I suppose what could have happened is that in the ultimate twist and, in essence, a very postmodern way—where contradictions are the norm, nothing is certain, the assurance of smug and logical closure is for hopeless simpletons, and so on—Auster’s credentials that led to his being celebrated in France were too perfect; every piece of the puzzle was so precisely in place, showing the full panoramic picture of the qualities the French savor, as discussed here, that something almost had to go wrong, in an unraveling that deconstructed the entire system, for a proof of the invalidity of any system. (And you beloved deconstructionists of faded yesteryear, even if your inner circle went a little over the top in those official edicts on theory issued in the U.S. from party headquarters at posh Yale, you voiced more than a few intriguing critical ideas!) I told you this could get complicated.
Conclusions?
Overall, the French do have an uncanny sense, as backed by a winning track record, in figuring out what we ourselves sometimes overlook and don’t realize is our significant writing, maybe just because we are too close to it. Though, to be honest, I think that some off their interests are often not that different from what we ourselves Stateside do take seriously and not so seriously. James Ellroy, popular here, is extremely popular in France even as writers of policiers go; he appeared on French TV when I was last in Paris, himself acting like an absurd parody of the hip, tough-guy detective novelist and using terms like “daddy-o” for the voiceover translation, which seemed like exactly what the French interviewer wanted to hear. As of this writing, my Parisian sources, who might be viewed as reliable handicappers in this competition, tell me that Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy, each with a following in France already and two of the very best fiction writers we have right now, which we ourselves generally acknowledge (except for the author of a confused, much-discussed Atlantic article some time ago, who with forced naiveté and shameless misreading thump-ingly bashed them, along with Auster), and they should turn up sooner or later on that sacred Agrégation, DeLillo most likely the sounder bet. One correspondent says that so-called Rocky Mountain fiction, by popular writers like Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane and their mostly Montana cohorts, has emerged as fashionable, but it certainly hasn’t yet generated attention like that afforded the Southern when it comes to American writing. In addition, it should be noted that the French make a real effort to translate so much American writing. I can’t stress enough that the authors I’ve concentrated on here as venerated to some extent are those who have been regularly studied and written about beyond simple newspaper, radio, and television reviews—of which there are still a lot in France—and it is amazing to see how much American fiction does get translated, especially considering how embarrassingly little of their work makes its way into our bookstores. And, again, concerning the matter of our neglected authors: Set aside for a moment the unchallengeable, beat-the-crowd celebration of Poe and Faulkner by the French, and for me merely the single truth that they created a classroom audience and in-depth study for a book like The House of Breath that it never really enjoyed in the man’s own country, where prevailing tastes and values are such that a wannabe literary maestro like the late James Michener—blatantly commercially oriented, in spite of his aspiration to be seen otherwise—once had his visage displayed on the side of those tan Barnes & Noble plastic shopping bags that have also featured greats like Joyce and Woolf, yes, the French honoring Goyen is enough for me to validate their taste, however strangely the system dictating it sometimes works. Believe me, if you haven’t read it, The House of Breath is that rare.
So for the moping, slighted novelist here Stateside, the one who never has benefited from something like the former book-club queen Oprah’s soppy praise—“These are real tears, girl!”—resulting in hefty sales and who cringes at the sight of any remainder table, adulation in France remains well worth the time spent fantasizing about it, to ease the hurt some, if nothing else.
As for the Jerry Lewis thing, go out and rent The Nutty Professor; fast forward to the scene of cool, Rat Pack-style Buddy Love with a rumpled sport jacket and hiply loosened thin tie trying to slowly, seductively croon a nightclub number at an off-campus bar called the Purple Pit when his magic potion is kicking in and out of gear, and in the midst of the hilarious, and deeply frightening, schizophrenia he keeps slipping into the squeaky falsetto of the bucktoothed Nutty Professor himself, a sequence that goes well beyond simple slapstick and may be as valuable as anything in the history of classic American cinematic comedy, Chaplin included.
Watch it, and you decide if it isn’t utter—not to put too fine a point on it—genius.
2003, FROM THE LITERARY REVIEW
Postscript:
Some of the situation portrayed in this essay has surely changed since it was written a while back, but I trust my essential premises and conclusions remain reasonably sound, so I won’t address all the details, just a few.
On a more recent trip to teach for a semester at a university in France—the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris this time—I witnessed what could only be seen as a phenomenon, the way Philip Roth’s stock had skyrocketed there—which makes sense, seeing that much of the later work in his long career, like American Pastoral and I Married a Communist, does treat directly and without compromise the “so-Americanness” of things. And—belatedly, and very long overdue—there seemed to be a good deal of keen interest in and a most respectful awakening to the value and importance of the best new multicultural American literature, most notably that of our wonderful younger writers.
Also, granted I do argue here for the seriousness with which the French in general treat literature and their eye for what’s truly lasting and in a place where best-sellerdom doesn’t seem necessary to establish the worth of a book (sometimes it can mean the mark of unpardonable crassness to French readers and a prime reason to shy away from a book, actually), yet that might be changing, too, if it hasn’t started to show large signs of having done so already. The old, venerable French publishing houses are becoming much more commercial-oriented, as may be indicated by just the fact that flashy novel covers and artwork for them are now the norm, rather than the simple uniform plain covers— devoid of any artwork and bearing only the author’s name and title, along with the publisher’s colophon—that were for years used on all books issued by any single house (Gallimard still often uses its distinctive beige and red, and Grasset its pale yellow, but they appear to be among the last holdouts), and many of the smaller independent houses are being sadly overshadowed by the bigger, ever-expanding conglomerate publishing concerns, as began to rapidly happen a few dozen years ago in the U.S., where, never mind overshadowing, most just got gobbled up or fast disappeared. I offered this observation about the changing scene in France to a French friend at dinner recently, a brilliant scholar herself who was visiting Austin, to see if she agreed, and she responded with a slow shaking of the head and a lowering of the hooded eyelids, feeling the pain of maybe the frank and honest chill of Gallic sang froid in the veins, if not outright, taken-for-granted pessimism, as she whisperingly asked what nobody in any quadrant of this big and glorious globe of ours really wants to hear: “Will anybody even be reading serious literature in fifty years?”
I managed to slap my hands to my ears before she got it all out. No kidding, I really did, looking foolish in the Austin restaurant where I performed it, but suitably expressing my own deep and stubborn and total optimism, nevertheless, which I hope against hope isn’t only more Yankee dumb naiveté on this score, in a time of assaults on the printed word itself coming from many directions as we move deeper and deeper into a new, thoroughly electronic and perhaps increasingly frivolous age.
THE OTHER LIFE OF ANY BOOK:
THREE COPIES OF
MALCOLM LOWRY’S
UNDER THE VOLCANO
1. I Am Wondering
I am wondering if books themselves have a life of their own or, more so, if every individual copy of a book sometimes does have an existence,
and possibly a purpose, somehow very separate from the text. I’m not sure how new this idea is, but I suspect it has taken me to an understanding that could be new, or at least worth repeating.
Bear with me on this one.
2. Calle Donceles
Once in Mexico City I came upon a rather odd copy of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano in one of the used bookshops along Calle Donceles.
Calle Donceles is not far from the fine cathedral and regally resplendent maroon-stone administration buildings from the Spanish colonial regime on the huge public square of the Zócalo, blue mountains all around, and it’s in what I like to think of as the “literary” pocket of this the old quarter of the sprawling, modern city. Literary not because of any major publishing houses that I know of being located nearby, but because there are maybe a dozen of those bookshops clustered on narrow Donceles, one after another and with open fronts and shelves so high that wobbly wooden ladders are often needed to access the top tiers. The names of the shops offer wonderful titles on their own, like El Inframundo (The Underworld), El Laberinto (The Labyrinth), Los Hermanos de la Hoja (punningly, Brothers of the Page), and my favorite, overtly invoking the metaphysical, El Callejón de los Milagros (The Alley of Miracles). I love that street.
It was a sunny June afternoon, my last of this particular trip, and I had been thinking a lot about Lowry, author of that one masterpiece in his short life, Under the Volcano. The novel is among the great performances of late modernism indeed, a philosophically probing, full-language symphony telling of the final day in the life of an alcoholic British consul, Geoffrey Firmin, who is called simply “the Consul”; he’s exiled to a meaningless diplomatic post in Cuernavaca, the beautiful mountain resort town south of the capital and once the summer retreat of ill-fated Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota. In fact, being close to obsessed with Lowry’s writing for nearly my whole adult life (more on this obsession later), I had once walked through just about every scene of the novel in Cuernavaca. And this time while in Mexico City I thought I might stay at the Hotel Canadá, seeing as that was where Lowry himself usually put up whenever in the city from Cuernavaca with his first wife. Lowry lived a life of alcoholic dissolution in Mexico during 1936-38, and no need to document how the novel itself is intensely autobiographical, a critical given.
For some reason that afternoon, I was sort of making it a point to see how much Lowry the local used bookstores had. I was heartened to notice that in one shop’s Novelas section, an entire long wall, there were yellow bands with bold black lettering for the major authors on those shelves, and right between one for LONDON and another for MANN, a label surely announced: LOWRY. Not that it or any of the other shops really had much by or about him, perhaps a single translated Under the Volcano issued by a Mexican publisher, or a worn copy or two of the translated Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid; that’s the posthumously released novelized account he wrote about going back to Mexico for several months in 1945-46 with his second wife to show her the actual scenes of episodes in the then unpublished Under the Volcano. The trip ended disastrously, by the way, with more booze-fueled calamities for Lowry and even an attempt at suicide, before he was officially deported by the Mexican authorities; yet it also ended somewhat miraculously, with Lowry getting word while staying in Cuernavaca that Under the Volcano—which had been through laborious revisions and several complete drafts in the last decade and had been submitted to publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, turned down by a long list of houses—was finally accepted by good publishers in both New York and London, the two letters of acceptance both arriving in Cuernavaca on the same day. As I said, at least there was some Lowry in those shops, understandable when you consider that Mexicans would respect an author whose most important book is set in their country.
However, when I got to one place, almost the last at the end of the street, there was something very different. High up on a shelf, but within reach, was a copy in Spanish of Bajo el Volcán quite unlike the dog-eared copies of a standard Mexican paper edition with its simple beige cover that I had seen elsewhere; this one was hardbound in maroon pebble-grain, like leatherette, with gold stampings on the spine and front for the title and author. Standing there in the shop open to the street, I pulled it down and—the din of taxi horns blowing and the rich, all-pervasive aroma of traffic exhaust, half pleasant, that is Mexico City stronger than ever at the end of such a hot and windless day—I saw that it was a special reissuing apparently for a matched series of books released in 1979 by the Mexico City publishing house Promexa:
LAS GRANDES OBRAS DEL SIGLO VEINTE
Yes, the Great Works of the Twentieth Century. And a page up front gave the rest of the good company the book kept in the series, the few dozen titles chosen seemingly free of any regional bias, listing just the top Latin Americans, such as Borges and Neruda, and showing a certain critical integrity overall, with not only a shoo-in like Kafka included, but also—attesting to a knowledge of the truly artistically significant—Henry Miller, represented by, naturally, Tropic of Cancer. Leafing through this Lowry edition, I read some of the introduction in Spanish, its talk of Lowry’s passion for Mexico, yet certainly no extensive mention of the Mexican government’s opinion of him. He was all but forced to leave in 1938 after repeated run-ins with the police concerning his public drunkenness, though he later claimed, boastfully, he had been falsely accused of being a foreign spy, as happens to the Consul of his novel; then the formal deportation in 1946 on his only return visit, when the police confronted him with trumped-up unpaid visa fines from 1938. I guess I also stared at the full-page black-and-white photo inside the cover, which seemed to be the shot from the original 1947 American edition. It showed a still relatively young Lowry with a neat mustache and wearing a herringbone-tweed suit coat and a sporty plaid tie, looking decidedly handsome in the shimmering backlighting; below it were biographical facts on his Cambridge University education and the like, but scant indication there either of the practically continual torment of his tumultuous life. It seemed odd to think that right in this quarter, the old colonial sector of Mexico City, transpired some of his worst alcoholic mess-ups while he was first trying to write a draft of this very book I was holding, which had been destined to be rejected by—even ridiculed by— those so many editors it was submitted to for so many years. I was just a couple of streets over from the still-shabby Hotel Canadá built in the 1930s, a place Lowry would himself later describe as “a nasty little hotel...like some jerry-built apartment house in Vienna or Berlin left unfinished from lack of money and then completed on a still cheaper plan while still preserving this illusion of the ‘modern’”—true, it was at the Hotel Canadá and in this area that some of his most disastrous alcoholic misadventures took place. Lowry hopelessly drunk again, Lowry plagued by guilt that he had disappointed his well-to-do parents back in England, Lowry trying to get published and forever having to justify himself to other writers and friends, Lowry hopelessly drunk again.
There’s a beautiful short story by his first wife, the late Jan Gabrial, an American writer and largely the model for the Consul’s wife in Under the Volcano. The story appears to be based on events when she finally decided to leave him after their brief marriage of several years, a piece printed in the old Story magazine in 1946, called “Not with a Bang.” Probably attracting little attention then, it has since become part of the Lowry biographical dossier and is reprinted in at least one critical casebook on his life and work. As the story would have it, a couple are staying in Mexico City. Late one evening the husband shows up in their room at what obviously is the Hotel Canadá, and the wife is already in bed for the night. He, the Lowry character, is thoroughly drunk—perfectamente borracho—from prowling around those saloon-door cantinas that still exist in abundance nearby; it has taken two bellboys to awkwardly maneuver him out of the elevator and into the room. He has bought a little puppy from a beggar on the street and is keeping it tucked under his coat. When he asks her to take care
of the puppy, she tries to gently tell him that he has to give it back, there is no place for it in a hotel room. Seized by another alcoholic rage, he turns on her, calls her “a bitch,” and says she doesn’t love him and the puppy is all he has to love. He then heads out, back to the cantinas again. Feeling responsible, she dresses to go and look for him in the cold night. Finally, after some searching on foot and then a taxi ride, she finds him sitting alone on the pavement, and together they go into one of his regular cantinas, where before long he is holding court while standing at the bar, noisily and happily drunk. She sits at a table, watching it all from that distance, then remembers the puppy and sees that the husband is leaning with his arm flat on the coat that he has placed on the bar, the puppy still inside the pile of it and suffocating. She tries to rescue it, but it is too late. Railing loudly, he proceeds to blame the entire thing on her, accusing her of being forever bent on ruining him. She admits to herself then that he is too much for her, he is too far gone for her to save, and she musters the resolve to leave him at last. The Lowry character is named Michael, and this is how the story ends: “And harshly, violently, she began to cry, because she knew that the boat that was Michael had slipped its moorings in her life, and was even now putting out to the darker sea to which she could not follow him.” Jan herself returned from Mexico to the United States on her own in 1937. She asked Lowry to swear off drinking as the sole condition on which she would stick with him, attempt to salvage the marriage, but he couldn’t do it.
The City at Three P.M. Page 12
