FICTION REVIEWS: 'K-O'

Franz Kafka, The Castle (trans. Mark Harmon) —

There is nothing to prevent a metaphorical novel from being rich, detailed, and compelling. See, for example, Moby Dick. Generally, however, I find them, like this one, cold and inhuman. Of course, that may have been Kafka’s intention here, but if so it does not explain why people have compared The Castle to Pilgrim’s Progress.

The novel is told from the point of view of “K,” who is identified as a “surveyor,” and whose efforts to get admitted to the castle form the narrative. “K” is indeed a surveyor, for I am told that Kafka originally wrote the work in the first person and studiously changed the “ich” to “K” toward the end. (Not that there is an end; Kafka broke off writing in mid-sentence.) “K” has come in the night to the village, possibly on assignment, possibly because he has been sent for, possibly by accident. His access to the castle is immediately blocked by a minor bureaucrat named Klamm (another “K”) whom he can never meet but who in his messages to “K” promises to “keep him in mind.” Gradually we begin to doubt whether Klamm is a real person and indeed the interchangeability of all people associated with the castle is made virtually explicit by the introduction of two other unseen characters, Sortini and Sordini. But actually none of the characters is particularly individualized and all of them speak alike. This too may be the result, accidental or otherwise, of Kafka having originally written the novel in the first person.

Meanwhile, there is so little action that almost any series of events that would take up several chapters in a normal novel is simply told in the second hand from one character to another — and always in the same dreary discursive essay-type prose. (Literature has wonderful examples of novels within a novel; this is the first time I can think of a novel outside of a novel.) I do not intend to be overly critical of the tone of The Castle. Obviously the colorlessness of the environment and the oppressive lassitude of the characters, many of whom are seen reclining or on the edge of sleep, is a deliberate choice of the author’s. (The book was written long before Hannah Arendt invented the phrase “the banality of evil,” but it does have some application here.) Still, because of all of these features -- and possibly exacerbated by the fact that I was obliged to read it in translation -- The Castle is ultimately a tedious, meaningless business.

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis --

Not a novel but an extended short story, this fantasy is what Nabokov calls an "enchantment." Perhaps he is right and that this is the ultimate insight into the artistry of a novelist. But it also underlines the subjective element: each man will be enchanted by his own talisman. For me, even if the intent was pathos and not hilarity, I still see Metamorphosis as a Charlie Chaplin movie featuring large hairy men and an insect.

Franz Kafka, The Trial (tr. Breon Mitchell) –

As in the other Kafka novels that I have read, The Trial is written in a style which is deliberately clinical, almost matter of fact. Whether the incidents are funny or grim, the reader is expected to figure out for himself. And although the story – and the supposed trial – takes place over the period of a year, it is told so succinctly that in many respects it resembles an official report.
On his 30th birthday, Josef K, a bank official in an unnamed European city, wakes up in his rooming house to find himself the prisoner of two men. An old woman in the house across the street is watching. (Here I must commit heresy. If the point is to be impersonal and chilling, these guys still seem like the mobsters in "Kiss Me Kate. They are menacing but friendly. They talk to each other about K in his presence while eating his breakfast.) But of course the story does become more serious and bleak at each succeeding step. K is puzzled. “After all, K lived in a state governed by law, there was universal peace, all statutes were in force.” Although this sentence is not intended to be ironic, I believe that there is a certain point of the novel to be found in both its truth and falsity.

But first, the author suggests something puzzling about K himself. The very next thing Kafka tells us about this man is how, as he tries to reason out what is happening, he recalls “a few occasions, unimportant in themselves, when, unlike his friends, he had deliberately behaved quite recklessly, without the least regard for his future, and had suffered the consequences.”
What does this mean? What was the “behavior? What were the “consequences”? Perhaps any normal person in this situation wrack his brain and put forward such feeble memories to explain the mystery of this unexpected menace.

K is brought to an “inspector” in an adjoining room who assures him that he is under arrest but he may nevertheless go to the bank as usual. He does go and returns that evening to wait up late for Fraulein Buerstner, whose room had been used for his interrogation. They had only been nodding acquaintances, but now, late as it is, he acts out the scene of the morning in the same room as she watches him with amusement. It is a comic scene. But his clumsy reenactment wakes another lodger, who stirs behind the adjoining door. (As the novel moves forward, there is a growing sense of witnesses, eavesdroppers, figures in shadows, and spies; indeed K himself takes up the role from time to time.)

The tone changes to doubt and suspicion. Will the girl be compromised? K assures her that she can tell any story to avoid scandal – including that he assaulted her! – and he will back her up. Suddenly, before retreating to his own room, he kisses her passionately, including on the neck “right at the throat.” This will not be the last time that one’s throat is mentioned.

Chapter 3 is dreamlike and unreal, but it reinforces the impression of forces that are fundamentally violent and primitive. K makes his way to a dismal apartment house for his official interrogation, which is conducted in a disorienting, crowded room suffused with increasingly hazy light. (It is worse outside; whenever K is in the presence of these officials, the outside air is so sooty and foggy that they cannot even open a window.) He assumes a condescending posture towards the magistrate. Some in the throng murmur, some applaud, some remain in silence, and in the rear a shrieking man might be raping an indifferent woman. As he walks through the spectators toward the disturbance, the men pull on their white beards, and to K “it seemed as if they were merely forming claws.” (Merely!) And yet, although he scorns it, at every step in the novel Josef K also accepts this “unknown system of jurisprudence” just as each of us does in a dream. In fact, he is mesmerized by it. (Kafka makes it clear that this trial is not the “normal, average trial” which K is aware would occur at the Palace of Justice.)

“[W]ithout knowing the nature of the charge and all its possible ramifications, his entire life, down to the smallest actions and events, would have to be called to mind, described, and examined from all sides.”

Under no compulsion, the following week K returns to the court and finds the hall empty but for the woman. The court, he now realizes, is her home when it is not in use and her husband is a court usher. They speak. The examining magistrate, she tells him, is in love with her and the man who had embraced her the previous week was a student whom she cannot repel because someday he will be powerful. (Judging from this scene and similar unerotic sex in The Castle, Kafka regards sex as a motive like hunger, but it is certainly not linked to love, which appears to be entirely absent from his world.) The woman now pledges herself to K.

“The woman did tempt him, and no matter how hard he thought about it, he could see no good reason not to give in to that temptation. The fleeting objection that the woman was ensnaring him on the court’s behalf he easily brushed aside. How could she ensnare him?”

Now the student abruptly appears, kisses the woman on her neck, and takes her under his arm “with a strength one wouldn’t have expected,” to carry her off to the examining magistrate. K puts his hand on the student’s shoulder, but he “snapped at it with his teeth.” This is all Hobbes and no Rousseau and for me it was a critical moment in the novel because it is where I was obliged to go back and examine the earlier suggestions of brutality. And yet K still does not yet fully comprehend the forces he is contending with, because he calculates that this, his first clear defeat, was “only because he had sought to do battle.” Avoiding battle, contempt of battle, is his method, and it will ultimately be his destruction. The chapter continues with no further reference to the woman or the student.

K is taken to the upstairs law offices and is stifled almost to death by the atmosphere, which however seems not to bother the workers there. Eventually, in a scene which foreshadows the final episode in the book, he must be physically escorted out. Days pass. Leaving work late one night, K hears noise and in a junk room at the bank finds a man flogging the two guards who had arrested him, apparently because of K’s remarks about them at the court to the examining magistrate. K’s effort to negotiate with or bribe the flogger come to nothing when one of the victims screams under the rod. K retreats, again avoiding battle. The next night he looks into the room, time has unwound, and the scene is about to begin again, just as it had the previous night. This time K slams the door and goes away “with his mind a blank.”

In the following chapter K is visited by his uncle, his guardian as a child, who has learned of the trial and takes K to a lawyer who lives in the same menacing suburb where the court is located. The lawyer is ill and attended by a girl, Leni. Lurking in the shadows, the court’s chief clerk is to be found. In the lawyer’s office, K sees a painting of a judge.

“The strange thing was that this judge wasn’t sitting in calm dignity, but instead had his left arm braced against the back and arm of the chair, while his right arm was completely free, his hand alone clutching the arm of the chair, as if he were about to spring up any moment in a violent and perhaps wrathful outburst to say something decisive or even pass judgment.”

This sent me immediately back to the first chapter where I recalled Josef K’s initial interrogation in Fraulein Buerstner’s room in his boarding house. The inspector “had crossed his legs and placed one arm on the back of a chair.”

In fact, posture is suggestive for Kafka. For example, to prepare us for K’s unexpectedly violent departure from Fraulein Buerstner which I have described, he tells us that K, in the midst of the absurd playlet of his arrest, noticed that the girl “was resting her head on one hand – her elbow propped on the cushion of the ottoman - while she slowly stroked her hip with the other.” Later, while at the law office mentioned above, K has noticed a man in the shadows at the doorway, “holding on tightly to the lintel of the door and rocking back and forth slightly on the tips of his toes, like an impatient spectator.” Leni wheedles from K a snapshot of his sweetheart, Elsa,
“caught at the end of a whirling dance of the sort she enjoyed performing at the tavern, her dress still swirling about her, her hands on her hips, looking off to the side and laughing, her throat taut.”

Leni attempts an odd seduction, spreading her fingers for Josef K to inspect the skin between the middle and ring fingers of her hand. The skin extends almost to the top knuckle. “What a whim of nature,” he says. “What a pretty claw.”

I cannot do justice by summary of the next chapter, which describes the futility of the court system which has ensnared Josef K. It is Dickens without the humor. And more than Dickens’s brief personal exposure to the court system, Kafka was a trained lawyer. But I will say that my earlier remarks about K’s unwillingness to confront the savage reality of his situation emerges again when K concludes that “[t]he trial was no different than a major business deal.” How wrong this conclusion is is brought home in the next chapter in which K is so preoccupied at work with his trial, that he ignores a major business deal brought to him by a bank customer. Indeed, to the clear disadvantage of his business life, K leaves work in midday to visit a painter, Titorelli, who, it has been told him, knows about his case. Naturally Titorelli is the painter of the picture of the judge described above. He says he is the court painter. And although he lives in a suburb in the opposite direction from the court where K is on trial, the door from the painter’s “atelier” opens directly into the offices where K had nearly fainted in an earlier chapter. It is Titorelli who explains to Josef K the only three alternatives to conviction: acquittal, apparent acquittal, and prolongation. Whether I am right or wrong to take this as metaphorical of any life under examination, in the novel Titorelli’s explanation of the jurisprudence makes it clear that the three alternatives are the function of how well the accused proves his innocence. And as he goes on, we learn that even these outcomes depend on the whim of a higher court about which no one seems to have much knowledge.

Presently, K discharges his lawyer. The next chapter, I was about to believe, was written on a more realistic level. As part of his job, K is to escort a visiting Italian client through the city’s cathedral. But the client never appears and K is alone in the dark and darkening space when a priest mounts an obscure low-hanging pulpit, barely visible in the blackness. K moves away since he is the only person there and it appears the priest will give a sermon. As he is about to exit, from behind him he hears the priest say through the gloom,“Josef K!” He identifies himself as the prison chaplain and tells K that his trial is going badly. He seeks too much help from women. Perhaps the priest can give advice about how K can live “outside the trial.” But K is deceiving himself, the cleric reveals, and he tells K an extended allegory taken, he says, from the introductory texts to the Law.

This tale of the “gatekeeper” is long and doubtless significant. On this, my first reading of The Trial, I don’t think I have grasped it, although there is certainly a suggestion that the priest himself is something like the gatekeeper in the story. But in fact, both K and the priest then engage in an extended discussion of what is meant by the gatekeeper’s story. Their discussion is highly nuanced and Talmudic, taking every possible inter-pretation of what is meant. Eventually K is overwhelmed by all of the consequences of the now-Protean story as to which the priest has said, “[Y]ou don’t have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary.”

In the final chapter, when K is about to turn 31 years old, two men (far less comic than those in the first chapter) come to his rooms and take him away. A bizarre picture is given. “They held their shoulders right behind his, didn’t crook their arms, but instead wrapped them about the whole length of his, seizing K’s hands below with a well-trained, practiced, and irresistible grip. K walked stiffly between them; now they formed such a close unit that had one of them been struck down they would all have fallen. It was a unit of the sort seldom formed except by lifeless matter.”

It is in this absurd posture that, when Fraulein Buerstner appears walking ahead of them, K and his doppelgangers follow her. But she turns off and they continue to a quarry where K is to die. He is seized by the throat and stabbed in the heart. “Logic is no doubt unshakable, but it can’t withstand a person who wants to live.”

Jack Kerouac, On the Road –

By making “Sal Paradise” the first-person author of this picaresque novel, Kerouac gives himself the latitude to introduce fictional elements to what must be seen as his largely autobiographical recollections of life in the frenzied ambit of Neal Cassady (disguised as Dean Moriarty). Still, it is a novel, and not too badly written at that, pace Norman Podhoretz. Dean is not recognizable as anyone who ever appeared in my life -- or who would have been welcome if he had arrived -- but the character is faithfully sustained through the book and, which is all that is required, is entirely cogent in that world. He is a lifelong delinquent with a literary soul, getting “kicks” from just about everybody and everything that crosses his path except responsibility. He repeatedly flies across the country, coast to coast, on a whim, with empty pockets and in stolen cars, marrying, divorcing, whoring. He is a mental case who uses and amuses Sal, who often accompanies him as commentator and occasional aider and abetter. Eventually, everyone else who appears becomes their willing victim, sacrificed in the fullness of time to Dean’s dreamy fractured logic.

But this is evidently the way Kerouac saw the perfect life -- an illustration of just how far soi-dissant “art” can depart from the rigors of ethical philosophy. But actually it is on the level of “art” that the novel fails as well as succeeds. Because it is simply episodic, On the Road finally becomes tedious by lacking an interesting plot conflict. This is the perpetual curse of the picaresque story, avoided only narrowly in the best of them, The Oddyssey, and otherwise to be encountered in small or large proportions in Don Quixote, the USA Trilogy, The Adventures of Augie March, etc.

Here, probably to escape the genre, the narrator periodically envisions an “old man” approaching him, walking the country as the characters travel in it. Toward the end, he actually encounters this apparition, who turns out to be just another hobo with an ambiguous word of encouragement. By the time I had finished, that was about the way I had sized up On the Road.

            Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler.

 

“Perhaps it was not suitable for a man to think every thought to its logical conclusion.”

 Darkness at Noon is one of the great books of the 20^th Century.

 In fact, it is not exactly a novel. It is a professionally wrought Kantian essay, an analysis delivered in novelistic form, the slight story of a man who achieves some clarity from his ordeal but no redemption. There is no plot. It is the story of an imprisoned man.

 The man is Rubashov, a political prisoner, in the late 1930s. He is in a Soviet prison, though that is never stated. There are occasional incidents, but they do not bring change; they illustrate a process of his thought. If anything, the implication is the oppressive prison of logic — logic, a word that appears on virtually every page.

 Rubashov knows that he will be shot.

 Rubashov is a middle-aged man in his fifties, obviously Russian, and very intelligent. He prides himself on having no “moral prejudices” and able to transcend distractions like sympathy or pity. He is not an anonymous prisoner out of millions caught in the recent purge. He has a fleeting memory of his father’s “estate” and “park,” but early in his life he had become a Party intellectual. In fact, he had been there at the beginning, one of perhaps a dozen “militant philosophers” who had orchestrated “the greatest revolution in human history.” In his day, he had actually met and exchanged pleasantries with the never-named man who had become “No. 1,” the leader whose picture hangs from every wall, including Rubashov’s cell.

 The book’s architecture rests chiefly on a variety of conversations, one or two of them recalled now and then in Rubashov’s memories, others in the form of tapped coded messages exchanged between him and his unseen neighboring prisoner, several extended interrogations, and most important, each of Rubashov’s several conversations with himself — starting as a one-man dialogue, later elaborated by entries in his diary, his realization of what he calls the “grammatical fiction,” and intimations by a “silent partner” — which might be his conscience. Rubishov’s recognition of the “grammatical fiction” is more or less the culmination of these conversations.

 Before exploring that idea, it must first be said that in Darkness at Noon there is no epiphany, no moment of “My God, what have I done.” What the author, Arthur Koestler, has done is to illustrate that Logic, “the acid of reason,” creates its own straitjacket. Its enemy, which Rubashov’s interrogator Ivanov dismisses as “moral exaltation,” is pity which “could not be expressed in logical forumulae — it lay in the realm of the ‘grammatical fiction.’”

 For a starting point, the book begins with three arrests, each arrest of the same Comrade Rubashov, each one in the interwar period of the 20^th Century. The first arrest had actually been no more than Rubashov’s dream (or was it?) of having been seized by German police. The second was the real arrest he had endured in his own country about two years ago, roughly awakened while immersed in that first dream. During one or perhaps both of those first two arrests, Rubashov had struggled with pulling on the sleeve of his nightcoat. And now has come the third arrest, the one which immediately precedes the opening of this story. This arrest has again placed him in a featureless prison cell where most of this book takes place.

 In a reverie in his early confinement, Rubashov recalls an official clandestine interview he had conducted as a Party official in a public gallery of a small town with a young Party member, ardent for the cause but insufficiently informed of the Party line. “The Party can never be mistaken,” Rubashov has to remind him.

             “You and I can make a mistake. Not the Party. The Party, comrade, is more than you and I and a             thousand others like you and me. The Party is the embodiment of the revolutionary idea in                     history. History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her             goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the               drowned. History knows her way. She makes no mistakes. He who has not absolute faith in                     History does not belong in the Party’s ranks.”

As he speaks, he already knows the boy is doomed and will be killed. Perhaps he even arranged the murder.

 But his sermon was not cynical. He means what he has said to the boy. History, implacable and irresistible, and its vicar the Party are inextricably, ambiguously bound. At most, he internally wonders why, in the strictly rational society to which he has devoted his life, history is accepted as “more of an oracle than a science.” After all, for the committed Party member, history (a woman, it seems) “ran on rails” and the Party is always vigilant that there be no dissent or even perceived dissent.

              “. . . The motives of the individual did not matter to her. His conscience did not matter to her,             neither did she care what went on in his head and his heart. The Party knew only one crime: to             swerve from the course laid out; and only one punishment: death. Death was no mystery in the              movement; there was nothing exalted about it; it was the logical solution to political                               divergencies.”

 Rubashov had been taught that, embraced it, had taught it to others. The Party was his “umbilical cord.”  It was a common conviction which “had etched and molded the character . . .  during the decisive years of development.” And so, immediately before he begins to talk to himself, he remembers the doctrine, “Revolutionaries, “should not think through other people’s minds.”

 “Or, perhaps they should? Or even ought to?

“How can one change the world if one identifies oneself with everybody?

“How else can one change it?

“He who understands and forgives — where would he find a motive to act?

“Where would he not?”

 Why has Rubashov been jailed and why will he be exterminated? Yes, from a distance he has been a murderer. Yes, to those outside the Party he would be called criminal.  But this is beside the point and not why he has been arrested. In fact, his crimes do not even concern him very much at all. He thinks back on the Party stenographer assigned to him whom he seduced in businesslike fashion and whom he later betrays with virtually no regret. There was the hapless boy in the gallery whom he had marked for death. But his imprisonment and eventual execution have nothing to do with guilt or innocence in the sense of any positive law. His “crimes” are those of deviation, unconnected to positive law. Publicly, the Party has arrested him because he has recently betrayed “humanitarian scruples and other sentimentalities of that sort.” Technically true, this had only left him with a feeling of “strong uneasiness”; but “he had never doubted the logical rightness of his behavior.” It was infallible.

 It should be added to this that we do not sympathize with Rubashov. Rubashov is always observant and clinical. He calculates that he himself has been directly responsible for the shooting of 70 to 100 people. And he would do it again. “It was necessary and right.” “Must one also pay for righteous acts? Was there another measure besides that of reason?” He has been talking to himself again, half-aloud. And on the common wall, the neighbor taps back, “you will pay.”

 In time, we come to have a better picture of this man. He carries himself with an air of nonchalance and wears a pince-nez which he is constantly rubbing on his sleeve. He has a toothache (probably a metaphor) which comes and goes. He is astute and perceptive, but it is a trained intelligence, a self-training which ironically has imprisoned him as much as his prison quarters. And for all his intelligence, he is not highly complicated and we are never invited to warm to him. His ruminations are tantalizing, but never conclusive. If he is searching for a solution, it never comes.

 The search is always complicated by the perplexing problem of expression, specifically a use of pronouns. Not only in his thoughts but in his communications with his interrogator, the words “I” and “you” and “we” become confused and much of what I have noted about this fascinating book is Rubashov’s struggle to sort out these distinctions and implications. It is after all, his nature to do so. For him, thinking is a “task,” pressing his thoughts to the logical conclusion, “coming to terms with the past and future, with the living and the dead.”

 From his first diary entry, although in it Rubashov refers to himself or the Party (i.e. “we”) in the past tense, it is a point of pride to him that he does not lie to himself.

             “We were the first to replace the 19^th century’s liberal ethics of ‘fair play’ by the revolutionary           ethics of the 20^th century. In that we were . . . right. . . . Our sole guiding principle is that of                 consequent logic. . . . ¶ It is that alone that matters: who is objectively right. . . . For us the                     question of subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong must pay. . . . We know          that virtue does not matter to history. . . . Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against          future generations. Therefore we have to punish wrong ideas as others punish crimes: with                     death. . . . ¶ I was one of those. I have thought and acted as I had to. I destroyed people who I                 was fond of, and gave power to others that I did not like. History put me where I stood; I have                 exhausted the credit which she accorded me. If I was right, I have nothing to repent of; if                         wrong, I will pay.”

And yet the many memories, ruminations, conversations, and confrontations are all eventually befuddled by deception and temptation. Before — and even after — Rubashov recognizes and gives the grammatical fiction its name, he periodically becomes conscious of two recurring opaque phrases: “Die in silence” and “I/you will pay.” Their meaning is never exactly established for him or the reader, but their implications are at the center of the book.

 The words “Die in silence” first appear on a surreptitious note smuggled to Rubashov by the prisoner barber who cut his hair. What does this mean? Was it a commandment? Good advice? Or the answer to a question from the first person singular? Whatever it is, it remains an admonition to the end of the story. As for “payment,” it is never clearly equated with what we call punishment, only with the inevitable consequence of entertaining an idea, such as the hypothetical idea of guilt and who decides what guilt is. Perhaps what the Party means by his guilt, Rubashov reflects, is what he means by truth. As he puts it to himself, his dilemma was that “there was only one revolutionary virtue which he had not learned, the virtue of self-deception.” His interrogator Ivanov calls Rubashov’s consciousness of guilt “moral exaltation.”

 During an early interrogation the prisoner suddenly demands to know why “you people” intend to have him shot. The answer comes back instantly and is right to the point. When Rubashov says “you,” he really means . . . .

                . . . “’[s]tate and Party,’ as opposed to ‘I’ — that is, Nicolas Salmanovich Rubashov. . . . [Y]ou             are convinced that ‘we’ — that is to say, the Party, the State and the masses behind it — no                     longer represent the interests of the Revolution. . . .’ “It was as if [the interrogator] had hit a                     tuning fork, to which his mind responded of its own accord. . . . The individual was nothing, the              Party was all . . . .”

A tuning fork indeed, but not an epiphany, not the road to Damascus, simply the opening of a new path of inquiry and a dull but growing “feeling of uneasiness.”

 The grammatical fiction is the chief reason for my writing this review. It is the essential factor of the book. The author comments that

               “those processes wrongly known as ‘monologues’ are really dialogues of a special kind,                            dialogues in which one partner remains silent, while the other, against all grammatical rules,                    addresses him as ‘I’ instead of ‘you,’ in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his                    intentions; but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation and even refuses to be                  localized in time and space.”

 Passages like this one first led me to conclude that the grammatical fiction and the silent partner were more or less identical. But this turns out not to have been so. The silent partner, which only becomes evident as the book progresses, eventually separates from the fictional confusion of pronouns. The grammatical fiction is a “mental sphere,” unpredictable, insidious, and not necessarily benign. It does, however, like the silent partner, unexpectedly ambush Rubashov when he is “out of the reach of logical thought” and attacks him “with day-dreams and toothache.” It appears when he rubs his pince nez on his sleeve, or when he recalls his past life, or when he notices “the uncontrollable movements of the lips which murmured . . . . ‘I shall pay.’”

 Insofar as he must face physical torment, Rubashov had discovered from his earlier imprisonment that a known physical pain was bearable like a surgical operation –- “for instance the extraction of a tooth.” The principal danger of pain was the possibility of an unknown weapon,

             “which gave one no chance to foresee one’s reactions and no scale to calculate one’s capacity                 for resistance. And the worst was the fear that one would then do or say something which                       could not be recalled.”

In other words, the possibility of not dying in silence. That is the point and those are the stakes.

 To make this point more specific, since Rubashov already knows he will be shot, the Party’s objective, as the interrogator Ivanov puts it, is to determine whether his case will be of the “A” variety, meaning administrative, or of the “P” variety meaning public trial. This is the dead center of the conflict in Darkness at Noon. How will he die?  For the Party, a man of Rubashov’s public eminence must have a public trial culminating in a confession of guilt and error. It would accomplish nothing for him to die in silence. Ironically, therefore, the Party must actually bargain for the prisoner’s cooperation, or trick him into it. For all its immense power it cannot prevent any prisoner from dying in silence.

 God, it must be said, plays no central role in this, but religion does; and so does temptation. Fleetingly Rubashov has envisioned the folded hands of a pieta, a glimpse of which he had caught when lecturing the boy who would be shot, and also the hands of a prisoner he had seen, stretched through the bars when the food was being doled out. “Now I am paying,” he thinks. But insofar as ingrained faith is emphasized, that goes no farther than the Party. To the end of the book, the uncertainty is over how complete the Party’s hold is on this strong man of compelling logic and obvious self-regard?

 In illustration, there are the extended exchanges with Ivanov. This man, who understands Rubashov, frankly acknowledges that with him he is playing the role of a tempter who knows that his victim’s strength is also his weakness. He works by dialog. With no dissimulation he says, “I need you sober and logical.” “The temptations of God,” he points out “were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan” — using mankind and logic, the two poles to Rubashoff’s struggle. The fact is that “One can only be crucified in the name of one’s own faith.”

 But Ivanov’s calculations, effective in their way, are too subtle, too much like Rubashov’s own methods. Abruptly he is replaced by Gletkin, a massive and expressionless Neanderthal, who is yet also the product of that same evolution which Rubashov has taught. Gletkin is

 “the brutal embodiment of the of the State which owed its very existence to the Rubashovs . . . . Flesh of their flesh, grown independent and insensible. . . . One can deny one’s childhood, but not erase it. . . . The Gletkins had nothing to erase, they need not deny their past; because they had none."

 Gletkin is not subtle. In the early hours past midnight he stages a horrifying dumbshow. In his cell, Rubashov is suddenly transfixed by a dead, chilling silence. He taps out a question to the neighboring prisoner. More minutes of silence, then an answer is tapped back, having passed through, one by one, a network of more than a dozen cells: “EXECUTION.” The silence ends: “SCREAMING AND HITTING OUT.” The ritual and its victim then pass his cell and move on. And then every prisoner drums a muffled funeral dirge on his cell door.

Gletkin also delivers his own clumsy temptation: he imposes on Rubashov endless days and nights of ceaseless interrogation. Temptation is now a single word: “sleep.” “It did not use arguments.” It had become a different iteration of “that dumb partner whom he had believed he had already forgotten and who had no business in this room, of all places: the grammatical fiction.” It simply repeated “Die in Silence.” The first person singular, which had remained silent through all these years, “had started to speak.”

 Insidious and not benign, this person supervenes logic. It had been born of the same brain that for an entire lifetime had been commandingly eloquent on the obvious inevitability of History. But the fact is that the silent partner is the weaker force. Rubashov may perceive that there are considerations other than the Party’s line, but whether it is vanity or the consequence of the life he has embraced, he never completes the turn. “The fact is, I no longer believe in my infallibility. That is why I am lost.” He is his own prisoner, the “consequence incarnate of his own logic.” Rubashov’s countless interior reflections —rational, self-analytical, honest —merely frame what might be called the disheartening reality of the life he led, which is

 “the denial and suppression of one’s own conviction when there is no prospect of materializing it. As the only moral criterion which we recognize is that of social utility, the pubic disavowal of one’s own convictions in order to remain in the Party’s ranks is obviously more honorable than the quixotism of carrying on a hopeless struggle." 

 And so at the end Darkness at Noon is a bleak, novelized assessment about the captivity represented by logic and History and vanity. Rubashov eventually signs a sham confession and testifies remorsefully at his own trial which Gletkin tells him will be his last service to the Party. Rubashov would call this “the theory of relative maturity.” He utterly abases himself and tells himself that he is dying in silence. To the court he says,

“I did not make it easy on myself. Vanity and the last remains of pride whispered to me: Die in silence, say nothing; or die with a noble gesture, with a pour out your heart and challenge your accusers. That would have been easy for an old rebel, but I overcame the temptation. With that my task has ended; I have paid.”

 This done, he is led to the prison cellar where, without protest, he is shot in the back of his neck. In that sense, he has “paid.” He did not die in silence. 

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street --

This derivative novel, from the era of World War I America, is about Carol Kennecott, a pretty young woman from Minneapolis, who marries a small town doctor from Gopher Prairie. She is artistic, idealistic, and naive, both more sophisticated than the townspeople and less. For chapter after chapter Lewis tells her story: the stultifying town customs, the small-minded bigotry, the unvarnished reliability of her decent but uninspired husband, her disappointing flirtations with various citizens, motherhood, etc. It is a wretched piece of work. The best scenes are no more than slightly diverting; the worst, painfully amateurish. As for the dialogue, even acknowledging that America, especially rural America, spoke differently then than it does now, it is inconceivable that adults -- never mind the embarrassing attempts at children's conversation -- would communicate in the way Lewis records them. Unlike Garrison Keillor, Lewis seems to have missed the humor, if not the wit, in the Minnesota delivery. This is not insignificant. If you are writing a novel about provincial people living in a boring place, you must take great care to be neither provincial nor boring yourself. Lewis seems not to understand this. Carol Kennecott is no Emma Bovary.

Bernard Malamud, The Fixer, --

Well done, although you can often see the stitching. For me this tale of a man imprisoned in anti-semitic czarist Russia illustrates how patient an artist (by which I mean the author) must be to do his work. And considering the inherent grimness of the subject-matter, Malamud always keeps a grip on his wry Jewish sense of humor. I notice that in certain dream-hallucination sequences, he also employs the present tense, which only Dickens does as well.

Thomas Mann- The Magic Mountain

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (tr. John E. Woods) – It has taken me a long time to finish reading The Magic Mountain and I cannot imagine how long it took Thomas Mann to write it. It surely must have been several years and I cannot doubt that it exhausted him. For example, there are two or three points in the novel where a conclusion of sorts seems to have been reached, where I had the sense that the novelist must have put his manuscript aside just to catch his breath and to decide how he would proceed. When the story picks up again, the tone has changed somewhat and the plot is momentarily adrift. A struggle has been ended (though not won), or players reappear after an absence, or the main character has changed his approach to the comedy presented to him.

Whether I am right or wrong, reading and trying to understand this novel requires endurance and reflection, though I do not mean to suggest that it is an unwelcome effort. But The Magic Mountain is both a rigorous struggle of ideas and a modern metaphor (based on a much older one) of the spiritual clash between the virtues of the ancient world, the Christian alternative, and a dash of utopianism. It also necessarily becomes a contest – an unemotional one, however -- of the spirit and the flesh. It must be read more than once, because it is not didactic and the contests are genuine contests. As one of the characters puts it midway through,

"Either Ptolemy and the scholastics are right, and the world is finite in time and space, which means that God is transcendent . . . . so that . . . the problem of [man's] soul rests in the conflict between what his senses register and what transcends his senses, . . . [o]r conversely your Renaissance astronomers discovered the truth, and the cosmos is infinite, which means there is no world that transcends the senses, . . . the polarity of God and nature is annulled . . . and all human conflict stems from the clash between the interests of the individual and of society as a whole and so the purposes of the state become the law of morality . . . ."

That would make it a clash between freedom and obedience – and a fair contest, as the debate is revealed[1].

Thomas Mann seems to have understood these differences thoroughly. Otherwise, he could not have written such a comprehensive -- and I might say sophisticated -- account of the combatants. He does so most thoroughly in the recurring debates between the freemason Lodovico Settembrini and the unfledged-Jesuit Leo Naphta. Somewhat late in the novel he remarks that "moderation and the golden mean were out of place here, that there was only the choice between extremes." But this soon becomes problematic and in any event it would have been no way to introduce the story.

Indeed, what we learn at the outset is that on the Magic Mountain, a Swiss retreat of tuberculosis sanitoriums, common measurements – especially those of time – are not in effect[2]. There are no real seasons, "merely summer days and winter days all mixed higgledy-piggledy." Young Hans Castorp has come there, not as a patient himself, but as something like a visitor – for three weeks. All of the patients are enervated and apathetic, caused by "something psychological." For many, including Castorp, it is obvious that the atmosphere has made them worse.

"A great many false ideas have been spread about the nature of boredom. It is generally believed that by filling time with things new and interesting we can make it 'pass,' by which we mean 'shorten' it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage. This is not true under all conditions. Emptiness and monotony may stretch a moment or even an hour and make it 'boring,' but they can likewise abbreviate and dissolve large, indeed the largest, units of time until they seem nothing at all. . . . [U]ninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death."

This is a recurrent theme played in a variety of ways. One of the characters, for example, thinks about the nature of music. Its lively measurement, he concludes,

"lends an awareness, both intellectual and precious, to the flow of time. Music awakens time, awakens us to our finest enjoyment of time. Music awakens – and in that sense it is moral."

These are the years before World War I, perhaps beginning a decade earlier, but maybe not. (More than once we are told that "little years" have passed.) The sanitorium is, of course, a place of death, or at least death's tedious waiting room. In fact, the story is more about dying than death itself, at least in reference to the visitors who come for the season to the Platz, the stylish town at the foot of the hospital. Up in the Berghof where Hans Castorp has come to visit his cousin, the residents themselves all have mastered the art of wrapping themselves during their chilly rest period in blankets such that they seem to be mummies -- or perhaps larvae.

The most colorful (and perceptive) of the patients is Settembrini, an Italian gentleman introduced in a chapter called "Satana."[3] His dress is somewhat shabby, but it is redeemed by his considerable moustache and silvering temples. He has a sense of humor. His conversation, easy and youthful, is also glib, often petulant, and sardonic. He appears to be under no illusions about where he is and about every metaphoric implication[4]. He cautions Hans Castorp and his cousin against the irony that flourishes on the mountain "as an intellectual stance." On the mountain it is "a source of depravity, a barrier to civilization, a squalid flirtation with inertia, nihilism, and vice." In some ways Settembrini is portrayed as a noble pagan, one "who sought morality in reason and virtue." Hans Castorp initially thinks of him as a "windbag."

Settembtrini resists the order required of the Berghof patients and it is he who has made the observation about music while a village band is playing on the Platz.

"I have some little regard for my freedom or what is left to us of our freedom and human dignity. . . . I drop by for 15 minutes and then go on my way. It gives me the illusion of independence. I'm not saying it is anything more than an illusion, but who can object if it gives me a certain satisfaction? . . . . . . Yes I am a fancier of music – which is not to say that I particularly revere it – not, for instance, as I love the written word, the bearer of the human intellect, the tool, the shining plow of progress. . . . [I]f you like, let music assume its most high-minded pose. Fine! And then our emotions are inflamed. And yet the real point should be to inflame our reason. . . . Let me overstate my case: my distaste for music is political."

Settimbrini constantly thrusts new ideas and views on Hans Castorp and Joaquim, his much sicker cousin. It is he who eventually brings into focus the Dantean image of the mountain as purgatory. But he is no prophet. He celebrates technology -- "the most dependable means by which to bring nations closer together, . . . leading at last to the brotherhood of nations" -- and he explicitly links technology with morality and Christianity. For Hans Castorp this is blasphemous and in bad taste, but Castorp is also young and "willing to let himself be influenced." And so he continues to listen as Settimbrini narrows his agenda to the overthrow of Austria – which will open the way to universal justice and happiness. Settembrini is a devotee of "the word" – civilization.

Having mentioned Settembrini, "a humanist whose sole concern was this earthly life," I must now also mention his counterpoint, the character Leo Naphta – a diminutive, ugly man of advanced years who rents his rooms in the town – in the same house as Settembrini. Settembrini and Naphta are intellectual antagonists, fire and ice. It was Naphta whom Settembrini had in mind when he cautioned Hans Castorp against the intellectual ironies on the mountain, its inertia and nihilism. Naphta is a converted Jew, now a Jesuit, who was prevented from taking orders because of his illness. He is also a former patient from the sanitorium who nevertheless must remain on the mountain for his health. "Caustic and logical" and a "brilliant Latinist," he supports himself by teaching at the local secondary school. Although he certainly gives the impression of a Christian monastic, he also displays a dash of Rousseau (just as Settembrini – and he – both have a dash of Marx). At one point Mann explicitly compares him to Hans Castorp's cousin Joaquim – whose personality is otherwise much different – because both of them are fiercely loyal to their respective "flag."

The Settembrini–Naphta debates – a long and vital part of the novel – commence in earnest when the topic is "the spiritual possibility of finding salvation in repose" or in "western mysticism" (for Naphta, freedom is "a problem") and the role or possibility of dignity. Unlike Naphta and Castorp, Settembrini is all classical art, a defender of dignity, beauty, and the Good. Whether or not there is a resolution, Hans Castorp tells himself that he simply likes Settembrini better because he means well, even though when the two tempters contend over his soul, Naphta is almost always right.

There are too many other characters in The Magic Mountain to catalog all of them, but some must be mentioned. Director Behrens, manager of the sanatorium, is the widower of a former patient who is buried nearby and perhaps is he infected himself. Settembrini calls him Rhadamanthus (in Greek mythology a judge of the dead). When Behrens comes to examine the innocent visitor Hans Castorp and detects a "muffled tone" in his chest, he cautions the young man that if he were simply to leave the sanitorium as though he were just a visitor, "the whole pulmonary lobe would go, willy-nilly, to the devil." Hans Castorp has a "moist spot."

And yet the condition is relatively mild, leaving Castorp a minor character in the eyes of the other residents. Perversely, the so-called Berghof "aristocracy" is populated by long term patients and the hard cases – even including his cousin Joaquim Ziemssen. Mann lets it be known that Joaquim is Castorp's guide on the mountain[5]. But the upright Joaquim, we also learn, is genuinely concentrated on regaining his health, unlike most of the others on the mountain. The intensity of the cousins' situation is magnified when Behrens conducts an X-ray, looking into each of them. In the darkened room, Hans Castorp peers at his cousin through the slit in the X-Ray machine provided for the purpose. There is sizzling and sparking and the floor trembles -- foreshadowing a later séance. Behrens gives a clinical explanation of what is before them, but Hans Castorp is transfixed by his cousin's pulsating heart. "He was filled with both reverence and terror." When the process is repeated with Hans Castorp himself in the X-ray machine and he is again invited to watch, he finds that he sees that "which no man was ever intended to see . . . .: he saw his own grave."

Coming in this oblique fashion, the passage is successfully grim, abrupt, and significant. But it is not a complete surprise. The death of these people – and especially the death of Castorp, the main character – is what a reader would anticipate by this point. And yet anticipation is not exactly the word because The Magic Mountain is always at arm's length from its characters[6]. Hence, although he is the central actor, Hans Castorp's chief role is always to serve as Exhibit A, unencumbered by the reader's personal affections or antipathy. That his personal fate has come up under clinical circumstances in Behren's laboratory is just right.

This overall detachment from genuine affection for any given character obliges the novel and the reader to share a certain bemusement as things move forward. In the "flatlands" or "plains" from which all the residents originally came, for example, flirtation had been treated with levity and vitality. But here on the mountain "to a far greater extent than down below, there was something inappropriate about the jokes, something to do with chattering teeth and shortness of breath." It seems that life is neither matter nor spirit, but "matter shamelessly sensitive to stimuli within and without – existence in its lewd form," "sensual to the point of lust and revulsion." He develops an emotional fascination for Mme. Chauchat[7], a young married Russian woman, a periodic patient. Across the dining room and its seven tables[8], the only place where he regularly catches sight of her, she glances his way once or twice causing him to whisper to himself, "My God," an expression he comes to use several times. He is only restrained by "Joachim's disciplining proximity."

On Walpurgisnacht Hans Castorp takes advantage of the atmosphere (and his own drinking). He and Clavdia speak in French, in dream-like fashion. He confides to her that love is "an adventure in evil" and explicitly equates it with death, both states being "carnal, . . . the source of their terror and great magic!"[9] She describes him as "a decent, simple fellow from a good family, with handsome manners, a docile pupil to his teachers." (Settembrini, by contrast, has called him a "problem child of life."[10]) He reveals his feelings for her, she is accommodating, and there is a suggestion (not depicted) that he is invited to her room for "one wicked, riotously sweet hour." The next morning Mme Chauchat then abruptly departs the Berghof, leaving a memento with Hans Castorp: her own X-ray photograph which he thereafter keeps in his pocket. This is also the passage in which Mann refers to her as a "guardian angel."[11]

Presently there is another departure. Joaquim, the loyal and decent young cousin, finally perceives that the mountain has not cured him. His duty is to his military career and he abruptly declares to Behrens that he will leave. The director, after a perfunctory demur, turns to Hans Castorp, and says sardonically that he too is actually "cured," assuming that he will follow his cousin. But he doesn't. His own departure, Hans Castorp decides, would be "fraudulent or semi-fraudulent," by which he would desert "the vast responsibilities that had grown up out of his vision of the sublime image, the homo Dei, a betrayal of the hard, exciting duties of 'playing king' . . . ."[12]

Here the novel takes on a different tone and Hans Castorp a different role. The flatlands have lost their tentative grip on him. "For the flatlands it meant a final shrug, the abandonment of any claim; for him, however, it meant freedom finally won . . . ." Hans Castorp has mastered the fear of death out of sympathy with the elements. His near death in a snowstorm becomes an epiphany described in a remarkable chapter called "Snow." And then Joaquim returns after nine months surely to die[13]. And that lengthy chapter called "A Good Soldier" has such significance by itself that it seems that the novel will end there.

But it does not because there will also be another return to the mountain. Interrupting Hans Castorp' new freedom and "his disgraceful management of time in his wicked dawdling with eternity," Clavdia Chauchat reappears unexpectedly. She is in company with Mynheer Pieter Peeperkorn, a wealthy (and ill) elderly Dutchman from Java. As before, Settembrini needles Hans Castorp by expressly referring to Clavdia as Castorp's lost "Beatrice." And indeed her role, rather than simply travelling companion to Peeperkorn, is portrayed as something of a wife who hovers in the background and "monitors" him from a distance. Mann notes that he is her "lord and master."

Peeperkorn is now the focus. A weak reader like me can easily make a fool of himself if he starts looking for metaphors and symbols. And so I am more comfortable dealing just with the text itself, in which several times Mann calls Peeperkorn a great "personality." But how this can be is offered as a mystery. His conversation is maddeningly vague and superficial and yet his "grandeur" effortlessly outshines the competing intellects of the pedagogues Naphta and Settembrini in comparison to whom the tall and "majestic" Peeperkorn is eventually compared to a king -- which even they seem to sense, probably because it does not occur to him to engage with them (or anyone) on an intellectual level. They are both stumped. He is a man of feeling – which he later says is that which makes men divine.

Peeperkorn also "spreads great confusion" over the pilgrim Castorp who does, however, detect in this man a unique fear born of his obsession with honor – and a fear that his feelings may fail him. Hans Castorp ventures his own observation, suggesting to Settembrini that Peeperkorn's "physical dimension" still played a role,

"not in the sense of brute strength, but in another, more mystical sense – the moment anything physical plays a role, things always get mystical. And the physical merges into the intellectual, and vice versa, and cannot be differentiated, and stupidity and cleverness cannot be differentiated. [I]f you are for values, then in the end, personality is a positive value, too, I should think – a more positive value than stupidity or cleverness, positive in the highest degree, absolutely positive, like life itself . . . ."

Hans Castorp makes this observation on the eve of his second interview with Clavdia Chauchat. His innocence and frankness, now less evident than on Mardi Gras, are also now seasoned by what might be called wisdom and recognition. In this conversation she remains as clever as before, but he is in control, he is playing king. He explains that he has been

"forced upward into these regions where genius flourishes. In a word . . . an enhancement, a transubstantiation to something higher . . . . I have been an intimate of sickness and death for a very long time, and even as a boy I borrowed a pencil from you[14] in the same irrational way I did again on that Mardi Gras night. But irrational love is a mark of genius, because death, you see, is the principle of genius . . . and it is also the pedagogic principle. For the love of death leads to the love of life and humanity. . . . There are two ways to life: the one is the regular, direct, and good way. The other is bad, it leads through death, and that is the way of genius."

Mann himself interrupts at this juncture, asking if it isn't true that love is grand because there is "perfect clarity in ambiguity."

Since Mme Chauchat's first departure, Hans Castorp's mission has been to visit dying patients. He does the same now for Peeperkorn, though more in the role of a student. At these times the old man's sentences are neither delivered in fragments nor are they particularly vague, as was his custom in company. But he is dying. During one interview, Peeperkorn's hand shakes so badly that his glass of red wine periodically sprinkles red drops on the sheets. And yet he is absolutely correct when he tells Castorp that he has discerned that he loves Clavdia and that they had been lovers. He also declares that he and Hans Castorp are "brothers."

Starting with the Peeperkorn episode, The Magic Mountain becomes episodic. After Peeperkorn dies (by his own hand) and Claudia again departs from the mountain, Mann re-introduces music in the form of a gramophone purchased for the hospital by Behrens. Hans Castorp is seized by the recording of Aida which causes him to dream of himself as a meadow faun in an exquisite idyll.

"There was no 'defend yourself' here, no responsibility, no war tribunal of priests judging someone who had forgotten his honor, lost it somehow. It was depravity with the best of consciences, the idealized apotheosis of a total refusal to obey Western demands for an active life."

I have only read the novel once, so I reserve judgment as to whether this choppy finish was deliberate, in service of a reason I have not yet detected. On first reading it seems more like the author's exhaustion. By themselves, the episodes are interesting, Peeperkorn being the most significant. But they are of variable interest, none of them as compelling as the earlier struggles between Naphta and Settembrini: specifically, after the gramophone, there is a teenage medium and growing conflict (including physical fights) among the residents of the Berghof. The séance, a communication with the dead, would be a logical culmination in a story of this kind (Joaquim Ziemssen appears) but Mann also observes that such episodes are a "miscalculation," bringing out reluctance and regret in those who seek it. "[W]hat we call mourning is perhaps no so much the pain of the impossibility of ever seeing the dead return to life, as the pain of not being able to wish it." In any event, Joaquim's second coming ends dramatically but on an ambiguous note with no comforting denouement. (This is purgatory, of course, not paradise.)

And we are not done with death. The intellectual contest of Naphta and Settembrini -- inevitably we are told -- culminates in a challenge to a duel. To Hans Castorp's protest that there had been no personal insult, simply a difference of ideas, Settembrini sets him straight. The intellect, he says, is not "too weak to produce conflicts and passions as harsh as those that real life brings with it and that can be resolved only by reaching for weapons." A duel, he says, is the "final arrangement, a return to the primal state of nature." It is what makes a man. The truth of this statement, contrary to all his instincts, staggers Hans Castorp. "[H]e realized that in the end it is only the physical that remains – the nails, the teeth." But at the moment of truth Naphta puts his bullet in his own brain.

The Magic Mountain, even derived as it was from a momentous theological metaphor, is itself not derivative -- and whatever its own metaphor, it is not a strictly theological one and does not take the reader or the author to any recognized paradise. The novel's melancholy and pessimistic conclusion, with Hans Castorp remaining on the mountain without the violence and aspiration of men like Joaquim and Naphta who have been loyal to "the flag" is what stays with me. He lives in "hermetic magic" until, like everyone else on the mountain, he is obliged to return to the flatlands and get lost in the reality of the Great War.

ENDNOTES

1. But at the very conclusion of the novel, Mann notes in passing that the only kind of freedom there really is is "orgiastic."

2. The conventional, chronological concept of time is at work here in novelistic terms: in time, the main character in particular changes. But the message is that which is important is what has been withdrawn from time.

3. This refers to a musical piece by the anti-cleric Carducci.

4. Settembrini quite specifically equates illness with sin.

5. Later their circumstances are reversed.

6. There is almost no humor in the novel -- the reason, I believe, why Nabokov was so dismissive of it

7. Speaking of humor, I don't speak French, but . . . .

8. The number seven occurs repeatedly.

9. But love and death, he later concludes, are irreconcilable, and reason must always yield to death. And yet when alive, "for the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts."

10. And Mann calls Hans Castorp a "child of peace." This is not the end of the subject. Later, Hans Castorp is caught in a snowstorm on the mountain, is in danger of death, and hallucinates a remarkable dream – or epiphany -- of which he says it is "an adumbration of one great urgent concern, which in fullest sympathy I shall now call by its name; life's problem child, man himself, his true state and condition." He has envisioned "a courteous, reasonable, respectful community of men" in whose background, however, there is "a ghastly, bloody feast." The state of homo Dei, he concludes, is "in the middle . . . between mystical community and windy individualism." And the dream, rather than being personal, is "communal," because "the great soul, of which we are just a little piece, dreams through us . . . its own external, secret dream."

11. And in a much later passage, Settembrini comes right out and calls her Beatrice (while referring to himself as Virgil).

12. In the wake of Mme Chauchat's departure, the young man had turned to offering solace to his dying co-patients -- to the universal condemnation of all present.

13. And Mann himself suddenly becomes a character in his own novel. Those who had known him, he says of Joaquim, were both happy and sad. "We looked no one square in the eye, but we assume there were many who felt a certain satisfaction . . . ." This use of the collective personal pronoun actually happens several times.

14. This is a reference to Pribislav Hippe, a schoolmate of Castorp's whom he had looked up to in a particular way. Hippe was nicknamed "the Kirghiz" by the other students because of his high cheekbones and slanted eyes -- features he shares with Frau Chauchat. He once loaned a pencil to Castorp, the only time they exchanged words.

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge --

Autobiographical novels or, as in the case at hand, those generated by a personal incident in the author’s life, are legitimate works of imagination. And yet to me they never seem to have quite the mystery and afflatus of a wholly invented work. Since the reader knows that such books are essentially factitious, they can lead to irrelevant musings and in extreme cases charges that the author has “lied.” But I suppose that a novelist takes his inspiration where he finds it, and so I have no reason doubt that Maugham drew upon and then sedulously disguised some events of his life for the early pages – and maybe the entirety – of this story. He even uses his own name in relation to the opening events, later interspersed with others of which he was a percipient witness, and then candidly admits that he has added his reasonable assumptions about the rest. What he tells us about is the journey taken by an apparently ordinary young American, Laurence Darrell, who has just returned home after fighting as a volunteer in World War I for the Canadians. But what seems ordinary about the young man is just the first impression. He is engaged to an attractive even younger girl from Chicago and has been welcomed back into the community with the expectation that he will take one of several promising jobs that have been offered to him. But he does nothing in particular, declaring to his sympathetic fiancé that what he really wants to do is “loaf.” (Whitman stirs.) Indeed, the engagement to the contrary notwithstanding, he decamps to Paris.

After more than a year, the girl and her mother travel to France staying in Paris with the girl’s uncle, an interesting and elegant character (indeed, the most interesting character in the story) named Elliott Temeplton. Maugham is not exactly dismissive of this eminence of taste and manners, but he evidently sees him as something of a contrast to young Larry whose authenticity is the focus of the novel.
The following description of Elliott reminds me in some parallel way of my late (and eventually dearly missed) law partner Joe Troy:

“He was a snob without shame. He would put up with any affront, he would ignore any rebuff, he would swallow any rudeness to get asked to a party he wanted to go to or make a connection with some crusty old dowager of great name. He was indefatigable. When he had fixed his eye on his prey he hunted it with the persistence of a botanist who will expose himself to the dangers of flood, earthquake, fever and hostile natives to find an orchid of peculiar rarity.”
Elliott has been perfectly willing to assist his niece by introducing Larry to the sophisticated life and manners of Paris. But Larry has essentially ignored him. This is not a rejection of the girl. When she arrives they are as much in love as ever, and Larry even tactfully accommodates himself to Elliott’s parties so that he might be with her. But what he has done for the past year – his “loafing” so to speak – has been to read voraciously, attend lectures at the Sorbonne, and teach himself Greek.

They break off the engagement amicably and 10 years pass. In this period, Maugham learns by third hand of Larry’s tramping though Europe (elaborated by some unlikely details), the fiancé marries Larry’s best friend from home and has children, the depression comes (but Elliott has escaped by selling early), and Maugham comes to Paris to stay briefly in a 200-year-old hotel near the Place Vendome:

“In that [parlor] I lived in the past of the French novelists. When I looked at the Empire clock under its glass case I thought that a pretty woman in ringlets and a flounced dress might have watched the minute hand move . . . . At that bureau a lovesick woman in crinoline, her hair parted in the middle, may have written a passionate letter to her faithless lover or a peppery old gentleman in a green frock coat and a stock indited an angry epistle to his extravagant son.”
Looking like one of the depression’s severest casualties, Larry suddenly appears to Maugham at a sidewalk café in Montmartre. He has been to India and assures Maugham that financially he is actually quite fit but with few expenses. “I had a feeling already that he never took root anywhere, but was always prepared at a moment’s notice, for a reason that seemed good to him on a whim, to move on.”

In fact the novel never follows Larry. It is told entirely in the first person by the narrator, whose personal encounters with Larry, Elliott, and others, occur entirely in Europe and America. And so although I came to the book thinking, from things I heard about it, that it would transpire in India, this is not so. Only at the end is there this segment in which Larry tells Maugham about his years there and his Westernized embrace of Vedanta. As always Larry, is self-effacing, modest, and kind in his story, the picture of an active man always simultaneously at peace. If he was a real person, as Maugham says he was, he must have been terribly attractive individual and it is no surprise that the novel enjoyed some renaissance in the “counter culture” of the 1960s.

But the fact is that it is only barely a novel at all. Were Maugham not so skilled at recounting the details of the characters on the periphery, the story would have no point. Its most memorable scene, the decline and death of the superficial Elliott embraced by the elaborations (and dignity) of the Roman church, is possibly meant as some sort of counterpoint to Larry’s unpretentious and serene contemplation of what he calls the Absolute. And this is followed at the conclusion by the unsolved murder of a minor character who had been entangled in the lives of the more prominent characters. In his coda, Maugham congratulates himself for having told a success story. For me, it was successful in engaging my interest, but it is not much of a novel.

Murasaki, Shikibu, The Tale of Genji –

About a decade ago I was told about this novel, “the world’s oldest,” written as a diversion in 10th Century Japan by a lady of the court. It was recently given to me as a gift and I have now read it in early 2006, almost a thousand years after it was written. I agree that it may be called a novel, as opposed to the epic poems of Europe, with which it shares several features, but it is not interesting to a western reader in any traditional way.

The Tale of Genji begins with a sweet simplicity about a girl of ordinary birth who was so attractive to the emperor that she bore him a child. But this could “become a warning to after-generations,” says the author on the very first page, citing similar instances in China in which such favoritism had caused disaster. I had supposed that a theme was being thus introduced, but this proved a disappointment, for the following story is no more than episodic and not at all thematic.

We learn that the girl soon dies and her son Hikaru Genji, the man of the title, comes to live in the imperial palace near his father who is solicitous to him. But he is not the heir apparent. Instead, the emperor has an older son (kind, quiet, and affectionate) whose mother is the daughter of a most powerful court family. Indeed, the emperor is sufficiently circumspect about that family’s influence and jealousy not to make Genji a royal prince, but rather makes him the founder of a new family. Meanwhile, at the court there is also a young princess, Princess Wistaria, the orphaned granddaughter of an earlier emperor, whom the emperor makes his favorite.

The emperor arranges for Genji to marry Lady Aoi, the somewhat older daughter of another high court official. This makes Genji the brother-in-law of To-no-Chiujio with whom he develops a life-long friendship. Genji’s subsequent story is dependent on these formal and blood relationships. But more important, Genji himself – unlike the other characters who periodically have motives, it is true– has a personality. He is considerate, affable, and well-liked, but not a paragon, because he is disposed to direct his thoughts in “undesirable quarters” leading him to various improprieties which move the story. (I had first written “plot,” but there is no plot.)

Although the novel resembles a Japanese “rake’s progress,” it has a most attractive feature: the characters, particularly those in flirtation, regularly communicate by sending each other (and sometimes reciting) lyrical couplets. Genji is a master of this, but all who use the form betray the serene Japanese appreciation of how their emotions correspond with the natural background (blowing leaves, flying birds, etc.) Here is one I have taken entirely at random:

Since first that tender grass I viewed, My heart no soft repose e’er feels, But gathering mist my sleeve bedews, And pity to my bosom steals.

Early in the book there is an interesting, lengthy interlude in which a group of men discourse on the merits and demerits of women and their various types. It is not bawdy; the discussion instead has elements of the Symposium, the Decameron, and the Canterbury Tales, with a dash of Conrad’s Marlow thrown in. And yet although the conversation starts Genji musing, it has no outward effect, because over the next several chapters we are told of a series of his seductions with little to mitigate them. Soon he compromises a sweet common girl who dies during their night together. Falling ill from grief, Genji visits an ascetic in the mountains where he is enchanted by Violet, a girl of about 10 years who is the daughter of Princess Wistaria’s brother. In time, he makes her his protege. When the girl’s father, ignorant of what has happened, comes to claim her, Genji essentially abducts her and takes her and her nurse to his home. For an Abelard or a Tristan, this would have been the crux of the story. For The Tale of Genji it is an unresolved incident.

Next, he is distracted by the somewhat dim and awkward princess Hitachi or “Saffron Flower.” Through a nurse, he contrives to visit her but discovers that his feelings reside more in the area of kindness and pity for her condition. Back at court, the emperor, having fathered a son on Princess Wistaria, makes her empress and abdicates. This does not displace the heir apparent, but it upsets and embarrasses his mother, for this new son becomes the new heir apparent to her son. Furthermore, Genji is appointed guardian of the new emperor, giving hm a greater status at court. (This episode may be fascinating to historians interested in the customs of the Japanese court 1000 years ago; to me, it was one more lost opportunity for a story.)
Meantime, Lady Aoi, facing her own confinement, is visited by an evil spirit of her enemy, the Lady of Rokjio, during which she delivers a son. Soon afterwards, however, she has a seizure and abruptly dies. Presently, the queen mother’s youngest sister develops an affection for Genji which is unwelcome to her sister. And then another death: that of the ex-emperor, who on his death bed reminds his son and successor to take Genji’s advice in governing. To-no-Tiojio’s father retires from the court, giving new resentful influence to the new Empress-mother. Princess Wistaria, mother of the new heir apparent, now falls into disfavor and retires from the court to become a nun, leaving her young son behind. But Genji, not sufficiently matured at 25, opens a liaison with a girl who was intended to be the royal consort and soon must prudently leave town, with the tacit approval of the court but public disappointment.

He comes to live by the sea at Suma. During a sleep, Genji is visited by his late father the emperor, who tells him he must return to the capital. Other characters have related dreams all of which persuades Genji to leave his exile. He is blown to the shore of Akashi in the company of a priest who has a daughter whom Genji impregnates and who eventually delivers a daughter. But the current emperor, Genji’s half-brother, has issued an edict permitting him to return to the capital. After Genji arrives, this emperor abdicates in favor of the 11-year-old heir apparent, putting Genji in a more prominent position. But the daughter from Akashi leaves Violet, now a young woman, jealous. Princess Hitachi is now reintroduced, living as a recluse in the suburbs of the capital. She had become an object of scorn by an aunt who is of a lower station but who advanced by having married her uncle. She taunts the princess as having been forgotten by Genji. Shortly afterwards, however, Genji, passes her mansion and, remembering her of old, visits and elevates her condition in his persistently kind manner.

Another earlier character, Cicada, also reappears briefly, but only long enough for her aged husband to die and for her to become a nun. Following an extended comparison of paintings in the emperor’s presence, the book closes abruptly with Genji’s voluntary retirement at a relatively young age to contemplate the happiness of the world mingled with his lingering ambition to see his children properly raised. The Tale of Genji concludes with this sentence: “It is not easy to understand or define the exact state of his mind at this period.” That’s me, too.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin – 

If there is a theme to the slight plot of Pnin, I would say that it is how memory influences fatherhood and mortality. After all, memory, sorrow, and loss are always a Russian writer's main working materials. But to keep the material strong, the writer must also never beg for the reader's sympathy. Nabokov knows this, but he also writes his own rules in Pnin. His accomplishment is not by exercising unflinching self-control. Quite the opposite: he indulges himself in the most Nabokovian way. His story is hilarious – and periodically cruel.

 

Superficially Pnin is written by a novelist, identified on the cover as "Vladimir Nabokov" -- the man who gets the royalties which pay the rent. But this novelist tells the story through an unnamed narrator, one who is masking his own regrets. For this is not a traditional authoritative narrator; instead he is personally acquainted with the main character, Assistant Professor Timofey Pnin. When convenient, this narrator steps obliquely into the story in the first person, making his first appearance in the personal pronoun just a few pages into the novel, admitting that he had once helped Pnin prepare a letter to the editor of the New York Times[1]. As the book ends, there he is again, the unintentional source of one more blow to his battered hero.

 

            There is more to this unusual delivery of the story. About midway through the novel, while Pnin and other émigré Russians have assembled for a holiday at a Vermont retreat, someone notes the regrettable absence of another party, Vladimir Vladimirovich, whose dissertations on butterflies are unfortunately a bit show-offy, however. This Vladimir, who himself is mentioned only once[2], is aparently like one of his butterflies: distinct, diverting, and probably insignificant. But he is not really missing.

 

Professor Pnin teaches Russian at an upstate New York college, Waindell, "a somewhat provincial institution" with a "landscaped campus" populated by "a lot of monstrously built farm boys and farm girls." He is a conventional European émigré, navigating his way on his own in post-World War II America, equally bewildered and delighted with the unconventional customs, certain he can fit in, dignified and proud of himself when he does not, and in some eternal sense, always missing the point.

 

Pnin's position at Waindell College is not secure, though he seems blind to that. He does not have tenure. He is at Waindell at sufferance of the chairman of the German Department who, however, is about to move on to a better school. He is frequently lampooned by other faculty members for his odd ways. He also has a wonderful (but often mute) laugh – and he cries in dramatic Russian style when forced to contemplate his circumstances. He digresses to his class about Pushkin's obsession with death. How will it come? In fight, in travel, or in waves? (Travel, we believe.) When he moves into a new office,

 

"he screwed onto the side of the desk a pencil sharpener – that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must."

 

The years are the early 1950s (10 years before I matriculated at Waindell). The locale and mores are typical for those years, though they seem almost grotesque as I write this in 2012: lodging in a room at another's house for $1 a day, bus travel between rural towns, shoe trees. Early on, Pnin has his bad teeth pulled and replaced by full dentures. "At night he kept his treasure in a special glass of fluid where it smiled to itself, pink and pearly, as perfect as some lovely representative of deep sea flora." More seriously, Pnin is randomly stricken by an internal pain – though he endures it, as he does every other setback. I fear symbolism.

 

I mentioned Nabokov's cruelty. It is not directed to Pnin – at least not by the author. (The professor's faculty colleagues, by contrast, are not so kind). But in Pnin the cruelty is otherwise used indiscriminately. Pnin's teaching to painfully small classes is based on grammar exercises established by a Russian professor from "a far greater college than Waindell – a venerable fraud whose Russian was a joke." (Two birds with one stone.) A landlord's bookshelf will inevitably have a bookcase containing "Mrs. Garnett impersonating somebody." "Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother." The college literary department labors "under the impression that Stendhal, Galsworthy, Dreiser, and Mann were great writers."

 

            As for wit, we come to the first joke before even getting to the first line of the novel. "All of the characters in this book," we are told in tiny print on the copyright page, "are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental." And pigs fly with butterflies. This recalls the Cook's Castle episode, the Vermont retreat where Russians in America meet to discuss old Russian things and Russian reactions to new things. It is a vehicle to describe what was and is always loved—the St. Petersburg manner, Russian gestures, the indignity and injustice of having lost a country, shared observations about America. Who are these people? At the Vermont retreat, other children of Russian emigres also appear – "healthy, tall, indolent, difficult American children of college age" -- and like young people everywhere, indifferent to their parents' stories of old times.

 

Victor is not there, however.

 

A moment ago I mentioned paternity. Pnin is the "water father" of young Victor, his crazy ex-wife's son, born of an affair with another Parisian refugee, a Dr. Wind. The humiliation notwithstanding, to keep the woman, Pnin was prepared to assume paternity of the unborn child and so he immigrates with Liza to America. In mid-transit, however, he is confronted in the ship's saloon by Dr. Wind himself, who has also taken passage and believes it necessary to disclose himself.

 

Upon arrival Liza decamps with her seducer (they are both psychotherapists) and she eventually gives birth to Victor. Dr. Wind then having moved on, however, she places young Victor to grow up in an American boarding school too expensive for her to pay for. She prevails on Pnin to contribute to his education. He does, he must.

 

Victor himself, it seems, is something of an artistic prodigy and (like you–know-who) he is a synesthete who thinks in terms of smells and sounds and colors. We first see him as a teenager concocting a wild fantasy contemplating his real father as a king -- sitting "at a spacious desk whose highly polished surface twinned his upper half in reverse, making of him a kind of court card."  Perhaps Victor loves no one, but after visiting Pnin at Waindell (it is not clear that they ever meet again), the boy sends him as a gift a crystal bowl of obvious beauty and value. Later, upon receiving devastating news, Pnin nearly breaks the bowl in his despair. (And here, Henry James, I begin again to worry about symbolism.)

 

The final fifth of the book reverts briefly to Paris in post-Revolution Russia. The narrator steps forward telling his own story, though Pnin and his crazy wife Liza are also participants. Perhaps Liza has flirted with this man (but she flirts with everyone). Perhaps Pnin accused him publicly of being a liar. Does it matter? We are then abruptly back in New York after World War II and the narrator has decided to accept his own professorship at Waindell (obviously to replace Pnin). Pnin, offered the chance, declines to assist him.

 

As he himself remarks a letter to a colleague, "Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the word people really posses?" And much later: "The history of man is the history of pain." The narrator reminds us,

 

"[O]ne of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. . . . . Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego."

 

At the end of the novel, Pnin does not die.

---

[1] He is also a bit irritating. He litters the book with a distracting and valueless use of parenthetical phrases translating Russian phrases into American idioms and vice versa. And in a late chapter he more or less confesses to having had a mote in his eye when it comes to Pnin.

 

[2] He merges with the narrator at the end, however.

V.S. Naipaul, Half A Life –

By self-appointment, Naipaul is interpreter of the third world to the first. In this effort he gives us his hero, Willie Chandran, a naive Indian boy who comes to London for school, and then moves on to live a demi-life in Africa.

Wilie’s middle name is Somerset, for his father has deliberately named him after the author of The Razor’s Edge. This has double significance. First, Half A Life – the title is significant – is written in Maughm’s spare style and in that way might be said to be a tribute to him. Second, Maugham’s remarks about his own novel echo here in the Willie’s tale as will be seen in this extract from The Razor’s Edge:

“I don’t think one can ever really know any but one’s own countrymen. Men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives’ tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are and these are things that you can’t come to know by hearsay, you can only know if you have lived them. You can only know them if you are them.”
I won’t pause here to debate that, but it is certainly central to understanding Naipaul and his novels.

Willie’s father is a feckless man living a nondescript life in the ambit of a Hindu temple, having taken a vow of silence chiefly to avoid scrutiny. He earned Maughm’s regard only by the accident of the author having visited the temple and over-interpreted the significance of the vow. In telling Willie’s story, Naipaul, while strictly adhering to Maughm’s simple delivery, uses three sequential methods, beginning with a first chapter (India) in which Willie’s Brahmin father describes the “mess” he made of his life by taking for wife a lower caste woman (a “backward”) who produces Willie. The next segment, much longer, describes in the third person Willie’s awkward life as a young student in London. The third part -- and this is a Conradian touch -- is told by Willie himself in the past tense describing his 18 years in the African bush as the consort of a mulatto Portuguese woman with an “estate” she has inherited from her grandfather.

By far the most interesting section to me is the first. It is told in the form of a narrative told to Willie by his father, but we are warned that it has actually been constructed out of the father’s reminiscences and asides as given out to him as a boy over a 10-year period. I have trouble getting a good picture of the father from this telling, and perhaps this was the intention of the double hearsay. He grew up, the father reveals, in the home of Willie’s grandfather, an employee of the maharajah of an Indian state not under the direct control of the English. (Much later, Willie decides that his grandfather was a “courtier.”) As a young student, Willie’s father decided to become an ascetic like Gandhi, which causes him to make numerous unwise and foolish decisions. (It is views like this, I suppose, that make Naipaul problematic for third world readers.) For example, as some sort of statement, he burns his school books (“No one noticed,” his wife dryly remarks), and he “sacrifices” himself by associating with this “backward” girl who becomes Willie’s mother. He is a literalist who cannot understand literature because he sees all of it as “lies.” (Later, this is one source of his complete rejection by Willie, who himself is a talented story teller – and eventually a liar himself – too subtle for his father.)

In the father’s first petty job before he moves to a life in the ashram, he risks jail by cheating for no apparent purpose. For trivial reasons, he periodically takes vows of silence for which he then congratulates himself. And why not? This had been the genesis of the Maughm connection. The father describes himself to Willie as having been the “spiritual source” of The Razor’s Edge. Thus Willie’s father – not given a name in the novel – came to enjoy a certain minor celebrity when The Razor’s Edge was a success. Possibly for all of these things, but mostly because of his father’s attitude toward both his mother and their relationship (part dismissive, part self-pitying), Willie despises his father. And so Willie, the half-caste, attends a Canadian Christian mission school in India, and then at the age of 20 departs for England.

He cannot escape his father. Intimidated by the crowds during the ship voyage, Willie “found himself unwilling to speak, first out of pure worry, and then, when he discovered that silence brought him strength, out of policy.” In England (it is the late 1950s), he makes a pilgrimage to the Speaker’s Corner where he is disappointed by the “idle scatter of speakers.” “[R]embering his home life, [he] thought that the families of these men might have been glad to get them out of the house in the afternoons.”

Willie becomes a student in what appears to be a college for colonials providing an artificial imitation of Oxford and Cambridge. And yet it gradually comes to him that he has been given a new perspective to view his life and is free to re-make himself. He begins to write stories for commercial publication. But the writing then “began to lead him to difficult things, things he couldn’t face, and he stopped.” He is visited by his frumpy, opinionated sister, Sarojini. She has made an “international marriage” with a German radical, recalling their mother’s “firebrand” brother back in India who had intimidated their father.) Although she is only a minor character – no internal change, growth, or thoughts – on my second reading I decided that without Sarojini, the novel would make less sense, because she is on her own incoherent journey, encumbered by the same family baggage that Willie is never able to put aside.

And so the reader begins to make out the “half-life” lived by people who mix race, caste, and cultures. Whether Willie ever squares this circle is left undecided, but this brings me to the final third of the novel. Having met a lonely Portuguese mulatto waif, adrift from her own colonial roots, Willie abruptly travels with her to her family farm in Africa. On board ship, he realizes that

“[h]is home language had almost gone, that his English was going, that he had no proper language left, no gift of expression. . . . Neither Ana nor anyone else would have known that there was anything wrong. But all this while Willie felt that there was another self inside him, in a silent space where all his external life was muffled.”
In just two or three paragraphs Naipaul describes Willie’s meeting with Ana, their developing relationship, the ocean passage, and the journey up country to Ana’s African home. They arrive and Willie looks about.

“Willie thought, ‘I don’t know where I am. I don’t think I can pick my way back. I don’t ever want this view to become familiar. I must not unpack. I must never behave as though I am staying.’ “He stayed for eighteen years.”

Beyond what that quotation tells the reader about Willie, it also tells me about Naipaul’s confidence in his own story telling. He covers 18 years in five words.
And so when we come to the final third of the novel, it mimics the first part, the retrospective scraps of recollection given by Willie to Sajojini in her nondescript German flat in Willie’s 41st year – roughly half of his life. (If my calculations are correct, this would put Willie’s monologue in about 1980. Furthermore, If I can believe the “autobiographical” references on the book’s dust jacket, this would mean that the novel – published in 2000 – was written by the narrator-novelist, Naipaul, another 20 years later, giving another level to the notion of a half-life of the title.)

Willie relates that he has lived in Africa among “estate people” all of whom live within a two-hour drive through the bush of each other. Always in the background is the guerilla war.

“[A]fter a year or so I began to understand – and I was helped in this understanding by my own background – that the world I had entered was only a half-and-half world, that many of the people who were our friends considered themselves, deep down, people of the second rank.”
(This works the other way, too. Late in the novel, a “full Portuguese” architect is sent to the colony by the property company. He speaks approvingly of the guerillas, who are obviously “full” Africans. “We decided he was a white man pretending to be a black man.”) Emotionally, Willie drifts away from Ana and undertakes an affair with a mutual friend of similar circumstances. As with his new lover’s history, this is not “part of the main story,” but Willie acknowledges that for the first time he has developed his own “sense of the brutality of the sexual life,” a “half-feeling of the inanity” of his own life, and “the beginning of respect for the religious outlawing of sexual extremes.”

Suddenly Portugal capitulates (we never hear a shot) and the guerillas take over. Life deteriorates and there are rumors of a new war in the bush. Ana will stay and protect what she says is hers. Willie says that he has been hiding too long. “I am tired of living your life.” Ana responds, “Perhaps it wasn’t really my life either.” That is the last line of the novel.

Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander --

O'Brian's series of historical novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars has been given much publicity in recent years -- so I decided to read one, this being the first in the series. Unfortunately, my initial impression is one of mild irritation. O'Brian obviously is a man of curiosity and precision, particularly when it comes to using maritime vocabulary and describing nautical practice. But eventually the sheer detail becomes merely pedantic and has much of the contrived character of a second-rate drama: "Alice, you know very well that you are the third daughter of your mother's second husband and that your 24th birthday will be next Tuesday."

On the other hand, the book causes me to reflect on historical novels in general. Why write one, after all? Generally the essential elements of any good novel are plot, character, and theme. Historical novels often dispense with the latter (but see War and Peace) which is why they generally fall in the second rank[1]. For his part, O'Brian contributes the element of atmospherics, not a novelty, of course, but worth remarking on because it is more or less the central quality of his writing. (What I call atmospherics is a subcategory of the much more important matter of style.) Is atmospherics a reason in itself to write an historical novel? I would not think so, unless at least one of the other elements is strongly present. In Master and Commander I am not carried away by either plot or character and so this effort, at least, is still in the second rank by my calculation.

Endnotes
1. Surely there are good historical novelists who have approached their mission the way Shakespeare approached his Roman plays, for example, having the characters operate within the context of the ancient virtues, but none occurs to me. Robert Graves?

Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain --

Joe Troy assured me that these books get better and better as you progress through them. The evidence here, based on this second in a very long series, is that he may be correct. As with a television series, the audience is now familiar with the main characters, i.e. Aubrey and Maturin, and so we can picture their delivery and reactions without too much help from the author. Joe's other remembered remark -- that these novels resemble Jane Austen -- remains far more problematic. All that I can say is that they are set in more or less the same period and that O'Brian is successful in recreating the atmospherics that would not have been a literary consideration to Austen. As to whether we have a very good novel here, my answer remains that such plot as there is short on conflict, and such conflict as there is to be found exclusively in the title.