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Year: 2013

Invisible Ink: Christopher Fowler on Forgotten Writers

Cover of 'Invisible Ink' by Christopher FowlerBritish writer Christopher Fowler has been publishing a regular column on neglected writers in the Sunday Independent since 2008. Excerpts from these can be found on the Invisible Ink page on this site.

The first 100 of these pieces have now been collected and published by the Strange Attractor Press in the book, Invisible Ink: How 100 Great Authors Disappeared.

The press release for the book pitches it more as a book about disappearances than about the authors’ works: “Adopting false identities, switching genders, losing fortunes, descending into alcoholism, discovering new careers, the stories of the missing authors are often more surprising than any of the fictions they wrote.” In reality, many of the writers passed from notice in the most usual fashion: popular tastes turned a different way and they were left behind. Not that it should matter to any fan of neglected books–what matters is the pleasure of discovering a writer as deserving as any you’d find in Barnes and Nobles or Waterstones, whether they were eaten by a tiger, switched sexes, or just grew old and died.

You can purchase Invisible Ink online from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and direct from the publisher.

Human Landscapes from My Country, by Nazim Hikmet

Cover of 'Human Landscapes from My Country'
One of the drawbacks to running this website is that I rarely read books that are still in print. Browsing in new book stores is always frustrating. I find things I’d love to read, but then struggle to justify the time that would take away from reading books I should cover on this site.

Last week, however, I couldn’t resist buying a new book. We were at the Istanbul airport waiting for our flight back to Brussels and my wife and I were killing time browsing in the D&R store in the international terminal. There was a small section of English translations of Turkish literature, and in it, a copy of Nazim Hikmet’s Human Landscapes from My Country, published by Persea Books in 2009. I thumbed through it and saw that it was a long poem (Hikmet’s subtitle is “An Epic Novel in Verse”), which would usually constitute strike two for me. I have to confess that I do not read as much poetry as I should.

But I soon found myself five pages into the book, almost inhaling the text like air. Although writing (mostly) in blank verse, Hikmet’s style is transparent and effortless to read. Unlike the only other verse novel I’ve read (Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, which I did enjoy and do admire greatly), Human Landscapes from My Country could be published as prose with little effect on the meaning–though certainly not the form–of the text. I decided to buy it, and read over 150 pages in the course of our flight back. I went on to devour its over-450 pages in the course of a few days.

The poem opens on the steps of the Haydarpa?a train station, one of the landmarks of the shoreline of the Asian side of Istanbul, in the spring of 1941. Hikmet takes us into the thoughts of Master Galip, an unemployed man in his fifties: “When will I die?/Will I have a bed to die in?” Then Hikmet’s focus shifts to a homeless boy, then to a middle-aged woman originally from the Caucasus, then to Corporal Ahmet, a veteran of the wars (Balkan, Great and Greek). In these first few pages, we are introduced to a cross-section of Turkish society, including Halil, a political prisoner who serves as something of a fictional persona for Hikmet. Some of them are about to depart on the 3:45 PM train for Ankara and points east. Others will travel in style on the Anatolia Express. Through the rest of Book One of the novel, we will follow the 3:45–the cheap, slow train–and its passengers. Then, in Book Two, we ride with the businessmen, fonctionaires and bourgeoisie on the Express, a modern and comfortable sleeper.

Book Three is set in an Anatolian prison and a hospital where Halil is taken to treat his growing blindness. Again, we meet a variety of characters representing different aspects of Turkish society. Hikmet’s vision is broad and all-embracing, as he deal with peasants still firmly rooted in feudal and tribal ways, intellectuals at various points along the political spectrum, government spies, crooks, and women (who are almost universally viewed as property, work animals, or sex objects). He shows an intimate understanding of the effect of imprisonment on both the prisoners and their loved ones:

A woman whose husband’s in prison always looks
                                                    in the mirror, always.
More than other women,
                               she fears getting old.
She wants the man she loves to like her still when he gets out,
no matter
                  if it’s thirty years later.

The centerpiece of Book Four is a series of dealings in grain sales in which the old ways come into conflict with the rigid, control-oriented mindset of the government and lead to a riot. And in Book Five, Hikmet places Turkey into the context of the world war going on all around it. This section contains the weakest part of the novel, a passage depicting the heroic defense of Moscow in December 1941 by a small band of Russian soldiers. It’s the sort of hackneyed drivel that belonged in some piece of Soviet propaganda and is completely out of place in this book. But maybe it helped Hikmet earn a roof over his head later on.

It’s a brief lapse, in any case, and the novel closes with a moving sequence in which Hikmet takes us to a small town along the Mediterranean coast and introduces us to a few characters killing time in a seaside cafe. They then watch as two boatloads of Greek men, women and children, trying to escape from German occupation, slowly come into the harbor. The Turks take up a collection to buy them food, but soon the police come along and force the boats to cast off, ignoring the Greek’s uncertain fate. Turkey managed to stay out of the fighting in World War Two, but, as Hikmet shows, it came at the cost of constant moral compromises. In that way, Human Landscapes from My Country reminds me of the first book I read in 2012, Maxence van der Meersch’s Invasion.

Hikmet’s technique of rapid cuts works well in creating a collage of “human landscapes.” Here, for example, is part of the cross-section he builds from one moment during the night of September 3rd, 1941:

10:36 p.m.
The dignitary
         rose from the table
The others stood up, too.
“If you don’t mind, I’m going to bed–
                    please don’t get up.”
Tahsin (the doctor-Representative)
                               thought:
“Intelligence goes to sleep this early?”

10:36 p.m.
Monsieur Duval talked with Jazibe Hanum:
“I like your peasants–
              they’re patient and don’t make demands.
Your merchants aren’t bad, either,

and your government men are harmless.
Above all, you need to develop your agriculture.
And you need to get rid of statism . . .”

…
10:36 p.m.
Emin Ulvi Achikalin, the Izmir merchant, sat with his head full of figures
for about a hundred thousand in currants, raisins, and figs.

Kasim Ahmedoff belched
and the lips of the girl sweet as a mandarin orange
                                                                                trembled.

…
10:36 p.m.
On the Anatolia Express
two women sat talking in a second-class section
They were fifty,
and both showed
                       their fifty years.

…
10:36 p.m.
Nimet Hanum sat in the same section.
A young woman,
she works at a ministry.
She isn’t beautiful,
but she has something else–
a certain warmth.

Hikmet, who is considered by many to be the greatest Turkish poet of the 20th century, wrote Human Landscapes while serving a sentence of twenty-eight years in a prison near Bursa. He had been convicted by the ?nönü government for being a member of the Turkish Communist Party, which has been banned since the early 1920s. Hikmet’s sentence was cut short in 1950 after he staged a hunger strike that gained national attention and led to organized protests. He was forced into exile soon after and spent most of the rest of his life in the Soviet Union. The book was banned in Turkey for many years.

Human Landscapes was translated into English by Randy Blasing, a poet himself, and his Turkish wife, Mutlu Konuk. A shorter version was published–also by Persea Books–in 1983. I can’t speak for the faithfulness of the translation, although a Turkish colleague of mine confirmed that she went through the book like lightning when she first read it. And I certainly feel no need to justify the time I took away from my stack of out-of-print books to read Human Landscapes from My Country. It’s a terrific book that will, I hope, forever remain in print as a classic piece of 20th century literature.

Human Landscapes from My Country, by Nazim Hikmet, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, with a foreword by Edward Hirsch
New York City: Persea Books, 2009

Passing Strangers, by Felix Riesenberg

Cover of first U. S. edition of 'Passing Strangers' by Felix RiesenbergIn his autobiography, Living Again, Felix Riesenberg mentions his 1932 novel, Passing Strangers, just once, calling it “a failure.” Riesenberg’s criticism is hardly any harsher than that of time itself, since the book has vanished along with most of his oeuvre and has apparently never even earned a mentioned in academic articles on literature of the Great Depression.

Yet Passing Strangers is a powerful specimen of the effect of the Depression on the creative mind. In the book, Riesenberg takes a cross-section of society and subjects it to the disruptive and erratic effects of a great economic collapse. As he put it in his preamble, “A group of people, caught in the mesh of cams and gears, are tossed about by the machinery of life.”

Riesenberg starts his story with “The Average Man,” Robert Millinger, a lowly elevator operator in the new and splendid Babel Building, the pride and envy of all Manhattan. Millinger is a perfectly working cog:

After a time people who entered and left the elevator, familiar or strange, no longer meant things to Mr. Millinger. They were merely presences. He responded to them without thought, or reason, but correctly. Clever as his car was, it was crude compared with that stranger flexible, self-oiling, economical machine, Robert Millinger, elevator operator No. 243, Imperial Holding Corporation. Residence 749 Taylo Street, Brooklyn. Married.

Millinger himself is a cipher, but he believes that makes him an invaluable source of insights into the common man, and fantasizes about being taken into the confidence of an important executive, such as Isidore Trauenbeck. Trauenbeck runs the Babel Building and dozens of other properties. “His day,” Riesenberg writes, “was marked by the grease spots of those completely squelched.” Even greater than Trauenbeck is his own boss, the mysterious tycoon, A. Thouron Clamson, an amalgam of Donald Trump, Howard Hughes, and John D. Rockefeller. Clamson puts Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” to shame:

A. Thouron Clamson hadn’t a single title. He signed his name with a flourish, beginning with Clamson, weaving the A. Thouron into the device with a degree of skill grown from long practice. He owned in many things, almost endless things, holding control of such vast interlocking and intermeshing activities that great charts were prepared to keep the picture reasonably in hand. He always prepared to shift his money from one raft to another at a moment’s notice. He owned sixty percent of Mid-Continental Gas. Then he bought out the rival pipe line of Sioux Service, and suddenly dumped his M. C. G., pounding it down while booming Sioux. On the swing, he drew back all but five percent of the first company. These two were then combined and on the seventh day he rested from his labor. But the labor, of course, was done by others. He merely decided.

Riesenberg reaches down from Clamson to Millinger through a string of almost random connections, drawn in such a way that only a few of his characters share acquaintances. They are, as the title suggests, passing strangers, but they share one thing in common: all are affected in some profound way, by the stock market crash and the resulting depression. Millinger loses his job, is abandoned by his wife and daughter, and nearly dies of hunger and exposure on the streets of New York. Millinger’s wealthy cousin, Zekor, is forced to move from Park Avenue to a slum in Brooklyn and dies on a park bench, worn out by the relentless loss of property and self. Willy Jennings, the department store owner who takes Millinger’s wife, Launa, as his lover, finds his web of speculations and leveraged deals collapsing around him and jumps from his office window [Riesenberg recounts one of these supposedly apocryphal suicides in Living Again.] Millinger’s daughter, Diana, in turn, becomes Clamson’s mistress, until she sickens of his esthetic and moral excesses. Clamson experiences the it all as mild turbulence, not even bothering to buckle his seatbelt.

Riesenberg wraps everything up in a climactic disaster scene somewhat foreshadowing events at the World Trade Center, as radicals set off truck bombs and explosives in the subway system to protest the human destruction caused by capitalism. Clamson is assasinated as he sits in traffic in his limousine. Millinger’s daughter escapes from the chaos with a man who used to drive Zekor Millinger’s Packard. And, ironically, Millinger is rescued by a young woman who brings him to Clamson’s wife, a noted supporter of social causes.

While certainly less experimental than his previous novel, Endless River, Passing Strangers lacks nothing in comparison when it comes to ambition. Riesenberg didn’t have quite the technical mastery to bring off all he aspired to, but the book is never less than enthralling. I read it in just three days, sitting in cafes as my wife and daughter shopped around London during Thanksgiving. It demonstrates yet again that we need to find a place in our memories for the like of Felix Riesenberg, who may not always have succeeded in his literary attempts but deserves to be recognized as a bold American artistic adventurer.

Passing Strangers, by Felix Riesenberg
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932

The Court of Charles IV, by Benito Pérez Galdós

The Court of Charles IV was the second of the forty-six historical novels, referred to as Episodios Nacionales, written by the great Spanish novelist, Benito Pérez Galdós, whose masterpiece, Fortunata and Jacinta, was the first title featured on this site in 2012. It’s a considerably lighter work–less than a fifth the length of Fortunata and Jacinta and told in first person by young Gabriel Araceli, a poor but amibitious lad whose backstage adventures in both the theaters and court of Madrid around the year 1807 make up the book.

Gabriel, son of a poor Cadiz fisherman, was first introduced in Trafalgar, Galdós first Episodios Nacionales novel, which depicted Nelson’s great victory from the eyes of a bystander on the losing side. Gabriel has made his way to Madrid and is now in the service of Pepita Gonzalez, one of the most successful actresses of her time. Among his duties, which he itemizes at the book’s start, are to hiss performances of “The Maiden’s Yes,” a play by Leandro Fernández de Moratín, whose work she despises.

Which leads to the first of several delightful set-pieces that are the book’s real highlights. In the company of a failed poet, Gabriel attends the play to make his obligatory interjections. Galdós weaves together Gabriel’s mocking account of the performance, his observations of the antics of the theatre’s audience, which is as busy talking and fighting among themselves as watching the play, and the poet’s non-stop commentary on the flaws of the writing and references to superior elements of his own work.

Indeed, the whole of The Court of Charles IV is something of a weaving demonstration by Galdós, with the threads of love, sex and politics as the raw materials. Gabriel’s mistress Pepita is in love with and insanely jealous of her director and leading man, Isidoro Maiquez–a real-life character from the time. Isidoro, in turn, is madly in love with Lesbia, the beautiful niece of a minor member of the Spanish nobility. And Lesbia, in her turn, is being watched and manipulated by Amarantha, another duchess with whom Gabriel becomes enthralled.

Gabriel’s experiences form the backing material against which Galdós winds and twists his fictional and historical characters. Some back the King, Charles (Carlos) IV; others support a coup by his son, Ferdinand, who favors the British. All despise the prime minister, Manuel de Godoy, known as “The Prince of Peace.” As the various intrigues of court and stage are being played out, the figure of Napoleon looms in the distance, utterly misinterpreted and misunderstood by all. Within a few months after the novel’s ending, he will invade Spain and drive them all into exile.

Typical of the clueness nobles is Lesbia’s uncle, a marquis and one-time diplomat, who has perfected obscurity as a tool for appearing to be all-knowing: “He always took care to maintain a studied reserve and utter himself in half-sentences, never expressing himself clearly on any subject, so that his hearers in their doubt and darkness should question him and insist on his being more explicit.” “What will Russia do?,” he often wonders aloud, to the perplexity of his listeners.

Gabriel is a Huck Finn-like character who maintains a healthy dose of skepticism about all he sees around him. Gabriel observes of the nobility at one point, “For my part, these typical specimens of human vanity have always been a delight to me as being beyond dispute those who amuse and teach us most.” One hears the voice of Galdós in these words. Though Lady Amarantha manages to lure him into acting as a spy, he wisens up before things get out of hand and lights out from the palace of El Escorial rather as Huck lit out from Widow Douglas’ house.

Galdós wraps up his story with a last bravura set-piece, in which the different love triangles come crashing together during a private performance of Othello–or rather, of Teodoro de la Calle’s translation of Othello, which was itself based on a French translation by Jean-François Ducis. And Gabriel manages to turn the tables on Lady Amarantha with a bit of dirty linen from her own past, allowing him to exit stage right with dignity intact and another boost up the ladder of success.

Overall, a fast and enjoyable tale–nothing too deep and certainly not a book that Galdós meant to be anything more than a historical entertainment, something like a precursor of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series.

The Court of Charles IV was translated into English by Clara Bell (who also translated Ossip Schubin’s fine comedy, Our Own Set, another neglected gem) and published by W. S. Gottsberger in 1888. You can find electronic copies of this translation, full of usual OCR errors, on the Internet Archive at http://archive.org/details/courtcharlesiva00galdgoog.