France and the French Riviera had been made permanently romantic for the American young in the 1950s by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, by the presence there of both Picasso and Matisse, and by a best-selling novel Bonjour Tristesse by the eighteen-year-old Françoise Sagan. There is a subgenre of American novels from the period about Ivy Leaguers at loose ends on the Cote d’Azur—James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime is the most memorable; also John Knowles’s Morning in Antibes and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, and the interesting fact here is that this literary France, so fashionable at that moment, is completely absent from Kinnell’s early work.
The Fulbright Foundation’s contribution to international goodwill in the person of Kinnell in the country of France would come in the form of his translations. His first book publication, in 1956, while he was in Grenoble, was the translation of a then-popular novel, Bitter Victory, by René Hardy, which dealt with combat in the Libyan desert during the war. It was made the following year into one of Nicholas Ray’s best films, with Richard Burton in the lead. This is interesting also because, like Black Light, it is a story about a hallucinatory trip across a desert and because one of the protagonists is a rigid man driven to violence. This translation must have been a job picked up from a New York publisher. How he came to that literary task, I do not know. More crucially, he translated what was probably the most important book of new French poetry in that decade, Yves Bonnefoy’s On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, which had appeared in 1953. Kinnell’s translation appeared in 1968, two years after Black Light. Whether he had absorbed Bonnefoy’s “poetics of imperfection” at the same time that he was discovering Whitman and how that bore on the creation of Jamshid, a man buried alive by a narrow and perfectionist temperament, is a subject for further research. What does seem clear about what he brought from France to Iran was the influence of the most important French novelist of the period. Albert Camus’s The Stranger had appeared in 1942, the same year that he published The Myth of Sisyphus. The Plague appeared in 1947, The Rebel in 1952. And it’s hard to imagine that Jamshid’s story had not found its form under the spell of Camus’s novels, which also inhabit a dream territory somewhere between fable and philosophical conte.
Kinnell returned to the United States in fall 1957 for a lectureship at New York University. It must have been during this time, living in the Village, that his first book of poems, What a Kingdom It Was, took shape. This is when the retrospective French poems might have appeared and didn’t, and when seeing New York with fresh eyes, after his discovery of Walt Whitman, would have given him the remarkable catalogues of vivid street life in “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World.” And then he was off to Iran, with a book accepted for publication.
THE SHAH’S IRAN IN 1959 and 1960. The great book on the subject is Ryzard Kryzinski’s Shah of Shahs. The simple version of the backstory is that the United States had taken on Great Britain’s imperial role in the Middle East. Their aim was to stabilize and control the oil market. When a democratically elected parliament of Iran’s constitutional monarchy began to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British corporation (now BP), the CIA staged a coup, had the prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, arrested and tried for treason, and installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who had fled the country during the political crisis, as monarch and autocrat. The oil business was returned to private hands in a new arrangement by which the US split the revenues with Great Britain, and a flood of cultural exchanges began, to promote American values and international understanding. President Eisenhower paid the Shah a visit, Duke Ellington’s band came through, US military police began to train the Shah’s security forces, and the promising young poet, Galway Kinnell, came to teach at the University of Tehran.
The coup occurred in 1953. Kinnell arrived in the fall of 1959, just as the country was celebrating (whether it wanted to or not) the Shah’s third marriage. Kinnell would have taught in English. Fascinated by the country, he stayed for almost another year, working as a journalist for an English-language daily for which he wrote a weekly Sunday story about Iranian culture. It gave him, he was quick to understand, a particular and limited view onto Iranian culture. He would have gotten to know well-educated university students. In an unpublished draft of an essay on politics, he wrote about the wedding and Eisenhower’s visit. He notes that the response on the street to the American president’s visit was subdued. “More significant perhaps,” he wrote, “was the reaction of young, educated, politically conscious Iranians, people who will surely have much to do with Iran’s future. Since political opinions in this country are expressed only guardedly, and sometimes in riddles, I can’t guarantee that the attitudes I report are representative, or even widely shared. It may be I just know the wrong people. I have the impression, however, that both the wedding and the president’s visit were met, by young politically aware Iranians, with almost chilling reserve.” He was getting to know the country and had acquired by the time he left, he said, a vocabulary of about five hundred words of Farsi.
He met and made friends among Iran’s young poets—Farough Farrokhzad, the brilliant and beautiful young poet and filmmaker who would have been twenty-five at the time, her first book recently published, and Nader Naderpour, who would have been thirty and who arranged in 1960 in Tehran the first modernist poetry reading in Iran, which Galway Kinnell likely attended. In his journalism, there is a sense of how he felt his way into the culture: “I spent months in Iran,” he wrote, “before I could listen to the music with any pleasure and the Iranian mosque still has its enigmatic side. But my first days there I took a walk down Ferdowsi and, seeing Persian carpets in the windows, I felt my sense of strangeness suddenly diminish. Perhaps no other Iranian work of art has such power to make the Westerner feel at home, but at the same time this sense of familiarity is, I am sure, illusory.” He was very aware of being drawn as an outsider and a tourist to old Persia and aware that his students were ambivalent: “The young people are proud of old Persia, but they are sick of it, too—at least of the extension of its feudal practices into the present.”
“The relentless, world-wide drive towards modernization,” he wrote in a piece on the Tehran bazaar, “tends to reduce the variety of human life, but as it also mitigates the suffering; only the reactionary could wish to arrest it. Nevertheless when you see the new steel-and-glass arcading going up in the bazaar . . . when you see the bazaar’s new second-storey and hear of the plans to install escalators in the bazaar, it is impossible not to feel some regret, some mild expression of the elementary panic of mortality.”
He wrote articles about the bazaar, the Persian teahouse, Iranian ski resorts, and the Zoorkhaneh, gymnasiums where the distinctly Persian sport of bastani, an ancient tradition that mixes gymnastics and martial arts, is practiced. In the piece on the bazaar, he confesses to being drawn to its alleys, in order “to see, touch, taste, smell, and hear its profuse, flagrant life,” which he enumerates in a passage that will call to mind his poem about New York’s Lower East Side: “Plastic flowers that look like embalmed real ones; plastic flutes which the peddler drives away most customers with by demonstrating; boiled beans; big, somber, steaming, boiled beets; oranges with their warts carefully scraped off; great white turnips; sacks of pistachios, hazelnuts, and the pumpkin seeds it takes weeks to learn to shell properly with your teeth; donkeys swollen with potato-filled saddlebags; shining sturgeon spread out in rows in the shade; hens held by the feet and waved in great squawking fistfuls; flocks of turkeys looking perfectly at home as they stray along the sidewalk.” He was curious about how exactly modernization worked in practice. “‘There has been a lot of progress for the people of Iran since the Americans came,’ a truck driver told me. ‘For example?’ I asked. ‘For example, an army general makes twice what he made seven years ago.’ ‘Good for the generals,’ I said, ‘But what about you?’ It turned out that the truck driver was earning $60 a month; now he earns about $70, but his rent has gone up 200%.”
/> When Kinnell returned to the United States in 1960, he proposed a book, The Half-Known Iran, based on his journalism, to publishers. The proposal describes “a country undergoing a rapid and in some ways tragic Westernization. The upper classes have given up their own traditions and have taken the worst of Western customs in their place. The poor people are having the same traditions taken away from them, without feeling any of the compensations which Iranians with money can buy.” There were no takers for the book. Not enough Americans were interested in Iran to make it marketable. In the 1960s it was beginning to be respectable to hire poets in English departments and Kinnell spent much of the decade as an itinerant visiting poet. He married in that decade, his two children were born, he bought the old farm in Sheffield, Vermont, that would be his refuge, in later life his home, and figure in his poems for many years. He threw himself into the civil rights movement, registering voters in Louisiana for the Congress of Racial Equality. His second book, Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock, appeared in 1964. It was during this period that he must have conceived and worked on Black Light, the Iran book for which he did find a publisher.
NONE OF THIS HISTORY, OF course, accounts for the dark brilliance of Black Light. When it was published in 1966, it ushered in what admirers of his work tend to think of as his great run of books: Body Rags in 1968, The Book of Nightmares in 1971, and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words in 1980. It’s a book not like anything else he wrote, except perhaps certain passages in The Book of Nightmares, and not like any American novel of the period. Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)? Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky (1949)? Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark (1968)? There are a lot of ways of thinking about it—a Nathaniel Hawthorne story like “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”? A Puritan fable by a twentieth-century New Englander? An existentialist parable out of Camus? A story from The Arabian Nights? As he writes in the afterword to the 1980 reprint of the book, “I did not intend Black Light to be a naturalistic novel; rather I had in mind to write a book that would be closer to a fable than a novel and thus could not pretend to depict an actual society.” Not that he didn’t use some of what he had seen. There is a hint about the origin of Jamshid’s profession in his piece on the Persian carpet: “Recently I had the luck to meet with Ali Aqa Turkeh, a man who runs a repair shop for carpets in the bazaar. He works in a little second-story room full of carpets, variously colored wools, and a family of tame pigeons. He weaves yarn into the moth and cigaret holes so carefully that only a close examination gives away his art.” And there is something nearer a clue to the writer’s intention in his reflection on the meaning of Persian carpets in the same piece:
We do not see designs of camels, sheep and donkeys on the carpets; we see peacocks and roosters and birds of paradise. We do not see the endless clumps of desert grass, we see rare flowers. . . . A relief from the ordinary world, the carpet must have been also, on a deeper level, a transcendence of it. It was an abstract garden, denying the desert, a dreamed area distilled from the sights and sensations of many oases, a bringing together of far-scattered signs of beauty into a stylized surface richer than anything that exists on earth. Composed of elements of the world, the carpets also oppose the world, as all acts of transcendence deal in symbols belonging to that which they seek to leave behind.
In just the same way does the Persian garden distill and oppose the world. It brings together the precious elements—greenness, coolness, and water—stylizes them, and marks itself off with a wall, as a carpet marks itself off with a border. The mosque represents similar kinds of concentration, stylization, and definition. European cathedrals grope toward the absolute and sometimes almost seem to dissolve into it. On the contrary, the Iranian mosque seeks to be a self-contained, perfectly defined whole, which, opposing the world, exists completely within it; and with the onion domes of the Sefavid era it almost succeeds in that effort.
Not a portrait of an actual society, but there are hints in it of an actual Iran. We know we are in a modern world and not an Arabian Nights tale, when the foreigner with the white car shows up. He is a buried glimpse of the Westernizing pressures the country was undergoing. And the New City—the red-light district in Tehran—where the last third of the story is set was an actual place. It was called Shahr-e-No, a walled-off neighborhood in the city reserved for prostitution. Infamous in its own day, it can still be seen in a set of classic black-and-white photographs by the Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golostan. It is an unsparing portrait of misery and squalor about which Golostan wrote, “I want to show you images that will be like a slap in the face.” Kinnell’s portrait shares that impulse, and another one as well. It sets us down in the domestic lives of these women. A historical note on Shahr-e-No: In the first wave of revolutionary fervor in the revolution of 1979, the district was razed to the ground and replaced by a park. Most of its prostitutes were executed by firing squad in the summer of 1980.
Galway Kinnell seems not to have written about Islam, about religion at all, in his journalism. It’s quite understandable that a young American journalist in those years would be almost exclusively in touch with the educated, upper classes in modernizing Iran and would not have much sense of the depth of resistance to the Shah’s program among the Shia clergy, from whom the revolution of 1979 originated. Nor did American policy intellectuals. The US, with its—to be frank—crude and single-minded policy of containing Russia’s imperial ambitions (while promoting its own), was so absorbed with repressing the secular left that it was taken entirely by surprise when the revolution came from the fundamentalist right. So it is possible to think that there was a kind of prescience in Kinnell’s telling his story from the point of view of a small man working in the bazaar, a pious widower, full of resentments, cut off from communication with his daughter by the cultural politics of patriarchy, who doesn’t know himself, spends his days repairing pictures of paradise in a rectangle of perfect sunlight, and who, threatened by the idea that he is not in control of his women’s sexuality, erupts in an act of murderous violence. Black Light is about that, and what happens after that. The book may have begun with an instinct about the pressures of modernization in the country he had visited. There is a puritanical streak in most revolutionary movements, and in the street, especially the lower-middle-class street, a rage, compounded of resentment and jealousy, against the indulgences and moral laxness of an old regime, and it is hard not to believe that this was part of the fury that drove the shears into the mullah’s heart, but the book is about something else. It’s a fable about this man ripped from his life and learning to see himself and the world with different eyes. Here is Jamshid in Chapter 5: “He had lain forty years in the coffin of his narrow life. Suddenly he had stirred and it had cracked like an eggshell. But too late. Only a dead thing lay within.”
The arc of the narrative is an account of the extent to which Jamshid comes alive, is redeemed. The act of violence, its connection to his own buried sexuality, is established in the first few shocking chapters. A pious man, a judge of others, plunges a pair of shears into a mullah’s heart. By Chapter 6 he is in the desert—and the picaresque of his fugitive wanderings occupies the magical center of the book. Here we are given a romantic bandit—Ali is a laat, a sort of Persian version of a Mafioso, a tough guy who works for a neighborhood boss—he is on the run because he too has murdered someone. There is an encounter with a desert scorpion, which establishes Ali’s survival skills; a moonlight ambush; a trek across the desert with a rotting corpse slung on the back of a sick camel and trailed by a troop of white-headed vultures; a tryst—sexual and not sexual—with a madwoman grieving for a son among the ruins of an ancient Persian kingdom; a session of opium-smoking with an old man near the tomb of the great poet Hafez; a second tryst; a small oasis of what ordinary happiness might feel like with a widow who hides him from the police; the journey by car with the foreigner, which delivers him to Tehran and the New City. If sexuality has been a motif of the book to this point, in the brothel in the New C
ity where he finds himself both trapped and taken in, it has now become the theme.
In these scenes Black Light shares with Crime and Punishment a sense of the holiness and horror of prostitution. But there is no saintly prostitute in Black Light, and it’s not clear if there is for Jamshid anything like redemption. What there is in the entirely earthly character of Effat is a sense of ordinary humans getting by in a place where men bring their shame, their swagger, made of insecurity and entitlement, and their secret needs, inside an institution that the gender politics of the culture has created. Kinnell doesn’t dwell on this. It’s a familiar story. The premium on virginity for respectable young women—which is what drove Jamshid to murder—breeds the New City and the New City breeds disease. All of this is captured most horrifically in the old prostitute maddened by syphilis applying quack remedies to her suppurating sores. It seems an important part of the story that both Effat and Goli, the house’s one working whore, have taken her in as a matter of course—“Hags of her kind,” Goli says, “haven’t any place to go, and we think it is our duty to take care of them”—just as they have taken in Jamshid.
The brothel is the scene of his third tryst, his fleeting sexual encounter with the young woman brought in to replace Goli while she gets treatment for her diseases. It is the opposite of the scene Dostoevsky imagined when he imagines the chaste coming together of the student Raskolnikov and the prostitute Sophia Marmeladov. Jamshid, who has either contracted a venereal disease or imagines he has—“possibly it wasn’t his disease that was hurting him, but the pain of desire,” Kinnell writes—has sex with the accommodating young woman, and then, feeling her features in the dark, is struck with a final horror at the thought that she could be his daughter. It brings the story of his rage full circle. Jamshid’s first impulse when the recognition of this possibility breaks over him is to kill himself. His second is to flee, and when he does, he discovers that the gate that had imprisoned him in the New City is suddenly open. “But how,” Kinnell has Jamshid think to himself, “could he step out there? Wasn’t he kin to those filthy, dark beings which, in his shop in Meshed, he had so desperately tried to hide and do away with?”
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