I woke up Thursday morning batting off the vestiges of a grisly dream: a lime-faced Bob Dylan had been swinging his guitar and showing a knobby leg to that famous Swedish conclave, hoping they’d tuck a Nobel Prize in his garter. Puffy and winded, I turned on my laptop to check the news on my BBC homepage, something I never do straight off after hauling myself out of bed. And there it was. The Nobel had been awarded, not to Dylan, but to the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. Brushing off the last hairs of the dream, I felt the need to cry. When the winner of the Nobel Prize happens to be your personal first choice, you feel at once elated and abashed, as if you’d discovered the ability to move silverware across the table with your mind, or the art of levitation. (It happened to me once before, with Orhan Pamuk: At the end of September, 2006, I picked up My Name is Red, thinking how fun it would be to be reading Pamuk when he won.)
It all gets to me more than it should, like football or soaps in other quarters. All day I found myself forgetting things, like eating breakfast, or returning a library book which had been set right where I’d have to trip over it to get out the front door. You should have seen me trying to count change at Starbucks. Lines from poems kept imposing on my thoughts:
Passing through walls hurts human beings, they get sick from it,/ but we have no choice. (“Vermeer”)
But those who glance enviously at men of action, people who/ despise themselves inside for not being murderers,/ do not find themselves in this music. (“Schubertiana”)
Like most poetry readers, I know very few people with whom I can share that delight, and among those even fewer who are acquainted with Tomas Tranströmer, so for most of the day I kept my delight to myself, which undoubtedly produced on my face more than one goofy abstracted look.
It’s been a hard winter, but summer is here and the fields want us to walk upright. Every man unimpeded, but careful, as when you stand up in a small boat. (“Standing Up”)
Me a sentimentalist? Nonetheless, on Thursday night I made Swedish meatballs, salty and scented with allspice and nutmeg, seared, then baked in a roux-and-beef broth gravy enriched, not with cream, but with buttermilk and a splash or two of dry sherry. Sam, also a great a lover of Tranströmer, made a Swedish “visiting” cake, rustic and golden. We celebrated as we could.
There will be those who feel this year’s Nobel prize was lost by Adonis. There will be those who will aim their snark guns at Scandinavians looking out for each other. There will be those who will use this award to a European as an excuse to raise the tired rant about the Nobel committee’s policy of stonewalling Americans. But, as more and more people use the occasion as impetus to discover Tranströmer for themselves, it will come clear that the only question to be raised against this choice is why it took so long.
Tomas Tranströmer, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature
The Half-Finished Heaven
Cowardice breaks off on its path.
Anguish breaks off on its path.
The vulture breaks off in its flight.
The eager light runs into the open,
even the ghosts take a drink.
And our paintings see the air,
red beasts of the ice-age studios.
Everything starts to look around.
We go out in the sun by hundreds.
Every person is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.
The endless field under us.
Water glitters between the trees.
The lake is a window into the earth.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2011 was awarded to Tomas Tranströmer “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality”.
At some point during a book signing in Stockholm on the Tuesday following the Nobel award ceremony the newly laureled William Golding had to use the “loo”. Over five hundred people had queued up to meet the famous author, whose pessimistic view of human nature had, in spite of itself, yielded more than a half-dozen novels. Perhaps the wait was too much for one of his admirers who seized the occasion of Golding’s attendance to physical imperative, followed him into said loo, and requested his autograph. “A first, I think,” Golding said later. It is, of course, unverifiable whether the solicitation came before or after the business at hand had been completed.
A few days earlier, as part of the pomp and circumstance surrounding the awards, he had been presented to Carl XVI Gustaf. The King, a furrow-browed young man in spectacles, shook his hand and said, “It is a great pleasure to meet you Mr. Golding. I had to do Lord of the Flies at school.” Which sounds a bit like Royal for “Thanks for nothing you pedantic English turd.”
Both moments are commensurate with a certain lack of gravitas that seems to have attended Golding from the first announcement of his Nobel Prize, and which persists, in some measure, to this day, eighteen years after his death. I challenge anyone to consider his memory without a sympathetic wince: Here was a man who had spent his life working hard, often with troubled heart and drink-flamed nose, at being a serious novelist, only to have his efforts rewarded by being just a little better remembered for having written Lord of the Flies than for having been the first, and so far only, laureate in the hundred and ten year history of the prize to incite public dissent among the members of the Nobel committee. In a now legendary breech of protocol following the announcement, Swedish poet, Artur Lundkvist pronounced Golding “a small British phenomenon of no importance.” Then, backpedaling, but only slightly, which may have been worse than not backpedaling at all, he said, “I simply didn’t consider Golding to possess the international weight needed to win the prize, but that doesn’t mean I am against him. He is a good author.”
More public disparagement followed. Paul Gray, writing for Time Magazine, seemed particularly irked. To him, Golding was “a comfortable Englishman with no extreme political opinions,” whose work was of interest mainly to adolescents. How, he wondered, could the committee have chosen him over Gordimer, Grass, or Greene (all equally suitable “G” names)? It was enough, he thought, to “give pause to even the staunchest defenders of the Nobel experiment.” One must search, in fact, to find anyone, apart from Golding himself and a few notable supporters, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and John Fowles among them, who was actually glad of his award. The choice, if left to the British, would, it seems, have been either Graham Greene or Anthony Burgess. Lundkvist himself was an admirer of Burgess. “He is of far greater worth than Golding and is much more controversial.”
Golding put on a good face, as any discomfited “comfortable Englishman” would. To Michael Davie of the Observer, he said “That panel chose me. Another panel would have chosen someone else. So I am not in the least distressed by a dissentient.” As you say, William. But it had to hurt, especially all the invocations of his old rival Anthony Burgess whose book Earthly Powers had, just four years earlier missed catching the Booker Prize, scored instead by Golding’s Rites of Passage. Burgess took his revenge the year after Golding’s Nobel in a review of The Paper Men, which most agree is a thin book in more ways than width. He dressed his disdain in a coat of shining irony: The novel’s dust jacket had it that the Nobel Prize had been “the final recognition of Golding’s genius”, a “confirmation of his unique greatness”, to which Burgess responded, “It would seem to me that, with right British modesty, Golding has deliberately produced a post-award novel that gives the lie to the great claim. He is a humble man, and The Paper Men is a gesture of humility.”
All this fun at Golding’s expense could be chalked up to the perils, too common among writers and their keepers, of dining solely on ego salad. Lundkvist, for example, had been used to dominating the Nobel committee. He and his cohort, Anders Osterling, had been largely responsible for the selection of many of the more floridly obscure laureates of the post-War years. But Osterling had died the year before, at the age of 96, and Lundkvist, 77, felt the sapping of his clout. He went so far as to claim that the other committee members had “carried out a coup”, excluding him from the second round of voting. Now all comes clear. Lundkvist was feeling impotent and, like a character out of Philip Roth, made a scene about it. Problem solved. Give the old coot a Viagra to play with and leave Golding’s reputation in tact. Of course, there is the problem of his first published novel, the famous Lord of the Flies…
Just the other day I was telling a friend who does deep message that I was working on a post about William Golding. “Did he win for Lord of the Flies?” she asked, her elbows gouging my rhomboids. “The Nobel is generally given for a body of work,” I explained, groaning in pain. To which she replied, leaning hard near my left scapula, “I didn’t even know he wrote anything else.” “Ow!” And this is where it stays for most people. That monstrous brood of pre-adolescent English Hitlers, worshiping their skewered pig head and doing each other in on the set of Robinson Caruso has usurped what little energy the average reader has for giving Golding any attention at all. It is a work hogtied, so to speak, by allegory, unable to breath lest it awaken even a wraith of free will among any of its so-called characters. Even its few – very few – critical admirers concede that it lacks the subtlety he would learn to employ in his subsequent novels. Golding himself acknowledged its triteness. If this is the only book for which he is generally known, then doubts about his merit, whether ultimately sustainable, have a right to a hearing.
So then, explain The Times of London‘s 2008 published ranking of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945. Golding places third, just below George Orwell, just above Ted Hughes. A list, in itself, is a dumb beast, useless for determining the actual worth of anything. But, as with the Nobel roster, such a list can be suggestive: Clearly, there are those, and not a few, who continue to hold Golding in high regard.
Sir William Golding, 1911-1993
In advance of William Golding’s centenary, I have spent the last few weeks reading his novels, trying to determine for myself if he is worth anyone’s bother. So far I have read The Spire, Darkness Visible, and Lord of the Flies. Yesterday I began Pincher Martin. After completing this one, if I have not burned out on Golding, I will read The Inheritors. I’ll be posting my impressions of each of these novels in upcoming weeks (though probably not until after next month’s Nobel announcement.). For now, I must confess that, with three novels down and a fourth begun, I still don’t know quite what to make of him. Clearly he is a better, more adult, more complex novelist than snippy Paul Gray would have it. He may even, on occasion, dance with greatness. Or at least wave at it. Nobel Prize material? Let’s wait on that one. In any case, reading him is giving me surprising, if mixed, pleasure.
I invite any of you who have read Golding, taught him, (met him?) even if it was a long time ago, to share your impressions. I would love to know what you think, what you feel are his best books, his virtues as a writer, his liabilities.
And now, to the shade of Sir William Golding: Today is September 19th, 2011. Happy 100th to you. May the memory of you and your work fare well.
So, no Toni Morrison for me. Not for years. A bit like being a literary vegan, in retrospect. I believed myself to be done with all that moralistic agenda exemplified by sentences like, “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.” Done, I was, with all those freighted character names I had once thought so searching and apt, names like Circe, and Milkman. No more self-consciously high prose as matrix for illiterate or half-literate descendents of slaves. Was their inherent dignity really so fragile as to require it? I’m not saying I didn’t touch a Morrison novel. I touched them all right. I would take them off my shelf, leaf through them, read a paragraph, or a page, then, as if practicing for a polygraph, I’d shake my head, will my pupils to shrink, slide them back between Momaday and Munro – careful not to bend their covers, of course – and construe myself superior to all that… superiority.
All this cant was on account of my wanting to be a writer myself. When I sat with my notebook before me, blue ballpoint in hand, Toni Morrison would start pounding in my head like a pick-up truck’s bass. I tried to write sentences like hers, but they floated off the page, sometimes with whole paragraphs in tow, unanchored as they were to any driving concern which could hold them in place. The same problem attended my efforts with Ulysses. In both cases, I was too impressed by “great writing” and its corrollary, “writing greatly”, to plum my own dubious depths and steadily amass a personal vision of sufficient honesty and scope out of which might arise a necessary style.
Then came 2008. Two books by American authors were published that year each bearing a marked debt to Faulkner. Specifically, Absalom, Absalom!. Both, in very different ways, repaid the debt with interest. The first was Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, which offered up its tribute overtly, complete with the conflagration of an emblematic mansion, and a central theme which could be summed up by the famous Faulknerian jewel, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” The second was A Mercy.
I read it. And then, I read it again.
I will not say that Morrison’s is the better book, but it is the stealthier. Both Absalom, Absalom! and Shadow Country are about the fallout of unchecked ambition, the expanding circle of damage around one man’s power-mad rampage into primordial America. In each, a man, white, decides that greatness inheres in taking, be it land, be it the freedom of others, or the spiritual well-being of his own descendents. In A Mercy the “taker” is Jacob Vaark, an Anglo-Dutch trader who has carved out a small holding in the wilderness of what would one day be New York. Vaark, known to his dependents as “Sir”, has in common with both Thomas Sutpen and Edgar J. Watson an explorer’s nervous system and a kind of Calvinistic shrewdness aimed at making good on the land. But he lacks a taste for subjugation. As a white man and a land owner, the law of the still largely inchoate land (The Revolutionary War is still ninety years off) has imposed advantages upon him, and he certainly lives his way into those advantages. He does acquire a slave, but it is with a sense of realism and necessity rather than inclination or entitlement. Sutpen and Watson are ambiguous monsters, not wholly evil, but dangerous, larger than life, and at home with their own rapacity. Vaark is more or less sympathetic, responding simply and smartly with what he has been given to what arises before him. He surely works for success, but his “superman” gene is recessive. By subtracting out the Neitzchean imperative, what might be called an “ubermensch neurosis”, from her white male land-and-slave owner “taker”, Morrison disallows the traditional romantic resting place for our concept of evil as residing in character, thereby exposing its true and awful “banality.”
Morrison’s perennial theme is the dynamics of slavery, in her universe always more of a pas de deux than most people are comfortable with. In A Mercy, each of her characters is, in one way or another, trying to make an escape. Vaark gathers about him a small society of dependents, mostly women, each on the lam from a dire, enslaving past: Rebekka, Vaark’s wife, from heretic-burning England; Lina, a Native American, from her plague-ridden village, conquered and burned to the ground; the strange girl named Sorrow, ego-shattered and pregnant, from the trauma of a shipwreck; and Florens, the slave girl Vaark purchases from a deliquescent Catholic plantation owner in “Mary’s Land”. Also among them are two white men, Scully and Willard, one young, one middle-aged, working off indenture. They share each other’s bed as well as their workload. This piece of undiscussed common knowledge, far from making them outlaws, gives them an aura of groundedness which mostly eludes the women. They make an artful contrast to the free black man whom Vaark hires as an blacksmith for his mansion. Morrison has said that in this novel, she “wanted to separate race from slavery,” and by making it clear that the free black man, his own boss, earns much more than the two white men, who will likely not live long enough to emerge from under their debt, she again disallows us our comfortably liberal head shaking about that terrible “slavery thing” that some bad people used to do to other people based on their skin color or ethnicity. Slavery cuts across all barriers and takes no prisoners.
On Florens is bestowed the “mercy” of the title. Vaark (“Sir” to her) had originally wanted to purchase Florens’s mother. Ascertaining that Vaark could provide a less cruel life than the one she had endured, she presses her daughter upon him, begging him to take her instead. He agrees. But Florens is not of an age to understand her mother’s motives for giving her away, and, even if she was, the “mercy” would still be forever tied to abandonment, or worse, disposal. She arrives at Vaark’s farm scarred and deeply needy. Wide open and raw, she falls hard in love with the sexy free blacksmith. Their lovemaking is transformative for her. She believes herself needed at last. She will be everything to him, as he is to her. Vaark dies, and Rebekka contracts smallpox. The blacksmith had once proved uncanny in curing Sorrow of the disease, so she sends Florens on the three-day journey through the wilderness to summon him from the village were he lives. When Florens arrives on his doorstep, she finds that he has taken in a small black boy, a foundling, and is raising him. Her hatred of this child, this other, this competitor, is as wild as her love for the blacksmith. The story turns on how she navigates this crisis, or rather fails to, causing a catastrophe which reveals her to the blacksmith as the slave she is, not for being bought by Sir, but made a slave by her own mind.
Unlike Beloved, this is not a book about redemption. In the end, no one comes to Florens’s aid. No one can, least of all herself. And yet there is redemption in Morrison’s art, distilled, pressed, agate-like, into a true late style. And I am quite done, I believe, with being done with her.
In 1992 I graduated from college and began working in a bookstore (Considering the way of Borders, this may one day become a point of nostalgia, like my great grandfather working as a trolly car conductor.). Toni Morrison published Jazz that year, so I used my employee’s discountlet and, as with each of her previous novels, ate up the pages. My heart beat slightly faster – don’t plead ignorance of the feeling, I know you know it – as I opened to the first page and discovered those first sentences:
Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.”
This was the Toni Morrison I knew and loved, writing books like Beethoven wrote sonatas, holograming the entire work into the opening measures. I continued loving her as I turned each subsequent page, loved her as my bewilderment mounted, loved her through those lyric interludes:
…But there is nothing to beat what the City can make of a nightsky. It can empty itself of surface, and more like the ocean than the ocean itself, go deep, starless. Close up on the tops of buildings, near, nearer than the cap you are wearing, such a citysky presses and retreats, presses and retreats, making me think of the free but but illegal love of sweethearts before they are discovered….
loved her even as my bewilderment turned to bafflement so that by the end I had no idea what I had just read. It seemed she had set for me a riddle, like Princess Turandot, and, alas I was not to be her Calaf. I still loved her, or said so while idly rubbing my vulnerable neck, but there was no denying the fact that I had been decidedly chastened.
Then she won the Nobel Prize.
When Paradise came out in 1997, I decided I would not read it until I had read all her previous novels again (My inner Puritan lives for this kind of arbitrary injunction.). As a result, I never got around to reading it. Reason being, it was about this time that I tried to get serious about being a writer myself. All my reading had accumulated in what amounted to a literary bladder that most desperately needed easing. The solution, I thought, was to try to be a novelist myself. I started one project after another, grinding out words in a notebook, thinking this was the morally upright way to go about it, never getting past about thirty torturous pages. I read The Bluest Eye, then Sula, then had to stop. I found her voice too strong, too monumental. Trying to write while reading Toni Morrison was like trying to sleep in a hot, airless apartment with Charlie Parker blasting above my head. Out of defense, I decided to agree with those critics who found her writing “sententious”, “operatic”, “self-conscious”, “self-important”, “heavy-handed.” I began to read other writers, like Alice Monro and William Trevor, great writers whose plain, condensed prose can be many-hued, but never purple. I remember resorting books on my shelf and coming across Jazz. I opened again to the first page. “Sth, yourself,” I said, and put it where it belonged.
But this pose of disdain was struck precariously over the memory of the unalloyed pleasure I had while first learning to untangle Beloved. The spontaneous delight, as taken in shooting stars or a Baryshnikov jette, that accompanied the reading of each subsequent book, (save, perhaps, Tar Baby, which seemed uncharacteristic) had not gone anywhere. Which meant I always secretly suspected her detractors, myself included, of a kind of prudery. Or, or perhaps, bald envy.
