Torn and frayed in Manila

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918--2008)

"Almost a happy day."

Most of the articles that have appeared since the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Sunday have focused on his political role as “the conscience of a nation whose writings exposed the horrors of the Communist Gulag and galvanised Russian opposition to the tyranny of the Soviet Union” as The Times put it.

Perhaps it is inevitable that Solzhenitsyn’s deeply political books should be viewed in this way, especially as he ended up on the right side of history, but it’s a shame that these early judgments have underplayed his greatness as a writer.

I spent much of my childhood in the Scottish version of the Gulag, known as a boarding school, and I can still clearly remember my absorption in both The First Circle and One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich; I have the well-thumbed copies beside me now. The genius of a great writer like Solzhenitsyn is both to both make his fantastic and distinctively Russian world as unique as a Siberian snowflake and yet to let it cover the earth with its truths about the human condition.

I read Cancer Ward when Frayed and I took the Tran Siberian Express to Moscow a few years ago. I took it up without enthusiasm—does anyone start a book with such a title eagerly?—but within a few pages I was drawn into the claustrophobic world of the hospital as completely as I had been transported to the prison camps 30 years earlier. Cancer Ward is a wise, readable, and even funny book—I was so delighted to rediscover my old friend Aleksandr as I bumped over the rails of his native land. What makes Solzhenitsyn's books so strangely alive is the way the characters’ little lives are starkly etched against the vast immovable backdrop of the institution, whether the hospital, prison camp, or simply “the system”, as in another great novella, For the Good of the Cause.

As`any Singaporean will tell you, it is the littleness of things that drives the totalitarian state. This is something Solzhenitsyn understood so well.

It is the minutiae that will get you committed:

She swallowed: “I don’t understand … What was it you actually did?”

“What did we do?” He drew on his cigarette and blew out the smoke. What a big man he was, and how tiny the cigarette looked. “I told you, we were students. If our grants allowed it, we drank wine. We went to parties. And you know, they arrested the girls as well. They all got five years.” He looked at her intently. “Imagine it happening to you, being taken away just before your second semester exams and put in a dungeon.” (Cancer Ward)

And it is the minutiae that will pull you through.

Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn’t put him cells; they hadn’t sent his squadron to the settlement; he’d swiped a bowl of kasha at dinner; the squad leader had fixed the rates well; he’d built a wall and enjoyed doing; he’d smuggled that bit of hacksaw blade through; he’d earned a favor from Tsezar that evening; he’d bought the tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill. He’d got over it.

A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.” (the end of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich)

Anyone who has fought the suffocating power of the institution will understand that passage.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

It is entirely typical of the anti-intellectualism in British life that one of its great political thinkers, John Stuart Mill, should have been ignored or ridiculed. Fortunately a new biography (John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand by Richard Reeves) has been widely covered on both sides of the Atlantic. Let's hope it sparks renewed interest in Mill's books, especially his classic libertarian tract, On Liberty.

Mill’s ideas on personal freedom seem so obvious to ex-hippies and ex- punks like me that it is hard to believe that more than 100 years after his death they have to be defended more than ever. Here is the nub of his argument:

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in its own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it. … Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. On Liberty

Isn’t that just so blindingly obvious, and yet how come so many people, from Bush to religious fundamentalists of all stripes, just don’t get it?

Anyway, I am very glad to hear of this new biography and I shall certainly read it. Mill was not only a great thinker, he also had one of the most bizarre and pressure cooked childhoods on record.

Here is an extract from the introduction to my copy of On Liberty:

…

he read Greek by the age of three, had assimilated a considerable body of classical and historical literature before he was eight, and had mastered philosophy, political economy, mathematics and the like by the ripe age of 12.

Guess what? Mill also suffered a nervous breakdown when he was 20. Well, what a surprise!

Postscript: Something makes me think that if Mill were (i) alive, (ii) American, and (iii) a registered democrat John Stuart Mill would be rooting for that skinny guy from Chicago.

“Twilight of the books”

Twilight of the books” in the Christmas New Yorker chronicles the slow death of reading for recreation and education across the world. The subject has a particular resonance for the Philippines, whose population is largely “alliterate”; people who can read but choose not to.

There is school of thought that regards the loss of the reading habit with equanimity. In the simple search for discrete pieces of information, the internet is nearly always faster and more efficient than traditional research methods. Although my institution has a large and well stocked library, I seldom use it since my mouse will usually take me where I need to go more quickly. Even the dictionary, perhaps the quintessential “book”, is more efficient in its online form.

It is also true that one reason for the reduction in the number of hours spent reading is that people had fewer choices in 1955 (when reading occupied 21% of Dutch people’s spare time) than in 1995 (when the figure had slumped to 9%). If life has provided us with more ways to spend our time should we not rejoice, rather than wring our hands?

Even computer games, the despair of the middle-aged, are believed to hasten short-term cognitive skills and reactions.

Finally, middle-aged people have always had to put up with the ground changing beneath them. A hundred years ago it was the decline of horse-drawn carriages, now it is the twilight of the books. So what?

After reading the research cited in the New Yorker article, the only answer to the question in its subtitle—““What will life be like if people stop reading?”—is “fundamentally different, and in most ways much worse”.

Is it any surprise that the decline in of a reading culture in America has coincided with a dramatic increase in religious fundamentalism? As the article points out:

“Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories … in an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. … it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.. "

In other words, true analytical thinking can prosper only in a literate culture. Without books, which distance us from the world and lend a sense of perspective, a world dominated by television news and YouTube seems likely to embed us in our own prejudices.

It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

Just think about reading an article about George Bush and having to watch him on television …

Finally, as if a world ruled by dogma and cliché were not enough, we risk losing all sense of ourselves as human beings. A Soviet study of illiterate peasants in the 1930s uncovered this poignant observation:

The illiterates did not talk about themselves except in terms of their tangible possessions. “What can I say about my own heart?” one asked.

Nevertheless and despite the terrible implications, I can't help thinking that this is indeed "the twilight of the books". As Samuel Johnson said, "people in general do not willingly read, if they have something else to amuse them".

Poems for my birthday

And the days are not full enough

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.

Ezra Pound

Villanelle

The crack is moving down the wall.
Defective plaster isn't all the cause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

It's mildly cheering to recall
That every building has its little flaws.
The crack is moving down the wall.

Here in the kitchen, drinking gin,
We can accept the damndest laws.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

And though there's no one here at all,
One searches every room because
The crack is moving down the wall.

Repairs? But how can one begin?
The lease has warnings buried in each clause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

These nights one hears a creaking in the hall,
The sort of thing that gives one pause.
The crack is moving down the wall.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

Weldon Kees

Richard Yates: a neglected American writer

Some months ago a friend asked if I had any book recommendations so I lent him Collected Short Stories and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. I haven’t seen my friend since, but I understand from frayed that, although he liked the books, he found their bleakness disturbing. He also thought that the fact that I had lent him not one but two of Yates’s books, with a recommendation that they were among my favorites, cast me in a new light. To which I intend to reply when I next see him –there is a reason why “they lived happily ever after” is the last line in the book.

Yates’s version of desolation is always full of unexpected twists, but it is not so much the tightness and originality of his plotting that makes Yates such a unique writer—it is the quality of writing. He has a brilliant ear for dialogue, punctuation, and pace. In the example below for example all Yates really has to do is say is that Sabella, the unpopular new boy in the classroom, comes from a poor part of New York. Yet in doing so he manages in a few deft strokes to paint a whole world for Sabella to inhabit at the end of the school day.

Ordinarily, the fact of someone’s coming from New York might have held a certain prestige, for to most of the children the city was an awesome, adult place that swallowed up their fathers every day, and which they themselves were permitted to visit only rarely, in their best clothes, as a treat. But anyone could see at a glance that Vincent Sabella had nothing whatever to do with skyscrapers. Even if you could ignore his tangled black hair and gray skin, his clothes would have given him away; absurdly new corduroys, absurdly old sneakers and a yellow sweatshirt, much too small, with the shredded remnants of a Mickey Mouse design stamped on its chest. Clearly he was from the part of New York that you had to pass through on the train to Grand Central—the part where people hung bedding over their windowsills and leaned out on it all day in a trance of boredom, and where you got vistas of straight deep streets, one after another, all alike in the clutter of their sidewalks and all swarming with gray boys at play in some desperate kind of ball game.

It all reminds me of that great Tom Waits song “9th and Hennepin”.

no one brings anything small into a bar around here
They all started out with bad directions
And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear
"one for every year he's away", she said
Such a crumbling beauty, ah
There's nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won't fix
She has that razor sadness that only gets worse
With the clang and the thunder of the southern pacific going by
And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet
'til you're full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin
And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen...
And i've seen it all, i've seen it all
Through the yellow windows of the evening train...

If you care anything for the “razor sadness” of life, do pick up some Richard Yates, he won’t disappoint you. I’ll leave you with Kate Atkinson’s judgment:

“Yates is a realist par excellence, the natural heir to Hemingway’s pared-to-the-bones style and the antecedent of Carver’s flat minimalism. Yates has something else though, a kind of transparency, that owes more to Fitzgerald… there is something curiously and quite contrarily uplifting about Yates’s pursuit of honesty. Read and weep.”

See also a previous post on Yates.

Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932–2007)

The great Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski died yesterday. Although most of the notices have referred to him as a journalist or reporter, his works will endure far longer than the copy handed in by most scribblers. Kapuscinski was really an ironic recorder who was drawn to wars, revolutions, and general weirdness.

The Emperor, his hilarious and absorbing portrait of the diminutive Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, must rank as one of the most accurate portraits of the absurdities of court life ever.

I was his Most Virtuous Highness’s pillow bearer for twenty-six years. I accompanied his Majesty on travels all around the world and to tell the truth—I say it with pride—His Majesty could not go anywhere without me, since his dignity required that he always take his place on a throne, and I was the pillow bearer. I had mastered the special protocol of this specialty, and even possessed an extremely useful, expert knowledge: the height of various thrones. This allowed me quickly to choose a pillow of just the right size, so that a shocking ill fit, allowing a gap to appear between the pillow and the Emperor’s shoes, would not occur.

Kapuscinski’s descriptions of apparently unique situations often cast light on broader political truths. After all, what are the flunkies that traipse the corridors of international organizations (like me), but glorified pillow bearers, each with our own extremely useful, but essentially worthless, “expert knowledge”?

Nor were the competing circles of power in Selassie’s court much different from those in other dictatorial regimes.

I’ll come right out and say it: the King of Kings preferred bad ministers. And the King of Kings preferred them because he liked to appear in a favored light by contrast. How could he show himself favorably if he were surrounded by good ministers? The people would be disoriented. Where would they look for help? On whose wisdom and kindness would they depend? Everyone would have been good and wise. What disorder would have broken out in the Empire then! Instead of one sun, fifty would be shining, and everyone would pay homage to a privately chosen planet. No, my dear friend, you cannot expose the people to such disastrous freedom. There can be only one sun. Such is the order of nature, and everything else is a heresy. But you can sure that His Majesty shined by contrast. How imposingly and kindly he shone, so that our people had no doubts about who was the sun and who the shadow.

And here is a homage to “the international life” that could have been written for our own pocket-sized leader.

… these visits were a break, a chance for him to rest and catch his breath. At least for a while he didn’t have to read the informants’ reports, to listen to the roar of crowds and the sound of police gunfire, to look into the faces of toadies and flatterers. He didn’t, at least for one day, have to solve the insoluble, repair the irreparable, or cure the incurable. In those foreign countries, no one conspired against him, no one was sharpening the knife, no one needed to be hanged. He could go to bed calmly, sure that he would wake up alive. He could sit down with a friendly president and have a relaxing talk, man to man. Yes, my friend, allow me once more to commend the international life. Without it, who could ever bear the burden of governing these days?

Frayed just looked over my shoulder and asked why my quoted passages were so long. She's right, theyare too lengthy for a post but I just can’t bring myself to cut them. Kapuscinski’s gentle mockery is just so spot on, his eye for the telling detail so acute, and his authorial voice so compelling that if I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow I could easily type out the whole book.

Unfortunately I do have to trudge in tomorrow, so I’ll end with a plug for Kapuscinski’s other famous book, Shah of Shahs.

To my way of thinking the Iranian revolution of 1979 was the most far-reaching political event of my lifetime and Kapuscinski brings it to life in the most wonderfully poetic way. Here is his description of the enduring appeal of a famous dissident under the Shah.

Yes, of course--you can record. Today he is no longer a prohibited subject. Before, he was. Do you know that for twenty-five years it was forbidden to utter his name in public. That the name “Mossadegh” was purged from all books, all history texts? And just imagine: Today, young people, who, it was assumed, should know nothing about him, go to their deaths carrying his portrait. There you have the best proof of what such expunging and rewriting history leads to. But the Shah didn’t understand that. He did not understand that even though you can destroy a man, destroying him does not make him cease to exist. On the contrary, if I can put it this way, he begins to exist all the more. These are paradoxes no tyrant can deal with. The scythe swings, and at once the grass starts to grow back. Cut again and the grass grows faster than ever. A very comforting law of nature.

There is stuff this good on almost every page. Any historian seeking answers to the way cultures in Africa and the Middle East were buckled and malformed by weight of the 20th century surely has to turn to Kapuscinski. He was one of the century’s very greatest chroniclers.

Postscript. After writing this post I took down Kapuscinski's The Shadow of the Sun and came across this nice tribute from Geoff Dyer, himself no mean writer, in the Guardian:

"Suppose we were to launch a spacecraft with the intention of establishing literary contact with the residents of some remote part of the galaxy. If we had room for only one contemporary writer, whom would we send? I'd vote for Ryszard Kapuscinski, because he has given the truest, least partial, most comprehensive account of what life is like on our planet."

For a writer in one of Europe's less well known languages to be so highly regarded is a mark of his genius.

Virginia Woolf (1882—1941)

“Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness”

A few weeks ago I found myself dreaming of a summer’s day in Britain, imagining myself lying on a cliff looking out over a choppy blue-black Atlantic and feeling a fresh breeze on my face.

That vision of white caps and fluffy clouds led me back to my favourite Virginia Woolf novel, To the Lighthouse, and from there to Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia.

It’s really the poetic quality of her writing that sets Virginia Woolf apart; her arresting imagery and intuitive understanding of the internal life. As I’ve grown ancient and world-weary I find that I rarely put a novel down and think “that’s exactly how I feel too” as I used to in my bookworm youth, yet there’s something about the way Virginia sees the world that hits me deep inside.

The famous dinner party in To the Lighthouse (mentioned by Madame Chiang just the other day) encapsulates all the things I love about her writing. Here is Charles Tansley, an awkward young man trying to contribute to the conversation:

He felt rigid and barren, like a pair of boots that has been soaked and gone dry so that you can hardly force your feet into them. Yet he must force his feet into them. He must make himself talk.

Ah, how many times have I felt that I too must force my feet into those dry boots!

Hermione Lee is quite a writer herself and her treatment of the “issues” in Virginia’s life that have aroused controversy (childhood abuse, madness, sexuality) is quite brilliant. Virginia Woolf richly deserved such a sympathetic biographer. I found Lee’s preference for a thematic over a strictly chronological approach (sample titles of chapters: Childhood, Siblings, The Press) a bit contrived though, especially at the beginning. At times I lost that that onrushing sense of a train running down the tracks that marks a truly compulsive biography. Still, it is her thematic approach that allows Lee to deal with the discrete elements of Virginia’s so judiciously, so I shouldn’t complain – there is no perfect way to approach a life.

There is so much more I could write about Virginia’s life and work but I’ll leave you with the last thing she ever wrote.

Dearest

I feel certain that I am going
mad again. I feel we cant go
through another of these terrible times.
And I shant recover this time. I begin
to hear voices and cant concentrate.
So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have
given me
the greatest possible happiness. You
have been in every way all that anyone
could be. I don’t think two
people could have been happier till
this terrible disease came. I cant
fight it any longer, I know that I am
spoiling your life, that without me you
could work. And you will, I know.
You see I can’t even write this properly. I
can’t read. What I want to say is that
I owe all the happiness of my life to you.
You have been entirely patient with me &
incredibly good. I want to say that –
everybody knows it. If anybody could
have saved me it would have been you.
Everything has gone from me but the
certainty of your goodness. I
cant go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two
people could have been happier than we have been.

V

Hannah Arendt: lighting up a man’s world

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a good review of a new book on Hannah Arendt.

In Why Arendt Matters (Yale University Press, 2006), a staunchly devotional brief for the continuing relevance of political theorist Hannah Arendt, by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt's much-acclaimed biographer, the author complains that despite writing "more than a dozen dense volumes" that include several "masterpieces of political analysis," and posthumously becoming "the subject of hundreds of books and articles," Arendt "lives on in newspeak through just four words."

"The banality of evil."

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters (2006)

I discovered The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt purely by chance when I was a student. In fact it was only because I was aware of Arendt’s famous “sound bite” that I plucked it out from its dusty shelf in the library. But what a clear thinker and beautiful writer I found. There is none of the padding and intellectual somersaults that characterize polical philosphers like Foucault and Durkheim. Instead, Arendt is always straight to the point and her understanding of such concepts as “power” and, yes, “evil” has seldom been bettered.

Why, then, is she almost unknown? I think there are three reasons: Hannah Arendt was a woman, she was Jewish, and she was a critic of Marxism.

Modern political theory is about as male as a football changing room. Those female intellectuals who have managed to penetrate this closed and sweaty world, Sontag and Paglia say, have done so elliptically, through cultural studies. Arendt, on the other hand, was a straight-down-the-line political theorist. I am convinced that one reason she is not as well known as her peers is that she was a woman, unlike the rest of the gang on the reading list.

It might seem odd to cite Arendt’s Jewishness as a barrier to her popularity, given the contribution Jewish thinkers have made to philosophy, but many people think of Arendt primarily as an analyst of Nazism (her aphorism on the banality of evil comes from her book on the Eichmann trial), rather than of authoritarianism in general. That is a shame, because, although her view is coloured by the fact that she was a German Jew who fled from the Nazis, her analysis of the totalitarian state tells us much about Saddam Hussein and Lew Kuan Yew, or even Gloria Arroyo, as it does about Hitler.

Finally, Arendt’s marginalization is partly because she is essentially a humanist, rather than a Marxist, the dominant school in European political thought since the end of the war. She was one of the first writers to recognize the essential similarities between Nazism and Soviet totalitarianism, a minority view for most of her life (1906-1975).

Well done Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, author of Why Arendt Matters (2006) and Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982), for keeping her candle burning.

“Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh Mr Gibbon?”—William Henry 1st Duke of Gloucester

Many thanks to Micketymoc for alerting me to the forthcoming 27th Manila International Bookfair. Although I am already savouring wandering the aisles, I can’t help feeling for the people attending the booths. I’ve manned a few book festival booths in my time and a more utterly tedious job it is hard to imagine. I remember one Singapore Book Fair in particular. I was working for a law publisher and we were only there to fly the flag for our astonishingly expensive and dull books. In the next booth was a children’s encyclopaedia publisher—the perfect product to be selling to ambitious Singaporean parents obsessed with child development. Their cash registers just didn’t stop ringing for three days, while we looked at each other and debated whether we would sell a single book that day. There will be booths like ours down at the World Trade Center—give ‘em a sympathetic smile if you pass by.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Caged Virgin

If I had to pick one person who seems to personify the clash between the contemporary Islamic and Western world views, it would be Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Hirsi Ali is a Dutch Member of Parliament of Somali descent. Brought up in the Islamic faith in a political family, she ran away to avoid an arranged marriage and wound up in Holland. She hasn’t stopped running since. She is now one of the most outspoken and eloquent European critics of Islam, in particular of the subservient role of Muslim women, hence title of this book. Because she was brought up in the religion, her views are respected far more than, say, Europe’s other female hammer of Islam, Oriana Fallaci, who often sounds simply bigoted.

It’s a dangerous business being an outspoken critic of Islam in the 21st century and Theo van Gough, Hirsi Ali’s collaborator in Submission, a movie critical of Islam, wound up murdered. A knife stabbed in his chest pinned a five-page note to his body threatening Hirsi Ali. She now requires heavy round-the-clock security.

Given all this, I figured that The Caged Virgin might have some interesting things to say about the terrible mess we find ourselves in at the outset of the 21st century. It does, but the book is such an confusing mishmash of biography and polemic, speeches, interviews, and case notes that any coherence is lost after the first few pages (which is ironic, since one of Hirsi Ali’s most common criticism of her opponents is their lack of “clear thinking”).

The Caged Virgin is a longish magazine article forcefed by Random House to justify a foie gras price tag. Perhaps Hirsi Ali herself is not really to blame for this disappointing book, but for their eagerness to cash in on the author’s notoriety and complete lack of editorial judgement Random House should hang their heads in shame. I can almost hear Hirsi Ali’s editor begging her to search her desk drawers and briefcase for something, anything to pad the book out. “Case notes from the early 1990s? A six-year-old speech? Great, send them along!”.

By far the best parts of The Caged Virgin are the autobiographical sections. Hirsi Ali describes her relationship with her parents with unflinching honesty and her portrayal of the brew of foresaken love (“I know my father loves me, but I have made a choice that redically opposes everything he stands for”) and political frustration that characterized her family hints at what a good book this could have been. The description of her sister Haweya (“a strong woman who commanded admiration and respect everywhere but home”) and her descent into mental breakdown and eventual death is particularly moving.

If you want to read how such an outspoken critic of Islam arrived at her position, if you wonder what it’s like growing up in a Muslim family in the horn of Africa, The Caged Virgin offers a few tantalizing glimpses. Still, I was left with an overwhelming sense of frustration. Hirsi Ali is right at the centre of the biggest ideological battle of our times, and I thought she would write something much, much better than this. Perhaps she will one day.