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.

One of these books is 1,100 pages long.  It was just by chance that I read two genuinely disgusting books at around the same time. FICTION A Glastonbury Romance (1932), John Cowper Powys -  I will write a bit about this beast, soon.  That line in the title is from Chapter 25, p. 798 of the Overlook edition Claudius the God (1934), Robert Graves A Buyer's Market (1952), Anthony Powell – The second novel in a series of twelve.  I will write about this, too, but I do not know when.  Each time I read one in the series I think, just one more, then I will know what I want to write. Giovanni's Room (1956), James Baldwin Dispatches from the Central Committee (1992), Vladimir Sorokin – Actually from the early 1980s, mostly, but unpublishable, real antinomian anti-Soviet gestures.  Sorokin had two main tricks, first, to begin in a conventional vein but suddenly interrupting the story with something disgusting or otherwise awful, and second, to suddenly switch rhetorical modes, say from realism to bureaucratic nonsense to grotesquerie to surrealism.  The suddenness is always the key effect.  In a sense the stories are satire but by the end I took it more as a kind of protest literature.  The book includes perfectly suited, disgusting new illustration and is well produced, not always true of Dalkey Archive books.  I guess it could be full of typos but given the nature of the text how would I ever know. POETRY Auroras of Autumn (1950), Wallace Stevens 17 Poems (1954) & Secrets on the Way (1958), Tomas Tranströmer Scattered Returns (1969), L. E. Sissman – The great Boston cancer poet. MEMOIR Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz (1950), József Debreczeni – Debreczeni, a Serbian-Hungarian journalist, passed through Auschwitz but was mostly imprisoned in labor camps and eventually a bizarre hospital camp, the “cold crematorium,” thus the curious, accurate subtitle.  Debreczeni emphasize the disgusting side of life in the camps, not exactly a neglected aspect in other accounts but I have never seen so much direct focus on it.  But again, that hospital camp, boy.  Please see Dorian Stuber’s review for more detail, if you can stand it.  As many Holocaust memoirs as we have now, it is a shame that this one did not appear in English until 2023. The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins (2024), Sonny Rollins – Full of notes about fingering and the effects of his diet on his blowing, this artifact is for fans only, but this is Sonny Rollins, a titan.  Become a fan! IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Claudine à l'école (Claudine at School, 1900), Colette – Young Claudine has a crush on her almost as young new (female) teacher, who is perhaps having some sort of affair with the only slightly older (female) school principal.    Colette later said that all of the (barely) lesbian stuff was forced on the novel by her odious husband Willy, which is plausible given that Colette abandons the plot – all plot – about halfway through for a long long long section about taking the bac, the final exams.  I found all of that fascinating and wish I had read the novel long ago.  But it was for some reason the lesbian stuff, not the test-taking, that gave Colette her first bestseller. Poesia, te escrevo agora (Poetry, I Write You Now, 1950-84), João Cabral de Melo Neto – The major works of Cabral de Melo Neto, including full versions of his great long poems like “The River or On the Course of the Capibaribe River from Its Source to the City of Recife” (1953) in one handy book. Recommended to the Portuguese language learner – easier than they first look, and highly rewarding.  I assume, and hope, that the English translations are good.

My subject is Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart (1943), her first novel, and the only book of hers I have read.  I read Alison Entrekin’s English translation because 1) I did not have a Portuguese text handy and 2) I figured it would be too hard for me, which I think is right.  I had enough trouble with the book in English. When she spoke, she invented crazy, crazy!  (162) For 90 pages, Lispector alternates scenes of Joana’s childhood and the beginnings of her marriage.  Then we get a hundred pages of the marriage falling apart.  The husband has, for example, a pregnant girlfriend, although that is more of a symptom of the collapse.  The real cause is that Joana is psychologically, hmm hmm hmm, unusual. How many times had she tipped the waiter more than necessary just because she’d remembered that he was going to die and didn’t know it. (101) That is maybe the strangest clear thought she expresses.  Joana’s stream of thoughts are generally much more abstract.  Entirely abstract.  Here is the ending of one abstract paragraph moving into the beginning of another. Eternity was not an infinitely great quantity that was worn down, but eternity was succession. Then Joana suddenly understood that the utmost beauty was to be found in succession, that movement explained form – it was so high and pure to cry: movement explains form! – and pain was also to be found in succession because the body was slower than the movement of uninterrupted continuity. (36) Joana’s thinking, outside of the childhood scenes, if often unconnected, or just barely connected, to a scene, or anything material at all.  A lot of this: How was a triangle born? as an idea first? or did it come after the shape had been executed? would a triangle be born fatally? things were rich…  Where does music go when it’s not playing? (164, ellipses mine) I would describe passages like this as philosophical if I understood how Joana moves from one thought to another, which I generally did not.  Sometimes I felt a move toward Surrealism, although without the playfulness or materiality I enjoy in Surrealism. The man was a child an amoeba flowers whiteness warmth like sleep for now is time for now is life even if it is later… (165, ellipses in original) This is Joana falling asleep, so here I did know what Lispector was depicting.  I could, in this section, draw a connection between my own perceptions of what I call “reality” and Lispector’s representation of an aspect of reality, the process and psychology of falling asleep.  But mostly I found that hard to do. Another possibility is that Joana is meant to be a pathological case study, repellent to understanding.  Or that she is meant to be entirely normal, a version of the way Lispector sees the world, however nuts she looks to me, the kind of mismatch I often bounce off when reading D. H. Lawrence, where I think I am reading about someone who is psychologically unusual and begin to think, oh no, he thinks everyone is like this. Yet another idea is that the novel is full of nonsense and anti-rationality, again like Surrealism, something I usually enjoy a lot.  I could have used more, I don’t know, jokes, I guess.  Surrealism is fun.  And material, too, not abstract.  Paris Peasant is about walking around in the mall. Benjamin Moser, in the introduction, suggests that Lispector’s “project was less artistic than spiritual… not an intellectual or artistic endeavor” (xi), a good clue about my difficulties with Near to the Wild Heart.  Beyond a couple of the childhood scenes I never found a hook into the art of Lispector’s novel.  It is the biggest mismatch of a book with my taste that I have bumped against in quite a while. Tony Malone liked the novel more than I did but his response, section by section, looks similar to mine: “the internal monologues were a little too abstract at times,” were they ever. Someday I will try another Lispector novel, perhaps one from the 1960s, and see how that goes.  Perhaps I will try one in Portuguese.

Farewell to The Story of the Stone and a valuable browse in Chinese literature.  I’ll do it again someday. FICTION The Peony Pavilion (1598), Tang Xianzu – written up back here. The Story of the Stone, Vol. 5: The Dreamer Wakes (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin & Gao E – some notes here.  The quotation in my title is from p. 94. Naomi (1924) & Quicksand (1930), Junichiro Tanizaki – and these are over here. Calamity Town (1942), Ellery Queen – A very lightly metafictional mystery.  Not only does the detective share his name with the book’s actual “author,” itself a fiction, but he is a mystery writer who at times seems to be generating the crime within the novel so that he will have something interesting to write about.  But not quite doing that, unfortunately.  That novel would have been more interesting.  The actual novel was fine.  This is one of those mysteries where every instance of clumsy plotting is in fact a clue. A Question of Upbringing (1951), Anthony Powell – I think I will write something about this book once I have read another volume of the series. Damned If I Do (2004), Percival Everett – short stories.  A perfect Everett title.  It is all his characters need since it doesn’t matter what will happen if they don’t.  They always do. On the Calculation of Volume I (2020), Solvej Balle – a Groundhog Day story told with more philosophy and less humor.  A good fantasy on its own terms, but the puzzle is that the series has six more volumes, two of which have not been written yet.  The whole thing will be at least 1,200 pages long, for all I know more.  This first volume is reasonably complete, so I have no idea where the series might be going.   POETRY NOT IN FRENCH OR PORTUGUESE Selected Poems (1968), Zbigniew Herbert   TRAVEL, MUSIC HISTORY Tschiffelly's Ride (1933), Aimé Tschifelly – a Swiss English teacher rides a pair of Pampas horses from Buenos Aires to Washington, D. C., just for fun, and writes an equestrian classic.  Lots of emphasis on the horses and horse-riding.  My geographical knowledge of South and Central America has greatly improved.  I have only been to one of the countries Tschifelly passes through.  Peru gets the largest number of pages; Mexico second. Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (2023), Jeremy Eichler – Before I finished The Emigrants in 1996 I knew that Sebald was going to be an important writer.  I knew that people were going to want to do what he was doing.  That was the only time I have been right about that, really, and I did not predict how much Sebaldian visual and musical art would follow, nor that there could be Sebaldian music history, which is what classical music critic Jeremy Eichler has written.  Lightly Sebaldian – he includes uncaptioned photos, yes, but always says, somewhere in the text, what they are.  The book is about World War II memorial pieces, built around Schoenberg’s A Survivor in Warsaw (1947), Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945), Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and several Shostakovich works.  Highly recommended to anyone who likes this sort of thing.   IN  FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE Odes et Ballades (1828), Victor Hugo – young, young Hugo.  I had read the first half several years ago; now I finished it up.  He sounded like himself from the beginning, but he would not become the greatest French poet until, well, almost immediately after this book. Les songes en equilibre (1942) & Le tombeau des rois (1953) & Mystère de la parole (1960), Anne Hébert – Lovely dream and childhood poems from a Quebecois poet.  I have not read Hébert in English, but I will bet there are some good translations.  Her Catholic poems did not do much for me.  If you have opinions about her fiction, please share them. Éthiopiques (1956), Léopold Sédar Senghor – One would not – I would not – guess that he would be President of Senegal four years later.  I have visited his childhood home. Post-Scriptum (1960), Jorge de Sena Flores ao Telefone (1968) & Os Idólatras (1969), Maria Judite de Carvalho – I do not remember exactly how this book was recommended to me by a soon-to-be distinguished Portuguese author.  “If you like sad stories about depressed people, these are good.”  Carvalho has a place in Portuguese literature and feminism perhaps a little like Edna O’Brien in Ireland or Grace Paley in the United States, sharply ironic domestic stories, although without O’Brien’s sexual explicitness or Paley’s humor.  Culture hero Margaret Jull Costa is bringing Carvalho into English and is presumably working right now on these books, recently published in Portuguese in Volume 3 of Carvalho’s collected works.  Of course with that recommendation I had to buy a copy.

Two Junichiro Tanizaki novels from the 1920s for Japanese Literature Month over at Dolce Bellezza.  Always interesting to see what people are reading.  Thanks as usual.  18th edition! The two novels I read, Naomi (1924) and Quicksand (1928-30), are closely related.  Both are about dominant and submissive sexual relations, an obsession of Tanizaki.  Both were serialized in newspapers.  How I wish the books had explanations of how the serialization worked.  Both novels are written in, or at least translated as, plain, sometimes even dull prose, perhaps a consequence of tight serial deadlines. Both have narrators who may well be playing tricks on me, although if so I did not see the signals, and believe me I am alert to the signals, well-trained by Pale Fire and The Tin Drum and Villette and so on.  Maybe Tanizaki’s tricks are different. Naomi is narrated by a creep of an engineer who picks up – grooms – a 15 year-old waitress who he finds especially “Western.”  … most of her value to me lay in the fact that I’d brought her up myself, that I myself had made her into the woman she was, and that only I knew every part of her body.  For me Naomi was the same as a fruit that I’d cultivated myself.  I’d labored hard and spared no pains to bring that piece of fruit to its present, magnificent ripeness, and it was only proper that I, the cultivator, should be the one to taste it.  No one else had that right.  (Ch. 18, 161) Pure poison.  By this point in the novel Naomi has taken power, well on her way to complete control, crushing her groomer, who is likely, it turns out, happier crushed. Much of the novel is set in the modern, Westernized Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo, before the terrible earthquake that obliterated the dancehalls and movie theaters.  I found all of that detail quite interesting, as it was in Yasunari Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929-30).  One more piece of bad luck and Naomi might have become one of the homeless teen prostitutes in The Scarlet Gang.  Too bad Naomi does not have the innovative linguistic interest of Kawabata’s crackling novel. The Japanese title of Quicksand is a single character, the Buddhist swastika, a perfect representation of the content of the novel, which is a four-way struggle for dominance among the narrator, her girlfriend, her husband, and the girlfriend’s boyfriend.  Some of the weapons in the struggle are pretty crazy, like a scene where the narrator and the girlfriend’s lunatic boyfriend swear a blood oath.  Eh, they’re all crazy.  The narrator is the eventual winner, obviously, I guess.  Maybe she is making it all up.  Quicksand has a lot in common with Ford Madox Ford’s devious The Good Soldier, another four-way struggle, but as I said if Tanizaki’s narrator is a tenth as tricky as Ford’s I sure couldn’t see it.  She seems more unreliable in theory than practice. One technique that is interesting and may hold clues: Tanizaki and the narrator return to key scenes, describing what happened from different perspectives, yes, like in Akutagawa’s “In a Bamboo Grove” (1922), except everything is filtered through the narrator, which does have the appearance of what I am calling a trick, a technique of emphasizing and controlling unreliability.  How newspaper readers followed this over two full years baffles me, but my understanding is that the lesbian aspect got the attention. I have trouble imaging the literary world where these were newspaper novels.  Naomi was in fact too shocking and was booted from the newspaper, with Tanizaki completing it in a magazine. Should I give an example of what I mean by dull prose?  Is it worth the tedium of the typing?  I mean that there is a lot of this: “Were you still asleep, Mitsu?” “Your phone call wakened me!” “I can leave anytime now.  Won’t you come right away too?” “Then I’ll hurry up and get ready.  Can you be at the Umeda station by half-past nine?” “You’re sure you can?” “Of course I am!”  (Quicksand, Ch. 15, 98) And this is nominally supposed to be the narrator telling her story to Tanizaki.  Serialization filler?  Maybe you can see why I am not in a hurry to solve the puzzle of Quicksand.  The appeal of both novels, for me, was exploring the psychology of the believably awful characters and seeing how their less believable awful schemes work out. Anthony Chambers translated Naomi; Howard Hibbett did Quicksand.