FICTION The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904), Arthur Conan Doyle – My emergency book, the book on my phone, for when I need to read in the dark, or it is raining at the bus stop, or similar dire situations.  I have been dipping into it for two years or more, but decided to finish it up.  In the previous collection, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), I could see Doyle growing bored with his creation to the extent that he shoved him off a cliff, but the stories in this book are rock solid magazine entertainment, every one of them. A Mirror for Witches (1928), Esther Forbes – How many of us read Johnny Tremain (1943) as a child?  All of us (among the U.S. us)?  This earlier novel is about a lively teenage witch in the Salem vicinity.  It is written in a lightly imitative 17th century, flavorful but not overdoing it.  The narrator thinks the girl is a witch, and the girl thinks she’s a witch, so the novel works as both inventive fantasy and as psychology.  It is a simpler younger cousin of James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), so enjoyable that I am tempted to revisit Johnny Tremain after, oh, not fifty years, but getting close. Soul (1935-46), Andrey Platonov – I wrote about this terrific collection here. The Gift (1938), Vladimir Nabokov – I should write at least a little something about this one, which I have read several times.  A favorite novel; a great book.  The quotation in the title above is from the second page. Near to the Wild Heart (1943), Clarice Lispector – This one received a bit of incomprehension back here. The Matchmaker (1954), Thornton Wilder – Twelve years ago I read On the Razzle (1981), Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Johann Nestroy’s farce Einen Jux will er sich machen (1842).  Wilder, in his earlier version, moves the fun from Vienna to Yonkers and Manhattan. The Acceptance World (1955), Anthony Powell – The third novel of Dance to the Music of Time.  Perhaps I will have something to write about it after I read the fourth novel. A Rage in Harlem (1957), Chester Himes – The portrait of grotesque Harlem from the first, say, half of this novel is astounding.  Then Himes has to move through a plot, which also has its pleasures. Attila (1991), Aliocha Coll Attila (2014), Javier Serena – A little bit of stunt publishing here.  I will write a longer note on these two books.  It’s a good stunt. POETRY Ten Indian Classics (6th-19th c) – A collection of ten excerpts from the Murty Classical Library of India series for its tenth anniversary.  There is so much to read. The Necessary Angel (1951) & Collected Poems (1954), Wallace Stevens Counterparts (1954) & Brutus's Orchard (1957) & Collected Poems: 1936-1961 (1962), Roy Fuller GERTRUDE STEIN Patriarchal Poetry (1927) Stanzas in Meditation (1932) The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) Picasso (1938) IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Journal du voleur (1949), Jean Genet – Genet parapatets around Europe cities and prisons, getting by as a beggar, thief, and prostitute.  His great weakness is that his type is brutes, which leads to some ugly places in the 1930s.  The French is somewhat easier and sometimes more abstract than in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (1943) but still rough going.  All that slang. Livro Sexto (1962), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – Poems of the shore and the sea, but with a little more political protest than usual. Tempo de Mercês  (1973), Maria Judite de Carvalho – Speaking of more abstract, compared to the earlier two collections I read.  Sad stories where nothing happens. O Surrealismo Português (2024), Clara Rocha – A volume in a Portuguese series like those Oxford Very Short Introductions.  I wish I had a shelf of them.  Portuguese Surrealism lasted five years.

Another remarkable Russian novel finally made it into English last year, Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur, written in 1929 but not published until 1972, in Paris. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler have been translating Platonov for decades now, and this novel and the apparatus they include with it are a triumph.  The Foundation Pit (1930) is a better novel, more focused and inventive, but this one is an event for English-language readers.  By current standards, Chevengur is at least the fourth best book published in the last twenty-five years. Platonov was, to reiterate my distant last post, not just a writer but an engineer, somehow a scientist but also a mystic who deeply believed in communism but also in its inevitable failure.  In Chevengur, his first novel, this is all as clear as fiction can make it.  A character theorizes about “the possibility of destroying night for the sake of an increase in harvests” (141) – you know, keep the sun out perpetually, by means of science or collective Leninist willpower or something – and although Platonov recognizes that the idea is crazy he, and not just his character, also kind of means it.  It is like, a descendant of, Charles Fourier turning the sea into lemonade.  It is like a communist Atlas Shrugged, if you can imagine that book continually undermining its own ideas, which in a sense it does, but I guess I mean knowingly. The novel begins in pre-Soviet crisis: famine, typhus, war.  An orphan theme runs through the whole book.  “Horselessness had set in” (91).  “Horselessness” is a fine piece of Platonov, a screwy word that accurately describes the disaster.  There is also hopelessness, of course: “Where are we going”? said one old man, , who had begun to grow shorter from the hopelessness of life.  “We’re going any which way, till someone curbs us. Turn us around – and we’ll come back again.” (92) Yet the novel is also a comedy in the tradition of Gogol and Dostoevsky, full of hysterical laughter, as well as Gogol’s tendency for anything to come alive.  The mechanic Zakhar Pavlovich “began to live with resignation, no longer counting on universal radical improvement” (62), a sad condition in a Platonov novel, but he can still talk to the locomotives he repairs: “I know,” the locomotive sympathized in a deep voice – and sank further into the dark of its cooling strength. “That’s what I say!” Zakhar Pavlovich agreed.  (64) The comical catastrophes turn into a long picaresque section, characters wandering through the ruins of the Revolution, bumping into Dostoevsky – “The lame man was called Fyodor Dostoevsky” (140) – and a crazy man named God – “Dvanov set off, along with God” (99).  One of the wanderers is openly a Don Quixote-figure, horse and all, although unlike Quixote he has a strong socialist horse.  Then later there is a second Don Quixote, this time with a suit of armor and a pile of disarmed grenades. In the second half of the novel, the characters concentrate in the steppe village of Chevengur where perfect communism has been established by the usual bloody methods, but where the great joke is that none of the surviving peasants and rural villagers have any idea what Marxist-Leninist communism is.  They are just making it all up, based on, more than anything, Old Believer Russian Orthodoxy.  How did Platonov think this could be published?  Anyway, things end pretty much as they have to end. The Chevengur half of the novel is full of heightened Soviet revolutionary language so bizarre that it was soon abandoned.  This makes for a challenge for the translators which they often solve by means of notes.  It is all, unfortunately, not much fun.  Somehow the bleak but lively picaresque half of the novel is a lot of fun, but the static, dialectical village half is not. “But communism’s about to set in!” Chepurny quietly puzzled in the darkness of his agitation.  “Why am I finding everything so hard?” (290) Exactly.  Languagehat read Chevengur in Russian fifteen years ago and had a similar experience with the switch between the first half and the second.  And here are two useful posts about reviews of the Chandler translation.  Chevengur got some attention last year. I will tack on some funny bits about books and reading: Dostoevsky’s home housed a library of books, but he already knew them by heart.  They brought him no consolation and he now had to do his own personal thinking.  (141) My worst nightmare!  A few pages later, in “a grove of concentrated, sad trees” we meet a forester who studies his father’s “library of cheap books by the least read, least important, and most forgotten of authors… life’s decisive truths exist secretly in abandoned books”  (150).  “Boring books had their origin in boring readers…” (151).  Chevengur was tough going at times but never boring.

I read Andrey Platonov’s novel Chevengur (1929) not too long ago and the collection of stories Soul (1935-46) last month.  Here we will have some notes.  These are the Robert and Elizabeth Chandler translations (four additional translators assist with Soul).  Those dates are for the completion of the writing; publication was always a complex story for poor Platonov. Platonov was a rationalist and engineer but also a mystic.  He was a true believer in the, or let’s say a, Soviet experiment, but also fully understood, for rationalist and mystical reasons, that the experiment would always fail.  He had a great writer’s imagination but – no, this should be “and” – had lifelong trouble adapting himself to Soviet censorship.  He was hardly alone there. I think I will stick with the Soul collection today, and quote from the novella “Soul,” “published” in a single proof copy in 1935, in censored form in 1966, and finally complete in 1999. Which is also when the Chandlers published their English version. “Soul,” like much of Platonov, is mercilessly grim: He foresaw that it would probably be his lot to die here and that his nation would be lost, too, ending up as corpses in the desert.  Chagataev felt no regret for himself: Stalin was alive and would bring about the universal happiness of the unhappy anyway, but it was a shame that the Dzhan nation, who had a greater need for life and happiness than any other nation of the Soviet Union, would by then be dead.  (75) Ambiguous phrase there, "the univeersal happiness of the unhappy."  Chagataev is a young engineer, tasked with leading his “nation,” a nomadic tribe subsisting, barely, in the deserts and marshes between the Caspian and Aral Seas, to Soviet civilization.  Which he does, eventually – happy ending! The entire Dzhan nation was now living without an everyday sense of its death, working at finding food for itself in the desert, lake and the Ust-Yurt Mountains, just as most of humanity normally lives in the world.  (108) An unconvincing happy ending given what happens along the way.  Platonov foreshadows the environmental destruction of the Aral Sea and the demographic decline of Russia (the nomads, by the time Chagataev returns to them, are almost all elderly, somehow living off grass and hot water).  Horrible things happen to everyone for many pages.  Chagataev is almost eaten by carrion birds.  But only almost! Chagataev felt the pain of his sorrow: his nation did not need communism.  It needed oblivion – until the wind had chilled its body and slowly squandered it in space.  (“Soul,” 102) Animals are treated terribly in “Soul,” and in other stories, no worse than the human animals, but still, the reader sensitive to such things should beware, and in particular get nowhere near the story “The Cow” (written 1938, published 1958) which is like an entry in a “saddest story ever written” contest.  Possibly my favorite thing in “Soul” is a few pages on a flock of feral sheep: And for several years the sheep had lived in the desert with their sheep dogs; the dogs had taken to eating the sheep, but then the dogs had all died or run away in melancholy yearning, and the sheep had been left on their own, gradually dying of old age, or being killed by wild beasts, or straying into waterless sands.  (62) “[D]ying of old age” is remarkable; the “melancholy yearning” of the absent dogs is a superb Gogolian touch. The other stories in the Soul collection are also good if you have the emotional strength to read them. Chevengur tomorrow.

Wolf Solent has pressed his beautiful young wife against an ash tree, presumably as a prelude to sex, but he begins rubbing the bark: ‘Human brains! Human knots of confusion!’ he thought.  ‘Why can’t we steal the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted lives?’ (Wolf Solent, “’This Is Reality,’” 356) I have learned that it is just when writers, many writers, write the strangest things that they really mean it.  John Cowper Powys has, like any good novelist, has a strong sense of irony, but he also has a fantastic, visionary mode that pushes past it.  As with his trees. To step back for a moment.  The first page of A Glastonbury Romance introduces three characters.  They are: The First Cause, which passes “a wave, a motion, a vibration” into the soul of A “particular human being,” John Crow (name on the next page), a “microscopic biped” who is leaving the third-class carriage of a train, returning to his home town just like the protagonist of Wolf Solent.  He is not especially affected by The sun, which is experiencing “enormous fire-thoughts.” On the next page, another character is added, “the soul of the earth.” John Crow turns out to be not the protagonist of A Glastonbury Romance but one of many, which is how Powys gets to 1,100 pages.  But the other characters or sentient metaphors or whatever they are recur occasionally.  Powys is, among other things, a fantasy writer, even aside from his use of the King Arthur and Holy Grail stories.  His landscape, his cosmos, is full of sentience, of which he occasionally gives me a glimpse.  For example, the old trees that are in love with each other: As a matter of fact, although neither of these human lovers were aware of this, between the Scotch fir and that ancient holly there had existed for a hundred years a strange attraction.  Night by night, since the days when the author of Faust lay dying in Weimar and those two embryo trees had been in danger of being eaten by grubs, they had loved each other…  But across the leafless unfrequented field these two evergreens could lift to each other their subhuman voices and cry their ancient vegetation-cry, clear and strong; that cry which always seems to come from some underworld of Being, where tragedy is mitigated by a strange undying acceptance beyond the comprehension of the troubled hearts of men and women. (AGR, “Conspiracy,” 786, ellipses mine) My single favorite passage in Glastonbury is also about the language of trees: The language of trees is even more remote from human intelligence than the language of beasts or of birds.  What to these lovers [lovers again!], for instance, would the singular syllables “wuther-quotle-glug” have signified?  (“The River,” 89) John Crow, one of the lovers, has just uttered a phrase – “It is extraordinary that we should ever have met!” – that “struck the attention of the solitary ash tree… with what in trees corresponds to human irony” because this is the fifth time in a hundred and thirty years that the tree has heard the exact same phrase.  Powys gives me the details – an “old horse,” a “mad clergyman,” an “old maiden lady” to her long-dead lover.  “An eccentric fisherman had uttered them addressing an exceptionally large chub which he had caught and killed.” All this the ash tree noted; but its vegetative comment thereon would only have sounded in human ears like the gibberish: wuther-quotle-glug. That chub, or its descendant, appears again about 700 pages later as a prophetic talking fish.  I believe the last talking fish to appear on Wuthering Expectations was the trout in John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981).  The talking chub is in the most Crowleyish chapter, “’Nature Seems Dead,’” about the night the of the powerful west wind, “one of the great turning points in the life of Glastonbury.”  Crowley has put a magical, history-changing west wind into a number of his books. I thought about writing about a marvelous antique shop Powys describes early in A Glastonbury Romance, but I will instead finish with one line of the description, a description of his own novels. But it was a treasure-trove for the type of imagination that loves to brood, a little sardonically and unfastidiously perhaps, upon the wayward whims and caprices of the human spirit.  (“King Arthur’s Sword,” 345)

Last summer I read John Cowper Powys’s novel Wolf Solent (1929) and recently I read A Glastonbury Romance (1932), not his first novels but the first that anyone noticed.  Wolf Solent is a plump 600 pages, and Glastonbury a monstrous 1,100.  Powys was 56 when the first was published, and 59 for the second, a mature writer, a seasoned weirdo. These novels are genuine eccentrics, in ideas and style, as odd as D. H. Lawrence or Ronald Firbank.  Powys, like Lawrence, is a direct descendant of Thomas Hardy, at least that is clear, not just writing about the same part of England but employing a Hardy-like narrator (although Powys’s narrator works with his characters rather than against them) and using explicitly fantastic devices.  In Glastonbury he pushes the fantasy quite far.  I’ll save that idea for tomorrow. Writing about these books has been a puzzle.  I am tempted to just type out weird sentences.  Maybe I will do that after a tint plot summary.  Wolf Solent – that, surprisingly, is the name of the main character – “returns to his birthplace, where he discovers the inadequacy of his dualistic philosophy.”  I am quoting the anonymous author of the novel’s Wikipedia entry.  That is, in fact, the plot of the novel, although it does not seem like it so much while actually reading, thank goodness.  A Glastonbury Romance earns its 1,100 pages by expanding to a large cast and many stories.  A mystic uses an inheritance to jumpstart the tourist industry of historic Glastonbury.  Many things happen to many people, murders and visions of Excalibur and the Holy Grail, all kinds of things.  Lots of sex, in Wolf Solent, too.  Powys is as earthy as Lawrence, if not as explicit, or not as explicit as Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), but also abstract: Both the two great forces pouring forth from the double-natured First Cause possess the energy of sex.  (AGR, “Tin,” 665) This is nominally the thought of an industrialist leaving a cave where he plans to establish a tin mine.  Or it is the philosophical narrator floating along with him.  Hard to tell. And the ecstatic quiver of that great cosmic ripple we call Sex runs through the whole universe and functions in every organism independent of external objects of desire!  (666) That exclamation point is a Powys signature. ‘Walking if my cure,’ he thought, ‘As long as I can walk I can get my soul into shape!  It must have been an instinct of self-preservation that has always driven me to walk!’  (WS, “Ripeness Is All,” 601) The characters use the exclamation point; the narrators love them.  Sometimes I can sense the need for emphasis, and other times I am puzzled. Powys’s characters are great walkers, that is true.  These two novels are fine examples of the domestic picaresque.  Powys can organize close to the entire plot just by having characters walk around, dropping in on each other’s homes, varying the pattern with “party” chapters like “The Horse-Fair” (WS) and “The Pageant” (AGR) where Wolf Solent can just wander around the fair, bumping into and advancing the story of every single character in the novel in whatever arbitrary order Powys likes.  A brilliant device; use it for your novel. Powys has the true novelist’s sense, or let’s say one of the kinds of true senses, in that he always knows where his characters are in relation to each other, in town, in a room.  If a character walks this way he will pass these houses in this order, and is likely to meet these characters.  He can over do it, as at the pageant – “At the opposite end of the sixth row from where Mrs. Legge and Blackie were seated were Old Jones and Abel Twig” (AGR, “The Pageant,” 560) – but he actually uses this kind of detail when the show begins.  He has it all in his head.  Or he made a diagram, I don’t know. Those are some aspects of these particular Powys novels.  They are original enough that I can see how readers can develop a taste for, or be repelled by, their strong flavor. Tomorrow I will write about Powys’s trees.