Re-reads

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein

As you can see, there’s something odd about the title/author. This “autobiography” wasn’t written by Alice, nor is it about her. She exists only as an appendage to Gertrude Stein. It is about their life together, full of people, activities, travel. The writing is straightforward and makes for fairly pleasant reading. Stein occupied a central place in the Paris scene in the early 1900s, when major changes were taking place in painting and writing. But, as for the many artists and authors who populate these pages, a lot of them famous, we get very little in-depth characterization. For example, Picasso appears quite often, but I don’t know much about the man. Parties, visits, talk – Stein loved these things, and, though we’re told they happen, they don’t come to life. Stein deals in externals, not feelings (and this includes her relationship with Alice). The section of the book that had more of a story line concerns the years of WWI, when she and Alice delivered supplies to French hospitals. My picture of Stein herself is a bit hazy. She seems pleasant, intelligent, opinionated, strong-willed. People seemed to have liked her, liked to be in contact with her mind. She has fall-outs with some, but she writes critically of only one of them: Ernest Hemingway. She uses slang for the first and only time to call him “yellow” – a word whose intent is to be hurtful (he was still alive when the book came out). This from a woman who elsewhere never displays cruelty. It doesn’t reflect well on her (nor do I think Hemingway was yellow, and Stein offers no reason for using that word). In closing: Stein was disappointed that her writing was not appreciated – something she dearly wanted (“One writes for oneself and for strangers but with no adventurous publishers how can one come into contact with those same strangers”). Well, Gertrude, I can answer your question (which doesn’t contain a question mark). Just as you appreciated the new movements in art, which turned away from a depiction of humans – cubism, surrealism, etc. – you also turned to writing which was unfathomable to humans (such as the 1000+ page The Making of Americans). Anyway, in a business in which Who Do You Know matters so much – and you knew everybody of importance – your obscure work did get published (though probably read by very few). You were fortunate to live in a time and place when innovation (however worthless) was valued, and even considered to be genius. When you were accessible, such as in this book, people did read and enjoy you. A pity you turned to “experimental” writing. Experiments are for labs. 3

 

Three Women – Gertrude Stein

The first and last stories (“The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena”) were about simple, one-dimensional characters, and their portrayals were done with an effective simplicity. But I found the long story, much longer than the other two put together, to be unreadable. I tried, but had quit on it. For starters – the title: “Melanctha.” Whoever heard of such a name, and how the hell do you pronounce it? She’s referred to as Black, but Stein makes her of mixed race. Probably her white blood, in Stein’s mind, qualified her to be a suitable subject to write about, for her characters who are just plain “niggers” (a word Stein uses) are not worth bothering with. I objected to her portrayal of Blacks; I don’t think Stein knew squat about that race. Melanctha (I’m using copy and paste) is exceedingly complex. She engages in long, long, very long conversations with a Black doctor (also of mixed race). Their discussions, full of repetitions and done with a sort of cadence, is monotonous and pointless. This is self-indulgent writing. I think Stein put words on paper, never revising, letting her genius flow, pure and unadulterated. The Melanctha section of Three Women is an early example of the experimental writing that I referred to in the previous review and which would take over most of Stein’s work. (Delete)

A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway

When I first read this memoir I may have been in a stage when I had a romanticized view of authors and writing – and of Hemingway. That’s long gone. Still, I enjoyed his account of how things were when he was in his twenties, living in Paris with his wife Hadley. Not that I believed much of what I was reading. He’s the hero of the piece, in that he’s always in control, a solid, sensible, all-knowing presence. A man who has little to say while others around him carry on, often foolishly. Feast is a falsification of the past – or, rather, a glamorization. Hemingway was in his late fifties and early sixties when he wrote the book, which was done in stages, and he wasn’t sound mentally and emotionally. So maybe he was indulging in a pleasant fantasy. He often claims that he was poor in the Paris years, and this simply isn’t true. He and Hadley had plenty of money. But poverty fits in with the image of a struggling writer living in a garret. As for the many authors he interacts with, one was Gertrude Stein. If you read my review of her Autobiography you probably wonder if he gets revenge for her comment about his being “yellow.” Not really (he even considers “Melanctha” to be “very good”). His portrayal of her isn’t a positive one – she comes across as dictatorial – and there’s a scene where he overhears her begging in a demeaning way. What I did find cruel was how he treated Scott Fitzgerald. Even if what happened between the two was true, it should not have been written. Maybe jealousy played a role, for Fitzgerald was his competitor as a writer. The book ends in an elegiac way: all that was precious would be destroyed. Hemingway blames it on the rich who invade his and Hadley’s lives. He writes of seeing Hadley waiting for him at a railway station: “I wished that I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.” But he would have an affair that would lead to the end of the marriage. As for Hadley’s presence in the book, it’s scanty. Her name doesn’t appear until page 54 (she’s previously referred to as “my wife”). The Scribner hardcover edition has an insert – a strange one, written by Jane Kramer. It mostly criticizes Hemingway and debunks the “facts” of Feast, often harshly. She calls it “an old man’s book, petty and incontinent.” She finds the sentences “pretentious,” as if “some besotted Hemingway student wrote them” (and then she gives a telling example). She attacks him as a man, especially his treatment of Hadley. So, the question arises, why was this introduction allowed by the lifelong publisher of his books? Hemingway committed suicide before Feast was published. It was edited by his last (fourth) wife, Mary, and there’s some controversy about how much was omitted and altered in her editing. It’s all so sad. 3

The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

Surprisingly, I thought this novel was very good. My surprise is due to the fact that I normally don’t care for EH’s work, and I thought that Sun was on the MMB list because, when I first read it, I was an impressionable teenager. In my review of his letters I wrote that I liked them because they were spontaneous. This novel has the same spontaneity; we don’t see the author laboring to find the one true word. My interest was constant, and I glided along. The first-person narrator, Jake Barnes, is mostly a detached observer. He gets involved, has feelings, but they’re muted. In place of a plot we get episodes, mainly the Fiesta in Spain, where the bullfighting sequence takes place. The novel is saturated with drinking; people are often drunk. The two main characters that Jake interacts with are Brett Ashley and Robert Cohen. Both people are based on real life figures, and both are portrayed unattractively. Cohen’s Jewishness is a factor in his unattractiveness; there’s a definite strain of anti-Semitism in the book (the word “kike” appears too often). As for Lady Brett, she’s no lady. To me, she isn’t. She’s an alcoholic, a beauty in her mid-thirties, and is a user. She uses men as sexual partners, then drops them. She’s not malicious, but she still causes harm. She claims, and probably believes, that she loves Jake, but there can be no sex between them due to a war injury he sustained. Except in regard to her, no reference is made of this loss; Jake seems detached even from that. Still, as noted, he’s an observer, and the descriptions in the book are excellent (I especially liked the fishing episode). The dialogue, of which there’s a lot, is spot on – Hemingway gets the various voices right. Is there a higher meaning in Sun? I don’t see one. It’s just a well-written, entertaining excursion into a world long gone. It was Hemingway’s first – and, many consider, his “greatest” novel. I would amend that by calling it his best novel. He wrote it while still married to Hadley, but it was published after their separation. He dedicates the book to her and to his son. 4

The next three books inspired an essay called “Three Authors in Search of a Life.” You can find it at Tapping on the Wall.

The Friend – Sigrid Nunez
I knew this novel won the National Book Award, but I had to check whether it was for fiction (it was). My doubts arose because there’s hardly any plot and only one human character – the nameless female first person narrator. There are two friends in the book. One (shown on the front cover) is a Great Dane named Apollo. The dog was passed on to the narrator when another friend committed suicide. We learn about the difficulties of having such a huge animal in New York. Apollo isn’t an endearing creature; he’s old and despondent. Eventually he warms up to his new “owner” (she doesn’t like that word), and she to him. But the bulk of the book isn’t about Apollo. The narrator, who’s in her sixties and has had a long career as a writer and teacher of creative writing (all of which is true of Nunez), devotes the most space to her thoughts on the literary life. Also of concern to her is the subject of suicide; that word – “suicide” – may set a record for appearance in a short novel. This centering on how Nunez (through her character) feels and perceives things made the book seem like a memoir. Her deceased friend (also a writer/teacher, though with the status of a Nobel candidate) was a womanizer who had affairs with his students (long ago she had been one of them and they had sex – only once, after which a close platonic relationship developed). Though he’s the “You” the “I” addresses throughout the book, Nunez sticks in a scene that raises the question of whether he exists as he’s been presented. She has a “woman” visit a man who failed in his suicide attempt and who has a small mutt she cared for briefly. After a long conversation the woman tells this diminished version of the famous author that she has written a story about him. Whatever Nunez is up to in this very personal book, I can’t see its appeal for the general public. I’m a literary soul, so I found her observations to be interesting, and I liked the clarity and precision of her prose. I even found the ending to be moving. But people who want a heart-warming story of bonding between human and animal will have to plow through a whole lot of other stuff, much of it depressing.

Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters 1917-1961 – edited by Carlos Baker
If you’re interested in Hemingway, this is the book for you. Because of the uninhibited nature of these letters, they’re very revealing as to what the man was like. The book is huge – over 900 pages – and I skimmed much of it (such as the parts about hunting and fishing and bullfighting and wartime exploits). What I paid attention to was his emotional life and how he felt about the people he interacted with. I came away with some sympathy for him, but the overriding feeling he evoked in me was disapproval – and sometimes disgust. But I won’t go into why I responded the way I did. Since the man is revealed in these letters, you can reach your own conclusions. I wonder how many care. In his heyday, in the 1950s, he was a Bigger-Than-Life figure on the American scene. Papa was the epitome of a new type of writer – the two-fisted brawler, the hard-drinking adventurer. His safaris, his marriages (four in all), and his feuds made the news; his face was on the cover of every major magazine. Hemingway wanted to be a great writer, right up there with the likes of Tolstoy and Flaubert, and when he received the Nobel Prize his status with the giants was confirmed. But is he still held in esteem? I think not. For me his characters are artificial and his prose is over-worked, self-conscious and, well, precious. If he were alive today and read that last word, he would challenge me to duke it out with him, so he could knock my teeth down my throat. (Which he would also do if he read my review of To Have and Have Not, which is a crummy novel.) I think, as a writer, he shines the brightest in these letters. A few are formal in nature, but most are spontaneous, full of misspelling and grammatical errors. Obviously there was no revision. But he avoids those qualities I found fault with in his fiction – they’re lively, inventive and often funny. He comes across in all his shifting moods: loving and spiteful, happy and depressed, generous and brutish. Also on display is a virulent racism and an anger that’s truly chilling. He didn’t curb his words; these letters weren’t meant for public consumption. In his will he wrote that “none of the letters I wrote in my lifetime are to be published.” His wife, Mary, was executrix of his estate, and for fifteen years after his suicide (a blast to his forehead from a double-barreled Boss shotgun) she abided by his wishes and sought to prevent their publication. But she relented, for whatever reason, and thus Carlos Baker has given us this volume. The letters are “selected,” and we get none of the ones Hemingway received. Oddly enough, this isn’t a problem. What we have is a journey through a life, from age eighteen to sixty-two (the last letter, which was written less than three weeks before he ended his life, closes with these words: “Am feeling fine and very cheerful about things and hope to see you all soon”). I should note, in closing, that success did not bring Hemingway happiness. In A Moveable Feast, his posthumously published memoir about the time when he was married to his first wife Hadley and was just setting out on his writing career, he closes with these elegiac words: “But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”

That Time of Year – Joyce Horner
This is a journal Joyce Horner kept during the three years (1975 to 1977) she spent in a nursing home (she became wheelchair-bound at age seventy-one). She had been a professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and had written two novels; her poetry had appeared in leading magazines. In the journal’s last entry she’s about to leave the nursing home to go to Boston for an operation (which was to prove unsuccessful). Three years later she died. I learned these scanty facts from Robert Tucker’s Introduction (I could find almost nothing about her on the internet). Mr. Tucker – who states that he never met Joyce Horner – was clearly moved by the person who wrote this journal – and so was I. In presenting a matter-of-fact chronicle of her daily life a distinct personality emerges. The beginning: “Everyone wants to go home. Perhaps that says too much. Everyone ‘wants out.’ Or there may be some who are beyond wanting as much as that. But the woman who calls ‘Martha’ over and over, the woman who calls ‘Eileen,’ want what they used to have and sometimes think they can get it if they call loud enough.” Unlike many, Joyce has resources to fall back on: literature and classical music (provided by her trusty radio). Nature is also precious to her, and she loves to sit out in the sun, to smell the new-mown grass and the pine. She keeps up with the politics of the time and continues to write poetry. Visits and letters from friends give her pleasure, and sometimes she’s able to go for a few days to her home, which she shares with her friend Elizabeth. Joyce never married, though in one entry she writes “I suppose nostalgia takes the place of fantasy in age. (Heaven knows, I had fantasies enough, including the recurring one of meeting the completely desirable husband – I never set foot on an Atlantic liner without hoping for that.)” She’s also nostalgic about her active days, when she could take a long trek with a backpack or explore the streets of a foreign city. This journal was meant to be read by others; it’s too carefully worked to be a purely personal undertaking. But the act of writing it also serves a purpose for its author. By observing, and by conveying her observations and thoughts through language, Joyce is trying to keep her intellect sharp. It is sharp, but the fear behind this effort is that her mind will deteriorate (as has happened to so many of those around her). She’s remarkably tolerant of what she experiences – the world of the nursing home isn’t a nightmare world for her; there’s kindness and humor to be found, and she appreciates the nurses who do a difficult and underpaid job and still retain their spirit. Though it wasn’t Joyce’s nature to be depressed or negative, with passing time her down moments become more persistent. She worries that she’ll be deprived of people with whom she can exchange ideas; she doesn’t want “to be visited as good work,” but she feels that she’s losing the energy to be interesting to others. Tiredness and resignation must be setting in, and the entries become more widely spaced. But that’s just part of the experience I shared with Joyce Horner. This is a rich and valuable book, and I thank the University of Massachusetts Press for allowing her to live for me. For Joyce that would mean something. *

The Ice Saints – Frank Tuohy
This is a Cold War novel without the espionage. Tuohy is concerned with ordinary people living in Poland in the 1960s, when it was under communist rule. A young English woman, Rose, travels to Biala Gora. Her sister is married to a Polish man, and a deceased aunt has left their teenage son a sizable amount of money. It seems like good news, but in Poland forces conspire to undermine anything that’s good. In this unrelentingly drab and dreary place even a stroll in a park reveals a squirrel with “thin fur and a degenerate face” and trees that show “the amputations of shell fire.” People long subjected to defeat and deprivation are resentful, suspicious, and their self-deprecating humor is a mixture of cynicism and defiance. Rose’s hope is that the son, Tadeusz (for whom she forms an immediate attachment), can escape to England; all he needs is a visa. Yet her plans turn out badly, and at the end the sister tells Rose “Just leave here as soon as possible. That’s all I want now.” Rose is appealing, and her imperfections are the sort that makes her easy to identify with. The prose seems made up of concrete slabs that don’t quite fit flush, but this wasn’t a defect; it conveys the unavoidable disorientation one feels in a foreign world. By keeping things grounded in the realities of everyday life, Tuohy gives us an honest look behind the curtain. In 1964, when this novel was published, it may have been important. Today, it’s still a good read.

An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
In the first sentence the elderly narrator tells the reader “you will not have to walk far.” This personal approach is to be a constant, along with asides (“I believe I was recalling the events of that day last month . . .” or “It is possible, of course, that Mori-san did not use those exact words”). What Ono slowly reveals is the part he played in the nationalism that led to World War II. In his paintings he portrayed the New Japan as a militant force, and he became an adviser to the Committee of Unpatriotic Activities. In 1948 (when events take place) some – especially the young – feel hostile to those who, in their eyes, caused so much misery. Ono can’t remain unaware of such an attitude because his daughter is of marriageable age; in the Japanese culture of the time, suitors hire investigators to check on the backgrounds of prospective mates, and Ono’s past may be an obstacle for Noriko. There are problems with how the story is told. The prose is smooth, unruffled; but people don’t talk that way, so Ono’s voice seems artificial. And then there’s what he tells the reader. For much of the book we don’t know what his “secret” is, even though he’s fully aware of it. To withhold information is a novelistic tactic that the author hangs on his narrator. Still, when we finally understand Ono’s involvement, Ishiguro rejects the simplistic path of presenting us with an unrepentant war criminal or a man wracked by guilt. Instead, Ono perceives that his actions were mistaken and caused harm, but he also knows that he was motivated at the time by sincere belief. We get acceptance instead of catharsis; the book turns out to be about an ordinary man contemplating his life from the perspective of old age. That he’s content at the end didn’t bother me. Others, though, may see it as an example of his callous obliviousness, and they may be right. When Ono’s daughter tells him that the role he played in the war was a minor one, he resists this evaluation. Is his desire to have been of importance a natural human impulse, or something more sinister? This is one of those books that can provoke argument, which is a strength.

To Have and Have Not - Ernest Hemingway
This book was depressing. Partly because of its content, partly due to the fact that everybody involved (including the author) had to know how bad it was. Maybe, if an editor had insisted on changes – that Hemingway take out the spite and make it a much shorter hard-boiled crime novel – it might have worked. It starts out pretty well, with Harry Morgan as the first person narrator. There’s far too much tough guy talk, but the voice is good, the action sequences move, and Hemingway’s knowledge of boats, fishing and Cuba adds authenticity. But Harry is a grim, oppressive presence, and I felt nothing but aversion for him. The back cover of the edition I have calls him an “honest man.” Honest? He agrees to smuggle some “Chinks” to Florida, but when he gets the dough he kills Mr. Sing by breaking his neck (“I bent the whole thing back until she cracked”); the Chinks get dumped back in Cuba. As for the above-mentioned spite, for long stretches Hemingway has other narrators take over; some are writers, and the only possible reason for their inclusion is to show how contemptible they are. So we swing from brutish Harry to Richard and Helen Gordon bickering: “I’m through with you and I’m through with love. Your kind of picknose love. You writer.” Eighty pages from the end I couldn’t bear to continue, though – having seen the movie and read the back cover (which claims that Harry will become involved “in a strange and unlikely love affair”) – I skimmed what was left, waiting in vain for Lauren Bacall to appear. Harry’s a family guy, but he exchanges about a half dozen words with his daughters, and his wife is merely a stooge whose purpose is to rhapsodize about what a man Harry is. He’s more of a man than other men, even after he loses an arm in a shootout and is left with a stub that’s “like a flipper on a loggerhead.” This grungy, sullen, blood and booze-saturated mess isn’t just a minor novel by a Nobel Prize winner; it’s a failure of character. The prose is careless, and the stream of consciousness sequences lumber along like Frankenstein’s monster: “You just get dead like most people are most of the time. I guess that’s how it is all right. I guess that’s just what happens to you. Well, I’ve got a good start. I’ve got a good start if that’s what you have to do. I guess that’s what you have to do all right. I guess that’s it. I guess that’s what it comes to.”