Something for the poet, something for the lover

Full title: Seducing the Demon. Writing for My Life

Author: Erica Jong

Genre: Nonfiction, memoir
Attributes: 304 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Tarcher (2007)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Writing, booze, sex, drugs, celebrity, and a few more things along the way; this pretty much sums up the whole book I am talking about here. And it would be unfair to expect anything else from a writer who made a name for herself in the 1970s, when she rose to prominence with Fear of Flying, a scandalous (although the word should be read in a positive sense) book about unbridled sexuality.

It would also be unfair to judge this memoir too cheaply, focusing on its themes the wrong way, as is usually easy with sex and drugs and mad writing dipped in thick Bohemian sauce.

That's because Seducing the Demon is, above everything else, a gesture of scandalous honesty (once again, read the adjective positively). It talks about the emancipation it caused in the seventies, but at the same time it asks the significant question: to what extent has that revolution achieved its goals?

"Our daughters cannot even imagine female invisibility. We raised them telling them they could do anything and everything. We told them God might well be female. We told them we wanted them because they were girls. We filled their heads with female goddesses, women poets and women's history. (Dear Goddess, don't make me call it herstory or womyn's history - I may break out in hives.) The point is: We taught them to love themselves."

And this is perhaps where those essential questions demand to be asked, although for the most part Erica Jong gives the impression that the answer has already been given, and that the world already knows that the sexual emancipation has had a positive outcome.

Speaking generally of this book, one may say that one simply needs to take Seducing the Demon as it is. With its demons, with its show-offs ("Dart and I wallowed in luxury at the Cipriani - and damn the cost (all on my tab)"), with its ostentatious groupie-ness ("I have been involved with brilliant poets who liked me to wear tacky underwear"), with its dubious exaggerations ("My father was Seymour. He was handsome and hot. It was hard to think of him as my father."), with its cheap melodramas, but also with its astute, roaring poetry. You can't, for instance, overlook her take on Omar Khhayam, the poet of wine, the champion of love:

"You cannot quote Omar and drink Diet Coke. You cannot quote Omar and drink San Pellegrino. Wine is demanded. Wine is essential. You cannot be in love and not drink wine. Or I can't, anyway."

It all rings so true it's almost encouraging. More wine, please, and more love!

But if you want a central point (a hook from which to hang the entire volume), it must be this: it feels good being Erica Jong and being a celebrity. It comes, as it were, with the job description. This is, it seems, the truth worth theorizing, even when the philosophy produced this way sounds bitter-sweet or perhaps a little regretful.

"Fame seems at first to be a protection against the common lot of humanity. The common lot of humanity is to be a blob that rots. With fame we can outsmart decay and be embalmed for times to come.Of course it's not really us but a version of us, an eviscerated version with all the blood and guts gone. Embalmed for posterity, like Lenin. We'll take it anyway. And thanks. Better to be known for the wrong things than not to be known at all."

Honest in almost everything she says, unashamed of talking about her sexual escapades as if they were some glacé cherries on a heavy-creamed cake, or about her life among the famous as if they were a mere head count at a country fair, Erica Jong would have defeated her whole purpose if she had not said this about fame:

"Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included."

But she says it. And then she moves on. To passages upon passages discussing the adventure of writing. Fragments in which Jong chooses to speak with the texture of sleek metaphors. Like, for instance, this, where the necessary connection is being made between – what else – but writing and sex:

"Without adultery, is there any novel? Without sex, is there any poetry? Surely sexual energy and creative energy feed each other. Often they feel the same.Sexual energy provokes creativity. Do poets fall in love to write about it, or does love impel creativity?"

It's easy to see how the two connect, right? The energies they share, the intensity that can be equated, the sense of loss of self that's involved in both. In fact, Jong's philosophy relies a lot on the articulation of this loss. At one point, she borrows the concept of "flow" from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which is precisely about the imponderability of one's complete immersion in one's object of adoration/passion. And out of this theory she comes out saying:

"Optimal experience, or the flow state, is characterized by the suspension of the sense of time, the obliteration of self-consciousness and the feeling that we are doing something for its own sake and not for its outcome. This is a perfect description of writing, sex, or sailing, or ballet dancing or painting or musical composition, or... you fill in the blanks. Athletes breaking records are in flow. So are writers writing, dancers dancing, sailors sailing. Immersed in their craft, they find flow - which is its own reward."

Once again, where there's writing there's sex, where there's sex there's writing. The energy, the passion, the performance, the intensity, the flow! Writing like an athlete or writing like a lover, what difference does it really make?

The sea and the city

Full title: Garlic, Mint, and Sweet Basil. Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction

Author: Jean-Claude Izzo

Genre: Nonfiction
Attributes: 107p, paperback
Publisher: Europa (2013)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Just over a hundred pages long, and therefore readable in an hour or maybe less, this tiny book is a combination of things, and for that reason it is likely to please on multiple levels. It is also (because such are the ups and downs of life) a book by an author who died in 2000, when he wasn't yet 55 years old. Jean-Claude Izzo, author of noir and detective novels, gave in this deceptively slender volume a symphonic description of his native Marseille and, with it, of the whole of the Mediterranean region. The text is copiously splashes with references to good food, good urban settings, good literature and good music.

It is at the same time a memoir, a pseudo-travel account, and a review (yes, at times it feels like you're reading the review of a book – the book of the Mediterranean Sea), all of which glorify an already heavily romanticised image of the region. Izzo dishes out a lot of superlatives and he's proud of every single one of them, the way he's also proud (if saddened too) of things that don't look very good when seen in perspective.

Source: Marvelous Marseilles

Most importantly, though, Garlic, Mint, and Sweet Basil is a collection of texts about communion and community. The "Mediterranean Basin" (an ugly term which, by the way, is never mentioned - thanks god!) is described in the broad strokes of universality. This is, at the end of the day, the origin of Europe itself, a cauldron filled to the brim with cultures that make it "creole" in its diversity.

Zooming in from the Mediterranean, the texts hover over Marseilles like a magnifying glass. They are very sensual. They speak of smells, tastes, sounds, tactile pleasures, beautiful women, wonderful food, memorable wine. But when you think things have gotten too sweet, too sunny-skyish, there's a warning. A warning about the threat from the North, from mainland France, which makes insistent attempts at homogenizing a space that's too hybrid to be bottled up in a juice of conformity and uniformity.

It's easy to see how admirably Izzo believed in the power of Marseilles to remain what it's always been: not only French but also European; not only European but also North-African and Middle Eastern; not only those but also South American and Caribbean and things of the rest of the world.

Because of this wealth of locations and points of origins, a constant feeling of abundance transpires from the texts; a feeling that Marseilles is so many things at the same time that it is impossible to settle on one and call it its essence. Marseille is a city of light, a city of music, a city of history, a city of delight. Hence the superlatives, hence the exaltations.

"Marseilles always exaggerates. That is her essence. And basically nothing has changed [since its ancient origins]. [...] When the harbour opens its arms to you, then and only then you discover the eternal meaning of the city: Hospitality. Marseilles gives herself without resistance to those who know how to take her and love her. Marseilles is a myth. That is the only thing there is to see. To embrace. The rest can be as futile or vain as anything else. We might even say that the city is just like those fake blondes you meet on her streets. They display only what they are not."

All this, of course, is like saying I don't really know how to describe this city. And at the same time like saying, oh yes, I know. I love this city so much I can take revenge on it, on its fall into fake polishes, exaggerated displays, futile add-ons. It's the same as loving its mix of cultures, its colourful settings, its long history, the way it deals with multiplicity. But this is maybe how every city should be loved. The way Orhan Pamuk described his Istanbul, hailing the city's appeal without blushing for its shortcomings.

One can only give in to the temptation of praising the unusual nature of such a place:

"Atypical is not the word for Marseilles. Unconventional is more accurate."

Which may be doing a better job of defining this space of contradictions and agreements, where the Mediterranean appears to be at the same time a bridge and a mote.

Jean-Claude Izzo (1945-2000). Source: Genova Mente Locale

In any case, Izzo's attitude towards Marseilles was so strong it seeped into his other proses. To prove it, he wrote an entire Marseilles trilogy, in a genre he baptised "Mediterranean Noir." And just in case that wasn't apparent to the reader of the present book, a short story ends it, a story featuring Izzo's favourite character, detective Fabio Montale; a story which, in order to prove the resemblance between author and protagonist, goes on to declare, once again, this special love for Marseilles:

"I knocked back my drink and stood up. I felt like going and losing myself in Marseilles. In her smells. In the eyes of her women. My city. I knew that I always had an appointment there with the fleeting happiness of exiles. The only kind that suited me. A real consolation."

This is the rest of the book in a nutshell. With it, the recurrent sentiments take front stage again, and the point is made as if anew.

The lives of other writers

Full title: Odd Type Writers. From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors

Author: Celia Blue Johnson

Genre: Nonfiction
Attributes: 200p, paperback
Publisher: Perigee (2013)

On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Few things work better to motivate the mind of a writer caught in a bad case of writer's block than anecdotes about other writers and their own survival strategies. Little stories of this type have the been-there-done-that attitude that somehow encourages the mind of the dispossessed to take up pen and paper and proceed, with renewed forces, to finish that text or to start that other one.

This is exactly what Celia Blue Johnson has provided in Odd Type Writers. The power of examples is what her book is running on, no doubt about it. Young or inspiring writers in particular may be inclined, every now and then, at crucial moments, to ask the obvious question, "How much work is to be put into the writing of a book?" It's only fair to ask this, don't we agree? Sigh of relief and frown of horror: it takes a helluva lot of effort and determination to make yourself write like mad. Don't believe it? Take the word of Alexandre Dumas Père, who never proceeded with his writing until he'd had everything daylight-clear in his mind. In his own words, quoted in the book:

"As a rule, I do not begin a book until it is finished."

This short sentence has the shine and appeal of a gem of wisdom. And Odd Type Writers abounds in aphorisms of this kind, easy to digest, easy to raise a brow at (in enlightenment), and, most importantly, easy to carry about. If anything, this book is a child of its own time: the product of a type of curiosity that takes delight in brevity, in easy-carrying, in headlines, in quirky information, in things to be tweeted, facebooked, pintrested, mentioned at parties.

And there's nothing wrong with all that. Why? Because a desperate writer (young or old, experienced or novice) doesn't need sermons. They want quick fixes. 'Get the jab, feel the rush, get back to work' kind of thing. And this book ticks the boxes alright.

Want to find out what’s the best time to wake up and start your work? The answer is ‘I don’t know.’ But here are a few examples, from page 61, where there’s a short list of authors and their wake-up calls:

“4:00 a.m.: Sylvia Plath
5:00 a.m.: Jack London, Toni Morrison, Katherine Anne Porter
5:30 a.m.: Anthony Trollope, Kurt Vonnegut
6:00 a.m.: W.H. Auden, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Victor Hugo, Vladimir Nabokov, Edith Wharton”

… and the list goes on, till we reach the sleepyheads: Carson McCullers, who liked to wake up at 9:30 a.m., and W. Somerset Maugham, who opened his eyes at 10:00 a.m.

Do you feel like complaining about rejection letters? How about reading the chapter about Jack London, who after 650 of them (!) got to the point where he even started contemplating suicide. And that, while keeping a mental-asylum routine:

“His bedroom lamp glowed until 2 a.m., and he sprang back to action at the sound of his alarm clock at 5 a.m.”

Do you want to know if the job can be done quickly? Kafka wrote “The Judgment” almost at a whim, “in one great gust, from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m.” and then had the confidence to declare:

“Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening of the body and the soul.”

Or would you like to find out how writers related to means of transportation? Well, in that case read how Getrude Stein could write comfortably on the passenger’s seat of a military truck, and how Sir Walter Scott composed the poem Marmion on a horseback.

Hemingway had his own quirky ways. He began his work day by sharpening numerous pencils, wrote facing the wall, so as not to get distracted by the outside world, wrote up to a point where he knew for sure what he was going to write the next day. And what's more, when asked what does it take to become a writer, he replied: "First, you have to defrost the refrigerator."
Image source: Thinking to Inking

This can go on for a long, long time. That’s how the book is organized: around imaginary questions (pretending that you, the writer reading these pages, might have the curiosity to inquire); questions which are given answers with a strong flavour of myth. Strong but sweet.
Let's not hide behind a finger: what would anybody expect to find in a book that says it upfront, straight from the title, that it deals in anecdotes about writers? This is not a compendium of academic reflections, and neither is it the transcript of a class in creative writing. It is a book you can have a coffee with. It's a chat partner. Pages you can read when you're out of mental gas, when you've exhausted your resources and can't resist any longer. And so it should be taken: as a welcome partner rather than a patronizing teacher. There.

Don’t be disappointed with Kurt!

Full title: Armageddon in Retrospect And Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace

Author: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (edited by Mark Vonnegut)

Genre: Fiction, Nonfiction
Attributes: 240p, hardback
Publisher: Putnam (2008)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

It’s a shame the work of Kurt Vonnegut cannot be read without the shadow of Slaughterhouse Five looming thick and nigh poisonous over everything. Put together by Mark Vonnegut, the writer’s son, the collection Armageddon in Retrospect appears to be precisely under the spell of this exclusivist love for the 1969 novel that made the author so (too?) famous. A review by Roy Blount Jr., published in the New York Times almost a year after Vonnegut’s death in 2007 and months after the publication of this collection, keeps a very distant tone and gives more credit to the son than it does to the author himself. On British soil, the book didn’t fare any better, if we take the word of The Guardian, where Jan Morris’s review ends in a straightforward declaration of disappointment, followed immediately by another refuge in the celebrity of Slaughterhouse Five. Add to all this the very introduction composed by Mark Vonnegut, a text equally clouded by a general meh feeling, and you get the feel of how these previously unpublished stories have been received.

But things look better (much better) than these reviews point out.

What I believe is worth paying a little closer attention to, and what (knowing Kurt Vonnegut’s excellent career in the field) students in Creative Writing are likely to be interested in perusing is the narrative technique to be found in no short supply in this collection. OK, these may be early works. OK, they may be lesser versions of Slaughterhouse Five (although, I think, even that can be negotiated at various points). But when you read something like

“Ivy pressed her back to the wall, as though God had just passed by.”

(“The Unicorn Trap”)

you need to admit it: you’re in the process of witnessing genius. Try to imagine an expression of awe, astonishment, fear and adoration – all mixed together and delivered as one parcel – that’s more evocative than this, and you’ll be ill at ease to find a better candidate.

"I guess all of you know, that I am suing the manufacturer of Pall Mall cigarettes,
because their product didn't kill me." Not then. And so it goes. Source: The Guardian

Another thing that stands out, as it stood in Vonnegut’s other works, is his carefulness around details. If the narratives are memorable, they are not because of the events they describe; not entirely so. They are also memorable because of how the characters make their appearance, how they touch insignificant objects, how they make tiny gestures (like the same character, who at some point “scratches herself daintily”), how they breathe and eat in ways rarely seen in literature, and how they discover the irrationality of the world.

Such as:

“The man in the bunk overhead was also astir. I asked him for the time. He stuck his head over the side, and I saw that his jaws were crammed with bread; be blew a shower of crumbs over me as he answered. He said he no longer had a watch. He chewed and swallowed until a major portion of the great wad of bread was cleared from his mouth and he could make himself understood.”

(“Brighten Up”)

And then, of course, one cannot be so desensitized as to overlook Vonnegut’s reflections on war, which cover a pretty extensive part of the volume. Sometimes, they appear as philosophical cogitations, as in:

“World War II was fought for near-Holy motives. But I stand convinced that the brand of justice in which we dealt, wholesale bombing of civilian populations, was blasphemous. That the enemy did it first has nothing to do with the moral problem.”

(“Great Day”)

At other times, they are embedded in narrative admonitions:

“It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children.”

(“Great Day”)

The combination of humour and repugnance, of humanity and lack thereof, is, no doubt, the “Saint Kurt the Vonnegut” trademark. You feel it in the sarcasm of statements like the ones above. He says it in the text that opens the collection; the unbeatable and unstoppable need for humour, for play:

“And somebody might now want to ask me, ‘Can’t you ever be serious?’ The answer is, ‘No.’”

And then there’s one more thing to be said about this collection, to silence the critics; or at least make them think again. The fact that these stories appeared posthumously should give an indication that the author himself may have felt a little uneasy about publishing them straight up. Maybe he himself saw in them mere exercises; experiments of sorts. So let’s be a little less “disappointed,” and read the collection in its proper context.

Dear justice

Full title: The Visit

Author: Friedrich Dürrenmatt (translated by Joel Agee)

Genre: Drama, tragicomedy
Attributes: 112 pages, paperback
Publisher: Grove Press (2010)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

This is a play in the tradition of things so tragic they are comical, and therefore absurd. A flavour of Ionesco hovers over the play, and one can't help but delight in tragicomedy, a hybrid genre where everything is possible and where everything, if given the chance, will take place. Dürrenmatt imagines a textbook moral crisis, yet complicates it to a serious extent. The dilemma that puts the play in motion involves not an individual (as would have been the case in a classical tragedy) but an entire community (as is often the case in comedy).

Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Source: Die Kunst der Fugue

The principal character and the protagonist/antagonist (notice how she seems to be ticking both boxes at the same time), Claire Zachanassian, is an old and filthily rich woman who’s coming back to her hometown. She’s visiting, but the visit turns out to be far from a touristic whim. She’s back with a vengeance. She’s here to fix a problem that’s been haunting her for decades: the treacherous act of Alfred Ill (it looks like a 3, but it's actually "ill"), her former lover, who, sixty years earlier, had abandoned Claire when their love story was in full swing, and condemned her to a life of prostitution and squalor. Now a billionairess, she's grown into a merciless revenger. She presents the town of Güllen, where Ill has lived all this time, with an offer they cannot refuse:

“I can afford justice. One billion for Güllen, if someone kills Alfred Ill.”

One sentence, and the town is shattered. The engine of tragedy has been turned on. There won’t be peace any longer, there won’t be patience. The command, veiled, like all moral dilemmas, in the illusion of choice, is precisely diabolical and leaves no room for negotiation. The offer falls upon Güllen like a thunderbolt. It destabilizes its institutional structure, it brings the populace into the marketplace, it shakes the foundations of its very humanity, and it makes it take pleasure in the idea of committing a crime for financial gain.

The mayhem generated by the old billionairess is illustrated by the Priest, who, acting like a chorus from a Greek tragedy, gives Ill the only advice that can, in all appearance, still save him  (BTW, choruses do appear in the end, to give the play that special twist and remind the audience to put the right frame onto the story):

“Flee! We are weak, Christians and heathen alike. Flee, the bell is resounding in Güllen, the bell of treachery. Flee and lead us not into temptation by staying.”

Let us not forget, this is a small town, where existential spleen happens in cyclical swirls, and where ethical norm could be disturbed by as much as an innocent pinch. Let alone a billion! As noted by one of the visitors, an idiot who’s managed to best define the town’s bucolic insignificance,

“All right, the linden tree’s rustling, birds are singing, the fountain is splashing, but they were already doing that half an hour ago. There’s just nothing happening, neither in nature nor in the people, nothing but deep, untroubled peace, contentment, satiety, and comfort. No grandeur, no tragedy. None of the ethical calling of a great age.”

Of course, he’s wrong in the essential part: exactly where he supposes there’s no “ethical calling.” Because the play is all about this problem, presented to the inhabitants of Güllen like an equation they are expected to solve. In the age of counting (in 1956, when the play was originally published, just as much as now, almost sixty years later), morality too must be looked for in numbers. One billion in unspecified currency against one very concrete human life! A problem for ethics, a problem for arithmetic, it’s all the same: a problem; and one that needs to be solved. Now!

The 1964 filmic version discarded some of the humour

and changed certain details, but heightened the drama

A few things need to be said about the play’s technical conceits as well. Dürrenmatt manipulates very well theatrical conventions, so as to encourage experimental treatments of both space and time. Settings, for instance, change without the fall of curtains, by mere prop handling (in the style of Brecht’s Epic Theatre, no doubt). Sometimes, even characters are used as props, as is the case with an omnipresent group of four blind men who turn now into trees, now into animals, now into different people. These are, perhaps, the most delightful characters. They bring that touch of comedy to the stage whenever they go through these unexpected transformations: a great source of humour.

When taken as a whole, The Visit entertains while exposing the weakness and the hubris of human nature. The end is not comic, but the journey there is paved with a lot of delightful moments, which ease the bitter taste of the ethical crisis the play occasions. Plus, the questions – the questions, whatever they may be, are worth pondering.

The novelist as a clone artist

Full title: The Literary Conference

Author: César Aira

Genre: Fiction, novella
Attributes: 96 pages, paperback
Publisher: New Directions (2010)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

César Aira, an incredibly prolific experimental writer of (according to his own admission) a Dadaist creed, experimented here with the very idea of Creation. The novella (his favourite format) is about a failed attempt to clone the Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes. There are complications to this, of course, but when reduced to the most essential, this is the book’s narrative core; its crux.

Since the central element has been disclosed, it may be of use to mention that, in The Eagle’s Throne, originally published in 2002, Fuentes had imagined César Aira as having won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Literary Conference may, therefore, be read as Aira’s return of favour.

Beyond the plot line (complex and multidirectional, hence impossible to summarize without missing something), what needs to be closely looked at in this book is the figure of the protagonist/narrator/implied author, César. He divides his life between improbable science and insignificant literature. He is a creator in and of both. He clones with the ease with which he writes, and he solves century-long mysteries with the bonhomie with which he attends literary conferences. However, no reviews (to my knowledge) have noticed how this character reasons and acts like a deity. One with a very interesting propensity towards forgetting or neglecting his own creations (a deus otiosus, no doubt), but a god-like figure nonetheless.

“My Great Work, my secret labor, is highly personal, nontransferable, nobody but I could carry it out, because it consists of the innumerable psychic and physical instants whose sequence confirms my velocity. The velocity at which I unfold through time.”

But there’s also something awkward, ridiculous, about this pseudo-god. He makes major silly mistakes, surrealist in their expanse, Dadaist in their juxtaposition. Having written a play entitled In the Court of Adam and Eve (if Carlos Fuentes had written his Adam in Eden a little earlier, one would have imagined this to be an allusion!), César, the playwright, gives the Biblical story an original twist, imagining that, while in Paradise, Adam was, in fact, married; but not to Eve! Interesting as it may seem, this innovation turns out to give the author nothing but headaches, as it becomes an unsolvable conundrum.

“I must confess, I didn’t know how to resolve the difficult problem this plot line presented. Because if Adam and Eve were, respectively, the only man and the only woman on the planet, then Adam’s wife – the absent wife whose existence prevented him from living out his love with Eve – couldn’t be anybody other that Eve herself.”

He drives himself into a similar dead corner with the cloning project as well. Here, the initial bulletproof plan (detailed to the minutest of gestures) turns to dust when a wasp, employed by the scientist to collect a relevant DNA sample from Carlos Fuentes, mixes up the genetic information and collects genes from Fuentes’ silk tie. Such mistakes and mismanagements make the protagonist a sad figure of lost causes, who’s brandishing a slogan that says it all:

“I fail because of my precipitousness, my rush to finish, and my desperation to please.”

But this is also what makes him funny. Not unlike, say, Don Quixote, whose endless experiments in reading are met with endless literal debacles. In words that play convincingly the autobiographical tune of César Aira himself:

“Once again I had submitted to nonsense, to the frivolity of invention for invention’s sake, resorting to the unexpected as if it were some kind of deus ex machina!”

Experimental to the point of surrealist unreliability and jovial to the point of mad experimentalism, it’s a pleasure to read this short but alert book, which waxes now philosophical, now satirical, now downright humorous and fun. The density of the text is quite remarkable. Only 90 pages, but whew, what a marathon! Which makes it necessary to talk about it somewhere else, perhaps: in a place that transgresses the condition of a simple book review.

Post scriptum. One must know that the joke of the book was more significant and more loaded at the date of publication, when Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was still alive. Now, however, it might still be a good joke: the thought of what it would have been like to have cloned Fuentes for real.

It would have been nice, though. Source: Latino USA

One year after the poet’s death, a reading

Full title: The Spirit Level

Author: Seamus Heaney

Genre: Poetry
Attributes: 82 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux (1996)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

The poems of Seamus Heaney (not only these, but all) are a learning field. One needs to learn about Northern Ireland in order to understand his political allusions. One needs to train oneself in the patois of literature in order to understand his citations. One needs to grow an academic eye in order to understand his intertextualities. One needs to read his interviews and teach oneself lessons in Seamus Heaney's biography in order to understand his contexts. Gradually, however, this shortcoming (this embarrassment with which one approaches his poems) turns into a blessing: at the end of the process, one will have made progress; one will have grown.

Autobiography is vital in Heaney's work, and so one might often end up staring perplexedly at some lines or other, which, beautiful as they may be, straightforward as they may appear, feel somewhat hermetic, somewhat self-referential.

"All of us on the sofa in a line, kneeling
Behind each other, eldest down to youngest,
Elbows going like pistons, for this was a train

And between the jamb-wall and the bedroom door
Our speed and distance were inestimable."

("A Sofa in the Forties")

The gist of these lines is to be found in the opening statements of the acceptance speech given by Heaney at the awarding of the Nobel Prize, in 1995.

There, the same setting materializes: a childhood in a solitary Northern-Ireland farmhouse, nine siblings, of which Seamus was one, growing attuned to the sounds (harmonious or not) of the world.

As above, there’s a delicate celebration of things in almost all of Seamus Heaney's poems, and this is what, perhaps, made his poetry so popular. From the "Rain Stick," which opens the volume ("You are like a rich man entering heaven / Through the ear of a raindrop") to the sofa in the poem already mentioned ("Its castors on tiptoe, / Its braid and fluent backboard gave it airs / Of superannuated pageantry"), to the text itself, in "Remembered Columns" ("The solid letters of the world grew airy"), Heaney appears to be engaged in a crusade for the affirmation of objects in a world dominated by humans. Whether this happens through the agency of memory or through the more topical involvement of these objects in political matters, there is this constant feeling that objects are invited to feast with humans.

There's glory to be found in this. A sense of elevation, of a bringing to poetical height of inanimate objects (itself with a rich literary history, at least from Swift onward) dominates these poems. At times, objects take front stage. At other times they remain, well-behaved and silent, in the background. But what's important is that they’re never completely absent. The often-cited Northern-Irish peasant legacy must have translated, for Heaney, into this peculiar, affective attachment to objects.

Source: Le Nouvel Observateur

And that, to any reader of poetry, becomes easily apparent; in the way, for instance, in the poem “Mint,” one plant is regarded with a sense of bafflement, as if it were a flower growing from a pile of rubble (a living object in an environment of discarded objects):

"It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice."

... only to let the object (i.e. the plant) grow to a dimension that imposes questions. Questions not about the object but the humans it may be standing for:

"Let the smell of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our disregard."

Heaney's multifaceted approach (at the same time political, historical, literary, and academic) makes the objects shine with their own luminous stances (and stanzas) on the page. You never know until you've read the poems twice, three times, a hundred times, where to place these objects – where to situate the poems, where, in the vast network of possible references, they are supposed to perform the role of their utterance. Often, their place remains a challenge to the mind – one as good as any riddle. But equally often, these objects are pinned down as aids to memory:

"The dotted line my father's ashplant made
On Sandymount Strand
Is something else the tide won't wash away."

("The Strand")

The attachment to objects considered, one thing needs to be clarified: in these poems, sentiment doesn't develop into fetishism. While not exactly props but rather active participants in a dramatic plot of large proportions (at the end of the day, Beowulf didn't happen out of the blue!), the things that inhabit these poems are meaningful in precise senses. To see this, one has to read the Heaney interviews.

There, it's impossible not the notice how munch everything meant at one point or another in the poet’s personal history. There are precise memories that go hand in hand with precise objects ("When the thorn tree was cut down / You broke your arm"). Or maybe it's the other way round – reading, I find it difficult to decide over priorities.

"The piper coming from far away is you
With a whitewash brush for a sporran
Wobbling around you, a kitchen chair
Upside down on your shoulder, your right arm
Pretending to tuck the bag beneath your elbow."

("Keeping Going")

As here, explosions of objects are felt throughout the volume; throughout the oeuvre, to be more precise. They send shards of poetry off into the land of speech, where the poems of Seamus Heaney can be read aloud, with the same intonations of a bard setting about telling his tales.