Notes on Recent Reading 45 (Williams, Muir, Waugh)

 

White Mule (Williams)

     William Carlos Williams’ novel, the first of a trilogy (followed by In the Money and The Build-Up), is a beautiful example of the power of clarity and straightforwardness in narrative.  Williams plays a good deal with point of view, and some of the early passages from the infant’s perspective may remind readers of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but, for the most part, the novel is closer to the proletarian realism of the thirties than to the experimentalism of the twenties.  Valuing descriptive vignettes over plot lines, Williams records several varieties of convincingly real speech and wholly plausible events in the life of an American immigrant family clearly modeled on his wife’s.  His willful neglect of reader expectations can be obtrusive as when, for example one sees a horrifying glimpse of the abusive Carmody home which is never again mentioned.  Worse, in the antepenultimate chapter Joe is being set up as front man in a dubious business venture, yet this theme vanishes.  Even if Williams had a multi-volume plan in mind, raising such significant issues only to drop them in this volume is annoying.  The reader feels played like the viewer of a movie serial, left with a cliff-hanger.

     The baby Flossie becomes the unlikely center of the book, though she is barely talking by its conclusion.  Her stubborn élan vital in the face of an inattentive mother, physical frailty, and all the imperfections of the world becomes a sort of mute heroism.  While all the adults bumble on, each handicapped by prejudices, habits, and vices, the baby makes her own way, sometimes by screaming, sometimes by repeatedly falling only to rise again undeterred.  Everyone who has raised a child will recognize the faithfulness of the good doctor’s account of the earliest and most significant stage of life, so rarely documented.

 

 

Scottish Journey (Muir)

     I was prejudiced in favor of this account remembering the German translations (some, provocatively done in Scots dialect) I had seen attributed to Muir (though I understand his wife Willa played a larger role in these than he) and I am receptive to writing about travel.   This particular journey proved, I am afraid, disappointing.  Borne down by the Great Depression visible on every side, Muir cannot prevent his righteous Socialist lamentations from intruding on nearly every page.  As he concedes more times than once, his descriptions are hardly specific to Scotland.  Legitimate enough, had he not defined his goal as setting down something of the national character.  His extended comments on the Scottish National Party reflect the tensions between nationalism and socialism, but are of primarily historical interest at this point.

    I did relish Muir’s down-at-heel persona (reminiscent of other road books by London, Orwell, Miller, and Kerouac).  He portrays himself as somewhat disreputable-looking with a car challenged by every hill, forcing its driver on the mercy of strangers, and this is wholly consistent with his picture of a land depressed by chronic unemployment on top of centuries of subjugation by England, with industrial centers filled with street-corner loiterers, drinking even more than usual. 

     For Muir the sentimental alternative is the pastoral dream of his memories of a childhood in the Orkneys in spite of the fact that his own father’s fortunes steadily declined there, leading him to move the family to Glasgow when Edwin was fourteen.  The description if the trauma of this sudden descent into a sordid urban scene is perhaps the finest passage in the book.  For the most part, however, his prose brings few rewards.  Muir has a sharp eye, and a serviceable pen, but this book is too hasty-seeming to reinforce the reader’s impression of his poetic skills.  Perhaps his wife should have taken a greater share in its composition.

 

 

When the Going Was Good (Waugh)

     I ordinarily avoid anything like an abridgement, but I make an exception for this collection of long excerpts from four travel books written between 1929 and 1935. It is, at least, Waugh’s own editing here of what he jauntily assures us were a series of books written, he assures us, as no more than a means of supporting himself.  Charming and self-deprecating, he describes these as “pedestrian,” “commonplace,” and, at times, callow.  Perhaps others may discern, as he must, the “vernal scent” of his youth in these pages covering trips through Egypt, Palestine, Ethiopia, Guiana, and Brazil.  Like the great off-hand observations of Robert Byron and Bruce Chatwin, he conveys with humor and humanity the bizarre and often inexplicable experiences of the traveler who ventures off the beaten track. 

     If all travel encourages receptive senses, the further afield one wanders, the wider one’s eyes are likely to open.  One ordinarily thinks of traveler’s enlightenment arising due to new information, knowledge about the variety of ways to be human, allowing at once new insights about both others and one’s own habitual attitudes, but, as there so often is, a complementary view is equally true.  The strangeness of being in strange places is enhanced by confusion over customs and taste and most of all by imperfect mastery of other languages on the part of both foreigner and native.  This lack of understanding only magnifies the distance between one consciousness and another and even more between the individual and the world.  The tolerance and acceptance of a drifter stranded in a tropical village where the road ends, as Waugh was more than once, are perhaps a workable attitude toward life.  They are sometimes all that one has.

Not Quite a Jackpot: Erskine Caldwell's Short Stories

Whatever else may be said of him, Erskine Caldwell was prodigiously productive and wildly popular. Though his best-known works were early -- Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre -- he was the author of several dozen novels, something like a hundred and fifty short stories, and a variety of other works. Attempts to censor at least two of his novels resulted in considerable notoriety and sizable sales. For the next twenty-five years he enjoyed best-seller status with his work widely available in inexpensive trade paperbacks offered in the racks in bus stations and drug stores with cover art and copy promising erotic fiction. The formula worked so well that he sold eventually something like a hundred million books.

He received attention from the start as a regionalist at a time when the American South seemed almost as fertile a field for fiction as the Jewish Lower East Side, and he doubtless benefited from the vogue for the proletarian novel and perhaps from liberal indignation at the attempts to ban his work, yet his critical reputation never approached his enormous sales. Apart from his exceedingly successful career as an author of potboilers, his belief in the eugenics movement and his conviction that many of the “poor white trash” were irredeemably degenerate through some biological devolution eventually alienated many of his progressive supporters.

The weighty volume of stories titled Jackpot, over seven hundred pages, seems at times like a collection of improvisations. The language is simple, direct, and transparent, but not in the exaggerated way associated with Hemingway. Each piece is very short, no longer than it might take a front porch lounger to deliver a bit of neighborhood news, satisfactorily heightened to make an impact.

Some of Caldwell’s stories do sound like just such gossipy anecdotes, a few have the ring of regionalist tales like those of George Washington Harris. Stories like “Meddlesome Jack” and “It Happened Like This,” and “Hamrick’s Polar Bear” sound like anecdotes that might have been current in oral form. As much, though as Caldwell is identified as a close observer of poor and feckless white Southerners, he had little difficulty in switching to similar characters in rural Maine when he lived there.

Caldwell was capable of social realism as protest as well, displayed in stories such as “Slow Death” and “Knife to Cut the Corn Bread With.” He pulls no punches in the depiction of vicious and violent racism as in “The End of Christy Tucker,” “Blue Boy,” and “The Negro in the Well.” A sort of mute, unthinking violence lurks always near the surface of his action, breaking out in stories like “The Growing Season,” “The First Autumn,” and “The Shooting.”

He was, of course, best-known for sexual content, an appeal enhanced by paperback cover art by artists like James Avati and Hans Helweg. A good many of the stories in Jackpot describe the dawn of desire in adolescents who barely understand their feelings as in “The Strawberry Season” or “Indian Summer,” sometimes in a comic vein as in “A Day’s Wooing,” “Snacker,” or “Where the Girls Were Different.” Erotic desire may be mysteriously inexorable as in “Warm River,” “Crown-fire,” or “A Dream,” rudely imperative as in “Midsummer Passion,” or calculating as in “Maud Island.”

These last two stories also illustrate the characteristic mixture of sex and violence typical of an author who presents virtually no examples of real and mutual love. In “Rachel” the theme of adolescent sexuality is combined with excruciating poverty. The narrator glimpses Rachel’s “sinuous beauty” at the moment she begins to die from ingesting rat poison. In “Martha Jean” another indigent young girl is raped, and in “The Lonely Day” Katherine is led to her death by an irresistible siren call of naked frolics.

My copy of Jackpot, the 1943 Sun Dial Press edition, includes brief headnotes for each story in a bluff style presaging the author’s late career in men’s magazines with names like Gent, Cavalier, and Male. While stressing his identity as a writer, these regularly suggest the informal, almost chance character of his compositions and ridicule critics with authentic American anti-intellectual vitriol in terms like “bloated middleman.” Such critics, according to Caldwell, “make a profession of tearing flesh from bone” and, failing to understand a story, they may well ”set out to prove that the author was a jail-bird and a wife-beater.” Oddly, though his career was in fact launched by the celebrated editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's who published and promoted him after he had been recommended by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Caldwell in these notes repeatedly ridicules a certain Prof. Perkins, making him the surrogate for all the pointy-headed critics who did not sufficiently praise his work.

Perhaps the truest note of Caldwell’s sensibility is suggested by a story such as “The Automobile that Wouldn’t Run” whose protagonist prefers to avoid work if possible and to sit in an engineless car serenading a lady with his banjo. According to another of his prefatory notes his wise grandfather maintained that “storytelling was a bastard art because it had been created by tellers of tales for the sole purpose of making laziness respectable.” The same sage, he says, rated every story “either a hum-dinger” or else “god-awful.” Substitute a typewriter for a banjo and one might approach Caldwell’s idealized version of himself. This insouciant image of the artist may not be wholly a pose. Once Caldwell learned how to sell his work, he turned out appropriate product in sufficient quantity to support himself. When he says that he does not read his own work the reader may guess that that policy includes eschewing revision.

An opinion that goes against the grain is often more engaging that a reinforcement of the general view of others. I am afraid I can only agree with the critics Caldwell feared. In the best moments as I read his stories, I was reminded of the unsparing though often comic portrayals of small towns in Huckleberry Finn where ignorance thrives and violence is never far off. The racial themes are reminiscent of Faulkner and the erotic ones of Nabokov, but simply mentioning these names emphasizes how far Caldwell fell short of the achievements of the American masters. Nonetheless, he has a place in the history of literature. These stories seem to me, however, less a jackpot than a modest trickling weekly allowance, dependable if never dazzling.

Notes on Recent Reading 26 (Tuchman, Premchand, Cocteau)

A Distant Mirror (Tuchman)

     Though a popular work by a nonspecialist, Barbara Tuchman’s account of fourteenth century history following the life of a significant French nobleman is intelligent, informative, and entertaining. She uses the devices of a novelist, noting not only descriptive details of weather and landscape but also detailing the moods and attitudes of the story’s principal characters. And it works admirably. She has done her research in primary and secondary sources both and has predigested it all for the comfort and amusement of the reader. Her narration is enlivened as well by wit and humane engagement. The reader will become immersed in the late Middle Ages and is likely to be educated about a number of topics. I, for instance, had never realized so dramatically the effect of “free companies” of mercenaries roaming Europe, hiring themselves out to one magnate or another, or, failing such regular employment, either plundering the countryside or extorting huge payments as the price of leaving a city alone. Only in the historical details can one realize the drama produced by the unpredictable rivalries of courts run by individuals amid crowds of competing barons who constantly shift allegiance in their own self-interest.


Godan (Premchand)

     Premchand ‘s last novel published in Hindi in 1936 details the exploitation of a rural peasant, a fundamentally honest and respectable man by his community’s standards (though he beats his wife) who is gradually worn down through malnutrition and hard manual labor despite his tireless efforts to improve his situation.
     The title refers to the donation of a cow which is thought to be a particularly meritorious religious act. For the novel’s main character, however, the mere possession of a cow is a lifelong dream that remains out of his grasp through his hard-working life. Written during the same era as the American proletarian novel, Premchand described the condition of the Indian masses, laying out in painful detail the plight of the peasant. Though the novel is rarely didactic, just before the end the theme is stated explicitly: “They all suffered. The peasant moved about, worked, wept and put up with oppression without a murmur, as if to suffer was part of his destiny.” As Hori says, “My life has been one long grind.” Not only does the landlord extort his wealth from the poor, the government does as well. The Brahmins are all depicted as charlatans and profiteers. Should police show up, they seek bribes from anyone nearby. Villagers with a bit of surplus cash turn to merciless moneylenders. On every side vultures seek to steal from the poorest and most vulnerable.
     The author, born Dhanpat Rai Srivastav, is the author of a dozen novels, hundreds of short stories and translations of Tolstoy, Dickens, and Wilde among others. He associated himself with the radical wing of the independence movement and his novel Soz-e-Watan was banned by the British. Unlike some writers from the same era, including many members of the Indian National Congress, Premchand sees no solution in socialism. In the book some left-wing Brahmins convince the sugar mill workers to go on strike, and, when the action proves disastrous for the poor, their advisors simply return to their customary comforts.
     Godan makes clear how insidiously ideology can operate. When an individual offends the community, the only recourse is donations of rice to all and a feast for the Brahmins. (On the other hand, villagers sometimes intervene to stop what strikes them as unjust behavior by their peers.) Hori wishes always to be proper and to win what prestige he can with his behavior. Even while slowly starving, he is acutely conscious of his standing and fights fiercely to maintain his respectability. Perhaps this is only natural, for it is very nearly the only asset he possesses.


Les Enfants Terribles (Cocteau)

     What to do with Cocteau? One need not buy Breton’s dismissal or even the raft of critics that find him a bit of a poseur to consider him a special case. I, like others, have always loved the drawings, so similar one to another and yet with such graceful lines, and found the films, especially Beauty and the Beast, unforgettable after a first adolescent film club viewing. This book, with its hothouse amalgam of myth, preciosity, perversity, and common meanness ending in the most shocking Liebestod the author could conceive.
     In spite of writing the title in French above, I read the New Directions version by Rosamond Lehmann, though Samuel Putnam (of whom I think very highly) had done a translation shortly after the book’s original publication.

The Man with the Golden Arm and a Friend with Six Seeds

Page references to The Man with the Golden Arm are from the 1964 Crest paperback with the Saul Bass arm design on the cover.


1.
     In the late sixties I had a filmmaker friend who lived in a broken-down place on N. Paulina in that section of Mayor Daley’s Chicago which was also Nelson Algren’s Chicago. This apartment was decidedly low-rent, with no lock on the building’s side entrance, a pie pan of water on the space heater, and heavy bars over the window that looked out on the alley. Every evening as midnight approached, my friend would head into the forbidding darkness of the neighborhood tavern on the corner and buy himself a six-pack of beer by the promising Christmas-like glow of hypnotic Budweiser lights. He could have paid half the price during the day at a store, but that would have required forethought. Not for him the beaded curtains that were popular among the psychedelic crowd. The filmmaker had painstakingly constructed ceiling to floor chains of thousands of linked beer can pop-tops. The neighborhood is the setting of much of Algren’s work, including the great stories of Neon Wilderness and his best-selling novel, The Man with the Golden Arm. My pleasure in reading Algren’s work is always mingled with thoughts of my friend and his scene.

     And I did enjoy visiting there, but I am glad I was not present the morning after my friend bought some pot from the wrong guy and found himself awakened before daylight by the cops who proceeded to tear his place apart, looking for the goods their informer had told them would be there. But they found nothing. They berated my friend, calling him a lazy hippie and scornfully advising him to get a job. He was hip enough at least to know that it would only harm his position to point out to the arresting officers that he would in fact be getting ready for work at that very moment had they not called on him. They tore the stove from the wall and tipped the refrigerator in their irritated zeal, but remained unrewarded until, just before they put Plan B into operation, they came upon a few seeds folded into a paper napkin which had months earlier been placed in the back of a filing cabinet to sprout. The experiment proved a dead end for their own botanical interests, as they were instantly forgotten and had dried by the time the law encountered them, but the half dozen seeds were, in 1969, more than enough for the Chicago Police Department to make a bust.

     The jig was up. He asked if he could use the toilet before being taken to the station. The lid of dope he had copped the night before was still in the pocket of the pants he had been wearing since answering the early morning banging on the door. Knowing he was a perfectly harmless citizen, they had never searched him, even for weapons. He flushed his stuff down the drain and emerged from the bathroom to meet a pair of handcuffs.

     Once he had been released on bail, he contacted a dope lawyer who knew how to deal with the local authorities. This man, after shrewdly assessing his client’s financial viability, told him just how much was necessary to put in the fix. The accused agreed to pay up and was glad he had done so when he turned up in court and found a plentiful heap of better quality pot than his budget could afford was to be exhibit A against him. He had no way to know whether the cops had borrowed it from their evidence locker or from one of their own personal stashes.

     Moments before the proceedings began, his lawyer turned to him. “This morning they told me it’ll take $1500 more to make this deal work. I can’t do anything about it. Sorry.” “But,” said my hapless friend, “I gave you all I have.” “Nah – you can sign over the bond,” his counselor assured him. It was not for nothing that he had gone to law school. The victim signed and was quite properly exonerated. Another case of Chicago justice, settled to most everybody’s satisfaction, even if the man on the bottom might find himself squeezed just a bit uncomfortably. As Algren puts it in the introduction to Chicago: City on the Make: “and the old earth sighs, heigh-o, the wind and the rain, having made this scene before.” [1]


2.
     So I was thinking of my friend the filmmaker and his markedly funky corner of a great city when I reread The Man with the Golden Arm, charmed as always by Algren’s vision of the lower depths. Even after living there for years, my friend might have been considered “slumming” [2] as he had arrived from an affluent suburb by way of university. (As a matter of fact, even Algren lived as a child further out in the considerably more respectable Albany Park neighborhood after his family had moved from the South Side.) And the cast of The Man with the Golden Arm is uniformly demimondaine, lumpen or criminal. They are decidedly low-mimetic, always behaving in ways even more selfish and short-sighted than the reader. Algren has been rightly criticized for repeating the lines he likes. Quite apart from his cannibalizing Somebody in Boots for Walk on the Wild Side, he repeats formulae, phrases, and personalities from one text to another. Often the characters are flat, yet they retain their power because that very hopeless sameness is his own individual brand of the stuff of despair that characterizes his vision. In hell everyone keeps going through the same useless motions. There is no escape.

     Algren’s stock has suffered since he won the National Book Award for the novel in 1950. Leslie Fiedler attacked him as the Last of the Proletarian Writers retailing vulgar leftist conventions long after their vogue had ended. [3] In fact, a disciple of Zhdanov would, of course, have shrunk from portraying such degraded types as petty con men, shoplifters, and junkies at all. In Algren’s book, there is never the slightest doubt that everything is rigged for the benefit of those on top, but there is also no glimmer of a way out from under for characters who offer little indeed that seems remotely redemptive. The human dilemma of absurd and helpless actors in a circular script suggests far more of Existentialism than of Marxism.

     There is certainly an economic critique in his sweeping accusation “All had gone stale for these disinherited.” He locates their deficiency precisely in “the great, secret, and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the land where ownership and virtue are one.” (22) Still, the fault seems more human than class-based when Frankie Machine laments that “all you businessmen [are] cheatin’ the people so fast ‘n hard there’s nothin’ left for an honest hustler to steal.” (114) In his private musings Bednar the police captain considers himself as guilty as the criminals and strives not to feel sympathy for them. (314-5) The greed and self-deception of the down-and-out illustrate not deviance and pathology but common humanity. In the end, as Frankie muses “Everybody’s a habitual in his heart. I’m no worse’n anyone else.” (293) This commonality, however, is based on a blind self-interest in a world where “Ain’t nobody on anyone’s side no more. You’re the oney one on your side, and I’m the oney one on mine.” So bleak is the prospect that “under one moon or another, he knew not one man on the side of men.” (305) A “half-crazed” priest in a police lineup declares a contrary line, “we are all members of one another,” but no one can even make any sense of his words. (314) In a temporary fit of anxiety or insight Antek may say “I’m not cryin’ for my own trouble. . . I’m cryin’ for everybody’s,” but Frankie knows the mood will pass. “He’ll be back behind his bar Monday morning.” (171) Moral responsibility can never be fruitfully traced in this tragic world. How can an individual be guilty when “we all got caught in it, one way or another”? (342) There can be no distinctions when “everyone’s chickens would be coming home to roost soon enough.” (114)

     To Algren we are all in the same spot as the “single gander” who stood gawking between its legs at a cord that forever held it fast” in front of Piechota’s Poultry (246), clueless and waiting for slaughter. Algren is eloquent with his animal images, but always with the same implication. Among others one might count Rumdum the drunken dog, the deaf-and-dumb cat (248), the cockroach overturned in the water bucket, (26) and the caged monkeys who can only cast baleful glances from the imprisonment above the bar and yearn for their lost Congo (321). [4] But even their lost eyes cannot compare with the fierce intimacy of the monkey on Frankie’s back.

     Human life is reflected in the “lonely beat” of “the last fly of autumn” who is trapped “in hustlers’ territory with one conviction to go.” (105) By the end of the novel such insects reappear in Sophie’s madhouse vision. “The wind is blowing the flies away. God had forgotten us all.” (354) Ego washes away: “They don’t remember people around here any more.” (25)

     The world is a “neon carnival” (104) in which dope or drink or the illusion of love can sustain one for a time. In desperation people strive to avoid feeling through intoxication; the New Years Eve party at Antek’s is wild and diverting (170 ff.), but only for a time could the denizens of Division Street avoid the sobering conviction that 1947 would be “a long, long year.” (175) The world is a game of cards and the best option is to get into the game and play a hand with spirit because there is no opting out, and no one winds in the end except the house. “The cards kept the everlasting darkness off, the cards lent everlasting hope. The cards meant any man in the world might win back his long-lost life, gone somewhere far away.” (130)

     Every incident of human life might be entered into Sophie’s Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence. (39, 254) We are indeed in a vale of tears, and Algren invokes religious imagery repeatedly, ironic usages finally coalescing with straightforward ones. In prison Frankie attends mass regularly and identifies with Christ’s suffering showing particular devotion to the Station of the Cross depicting Christ’s falling. (224) Later on the street he sees the wind stirring a lost kite and notes that “the frail cross of the kite’s frame hung as piteously as his own heart had hung.” (263) Heroin is “God’s medicine,” (30, 90) and the police interrogation room is “the only house of true worship.” (290)

     So I would say Algren’s concerns are philosophical or spiritual rather than social or psychological. His low-life characters simply find themselves in an environment where it is hard to avoid looking reality in the face. Lacking the comforts of bourgeois life, they must work harder to maintain any illusion at all. Frankie may imagine himself the next Gene Krupa and Sophie picture herself singing with an all-girl band (255), but these are last pathetic wisps of straw at which they clutch as they daily confront their own ignominy, powerlessness, and mortality. The reader is drawn to their portraits by the uncompromising power of that bleak vision. Perhaps my friend on N. Paulina and I were seeking the scent of a world where simply to survive is heroic. Even if we occupied just such a world already ineluctably, we may have needed a whiff or two of stench to make the point.

     When I attended the University of Iowa in 1971 where Algren had taught in the middle sixties, I heard that he was more attentive to poker games than to the Writers Workshop, but that, for all his enthusiasm and presumed street smarts, he invariably lost. Perhaps he had to teach himself the same old lesson he never tired of teaching the rest of us losers: we’re all in the same boat and the water in the hold is only getting deeper. Though it is patently untrue that “just junkies know how everything is,” (278) [5] they may in fact hold fewer illusions. And the same may be true for their chroniclers.


1. p. 10.

2. Use of the word slumming to describe visiting poor neighborhoods as a recreation dates from 1884 according to the OED. The phenomenon deserves attention as one of the distinctly modern forms of ironic aesthetic appreciation along with kitsch and camp.

3. Leslie Fiedler, “The Noble Savages of Skid Row,” The Reporter. July 12, 1956. Fiedler also called Algren the “bard of the stumblebums.” Around the same time, Algren was also publicly attacked by a young Norman Podhoretz in a June 2, 1956 article for the The New Yorker entitled “The Man with the Golden Beef.” Both critics were responding to the publication of Walk on the Wild Side.

4. On the same page is a reference to the “Negro streets.” Is this the source of Ginsberg’s line in the opening of Howl?

5. In fact, according to his Paris Review interview, Frankie Machine had not originally been a junkie. Algren’s agent admired the book but said it needed a “peg.” Algren claims in the same interview that the lives of ordinary people without “big scenes” would make “an awfully good book.” However, he notes that these typical citizens might hustle a bit on the street and use just a bit of heroin “to keep from getting sick.” They don’t sound so different from the cast he used.