Enduring Love (a change of plan)

Change of plan. The good people behind Love, InshAllah have let me know the book won’t be available for purchase in the UK until March – it’ll be out earlier on Kindle (which I don’t have yet and, given the state of my finances, won’t buy anytime soon) - so another print text to get my 2012 reading project of the ground is needed.

Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love isn’t an original choice. But it was sitting there, spine facing out – the title lettering’s delicate pink on dark, faded gold, exactly where I left it on the bookshelf at the end of my 2001 summer semester at St Andrews University - and I realised I haven’t ever re-read a book. I get through one and it’s buried deep in my brain, left to gather dust (or should that be dead red blood cells?) - ’filed and forgotten’, as Ralph Ellison might say. 

A depressing thought really, when I consider the time I spend on books and how little the words seem to influence how I feel and act afterwards.

I also realised it’s been years since I last read a book by a British author. I don’t know if that’s a reflection of the current state of British fiction or my own laziness (prejudice even?). Probably the latter.

Time to change some habits then. And is there a better moment than now, as 2012 gets underway, or a better book to do it with than Enduring Love? Even as a nervous undergrad, I was blown away by chapter one. I don’t think I’ve read a more horribly yet thought provokingly suspenseful opener since.

I re-read that chapter just before writing this post and yes, I was blown away all over again. It felt good. Like recovering something I thought I’d lost…

2012 blogging resolution…

To be more focussed, structured and regular. No more loose flitting from topic to topic - a post here, a post there (usually separated by a gap of two, sometimes three, months, ensuring the tiny handful of people who experience a smidgen of interest soon lose it).

This year I’m going to blog properly, with determination and discipline; posts will go up at least once a week (and hopefully more often than that).

And there’ll be a clear thematic focus. I’m going to try one of those reading programmes – ‘a book a week’, ‘my mission to read every Pulitzer Prize winner since 1950′ - that initially seem straightjacketing but actually mean giving time to texts I probably wouldn’t have looked at when I was picking reading matter on a whim. People/other bloggers also seem to respond more enthusiastically.

I’m hoping I’ll finish the year with the sense I’ve completed a journey rather than spent 365 days meandering through the world of the printed word. 

And the theme? Books with love in the title. Certainly not because I’ve discovered a romantic streak. Rather because I spend too much time thinking about romantic love (or the lack of it) in my own life and find the self-absorption counterproductive, isolating and boring.

Why not continue the interest but in a more outgoing, cosmopolitan way that involves learning about the world and other people rather than obsessing about the possibilities and limits of my own happiness?

No 1 on the 2012 list following Madeleine Crum’s recent Huffington Post blog article. ”An anthology of romantic relationships, gay and straight, arranged and spontaneous, monogamous and not” in Crum’s words; intriguing because of its openness about Muslim romantic and erotic life, and because it focusses on that (relatively) under-documented category – the American Muslim. A world of “heavily cloistered beauties”? Muslim friends claim their women, if apparently ”submissive to their male counterparts”, certainly don’t hold back in private (or the bedroom). 

A new perspective on a world removed from the one I grew up in? We’ll see…

Library books – an endangered species?

Should we be putting library books on the endangered species list?

Are they becoming an optional extra in the very places they previously provided with a raison d’etre? 

Councillors in Edinburgh – a UNESCO-designated World City of Literature – recently announced they want to revamp the Scottish Capital’s central library to connect it to a new ”literary hotel“, complete with performance and event spaces, cafes, bars and restaurants. But there’s not all that much in the press coverage, as far as I can see, about expanded opportunities for accessing the dusty old ink-and-paper things I always thought libraries were for.

Edinburgh Central Library - back in the day

I’m also pretty sure computers now take up more space in my local library than print.

Brilliant. Great. Not for a second do I want to seem like a moaning book-luddite - 21st-century learning being interactive and multimedia-oriented and collaborative and all that. Only it grates just a little when I visit the local, public bibliotheque and struggle to find a novel penned by an author who was on the Man Booker shortlist only a couple of years ago. 

The grating becomes even more painful when I discover the facility’s already impressive phalanx of desktops seems to have doubled overnight, and is now bristling in a space previously occupied by shelves of dog-eared pulp romance titles (which, as it happens, I was really hoping to dip into…).

Yup – there was silly old me thinking a library - derived from the Anglo-French librarie and Old French librairie (“collection of books”), the Latin librarium (“chest for books”) and liber (“book, paper, parchment”) - would be the best place for finding, well, you know, books…

So while I’m pondering whether borrowing print texts is indeed going the way of the dodo, here’s a short list of cool alternative uses for libraries – big or small – that have nothing, or very little, to do with stocking and lending books…

the Watergate complex, Washington - why did everything look cooler in the 70s?

1) Political  expose? After many years of presenting an airbrushed account of the Watergate scandal – all the work of Richard Nixon’s enemies apparently, with missing sections in the ‘Smoking Gun’ tape due to a “mechanical failure” – the attractively named Yorba Linda presidential library is, according to knoxnews.com, setting the record straight with an unflinching, unbiased look at events leading up to and surrounding the bungled burglary that drove Richard Nixon from office. 

A deeply embedded culture of sabotage, dirty tricks and spying is laid bare in the revamped exhibit, which features interactive screens and taped interviews. Library director Timothy Naftali said the exhibit reflects a democracy not afraid to confront “evidence of its own wrongdoing”.  

It would be good if something similar could be done with an equally disgraceful episode in British high politics. In our multimedia age, you could really go to town. For some reason, Tony Blair, David Kelly and WMD spring to mind…

The Occupy Wall Street People's Library

2) Revolutionary meeting point? Libraries, as this slideshow makes clear, are a major element in the Occupy movement, helping to preserve and disseminate ideas underpinning the protests.

Incidentally, the radical potential of libraries can manifest on a much smaller and more local scale, as I found out during the bypass protest in Dalkeith, Scotland, in 2005/6. I still remember visits by eco-activists – who had occupied various sites along the road’s proposed route - to the town’s library. They would use its computers to send and check email, or communicate with family, friends, relatives and, no doubt, other activists. In its own quiet way, the library helped their struggle continue.

3) Real estate opportunity? The Willesden Green Library revamp in London could be funded by giving part of the redevelopment site over to new housing. I know we’re living in times of austerity and radical measures are necessary if public services are to be maintained but swapping ink and paper for bricks and mortar?…

The New York Public Library

4) Spa-aahhh time? The NYPL kicks ass as far as I’m concerned. Not only does it seem to know infinitely more about social media than many traditional news organisations (always enjoy glancing at its  tumblr page), it’ll also teach you how to make your own bath salts, lip balms and shower scrubs – and just about anything else you might want or need that has absolutely nothing, or precious little, to do with borrowing books. Something of a change of tack given everything else I’ve said here but I don’t think this place could get any cooler. Another reason to move to the Big Apple…  

a listening post at the Dok Library Concept Centre, Delft, the Netherlands

5) Design lab? The Dok Library Concept Centre in the Netherlands sells itself as a “better friend than Google” for those who want information on the latest books, CDs and art. With environmental innovations such as these music listening posts, who can argue? My curiosity is also piqued by the fact Dok has extended the library concept to include lending art to company managers who want to improve working environments for their staff. I happen to work for an Edinburgh bank that got rid of its best original art during the credit crunch, apparently in order to claw back as much cash as possible. Now my working day is spent surrounded by bland prints and predictable photos of the Scottish landscape that have an emotionally deflating effect. Perhaps the soon-to-be-souped-up city library could step in with a scheme similar to Dok’s?

It looks like I’m contradicting myself. I started off with a barely concealed moan about how contemporary libraries are neglecting print books. I’m about to end it with a cautious cheer for institutions that have dramatically extended the scope and variety of what you can find in the public library. Is there, as one blogger has suggested, no longer a need for the traditional library – that solid, (mostly) silent, (mainly) solitary place of old – and its shelves and shelves of books? Is the role of today’s libraries more about “guiding” the quest for information and providing an appealing, accessible space for such a search? Is it time to embrace libraries as places where people will meet, interact and – shock, horror – maybe make some noise?

Yes, yes and yes. I don’t want to stand in the way of progress. Just hope the powers-that-be don’t forget completely about the dusty old paperbacks I still hope to find in plentiful supply when I visit my local library.

the dodo

Prison Writing and Feeling Good

When at a low ebb in life (for various reasons in my case - none particularly interesting), how many prison novels about intense, brutal suffering is it healthy to read?

The Jewish quarter in Lviv, Ukraine, after the 1918 pogrom

I ask because I’ve just read two in quick succession and heard the comment more than once that I should maybe re-examine my choices if I don’t want make myself even more fed up. Both books are by Jewish writers; both deal with the uniquely fanatical hatred to which millions of Jews have been subjected for centuries. How do I feel now? Sombre, yes, but also invigorated. Is that odd? Misplaced? Unhealthy?

Primo Levi as a young man

Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man documents the year (1944) spent by the Italian writer in the Auschwitz III (Monowitz) labour and death camp. It tells of how prisoners were systematically stripped of all elements of their humanity – clothes, possessions, family members, then names, language, the will and capacity to remember – before literal extermination in the gas chamber. It illuminates the brutal yet shifting nature of the camp’s master-slave relationships; the contradictions in its rules and moral codes; the various paths – from demented, brute strength to manipulation - that made survival possible; the surprisingly sophisticated, speculative nature of its bartering and exchange practices. Nothing is added or furnished beyond what Levi has seen directly.

Fittingly for a writer whose initial training was in chemistry, there’s an observational and analytical precision about Levi’s text. There’s also a startling sense of composure - an unwavering alertness to the paradoxes, cracks and absurdities marking the Nazi ”Lager”, for all their efficiency in attempting to eradicate a race from the face of the earth, as a human enterprise.

Bernard Malamud won the 1967 National Book and Pulitzer prizes for his novel The Fixer. Its protagonist, Yakov Bok, has been wrongly imprisoned, without indictment, for the murder of a Christian boy in Kiev in the years leading up to World War One and revolution. He’s completely innocent, searching only for opportunities after a failed and barren marriage. Yet as a Jew in a backward and anti-semitic state, he is prisoner to history in a way non-Jews aren’t. Conditions for the sort of injustice he is about to suffer are “ripe” and he - passing himself of as a gentile and resident in a city district forbidden to Jews - is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Bernard Malamud

What follows is a relentless yet nuanced account of suffering in jail as Bok waits for the city’s investigating authorities to substantiate their fabricated blood libel charge. Hunger, darkness, the cold, beatings, sleeplessness, boredom, loneliness, hallucinations and nightmares – just about every possible facet of human pain is rendered in Malamud’s narrative, with Bok contemplating suicide then stepping back, determined to resist and survive to his trial.

Essential and provocative, certainly - but works I’d want to read and dwell on when feeling low? Yes, I found out. Because Malamud and Levi are writers driven by justice. And it’s this sense of ‘purpose’ – the need to see justice done – that turns what would otherwise be crushing accounts into something much more uplifting, even inspiring.

Menahem Mendel Beilis

Take The Fixer. Although a novel, it’s also a fictionalisation of historical events. Bok’s story is based on the case of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Ukrainian Jew imprisoned on blood libel charges following the discovery of the mutilated body of a 12-year-old boy, Andrei Yushchinsky, in a cave in the outskirts of Kiev in May, 1911. Although the police initially traced responsibility for the murder to a notorious gang of thieves and their female associate, Vera Cheberiak, the country’s right-wing press pressured justice minister I G Shcheglovitov into investigating the death as a ritual murder. The authorities began looking for a Jew they could blame. Beilis, a local Jewish brick kiln superintendent, was charged and imprisoned for two years before his trial began on September 25, 1913. 

The miracle in this episode, as Malamud’s book makes clear, is that this innocent, ordinary man made it to trial at all, suffering as he did the dehumanising, degrading treatment in jail reserved especially for members of his religious group. Malamud’s character considers attacking his guards so they will kill him but, deciding against it, reasons thus:

He pities their fate in history. After a short time of sunlight you awake in a black and bloody world. Overnight a madman is born who thinks Jewish blood is water. Overnight life becomes worthless. The innocent are born without innocence. The human body is worth less than its substance. A person is shit. Those Jews who escape with their lives live in eternal pain. So what can Yakov Bok do about it? All he can do is not make things worse. He’s half a Jew himself, yet enough of one to protect them. After all, he knows the people; and he believes in their right to be Jews and live in the world like men. He is against those who are against them. He will protect them to the extent that he can. This is his covenant with himself. If God’s not a man he has to be. Therefore he must endure to the trial and let them confirm his innocence by their lies. He has no future but to hold on, wait it out.

The Fixer - also an Oscar-nominated film starring Dirk Bogarde and Alan Bates

Not cheerful, but a choice that is reasoned, purposeful and altruistic. “The purpose of freedom is to secure it for others,” states Malamud’s narrative, referencing Spinoza. It’s a position backed by history. During a trial that inflamed and galvanised liberal, free-thinking and progressive elements in Russian society, the charge against Beilis was demolished by some of Moscow’s leading lawyers. He was acquitted by a jury composed largely of peasants. Hatred did not end but the very fact of the trial – and the subsequent exposure of the blood libel charge as false – at least allowed the evil and stupidity of anti-semitism to be confronted and exposed, both within and outside of Russia.    

In what must be the most efficient example of author-readership communication I’ve come across, Primo Levi published an appendix to If This Is A Man in 1976 which sets out answers to the questions about his life and work asked most often by students. It seems Levi was frequently asked why his account of Auschwitz seems devoid of open expressions of hatred and the desire for revenge. His answer is telling:

I have to confess that before certain faces that aren’t new, old lies, figures in search of respectability, instances of leniency, connivance, I feel tempted to hate, even violently – but I am not a fascist, I believe in reason and discussion as the supreme instruments of progress, and therefore I put justice before hatred. Precisely for this motive, in writing this book, I have adopted the calm and sober language of the witness, not the plaintive, pitiful language of the victim nor the irate language of the avenger. I thought that the more objective and the less emotional and passionate the words sounded, the more credible and useful they’d be. It’s only this way that the witness fulfills their function at trial, which is that of preparing the ground for judgement. You are the judges.

Levi in later life

In another answer Levi states that, had he not been imprisoned at Auschwitz, he would not have become a writer. He says he felt forced to write after the camp, no longer struggling with laziness and problems of style. ”It seemed,” he goes on, “that I already had this book completely ready in my head, that I only had to let it come out and fall onto the page”. It’s an imperative that the reader can feel in the text. That Levi’s composed, clear-eyed narrative, capturing all of the camp’s nuances and contradictions, should embody a purpose, a calling and a commitment to humanity marks it as one in which the reader can breathe and move. There is determination and spirit. Its effects are, potentially, as political and social as they are personal. Levi’s, like Bok’s, is suffering “for something”.

It’s also why, far from feeling crushed after reading The Fixer and If This Is A Man, I felt uplifted.

Coming of Age

                                                                                                             

                                                                                                       DEPORTED

James Herf young newspaper man of 190 West 12th Street recently lost his twenties. Appearing before Judge Merrivale they were remained to Ellis Island for deportation as undesirable aliens. The younger four Sasha Michael Nicholas and Vladimir had been held for some time on a charge of criminal anarchy. The fifth and sixth were held on a technical charge of vagrancy. The latter ones Bill Tony and Joe were held under various indictments including wifebeating assault and prostitution. All were convicted on counts of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance.

James Herf imagines one way of ”burying” a decade and growing up in John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer. Marriage, journalism and, possibly, New York City are about to be left behind for the open road and life as a writer - marked by a passage that’s sadly yet colourfully affectionate for the past while leaving it firmly in the rear-view mirror. What makes for a good ‘growing up’ story and why do most of the iconic ones seem to come from America? My current top-five list:

  

Reading for goodness’ sake

Dinner to Admiral Campion, Delmonico's, New York, May 2, 1906

You read about hunger a lot in John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer - individuals functioning for days without a crumb passing their lips.

Equally as often, you’ll read about food and drink in all its warmth and energy. NYC dwellers ruminating, falling in love (or lust), betraying each other, declaiming, terrified, losing their minds - in a thronging diner, cafe, bar, restaurant or sweet-shop. Food and drink is a point or, at least, sign of gathering – a structuring motif and the most frequent manifestation of the city as something (potentially, unpredictably) shared and collective. The have/have-not divide is marked as much by lack of social being as by inadequate sustenance.

There’s a passage in the book in which the starving and the gorged come together, inhabiting the same space and time. A waiter of French extraction – newly arrived in America and yearning for the future - is serving a group of wealthy customers who have no interest other than satiating their appetites. They’re eating Lobster Newburg, a traditional American seafood dish dating from 1876:

‘Well we cant wait for her even if it is her birthday; never waited for anyone in my life.’ He stood a second running a roving eye over the women round the table, then shot his cuffs out a little further from the sleeves of his swallowtail coat, and abruptly sat down. The caviar vanished in a twinkling. ‘And waiter what about that Rhine wine coupe?’ he croaked huskily. ‘De suite monsieur…’ Emile holding his breath and sucking in his cheeks, was taking away the plates. A frost came on the goblets as the old waiter poured out the coupe from a cut glass pitcher where floated mint and ice and lemon rind and long slivvers of cucumber.

‘Aha this’ll do the trick.’ The man with the diamond stud raised his glass to his lips, smacked them and set it down with a slanting look at the woman next him. She was putting dabs of butter on bits of bread and popping them into her mouth, muttering all the while: ‘I can only eat the merest snack, only the merest snack.’

Dos Passos is the kind of writer who can range over epic cityscapes with all their complex social strata in a moment. Images and sensations flash and tumble across the page, relentless in their immediacy.    

That his prose should hover and dwell - ”and” after “and” after “and” - on the lobster munchers startled me even as it made narrative sense. More than that, I began to feel a discomfort verging on guilt - caused partly by the chasm between waiter and diners, partly by the very act of reading a passage whose ramble embodies the inequality and imbalance it seeks to portray.

Why, I found myself thinking, should I have the space, time and leisure to give to reading a bloated description of people eating lobster? As I read, my mind drifted suddenly and vaguely to newspaper front pages about the Horn of Africa crisis. From the window of my bus I could see rush-hour Edinburgh come to life, the struggling and the thriving side by side on pavements. Reading about Lobster Newburg felt as indulgent and privileged as eating it.

I probably won’t run out and enrol as a famine relief worker this side of Christmas. But can the imaginative insights provided by fiction really help make you a better person? Can empathy and compassion, as essayist and thinker Martha Nussbaum has argued, inform an “ethical stance” - a concern and understanding for individuals whose lives and circumstances are completely different? What concrete changes and actions would such an awareness prompt?

Questions that had never entered my mind as a reader. Until I encountered Dos Passos’ lobster munchers…

Body and soul crusher

“At the next corner a crowd was collecting round a high-slung white automobile. Clouds of steam poured out of its rear end. A policeman was holding up a small boy by the armpits. From the car a redfaced man with white walrus whiskers was talking angrily.

‘I tell you officer he threw a stone…This sort of thing has got to stop. For an officer to countenance hoodlums and rowdies…’

A woman with her hair done up in a tight bunch on top of her head was screaming, shaking her fist at the man in the car, ‘Officer he near run me down he did, he near run me down.’

Bud edged up next to a young man in a butcher’s apron who had a baseball cap on backwards.

‘Wassa matter?’

‘Hell I dunno…One o them automobile riots I guess. Aint you read the paper?  I don’t blame em do you? What right have those golblamed automoebiles got racin round the city knocking down wimen an children?’”

(1920s NYC and the arrival of the car – Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer)

What does new life look like?

Human, that is – sour, squalling and squirming, according to Dos Passos…

Race riot

“I wants all the women and chillun and the old and the sick folks brought out. And when you takes your buckets up the stairs I wants you to go clean to the top. I mean the top! And when you git there I want you to start using your flashlights in every room to make sure nobody gits left behind, then when you git ‘em out start splashing coal oil. Then when you git it splashed I’m going to holler, and when I holler three times I want you to light them matches and git. After that it’s every tub on its own black bottom!”  (Rioters destroy their tenement in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man – image at AP Wide World Photos)

The power of speech

The power of oratory to lift the people onto the plane of history…even if your local reporter won’t.