Of Marlins and Men

When I first visited Floridita, a watering hole at the beginning of old Havana, one corner of the bar was chained off in tribute to an American writer. It was allegedly the spot where Ernest Hemingway quaffed his daily daiquiri when he was in town. Whether he sat on that lonely stool or not, I thought it a restrained and tasteful gesture. The next time I went the chain and the stool were gone. In its place was grotesque larger than life figure of Hemingway propping up the bar!

It’s now over fifty years since the real larger than life figure took his own life. I have mixed feelings about the man and his work. When he was good he was very very good, and when he was bad he was awful. I was seventeen when I first came across him in The Old Man and the Sea, a wonderful story of transcendent values, simple in its beauty, the tightness of its narrative and the economy of prose. For me it had almost mythological quality.

Later, at university, I ploughed through his other work, delighted at some points, acutely disappointed at others. It’s perfectly obvious that such novels as Across the River and into the Trees and the posthumous Islands in the Stream would never have been published if they had not come with the Hemingway label. But - along with The Old Man and the Sea - A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and To Have and Have Not will stand as classics of English literature. So, too, will Fiesta: the Sun Also Rises for introducing the world to a new, more rigorous prose style, though it’s a novel that really did not engage me emotionally. Overall I think that Hemingway did for twentieth century American literature what Mark Twain did for the nineteenth.

His was a truly remarkable life, full of incident and adventure. In a way he became his work and his work became him. There were good and bad things in this; good in that his writing is often imbued with an immediacy and authenticity; bad in that, as time went by, he had to live up to a macho myth, as bombastic as that figure in Floridita. I think in the end it’s a myth that pursued him to death.

Still, for all his limitations, I admire him as a man, as a hunter and as a writer, largely free of cant and dissimulation. There is so much to envy in a talent that was in the right place at just the right time - Paris just after the First World War, where he was befriended by Gertrude Stein and met such architects of twentieth century culture as Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. I read a biography of Hemingway a few years ago – the name of the author escapes me - and was amazed by the amount of incident he managed to crowd in while still writing! Incident, love, life and travel, are all there, including four marriages.

But while there was a huge expansiveness, paradoxically caught in The Old Man and the Sea, a tale of a man and a fish, there is also a narrowness, the narrowness of For Whom the Bell Tolls, which, for all of its value as a work of literature, reduces the great tragedy of the Spanish Civil War to a mere backdrop, a setting for testing the moral courage of Robert Jordan, the novel’s American protagonist. Send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for me!

It’s this narrowness that caught up with the man, who began to write in a sort of autobiographical fashion, his heroes really just being dimensions of his own personality and acquired mythos. The buccaneering Harry Morgan of To Have and Have Not is tolerable and believable; the figure of Colonel Richard Cantwell in Across the River and into the Trees is a laughable parody.

In general there is a boy’s own quality to his work that is now largely out of sympathy with the times. I like hunting, I’m a hunter, but even for me Hemingway’s blood lust seems excessive. I got no pleasure at all from Death in the Afternoon, his homage to Spanish bullfighters. And as for the female figures in his books, they are also there to be hunted, for me mostly unconvincing appendages, trophies on a wall!

But he was a man for his time, a pathfinder in a unique American tradition. On my own path, I followed him through the tourist traps of Havana, even staying on my latter trips in the atmospheric and idiosyncratic Hotel Ambos Mundos, where he lodged in the 1930s before he acquired his Cuban home. His room, number 511, is preserved as a museum. I stood there, the sun shining through the window, looking at his typewriter and thinking of marlins and of men.

Capote’s Taylor

Truman Capote was a writer of unique genius, one who could cover so many genres, fiction and non-fiction, the creator of some brilliant literary cameos. I’ve loved his work ever since I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which introduced me to Holly Golightly, a free spirit, the one figure in literature that I identify more with than any other, the delightful, effervescent, wonderful Holly, always travelling and never arriving.

A few years ago I saw Capote, an excellent biopic of the author, played with commendable skill by Philip Seymour Hoffman. It follows in Capote’s steps as he, with the aid of Nell Harper Lee, his childhood friend and fellow writer, researches the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, a quest that would end in the publication of In Cold Blood, in so many ways the definitive non-fiction novel, disturbing and horribly compelling at one and the same time.

The recent death of the veteran actress Elizabeth Taylor brought to mind another aspect of Capote’s work – the detailed and memorable little pen-portraits he painted of some of the celebrities he knew, not the kind of superficial tittle-tattle one usually associates with this kind of thing, but revealing, affectionate and intimate. There are several in my A Capote Reader, an anthology which covers various aspects of his work, short stories, novellas, reportage and travel writing as well as his portraits.

My favourite of his pen sketches by far is A Beautiful Child, an account of the day he spent with Marilyn Monroe, but Elizabeth Taylor, published in 1974, is almost as good, not just for the sympathetic way he depicts her but for the obvious empathy between the writer and the actress, which, in so few words, enables him to get well below the surface.

My rereading was well-rewarded. He describes how he once visited her in hospital, where she was recovering from a bout of life-threatening illness. In response to a question of his she replies that she wasn’t afraid, that she was too busy fighting, that she was not ready, as she put it, to “go over that horizon”, not being the type. She clearly had a ‘type’ in mind, as Capote immediately deduced;

“Perhaps not; not like Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, both of whom had yearned to go over the horizon, some darker rainbow, and before succeeding, had attempted that voyage innumerable times. And yet there was some kind of common thread between these three, Taylor, Monroe, Garland – I knew the last two fairly well and yes, there was something. An emotional extremism, a dangerously greater need to be loved than to love, a hotheaded willingness of an incompetent gambler to throw good money after bad.”

When it came to life and relationships Taylor was certainly a gambler, evidenced by her turbulent relationship with Richard Burton, another movie veteran, a relationship itself with enough drama for a movie; a relationship that, in some ways, did make a movie in the screen version of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where they played opposite one another in the lead rolls. They were the most celebrated off-screen lovers, as Capote says, since Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.

The essay concludes several years after this hospital visit. Taylor is in New York with Burton, where he is appearing in a play. After one performance Capote joins them in their hotel suite, where he shares in a late-evening buffet. When Burton leaves the room to fetch some more champagne Taylor describes their relationship:

Oh, we quarrel. But at least he’s worth quarrelling with. He’s really brilliant. He’s read everything and I can talk to him – there’s nothing I can’t talk to him about…But the most important thing is what happens between a man and a woman who love each other. Or any two people who can love each other.

Capote writes, as Taylor draws the curtains against the rain, she looked at him sightlessly, like Galatea surveying some ultimate horizon. “What do you suppose will become of us?,” she asked, but the answer came already supplied – “I guess, when you find what you’ve always wanted, that’s not where the beginning begins, that’s when the end starts.”

I felt sad the first time I read this, even sadder the second. I hope not to find what I’ve always wanted for some time yet, though I can’t help but envy the actress. I think also of the brilliance of past celebrity, the brilliance of Taylor and Burton, both now over that ultimate horizon, compared with the mediocrity of the present.

Gatsby on the outside

Fortunate is the writer who creates a novel in perfect tune with the times; fortunate was F. Scott-Fitzgerald, who, in The Great Gatsby created the novel and the times! It’s not just the novel of the Jazz Age, a term coined by Fitzgerald; it’s the novel for the Doldrums Age, judging by the popularity of a new Broadway reading of the book. I saw from a report in the Sunday press that a new film version is also planned, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Jay Gatsby, the part played by Robert Redford in the 1974 adaptation.

It’s easy to understand its popularity because the message goes beyond all ages, all times. It’s a novel that is read with hindsight, if that makes sense – from the lows of the 1930s looking back to the highs, the thoughtless, effervescent, champagne bubbles of the 1920s; from the lows of present-day America back to a vanished prosperity of Gekko-land and greed is good. The American dream and the American nightmare go hand in hand; they always have.

I suppose there is a combination of emotions here. There is nostalgia for the good times, and the Jazz Age was in so many ways the best time of all, the best time to be young, rich and alive, whirling around in a endless round of parties and social engagements. Nostalgia, yes, but accompanied by a realistic appreciation of the sub-text; that all was not quite right, that were there is brilliance there is also decay; where there is Eden there is also a serpent. The thing about impossible dreams is that they are, well, impossible. Gatsby, it’s as well to remember, was published in the 1925, right at the height of the Roaring Twenties. It celebrates the period, it defines the period…and it presages its end.

I love the figure of Jay Gatsby, a brilliant social climber who successfully manages to disguise his roots, who creates an elaborate illusion in pursuit of love. He is a fraud, yes, but he’s more endearing, nobler and more refined than the ‘old money’, represented by Tom and Daisy Buchanan. The tragedy is that he is himself deceived by a greater illusion; that Daisy Buchanan is a figure worthy of pursuit when the reality is that she is shallow, insincere and essentially worthless for all her wealth. Daisy is love alright, with money, which is to say with herself.

There is so much symbolism in this simple novel, so many possible readings. Baz Luhrmann, the director of the new movie, said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that he sees parallels between the rise and fall of Gatsby and our modern economic hard times;

If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says ‘You’ve been drunk on money’ they’re not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time, they’d be willing to. People will need an explanation of where they are and where they’ve been – and The Great Gatsby can provide that explanation.

Daisy and Tom still have their money; they always will. Gatsby and his kind are still on the outside looking in. Perhaps they, too, always will.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out Daisy's light at the end of his dock. He had come such a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. But what he did not know was that it was already behind him, somewhere in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Tomorrow is another day

Knowing full well the danger in defining anything as the ‘greatest’ I’m still prepared to take the risk: Gone with the Wind is the greatest movie ever made! Not only is it a splendid piece of cinema, which won ten Oscars, an achievement rarely passed, but it went a long way to reshaping perceptions of the past. It created history by recreating the Old South as a vanished civilization, as a land of cavaliers and grand ladies. It’s a myth, I know, but it’s captivating and beautiful notwithstanding.

Based on Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling novel of the same name, Gone with the Wind, released in 1939 in the early months of another conflict, is the defining epic of the American Civil War, one that helped give Southerners a new sense of pride, still reflected today in the Confederate heritage and memento industry. I know the South, Georgia in particular, and I’ve long had my own romantic attraction to things past;

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South…Here in this pretty world Gallantry took it’s last bow…Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave…Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered…A Civilization gone with the wind…

The objections arise at once, do they not? A land of slaves- this was no idyll, how could it be? Although widely praised at the time, the movie was still criticised by some for its whitewashed depictions of slavery, though generally people were a lot less sensitive to these issues in the 1930s than they are now. But slavery and the politics of slavery actually play a very small part in the movie, unlike Mitchell’s book, where the racism is blatant.

David Selznik, the movie’s producer, asked Sidney Howard, the principal screenwriter, to remove all reference to the Ku Klux Klan –though it features in a key scene in the novel -, because he was determined not to produce “an unintentional advertisement for intolerant societies in these fascist-ridden times.” It’s true that the black actors had to conform to the stereotypes of the day, but they are still depicted in a positive if patronising light. Even within these circumscribed limits there are some outstanding performances. Hattie McDaniel, who plays the larger than life figure of Mammy, was the first black actor to win an Oscar, that for best supporting actress.

If Gone with the Wind is not about slavery, in a deeper sense it’s not even about the Civil War, which only features as a background to the first half: it’s about survival; it’s about a determination to survive. It’s the story of Scarlett O’ Hara, played by Vivian Leigh, and her struggle to surmount the twin disasters of war and personal loss, to preserve her beloved Tara, the plantation home in which she grew up. She begins, before the war has had a chance to make its presence felt, as a rather shallow, self-centred individual. But as time and chance take over she finds new depths within herself, finds new strength, becoming an icon of renewal. For me the symbolism is obvious: Scarlett, a figure I love, is the South, for whom tomorrow was to be another day.

A modern Faustus

When it comes to genre fiction there is no writer who can match Edgar Allan Poe. It’s he who deserves the credit for creating the detective story and in developing new forms of science fiction; he who gave a new starkness and vitality to the Gothic form, free of the exotic excesses of a previous generation of writers, the kind off thing parodied by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Add to this his poetry, with themes of loss, separation, death and madness then we really do have a unique and disturbing talent.

It was through the poetry that I first came to Poe, verses that unsettled and scared me; poems like The Raven and The Haunted Palace, the last verse of which is firmly settled in my memory;

And travellers, now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms, that move fantastically
To a discordant melody,
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh- but smile no more.

What a strange, haunted, compelling man Poe was; what a brave and tragic life he lived. His was the best of times…and the worst of times. Born in America not long after the beginning of the nineteenth century he was to do so much to shape the literary imagination of the new nation, to shape the imagination of the world beyond.

But there was something of a devil’s bargain here; his success, always hard won, was accompanied by the sense of loss, the absolute loss that he touches on in The Raven, of death and nevermore. He lost his mother Eliza at an early age to tuberculosis (TB), the great killer of the age; he lost Virginia Clemm, his cousin and child bride, to the same disease. The latter was particularly bad, for Virginia’s death was prolonged: she rallied in false hope at some points, only to sink still further at others, a spiral ever downwards.

I watched – if you’ve not already guessed – Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women, a documentary broadcast on BBC4, in which Denise Mina, a writer of crime fiction, had a look at Poe’s life through his relationship with significant female figures.

I have mixed feelings about arguments that try to detect elements of personal biography in an author’s work, but in Poe’s case a psychological explanation seems wholly convincing, particularly with regard the tragic details of the slow decline of Virginia. Her five year struggle impacted directly on Poe, causing his own steady descent into the alcoholism that was to kill him in the end. It also impacted on his work, his poetry, most particularly, and some of his fiction.

Take the disease itself, the nature of the disease, which wastes victims in a kind of hinterland between life and death. Apparently those suffering from TB can sink into a kind of catatonic torpor, characterised by shallow breathing, so shallow, so difficult to detect, that it can be mistaken for death itself. Hence the fear of being buried alive that haunted contemporary imagination, a fear that Poe makes use of in such stories as The Premature Burial, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado and Berenice. It’s really no surprise that this is the beginning of the age of the vampire.

Then there is the fear of death, the fear of ultimate and irredeemable separation, more real in Poe’s age than any other because the old Christian certainties were under question by science, even in the time before Darwin. Hence the desperate and hopeless appeal of the scholar to the Raven, an appeal for reassurance, rejected in one awful word;

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named Lenore?'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

The narrator in The Raven, incidentally, is clearly looking for consolation for the loss of Lenore in magic, not God, in his books of forgotten lore. Is it consolation, I begin to wonder, or is it something else; a message from beyond, or even resurrection? A messenger comes alright in the form of the black Raven, a devil bird destined to stay with him evermore. As for resurrection, in some kind of vampire or witch form, there is the story of Ligeia, who comes back to life in the body of another, or there is Morella, another voyager in the black arts, in volumes of forgotten and forbidden lore.

I’ve journeyed far from the themes of the BBC documentary, which was really about women as archetypes in the author’s life. Is there anything, anything more dreadful than an archetype? In the end it seems to me that Poe lived a half-life, somewhere between existence and non-existence, brilliant and sad at one and the same time. His own end in Baltimore, while still only forty years old, is as mysterious and macabre as anything in his fiction, a modern Faustus, laughing but smiling no more.

Out of the dust

In June of this year I wrote a piece marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, high among the greats of modern American literature. At the time another blogger suggested that there might be some similarities here with themes earlier examined in the work of William Faulkner. After a little exploration we both agreed that there were possible parallels between To Kill a Mockingbird and Intruder in the Dust, a novel published in 1948. I agreed to read this with a view to discovering if there was.

First of all, my apologies to Ike Jakson, the blogger who brought this book to my attention. I bought it soon after - I even took it to Central America with me as part of my holiday reading – but I got sidetracked along the way, ambushed by other demands and other writers! Second, I would like to thank him for raising this, otherwise I might have bypassed not just this novel but Faulkner altogether.

The thing is first impressions are really important with me; if writers do not engage me almost immediately I’m likely to shunt them off to a sideline, there to remain neglected, possibly indefinitely. In my late teens I read Soldier’s Pay, Faulkner’s first novel, published in 1926, which left me dissatisfied and unimpressed. I may never have read any more. But now I’ve finished Intruder in the Dust, a reading and a discovery.

Is there any comparison with To Kill a Mockingbird? Yes, on a superficial level, there certainly is. Both are set against the background of the segregated American South, the South where black people existed on the margins of society, and even there on sufferance. They are both about black men accused of crimes they did not commit. Much of the observation is from the point of view of a young person and the accused are both aided by lawyers of commendable virtue and liberal instinct. Towards the end of chapter ten of Faulkner’s novel the sheriff complains about the racket a nearby bird is making, interrupting his rest and doubtless filling his head with murderous thoughts, thoughts of killing a mockingbird!

I have no doubt at all that Harper Lee read this book and I feel sure that she would acknowledge its influence, but beyond the general themes of racial tension and potential injustice there is much more that divides than unites the two books. To Kill a Mockingbird is really the story of Atticus Finch, the paternalistic lawyer, a sort of American Cicero. Intruder in the Dust isn’t really the story of anyone, or if it is it’s the story of Lucas Beauchamp, the elderly black man accused of killing one Vinson Gowrie, the scion of a local hillbilly clan. Beauchamp is a particularly memorable character, stiff, proud, himself almost senatorial in bearing, a man who refuses to “act like a nigger”, as his defenders complain.

At once simpler and yet more complex than To Kill a Mockingbird, Faulkner’s novel is in essence a mystery thriller. Beauchamp’s defence is clear: in jail and threatened with a particularly horrible form of lynching from the outraged hillbillies (fortunately for him the crime was committed late on a Saturday and decent folks don’t lynch other folks, even niggers, on a Sunday) he says that it was not his pistol that was used to kill Vinson. The only way this can be proved is for the body to be dug up in secret, a task he ‘delegates’ to sixteen year old Charles Mallison, the nephew of the lawyer, whose life he once saved from a freezing river. Mallison, despite the danger of the mission, agrees to act, assisted by a reluctant black teenager and the elderly Miss Habersham, a name I simply refuse to believe is not a nod in passing to Charles Dickens’ Miss Havisham from Great Expectations! No matter; like her near namesake she is also a highly memorable character.

There is an interesting ambiguity in Faulkner’s book on the question of race relations that is unlikely to appeal to modern sensibilities. He’s against the entrenched racism of his native South but he is also proud of a Southern tradition, of a Confederate tradition, hostile to the interference of outsiders, of ‘moral carpetbaggers’ from the North, an expression, incidentally, that I just invented! The problem of the ‘nigger’ is their problem and they should be left to solve it themselves in a gradual, undemonstrative and paternal fashion. History does not work like that; history did not work like that.

Intruder in the Dust is really quite a simple story, as I have said, no more than a mystery thriller (I’m not going to tell you who killed Vinson, just that it wasn’t Lucas!) But then there is the language, the style and the literary presentation. I had fun looking over other reviews because this book one of those rare love-or-hate additions to the literary cannon, a book that cannot be passed with indifference.

The ‘hate’, if that’s really the right word, can be put down most often to confusion and incomprehension. Intruder in the Dust, you see, is a stream of consciousness novel, though whose consciousness is being streamed is not always easy to tell! Some of the sentences are prodigiously long, going on for pages. But I quickly picked up on the cadence and the poetic rhythms, the rise and fall of words.

I just love this sort of thing, the kind of playfulness with language I so much admire in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and, above all, in Malcolm Lowry, for me the greatest English novelist of the twentieth century. Here is an example from Faulkner taken quite at random, in full flow from mid-passage;

…strolling timeless and in no haste since they were going nowhere since the May night itself was their destination and they carried that with them walking in it and (stock-auction day) even a few belated cars and trucks whose occupants had stayed in for the picture show too or to visit and take supper with kin or friends and now at last dispersing nightward sleepward tomorrow-ward about the dark mile-compassing land…

Yes, for me this is poetry in prose, a form of writing based on a love of words for the sake of words. I enjoyed this book in some ways more than I enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird. Much more than that, I have enjoyed discovering Faulkner anew, knowing ahead of me lie such books as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom! Absalom! and Light in August, the great landmarks of his literary life.

Mockingbird

I read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Nell Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, those twin classics of modern American literature, at more or less the same time in my mid teens. I remember thinking afterwards, once I had discovered something about the authors in question, that they were the best of books to have written…and the worst. The best in the sense that both were an immediate commercial and critical success; the worst in the sense that the authors’ work thereafter would always be judged to the standards set by these monoliths.

To these two books I would add Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, but at least this did not have the same impact on his life that The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird had on the lives of Salinger and Lee, both of whom more or less stopped writing altogether, both of whom became recluses, hating the fame that their work had brought. I assumed they realised, in their different ways, that they only really had one great book inside them and that any further effort was pointless. Success for them was not a blessing: it was a curse.

I haven’t entirely changed that view. I did, however, read a very interesting feature article on Harper Lee by Sharon Churcher in The Mail on Sunday (Don’t mention the Mockingbird) which has caused me to partially reassess it. Harper Lee, whose book was published almost fifty years ago, grew up in Monroeville, Alabama, in the ‘Old South’, the pre-integration South, the South of Jim Crow. The racial bigotry witnessed by Scout Finch, the six-year-old narrator in Mockingbird, was essentially that witnessed by Lee herself as she was growing up.

It’s no secret that the novel has an autobiographical element. But it seems to have been much stronger than generally supposed, so strong that she came in for intense criticism not just from the community of Monroeville, who claimed to recognise themselves in its pages, but from members of her immediate family. The suggestion is from those who knew her well that this had a traumatic effect. Mockingbird is so authentic because it is so personal; but because it is personal it has also been deeply painful. There are some things that can only ever be said once.

My Favourite Fascist Writer

Who is your favourite fascist writer? I quite like the work of the madly eccentric French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, particularly Journey to the End of the Night, but my absolute favourite really has to be Knut Hamsun, the great Norwegian writer and Nobel laureate. My, oh, my, how could one possibly like fascist writing? But that’s just the point: it’s not fascist writing; it’s a fascist writing and, yes, there is a huge difference between the two. Good writing and good art does not always need good people as creators.

I discovered Hamsun in my mid-teens, working my way through all of his early work with huge enthusiasm; books like Hunger, Pan, Victoria, and Mysteries, all written in a wonderful, taut and economical style, all deeply engaging at a level of simple emotion, full of mood and mystery. I moved on to his later work but found it a little too ponderous for my taste. I did not really like The Growth of the Soil overmuch, with its agrarian mysticism, but it was well enough thought of to win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.

So much for the artist; now let’s have a look at the man. I’ve been reading Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter, a warts and all biography by Sletten Kollen. Hamsun wasn’t a good man; he was, rather, a thoroughly nasty human being, an obsessive, egotistical monster in the same way that Céline, or, say, Wagner was an obsessive, egotistical monster.

With people like this one gets the feeling that politics is really only of secondary concern, a way of expressing one’s peculiarities, and Hamsun had more peculiarities than most. He was a reactionary who hated the modern world; who hated and envied Henrik Ibsen as much as he loved and admired Adolf Hitler. He also hated the Anglo-Saxons, or, to express this in another way, he was an ass about AS. :-))

For Hamsun Hitler offered hope for the revival of Nordic culture. He was one of the few to welcome the German invasion of Norway in 1940, championing Vidkun Quisling, the traitor who headed a collaborationist government, and looking forward to the prospect of his country becoming part of Greater Germany. Even the end of the war brought no change of mood. He remained consistent in his support for Hitler, refusing to apologise for his past sympathies. Many of his fellow citizens were so outraged that they sent his books directly to the author as a mark of their displeasure. His local post office found it difficult to cope with the volume of the volumes!

Still, that’s the man and great art will always transcend the messenger. Hamsun is long dead and passions have died away It’s nice to know that the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, which falls this year, is being widely celebrated across his native land.

Lolita, ya, Lolita!

This is so cool. :-))


Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as "nymphets."


Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat. I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off — a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth — these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had.

Characters in Literature I Hate

Well, perhaps hate is too strong a word though there are a lot that I find quite tiresome, particularly the feckless Harold Skimpole in Charles Dickens's Bleak House, and just about everyone in George Bernard Shaw's overrated and bloodless plays.

But the one character who had the most negative impact on me was Uncle Tom. I used to wonder what black Americans meant when they used the term in such a disparaging way towards certain members of their community; I used to wonder, that is, until I opened the pages of Uncle Tom's Cabin!

Yes, I know that Harriet Beecher Stowe intended him as a 'noble hero.' Yes, I know that he demonstrates a certain form of Christian resignation and acceptance, that would have been wholly understandable to a nineteenth century readership. Yes, I know that it was a message for the times. But when I reached such a stage of irritation with him, when I began to feel that he needed a 'damned good whipping' to rouse him from his dog-like torpor, then I simply knew I had to stop reading. To be put in the frame of mind of a slave owner in the Old South was far from being a comfortable experience! :))

Gatsby, Race and Cultural Pessimism

In The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald makes an oblique reference, in the character of Tom Buchanan, to the theories of Lothrop Stoddard on the decline of the white race. There is a background, in the fashion of Oswald Spengler, to this kind of cultural pessimism.

There is also, it might be said, wider concerns of sexual anxiety, fears at one and the same time of miscegenation and inadequacy. I'm thinking specifically here of Henry Champley, one time foreign editor of Le Temps, and his wonderfully eccentric White Women, Coloured Men, his bizarre and salacious travel book, published in 1936.

In this he urges white women to beware of the dark races; for his travels in the USA and the Far East have convinced him that The coloured people have discovered the White woman as an idol worthy of being desired above all else. The problem for Mr. Champley is that the white woman has also discovered the coloured races! She is therefore urged to resist the tempations of racial mixing and promiscuity in favour of 'heroic humility', which, I assume, means being at the disposal of dear old Mr. Champley! :-))

Actually this whole cultural trend has a wider resonance than Stoddard's specifically American concerns. It's already evident before the First World War, in work like The Conflict of Colour, where Putnam Weale warns his fellow Britons against the perils of the Japanese alliance. In the mid-1920s, independently of the American school, the poet Leo Chiozza Money published The Peril of the White, saying that The whites of Europe and elsewhere are set upon race suicide and internecine war.

Is it surprising, then, that Fitzgerald allows the ridiculous Buchanan to voice such views? Always remember Nick's thought in Gatsby I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. I dare say Tom and Mr Champley would have got on well, though. :-))

Fascist Literati

Céline is the first to leap to mind, though his 'Fascism' was anything but systematic; more a collection of petty personal grievances of one kind or another. Castle to Castle is not his best novel, but it gives much insight into the character of his politics. Ernst Jünger is one of those deliciously ambigious figures, though if you really want to discover his views on Fascism his Notebooks are worth examination.

There are some other good examples that should be added to the list, including Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Celine's countryman and fellow novelist, although he is now almost completely unknown in the English-speaking world. From the Anglo-Saxon world we have Percy Wyndham Lewis, painter and author who co-founded the Vorticist movement in poetry. More of a 'fellow traveller' than an outright Fascist, he was, a little like Celine, one of those individuals who has to swim against the tide. His 1937 novel, Revenge for Love, is highly critical of Communist activity on the Spanish Civil War, and dismissive of the political enthusiasims of left-wing English intellectuals.

But the greatest of all the 'Fascist' writers is surely Knut Hamsun, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. He later became a supporter of Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian Nazi leader. After a war-time meeting with Josef Goebbels Hamsun sent him his Nobel Prize medal as a gift; and after Hitler's death in 1945 he wrote an obituary describing him as a "warrior for mankind." Even so, the work and the politics are two quite different things. Hunger, Pan, Victoria and Mysteries have a value well beyond the mundane.

Speaking of Drieu, I now have a copy of his 1931 novel, Le Feu Follet, translated into English as Will O' the Wisp. I'll record my impressions here in due course. I will say, though, that he is beginning to exercise a kind of spell over me. :-))

Loving The Devil’s Dictionary; Loving Ambrose Bierce

I’ve been leafing through my copy of the wonderful The Devil’s Dictionary, alighting on some favourite definitions. Here are a few;

Cat: a soft, indestructible automaton provided by Nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.

Love: a temporary insanity cured by marriage.

Philosophy: a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

Religion: the daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Idiot: member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. :))

And what about me? Well, I like this;

Zeal: a certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced.

In general Ambrose Bierce is one of my favourite American writers, along with Mark Twain, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hewingway, Damon Runyon and Truman Capote. But there is something strangely unique about Bierce, something, it might even be said, of Faust himself. His wonderfully Gothic short stories reveal complexities and depth of meaning beyond ordinary eyes.

Where did he go, what happened to him in the end? Alas, we will never know. Perhaps the Devil simply claimed his own. :)