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Month: August 2006

Three Cities, by Sholem Asch

Book One. Chapter I. The Capital

Cover of 1983 Carroll and Graf reissue of 'Three Cities'
From the Warsaw Station a long trail of little one-horse sledges lined with straw was slowly making its way through the soft, watery slush of the Vosnessensky Prospect towards Issakievsky Square. The sledges straggled in several long, apparently endless processions. The sheepskin coats of the drivers, some of whom had clouts tied round their feet with pieces of string, while others wore felt boots, were steaming like the flanks of their spirited black horses. Men and beasts breathed heavily as they struggled through the dirty gray gutters flowing along the ice-covered bridges in the dark thick fog which, rising from the canals, was gradually enveloping the whole of Petersburg.

Now and then a light troika flew through the slow-moving lines of sledges. The swift horses splashed the drivers from head to foot with the mud that flew from their hoofs, and gave them something to swear at. The drivers took liberal advantage of the opportunity; when they were not pelting each other with free samples from their stores of abuse, they addressed their horses, bestowing on them at one moment the tenderest terms of endearment and the next cursing them to the tenth generation with the most fluent oaths.

These little one-horse sledges were conveying the riches of the south into the capital of the Czar. The plains of Champagne sent their choicest vintages, of which Petersburg consumed more than all the rest of the world. Closed wagons bearing roses, carnations and violets were brought from the Riviera to the metropolis of Nicholas the Second; crates of the earliest fruits from the forcing houses; exquisite perfumes, soaps, and other cosmetic accessories from France’s best factories; rare jewels; cooling mineral waters: in short, the finest and most expensive luxuries that Europe possessed came in prodigious abundance to the Warsaw Station and thence to the capital. From the Warsaw Station the riches of the whole world streamed into Petersburg; the other railway stations of the city received and distributed the wealth of Russia itself.

In a narrow side-street off the Vosnessensky Prospect, through which the one-horse sledges were now lugging their crates and baskets of wine, fruits and flowers, stood an old and spacious building. It dated from the time of Alexander I and was built in the typical Petersburg Empire style. The yellow-washed facade had two entrances which were guarded day and night by liveried doorkeepers. The front of the gigantic building, which was so long as to be almost uncanny, stretched nearly to the end of the street. The side, which faced on another cross-street, was almost as long. Yet there were only three families lodged in this huge structure. The whole of the ground floor was reserved for a general’s widow, to whom the house belonged. The first floor was rented by a rich land-proprietor, and the top floor–that was occupied by the advocate, Solomon Ossipovich Halperin.

The corridor that led to the reception-rooms of the celebrated advocate had been packed with clients ever since three in the afternoon. It was a corridor such as was often to be seen in Petersburg, well lighted and heated, with long rows of sofas covered with red plush, and large Empire mirrors on the walls. It was pleasant to wait in that corridor, and clients who had secured admittance by bribing the attendants waited there until four o’clock, so that, when the advocate’s reception-rooms in front were thrown open, they might be among the first to enter.

And when the tall doors opened, the great rooms soon swarmed with human beings–peasants, land-proprietors, Jews. From every province of the Russian Empire came a stream of litigants; people who had been wronged, who were oppressed by the Czar’s officials, goaded by the pitiless laws, persecuted by judges and attorneys, tortured by the petty ill-will of local authorities–they all sought refuge in the capital and there appealed for justice to the supreme court or the highest State officials. Petersburg, the seat of the Czars and their officers, mistress of a hundred million human beings and tens of thousands of people drawn from the remotest corners in the whole breadth of Russia, pilgrims to this European Mecca in search of justice, safety and protection, concessions and privileges; for all affairs concerning the boundlessly great and rich empire of Russia were decided in Petersburg alone. And quite a respectable proportion of the pilgrims filled the corridors and the official and private reception-rooms of the advocate Halperin. For, though a Jew, Halperin was celebrated far and wide in Russia for his acuteness, his eloquence (he was counted one of Russia’s best orators) and his influential connections.

Editor’s Comment

I struggled with Three Cities for months. It looks, at first glance, to be a terrific story: the epic saga set in St. Peterburg, Warsaw, and Moscow in the years before and during the Russian Revolution. It has a cast of thousands, or at least hundreds, from millionaire railroad tycoons to homeless beggars, from Hassidic Jews to anti-semitic Russian noblemen. There are love affairs, jealousies, greedy schemes, worker’s strikes, famines, troika rides on moonlit nights.

And Asch has the capacity, even when filtered through double translation (from Yiddish to German to English) of producing passages remarkably vivid color and characterization. Every few pages, there are wonderful sketches in which he takes best advantage of the freedom of a long and complicated novel, taking time to inventory the residents of a Warsaw tenement or to lead us through the thoughts of a Russian estate owner on his way to his mistress in Moscow. For these passages, the novel rises to great heights of accomplishment.

Unfortunately, in between, the reader is subjected to endless and repetitive dialogues about the meaning of life and the value of life and whether the meaning of life has any purpose and whether a purposeful life has any value and whether the value of purpose is…. If you’re starting to doze off at this point, you’re not alone. After one too many of these discussions, you simply gives and skip on to the next descriptive passage.

The problem is with the protagonist. After putting so much energy into scene-setting, philosophical dialogues, and sketches of peripheral characters, Asch seems to have none left for his lead character, Zachary Mirkin. Mirkin is a young lawyer, left motherless at a young age, who discovers in his teens that he is a Jew. His father, a powerful industrialist, has worked hard to distance himself from his Jewish roots. The narrative follows Mirkin as he grows disenchanted with the materialism of Czarist St. Petersburg, seeks a mission in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz, joins a revolutionary movement, ends up in the midst of the Bolshevist take-over in Moscow, then finally abandons the revolution and returns to Warsaw. All around Mirkin Asch colors in a rich setting of places, smells, sounds, and people. Mirkin himself, however, is a void:

In this building filled with unfettered energy, Comrade Mirkin walked about with hesitating steps like a sleep-walker, as if he were in a dream. Everything seemed to him real and unreal at the same time, clear and yet indistinct; he knew what has happening round him, and again did not seem to know.

This comes on page 626, when the Bolshevisks and Whites are battling in the streets of Moscow. Meanwhile, our hero is wandering around in a fog, which is where he’s been since being introduced on page 18. And there are still 230 pages left to go! One academic has argued that most critics fail to understand the real character of Zachary Mirkin, the brooding protagonist of Asch’s novel. His struggle shows us, so the writer claims, that the hardest path in life is that of sticking to one’s beliefs. But Zachary spends virtually the whole novel wondering what he really believes. A good bitch-slapping is what the boy needs, and by the end, the reader is ready to give him one.

I’ve never thought much of Reader’s Digest condensed, but in the case of Three Cities, the approach has its merits. Chuck the soul-seeking and the clueless protagonist and preserve the scenery and supporting players, and you have the makings of a rich and satisfying read.

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Three Cities, by Sholem Asch
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933

Sightings: Neglected Books in Scotland

We spent the last couple of weeks in Scotland — a few days in Edinburgh and a week or so in the Highlands. Although not part of the agenda, neglected books cropped up on several occasions.

In a small bookshop near Edinburgh University, I found a few titles new to me:

• The Seizure of Power, by Czeslaw Milosz

The Nobel Prize-winning poet’s first novel, about the Soviet-orchestrated establishment of a Communist government in Poland at the end of World War Two.

• My Sinful Earth, by William Gerhardie

A copy from the 1947 “Uniform Edition” of Gerhardie’s works. One could hardly consider Gerhardie neglected in 1947 if he had a uniform edition of his works being published. However, among neglected authors Gerhardie is one of the hardiest perennials, coming back into critical bloom (and print) every decade or so. In an essay collected in Power of Delight, John Bayley writes that:

[Evelyn Waugh’s] favorite William Gerhardie novel was to be Jazz and Jasper. This almost forgotten work appeared in 1927, two years earlier than Vile Bodies. Its author wanted to call it Doom, a title not adopted until the 1974 edition. In 1947 it made a brief appearance as My Sinful Earth, and the 1928 American edition was called Eve’s Apples [in fact, it was Eva’s Apples — Ed.], the American publisher having decided, no doubt wisely, that the word “jazz” had been “worn threadbare” in crossing the Atlantic.

• The Tragedy of the Korosko, by Arthur Conan Doyle

A short novel about the capture and rescue of a group of Western tourists by Muslim extremists. A remarkably contemporary book, reissued in 2003 as a Hesperus Classic.

• The Life of Samuel Belet, C.F. Ramuz

An autobiographical novel. Ramuz is considered by many the greatest Swiss writer of the 20th century. His best-known book in English is When the Mountain Fell, which was a Book-of-the-Month club selection in 1947. Time magazine wrote of the novel, “U.S. readers will get here what few other recent books have given them — a genuine literary experience.”

Then, in the bookcase of the small house we rented in the Highlands, I came across a few more. Amongst the best-selling thrillers and romances one usually sees in such holiday rentals, I found some unexpected titles:

• Assassins, by Nicholas Mosley

An early novel by this great English experimental writer, about the abduction of a diplomat’s daughter in the midst of a crucial summit meeting.

• The Conspiracy and Other Stories, by Jaan Kross

A collection of mostly autobiographical short stories by an Estonian writer recommended by Doris Lessing and others.

• So Many Loves, by Leo Walmsley

The autobiography of a novelist best known for his books about life on the north Yorkshire coast. From the excerpts I read, it seemed a lively and entertaining tale, ranging from his apprenticeship on a fishing boat to travels through Africa.

• The Ballad and the Source, by Rosamond Lehmann

In this 1944 novel, Lehmann tells the story of Sibyl Jardine — her unhappy marriage, her flight from it, her life as a single mother, and the descent of her daughter into mental illness.

The Office, by Nathan Asch

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Other Comments
· Reviews
· Locate a Copy

Excerpt

Title page of the first U.K. edition of 'The Office'

They were six in the crowd. There had been many more before; the entire office. But some of these had stopped being a crowd earlier and began to think for themselves; and, frightened, left the office, and took up their thoughts. But these six that remained, stayed in the crowd, and from then on until late evening, when they were all drunk, and had no thoughts even as a crowd, these six acted together, did things together. When one suggested something to do, they all grasped his suggestion eagerly, and all acted upon it.

There was Bill, who had been the head of the trading room. An older and more intelligent fellow, who should have known better but didn’t. A man with a wife and a child. A man with a future before him. A man who, when he knew where he was going, was as unbent as a steel knife, but when he was broken looked like this same steel knife snapped in two: lost and useless, and good for nothing in the world. A man who should have had somebody to guide him, but who didn’t, and just by a lucky chance had gone as far as he had.

Then there was Blackbird. A braggart. A stupid little fellow. Was always talking about what he had done. Whatever anybody ever talked about had already happened to him. He knew everything. Anyway, he said he did. Contradicted himself in every other word. Shrewd, too. But in a little way. Never had the sense to be large in little ways and clever in big. Anyway, he couldn’t be big. Couldn’t if he had tried to. He was little in everything. And in this little way he was mean.

Ferrari was a wop. Even a God damned wop. With his slick, black hair and long nose. If you didn’t know him you’d say you wouldn’t have liked to meet him at night. He looked like that: tall, and beaky, and not to be trusted. But he was the best telephone clerk on Wall Street. Everybody said that. A holy wonder, this fellow. You couldn’t beat him. And fast! Fast as hell! If he weren’t a God damned wop he’d get somewhere. But you wouldn’t trust him if you’d meet him.

And then there was Eddie: Eddie Drucker. A good fellow. Damned nice fellow. A peach of a guy, a white man. Only a little bit too good. That’s why he wouldn’t go far. He couldn’t. He’d take off his hat, shoes, and underwear and give them to the first person that asked him for them. And he was a bit dumb too. Kind of slow and big. And he wouldn’t have kept this job long if the others hadn’t helped him.

And Charlie. You couldn’t keep a straight face when Charlie was around. They said he could almost make Zuckor laugh. Always cracking jokes and playing tricks, and singing, and raising hell generally. He’d make a funeral laugh.

And finally Phil Johnson. Never say much. Never talk. He’d work like hell, and you wouldn’t know it. Now Ferrari, when he worked, you’d see the feathers flying. Everything with gestures. Stage work. But not Phil Johnson. He was almost as fast as Ferrari, but you’d think he did nothing at all. He didn’t belong in this crowd. He was out of place in it. He should have gone home, and stayed in his little room, and smoked his pipe. That’s what a Swede does. But somehow of other he got into this crowd, and stayed in it, and he was almost as much part of it as Charlie or Eddie.

These six played poker, shot craps, and wanted to fight. And then when they had nothing else to do, they stayed still, slightly out of breath, looking around them.

Then Charlie said:

“Let’s go uptown.”

They said all right. They had been paid off, and their pockets were full with the two weeks’ pay. And they were ready to spend that money. The day before they would not have done it. The day before each one would have said: “This much for rent, this for the grocery bills, and this for the movies.” One or two might have gone into a saloon and bought a drink of whiskey. That would have been all. But this money that they received now, that was all they would get until the next job. And they didn’t think about the next job. They didn’t give a damn what would happen tomorrow. They were a crowd. And they were willing and ready and were going to spend every cent of their money this same evening. They were all going to be broke that night. Tomorrow they would all have to go to the savings bank, or to their relatives, or borrow from their friends, or just go hungry. But they didn’t care about that. They were a crowd.

So they all picked up their hats, and were walking out. And they saw Zuckor. And Charlie being the first wanted to play a joke on Zuckor. He wasn’t afraid of him any more. Like a little boy who on the last day of school tells his teacher to go to hell, wanting to revenge himself for all the wrongs the teacher had committed toward him, Charlie wanted to pay back to Zuckor, to get even with him. So this is what he did: he bowed before Zuckor, tipped his hat, and said:

“Good night, Mr. Zuckor.”

And Blackbird who followed him, also tipped his hat, and said:

“Good night, Mr. Zuckor.”

And Eddie, Phil Johnson, Bill, and Ferrari all did the same: they all tipped their hats to Zuckor and said:

“Good night, Mr. Zuckor.”

This was the worst insult they could think up to show Zuckor what they really thought about him. To show him that before, when they had greeted him, they had never really wanted to. That they had had to do it. Had been forced to. Their job had depended upon their saying, each morning, “Good morning, Mr. Zuckor,” and each evening, “Good night, Mr. Zuckor.” That they had never meant it. That they had never wanted him to have a good morning or a good night. Because he had always been mean and small to them and had wanted to persecute them. Because they had been in his power. He could have made them suffer, go through the agony of being jobless, of not knowing what they would do tomorrow, where their next meal would come from. And he had taken advantage of that, a mean advantage over them, being stronger than they were. So they said to him, “Good night, Mr. Zuckor,” and of all the ways they could have thought up to hurt him, this was the worst way.

They felt that as they were going down the elevator, and they were astonished that they could have thought up such a fine insult. It was more than they could have done had they really thought about it. They didn’t remember who had said it first, but they were glad that they had said it, and even proud of their own cleverness. And thinking of their cleverness made them quiet, not boisterous, as they went down, and as they took a taxi for uptown. They were quiet and dignified, self-conscious of their own cleverness.

Editor’s Comments

The Office is a Wall Street brokerage. In the first three brief chapters of the novel–“Wall Street,” “The Voice of the Office,” and “The Office,” Asch uses a series of impressionistic techniques to sketch his context:

  • “Wall Street”:
    • New York — downtown — streets — buildings — firms

    • buy — sell — exchange — beg — borrow — steal — cheat — give — take — donate — endow — deceive — lie — sympathize — pity — love
  • “The Voice of the Office”:
    • hey Glymmer I see where Federal Tel went up to par I guess we can let go a few Jacobs get the market on Federal Tel
    • zing-ing-ing-ng-g-g

    • Mex fours five to a quarter Mexican Irrigation thirty-two to six Mex large five to fifty
  • “The Office”
    • The office consists of three rooms: one large, one small, and a third cut into smaller cubicles.

    • The office gives its employees a living; they work in it and in return they receive pay, for which they buy food, clothing, shelter, amusements, pay the doctor, the undertaker, pay taxes.

… and then one day the office failed …

So Asch titles the second, longer part of the book. Why does the office fail? Asch offers no explanation. The cause is of no special interest. The fact is, the office fails, and suddenly, everyone who works there is out of a job.

Asch’s attention focuses on the immediate impact of the failure, on the thoughts and actions of a cross-section of the people who worked there, from the principal partner to the switchboard operator and the clerks depicted above, in the first few hours after they’re told.

Whatever the cause, the failure comes as a sudden and unexpected shock to almost everyone. In an instant, a fundamental element of each person’s life is wiped out, and the blow sends each reeling. For the clerks, the impact is visceral: they wonder “where their next meal would come from.” One walks down the street, confident in his ability to land another position the next day, until the sight of a vagrant leads him to consider what little separates him, now jobless and with little more than his final pay to his name, from the vagrant’s lot:

He would come in after having long looked for work, looked everywhere and had not been able to find it. Everywhere he came they would look at him and say or only think: “You’re a bum, see? It’s no use giving you work. You’d quit after the first pay-day. You don’t want a job, you only want a meal.” And they’d say, “No, nothing today.”

Another returns home resigned that the loss of her income now dooms her to become a dependent — literally. Without a job of her own, the only alternative she can see is to marry a man she neither loves nor respects:

She was to go home and stay with Jim Denby. She was made for such as he. For men with warm, moist palms, and warm, moist faces, and warm, moist looks. For men who do not take but beg. For sixty dollars a week, and a book-keeper’s household, and a book-keeper’s children, and a book-keeper’s life. Oh, hell!

For others higher up the management chain, the economic impact is multiplied by the social stigma of failure. The principal partner, Glymmer, brought in for his name more than his resources, is a former Treasurer of the United States. A career politician brought up through the ranks by machine politics, he now realizes how little substance stands behind his resume. He has no wealth of his own: he has always lived off his salary. He has no real business acumen to offer, and now that his own firm has failed, his name is only a liability. He is trapped like an animal, and Asch does a stunning job of showing the range of instinctive reactions he experiences as he ride home quietly in the back of his chauffeured limousine.

In his panic, Glymmer latches onto his wife as the source of all his troubles, and he begins to fantasize about how to best humiliate her with the bad news. “You know, we are ruined,” he plans to announce that night at dinner, in front of guests, shattering her world. But something even more fundamental than money and prestige brings Glymmer back to reality:

He had taken the cigar out of his pocket, and was chewing on it, as he always did when he was satisfied with something.

Then, little by little, a look of fright came into his face. His jaw tightened, the cigar fell out of his mouth, and he trembled.

He, he, he, that’s what he would do? That’s what he was doing? Who was he? How could he? Who …

Perhaps I’m reading too much into such a short passage, but I think this is one of several places in The Office where Asch shows a remarkable talent for bringing out depths in his characters with the slightest and subtlest of strokes. Although much of The Office brings to mind the works of his contemporary, John Dos Passos, particularly U.S.A. and Manhattan Transfer, Asch is far more successful in creating three-dimensional characters.

In a few cases, the failure opens an opportunity. One junior partner decides to take his chance as an aspiring writer. Another, the “brains” behind the firm, merely see it as another challenge to be overcome through charm and persuasion:

All around him men trying to get ahead. Men forging ahead. Using all of their wits, all of their powers. Building. Building. Creating new things. Selling. Buying. Exchanging.

And so was he. So was he. He was trying to build too. He also was working.

What if it failed? Other things fail. A man may be down, but he’s never out. And he wasn’t even down. Wasn’t he waiting for the two men to join him for the conference? Wasn’t he going to build a new office? Start things again?

Not all opportunities are taken. Second, skeptical thoughts come and undermine the first optimistic speculations about possibilities and bold choices. In one case — Miss James, the switchboard operator (a wonderfully effective sketch by Asch) — emotions run the full gamut from shock and anger to resignation and disinterest before she even puts on her hat and leaves the office.

Asch wrote The Office in 1925, when business failures were not unknown, but rare. When the Depression hit a few years later, the same experience would be repeated a thousand-fold, but as far as I’m aware, no writer succeeded so well in describing it. FDR’s New Deal introduced a network of social services that provides something of a buffer between the loss of a job and basic survival, but even now, I suspect people would feel many of the same emotions Asch portrays in the first few hours after getting the news. Certain works of literature manage to stay in print because they capture so well something — the death of a child, the loss of faith — many people experience. On this basis alone, The Office deserves to be brought back into print — and kept there.

Other Comments

• from Conversations with Malcolm Cowley, edited by Thomas Daniel Young, University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

Nathan was the son of Sholem Asch, who was an enormously popular Yiddish novelist; all of his books were translated into English and many of them were bestsellers. Nathan started out quite young with a novel called The Office, which received very good reviews here. Didn’t have much sales, most first novels don’t have, but for some surprising reason it sold better in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Then he wrote a second novel that was disappointing to me, called Love in Chartres, and a third novel called Pay-Day, which was more or less suppressed on moral grounds. That was the best of his novels. Pay-Day was also the day of the Sacco-Vanzetti execution, so he worked that into the novel. After that he wrote a book called The Road, about traveling over America by bus, and he wrote a novel about this area, called The Valley. That ended his publishing career. During the war he was a sergeant in the Air Force, really in their public relations, a P.R. non-commissioned officer. Not having to do it, he nevertheless flew a large number, a dozen or more, of bombing flights over Germany, and he wrote letters that were extraordinary. I used to get them. He came back and lived in Mill Valley and wrote, and nothing he wrote was published. Each of his manuscripts would have been accepted if it had been a new book by a new author, but his bad record in the bookstores frightened publishers, and they wouldn’t take his other novels. Then he started to work on memoirs…. He wrote an extraordinary memoir of his father, Sholem Asch, which he gave to Commentary and Podhoretz printed it, after cutting the heart out of it. Then he died of lung cancer. I think he was almost a paradigm of the failed author, but he had loads of talent. He was in Paris with Josie Herbst, another author whom they are making efforts to rescue from obscurity, and John Herman and also Hemingway, who was the great star of Paris in those days….

Reviews

· Boston Transcript, 14 November 1925

It is powerfully written. It is swift, relentless. It is New York as people generally conceive New York. It is human nature under the grinding wheels of economic disaster.

· New Republic, 16 December 1915

The opening chapter is a sensational accumulation of words. The second chapter carries the method into conversation, and is sensationally effective.

· New York Times, 11 October 1925

A Wall Street office of “bucketshop” brokers is evoked by Nathan Asch in sharp, staccato phrases, almost in isolated words. His portrait is completed in less than twenty pages, yet the atmosphere, the nervous tension, the incessant telephoning, the relentless outpouring of tickertape, aimless, meaningless interjections of conversation, and a vague, submerged suggestion of human presences are fully indicated.

“And then one day the office failed.” Thereupon Mr. Asch pursues twenty of the office help, from porter to President, as they wander home or resort to pallid, unimaginative, disheartened efforts at amusement….

His selections are amazingly apposite. He varies his pace and adjusts it unerringly and precisely to the mood he wants to convey. It might be called expressionism in fiction, yet it is not a blind and rigid application of a technical principle. It is fluid and plastic and enormously fresh and stimulating. The effect amply justifies the form.

• Time magazine, 9 November 1925

Some staccato words are ripped out. There is The Office: tape, shares, toil, sex, money. The office fails and you go home with the various people whose lives centre in it. A stenographer has to forget the junior partner and marry her boyfriend. The stupid figurehead of the firm trembles, tells his wife. Clerks curse, get other jobs. The junior partner brandishes his cane, plans to run away and be a heman; slinks to his father instead. The crooked partner plans another office. Author Asch seems to know his Wall Street and hate it thoroughly. Striking as an experiment, his book never gets beyond its starting point.

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The Office, by Nathan Asch
New York: Harcourt,Brace, 1925

Jonathan Yardley: “… my own list of unjustly overlooked and underrated writers …”

Source: “‘Woman Within’: An Unlikely Rebel of the Privileged South,” Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post, 29 November 2003, available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20195-2003Nov28.html

Reading through the individual articles in Washington Post Book Editor Jonathan Yardley’s excellent series on neglected and revisited classics, Second Readings, I came across the following quote worth highlighting here:

The court of literary opinion is no more fair or just than the court of public opinion. Writers of limited gifts and accomplishments (Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, John Steinbeck) are overpraised and over-rewarded, while others of great gifts and singular accomplishments (William Humphrey, Dawn Powell, Jerome Charyn) are ignored or misunderstood. This of course is true in other endeavors, but somehow it seems especially unjust that writing, the best of which is supposed to stand the ages, so often produces such small recognition for those who do it so well.

My own list of unjustly overlooked and underrated writers is long; it includes, in addition to those mentioned above, John P. Marquand, Thomas Savage, Roxana Robinson, Harold Frederic, Elizabeth Spencer, John Oliver Killens and, at or very near the top, Ellen Glasgow.

A few expository notes on these writers:

  • Marquand is one of the more oft-mentioned underrated writers, and his works appear on a number of lists on this site. In fact, I’ve been toying with the idea of devoting a separate website to his works.
  • A New York Times reviewer once wrote of Thomas Savage: “The best-seller lists make it clear that American readers are powerfully fond of the familiar and the accessible — and if there were justice (or better taste) in the literary marketplace, surely one or another of Thomas Savage’s dozen novels would have been topping those lists for the past 30-odd years.” His 1967 novel, The Power of the Dog, was included in Roger Sale’s “Neglected Recent American Novels” article in The American Scholar. Unfortunately for Savage, he’s taken as his subject the American West, which has often been a kiss of death for critical recognition and sales. Annie Proulx, whose “Brokeback Mountain” avoided the same fate, wrote the introduction to the 2001 Bay Back Books reissue of The Power of the Dog. Even readers who got to the point of picking up the book, though, had to get past this opening sentence:

    Phil always did the castrating; first he sliced off the cup of the scrotum and tossed it aside; next he forced down first one and then the other testicle, slit the rainbow membrane that enclosed it, tore it out, and tossed it into the fire where the branding irons glowed.

  • Roxana Robinson is a biographer, novelist, and short story writer. The youngster of this group, illustrated by the fact that she’s got her own website and domain name.
  • Harold Frederic was a contemporary of Twain and Howells. The texts of three of his novels — The Damnation of Theron Ware, In the Valley, and The Market-Place, can be found at Project Gutenberg.
  • Elizabeth Spencer is known for her novella, Light in the Piazza, but her critical reputation is best reflected in her extensive oeuvre of short stories. And it turns out she also has her own website.
  • John Oliver Killens was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Of his 1963 novel, And Then We Heard the Thunder, Yardley once wrote that it was “one of the few distinguished novels about World War II.”
  • Ellen Glasgow’s recognition improved, along with that of a number of other women writers such as Kate Chopin, when the eddies of the feminist waves hit the academic and publishing worlds, and all her major works are back in print. Yardley’s article moved me to order a copy of A Woman Within.

Underappreciated Literature: from WNYC’s “Leonard Lopate Show”

Source: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/underappreciated.html

During July and August 2006, WNYC’s “Leonard Lopate Show” devotes time to a series of features on “authors that are little-known in America, authors that mysteriously fell out of fashion, and authors who never gained wide recognition in the first place.” Authors discussed include:

The programs can be heard or downloaded in MP3 format at the link above.

Antoine Bloyé, by Paul Nizan

· Excerpt
· Introduction by Richard Elman
· Other Comments
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Excerpt

Cover of Monthly Review Press reissue of 'Antoine Bloyé'Antoine left with two stretchers, their bearers silent. They went on foot. In the depot at night you have to watch where you put your feet. The ground is full of traps and pitfalls, switch heads, ditches, and engines under steam, a tiny wisp of smoke coming from their stacks. Antoine was thinking. He did not take such deaths very easily. People said, “Accident at work.” And they tried to make you believe that work is a field of honor, while the company provides the widow with a pension, a niggardly pension, it parts with its pennies like a miser, it thinks that death is always overpaid; later it hires the sons of the dead and all is said.

Nothing is said. Every morning Antoine still saw on his arm the scar made by the explosion of a water gauge when he was an engineer. It dated from yesterday, this severing of a radial artery. He was “off the foot plate” too short a time not to feel close to men who die on their job from the blows of their profession. Engineers, people who give orders from afar, administrators, die in their beds more frequently than do the men of the train crews, firemen, conductors. General staffs rarely fall on the fighting line. How does one get reconciled to these things? Already there were so many stretchers in his memory, smashed chests, figures mangled like charred wool. He knew the life of the men who run the trains, their joys, their work, their code of honor, and their death, and now he was going to announce the final episode. It was a boss’s mission, the bosses announce the deaths and injuries. The bosses send messages of condolence. The bosses sometimes experience the uncomfortable feeling of guilt.

The stretcher bearers and Antoine arrived before the engineer’s house and then before that of the fireman. Antoine climbed their dark stairs, stifling his breath and muffling his tread as though to wake each new-made widow as late as possible, to delay the moment when he had at last to face the cries, the stammering of a woman blinded by the pepper of pain, befuddled by the coils of sleep. It was nevertheless necessary to knock and await the woman’s cough, the shuffling of her slippers, her fumbling with the latch. The door opened and all the warmth and security of the rooms evaporated. He entered the quiet semi-darkness as a thief, as a demon. And he spoke at first of wounds; he said, “We have brought him home.”

Then of severe wounds, then at last — and the wife had understood from the beginning — of death.

“Be brave, madame. It is a fatal accident.”

It left an unforgettable impression on his memory — the hastily lighted lamps, the plates on the oilcloth beside the wine bottle, the rigid bodies heavily borne to beds still warm from the women’s bodies, a dazed child standing in a corner, the widow’s wrath.

“You take away our men from us, you bring them back in pulp. Company of murderers!”

That night, Antoine discovered death. A certain death that he could not forgive himself.

To lay out the driver’s body on the bed, he had taken it in his arms. What terrible weight a dead man is. Besides the seventy-five or eighty kilos of his flesh, bones, and blood and all his fluids there is the weight of death itself, as though all the years the man had lived had suddenly accumulated in his body, weighing it down, coagulating like lead grown cold. A wounded man still knows how to make himself light; he has the magic warmth of his breathing, of his blood circulation, but this dead man was as rigid and motionless as marble. This dead man no longer looked like a man. Only his clothes were like all other clothes. Antoine held him tight, he embraced this body fraternally. Living men do not clasp each other thus, their bodies do not come into contact save through their hands. Embraces are decently reserved to love; men scarcely venture to touch each other. So it needed death for him to embrace this man.

Antoine could do nothing for him save stretch him out, and the weight of the dead man drew him toward the bed. He felt like saying to him, “Come on, old boy, help yourself a bit.”

He wanted to ask for forgiveness as though he had killed him with his own hands.

Introduction by Richard Elman

From the 1973 Monthly Review Press edition of Antoine Bloyé:

Paul Nizan never reached middle age. He died in 1940, aged thirty-five, with the French army at Dunkirk. He wrote six complete books: the novels Antoine Bloyé, La Conspiration [English title The Conspiracy, and Le Cheval de troie (translated in England as The Trojan Horse); two polemics, Les Chiens de garde (American edition, The Watchdogs) and Aden Arabie; and Chronique de Septembre. He had been a philosophy student of the idealist academician Leon Brunschvig at the Ecole Normale, a writer for L’Humanité and Le Soir, a Communist who broke with the party over the Hitler-Stalin pact. According to his former schoolmate Jean-Paul Sartre, he enjoyed the company of women. Nizan’s was a short though not an ordinary life and Antoine Bloyé is a major novel of such great intensity and compassion that its strength is still available to us. It is one of the truly great Marxist novels I know of, a work that incorporates the imagination of Marx to treat of the alienation of ordinary men from their fellow and their work, yet does so without once becoming scolding, combative, or sneering. It’s a thirties book that has not become time-locked.

This edition of Antoine Bloyé uses a translation that was published in the Soviet Union in 1935. Edmund Stevens, then Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, found a way to make hard, clear, intelligent English out of Nizan’s precise thoughtful French with its meditative echoes of Pascal. Published only a year before the Great Purges of Stalin, it must have had the force of novelty in party-hack Moscow literary circles. Nizan had been a Communist but, in literary matters, never a Sovietist. His literary inclinations were gravely modernist and French, and English publication of a novel such as this in the Soviet Union had to be something of an anomaly, explained perhaps by the fact that it was issued by the Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R..

… The power of this artist, she [Tilly Olsen] observed, had only once been expressed — in Antoine Bloyé, a book which she said had been important to her life. Tilly’s gift of mind was shortly thereafter followed by Nizan’s text.

The feelings aroused by my first encounter with Nizan’s funereal moral fiction remain with me even know, like a hurt one cannot forget. Tilly spoke of Bloyé in the reverential way that one reserves for masterpieces, although, as with any true masterpiece of this century, its language and feelings are understated, and much of the force of Nizan’s work derives from his ability to transform an ordinary life into a drama of suffering without redemption, of failure without pathos.

Antoine Bloyé’s terrible death in life was to manage his existence so that, in fact, he had never lived. Sartre tells us Nizan was obsessed by his father. All his life the man had cheated himself. He had led a life that denied his own humanity, his feelings. But within this parable of the career of the railway functionary is the choice each of us confronts, almost daily: to remain vivid and in touch with one’s experiences, to grow, to be one with one’s comrades, brothers, friends, and lovers; or to withdraw into oneself and bitterly await death, to suffer the slow, wasting passing of the timid, the intimidated, the encapsulated, the bourgeois whose life is wrapped “in cotton wool” (to use Nizan’s phrase), those whose selves have been shrunken into the deals they have made with their own lives. It is this constant test of humanity which Bloyé so plainly fails….

Antoine Bloyé is a child of the working class, a locomotive engineer who seeks to better himself by becoming petty bourgeois. He joins the bosses: he marries his boss’s daughter. At moments throughout his life, he is seized by a certain dull anger and regret. For he has given up everything in his life that was vivid for certain smug assurances. As Nizan puts it, “All his work only served to hide his essential unemployment…. There were times when he would have liked to quit the life he was leading and become someone new, a foreign someone who would be more like his real self….”

Time and again Nizan wants us to see Bloyé’s defeat as our contemporary defeat. It is the sort of life, Nizan tells us, that one could sum up in two brief obituary paragraphs in one of the provincial papers; that is just what he refuses to do. He treats Bloyé’s promise and vividness and yearnings empathically. He is able to make us accept, like breathing, the subtle social and political corruption of youthful spirit, that cruel banalization through marriage and getting on that our culture imposes on so many men as their rite of passage. He forces us to know this nobody — but never abstractly, as Camus might do, or with Sartre’s contempt. Bloyé is an authentic man set loose on a course of death, who lives in a world of schedules and trains, of honest accomplishments, domesticities, and occasional celebrations. He seeks to improve himself. He becomes declassed. He becomes a traitor. He dies alone, with only a wife to look after him, their pretense at love and sharing long a waste. His education has been to be selfish. He has been encouraged only to be isolated, greedy, and resentful, a mere atom, or monad. His oppression is the cultural — finally political — oppression directed against so many males; because they have been told they must get on, they must choke themselves emotionally….

… He wrote a book that is as current as the slogans of the best of our young people. It is a Marxist book: not only, or simply, because it sometimes incorporates into its analysis the language of Marxist economics as diction and metaphor with which to dramatize Bloyé’s betrayal; nor because its central event is a workaday life, its action the precise way in which the illusion of well-being is manipulated to imprison most of us and, in turn, to make us exploit our wives, our so-called friends, our mistresses, our children; but also because, as in most of Marx’s finest work, its instincts are poetic, its seeming prosiness is about a way of feeling that is materialist; and its expression is by psychological insight.

Other Comments

Karl Miller, New York Review of Books, 15 November 1973

There are those rare novels — Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep is one — for which the label of masterpiece always seems slightly beside the point. Both Antoine Bloyé
and Call It Sleep suffered the similar fate of being lost literary classics that had to wait a generation or so after their publication before being restored to their rightful literary place. Antoine Bloyé, although of an entirely different literary tradition than Call It Sleep, has the same obsessive, wounding power.

Chicago Daily News

Its revival is a gift to modern literature. No one writes this way any more: Nizan tells a story that can be read on many levels and is expressed with a classic use of language. Antoine Bloyé is in the tradition of the great novels … it concerns a man, a class and a society…. This is a profound book, profoundly moving and profoundly sad. It makes the reader examine himself; it causes him to look again at the world he lives in, at the life he has chosen…. It is not a long book, but it is beautiful, satisfying and unforgettable…. This masterpiece will spur many readers to fill their lives, to search for the secret….

James Atlas, The Nation, 22 October 1973

Now, what distinguishes Paul Nizan’s Antoine Bloyé from the work of his fellow writers in France is the manner in which it illustrates the character of dialectical materialism–from the inside–without sacrificing the aesthetic possibilities of realism….

… It is a matter of real importance, then, that we have this translation of his best novel, not only, because Antoine Bloyé is a brilliant example of modern European literature but because it can serve to refine our awareness of the life and work of a significant literary figure….

What makes Nizan,s chronicle of a wasted life so vivid is the author,s awareness of Bloyés human possibilities. Writing from within the mind of an “ordinary” man, he was able to depict the circumstances, emotions and desires, the consciousness of which is necessarily diminished in those whom labor has robbed of the abillty to reflect. School, sexual adventures, marriage into a bourgeois family, the death in early childhood of a daughter; the birth of a son, promotions, vacations: these are mere events, and their qualities as lived experience he buried beneath obligation and blind will. Nizan tells us that Antoine Bloyé wasn’t “meditative,” that “events rolled past without his taking notice.” But the texture of Nizan’s prose, viscous and laden with sensation, imitates the world through which Bloyé moves. While his own life is crushed, “caught like an insect in this quivering web of railway lines,” the richness of the natural world surrounds him like a penumbra of unrealized hope. And that is what is most remarkable about Nizan’s achievement. Despite Antoine Bloyés docility, he sees, through the lens of Nizan’s sensibility, the world’s possibilities: the heaviness and indolence of Sunday, summer evenings on the waterfront, the memories of childhood whose atmosphere settled over the dinner table on visits to his parents’ home.

Locate a Copy

Antoine Bloyé, by Paul Nizan
Translated by Edmund Stevens
First English publication: Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society Of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1935
Reissued: New York, Monthly Review Press, 1973

Eland Books added to Publishers page

Just added to the Publishers page:

Eland Books, on the web at www.travelbooks.co.uk

Owned and run by travel writers John Hatt, Rose Baring, and Barnaby Rogerson, Eland “specializes in keeping the classics of travel literature in print.” Although its list has well under a hundred titles, Eland easily takes the first place award when it comes to bringing long-lost travel books of particular excellence back to print. And the quality and diversity of its titles is remarkable: Norman Lewis’ A Dragon Apparent, excerpted here; Leonard Woolf’s novel of Sri Lanka, The Village in the Jungle; and the intriguingly-titled A Cure for Serpents, Alberto di Pirajno’s memoir of life in Ethiopia and Libya (during the periods of Mussolini-led colonisation).

Sharing the Rice-Mash, from A Dragon Apparent, by Norman Lewis

Excerpt

CoverThere were seven jars attached to the framework in the centre of the room and as soon as the chief’s sons-in-law had arrived and hung up their cross-bows on the beam over the adventures of Dick Tracy, they were sent off with bamboo containers to the nearest ditch for water. In the meanwhile the seals of mud were removed from the necks of the jars and rice-straw and leaves were forced down inside them over the fermented rice-mash to prevent solid particles from rising when the water was added. The thing began to look serious and Ribo asked the chief, through his interpreter, for the very minimum ceremony to be performed as we had other villages to visit that day. The chief said that he had already understood that, and that was why only seven jars had been provided. It was such a poor affair that he hardly liked to have the gongs beaten to invite the household god’s presence. He hoped that by way of compensation he would be given sufficient notce of a visit next time to enable him to arrange a reception on a proper scale. He would guarantee to lay us all out for twenty-four hours.

This being the first of what I was told would be an endless succession of such encounters in the Moï country I was careful to study the details of the ceremony. Although these varied in detail from village to village, the essentials remained the same. The gong-orchestra starts up a deafening rhythm. You seat yourself on a stool before the principal jar, in the centre, take the bamboo tube in your mouth and do your best to consume the correct measure of three cow-horn’s full of spirit. Your attendant, who squats, facing you, on the other side of the jar, has no difficulty in keeping a check on the amount drunk, since the level is never allowed to drop below the top of the jar, water being constantly added from a small hole in the side of the horn, on which he keeps his thumb until the drinking begins. After you have finished with the principal jar, you more to the right of the line and work your way down. There is no obligatory minimum consumption from the secondary jars. At frequent intervals you suck up the spirit to the mouth of the tube and then, your thumb held over the end, you present it to one of the dignitaries present, who, beaming his thanks, takes a short suck and hands it back to you. In performing these courtesies you are warned to give priority to those whose loin-cloths are the most splendid, but if, in this case, the apparel oft proclaims the man, age is a more certain criterion with the women.

The M’nongs are matriarchal and it is to the relatively aged and powerful mothers-in-law that all property really belongs. Although the women hold back for a while and it is left to the men to initiate the ceremonies, the rice alcohol, the jars, the gongs, the drums and the house itself are all theirs. It is therefore, not only a mark of exquisite courtesy but a tactful recognition of the economic realities to gesture as soon as possible with one’s tube in the direction of the most elderly of the ladies standing on the threshold of the commonroom. Wth surprising alacrity the next stool is vacated by its occupying notable to allow the true power in the house with a gracious and impeccably toothless smile to take her place. This toothlessness, of course, has no relation to the lady’s great age and arises from the fact that the incisors are regarded by the Moïs as unbearably canine in their effect and are, therefore, broken out of the jaws at the age of puberty.

from:

A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, by Norman Lewis
London: Jonathan Cape, 1951.