May Books

the way and the waygoer

I continue my sabbatical from longform criticism as I write my novel, Major Arcana, which I am now serializing on Substack in both text and audio format for paid subscribers. For now, in this cross-post from johnpistelli.com, a brief catalogue of my last month’s reading, minus Colin Wilson’s lengthy and insane The Occult: A History, which I’m only halfway through. Wilson’s book, speaking of the occult, appears in one shot of Noah Baumbach’s eerily synchronicity-ridden film of Don DeLillo’s eerily synchronicity-ridden novel, White Noise; see my newsletter about my recent chance discovery of Wilson and my newsletter about DeLilloesque sortilege and the figure of the writer as prophet. Please enjoy!

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Edwin Long, Esther (1879)

The Books of 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther
For the purposes of the wicked common reader seeking literary pleasure, the Hebrew Bible returns to skimmability with Chronicles: a genealogy-larded and narratively simplified reprise of the richly dramatized Samuel and Kings, written by a priestly ideologue to consolidate the tradition after the rebuilding of the temple. Ezra and Nehemiah are the prophet and civic leader, respectively, who did the rebuilding under the aegis of an enlightened Persian king; their books describe the restoration of the temple in elaborate detail, even as they inveigh against the lax morals (and above all the interfaith and interethnic marriages) they find among the Jews left behind in Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity. With the brief and bloody fairy tale of Esther, however, we return to something like the Book of Ruth’s narrative pleasures and more relaxed moral sensibilities. Our titular Jewish queen of Persia repulses the exterminationist threat to the Jews from within the Persian court and exacts a thorough revenge against the would-be genocidaires. In his introduction to Esther in the Norton Critical Old Testament, editor Herbert Marks posits the worldly book, with its vision of Hebraic heroes securing their people’s cosmopolitan safety, as the inaugural work of Jewish diaspora literature, this as against Ezra and Nehemiah’s dream of purifying Zion.

C. P. Cavafy, The Collected Poems
A reader-submitted question about literary “late style” sent me first to Edward Said’s famous essay on the topic and then to investigate Cavafy’s poems more closely. With your leave, I reprise here an extensive footnote I wrote in my newsletter exploring the topic of lateness. As his prime literary examples of “late style,” in which “artistic lateness [appears] not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction,” Said strangely gives Cavafy and Lampedusa. Some other and presumably counter-Nietzschean thesis about the multicultures of the Mediterranean and the worth of belatedness seems to be at work here, and I don’t think Said, then dying himself, had time to gather his thoughts: to join, that is, the theory of late style to the theory of Orientalism. I refer to Nietzsche’s disparagement of Alexandrian culture in The Birth of Tragedy. As Nietzsche saw it, third-century Alexandria, not in spite but because of its learning and cosmopolitanism and vaunted library, made a poor successor to fifth-century Athens’s Dionysian energies, even if it was a consequence of the fifth century’s nascent Socratic rationalism. The modern world, Nietzsche further argues, is essentially Socratic and Alexandrian, culturally belated and neutered by scientism:

The whole of our modern world is caught in the net of Alexandrian culture and takes as its ideal the theoretical man who is equipped with the highest powers of knowledge, works in the service of science, and whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates. […] [The contemporary artist] still remains eternally hungry, the weak and joyless ‘critic’, the Alexandrian man, who is basically a wretched librarian and proofreader blinded by book dust and printer’s errors. (Trans. Douglas Smith)

The immensely appealing figure of Nietzsche’s younger contemporary, Cavafy, a poet synonymous with Alexandria, redeems Alexandrian man for modernism, turning what Nietzsche saw as weakness into literary strength: the belated “librarian” as wry elegist of all former glories, global and local, from the Hellenistic fragmentation of the Greek culture to the loss of eros to time in the private life. Said treats Cavafy’s whole corpus as late work, no surprise given that even a poem as chastening as “The City” comes early in the established oeuvre. But in this lecture on his own translation of the poet, Daniel Mendelsohn describes Cavafy’s trajectory from the “perfumed” fin-de-siècle lyricism of the early work to the austerely understated and gravely ironic lines of his great period—in other words, roughly the same 1890 to 1930 poetic journey from passionate aestheticism to disillusioned modernism taken by Yeats. Despite his reputation for mortifying ironies, my own favorite Cavafy poem might be “The First Step,” a one-page pick-me-up that practically counts as self-help:

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritus:
“I’ve been writing for two years now
and I’ve composed only one idyll.
It’s my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I’m standing on now
I’ll never climb any higher.”
Theocritus retorted: “Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you’ve done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it’s a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you’ve done already is a wonderful thing.”

(Trans. George Barbanis)

W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
I’d never read a novel by Maugham. I wanted to read The Magician, his roman à clef about Aleister Crowley, as a counterpoint to my own occult novel, but they didn’t have it at the library, and it’s not said to be his best anyway. This slim 1925 novel of adultery and plague among British colonials in the Far East is so acclaimed, and deservedly. Maugham offers a cosmic and ironic portrait of an eventually penitent adulteress exposed to what the novel portrays as the Eastern insight into the nothingness beyond the eponymous veil (a quote from Shelley: “Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call life”):

“You spoke of Tao the other day,” said Kitty, after a pause. “Tell me what it is.”

Waddington gave her a little look, hesitated an instant, and then with a faint smile on his comic face answered:

“It is the Way and the Waygoer. It is the eternal road along which walk all beings, but no being made it, for itself is being. It is everything and nothing. From it all things spring, all things conform to it, and to it at last all things return. It is a square without angles, a sound which ears cannot hear, and an image without form. It is a vast net and though its meshes are as wide as the sea it lets nothing through. It is the sanctuary where all things find refuge. It is nowhere, but without looking out of the window you may see it. Desire not to desire, it teaches, and leave all things to take their course. He that humbles himself shall be preserved entire. He that bends shall be made straight. Failure is the foundation of success and success is the lurking-place of failure; but who can tell when the turning point will come? He who strives after tenderness can become even as a little child. Gentleness brings victory to him who attacks and safety to him who defends. Mighty is he who conquers himself.”

A postmodernist—the aforementioned Edward Said, for example—would assail the novel’s Orientalism, its admiring but patronizing evocation of the “inscrutable” east. A postpostmodernist—a metamodernist, perhaps, ready to travel hopefully again, after having internalized the true parts of the postmodernist critique—will take seriously Maugham’s sincere appreciation of a rival civilization’s more sophisticated metaphysical claims. I think of an introduction Gore Vidal wrote to one of the translations of the aforementioned Cavafy; Vidal ends by praising Cavafy, whose Christianity (and hostility to Julian the Apostate) troubled him, because he wrote a poem based on the Bhagavad Gita, a poem about the nothingness behind appearance—a metaphysic truer, apparently, to Vidal’s own experience. Vidal also wrote one of his funniest essays on Maugham, “Maugham’s Half-and-Half,” collected in United States. He concedes the longstanding criticism that Maugham’s swift and transparent style is, as Edmund Wilson put it, “a tissue of clichés” (one imagines the late Martin Amis vomiting—since I can’t say “rolling”—in his grave). He also insists, however, that Maugham’s cinematic power to evoke and to dramatize legitimates the fame he enjoyed in his lifetime as a popular storyteller. Reviewing a biography that extensively discusses Maugham’s bisexuality, Vidal is in such fine comic form I can’t resist quoting an otherwise irrelevant passage:

To [heterosexual biographer] Mr. Calder’s credit, he does his best to show the amiable side to the formidable Mr. Maugham—the side that Mr. Calder terms “Willie,” as he was known to friends. But our schoolteacher also distances himself from “nastiness” in his acknowledgments where he notes “the unqualified encouragement of my parents, and my children—Alison, Kevin, Lorin, and Dani.” (Did they pipe “What’s rough trade, Daddy?” with unqualified encouragement?) No matter. By and large, children, your Daddy has done the old fruitcake proud.

Philip K. Dick, “Faith of Our Fathers”
References on both the Manifesto! and Art of Darkness podcasts sent me to this long story that first appeared in Harlan Ellison’s shock-the-bourgeoisie 1967 anthology of speculative provocation, Dangerous Visions. Dick is at what the blurb-writers call the height of his powers here. At first, the “dangerous vision” seems to be a send-up of left-wing totalitarianism in a future when the Chinese Communists have won the Cold War. It’s an effective send-up, too, as our bureaucrat-protagonist is called upon to differentiate between two student essays, each of which produces the requisite politically-correct pabulum, but only one of which is sincere.

From his fingers she took the examination papers. “They’re having you pol-read?” she asked.

“‘Pol-read’?” He did not know the term.

“Study something said or written to see if it fits the Party’s current world view. You in the hierarchy merely call it ‘read,’ don’t you?”

I can attest that in the Party’s hierarchy—or, as I prefer to call it, the English department—they do merely call it “read.” But Dick is after larger quarry than a satire against the immemorial left-wing censoriousness, irritating and irrepressible as it is. Instead, after a very Dickian dance of double-agents and dialectical drug trips, the story reveals that standing over and behind Communism’s Leader, as over and behind the leader of every political faction, and over and behind the leaderless masses, too, is the eldritch horror of a Lovecraftian nothingness that would not have startled Gore Vidal or the author of the Bhagavad Gita:

“You founded the Party?” he asked.

“I founded everything. I founded the anti-Party and the Party that isn’t a Party, and those who are for it and those who are against, those that you call Yankee Imperialists, those in the camp of reaction, and so on endlessly. I founded it all. As if they were blades of grass.”

“And you’re here to enjoy it?” he said.

[…]

“As you live on, unable to stop, I will torment you,” it said. “I will deprive you, item by item, of everything you possess or want. And then when you are crushed to death I will unfold a mystery.”

“What’s the mystery?”

“The dead shall live, the living die. I kill what lives; I save what has died. And I will tell you this: there are things worse than I. But you won’t meet them because by then I will have killed you. Now walk back into the dining room and prepare for dinner. Don’t question what I’m doing…”

Matthew Gadsa, Dimes Square and Other Plays
Speaking of the futility of politics, and of the need for “dangerous visions” in a time when politics in all its squalor presumes to dictate to artists, I can’t fail to note the print publication of Matthew Gasda’s Dimes Square. About this time last year, Gasda’s tragicomedy announced a revolt in the metropolitan heart of culture against the last decade’s droning and censorious pieties. This volume collects Dimes Square along with three other plays; I direct interested readers to my newsletter review from last July of both the title drama and Berlin Story, also in this volume. It’s almost a year later and artists are still being “cancelled” by the left for largely imagined transgressions. Please see this essay from today by the poet Emmalea Russo about her own experience; and please don’t miss her acute commentary on how anti-fascism mirrors fascism’s own desire to purify and to exterminate, desires dramatized in the cosmopolitan (anti-fascist) Book of Esther no less than in the nationalist (fascist) Books of Ezra and Nehemiah—this, even as the “new right” or “post-left” takes its own censorious turn (as I write, one of this latter tendency’s ex-leftist luminaries is throwing around the word “sodomite” on Twitter). It’s past time for artists to ignore politics of all stripes and produce worlds of our own, not to shock the bourgeoisie, but to testify that we were here, in all the ideology-exploding complexity of “we” and “here,” and because new worlds are ours, not ideologues’, to devise. Christian Lorentzen, who acted in Dimes Square as a coke-snorting literary curmudgeon, writes in his Foreword to this volume:

Now that they are between covers and not just being performed in rooms in Manhattan and Brooklyn, these plays of Gasda’s are yours to interpret as you will, whether in solitude or collaborative performance. Some of the behaviors and attitudes enacted and expressed by the characters in these pages—incest, adultery, careerism, cynicism, intoxication, pornography, war tourism—belie the commitment brought to these works by their author and his initial collaborators. They are, in the slang of Rosie from Dimes Square, “based.” The plays’ conception has been, and their further contemplation and execution, should be entirely otherwise.

Martin Amis, London Fields
The aforementioned anti-cliché warrior Martin Amis died this month. I decided to read this 1989 novel, one of his most celebrated, in memoriam. I’ve always been attracted, since my teen years, to this book as a book—to the 1991 black and neon-yellow Vintage International edition, which looked to me like an artifact of the post-imperial “Cool Britannia” just about to come together in popular music. As I noted in a brief Tumblr post gently tut-tutting the aforementioned Lorentzen for including the phrase “Courtney Love once told me” in his own elegy for Amis, this novel reminds me of the slickly cynical but crypto-heartbroken Britpop albums it foreran. I cited Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish, but given the dissolute sexuality shared between album and novel, Pulp’s His’n’Hers might be more to the point. Has Jarvis Cocker ever said as much to Lorentzen? Inquiring minds want to know. As for the novel itself, it’s an extravaganza of pre-Millennial anxiety—some unspecified nuclear or environmental disaster impends upon London in 1999—depicting a doomed ménage among the death-eager sexpot Nicola Six, the dart-playing yob Keith Talent, and the henpecked toff Guy Clinch, all narrated in high Bellovian spirits by a dying Jewish-American writer. The plot—lifted, such as it is, from The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark—barely budges for all Amis’s verbal hijinks, is only an occasion for comic routines, ornate descriptions, metafictional asides, and lyrical laments. The twist ending is equally desultory, there just for the tonal sake of an Humbertian diminuendo. You can’t get further from Somerset Maugham than this. Belonging to what Twitter celeb Paul Skallas (AKA “The Lindy Man”) calls “the vulgar wave” of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, London Fields, with its rich brew of racial humor, class commentary, and sexual typing, would surely be considered an extended hate crime in the U.K. of today (and Amis’s anxious metacommentary on the same, writing as he was on the eve of 1990s “political correctness,” won’t appease the prosecutors, as when the narrator worries that Nicola Six will come off as a “male fantasy”). But Amis’s elegiac last-of-England tone grounds the strutting bad-boy performance in a world-weary plangency one doesn’t expect from an enfant terrible, and which one honors in a fallen elder:

Shaken awake to a sticky bun at 1.30 in the morning, my time, I moved to a window seat and watched through the bright mists the fields forming their regiments, in full parade order, the sad shires, like an army the size of England. Then the city itself, London, as taut and meticulous as a cobweb. I had the airplane to myself because nobody in their right mind wants to come to Europe, not just now, not for the time being; everybody wants to go the other way, as Heathrow confirmed.

It reeked of sleep. Somnopolis. It reeked of it, and of insomniac worry and disquiet, and thwarted escape. Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

Pulp, “Lipgloss” music video (1994)