Into the Looking-Glass Wood

by Alberto Manguel

  Brill chooses for his school a dual curriculum that combines the Jewish and French traditions; he sets it up in Middle America, in the centre of a lake, “as though he had a horror of coasts and margins, of edges and extremes of any sort.” On this island, Brill never succeeds in holding his students’ interest, nor does he recognize genius when it comes his way. When the famous “imagistic linguistic logician” Hester Lift enrols her daughter Beulah, Brill, Lear-like, dismisses the subdued child. Instead, he places all his hopes on his son, who ends up studying business administration in Miami.

  And yet, even along his chosen middle road, Brill is pushed onward by a vital thrust: the urge to survive. Not simply being, but growing, increasing, while threatened as a Jew by the cannibal galaxy of Christian culture. Survival, in Brill’s case, is achieved by assimilation—a reverse assimilation, taking the outside world and making it his own, cannibalizing the cannibal.

  The astonishing discovery that Ozick helps us make is that survival can be, at its best, a secret event: not even the survivor needs to be aware of it. Brill’s son finds his own commercial way; Hester Lift triumphs in her own terms; Beulah fulfils her promise; even the failed Brill succeeds, however unwittingly, because his school brings about Beulah’s success. Even though we choose to forget it, or deny it, or pretend to ignore it (Ozick argues) God is generous. Perhaps her books are largely about the generosity of God.

  In his introduction to Herbert Read’s masterpiece, The Green Child, Graham Greene says that art is always the resolution of a combat. But is this always the case? Surely sometimes it is the combat itself that, unresolved, becomes a work of art, offering no outcome, waiting, hoping against hope, for the Messiah of its resolution. The description of this combat, during which the writer doesn’t answer but asks questions, unfolding possibilities and resolving nothing, is in many cases, I believe, more satisfying than the literature of outcome, which often smacks of moral fable.

  All of Ozick’s fiction shares this unfolding quality. In The Messiah of Stockholm, for instance, Ozick invents the story of a man who invents his story—his name, his birth, his ancestry—reshaping his daily life to make it unreal to others but real to himself. For Lars Andemening, the outside world is a person from Porlock. Lars, like Coleridge, is a dreamer.

  He is also a book reviewer for a small Swedish newspaper. He never knew his parents—he is an orphan smuggled into Sweden during the Nazi terror—but he has convinced himself that his father was the great Polish writer Bruno Schulz, murdered by the SS in 1942. Lars has no proof of this parentage except his own conviction, which has made him a half-hearted misanthrope. His only confidante is a German bookseller named Heidi, a woman protected from both affection and pain by a cocoon of scorn. Heidi provides Lars first with a teacher of Polish, then with Polish books to learn the language of his chosen father.

  Schulz’s entire oeuvre consists of two volumes, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass and The Street of Crocodiles, plus a few letters and drawings. Missing is a novel scholars suppose to have been Schulz’s masterpiece, The Messiah.

  One day, Heidi tells Lars that a woman calling herself Adela (the name of a character in Schulz’s books) has appeared out of the blue with the lost manuscript in a plastic bag; she says she is Schulz’s daughter. According to Heidi and her husband, Dr. Eklund, The Messiah has returned. Lars’s reality, and therefore his sanity, is threatened. “There’s no room in the story for another child,” he says to Heidi. “It’s not feasible. It can’t be.” For Lars’s story to make dramatic sense, there must be only one child, Lars himself. Adela must therefore be a fraud, and The Messiah, the long-awaited, much thirsted-for Messiah, must be a false one.

  The choice of Schulz as Lars’s father is not fortuitous: Schulz’s work is inhabited, even possessed, by the figure of the Father, a man who does not believe that Creation is exclusively the prerogative of God. In a quotation Ozick places at the beginning of her book, Schulz’s Father says: “There is no dead matter … lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life … even if the classical methods of creation should prove inaccessible for evermore, there still remain some illegal methods, an infinity of heretical and criminal methods.” Ozick the citizen, the Jew, must have watched in awe as Ozick the writer, the pagan, rolled out her heretical chain of linked creations in Lars’s story.

  It is as if Lars stood between two mirrors. First, there is Ozick, who creates Lars, attributing him to “an indifferent maker” whose hand “had smeared his mouth and chin and Adam’s apple.” Then comes Lars himself, a reviewer, a creator, though admittedly a second-hand one. Reviewers (such as myself) are envious readers who believe in surrogate parenthood, creating texts from someone else’s seed; Lars, after devouring a book he must review, falls asleep feeling “oddly fat,” as if pregnant with the words the writer has created. After his sleep, he can produce his piece almost in one draft. Lars is also the creator of his own name (in secret he calls himself Lazarus Baruch), of his own time (living much by night and sleeping in the afternoon, wringing two days out of one by dividing the day in two with a nap), of his own ancestry. In third place are Heidi and Dr. Eklund, who create around Lars’s world a meaner, tawdrier reality. Finally, somewhere along this line of creator-creations is God.

  God provides the contrast. In the seventeenth century, Judah Loew ben Bezabel, rabbi of Prague, made an artificial man, a golem who could, it was said, do a few menial tasks around the synagogue, like sweeping the floor and ringing the bells. But something was lacking in the golem. In the eyes of those who marvelled at it, the creature was more like a thing than a person. In the end, out of pity or terror, its creator destroyed it.

  Lars’s reality is like the golem: to Lars it may seem more real than real life, but it lacks the iron-clad immanence of a reality made by God. Lars knows this and refuses to see the last surviving person who had been part of Schulz’s life: Jozefina, Schulz’s fiancée, now living in London. Lars will not see her because his reality is far too fragile to bear confrontation. Schulz himself declared (as both Lars and Heidi quote) that “reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.” Lars, like God, will admit no other reality than his own. “He’s a priest of the original,” Heidi says of him. “What he wants is the original of things.”

  Lars accuses the Eklunds of wanting to be “in competition with God,” not realizing (or realizing only vaguely) that he is guilty of that very sin. Lars also sins by imagining that God requires our belief in order to exist. Discussing the need to inform the world of the appearance of The Messiah, Heidi insists, “People have to be told it exists.” And then, “If it’s not believed in, it might as well not exist.” “That sounds like God,” is Lars’s blasphemous answer.

  There are books designed to have no end: they are fathomless, they have the richness of unresolved mysteries. Every time we read through them and believe we have answered all their questions, new questions arise, and then more questions. The Messiah of Stockholm is one such book. In part, this endless reading can be attributed to Ozick’s Talmudic tradition of leaving no word idle, of pursuing each meaning to the marrow, as if the author (and the reader) were convinced that the entire Creation, including novels, was infinitely pregnant with revelation.

  But there is more. When, at the end of the book, Lars comes face to face with his grief, as his phantom father vanishes “inside the narrow hallway of his skull” clutching the never-to-be-seen-again Messiah, we know that Lars’s dream world has been shattered, and we mourn for his loss—but we are also left with a curious sense of wonder. Because in spite of murdered writers and orphaned men, Ozick realistically shows us, somewhere between bewilderment and belief, the possible beauty of the universe.

  Waiting for an Echo:

  On Reading Richard Outram

  Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for an echo.

  DON MARQUIS

  1. The Canyon
>
  WE ARE WHAT WE READ, but we are equally what we don’t read. What we, as a society, leave on the shelves defines us at least as much as the books we gobble up. Nineteenth-century Americans are mirrored in their choice of Longfellow as their parlour poet—nationalistic, traditional, hardly ever uncomfortable. But they are also mirrored by their misunderstanding, if not rejection, of Herman Melville—universalist, difficult and very unconventional.

  Until the 1960s, Canada barely acknowledged the existence of Canadian literature. When, thanks to the perseverance of young writers such as Margaret Atwood, and stubborn editors such as Robert Weaver, Canadian readers made the discovery that this literature existed, the pantheon of writers chosen to represent it set a style against which the writing to come was measured. The most vociferous representatives of the newly discovered literature were poets, and small publishers of poetry—Anansi, Talonbooks, Coach House Press—were among its most energetic champions. In very broad terms, the style of what became recognized as Canadian poetry was simple-sounding, chatty, intimate but never overwhelmingly passionate, well-mannered though sometimes effectively ironic, often funny, in obligatory free verse. Leafing through what may well be one of the pantheon’s canonical books, the New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, edited by Atwood (though published in 1982, it still echoes the sixties’ tenets) one is struck by the overall lightness of its tone and vocabulary, even in poets as seemingly dissimilar as Irving Layton and Paulette Jiles.

  A few lines, chosen at random, will illustrate what I mean: “my love is young & i am old/ she’ll need a new man soon” (Earle Birney); “A soldier is a man who is not a man” (Eli Mandel); “I live like a trapeze artist with a headache, my poems are no aspirins” (Milton Acorn); “Though what would a god be like—would he shop at Dominion?” (Dennis Lee). It is as if, in the long beginning, Canadian literature chose to be easy. This, perhaps, explains why certain poets, Atwood included, are remembered for their lighter verse, and others whose work seems more complex are virtually ignored. Among those notable for their absence from the Canadian pantheon is one of the finest poets in the English language: Richard Outram.

  My acquaintance with Outram’s work dates from 1979, when the publisher Louise Dennys, exercising that prerogative of friendship which consists in forcing books upon a friend, suggested that I read a slim volume called Turns. On page 40 was a poem that had almost all the characteristics of Canadian poetry listed earlier, and yet was something different, profound.

  Bearded Lady

  I am in fact a public slave;

  How I would like to misbehave

  And start the morning with a shave;

  But do not dare. Each day I rise

  To face my face with downcast eyes

  And make the toilette I despise,

  So that, my moustache all unfurled,

  My whiskers neatly oiled and curled,

  I may go forth to face the world.

  To bear all day the cruellest whips

  Of dirty jokes and jeers and quips;

  I am adept at reading lips.

  Hell hath indeed, as we are warned,

  No fury like a woman scorned:

  God knows why I am so adorned.

  He may not find, for all His Grace,

  A member of the human race

  To love me for my hirsute face;

  But when the world and time have died

  You’ll face me, seated by His side,

  His radiant and bearded Bride.

  I was overwhelmed by the intelligence, passion, and music of this concise collection, and by the robust joyfulness that echoed the ancient Talmudic warning: “A man is to give account in the Hereafter for any permissible pleasures from which he abstained.” Lines stayed with me, bred ideas, gave sense to experience. When later I needed an epigraph for an anthology of fantastic literature I was editing, two couplets read in Turns spelled out the essence of what I was trying to say:

  From one who maintains, there is nothing beyond

  The Human Imagination; or another

  Soul who contends, by night, that beyond

  The human imagination, there is Nothing?

  Turns made me want to read more of Outram’s work. I soon found that bookstores assiduously ignored him, and that he was absent from the libraries of most of my friends. I discovered, in fact, that Outram’s entire career had been one of absences. He has never received a national, let alone international award, or a Canada Council grant; he has never been included in any major anthology of Canadian poetry, rarely been acknowledged in reviews. Perhaps there is a reason for the silence surrounding Outram’s work. At work in his poems is that creature derided in so much of our accepted literature: that most unpopular of citizens, the moralist, the person who, in the simplest terms, is concerned with how we behave in the world.

  After reading Outram, I wanted to meet him. This was in 1979. Since then, several years of conversations have shown me that he is not concerned with picture postcards of heaven and hell: his interest is in conduct, not in punishments and rewards; in our reactions to the everyday flow, in how, by everything we do, we affect ourselves and the world around us.

  Outram was born in Oshawa, Ontario, in 1930 and graduated from Victoria College, University of Toronto. From 1956 to 1990, he worked as a stage hand at the CBC. With his wife, the artist Barbara Howard, he founded in 1960 the Gauntlet Press, where he printed several sequences of his poems later collected in other volumes. His first book, Eight Poems, was published by the Tortoise Press in 1959—the press’s single production. A few years later, an editor at Macmillan Canada invited him to submit a manuscript. The result was Exultate, Jubilate, published in 1966. Macmillan, however, rejected Outram’s next collection, as did several other publishers. Louise Dennys, who had just resigned as an editor at Clarke Irwin, was outraged at the rejection and took Outram’s manuscript with her to England, where she convinced Chatto & Windus to publish it in their prestigious Phoenix series. Chatto agreed, on condition that a Canadian publisher be recruited to help with the production costs.

  Outram found a co-publisher in a Toronto antiquarian bookseller, Hugh Anson-Cartwright, who, joining forces with Dennys, created Anson-Cartwright Editions in 1975 and published Turns. Anson-Cartwright also published Outram’s next book, The Promise of Light, in a limited edition of 250 copies. As it turned out, Outram was not the only author in the new press’s catalogue; in 1978 it published another obscure Canadian, the Czech émigré novelist Josef Skvorecky, later nominated for the Nobel Prize.

  Since the publication of Turns, Outram’s work has appeared under two other imprints. In 1985 his Selected Poems was published by Exile Editions and, a year later, Man in Love was published by Porcupine’s Quill, which also published Outram’s following books: Hiram and Jenny in 1988 and Mogul Recollected in 1993.

  2. The Echo

  Hiram and Jenny is a good starting-place. At its core are man and woman, that multitudinous couple, sitting at the water’s edge and leading lives that, like those of Adam and Eve, contain the whole of mankind—every thought, every war, every discovery, every death to come. “Every man,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote with moving conviction, “is an inlet to the same and to all of the same … what at any time has fallen to any man he can understand.” Hiram and Jenny exercise that understanding.

  They are common folk. Hiram has his banjo and his bodily aches; Jenny her neighbours and her newspaper. They go to movies at the Palace and to slide shows at the church. But Hiram and Jenny are also gods and heroes: Hiram becomes Icarus at the fall fair, plunging from a “slicker-yellow biplane” which he rides for $5.50. Jenny sees Jehovah in a moth caught on fire. Jenny metamorphoses into the four primordial elements. A seal offers Hiram Poseidon’s throne.

  … Hiram shuddered, knowing the cold’s bone stealth, the crushed lightless abysm. Said, “No!”

  History’s greats visit them. A snake becomes Diogenes the Cynic to Jenny’s Alexander, asking her to “step aside,/ stop blocking the sun
.” Plato comes to visit and he and Hiram go fishing. Beethoven talks to Hiram about the afterlife. A monarch butterfly turns out to be the Apostle Paul. Episode after episode, poem after poem, Outram builds a cosmology of sorts, rethinking our relationship to everyone and everything, writing, as Gosse said of Kipling, “with the whole of the English language” and the whole of humankind’s events.

  One of the most memorable poems in the volume is “Techne.” Here is Hiram crouched, washing his socks in a creek, while

  Not far offshore, unseen,

  crammed with warheads and comic books,

  a nuclear submarine

  noses about with her cornfed crew

  The submarine “buggers off”; Hiram continues to wash his socks, one yellow, one green with orange stripes.

  … No doubt

  God’s socks match in mysterious ways.

  Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,

  The Dead shall rise up on the Last Day.

  Hiram don’t give a damn.

  Hiram’s conduct, his concern with immediate responsibilities, the awful and ludicrous importance of his assigned task, becomes suddenly clear. Comprehension follows surprise, compassion replaces curiosity. Hiram and Jenny’s God is like the gods of Greece and Rome, prone to human weaknesses that do not diminish His divinity, but illuminate instead man and woman’s Godlike essence promised (or revealed) in the Garden. Outram humanizes God’s mysteries, picturing man’s plight and God’s tremendous covenant—why not?—as the washing of socks.

  If one poem in Hiram and Jenny could sum up Outram’s credo, that poem would be “Error,” in which both heroes bring light into water by entering it themselves.

  Hiram’s discovered desire is to enter water