Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  If McCarthy does not want us to regard the Judge as a Gnostic Archon or supernatural being, the reader may still feel that it hardly seems sufficient to designate Holden as a nineteenth-century Western American Iago. The Glanton Gang passes into a sinister aesthetic glory at the close of Chapter XIII, when they progress from murdering and scalping Indians to butchering the Mexicans who have hired them:

  They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of the citizenry for whose protection they had contracted. The scalps of the slain villagers were strung from the windows of the governor’s house and the partisans were paid out of the all but exhausted coffers and the Sociedad was disbanded and the bounty rescinded. Within a week of their quitting the city there would be a price of eight thousand pesos posted for Glanton’s head.

  I break into this passage, partly to observe that from this point on the filibusters pursue the way down and out to an apocalyptic conclusion, but also to urge the reader to hear, and admire, the sublime sentence that follows directly, because we are at the visionary center of Blood Meridian.

  They rode out on the north road as would parties bound for El Paso but before they were even quite out of sight of the city they had turned their tragic mounts to the west and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun.

  Since Cormac McCarthy’s language is deliberately archaic, the meridian of the title probably means the zenith or noon position of the sun in the sky. Glanton, the Judge, the Kid, and their fellows are not described as “tragic”—their long-suffering horses are—and they are “infatuate” and half mad (“fond”) because they have broken away from any semblance of order. McCarthy knows, as does the reader, that an “order” urging the destruction of the entire Native American population of the Southwest is an obscene idea of order, but he wants the reader to know also that the Glanton Gang is now aware that they are unsponsored and free to run totally amok. The sentence I have just quoted has a morally ambiguous greatness to it, but that is the greatness of Blood Meridian, and indeed of Homer and of Shakespeare. McCarthy so contextualizes the sentence that the amazing contrast between its high gestures and the murderous thugs who evoke the splendor is not ironic but tragic. The tragedy is ours, as readers, and not the Glanton Gang’s, since we are not going to mourn their demise except for the Kid’s, and even there our reaction will be equivocal.

  Here is the final encounter between the preternatural Judge Holden and the Kid, who had broken with the insane crusade twenty-eight years before, and now, at middle age, must confront the ageless Judge. Their dialogue may be the most memorable interchange in the book.

  The Judge and the Kid drink together, after the avenging Judge tells the Kid that this night his soul will be demanded of him. Knowing he is no match for the Judge, the Kid nevertheless defies Holden, with laconic replies playing against the Judge’s rolling grandiloquence. After demanding to know where their slain comrades are, the Judge asks, “And where is the fiddler and where the dance?”

  I guess you can tell me.

  I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?

  You aint nothin.

  To have known Judge Holden, to have seen him in full operation, and to tell him that he is nothing, is heroic. “You speak truer than you know,” the Judge replies, and two pages later murders the Kid, most horribly. Blood Meridian, except for a one-paragraph epilogue, ends with the Judge triumphantly dancing and fiddling at once, and proclaiming that he never sleeps and he will never die.

  The strangest passage in Blood Meridian, the epilogue, is set at dawn, where a nameless man progresses over a plain by means of holes that he makes in the rocky ground. Employing a two-handled implement, the man strikes “the fire out of the rock which God has put there.” Around the man are wanderers searching for bones, and he continues to strike fire in the holes, and then they move on. And that is all.

  The subtitle of Blood Meridian is The Evening Redness in the West, which belongs to the Judge, last survivor of the Glanton Gang. My own surmise is that the man striking fire in the rock at dawn is an opposing figure in regard to the evening redness in the West. The Judge never sleeps, and perhaps will never die, but a new Prometheus may be rising to go up against him.

  CHAPTER 47

  The Rings of Saturn (1995)

  W. G. SEBALD

  I AM A LATECOMER to Sebald. My close friend the late Geoffrey Hartman, who was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929, and died in 2016 near New Haven, Connecticut, introduced me to Sebald in 2002 by kindly giving me a copy of the novel Austerlitz in German. I read Austerlitz and was both moved and upset. It had the same effect on me as reading Primo Levi (1919–87), the Italian Jewish scientist and survivor of Auschwitz.

  My initial reaction to Sebald and to Primo Levi was both temperamental and historical. I had grown up in a Yiddish-speaking household. My mother, Paula Lev, came from a small Jewish town near Brest-Litovsk. My father, William Bloom, came from Odessa. They met on Orchard Street in Manhattan, married, and had five children, of whom I was the youngest. All four of my grandparents, many aunts and uncles, and a great many cousins were murdered by the Germans and their Slav helpers in the Shoah. My father was stoic and quiet, but I have many memories of my mother and her sister weeping for their lost family throughout the early 1940s.

  Geoffrey Hartman himself, like Sebald’s Jacques Austerlitz, came to England in 1939 on a Kindertransport. Stronger in trust than I was, Geoffrey helped found the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale in 1981. We talked about Sebald, and I expressed an admiration but said it was too much for me to take. Hartman remarked that if I were patient and read the rest of Sebald, the aesthetic and moral reward would be immeasurable. He was right, as I have slowly learned.

  I have read Sebald’s poetry in German but otherwise have relied upon the exemplary English translations. At their best, the poems are lucid, disciplined, eloquent, and all but major. Sebald’s lasting poetry is his prose, always essayistic, learned, contemplative, morally compelling, and almost a new kind of fiction. That “almost” is simply an echo of Sebald himself, who celebrates his many precursors with somber elegance: Rousseau, Goethe, Gottfried Keller, Johann Hebel, Eduard Mörike, Robert Walser, Kafka, Borges, Thomas Bernhard, and others.

  One does not ask either Borges or Sebald for this massive music, yet Sebald subdues himself to a quieter harmony:

  The train rolled slowly out of Liverpool Street station, past the soot-stained brick walls the recesses of which have always seemed to me like parts of a vast system of catacombs that comes to the surface there. In the course of time a multitude of buddleias, which thrive in the most inauspicious conditions, had taken root in the gaps and cracks of the nineteenth-century brickwork. The last time I went past those black walls, on my way to Italy in the summer, the sparse shrubs were just flowering. And I could hardly believe my eyes, as the train was waiting at a signal, to see a yellow brimstone butterfly flitting about from one purple flower to the other, first at the top, then at the bottom, now on the left, constantly moving. But that was many months ago, and this butterfly memory was perhaps prompted only by a wishful thought. There was no room for doubt, however, about the reality of my poor fellow travelers, who had all set off early that morning neatly turned out and spruced up, but were now slumped in their seats like a defeated army and, before they turned to their newspapers, were staring out at the desolate forecourts of the metropolis with fixed unseeing eyes. Soon, where the wilderness of buildings thinned out a little, three tall blocks of flats entirely b
oxed in scaffolding and surrounded by uneven patches of grass became visible at some distance, while much further off, before the blazing strip of sky on the western horizon, rain fell like a great funeral pall from the dark-blue cloud that hung over the entire city. When the train changed track, I was able to glance back at the great towers of the City, rising far above everything around them, the topmost storeys gilded by the rays of the sun slanting in from the west. The suburbs swept past—Arden, Forest Gate, Maryland—before we reached the open countryside. The light over the western horizon was gradually extinguished. The shadows of evening were already settling on the fields and hedgerows. Idly I turned the pages of an India paper edition of Samuel Pepys’s diary, Everyman’s Library, 1913, which I had purchased that afternoon, and read passages at random in this 1,500-page account, until drowsiness overcame me and I found myself going over the same few lines again and again without any notion what they meant. And then I dreamed that I was walking through a mountainous terrain. A white roadway of finely crushed stone stretched far ahead and in endless hairpins went on and up through the woods and finally, at the top of the pass, led through a deep cutting across to the other side of the high range, which I recognised in my dream as the Alps. Everything I saw from up there was of the same chalky colour, a bright, glaring grey in which a myriad of quartz fragments glimmered, as if the rocks, by a force deep inside them, were being dissolved into radiant light. From my vantage-point the road continued downward, and in the distance a second range of mountains at least as lofty as the first one arose, which I feared I would not be able to cross. To my left there was a drop into truly vertiginous depths. I walked to the edge of the road, and knew that I had never gazed down into such chasms before. Not a tree was there to be seen, not a bush, not even a stunted shrub or a tussock of grass: there was nothing but ice-grey shale. The shadows of the clouds scudded across the steep slopes and through the ravines. The silence was absolute, for even the last traces of plant life, the last rustling leaf or strip of bark, were long gone, and only the stones lay unmoved upon the ground. Into that breathless void, then, words returned to me as an echo that had almost faded away—fragments from the account of the Great Fire of London as recorded by Samuel Pepys. We saw the fire grow. It was not bright, it was a gruesome, evil, bloody flame, sweeping, before the wind, through all the City. Pigeons lay destroyed upon the pavements, in hundreds, their feathers singed and burned. A crowd of looters roamed through Lincoln’s Inn. The churches, houses, the woodwork and the building stones, ablaze at once. The churchyard yews ignited, each one a lighted torch, a shower of sparks now tumbling to the ground. And Bishop Braybrooke’s grave is opened up, his body disinterred. Is this the end of time? A muffled, fearful, thudding sound, moving, like waves, throughout the air. The powder house exploded. We flee into the water. The glare around us everywhere, and yonder, before the darkened skies, in one great arc the jagged wall of fire. And, the day after, a silent rain of ashes, westward, as far as Windsor Park.

  (Vertigo)

  Sebald transmutes a vivid moment in Pepys, when the housemaid Jane informs him of the fire’s devastation:

  By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish Street, by London Bridge. So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower; and there got up upon one of the high places, Sir J. Robinson’s little son going up with me; and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge; which, among other people, did trouble me for poor little Michell and our Sarah on the bridge. So down, with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it began this morning in the King’s baker’s house in Pudding Lane, and that it hath burned St. Magnus’s Church and most part of Fish Street already. So I down to the waterside, and there got a boat, and through bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire. Poor Michell’s house, as far as the Old Swan, already burned that way, and the fire running farther, that in a very little time it got as far as the Steelyard, while I was there. Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river, or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs, by the waterside, to another. And, among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loath to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies till they burned their wings, and fell down. Having stayed, and in an hour’s time seen the fire rage every way; and nobody, to my sight, endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire; and having seen it get as far as the Steelyard, and the wind mighty high and driving it into the City; and everything, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches, and, among other things, the poor steeple by which pretty Mrs. —— lives, and whereof my old schoolfellow Elborough is parson, taken fire in the very top, and there burned till it fell down; I to Whitehall, with a gentleman with me who desired to go off from the Tower, to see the fire, in my boat; and there up to the Kings closet in the Chapel, where people came about me, and I did give them an account dismayed them all, and word was carried in to the King. So I was called for, and did tell the King and Duke of York what I saw; and that unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire. They seemed much troubled, and the King commanded me to go to my Lord Mayor from him, and command him to spare no houses, but to pull down before the fire every way. The Duke of York bid me tell him that if he would have any more soldiers he shall; and so did my Lord Arlington afterwards, as a great secret.

  Vertigo is a lesser work than The Emigrants and, even more, The Rings of Saturn. What I like best in Vertigo are the loving and disconcerting visions of Stendhal and Kafka. There is also that great scamp Giacomo Girolamo Casanova—swindler, devourer of womankind, celebrity chaser—whose ingenious escape from a Venetian prison is a Sebaldian dazzlement.

  In the autumn of his second year of imprisonment, Casanova’s preparations had reached the stage at which he could contemplate an escape. The moment was propitious, since the inquisitors were to cross to the terra firma at that time, and Lorenzo, the warder, always got drunk when his superiors were away. In order to decide on the precise day and hour, Casanova consulted Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, using a system comparable to the Sortes Virgilianae. First he wrote down his question, then he derived numbers from the words and arranged these in an inverse pyramid, and finally, in a threefold procedure that involved subtracting nine from every pair of figures, he arrived at the first line of the seventh stanza of the ninth canto of Orlando Furioso, which runs: Tra il fin d’ottobre e il capo di novembre. This instruction, pinpointing the very hour, was the all-decisive sign Casanova had wanted, for he believed that a law was at work in so extraordinary a coincidence, inaccessible to even the most incisive thought, to which he must therefore defer. For my part, Casanova’s attempt to plumb the unknown by means of a seemingly random operation of words and numbers later caused me to leaf back through my own diary for that year, whereupon I discovered to my amazement, and indeed to my considerable alarm, that the day in 1980 on which I was reading Grillparzer’s journal in a bar on the Riva degli Schiavoni between the Danieli and Santa Maria della Visitazione, in other words near the Doge’s Palace, was the very last day of October, and thus the anniversary of the day (or rather, night) on which Casanova, with the words E quindi uscimmo a rimirar le stelle on his lips, broke out of the lead-plated crocodile.

  An occultist as well as a charlatan, the wily Casanova “broke out of the lead-plated crocodile”—that is, lead-lined cells just under the roof of the Doge’s Palace. I myself was accustomed to loiter on that waterfront street, drinking in one bar or another with a young friend who was kindly wandering with me around Italy.

  Vertigo opens wi
th a bittersweet essay-fiction: “Beyle, or Love Is a Madness Most Discreet.” Its protagonist is Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), known to all of us as the novelist Stendhal. Sebald’s Beyle, a wistful would-be Italian, scarcely duplicates Casanova’s success with women.

  And once fully apparelled in the uniform of a dragoon, this seventeen-and-a-half-year-old went around for days on end with an erection, before he finally dared disburden himself of the virginity he had brought with him from Paris. Afterwards, he could no longer recall the name or face of the donna cattiva who had assisted him in this task. The overpowering sensation, he wrote, blotted out the memory entirely. So thoroughly did Beyle serve his apprenticeship in the weeks that followed that in retrospect his entry into the world became a blur of the city’s brothels, and before the year was out he was suffering the pains of venereal infection and was being treated with quicksilver and iodide of potassium; although this did not prevent him from working on a passion of a more abstract nature. The object of his craving was Angela Pietragrua, the mistress of his fellow-soldier Louis Joinville. She, however, merely gave the ugly young dragoon the occasional pitying look.

  A true obsessive, Beyle after eleven years journeyed to Milan, and overwhelmed Angela with a torrent of language, finally enjoying her just once on her condition that he quit Milan. Sebald dryly chronicles this career of erotic vicissitudes until the death of Beyle/Stendhal at the age of fifty-nine by a stroke probably brought on by ghastly medication rather than the syphilis itself. There is no mention of The Charterhouse of Parma, The Red and the Black, Lucien Leuwen.