says. “So now it’s all over the web that I’m a left-wing wacko traitor who should be horsewhipped.” But then what would you expect from a film-maker who has courted controversy right back to the early 1980s when he made the coked-up gangster classic Scarface? “I hardly think of myself as a safe director,” he says, baring his mouldy teeth like a decrepit shark.

According to De Palma, the pent-up anger of the US forces in Iraq is worse than that of the troops who served in Vietnam, there, he says, at least US soldiers had brothels to visit in order to let off steam. “This is not the way the army likes to see itself portrayed,” he adds. “They want to be seen the way the administration portrays them: valiant people over there creating democracy – all that mumbo jumbo.” More importantly, De Palma sees the film as a critique of how American audiences are fed propaganda by the US news media. “They sit there and watch their television screens, and see these embedded reporters and infomercials from Iraq, and how well things are going over there, and they think that’s the truth.”

The end result won the 67 year-old De Palma the Silver Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival, one of just a handful of awards he’s won across a 40-year career that has frequently irritated the Moral Majority. In content at least, Redacted recalls his 1989 Vietnam film Casualties of War, which starred Michael J Fox as a soldier who looks the other way as his fellow grunts perpetrate a brutal rape. “The similarities are striking,” De Palma notes.

Far more raw than other recent Hollywood examinations of the conflict, say Lions For Lambs or Rendition, Redacted is closer in tone to Nick Broomfield’s Battle For Haditha. Shot for just $5m, using a cast of unknowns, Redacted is a fictionalised account of an abhorrent real-life event, concerning the rape of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her family by US troops. “I couldn’t use too much of the real material,” De Palma explains. “I had to fictionalise it, because there are continuing prosecutions. You get a large book of things you can’t do from the lawyers.”

Filmed on High-Definition Video in Amman, and made to look like a “dossier” of internet uploads and camcorder footage, Redacted, says De Palma, is meant to echo the way he found the real-life event on the internet. Much of the material in the film originates from a soldier named Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), who is hoping to make a documentary to get him into film school. In part, this consists of conversations with other members of the unit, including the two men who lead the night-time raid on the Iraqi home in question. … more here, where you can also watch the trailer for ‘Redacted’.

Balkan warrior

During the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Dubravka Ugresic was denounced, she says, as “a whore, a witch and a traitor”. A reluctant citizen of newly independent Croatia, she took a stand against nationalism “and all its perversities”, and like many people became a target. As the Balkan wars escalated, she found herself the victim of a “collective paranoia: people rushed to be willing executioners. Nobody forced them to kill, spit on and humiliate others – but they did. It became acceptable. It was like being marked with a yellow star.”In her astringent writing of the early 1990s, collected in The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (1995), Ugresic wrote of nationalism as the “ideology of the stupid”. Though she was just as scathing about Serbian chauvinism, she excoriated a self-justificatory victim mentality in the “freshly baked European state of Croatia”, whose ultra-nationalist president, Franjo Tudjman, had come to power in 1990, declaring Croatia paradise on earth. With a nod to Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Ugresic wrote: “What is being annihilated with guns, grenades, murders, rape, the displacement of peoples, ‘ethnic cleansing’, the new ideology supported by the media, is memory.”

The title essay was written shortly before Ugresic was driven out of Croatia in 1993: the book appeared first in Dutch translation. She wandered in Germany, the Netherlands and the US before settling in 1999 in Amsterdam, where she lives alone. A novelist, critic, screenwriter and children’s author, she loathes being identified as a Croatian writer, the representative of a “country from which I ran away into exile.”

For Marina Warner, Ugresic is a “wise jester and aphorist with a madcap wit”. Lisa Appignanesi relishes her “acerbic sense of life, and Eeyore grumpiness”. Ugresic, who likens AA Milne’s Eeyore to the sceptical, melancholic figure of the central European intellectual, practises sardonic jesting with a serious intent. Her work ranges from Thank You For Not Reading (2001), a dissection of today’s literary marketplace, to dark fiction exploring trauma, flight and the violence done to selfhood by political upheaval.

Her most recent novel, The Ministry of Pain (2004), now out in translation, is named after an S&M club in The Hague – also, of course, the setting of the war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia. In the book a lecturer in Serbo-Croat at Amsterdam university tries to keep alive “Yugonostalgia” in her students – who are all fellow emigrés – as her own world disintegrates. The depiction of a sado-masochistic relationship underlines what Ugresic sees as the “self-hatred, self-hurt part of post-traumatic conditions”: it is a novel about “the trauma of language and the language of trauma.” … more>>

Ancient Afghan treasures on exhibit in Amsterdam

An exhibition in the Netherlands showcasing the rich history of ancient Afghanistan, gives visitors a picture of a country that is both entirely different yet also strikingly similar to the conflict-ridden country it is today. Hidden Afghanistan, which is on at the Nieuwe Kerk in central Amsterdam’s Dam Square, contains a collection of some 250 magnificent archeological artifacts. During the war, the treasures were hidden in a safe in Afghanistan’s central bank in Kabul, where they were “rediscovered” in 2004 and transported to Europe for restoration in 2006. The exhibition, which follows negotiations with the Afghan government and runs to April 20, includes a tour and workshop on the making of Afghan jewellery for children. Due to its strategic location on the former trade routes between East and West, Afghanistan has always been the crossroads of civilizations in Central Asia. For the West, it is the region where the eastward-bound expeditions of Alexander the Great were halted. The Oxus river, today known as Amu Darya, became the border between the West and the “barbarian.” The river is also the eastern border of the legendary ancient empire of Bactria. For the Chinese, by contrast, Afghanistan was the most western region they entered en route to India. Most of the artefacts on display in the Nieuwe Kerk originate from four archeological sites, he oldest of which, Tepe Fullol, dates from the Bactrian Bronze Age – around 2000 BC. The bigger collection of artifacts that originate from Ai Khanum, a city founded by the ancient Greeks as part of one of Alexander the Great’s expeditions, provides evidence of the Hellenistic influence in Afghanistan. (The Earth Times)