Cozzens

James Gould Cozzens. Until last year I'd never heard of him.  But in his time people seriously pondered whether he was the greatest living American novelist; Pullitzers by the score, seriously considered for the Nobel (until he made it plain he would reject it if offered).  Why has he dropped so comprehensively off the radar?  I'm wondering whether (and I'm conscious, as I say this, that my own left-wing political views will bias my sense of things) whether he was just on the wrong side of the political divide -- the triumphs of the 20th century were progressive (feminism, fighting racism, the liberalisation of sexual life). Cozzens was not only right-wing, he was right-wing in a way that absolutely informs his condition-of-America novels.  Maybe he just seems today to have missed the larger point of the age through which he lived. There are other right-wing writers, of course; but I wonder if there's a sense in which those sorts of figures either happened to fall in with the grain of the age -- so, Kipling's Kim (amongst others) shows a deep fascination with and joy in multiculturalism, for example -- or else were right-wing in way that seems centre or even centre-left today (I'm thinking of Updike).

Then again, Castaway (1934) has a remarkably, avant-la-lettre Ballardian vibe to it.  Mr Lecky is marooned in his high-rise apartment, for reasons never explained: he's a modern Robinson Crusoe, scavanging food and weapons from the tower block, killing a man that he meets on one of the lower floors and dumping the body in the basement 'feeling no more remorse than Cain'.  Things get grimmer and grimmer, until he is compelled to descend to the basement again, turning over the corpse to discover, in a Prisoner-esque touch (you're ahead of me here, aren't you) that it is himself.

Hook

A fish-hook is a three-dimensional cul-de-sac.

Booker Longlist 2012, 6: Sam Thompson, Communion Town: a City in Ten Chapters

In the introduction to a recent reprint of Dracula (Constable, 2012), Colm Tóibín makes the case for Stoker’s book as, specifically, a great Irish novel. The apparent absence of great Irish writers of the nineteenth-century, before Joyce (we might prefer: before Wilde and Shaw) is an illusion, he says. The 19th-century, Tóibín argues, saw important manifestations of a kind of Irish subconscious in the writings of Maturin, Le Fanu and Stoker. He quotes Maria Edgeworth, from 1834:

It is impossible to draw Ireland as she is now in a book or fiction. Realities are too strong, party passions too violent, to bear to see, or care to look at their faces in a looking-glass. The people would only break the glass and curse the fool who held the mirror up to nature—distorted nature in a fever.

So, change scenes: Communion Town, first novel by the (clearly) very talented Sam Thompson. It’s about London, but it follows the Pratchett-Harrison-Gaiman-Miéville line—and what a strange collection of names to bring under the same umbrella—of writing about London indirectly by writing about an imaginary metropolis that both is and is not London. If I ask why?, I hope it won’t be taken, by the seven people liable to read this post, that I’m sniping at the validity of the 'speculative' approach as such. Obviously not; it’s what I love; it’s what I do. But what is our excuse? We aren’t living through the situation Edgeworth described. What does a fantastic and metaphorical apprehension of the city have that documentary verisimilitude (say) doesn’t?

Here's one idea: that we metaphorise the monstrosity of life as actual monsters because, pace Edgeworth and Stoker, it’s the only way we can articulate it. But I don't think so; we're post Chatterley-trial, after all.  All sorts of horrible things get written and published in broadly 'realist' modes nowadays. Another is that we metaphorise that monstrosity, even though we’re perfectly capable of addressing the monstrousness more directly, because we’ve fallen in love with our imagined monsters to the exclusion of real life. Maybe the problem is that we take our imagined monsters too seriously—more seriously than the problems of real life. Maybe the problem is that we don’t ironize our metaphors enough. Of course, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

So here’s Thompson’s City (it is unnamed in the novel: ‘Communion Town’ is one of its quarters); more specifically, here's it's main railway station:

A world of grey dawn twilight and blackened stone above, rainwater dripping from the girders, pigeons skulking in rows and strangers spilling from carriages to gather on the concourse, disoriented. [3]

Waterloo? Or, wait: Paris Gard de Nord? (further out, ‘...those banlieues where the old streets are overshadowed by never-completed tower blocks stalled midway through the process of being torn down’ [6]). No: because we’re on the coast (‘I head past shut shops and cafés and across the park … as the gaining light scribbles colour and texture into the world, and soon I smell brine, and I’m on the seafront, buffeted by gusts of wind with crows blowing around above the mud’ [10] Aberdeen?). Except the flavour is London (‘River walkways and cycle paths looping from Three Liberties to Green Stairs, from Syme Gardens to Glory Part’), inflected—as actual London increasingly is—via Continental Europe (a metro rather than an underground; ‘these flower tubs and iron railings, these stained white pavements, locked restaurants, fire escapes and commercial accessways, these airy canyons whose window-sills are crowded with geraniums …’ [41]; ‘the Market was a broad, kinked half-mile of cobbled thoroughfare as old as the city, jammed with stalls’ [146]; ‘tarry clutches of lobster pots lay here and there’ [173] ‘Simon rode the metro over to Sweatmarket station and climbed through the chipped tiling and wet concrete up to the streets of Glory Part. He crossed a footbridge and turned down Sluice Lane.’)  What else? Well there’s something monstrous in this city. Which is to say, there are monsters in Thompson’s city rather in the way that there are ghosts in Turn of the Screw.

It’s not a novel, although I’m not going to sit here (I do happen to be sitting down) and tell you that taxonomy matters. It doesn't matter that it's not a novel, but it is not a novel for all that.  It is ten short stories, linked each-to-each not by character or narrative but by the propinquity of all taking place in the same imaginary city, as well as by a certain commonality of mood, tenor and theme (arrival; alienation; suspicion; compromised love; crime and violence). The first story is sort of about terrorism (a group call ‘Cynics’ attack the city’s Metro in a 7/7esque move). The second is a melancholy sort of love story that has to do with music and the making of music. In the third, a boy builds elaborate model city in his room (Kurosawa liked to put models of his worlds in his fictions about his worlds too). The fourth, ‘Gallathea’, spins Noirish adventures amongst the criminal element via a slightly clumsily ventriloquized Chandler tone (‘I tipped the spirit into the back of my throat and choked appreciatively as it burned all the way down. The swell at the other end of the bar was taking a sidelong interest in me’ and so on). Then there’s ‘Good slaughter’ , a Dexter-ish (or, we might say, ‘Sinister-ish’) first-person tale of serial killing; ‘Three Translations’ again about arrivals, and foreignness; ‘The Significant City of Lazarus Glass’—perhaps the best of the stories—much interested in crime as puzzle (‘exquisite enigmas, mysteries, sinister and bizarre: for Peregrine Fitch these were at once a vocation and the keenest happiness of life’ 189); then ‘Outside the Days’ and ‘The Rose Tree’ (We’re in a pub, one evening. A bold young man says: ‘They tell me that in this season, in your city, no one dares go out after dark … well I’m going out!’ [243] So what happens to him? Well he comes back. ‘unsteadily, with his jacket hanging open, confused … one arm of his jacket was ripped and the blood was sticky on his hand. We couldn’t work out where all the blood had come from.’ [252]. He falls down.) Finally ‘A Way To Leave’ tells us about the relationship between Simon and Florence, and, well, about ways of leaving.

Thompson works to give each chapter a different voice, and this kind-of-works, though it’s a little hit and miss. My sense is that Thompson’s skill as a writer is not in variety, or pastiche, but in a kind of dense, closely observed atmospherics. His dialogue is not very well differentiated, character to character; nor does it have the snap or vim of actual interchange; and his plotting is a touch over-reliant on a small number of oblique knight’s-moves—the beauty of insinuations, rather than the beauty of inflections. But the novel is often very striking and memorable, and many moments are eerily beautiful, and that’s not (sniff! sniff! sorry; bit of a cold) to be sniffed at. Does the novel wear its academic learning on its sleeve? Pharmakons and homi sacri? A serial killer called ‘Le Flâneur’? Characters from Jonson’s Alchemist? Yes; well that’s alright. Pretentious is the new black. Will Thompson win the Booker Prize? Maybe, though not with this novel. (Will Thompson win the Clarke? That’s a more plausible supposition, and a more valuable prize).

Wait a minute: who's Will Thompson?

I’m more interested, I think, in the larger picture: the thing this intriguing novel is symptomatic of. That there is more purchase in talking about the fragments of urban subjectivity by removing it from the real. I wonder, though: is that true? It’s not so much about the fragmentation of urban living as it is about the subjectivity of urban spaces (all these people, like the ten speakers of The Ring and the Book perceive a slightly different city!) which is news about on the level of the news when Roscius was an actor in Rome. Buzz, buzz.

Here’s what I half-suspect, though I’m not sure, am still thinking it through. The predatory violence at the heart of ‘civilised’ society, sexualised and class-marked, was the hidden thing that could not be directly expressed by a 19th-century writer like Stoker. What’s the 21st-century equivalent? We can write as much violent sexualised class critique as we like; and we do. It just doesn’t change anything. What a novel like this suggests is that it’s something else that is becoming inexpressible except via the displacement of metaphor: a mood, or a flavour, a particular scent of ontology. The way living in the city makes us feel like strangers. The way it baffles us, intrigues us, frightens us, attacks us. We can’t admit to it, directly; because we’re all so clever and postmodern and self-aware. It may be a variant of the Eco notion that we can no longer own emotion directly (that we cannot say ‘I love you’; we can only say ‘as Barbara Cartland might say “I love you” … and how that Barbara Cartland reference dates old Umberto!). Except that the point of Communion Town is not love. It’s something else.

Rilkean advice

Rilke replied to a poet who sent him his poems saying 'are they any good?' (good advice follows: for 'poet' read 'writer'):

You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must", then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. [Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet; this first letter was written 1903]

He goes on with some specific advice, that we need to apply with a proper 'mutatis mutandi' sense: 'come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don't write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes a great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty Describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place.' Of course, then he goes on then to his famous bit about how for no poet could ever be unhappy locked away in prison, for he would always carry with him the treasure house of his imagination (Clive James once quoted this and added the laconic, but accurate, judgment: 'in some ways, Rilke was a prick') but you can't have everything.

Morning Poem, Rural France

One euclid spider
has drawn an ideal
line, sun-whitewashed
between two branches.

One breeze primps the
fanned-out spear tips
of this dried palm,
castanet-rattly, like

feathers from the tail
of one Jurassic bird
showing off rear plumage
scales to its mate.

One morning, unlike
all the other mornings:
sunlit and lonely
as any singularity.

Gaggity giggity

I was talking to Mr Five-Fifteen-And-Thirty-Seconds when he suddenly said: ‘STOP! Am a time.’

I always thought ‘Pop Will Eat Itself’ should have been named ‘Pop Will Drink Itself’. 

My tweet-review of "The Dark Knight Rises": needs more yeast.

Stockholm Syndrome is bad. Eamonnholmes Syndrome is worse.

‘Knack Knack!’ ‘Who’s there?’ ‘80s one-hit wonder famous for “My Sharona”!’ ‘Did you bring a punchline with you?’ ‘[long pause] No.’

Pliny the Elder was only one famous Ent to be granted Roman citizenship: there was also Pliny the Oak, Pliny the Willow and Pliny the Elm.

My sit-com pitch: four nerdy guys who like to balance miniature hairpieces on their genitalia: ‘The Wig Wang Theory’.

Breaking news! Archaeologists have unearthed a papyrus containing Homer’s lost epic ‘Evenssey’. At last the set is complete!

On July 14th the whole of London responds to the call to spit-roast Elvers. We call it ‘Baste Eel Day’.

‘Mr Dabolina Mr Bob Dabolina. Mr Dabolina Mr Bob Dabolina. Mr Dabolina Mr Bob Dabolina Mr Bob Dabolina Mr Bob Dabolina.’ ‘YES??’ ‘Oh. Hi.’

They’re all studying Sir Geoffrey Howe’s speeches except my friend, Finn KCG. I said: Let’s go, Sir Finn — now everybody’s learning Howe.

It's come to my attention that the Spanish translation of Robert Graves' "I Claudius" is the Sopranos-worthy "Yo, Claudio"

Scientists in Switzerland have discovered the molecule that makes you touchy-feely with friends when tipsy: The Hugs Boson.

So much chart pop sounds like barking sea mammals! You think that people would have had enough of seal-y love songs.

I’m going to write a novel about an untrustworthy contrast-control button called ‘Shifty Fades of Grey’. I hope to retire on the proceeds.

This Lord Sreform seems to be in the news a lot lately. What's he done, exactly?

I have cut myself off from all social interaction. I shall get all groceries via IncommunOcado.

One does not simply moonwalk into Mordor … wait, no: wrong Jackson.

To quote the West Country Will-Smith classical-music rap, ‘Barenboim-boim-boim/Shake the roim.’

The RAF developed the three aircraft in tandem but only flew the Spitfire, leaving the Spitphlegm and Spitmarshmallow in mothballs.

Jazzster & trumpet-tooter Hester Ribes is in belligerent mood. And when ‘Toot’ Ribes goes to war a point is all that you can score.

Men love it when I take hold of an adult moose by the horns and shake it like a doll! In point of fact my elk-shake brings ALL the boys to the yard.

The original music for “The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe” was actually composed by Faun Williams.

I repudiated one third of the end of my fork, and in return they gave me EVERYTHING! Forgone the tine: it’s all mine — it’s all mine!

Why is there a why is there something rather than nothing question rather than no why is there something rather than nothing question?

Booker Longlist 2012, 5: Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

We might want to suggest (and even if you don't want to suggest it, I'm going to) that the big task facing the modern novelist is: how to represent the city. At the beginning of the 20th century fewer than a sixth of the world's population lived in cities; at the beginning of the 21st more than half do -- in the more affluent West, quite a lot more than half.  Cities, as I once wrote in another place, are our new machines for living in.  But how to fix them, in fiction?  Dickens did it by dint of arranging a medium-sized cast of characters, each with a larger-than-themselves representational capacity (standing, as it might be, for 'the aristocracy', 'the homeless street sweepers' and so on) and writing about them with a distinctive, teeming linguistic and observational inventiveness.  The dramatis personae was large enough to suggest populousness, and the style inflected the former with a flavour of teeming, restless, newness and potential.  Fine: but modern cities are much, much larger even than Dickens's London; and I'm not sure I know of many successful attempts to pin them to the board of Fiction.  Or, to be precise: I can think of one, but it's a televisual not a verbal novel: HBO's The Wire. That works, but try to emulate it in words and the cast of characters would surely become unwieldy, the binding would burst the seams trying to hold in the thousands of pages, and the readers would lose their way.

So, onward (excelsior!) through the 2012 Man Booker Longlist, and we come to two novels that set out to  capture at least some essence of urban existence.  Tomorrow (or, like, whenever I get round to it): Sam Thompson's borderline-speculative Communion Town, that adds a carefully-orchestrated formal fractured-ness to the MadeUpPolis template so beloved of the modern Weird.  But today--today is the day for Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis.

The city is Mumbai, Bombay as was, and the time is the late 70s and early 80s.  Thayil's part-dreamily-effective part-infuriating strategy is to parse the urban space via opium.  We start in Rashid's opium house on Shuklaji Street, and in soporific, sometimes poetic, sometimes self-indulgent prose Thayil introduces us to Rashid's regulars, to their mistily rendered intersecting backstories and lives: above all we get to know the Muslim eunuch called Dimple; a sort of intersex character with a (I thought: perhaps over-telegraphed) Waste-Land-Tiresias-esque role in the narrative.  Time moves on, whilst also seeming, in the amber of this book's poetic-prose, to stand still: Hippies come from the West to smoke themselves silly.  Heroin replaces smoky opium as the drug of choice, with a harsh-ening of the general buzz; life in the teeming city becomes more violent.  And time moves back into the past too; as with a vivid recreation of Communist China in the 1940s.  Thayil sets out to reproduce the city partly with the tried-and-tested strategy of introducing a lot of varied characters, each colourful and distinctive, although most down-at-heel, addicted, lassitudinous, beggarly and the like.  But mostly he does it via a sort of impressionism.  It kind of works; the book is an atmospheric Turner-watercolour or Whistler-wash of Mumbai.  It's a place I have never visited, so I'm not really in a position to judge it on grounds of representational precision.  I can judge it as a novel, though. That's my privilege.  Yours too.

OK: in that previous paragraph I talked about characters being trapped in the amber of Thayil's prose.  But that's not right; his prose is not hard, as that implies.  Thayil is a poet (the inside flap, slightly heart-sinkingly, describe him as a performance poet), and more than the episodic plotline and myriad characters, it is through a self-conscious narcotic richness of tone that he sets out to evoke Mumbai.  The whole thing is written in a kind of smoke-of-consciousness style, drifting richly round and round without really going anywhere; sometimes it smells lovely. Sometimes it reeks.  And Thayil's transition to the 'new' India at the novel's end is less to do with plot -- plot in this book is largely superluous, or actively bad, as with a serial-killer sub-narrative that adds almost nothing -- and much more to do with the shift to a semantic field of metal, hardness, sharpness, cocaine and violence.

It's a good novel; better than many on the longlist; but it's a distractingly shapeless, muddled novel as well.  That's not accidental, I'm sure, but saying so doesn't necessarily excuse it.  Bottom line: I'm not sure narcosis is the best way of capturing urban existence.  Consciousness is more than a smoke, after all; even to an addict.  And the problem with drug addiction is that it tends to scuff over, elide or even erase the social roles that define that city living we call 'civilisation'. I'm not moralising when I say so: feel free, so long as you harm no others, to smoke all the dope you like. It's not the morality of drug-taking that's at stake in this novel; it's the aesthetics of it, the effectiveness of it as a metaphor for city life.  This is a novel that says: here's a great world city and it's kind of unstructured, and dreamy, and druggy, and full of lots of different sorts of people, and sometimes these people interact in spaced-out contentment and sometimes in violence.  It's a metaphor-vehicle that only took me so far.  You may find it carries you further: it's certainly a ride worth taking.