BANNED: a detour and the back

 4-There is only one banned book in the world today and that is Louis Ferdinand Celine’s “Bagatelles pour une Massacre.”  Via the internet a reader can read a translation by Anonymous who has entitled the book Trifles for a Massacre.  The source seems to be in South America. The other two pamphlets of Celine have not been translated. 

5-Of course Maldoror also came out of South America from the imagination of Lautremont.  A detail by an obscurantist, to be sure.

6-I am not naïve as to why this book has never appeared from a conventional publisher while all of Celine’s  other books are  easily and widely available with great blurbs from Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut among others. 

7-But is the Bagatelles, like the collected works of de Sade with their detailed descriptions of child rape, torture and murder, a something that is beyond the pale as it were? 

9-De Sade of course is celebrated by liberal academics as being transgressive and given pride of place in Queer Studies programs as a misunderstood pioneer into the unthinkable.

9-The Bagatelles is a nasty book and very very funny in the way that A Modest Proposal by Swift is funny… but it is argued that it is an incitement to murder but the same could be said of the Koran or The Bible. for that matter.

8-So forget those nice little displays of Banned Books which allow people to cluck their tongues at the idiots who take offense at words like nigger, cock, pussy, shit, fuck….

7-The word in Bagattelles that causes offense is Jew and the various derogatory equivalents… and the same is true for a book by  that other complicated writer, Ezra Pound, but his Radio Speeches is easily available and again the word that causes difficulty is the word Jew.

6-Only one writer in the US has written about the Bagatelles:  Alice Kaplan, but she has both tenure and a professorship though when I went to look she is no longer at Duke.  I reviewed long ago (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1994-02-01/features/9402010105_1_alice-kaplan-french-lessons-french-boy)  her little memoir French Lessons and have followed her career but I missed that she was one of those who rushed to judgment about the Lacrosse players in the famous scandal of recent memory. 

5-You remember that? 

4-A black woman claimed she was raped by some Duke Lacrosse players.  Liberal academics, including Kaplan, and among other s those stalwart guardians of progressive literary thinking,  Frank Lentrecchia and Ariel Dorfman,  rushed to judgment  by signing a petition protesting the racist nature of Duke society and deciding the case before  a jury had  even  heard the case.  

4-I was thinking recently while driving around in North Carolina that those three academics probably wanted to participate in a lynch mob but lacking, thankfully, such opportunities in the real world, took the plunge and signed this petition: imagine the thrill of it, a risk free membership in a lynch mob and while those Lacrosse players were probably not the sort of guys I would want in my house, one still wonders about the men who had been lynched and the smiling faces of the members of the lynch mobs…  

5-Of course driving around in North Carolina thoughts of the Civil War, the War Between the States, the KKK, lynch mobs, Sherman, Lee, Grant.. .no wonder these liberal academics took the plunge.  What could be more transgressive than wondering what it felt like to be a member of a lynch mob and suddenly being given the chance…  as the kids say: go for it!

6-Kaplan is now at Yale.

7-But to come back to the Bagatelles… the book is seriously funny and while a friend has criticized the translation as being rather wooden, I do find the book as being the only book that it is necessary to read if a reader is to think of him or herself as a reader.  It is the equivalent of that mean cartoon in THE REALIST of long ago which depicted an obviously Jewish guy in prison garb pointing his finger at a Nazi guard saying, Wait until the Pope hears about this.

8-Did Celine’s book send a single Jew to be murdered?  Not as far as I know while De Sade’s books with some regularity show up as the favorite readings of particularly gruesome murderers, usually in the British Isles.

9-I was thinking of Celine when I went to Auschwitz and Birkenau…  I wish I had had his satirical flair, his nastiness to describe the museum at Auschwitz, where mass killing is packaged up in a neat parcel for easy consumption… but Celine would have been stopped as I was by Birkenau…  the size, the desolation, the drawings on the wall in the children’s barracks…

9-Beyond the memoir books, beyond the history books, beyond all the explanations one arrives at the Bagatelles pour une Massacre.

8-The only thing that comes a distant second is to read the writings by that famous New York Times correspondent on the “supposed” famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s.  Walter Duranty is a study in not seeing… a characteristic of most journalists to be sure.

7-Celine sees. Celine hates.

6-If you go looking for Celine’s grave in the cemetery in Meudon there are no directions provided. The ship sails on.

5- Even in this day literary tourists come from as far away as Bulgaria looking for the greatest shit house in the world described by Celine in  the Journey to the End of Night as being located near City Hall in New York City... finding it is for those who know where to look.

TWO ILLUMINATING AND NECESSARY details from the Selected Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The following entry from the SELECTED JOURNALS of Ralph Waldo Emerson just out from the Library of America is one of the most touching paragraphs I have read in a long time.

ONE

Wednesday, 8 July, 1857. This morning I had the remains my mother & and of my son Waldo removed from the tomb of Mrs Ripley to my lot in "Sleepy Hollow." The sun shone brightly on the coffins, of which Waldo's was well preserved--- now of fifteen years. I ventured to look into the coffin. I gave a few white oak leaves to each coffin, after they were put in the new vault, & the vault then covered with two slabs of granite.

Note: the son was five years of when he died
My ignorance: I could not tell you white a white oak leaf looked like.
A question What did Emerson see when he looked?


TWO


31 January 1841

Yet a novel may teach one thing as well as my choosings at the corner of the street which way to go,--- whether to my errand or whether to the woods, --- this, namely, that action inspires respect, action, makes character, power, man, God.
These novels will give way by & by to diaries or autobiographies,--- captivating books if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly!

Note: while there is comfort for the the novel haters...but THAT WHICH IS REALLY HIS EXPERIENCE and then HOW TO RECORD...

Very high standards are set...

I would erect five examples:

THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE by Hannah Green
WARRENPOINT by Denis Donoghue
CASTLE TO CASTLE by Louis Ferdinand Celine
STORM OF STEEL by Ernst Junger
GOING TO PATCHOGUE by Thomas McGonigle

A NOTE FROM ESTONIA

No longer that possibility to write as I do not have the connection.

What do I mean?

In every country of the former Soviet Empire from Bulgaria to Estonia there is a word for connection, for that person who will help you in whatever matter is at hand

If a person does not have a connection there is the shaking of the head and the lowering of the voice: it is or was very sad, he or she did not have a connection so it was not possible.

I have come to that moment in writing.

While in memory the pleasure of writing remains… the reality is that I do not have a connection that would allow my words to be read.

Dalkey Archive, Turtle Point, Harper Collins, Arcade, Melville, FSG have found even JUST LIKE THAT my most accessible novel and the one with the easy hook of being a book from the so-called Sixties to be too something or other…

I could delineate the reasons these publishers found for… but what is the point.. I could show the whim that lead them to whatever it was that they actually did publish…

I have no connection… and everyone should understand that publishing is a simple a matter of whim.. just as in the life in Estonia under communism: whim masqueraded as political reasoning…

So…

Even reading becomes difficult.

For two weeks I have been reading the new translation of PORNOGRAFIA by Witold Gombrowicz that Grove will publish in the fall, published only to maintain some connection to the reputation that made that publisher.. but when our hostess in Helsinki falls asleep looking into the poster of a pensive PAUL AUSTER… what hope is there for reading?

Anyone who might think that Paul Auster is a writer is beyond help… even my reading of PORNOGRAFIA is shadowed by the fact that Grove feels it must foreword the book by a popular writer like Sam Lipsyte--- who is supposed to write funny stuff about “losers” though his press agent seems to get him space in popular magazines to look down upon… but the bound galleys are not burdened by his words except for the blank space where the Foreword is supposed to be…

Even mentioning Auster’s name is a victory for Auster…

I wrote a review of NORMANCE by Celine for the Los Angeles Times... it might appear on 12 July... of course I remember and Celine’s words shadow these: you have to be a little bit dead to be really funny…

WHAT YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ and a few suggestions of what to read

THE FIRST

An Avalanche of shit is about the only way to think of the new books that are scheduled to come out in the near future even as publishers see themselves going out of business, cutting back and moaning that this is the most difficult time they have ever faced.

Of course people are not reading. That is nothing new. In the 1920s a literary book was lucky to sell and I mean really lucky two thousand copies… today with the population almost tripled things have not changed: a literary book still sells two thousand copies over a certain number of years.

What has changed is the sheer amount of crap that the publishers keep shoveling out. The big publishers have a large core of six figure salaried pencil pushers who have to be wined and dined to suit their personae as wise leaders who know what is good for the reading public.

As a guide to how to sift through the crap that is on offer and in the bookstores just beyond where they keep all the non-book stuff which of course is usually of more interest to the people who wander into a Borders or Barnes and Nobel I offer these tips:

You don’t have to read any novel or memoir by a person who claims to be a script writer.

You don’t have to read anything at all by anyone who appears with some regularity on television…

You don’t have to read anything that purports to tell you the real story behind whatever it is…

You don’t have to read anything by a person who has the indecency to admit that they are recent graduates of an Ivy League college or university…

You don’t have to read anything by a person who claims to be a journalist working for some major newspaper or of course television. By writing a book they are shortchanging their employers and anything that they really know is in the newspapers or at least should be…

You don’t have to read any novel or book of poetry in which the race or ethnicity of the author or of his or her characters is mentioned on the dust jacket. The book will be inevitably be second rate and compromised by this limitation

THE SECOND

HOWEVER there are a few tiny glimmers of literature that will be shyly taking themselves into the world:

From the Library of America : The American Writings of Lafcadio Hearn who was well known once upon a time for his writings about New Orleans and Japan… but in this volume of his writing about New Orleans, his travels in the West Indies and his miscellaneous journalism there is a story that is so startling and moving that once read you will have hard time going to bed for their you know you will be finding yourself either as a witness or as the center of the story:

Gibbeted Execution of a Youthful Murderer

“The execution of James Murphy yesterday at Dayton for the murder of Colonel William Dawson in that city on the night of August 31, 1875 was an event it must be said which the people of Montgomery County had long looked forward to with no small degree of satisfaction…”

The subtitle of the story gives a hint: A Broken Rope and a Double Hanging…

The story concludes: “The rope has cut deeply into the flesh of the neck, and the very texture of the hemp was redly imprinted on the the skin. A medical examination showed that the neck to have been broken.”

AND from Dalkey Archive: NOTES FROM THE EMPIRE by Fernando Del Paso… a meditation at 716 pages of the fates of Maximilian and his eventual widow… that French emperor of Mexico… You will remember the painting by Manet… a model of what an historical writing can and should be

AND also from Dalkey the last of Louis Ferdinand Celine’s great novels to be translated NORMANCE

AND AGAIN from Dalkey: THE LOOP by Jacques Roubaud , a companion to his THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON.

AN ASIDE: There is not a publisher in the English speaking world with such a selection of books to be published in this season and that is just a few of them…

NOT TO forget GHOSTS by Cesar Aira which I am reviewing for the Los Angeles Times… from New Directions, one of the few publishers that has never forgotten what their job really is…

Unlike 95 percent--- maybe I could push that to 98 percent--- of what will be published in the coming months will not be remembered a year from publication… I can guarantee that these five books will be still be read as long as books are being read and you will be able to re-read them with increased enjoyment...

THE THIRD

Contrary to the delirium of delusion that seems to have gripped the hacks who write for the newspapers, that teach in our universities and inhabit the television networks, I do think we are about to enter a truly dark period of history with only an increasing tide of terrible news.

I have begun to read again Ernst Robert Curtius’s EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES which he began to write as Adolf Hitler took control ---in the midst of scenes of delirious hope for change--- of Germany.

I do so as a personal answer to this moment and as a way to remain sane midst the increasing barbarism which is our sure fate as things will get inevitably worse and worse.

What Curtius was trying to remind his readers is that while the Twentieth Century saw its progressive fruition in Auschwitz, in The Gulag, and at Hiroshima, there was still some tiny possibility that this might eventually be a continuing otherwise.

As someone living in New York City who lived through 9/11 and now in February 2009, as we are in the midst of the 19th year of the Iraqi War, I will refuse the easy temptation to despair and at the same time forsake the consolation of optimism.

THE FOURTH

I did take a little pleasure in seeing that the Book World of the Washington Post is about to cease publication. The last book I reviewed for them in 2002, commissioned by Michael Dirda, was Maurice Blanchot’s AMINDAB.

I never reviewed for them again and when I asked I was told that Marie Arana and the younger editors at the paper decided that my review of this novel by the most influential French critic of the 20th century was exactly the sort of book they never wanted reviewed in the paper. It was too intellectual, too obscure, too foreign. It sent the wrong message as to what they were really interested in.

Of course Blanchot is represented by 15 titles in St Marks Book Store and is even well stocked by Politics and Prose in Washington… but what the geniuses at the Washington Post decided was: they wanted to truly embrace their public of semi-literate political junkies whose only interest is in the aggregation of personal political power, forgetting that when you suck up to the public that public has to evacauate its bowels once a day, and the tongue attempting to block that path is no match for the…

LIBRARY OF AMERICA and LIEBLING and CELINE and DAHLBERG and a SAD LUNCH and a NOT SO SAD LUNCH

28---

The publicity people for the Library of America must have missed sending me a copy of A.J. Liebling that just came out. An editor at a newspaper sent me a copy as they were not going to review the book.

I always look forward to the Library of America books and in the Fall they have some interesting ones: the second William Maxwell, a Philip Roth and a book of poetry by Ashbery. I hope I will not be over-looked as the bound galleys should be coming shortly. In the summer they are doing a second book by Philip Dick which I will talk about one of these days.

But to the Liebling. If this editor had not sent the book to me I would not have discovered this meeting with Louis Ferdinand Celine:

For myself, I shall always remember him as a big-shouldered man, unexpectedly rugged and tweedy for a Frenchman, sitting in the dining room of the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York in 1934, eating strawberry ice cream after rare roast beef and at intervals pausing between enormous mouthfuls and great, grasping swallows to shout obscene regret for the Middle Ages, when the Church assured the common people that they would go to hell after death and be miserable in the meantime. "Then, at least, there were no false hopes," he said.

So, while I might have been skeptical of why the LOA was doing Liebling, I have been won over. The book is a compilation of all his writings during the Second World War and while it is a little marred with the fakery of having a celebrity editor whose name I will not mention it is a real book.

Many of us are waiting for the LOA to do the collected poetry of Melville, the books of Sherwood Anderson, the work of T.S. Eliot and of course: Where is Hemingway? Where is Glenway Wescott? Edward Dahlberg? William Carlos Williams?

29---

In THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE, the trade journal of the creative writing business there was an announcement of the PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL. "Over 200 members of the publishing industry attended a reception for the festival in March, boarding the ocean liner Queen Mary 2 to celebrate the upcoming event"--- hours waiting in a vast storage facility to board, searched as if getting on a plane, a thousand waiting to sail... lines like entering a detention camp--- "the on-board luncheon featured readings"---before the food people were ordered into a stadium seating theater to hear speeches about how the Cunard lines (remember they gave us the Titanic: the ship that God couldn't sink, as they say but as Julian Green once told me, "As they were saying that the iceberg was making its way..." were in favor of crossings, communication... And then there was a pathetic rock band with dragooned "writers" singing anti-George W Bush lyrics; I kid you not, and then the President of PEN was going on about the impending dawn of fascism in the US as witnessed by the denial of entry to a convicted criminal writer at Newark airport. The decor of the boat is down-market Las Vegas. "was hosted by Salman Rushdie, the festival chair"--- no, he did not show up as he had more important things to do: he was in London shilling for another of his unreadable novels.

Two writers by chance this week asked me if I had received the brochure for the PEN conference. Did you do what we did: throw them out? I did not ask why they had thrown them out but can only guess---

If anyone remembers Georgi Markov, the exiled Bulgarian writer who was murdered in London by agents of the Communist regime in Bulgaria they might remember his wonderful exposition of why the Communist regimes loved writers conferences, readings, writers visiting factories, writers retreats: the regime always dreaded the appearance of another book and the inevitable task of having to read it so why not find agreeable and progressive ways to hinder the writing of books and maybe even hinder the reading of books for probably the best way to discourage reading is to have writers read their own works in public along with colleagues, one of which always goes on for too long

30---

I went to a sad lunch for Dirk Wittenborn at The Museum, a restaurant connected to that dreary junk shop MOMA. The dining room was large for the one round table so it seems that they had at one time expected more people. Never having met Wittenborn, never having read a word he has written or seen the film he wrote THE FIERCE PEOPLE--- like most people, as it seems to have gone direct to DVD, or seen another documentary he produced about the hard lives of rich kids and will I be going to see a new film he wrote that is due in the summer The Lucky Ones, something about Iraq War and I am sure it is not celebrating the American effort there---

These lunches happen all the time. They are designed to get word of mouth going... the occasion for this is the publication in August of PHARMAKON.. murder, drugs, rich people, fathers, children, privilege, cover-ups, pain, anger, sex...

Why write a novel instead of a screen play, I asked Dirk. "In a novel you can show thinking," Dirk replied

At the actual lunch of course the question who will write the screenplay and I was wondering, again, why bother with the novel as only then did people at the table seem animated: the movies are the reel world. Why do writers set themselves up like this? Well, money of course and the rich are as grubby as the next person and probably even more so...

Dirk was talking about his three therapists and I could hear them as they alternatively moved through his little talk: the one who dealt with his father/son issues, the next one who dealt with his intimacy/women issues and the last with the issues of drugs...

The pork loin was dried out and without flavour.

PHARMAKON has an opening line that the author is proud of: I was born because a man came to kill my father.

31--- I was reading THE WAGES OF EXPECTATION the biography of Edward Dahlberg by Charles DeFanti... DeFanti quotes as his concluding lines the epitaph that William O'Rourke had written for Dahlberg, For whatever Dear Readers there are now, or are to come Edward Dahlberg wrote 18 books and one masterpiece that will endure; at the end of his long life he had less than six people he would have called friend."

In a Village Voice review of this biography also written by O'Rourke:

"Dahlberg's bile was in direct proportion to the neglect he felt, which of course was enormous. Even if you produce a master work--- which Because I was Flesh surely is--- you can be ignored because literature plays little role int he life of the commonwealth."

And:

"Dahlberg led his life seemingly enunciating one state above all, that of the writer as pariah, the glorious nay-sayer unsullied by commerce, fashion and vain success."

And:
Dahlberg was payed the wages of his own expectations: rejection, isolation, and the curse of superfluity."

O'Rourke's review appeared in the Village Voice on April 16, 1979.

Can anyone imagine such writing in the newspaper that goes by that name today in the year 2008?

32 PS---

We were in Enzo's (Second Avenue between 2nd and 3rd Streets) for pizza this afternoon.

The guy from the funeral parlor across the street was in for a slice.

After he left I mentioned to Mike that I usually see him standing in front of the parlor waiting for a delivery.

If you shake hands with him watch his eyes. They start from your eyes and go down. He's measuring you. If you've shaken hands with him scratch your balls three times that'll keep him away for now.

As I was leaving Mike was looking in the Village Voice at a profile of Philip Glass. Enzo's is mentioned. Glass is a nice guy, Mike says. He comes here.

I tell Mike I see Glass around, sometimes up at the Domincans' bodega.

FRANZ KAFKA, EDMUND WILSON, LOUIS FERDINAND CELINE, THE ORDEAL OF CIVILITY

86

"The misery of having perpetually to begin, the lack of the illusion that anything is more than, or even as much as, a beginning, the foolishness of those who do not know this, and play football, for example, in order at last "to advance the ball" one's own foolishness buried within one as if in a coffin, the foolishness of those who think they see a real coffin here, hence a coffin that one can transport, open, destroy,exchange

Among the young women up in the park. No envy. Enough imagination to share their happiness, enough judgment to know I am too weak to have such happiness, foolish enough to think I see to the bottom of my own and their situation. Not foolish enough; there is a tiny crack there, the wind whistles through it and spoils the full effect.

Should I greatly yearn to be an athlete, it would probably be the same thing as my yearning to go to heaven and to be permitted to be as despairing there as I am here.

No matter how sorry a constitution I may have, even if-- "given the same circumstances"-- it be the sorriest in the world (particularly in view of my lack of energy), I must do the best I can with it (even in my sense of the word)-- it is hollow sophistry to argue that there is only one thing to be done with such a constitution, which must perforce be its best, and that one thing is to despair.
----FRANZ KAFKA October 16, (1921)Sunday


87

I put the quote from Kafka's Diary there as a way to tell against myself. I have never really "gotten" Kafka. I think I have read myself through almost all of his work. He does not stick. I know that there are many--- Nabokov, Calasso come to mind--- who look to him with...

As far as I know, Edmund Wilson is the only writer to not be taken in by Kafka: "Kafka's reputation and influence have been growing till his figure has been projected on the consciousness of out literary reviews on a scale which gives the illusion that he is a writer of towering stature," "A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka"
July 26, 1947. CLASSIC AND COMMERCIALS.

"If,however, one puts Kafka besides writers with whom he may properly be compared, he still seems unsatisfactory. Gogol and Poe were equally neurotic, in their destinies they were equally unhappy; and if it is true, as Mr Savage says, that there is present in Kafka's world neither personality nor love, there is no love in either Gogol or Poe, and though here are plenty of personalities in Gogol, the actors of Poe, as a rule, are even less characterized than Kafka's. But,though the symbols that these writers generate are just as unpleasant as Kafka's, though,like his,they represent mostly the intense and painful realization of emotional cul-de-sac, yet they have both certain advantages over Kafka --for Gogol was nourished and fortified by his heroic conception of Russia, and Poe, for all his Tory views, is post-Revolutionary American in his challenging , defiant temper, his alert and curious mind. In their ways, they are both tonic. But the denationalized, discouraged, disaffected, disable Kafka, though for the moment he may frighten or amuse us, can in the end only let us down. He is quite true to his time and place, but it is surely a time and place in which few us will want to linger -- whether as stunned an hypnotized helots of totalitarian states or as citizens of freer societies who have relapsed into taking Kafka's stories as evidence that God's law and man's purpose are conceived in terms so different that we may as well give up hope of ever identifying the one with the other."

88

In the title of John Murray Cuddihy's book THE ORDEAL OF CIVILITY we probably have everything we need to know about Kafka. The sub-title elaborates: "Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity." Cuddihy is or was a professor of sociology at Hunter College. The question of course: if one is not Jewish why should one care about Kafka?

89

The problem of Kafka is also the key problem in the United States when it comes to the question of what German writers are available. If one is honest, Americans only know two German language writers: Kafka and Remarque. They know Remarque for his sentimental ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT which they read in Junior High School and they read maybe the Metamorphosis by Kafka in college. That is it.

Of course on the positive side by focusing all the reading of German literature on Kafka and Remarque Americans are preserved from Gunter Grass and Christa Wolf.

But the loss: without Ernst Junger, Robert Walser, Uwe Johnson, Arno Schmidt my own life would be far dimmer than it might be. These writers, each so different from the other, combine to provide a way to understand the world, a way to describe the world that enables the thoughtful person to find his or her own way in the world: they do not seek disciples which of course is what reading Kafka produces...

90.

A tonic end, finally, of the year from Louis Ferdinand Celine:

Living, just by itself-- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that terribly exciting--- or he'll come along and nibble your brain. A day that is nothing but a mere round of the twenty-four hours isn't to be borne. It has to be one long, almost unbearable thrill, a twenty-four copulation, willy-nilly.
---JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT