Monthly Archives: April 2020

“A Cemetery of Books”: David Fishman’s The Book Smugglers

Posted on by under book review, Holocaust, judaism, review, Uncategorized

Remember in 2001 when the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamyan, those giant statues in Afghanistan? Cue handwringing about the desecration of an important cultural treasure. I was in graduate school at the time and I remember one of my professors rejecting that response. People care more about those sculptures than they do other people, he said. Where’s the outcry about everyone the Taliban oppressed, violated, killed?

My tendency to please others, to see the point they’re making, especially in situations I perceive as confrontational, combined with the inescapable servility of grad students toward the professors who have such power over them made me accept this claim, even though there had in fact been plenty of horror at the Taliban’s human targets. And, after all, I could see the man’s point. It is easier to lament cultural rather than human destruction, cultural objects being less difficult than people. Paintings and buildings and books—they’re less annoying, insistent, demanding, less, you know, living than people. Silently, to myself, I worked myself into righteous indignation. Shouldn’t we care more about people than about the things they’ve made? Fuck everyone getting all weepy about, say, a manuscript while they’re resigned to torture or genital mutilation or mass rape. I resolved to take this line from then on, to harden my heart against the loss of “cultural treasures,” especially since this sort of dismay is usually accompanied by the idea that culture is morally improving, something I’ve never been able to stomach.

I maintained my people > objects stance even as, years later, I began to study the Holocaust seriously. But having done so I couldn’t maintain the belief for long. Not because people don’t matter. But because the differences between people and objects are less evident than my professor would have us believe. I’ve written before, for example, about how diaries, Holocaust diaries in particular, treat books as extensions of people. Not just that the book is a synecdoche for the person, but that diary and diarist become indistinguishable, an equation made by the writers themselves. Think of Chaim Kaplan, writing on August 2, 1942, amidst liquidation of Warsaw ghetto, in the last line of his last entry: “If my life ends—what will become of my diary?” Or of Hélène Berr, writing in October 1943: “It makes me happy to think that if I am taken, Andrée [the family’s cook] will have kept these pages, which are a piece of me, the most precious part, because no other material thing matters to me anymore.” Neither Berr nor Kaplan effaces themselves by valuing their writing. Rather, each pays tribute to the reality of experience by affirming its indirection: what’s real is what’s written.

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But maybe books—which I’ll use as a synonym for cultural artifacts generally: I mean representations—are different from other things. Do books have a special quality that is either the same as or, if different, then morally equivalent to the one that we rightly assign to people? These thoughts were prompted by my reading of David Fishman’s The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis, a book centered on events in Vilna, Lithuania, known for centuries “the Jerusalem of the North” because of its status as a center of Jewish learning and study.

Fishman’s story begins in the interwar years, when Vilna was part of Poland. (Before WWI, it had been ruled by Russia for 125 years; today, Vilnius is in Lithuania.) Almost 30% of its 193,000 inhabitants were Jewish, making it the fourth largest Jewish city in Poland. But its cultural weight was even greater. Its Great Synagogue, modest looking from the outside (by decree, synagogues had to be shorter than churches), astonished visitors, who descended a staircase and looked up at its marble columns and silver ornaments. Nearby was the home and synagogue of the Vilna Gaon (genius), Rabbi Elijah, an 18th century Talmudist, and spiritual head of the Misnagdim, the opponents of Hasidic Judaism.

But by the 20th century much of Vilna’s Jewish life was secular. The most famous Yiddish play, S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, was first performed there in 1921. The Strashun Library, “the intellectual hub of Jewish Vilna” contained 40,000 volumes and was open even on Shabbat and Jewish holidays. A Jewish gymnasium (academic high school) taught modern chemistry and physics in Yiddish. Publishing companies and newspapers pumped out Jewish books and reported on Jewish life. Most importantly, Vilna was home to the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO), “a modern research academy that employed the methods of the humanities and social sciences to study Jewish life.” Founded in 1925, by the 1930s YIVO had branches in Berlin, Paris, and New York (the latter is still around). Befitting its status as what Fishman calls “the national academy of a stateless people, the Jews of Eastern Europe,” YIVO held a vast archive of all things related to Jewish life: religious texts, but also folksongs, playbills, posters, you name it. YIVO housed scholars but also offered wide-ranging educational programming for general audiences.

Having introduced the setting, Fishman turns to some of the key players (helpfully introduced in a Dramatis Personae). They include:

Shmerke Kaczerginski (1908—1954), known as the heart of the “Young Vilna” literary group. This poet and sing-songwriter had been orphaned at a young age and educated at night school. After the invasion of Vilna in 1941 he spent seven months roaming the countryside disguised as a Polish deaf-mute, but voluntarily slipped into the ghetto in 1942 where he and Avrom Sutzkever (see below) became inseparable. He participated in the failed ghetto uprising and escaped to the forest where he joined a band of partisans. After the war, Kaczerginski set up the Vilna Jewish museum, the first post-Holocaust Jewish museum. He clashed repeatedly with Soviet authorities, however, and, after ensuring that many of the documents that survived the war were shipped to YIVO in New York, he left Vilna, first for Lodz, then Paris and, in 1950, Argentina, where he died a few years later in a plane crash.

Zelig Kalmanovitch (1885—1944), who held a doctorate from university in Königsberg, became co-director of YIVO in 1928. In midlife, he was increasingly religious and Zionist. Known as “the prophet of the ghetto” for urging those imprisoned to maintain their dignity.

Rachela Krinsky (1910—2002) was a historian and high school teacher whose (first) husband died weeks after the German invasion of Vilna, leaving her with a small child. Krinsky later gave her daughter up to the girl’s Polish nanny in hopes she might survive outside the ghetto. The girl did, and the two were later reunited.

Herman Kruk (1897—1944) had been the director of the largest Jewish library in Warsaw, an ardent Bundist who believed books were central to Jewish flourishing. Kruk fled Warsaw for Vilna after the German invasion of Poland in 1939. He turned down the chance to emigrate to the US in 1940 because he hoped to track down his wife and child, who were trapped in Warsaw. (They perished.) In occupied Vilna, Kruk became the director of the ghetto library, an enormously popular and life-affirming institution. He kept a diary of his experiences in the ghetto and beyond, after he was deported to various labour camps. Miraculously, this document survived, though Kruk did not. (It’s available in English, but it’s very expensive!)

Abraham (Avrom) Sutzkever (1913-2010) is the most famous person in this story: the poet laureate of Young Vilna, and probably the greatest Yiddish poet of the 20th Century (Jakob Glatshteyn would seem to be his main competitor). Sutzkever escaped death many times, first in the ghetto and later with the partisans in the forests of Lithuania. (His infant son, murdered in 1942, was not so lucky.) From there, Sutzkever was brought by special plane to Moscow (the Soviets plucked him out of the forest), but he returned to Vilna at end of war. Sutzkever later testified at Nuremberg trials, made his way to Paris, and eventually settled in Mandate Palestine, later Israel.

All these principals were members of the paper brigade, a work detail founded in February 1942 to sort through Jewish documents for the Nazis. The brigade was founded at the insistence of Johannes Pohl, a former Catholic priest turned Nazi orientalist who worked for the Einsatz Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the agency in charge of looting cultural treasures in occupied Europe. Much of that plunder was Jewish; Pohl, who had lived and studied in Jerusalem, was appointed a Judaica expert. Soon after, he was named chief librarian at the Institute for Investigation of the Jewish Question in Frankfurt. (The Nazis planned to commemorate the people they had exterminated.)

Pohl had first arrived in Vilna in July 1941, just weeks after the German invasion. At that time, he arranged for a mass of Jewish material to be shipped to Frankfurt. But the YIVO archives were so big a dedicated work detail was needed to sift through the materials. Thus the “paper brigade,” which gave surprising shelter to the intellectuals and artists named above. The brigade was unusual in that it was one of the only all-Jewish work details (no non-Jewish overseers) and that its work took place outside the ghetto, as that’s where the YIVO building was located. As a result, the brigade was a peaceful place to work, with plenty of chances to snatch a cigarette and to hide valuable documents on one’s person for smuggling back into the ghetto. As you can imagine, such smuggling was dangerous; Fishman dramatizes various near catastrophes when workers were searched at the gates. For most of the Jews imprisoned in the ghetto, however, the paper brigade was not a desirable work assignment. Not so much because of their lack of interest in smuggling paper, or their fear of being caught if they did, but because opportunities for the most valuable kind of graft were almost nonexistent. You couldn’t find or trade any food while toiling in the YIVO archives.

Food, of course, was all-important. As was true in all the ghettos the Nazis set up across Eastern Europe, life in the Vilna ghetto was terrible: overcrowding, hunger, and despair were rife; these conditions led to widespread disease. Yet the Jews of Vilna also made heroic efforts at maintaining more than mere life. (That was true in other ghettos as well; Fishman sometimes implies that Vilna was unique in this respect, though I think that implication stems more from his focus: this isn’t a comparative work.)  A distinguishing feature of the Vilna ghetto was its lending library, composed of 45,000 titles, which was extraordinary well used. Fifteen months after its inauguration in September 1941, over 100,000 books had been checked out. Because the director, Kruk, kept detailed statistics, Fishman is able to show what kinds of people used the library and what kind of books they checked out. Users were mostly young, they mostly read novels, and most of those novels were what Fishman dubiously calls “pulp fiction” (Margaret Mitchell and Vicki Baum were especially popular). “Socially mature readers” gravitated to books that resonated with their own wartime experience. Favourite titles included War and Peace, All Quiet on the Western Front and, especially (heartbreakingly, all too pertinently) Franz Werfel’s novel of the Armenian genocide, Forty Days of Musa Dagh.

Kruk hung two signs near the circulation desk. One was prosaic:

Keep the books clean and intact; do not read while eating. Do not write in books; do not dampen them; do not fold pages or break bindings. If a reader has been ill with a contagious disease, he must notify the librarian upon returning the book.

The other exhortatory:

Books are our only comfort in the ghetto!

Books can help you forget your sad reality.

Books can transport you to worlds far away from the ghetto.

Books can still your hunger when you have nothing to eat.

Books have remained true to you, be true to the books.

Preserve our spiritual treasures—books!

Reading these words now, I’m filled with respect for this commitment to literature in the face of suffering. But I’m also filled with doubt—are these sentiments accurate or advisable? Kruk was aware that books in the ghetto were a narcotic, with all the double-edged qualities we might associate with the term. “It often seems to the ghetto librarian that he is a drug pusher,” he wrote, adding that it sometimes seemed what he saw in patrons was not so much reading as “self-intoxication.”

We often find references to fantasy in Holocaust literature: day-dreaming, sleeping, reveries, memories are regularly described as ways to help manage the situations victims found themselves in. It makes sense that books would do so too. But every description of a strategy for removing one’s self from current reality is immediately qualified: fantasy is as dangerous as it is helpful.

Similar ambivalence haunted the members of the paper brigade. “Kalmanovitch and I don’t know if we are gravediggers or saviors,” Kruk confided to his diary. Despite the relatively benign working conditions, workers were often in tears at what they were asked to do. Fishman compellingly shows how the protagonists of his tale regularly compared the fate of the cultural objects they were helping the Nazis spirit away and/or destroy to the fate of the Jewish people. When the brigade was first sent to the YIVO headquarters to begin their mission they found the place a ruin (it had been briefly used as a barracks), which papers piled a meter high in the basement: “It looked like after a real pogrom,” wrote one member. Kruk was even more explicit: “like everything here, [YIVO] dies in a mass grave, along with scores and scores of others … The mass grave, ‘the trash paper,’ grows bigger every minute.” Zelig Kalmanovitch—former YIVO co-director—wrote similarly in his diary. In an entry dated August 26, 1943 he notes:

I sorted books all week. I sent several thousand books to their destruction with my own hands. A mound of books is lying on the floor of the YIVO reading room. A cemetery of books. A mass grave. Books that are victims of the War of Gog and Magog, along with their owners.

Once again we see books equated to people. Both are vulnerable. Both can be murdered. (Even, as was true so often during the Holocaust, by their own—Kalmanovitch speaks of sending books to destruction in the same way members of the Sonderkommandos, for example, spoke or sending people to death.) There is a strong sense that people and books need each other. The paper brigade workers often used their lunch hour to read some of the books they were surrounded by, not idly but desperately. Rachela Krinsky later wrote of this intense experience: “Who knows? These might be the last books we ever read. And the books were also, like us, in mortal danger. For many of them, we were their last readers.”

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Sorting through material at YIVO, April 1943

Fishman makes his story accessible without sacrificing nuance. Sometimes that informality misfires, as in a present tense reconstruction of smuggling scene at the beginning of the book, or a tour of pre-war Vilna, imaged to be given by Kaczerginski. But the book gets better as it goes along. Readers whose knowledge of the Holocaust is limited might find the topic a bit niche, yet they are exactly who I most wish would read The Book Smugglers. It’s important to understand that resistance took many forms in this period (knowledge that might help us imagine similar forms of resistance in our own, increasingly authoritarian times). It’s important to recognize that Jews suffered under both the Nazis and, after the war, the Soviets (not in the same way, to be sure, but neither regime was interested in enabling Jewish life). It’s important to see how Jewishness remained a problem in a post-war world still defined in nationalist terms, a problem that persists to this day. (A problem that, in a different world, could be taken as an opportunity.) And, finally, it’s important to think, pace my grad school professor, about how the objects we live among, perhaps especially those we use to tell the story of ourselves, are versions of ourselves. We shouldn’t mourn the lost manuscripts of Vilna—or the Buddhas of Bamyan—more than the death of the people who made, read, or otherwise appreciated them. But we shouldn’t disparage that mourning either. The destruction of the one is so tightly connected to the murder of the other.

(I was recently introduced to this footage of Avrom Sutzkever testifying at the Nuremberg trials–in Russian rather than Yiddish, as he desired, because, perversely, Yiddish was not a recognized official language of the trials. Anyway, he’s much more dashing than I expected!)

On D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love

Posted on by under #1920Club, readalong, review, Uncategorized

I wrote this essay in 2016–O brave old world!–for Open Letters Monthly (of blessed memory–how I miss it). You can still find it in the OLM archives, but when I heard that Karen and Simon had chosen 1920 for their latest Reading Club project, I thought I’d dust it off. Women in Love is my favourite book, and I never miss a chance to talk it up. Thanks to Karen & Simon for their indefatigable hosting of these events. And thanks to the old gang at Open Letters: Sam Sacks, John Cotter, Steve Donoghue, Greg Waldmann, and, especially, Rohan Maitzen. They made this piece better.

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D. H. Lawrence’s masterpiece, Women in Love (1920), is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. It’s also intense and uncompromising, to the point that it daunted even its author. To one of his most supportive friends, the Scottish writer Catherine Carswell, Lawrence admitted, “The book frightens me: it is so end-of-the-world.” Indeed, its working title was Dies Irae (Day of Wrath). Yet the book isn’t apocalyptic. Its grim fascination with endings is balanced by a joyful appreciation of beginnings. The letter to Carswell continues, “But it is, it must be, the beginning of a new world too.” Perhaps that’s why my students love the novel so much. After all, it’s about young, intelligent, talented people figuring out how they want to live in the world, and what they will have to change to make that happen. But you don’t have to be a student to enjoy Women in Love. There’s nothing dutiful or high-minded about it. You’ll race through it, I promise, caught up in its passion, its intensity, its extraordinary prose. Reading it, you’ll feel alive.

That aliveness might be a reaction against the terrible war during which it was written. Although the novel is set in the English Midlands in an unspecified year before WWI and so doesn’t concern the war itself, Lawrence wished “the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.” That’s a strange thing to say: it only makes sense if war — or at least its emotional effects, like bitterness — is a natural state of affairs. And that’s in fact true of this novel. The characters might not actually be at war with each other, but they are always at loggerheads. The novel thrives on these arguments: disagreement is a moral force in Women in Love, its highest value.

At the center of those disagreements are two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, a teacher and an artist, respectively. Early in the book, they meet two men who are close friends: Rupert Birkin, an inspector of schools, and Gerald Crich, an “industrial magnate,” heir to a large mining company. As the novel begins, Rupert is extricating himself from a relationship with Hermione Roddice, an avowedly modern and progressive Baronet’s daughter. Eventually Birkin leaves Hermione for Ursula, and Gerald and Gudrun get together. The foursome, sick of England, travel to a snowy valley in the Tyrolean Alps. In this “cradle of snow,” ominously described as “the navel of the world, where the earth belonged to the skies, pure, unapproachable, impassable,” their relationships end badly.

Although the ending is quite dramatic, Lawrence is not much interested in plot. Instead he cares about ideas, specifically, ideas about human relationships. What does it mean to be involved with another person? What characteristics would an ideal relationship have? How do individual relationships combine to create society?

The novel launches us into these considerations from its first sentence: “Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working and talking.” Whereas Lawrence’s earlier novels (The White Peacock and Sons & Lovers) emphasize work, this one emphasizes talk. And talk isn’t just a way of passing time while the day’s work gets done. It’s the main attraction — and a lot rides on it. In this first conversation the sisters consider marriage: is it something they want? Is it anything they could even imagine for themselves? Is there any way for them to avoid it? What begins as speculation rapidly dissolves into enmity and resentment. Marriage, children, managing a household: these conventional female roles seem absurd. But their absence is frightening. The sisters find themselves “confronted by a void, a terrifying chasm, as if they had looked over the edge.” The impasse is only surmounted, ironically, by their decision to watch the guests arriving for a nearby wedding. Standing in the throng outside the church, the sisters catch their first glimpses of Rupert, Gerald, and Hermione. The wedding symbolizes the social norms the characters reject but are nonetheless drawn to. They want to be modern, but they can’t just ignore the past. The uncertainty of their position — knowing that established ways of living are impossible yet not knowing what to replace them with — is what Gudrun responds to when she cries in frustration, “Don’t you find, that things fail to materialize? Nothing materialises! Everything withers in the bud.”

We soon learn that for things to blossom they must be subject to conflict. Despite its title, Women in Love is characterized more by anger, even hatred, than love. It might not be surprising that these self-styled modern women loathe the provincialism of the Midlands, the violent bluster of their father’s patriarchal values, and the contempt they feel emanating from the local miners and their families. But a lot of the time they also hate each other. Even though Gudrun is the one who proposed looking at the wedding as a way to ease the tensions between them, she feels “a friction of dislike” when Ursula readily agrees. The novel captures this ambivalence through competing similes: “The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, snipping off everything that came athwart them; or like a knife and a whetstone, the one sharpened against the other.” In the first, the sisters are a team; in the second they are at odds. Yet in both the relationship is antagonistic, whether they’re fighting the world or each other.

Every important relationship in Women in Love is like this, equal parts attraction and repulsion. These conflicting emotions are invariably expressed violently. Consider a famously tempestuous scene between Hermione and Birkin in which she comes across him in her boudoir, absorbed in a book. Realizing that he is as shut off from her as he is in his reading, Hermione is overcome with rage:

A terrible voluptuous thrill ran down her arms — she was going to know her voluptuous consummation. Her arms quavered and were strong, immeasurably and irresistibly strong. What delight, what delight in strength, what delirium of pleasure! She was going to have her consummation of voluptuous ecstasy at last. It was coming! In utmost terror and agony, she knew it was upon her now, in extremity of bliss. Her hand closed on a blue, beautiful ball of lapis lazuli that stood on her desk for a paper-weight. She rolled it around in her hand as she rose silently. Her heart was a pure flame in her breast, she was purely unconscious in ecstasy. She moved towards him and stood behind him for a moment in ecstasy. He, closed within the spell, remained motionless and unconscious. Then swiftly, in a flame that drenched down her body like fluid lightning, and gave her a perfect, unutterable consummation, unutterable satisfaction, she brought down the ball of jewel stone with all her force, crash on his head.

Hermione wants to be recognized by Birkin as his intellectual equal but the harder she tries the more he disparages her. Their relationship is excruciating. He doesn’t know how to escape her smothering attentions except by retreating into cold detachment. She exasperates him, and everyone else, by always having to know better, but she also suffers cruelly from his disdain and unwillingness to make a clean break. No wonder she is reduced to a desperate, literal attempt at cracking his exterior. No matter how sensual this moment — “the flame that drench[s] down her body like fluid lightning” is obviously orgasmic — what Hermione really wants is to get inside Birkin’s head. The crash of paperweight against skull is really a clash of ideas. Hermione and Birkin’s psychosexual troubles stem from their competing world-views. They are not alone in subordinating sex to philosophy. Everybody in the novel upholds an ideal way of being in the world. Hermione has her need to know and grasp everything; Gerald his love of domination and the will-to-power; Gudrun her elitism; Ursula her ironic deflating of any self-satisfied philosophizing; and Birkin his misanthropic insistence that the human species is at best a nuisance and at worst a menace to be exterminated. In Birkin’s view, the only hope for humanity lies in relationships of tense equilibrium between like-minded souls, like the one he offers Ursula and which he calls “a perfect union” and “a sort of ultimate marriage.”

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As this catalogue suggests, the novel offers a bewildering set of arguments about how to live. But if we think that our job as readers is to choose the best one — that is, if we think we’re supposed to side with one character over another — we’re missing the point. Women in Love is dialogic. What matters is not that one set of beliefs triumphs over another but that these beliefs continually do battle. The novel’s highest value is contestation itself. That’s why it’s filled with so many fights. Characters are always being roused to sudden passions. Nothing is worse than indifference. Reading Women in Love you need to be prepared for wild swings of emotion. Birkin will interrupt a seemingly friendly conversation with Gerald to proclaim, “I rather hate you.” A pages-long bare-knuckle argument with Ursula end abruptly when Birkin, who has been fulminating against the idea that love is a kind of fusion, accepts a flower from Ursula: “It was peace at last. The old, detestable world of tension… passed away at last… they were at peace with each other.” “Peace at last… they were at peace with each other.” Like so many other, this passage demonstrates the novel’s most obvious and contentious stylistic trait: repetition. Remember how often “consummation” and “voluptuous” and “ecstasy” appeared in the paperweight passage. Fittingly, Lawrence’s repetition has incited strong reactions. In her memoirs, Ottoline Morrell — who had been a friend and patron of Lawrence’s before a bitter quarrel ended their relationship permanently — recalls reading the manuscript of Lawrence’s previous novel, The Rainbow:

I was shocked in reading it by what then seemed to me to be the slapdash amateurish style in which it was written, and the habit he then began of repeating the same word about ten times in a paragraph … reading very loose sloppy writing gives me always a feeling of great discomfort, almost shame.

Her reaction to the manuscript of Women in Love was even stronger. “Lawrence has sent me his awful book,” she wrote to the philosopher Bertrand Russell. “It is so loathsome one cannot get clean after it.” Morrell’s forceful response — her shock, her discomfort, her almost-shame, her feeling of having been dirtied — is even more over the top than Lawrence’s prose. (It didn’t help that Lawrence based the character of Hermione on her, a fact she noticed immediately.) What Lawrence wrote in a short Foreword attached to the first edition of Women in Love might have been written in response to criticisms like Morrell’s:

In point of style, fault is often found with the continual, slightly modified repetition. The only answer is that it is natural to the author: and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro, which works up to culmination.

It’s characteristic that even when he’s writing about his sentences Lawrence seems to be writing about sex. But that’s not because he’s obsessed with sex, as his frankness and impatience with prudishness has sometimes led him to be described. It’s not that everything in Lawrence is about sex; it’s that even sex in Lawrence is about arguing. The “pulsing, frictional to-and-fro which works up to culmination” describes the principle of contestation that characterizes every meaningful relationship in the novel.I believe that Lawrence’s repetition enacts his theory of relationships. In the scene with Hermione and her paperweight, for example, almost every word is repeated, but these repetitions don’t simply reiterate. Instead, they introduce variation. “Voluptuous,” for example, modifies first “thrill,” then “consummation,” then “ecstasy”; the metaphor of flame shifts, first describing Hermione’s heart (“her heart was a pure flame in her breast”), then something more general that it is hard to name — perhaps her way of bringing the paperweight down on his head, or perhaps her entire mode of being (“in a flame that drenched down her body like fluid lightning”). Repetition is Lawrence’s way of dramatizing shifting emotional responses, of making us feel the uncertain, unfinished, even self-contradictory qualities of his characters. That’s because repetition always appears in the guise of continual refinement or qualification. Something has to be said but there is no definitive way of saying it.

Seen in this light Lawrence’s style offers an extraordinary balance between artlessness and carefulness. The former risks clumsiness, the latter artificiality. Some of Lawrence’s contemporaries — James, Joyce, Woolf — are heirs to Flaubert. They strive for the perfection of le mot juste. Lawrence is not like that, and indeed formal perfection of all kinds is suspect in this novel. Birkin describes the neoclassicism of Hermione’s country house as “a snare and a delusion… a horrible dead prison.” Artlessness keeps things alive, ensures emotional truth. But artlessness that doesn’t attend to form at all is simply shapelessness. Too many of Lawrence’s readers have failed to see that attention and thereby missed Lawrence’s interest in structure. Earlier I quoted Morrell’s criticism of Lawrence’s style, her rejection of what she called “very loose sloppy writing.” To my mind this description reads as an unacknowledged expression of her own anxiety: the only reason you might feel shame over what appears to be loose and sloppy writing would be if you were frightened by its vulnerability, its willingness not to conform to accepted standards of literary decorum. Lawrence is loose, yes, out of a belief that truth is only caught on the wing, that imperfection keeps things alive, but he isn’t sloppy. Even his critics admit that his writing can have electrifying power. Morrell, for example, was also alive to its pleasures. Lawrence’s writing, she admitted, contains “passages of such intensity and such passionate beauty that they never leave one’s memory.” Women in Love is filled with such passages. Here’s one I love. It’s the opening of a chapter called “Diver”:

The week passed away. On the Saturday it rained, a soft, drizzling rain that held off at times. In one of the intervals Gudrun and Ursula set out for a walk, going towards Willey Water. The atmosphere was grey and translucent, the birds sang sharply on the young twigs, the earth would be quickening and hastening in growth. The two girls walked swiftly, gladly, because of the soft, subtle rush of morning that filled the wet haze. By the road the blackthorn was in blossom, white and wet, its tiny amber grains burning faintly in the white smoke of blossom. Purple twigs were darkly luminous in the grey air, high hedges glowed like living shadows, hovering nearer, coming into creation. The morning was full of a new creation. When the sisters came to Willey Water, the lake lay all grey and visionary, stretching into the moist, translucent vista of trees and meadow. Fine electric activity in sound came from the dumbles below the road, the birds piping one against the other, and water mysteriously plashing, issuing from the lake.

In his appreciation of Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, the essayist Geoff Dyer says that Lawrence was the kind of person who knows the name of every flower, every tree. We see that knowledge here, the sense of being rooted in a particular place (for example, in the reference to dumbles, Midlands idiom for a little valley with a stream). But Lawrence, who spent the last decade of his life restlessly travelling through Australia, Ceylon, Mexico, and the American Southwest, doesn’t simply chronicle provincial English life. Nor does he unthinkingly extol nature against the depredations of modernity. Lawrence doesn’t love birds and flowers more than mines and dams, and in fact he uses the language of the second to describe the first: recall the “fine electric activity” of the dumbles. What he admires is nature’s ceaseless change, all those high hedges “glow[ing]” and “hovering” and “coming into creation.” The incessant coming into being of new life is the reason the passage’s phrase “a new creation” isn’t a solecism. Purple twigs notwithstanding, this isn’t a purple passage, though one thing we might say about Lawrence’s writing is that you have to risk some purple passages to write ones that shimmer with the intensity of the ones I’ve quoted here. “Darkly luminous”: this isn’t just a paradox, but rather an example of what the critic James Wood calls Lawrence’s “anti-pictorial” style. Yes, the scene is vivid, glowing even. We can just picture it. But Lawrence’s language is as antagonistic to simple depiction as his quarrelling characters are to each other. In phrases like “darkly luminous” Lawrence shows us, says Wood, that language “at its densest becomes its own medium, like night. At such moments one feels language’s lack of transparency as a new kind of visibility; and this also enables us to see the old transparency as a new kind of obstruction.”

In its preoccupation with the new, Lawrence’s novel shares something with the literary modernism with which he is sometimes aligned. Lawrence is an uneasy modernist, however. He is less concerned with sensation and perception than writers like Woolf and Mansfield, more invested than they in a tradition of literary realism he nonetheless contests. The works of Lawrence’s contemporaries, no matter how brilliant, sometimes feel to me like period pieces. But Lawrence feels vital, relevant, not just modern but contemporary, and in Women in Love most of all.Nowhere is this more evident than in its preoccupation with forms of life. By that I mean both the biological quiddity shared by all living beings and the structures that make up human society. The first is evident in the novel’s vivid descriptions of something like a life force, as when a rabbit resisting capture is described as a “black-and-white tempest,” “lunging wildly, its body flying like a spring coiled and released, as it lashed out.” The second is evident in the array of possible permutations for human relationships. Just when we’ve convinced ourselves that Birkin and Ursula’s relationship is the best because it’s the most balanced, if not the most harmonious, we’re forced to revise our ideas completely. In the novel’s final pages, Birkin realizes that his “sheer intimacy” with Ursula needs “an eternal union with a man, too: another kind of love.” Ursula rejects this claim, saying. “You can’t have two kinds of love” and the novel finishes with one of the great unresolved endings in fiction, another version of the “terrifying chasm” that Ursula and Gudrun faced in the opening scene. Women in Love, then, is a queer novel, not just in the sense Lawrence’s contemporaries would have used it (strange, odd) but in our own. It refuses normative sexual relationships and personal identities, whether through the same-sex love Birkin evinces for Gerald, or Ursula’s tortured relationship with her sister, or Gudrun’s eventual refusal to enter into any kind of relationship at all. How to live, how to be alive; who can you love, what makes something living: these are Lawrence’s great concerns, and in this age of same-sex marriage and animal rights activism they feel like our own.

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It’s easy to speak of writers as rebels or misfits. But Lawrence truly was out of step with his time. That was especially true during the war. Just weeks after its publication in September 1915, his previous novel, The Rainbow, which he rightly considered the pinnacle of his career to that point, was banned for obscenity. This was the great trauma of Lawrence’s life. All copies were pulped, and for the next five years Lawrence, whose poor health precluded him from regular work, who had no inherited wealth to rely on, who lived only on the income brought in by his writing, who owned almost nothing, not even any copies of his own books, couldn’t find anyone willing to publish him. He and his wife, Frieda, a German national — a woman who left her respectable husband to be with him at the price of never seeing her children again — were suspected of being spies by British authorities. He was at odds with the jingoistic nationalism of the time. And his masterpiece, which he recognized Women in Love to be, languished in obscurity, not published until 1920 and even then only in the US and only in a private, limited edition. Yet he knew what he had done in writing it and took great joy in it. “It is the book of my free soul,” he told a friend. To read it is to experience that freedom. In its time this extraordinary work went through extraordinary difficulties. But perhaps its true time has finally come. What Gudrun fears — that things wither in the bud — is certainly not true of this brilliant bloom of a book.

 

Malicroix Readalong

Posted on by under readalong, review, Uncategorized

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A nice young man, of stolidly unimaginative, good bourgeois stock, is surprised to inherit a house on an island in the Rhône, in the famously desolate and untamed region of the Camargue. The terms of his great-uncle’s will are even more surprising: the young man must take up solitary residence in the house for a full three months before he will be permitted to take possession of it. With only a taciturn shepherd and his dog for occasional company, he finds himself surrounded by the huge and turbulent river (always threatening to flood the island and surrounding countryside) and the wind, battering at his all-too-fragile house, shrieking from on high. And there is another condition of the will, a challenging task he must perform, even as others scheme to make his house their own. Only under threat can the young man come to terms with both his strange inheritance and himself.

That’s how the good people at NYRB Classics summarize Henri Bosco’s Malicroix, first published in 1948 and now available in English in a translation by Joyce Zonana. Bosco (1888—1976) was born in Provence but spent much of his life abroad, teaching in Algeria, Italy, and Morocco. Maybe all that moving around is why he’s known as a great writer of place.

Bosco is sometimes thought of as kin to his near contemporary Jean Giono, who grew up just a bit to the north. A few years ago, several bloggers and I read and wrote about Giono’s Hill, a wonderful novel (also published by NYRB). Doubtless that’s why the publisher reached out to us to encourage us to read Malicroix. Most of us didn’t need much convincing: after all, what could be more relevant than a novel about isolation? Yet the novel also gives us a taste of what so many of us are missing these days: freedom. Like Malicroix’s first-person narrator, our lives have been suddenly upended, but unlike for him the upheaval hasn’t been of our choosing. If the first ten pages are any indication, the novel is both exciting and philosophical. The perfect book for a time when so many of us are thinking a lot about place.

Frances of Nonsuchbook, Meredith of Dolce Bellezza, Grant of 1streading, Nat Leach (@gnatleech), and Scott of seraillon will join me in blogging about the novel in the second half of April. We encourage you to join us: either at your own blog or by writing a guest post here at mine. We’re using the hashtag #malicroix2020 on Twitter if you prefer to participate that way. We hope to arrange some other Malicroix-inspired material, perhaps an interview with translator Zonana. Stay tuned, and drop me a note in the comments if you’d like to join our little group!

What I read, March 2020

Posted on by under month in review, review, Uncategorized

The month began in full mid-semester throttle. I taught a colleague’s class at a university at the other end of the State—preparing for that was a lot of work. Then I organized a visit to campus from a friend who presented on his work in progress. And almost the minute I dropped him at the airport, things started being canceled: our daughter’s school; then mine; then we were hunkering down for the foreseeable. And the month kept on going, stretching out endlessly, a disorienting expanse of fear and stress and, strangely, intimacy and, oh I don’t know, not languor or relaxation, but time. (To be able to experience is a sign of our privilege.) During all of it, I was reading, I hear a lot about people being unable to read at the moment. I get that, but since reading, for me, is a way to keep the world at bay I’ve been struggling with the opposite problem. I need reading even more than usual, but life (switching to remote teaching, figuring out how to handle our daughter’s homeschooling) is making that harder. Still, my family and I are safe, we’re mostly enjoying our time together, our dogs think this is the best thing that’s ever happened.

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Louise Erdrich, The Round House (2012)

The narrator of Erdrich’s novel, thirteen-year-old Joe Coutts, lives on a rez in North Dakota in the late 80s. At the beginning of the summer during which the book is set, Joe’s mother is violently attacked and raped, plunging the family into a tailspin from which it recovers only at great cost. Frustrated at the lack of progress in finding and arresting the perpetrator—a frustration that has much to do with the disparity between Federal and Tribal law, and the insufficiencies of the latter as enshrined by the callousness of the former: a frustration felt even more strongly by Joe’s father, a judge on the rez—Joe and his best friends try to solve the crime. That could sound cute, but although often funny and filled with a large and sometimes larger than life cast of characters, the novel is sorrowful, especially when two more instances of unexpected violence bring matters to a chastened conclusion. I was surprised at Erdrich’s decision to narrate this story of violence against indigenous women from the point of view of a teenage boy, but one of her points, I think, is that such violence is everyone’s problem. I listened to the audiobook—the last of this semester’s commuting, as it turned out—and another pleasure was the actor Gary Farmer’s reading: I loved his cadence and emphases. My first Erdrich, but not my last.

Paulette Jiles, Enemy Women (2002)

You may remember me rhapsodizing over Jiles’s News of the World. I didn’t quite like this earlier novel as much, but I still liked it a lot. I’m so ignorant about the Civil War (I’m Canadian, sue me), but I bet even many American readers might not know that women from Confederate families (or even families who supported neither side) were jailed for (supposedly) abetting the enemy. Enemy Women is set in Missouri, especially the hills between Rolla and the Bootheel, land I’ve driven through plenty of times on my way from Little Rock to St. Louis, which I’ll now never think of in the same way. (Usually I try not to think of it, finding it incredibly dull. It certainly wasn’t in the 1860s.) Missouri wasn’t just swept across by the Union and Confederate Armies; it was also ravaged by militia on both sides. The women of Jiles’s title were mostly arrested by the Missouri Union Militia. As The New York Times reviewer resonantly put it, “the Ozarks became a wilderness of free-floating entrepreneurs of violence.” 18-year-old Adair Colley is arrested and sent to a jail in St. Louis after her family’s farm is burned, her father taken away, and her siblings scattered. In prison Adair draws the attention of her interrogator, Major William Neumann. The two begin a romance but are soon separated: Neumann is reassigned to Alabama while Adair escapes and tries to return to what’s left of her farm. Jiles switches between the storylines: Neumann is interesting, but Adair is the star. I found the first part of the novel slow, but I read the last third in a long rush that left me tired (but unrepentant!) the next morning. (There’s a bit in which she shakes off a dangerous pursuer that’s real heart-in-the-throat stuff.) This was Jiles’s first novel (she had published several books of poetry before that) and she’s certainly improved a lot since then. Even so Enemy Women is definitely worth your time.

Rennie Airth, The Decent Inn of Death (2020)

Latest installment of a crime series that (a) does not have too many books in it and (b) is worth reading even though later books don’t reach the heights of the first ones. Interestingly, Airth has let the characters age: their inabilities are central to this case, which riffs on the classic country-house murder.

Friedrich Gorenstein, Redemption (1967) Trans. Andrew Bromfield (2018)

The last text I taught in person before we switched to remote learning. A few months ago, I worried students might find this novel of postwar Russia difficult and off-putting. Proving once again that even twenty years into the gig I know nothing about teaching, they loved it. Many said it was their favourite text so far. (And we’d read Ruth Kluger and Art Spiegelman!) Students were rightly fascinated by Gorenstein’s ambivalent portrayal of his teenage protagonist, Sashenka, who veers between cruelty and kindness and isn’t sure what she wants, just that she feels everything a lot. (The word the book most often uses about her is “spite.”) Gorenstein veers between realism and religious/philosophical abstraction; to me, he’s more compelling when writing in the former mode. What’s hard to figure out is how Gorenstein would have us reconcile psychology with sociology. His presentation of the Holocaust is strikingly non-ideological. On the one hand, he acknowledges the murder of Jews (rare in Soviet literature); on the other, he presents those murders as personal and local rather than systematic and genocidal. He’s good, though, on the terrible intimacy and physicality of such killing.

Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird (2017)

Set on and around Highway 59 in east Texas—the very route we were planning to take on a canceled Spring Break trip to Houston—the first in a new series for Locke is atmospheric and interesting. (She’s writing about Texas, but it could easily be Arkansas. Normally I’m allergic to all things Southern/Arkansan, even though I’ve landed here; that Locke kept me engaged with this material says something.) Darren Mathews, her hero, is a black Texas Ranger who grew up in east Texas, left as soon as he could, but was drawn home again. He’s got a complicated family background that Locke uses to good effect and a predictably failing marriage that is less interesting. The book is best on race relations in the South (less straightforward than many non-Southerners like to imagine). It is weakest in hewing to conventions of the procedural (renegade cop, troubles with alcohol). According to her bio, Locke has been writing for TV a lot. More power to her—it’s where the money is—but the book manifests a certain sheen or glibness, an unwillingness to let scenes linger, that smacks of the more disappointing qualities of television pacing. I found Steph Cha’s recent take on how to write crime fiction that challenges the institutional racism of policing more compelling.

Attica Locke, Heaven, My Home (2019)

Sequel to Bluebird (they could be read as a single novel). Competent, but I’m not convinced Locke has yet figured out what she wants to do with the series. Most interesting when it addresses how quickly life changed for minorities—including those in the police—after Trump got elected.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust (1975)

Cool, even icy, novel about a woman who travels to India to learn about her grandfather’s first wife, who left him for an Indian prince in the 1920s. I didn’t care for it, but Tom’s review made me appreciate it more. He really helped me think about the novel’s narration. The 1970s material takes the form of the narrator’s diary; the 1920s material is in third person. Where’s it coming from? Is the narrator writing it? If so, why/how does it include material the narrator surely couldn’t have known? Or is it omniscient? If so, what’s the relationship between the two timelines? What information should we trust? Is the narrator any different than the hippies surging through India on the hunt for spiritual enlightenment? Is she any different than her not-quite grandmother? What does it mean that her life begins to imitate her ancestor’s? These are interesting questions, but they’re more interesting than the novel itself. You certainly can’t accuse it of romanticizing India. If anything, it dislikes the place. In that sense, it’s still a colonial text—India observed from the outside. And I found the willingness of both female characters to have sex with men despite having no real interest in doing so troubling. (Quite a strange aspect of the novel: sex isn’t about liberation or pleasure or, conversely, violence or trauma. It’s a blank.) In the end, Heat and Dust gave off more dust than heat—I like my fiction warmer. But those with different tastes might feel differently. Not sure I’d try any of Prawer Jhabvala’s other novels. Are they all like this?

Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing (2019)

I loved this essay collection, which Stephen Sparks of Point Reyes Books, who sold it to me, said is not even her best. (Naturally, I ordered her first two from him immediately.) I read most of it outside on the back porch in those days after face-to-face teaching stopped and before remote learning started—a dead, anxious, weird time that happened to coincide with that short time in Arkansas when the weather is gorgeous, the humidity low, and the mosquitoes not yet swarming. With less traffic on the roads (but not that much less: shamefully, Arkansas still does not have a Stay at Home order), the birds were louder and more frolicsome than usual. The azaleas in full bloom, the irises coming out, the redbuds just moving from that gorgeous pink blossom to their ordinary ugly leaves. I mention all this because Jamie is so attuned to place; reading her essays helped me be more so too. What made this an especially good book to read now is that many of its essays are about sojourns Jamie made to remote, isolated places that are nonetheless characterized by strong senses of community. We see that in a remembrance of travelling to the Chinese border with Tibet during the time of Tiananmen, a three-part piece on the excavation of a Neolithic settlement in the Orkneys, and, especially, in a long, magnificent essay about a summer spent in a Yup’ik village on the Alaskan coast, where the thawing tundra is bringing forth revelations about the area’s ancient hunter gatherer culture. (I am a sucker for all things northern, dream of traveling north of 60, so this essay was Extremely My Shit, but I also think it’s just objectively gorgeous and moving.) In all cases, Jamie shows that for things to surface, change has to happen, and that change isn’t always good. In the case of climate change, it’s terrifying. But these are hopeful, not hopeless essays. Not naïve, but sustaining. And boy that is what I need right now.

Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994) Trans. Ann Smock (1996)

A book I’ve read many times. Even though I stand by most of the things I say here, my sense of the memoir has evolved over the years. And it changed yet again this month: students always like it, but this was the best experience I’d had with it, all the more astonishing because we studied it together remotely. This group helped me see how obviously Rue Ordener is a traumatized text, so different, for example, from self-reflective Holocaust texts like Kluger’s Still Alive or Spiegelman’s Maus. Kofman forgoes retrospection, making it hard to decide how she feels about her experiences, especially what it was like to be torn between her mother and the casually antisemitic Frenchwoman who hid her in occupied Paris. Yet as a student pointed out the very raw, unprocessed, or traumatized quality of the text might itself be an illusion, a stealth way of exerting control by challenging us not to interpret. Highly recommended.

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Surfacing was my book of the month, followed by Enemy Women and The Round House. Rue Ordener I know so well I can’t even rank it here. Maybe I’ll read a little more in April. Or maybe not. At any rate, I’ve finished a very long cowboy novel that’s been keeping me entertained. Let me know what you’ve been reading during the pandemic, if you’ve been reading at all. And most importantly stay well, friends.