• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Avatar of Eros, suffers dementia

    Posted on by David

    Just as, inevitably, the scent of bitter almonds always reminded Dr. Juvenal Urbino of the fate of unrequited love, so there is a cadence of sentence, that always reminds me, in my evil hours, of what I love. Extravagant, poised, penetrating sentences. Sentences which, contrary to contemporary writerly morality, draw my attention to themselves. In the way Montserrat Caballé’s voice draws me into its own sound as she sings “Costa diva”, every tremulous note in every phrase extending beyond mortal breath. I hear it and requital becomes moot; I love again. That Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote more, and more consistently, such sentences than most twelve other writers combined, makes him one of Love’s great exponents. An avatar of Eros. Imagine signing that on your taxes.

    So that when, early this month I got a text from my friend Nathan, saying that Jaime Garcia Marquez had made a public announcement that his older brother, Gabriel, now 85, was suffering from dementia and, in all likelihood, would not be writing any more, I felt a moment of disorientation. Remember, as a child, emerging from the waking dream of your life to discover that your parents were not where you had, you thought, left them? You felt the earth roll. Without realizing it, I had come, in some way, to rely on Don Gabriel being on the rolling earth, somewhere, breathing air continuous with the air I breath, somewhere working, writing those reminders to love I so regularly require.

    Nathan, a slender man in his early thirties, quick of wit and large of heart, is one of the hidden treasures of the North Denver book scene. He works at West Side Books, one of those remodeled auto garages which belie their former incarnations less through architectural traces than through arcane profusion, book mold replacing axle grease and sparking metal in the nose, hopelessly overflowed shelves replacing hydraulic lifts. Nathan works among the books a bit like a grounds keeper tends a public garden, planting, weeding, mulching, watering, all the while  steadily reading his way, both in English and Spanish, into a formidable mastery of Latin American literature. His knowledge already encompasses wide swaths of the literary landscape out of sight to most of us who are not ourselves Latin American. His current obsession, for example, is the apparently great Argentine writer, Juan Jose Saer. Nathan’s desire, rather avaricious, for the horde of the mind is one of the things I love about him. No one better to have delivered the hard news about Gabo.

    The day before, he had texted me about the Argentine.

    “Who the effen wg sebald is Juan Jose Saer!?” I sent.

    His reply came a few minutes later: “A great Argentine writer whose works weren’t, apparently, exotic or magical enough for the North American publishers to market to our name-brand-hungry audiences when they started appearing in the late ’60s. Something like Cortázar meeting Faulkner from what I’ve read so far.”

    What he was referring too, I soon learned, was the germ of a backlash among younger Latin American writers against the literary esthetic known popularly as magic realism, of which Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the most famous exponent. In the mid 1990s, the germ sprouted verdantly and bloomed into a two-headed Godardian attack against the cultural hegemony of the major North American publishing houses: In Mexico it became known as “La generación del crack” (The Crack Generation), while elsewhere in Latin America, it became known, rather bitingly, as “McOndo”, a subversive conflation of McDonald’s with Macondo, the mythical setting of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The two movements differed ideologically, but agreed on a repudiation of Realismo mágico, conversely known as Macondismo. The authors of these movements believe that magic realism too easily reduces real life as lived by real Latin Americans to stereotype and kitch, and was not equal to the portrayal of the diverse, complex, and messy Latin American moment.

    Then, the announcement that Gabo suffers from dementia.

    I texted him: “Terrible news! He’s been a fixture for so long in my literary world. Actually, calling it my “literary world” sounds vaguely silly, and certainly reductive. Garcia Marquez, Annie Dillard, now Patrick White, all the others, they are my world, simply, as much as you are, and Sam, and Bach, and Rachmoninoff, and damned old Protestantism. When one of those fixtures prepares to move, so autonomously, out of the picture, it’s rattling. I’ll still have his books. All of him I ever had, really, or could have. But it has been a tacit reassurance knowing he’s around.”

    He texted me back: “I know what you mean. But… All types of madness were always just around the corner in all of his works. I’d still so love to have tea with him in his living room, whatever condition he’s in.”

    Me: “I wasn’t aware that he has been the object of some resentment among Latin American authors. I wonder if its the same species of resentment many Japanese directors held against Kurasawa.”

    Nathan: “All the Latin American talk against magic realism was never against him, just against publishers only wanting works that cheaply replicated that aspect of his style and stereotyped Latin American culture. McOndo tried to open doors for writers who had trouble publishing because their work wasn’t about country folk in sombreros feeding their burros which, incidentally, fart prognosticating ghosts, while the menace of a dictator is felt from afar. The realities of life in Latin American countries has changed a lot in the last fifty years, and those realities, and the strength of other Latin American literary traditions, and the distinctness of individual nations, are not well represented by works that pander to a market demand for magic realism. But Gabo himself, as far as I can tell, is universally venerated.”

    Me: “Thanks for the clarification. The perfidy of a consumer public and its lackeys faulting gifted artists for not being sufficiently someone else.”

    Nathan: “These writers are as good as it gets, but aside from possibly Bolaño, I don’t think any of them, at least that I’ve read, achieve Garcia Marquez’s grandeur. What royalty he truly is. So thankful for the many books he gave us!”

    The conversation continued, through text, and then over dinner at our house. Nathan suggested that a gifted Latin American writer trying to carve out a space in the shadow of Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a bit like a 19th century German composer working in a different vein from Wagner while Wagner was still living. Sam asserted that, while the point was taken, the analogy breaks down because of the Brahms/Wagner divide and how passionate and how evenly split the two factions were. And as we talked, the colloquy become ever less about its apparent subject. Even as we continued to lay before each other our offerings, what we knew about the books we’d read, the music we’d heard, the history we’d learned, in hopes of having them returned to us in such a way that we might ourselves understand them better, it became apparent that the real colloquy was on love. The love of these artists for their culture and craft. Our love for them, for the company they keep us. Our love for each other. Our love for our own lives, of all in ourselves we want affirmed. We’ve known all along, though we adore forgetting, that we live in a world in which a man with orange curls aching on his tormented head can walk with legally purchased weapons into a movie theater not a dozen miles from where we live, and try to appease the other demons by laying waste to the lives he finds there. We live in a world in which the political blather narrows to absurdity the native human capacity to look up and to look around. All that Nathan and I texted, all the three of us said over vegetarian food, all that Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote, and all that his dissenters hold true, Brahms, Wagner, the rest, all runs counter to this decay. It is the resistance we stage against the public dementia. Such resistance is, practically speaking, futile. Only, many years later, or tomorrow, when we face the firing squad – and we all will, one way or another – we will remember that distant afternoon, or the evening last week, when we took each other to discover, not ice, but our own loves, and through those loves, our lives.

    Gabo knew this. And I believe that, whatever lines of magical reality his mind now follows, he always will.

     

    Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings  stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur. Only then did we dare go in without attacking the crumbling walls of reinforced stone, as the more resolute and wished, and without using oxbows to knock the main door off its hinges, as others had proposed , because all that was needed was for someone to give a push and the great armored doors that had resisted the lombards of William Dampier during the building’s heroic days gave away.

    — The Autumn of the Patriarch, opening lines


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  • DARKNESS VISIBLE: William Golding’s Fiery Meditation

    Posted on by David

    A question for you: If a book’s opening pages amaze you, and its closing pages bring you near tears, have you read a great book? The need to pose the question at all is probably its own answer. Nevertheless, Darkness Visible, William Golding’s troubling and troublesome novel, had me hashing out this question long after closing the back cover.

    The title refers to Milton’s evocation of hell in Paradise Lost:

    A dungeon horrible, on all sides round
    As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames
    No light, but rather darkness visible
    Served only to discover sights of woe,
    Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
    And rest can never dwell, hope never comes.
    (I. 61-67)

    And so, before we even open the book we have some idea of that into which we are about to be plunged. When Darkness Visible came out in 1979, Golding had not published a novel in twelve years, and you can tell. The pages are heavy with density of meaning. The writing is gorgeous, in places baroquely claused, allusive. Golding begins with hell on earth, a furnace – 1940 London during a German Blitz – out of which walks a flaming child. Listen to his description of the moment the child is spotted by the fire crew peering into the blaze left by a bomb:

    At the end of the street or where now, humanly speaking, the street was no longer part of the habitable world – at that point where the world had become an open stove – at a point where odd bits of brightness condensed to form a lamp-post still standing, a pillar box, some eccentrically shaped rubble – right there, where the flinty street was turned into light, something moved. (12)

    That phrase, “no longer part of the habitable world”, is large, and apt, to the passage and the novel, for clearly, after his twelve-year silence, Golding had come to wonder what part of the spiritually decimated post-WWII post-Vietnam world, whose only hopeful generation was being conquered by and divided between the guru and the radical, remained habitable, “humanly speaking.” To explore  this problem, he adopted the convention of the double, two characters opposed, the guru and the radical, who, though they never meet, set in motion a philosophical weather system.

    The first is Matty, the flaming child, whose stride out of the Blitz and onto the page loudly echos the most famous photographic image from the Vietnam War. Severely burned, he becomes, almost point by point, the “burning babe,” in Robert Southwell’s somewhat off-putting allegory of Christ.

    My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
    Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
    The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
    The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
    For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,

    In the character of Matty the saccharin is, thankfully, neutralized by his daunting literalness, which makes him at once a holy fool and destructive element. His face makes visible his character, and the darkness therein: the left side has been burned away to a bald white scar while the right remains intact. After his rescue, Matty (Matthew Septimus Windrove, as he has been named, though no one uses the middle name or can ever quite get a handle on the last) is taken to the mythical town of Greenfield where he is put in a school for foundlings. There he meets  the homosexul pedophile, Sebastian Pedigree. Mr. Pedigree, to deter rumors about his practice of giving the most beautiful boys private “tutelage”, bumps one, his beloved Henderson, for Matty, whose grotesque appearance disgusts him, but, he hopes, will quash suspicion. Matty is only able to take this turn in his favor at face value, and so believes Pedigree to be his “one true friend”, and pretty Henderson to be essentially bad because fallen from grace. When Henderson falls even further, from the lean stairs outside Pedigree’s window to his death, Matty is implicated because his gym shoe is found near the body. Accident, suicide, murder – Golding is admirably ambiguous on this point. In any case, both Pedigree and Matty are removed from the school in disgrace, but not before Pedigree spits out a curse on Matty, calling him “That horrible, ugly boy!” and telling him “It’s all your fault!”.

    Matty spends the next years of his life attempting to atone for a sin he accepts without attempting to understand. He becomes a highly idiosyncratic Bible freak, expatriates to Australia where, among other things, he undergoes a “crucifarce” in which he is nearly emasculated by an Aborigine. He keeps a journal in which he records his conversations with two angelic presences, one dressed in red robes and hat, the other in blue, the first “more expensive” than the second, who tell him he is “very near the center of things.” He puts himself through a bizarrely convoluted cleansing ritual or baptism in a swamp near Darwin before repatriating to Greenfield, which he enters riding the bicycle equivalent of Monsieur Hulot’s automobile. He becomes a handyman at an exclusive boarding school, and emerges as a kind of prophet, at least in the minds of two rather mediocre men, a retired school teacher named Edwin Bell and a bookseller named Sim Goodchild.

    Matty’s double is Sophy, the more deadly of two beautiful sociopathic twins. Early in our acquaintance with this character, one of Golding’s vilist, we see her as a small girl, throwing stones at dabchicks as they swim down a river. With awful precocity, she ascertains the exact arch and moment of release which will cause her stone to kill one of them. To her, the mere possibility of doing so makes it an imperative.

    Then there was the longer pleasure, the achieved contemplation of the scrap of fluff turning gently as the stream bore it out of sight. (109)

    Well then. She awakens to sexuality early, through her preternatural awareness of her feelings for her emotionally distant father (the twins’s mother left early on), and his relationships with a series of “aunties”. It is almost a matter of course that her eroticism turns violent. She has her first orgasm only when, during sex, she stabs her thuggish boyfriend, Roland, deep in his shoulder. She can’t fathom his fuss. A radio broadcast on the subject of entropy articulates for her the sense that “the whole universe is winding down.” She believes the only viable course of action is to help it along. While her sister, Toni, heads out for a career in international terrorism, Sophy remains in Greenfield where she uses sex as a magnet to bind a handful of dupes to her like iron filings, and, with them, hatches a terrorist plot of her own. This involves kidnapping the son of an oil sheik from the school where Matty is employed. As the operation commences, she imagines murdering the boy in such graphic detail, and in such an orgiastic swoon, that I had to read the passage twice to satisfy myself that the murder didn’t actually happen. The bomb the terrorists use to incite the chaos brings Matty full circle; as the kidnapping gets underway, Matty, immolating, pursues the kidnappers and thwarts the operation.

    The accumulation of pages, up to this point, had left the book’s importance, and Golding’s urgency, thoroughly overdetermined, and I was looking forward to being done with it. So much so that I was entirely unprepared to find the novel’s beating heart, right there in the last four pages. Matty, as it turned out, was not finished with his task on Earth. Pedigree was still out there, all those years later, old, disintegrating, and still grievously in thrall to his addiction to “the sons of the morning”. We see him, lonely and broken, in the park with its public restroom where he habitually operated. He positions himself on a bench near the gravel playground. He has with him his lure of choice, a big many-colored ball. Just as he is preparing to use it Matty appears to him, transfigured. The tables are turned, and Pedigree finds himself the object of an unwanted advance. A tussle ensues, more awesome than any of the preceding conflagrations, for Pedigree’s soul. It is a paradox that here, at the end, when the story becomes most blatantly metaphysical, it also becomes most believable.

    Darkness Visible groans and buckles under converging pressures: Vertically, it staggers under its freight of symbolism. Horizontally, it is stretched by the tortured exigencies of plot.

    Take Matty, by comparison the more approachable of the two protagonists. He is an amalgam of metaphors. In addition to being Golding’s most transparent Christ, there is his name, Matthew Septimus. Looking up Matthew 7 in the Bible, one finds Christ’s warning against false prophets. Though he be Christ, he is one of these too. Then there is his face, split between the hideously wasted left and the healthy right. In the bicameral brain, the left hemisphere controls speech and sequential reason, the right is inarticulate but feels, has visions, making him a fool-proof fool to play against Sophy’s extreme rational materialist. A. S. Byatt, who loved the book, can’t get enough of this game:

    If the beautiful twins are the fallen Whore, Matty, piebald, mutilated, is the incarnate Second Coming, the figure in the fiery furnace in the Book of Daniel, the alchemical conjunction of opposites in one body and thus the Philosopher’s Stone – which was often pictured as a naked child and referred to as the orphan. He is also Horus, Horapollo, one-eyed God of Light, who was imagined as a naked boy with one bald side to his head and one “lock of youth” over his temple. Horus is also falcon-headed, and it is as a great golden bird that Matty finally appears to Mr. Pedigree at the end of the novel, flaming, feathered, golden, loving and terrible. That is why I also believe that the name which came into the hospital superintendent’s mind, the name no one speaks, was Windhover – Hopkins’s Falcon, the Christ whose blue-bleak embers fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion…. If Satan is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Golding has said that he believes man is “the local contradiction to this rule,” that in him “the cosmos is organising energy back to the sunlight level.” Matty is the contradictory burning bush that is not consumed.

    Matty, it seems, is a veritable kitchen sink of symbols an and allusions. He is everything, it seems, except an actual human being, about whom one can feel a shred of empathy. To me, he comes across as a Joan d’Arc cum Don Quioxte without the romance of either.

    In spite of a lot being said about her, including how her pointy breasts rise in her father’s presence, Sophy is even more reduced. With Matty we can at least feel pity. With Sophy, only revulsion. Everything about her pertains to her nihilism. She is more a type of sin than a person. Her belief in the ennobling power of gratuitous acts of violence makes her a cousin to Gide’s Lafcadio, albeit drained of all wit or charm.

    Golding clearly wanted much for this novel, so much, in fact, that its complexity comes perilously close to mere complication. For example, before the kidnapping, Matty holds a kind of seance with Bell and Goodchild, his devotees. I won’t go into how it comes to be held in the room in which Sophy and Toni grew up. Bernard F. Dick, in his excellent study of William Golding, tries to rescue the book from charges that it strains credulity past bearing, and nearly succeeds. If Darkness Visible

    is judged solely on a narrative basis, it would be like subjecting Twelfth Night or The Tempest to the standards of literary realism. Although Golding’s novels abound in realistic detail, they are not realistic novels; one does not “believe” in a Golding novel the way one believes in, say, Madame Bovary.

    For Golding, it seems, his plot was but a point of departure, a hook on which to hang his meditation on the late 20th century world, the nature of evil, anomie, the divorce of heart from mind. Very well. I can accept this. But this means that, for all of Darkness Visible‘s undeniable riches, its narrative, that for which, when it comes down to it, we read novels, is subsumed under its own meanings. His characters become illustrations of arguments rather than agents of the actions, or even thoughts, Golding provides for them. Which is what makes Pedigree’s final moments so shattering. Faced with the awful prospect of redemption, he at once longs for its release and recoils from it in terror. After 260 pages, Golding at last exhausted his topic, and could afford this moment of true, human drama, of which our recognition is immediate and total. And it is worth all the rest combined.

     


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  • Patrick White’s Centenary: Australian Monolith, Explorer of the Inner Desert.

    Posted on by David

    208 miles southwest of Alice Springs, in Australia’s Northern Territory, somewhat to the west and south of the dead center of the continent, where, were it a body, its heart would beat forth a circulation of scorching rocks and pebbles, rises Uluru, the sandstone monolith called Ayers Rock. Its 1142 vertical feet and 5.8 mile circumference have been home to the creator gods of the Anangu people for so far back in time as to yield time’s immateriality. Those who bandy the notion of history call its painted caves prehistoric. For those to whom it remains sacred, the only temporal frame with which to regard it at all it is the dreamtime. One legend has it that the Rock was originally an ocean on whose shores a great battle was fought. In protest, the earth itself rose up, and has remained. This accounts for the known parts. Its unknown parts extend, by some estimates, as much as 20,000 feet below the gibbers plain.

    Uluru/Ayers Rock is the most recognizable image of the antipodean world, outstripping Sydney’s opera house, the fjords of New Zealand, and koala bears. The Cyclopean feature on the face of the desert defining the Australian interior. The people of Australia – not the People of the dreamtime, but the immigrants, descendents of European settlers and British penal colony overseers, those who, in the words of Patrick White’s Voss, “huddle” along the coast – live out their time either turning from or turning toward this 529,000 square miles of emptiness glaring out from the heart of the continent.

    Portrait of Patrick White by Brett Whiteley

    Patrick White was one who turned toward. His fiction rises, forbidding, beautiful, from the desert we all must cross who would count ourselves among the Living. As much as any writer of the twentieth century, he knew that the great expanse of emptiness must be explored, for emptiness is not nothingness but the only place from which we can know ourselves. And death, in the desert or the suburbs, is not life’s greatest peril. This distinction goes to Mediocrity. Listen to  this passage from The Aunt’s Story: The unmarried Theodora Goodman has just had a transcendent and wordless spiritual exchange with a Greek cellist, and receives a letter from her sister, Fanny:

    About this time Fanny wrote to say it was going to happen at last. When I was so afraid, dear Theodora, Fanny wrote. But  Fanny had made of fear a fussy trimming. Emotions as deep as fear could not exist in the Parrotts’ elegant country house, in spite of the fact that Mr. Buchanan’s brains had once littered the floor. Fanny’s fear was seldom more than misgiving. If I were barren, Fanny had said. But there remained all the material advantages, blue velvet curtains in the boudoir, and kidneys in the silver chafing dish. Although her plump pout often protested, her predicament was not a frightening one. Then it happened at last. I am going to have a baby, Fanny said. She felt that perhaps she ought to cry, and did. She relaxed, and thought with tenderness of the tyranny she would exercise.

    ‘I must take care of myself,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I shall send for Theodora, to help about the house.’

    So Theodora went to Audley, into a wilderness of parquet and balustrades. There was very little privacy. Even in her wardrobe the contemptuous laughter of maids hung in the folds of her skirts.

    ‘God, Theodora is ugly,’ said Frank. ‘These days she certainly looks a fright.’

    —The Aunt’s Story, pp. 112, 113

    The bight of his prose attends the jaws of his own horror at the malicious force of the mediocre, the “average”, as embraced by those who turn from the desert.

    ‘A pity that you huddle,’ said the German. ‘Your country is of great subtlety.’

    —Voss, p. 11

    Patrick White’s entire oeuvre is a paean to the plight of the man or woman living out of a spiritual vision, or, as Paul Tillich would have it, an “ultimate concern”, assailed by the malevolence, sometimes intended, often inadvertent, of the desert deniers. His personal theology aside, the God of his novels is, in Christian terms, Old Testament, an austere flame lighting the way of the chosen, if not always warming them, and laying waste to those who would choose.

    Patrick White, 1912 - 1990

    His affinity for those budding on the world’s far and tenuous branches he attributed to his homosexuality. It gave him dispensation, he felt, with the oppressed and reviled. He found it useful, in terms of his artistry, to adopt the rather outmoded notion that his orientation was a kind of gender inversion, a feminine spirit in a man’s body, which allowed him special knowledge and the ability to inhabit many lives. The title of his last completed novel was Memoirs of Many In One.

    In my case, I never went through the agonies of choosing between this or that sexual way of life. I was chosen as it were, and soon accepted the fact of my homosexuality. In spite of looking convincingly male I may have been too passive to resist, or else I recognised the freedom being conferred upon me to range through every variation of the human mind, to play so many roles in so many contradictory envelopes of flesh. I settled into the situation. I did not question the darkness in my dichotomy, though already I had begun the inevitably painful search for the twin who might bring a softer light to bear on my bleakly illuminated darkness.

    —Flaws in the Glass, pp. 34, 35

    Against his disavowal of “the agonies of choosing” and his easy acceptance of the “fact”, his telling self-analysis of having been “too passive to resist”, his taking his sexuality for a “darkness”, suggests a somewhat different, more tormented relationship with himself. Very little of his writing deals explicitly with homosexuality. In all the novels up to The Twyborn Affair (1979), the homoerotic undercurrents are so fleeting, so organic, so subtly rendered, that the closest reader would be forgiven for missing them. But all of his work shoots from Jacob’s hip, wounded in a battle where to be blessed means to finally accept and assimilate (though by no means necessarily to reconcile) one’s own multiple and warring selves, even those which destroy.

    Some critics complain that my characters are always farting. Well, we do, don’t we? fart. Nuns fart according to tradition and pâtisserie. I have actually heard one.

    —Flaws in the Glass, p. 143

    At his centenary, Patrick White’s relevance has increased, it seems, inversely to his readership. He is one of the essential writers. I hope you will read him.

    What do I believe? I am accused of not making it explicit. How to be explicit about a grandeur too overwhelming to express, a daily wrestling match with an opponent whose limbs never become material, a struggle from which the sweat and blood are scattered on the pages of anything the serious writer writes? A belief contained less in what is said than in the silences. In patterns on water. A gust of wind. A flower opening. I hesitate to add a child, because a child can grow into a monster, a destroyer. Am I a destroyer? this face in the glass which has spent a lifetime searching for what it believes, but can never prove to be, the truth. A face consumed by wondering whether truth can be the worst destroyer of all.

    —Flaws in the Glass, p. 70

     


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  • Carlos Fuentes — Stockholm’s Loss, His Life and Work the World’s Gain

    Posted on by David
    Carlos Fuentes, 1928 - 2012

    I.

    Four years ago my brother almost died of a bacterial infection. When his roommate found him, what little of him was conscious had been gutted by delirium. As we began to guess that Death, poker-faced to the end, did not have the winning hand, I asked my brother if he wanted me to bring him books. Pure projection on my part. Anyone who desires to live will surely want to read. He must have said yes, or I must have thought he did, because the next day I brought him books to borrow. Because I did not know how to lend him actual strength. However much my brother and I may have wanted to be there for each other, we have not been. Every so often, Extraordinary Circumstance attempts to play matchmaker for us, but as soon as it leaves the room, we drift.

    My brother is a serious reader. Strange that we have never been able to make of this more than a passing interest between us, like strangers noticing each other wearing identical shoes. But, once in a while, books make handy offerings. Flouting the daunting impassivity of the vital signs monitor glittering overhead, I laid two books in his hands, one short, one long. The first, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, I had not yet read myself, but I told him Sam had, and had loved it. The second, “one of the best I’ve read in recent years,” was Christopher Unborn. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, avatar of all fecundity, and Carlos Fuentes. I looked for signs of interest, satisfied myself that they were there, then took the books off the bed cover where he’d let them rest and set them on the stand next to his bed, pushing aside cards, flowers, and a teddy bear, given by those who knew him better. As I walked past the nurses’ station towards the elevators it felt good to have left him in the care of these great Latin Americans; I was quite sure the restorative powers of their works far outstripped my own.

    I hadn’t so much read Carlos Fuentes’ book as shredded it, paper flung and flying from my canines until every bit had been consumed. The wealth of that book, a literary billionaire if ever there was one, its boggling complexity of thought paired with sheer sensual delight, a voluptuous braininess if you will, would make a powerful infusion, I knew. Enough to raise the three-days dead. Enough for my brother.

    He is angry, my brother. Some of it I understand. Much of it I share. Most of it I would not presume upon. Fuentes, if Unborn signifies, was angry too. His black and flowing anger at what corruption had done to the Mexico he loved must have made his pen hot to the touch. At once knotted and panoramic, Christorpher Unborn – Cristóbal Nonato – with its sinewy orphans, its vamps and dictators, floods and revolutions, mountains of shit and histories of blood, must surely be one of the most coruscating satires in modern fiction. A supreme example of what anger, undammed and channeled, can produce. I wanted that. I wanted that for my brother.

     

    II.

    Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal. Monstrous the first vertebrate that succeeded in standing on two feet and thus spread terror among the beasts still normally and happily crawling close to the ground through the slime of creation. Astounding the first telephone call, the first boiling water, the first song, the first loincloth.

    —Terra Nostra

     

    III.

    “Sad news: Carlos Fuentes died.”

    When Sam’s text came through five days ago I was sitting at my favorite coffee house, immersed in Patrick White: A Life, David Marr’s biography of my current literary addiction. Months had past since my last thought of Fuentes. Not since last October, Nobel season. And before that, not since Sam brought home Destiny and Desire, his last book published in English, from the Border’s dissolution sale.  As Christopher Unborn has as its unlikely narrator a fetus waiting to be born on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World, so in this last book, we are addressed from the tongue-biting mouth of a decapitated head. Artemio Cruz narrated his story from the vantage of his last moment in life.  Something in Fuentes was drawn to these far boundaries of existence, needed, somehow, to crash them, as if what he had to say could only be said if common understandings were dissolved at the outset. Time, after all, is passing.

    Fuentes’ Nobel Prize had been ripening for years in that Northern grove, its luster outshining many of those which dropped before it. Including that of Mario Vargas Llosa. I was dismayed when two years ago the Nobel went to the Peruvian. Not because I thought him undeserving. Only that Fuentes was more deserving. Llosa is, without question, a great writer, but what of his matches the shear myth-making weather system of Terra Nostra, the evocation of the uncanny of Aura, the summation of a history of revolution as found in The Death of Artemio Cruz, the volcanic heart of Christopher Unborn?

    Now, Fuentes has died. His Nobel still hangs, no less bright for having never been given. Those tenders of literary reputations in Stockholm won’t touch it. It burns their hands.

     

    IV.

    You will never again see those faces you saw in Sonora and Chihuahua, faces you saw sleepy one day, hanging on for dear life, and the next furious, hurling themselves into that struggle devoid of reason or palliatives, into that embrace of men which is broken by other men, into that declaration, here I am and I exist, with you and with you and with you , too, with all hands and all veiled faces: love, strange, common love that wears itself out on itself. You will say it to yourself, because you lived through it and you didn’t understand it as you lived it.

    —The Death of Artemio Cruz

     

    V.

    My brother has not returned Christopher Unborn. I even asked him to bring it with him when, a few weeks ago, we had dinner together. “I even set it by the door before I came,” he apologized. “No worries,” I said. “Nothing urgent.” As we chewed our restaurant food along with his recent, failed, engagement to a girl who could never have shared in his reading. I don’t know why he hasn’t given it back. I don’t know why he left it at home that night. And since I don’t know, I’m free to imagine. Let Fuentes be with him awhile longer. As long as necessary.

    Fuentes? Now more than ever.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Fuentes, Carlos Novelists Should have won 📎and tagged

  • As Patrick White turns 100, why is no one reading him?

    Posted on by David
    Patrick White, 1912 - 1990

    The time has come to speak of Patrick White, whose centenary on May 28th, is fast upon us.  I will try to keep this post fairly short because I am currently in such a snit of idolatry that I won’t have anything especially coherent to say. I will simply put forth that, for me, Patrick White ranks along side Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Saul Bellow as one of the greatest novelists to write in English in the twentieth century. Hyperbole? You decide:

    The woman winding wool held all this enclosed in her face, which had begun to look sunken. It was late, of course, late for the kind of lives they led. Sometimes the wool caught in the cracks of the woman’s coarse hands. She was without mystery now. She was moving round the winding chairs on flat feet, for she had taken off her shoes for comfort, and her breasts were rather large inside her plain blouse. Self-pity and a feeling of exhaustion made her tell herself her husband was avoiding her, whereas he was probably just waiting for a storm. This would break soon, freeing them from their bodies. But the woman did not think of this. She continued to be obsessed by the hot night, and insects that were filling the porcelain shade of the lamp, and the eyes of her husband, that were at best kind, at worst cold, but always closed to her. If she could have held his head in her hands and looked into the skull at his secret life, whatever it was, then, she felt, she might have been placated. But as the possibility was so remote, she gave such a twist to  the wool that she broke the strand.

    —The Tree of Man

    Here is the Whiteian sublime. The physicality he evokes signifies without strain: note her too large breasts, elected from, we gather, a panoply of attributes waxing too large in her plain life. And how about that biblical ninth sentence, gathering into her obsessions the hot night, insects filling the porcelain lamp shade, the eyes of her husband, and finally  something vast and forsaken at her core. Of course, we realize upon reaching the end of this passage, which feels more like a perimeter than a terminus, how obvious, the strand of wool will break, lacking, as it does, the heart’s resilience. Whole chapters could be written plucking the riches from the limbs of this passage. And, in a fictional output comprised of some six thousand pages of such passages, this one is more or less garden variety, making the oeuvre of Patrick White one of the most valuable gardens in modern literature.

    Which begs the question, why is no one reading him? Why am I practically the only one I know who has even heard of him (apart from those few of my friends who politely let me blather encomiums)?  His oeuvre has received sufficient critical attention to persuade me that I am not alone in my admiration. But even those who speak highly of him tend to refer to him as “the most important figure in Australian letters,” or “the first to put Australia on the literary map.” Three cheers for post-White Aussie writers. But White himself is so much more than the down-underwriter of his country’s literary life. He is a world writer in every sense, and should be spoken of in the same terms we reserve for José Saramago, Thomas Mann, Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer. Why isn’t he?

    In my search for answers I’ve been reading his books like mad, reading criticism, trolling the internet, and talking with friends. A distillation of what I’ve found comes down to these four points:

    1. Patrick White is a high modernist, making him unfashionable in a post-modern world. As far as I can tell, what this means is that he followed Joyce, Woolf, Pound, and their ilk, in the belief that the old assurances provided by religion, society, and political designations, could no longer bear the weight of modern life and thought. These writers saw a sharp division between literary art and more accessible, or popular, writing. Their books are frank about their difficulties. White has been criticized for the density of his “mannered” or “poetic” prose, his “clotted images”, and fragmented sentences. Naturally, this will limit his readership, but it cannot, on its own, account for his enduring obscurity. His writing is dense, but not daunting. Most of the best of Faulkner is much more difficult. We don’t call Samuel Beckett unfashionable just because no one writes like him now.

    2. Patrick White is too pessimistic, too dark, and what he asks us to consider about human nature – ourselves included –  is beyond the pale for most readers.  I concede this may be so. Many readers have commented on the “shock of recognition” which assails them on nearly every page. But this laying bare, this “truth telling”, to use a rather hackneyed term, this “vivisection”, to use a Whiteian term, is solidly within the purview of the artist. Do serious readers really find the meanness of Nabokov so much more edifying? Does one turn to Eugene O’Neill for a little cheer-up? If White is too relentlessly grim, how, then, make sense of the ever-rising star of Cormac McCarthy, who throws a dense, gorgeous, ball of modernist prose at the violence at the heart of the void? (White’s biographer, David Marr, has said, perhaps too felicitously, that McCarthy could be “up before Media Watch on charges of plagiarism by spirit.) While we’re at it, why don’t we, for the sake of our constitutions, leave Shakespeare on his increasingly dusty shelf while we get a little spiritual r&r.

    Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris in the kitchen

    3. Patrick White was gay. This seems to be the pet gripe of educated gay men of a certain generation, who, to compensate for their admitted fragility in the world, draw strength from being “the only gay in the village.”

    4.  Patrick White was Australian, making him peripheral to the bossier entities of the literary world. This argument is, sadly, the most persuasive. It grieves me to think that literature may be subject to the same laws as cynical politics: if a country fails to find ascendance in the consciousness of a more established block, it could drop off the map altogether and the privileged parties would be none the wiser. Sam, my partner, has a different take. “There is just so much literature,” he says. His point being, if you are looking to expand your knowledge of even just the essential modern writers, would it occur to you to look to a country known mainly for kangaroos, English convicts, a rather flamboyant strain of machismo, the world’s largest Gay Pride parade, one famous piece of architecture, and an accent often invoked in comedy? Of course there is great writing coming out of that lonely desert of a continent, or at least the thin portion of it strung along its Eastern cost, but its not where most of us would go looking for it. All the same, I would think the fecund sub-genre of post-colonial literature would be happy to hold up Patrick White as one of its shining lights. Can it really come down the banality that Naipaul, Walcott, Gordimer, Coetzee, and Rushdie hale from politically sexier homelands? But then, how to account for Les Murray, widely considered one of the three or four greatest poets currently writing in English. He’s Australian.

    None of these explanations finally compel. Factoring in the idea that depth and brilliance in a body of work ought to outweigh whatever might be put in the opposing balance – an apparently fanciful notion in which I persist –  here is one further explanation:

    5. Ignorance of Patrick White and his work has, quite simply, become a habit. A bad one, I might add.

    As with racism, car crashes, and other absurdities, I find Patrick White’s obscurity hard to live with. My question – why is no one reading him? – is not rhetorical, but an honest plea for responses. Someone, please tell me.

     


    📂This entry was posted in English language laureates Novelists White, Patrick You weren't going to forget about this one, were you? 📎and tagged