Singing Poetry: Williams, Frye and Bolano

            I received a note from a friend yesterday expressing shock that I could say that William Carlos Williams never wrote a good poem.  I have read quite a lot of Williams’ poetry, but I’d be willing to have another look at some poems if this Williams fan would direct me to the poetry he likes – and I can find it in the volume I have of Williams poetry. 

Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism writes on page 6, “The First thing the literary critic has to do is to read literature, to make an inductive survey of his own field and let critical principles shape themselves solely out of his knowledge of that field.  Critical principles cannot be taken over ready-made from theology, philosophy, politics, science, or any combination of these.”  I probably got my own opinion about reading poetry from Frye.   Two of my favorite poets are Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Butler Yeats though I am neither a Catholic nor a believer in the occult.  But somewhere along the line I developed the strong opinion that poetry ought to be lyrical.  The words needed to sing in some way either through end or internal rhyme or through onomatopoeia or in some other way.  I want to know I am reading poetry and not prose.  And I never knew that when I read Williams.

On the other hand, and contradicting my own prejudice to some extent, I am often struck by the “poetry” in writers of prose.  Good writers cause their prose to sing from time to time,  and I admire it in the same way I admire good poetry.  How it sings is up to the writer not me, but I can hear it.  The following from Robert Bolano’s The Savage Detectives is an example.  I don’t know to what extent I should credit the translator, Natasha Wimmer, but I won’t struggle with that here.  On page 222 an old poet, Amadeo Salvatierra, has been drinking with two of the detectives who are trying to learn about individuals from an earlier literary movement.  They have contacted Salvatierra to learn about Caesarea Tinajero.  Her name came up in a number of references but they couldn't find anything she wrote.  Amadeo Salvatierra, someone told them, knew Caesarea and could help them.  Salvatierra is glad for the company.  They have been drinking and he just sent one of them off for another bottle.  He offered to pay for it but the young man wouldn’t accept the money.  He says,

“I had put my money back in my wallet, and with shaky hands (once you reach a certain age drinking isn’t what it used to be), I was going through my old, yellowing papers.  My head was bent and my vision was blurred and the Chilean boy moved silently around my library and all I heard was the sound of his index finger or his little finger, such a need that boy had to touch everything, skimming like lightning along the spines of my massive tomes, his finger a buzz of flesh and leather, or skin and pasteboard, a sound pleasing to the ear and sleep inducing, and I must really have fallen asleep because suddenly I closed my eyes (or maybe they’d been closed for a while) and I saw the Plaza de Santo Domingo with its archways, Calle Venezuela, the Palacio de la Inquisicion, the Cantina Las Dos Estrellas on Calle Loreto, the Cafeteria La Sevillana on Justo Sierra, the Cantina Mi Oficina on Misionero near Pino Suarez, where men in uniform and dogs and women weren’t allowed in, with the exception of one woman, the only woman who ever went there, and I saw that woman walking those streets again, down Loreto, down Soledad, down Correo Mayor, down Moneda, I saw her hurry across the Zocalo, ah, what a sight, a woman in her twenties in the 1920s crossing the Zocalo as fast as if she were late to meet a lover or on her way to some little job in one of the stores downtown, a woman modestly dressed in cheap but pretty clothes, her hair jet-black, her back straight, her legs not very long but unutterably graceful like all young women’s legs, whether they be skinny, fat, or shapely – sweet, determined little legs, and feet clad in shoes with no heel or the lowest possible heel, cheap but pretty and most of all comfortable, as if they were made for walking fast, for meeting someone or getting to work, although I know she isn’t meeting anyone, nor is she expected at any job.  So where is she going?  Or is she going nowhere at all, and is this the way she always walks?  By now the woman has crossed the Zocalo and she’s walking along Monte Piedad to Tacuba, where the crowds are thicker and she can’t walk as fast anymore, and she turns down Tacuba, slowing, and for an instant the throngs hide her from sight, but then she appears again, there she is, walking toward the Alameda, or maybe she’s stopping somewhere nearer by, maybe she’s headed to the post office, because now I can clearly see papers in her hands, they could be letters, but she doesn’t go into the post office, she crosses the street to the Alameda and stops, as if she’s trying to catch her breath, and then she keeps walking, at the same pace, through the gardens, under the trees, and just as there are women who see the future, I see the past, Mexico’s past, and I see the back of this woman walking out of my dream, and I say to her: where are you going, Cesarea? Where are you going, Cesarea Tinajero?”

            Bolano's words sing to me in a way that Williams' never has, but perhaps this is just that in my own inductive search for good poetry I have built up strong prejudices that may be unique to me, or at least unlike those of my friend who admires William Carlos Williams.   And it will do no good for someone to tell me how much they like a poet or to insist that Williams is a good poet.  A liking for Williams, and probably any poet, is not transferable.  I would need to build up new prejudices, new presuppositions to fit him in and like him more than my old prejudices would permit.   

            Then again, maybe I am impressed by the shock of reading such a passage as Balono's for the first time.  I recall a similar, even a greater shock, when I first read Plath's Aerial, standing outside the bookstore where I had just purchased it, oblivious to passersby and then later in my car, not caring about anything else.  Could she keep it up?  She did -- a memorable time.  I have positive memories about reading Plath's Ariel for the first time, but very different memories of trying and, but failing, to appreciate William Carlos Williams.

Bolano's The Skating Rink

Roberto Bolano’s The Skating Rink was written in 1993 but wasn’t translated into English until 2009. 

There was a murder in this novel, but it would be a mistake to think of The Skating Rink as a murder mystery.  A skating rink has surreptitiously been built on the premises of a deserted mansion, the Palacio Benvingut, in the town of “Z.”  Z is a dismal place with little in it that could be described as beautiful – until Nuria, an ice-skater who has through no fault of her own run afoul of the Ice-Skating bureaucracy.  She is marooned in Z, the omega, seemingly, of Spain. 

But Enric Rosquelles comes to her rescue.  He is short and fat and the casual reader may think it is because he is that he doesn’t seek a romantic relationship with Nuria, but Nuria, and the Skating Rink are Z’s striving toward something beautiful – and Rosquelles is Z’s agent.  The rink, though located in a Kafka-like Castle is beautiful in the midst of the never-to-be-completed stadium.  Rosquelles works with Nuria, becomes her trainer, and strives to enable her to make the Spain’s Olympic team. 

Second in importance after Rosquelles is Remo Moran, a self-made successful businessman.  In addition to a chain of jewelry stores and a restaurant, he owns a Camp Ground.  He too has an interest in Nuria, but his interest is physical.  Though Moran writes novels and ought to be more interested in beauty, he isn’t.  He and Nuria become lovers.  Eventually Rosquelles finds out, but the discovery doesn’t deter him from his dream of maintaining the skating rink in order to prepare Nuria to make the Olympic team.

Moran’s Camp Ground has ongoing significance.  We see it through the eyes of Gaspar Heredia, whom Moran hired to be one of the camp-ground guards.  He falls in love with Caridad who says little but follows the authoritative middle-aged opera singer, Carman, about.   Carmen is given coins as she walks about Z singing arias.  She and Caridad sometimes go to the Palacio Benvingut where they learn of the Skating Rink, something Rosquelles hoped to keep secret until Nuria made the team.  Carmen attempts to blackmail Rosquelles, and is almost immediately murdered – on the ice in the middle of the Skating Rink.

This happens late in the novel and anyone who has spent time reading detective fiction may be excused for thinking this a murder mystery, but it isn’t.  Rosquelles is arrested and Nuria loses her chance to make the team and while Rosquelles is initially accused of the murder he is not prosecuted.  We learn in the last few pages that it was “the Rookie,” one of the bums who hangs out in the camp ground, who killed Carmen, and he doesn’t even know why.  Moran hears the Rookie’s confession, but it isn’t clear that he intends to turn him in. 

We can see the probably-insane Rookie as a force of Z as Z strives toward beauty.  Had the Rookie been cleverer he would have killed Carmen elsewhere, but doing it in the center of the skating rink made a primitive statement.  Surely we see this and aren’t distracted just because the authorities arrest Rosquelles.  The dream is ended.  Nuria suffers loss of her chance to make the Olympic team, but also another loss.  She is offered the opportunity given in the West to any celebrity, to make money doing interviews but also to make money posing nude for a magazine, and she accepts.  Z’s skating rink and skating star collapse at the same time.

Rosquelles is sent to prison for the embezzlement of public funds.  Rosquelles is not presented as a corrupt man.  The skating rink would have paid for itself in seven years if Z’s bureaucracy could see it.  All they saw was that he had become overcome by an ill-defined passion when he used public funds to build the skating rink.  He didn’t steal for reasons of greed which might have told in his favor.  While in prison he makes friends with the warden and together they write a book on Prison reform.  After that, and probably because of that, Rosquelles is released.  He has lost weight, is now trim and tanned and no one in Z recognizes him. 

The novel ends with Rosquelles asking “Was I tempted to visit the Palacio Benvingut?   Well, the simplest answer would be no, or yes.  To tell the truth, I did drive out that way, but that’s all.  There’s a curve in the highway on the way to Y, from which you can see the cove and the palace.  When I got there I braked, turned around and drove back to Z.  What good would it have done me, going there?  I would only have been adding to the sum of pain.  Besides, in winter it’s a sad place.  The stones I remembered as blue were grey.  The paths I remembered as bathed in light were strewn with shadows.  So I braked, made a U-turn and drove back to Z.  I avoided looking in the rearview mirror until I was a safe distance away.  What’s gone is gone, that’s what I say, you have to keep looking ahead . . .”

I’m tempted to see Rosquelles prison experience as cathartic.  He  was willing to sacrifice himself for the Nuria and the Skating Rink.  By the time he gets out of prison Nuria has dwindled to a center-fold and the Palcio Benfingut, despite its ice rink, has once again been abandoned.  Though slimmed-down and better looking, he won’t try to find Nuria.  All that is behind him.  “What’s gone is gone.”  Remo Moran wonders if it isn’t time for him to move away from Z.  The camp-guard Heredia and his girl friend Caridad now have enough money  to leave Z and go to Mexico.  But what of Rosquelles who has “to keep looking ahead”?  Don’t worry about him, Bolano would probably tell us.  He is extremely talented and is sure to find something to do – but it won’t be another quest for beauty.

 

Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas (2)

The second half of this “novel” is good, but I had a few problems with it here and there.   Beginning with “Speculative and Science Fiction” he writes several vignettes about U.S writers.   They are clever but not as impressive as when he writes about characters in Argentina or Chile.   He doesn’t have a solid block of U.S. vignettes – as if to indicate that we are all (South and North America) one screwed up entity.  The U.S. writers J.M.S. Hill (who writes science fiction) and Zach Sonderstern who wrote a “Fourth Reich Saga,” the opening pages of which introduce “a mutant, stray German Shepherd with telepathic powers and Nazi tendencies.” 

But the fourth novel (of the Fourth Reich saga) is entitled The Crystal Cathedral.  Did Bolano know there was an actual Chrystal Cathedral in Orange County California?  Surely, he did for he centers Sonderstern in Los Angeles, but he describes The Crystal Cathedral as being “a story about God, fundamentalist preachers and the ultimate meaning of life.”  Robert Schuller, the founder of the Chrystal (not the spelling used by Bolano’s translator, and presumably Bolano) Cathedral is the very opposite of a fundamentalist preacher.  In fact the fundamentalist preachers, and they are in abundance in Orange County, have been critical of Schuller for being too liberal.  So if Bolano intended something interesting in this allusion, it fell flat – at least for someone who used to live in the very city (Garden Grove) where Schuller.

And to some extent I have the same complaint about his other vignettes about U.S. writers.  His section on “The Aryan Brotherhood” is an example.  The Aryan Brotherhood is a prison gang (in reality and not just in Bolanoity).  The Whites against the Mexican Mafia and the Black Guerillas . . . or more recently the Aryans and Mexican Mafia against the Black Guerillas, but names intending to be intimidating.  This gang has little to do with the German or Italian Fascists.  They like invoking the Nazi image in order to scare those that might challenge them, but do they have anything to do with what Hitler believed?   Don’t be too quick to say “racism,” because Hitler wasn’t a racist in U.S. terms.  His greatest enemies were the Russians, who are “white” and therefore acceptable to the Aryan Brotherhood.  Nazi, after all, stands for “National Socialism.”  Hitler believed the Germans and not a “white race” should rule Europe, if not the world.  I’m sure the real Nazis would have shuffled those Aryan Brothers off to the nearest crematorium if they had encountered any of them. 

The concluding vignette on “Carlos Ramirez Hoffman” was further developed in Distant Star, the story of an Allende assassin who (on orders) kills twin girls, one of whom he is in love with, is a fighter pilot who writes poetry in the sky, and is finally killed by a Chilean assassin (also on orders).  I read Distant Star back in 2007 and so don’t have it vividly in mind, but it was written after Nazi Literature in America; so I assume the story fascinated him so much that he sought to develop it further.  It is 25 pages in Nazi Literature in America and 149 pages in Distant Star. 

The relative briefness of the “Carlos Ramirez Hoffman” vignette gives it a different flavor than Distant Star.  I was reminded of the conclusion of Kafka’s The Trial in a way I was not in Distant Star.  But if that was intended, and I am reluctant to accuse Bolano of “not” intending any allusion I think I see, in what sense was Hoffman or (in Distant Star, Carlos Weider) like Kafka’s Joseph K?  Hoffman/Weider both engaged in violent acts in support of a brutal government; so one might say that they didn’t understand the reality of their situation with the proper (or at least ultimate) reality.  They were not guilty in any clear sense.  They acted as agents of a legitimate government.   So that vagueness is perhaps relatable to Joseph K’s crime or sin which is never defined.   Bolano seems to have some sympathy for him.  In Nazi Literature he (Bolano) pleads that Hoffman’s life be spared, but the narrator of Distant Star, while suitably “horrified,” doesn’t plead for Weider’s life.  But Bolano in Nazi Literature seems more an actor in the death of Weider than the narrator does in Distant Star; which made me think of the men in the pork pie hats who came to execute Joseph K.  Someone unidentified determined that Hoffman, Weider, and Joseph K. should be executed, and so they were.

Is Nazi Literature in the Americas truly “a novel”?  Not in any traditional sense, but Bolano is so good we must let him have his way.   After all it must be the writers who write them and not the critics who review them who determine the nature of the “novel.”   But I’m reminded of the poetry of E. E. Cummings and the novels of Kafka here.  Who could write like them?  No one.  I am also reminded of J. R. R. Tolkein who created a whole world of fictitious beings who have taken on a reality that is still with us.  I’m tempted to reread Distant Star, thus getting his stories in their proper order and determine if I still believe what I’ve written here.

Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas (1)

Rorty in a footnote in his Essays on Heidegger and Others quotes from Byron’s Don Juan, XIII, ii: “Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away;/ A single laugh demolished the right arm / Of his own country; -- seldom since that day / Has Spain had heroes.”

There is no smiling away of German heroism in Heidegger, no “single laugh” in anything I’ve read, but that isn’t true of the Chilean, Roberto Bolano. 

I began Nazi Literature in The Americas wondering what Bolano was up to this time.  He has created a fictitious genre and a series of fictitious poets, novelists and artists, but to what end?  There were Nazis in Chili -- that much is true.  There was even a fondness on the part of many Chileans, indeed many in “the Americas” (Bolano does not restrict himself to Chili) for the Nazis.  But we find no expose – no hint of  the furious malevolence we saw in Emmanuel Faye’s treatment of Heidegger.  In an accumulation of vignettes we often see Bolano “smile.”   His American (largely South and Latin American, but he doesn’t exclude North America) Nazi lovers drift into their affection.  One poet, for example, became a lover of Hitler because Hitler once held her as a baby.  She treasured a photo of that event above everything she owned. 

I don’t mean to imply that Bolano is uniformly humorous – he isn’t uniformly anything.  He seems rather brutal, for example with his  “Silvio Salvatico.”  I noticed before I read the vignette that he was the longest lived of any of Bolano’s “poets” as far as I had read (1901-1994).  Salvatico advocated one outrageous thing after another, and “. . . From 1920 to 1929, in addition to frequenting the literary salons and fashionable cafes, he wrote and published more than twelve collections of poems, some of them won municipal and provincial prizes.  From 1930 on, burdened by a disastrous marriage and numerous offspring, he worked as a gossip columnist and copy-editor for various newspapers in the capital, hung out in dives, and practiced the art of the novel, which stubbornly declined to yield its secrets to him.  Three titles resulted: Fields of Honor (1936), about semi-secret challenges and duels in a spectral Buenos Aires; The French Lady (1949), a story of prostitutes with hearts of gold, tango singers and detectives; and The Eyes of the Assassin (1962), a curious precursor to the psycho-killer movies of the seventies and eighties.

“He died in an old-age home in Villa Luro, his worldly possessions consisting of a single suitcase full of books and unpublished manuscripts.

“His books were never republished.  His manuscripts were probably thrown out with the trash or burned by the orderlies.”

But “Willy Schurholz” is another matter.  Purportedly raised in the 100% German “Colonia Renacer,” and Willy came to think of his childhood as rather like being in a concentration camp.  Bolano tells us that Willy “. . . had what it takes to fail spectacularly . . .  His first poems combined disconnected sentences and topographic maps of Coloni Renacer.  They were untitled.  They were unintelligible.  Their aim was not to be understood, and certainly not to secure the reader’s complicity.  One critic has suggested that they indicate where to dig for the buried treasure of a lost childhood. . . .”

[Skipping ahead a bit]  “In 1980, with the support of Review of Thought and History, he published his first book.  Fuchler, the editor of the review, wanted to write a preface.  Schurholz refused.  The book is called Geometry, and it sets out countless variations on the theme of a barbed-wire fence crossing an almost empty space, sparsely scattered with apparently unrelated verses.  The fences seen from the air trace precise and delicate lines.  The verses speak – or whisper – of an abstract pain, the sun and headaches.”

[Skipping further ahead]  “In 1985, Schurholz, whose fame had previously been restricted to Chile’s literary and artistic circles, vast as they are, was catapulted to the very summit of notoriety by a group of local North American impresarios.  Commanding a team of excavators, he dug the map of an ideal concentration camp into the Atacama desert: an intricate network which, from the ground, appeared to be an ominous series of straight lines but viewed from a helicopter or an airplane resolved into a graceful set of curves.  The poet himself dispatched the literary component by inscribing the five vowels with a hoe and a mattock at locations scattered arbitrarily over the terrain’s rugged surface.  This performance was soon hailed in Chile as the cultural sensation of the summer.

“The experiment was repeated in the Arizona desert and a wheat field in Colorado, with significant variations.  Schurholz’s eager promoters wanted to find him a light plane so he could draw a concentration camp in the sky, but he refused: his ideal camps were meant to be observed from the sky, but they could only be drawn on earth. . . .”

[Skipping ahead]  “In 1990, to the surprise of his followers, he published a book of children’s stories . . . the children’s stories were scrutinized with disdain and pitilessly dissected.  In his stories . . . Schurholz idealized a childhood that was suspiciously aphasic, amnesic, obedient and silent.  Invisibility seemed to be his aim.  In spite of the critics, the book sold well. . . .”

“Shortly afterwards, amid protests from certain sectors of the left, Schurholz was offered the position of cultural attaché to the Chilean Embassy in Angola, which he accepted.  In Africa he found what he had been looking for: the fitting repository for his soul.  He never returned to Chile.  He spent the rest of his life working as a photographer and as a guide for German tourists.”

COMMENT:  I begin each Bolano novel expecting to dislike it.  Who writes like Bolano?  No one.  He writes nonsense as though he is doing journalism or literary criticism.  And yet I am inevitably surprised to discover that he has created something . . . it would be a disservice (as well as an impossibility) to attempt to reduce what Bolano does to what that something is.  To borrow Heidegger – or perhaps Rorty – one can see Bolano writing of one aspect of Chilean (and American) history thus far.  What we find isn’t an “essence” (Heidegger, by contrast, seems to come close to describing the “dead serious” essence of the German spirit), but something of this history – the naïve attraction of Chileans and others for the Nazis.   Heidegger wouldn’t laugh at this, but we can, and because we (of the Americas) can, perhaps we have given up, or are in the process of giving up our ability to produce heroes.  One thinks of Nietzsche’s “last man.”  Nietzsche, and Heidegger after him, don’t find this “last man” humorous.  But Bolano often does. For Bolano the last man isn’t an untermensch in Nietzschean or Heideggerian terms.  He isn’t subhuman or uninteresting.  Bolano’s poets are uniformly untalented.  There isn’t a Holderlin among them, and the “literary salons,” “fashionable cafes” and literary publications don’t give evidence of caring.  Perhaps we can group all of these Bolanoen characters together and conclude they are “last men,” but Balano would deny that they are uninteresting.  They are worthy of our interest and laughter –  when Bolano describes them to us.

Bolano: The Desperate Reader

I have not found, although I must confess to not having engaged in a desperate search, a review of Bolano’s The Savage Detectives. I found plenty of “reviewers” who said, “oh what a wonderful book” and left it at that. Why is it wonderful? What’s good about it? They don’t say. Well I’ll say a little bit. I can’t say anything all-encompassing because his book is so episodic, but I can say a few things about some of the episodes. The following from pages 184-5) purports to be something said (I’ll only quote what I consider to be the meat of it) by Joaquin Font who is incarcerated in a “Mental Health Clinic” near Mexico City:

“. . . Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience of the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot (Pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. Second: he’s a limited reader. Why limited? That’s easy: because he can only read the literature of desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who’s unable to read all the way through In Search of Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain (a paradigm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Miserables or War and Peace. Am I making myself clear? Good. . . Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or later they’re exhausted! Why? It’s obvious! One can’t live one’s whole life in desperation. In the end the body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up by turning away from books. Inevitably he ends up becoming just plain desperate. Or he’s cured! And then, as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly – as if wrapped in swaddling clothes, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives – he returns, as I was saying, to literature written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what’s called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood. And by that I don’t mean that once someone has become a cool-headed reader he no longer reads books written for desperate readers. Of course he reads them! Especially if they’re good or decent or recommended by a friend. But ultimately, they bore him! Ultimately, that literature of resentment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs, doesn’t pierce his heart the way a calm page, a carefully thought-out page, a technically perfect page does. . . .”

COMMENT:

Font doesn’t go into detail about the “literature of resentment” although the reader could probably glean what Bolano thinks it is from other parts of The Savage Detectives, but just looking at what is here, we do know there was a rash of suicides in Europe, primarily in Germany, when Werther was first published. Werther committed suicide for love and this was deemed so beautiful by young men that many of them followed suit. This is indeed age-related. I haven’t read statistics on this matter, but probably not many older people committed that sort of suicide: reading The Sorrows of Young Werther and being so struck by the beauty of it that they committed suicide as well. I read Werther when I was young but was probably too cynical (having served a hitch in the Marine Corps before entering college) to even understand why Werther would do anything so idiotic.

I don’t feel that Joaquin Font, with the single mention of Werther, adequately describes the sort of literature that appeals to desperate people. I agree with Font that the sort of person who would commit suicide after reading Werther is idiotic, but is he desperate? Font hasn’t demonstrated that. He describes more completely the sort of books a desperate person could not read; although I’m not sure Proust’s multivolume In Search of Lost Time should be on this list. There are many reasons besides desperation for not making it all the way through this collection of novels. I must confess that I made it only through two and a half of them and the reason I gave up wasn’t desperation.

I did read The Magic Mountain and enjoyed it, but I wasn’t young when I did so; so that wouldn’t count. Les Miserables was a novel forced upon us in High School. We didn’t make it all the way through the novel during class and I was never inspired to compete it. I don’t recall that desperation entered into it. I didn’t like the novel at the time and have never been sufficiently inspired to finish it, but maybe this is along the lines of what Font means. Perhaps I was desperate in some way and so incapable of reading Les Miserables. The only “desperation” I recall was the desire to complete High School and get on to something else – joining the Marine Corps as it turned out. I did read War and Peace when I was in my early 20s; so perhaps I wasn’t terribly desperate.

What sort of literature might suit the desperate reader? What came at once to mind when I asked myself this question, was Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. I can recall being stunned by that volume. I had never read anything like it. I read a review some place and went out at lunch from work and bought it and then sat on a bench some place and let her poetry hammer me. Plath was desperate when she wrote those poems. She committed suicide shortly after the last of them. Years later when I tried to read them I didn’t feel the same impact. I recall that I read Plath during my Leftist phase; so perhaps I was interested in reading that sort of literature. Resentment is a part of what made Plath’s poetry so powerful. Her resentments were personal rather than against “the system,” but perhaps it didn’t matter.

I was interested in Muck-Raking literature at one time. I read many of the Classics of early American anti-Capitalistic literature. They embodied resentment against various parts of the Capitalistic System: The Octopus, The Jungle, and The Brass Check come to mind. I also read Jack London’s The Iron Heel, which was pretty poor literature. Maybe London was one of the steps I took in eventually rejecting the “literature of resentment” if that is what it was. Although I don’t feel that I’ve changed in regard to disliking the same things that Norris and Sinclair disliked. It isn’t that I’ve changed in that regard. It is that Capitalism turned out to be more malleable than Marx gave it credit for. The sins and crimes that the muckrakers publicized have been punished and corrected, more or less. Workers and lower classes of today don’t suffer to the extent they did back when the Muckrakers wrote. What Capitalism has become, Liberal Democracy, is better than anything else out there. The Media is still looking for Muck to rake up, but it isn’t the same.

In thinking about the modern penchant of the media, looking for muck, I recalled reading, perhaps in Sir James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bowl, about the religions of primitive peoples. Typically they had rituals, certain things that they did and said over and over. They felt compelled to do them and thought it would be a great sin not to do them, but they couldn’t recall the origin of their rituals. The same thing might be said of the modern media. I wonder how many modern journalists have read the great Muckrakers of the past like Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair. Do the moderns have the same motives? I don’t see how they could have. The things those muckrakers criticized have been fixed. So what are their motives? Whatever they are, I suspect they have more in common with those of primitive people than with those of Norris and Sinclair.

Bolano's By Night In Chile and the Wizened Youth (4)

I finished the novel and in retrospect it seems more like Kafka than Joyce – perhaps somewhere between Kafka’s The Castle and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. That’s just an impression.

The “wizened youth” image is clever. It is himself when he was young, but he now calls himself Father Ibacache – when he visits Maria Canales whose castle is in disrepair and soon to be taken from her. No doubt I should read this again with the idea that the Wizened Youth is Ibacache himself . . . but not Ibacache exactly. He is the true being, the one Ibacache prostituted and corrupted, the one Ibacache sinned against.

And do we not all, all of us who are older, have Wizened Youths? Perhaps we can say as Ibacache does that we regret nothing, but how do we fare when we are compared to our youthful ideals. We were once beings who had yet to do anything in the world, but we dreamed and planned and intended to do things, idealistic things, perhaps great things. How did we do? Does our Wizened Youth like Ibacache’s shout at us and accuse us? What are these shouts and accusations? That we have not done as we said we would. That we have not persevered in our ideals. That we have compromised and rationalized the choosing of something else.

Perhaps I always knew I had a Wizened Youth. Way back when he was a real youth and not yet wizened, he sat in a Sunday School class and heard the story of Solomon. He thought Solomon’s prayer for wisdom was wonderful and he too prayed that prayer. I don’t think the Wizened Youth can criticize me in that regard – or can he? I have persevered in study and even thought often of that long ago prayer. As to the achievement of wisdom itself. . . how can the Wizened Youth rail at me about not having achieved it when it is beyond my control? I can study and even reason from what I study, but can I stop at some point and declare myself wise? Or not stop, perhaps, but believe myself wise? I haven’t managed either of those things.

If we move into the realm of religion, and Father Ibacache was after all a priest, even if only in Opus Dei, then wisdom is not our own but Christ’s. He has been made unto us wisdom. Yes, I believe that, but that is way too abstract for the present world. If you go to churches you will hear Jesus words repeated over and over, read over and over, but who can put his words into their own? Who can encounter a Maria Canales or Pinochet or Mr. Raef and Mr. Etah and exemplify wisdom? When the breeze picks up and we don’t hold the rudder just so, or perhaps pull in the main or jib sheets at the right time and in the right way, we may go into irons, and if in irons we are confused. Where is our wisdom then? Jesus has been made unto us wisdom, but what happens when we haven’t handled the boat quite correctly and we are in irons? I look about and the Wizened Youth is just as confused as I am. He didn’t shout at me do this or do that when I was coming about. He didn’t say go on as before, don’t tack. He waited to see what I would do. Or perhaps it didn’t really matter to him. I could do as I liked. I could go into irons or not. Eventually I would catch the wind again and go someplace. What did it matter? It didn’t impact the Wizened Youth.

Our Western Civilization has a Wizened Youth. He shouts and rails at what we have become. We try experiment after experiment and he shouts and curses, but we don’t listen. He knows nothing about Socialism or Welfare States. He is idealistic and devout. He is a Renaissance Man, every inch an individual, and we have become herds of cattle, jostling against one another in subways and if thunder should occur or lighting crash, then we may very well be trampled.

Bolano's By Night in Chile (3)

Here is another interesting section from Bolano’s By Night in Chile, pp 81-2. The activities of the priest in this section reminds me of a friend from Argentina whom I will not name but will send a copy of this note to. This priest who is making his death-bed narration, perhaps “confession” is a better word, but he isn’t confessing to another priest so I’ll call it a narration. Also, he doesn’t feel he has anything to confess. He stands behind everything he did and regrets nothing. But he is sounding more and more, the further I read, like one of the fascists or right-wingers Bolano satirizes. Bolano was a socialist and this following section covers the period of the Socialist Allende’s presidency. We can read what this Opus Dei priest, father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix does after he learns of Allendes victory:

“When I got back to my house I went straight to my Greek classics. Let God’s will be done, I said. I’m going to reread the Greeks. Respecting the tradition, I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and then a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episodes of the soap opera The Right to be Born were broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochos of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stesichoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilena and Anakreon of Teos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favourites), and the government nationalized the copper mines and the nitrate and steel industries and Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize and Diaz Casanueva won the National Literature Prize and Fidel Castro came on a visit and many people thought he would stay and live in Chile forever and Perez Zujovic the Christian Democrat ex-minister was killed and Lafourcade published White Dove and I gave it a good review, you might say I hailed it in glowing terms, although deep down I knew it wasn’t much of a book, and the first anti-Allende march was organized, with people banging pots and pans, and I read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, all the tragedies, and Alkaios of Mytilene and Aesop and Hesiod and Herodotus (a titan among authors), and in Chile there were shortages and inflation and black marketeering and long queues for food and Farewell’s estate was expropriated in the Land Reform along with many others and the Bureau of Women’s Affairs was set up and Allende went to Mexico and visited the seat of the United Nations in New York and there were terrorist attacks and I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the rivers and plains, the winds and the plateau that traverse the time-darkened pages of Thucydides, and the men he describes, the warriors with their arms, and the civilians, harvesting grapes, or looking from a mountainside at the distant horizon, the horizon where I was just one among millions of beings still to be born, the far-off horizon Thucydides glimpsed and me there trembling indistinguishably, and I also reread Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (whom one cannot read too often), and there were strikes and the colonel of a tank regiment tried to mount a coup, and a cameraman recorded his own death on film, and then Allende’s naval aide-de-camp was assassinated and there were riots, swearing, Chileans blaspheming, painting on walls, and then nearly half a million people marched in support of Allende, and then came the coup d’état, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Mondeda and when the bombing was finished, the president committed suicide and that put an end to it all. I sat there in silence, a finger between the pages to mark my place, and I thought: Peace at last. . . .”

COMMENT:

Is this not what intellectuals sometimes do, especially intellectuals who don’t enjoy rubbing elbows with ordinary people? There is a political upheaval; so begin a reading project or work on a book. I recall in War and Remembrance, Aaron Jastrow puts himself, his niece and her son in danger when he can’t turn away from his book project as the Nazis advance. The priest isn’t in that sort of danger, and neither am I after Obama’s victory, but when something of an unpleasant political nature occurs, we take the opportunity to engage in literary projects.

Interestingly, I only learned from Wikipedia’s bio that Bolano was a Socialist and supported Socialist projects. I have seen no evidence of that in his writing thus far. One might argue that the piece above supports a Socialistic position in that it satirizes this priest who reads the classics until Allende is forced to commit suicide, but the Allende activities in this section aren’t described in such a way that we can see anything good in them. If he intends to satirize the non-Socialist position here, I can’t see it.

But yes this Opus Dei priest who believes in common work does no work while but while the people are fighting back and forth during the Allende presidency. He escapes from this time of trouble into the Classics, a class of literature remote from his difficult times. Looking for application, wondering if Bolano would accuse me of a like activity for abandoning the discussion of foreign affairs to read his novels, I think he might. And yet I haven’t given up foreign affairs entirely. It is just that I am no longer interested in focusing upon it exclusively. But if there were any anti-Obama riots occurring, I doubt that I could keep my attention focused on Bolano.

I thought about my Argentinean friend, someone who spends huge amounts of time in the classics. I wonder if he is as fast a reader as Bolano’s priest who completed his reading program (in the original languages) in the three years of Allende’s presidency. As far as I know he isn’t escaping from difficulties in Argentina through his study program. Surely all such programs cannot be suspect – can they?

Bolano's By Night in Chile (2)

Here is father Sebastian Urrutia reminiscing about his past while dying on page 54-56 of By Night in Chile:

“. . . and then I was walking alone through the streets of Santiago, thinking of Alexander III and Urban IV and Boniface VIII, while a fresh breeze caressed my face, trying to wake me up properly, but still I cannot have been properly awake, for deep in my brain I could hear the voices of the popes, like the distant screeching of a flock of birds, a clear sign that part of my mind was still dreaming or obstinately refusing to emerge from the labyrinth of dreams, that parade ground where the wizened youth is hiding, along with the dead poets who were living then, and who now, against the certainty of imminent oblivion, are erecting a miserable crypt in my cranial vault, building it with their names, their silhouettes cut from black cardboard and the debris of their works, and although the wizened youth is not among them, since in those days he was just a kid from the south, the rainy border-lands, the banks of our nation’s mightiest river, the fearsome Bio-Bio, all the same I sometimes confuse him with the swarm of Chilean poets whose works implacable time was demolishing even then, as I walked away from Farewell’s house through the Santiago night, and continues to demolish now, as I prop myself up on one elbow, and will go on demolishing when I am gone, that is, when I shall exist no longer or only as a reputation, and my reputation resembling a sunset, as the reputations of others resemble a whale, a bare hill, a boat, a trail of smoke or a labyrinthine city, my reputation like a sunset will contemplate through half-closed eyelids time’s little twitch and the devastation it wreaks, time that sweeps over the parade ground like a conjectural breeze, drowning writers in its whirlpools like figures in a painting by Delville, the writers whose books I reviewed, the writers whose work I criticized, the moribund of Chile and America whose voices called out my name, Father Ibacache, Father Ibacache, think of us as you walk away from Farewell’s house with a dancer’s sprightly gait, think of us as your steps lead you into the inexorable Santiago night, Father Ibacache, Father Ibacache,, think of our ambitions and our hopes, think of our mute, inglorious lot as men and citizens, compatriots and writers, as you penetrate the phantasmagoric folds of time . . . .”

COMMENT:

Surely we must read this as poetry if the translator Chris Andrews has not improved upon the original. The dying priest Sebastian Urrutia is also Ibacache, a pseudonym he adopted for his critical works. He was Sebastian Urrutia when he wrote poetry, but Ibacache when he criticized the poetry of others. He comments at one point that his reputation as Ibacache became greater, perhaps much greater, than his reputation as the poet Sebastian. I’m a little surprised that the poets calling after him in the above poetic sequence call him Father Ibacache. If it was his critic-pseudonym then how would they know he was a priest. He was never Father Ibacache, but in his dying meanderings to be Father Ibacache, watching over the reputations of his flock (or perhaps merely destroying them) is perhaps fitting.

The “Wizened Youth” is someone who haunts his dreams and we have yet to learn who he is or why the priest is afraid of him.

His comments on reputations is provocative. His own reputation as a critic resembles “a sunset” contemplating “through half-closed eyelids times little twitch and the devastation it wreaks, time that sweeps over the parade ground like a conjectural breeze, drowning writers in its whirlpools like figures in a painting by Delville. . . .”

Delville was a Belgian symbolist painter who lived from 1866 to 1953. Here are some examples of his paintings: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Delville&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title

Is Father Ibacache here feeling guilt over having devastated the reputations of the poets who called after him to think of their ambitions as he penetrated the phantasmagoric folds of time; which I take to mean that they considered him so far above them (as he considered himself far above them), a critic so far above mere poets, that he was considered almost a god by them. He blames time and not himself for the destruction of their reputations, those long dead poets who now want to build a crypt in his mind.

Earlier he says he regrets nothing; so if he was being accurate, he doesn’t here regret the reputations he ruined, if he along with time helped ruin them. Even earlier on page 2 he describes meeting his mother after he became a priest: “. . . my mother kissed my hand and called me Father or I thought I heard her say Father, and when in my astonishment, I protested, saying Don’t called me Father, mother, I am your son, or maybe I didn’t say Your son but The son, she began to cry or weep and then I thought, or maybe the thought has only occurred to me now, that life is a succession of misunderstandings, leading us on to the final truth, the only truth.”

He doesn’t like Jesus say “why do you call me good, there is none good save the Father.” Instead he says “Don’t call me Father.” “I am the son.” But perhaps his memory was revised later on and he only became “the son” after he became the critic Ibacache.

Balano's By Night in Chile (1)

I’ve begun reading Roberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile. Unlike Bolano’s priest, Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix who can remember events and the scenery, tastes, sounds, and impressions of long ago in amazing detail, I must write them down soon after I encounter them or I’ll forget.

I am encountering something I have come to expect in Balano, long lists of literary figures. I see on the back of this book that the London Times Literary Supplement calls it “Bolano’s intelligent indictment of Chile’s literary elite . . .” But it is obvious that Balono spent huge amounts of time studying his fellow Chilean writers as well as other Latin American and European writers. He knew what it was like to join “Visceral Realists.” No doubt there is a stinging indictment of someone’s “literary elite” in The Savage Detectives as well but it isn’t coming across that way to me.

Balano is never heavy handed, but in The Savage Detectives the reader can’t escape the understanding that the “Visceral Realists” is going to make no impact on Mexican literature. But does Balano intend to indict the “Visceral Realists” or is his treatment a nostalgic longing. Perhaps none of the groups like this one amounted to much, but there was a camaraderie that they enjoyed, friendships that developed, and maybe one or two of them went on to gain a deserved reputation – long after no one not in it could remember the Visceral Realists. Is Bolano part of some school? I haven’t read mention of it. He does seem to have been impressed by the “stream of consciousness” style Joyce popularized, or perhaps merely the “interior monologue” style which can hardly be credited to anyone, unless it be Shakespeare. But Bolano’s priest is no Hamlet. Perhaps he, and Bolano himself, is a bit like Dante describing the various realms of purgatory (not the Inferno nor Paridiso) that he has travelled through, replete with long lists of the people he has encountered.

Bolano wasn’t so dedicated to his craft that he gave his life for it as perhaps Hart Crane did if he indeed leaped (as opposed to being thrown) from the aft end of a ship. Perhaps Crane realized that he would never be a great poet and had done as much as he could bear. But Bolano suffered liver failure as the result of Hepatitis C contracted while sharing needles many years earlier during his drug-using days. He was on a liver-transplant list. He didn’t want to die so young – 17 years older than Hart Crane, however.

Bolano's The Savage Detectives

I’ve given up on this novel more than once, but I have managed struggled up to page 170. I knew people like the ones Bolano is writing about, people who wrote poetry or worked on novels that few read or cared about. Although it would seem that in Mexico, Chile and Argentina more care about them than here in the U.S. – or perhaps it is just that our literati is more spread out, that part that isn’t running the small magazines for the Politically Correct, but then they are probably spread out too. Actually, before it became politically correct, it was rebellious – like the beats, the dropouts, and all those who opposed “the system.” So what do those in the little magazines who are saying things the system (which is synonymous with the Leftist Media)is also saying think? Never mind. Don’t tell me. I’m not that interested.

Eons ago I resolve to read all the great novelists, poets, and playwrights. I liked quite a lot of what I read, but I dutifully plodded through things I didn’t. That was even after I abandoned my plans for entering academia. I was never interested in travel. Why go off and look at something when you can read what truly perceptive writers wrote when they studied it. Maybe I’m not all that much into “looking” since my eyes went a wee bit bad – and then after I had the cataracts replaced with plastic lenses I was too set in my ways.

So when Jacinto Requena tells his little story (pp 165-170) about his pregnant girlfriend Xoxhitl and of how most of the “Visceral Realists” have decided to leave Mexico for Europe, he concludes “I’m not leaving Mexico.” The thing is, no one cares about the Visceral Realists. They concocted what they called a school of poetry, but it was more like a club – a group of people who got drunk together, slept with each other (including with the same sex, some of them) read poems to each other and talked into the wee hours about poetry, poets, novels and novelists. Some of them were also painters, but no one earned a living; although some got money presumably from parents, and some stole.

Where did I know such people? I knew a few in college who sounded a bit interesting when we talked after class, but they typically didn’t make it all the way to the end of a semester. I knew a few at the docks, where I worked part time while attending college, and I knew several in aerospace. I wasn’t in to begging or stealing so I decided to work for a living; which cut me off from my Visceral Realist friends who mostly talked about what they were going to write – aside from a very few poems; which I didn’t think were very good.

And we were all “rebellious” in those days, but what we rebelliously thought back then is politically correct now. Perhaps some of those I once knew settled more substantially into some of that. One of my Visceral Realist friends, Ken Hackney, who was laid off from McDonnell Douglas for not showing up for work often or sober enough, borrowed $50 from me years ago so he could travel from California to Kansas – or Missouri, to edit a small newspaper. Perhaps he, if he is still doing that, is churning out politically-correct editorials.

As for me, I never left Mexico – so to speak.

Lawrence Helm

San Jacinto, CA.

Bolano's Gaucho & Distant Star

From a note I posted elsewhere on 11-24-2007. Someone found it and sent me a note to this blog about it. See comments below:

Today I received Borge’s A Personal Anthology and read “The South.” After having read Bolano’s The Insufferable Gaucho, “the South” was a disappointment. Yes, Bolano must have used the story as an outline, but not merely that. I suspect he found “The South” insufferably short with too many important loose ends left to the imagination or more likely the perplexity of the reader. Dahlman remains a puzzle which Bolano plausibly explains.

What can Dahlman’s motive be for going out to die other than the precedent set by his maternal great-grandfather who died gloriously from an Indian spear? But don’t we all have great-grandfather’s who died gloriously from an Indian spear – so to speak. Let me think . . . I have a great-grandfather, Schyler Helm, who was a Sergeant working in the Engineers in one of the Northern armies. Actually I don’t know how he died. I do know that he used his mustering-out pay to buy a plot of land in Iowa. Pretty disappointing that – someone choosing to live in Iowa – that strikes me as almost like dying – can’t call it glorious I suppose.

I had another great-grandfather who was mustered out with dysentery – not terribly glorious that, now that I think about it. He lived in a small town in Illinois– and other ancestors who were in the Civil war. Surely some of them must have died gloriously . . .

I know a private William Matthews on my mother’s side who was captured by the British in the War of 1812 – that, I suppose, couldn’t count as glorious either – more like an interesting adventure – unless he was tortured and he probably wasn’t – why would the British torture a private? Anyway, I can’t say that I was influenced by any of them, and maybe I’ll have to retract my earlier statement. Had one of them died gloriously like Dahlman’s ancestor who can say how that might have affected me. I might, in a Dahlman frame of mind, have left my base in Kunsan, stolen a jeep and drove up to the DMZ and rushed out to be shot down by 7.62x39 SKS rounds or failing that to throw myself on Chinese bayonets.

Lawrence, an insufferable Marine

t. lief tepper left a note on the blog reading as follows: Lawrence --

Just read Bolano's Insufferable Gaucho and, tacking back to Borges, an old favorite, reread The South. Then googled both and found you and your post. Then this blog.

Would suggest that, having read Bolano first, explained why you didn't see the point of the Borges. And was curious to have an internet exchange with someone, anyone, who's bothered to think about both stories.

Your blog, however, moots that. Still, glad you're open-minded enuf to give works by people like Bolano and Borges a try.

Dahlmann, btw, isn't about to die in The South. And the Insufferable Gaucho is unlikely to live. The 2nd story is an updating of the first. It's about Argentina, and identity, and its connection to mythos. Like our cowboy west. There's more, plenty of enigma to chew over. But the "ungrounded" "homeless" meandering of both heroes is the central parallel.

The knife-point daring of the Gaucho's final act may have whet your sense you'd 'got' what Bolano's prose obviously excited in you. Life and literature, however, is complicated, and there are inevitable disappointments when our presuppositions aren't confirmed by reality. When writers we're attracted to don't share the views we ascribe to them.

The Dow didn't drop cuz Obama got elected, nor did it drop 900+ pointd in one day a few weeks earlier because W. was and is an idiot. Bolano is a fascinating writer, and so, you will find, is Borges.

Use that Marine determination to incorporate lessons without denying reality and charge on, sgt.

Please don't hesitate to delete this post. It was really meant for your eyes only. didn't know how else to email you.

COMMENT:

Actually, t. lief tepper, you weren’t remiss in posting your note to the blog. I didn’t intend this blog to pertain exclusively to foreign affairs and politics. I would eventually have posted motes pertaining to literature. In fact I posted a few poems there already. And If you checked back to the very beginning of the blog you would discover that I was provoked into beginning it as a result of a debate that turned vindictive – about Rhodesian Ridgebacks.

After reading Bolano’s “Insufferable Gaucho” I read Distant Star. I commented at the time: “Bolano has a huge long list of Chilean poets in his Distant Star which I finished this morning – longer than your list of philosophers – everyone in Chile must be a poet. Not everyone wants to publish so he counts unpublished poets as well. They belong to Poetry reading groups, clubs and seminars and they are all happy to read their poems to you. They read their poems out loud and are jealous of the good poets and the handsome ones whom the girls are attracted to.

“According to the writing on the back, this novel was considered great. I’ll have to read some reviews now to see what others thought of it. Coming out of a Negative/Positive consideration I was conscious of Bolano dealing with a lot of negativity, but he does it so engagingly and entertainingly that I forgave him.”

Elsewhere I wrote, “. . . reminded me of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle’s entrance into the Juan Stein’s poetry workshop in Concepcion. Of course Alberto Ruiz-Table wasn’t his real name. His real name was Carlos Wieder and from the activities he engages in described by the narrator (in Roberto Bolano’s Distant Star) I took him to be a serial killer, but after reading several reviews, I now suspect he was an assassin for the Pinochet regime. He was at least a lieutenant in the Pinochet Air Force and disposed of prisoners because there wasn’t room for them in prisons; so one of his jobs was killing. The thing that threw me off – made me think he was an ordinary demented serial killer – was his killing of the Garmendia sisters. Yes they were mildly engaged in subversive activities but so was everyone. It went with being a poet, but if Carlos Wieder killed people for Pinochet, he may well have been sent to kill them. One evidence of that is that even though it became well known that he as Alberto Ruiz-Tagle had killed them, he was never really pursued by the police. He merely changed his name.”

Also, t. lief tepper, I got only to page 147 of The Savage Detectives before bogging down – or finding something more interesting. I can’t recall for sure. As to Bolano exciting something in me, I can’t recall that he did. I just read a lot.