Comments on A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas

 

This novel is about people whose self-definition has been fragmented and rotted generation by generation by a totalitarian state. Perhaps a reader who had been immersed in the Soviet control of Eastern Europe would know this from the first page, but to a Western reader it at first appears a book about a neurotic guy with romantic and self-image problems. For us, the social depth of the origin of those problems gradually emerges over the first couple of hundred pages. 

 In December 1954, on the last day before winter break, as I recall, a sizable delegation of grim looking men showed up at our school. They arrived in huge black automobiles. They all wore dark hats. From our classroom window we saw the hats disappear in the doorway downstairs. All teaching ceased. We had to sit in silence. Footsteps echoed in the corridors, never just one but several pairs of footsteps, and then silence again. Some people were being led somewhere. Not a peep out of anybody hissed our most hated instructor, Klement, when somebody would stir to change position. The door opened. The janitor called out someone barely whispering the name. Footfalls. Then the waiting: will he come back? After a short while the student would come back, looking pale, and sidle into his seat, followed by our curious stares, and the door would close again. Trembling lips and ears rubbed red told us that something must have happened. Something was going on. But the most unlikely people were taken out; I saw no pattern, so I could draw no conclusion. 

 

 It is not an easy read at 705 pages. For the first 591 the nameless narrator recounts and ruminates on his life. At the time of the narrative he is in his late 30’s or so but lengthy flashbacks explore his childhood and adolescence. He is also writing a novel that seems to be set in the 19th century and interrupts the narrative here and there. The next 90 pages are a first-person narrative by a friend of his. A single, final chapter is a kind rough draft of the end of the protagonist's life, mostly in first person. The present-time story is of an unnamed Hungarian who is explicitly bisexual. He is living in East Berlin. The wall is still up. He works in an unclear function in a theatrical production where he is in a love triangle with an East German man and a prominent actress. "Love triangle" usually really means an acute angle with the protagonist at the apex, but this is a full-fledged triangle where each of the people involved is in love with each of the others because being in love with the other is part of being in love with the one and, well or badly, whether they love themselves. The narrative tension focuses mostly on the probability of his affair with the man breaking up. 

 The sentence structure differs in the different sections. Of course, this is a translation and I can only infer that something similar is true in Hungarian. The long first section contains frequent stretches of dialogue. Here’s one from a flashback to his adolescence: 

 

"But may I ask you how you found out about their plans, then?" 

"That's my business, don't you think?" 

"So that means you have your own little plans, right?" 

"Right." "And of course that's where you want to go." 

"Why not? I haven't decided yet." 

"Because you don't want to miss out on anything, right?" 

"I'm not going to tell you, so don't get your hopes up." 

"I'm not interested." 

"So much the better." 

"I'm an idiot for coming here." 

There was a moment's silence then very quietly and hesitantly, she said, 

"Want me to tell you?" 

"I couldn't care less. Keep it to yourself."

 It also includes vivid descriptions of action. The narrator pays lots of attention to physical detail of many kinds; in particular there are several erotic scenes, closely described but not very sexy. 

 I held his face in my hands, and he held my face in his, the gestures were identical, yet our intentions seemed to be at odds; it's possible that I didn't even mention my shame, didn't say it out loud, afraid that if I went further and said the word, I would have to be truly ashamed, because he would respond the only way he knew, with cold reserve and suggestive irony, with his perennial, exasperatingly beautiful smile, then my own embarrassment would spoil something that must not be spoiled at any cost, I could deprive my hand of the warmth of his face, of its movements, of the stumble’s crackle under my fingers, which I especially liked, though on our first night it had still elicited resistance from me, caused by the dread of the familiarly unfamiliar, the resistance that was also an attraction enticing me to cross the border between smoothness and coarseness on the face of a man, with my mouth to touch another mouth that was also ringed with stubble, to feel the same kind of strength from it that I was imparting to it, as if receiving back not his strength but my own "Why it's my father's mouth!" someone shouted in my voice on our first night when he leaned over to kiss me on the lips, and I could hear the scraping and blending of whiskers on our chins, the stubble on our father’s chins touching the smooth skin of our forgotten childhood selves! 

 A description of someone assisting the birth of piglets is almost unbearably vivid. 

 But long paragraphs, sometimes two or three pages long, of reflective thought by the protagonist, dominate the first 600 pages. These paragraphs lean heavily on what my highschool English teacher would have called comma faults and on semicolons where standard English practice would have periods. Phrases and ideas are often rephrased and repeated; a point is made three times where a more direct voice would have made it once. Em dashes often enclose tangential thoughts. The style of this narrator is not a mannerism of the author; rather it embodies the narrator’s fragmented state of mind and fragmented self. 

 Now if some unauthorized strangers were to rummage through my things and go over my papers. ... Well, this stranger, this secret agent would appear after my death to make out a report about me based on the papers found among my affects had often cropped up in my dreams; although he was faceless and of intermediate age, I found his immaculate shirt front, stiff collar, polka dotted necktie adorned with a glittering diamond pin, and especially his rather shiny frockcoat all the more characteristic and significant; with long, bony fingers he rummaged expertly through my papers, occasionally lifting a page close to his eyes, giving me the impression that he was near-sighted, though I didn't see him wearing eyeglasses; the pursuit reused a sentence here and there, and I noted with satisfaction that he derived completely different meanings from the ones I had hoped my sentences would imply; no wonder I had managed to fool even someone like him; after all, I made sure that my fleeting ideas, fragmentary thoughts, and hasty descriptions were jotted down so that my papers remained well within the bounds of middle-class propriety, counting also on the possibility that my dear old Frau Huebner[his landlady], taking advantage of my absence driven by simple curiosity, would likewise look through the pages piled on my desk; thus I became an unauthorized stranger to my own life, because of seeing myself as a criminal, a miserable misfit, I still wanted to remain a perfect gentleman in the eyes of the world, I myself became that shiny frock coat, and starched shirt front, and the tie pin, the irreproachably inane form of bourgeois respectability; secretly, and proud of my own slyness, I figured that if I used a private code when recording my accumulated experiences, then, since I possess the key, I'd always be able to open the lock of the code; but as might be expected, the lock turned out to be fool proof, and by the time I finally came around to open it, my hands trembling with anxiety, I simply could not find the keyhole. 

The section narrated by his friend is mostly in crisp sentences; the first quotation above is an example. The final chapter is in the form of a rough draft, the end of a life never resolved. Many flashbacks, not necessarily in chronological order, render painfully present the narrator’s childhood and adolescence. 

 Maybe it's fortunate, or unfortunate, that to this day I cannot decide what is better, knowledge or ignorance; no matter how much I tried to live their [his parents’] lies and find my place in the system of falsehoods, contributing to the smooth operation of the system's fine mechanism with effective lies of my own, and even if I could not see what it set it all in motion or what was covered up by what, still, over time I did gain some insight into the layers of deception;… 

 His father was an important prosecutor in the Hungarian government, and political power shifts eventually drive him to suicide. His parents, grandparents, and their friends live in a state of constant evasiveness joined by powerful bonds. His father and his mother are each involved in love affairs that are enmeshed in arbitrary and dangerous government structures. He is aware of them and his awareness contributes to his confusion about himself, his sexuality, and, even who his father is. As an adolescent, the narrator has intense and erotically charged emotional relationship with a group of friends, both boys and girls, which involve the sort of triangles described above. This part of book is Freudian in the sense that all the characters’ involvement with others and with themselves have an erotic pressure. 

All these people are deeply affected by the oppressive government. For instance the death of Stalin is a major event in all their lives. A friend of the narrator is shot and dies in his arms during the abortive Hungarian revolution in 1956. Fragments of the novel the protagonist is writing appear from time to time and are in effect another level of narrative, like flashback, something that occupies his mind. The novel is based on similar triangular relationship and the hero’s despair over resolving it, which leads to a murder. His account of his motivation is also Freudian in the sense that his acts are over determined. For many actions and thoughts more than one adequate motive is documented. Nádas often asserts that what really controls people’s emotions and actions is ‘the body,’ but it is not clear to me how the ‘the body’ is different from other sources of motivation. 

The protagonist is an unreliable narrator, not in the sense that we should not trust him – he is often painfully frank —, but in the sense that he does not trust himself. His dubiousness embodies the constant pressure of that society to manifest appearances not central to the self. The characters who suffer this are bitterly forced to be this or that, so that they can never commit themselves to a core self. This dubiousness is at the heart of the fragmentation. He does not endorse himself. He never believes in himself. So no core ever flourishes. 

 

The title evokes À la recherche du temps perdu. The constant state of inquisitive flirtation with a group of friends in flashbacks to his adolescence specifically suggests À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, but with no Elstir to guide them. Long passages when the protagonist and his lover, while not imprisoned, are cloistered in the lover’s apartment, including his scrutinizing his sleeping partner, suggests La Prisonnière. But whereas for Proust rediscovering the past, though it may be painful, is integrative, and forward looking, for our unnamed protagonist it is disintegration, a horror that destroys him.

Comments on Child of Light

 

I have to warn you that these thoughts are as much about me as about Madison Bell’s biography of Robert Stone and offer as many questions as answers. In several ways I'm not a very good person to comment on it. First, I'm not a reader of biographies. I can remember reading only four others in my long life: a biography of Duke Ellington for a high school paper; a biography of Mahatma Gandhi by Erik Erickson because of the time I was seeing therapist trained by Erickson; Maynard Solomon’s biography of Beethoven for a short story I was writing; Earnest Jones’ stately tome on Freud (which was stolen from me in a laundromat in Manhattan Beach). I’ve read hundreds possibly thousands of novels for each biography. 

 

The Ellington biography as best I can remember was a dutiful grind. I hated the Gandhi biography because at the time I hated Erickson’s thesis that people's lives divided into developmental stages (like Shakespeare's seven ages of man). In reading Solomon I wanted to get a feeling of what it would be like to know Beethoven. It worked for that, and much of his lore has stayed with me to enrich my listening. But there is something in me that wants to concentrate on what people offer us rather than what they do.

 Second, I was a long-time friend of Bob's and have my own ideas and feelings about who he was and its relation to his books. In full disclosure I read small parts of this biography in draft and corrected a few factual details. 

 This biography embodies extensive study of sources also depends on personal knowledge. Bell was a good friend of Stone’s in his later years and travelled with him. Among other things, Bell reports his own feelings about various matters Stone was involved in in real time, which lends vividness to perspective. Bell has also had detailed support from conversations and written material by Bob's wife Janice who is also a friend of Bell's and of mine. Indeed there is a way this is the Bob and Janice story.

 What if we had biographies of, say, Tolstoy or Hemingway, some written with substantial cooperation of the authors wife(s)? I guess they would be very interesting to compare. Maybe we do; I don’t know. If we had a biography of Shakespeare based on interviews by séance with Anne Hathaway, it would be wonderfully informative and widely read, but would not be the last word on Shakespeare. That is an unfair comparison because William and Anne lived largely apart while Robert and Janice were constantly enmeshed.

 Bell provides great detail about Bob's relations with various people he knew and their effect on his work both in a practical way and as source for his plots and characters; about his publishing contracts, which he tended to fall behind; about the interventions of his agents, but not so much by his editors; about where he travelled and whom with, and Bob travelled a lot; and about where he lived — Janice and Bob had a great many dwellings, sometimes two and even three at once. Bell keeps before the reader Bob's use of alcohol and other drugs. He recounts who went to bed with whom and to a certain extent Bob's thoughts and experiences relative to the Catholic Church and religion in general. Lots of information. As a friend more than I’m interested in. As a reader I feel there is more than enriches the experience, but I’m not quite sure what I would want to omit. For future scholars this is a gold mine.

 Travel is important to Bell’s image of Bob. The most fulsome accounts of his personal encounters with Bob come from time he spent traveling with him, and he always sees Bob as a potential traveller rather than someone who lived somewhere and occasionally travels. 

 Bob’s childhood is hard to describe briefly, but it involved a close but intermittent relationship with his schizophrenic mother, no involvement whatever with his father, and years in an orphanage. Bell carefully unpacks influences in Bob's childhood and adolescence, his mother's religion and his stint in a Marist high school, as sources for his interest in religion (see below). Bell also considers Bob as a commentator, almost a public intellectual, on the state of US culture in his lifetime. That's a little odd considering much of the action of his novels is set outside the United States. Indeed I remember Bob telling me a little before he wrote his last novel, which is set in the US, that he was tired of being considered an expert on countries he had spent a few weeks in. But Bell does not cite people as a source of Bob's perspective on the US. That fits his observation and mine that Bob was an autodidact. He knew a lot about literature and society, but not from studying under X or Y, but through reading and observing with intelligent, passionate attention. 

 The narrative is a straight ahead time line. Bell provides a useful analytical summary of each of his novels in turn and reports the circumstances they were written in. He points out relationships between Bob’s interests and events in his life and events in the novel or even structural and technical issues in the novel.

 One thing Bell points out is that, with one exception, Bob's novels have a river structure. That is, he begins writing about several characters with separate lives who gradually flow together in plot lines until all are involved with one another at the end. Reading the bio made me wonder why that was. I have a vague feeling some connection exists among his scattered dwellings, persistent travels, and diverse friendships, and the scattered plot lines that inevitably pull together, but I can’t put it in words. His endings, I want to add, are almost always bang up. By ‘bang up’ I mean violent, rapid, physical action often including gunfire and explosions. From my perspective these endings are the weakest part of his work. Carefully and deeply developed characters go up in smoke. 

 Reading this biography made me wonder what it was about Bob's personality or goals as a writer led to this kind of endings. Bell devotes a lot of attention to Bob's ambivalent rumination about religion, Roman Catholicism in particular, certainly front and centre in Damascus Gate, set in Jerusalem and peopled with a variety of religious fanatics, and A Flag for Sunrise, set in (unnamed) El Salvador with  important priests, nuns, and a protestant fanatic. I’m not sure it is as important as Bell suggests, but Stone told Bell and told me that he tended to talk about religion mostly with people who are particularly interested in religion. I am not one, so perhaps I am in no position to comment. 

 In trying to understand my feelings about this biography I reconsidered two long autobiographical novels I’ve enjoyed recently by/about writers. One is Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle. Like Child of Light, it is full of details, but they are details of a different kind. They are mostly accounts of things he did, like the ~ 150 pages it devotes to hiding a case of beer as a young teenager so he can sneak it to a party. It is also highly selective. Knausgård devotes thousands of pages to his relations with his second wife and children and barely mentions his first wife, for instance. Is selectivity what makes it a novel rather than an autobiography? Is it what makes it more interesting to me?

 The other is The Diaries of Emilio Renzi by Ricardo Piglia. I’ve read only the first of three volumes. It is a semi-true diary of a young man trying to be a writer in the lively intellectual and treacherous political world of 1960’s Argentina. Bell, appropriately, precedes in a serious and workmanlike spirit. Bell patiently builds his case; Piglia is free to scatter our thoughts. It has touches of magical realism; there are events that could not have occurred. (More than a hint of magic realism appears in Stone’s novel Bay of Souls, but neither Stone nor Bell really commits as to whether it is magic or delusion.) Why do I find it more fun and more stimulating than reading Child of Light? For one thing, I learn more because it is set in a different country. Although painful at times, overall it stirs a sense of joy. Renzi is constantly at play even when hard up to pay the utilities, betraying his lover, or, briefly, in jail. His feelings about reading and writing blend with those of real life — not something you see in Bell’s account of Bob. Is that a reason I find in more stimulating? 

 Both Knausgård and Renzi were deeply involved in painful struggles with their fathers, something denied to Bob.

 As Bell explains, many of Bob’s characters are prey to demons. They're crazed, haunted, uneducated, men and some women, who are at best thoughtless toward other people and toward their universe and at worst sadistic. Bob was a caring, warm friend and a thoughtful, well informed evaluator of the world. Of course you saw the shadows of his own demons through his drug use, peripatetic life, as well as through his creations, and he was not shy of acknowledging them. Perhaps they have something to do with the convergent and explosive endings. He exorcised them. Bob once told me that his favourite of his novels was Outerbridge Reach because the protagonist, a straight-arrow Annapolis graduate, is least like himself. He was proud of being able to create such a character. That book ends quietly with a drifting empty boat after the protagonist’s suicide.

Comments on Catching a Memory

Some of the pieces in this collection by Judith Shaw are stories in the sense that a protagonist faces tension and the tension is somehow resolved. Some are brief memoirs. Some, like many poems these days, are brief, intense descriptions of a person, place, or event. 

 The prose is tight, flexible, supple employing short to long sentences as appropriate. 

 One of the stories is about two sisters, one married to a childish, arrogant husband and how the sisters deal with him separately and as a team. The husband has vainly acquired a drawing by the renascence artist Guercino. Guercino is aptly chosen as if the character knew the author who was writing hm. His style is intensely realistic, his subject mostly people whose portraits appear in revealing light, whose faces, unlike many artist of his time, show particular emotion, but coolly. 

 Shaw is not afraid of esoteric references, to location: New York street corners; to Guercino; to someone undergoing a Kohutian analysis, to little-known culinary techniques. 

 The voice is both detached and intimate, like Guercino. 

 Where there is room to do so, the characters are fully conceived. You read about them like you read about people, not like stereotypes. They tend to be intelligent and educated.

 The stories are mostly about facing death, in one way or another, mourning, either the mourning of a person for a beloved who is dying or has died, or the mourning of a dying person for his (usually) life. Those dying are usually men who are important figure to those who mourn them, husbands or fathers of the mourners, who are usually women. Sometimes the mourning is drawn from an oblique angle, as in a woman seeking recontact with an old lover after the death of her husband, but mostly straight on, searchingly engaged.

 Less searching but illustrative, is a poem in reply to a poem by Richard Wilbur. Wilbur’s poem recounts how Don Quixote lets his horse decide where to go next, reveling in the fantasy that whatever course the horse chooses will lead to grandiose adventure. Rosinante heads for the barn. This is Cervantes’ usual trope of warmly contrasting Quixote’s grandiose visions with commonplace reality. Shaw’s response is about Quixote grieving for his fate.

 Another theme is separation in geography, usually between characters living in New York and those living in parts of northern California. The New Yorkers in California mourn for their lost environment. 

 The stories mostly focus on a single thread. My favorite, however, has the resonance of two strings. The point of view character is a New York woman enduring mourning in a Northern California coastal village, but the subject is the tenuous existence and final death of a local hippie waif. 

 The book is nicely designed and printed. This is quality reading material also in the material sense.