American writers

This of course doesn’t make any sense

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Foer, 2007 (Photo by David Shankbone, via Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons CC-BY-3.0)

Foer, 2007 (Photo by David Shankbone, via Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons CC-BY-3.0)

Lisa, over at ANZLitLovers, has produced a list of some of the main features of postmodernism. It just so happens that I am also reading a postmodernist book, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is illuminated (from which the title of this post comes). I’ve only just started the book but it is exhibiting those features of postmodernism that I most enjoy:

  • metafiction – in this case highly self-conscious authoring
  • absurdity and irony thinly but uproariously disguising “real” meaning
  • visual playfulness – the titles of chapters by one character typeset in various curvy shapes, while the titles by the other are presented in the usual straight line; use of other typographical features such as upper case, italics, strikethroughs and the like
  • mixed genres – letters (ie correspondence), novel within novel, playscript, and so on.

All these are contained within a comprehensible story-line, once you get into it, and in language that is playful but not so playful that it’s obscure. But more anon. As a character in the novel says:

I do not have any luminous remarks because I must possess more of the novel in order to lumin.

Writing like this makes me laugh out loud…and that is always a good thing.

William Styron, Rat beach

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I haven’t read any William Styron, though I have seen the movie of Sophie’s Choice, and so was pleased to have the opportunity to read his “Rat beach” for one of my many bookgroups this month. This short story was published in The New Yorker three years after Styron’s death and is about a young second lieutenant in the Marines training on Saipan in the Western Pacific in mid-1945. Their goal is, of course, the invasion of Japan. I should add here that Styron himself did serve with the Marines in the war.

The story starts with:

When I was seventeen, bravado, mingled with what must have been a death wish, made me enlist in the officer-in-training program of the Marine Corps.

He continues that, as they were young and considered “too callow to lead troops into battle”, they were sent to college “where, as book-toting privates, we would gain a little learning and seasoning, and also a year or two of physical and mental growth”. As he was particularly young, he was at college longer than some and so was not in the first wave of second lieutenants sent into battle in the last stages of the Pacific War. He quotes EB Sledge as saying, in his book With the old breed, that “Our officers got hit so soon and so often that it seemed to me the position of second lieutenant in a rifle company had been made obsolete by modern warfare”. And so the scene is set for a young second lieutenant arriving at Saipan with this likely fate in his mind.

The story, then, centres on the “internal conflict” of a young second lieutenant who is “scared” – scared of dying and also scared of failing as a leader of his men. With some pathos Styron writes:

As I lay on my cot, “The Pocket Book of Verse” would slip from my hand, and fear – vile, cold fear – would steal through my flesh…

This book of verse was published in 1945 and contains English and American poems, including those by the war poet AE Housman who, among other things, wrote about the futility of heroism. For our narrator, Housman’s poems contain “a note both stoical and ill-omened”.

In a highly evocative passage he describes the island’s snails – their hard shell covering their great vulnerability. They “were always getting squashed beneath our field boots, making a tiny mess that reminded me of the fragility of my own corporeal being”.  There is also a gorgeously written section in which a “desk admiral” delivers a shallow (to his listeners) motivational “spiel” under “klieg” lights and gesticulating with his “meerschaum” pipe (note the German-derived words in this section!), after which they are led on a wild, head-clearing run in the storm by their unconventional lieutenant colonel, Happy Halloran, who gives his own far more effective motivational speech. He says “I really think the world of you. When the time comes, I know you’ll do your best – that’s the best the Marine Corps has to offer”.

As short stories go, this one is fairly straightforward in its narrative and plot – but this doesn’t mean it’s simple. It’s also a powerful story, not least for the decision our narrator comes to at the end – but that, you will have to read for yourselves!

PS I really should have mentioned, here, the overall irony relating to “the bomb”. I’m not sure why I didn’t because as I read the story I kept expecting the bomb to be mentioned (or to fall, even). Was the gathering going to be an announcement re the bomb? Were the planes heard overhead going to be carrying the bomb? We readers knew that the bomb was going to change everything for the narrator but he didn’t know it. The ultimate irony.

Maile Meloy, Liliana

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[WARNING: SPOILERS IF YOU CARE]

Fun but flimsy was my first reaction on reading the short story Liliana by American writer Maile Meloy. But, after reading it a couple of days ago, I found that it kept popping back into my head. What seemed at first to be a funny little story – about a grandmother who returns from the dead – turned out to have a few things to think about.

It is, I guess, both an inheritance and a second-chance story but with a difference. It is told first person by the thirty-something grandson, recently laid-off work and so functioning as house-father. Inheriting a little of Liliana’s millions would not be unwelcome (to him, anyhow). However, Liliana, the flamboyant independent one has left her money to the RSPCA – that is to animal welfare! When Liliana turns up on our narrator’s doorstep alive and well – at the beginning of the story – our narrator clearly thinks he’s still in with a chance.

In the next few pages – it’s a tight little story – we learn about the complexities of family, about need/neediness and about, really, the failure of imagination. We learn that if you don’t make it on the first chance, you are unlikely to make it on the second – particularly if neither situation is based on sincerity…and our narrator is not exactly dripping with that particular virtue:

…I thought about Jesus and Elvis. People had wanted them back, badly, and still do. But who would have willed Liliana back…

and

My wife, whose family is Jewish, says that I tricked her into falling in love with me by withholding my grandmother’s Nazi-movie past until it was too late, which is entirely true – I’m not an idiot.

Get the picture? This is a man who thinks he might get a job simply by using “new fonts with which to express my accomplishments”.

And so, our narrator, who had lived a somewhat Bohemian life as a child but had yearned for and created a “buttered saltines in front of TV” sort of life, is not the sort of person to engage his grandmother. “Well, you aren’t very much like your father, thankfully … But you aren’t very much like me either”. The story therefore ends much as it begins – no grandmother, no inheritance and no job. He knows he failed, but does he know why? Meloy doesn’t really answer this – and perhaps that’s part of her skill. She drops some choice words, and the rest is up to us.

(PS As well as being published online, “Liliana” appears in Meloy’s latest collection, Both ways is the only way I want it.)

Advice to would-be women journalists, 1930s style

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While I was researching something completely different today, I came across a wonderful – you’ll see why soon – article titled “Not much fun in being a woman journalist – or is there?” in the second issue of The ABC Weekly published on 9 December 1939 by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The article was written by Zelda Reed, an American who was working her way around the world as a journalist. The editor says that Miss Reed has directed the article “to ambitious Australian girls who think, perhaps, that JOURNALISM IS SUCH FUN” (their stress).

Miss Reed starts by describing how “the talkies [that is, movies] have discovered that there is glamour in the newspaper business” and goes on to give a rundown of the typical plot involving “cheeky young females” who “peck perkily at their portables and indulge in gay repartee with that winsome character, the Editor”. HOWEVER, Miss Reed warns, young women dreaming of such a career should first “well study the seamy side of the journalist’s lot”.

She says would-be reporters should be aware of:

a curious paradox in the minds of practically all editors. These men are liberals by temperament and feminists by conviction. They will do everything to help women break down the prejudice against their sex – everything, that is, except hire them as general news reporters.

Dorothy Dix (released to Public Domain, at Wikipedia)

Dorothy Dix (released to Public Domain, at Wikipedia)

She says that the real paying jobs are not the adventurous ones – and cites Dorothy Dix as one who makes very good money without ever having to move from her desk. This leads her into the traditional areas in which women do well – because “nobody else wants them. The women’s page editors, the society editors…” and so on. You know the drill.

Then she dashes any hopes of romance! She says that

Gallantry is not a strong point among the men who work on newspapers. Except when salaries are involved, these are the men who believe in equality of the sexes and act on it!

Hmmm…what does that mean? They believe in equality but don’t want to marry it? Well, she goes on to say that newspaper men have “none of the elementary requirements for a good husband”. In other words, “men reporters … go in for irresponsibility as an art” and “lack material ambition, and are proud of it”!

So, the positives? Well, there’s never being bored in a newspaper office because “entertaining companions, with a rich store of anecdotes, will always drop their work to share a coffee with you”. And a female reporter “will have her scrapbooks filled with forgotten scoops [and] a reputation as a ‘top journalist for a woman’. But that is a Bohemian reward which perhaps one woman in a million finds satisfactory”. Well…

Her conclusion is that

the rest [the other 999,999 women in a million, that is] would do well to run like rabbits whenever the urge to work on a newspaper creeps over them – they’ll pay a price that is exorbitant for the doubtful privilege of being the uninvited guest at a social function, or meeting a few front-page characters face to face.

Miss Reed, it seems, doesn’t think much of the career that is taking her around the world! I’m sure there’s truth in what she says – and I’m sure things have changed since then. All I can say is that I’ll stick to blogging. May not be as adventurous but I can have the fun of writing what I like while steering clear of all those non-materialistic irresponsible male writers!

Peter Godwin, When a crocodile eats the sun

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[WARNING: SOME SPOILERS]

Saltwater crocodile

Saltwater crocodile

We know it happens – is happening – but it is shocking to come face to face with it, that is, with the experience of living in a situation which was once ordered and safe but which, almost overnight, becomes chaotic and downright dangerous. This is the story Peter Godwin chronicles in his most recent memoir of life in Zimbabwe, When a crocodile eats the sun. The title comes from an old Zulu and Venda belief that a solar eclipse occurs when a crocodile eats the sun. They see it as the worst of omens, “as a warning that he [the celestial crocodile] is much displeased with the behaviour of man below”. Two eclipses occur in the space of two years during the writing of the book. If you were not superstitious before, you might be after reading this! There is, however, an added layer to the crocodile motif: an old woman now living in a nursing home spends her time reading and rereading an old English magazine containing an article in which Churchill warns the English that “appeasement is feeding the crocodile, hoping it will eat you last”. There’s a reason I think that Godwin tells us this story twice in the book.

I might as well come clean now. I am not very good at keeping up with all the world’s trouble-spots and so was rather horrified last year by the events surrounding the elections in Zimbabwe. I had thought Mugabe was doing a good job – and I think he did in the very beginning – but clearly I had taken my eyes off the ball long ago because as most of you will know I’m sure things had been going downhill there for well over a decade. It is the political change in Zimbabwe since about 1996 that forms the backdrop to this book.

Morgan Tsvangirai, 2009 (Photo: Harry Wad)

Morgan Tsvangirai, 2009 (Photo: Harry Wad, using CC-BY-SA licence)

Godwin recounts how with increasing violence Mugabe (who is 80 by the end of the book), through various groups and organisations such as his ZANU-PF, seizes land, uprooting both white and black farmers and workers – any one who appears to oppose him – in his quest to retain power.

Excluding the prologue, the book starts in July 1996 and ends in February 2004, with each chapter titled by the date of a visit Godwin, now residing in the USA, makes back to his home country. During these trips, many of them justified by a journalistic assignment, Godwin visits, with some bravery it seems to me, besieged white farmers and the families of people who have been murdered. However, while the conflict between Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC and the ZANU-PF is central to the book, Godwin also explores his family, particularly in relation to his discovery, in middle age, that his father was a Polish Jew who had been sent to England to avoid the coming Holocaust. Without labouring the point, Godwin draws some parallels between the experience of Jews and of white farmers in Zimbabwe. He also, on a more personal level, parallels himself with his father: “Like Poland was to him, Africa is for me: a place in which I can never truly belong, a dangerous place that will, if I allow it to, reach into my life and hurt my family”. In a lovely bit of – hmm, je ne sais quoi – his father, who started life as Polish Jew but who lived most of it as an English Christian, is buried as an African Hindu.

Godwin has a lovely style – some nice turns of phrase without being over-florid. Here’s one such: “It is winter in Africa, when the warm breath of day dies quickly on the lips of dusk”. The book is rich in anecdotes and observations. Topics as wide ranging as the legend of the hippopotamus’s creation, the story of Livingstone, and the life-cycle of the aid worker are all neatly fitted into the narrative. He  tries a little to explain and perhaps even justify the role of whites in Africa – methinks he is on somewhat shaky ground here but I suppose, like all colonial societies, what’s done is done and we need to find ways for peaceful co-existence. Too late now I suppose to worry about the rights and wrongs of the past…but he could perhaps have been a bit more cognisant of the entrenched inequities beneath the current strife.

At the heart of the book though is the people – the strong-willed parents who despite themselves start to become the children, the rebel-broadcaster sister who flees to England, the white farmers and black supporters of the MDC who face each day with amazing (to me, anyhow) bravery, the black workers and labourers who struggle along often quite loyally while nothing really improves for them, and so on. This is its richness.

Near the end of the book, Godwin makes one albeit backhanded concession to Mugabe:

Mugabe has managed to achieve something hitherto so elusive; he has created a real racial unity – not the bogus one portrayed in the beer commercials of the new South Africa, but something more substantial, a hard-won sense of comradeship, a common bond forged in the furnace of resistance to an oppressive rule.

Perhaps the crocodile hasn’t quite yet had its day!

Vale Frank McCourt

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Frank McCourt, 2007 (Photo by David Shankbone, used under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0)

Frank McCourt, 2007 (Photo by David Shankbone, used under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0)

I’ve only read one of Frank McCourt’s books, his Pulitzer Prize winning memoir, Angela’s ashes. I loved it, but for some reason didn’t really feel the need to read more, though I’m sure I would have enjoyed them if I had!

Angela’s ashes was such a visceral read. I’ve never read quite such a vivid description of poverty as I found in this book. I know there are some who claim that he exaggerated it but who cares? My sense is that what he described was “real” – real either because it “really” did happen that way or because it genuinely conveyed what deep poverty “feels” like. And, the fact that he could describe such poverty in a way that could make you laugh and cry at the same time marked him out as a true storyteller. One of the, little really, scenes I remember is when he was in hospital and isolated in a ward on his own. The nurse wouldn’t let him talk to the equally lonely and isolated girl in the ward next door. The nurse would yell out to them, “Diphtheria can’t talk to Typhoid” (or vice versa). Oh dear! Just as well he had a sense of humour I reckon.

I saw the film, too, of course. As I recollect it was true to the facts but it somehow managed to convey the grimness without the accompanying humour. That was a shame really.

Anyhow, now McCourt has died. I’m sure his death will result in a resurgence of interest in his books. Commercial, yes, but why should new readers not have his books brought to their attention? There are far worse books they could be reading! Just ask Tom Keneally, who knew McCourt and was interviewed on the radio today. He said :

He is the only man I’ve known who in his mid-60s went from a school teacher pension to being a multi-millionaire and also remaining the same bloke he’d been before it all happened to him. The same whimsical, ironic, very Australian sense of humour he had. …

In the first paragraph [of Angela’s ashes] he mentions the fact that in Limerick the churches were full but he says that was because it rained all the time. It was not piety but hypothermia that filled the benches and I think you would have to search a long way back into Irish history to find such a funny line as that.

I am missing him even now. I have to say starting, as old men do, to get teary that such a grand spirit has departed this earth …

Murakami on The Great Gatsby

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F Scott Fitzgerald, 1937, by Carl van Vechten (believed public domain)

F Scott Fitzgerald, 1937, by Carl van Vechten (believed public domain)

I have nearly finished Haruki Murakami’s slim memoir, What I talk about when I talk about running, but thought this little tidbit deserved its own post. As well as writing his works in Japanese which others translate for him, he also translates English language works into Japanese. Interesting eh? Anyhow, while he was writing this memoir, he was also translating F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. This is what he says:

…Gatsby really is an outstanding novel. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I read it. It’s the kind of literature that nourishes you as you read, and every time I do I’m struck by something new, and experience a fresh reaction to it. I find it amazing how such a young writer, only twenty-nine at the time, could grasp – so insightfully, so equitably, and so warmly – the realities of life. How is this possible? The more I think about it, and the more I read the novel, the more mysterious it all is.

Well, that’s it. I really do have to read The Great Gatsby again. I felt it when I read Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, I feel it when I see it appear in those top 10 (100, or whatever) lists, and I feel it again now. Murakami, with lovely modesty, has pinpointed that thing which defines great literature – the ability to read a work again and again and find “something new”, or “experience a fresh reaction”. That’s what I get from writers like Jane Austen. It’s not what I get from, say, Toni Jordan (as enjoyable as her novel  Addition was).

Gatsby, here I come – sometime soon I hope!