Leopardi
the greatest Italian poet in succession to Dante, Petrarch, writes: "There
are two truths which most men will never believe: one, that they know nothing,
and the other that they are nothing. And there is a third, which proceeds from
the second---- that there is nothing to hope for after death." And true to
that he was able to write about his own "work": "I never
achieved any real work. I have made attempts..." and Finally, "if I
were a poet..."
By now most people are familiar with
the line from E. M. Cioran that each book is a postpone suicide. He was referring to his own books and of course
we want that quality in any book we read so I think that while I would hope my
own writing might postpone my suicide, I also am aware reading certain books
postpone suicide and that is how I remember originally reading both SAPEEDBOAT
and PITCH DARK by Renata Adler, both published in hardcover by Knopf in the
late 70s and early 80s of the last century.
Both books are fragmented and have a
wonderfully cold distant narrator who assumes the reader is widely read, has seen
many movies, listens to music and has traveled.
Now republished by New York Review
Books I am pleased that the books have not dated and still remain the sort of
novel I think of as being right in the center of what everyone should read but
so rarely find, in particular from American writers published by American
publishers.
The uniqueness of form in the Adler
books is what has always held me and I of late have realized that this form
comes--- if such can be written--- from Joan Didion’s PLAY IT AS IT LAY,
published as far back as 1970 and while
I am sure it is as they say a stretch, I also seem to detect the voice of Mike Hammer
as transcribed by Mickey Spillane in I, THE JURY and VENGEANCE IS MINE. Didion’s novel was always viewed as flawed
because of its Hollywood setting but that is what makes it special as only
Nathaniel West has done justice to that
seductive place…. Everything else about Hollywood excepting only the Hollywood
pieces by F. Scott Fitzgerald who of course you remember Cioran mentioning that
it was with THE CRACK-UP “in which he
(Fitzgerald) describes his failure, his only great success.”
From the opening of SPEEDBOAT: No one died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages.
From PITCH DARK: We were running flat out. The opening was dazzling. The ending was dazzling. It was like a steeplechase composed entirely
of hurdles. But that would not be a
steeplechase at all. It would be more
like a steep steep climb.
From PLAY IT AS IT LAYS: What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.
Adler presciently refused, I am told,
to allow her novels to appear in paper in the much hyped Vintage Contemporaries
back
then so that they could nestle next to
Jay McInerney’s novels which were
the flavor of the month as had been shortly before, The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas… and I refuse
to mention the title of another extinct novel by another once-upon-a-time
famous writer John Irving. McInerney’s
novels are today mentioned but not really read… they are tied to their moment
and when the moment goes…: at least he has married well a number of times and
lives in great comfort which is a fitting purgatory: you remember, he’s the guy
who once was…
SPEEDBOAT and PITCH DARK have survived
because they are written in the moment for that one really existing flesh and
blood reader, as Osip Mandelstam mentioned, who lives two hundred years in the
future.
There have been no more novels from
Adler. She fell into the law and has written
books after getting a law degree. The
heart sinks. How much more interesting
she would have been to be around if she had taken up mathematics as did Paul
Valery? The law is designed for those
who want to give the appearance of thinking but really simply want something of….
do I dare use the word relevance… a
sad human failing.
Maybe I am mistaken about Adler’s
work after these two novels. Maybe there
will be the notebooks as Valery devoted his life to and her thinking of the law,
though I doubt it as there is a uniqueness to Valery who writes for instance in
volume 4 of the English version of his CAHIERS/NOTEBOOKS:
Crime = the mask falling away. Social life covers everything in a
plaster-cast, and allows only those movements that preserve this artificial character. Violence of those movement that smash the
mask.
OR
Criminals would not be punished if the judge were
forced to imagine in the extreme the circumstances in which they had been put
and which drove them to commit a crime.
The judge accords criminals a freedom that he himself has, not being
what they are, and thus condemns them as not being what they are.
