Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain

Creative History

or

What’s the Matter with Britain?

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s

The History of the Kings of Britain

Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

There are but 3 matters that no man should be without,

That of France, of Britain, and of great Rome.

—Jean Bodel, Chanson de Saisnes (12th century)

Of all of the “Matter of Britain”—the accumulated myths and histories about the founding and rule of Great Britain, a mass of literature and beliefs that, like the Matter of France and the Matter of Rome, provided much of the source material for medieval literature—perhaps no single text is more fancifully fabricated than Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain. The first non-Welsh work to chronicle the life of the legendary King Arthur, and presented to the public as a history (in Latin) rather than as a romance or an epic, it’s the most influential artifact—or artifiction—of the whole Matter, forming a very particular British self-conception that seems to remain to the present day. Serving in part as a nationalistic, imperialistic, and even racial/cultural propaganda-piece, The History of the Kings of Britain attempted to define who the Britons were—and weren’t—and elevated British national identity to nearly Biblical proportions. Historians in Geoffrey’s own century (the twelfth century) dismissed the chronicle as almost complete invention, but the book’s immense popularity and influence has never waned in the face of mere facts. Its wishful history prevailed over historical record in the collective popular and political consciousness in the same way that our own country’s outlandish myths have often overshadowed many of our more complex and difficult truths, and the result in both cases has been a partially self-imposed mask that delights many but that dissembles much more than it actually resembles.

Part of the book’s fascination today is that in addition to its Arthurial precedent, it contains the first record of King Leir (Lear), and Cymbeline as well, either directly influencing Shakespeare or having its substance passed to him through Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. This post-hoc view through Shakespearean eyes does nothing to explain its original enduring appeal, of course, and so one of the book’s many pleasures now is in examining its falseness and trying to parse the fraying threads of its fantastical tapestry. Although he draws and reshapes material from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and from The History of the Britons, which was attributed to Nennius, Geoffrey claims that his chronicle is in fact a direct translation of “a certain very ancient book written in the British language” (meaning Welsh). This outright falsehood on the book’s first page was meant to give his book serious credibility, but even just a few pages in, it becomes difficult to believe that anyone could have ever believed its wild refashionings of the world’s various successions of events. Belief is a very tricky thing, however. Besides, the book is so enjoyable to the credulous and incredulous alike that it may be best to view the whole thing as being beyond belief.

Geoffrey of Monmouth

Attempting to equate Britain with Rome—and ultimately to elevate Britain above it—Geoffrey constructs a founding myth in which Brutus, an invented great-grandson of Aeneas, leads a group of Trojan exiles to the island of Albion, which he renames Britain, after himself. Clearly mirroring Rome’s founding myth, Geoffrey’s narrative tries to weave itself into the threads of Vergil’s Aeneid, but the timelines of Aeneas’ progeny are jumbled and implausible and fit poorly into the framework of the myths that he’s attempting to employ. Also: Aeneas is entirely mythic. No matter, though, because all the battles with the new country’s native giants amuse and distract and create a primordial vision of an undiscovered country that it pleases the reader to see “settled” and “civilized.”

A large part of Geoffrey’s intention in creating his specific view of Britishness arose from a desire to ingratiate himself to the current political establishment and to align that establishment with the long sweep of “history” contained in his narrative. After establishing Britain as a kind of twin to Rome, Geoffrey chronicles its subsequent subjugation to Rome, its eventual emancipation from Rome, its entirely fictitious sack of Rome by victorious Britons, the subsequent golden-era heights of Arthurian rule, and then the ultimate “downfall” of Britain under relentless Saxon invasion, ending the chronicle in the late seventh century. Geoffrey published his book in 1136, just a few generations after the Norman conquest of England, and in his re-woven order of things, this Norse/French conquest tacitly serves as a reestablishment of the true Britons rather than as an invasion. As part of their own centuries-earlier conquests, the Britons had settled a colony called Armorica in the area of France that’s now called Brittany, and when Geoffrey picks an arbitrary time to put a clean end to his chronicle, the British royalty heads to exile in Armorica. So in his imagination, the Norman invasion is actually a return.

Merlin and Arthur, from a manuscript of
The History of the Kings of Britain

Part of how he arranges this is by having Merlin prophesy all these events in an oblique and long-winded vision that Geoffrey originally planned to write as a separate book but that he decided to interpolate into his chronicle. The parts of the book concerning Arthur and Merlin are central to its thrust, both because of their popularity and because of how Geoffrey reconciled their imagined floruit with the regime of his own time. Using several Biblical devices, he tries to outdo Rome once again by having the new Britain implicitly mirror the Jerusalem of the Second Temple. Although Merlin’s bizarre utterances are more reminiscent of the nonsensical hallucinations recorded in the book of Revelation (whose style of vision Dante would put to much better and more focused use in his Commedia), they also emulate the way that the Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures ostensibly foresaw Jerusalem’s fall, exile, and rebirth. And more to the point, Geoffrey manipulates his text in the same way that the Biblical Redactor arranged the past to fit what would happen afterward.

Like the Israelites, whose travails were explained in the Bible to be the result of their repeated failure to walk in the ways of the Lord, the Britons fell (according to Geoffrey) because of their leaders’ wicked ways. And just as the Davidic line of rule remained alive in the Babylonian exile with a promise to return (according to the Biblical Redactor), so did the Arthurian line in Armorica. Thus with the Normans ruling Britain in Geoffrey’s time, the renaissance promised at the end of his chronicle has come, making Britain not just the new Rome of the chronicle’s time but a kind of new Jerusalem as well.

Geoffrey of Monmouth

With almost completely out-of-hand synchronization to the Bible and to a wildly revised Roman timeline, Geoffrey’s book is creative history at both its best and worst. The History of the Kings of Britain is a wonderfully rich and entertaining historical tapestry that’s also a craftily woven web of lies, and as with the self-aggrandizing propaganda of all previous and subsequent empire states, its facade forms the graven image of what seems to be quite a substantial Matter. But it’s a Matter that’s in no way a matter of fact.

—David Wiley

Poems of the Night and The Sonnets, by Jorge Luis Borges

A Dual Review of Jorge Luis Borges’

Poems of the Night and The Sonnets

Originally published in the Rain Taxi Review of Books, Summer 2010

Poems of the Night

By Jorge Luis Borges

Edited by Efrain Kristal

and Suzanne Jill Levine

Penguin ($17)

The Sonnets

By Jorge Luis Borges

Edited by Stephen Kessler

and Suzanne Jill Levine

Penguin ($18)

Although Jorge Luis Borges is considered to be one of the twentieth century’s greatest short-story writers, as well as one of its most dazzling and erudite essayists, he considered poetry to be his primary mode of artistic expression. Decades before he discovered his voice as a prose-writer, he began his literary life as a poet, and in his mid-fifties, when he lost his long battle with blindness and was no longer able to compose and revise his diamond-like prose to his exacting standards, he returned his focus largely to poetry. Unlike in his youth, however, blindness caused Borges to compose mostly rhymed and metered poetry, which he would revise in his head as he strolled around on his evening walks before dictating the finished versions to whomever he could find with pen in hand.

Focusing on one of Borges’ favorite themes (darkness) and on one of his favorite poetic forms (the sonnet), Penguin Books has published two new collections unique to both the Spanish and English languages: Poems of the Night and The Sonnets. Many of these poems are already famous in both languages, but scores of them have never been translated into English before, and with both books containing dual-language parallel texts, the latter collection is in fact the only complete collection of Borges’ sonnets in any language.

Borges was fascinated with darkness and dreams and with the surreality of dawn all his life, and so Poems of the Night covers this aspect of his poetic focus over the course of his entire literary career, from the early 1920s until just before his death in 1986. What’s somewhat unfortunate about this collection is that almost all the poems in it are the final revisions of the very old Borges (in order to suit his ever-changing self-conception, he revised his Obras completas every time it was republished), and so these poems’ styles and tones are fairly uniform and the reader hardly gets to see any of his evolution. In his later essays, interviews, and speeches, Borges often dismissed the “fine writing” of his earlier days—possibly because he was no longer able to write as complexly as before, but also perhaps because simplicity had become a truer mode for a man who yearned to forget his vastness and to dissolve into the darknesses of sleep and death. In its appendix, Poems of the Night includes his first version of “Insomnia,” which Borges wrote in 1921 when he was under the influence of the short-lived “Ultraists,” and its baroque flashes of non-sequitur nonsense are so ridiculous that it makes clear why Borges would have wanted to revise the salvageable aspects of this poem’s significant themes when he was more mature. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that Poems of the Night is largely monochromatic in its crepuscular fade into aging darkness.

In contrast, the works in The Sonnets were all written after Borges went blind, and they’re taken from nine separate collections written over nearly three decades (including eight uncollected sonnets) rather than from the final Obras completas, thus displaying Borges’ widely varied and evolving reinventions of the form. He wrote in both the English and Italian models, but almost never in strictly either, often stretching, combining, and creating new tactics within the form, and his organic approaches allowed for endless playfulness (and seriousness) within its seeming strictures. As in Poems of the Night, the tones are generally muted, but it’s always fascinating to see how each poem creates and resolves its unique mathematical formula. Perhaps Borges’ most celebrated sonnet, the two-part “Chess,” best illustrates in form and content the intertwining elements of his sonnets’ elegant calculus. For the sake of brevity (and enticement), here’s part II, in English:

                        Faint-hearted king, sly bishop, ruthless queen,

                        straightforward castle, and deceitful pawn—

                        over the checkered black and white terrain

                        they seek out and begin their campaign.

                        They do not know it is the player’s hand

                        that dominates and guides their destiny.

                        They do not know an adamantine fate

                        controls their will and lays the battle plan.

                        The player too is captive of caprice

                        (the words are Omar’s) on another ground

                        where black nights alternate with whiter days.

                        God moves the player, he in turn the piece.

                        But what god beyond God begins the round

                        of dust and time and sleep and agonies?

With its references to Gnosticism, Paradise Lost, and to FitzGerald’s version of the Rubaiyat—as well as to the circular ruins of day and night, with their “dust and time and sleep and agonies”—this is vintage Borges. The translation is also very good, as are most of the translations in Poems of the Night and The Sonnets. With the exception of one specific translator, who often radically alters the words and meanings to come up with the most outlandish rhymes, these collections’ two-dozen-or-so translators stay fairly close to the text and generally only use rhymes when they’re perfect translations of the Spanish rhymes. There are a few happy and ingenious exceptions every once in a while, however, where the translator comes up with a particularly felicitous invention. In the two-part “Clouds” the normally faithful Willis Barnstone transforms “las catedrales/de vasta piedra” (cathedrals of vast stone”) into “that tree of boulders,” which may be a little too “fine” for the late Borges but which erects an unexpected and novel image.

A problem with both collections—and with much of Borges’ poetry as a whole—is that these works often read like either brief sketches for or vague epitomes of many of his fictions. Several of these poems are perfect in their scope and execution, such as Poems of the Night’s “Qyatrain,” which Borges wrote in the voice of a 12th-century Persian:

                        Other people died, but all that happened in the past,

                        the season (everyone knows) most propitious for death.

                        Can it be that I, a subject of Yaqub Almansur,

                        shall die as the roses have died, and Aristotle?

Few of the poems are this pithy or self-fulfilled, however (perhaps the centuries-old mask helped to facilitate the channeling of this brief work). Borges is clearly obsessed with words and language, but most of his poems, even the sonnets, exist more as interesting explorations of Borges’ obsessions than as potent poetic entities of their own. Unlike his stories and essays—which are elaborated and revised to such polished perfection and originality that each phrase and word choice takes the reader on an unforeseen direction through the work’s unique and fully articulated labyrinth—his poetry rarely surprises or gives the reader that dazzling chill of linguistic or metaphoric invention. His poems are generally far less poetically wrought or imagistic than his prose, and in fact when coming across Barnstone’s “tree of boulders,” the phrase stuck out as particularly Borgesian because it sounded like something from one of his fictions.

For lovers of Borges, these two collections are a great treat, offering yet more glimpses into one of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century, but it’s difficult to assess what a reader who’s not already familiar with Borgesese would think of these works. Perhaps his recurring obsessions (Buenos Aires, tigers, mirrors, labyrinths, time, memory, death, his illustrious military ancestors, his own face) and his endless ruminations on his vast but idiosyncratic reading (Homer, the pre-Socratics, the Neoplatonists, Old English, Old Norse, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Spinoza, Swedenborg, the English Romantics, the long- or recently dead Argentine poet-friends of his youth) might seem more like self-indulgent musings than like inspired poetic creations. These two collections complement his prose works well, and to Borgesians they will read like boxes of half-forgotten notes from a beloved mentor, but they’re probably not for the uninitiated. For a more representative introduction to Borges’ poetry, see the 1999 Selected Poems (Penguin). And for a truly astonishing introduction to what Borges can really do with words, the genre-bending 1962 collection Labyrinths (New Directions) remains the best place to start.

—David Wiley

Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Under Several Covers:

Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

As a lover of strange and unique fiction, I’ve sometimes found that the most unusual works take on unassuming and seemingly conventional forms and then slowly reveal their layers of perversity through the most unexpected means. The Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow immediately strike the reader as mad works of virtuosic style and ambitious scope, but, for instance, a novel such as Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies takes perhaps half its volume before readers start scratching their head in amused befuddlement. A book that recently took me for such a surprising series of turns—and one that I’ve owned two copies of and that had passed (or not passed) through nearly two decades’ worth of shelves, boxes, and collection-downsizings because of its ho-hum self-description and its thoroughly conventional collection of blurbs—is Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Billing itself as a novel about the effects of an Edinburgh girls’ school teacher upon the lives of her six favorite charges—with one of them ultimately destined to betray her in some undisclosed way—the book doesn’t exactly compel the prospective reader into its world the way that novels such as The Tin Drum or One Hundred Years of Solitude do. Perhaps in the hands of Charlotte Brontë or Gustave Flaubert, this premise might sound promising, but published in 1961, in a period of extremely arrière-garde New Yorker fare, this novel might cause the uninitiated reader to expect its fictional terrain to occupy a place somewhere between slight and trite.

But even though the book opens with a fairly conventional description of the school’s mise-en-scène—which in fact turns out to be both a flashback and a flash-forward—establishing “the Brodie set” and some of the levels of belonging and not-belonging that membership in this chosen group affords its individual girls, Spark’s narrative techniques soon start to seem a bit odd. The Brodie set comprises just six girls from a specific form at a specific time in Miss Brodie’s life who then remain under her aegis for the rest of their school years, and Miss Brodie constantly refers to this somewhat motley group as “the crème de la crème,” even though the only really unique aspects about most of them are their willingness to be chosen and their (and their parents’) unlikelihood of exposing the teacher to her superiors. Miss Brodie has cannily vetted each of them to become her disciples, and when each is introduced (and reintroduced) to the reader, Spark almost always repeats what each girl was “famous for.” At first this makes the novel read a bit like a creepy kids’ book whose author chooses one or two attributes per girl to help the reader remember and distinguish between the characters, but both Brodie’s and Spark’s repetitions soon reveal themselves to be much more sophisticated devices. Even though Classical motifs echo throughout this novel, these aren’t just the mnemonic and metrical epithets of epic poetry (“pious Aeneas,” “wily Odysseus,” “white-armed Hera,” etc.). These are attributes that Miss Brodie has either chosen the girls for in her plan to bind them together, play them off of each other, and ultimately bind them to her, or else that she’s cultivated in them over the years to serve her needs.

At first Miss Brodie comes off as a marvelously eccentric and progressive teacher, exposing her girls to profound worlds of art and thought rather than to the banalities of standard grade-school instruction, but then through Spark’s own marvelously eccentric (but highly controlled) meanderings through these girls’ lives and minds—past, present, and future—the reader watches Miss Brodie’s facets become sickening rather than dazzling, ultimately proving herself to be not an inspired pedagogue but a ludicrous demagogue (and far worse). Miss Brodie visits Italy often, and she immerses the girls in Renaissance art, which certainly heightens their sensitivity, but she also greatly admires Mussolini and extols the ostensible order that he brings to his country. After a year or two her admiration gravitates toward Hitler. Even more dangerous for the girls, however, is Miss Brodie’s manner of entangling them in her love life—past, present, and future. It seems at first that she’s introducing them to the fuller life of true womanhood, but as the girls’ natural enthrallment with romance becomes piqued and then irreversibly engaged, the reader watches in disgusted amazement as they fall into roles that allow Miss Brodie to live out her own sickest fantasies through them, if not exactly in the way that she expects.

Maggie Smith in the 1969 film version of
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Spark’s approaches in revealing Miss Brodie’s grotesque world are widely varied and always surprising, with each glimpse into the lives of her characters—especially Sandy, who takes on shocking roles in Miss Brodie’s machinations, and in the novel as a whole—coming at totally unexpected times and always in the most unusual manner. The reader at first expects this to be a book that moves toward a standard revelation of which character betrays Miss Brodie, but Spark thwarts all normal expectations of both plot and form in this novel. One of the characters’ inner monologues reveals fairly early on who betrays Miss Brodie, and by then the novel’s bizarre maze of fascinations has already led the reader’s imagination and expectations in totally unforeseen directions.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has had a cult following since its publication, and perhaps one of the reasons why its cult hasn’t widened is because—in the same way that its unique contents are belied by the conventional that way it’s been marketed and discussed—the novel’s deep strangeness is somewhat covered by fairly conventional prose. Although always deliberate and precise, Spark’s writing is only occasionally beautiful or moving, which in some ways works in both the book’s favor and disfavor. There’s a strong undercurrent of political allegory in Miss Brodie’s despotism, and just as England didn’t fight Hitler because of his dangerous ideologies but rather because it was obliged to stop him—initially only because of a mutual-defense pact with Poland; there were a shocking number of Hitler-supporters in England, and in the United States, and across the world, but Spark leaves all this significantly unstated—the specific member of the Brodie set who betrays her does so not because Miss Brodie teaches Fascism, which is merely the most “expedient” way to get her fired, but simply because Miss Brodie must be stopped. So even though the myriad sicknesses in this novel aren’t handled with the linguistic magic of, say, Lolita, its inconspicuous language plays nearly innumerable bait-and-switch games, perhaps mirroring Miss Brodie herself in the way that it surreptitiously seduces the unsuspecting reader into a complex world of deep and insidious corruption. In showing the reader not an overtly mad Hitler-figure dashing his way through a wildly horrific novel, but rather a cannily twisted member of our own side’s establishment weaving through a quietly controlled narrative structure, Spark’s subtler approach to exposing tyranny reveals a much more ordinary and thus much more thorny problem to eradicate: our own undiagnosed sickness.

—David Wiley

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio

A River Runs Through It:

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio

Originally published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

I’ve recently come to the interesting reflection that many of my American literary peers began their reading and writing lives as Anglophiles. If a young reader has the inclination to pursue the music that rings throughout the realms of gold that exist in literature, it’s often the magic rhythms of Donne or Keats or Housman that calls them in. And who on Earth is better than Shakespeare at seducing the ear and the mind and the heart into devotion to the word? Or, just as often, it’s the strange and striking (but psychologically familiar) allure of the settings and subject matter of Jane Austen or the Brontës or Charles Dickens that draws young readers into the world of books. I remember being fascinated as a young reader by both the word choices and the inner and outer universes in Dickens and then being utterly astounded by the quadruple pun on “coal” in the first few lines of Romeo and Juliet. Who knew that words and sounds and ideas could be so endlessly polysemous and associative? Although I’d been an addicted reader ever since I first found out that you could represent spoken words and interior thoughts by using abstract marks on paper, this Shakespearean riff was my true initiation into the deepest mysteries of the word.

Strangely, though, I still didn’t become an Anglophile the way that so many other readers did. My formative literary world was American, mostly written in my own contemporary American English, and it was peopled by workers and loners and misfits rather than by aristocrats in fancy dress fretting about who was going to marry whom (this fascination came later, especially with Proust and Tolstoy). My formative literary world was authored by Steinbeck and Hemingway and Harper Lee and Arthur Miller—all seemingly engendered by His Holiness Mark Twain. Then when I was a teenager reading John Dos Passos and William Faulkner and William Saroyan and Henry Miller, I found a recurring name springing up as another common influence among almost all of my favorite twentieth-century writers: Sherwood Anderson. When I finally read his seminal 1919 collection, Winesburg, Ohio, I then followed his wellspring of influence in nearly infinite directions—initially back forward, but then nearly endlessly outward in both time and space, always starting the process anew when I found a particularly potent book or author or stream of writers.

Perhaps it was the fact that Anderson was a fellow Ohioan—born in Camden, only thirty miles from my hometown of Dayton—that made the language and world of Winesburg, Ohio so compelling to me. Anderson had famously abandoned his family in Ohio to become a writer, which also appealed to the young reader/writer looking toward the larger world of artistic dedication. Anderson had moved a lot in his early life, growing up mostly in Clyde, Ohio, in the north of the state, and then later moving around to nearby Cleveland and then to Elyria (a city whose name recalls the classical Illyria, the setting of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; also: Anderson went to college at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, a school named after the more famous Wittenberg University in Germany, whose most famous fictional alumnus was Hamlet). There’s a real town in northwest Ohio named Winesburg, but most critics agree that it was Clyde, Ohio, where Anderson lived from around age eight until age fourteen, when he was forced to quit school and help support his family, that was the model for his most famous book.

A kaleidoscopic panorama of smalltown America, Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of interrelated stories that many critics say works as a novel. Anderson most wanted to be a novelist, but his best work was his short fiction, and perhaps the reason why Winesburg, Ohio works so well is because its discrete tales accrete meaning and multiply their facets as the book progresses, melding Anderson’s penetrating gifts as a storyteller with his larger novelistic aims. This method of building a fictional town (Anderson actually supplies a map of Winesburg and its main haunts at the beginning of the book) and of having different stories intersect along its streets’ intersections directly influenced William Faulkner’s “Yoknapatawpha County” series of novels and stories, which in Absolom! Absolom! also has a map of its fictional layout (Anderson was Faulkner’s friend and early mentor). Another excellent (and somewhat neglected) literary landscape to which Winesburg and Yoknapatawpha are tributaries is the “Manawaka” series of novels and stories by Margaret Laurence—a Canadian author whose mind had surely traveled widely in Ohio and Mississippi and in whose works the reader can actually see the people and relationships and houses and towns reflecting off of each other and fashioning a world as complex and as compelling as our own.

Along with its varied interconnections, one of the ways that Winesburg, Ohio holds together and builds to its gemlike level of refraction is through the growing presence in the stories of George Willard, a young reporter who interacts with and reflects the lives of Winesburg’s inhabitants. Like all other small towns on the planet (including those outside of Ohio), Winesburg is both friendly and solitary, full of hope and fear, and steeped in dreams and disillusion, and because people trust him and confide in him, George Willard is one of our main lenses into the town’s lives. The book is written in third person, though, and so we’re privy to the thoughts and actions of characters whose worlds of experience and memory are far beyond the purview of George Willard’s consciousness. Through George Willard’s eyes, through the townspeople’s eyes, and through our own eyes, we see people and relationships evolve constantly, with no single facet remaining the same from viewpoint to viewpoint.

There’s almost no chance that at this point in his life Anderson could have read Proust, who in 1919 was still revising and expanding the later volumes of In Search of Lost Time, but evaluating Anderson in hindsight, the dynamism of Winesburg, Ohio’s characterizations seems to parallel the way that nothing in Proust’s world remains static or tied to any single perspective (including its first-person narrator’s). Although critics often associate Anderson with the literary school of American Naturalism (see Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 Spoon River Anthology for a similar approach), and although the technical influence of Anderson’s writing style is seen more clearly in conventional writers than in avant-garde ones, it seems probable that Anderson would have been familiar with the work of Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce, because the levels of seeing and understanding and portrayal in Winesburg, Ohio seem to have deep affinities with many aspects of early Modernism. Ultimately, Anderson remained a fairly conventional writer, and even while his profound influence spread widely through writers of varying styles (Nabokov famously declared that there was only one school of writing that mattered: the School of Talent; and clearly the talented writers saw Anderson’s greatness), even some of Anderson’s most beholden descendents disclaimed him when times and styles changed. Even the deeply indebted Hemingway and the ungracious Faulkner wrote cruel parodies of him. But while there was some merit to their criticisms, these were probably just cases of pupils trying to distance themselves from an early master.

Anderson’s artistic fortunes started to diverge not long after Winesburg, Ohio, and perhaps Hemingway and Faulkner saw this coming before anyone else. Although it was a huge success among writers and critics, Winesburg, Ohio didn’t sell well, and as Anderson pursued his dream of being a novelist, his works became more popular with the public and less popular with his fellow writers. Perhaps his was an example of a great artist following the wrong artistic stream, both in form (the novel) and in style (conventional works for a popular audience). Or perhaps his was yet another example of an author with only one truly great work in him. Either way, Winesburg, Ohio is a tremendous cataract in humanity’s endless flow of creative fiction. It’s one of the great works of American literature, and of world literature, and for its brief 220 pages it makes Ohio the size of ancient Greece (I’ve often mused that Anderson should have called the book Elyria, Ohio and had one of his characters declare, “This is Elyria, lady”). Finishing the book as a teenager in Ohio, though, I joined George Willard on the train as he left his hometown (“a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood”) and wanted the book’s final story, “Departure,” to be just the beginning.

—David Wiley

Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts

This Jesus Business:

Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts

Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

Near the end of Woody Allen’s 1979 film Manhattan, Allen’s character, Isaac, lies on a couch and dictates an idea for a short story into a tape recorder, and in his loneliness and his search for any sense of positivity, he lists a number of things that make life worth living. Somewhat similarly, in his introduction to the 1987 collection Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon, critic Harold Bloom lists a small canon of what he calls the “twentieth-century American Sublime.” Perhaps not coincidentally, both Isaac and Bloom prominently mention the Marx Brothers, a few specific jazz recordings, and, of course, a number of great works of literature. Isaac lists Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, and, among others, Bloom lists William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Wallace Stevens’ Auroras of Autumn, and the “Byron the Light Bulb” episode from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. But the book that Bloom significantly lists first is Nathanael West’s great 1933 novel, Miss Lonelyhearts.

I’ve been haunted by Miss Lonelyhearts ever since reading it nearly two decades ago—and have been greatly disappointed by West’s other works, including the interesting but poorly written The Day of the Locust, his last novel, from 1939—and as I reread his one great, astonishing, horrifying novel this past week, I was simply shaken to the core by how relentlessly it assaulted all sense of stable meaning in the modern world. Somewhat influenced by the struggle between decadence and dedication in The Great Gatsby (West later became F. Scott Fitzgerald’s neighbor in Hollywood and coincidentally died one day after Fitzgerald in 1940) and perhaps more than a little influenced by the anarchic humor of S. J. Perelman (who cowrote most of the Marx Brothers’ best films and who, before marrying West’s sister, Laura, was West’s classmate at Brown University), Miss Lonelyhearts takes leaps beyond the audacity of any of its influences and enters a realm only achieved in writing by the maddest of medieval mystics.

Never referred to by any other name, Miss Lonelyhearts is a man who writes an advice column for a New York newspaper, and after months of writing replies to the most heartbreaking and unnerving letters, with the novel’s text incorporating many of these letters’ inarticulate and naked desperation into its texture—or perhaps displaying them to the reader like stigmata—he begins to lose the grounding that he’d already been struggling to keep beneath and inside of himself. He’s the son of a New England preacher, and he’s struggled all his life to maintain some kind of belief in a living and vital Christ without unleashing his lurking inner hysteria—“a snake whose scales are tiny mirrors in which the dead world takes on the semblance of life.” He tells himself that Christ is the answer to these people’s problems, but he knows that he can’t take his newspaper column in that direction, in part because he can’t fully go in that direction himself.

The job began as a kind of circulation stunt, and although the rest of the staff—especially the newspaper’s feature editor, Shrike—still treats it as a joke, Miss Lonelyhearts, with his susceptibility to taking on others’ pain, has lost his ability to laugh. Making light (and darkness) of his employee’s growing despair, the gleefully satanic Shrike becomes Miss Lonelyhearts’ personal tempter and tormentor, taunting him with the most astounding blasphemies and goading him with his incisively erudite demi-sermons ever more dangerously into the domain of what Miss Lonelyhearts refers to in his head as “this Christ business.”

 From Gabrielle Gamboa’s comic-book
adaptation of this tragicomic novel

Miss Lonelyhearts is himself no saint at all, and as the novel says, “even if Shrike had not made a sane view of this Christ business impossible, there would be little use in his fooling himself.” Miss Lonelyhearts drinks and carouses violently, treats women abominably, and often wakes up not remembering who he’d beaten or who had beaten him. But no matter how much he abuses himself into oblivion, he can’t forget the letters.

West was a famous parodist and impersonator—in real life as well as in fiction—and Miss Lonelyhearts is a masterpiece of contrasting and intertwining styles. Each letter to Miss Lonelyhearts is a terrifying descent into the singular despair (and language, and thought) of just one individually tortured soul, and West creates these letters with as much conviction as he does Miss Lonelyhearts’ inner monologues, his friends’ and coworkers’ cruel vitriol, and Shrike’s irreverent (and brilliantly pseudo-reverent) abuse. Between Miss Lonelyhearts’ inner and outer transformations and Shrike’s warped mirror of these transformations, West displays a profound knowledge of Biblical and religious language and thought, and his pitch-perfect mastery of the common street-talk of his time is equally stunning. Rereading this book, I wondered how many jokes and nuances I’d missed the first time through, and although its Christ-themes are meant to be quite clear, I found deep and meaningful (and disturbing) resonances that only years of religious study allowed me to discern in full. I was also glad that I’d watched so many old films in the intervening years, especially the randy pre-Code films of Miss Lonelyhearts’ time, so I could parse some of this book’s more profane passages.

In a revolting but truly moving parody of the kind of pious metamorphoses found in Dostoyevsky, who he is reading, Miss Lonelyhearts slowly becomes dangerously identified with his reader/correspondents and subsequently becomes dangerously involved with one of them. It probably could have been any one of his correspondents who takes him on his final steps downward (or upward, depending on whether you’re F. Scott Fitzgerald or Flannery O’Connor), but the sordid series of events that follows his sick entanglement achieves a level of beatific grotesquery that may be unmatched in all of creative literature.

From Gabrielle Gamboa’s comic-book 
adaptation of this tragicomic novel

With Miss Lonelyhearts as its masthead, Harold Bloom’s conception of the “twentieth-century American Sublime” leaves me searching for a much more expansive sense of the word “sublime.” With the exception of the book’s last chapter, which too rapidly and clumsily narrates its shocking events while forgetting to maintain its soaring and sophisticated technical artistry (like an action or horror film that pretends to be an art film before things come to a head), Miss Lonelyhearts is a work of nearly divine artistic perfection, yet its endless cruelty—to the reader even more than to any of its characters—adds deep thorns of sadism and masochism to its sublimity. Perhaps this piercing journey through the inseparable hells, purgatories, and heavens of human experience unites not just Miss Lonelyhearts with all of humanity’s lost souls, but also, by extension, unites us to them through him. Maybe the dual descent/ascent of both Miss Lonelyhearts and the readers of Miss Lonelyhearts encompasses the fullest possible spectrum of the sublime. Or maybe it’s all just a very sick joke, which adds yet another possible layer to its sublimity. Whatever your reading of this masterpiece, it will surely transform your experience of life. As in the sad and desperate search for meaning at the end of Woody Allen’s Manhattan, its diverse forms of sublimity may end up adding to your list of things that make life worth living.

—David Wiley

The Original of Laura, by Vladimir Nabokov

A Review of Vladimir Nabokov’s

The Original of Laura

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Winter 2009/2010

The Original of Laura
By Vladimir Nabokov
Edited by Dmitri Nabokov
Knopf ($35)

In his aptly titled collection of interviews and essays, Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov declaimed, “Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It is like passing around samples of one’s sputum.” A relentlessly productive artist, Nabokov was sure to be working on something when he died, and in the last two years of his life, in the face of rapidly failing health, he feverishly composed what he intended to be his final novel, The Original of Laura, which in the time-honored fashion of genius perfectionists he insisted that his family burn if he was unable to complete.

Out of emotional inertia and reverence for the last fragments of her husband’s precious work, Nabokov’s widow, Véra, found herself unable to carry out his wishes, and when she died in 1991 the task fell to the Nabokovs’ son and sole remaining heir, Dmitri. As his father’s literary executor, Dmitri Nabokov has wrestled ever since with what to do with the unfinished novel, and now at age seventy-five, just a few years younger than when his father died, he’s relented and tipped toward the archivist side of père/professor Nabokov, who cherished literary fragments as much as he loathed the thought of people reading his own. In his meticulously prepared university lectures Nabokov employed his knowledge of Tolstoy’s stratifying drafts of Anna Karenina to inform his understanding of its occasionally ambivalent valences—preceding by decades the way that James Joyce scholars have used genetic criticism to explicate Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Taking this preservationist cue now that he’s in his own twilight years, Nabokov fils has finally decided to publish his father’s final opus/coda and ease our minds about what he half-jokingly calls “Dmitri’s dilemma.”

As described in several interviews, as well as in his much-overlooked final masterpiece, Look at the Harlequins!, Nabokov had a peculiar way of composing his novels: After conceiving the whole work in his head, he’d write it out longhand on index cards, variously working on different parts at his whim as the whole thing slowly expanded to near-hypertextual perfection. He only drafted 138 index cards for The Original of Laura, however, leaving the text at nowhere near the level of finish of so many other famously uncompleted works (Vergil’s Aeneid, for example, or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, or any of Kafka’s three novels, or even the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom). Not wanting to make (m)any editorial decisions about his father’s work, Dmitri has lovingly reproduced every card in this present volume—in printed form as well as in facsimile, with perforations so we can take out and shuffle the fragments to our liking—giving us an unprecedented view into Nabokov’s working mind.

In the novel’s first several chapters, the first two of which come the closest to achieving Nabokovian polish, a writer (probably named Ivan Vaughan) lyrically describes (in perhaps a memoir) the true story of Flora, with whom he had an affair that was the inspiration for his bestselling novel, My Laura. Flora is ruthlessly mercenary and is married to a fat, famous, and independently wealthy neurologist named Philip Wild, who she incessantly cheats on and seems to despise. In the awesome opening chapter the narrator constructs a dizzyingly elliptical description of meeting her at a party, taking her to an obliging couple’s house for a comically cold (but nonetheless powerfully erotic and brilliantly evoked) sexual tryst, followed by his attempt the next day to assure a continued connection, which she assents to while making sure to keep him at arm’s length.

The second chapter flashes back to describe Flora’s ancestry and childhood, particularly focusing on her experiences with her mother’s elderly and overly familiar but essentially harmless lover, a wine smuggler who goes by the pseudonym Hubert H. Hubert, a moniker that hilariously references both the nom de plume of Lolita’s pedophile narrator, Humbert Humbert, and the former American vice-president Hubert H. Humphrey. While this chapter is quite rich and well constructed, certain details—such as the conspicuous use of the word “omoplate,” which also appears in the first chapter—suggest that Nabokov would have continued to scrutinize and refine its imperfect epidermis. Then a later fragment expanding Flora’s words about her husband at the opening party scene seems as if it were meant to be incorporated into a later draft of the already gorgeous initial chapter. Subsequent chapters follow Flora’s youth and eventual marriage to Wild, who in various later fragments seems to be referred to as Nigel Dalling (or Delling) and A.N.D., with each chapter more fragmentary and tentative than its predecessor.

About halfway into the book the numbered chapters end, and—as perhaps shuffled by the younger Nabokov—Wild suddenly becomes the narrator of several extremely significant chapters and fragments. The rotund, aging, unhappy, but visionary Wild spends a few heartbreakingly vivid sections describing his relationship with Flora, but mostly he recounts his experiments with a kind of cognitive-visualization technique that temporarily allows him to kill off parts of his loathed body and enjoy more and more nonexistence with each successive attempt. Later fragments describe contradictory approaches and experiences, while the most vivid and chilling is the initial account, where he slowly imagines more and more of his lower extremities into oblivion and then back into reality again, until one day he decides not to imagine back his toes. Opening his eyes, his toes are still there, but when he stands up he falls immediately, because his toes have no feeling at all, and then later that night they simply slough off.

The novel’s unsubtle subtitle—which isn’t printed on the cover and strangely isn’t mentioned anywhere in the text—is (Dying is Fun), and as the fragments of The Original of Laura continue to fragment there’s a fascinating contrast between the neurologist with the unwanted embonpoint who serenely moves toward self-effacement and the bibliologist with the preciously receding corpus (the physical Nabokov, not the metaphysical Vaughan) who desperately struggles to draw one more novel novel up into existence. Perhaps the parenthetical subtitle is in fact the mid-septuagenarian Dmitri Nabokov’s foreboding interpolation into his father’s work as he leans toward nonexistence too. The varied and fragmenting contrasts between the novel’s three main characters—Vaughan and Wild’s terribly sad longings (partially for Flora and then for something either within or beyond themselves) and Flora’s elusive loneliness that in one later fragment manifests itself as religious devotion—also form a deeply moving dynamic that becomes even more evocative as its kaleidoscopic house of index cards swirls into leaf-scattered nothingness.

It’s wholly unclear how Nabokov would have woven together the circling strands of this final work’s DNA, but even though the completed Look at the Harlequins! serves as a perfect summation of a master at full power while also resigning himself to having exhausted his strength—“mumbling comfortably, dropping off, mumble dying away”—The Original of Laura sincerely adds to his legacy and attests to a true genius who only death could stop from creating.

— David Wiley

Vladimir Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins!

One Final Masterpiece:

Vladimir Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins!

Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

As a longtime devotee of Vladimir Nabokov, I’ve spent more than half of my life reading and rereading his novels, stories, memoirs, correspondence, lectures, plays, translations, essays, and interviews, and whenever anything previously unpublished crops up, I feel like a kid waiting in line for the new Star Wars film to open. When Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, recently decided to publish the master’s drafts for his final, unpublished novel, The Original of Laura, though, I realized that I had one last book to read before delving into this posthumous treasure. Like many other fans and critics, I’ve always felt that Nabokov’s English fiction peaked during the period of Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962) and that because his belated financial success allowed him to stop teaching and devote himself solely to writing, some of his later works became a bit too oneiric and uninspired by the difficulties of actual reality. I was particularly disappointed by his penultimate novel, Transparent Things (1972), which I admittedly read when I was probably too young to appreciate it in full, and so for some reason I never bothered to read his final novel, Look at the Harlequins! (1974). In preparing to read and review The Original of Laura, then, I somewhat warily decided to examine the state of Nabokov’s art at the end of his life, and in finally reading Look at the Harlequins!, I’ve had to revise my whole view of this amazing writer’s artistic trajectory.

A strange and often hilarious reflection of certain aspects of Nabokov himself, Look at the Harlequins! is set up as a memoir written by a Russian émigré writer named Vadim Vadimovich N., whose life and works resemble (and diverge from) Nabokov’s in a way that allows for a nearly infinite number of intertextual games—as well as for deeply penetrating examinations of art, love, loss, life, and death. Like Nabokov, N was born in St. Petersburg in 1899 and emigrated to Western Europe after the Russian Revolution to become a brilliant, if struggling, novelist in his native language. Then at around the same time that Nabokov did (1940ish), N started writing novels in English and moved to America, where he supported himself by teaching and then gained financial independence after publishing a scandalous international bestseller much in the vein of Lolita. The novel/memoir even begins with a list of N’s Russian and English novels, which amusingly mirror Nabokov’s works, and as Look at the Harlequins! progresses, we see the themes and subject matter of N’s work play off of Nabokov’s real literary career in fascinating ways.

N may share many of Nabokov’s tastes and traits, but it’s also very clear that he’s an intriguing literary invention rather than Nabokov himself, and part of the pleasure of reading this book is in watching how the real author teases us with the invented author’s dissimilarities to himself, while adding profound touches of memory that seem to be reflections of Nabokov’s own. It’s great fun to tease apart the two authors as they weave themselves into a strange mirror-tapestry, but even without these games, this book stands wholly on its own and is so brilliantly constructed—and moving, and funny, and sad—that it could easily be enjoyed by someone who’s never even read Nabokov.

N’s most marked differences from Nabokov also happen to be the two things that make for most of the novels’ most substantial explorations: N has serious mental health problems, and he ends up having four wives throughout the novel who give his life a constantly fluctuating sense of connection and disconnection. Whether Nabokov himself had mental health problems is debatable—he definitely suffered from anxiety, and some of his 1930s stories reflect a pre-Sartrean terror/nausea at the world—but he only ever had one wife (of fifty-two years), the brilliant and steadfast Véra, who in many ways grounded Nabokov and helped enable him to maintain his intense productivity (see Stacy Schiff’s deeply flawed but illuminating biography Véra [Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov]: Portrait of a Marriage). N has several interconnected mental maladies, but while he mostly fixates on one that involves his mind’s difficulties with spatial issues, he seems most troubled by anhedonia—the inability to feel joy. In chapter two, he recalls (or conceives) a particularly incisive exchange (or change) that he had at age seven or eight with one of his grand-aunts:

            “Stop moping!” she would cry. “Look at the harlequins!”

            “What harlequins? Where?”

            “Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together—jokes, images—and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

            I did. By Jove, I did. I invented my grand-aunt in honor of my first daydreams, and now, down the marble steps of memory’s front porch, here she slowly comes, sideways, sideways, the poor lame lady, touching each step edge with the rubber tip of her black cane.

In order to feel any kind of joy, N invents. Even seemingly inventing the relative who induced him to invent, N is only at ease when manipulating dreams and memories into fiction. The novel/memoir itself even contains a serious inconsistency about N’s parents: In an early part of the narrative he writes that they divorced when he was very young, and then later he tells a bookseller friend that his father died six months before he was born, and at the narrative opening of the next chapter he continues this possible fabrication to become the novel’s more substantiated truth about his parents.

While his relationship to “dementia” (a nearly incarnate manifestation of his mental-health problems) remains fairly constant throughout the novel, his wives change constantly. What’s wonderfully enjoyable about this is that each wife is so uniquely and individually drawn that their entrances and exits from his life read like short-story frames within the novel, making it constantly renew its scaffolding as we find ourselves adjusting to and caring about each successive woman. While all his wives are entirely vivid—his first and last wives being the most compelling—the most powerful and touching relationship he has is with the daughter that he has with his second wife. The marriage is a bizarrely forced disaster, and his wife leaves him, taking their daughter, but when a tornado kills the mother several years later, his pre-teen daughter, Bel—another one of Nabokov’s brilliant (and only slightly disturbing) Poe-lita-like inventions—comes to live with him. Their emotional, artistic, and intellectual connection is perhaps the most profound and moving relationship that Nabokov ever created, but it’s so intense and unorthodox that in order to keep up appearances he marries again, which drastically changes Bel’s outlook and relationship to her father. Not wanting Bel around, wife number three sends her to a boarding school in Switzerland, which further alienates her and causes her to run away with a fashionably idealistic communist for the abyss of the Soviet Union.

Before she disappears and is still at school in Switzerland, N’s melancholy longing for their perfect relationship inspires him to write A Kingdom by the Sea, the Lolita-like novel that makes him rich and famous. Becoming ever more distant from his meandering and philandering third wife, N eventually receives a letter from a friend of Bel’s in St. Petersburg and undertakes a convoluted journey to try to help/rescue her. Failing, he returns home broken, but life and art still continue.

At a certain point in the novel/memoir N begins to write parts of the book in the second person, to “you” (the way that Nabokov wrote his famous memoir, Speak, Memory, to his wife, Véra), and just as he’s making a change to his life that’s both a literal resignation and a step toward complete self-determination, he finally meets the book’s “you.” The same way that the novel/memoir works as a summation of N’s (and Nabokov’s) literary career, the ensuing relationship is a kind of summation of N’s loves, and as a final, healing, caduceus-like intertwining of art and love, the woman who’s to become his fourth wife helps him solve a problem in a chapter of his last novel, Ardis (a play on Nabokov’s own antepenultimate novel, Ada)—the spatial problem that’s been plaguing his mind all his life.

With her insightful twist correcting his troubled conception of time and space, N suddenly realizes that he’s cured of his mental illness. But he also realizes that he isn’t. He knows that her solution is merely a linguistic “trouvaille”—or perhaps just a caduceus-like cadeau—and that at this point in his life he’s simply happy to accept happiness rather than to continue his search for a true solution to his condition. Which is perhaps true healing in itself: the acceptance of the happiness that he’d never been able to feel before and that his whole life had been a search and preparation for. Abstractions such as time and space were never his true problem anyway. It was his inability to see the harlequins.

V & V

Like this final gift that N receives, Look at the Harlequins! is itself a final gift of art and love from one of the twentieth century’s most ardent artists. Finally reading this masterpiece after all this time, it gave me not just an insight into the unflagging power of Nabokov’s later years, readying me for the dazzling harlequins dancing through the fragments of The Original of Laura, but it made his career retrospectively form itself into an entirely different shape in my mind. Both Look at the Harlequins! and The Original of Laura find Nabokov at his most relentlessly creative and innovative, and the fully polished Look at the Harlequins! especially alters the arc of his artistry. Joining Lolita and Pale Fire as perhaps his greatest English-language novels, this amazing work sums up just about everything that Nabokov could do, leaving one last full testament to his genius in its hall-of-mirrors portrait of the artist as an old man.

—David Wiley