… writes Geoffrey Firman of the Mexican Day of the Dead in Malcolm Lowry’s novel, Under the Volcano.

Tonight children dressed as vampires will come to UD‘s house, and she’ll give them chocolates.

Tomorrow and the next day Mexico and other countries will celebrate and summon the souls of the dead.

The calm piety of the Mexican attitude toward death stirs Firman, an alcoholic and a depressive for whom the facts of human suffering and death are an intolerable bafflement and outrage. He thinks of his soul as

a town ravaged and stricken in the black path of his excess, and shutting his burning eyes he had thought of the beautiful functioning of the system in those who were truly alive, switches connected, nerves rigid only in real danger, and in nightmareless sleep now calm… : a peaceful village. Christ, how it heightened the torture … to be aware of all this, while at the same time conscious, of the whole horrible disintegrating mechanism, the light now on, now off, now on too glaringly, now too dimly, with the glow of a fitful dying battery – then at last to know the whole town plunged into darkness, where communication is lost, motion mere obstruction, bombs threaten, ideas stampede –

Under the Volcano is an extended day of the dead on which Firmin, killed in an act of violence he all but invites, is summoned back to life, reanimated as we read. Passages like the one I just quoted describe a person who has nothing to do with his hyper-awareness of being-toward-death but be tortured by it, to want above all to blot it out. The whole horrible disintegrating mechanism sickens him and makes the goods actual human life, such as it is, offers unreal to him. Here are his thoughts as he’s dying:

When he had striven upwards… had not the ‘features’ of life seemed to grow more clear, more animated, friends and enemies more identifiable, special problems, scenes, and with them the sense of his own reality, more separate from himself? And had it not turned out that the further down he sank, the more those features had tended to dissemble, to cloy and clutter, to become finally little better than ghastly caricatures of his dissimulating inner and outer self, or of his struggle, if struggle there were still? Yes, but, had he desired it, willed it, the very material world, illusory though that was, might have been a confederate, pointing the wise way. Here would have been no devolving through failing unreal voices and forms of dissolution that became more and more like one voice to a death more dead than death itself, but an infinite widening, an infinite evolving and extension of boundaries, in which the spirit was an entity, perfect and whole: ah, who knows why man, however beset his chance by lies, has been offered love?

In his final moments, Firmin’s remorse takes the shape of a dialectic involving reality and unreality. Whether any firm basis for the gesture in fact existed (“the very material world, illusory though that was…”), Firmin nonetheless always had the option to “strive upward,” to create the sort of “spirit” passionate human love represents.

But the compensations of the material world, and of love, were uncompelling to Lowry’s Faust; he preferred exploring infernal realms, which promised the deepest reality, the deepest knowledge, of all.

SO glad to be able to reuse this, one of UD‘s greatest post titles. The original post, from 2010, described Israel’s endless efforts to pry Kafka’s manuscripts out of the hands of Max Brod’s girlfriend’s daughters, who hoarded them or sold bits of them off.

A judge has now ruled that Israel gets them. They will be placed in a special library, and they will be scanned and put online. So we will all be able to read these new Kafka works.

… here’s a post I wrote last year about a passage in The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald’s grave is just down the Rockville Pike from UD‘s Garrett Park house.

… says Malcolm Lowry’s autobiographical narrator in his story, The Forest Path to the Spring, and he’s right; but useful only if a writer can narrate the man’s experience well.

You know UD as a mad lover of Lowry’s despairing novel, Under the Volcano. She admires just as much the totally different Forest Path, an extended meditation on happiness.

Like Lowry during the 1940’s, the narrator is an artist who lives as a squatter in a shack on the water in Dollarton, Canada. He writes a strange story, with no real plot beyond a spiritual one which traces, through his general love of nature and his particular daily ritual of carrying a water canister through the forest to a spring, his recognition of the character of happiness.

A long story like this one, with little event, has to carry you along on the strength of its mood and language, and Lowry’s open-hearted, earth-besotted prose accomplishes this from the outset. (Another great example of this sort of story is Katherine Anne Porter’s Holiday.) We are accompanying a man whose mood is happy, first, because the woman he loves is with him and loves the water and forest and sky as much as he does. And he’s also happy because, engrossed in natural life, he suspends his customary anxious self-consciousness.

His awareness is overwhelmingly of the earth, the “ever reclouding heavens” which, when they finally clear at evening, reveal a stand of pines that “write a Chinese poem on the moon.”

Awareness itself – this astoundingly sharp perception of the natural world – is a symptom of his happiness, one that he sees too in his lover:

[I]t was … her consciousness of everything that impressed me …

“Joy,” wrote Simone Weil, “is the overflowing consciousness of reality.” That overflow is what the writer gathers when he goes to the spring. “Ah the pathos and beauty and mystery of little springs and places where there is fresh water near the ocean… [S]uch happiness… was like what is really meant by freedom, which was like the spring, which was like our love, which was like the desire to be truly good.”

The writer says the same thing at the end of his long story as he remembers his years in Dollarton:

[I]t was as if we were clothed in the kind of reality which before we saw only at a distance…

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Burdened, to be sure, by thoughts of the war in Europe (“The shadow of the war was over everything. And while people were dying in it, it was hard to be really happy within oneself. It was hard to know what was happy, what was good. Were we happy, good? Or, being happy at such a time, what could one do with one’s happiness?”), and, more immediately, by the gradual encroachment of the nearby city into his paradise, the writer nonetheless spends most of his time moving unselfconsciously through the natural world and reflecting upon that world.

His little community of fragile shacks and penurious squatters represents

something that man had lost, of which these shacks and cabins, brave against the elements, but at the mercy of the destroyer, were the helpless yet stalwart symbol, of man’s hunger and need for beauty, for the stars and the sunrise.

Part of the answer to the question of happiness has to do with the realization here of the perilousness, the jerry-built vulnerability, of oneself even as you brave the elements of mortal life. Part will have to do with – despite this – fashioning your life as “a continual sunrise… a continual awakening.”

An ideal of all-transcending serenity flickers occasionally in these pages – “the Tao… came into existence before Heaven and Earth, something so still, so changeless, and yet reaching everywhere, and in no danger of being exhausted…” – but the writer knows that he exists confused, in a human world of suffering. Like Thoreau, he also knows the extremity of his human-world-estranging gesture:

Often I would linger on the way and dream of our life. Was it possible to be so happy? Here we were living on the very windrow of existence, under conditions so poverty-stricken and abject in the eyes of the world they were actually condemned in the newspapers, or by the Board of Health, and yet it seemed that we were in heaven, and that the world outside – so portentous in its prescriptions for man of imaginary needs that were in reality his damnation – was hell.

He can’t keep his own hell off the forest path to the spring, though, and another part of happiness is somehow admitting into this new lucid consciousness one’s own ugliness:

Half-conscious I told myself that it was as though I had actually been on the lookout for something on the path that had seemed ready, on every side, to spring out of our paradise at us, that was nothing so much as the embodiment in some frightful animal form of those nameless somnambulisms, guilts, ghouls of past delirium, wounds to other souls and lives, ghosts of actions approximating to murder, even if not my own actions in this life, betrayals of self and I know not what, ready to leap out and destroy me, to destroy us, and our happiness…

These theatrics, though, these anticipated beasts, weren’t really what his unfolding spiritual life was about:

I became convinced that the significance of the experience lay not in the path at all, but in the possibility that in converting the very cannister I carried, the ladder down which I climbed every time I went to the spring – in converting both these derelicts to use I had prefigured something I should have done with my soul… [As] a man I had become tyrannized by the past, and… it was my duty to transcend it in the present.

Those derelict objects – his own dereliction – would not be rejected, avoided, denied, made ghoulish; they would be made useful in the capture of something beautiful.

Having, on the path, encountered and to some extent calmed these ghouls, the writer enters into a lucid stillness in which

I dreamed that my being had been transformed into the inlet itself… so that I seemed to contain the reflected sun deeply within my very soul, yet a sun which as I awoke was in turn transformed … into something perfectly simple, like a desire to be a better man, to be capable of more gentleness, understanding, love –

It is the same selfless stillness that Norman Maclean describes at the end of A River Runs Through It:

Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

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The Dollarton shacks. Long bulldozed; now aestheticized.

[T]he present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.

This was the unforgettable writer Robert Hughes in 2004. I mean literally unforgettable. I have never forgotten these lines and their great words: obscenity, immature, rotten, and, coming at the very end — Hughes, like all strong writers, knew to hold his strongest word for the very end of his sentence — pathological.

Obviously what one notices is the total lack of evasion, softening, the mealy-mouthed; but note too how the harshness of all that is indeed softened by the sweet Shakespearean lilt of his final phrase:

Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.

In talking about the super-rich he uses ugly modern words like super-rich; in talking about his beloved art he regresses as it were not only to (as Paul Fussell argues) archaic words like honor, but to the alliterative lightness of do, debase, and desire.

You see the care Hughes took with language everywhere, as in this brief description of Alfred Munnings:

a brilliant horse-painter in his better moments but a paranoid blimp of a man

See the same technique? brilliant… better… blimp mixing with painter and paranoid, moments and man — this is a writer working hard at the level of the word to create wit, beauty, and surprise, to mix, as he did in the sentence before this one, high and low (there, honor/super-rich; here, brilliant/blimp) to create interest, amusement, a sense of the weird wealth of the world.

Here again:

No serious artist could gain anything from having the tarnished letters RA tacked on to their name, so redolent of boardroom portraits, cockle-gatherers at work or sunny views of Ascot.

No reader moving her eye along this really takes in how Hughes puts tarnished and tacked and to together to make the phrase go tra-la-la; no reader realizes that the words redolent and boardroom balance one another interestingly or that cockle and Ascot are also a sort of a pair. This is the subterranean sonar of a sentence, the notes from underground you don’t think you hear or care about, but you do. They pull the sentence together, give it a ground tone, a thrum, a voice – this is what all those English comp textbooks mean by finding your voice – and distinguish it from the rest of the tossed off prose of the world.

The greatest prose stylists – James Joyce comes to mind – use this technique of groups of similar sounding words following one another in a sentence. I mean, note how there’s one short succession of somewhat similar words after another:

anything / having
tarnished / tacked
boardroom / portraits
cockle / Ascot

And what does this do? Why go to the trouble…? Because the effect is one of coherence, flow, a worked, mature (the Picasso is immature), individual, considered, musical voice. And because that stylistic coherence conveys to us the sense that there is a coherent world, and the writer has hold of it. That’s what the comp textbooks mean by writing with authority. We keep reading because we want to go where the writer goes; we want to be in his world.

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No surprise that the Hughes painterly ethos had also to do with work and the worked. Here it was the work of inquiring closely and tirelessly into the brilliant/obscene world, and demanding the same effort from your viewer:

About artists he admired, like Lucian Freud, he cast the stakes in nothing less than heroic terms. “Every inch of the surface has to be won,” he wrote of Freud’s canvases in The Guardian in 2004, “must be argued through, bears the traces of curiosity and inquisition — above all, takes nothing for granted and demands active engagement from the viewer as its right.”

“Nothing of this kind happens with Warhol, or Gilbert and George, or any of the other image-scavengers and recyclers who infest the wretchedly stylish woods of an already decayed, pulped-out postmodernism.”

… [Goya] was an artist, he wrote, whose genius lay in his “vast breadth of curiosity about the human animal and the depth of his appalled sympathy for it.”

Why she remains obscure, despite having written several terrific novels:

Powell was that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less a final, down payment on Love or The Family; she saw life with a bright Petronian neutrality, and every host at life’s feast was a potential Trimalchio to be sent up.

In the few interviews that Powell gave, she often mentions as her favorite novel, surprisingly for an American, much less for a woman of her time and place, the Satyricon. This sort of thing was not acceptable then any more than it is now. Descriptions of warm, mature, heterosexual love were — and are — woman’s writerly task, and the truly serious writers really, heartbreakingly, flunk the course while the pop ones pass with bright honors.

Vidal notes a reviewer complaining about Powell: “[S]he views the antics of humanity with too surgical a calm.”

Like Vidal himself, who said “Love is not my bag,” love was, wrote Edmund Wilson, “not Miss Powell’s theme.”

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It’s a curious thing. John Montague once said, “The urge to comprehend is so deep. It would make little sense to live a life if you didn’t understand what you had done.” Yet this can’t be true, since we so often tend to loathe our best writers and intellectuals, the ones who – we grudgingly admit – tell us the truth so that we can see ourselves and comprehend. Look at the post-mortem contempt heaped on Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin… I mean, sure, plenty of tributes, too. But on and on about their heartlessness, their surgical calm as they dissect humanity…

Imagine how much harder this tendency toward clinical appraisal – absolutely typical of the great writer – is for people to take when a woman has it.

Here’s Vidal, at the end of his memoir, Palimpsest::

I’ve… been reading through this memoir, adding, subtracting, writing over half-erased texts, ‘palimpsesting’ – all the while looking for clues not so much to me, the subject, if indeed I am the subject, as to what [my] first thirty-nine years were all about… [on] the small planet that each of us so briefly visits.

Recognizing that his patterns are all about an imperishable youthful love for a classmate killed at Iwo Jima, Vidal concludes his book in this way:

Finally, I seem to have written, for the first and last time, not the ghost story that I feared, but a love story, as circular in shape as desire (and its pursuit), ending with us whole at last in the shade of a copper beech.

Vidal will be buried near his lover in Rock Creek Cemetery.

Your bloggeure has occasionally sung in the chorus of St Paul’s Episcopal church, where the cemetery is located. A very rich aesthetic experience – the music, and then, after, the walk through the graveyard.

I’ll do a Vidal pilgrimage, and write about it here, once he gets there.

… here, in this Jonah Lehrer post, because I’ve always loved Gore Vidal’s phrase “a patter of penitence.” And – even stranger – I mention Johan Hari in the post, and Hari once conducted an interview with Vidal that Christopher Hitchens mentions in this 2010 essay about Vidal’s having become, in old age, a hopeless crank.

Vidal has died.

One can only wonder about that interview, now that we know Hari, like Lehrer, routinely made quotations up. But one doesn’t have to wonder about Hari feeding lines to Vidal that he must have known would bring out the worst of his nutty nihilistic nastiness.

Rounding off his interview, an obviously shocked Mr. Hari tried for a change of pace and asked Vidal if he felt like saying anything about his recently deceased rivals, John Updike, William F. Buckley Jr., and Norman Mailer. He didn’t manage to complete his question before being interrupted. “Updike was nothing. Buckley was nothing with a flair for publicity. Mailer was a flawed publicist, too, but at least there were signs every now and then of a working brain.”

This description of Hari’s shock, and his motive in asking the question, makes Hitchens look naive, though I suppose he can’t have known, at that time, Hari’s amorality. It’s unlikely Hari was shocked and trying to cool things off when he brought up Vidal’s literary rivals. Hari was twitting the old guy; he got exactly what he expected to get.

When Vidal was good, he was very very good. Here’s the opening paragraph of a 1979 review he wrote of a Leonardo Sciascia novel:

Since the Second World War, Italy has managed, with characteristic artistry, to create a society that combines a number of the least appealing aspects of socialism with practically all the vices of capitalism. This was not the work of a day. A wide range of political parties has contributed to the invention of modern Italy, a state whose vast metastasizing bureaucracy is the last living legacy anywhere on earth of the house of Bourbon (Spanish branch). In fact, the allegedly defunct Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has now so entirely engulfed the rest of the peninsula that the separation between Italian state and Italian people is nearly perfect.

There’s a completeness about this paragraph. It’s not only sly and witty and stylish; it actually encapsulates everything Vidal is going to go on to say. When I say stylish I mean that it does poetic things with prose. Take a phrase like

vast metastasizing bureaucracy is the last

Vast and last are a straightforwardly rhymed pair; but there’s also the ast lurking in metastasizing. Few prose writers have this sort of ear, though …

Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we’re in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we’re leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night.

Light/night; again/peneplain/rainbands; secluded beauty… Don DeLillo does it too.

Of course you could argue that Vidal overdoes it in his last sentence –

In fact, the allegedly defunct Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has now so entirely engulfed the rest of the peninsula that the separation between Italian state and Italian people is nearly perfect.

You could argue he sticks in too many intensifiers and modifiers: in fact, allegedly, so entirely, nearly… But aside from the fact that defunct and engulfed are a nice assonantal pair, there’s the way in which this overloaded language conveys the beyond-maddening reality of life in the broken Italian state. When he wrote this, Vidal lived there, and in his both careful and over the top prose you sense that he’s been stewing in contempt for so long that he’s been able to produce a spectacularly mature carbonade.

This sense of a writer having overcome his raw emotions (see the problem with raw emotions here) enough to create chiseled language, but at the same time having retained enough emotion to keep his blood flowing through the passage is exciting to us — it’s what we go to the best prose for, as in George Orwell’s essay about charity hospitals, and Hitchens’ and Tony Judt’s essays about their last illnesses. You want the writerly control of the language; you also, just as intensely, want the honest, immediate reality of the writer’s emotions. It’s very difficult to provide both of these things, especially at a time dominated by fakers like Hari, Jonah Lehrer, James Frey, Jason Blair, Stephen Glass and a ton of others. We have to be wary now; we have to look out for prose that looks honest but is actually cynical and manipulative.

You never needed to worry about – even to think about – that with Orwell, Hitchens, and Judt. Vidal, for all his nuttiness, was like that.

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Cruella Vi Dal.

[In today’s] college football world… football is the big rat that keeps the university wheel turning.

It’s clear, vivid, a beaut.

… has died. His work – in particular, The Great War and Modern Memory – was lucid and accessible.

Here are some excerpts from “The X Way Out,” in his book, Class.

Mona Eltahawy pulls no punches in this spectacular essay, one of the few UD‘s seen worthy to be read alongside the essays of George Orwell. Eltahawy and Orwell share an incandescent anger which lies unsteadily under hyper-controlled prose. This latent, labile, anger sustains the riveting tension and clarity of their unsettlingly poised voice. After you read Eltahawy, read Orwell’s How the Poor Die. The same outrage, the same strange, meticulous composure; and of course the same focus upon a large segment of hated humanity.

(Eltahawy makes me think, too, of D.H. Lawrence, for she begins her essay with an excerpt from a modern Egyptian short story that captures the crushing nihilism of a cruel marriage; and that same thing plays out in Odour of Chrysanthemums)

What hope can there be for women in the new Egyptian parliament, dominated as it is by men stuck in the seventh century? A quarter of those parliamentary seats are now held by Salafis, who believe that mimicking the original ways of the Prophet Mohammed is an appropriate prescription for modern life. Last fall, when fielding female candidates, Egypt’s Salafi Nour Party ran a flower in place of each woman’s face. Women are not to be seen or heard — even their voices are a temptation — so there they are in the Egyptian parliament, covered from head to toe in black and never uttering a word.

And so women able to utter speech must utter it with a vengeance.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Few writers have the guts to express their hatred of particular artworks. This wasn’t always the case (read the reviews that came out when Joyce’s Ulysses appeared), but in our day, as Brian Phillips writes, taste – and the ability to defend it – seems to have died:

A kind of obscurity, something felt but not quite formulated, overwhelms aesthetic judgment. It becomes difficult to say what is good or bad, and worse, what one likes or dislikes.

SOS has already, on this blog (though she can’t find the post), drawn your attention to one strong survivor of the death of taste – the New York Times critic Jon Pareles, who, in his review of a Sarah Brightman concert back in 2008, showed you how it’s done: How to have aesthetic judgment, and how to write about a negative response to a particular work.

Now Brightman… well… you might say she’s already obviously big-time kitsch… It’s like going after Celine Dion… And I’m inclined to agree with you. But although the target was soft, Pareles penned an exemplar of the pan, so SOS wanted you to see it.

Remember? Here are snippets, with the mean parts helpfully bolded by SOS:

… Ms. Brightman’s pop is an enchanted castle, luxurious and remote, a refuge from turbulence and untidiness. Her spectacle is meticulous; even when confetti dropped, hardly a particle landed anywhere but onstage.

… Her finale, “Running,” merged two Gustav Holst melodies with thumping pop fit for Abba: “We are running to save the save the world,” she sang, promising hope.

… Ms. Brightman proffers sweetness and light, as well as diva graciousness. Between songs she spoke in a plummy accent about the “amazing, amazing journey” of her career. Although she started out as a dancer in musical theater, now her stage movements are limited to promenading, swirling the fabric of her dresses or slowly raising her arms to acknowledge applause.

… The night’s oddity was an ominous electronic remix of “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” throbbing and tinkling as Ms. Brightman, dressed like Little Red Riding Hood, pedaled a (stationary) bicycle through darkness with holographic wolves looming nearby. She was rapping, “Even if you cry you won’t be heard,” and wailing, “It’s just in my mind!” It was a strange outburst, a breach amid all the plush, soothing kitsch.

Notice that killer pans aren’t this fake bitch made me puke. You want to keep hold of yourself, and of your prose — it’s much meaner that way. Colder. More analytical.

This morning, in the Times, there’s another winner. Read and learn.

Alastair Macaulay is reviewing Russia’s Eifman Ballet. First paragraph:

Bad [First word sums up review. No shying away from negativity here. No platitudes, softeners. B.A.D.]  choreography crops up all too often, and yet nobody else today, now that Maurice Béjart and Roland Petit are no longer with us, [No longer with us.  Note the amusing disrespect here, Macaulay’s importation of pious language even as he’s clearly putting these two down.  Fun.]  makes the kind of awful ballet that is Boris Eifman’s forte. Ken Russell’s more sensationalist movies seem like models of restraint beside Mr. Eifman’s lurid, overemphatic, far-from-coherent oeuvre. Mr. Eifman flaunts all the worst clichés of psycho-sexo-bio-dance-drama with casual pride while he rushes headlong to commit a whole new set of artistic felonies.  [Laugh Out Loud.  The farcical image of Eifman rushing about in search of more felonies – and by the way, note Macaulay’s sly, stylish, use of alliteration: far from/forte/flaunts/felonies – is amusing, belittling, over the top verbally in the same way Eifman is over the top balletically.]

… [Eifman] is an exponent of crudely sensationalist trends that were fashionable in Europe several decades ago (Béjart and Petit were both approved by the Soviet artistic authorities in Leningrad, where Mr. Eifman began work in the 1970s) and have long been notorious elsewhere. Ballets like his two-act “Rodin” …were much easier to find 30 years ago. I had hoped the species was extinct. [I had hoped... Snooty?  Yes! ]

“Rodin” tries to give us sex, art, mania and martyrdom. Tries to. Mr. Eifman lacks the skill to depict any of these things seriously. [Lacks the skill.  Simple declarative English.  Macaulay will now go on to explain why he lacks the skill.]

Perhaps the silliest scene is one in which [Camille] Claudel, alone in her studio with a rectangular block of stone, starts sculpturing. She attacks it with both hands like a tympanist at full climax, punctuating her efforts now and then by turning to us and planting her wrist on her brow to indicate creative exhaustion, and then she recycles this series of gestures so it becomes a dance phrase. The point of the sex is to show Rodin’s manipulation of Claudel; still, the way in which he handles her groin, though unpleasant, has far more originality and artistry than the way she tackles sculpture.  [Great simile, drawn from music; and climax has a nice punny feel to it.  His exact, amusing descriptions of the dancer’s movements make clear just how pretentious and obvious and heavy-breathing it all is.  The groin-handling bit is hilarious.  Note the calm use of the word “unpleasant,” when what the critic obviously means is sickening, unwatchable.]

As for mania, “Rodin” is one of those expressionist ballets (there are examples going back to the 1930s) in which the dancers aim long, wide-eyed stares out front at the audience. (Often the head hangs plaintively on one side, to indicate psychological distress.) Most gestures are reiterated forcibly. To show disturbance of a more advanced kind, you take one hand and clutch the opposite side of your body. (Try, for example, passing your left hand behind your back to grip your right elbow. Now hold this while staring at the audience as if in misery or anger and with your head tipping to one side.) No small gestures are permitted.  [His transformation of the deep deep profundity of the performance into a Jane Fonda Video Workout is complete, and completely wonderful.]

[It] is amazing to find how indifferent Mr. Eifman is to making his story clear. The historic record of the Rodin-Claudel relationship does not always coincide with the program synopsis, and neither version helps you to decipher the stage action.

… Some artists are bad because they so obviously fail to achieve what they intend. Others are bad because what they intend is rotten in the first place. [Note the careful return to the word bad which opened the piece.  He has called it bad, explained meticulously why it’s bad, and now reiterates that it’s bad.] Mr. Eifman fits right into both categories, to a spectacular degree. And his audience loves him all the way.

 

Sarah Brightman was a huge hit too.

… takes a close look at an instance of superior writing. Superior not only in its displaying higher verbal skill than most other pieces of prose display, but also in its having the effect of elevating us, ethically and emotionally, as we read it.

Jennifer Homans, Tony Judt’s widow, wants to clarify, for readers of his last book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, “the conditions under which it was written.” These were profoundly dark, and “the darkness shaped the book, in its form but also in its ideas.” For Judt, ideas were personal as well as public; abstract laws were about bettering the living conditions of not at all abstract people, and as he gradually, humiliatingly, miserably died of ALS, he became very intimately enraged at the way people less fortunate than he were suffering with it:

[M]any of these people were younger than Tony and destitute or medically uninsured, with narrow if not ruined life possibilities. They needed help — practical social and medical services. Humiliation was a terrible feeling, but, as he felt strongly, it was also — and should be treated as — an ugly social fact. “Night,” his essay describing his “imprisonment without parole,” was partly for these new friends, and so, in another key, was the end of Thinking the Twentieth Century, where Tony mounted as fierce — and felt — a case as ever he had for our need to “think socially”: to make human rather than monetary gain the goal of social policy. This was not the politics of disability or special interest; it was about collective responsibility and the duty of us all to each other.

So that’s the basic thing, the thing Homans wants to convey as people open Judt’s book – its particular intensity about injustice and the social good derives from his having felt, viscerally, a certain unjust endgame. “Tony’s own physical hardship, and his sense of the fragility of human dignity, if anything increased his worry for the world he was about to exit.”

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But there’s so much more in this essay than its basic point…. Phrases like the fragility of human dignity, for starters, fragility and dignity having a nice brittle uncertain assonance… When interrupted by the smooth word human the phrase generates an almost graphic sense of the shaky balance we try to maintain between the ideal of dignity and the reality of, well, shakiness.

Or take the way Homans conveys the always peculiarly intense nature of Judt’s intellectuality:

For Tony, ideas were a kind of emotion, something he felt and cared about in the way that most people do about feelings like sadness or love.

This is odd – hard to understand, perhaps. How can concepts be sad or happy or passionate? Maybe one can think about it in a couple of ways. Judt spent his life raising, rearing, if you’d like, ideas – he loved to gestate ideas, expand them, argue them; and in this thinking and molding and arguing he was cherishing, maintaining, defending, growing, his sense of the world, his sense of the best ways to think about the world. Like a lot of intellectuals, he seems never to have outgrown the excited erotic fun of the adolescent bull session. So ideas were emotions in this sense, that they were always an intense part – perhaps the most intense part – of his affective life.

And in another way Judt was simply a materialist thinker, in the left tradition …

And yet that is an abstraction, and it doesn’t take into account the emotionality involved here, which I think has to do with the pathos of his lifelong effort to feel the reality of human suffering — to feel the link between that suffering and certain settled political and social ways of doing things. Think of an excerpt like this one from Orwell’s essay, Down the Mine:

Here am I sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just ‘coal’– something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it. You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.

You sense in this paragraph the same emotionally intense “mental-effort” to connect political abstraction with human suffering. One reason Judt’s brief autobiography (I reviewed it here) is so beautiful is that it breathes life into the all but moribund ‘lost illusions’ plot of so many lives — so many politically engaged lives. Judt recalls, as he lies dying, his several youthful attempts toward ideologically charged collective life – kibbutz Zionism, for instance – and how they all failed, all brought him to where “Fierce unconditional loyalties – to a country, a God, an idea, or a man – have come to terrify me.”

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As he grew sicker, he became understandably more fearful. There was too much he couldn’t control in the outside world: everything from electrical outlets for the breathing machine (batteries fail) to his wheelchair (power-operated but he had no way to steer it) and — not least — the unbearable goodwill of people who didn’t understand. He took grim refuge in his study, his sickroom, his closed, safe prison-cocoon that would house his deteriorating body and entrapped mind.

Grim refuge is something of a cliché, but never mind; the phrase that hit me here was “the unbearable goodwill of people who didn’t understand.” For a couple of reasons. Since Homans has already made vividly clear how much lucidity, clarity, and understanding meant to Judt, we now feel with a special ache just how hideous this incomprehensible, incommunicable condition must have been for him.

And then too, the writing here is so personal, I’m receiving it so strongly, she’s been able to place me so powerfully in his sickroom (“thick air and layers of dust impossible to clean, smells that seemed almost visible, of antiseptic, flowers, morphine, and the burn and buzz of electricity from the amplifier that projected his ever-weakening voice; windows thrown open for air and light and hastily shut against the unnatural chill in his static and stationary bones”), that I absolutely see myself there understanding. And then I absolutely recognize that although I want to see that – want to idealize that – the reality is that like almost everyone else I would have brought into that study an unbearable goodwill… Which has me musing yet more deeply on my empathy generally, my… humanity — a very big abstraction, but this great writing has fitted it to one particular prison-cocoon.

Ultimately this is great writing because Homans regenerates in me a powerful and immediate sense of what an abstract phrase like the life of mind really means. The life of the mind.

For Tony the incentive behind the book — and it had to be a powerful one to overcome the discomfort and depression that were his constant companions — was primarily intellectual, a matter of clarification. [W]hen his dialogue with his co-author] worked, as it usually did, Tony was transformed. Sick Tony, frustrated and anguished Tony, unable to eat or scratch or breathe properly, his body aching from inactivity, was able, with Tim and through sheer mental and physical exertion, to find some relief and exhilaration in the life of the mind… To hell with the disease, with fate, with the body, with the future and the past. He would keep the conversation going and raise the stakes; his public would fight back — and when you fight, you feel alive. Engagé. He needed that to keep going. Which is why he kept going with Thinking the Twentieth Century; it was part of the fight, from his withering comments on intellectuals who supported the Iraq war right down to his ever-prescient defense of the role of the state in public life. He had a soldier’s discipline and even though he was miserable he fought on, saying what he had to say and refining and honing his every word. That was the only kind of public intellectual he knew how to be.

It’s the 200th anniversary of the notorious death of the great story writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), precursor of Kafka and assorted absurdists.

Like Kafka, Kleist (who early in life sat down on the shore of Wannsee Lake, shot a suicidal friend, and then shot himself) has this weird combination of clear, calm, confident, very expository-feeling prose, and brutally meaningless content. The stories are typically told from an extremely detached, affectlessly rational point of view – the narrator is simply a set of lucid eyes setting down what they see. Indeed sometimes the Kleist narrator, with his long paragraphs of diligent, painstaking description, is tiresome… Yet what these eyes see, as in Kleist’s greatest short story (if you ask me), “Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music,” is pointless sadistic hatred, sudden communal psychosis, obsessive demented ritual unto death…

Four viciously anti-Catholic brothers, outfitted with weapons to destroy a church, hear, as they prepare to attack, the music of its mass – music so beautiful that it bears the congregants’ “souls, as if upon wings, through all the heaven of harmony” – and instantly the brothers throw down their weapons and become hysterical religious fanatics for life.

[T]he young men had led [a] ghost-like life [in the local insane aslyum] for six years… [T]hey slept little and tasted little, …no sound usually passed their lips, and …it was only at the hour of midnight that they rose from their seats, when, with voices loud enough to shatter the windows of the house, [in the most hideous and horrible voice] they sang the Gloria in excelsis.

Their mother finds them years later in the madhouse, where, overwhelmed by despair and confusion, she examines the score of the music played and sung that day:

She looked at the magical unknown signs, with which, as it seemed, some fearful spirit had mysteriously marked out its circle, and was ready to sink into the ground, when she found the “Gloria in excelsis” open. It seemed to her as if the whole terrors of music, which had proved the destruction of her sons, were whirling over her head; at the mere sight of the score her senses seemed to be leaving her, and with an infinitely strong feeling of humility and submission to the divine power, she heartily pressed the leaf to her lips, and then again seated herself in her chair.

Inside of a story whose authoritative narrator renders the world as a setting of utterly known signs sits a woman collapsing under a whirling, utterly unknown language. Her disharmonic sons’ first encounter with harmony (“beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure”) has undone them…

See, I think writers like Kleist and Kafka want to evoke what happens when our quotidian efforts to make sense of earthly meaninglessness and suffering are interrupted by epiphany — by entries into a fully meaningful world. Only our epiphanies aren’t beautiful and transcendent; they’re nightmarish. Like all epiphanies, they suddenly disclose to us what is really there; we see that there is a hand creating and directing our lives. But it is a hand whose absolute power is matched by its absolute, and seemingly malign, mystery. We can only agree to subjugate ourselves to that crushing enigma.

Or not. We can go on living the way we always have, suspecting now, however, that life is a crushing, sick joke. This is a guy option, as Christopher Hitchens makes clear in his essay about why women aren’t funny:

Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with — and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough… Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.

I mean, what’s all that Bach doing on the soundtrack of Shame, a film about sexual addiction? Aren’t Bach’s surpassing clarities, his you-could-weep harmonies, there as a counterpoint to the main character’s embroilment in ugliness, arbitrariness, and futility?

Always, Kleist and Kafka seem to say, we are at play between these two forces – the force of ugly visceral embroilment in a world that hurts and confuses us, and the counterforce of heavenly harmony whose voice is the voice of music, beauty. Their brilliance as writers is to retain narrators who dwell in the heavenly-harmonic even as the events they tell come from hell.

The absolutely contrary principle to the work and philosophy of Kleist, Kafka, and Hitchens is that of absolute confidence that the world has meaning, and transcendent meaning at that:

The sadness is that there is a hell for Hitch to go to. He was granted a long farewell, with the opportunity for reconsiderations and reconciliations with those he hated and those he hurt. He declined to take advantage of it. Mother Teresa is fine, and no doubt prays for her enemies, including that Hitchens would be delivered both from hell and the nihilistic oblivion, which he thought awaited him.

Ian McEwan on the last days of Christopher Hitchens:

[We] set up a desk for him under a window. We helped him and his pole with its feed-lines across the room, arranged pillows on his chair, adjusted the height of his laptop. Talking and dozing were all very well, but Christopher had only a few days to produce 3,000 words on Ian Ker’s biography of Chesterton. Whenever people talk of Christopher’s journalism, I will always think of this moment.

Consider the mix. Chronic pain, weak as a kitten, morphine dragging him down, then the tangle of Reformation theology and politics, Chesterton’s romantic, imagined England suffused with the kind of Catholicism that mediated his brush with fascism, and his taste for paradox, which Christopher wanted to debunk. At intervals, his head would droop, his eyes close, then with superhuman effort he would drag himself awake to type another line. His long memory served him well, for he didn’t have the usual books on hand for this kind of thing. When it’s available, read the review.

His unworldly fluency never deserted him, his commitment was passionate, and he never deserted his trade. He was the consummate writer, the brilliant friend. In Walter Pater’s famous phrase, he burned “with this hard gem-like flame”. Right to the end.