NYRB: Ten Favorites

Others have tried their hand; I will try mine--ten favorites from the formidable catalog of NYRB Classics:

• Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.  Oddly sympathetic account of a man who made it his life plan to be an assassin.

• Alexander Wat, My Century   A triumph of endurance and preserved humanity under unimaginable stress.  Like so many who lived through the worst the Century had to offer, he died a suicide.

• Nirad Caudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.  Another hymn to civility and good order under another kind of stress.

• Richard Cobb, Paris and Elsewhere.  The most straightforwardly refreshing of NYRB's "we'll always have Paris" line.

• Yashar Kemal, Memed, My Hawk. Said to be hugely popular at home in Turkey.,  Though nominally a  novel, it is clearly intended to convey the reality of peasant life in the rural Anatolia.  I wonder how far it succeeds, how far it is a romantic delusion

• Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties.   In the 50s at Antioch, people used to scoot down to the libraries on Thursday so they could catch Kermpton's pyrotechnical wisdom in the radical/liberal New York Post.  The memories are not quite mine but they form the substrate out of (or into) which mine emerged.

• Andrei Platonov, Soul.  Here's one I had never heard of until NYRB came along.  Billed as a Russian writer, I think he might almost be better understood as Central Asian, or at the very least one who writes about the encounter between the two.

•  Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev.  We never knew, the old lefties used to say, what a miserable tyrant Stalin really was.  Serge knew, and told the truth movingly and directly while lots of people were still in denial.

• Rebecca West. The Fountain Overflows.  An unexpected delight. I've long been a great fan of her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, but I really wasn't prepared for the energy and vivacity of this loosely-jointed ramble through women's lives on the edge.

• J. F. Powers, The Stories of J. F. Powers.  An old favorite, rediscovered.  Powers wrote novels with NYRB also reprints, but he is one of those for whom the (longish) short story is the perfect form.  "Lions, Harts, Leaping Doves," ranks right up there alongside "That Evening Sun" or "Lady with Lapdog" or "My Dovecote."

Review:  I see that I favor nonfiction over fiction, Europe over America, the implications of World War II over all else.  I'm already startled and chagrined and what I have left out.  Where is Mavis Gallant, Rose Tremaine, Janet Hobhouse, Gregor von Rezzori Olivia Manning, J.A. Baker (I notice that the A-list is mostly men, the B-list,  mostly women; and my point is--??)?  Where are a dozen others (I think I've read about 100)?  Which is not to say that their list is unerring: I persist in my conviction that Curzio Malaparte is a narcissistic fraud; that there is a bit more Leonardo Sciasscia and George Simenon than they really need; and that Gershom Scholem really didn't get the point of his own story.  Oh, and way too many former consorts of Robinson Jeffers.  But it's a noble venture, executed with great skill and mostly good judgment.  I want them to keep at it for years to come though I suppose this kind of publishing venture either runs out of good material or just starts jumping the shark.  Before that, they should quit.

Appreciation: Names on the Land

Kudos to New York Review of Books for bringing back George R. Stewart's Names on the Land (original copyright 1945), surely one of the most affable books ever written, perfect for fending off night sweats. Stewart must have been one of the most affable professors who ever lived--a breed who doesn't exist much of anywhere any more who mixed kind of father-knows-best gentility and gentleness with a bit of honest acculturation. I bet he showed up from time to time at the student dining hall and rooted for the home team at football. He was nominally a professor of English, but as Matt Weiland observes in an appreciative introduction, he was also a pioneer in the teaching of California history--surely his most enduring work is Ordeal by Hunger, the most durable history of the Donner Party.

Names on the Land is just what it purports to be: an account of place names and how they came to be. A superficial reader could dismiss it as mere antiquarianism but it is a good deal more than that: Stewart understood how to weave a good deal of social history into the warp and woof of his material. We learn a lot about patterns of exploration of settlement; about the ethnic patchwork; about fashions in imitation and aspiration (I am pretty sure he is wrong, however, on the etymology of "borough" and "burgh"). We also get a humbling lesson in the accidental nature of fame:

Besides Washington, only three Revolutionary heroes won the honor of large cities. They were Knox the gunner, "Mad Anthony" Wayne, and Frances Nash, whom nobody remembers. ... The story of Nash is this. On a foggy morning in 1777 General Washington launched an attack upon Lord Howe at Germantown. The sudden advance of the Continentals sent the British light infantry rolling back. Then, the defense stiffened and held. Confused in the fog, the American regiments lost contact and fired into one another. In a desperate attempt to restore the line, the Norrh Carolina brigade pushed forward from the reserve under its youthful commander, General Francis Nash. A cannonball struck him down and he was carried dying form the lost field. His own state honored him, and three years later a stockade in its western lands was called Nashborough. In 1784 it followed the fashion by shifting to Nashville.

--George R. Stewart, Names on the Land 199 (NYRB Edition 2008)

It's a mercy they haven't changed it to Presleyburg.

Roth Versus Trilling--and Remembering "When She Was Good"

NYRB Classics showcases a remarkable (unsent) letter in which Philip Roth gives a bit of what-for to Diana Trilling for what she said about Portnoy's Complaint (link, link). Good fun in its own right, but not least remarkable because it calls attention to an early Roth novel, now unjustly forgotten. That would be When She Was Good, which Roth himself obviously holds in esteem. I don't know anybody but me who still remembers it. I confess I haven't read all that much of the later Roth but this early one sticks in my mind more than Portnoy, more than Goodbye, Columbus.

Victor Serge and his Contemporaries

NYRB Classics is bringing out a new edition of Unforgiving Years, which I haven’t read yet but probably will, to accompany its reissue of his The Case of Comrade Tulayev, which NYRB reissued a while back, and which I did read a while back in a battered old second hand paperback. Of Serge, the NYRB Classics editor says (link):

He is one of the greatest of twentieth-century political novelists, and his work more than holds its own—I'd even say overshadows—that of contemporaries like Andre Malraux and Ignazio Silone, not to mention such fading Cold War relics as 1984 and Darkness at Noon.

Hm, let me think about that. I resist calling 1984 a “relic.” I haven’t read it in years, but I’m one of those bitter-enders who thinks that Orwell was and is just as great as we always thought. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is, perhaps, a different sort of creature. It was surely an important political statement in its place and time, although I suspect serious readers recognized from the start that it was more important due to its context than it was for any possible intrinsic merit.

Silone—I wonder if anyone under 50 has even heard of Silone? He is perhaps a classic exemplar of the category of “troubled liberal,” and we know those guys all get chewed up by events. I read Bread and Wine a few years back and found it naïve—but it had a kind of charm about it, a good deal of the flavor of a certain time and place. I read Fontamara a couple years back in an Italian student reader, and made it the subject of my first-ever substantive blog post. I don’t suppose it was a “great” book—it seemed a bit manufactured, as if produced for a show—but its compassion seemed sincere and some bits were telling, and some bits tellingly funny. So, I’d say Silone is a keeper.

Malraux. Ah, Malraux. I certainly remember when we treated him like an icon. But I also remember assigning Man’s Fate to a class of undergraduates years back—it was for one of those get-to-know-the-faculty seminars that meet in your living room—and finding it almost indefensibly false. Good writing in its way, I suppose, but preening, self-aggrandizing moralism in a style that makes my skin crawl. I suspect in general, Malraux’s reputation as fallen pretty low.

So, where does Serge fit? As I say, I haven’t read Unforgiving Years, but on the strength of Comrade Tulayev, I certainly want to. Like the other authors mentioned here, I suppose he is in some sense a product of his time. But then again, who isn’t? The best of these—certainly Orwell, probably Silone—have a way of at once capturing and at the same time transcending their time, allowing them to reach forward and make contact with a very different time. On that score, I’d say Tulayev measures up. I think he did a good job of capturing some of the deceptions and of what Auden called the “Low, Dishonest Decade”—and, more than the deceptions, the self-deceptions that allowed some people to get themselves sucked into it.

I certainly wasn’t politically conscious in the 30s (!) but I was by the 50s (at least in a childish way) and I knew old lefties who said “We never knew! We never knew!” Serge is living proof that somebody knew, and tried to tell the truth before it was fashionable. That’s enough reason for Serge to survive and, I hope, to endure. I look forward to Unforgiving Years.

Postscript: The introduction to Tulayev is by the late Susan Sontag. NYRB calls it one of Susan Sontag's most ambitious and thoughtful late statements. I’m not persuaded: if I had read the intro alone, I might well have skipped the book. But that might just be a thing between me and Susan. Read the book because of Susan if you like, or in spite of her if you prefer. But do read it. And, probably, read the new one, too.

Appreciation: Memed, My Hawk

“Banditry” is not just another name for theft, or robbery, or even of outlawry. It’s a crime with a particular social context: great latafundia, weak central control, oppressed peasantry, bumbling police who vacillate between brutality and comic incompetence. The second-best book about banditry that I ever read is Eric Hobsbawm’s Bandits, one of the most convincing arguments I ever encountered for Marxist historiography (I read it Bandits 30 years ago; I see there is a new edition). Perhaps it takes a Marxist sensibility to understand the social yeast that gives life to this particular phenomenon.

Hobsbawm is second best; the best book I’ve ever read about banditry is Memed, My Hawk, which has been sitting on my shelf for several years, and which I threw into my backpack for travel just this weekend. It’s by a Turk named Yashar Kemal, born in 1922, apparently still alive. The blurb says he is “the descendant of landowners on his father’s side and bandits on his mother’s side.” I recall reading someplace else that eight of his mother’s brothers were bandits, though this sounds suspiciously like an exaggeration.

In some ways, Memed is a classic adventure hero. He’s fatherless; he runs away; he tangles with a powerful villain; he robs from the rich and he gives to the poor. And he rides into the sunset. Yet oddly, there is almost nothing here that would translate well to Hollywood. We have all the adventure, but also all the squalor: the bleak, pitiless, near-desperate world where man is wolf to man. Nearly everybody in this book lies. They betray their friends and their enemies. Many of them are trigger-happy killers. They almost all undergo fear, grinding labor and deprivation.

And a good many of them are hopeless romantics, in that they can spin fairy tales of salvation and self-justification. Yet there is so much to like about their world. There is the sere and awesome beauty of the landscape. More important is the sheer humanity—even if excess thereof—of these people. In a way it is an exhausting read, but it is ultimately hypnotic and you are sorry to see it done.

As I suggested above, I don’t know of any novel quite like it. But the wild world of the Turkish countryside does put one in mind of Tolstoy’s Haji Murat or The Cossacks, or of Gogol’s Taras Bulba. The compassionate portrait of the peasantry may suggest Silone or Verga. It certainly does not suggest (as one reviewer did suggest) Lampedusa; at least not to anyone who has actually read the book.

Kemal even dares to stop halfway through and offer a little sketch of the history of banditry in the Turkish countryside, in a manner that comes near to sociology. Even this bit is so precise, so economical, and so on point that you can accept it in its apparently intended function of the story. It’s a way of making it clear that this is not just a folk tale: it is a real story of real people in a particular social situation.

Folk tale: some readers have complained of the folk-tale style of the telling and this complaint is persuasive. The characters do indeed speak in a style that is direct, unadorned, and scarcely human. But their speech probably does capture the way in which this kind of story is told; indeed it’s not too much to say that the style serves to link Kemal with older traditions of war literature like the Norse sagas.

My copy of Memed is a “Pantheon Modern Classic” dated 1961 (for which it appears I paid $1.95). I see that NYRB classics has republished Memed along with a sequel (link) (and I gather there are still more sequels, perhaps not all translated into English). That is good news. I will surely put the sequel on the list, though perhaps not for tonight. Memed, at any rate, is a great discovery, well worth the time and effort.

Some Suggestions for NYRB

New York Review of Books invites readers to suggest titles for inclusion in its Classics series (link). Here's a personal selection. I haven't made exhaustive inquiry but I think some are available elsewhere, and some are entirely out of print. Most are stuff I already own and, in the cull, am choosing not to throw away--although I would like to lay my hands on an acceptably-priced set of the Sperber trilogy. A couple I have discussed earlier here.

Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South (1941)

Inimitable “appreciation” of the South at the end of the long antebellum.

Davis, Norman, ed. The Paston Letters (1963)

Family letters from the late Middle Ages.

Levy, Newman, Opera Guyed (1923)

Opera in comic verse.

Lippman, Walter, Public Opinion (1922)

Wonderful insight into the mind of the most influential journalist of his day.

Markham, Felix, Napoleon (1963)

The busiest life in short compass; a marvel of concision.

Matthews, George T. The Fugger Newsletters (1959)

Another retrieved letter cache.

Nicolson, Harold, Good Behavior (1955)

Instructive insight into a certain kind of British mind.

Sitwell, Edith, Planet and Glow-worm (1944)

Bedside anthology.

Sperber, Manes, All Our Yesterdays trilogy

God's Water Carriers (1991)

The Unheeded Warning (1991)

Until My Eyes Are Closed With Shards (1994)

Autobiographical account of life in hard times.

Waugh, Evelyn, Edmund Campion: Jesuit and Martyr (1946)

Waugh as Catholic.

Westcott, Edward Noyes, David Harum (1900)

American local color.

If They Asked Me...

The New York Review of Books invites readers to contribute suggestions of books they ought to include in their “classics” series—now over 200 strong, some genuine classics, some eccentric or just goofy (link—look down towards the bottom of the right-hand column).

Rearranging some old books last night, I kept running across things that I thought ought to be on the list. I haven’t any idea whether any of these is actually in print or not. But without careful cite-checking, here are the names (dates are the editions I have at hand).

W. J. Cash, Mind of the South (1941). Non-fiction Faulkner. Beautifully written account of the tragedy of the south after the civil war.

Newman Levy, Opera Guyed (1927). Famous operas deftly recast in doggerel verse, buy a guy who never really wanted to be a lawyer in the first place.

Prince de Ligne, Letters, Memoirs and Other Writings (1927). Last of the ancien régime aristos. Had the good sense to die, and thus to command a grand funeral, during the Congress of Vienna.

Harold Nicolson, Diaries. Or at least a selection. If that is impractical, any of half a dozen other books; a particular choice might be Diplomacy (1950).

Edith Sitwell, Planet and Glow-worm (1944). Sitwell’s personal bedside anthology. Introduced me to Sir Thomas Browne and Sir John Mandeville.

Edward Noyes Westcott, David Harum (1960). Local-color Americana.

Here’s one more I just thought of while writing this post:

Felix Markham, Napoleon (1963). Amazingly successful compact rendition of one of the busiest lives ever.