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.  

SUNDRY BOOKS ABOUT NAZIS  (all published in the early 21^st century)

 

            There’s nothing wrong in reading scholarly and well-researched books about Nazi Germany and the catastrophic results of its ruling ideology. We have to know the dark side of history if we are not to sink into profound ignorance about how human beings are capable of behaving. But I am always sceptical of people who take an obsessive interest in books about Hitler and his regime. There seems to be a sort of dark nostalgia about such an obsession; a fetishisation of evil just one step away from those people who collect Nazi memorabilia (medals, buttons, posters, uniforms) from junk-shops or specialty stores.

            As a work-horse book reviewer, I have never actively sought out books about Nazis for review. But quite a few such books have been pushed my way over the years. So here is a collection of five of them. The first two are about monsters, but are also very speculative in a way that many professional historians would question. The third is about a sheer opportunist. And the last two are about the genocidal results of Nazism. These reviews are all presented here unaltered from the way they originally appeared in newspapers and magazines.

 

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            First, “THE HIDDEN HITLER” by Lothar Machtan.  This review appeared in the Dominion, 5 January 2002

 

By inclination and practice, Adolf Hitler was homosexual. This fact determined much of the course of his private life and some of the course of his public life.

On hearing that this was the thesis of Lothar Machtan’s The Hidden Hitler, my first impulse was to bracket it with one of my all-time favourite headlines from Britain’s trash-tabloid press: Best kept secret of the war – Hitler was a woman. In other words, as a piece of off-the-wall sensationalism. But Machtan (professor of history at Germany’s Bremen university) is remarkably persuasive. Yes, he does have to lean heavily on inference sometimes, and yes, he does strain the interpretation of some documents. But there is enough here of solidly cross-referenced fact to suggest that this is a perfectly valid line of enquiry for the biographer of Hitler.

And besides, one cannot blame Machtan for having to be imaginative in some of his conclusions. One of his main arguments is, after all, that the Nazi regime assiduously destroyed evidence of the Fuhrer’s real sexuality, just as they ruthlessly destroyed witnesses.

Once he was about to become dictator, there were women who found Hitler sexually attractive, including Magda Quandt (who eventually married Josef Goebbels), the loony film-maker Leni Riefenstahl and the even loonier Englishwoman Unity Mitford. But none of them achieved the intimacy with Hitler they clearly desired. Hitler kept his niece Angela (“Geli”) Raubal as an employer keeps a servant. She committed suicide. Then there was blonde, vacuous Eva Braun, the official “mistress”, who was Hitler’s companion for his last ten years and whom he married at the last minute in the bunker. Machtan interprets Braun as Hitler’s public token of sexual “respectability” and surmises that, in fact, Hitler never advanced beyond the platonic stage with her or with any woman. Actually Hitler knew no woman (apart from his mother) till he was nearly 40 and emerging as a national political figure very much in the public gaze, whereas he knew many men on intimate terms.

His boyhood friend, August Kubizek, wrote a memoir of their erotically-charged life together. In four years of World War 1, he was so inseparable from his fellow runner Ernst Schmidt that another member of their battalion use to refer to them as “the nancy boys”. Then there were Hitler’s openly-homosexual mentors such as the anti-semitic writer Dietrich Eckhart in the 1920s and the rivals Kurt Ludecke and Ernst Hanfstaengel, who both attempted blackmail in the 1930s. And there was the whole nature of Ernst Rohm’s SA stormtroopers which, as no historian has ever denied, contained a higher-than-average proportion of homosexuals and, at first, gloried in the homo-erotic experience it promised.

It is worth noting that the exiled German socialist and communist press never tired of linking Hitler to this milieu and presenting him as a homosexual, even after the murder of Rohm and his associates in 1934.

Of course it could be argued that all this is irrelevant to the serious stuff of history. To examine Hitler’s sexuality is not to explain why he was a mesmeric orator, pathological anti-semite and mass murderer. But Machtan does make a good case for linking Hitler’s sexuality to public affairs, especially in the manner in which Nazi Germany severely persecuted male homosexuality and yet left untouched a number of high-placed homosexuals in the Nazi movement itself.

I do not believe this book will be the last word on the subject. Machtan admits that many key documents are still inaccessible. But Machtan’s evidence is at least as good as the evidence that some gay writers have used to “out” prominent cultural figures from Shakespeare to Schubert to Henry James. The difference is, of course, that young Adolf will not be as welcome an addition to the gay pantheon.

 

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The next monster is Heinrich Himmler, as depicted in “S.S.1 – THE UNLIKELY DEATH OF HEINRICH HIMMLER” by Hugh Thomas. This review appeared in the Dominion 2 March 2002. It is worth pointing out that the historian mentioned in this review, Hugh Thomas, was the author of what for years was the best-known history of the Spanish Civil War. Obviously, he is not the author of this very speculative book.

 

            At the end of the Second World War, SS boss Heinrich Himmler was arrested by British troops as he attempted to pass through their lines with fake identity papers. Due to poor supervision, he was able to commit suicide while in British custody by biting the poisoned capsule hidden in his mouth. His body was hastily buried in an unmarked grave.

            That, at any rate, is the received version of Himmler’s death. But Hugh Thomas doubts it. Thomas (not to be confused with the famous historian of the same name) is a surgeon. He has a habit of doubting things. He has already written two books using medical evidence to argue that the Rudolf Hess who was put on trial in Nuremberg was not the real Rudolf Hess. His conclusions have, of course, been hotly contested.

This time, however, he is more circumspect. He does not exactly say that the man who committed suicide in custody was not Heinrich Himmler. But by examining the imperfect postmortem records from 1945, he declares a strong suspicion that it was somebody else. Oddly enough, Thomas’s circumstantial evidence is more persuasive than his rather thin medical evidence.

As Thomas tells it, Himmler was aware by 1943 that Germany had lost the war, and was already making plans for his post-war survival. At first Himmler harboured the fantasy that he would be acceptable to the Allies as an alternative German head of state to Adolf Hitler. He sent out tentative feelers to British and Amercan agents offering himself as an anti-communist ally. When these approaches were rebuffed, the Holocaust’s chief architect went to Plan B. This was to use his SS to transfer as many German funds as possible abroad (in effect robbing the Third Reich of essential capital and assets) in the hope of creating a Fourth Reich at some future date. He also made meticulous plans for his own escape.

So how, implies Thomas, would this thorough man have so easily walked into captivity at war’s end?

In an odd sort of way, I feel that Thomas has fallen for the Nazis’ myth of their own invincibility. He simply does not accept that the ferocious Himmler could (and did) do extremely silly things, especially as the Reich came tumbling down. And he never ventures to explain how an imposter would have been induced to kill himself in Himmler’s place.

On the other hand, despite a confused and plodding prose style, this is a book that raises a lot of tantalising questions. It is genuinely curious that Himmler’s second-in-comand, Walter Schellenberg, was treated so leniently by the victorious Allies (he never served the light sentence he was given at Nuremberg). Thomas claims that Schellenberg knew some dirty secrets about Soviet moles in the British secret service, and those moles (Philby, Blunt) therefore did their best to strike a deal with him to keep his mouth shut.

This section of the book is far more intriguing than theorisings about faded duelling scars that may or may not have been on the cheek of Himmler’s corpse.

 

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And here is the opportunist, as depicted in “MAGDA GOEBBELS” by Anja Klabunde. This review appeared in the Sunday Star-Times 5 October 2003. For the record, the “mysterious” death of Victor Alorosoff is often suspected to have been a “hit” carried out by Nazi agents, who were eliminating an embarrassing reminder of Magda Goebbels’ past.

 

If somebody concocted the life of Magda Behrend as an historical novel, it would be considered very far-fetched.

She was born, illegitimately, to a woman who married and divorced a number of times. The man her mother was married to for the longest period, Richard Friedlander, was Jewish. He was the stepfather Magda grew up with, on very good terms.

Although she was an ethnic German, Magda got on well with her stepfather’s Jewish friends and mingled with members of an early Zionist youth group. Her first serious boyfriend – possibly her lover – was the left-wing Zionist leader Victor Alorosoff. They contemplated marriage, but Magda was ambitious. She chose instead to marry the staid, but incredibly wealthy, German businessman Gunther Quandt.

Quandt gave her wealth, prestige and one son. But he also profoundly bored her. She divorced him. She almost took up with Alorosoff again, but he emigrated to Palestine (and was later murdered in very mysterious circumstances).

Instead, to fill her empty life, Magda discovered the Nazi movement. She wooed and married Hitler’s Berlin deputy Josef Goebbels, who was then the chief organiser of the brownshirts’ running street battles with the communists. Her complaisant first husband witnessed her wedding to her second. Socialist newspapers, knowing something of her background, gleefully ran the inaccurate headline: “Nazi Boss Marries Jew”.

Anja Klabunde’s biography doesn’t make any excuses for Magda Goebbels. But it does try to understand her. Basically, she was an opportunist with no strong convictions of her own, who was willing to go along with any dominant male who could deliver her power and position. If, in an alternative version of history, Germany had been going communist, then she would happily have married a commissar.

Once committed to the Nazis, however, she supported them fanatically. This included turning her back on Jews who had been her friends. As the wife of Hitler’s propaganda boss, she was fully aware of the regime’s crimes and attempted genocide, and justified them in her diaries.

For the sake of appearances, she remained married to Goebbels, although she was twice sorely tempted to divorce him. As head of the Nazi film induistry, Goebbels had access to young actresses, whom he exploited in endless affairs. Magda, meanwhile, gave birth to their six children, all of whom were bizarrely given names beginning with “H”: Hilde, Helga, Hedder etc.

In the bunker, when defeat was inevitable, the Goebbels murdered all of their six children before killing themselves. Pity about the kids, of course, who were too young to bear any responsibility for their parents’ crimes. But very hard to feel sorry for a woman who had nothing going for her but her social ambition and a love of chic clothes.

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“THE LOST” by Daniel Mendelsohn is a very compassionate work by a Jewish writer, who goes down the unusual path of seeking to understand those who collaborated with the Nazis in their genocidal programme. He does not condemn. He understands. This review appeared in the NZ Listener 30 June 2007

Why did Cain kill his brother Abel? If you like, you can go all anthropological, the way Jean-Jacques Rousseau did, and say the story encodes long racial memory. Cain tills the soil while Abel keeps sheep. So the story's really about centuries of hostility between farmers and nomadic herdsmen. But such Enlightenment guessing really misses something more fundamental. God accepts Abel's offering but rejects Cain's. Cain, the elder brother, feels humiliated and hurt. He turns on his brother and kills him. People who have suffered are often spurred to make others suffer as well.

Now flash-forward some millennia. Why did many Ukrainians collaborate with the Nazis in the Ukraine and eastern Poland, helping to hunt down and kill Jews during the Holocaust?

In the 30s, Stalin's regime visited terrible suffering on Ukrainians, whom the Georgian dictator particularly despised. In collectivisation, purges and organised starvation, the number of murdered Ukrainians at least equalled, and possibly exceeded, the number of Jews Hitler murdered.

True, this historical fact has been used by Holocaust-deniers and other nutters in mitigation of the Holocaust. But it is a fact, nevertheless. When Nazi tanks rolled eastward in 1941, whole Ukrainian villages welcomed them as liberators.

When the time came, Cain murdered Abel a million times over. It's not frivolous to think of a Holocaust book in these terms, because they are the terms of the author of The Lost, Daniel Mendelsohn.

Apparently Mendelsohn is a secular, non-observing US Jew for whom the Torah is no more a historical record than those Greek tragedies that he (as a professional classicist) has spent much of his life studying. Yet as he tells his own Holocaust story, Mendelsohn can find no better unifying structure than meditations on what Jews call Bereishit and Gentiles call the Book of Genesis.

Why did Cain kill Abel? Does God's covenant with Abraham mean Jews are special? Do Noah's Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah mean that God is indifferent to His Creation, or does He actually approve of mass murder? Whether readers are secular or religious, they will find that these meditations, underscored with remarks by rabbinical commentators, give this particular quest a wholeness and moral authority lacking in other accounts of equal horrors.

Mendelsohn's quest is to find out how exactly his great-uncle and his daughters died in the Ukrainian town of Boleshaw under Nazi occupation. Over nearly 600 pages, The Lost (subtitled “A Search for Six of Six Million”) tells how he and his photographer brother Matt travelled, interviewed and researched for five years. This makes The Lost as much a reflection on the fragility of historical memory as on the Holocaust.

So, often, old people in Boleshaw, Israel, Sydney, Stockholm and Copenhagen only half-remember things. Or what they remember turns out to be wrong. Or they confuse rumour with witness. Or they have reason to suppress information, like the old lady who clams up because, as Mendelsohn later discovers, her brother was in the "Jewish police" who thought they could save themselves by collaborating.

The story includes some heroism and some moral solace. The two Poles who hid Mendelsohn's great-uncle and one of his daughters. The Ukrainian priest who provided baptismal certificates to give Jews cover identities. The Catholic boy who chose to be hanged rather than give up his pregnant Jewish girlfriend.

And of course, the story also includes the unspeakable. The crowds who watched impassively or jeered or even cheered when the round-ups and mass shootings were taking place.

It's an extraordinary serenity that Mendelsohn finally reaches. He befriends elderly Ukrainians. He understands what makes Cain tick and respects Cain's viewpoint. Having lived a privileged life in the US, Mendelsohn knows he has no right to criticise other people's lack of courage when the reward for helping or sheltering Jews was a public hanging.

Read with the most objective and rational spirit, there are still parts of this book that will choke you up. If they don't, I assume you are a hardened cynic. Or maybe you have read too many books.

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            Finally, “THE HOLOCAUST – A NEW HISTORY” by Laurence Rees. It can be recommended as a concise, but comprehensive, history of the subject. This review  appeared in Sunday Star-Times 12 February 2017

 

 

            It is always gruelling to read a book about the Holocaust because no other subject gives so much evidence of human depravity and cruelty on such a vast scale. Industrialised mass murder, gassing by Zyklon B or carbon monoxide, machine-gunning of men, women and children by “Special Purpose” units, consistent sadism by camp guards and SS officers, inhumane medical experiments and millions of deaths all justified by an insane racial theory. To read the 400-plus closely-printed pages of Laurence Rees’ The Holocaust is to read about all this and it is inevitably very, very depressing.

            But the questions arise: Haven’t we heard this all before in numerous books and TV documentaries? And is there really a place for this “new history”?

            I think there is a place for this book for a number of reasons.

            First, Laurence Rees is not only a bona fide historian (Oxford University grad.), but he is also an excellent communicator. For years he was in charge of BBC TV’s History unit and he produced such series as The Nazis: A Warning from History and World War II: Behind Closed Doors. He does not simplify or talk down to readers, but his style is clear, fluent and easy to read, as well as scholarly.

            Second, his methodical, chronological approach allows him to follow the whole course of the disaster from Hitler’s first years of wide influence in the 1920s to the end of the war. In the process he is able to show how the attempted genocide of Jews (and Roma and Slavs) grew gradually from theory to practice. There was no one moment  - not even the much-publicised Wannsee Conference – at which the Holocaust “began”. It was implicit in what Hitler preached from the start. In his postscript, Rees agrees with the historian Ian Kershaw’s statement “No Hitler, No Holocaust”. Holocaust-deniers sometimes pretend that Hitler had no hand in ordering atrocities, but that is complete nonsense as the record shows. Even so, genocide was often carried out according to initiatives of local Nazi Gauleiters and camp commandants.

            Third, Rees shows in detail how non-Jewish populations reacted to the Jews’ plight. There was much collaboration with the Nazis. There was also much heroism. Basically Italians (even Fascists) refused to cooperate with Hitler’s plan to destroy Italian Jews, and most Italian Jews survived the war.  Many church people showed sympathy. Some even practised it, although the highest church authorities remained hesitant to do anything and the silence of the Vatican still causes debate.

            At the other end of the moral scale, it is almost funny, in a grotesque way, to learn how leading Nazis tried to dissociate themselves from the Holocaust at the last moment, when they knew Germany faced defeat and retribution would follow. Worst monster, making pathetic attempts to do this, was Heinrich Himmler himself.

            Of course detailed accounts of what happened in each facility are sheer horror, but they are a necessary part of the story. This could well be the best single-volume history of the Holocaust to date.

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.

LIMITS OF PERFECTION

 

            We didn’t exactly have a quarrel, my wife and I. We had a difference of opinion.

 

            Judging solely from recordings and such relevant videos as are found on Youtube, she had decided that Maria Callas was the finest operatic soprano ever to record the great arias. Neither of us had ever heard Callas sing live, of course, as she was well past her prime before either of us was fully an adult – and besides, we didn’t ever have the money to fly over to the Met.

 

            Judging solely from recordings and such relevant videos as are found on Youtube, I had decided that Renee Fleming was the finest operatic soprano ever to record the great arias. We hadn’t heard her sing live, either.

            I said that Maria Callas’s voice always sounded as if she had something stuck in her throat, affecting her vocal cords.

            My wife said that Renee Fleming always sounded too, too perfect and in control, missing the necessary emotionalism that the great arias require.

            She also said that I was probably influenced by the media in which I saw and heard Renee Fleming.

            She might have had a point there.

            Maria Callas lived and sang before the age of the internet and of regular filmed transcriptions of operas from the Met. One saw her performing only in old black-and-white broadcasts captured from television (and now available on Youtube). Renee Fleming lives in the age of full-colour Met transcriptions. We have twice seen and heard her in full-screen cinema presentations of Met transcriptions, as well as seeing her often in older transcriptions available on Youtube. My wife suggested that I was responding to Fleming because of her physical beauty and because of the more advanced medium in which we could appreciate her.

            I had to confess that I was a little smitten with her beauty and I may have been biased when I was judging her singing. But I clung to my verdict. After seeing her at the movies as Desdemona in the Met transcription of Verdi’s Otello, I had rushed home and watched her on Youtube singing some of the same arias in a production staged a decade earlier – and comparing this with the recent transcription, I concluded that her voice had not degenerated in the least. She must be the best.

            Anyway, to settle the matter over a bottle of wine, we sat down one evening and compared the two sopranoes aria for aria.

            On Youtube, we watched and listened to Maria Callas singing O mio babbino caro from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi.  Then we watched Renee Fleming sing it. No contest there, because O mio babbino caro is really a sweet sentimental song, not one to wrench the emotions… and I still thought Callas’s voice sounded somewhat constrained.

            We followed this with first Callas then Fleming singing the Ave Maria and the Willow Song with its Salce, Salce, Salce and all the recitative that follows in the last act of Verdi’s Otello, when Desdemona is about to be murdered.  I admit that my judgement shuddered a little. This is one of the most wrenching scenes in opera, and both women sang perfectly and with the appropriate emotional display – the fear of Desdemona for she knows not what, played against Verdi’s lowering music. But I did realise that Callas’s lower tones, the darker element of her voice, really did suggest a more tragic situation than Fleming’s well-managed cascade of sound.

            What really battered me, however, came when we compared Callas and Fleming singing one of the great show pieces, and the aria that probably popularised the word “diva” as a designation for operatic sopranos. I refer to the Casta Diva from Bellini’s Norma, where the pagan priestess addresses reverently the chaste goddess of the moon. As it happened, both Callas and Fleming were filmed, forty or so years apart, performing this as a concert piece rather than as part of a production of the opera.

            Maria Callas put her soul into it. Even if she was dressed to the nines with a silk wrap over her evening gown, and with jewels glittering around her neck, she played the part of Norma, drawing her wrap protectively about herself as her first note approached, really beseeching the goddess, being both humble and reverent but begging the goddess to answer her prayer. She inhabited the role, and for the first time I fully appreciated how those darker tones of her voice, those very notes that I had taken to be a defect, were what conjured up emotion.

            And Renee Fleming, also dressed in an elegant evening gown? Note for note she was perfect. You thought how beautiful her voice was, how well she managed every sound, how fully rehearsed she was. But she was manifestly playing the part rather than being the part, smiling wistfully at her audience rather than giving her full attention to the goddess. Of course both sopranos were giving a performance and consciously doing so, but Callas’s voice and performance won.

            So, eventually, I had to agree with my wife’s original judgement… much as I still love Renee Fleming.

            Maria Callas died at the age of 53, many years ago. Renee Fleming is now in her 61^st year and has moved away from opera to giving concert performances only.

            What is the point of this sermon?

            Especially in music, technical perfection is not always what touches the heart and mind. Important though it is, it is only part of the impact that music has. Still, complete wuzz that I am, I did begin to tear up watching Renee Fleming in La Traviata, so I am not saying that this diva lacks completely the ability to fire the emotions.

Something New

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

“READING THE SIGNS” by Janis Freegard (The Cuba Press, $NZ25); “THE SETS” by Victor Billot (Otago University Press, $NZ27:50); “SHAPE OF THE HEART” by Kevin Ireland (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $NZ 24:99)

 

            I’ll do what I should never do in a review, and begin with my conclusion. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Janis Freegard’s Reading the Signs. I enjoyed the clarity of her writing, the precision of her descriptions of nature, the candour about her feelings and above all the way she was able to convey exactly what she believes without mystifying readers in a recherche vocabulary, as I have found other bards doing. It was a pleasure to read Reading the Signs. I say all this clearly to begin with, because I do not necessarily agree with all the poet’s views on the world and on human nature – of which more later.

A few quick words on the format - Reading the Signs consists of 75 items, most being prose-poems. Often they are unashamedly jottings about daily events and experiences. The text is illustrated with six not-exactly-representational art works by Neil Johnstone. Acknowledgements and the cover blurb explain that Freegard wrote much of this sequence when she was in a writer’s residence in Wairarapa. Freegard herself explains she wrote while going through a “difficult time”; and near the end of her residency, her sad mood was compounded when her mother died. Hence there is often a sense of loss in Reading the Signs. But it does not overwhelm what appears to be Freegard’s essentially optimistic philosophy. These prose-poems are mainly in the first-person and hence confessional, but much depends on the potency of dreams and the ability to see symbols in everyday things.

The sequence’s opening poems are dream-like, situating the poet first in the vast context of the ecological creation of this country, then in the forest, then in a reflective mood and at last finding an anchor in the serenity of drinkng tea in the traditional, leafy way. She finds herself working in the room once occupied by the poet Ema Saiko, who remains a strong presence. Tea becomes an important part of her environment. She writes: “In the kitchen at Kaiparoro House, I pour in the water and the leaves spill over themselves like spawning salmon. I taste tall trees, mountain streams. Below are the shoals, the swarming, swimming shoals, the single intent of the group, the single passion.” (page 14) Reading tea leaves become the sequence’s central motif as she sees animals and numinous creatures in her cup, and interprets their significance.

In an important way, the sequence is therapeutic. The serenity of the setting and the ritual of reading the leaves are healing. Figures who appear in her dreams and imagination are guides, gurus, interpreters of signs. They gradually morph into The Interpreter, who is (I surmise) Freegard’s own subconscious and imagination. While the poet and The Interpreter deal with weighty matters, they sometimes stop to look at immediate domestic arrangements, as when we hear about the poet’s neighbours Lydia and Vladimir, intent on making an icosahedral dome, resembling a cross between Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and a wool-covered Mongolian yurt. More often, however, there are conversations on primal fire and ice and the interconnectedness of nature. Of course this has a strongly ecological theme as The Interpreter frequently produces lists of animals that have recently become extinct and of glaciers that are melting away. Entering the forest and reading the behaviour of animals and plants naturally leads to daunting thoughts on climate change.

And where, in all this benign commentary, do I differ from the poet’s worldview? It is in her frequent references to the modish subject of what the blurb  calls “gender fluidity”. Scattered through the text you will find The Interpreter lecturing on frogs and mites and insects that are either hermaphroditic or can change from one sex to another in the natural course of their lives (see, for example, pages 21, 36, 49, 60, 69, 75, 80 and 87). I do, of course, find this very interesting as all biology and zoology are. But I do not think the sexual nature and habits of less-evolved creatures convey any message relevant to human behaviour, such as is implied in this text. In the natural course of things, more-evolved creatures, including all mammals and us, do not change sex. Further, if we are to see less-evolved creatures as the paradigm for human behaviour, then why be choosy? Let us imitate the black widow spider, and eat our mates for protein, or follow the cannibalistic tuatara and eat our young. These are ridiculous suggestion of course, but then so are all exercises in anthropomorphism.

            Enough of this objection.

            Often what I find most endearing in Reading the Signs are jottings which are based on physical observation, as in: “Bellbirds call from the trees above me. A fantail pops over to say hello. I wonder if it’s hoping for a moa and gets me instead., or maybe they hung around moa to eat some tasty insect that lived in moa fathers, like oxpeckers on giraffes.”( page 41)

            I endorse Janis Freegard’s comment on freedom [reproduced as punctuated in the text]: “the wild the glorious the free you have forgotten what freedom is it does not mean doing as you please with no regard for others it does mean doing more of what you want but everything in harmony as far as possible if I had more faith in human nature I might be an anarchist.” (page 59)

And, if only because as a child I hated those fairground open-mouthed clown things,  I like this statement from a prose-poem called “Clockwork”: “I’ve always liked fairs, says the Interpreter mildly. Except for those open-mouthed clowns whose heads move perpetually back and forth. I’d like to smash the mechanisms that have trapped them in the one repeated movement and set them all free. It’s the same with those wretched Santas in shop windows or the endlessly waving Chinese restaurant cats.” (page 84)

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I understand that in maritime talk, “sets” refers to currents, and such sets certainly play a role in Victor Billot’s collection The Sets. But there are currents other than the literal ones running through this collection – currents of fashion, currents of change in society and currents of passing time, all of which get a hearing. The collection’s Prologue “The Sets” presents the sea as daunting and as the centre of Billot’s own personal mythology, the place to which he returns for many of his most significant images. This opening poem places human beings in the context of nature that is wild, fearsome but oddly beautiful.

Unlike many collections of poetry, the four parts into which The Sets is divided do actually mean something, for each part plays in a different key.

The 22 poems of Part One are in the key of melancholy and loss. Poems consider the cold distance of the stars and the extinction of dinosaurs. The care of children is clearly a worry and a burden. In the poem “The Boy” are the lines “My heart is scratched by love’s sharp claw / as I watch quietly from the shadowed door.”). The poem “602” implies the poet’s major alienation from city life; and a clutch of poems (“Facebook Sends a Memory”, “Collection” and “Caput Mortuum”) suggest the disintegration of a domestic arrangement, as does the even fiercer “On the Run”. All of this indicates somebody ill at ease in the world and wary of relationships.  When we come to “Litany” we find an expression of self-hatred when the poet (or at least the persona he is adopting) looks in a mirror and curses himself… or is this an exercise in the grotesque, a deliberate attempt to be shocking? Put simply, there is an awful lot of self-laceration in these poems. In “Straight and Clear”, which begins by remembering early, innocent love, we are told “Love became a rusted claw to snare. / In unlife we snarl, tear and bite / on a road that once ran straight and clear”. Even a poem like “In the World”, which seems to be celebrating carnal love, ends with “gentle pain”.

            The 17 poems that comprise Part Two are more in the nature of protest and satire, taking many swings at neo-liberal NZ as it now is, and sometimes adopting an apocalyptic tone, especially when Billot confronts climate change. The long blank-verse poem “How Good is This?”, for example, which apparently has an Aussie setting, is a vision of climate-change-end-of-world as seen by a complacent narrator. Brisker is “Phoning it in”, a satirical swipe at a crass cartoon, with racist overtones, that appeared in a Dunedin newspaper. Another longer poem is the series of surrealistic couplets called “The National Conversation” which knocks at modish fragments of neo-liberal speak and technospeak. When Billot presents one of his “list” poems ,“Alternative Book Titles For an Imaginary Airport Bookstore”, I admit I sniggered happily along with such imaginary titles as Rich Wankers Posing on Third-World Mountainsides and Authentic Insincerity. Billot is not the only satirical poet in New Zealand whose diatribes can sometimes curdle into incoherence as he plays with so many concepts that they do not focus on any particular target. It is as if his exuberance in creating images leads him off theme. As I noted when, in  2017 I reviewed on this blog Billot’s Ambient Terror I made it clear that, while I enjoyed his populist and politically charged raves, I felt they would have been more effective in life performance than they were on the printed page. Mercifully, as he shows in The Sets, Billot can also write carefully structured, and deeply ironic, satires like “The Prince of Darkness Attends a Work and Income Interview”.

Again, there is a change of tone in the 19 poems of Part Three. Much of it calls on nostalgia. “Esplanade 1979” recalls the seven-year-old Victor Billot’s encounter with the seashore and after this come pastoral poems like “Living in the Maniototo” and “Selene” which, despite some harsh things, are almost lyrical childhood memories… but in due course these poems give way to more eco-conscious laments for the depredation of the landscape such as “Central Redux”; and “Great South Desert” is another post-apocalyptic vision of ecological destruction.

The five poems of Part Four return to imagery of the sea, now in most savage form, with a poem about a Vietrnamese man swept overboard from a fishing rust-bucket and drowning; and another apocatlyptic vision of cephalopods prolferating in warming oceans and taking us over.

How do I sum up the work of this poet? Billot sometimes stumbles over an erudite – or strained - vocabulary. His satires can become raves. There is much anger and alienation in his work, sometimes almost self-loathing. But the repeated image of the sea does provide a convincing background to his world view – a sort of wild music against which human endeavour is judged. At his best (as in his opening “Prologue”) he is masterly and The Sets is one worth re-reading. 

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            Let me begin with the bleeding obvious, which is always the essential truth about anything. Kevin Ireland’s Shape of the Heart is an old man’s book. This is not stated with any derogatory intent. It is simply stated as a fact. Kevin Ireland is in his 87^th year and Shape of the Heart is his 46^th collection of poetry. Fittingly, he dedicates it to other octogenarians who are his surviving contemporaries among New Zealand poets and novelists (Adcock, O’Sullivan, Gee, Bland, Stead). He also dedicates specific poems to some of them. All 56 poems are in clear traditional stanza form and very occasionally (oh the heresy of it!) Ireland even uses rhyme.

More than once, Ireland suggests that this will be his very last book. In the opening poem “Tidying up last items” he declares: “The page you are now casting / an eye over is number one of the very / last items of evidence I can be bothered / to offer on the many matters before us…” Later he begins the poem “The cost of calamity” thus: “At some time or other it crosses / the minds of poets I’ve spoken to, / usually over a drink and late at night, / that possibly the time has come / for them to put a stopper on it all.”

None of this means that Ireland’s powers of observation are fading. In the poem “Mr Forgetful Recollects” he makes a sturdy defence of the minds of the aged: “Failing memory comes in for too much blame / as you pass the limits of the average lifespan - / and, by the way, it’s nowhere similar to going mad / for that’s an aberration in the patterns of the mind. / What happens is your head gets overburdened - / there’s no more room for storage and retrieval.”

What you get in this collection is the same sharp, bloke-ish, ironical, no-nonsense voice that we have heard in so many of Ireland’s earlier tomes – it’s just that the topic is more insistently on old age.

So on come well-crafted poems in which he gives his best wishes to absent friends (some dead); visits a familiar town in the deep Southland; lunches with an old friend; enjoys sleeping in without guilt; puts up with bad weather by grinning along with the weather gods (“A civilised response” – one of his best poems); looks at old photographs and finds it hard to recognise himself; and enjoys the consolations of drinking red wine.

Of course there are intimations of the chimes at midnight. “Something Beyond All Grasp”, maybe the saddest poem in the book, suggests a loss of relish for life. Poems record problems with heart and feet and the annoying trauma of having a fall. There is a rueful recognition that there is no such thing as Utopia in the poem “Something went wrong”, which seems a firm farewell to naïve youthful idealism; and the the physical degeneration in old age  is charted without sentiment in “The True Facts of Age”.

There is an interesting string of imagery in Ireland’s late poetry. There is much consciousness of foul weather but there are also many poems about sunrises. In Ireland’s aged vision, however, optimistic sunrises tend to be blotted out by unwanted clouds. The reaper advances.

 

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 PEAU DE CHAGRIN” by Honore de Balzac (written 1830-31. First published 1831. Revised many times before being included in La Comedie Humaine in 1845) Usually translated as “THE WILD ASS’S SKIN”

 

            So far on this blog, whenever I have taken it into my head to deal with Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), I have dealt mainly with his more mature novels, generally regarded as his best work. Thus you can find accounts of Eugenie Grandet (1833), Le Pere Goriot (1835), La Rabouilleuse (1842), La Cousine Bette (1846), and Le Cousin Pons (first published 1847), as well as Selected Short Stories, mainly written in Balzac’s mature period. Now I turn to something from the period when he was still finding his feet as a novelist. Only in 1829, after some years of writing pot-boilers under pseudonyms, did Balzac produce his first novel under his own name. This was the historical novel Les Chouans, which was well-received but did not sell.  La Peau de Chagrin (usually translated as The Wild Ass’s Skin but sometimes called The Magic Skin) was the novel that made his name and was instantly a bestseller. It is a work of youthful Romanticism as much as it is a work of the social realism for which Balzac is better known. I admit that it is one of Balzac’s novels which I have never attempted to read in French. I have relied on the two translations that sit on my shelves – the Everyman edition translated by Ellen Marriage and the (more recent) Penguin edition translated by Herbert J. Hunt. Hunt’s version has a detailed introduction asking us to see this novel as a genuine philosophical discourse, wherein Balzac sounds out, in a complex way, his ideas on the nature of human will. For Hunt, this is all related to “illuminism”, the collection of pseudo-scientific ideas, most of which would now be regarded as crank theories, which Balzac took seriously as emerging science – notions of animal magnetism, phrenology, Swedenborgianism etc. And indeed, when Balzac finally included La Peau de Chagrin in his Comedie Humaine, he classified it as one of his “philosophical” works.

 

            While there are indeed passages of philosophical musing in La Peau de Chagrin, I prefer to see it more as a fable or parable about self-destruction brought on by wishing for too much.

            Consider the first of the three long passages into which the novel is divided. It is called “The Talisman” in both the translations I’ve read, and it goes like this: A young man, Raphael de Valentin, having lost his last piece if gold in a sordid gambling den, disappointed in love, unable to bring himself to commit suicide by jumping in the Seine, wanders into a curio shop in a Parisian back-alley. It is a store-house of lost hopes. Among the knick-knacks are works recalling the great art of many periods, now dust-covered, forgotten, and solid reminders of the vanity of human wishes. Here the young Raphael de Valentin discovers the wild ass’s skin, a square of chagreen (chagrin in French, which, signifcantly, also means sorrow and loss) covered in a mystic Oriental inscription promising to grant all the buyer’s wishes, but with the warning that it will shrink each time it grants a wish and will thus shorten the owner’s life. The old proprietor of the curio shop warns Raphael that to own the square of skin and make wishes on it will, in effect, be a prolonged form of suicide, and that will (vouloir) and power (pouvoir) – in other words, wishes and fulfilled wishes - always destroy us, while only knowledge (savoir) can save us. But Raphael burns to possess the magic skin. “I want to live to excess!” he exclaims, throwing out an ironical curse at the old man “May you be loved by a ballet dancer”, before he rushes into the street with the magical skin.

            At once he falls in with a louche group of cronies, and is swept along to an orgy at the shady M. Taillefer’s. Wine flows. There is fashionable talk demolishing the reputations of rising literary stars. The year is 1830 and the July Revolution has just overthrown the old monarchy and replaced it with the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Here Balzac moves into ironical and realist mode, satirising the crassness of the middle-class opportunists who have been unleashed in this change of regime. Society is corrupt and the orgy is its symbol.  Raphael insults the stately, beauteous, worldly courtesan (i.e. call-girl) Aquilina by telling her that her beauty and ability to attract men will fade away as she reaches middle age. Also at Taillefer’s establishment is the 16-year-old prostitute and “dancer” Euphrasie, all the more corrupt for appearing so young and innocent while being so knowing and cold. As the orgy reaches its lethargic stage deep in the night, Raphael pours out his life-story to the journalist, critic and poet Emile Blondet as the two of them lie with their heads resting on the bodies of two expensive whores.

 

            I will not synopsise in detail  the novel’s long second part (“The Woman Without a Heart”), which is Raphael’s back-story. Suffice it to say that Raphael felt scorned and overlooked by the world. When he wrote what he thought would be a world-shattering treatise A Theory of the Will, it was jeered at as an immature effusion. The sophisticate Rastignac (a recurring character in Balzac’s novels) told him that he had to “arrive” to be anything in the world, and introduced him to high society. In this milieu, Raphael was for a while a social success and fell in love with the (soi-disant) “Countess” Foedora, who was beautiful but spurned his advances and she successfiully flirted with any elegible men. Raphael finally judged Foedora to be “without a heart” and a woman who led a vacuous life. He really failed in high society, and he plunged into a life of dissipation, sinking deeper into debt… We as readers know, however, that he missed an opportunity for genuine love by not noticing the humble and unpretentious Pauline, who admires and loves him.

            And so now, in the novel’s last section “The Agony”, Raphael, having told his life history to Emile Blondet, is possessed of his magic ass’s skin and he can realise all his wishes. But as predicted by the old man, the fulfilment of his wishes leads to disaster and death. He wishes he had wealth… whereupon a relative dies and leaves him wealth. Now a millionaire, he is fawned on by parasites asking for favours. When he grants them, the skin shrinks. His old schoolmaster Porriquet calls on him, begging his influence in gaining a post under the new regime. Raphael absent-mindedly wishes him well… and the skin shrinks further. When people beg things of him, his standard answer becomes “You are killing me!” The old man he cursed really does fall in love with a ballet-dancer (the corrupt Euphrasie!) and is financially ruined by her. Raphael realizes that the only way he can stay alive is to control (and stifle) all his desires, so he tries hard to wish for nothing. His life becomes grey, joyless and limp. But he meets Pauline once again and at last desires her. His death is hastened. After many destructive episodes, he tries to call on science to free him of his death-sentence, consulting respectively a naturalist, a professor of mechanics, a chemist and a physician. But it is no good. Science is of no help. The wild ass’s skin is now a tiny speck and Raphael’s body is wasting away. In one of his most melodramatic episodes (yes, Balzac did do melodrama), the idealistic Pauline offers to commit suicide so that Raphael’s desire for her will die. Raphael prevents her from doing this and they at last consummate their love. But it is too late, and Raphael’s emaciated body falls down dead. 

            The most obvious thing to note about this novel is that Balzac situates a fantastical story in a very realistic setting. La Peau de Chagrin navigates through very credible Parisian and provincial scenes, described in hard, physical detail: the poor boarding-house where, as a student, Raphael tries to write his thesis and first meets Pauline; the dusty and seedy curio shop; the pretentious mansion of the arriviste haute-bourgeoisie; the scene of the orgy (i.e. an expensive brothel); the club and sanatorium at Aix-aux-Bains, in the south of France, where Raphael is surrounded by fashionable hyperchondriacs as he seeks to evade immanent death. La Peau de Chagrin is also a work of topical social and political satire, as the very class-conscious Balzac vents his fury at the opportunists and place-seekers who enrich themselves and exploit others under the new bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe.

            Yet it is, forsooth, a parable involving magic, somewhere in line of descent with all Faustian fables of men who barter their lives (or souls) for wealth or youth or short-lived happiness. One original element is the way Raphael’s decline is traced through a physical object – the wild ass’s skin. Its progressive shrinking charts the closing-in of Raphael’s options. It is at least possible that Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (published sixty years after La Peau de Chagrin in 1890), with its protagonist’s moral decline charted in a painting, was influenced by Balzac’s work. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a very different work from La Peau de Chagrin, and nobody is suggesting plagiarism. But Wilde was genuinely a great admirer of Balzac, read him devotedly, and was possibly in part inspired by reading La Peau de Chagrin.

In 1891, one year after The Picture of Dorian Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “The Bottle Imp” was published, having a similar theme (“You can have your wishes but they will kill you”…). Unlike either Wilde or Stevenson, however, Balzac saw his story as a genuine inquiry into the human will.

            Let’s admit that La Peau de Chagrin is in part a young(-ish) man’s novel. Balzac was just over 30 when it was first published, and his protagonist is 26. There is in Raphael de Valentin’s despair much of a young man’s “sense of injur’d merit” at the unfairness of women and society in general. There is also Balzac’s youthful tendency to “show off” when he inserts passages of ostensibly erudite exposition, as in the discourse on art when Raphael first enters the curio shop and the discourses on science and medicine when the rapidly-ailing Raphael seeks relief. A final brief epilogue (actually added years after the novel’s first appearance) rather too neatly spells out Balzac’s intended symbology when we are told that Pauline represents the eternal, unattainable woman, whereas Foedora represents the corruption of society. In the (eventual) impassioned love of Raphael and Pauline there is Romanticism and melodrama with the final Liebestod scene. Yet the realistic milieu “grounds” the novel, and makes this Romanticism with teeth.

            In one sense, La Peau de Chagrin says that even boundless wishes can be no greater than the flawed person who makes them. Balzac moralises: “Power leaves our natures untouched and confers greatness only on the great. There was nothing Raphael might not have done [when he had the power to fulfil his wishes]; he had done nothing.” So this is a novel about the defectiveness of the will. When the will is gratified, it becomes impotent and dead (as in a crucial scene where Raphael stands, without desire, over the sleeping body of the heartless Foedora). Ironically, Raphael is more tightly confined to “the small circle of pain” in the skull when his wishes are answered than when his desires went unanswered. Perhaps this view is questionable when so many of Balzac’s subsequent novels show the triumph of strong wills over weak wills, but the point may be that he always saw true character being formed by struggle and adversity, not by instant gratification. A lesson for many of the world’s adolescents I guess.

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.

SPECTACLE AS FAILURE (or Failure as Spectacle)

 

I wonder how good your memory is for silly news items.

There are three incredibly silly news items which, out of the mass of trivia that passes as the evening “news”, have stuck in my mind. All are rather old; but all (I think) were broadcast within the last twenty years.

 

First Item: With invited television cameras watching him, an hubristic chap said he was going to row, single-handedly, across the Tasman Sea. He pushed his boat into the water of one of Auckland’s wild west coast beaches, and began rowing. But before he set out on this epic journey, he felt obliged to make an inspirational statement for his audience. So he announced that his adventure would be a triumph of the human spirit. “Human spirit! Human spirit!” I recall him saying, “You can’t beat the human spirit!”

Alas, his epic journey didn’t last very long. After a couple of hours battling with the big incoming rollers, he had to give up, exhausted. He was helped back to shore. He had managed to row at most a couple of hundred yards. As far as I know, he never resumed his journey.

Of course I sniggered gleefully at this. (Alright. There is a sliver of cynicism in me.). I would greatly admire somebody who really was able to row across the thousand or so miles of the Tasman Sea. It would be a truly heroic endeavour, and require great reserves of stamina. But surely one makes inspirational statements only after the deed has been done. Sounding off about the “human spirit” before you have actually achieved anything can only come across as idle boasting.

Another thing occurred to me. The failed-Tasman-crosser could only have picked up that phrase about the “human spirit” from all the tele-movies he had seen. In his intended farewell, he was aping the cliché dialogue of a teleplay. He was acting as if he was the star of a movie. Human life was confused with scripted fantasy.

 

Second Item: I feel a little more contemptuous of this one.

In attempting to scale a mountain in freezing conditions, a mountaineer had just failed to reach the summit. He was rescued and returned to base camp. In this ordeal, he had lost his legs and become a paraplegic, with steel legs in place of the legs that he was born with. So far, the story is one of real endeavour and real trauma and we naturally sympathise with the climber.

But some time later, a television producer decided he could make a “human interest” documentary by following the mountaineer as he “finished the climb” and reached the summit. Alas, the producer was interviewed by a journalist. The journalist asked how the paraplegic ex-climber would be able to scale the whole mountain in his disabled condition. The producer admitted that the ex-climber was going to be flown up to a certain level by helicopter. Finally the journalist prised out of the unwilling producer the information that the ex-climber would in fact be flown up to within yards of the peak he had never quite reached. In effect, he would spend a few minutes crawling up to the peak, thus “completing” his climb before he was flown down again. At this point, the producer lost his temper, saying that the journalist would be destroying the whole impact of the programme if this information were made public. As I recall it, the producer called the journalist many angry names.

I may be wrong (if you know better, you can correct me on this) but I believe the projected programme was never screened. It was an attempt to curate reality like a TV show – to manufacture artificial heroism out of a staged and artificial event.

 

Third Item is the most artificial and contemptible of the lot – as well as the silliest.

During America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, a young woman and a young man, both in the American military, announced before cameras that they had made a special “promise” to each other. Should either of them be in danger, the other would come to his-or-her rescue, no matter how perilous the situation was.

A few days later they were sent into action… which in their case meant rushing into a safe building which had already been abandoned by Iraqi forces. They were briefly separated from each other… but with cameras following them, they were reunited. They embraced. See! They had fulfilled their “promise”. What an heroic story.

I do not know if the whole world guffawed as I did at this obvious play-acting, but I do know that there was no follow-up and to the best of my knowledge nothing was heard of them again.

What on Earth was all this about? The best I can interpret it would be this – two servicepeople decided that they could earn big money if they sold their story to a television network. I surmise they saw themselves as the basis for a miniseries. “They were true to their promise. In the midst of battle their friendship endured. The true story of…” blah blah blah. But even by the low standards of network television, this one simply did not fly.

 

What do these three stories have in common? They were all artificial events played out for the camera. They all revealed a confusion between real heroism and acted-out spectacle. They showed how real thinking, breathing people can be persuaded to think and act like fictitious characters as projected by the media. That’s what these stories have in common. That, and a degree of ingrained stupidity.

 

FOOTNOTE: I have reported these three stories as I remember them from years ago. If you recall, and know more about any of them (dates; people involved etc.) than I have noted here, please send me the details via a comment posted below this posting.