Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“LA COUSINE BETTE” by Honore de Balzac (written in six weeks in 1846; many English translations as “COUSIN BETTE”)

            Honore de Balzac’s novels often have rambling plots and a pitiless view of human nature, in which scrupulous and idealistic characters suffer defeat at the hands of unscrupulous and worldly characters. There is room for wit and insight into social classes in the Balzac universe, but there is little room for sentiment or tenderness as characters go about the business of gaining money, snaring fortunes and winning personal sexual satisfaction at the expense of others. This may be why, as I’ve said before on this blog, my two favourite Balzac novels are one with an uncharacteristically well-wrought plot, La Rabouilleuse / The Black Sheep; and one with two characters whose essential goodness is not seen as weakness, Le Cousin Pons / Cousin Pons. [Look them both up under “Honore de Balzac” on the index at right].

But having asserted all this, there is a lot to be said for Balzac in his more frequent rambling mood, where the plot is crammed with named characters and complex back-stories about who is related to whom. This is especially true when there is a central character so well drawn that all the elements of the plot mesh in her being. Such is the case with La Cousine Bette, which has always been one of the general reader’s favourites from the whole sequence of La Comedie Humaine.

La Cousine Bette does indeed have a complex plot, and when I go back to my reading diaries, I find that I have taken three full pages to summarise it. I shall spare you this, and point out that the essence of the plot may be conveyed in one sentence.

 Using sexual jealousy as her weapon, a vindictive, cunning and vengeful spinster gets her revenge on the family she believes have destroyed her happiness.

To be a bit more specific, but still simplifying furiously, the plot goes like this; The minor aristocrat Baron Hector Hulot and the wealthy bourgeois Celestin Crevel are related by marriage (Hulot’s son Valentin is married to Crevel’s daughter). But they are sworn enemies. Both being philanderers, they feud over the fact that Baron Hulot once stole Crevel’s mistress from him. As it happens, the spinster Lisabeth (“Bette”) Fischer also hates Baron Hulot, even though she is the cousin of Hulot’s wife Adeline. (She has a German name, Fischer, because she is from Alsace).  Bette, in her forties, plain and unmarried, once rescued a struggling Polish artist, Wenceslas Steinbock, from suicide, became his mentor and had more-than-maternal feelings for him. But then Baron Hulot’s daughter Hortense came along, stole Wenceslas Steinbock from Bette and eventually married him.

So Bette, bitter in her singleness, sets out to destroy the fortunes of the Hulots. She happens to live in the same apartment block as Madame Valerie Marneffe, a demi-mondaine whose compliant husband is perfectly happy to live off what her lovers give her.  Valerie Marneffe is currently the mistress of Baron Hulot. Bette strikes up a friendship with her and is really impressed with her. Bette deliberately introduces Valerie Marneffe to Celestin Crevel, knowing that he will become her next (paying) lover and that Baron Hulot will be “cuckolded”. Then she arranges a meeting between Wenceslas Steinbock and Valerie Marneffe. The weak Polish artist easily submits to the courtesan’s practised charms, and the marriage of Baron Hulot’s daughter Hortense is conveniently ruined.

Bette has gained a big part of her revenge on the Hulots.

In all this, it should be noted that Bette and Valerie Marneffe act very much as partners. Indeed, as a discreet subtext, there are hints of a lesbian attraction between them, Bette being the “manly”, strong-willed and plain peasant woman and Valerie being the more obviously “feminine” and pretty one whom philandering men crave. But Valerie is not merely Bette’s creature. Dangling three lovers on the hook at the same time (Crevel, Hulot and Steinbock) and milking them for their wealth, she has her eyes on a fourth, a Brazilian millionaire whom she hopes to marry when she gets rid of her silly husband.

I won’t give you all the details that follow. It’s sufficient to say that Baron Hulot’s follies lead him to disgrace his family, to commit business indiscretions that lose the family fortune and impoverish his wife, and finally to sink lower and lower down the social scale, residing in successively seedier parts of Paris and taking mistresses further and further down the social scale (his last two being a 15-year-old proletarian and a chambermaid). Bette’s revenge seems triumphant.

But, as so often in Balzac, fortunes change when there intervenes a character every bit as cunning as the destructive protagonist. This is the element that in a previous discussion on Balzac I called “virtue leaning on vice”.  Hulot’s lawyer son Victorin is not the dupe that his philandering father is, and by various means (including the help of another knowing demi-mondaine “Madame Nourrisson”) he is able to negate Bette’s plots, and restore the fortunes of Hulot’s aggrieved wife Adeline and aggrieved daughter Hortense. He even destroys Valerie Marneffe’s fortune-hunting.

Valerie dies penitent for her sins. Bette basically dies of grief that all her years of plotting have come to naught and that her enemies, the Hulots, once again prosper. But there is a sting in the tail. Balzac (unlike Dickens) rarely does unqualified happy endings, and there is a nasty twist when Adeline at last finds her erring husband Baron Hulot.

Now please don’t rage against me, dear reader. I assure you that this is in fact a concise summary of the novel’s plot and there is very much that I have left out. (Lawks-a-mercy, I haven’t even mentioned a double poisoning, and the episodes where Valerie Marneffe’s husband is sent off to Algeria.) One is once again struck by the white-hot genius of Honore de Balzac who – doubtless aided by those all-nighters he often pulled, fuelled by thick black coffee – wrote this whole complexly-plotted novel in a mere six weeks. For the record, it runs to nearly 500 pages in both the French edition and the English-language translation (by Kathleen Raine) that sit on my shelves.

One of the most obvious things to be said about it is how very frank it is on sexual matters. Can you think of any English novels, written in the 1840s, which speak so freely of feuds over mistresses (specifically identified as such), present sex as the machinery of revenge, and heavily imply a lesbian relationship? Dickens would ignore or euphemise such matters. Thackeray would nudge and wink. But Balzac calls a jade a jade. Another obvious thing is the way many minor characters, in the background of the central intrigues, are those “recurring characters” that are such a feature of La Comedie Humaine – Popinot, Rastingac, du Tillet, de Nucigen etc. Many of the ancient forbears of the Hulot family were people who appeared in Balzac’s early historical novel Les Chouans.

There is also the social perspective. La Cousine Bette is very much comment on Balzac’s own times. Written in 1846, its action covers the seven years from 1838 to 1845. This is the Louis Philippe Paris of the schemer, the sexual adventurer and the careerist, where the trusting and the honourable go to the wall. In some of the minor characters, whom I have not named, Balzac suggests that public morality has degenerated from the rectitude of an earlier generation. Wives and mistresses are openly bartered, especially on the basis of their incomes. (There is a scene in “Madame Nourrisson’s” establishment where bets are laid on whether the Brazilian millionaire whom Valerie covets already has a mistress.) Virtue is only for show. Most people believe that Valerie is the respectable housewife she has claimed to be. When Bette dies, she is mourned as if she had been the loyal family friend she pretended to be.

But for all the pungency of Balzac’s comments on these matters, the thing that leads people to read La Cousine Bette now is the title character herself.  Ugly, cunning, hypocritical and vengeful, Lisabeth Fischer is a complete bitch, incapable of any altruistic action. As a person she has no redeeming features. But as a character in a novel, she is compelling. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III or Dickens’ Quilp, she has both the force and the delight in the evil she is doing to become a grotesque and make us almost like her. And given that the people upon whom she avenges herself are mainly spineless roués and their dupes, we almost applaud her actions. A pity some innocent people get in the way, but she takes the role of an avenging angel upon a corrupt society. Or at least she does until somebody of even greater cunning than her own cuts her down to size.

That is how it works in the Balzac universe.

Typically dyspeptic footnote: I mentioned this before in one of my earlier Balzac postings. But it’s fitting to repeat it here. I understand that La Cousine Bette has been dramatized a number of times for French television, but I have seen none of those versions. I have, however, seen two English language filmings of it, one trite and dreadful and the other quite convincing as a rendition.

The trite and dreadful one was directed by Des McAnuff (anuff already!) and released in 1998. It was an expensive Anglo-American co-production, which bombed at the box office and sank without trace. This Cousin Bette not only alters the story beyond recognition (e.g. it kills off Baron Hulot’s wife in the opening sequence) but changes its whole tone. Jessica Lange is cast as Bette, though she is clearly still too young and too attractive for the role of a plain, embittered, vengeful old spinster. The character of Valerie Marneffe simply disappears. Instead, Bette’s bait for philanderers becomes the actress Jenny Cardine, played by Elizabeth Shue. The film has a sequence in which she gains applause in a theatre by baring her derriere for male admirers (no such sequence in the book, of course). Hugh Laurie is vaguely amusing in the role of Baron Hulot, presenting him as the same cretinous upper-class twit he perfected on television as Bertie Wooster. Bob Hoskins growls and rants as the bourgeois businessman Crevel. I do not condemn films for not being exactly faithful to their literary sources, but there is really so much wrong with this inept film that it is hard to see what the producers were trying to achieve. A comedy? A revenge fantasy? Commentary on history? It doesn’t work in any of these categories.

The convincing English-language rendition of La Cousine Bette is a real oldie, but [as I discovered in Auckland library’s DVD rental collection] it is still quite accessible. This is the five-part BBC serial adaptation of the novel made way back in 1971, so you have to make allowances for its relatively primitive technical aspects. Not only is it quite faithful to Balzac’s plot, but it centres on two very good performances. Valerie Marneffe is played by a very young Helen Mirren, who is good at looking innocent and then going all cunning. But it is Margaret Tyzack who is outstanding as Bette – gaunt, angry, cunning, vengeful, all of that, but also actually looking the part. Her howls at losing Wenceslas Steinbock are wrenching; her plotting scary. I think she’s the character Balzac created.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

WE ALL LIVE IN MODERN TIMES

There is a game I used to play with junior history classes.

“When did Julius Caesar live? ” I would ask. And after some dithering a bright spark might reply “In ancient Rome”. A really bright spark might even say “In Classical Antiquity”.

“Okay”, I would say. “And when did Joan of Arc live?” More dithering, but eventually the answer “In the Middle Ages.”

“Fine”, I would say, “and what would you call the age in which Leonardo da Vinci lived?”

“The Renaissance,” would come the reply – or at least it would if the class had had a little education.

“Good, “ I would say, “but you’re all wrong.”

Looks of annoyance and/or surprise, before I produced my killer explanation:

“They all lived in modern times because everybody lives in modern times.”

And so I would proceed to one of my favourite lectures.

Everybody in all of history lived in modern times because all times are modern to the people who are living in them. Only centuries later do historians start to periodise by inventing labels such as Classical Antiquity or the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages or the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment.

Of course all these labels are gross simplifications of the times they designate. Some are simply inaccurate. “The Dark Ages?” This is merely an ignorant way of referring to some of Europe’s confusions between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the so-called Middle Ages. There was still scholarship and learning in these ages. The term “Dark Ages” has basically been dropped by serious historians.

I would then rudely remark that, perhaps in four or five centuries, future historians will have made up a name for our age (The Age of Credulity? The Age of Disintegration?). They will almost certainly, if they are popular historians of the unreflective sort, berate us for our barbarous ideas, ignorance of things that haven’t been discovered yet, social organisation and so on. That, after all, is what populist and unreflective historians always do when they consider past ages. In some form or other they succumb to “Present-ism” – the ignorant superstition that all values and achievements have to be measured by the criterion of our own age. But (do you now understand, class?) our “modern” age is only provisionally modern. It will be somebody else’s antiquity.

If I had the time in delivering this favourite rant, I would add that people in the so-called Middle Ages did not sit around saying “Gosh, if only the Renaissance would start, so that we could enjoy perspective and chiaroscuro in painting!” For one thing, people would not reflect on things that do not yet exist. For another, one so-called “age” does not stop at a certain neat point so that another “age” can begin. Social and cultural change is a slow and gradual thing, and it is only much later that people claim to see where one “age” ended and another began. “Each age is one that is dying, or another one coming to birth.” Quite.

So each age has been modern. Each age exists with its own horizons, not knowing what exactly is going to follow it. Each age considers itself to be normality – indeed the only conceivable normality.

Where I have always been most aware of people ignoring these concepts is, naturally, in historical fiction. It would be wearisome to name all the historical novels in which novelists not only commit anachronisms, but blithely assume that a “normal” scale of values is the one we possess now, and that therefore “good” people in the past thought just as we do. There is always the implication that the past is just waiting to turn into our present, and no real understanding of how what we think of as a past age would have looked to people who saw it as modernity. In other words, there is no real historical imagination.

The most foolish sentence ever to appear in a New Zealand novel by an established author appeared in Witi Ihimaera’s painfully bad The Trowenna Sea (2009), a novel riddled with the sort of Present-ism I’ve been describing. There, a character writes, in a diary or letter “It is 1917 now, and World War One still alarms us.” This nonsense could be written only by somebody who had failed to think himself into the past, and who remained doggedly locked in the perspective of his own age. It was, as one wit said to me, the “Good people of the Middle Ages, let us go and fight the Hundred Years War!” moment of a very bad novel.

We only begin to understand the past when we know that it was modern times, unaware of future wars and upheavals, unaware of what future generations would take for granted. Just like us.

Everybody lives in modern times.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“A SPOOL OF BLUE THREAD” by Anne Tyler (Chatto and Windus – NZ distributors Penguin-Random House, $NZ36:99)

 

            I do not have to tell you who Anne Tyler is because Anne Tyler (born 1941) is one of America’s most esteemed writers – a multiple-award-winner with many acclaimed novels behind her. I am allowed to tell you, however, that to read her 20^th and latest novel A Spool of Blue Thread is like reading the work of an inspired newcomer. Mature in its vision, its style is nevertheless so fresh, clear and engaging, that you would think it was written by somebody half Tyler’s age. And this is a good way to approach the novel, because A Spool of Blue Thread is very much about ageing and the perceptions of different generations in the family context. Let nobody damn this fine work of fiction with the idiotic label “family saga”. To me “family saga” implies one of those fat potboilers that relate tycoons’ struggles over property, stretched sensationally across three or four generations.

A Spool of Blue Thread is no such tiresome thing.

This is a novel about a real and credible family. In fact, as Tyler explicitly describes them, the Whitshanks are an ordinary family even if, like every ordinary family, they imagine themselves to be special.

“There was nothing remarkable about the Whitshanks. None of them were famous. None of them could claim exceptional intelligence. And in looks they were no more than average. Their leanness was the raw-boned kind, not the lithe, elastic slenderness of people in magazine ads, and something a little too sharp in their faces suggested that while they themselves were eating just fine, perhaps their forefathers had not.”  (Chapter 2, pp.55-56) 

To give you just a little soupcon of plot, the Whitshanks live in an affluent suburb of Baltimore (the scene of most of Anne Tyler’s novels) in a fine house acquired in the 1930s by grandfather Junior Whitshank, who was a master builder and very particular about his residence.

Now father Red Whitshank and mother Abby Whitshank are in their 70s. Red, a building contractor, is slowing up and has had a mild heart attack. Abby, a social worker (as Anne Tyler’s mother was) is starting to have odd lapses of memory and brain fades.  Could this herald Alzheimer’s or dementia? So their adult children come home to make some decisions about who will care for Red and Abby now that they’re getting past caring for themselves.

And that is the set-up of the novel. But plot as such not the essential thing. The technique is to establish the basic context and then bit by bit reveal the long-standing alliances and fissures in the family, and how they came about. The fissures are not extreme. Like the family itself they are credible. But it is Anne Tyler’s skill to show us how much they dominate these characters’ lives anyway.

There is the disruptive effect of the family’s black sheep Denny, who is in a permanent state of unhappiness because his parents adopted another son, “Stem”, and then seemed to prefer him. There is the domestic perfection of Stem’s wife Nora, whose polite and studiedly Christian ways are a mild rebuke to the more unfocused Whitshanks. There are Abby and Red’s two married daughters, comparing their respective husbands and each sometimes pointedly suggesting the superiority of her own abilities in child-rearing. Sibling rivalry among adults is a less overt than sibling rivalry among the same people when they were children, but it is still acute.

Tyler’s omniscient third-person narration allows her to jump from consciousness to consciousness, but also to make leaps back in time. Abby has an idealised memory of her first courtship, in the late 1950s, by Red. When Red’s memory takes us back to those same years, the scene is less ideal, with some rough edges, although the sense of their love is no less urgent. Even more daringly, Tyler takes us right back to the years of the Great Depression, in the early 1930s, when grandfather Junior first met grandmother Linnie. These characters are dead and gone in the “present” of the story, but Tyler is revealing to us the way attitudes and patterns of thought have been transmitted through the generations in the form of those traditions and phrases that younger people inherit without fully knowing it. Young Junior and young Linnie are in some sense the embryo from which the whole tone of the family will grow. The past hangs on the present. Repeatedly the present situation is undercut by a scene from past, which Tyler inserts after it.

In every time-frame, however, what hits you most is the absolute accuracy of Tyler’s observation. There are those family pressures that lead Abby to reflect:

“One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they’d felt all those years?” (Chapter 6, p.156)

There is the chaos of a family beach holiday, with all generations doing their best to correlate. There is the devastating awkwardness of a funeral scene. The pastor hardly knows the deceased or the deceased’s family, there is the pecking order of who gets to speak, and while the family expect a church funeral, they’re not quite sure how they should react when they actually get one. And there are the times when adult siblings, no matter how different they are from one another, instinctively know how to react when the family home is invaded by an unwelcome aunt. If the milieu is specifically American (Baltimore, with familial traditions coming from further South), the patterns of interaction are fairly universal. Anyone who has lived with an extended family will recognise much of this.

It is particularly effective that so much meaning is conveyed in conversation, with Tyler’s sharp ear for the type of things that are actually said at family gatherings.

As to what it all means – I can only conclude lamely that this novel becomes a diagnosis of the whole condition of being a family. I would also note that Anne Tyler, projecting herself imaginatively into all her characters, is fully aware that males of every type think differently from females of every type. And could any male writer create the image of a woman-as-life-force as convincingly as Anne Tyler creates her young Linnie? The 1930s Depression scenes, in a way the “Rosebud” to which this novel leads, are dramatically among the strongest.

As for that title, A Spool of Blue Thread, as I read the novel I began to construct elaborate ideas about the thread that leads us through the labyrinth that is a family. But that is not what it means. You have to read the whole novel before the title’s meaning becomes clear.

I send up a solemn prayer – please, please don’t let anybody try to make a film or miniseries out of A Spool of Blue Thread. It would flatten the characters, simplify the time sequence and lose all those fine literary skills that make this the remarkable thing it is.

Irrelevant Footnote: This is not really related to Anne Tyler's fine novel, but it is grimly ironic that in the week I read about middle-cllass inhabitants of Baltimore living in leafy suburbs, the same city of Baltimore was in the grip of riots sparked by police brutality towards a black youth. Inhabitants of the same city can live in quite separate worlds.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

 “THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (El General en Su Laberinto first published 1989; English translation by Edith Grossman first published 1990)

Six years ago, the books page editor of the Sunday Star-Times asked me to write a long-ish review of Gerald Martin’s very long and (as it turned out) rather too worshipful biography Gabriel Garcia Marquez – A Life. I readily accepted the commission as I am not the lad to turn down a book-reviewing job unless the book sounds like complete tosh. There was only one snag, about which I did not tell the editor. I hadn’t at that stage read any of Garcia Marquez’s works.

No problem.

Over the five or six weeks before deadline, I did a crash course on Garcia Marquez, reading seven of his best known novels and two of his shorter works of reportage, before I plunged into the biography. I wanted to be knowledgeable about the chap whose life I was reviewing.

What an experience! I know that Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927–2014), who died last year, was a popular Nobel laureate and was certainly the most famous novelist Colombia ever produced [displacing Jose Eustasio Rivera – look up The Vortex via the index at right]. I know that he ended up as the South American sage, consulted – not always wisely – on all manner of political matters and giving kidding press conferences to journalists. His feud with his fellow Nobel laureate, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, was the stuff of literary gossip worldwide. I was aware that his One Hundred Years of Solitude was sometimes described as the most influential Spanish-language novel since Don Quixote; and his Love in the Time of Cholera came a close second as a Garcia Marquez favourite. Heretic that I am, though, when I came to read them I did not consider them the novelist’s best. My own choice would go to his highly-experimental early novel The Autumn of the Patriarch (with which I might some day deal on this blog) and especially to the robust and complex historical novel about the last days of Simon Bolivar, The General in his Labyrinth.

Here’s the synopsis I jotted into my reading diary:

Known throughout the novel only as “the General”, Simon Bolivar is travelling up Colombia’s Magdalena River, from Bogota to the Caribbean port of Cartagena. The year is 1830. He is on his way to exile in Europe. Although he is only 46 years old, he is wracked with tuberculosis and hence is depicted as an old man pushing his strength to the limits. The journey is arduous, requiring both a strong will and a strong constitution. Even the humid tropical air is an enemy:

“The last stage of the journey to Honda was along a heart-stopping precipice through air like molten glass that only physical willpower and stamina like his could have endured after a night of agony.” [p.66 in the Penguin edition – this novel is not divided into chapters.]

 In fact, this journey turns out to be the General’s last, for he dies in Santa Marta before he can embark for Europe.

Much of the third-person narration is presented in flashback, via his memories of past battles, past victories and past defeats. The tone is often elegiac and regretful. His ideal was a united Spanish-American republic after independence was won and the royal Spanish forces had been driven out. Instead, independence has meant the splitting up of the old Spanish Empire into quarrelling separate states. Venezuela has seceded from the proposed grand state of Colombia, and the man who was once called “the Liberator” is no longer so universally respected. There have been plots and assassination attempts against him. His most loyal high-ranking military follower, Field Marshal Sucre is assassinated. Before he dies, Sucre remarks to the General “It’s destiny’s joke… It seems we planted the ideal of independence so deep that now these countries are trying to win their independence from each other.” The General replies dryly “Don’t respect the enemies’ vile remarks, even when they’re as accurate as that one.” (p.18)

 General Santander plots against the General. General Rafael Urdaneta would be willing to hand over power to the General, but the General knows his time is past. Throughout this novel, the characters who stand most constantly by the General are his servant Jose Palacios and the minor figure of General Daniel O’Leary, who later writes voluminous memoirs of the General.

The labyrinth of the title is threefold. It is the labyrinth of memory in which the General is caught. It is also identified specifically with the twisting course of the river, which the journey follows. As the General’s physical condition degenerates, it is also specifically identified with his body and the diseased sinews through which death creeps. The General is in his labyrinth – a journey going nowhere. The General is also aware that he is replaceable, as suggested in the cynical aside:

“Someone had told the General that when a dog died it had to be replaced without delay by another just like it, and with the same name, so you could go on believing it was the same animal.” (p,173)

There’s a certain paradox in my appreciation of this novel. It’s possible that if I knew South American history better, I would like The General in his Labyrinth less. When it was first published in South America, it drew cries of protest from those who thought it depicted the great continental hero Bolivar negatively. It was noted that Garcia Marquez freely mixed historical fact with outright fiction, especially as there is no historical documentation of Bolivar’s last journey. However Garcia Marquez showed in a note of thanks (printed at the end of the Penguin edition) that he had put a couple of years of solid research into the novel – as well as allowing the free play of his imagination. He also noted that the genesis of The General in his Labyrinth was an unfinished novel about Bolivar by his friend Alvaro Mutis, who approved of Garcia Marquez doing his own take on the General.

One of the unflattering things about Garcia Marquez’s version of Bolivar is the man’s voracious sex-life. At one point we are told that he had cohabited with 35 women (not counting frequent one-night stands) and had sworn to them all that he loved them eternally.

“Once satisfied, he was content with the illusion that he would keep them in his memory, give himself to them from a distance in passionate letters, send them extravagant gifts to protect himself from oblivion, but, with an emotion that resembled vanity more than love, he would not commit the least part of his life to them.” (p.183)

The women in his life include the Englishwoman Miranda Lyndsey and the robust virago Manuela Saenz, who to the very last plots and fights on his behalf. Only towards the very end of the novel do we hear of his short-lived early marriage, which left him a widower at the age of 20.

Story-book superman sensuality is a staple of such Latin American fiction as I have read, but I am fairly sure that in this novel (unlike some of his others) Garcia Marquez is offering a satirical critique of boastful machismo, especially as, in the novel’s “present”, the sexual athlete that the General used to be has been reduced to a skeletal tubercular body.

In political matters that are perhaps closer to the General’s heart than women are, the General is aware that those who call themselves a new “liberal” party are often members of a wealthy elite – so here is the familiar problem of a self-interested bourgeoisie taking over once a war of independence has been won. At the same time it appears that the General’s own ideal of a republic gives little consideration to non-Europeans. Black slaves are taken for granted and there is scarcely a mention of indigenous (“Indian”) South Americans. In the General’s final reflections before he dies, Garcia Marquez has Bolivar say:

“America is ungovernable. The man who serves a revolution ploughs the sea. This nation will fall inevitably into the hands of the unruly mob and then will pass into the hands of almost indistinguishable petty tyrants of every colour and race.” (p.257)

Both class prejudice (“mob”) and racial prejudice (“colour and race”) are evident in this disillusioned outburst.

What is clear is that Garcia Marquez is using his historical novel to suggest the origins of all Spanish America’s subsequent woes – militarism (leadership by dictatorial generals); political factionalism; rule by European elites; the division of the continent into petty, feuding states. In all this, I am interested that the church does not come in for more criticism – perhaps because, by the time the novel was written, the church in South America (via liberation theology etc.) had taken a big step towards identifying more with the deprived classes than with the wealthy elite. Bolivar is a Freemason, but the comments on the church, which the novelist puts into his mouth, are relatively benign ones.

Garcia Marquez also uses the imagined historical situation to comment obliquely on the present day. At one point, Bolivar tells one of his generals “don’t go with your family to the United States. It’s omnipotent and terrible, and its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all.” (p.223). Elsewhere in the novel, the United States representative at the Congress of Panama is likened to “a cat at a congress of mice”. These are clearly remarks influenced by all the United States’ unwelcome interventions in South America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seen by Garcia Marquez as yet another of the continent’s ongoing woes.

Partly admiring, but also partly iconoclastic about an historical hero, The General in his Labyrinth is an excellent instance of historical novel as political statement.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

GALLIPOLI MYTHOLOGY

 














I have tactfully let some weeks go by before mentioning a matter that bugs me greatly.

Anzac Day is past. The parades, the concerts and the TV coverage from Turkey are now over. The newspaper supplements have ceased rolling off the presses and we are no longer being assailed by those instant experts, who suddenly know everything there is to know about the Dardanelles campaign.

It is understandable that this year, the centenary of the campaign, Gallipoli should have been given such high-profile coverage. But it has run the risk of giving New Zealanders the false idea that this was the most lethal campaign in which New Zealanders took part in the First World War. The reality is that far more New Zealanders died on the Western Front, and especially at Passchendaele, than at Gallipoli. Like those of other nations, our dead and wounded were most mauled by the European meat-grinder, not the Turkish one.

This misapprehension, however, is not what bugs me.

I make it clear that I am not a pacifist. I think it is fitting and proper that every nation both mourn and commemorate its war dead. I believe there are times when, regrettably, the use of military force is justifiable. I won’t explain my attitude in detail. Let’s just say it’s a modified form of the Thomist “just war” theory.

I also make it clear that I do not belittle or ridicule things in the past simply because they were “failures”. To do so would be to deploy the sweet and seductive faculty of hindsight, and to claim to be wiser than people in the past, who could not possibly know with certainty what the outcomes of their actions would be. In short, it would be rank “present-ism”.

Even so, here are the three things that bug me about current mythologisation of Gallipoli.

First, it was a foolish and botched campaign from the word go. Lives are always lost in war, but they can be lost to some purpose. The original strategy for the campaign was a feasible one. Here on the Western Front are the allies France and Britain and their respective empires. Separated from them by the belligerent German, Austrian and Turkish empires is France’s and Britain’s great ally Tsarist Russia. The idea of cutting through the Dardanelles, linking up with Russia, taking joint control of the Black Sea and helping Russia belt Germany, Austria and Turkey from the east was a good idea on paper. I am not saying smugly that it was not worth a try. But, forgotten in all the recent hoopla is the fact that the first attempt to put this into effect was a purely naval affair. The British and French navies attempted to rush the Hellespont, barge past Constantinople and connect with the Black Sea. They failed. The Turks had mined the Hellespont at strategic points. British and French ships were sunk. The British and French navies withdrew. The first attempt to “encircle” Turkey failed. Worse, this failed naval action gave the Turks full warning as to what the British and French strategy was. This meant that by the time British (and Australian and New Zealand) boots made contact with the Gallipoli peninsula, the Turks were fully prepared for them and – with the assistance of astute German military advisors – they were waiting to repulse the invaders of their home turf. We hear much of the circumstance that ANZAC landings were flunked and that, instead of landing at beaches from which they could have advanced across level ground, they were landed where there was a thin ribbon of beach overlooked by daunting cliffs and rugged terrain. True – but it would probably have made little difference to the outcome inasmuch as the Turks were already one strategic jump ahead of their enemies. Remember, I am not using sanctimonious hindsight in saying all this. I am simply suggesting that, after the failure of the naval action, there must have been at least somebody in the British or French War Departments to suggest that the Turks would now be in a state of alert and preparedness, and that pursuing the grand strategy of linking up with Russia was probably not advisable.

Second, I react very negatively to the notion that the Gallipoli campaign was somehow the birth of our nationhood. Wiping away the patina of post-war fictions, one has to accept that most young New Zealanders and Australians who rushed off to war in 1914 and 1915 did so from motives of loyalty to the British Empire, rather than from the idea that they were building their respective Pacific nations. They thought of themselves as British. To be involved in the big war going on, on the other side of the world, was essentially a way of saying to Mother England “Look, Mum, we’re big boys now and we can fight too.” It is quite true that when the Gallipoli campaign was in progress, some Aussies and Kiwis modified their views of British High Command, began to see British (as opposed to colonial) forces as other than themselves and, like Malone (fictionalised by Maurice Shadbolt as “Connolly” in his play Once on Chunuk Bair) began to assert their non-British identity. It is quite true that, especially on the Western Front, Aussies and Kiwis sometimes became disrespectful towards British manners and the old-school-tie ethos of British officers. (Read John A. Lee’s Civilian into Soldier sometime.)  But even so, neither at the time nor until a process of post-war mythologisation had occurred, was Gallipoli seen as the birth of our nation. Damme! I know that custom means we have to believe something was the start of the nation we inhabit, but give me the election of the Liberals or Gate Pa or Mickey Joe Savage’s feints at welfare or even the wretched Treaty of Waitangi if we are going to canonise some event as our national birth date. [By the way, subsequent to writing these remarks, I have been reading Steven Loveridge's Calls to Arms, a study of the New Zealand mentality during the First World War which I will be reviewing on this blog in a few weeks' time. I am delighted to note that Loveridge strongly reinforces my view that most New Zealanders at the time thought of themselves as British, and willingly fought in defence of British interests.]

Finally, and most in reaction to the recent celebrations of the centenary, there is my fear that Gallipoli becomes a pretext for recruitment – that, in effect, commemorations of soldiers’ courage and determination function as a big recruiting poster. It is right to remember soldiers’ sufferings, remember the courage of some and the fear of others, remember the hard conditions they had to endure and be thankful for our own easy and comfortable lives in comparison. But courage, endurance and perseverance, admirable though they are, can be deployed in the service of monstrous or foolish causes. Soldiers who went through Gallipoli (including at least one of my great-uncles) were going through a campaign that could not possibly be won. In short, for all their admirable qualities, their lives were thrown away. The words “Lest we forget” are often invoked in their remembrance as if we are being called to emulate their warrior spirit. Surely “Lest we forget” should also mean “Lest we forget the realities of their historical situation and the way their lives were squandered”. I am reminded that the phrase was most popularised in a poem (“Recessional”) by Rudyard Kipling who, great imperialist though he was, was warning the British people not to be too smug about their empire. And I am very cautious about the current justification of intervention in Iraq on the basis of the ANZAC spirit.

Different war. Different circumstances. Irrelevant imagery.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“BEING HERE: Selected Poems” by Vincent O’Sullivan (Victoria University Press, $NZ40)

 

There is a foolish and, I now realize, pointless game I used to play when reviewing any new collection of poetry.

I attempted to guess why the poems had been arranged in the order in which they were arranged; and why they had been divided into different sections. Sometimes this game led me to fashion all manner of elaborate theories about the thematic connections between the poems in Section A as opposed to the poems in Section B of the same volume. I’m afraid I attempted this in the brief notice I wrote of Vincent O’Sullivan’s capacious 2011 collection The Movie May Be Slightly Different when I reviewed it for the NZ Listener (23 July 2011) and I played the silly game again when I reviewed on this blog [look it up on the index at right] O’Sullivan’s prize-winning 2013 collection Us, then.

But I have given up playing this game. A wise poet told me that the only reason he divided a collection into sections was to give readers a break. Readers might be happy to read 15 poems one after the other, but they could be daunted by the prospect of reading 35 poems one after the other. Therefore, said the poet, dividing a new collection into sections was for him simply a way of signalling to readers that it was okay for them to take a break in their reading.

So I have abandoned the game. I now tend to approach new collections of poetry as collections of individual poems, each to be considered on its own merits.

But the rules are rather different, are they not, when it comes to a volume surveying a poet’s whole career so far? Surely it’s legitimate for a reader to look at the development or persistence of the poet’s ideas, or at the changes in the poet’s style, when the volume presents the poems in chronological order?

Let’s situate this argument.

Being Here: Selected Poems gives us, in order of publication, selections from over forty years of Vincent O’Sullivan’s output. It covers 15 collections, beginning with Bearings (1973) and ending with Us, then (2013), with eight new poems appended at the end. En route an earlier Selected Poems (1992) is sampled. Being Here: Selected Poems is a handsome hardback in which the 230 pages of poems are followed by an alphabetical index of titles of poems.

There is no introduction and no apologia by the poet. I have to assume (and why not?) that these are the poems Vincent O’Sullivan has chosen to represent what he, at the present time, considers the best and most vital of his work so far.

Again, I have to assume that O’Sullivan has had to be severely self-critical to make such a selection, because it represents only a small part of all the poetry he has had published. His first two collections of poems (from the 1960s) don’t figure. The 120 poems of The Movie May Be Slightly Different (admittedly a bigger-than-average collection) are represented by16 poems in Being Here. The 78 poems of Us, then are represented by 23 poems. So I could rattle on, comparing the contents pages of earlier volumes with the contents pages of this one. All “selected” poems are provisional, especially when the poet is still writing. It does mean, however, that the reader might sometimes regret what isn’t here. I’m sorry not to sight “The incentives, south”, which I still think one of the best of Us, then. And (blowed if I rationally know why), I missed the cheery “Anglicans, good oh!” from The Movie May Be Slightly Different. Other readers might have different omissions to mourn.

Reading Being Here from cover to cover over the course of a couple of weeks, I met many familiar acquaintances and re-considered some earlier judgments I had made on them. In Butcher and Co. (1977) and The Butcher Papers (1982), the figure of Butcher has always puzzled me. Is this meat-chopper-wielding guy a satirical swipe at the materialistic Kiwi joker, who has no time for Culture, God and Higher Things? Is he the man for whom the beauty of catching a fish ends merely in dead meat? (As is implied in the poem “Fish for All That Rise as Rise Wet Stars”). Or is he an affirmation that inside even such a joker as he, there is still room for poetry, myth and legend? (The poem “Do You Ever Consider” would suggest so). As I now read what is representative of the Butcher poems in Being Here, there is a fruitful ambiguity to the character, in which respect he is as distant cousin to the similarly mythologised “Mr Maui” of Peter Bland.

O’Sullivan’s preoccupations have changed over the years, but there are some constants in what is represented in Being Here. One of his greatest skills is his ability to express complex philosophical and theological ideas without condescension and without too much abstraction. His language often sounds deceptively colloquial. He does not show off his learning. But the ideas ambush us anyway. There are those instantaneous connections between things, which prove to be the heart of the poem. “Kingfisher: Winter”, from the first represented collection Bearings (1973), flips from a literal wintry scene to archetypes of Greek mythology. In “Holy Thursday – 2” (from For the Indian Funeral, 1976) a bite into a sweet potato (kumara) suddenly flips the poem from Mexico to New Zealand. Similarly, and especially in the earlier poems represented, the metaphysical butts into everyday reality. Death, with his horse and scythe, lurks in doorway in “For a Third Birthday” from Butcher & Co. (1977). More pointedly, “Don’t Knock the Rawleigh’s Man” (from The Rose Ballroom, 1982) seems set to be piece of Kiwiana nostalgia. (It appealed as such to my wife and me as we read it out, and had to explain to our teenaged daughters what a Rawleigh’s man was.) It transmutes into a reflection on the temptation of Christ; and the congeries of flashy things that detract from the deep heart’s core.

Another of O’Sullivan’s special skills is his pithy way with titles. His titles are an intrinsic part of most of his poems. A certain book editor once remarked to me that O’Sullivan’s titles are often better than some people’s poems. True. Prime example? “Nice Morning for it, Adam” (from the 2004 collection of the same name). If the reader were a little inattentive, he/she might at first take this poem to be simply about a gardener and flowers. Add the title and we have Eden and God with shears clipping us.

None of this means that the O’Sullivan’s poems are all conundra waiting to puzzle us. The straight colloquial satire is here, in the likes of  “Resthaven” (from Butcher & Co.), a devastating reportage on old people trapped in a nursing home like prisoners. And quotidian reality – what we literally see, hear, smell, taste and touch – is a constant preoccupation. In the selection from The Pilate Tapes (1986) there are just a few of the poems referencing Pilate and the Crucifixion. (I note O’Sullivan does not include the most explicit Crucifixion and Resurrection ones, “fault / line” and “TELEX FOR JIX RE SUNDAY”, which he chose among the poems that represented him when he edited the Oxford Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry.) More space is given to the sequence “The Westmere Replays” which tells us of a man trying unsuccessfully to chat up women (“Corner”); a woman dying (“Visitor”); women remembering American soldiers in New Zealand in the Second World War (“Was She?”) and the experience of meeting an old flame after a long separation (“Late Romantic”, which opens with that fine anti-romantic line “The moon mightn’t be so fat if it wasn’t for what we fed it.”)

Quotidian reality is not, however, as straightforward as it at first seems, and this brings me to another O’Sullivan preoccupation which I can only call “the thingness of things”.

Often, in his poems of the last twenty years, there is a resistance to overloading things with “meaning”, an attempt to see things as they are without philosophising and without imposing upon them a human perspective. I was getting a little lost in the poems selected from the collection Seeing You Asked (1998), whose allusions were, to me, somewhat opaque and whose philosophical speculations strained; when “Right on”, the first poem selected from Lucky Table (2001), slapped me alert with its opening lines “A dead overturned beetle can look as if / it’s feeling in several fob-pockets at once,  / checking the beetle version of time / when the ticking stopped on cue. / A dead beetle looks as though / there’s nothing left to do, supposing / it stayed alive. Dead and complete”. Sure, there is the hint of anthropomorphism here (feeling in fob-pockets), but this is a brilliant reflection on the humanness of being human and the animalness of being animal. The beetle and its death are different from, and other than, the human. A similar idea is seen in the reflections on an elephant in “The monastic life” (from Nice morning for it, Adam, 2004)

From Seeing You Asked, the poem “As is, is” wishes for a world in which it were possible to meet reality face to face, with the line “Come down, each atom invites, come down to where things actually are”. But given the nature of human perception, given the human propensity for abstraction, and given language’s nets of metaphor and approximation, this is not possible.

In “River road, due south” (from Nice morning for it, Adam) we seem to be getting a picture of literal “reality” until we re-read the opening line and realize we are in an extended metaphor.

“Being here” (from Further Convictions Pending, 2009) wishes for direct experience of bees, apricots, the beauty of the day – the thingness of things. But metaphor and abstraction creep in. In other words, in high-falutin Kantian terms (of which O’Sullivan would never be guilty in his poetry), we can know only the phenomena, never the noumena. The noumena are the Eden that is never attainable. The screen of our humanity comes between us and nature. That O’Sullivan chooses “Being Here” as the title of this collection shows how central these concerns are to him.

Which, as I now realize, is a very lame way to sum up the man’s work. What of those poems about childhood? What of the ones that comment on high art – literature and especially paintings? What of the familial ones? To do justice to them all, I would have to write a notice much longer than this.

Time for the purely personal response.

First, I have to mention three poems that have stayed with me since I closed Being Here.

* “Poem 13” from the chilly, wintry collection Brother Jonathan, Brother Kafka (1980) because of its severe and admonitory opening: “To be in a place for spring and not have lived its winter / is to get things on the cheap – it is asking from sky / as much as taking from earth, what has not been earned, / it is food without its growing, pay without labour.”

 * “Saving the Image” from The Rose Ballroom (1982) is as perfect a poem about the persistence and wayward ways of memory, and the potential falsity of artificially-preserved images, as New Zealand has produced.

* The brilliant “No harm in hoping” from Lucky Table (2001), which I here quote cheekily in its entirety:

“At the end of the story I want you

to say, ‘I’ve forgotten the plot entirely.

It’s no use asking which character was which,

What name she used, what his job was.

Or where the bridge crossed the canal.’

At the end of the story I want you

to remember only the important things

that walk between the congregations of print

like a bride you’ve read of between the torches

of the story you thought you read.”

Second, a summary of this whole review.

It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? This is essential reading.