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What’s odd about you is what’s interesting.

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.

Certain writers inspire profound ambivalence. We admire them for something – often style – and they let us down by writing something stupid, dull or otherwise offensive. It’s easier dealing strictly with good guys (Chekhov, for instance) and bad guys (like Louis-Ferdinand Céline). Among the bothersome I think first of Thoreau, whose prose is frequently superb until his snobbery and general contempt for his fellow humans gets the better of him.  Another is H.L. Mencken. For some of us, he is a prose phase we live through. His style can be addictive, particularly when you’re young and impressionable. As a rookie newspaper reporter, I remember aping his prose almost to the point of plagiarism. Still, his anti-Semitism rankles. Such a foolish prejudice for so intelligent a man. And his repeated denunciation of his fellow Americans for their purported idiocy grows quickly tiresome. Yet Joseph Epstein once wrote that he relies on three writers to “lift one out of gloom, and away from the valley of small and large woes” – Montaigne, Justice Holmes (in his letters) and Mencken.   In 1941, the marvelous, doomed critic Otis Ferguson reviewed Newspaper Days, the second of Mencken’s three memoirs. He wrote in The New Republic: “I would call Mencken a peculiarly American article, not only for his labors in establishing the language and the mildly ribald history of the press; but for the place he stands in, as a force for a certain liberation when we were only beginning to wake up, as a healthy explosion on the whole field of letters, as an exact and original writer and a man whose intolerant courage was at the service of others at a time when it did much good in clearing the air.”   In prose, Mencken is pure energy. Reading him at his best – the memoirs, The American Language (1919), a hundred or more essays – is a rejuvenating experience. In “On Being an American” (Prejudice: Third Series, 1922), Mencken concedes his agreement with many critics of the United States and asks:   “Well, then, why am I still here? Why am I so complacent (perhaps even to the point of offensiveness), so free from bile, so little fretting and indignant, so curiously happy? Why did I answer only with a few academic 'Hear, Hears' when Henry James, Ezra Pound, Harold Stearns and the emigrés of Greenwich Village issued their successive calls to the corn-fed intelligentsia to flee the shambles, escape to fairer lands, throw off the curse forever? The answer, of course, is to be sought in the nature of happiness, which tempts to metaphysics. But let me keep upon the ground. To me, at least (and I can only follow my own nose) happiness presents itself in an aspect that is tripartite. To be happy (reducing the thing to its elementals) I must be:   “a. Well-fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion.   “b. Full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of my fellow-men.   “c. Delicately and unceasingly amused according to my taste.”   This is classic Mencken, effortlessly muting the outrageous by making it sound so reasonable. Among the cruelest of ironies are his final years. Never stricken with writer’s block, always a reliable geyser of prose, Mencken suffered a stroke on the evening of November 23, 1948 at his stenographer’s house in Baltimore.  He was sixty-eight and would live for another eight years, severely impaired. “All he could do now,” Terry Teachout tells us in his biography of Mencken, “was sign his name, scrawl an occasional one-sentence note full of misspelled words, and recognize the names of people he knew when he saw them in the paper, though he had trouble remembering them otherwise.” This most facile of writers, almost pathologically prolific, was silenced. Mencken died in his sleep on January 29, 1956.   [The Ferguson review is collected in The Otis Ferguson Reader (December Press, 1982). Terry’s biography is The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (HarperCollins, 2002).]

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