Archive for Barney’s Picks

5 results.

Why Are There No Alternatives? by Paul Goodman

Posted In: Barney’s Picks, Non Fiction, Reprints

Reprinted from Evergreen Review Vol. 5, No.16, January-February 1961

In every day’s newspaper there are stories about the two subjects that I have brought together in Growing Up Absurd, the disgrace of the Organized System of semimonopolies, government, advertisers, etc., and the disaffection of the growing generation. Both are newsworthily scandalous, and for several years now, both kinds of stories have come thicker and faster. It is strange that the obvious connections between them are not played up in the newspapers; nor, in the rush of books on the follies, venality, and stilling conformity of the Organization, has there been a book on Youth Problems in the Organized System.

 

Those of the disaffected youth who are articulate, however–for instance, the Beat or Angry young men–are quite clear about the connection: their main topic is the “system” with which they refuse to co-operate. They will explain that the “good” jobs are frauds and sells, that it is intolerable to have one’s style of life dictated by Personnel, that a man is a fool to work to pay installments on a useless refrigerator for his wife, that the movies, TV, and Book-of-the-Month Club are beneath contempt, but the Luce publications make you sick to the stomach; and they will describe with accuracy the cynicism and one-upping of the “typical” junior executive. They consider it the part of reason and honor to wash their hands of all of it.

 

Naturally, grown up citizens are unconcerned about the beatniks and delinquents. The school system has been subjected to criticism. And there is a lot of official talk about the need to conserve our human resources lest Russia get ahead of us. The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same connections as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has become increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don’t more people speak up and say so, and initiate a change? The  question is an important one and  the answer is, I think, a terrible one: that people are so bemused  by  the  way  business and politics  are  carried on  at present, with all their intricate relationships, that they have ceased to be able to imagine alternatives. We seem to have lost our genius for inventing changes to satisfy crying needs.

 

But this stupor is inevitably the baleful influence of the very kind of organizational network that we have: the system pre-empts the available means and capital; it buys up as much of the intelligence as it can and muffles the voices of dissent; and then it irrefutably proclaims that itself is the only possibility of society for nothing else is thinkable.  Let me give a couple of examples of how this works. Suppose  (as is the case)  that  a group of radio and TV broadcasters, competing in the Pickwickian fashion of semimonopolies, control all the stations and channels in an area, amassing the capital and variously bribing Communications Commissioners  in  order  to  get them; and the  broadcasters tailor their programs to meet the requirements of their advertisers, of the censorship, of their own slick and clique tastes, and of a broad common denominator of the audience, none of whom may be offended: they will then claim not only that the  public wants the drivel that they  give them, but indeed that nothing else is being created. Of course it is not! Not for these media; why should a serious artist bother? Or suppose again (as is not quite the case) that in a group of universities only faculties are chosen that are “safe” to the businessmen trustees or the politically appointed regents,  and  these  faculties  give out all the degrees and licenses and union cards to the new generation of students, and only such universities can get Foundation or government money for research, and re­ search is incestuously staffed by the same sponsors and according to the same policy, and they allow no one but  those  they  choose,  to  have access to either the classroom or expensive apparatus: it will then be claimed that there is no other learning or professional competence; that an inspired  teacher  is not “solid”; that the official projects are the direction  of science;  that progressive education is a failure; and finally, indeed-as in Dr. James Conant’s report on the high schools -that only 15 percent of the youth are “academically talented” enough to be taught  hard subjects. This pre-empting of the means and the brains by the organization, and the shutting  out of those who do not conform, can go so far as to cause delusions,  as  when  recently  the president  of Merck and Company had the effrontery to warn the Congress that its investigation of profiteering in drugs might hinder the quest of scientific knowledge! as if  the spirit of Vesalius and Pasteur depended on the financial arrangements of Merck and Company.

 

But it is in these circumstances that people put up with a system because “there are no alternatives.” And when one cannot think of anything to do, soon one ceases to think at all.

To my mind the worst feature of our present organized system of doing things is its indirectness, its blurring of the object. The idea of directly addressing crying objective public needs, like shelter or education, and using our immense and indeed surplus resources to satisfy them is anathema. For in the great interlocking system of corporations people live not by attending to the job, but by status, role playing, and tenure, and they work to maximize profits, prestige, or votes regardless of utility or even public disutility­ e.g., the plethora of cars has now become  a  public  disutility,  but automobile  companies continue to manufacture  them  and  persuade people  to  buy  them.  The indispensible premise of city planning, according to a vice president of Webb and Knapp, is to make a “modest, long-term profit on the promoter’s investment.” (His exact sentence, to a meeting of young planners, was, “What we’re going to have built will be built only if some developer is going to make a profit from it.”!)  Obviously he is not directly interested in housing people or in city convenience and beauty; he is directly interested in being a good vice president of Webb and Knapp. That is his privilege, but it is not a useful goal, and an idealistic young fellow would not want to be such a man. Another example:  Some earnest liberal Congressmen are baffled “how to give Federal aid to education and not interfere in the curriculum and teaching.”  But when the teaching function is respected and assayed by the teacher’s peers-in-skill, no one can interfere; no one would dare (just as Harvard tossed out McCarthy). The  sole function  of  administration  is  to smooth the way, but in this country we have the topsy-turvy  situation that a teacher must devote himself to satisfying the administrator and financier rather  than to doing his job, and a universally  admired teacher  is fired for disobeying  an administrative order that would hinder teaching. Let me give another example, because I want to make this point very clear: These same Congressmen are concerned with “how to discourage low-level programming in private TV stations without censorship.” Their question presupposes that in communication the prior thing is the existence of networks and channels, rather than something to communicate that needs diffusing. But the prior thing is the program, and the only grounds for the license to the station is its ability to transmit it. Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship. We live increasingly, then, in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the  program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, procedure, prestige, and profit. We don’t get the shelter and education because not enough mind is paid to those things. Naturally the system is inefficient; the overhead is high; the task is rarely done with love, style, and excitement, for such beauties emerge only from absorption in real objects; sometimes the task is not done at all; and those who could do it best become either cynical or resigned.

 

 

In the light of this criticism, the recent scandalous exposures of the advertisers, the government, and the corporations are heartening rather than dismaying (I am writing in the winter of 1959-60 and we have been hearing about TV, the FCC, Title I, and the Drug Industry; by the time this is published there will be a new series). The conditions exposed are not new, but now the public skepticism and disgust are mounting; to my ear there is even a new ring; and the investigations are being pushed further, even further than intended by the investigators. The effect of this must be to destroy for many people the image of inviolability and indispensability of the kind of system I have been discussing, to show its phony workings and inevitable dangers. It is the collapse of “public relations.”

When the existing state of things is  suddenly measured by  people against far  higher standards than they  have  been  used  to, it is no longer  the case that  there  are no alternatives. People are forced by their better judgment to ask very basic questions: Is it possible, how is it possible, to have more meaning and honor in work? To put wealth to some real use? To have a high standard of living of whose quality we are not ashamed? To get social justice for those who have been shamefully left out? To have a use of leisure that is not a dismaying waste of a hundred million adults? The large group of independent people who have been out of the swim, with their old-fashioned virtues, suddenly have something admirable about them; one is surprised that they still exist, and their existence is relevant. And from the members of the Organized System itself come acute books criticizing the shortcomings of the Organized System.

 

It is my belief that we are going to have a change. And  once  the Americans can  recover from  their mesmerized condition and its astounding political apathy, our country  will  be  in  a  most  fortunate situation. For the kinds of radical changes we need are those that are appropriate to a fairly general prosperity. They are practicable. They can be summed up as simply restoring, in J. K. Galbraith’s phrase, the “social balance” that we have allowed to become lopsided and runaway in the present abuse of the country’s wealth. For instance, since we have a vast surplus productivity, we can turn to finding jobs that will bring out a youth’s capacity, and so really conserve human resources. We can find ways to restore to the worker a say in his production, and so really do something for manly independence. Since we have a problem of what to do  with leisure, we can  begin to think  of  necessary community enterprises that  want  doing, and that  people  can  enthusiastically and  spontaneously  throw  themselves  into,  and be proud of the results (e.g., beautifying our hideous small towns). And perhaps thereby create us a culture again. Since we have the technology, the capital, and the labor, why should we not have livable cities? Should it be hard to bring back into society the 30 percent who are still ill-fed and ill-housed, and more outcast than ever? What is necessary is directly addressing definite objective needs and using available resources to satisfy them; doing things that are worthwhile just because they are worthwhile, since we can. Politically, what we need is government in which a man offers himself as a candidate because he has a new program that he wants to effectuate, and we choose him because we want that good, and judge that he is the best man to effectuate it. Is that outlandish?

 

The present widespread concern about education is only superficially a part of the Cold War, the need to match the Russian scientists. For in  the  discussions, pretty soon  it becomes clear that  people are uneasy about, ashamed of, the world that  they  have given  the children to grow  up in. That world is not manly enough, it is not earnest enough; a grownup may be cynical (or resigned) about his own convenient adjustments, but he is by no means willing to see his children robbed of a worth-while society. With regard to the next generation, everybody always has a higher standard than the one he is used to. The standard is ceasing to be one of money and status and is becoming a standard of the worth of life. But worth, like happiness, comes from bona-fide activity and achievement.

 

My stratagem is a simple one. I assume that the young really need a more worthwhile world in order to grow up at all, and I confront this real need with the world that they have been getting. This is the source of their problems. Our problem is to remedy the disproportion. We can. Our inheritance, our immense productivity, has been preempted and parceled out in a kind of domainal system; but this grandiose and seemingly impregnable feudalism is vulnerable to an earnest attack. One has the persistent thought that if ten thousand people in all walks of life will stand up on their two feet and talk out and insist, we shall get back our country.

 

 

Paul Goodman (September 9, 1911 – August 2, 1972) was a novelist, playwright, poet and psychotherapist, although now best known as a social critic, anarchist philosopher, and public intellectual. Though often thought of as a sociologist, he vehemently denied being one in a presentation in the Experimental College at San Francisco State in 1964, and in fact said he could not read sociology because it was too often lifeless. The author of dozens of books including Growing Up Absurd and The Community of Scholars, Goodman was an activist on the pacifist Left in the 1960s and a frequently cited inspiration to the student movement of that decade.

└ Tags: , ,
Comments Off on Why Are There No Alternatives? by Paul Goodman

Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, The Evergreen Review and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde by Loren Glass

Posted In: Barney’s Picks, Jim Feast, Reviews

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013

Reviewed by Jim Feast

Perhaps there’s a new academic field – I’m not up on these things – which concentrates on the esthetics of book design: layout of the page, colors on the cover, illustrations chosen, and so on. I mention this because Loren Glass in his new Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, The Evergreen Review and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde spends a lot of time meticulously analyzing Grove book covers. Even so, the heart of and the real magnificence of this book is Glass’s combination of a detailed history of the press and, the more difficult task, a thoughtful evaluation of this publisher’s impact on American culture.

The most well known of these impacts is how Barney Rosset, with able lieutenants Fred Jordan and Richard Seaver, broke down the censorship rules, which had muzzled publishers. The story has often been told of how Grove in its spirited legal defense of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and other works more or less demolished all the legal barriers that had Puritanically controlled publishing and told adults what they could read. Not mentioned in this story is the fact, which Glass shows is of key explanatory value, that the battering rams Grove used were not books such as Ulysses, an earthy but decidedly high-brow work, but books Glass calls example of “vulgar modernism.” These were novels that honored the stylistic and topical concerns of high modernism, for instance, in Burroughs use of a fragmented, cut-up style of composition or in Henry Miller’s focus on the travails of being a writer, but that, due to their humor, absurdity and high quotient of x-rated scenes, were favorite reads of the general public. Glass puts it like this: “The principal authors Grove brought to the forefront in its battle against censorship – Lawrence, Miller, Burroughs, Genet, Rechy, Selby – received both critical and popular acclaim during the 1960s.” And something Glass doesn’t mention, but which a glance at book sales indicate, is that these authors, not taught in academia to the degree they used to be, still sell widely to the general public.

While Grove brought the avant-garde to a much wider readership – this is one of the major themes of Glass’s study – it did not do this solely through battening on writers who favored salacious material. Grove’s championing of Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, and other not erotically inclined but equally audacious writers is proof of this. Here a confluence of other factors, along with Grove’s canny marketing, brought this group to the fore in sales and attention. For one, there was a new audience of being-educated, young people. “Subsidized by the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) Americans entered college in unprecedented numbers in the postwar years. … undergraduate enrollment increased by almost 500 percent between 1945 and 1975. ” This new audience represents what may have been print’s last stand. Glass quotes Phillip Beidler to the effect that the 1960s, “was truly the last great moment of reading and writing in the West by an identifiable mass-cultural constituency  … [being] spiritually, the last great moment of America’s own faith in the Word as its basic article of political and educational reliance.”

Moreover, it was not accidental that all these writers, who each bested the next in terms of nihilism and a pessimistic view of the human future, were Europeans. Glass suggests that there was a latent element of American boosterism in the interest in these books. “Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Genet represent the long twilight of the European male modernist. … [There was] The sense that the [particularly European] West had exhausted its ethical authority … [in contrast to] America’s triumphant emergence from the war.”

So, it stands to reason if the establishment, represented by the European modernist tradition, is defunct, a new generation needs to come forward to take the reins, just as Grove’s young Turks had come forward to rewrite the rules of publishing. However, due not only to historical circumstances but (I think)  also to Rosset’s time in China, most of the sources for this new order were looked for either outside the U.S., in Mao’s People’s Republic or Che’s Cuba, or in non-white America, as in the writings of  Malcolm X. In a second evolution, following the creation of a mass readership for vulgar modernism, Grove now argued that revolution had to be by the book. Glass explains both how works such as Malcolm X Speaks “promised to provide readers with both empirical evidence of and practical guidelines for the development of revolutionary consciousness,” and how the new political booklist from the publisher combined seamlessly with the earlier cultural one. “Grove sought to merge literary and political understandings of the term ‘avant-garde’ in the belief that reading radical literature could instill both the practical knowledge and psychological transformation necessary to precipitate a revolution.”

Being first on the market with books on topics such as black power, Cuba, China, gay liberation, and Irish nationalism, it seemed there was only one area of revolutionary ferment which Grove overlooked, feminism. We’ll come back to that.

First, let’s return to the opening point about the esthetics of book design. Another interesting feature of Grove is how, at the time when film studies was originally becoming an academic field and when, moreover, there were no DVDs or video players so cinema had to be viewed in the movie theater or not at all, Grove invented a new form: the print film. These were books that contained the script, stills and director’s comments from individual significant films in an artifact that, Glass says, made up a “hybrid and transitional genre that provides a unique insight into the process whereby films were presented texts that needed to be read both closely and repeatedly and whose difficulty requires reading other supplemental material to be fully understood.”Analogously, Glass’s Colophon can be seen as the skillful creation of another hybrid, one that concurrently studies history, literary texts and book design. So, just as Grove invented a new breed of film books so Glass’s work, which is chock full of illustrations of Grove covers, which he penetratingly scrutinizes, invents a new form of cultural study.

But, as noted, Glass ends the book examining how the all-male upper crew of Grove management tended to overlook feminism, a neglect that came to a head when a group of dissident women, led by Robin Morgan, occupied Grove’s offices till they were expelled by the police that Grove staff called. Although there seemed little else the Grove executives could have done but call the cops if they wanted to continue operating, this event tarnished the press’s countercultural credentials and led to further complaints about its male chauvinism. Partially reacting to these events, Grove did begin publishing feminist authors, including Kathy Acker, who, Glass points out, “exemplifies the radical feminist appropriation of sexual idioms and attitudes previously reserved for male modernist authors.” He notes further that she represents an “ambiguous legacy,” in that “though her underground and avant-garde credentials are impeccable, they are also thoroughly integrated into the cultural field as a legitimate market.” In other words, once the censorship battles had been won repeatedly by Grove, and barriers against such books as those about, say, male hustlers or third world revolution had been downed, everything could be said, but, therefore, nothing was challenging. “Grove helped to affect a revolution that vastly expanded the range of voices that can be heard without radically challenging the larger socioeconomic order.”

Here, though, I can register a reservation about this tremendous book.  If Glass had gone further in history  — though this would have gone beyond the parameters of his examination — and looked at the small publishing company Rosset founded after he sold Grove, it would seem Rosset was still publishing books that came from unacceptable-to-the-mainstream, outlaw traditions that even now resists academic incorporation.

One type of renegade book would be those like Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary, which attack a famed author, here Nabokov, from a feminist position. This rewriting of Lolita rated a savage, undeserved attack in the New York Times, in which the reviewer gave no evidence that he had read beyond the first chapter. (Believe it or not, the gist of the attack was the contention that nobody wanted to read about a main character that tortured guinea pigs!)

A second type of renegade book is a work like Alan Kaufman’s Jew Boy. Again, this is a book Rosset published that violates a principle that still governs academic and mainstream inclusion.  Recall Glass’s comments that academics and reviewers were always embarrassed by Henry Miller’s tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve as if good writing could never have too much feeling. But Kaufman combines this type of emotional openness with a penchant for discussing taboo subjects. One such subject is the Holocaust, whose horrors can be revealed in the standard treatment but whose wounds have to be shown slowly healing. Kaufman’s book, in violation of this principle, centers on a Holocaust survivor who did not make peace with her past, and who even passes on neuroses to her children. The wounds in this book never heal. This text, too, was neglected by the mainstream, as is to be expected for such a product of rebel intelligence.

The great contribution Glass makes is to show the heroic, humorous and vigorous fight Grove and Evergreen Review made to break down barriers and create new forms that introduced vulgar modernism, sex and politics into the relatively staid world of bookselling. We can say they won a major skirmish but the fight is not over. The establishment is different now. It doesn’t censor but rather ignores significant outsider voices. It no longer fears things like x-rated sex, but rather studiously avoids books, like Jew Boy, that are in your face for (what it considers) all the wrong reasons.

└ Tags: , , , ,
Comments Off on Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, The Evergreen Review and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde by Loren Glass

Re-imagining Henry Miller by Christopher G. Moore

Posted In: Barney’s Picks, Christopher G. Moore, Non Fiction, Reviews

Henry Miller: the Paris Years by Brassaï

Arcade Publishing: October, 1995

Reviewed by Christopher G. Moore

In Bangkok and New York, Barney Rosset told me many stories about Henry Miller.  He’d published Miller and knew the author personally. My views about Henry Miller have been shaped by Barney’s recollections over the years. Richard Seavers also had a long history with Barney. A friend gave me a copy of a memoir written by Henry Miller’s Paris friend and contemporary, a photographer named Brassaï.

 9781611450286_p0_v1_s260x420

Henry Miller The Paris Years was  published in 1995 by Arcade Publishing, a press run by Richard Seaver. I’d met Richard Seaver in New York at Barney’s loft in the East Village and again at Barney’s table at the National Book Foundation award ceremony in 2008 when Barney was given a lifetime achievement.

With those connections, I was the right audience for Henry Miller: the Paris Years, having know a couple of the people who were close to Miller for years. You can be close to someone without knowing the interior layers that go deep, where stuff is hidden, forgotten, fractured into a prism like mystery.  Even when you know them well, years later when you seek to recall what was said and done, the memory can play illusive games.

I am weary of memoirs written by the friends of famous people. It is natural that they will put themselves in the center of the famous friend’s life. That is a danger. I wondered if Brassaï fell into that trap.

Brassaï was one of Henry Miller’s friends. The one result of fame is that an author’s friends have their memories and correspondence ready for a memoir about the author, his life, habits, attitudes, weaknesses, ticks, and philosophy.

The book titled Henry Miller The Paris Years ends with, “Henry left France without tears, without regret, and without looking back, as if the ten years he’d lived there had simply vanished.” I wish that Barney were still around to ask if that was his take on Miller’s years in France.  His time in France had made Henry Miller’s reputation; it has established him as a writer, a genius, and a literary tiger. I have been around expats a large portion of my life—it is very rare to find someone who has lived in a culture as Henry Miller did in France would discard the place like an old sweater.

 

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSL5pkumlP0no1zYplYh3wfMAxR16d8DYb7egf78zNllRzXelpEHenry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and his other major works, were written out of experience that was processed through a hyperactive imagination. His reality was the result of this creative process. The boundaries of fiction, make-believe, became the raw ingredients of life in Paris and cooking up an exotic confection. His books were not just exotic, they were—according to the Americans—obscene. The Tropic of Capricorn was banned. But for the efforts of Barney Rosset who spent a personal fortune on court battles (only stopping at the Supreme Court of the United States) started in the 1960s. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn had established himself as a writer that upset officials who decided what could be read in the United States.

Understanding Henry Miller’s Paris experience sheds light on his views on relationships, sexuality, identity, memory and imagination. Pornography is largely the legal conclusion from the conservative elites that the combination of those elements must stay within strict boundaries of propriety.

Henry Miller, according to Brassaï, a person was lucky or unlucky on whom they met. For a writer, who needed the constant input of new experiences, Paris brought him much luck in companions.  If experience was fuel, the high-octane stuff came from two women. Anaïs Nin, born in Paris, American by nationality, a Spanish father, and Franco-Danish mother—the original globalized woman before anyone used the term globalization. She kept a diary that by the time Miller met her ran to 48 notebooks—but she dismissed them as ‘bloody ejaculations.” It was a relationship of conflicting attitudes toward literature, a writer’s role, and the nature of reality. Anaïs Nin believed that a writer should stay bound into the moment of truth, not to filter it through imagination, which changed the reality to something no longer true. Henry Miller was at the opposite pole—where reality until processed and transformed by imagination would never become ‘real’ and fiction and myth were the techniques of this transformation.

Anaïs Nin was Miller’s intellectual muse. Brassaï writes that during the two-year period that the Tropic of Cancer was put on ice by a publisher in Paris anxious about possible legal problems, Anaïs Nin guided Miller through multiple rewrites. It wouldn’t have been the book that made his reputation without her tireless, patient pushing him to make changes.

Another woman, June, was Miller’s sensual muse. She walked on the wild side. A woman filled with a huge amount of energy, men were attracted to her, and she exchanged sexual favors for money. As June’s husband, Henry Miller didn’t ask where the source of her money was coming from. It was no surprise to learn that Henry Miller admired the pimps who gathered at Chez Paul near the offices of the Chicago Herald Tribune, 5 Rue Lamartine, in the heart of Paris’ red light district. He admired their power of women, their lack of shame, their sales banter and their disdain for ordinary work. They had a life style that Henry Miller idealized as one route to take in the rebellion against culture and those in authority.

June had, in Brassaï’s view, a superabundance of life; she was one of those people with ten times the intensity and energy of ordinary mortals. If one is writing out of experience, hooking one’s star to such a woman as June propelled Henry Miller into dramas that most writers would never dream possible.  Her betrayals and lies created a stormy relationship. At the same time, passive women bored him. Such a woman was an open book. Miller didn’t want that kind of woman.

Brassaï writes that Miller married June without knowing the basics like her place of birth, name or family background. He wanted mystery, someone who was unpredictable, unreachable, whose life and background remained vague and unknown. June was not just a siren, she was a cypher—one that Miller tried with his imagination to break the code. He failed in that goal, but his failure to decode June nonetheless set him on a journey that inspired him to write two brilliant books: Tropic of Cancer and Tropics of Capricorn. June felt committed to Miller; though he was a genius, and for her, he was the one true love of her life. For Miller, June was part of his expression of open rebellion against his Brooklyn upbringing.  They were both displaced spirits seeking to escape old lives and create new ones.

http://cb.pbsstatic.com/m/92/3492/9781481223492.jpg

 

One detail of Miller’s writing habit concerned his daily routine of walking the streets of Paris. He was a great observer. He could only think on his feet. And that meant walking around examining buildings, people, activities until some thought—the Voice—would come into his head and he’d rush back to his room and sit in front of his typewriter as the cascading images, ideas, and expressions tumbled out of his mind and onto paper. He was less interested in the truth—thus his arguments with Anaïs Nin—then in stories he drew from observations. For Brassaï Miller’s casual relationship with the truth was ‘bewildering’. In Tropic of Capricorn, June emerged as a character filtered through imagination to the point she was no longer recognizable from the flesh and blood woman he had married.

In the end the well of Henry Miller’s experience drifted away. He left Paris without a backward glance. Anaïs Nin drifted away. He slipped away from June. Having lost the city and two women who had inspired him, brought him the Voice that defined him, there is a lesson to be learnt for an author. If your work is dredging experience arises from the lucky strike of a gold mine of life, like all resources, sooner or later the gold runs out. The mine is an empty shell, a hole in the ground, and a hole in the heart. Only a few writers are lucky enough to find the perfect match of time, place, and companions that put him in touch with that Voice—the one that moves and touches not just the author but readers for generations.

Chairs

In a book titled Chairs, I wrote about Barney Rosset’s Henry Miller connection in a story called Star of Love. I had asked Barney if Henry Miller had discovered Bangkok would it have changed his life. Barney replied, “Totally. Absolutely. How could it have not influenced him?” In the end, Barney said that Henry Miller holed up on top of a mountain in the Big Sur. He had a security guard at the bottom where there was a dirt road. The guard’s job was to stop anyone going up to bother Henry.

This was the author who roamed the streets of Paris searching for the Voice. The oyster had closed its shell. No more pearls would emerge. Brassaï set out how he saw Henry Miller’s reality. Too bad there’s no chance to ask Anaïs Nin if Henry Miller The Paris Years was filtered through the imagination factory—part illusion, part hallucination. Or does the author give the reader the unfiltered, unmediated truth. But the person I’d really like to ask is June. What would she have thought of this version of the truth? All these people are dead. Whatever the truth of their reality will continue to slip into the recycle bin of their reimagined lives once created for succeeding generations. A literary life that has the capacity for self-generating truths by those who knew the author is rare.  We are reminded that truth rung through the active imagination of writers like Brassaï is part of what keeps Henry Miller alive in the minds of readers today. Oblivion is the alternative.

After finishing Brassia’s memoir, and thinking about the big picture, the reader could say that Henry Miller was a lucky man. Luck has a great role in a writer’s life. As I put the book aside, I felt I had been lucky to have discovered Bangkok when it was the Paris of the 1930s, a place where Barney Rosset, Henry Miller’s friend, discovered my existence, making me a small piece in the chain of people who have written about Henry Miller.

Miller had Paris, while I had Bangkok pretty much to myself for the early years, and it was a place where I walked, explored, learnt a language and culture and the place where I found my Voice. Unlike Miller, I couldn’t imagine leaving Bangkok for the isolation of a mountain top or, at the very least, not without stopping and looking back one last time to say a final goodbye to all of that.

2 Comments

Barney Rosset: Outsider on the Inside by Jim Feast

Posted In: Barney’s Picks, Jim Feast, Non Fiction

[This piece appeared in the recently published anthology, Jews: A People’s History of the Lower East Side, Volume II, edited by Clayton Patterson.]

Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes with Barney Rosset, that maverick publisher who, with Grove Press and its affiliated magazine, Evergreen Review, upended and changed (for the better) American publishing and culture from the 1950s through the early ’80s, will know that his opinions are unpredictable, adventurous and decided. And so they proved to be when, one afternoon in December ’09, we sat down to talk about the Jewish Lower East Side.

Having courageously published, championed and often befriended some of the most daring, unsettling and masterly writers of the 20th century, going from Beckett and Burroughs onto Henry Miller, Genet, Pinter, Leroi Jones/Baraka, Marguerite Duras, Kenzaburo Oe, and Jack Kerouac, he had definite ideas about literary culture, the part (often negative) New York City played in it, and on Jewish LES authors, such as Ginsberg, whom he knew well and who helped created this city’s literary milieu.

Let me preface a recounting of his remarks with a brief sketch of the man’s extraordinary career.

Born in Chicago in 1922, son of a Jewish banker father and Irish mother, he was already a flaming radical in the forward-thinking grammar school where his progressive English teacher had the class perform a rewritten version of Robinson Crusoe, which departed from Defoe by ending with a denunciation of capitalism! Soon enough, he and his buddy Haskell Wexler (who grew up to become an Academy Award-winning cinematographer and director) were putting out their own newspaper, Anti-Everything, which pretty much summed up their opinion of a country where, on May 30, 1937, some of his schoolmates witnessed the violence unleashed against picketers on strike at a Republic Steel plant in Chicago. The police dispersed the peaceful protesters via a barrage of gunfire, which killed ten outright and wounded scores more.

After high school and a few years of college, in 1944 Rosset joined the army, serving in China, where he was witness to both warfare and life in postwar Shanghai. Returning to the States, still hell bent on reform, he worked with Leo Hurwitz and a small group to produce the documentary film Strange Victory, which underscored the anomaly that a U.S., which had just fought a war against Nazi intolerance and anti-Semitism, went right on practicing Southern-style segregation and racism at home. This was not a message the country wanted to hear, and the film flopped. Rosset licked his wounds in France where he had gone with his wife Joan Mitchell, who is now recognized as one of the leading Abstract Expressionists. Mitchell knew that in the late 1940s New York City was the “happening” place to be for a fledgling painter, and they moved back, settling in the Village on 11th Street. Then Rosset bought a small, defunct publishing house for three thousand dollars, including its inventory of three paperbacks, as a new outlet for his progressive impulses.

The rest is history, U.S. history. American literary sensibility was changed as Grove poured out one

groundbreaking text after another, and not only the now well known, such as Genet’s Our Lady of the

Flowers, Beckett’s The Unnameable, Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, and Kerouac’s The

Subterraneans; but lesser known, though still potent texts such as Robert Gover’s One Hundred Dollar

Misunderstanding, John Rechy’s City of Night, and Last Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh. (In this

last group, of lesser known, but significant works, should go such specifically Jewish works as Norman

Rosten’s novel Under the Boardwalk and the anthology Jewish Radicalism.) And, since so many of

Grove’s authors were dramatists, Grove also rewrote theatrical history with the publication

of Waiting for Godot, Ionesco’s Rhinocerous, Jones’ Dutchman, Pinter’s The Homecoming, and

other works. And, since Grove branched out into film distribution, it also set its seal on cinema culture

with its introduction of such works as the Swedish film I Am Curious, Yellow directed by Vilgot Sjöman;

Oshima’s Boy, and Rocha’s Antonio Das Mortes, as well as by producing Beckett’s only motion picture,

Film.

Moreover, Rosset put his money where his ink was by, for example, in 1959 famously promising to reimburse the judicial costs for any bookstore brought to court for selling Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, a book that he had read and written about while a freshman at Swarthmore in 1941. Since at that time censorship laws differed from state to state, the cases were fought across the country. Not only did Rosset and Grove fight for freedom of expression in relation to Miller, but took up the cudgels for Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and other works in order to win new freedom of expression and latitude for the arts. In 1964, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that Miller’s novel could be sold and distributed in the U.S., a landmark affirmation of First Amendment rights.

Rosset sold Grove in the early 1980s, although retaining an editorial position, from which he was soon forced out, possibly because his brand of iconoclasm was ill-suited to the more corporate direction the firm was henceforth to navigate. His unceremonious ejection from the company he had guided for decades caused an outcry from many of the authors he had worked with, including Nobelists Beckett and Kenzaburo Oe, who not only expressed outrage but wrote or gave him unpublished materials to use in any new venture he established.

Since he left Grove, Rosset has continued putting out notable books, though on a smaller scale, offering such works as Eleutheria, Beckett’s first and only three-act play; Lo’s Diary, a work by Italian feminist Pia Pera, which playfully told the story of Nabokov’s Lolita from the nymphet’s point of view; and Alan Kaufman’s Jew Boy, the powerful memoir of a young man growing up in the Bronx, son of a holocaust survivor. Now [in Dec. ’09 before his passing], he is making what is hopefully a final revision of his autobiography  and publishing the innately controversial Evergreen Review online.

In fact, it was just after putting to bed the latest issue of Evergreen Review (where I am a contributing editor) that Rosset talked about the Jewish Lower East Side.

Let’s note that just as Rosset is half Jewish so it might be said that Grove Press’s final offices (when the house was under Rosset’s control) on Houston and Sixth Avenue were on the outskirts of the Lower East Side. It is this same insider/outsider positioning that I am tempted to say partially accounts for the characteristic objectivity, creativity and flair of his opinions.

The first matter he took up in connection to the LES was how it was configured. Simply put, coming from Chicago, he was not familiar with the way New York’s different sections were arranged via ethnic patterning. As artist Clayton Patterson has explained, “The LES was always an immigrant neighborhood, though certainly not always Jewish. Look round at the many Catholic Churches.  When the Slocum sank,” he continued, referring to a 1904 disaster when 1,000 people, mainly Germans on a church picnic excursion, were burned when the paddle steamer, the General Slocum, caught fire and sank, “a large portion of the LES German Lutherans moved to Yorkville. The LES Lutheran churches became synagogues. After World War II, the Puerto Ricans came in, and the synagogues turned back into churches.” But Chicago, possessing less variety of ethnicities and having its main dividing line being between white and black, not different nationalities, was not conceived in the same way.

“You see,” Rosset explains, “I could never identify locales in New York the way I could in Chicago. I couldn’t connect the North Side of Chicago with the Lower East Side. In Chicago, there was a straight line from the Upper North Side down to the South, all along the lake. The city stayed on the lake.” While each neighborhood had its distinctive ethnic or racial profile, districts were not primarily viewed along these lines, but rather according to income. Moving down from the north, the city was arranged according to “ascending levels of wealth until it reached the center [the Loop], then its well being dipped abruptly [continuing south] only to recover very strongly as it went toward the University of Chicago. I knew nothing of that second [south of downtown] half.” By contrast, he continued, “New York was different, especially the Village. It mixed a lot of different people. You would be in a circle of different people, and the circle would circulate.”

Although this form of interaction was not common between ethnic groups – as Patterson has pointed out, in the 1940s there was a line dividing the Jewish and Italian sections, and youth crossing it in either direction would be in danger of harassment from the neighborhoods respective gangs –  it would have been true of the LES’s artistic fringe where Jews and non-Jews interacted as freely as they did in the Village.

Speaking of the fringe, Rosset made another remark that, at first, seems quite surprising. He says that bohemia is not an essential place for writers. Why? “Writers could live anywhere and carry on their writing.” But, as he found from living with Joan, “painters had to have each other’s company. They had to talk, to ask, `What kind of paint did you use?’ They learned from each other. Eighth Street [in the late ’40s] was the center of the universe for them.” Rosset himself did not confine his cultural activities to the Village, but would make trips to Lower East Side jazz clubs, such as Slug’s and The Five Spot, to catch the latest sounds.

Mitchell took him along when she hung out with de Kooning, Pollock and others in the Abstract Expressionist crowd. “The painters were very convivial. But also very poor,” at least till they moved to East Hampton. Rosset followed them there, buying a house or, rather, a Quonset hut, which he purchased from Robert Motherwell. “They went out there because a benefactor gave money to them, supported them. Of course, some of them, like Motherwell, were already rich.” He added that he himself was not a painter. “I was an outsider.”

I asked him, then, given that he had found some camaraderie with painters, how he got along with writers. His thought turned to Ginsberg. “I was never as close to the writers [as a group] as I was to the painters. But when I met Allan, he was like a painter, very simple. He was not a part of the ‘literocracy.’ No emphasis on Ph.D.’s, going to Columbia.”

“But he did go to Columbia,” I objected.

“Yeah, but he got out of there as fast as his legs could carry him.”

Perhaps this would be a good point to say something about the vagaries of literary history as revealed in Ginsberg’s climb to fame.

In the hagiography of the Beat generation much is made of the Big Six Gallery reading in San Francisco at which Ginsberg premiered Howl, with Kerouac in the audience shouting “Go, go” to the poet’s rousing performance. Yet electrifying and inspiring as this unveiling was, it was only a reading, and, so far as the poem’s wider reception is concerned, the main value of this event was the securing of the poem’s publication by City Lights in 1956. But, again, to concentrate on readership, City Lights was a small press, just starting out, and did not have a wide distribution.

It was controversy, as so often with the Beats, that preceded celebrity and wider readership. Take Naked Lunch, as another example. The book had circulated for years, but no publisher took it up. Then the Chicago Review, literary magazine of the University of Chicago, decided to run an excerpt. When school officials found out, alerted by a pre-publication right-wing editorial in a Chicago paper, the magazine was suppressed, the student editors resigned in protest, and Naked Lunch, now famous, was published by Grove.

In an analogous way, Howl’s  fame grew when the book was seized as obscene and City Lights’ owner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was arrested for publishing it. However, the book’s artistic value was vindicated in the courts, who allowed it to be sold. Still, City Lights was small, and even with its notoriety, the poem was more talked about than purchased and read. Again Grove stepped in. With the poem’s legalization, the publisher’s magazine arm, the recently inaugurated Evergreen Review, devoted its second issue, “The San Francisco Scene,” to various Beat writers and included Howl, as Exhibit A of the new writing.  It was this publication by Grove Press, larger and more well-known New York company – at that time, the city was the country’s dominant publishing center – that got Howl in the hands of a much larger public, establishing the poem as a widely read masterpiece (almost an oxymoron in the U.S.), and put Ginsberg in the new pantheon.

Let it be noted that in many cases, such as with Last Exit to Brooklyn or City of Night, Grove itself unearthed the controversial, first-rank authors behind the books. However, as we see with Ginsberg’s Howl, Grove also acted by picking up books that had been put in print by small houses and already stirred controversy, and then created further excitement by putting its imprimatur on them. Ginsberg, though unconventional in many regards, recognized the value of a New York publishing connection, especially with a fellow maverick like Rosset. Though not close friends, over time Ginsberg and Rosset developed a relationship that was filled with respect and congeniality.

We left Kerouac beating a tom-tom at the Big Six Gallery, but let’s return to him briefly, since Rosset classified him as another serious but unpretentious practitioner of this craft, just like Ginsberg. Rosset said that, as was Howl’s author, “Kerouac was natural and I loved him for that.” Moreover, as Rosset explained in relating a key incident, Kerouac’s lack of academic training did not leave him feeling abashed in front of credentialed people. “When Kerouac gave us The Subterraneans, my editor, Don Allen, loved it. But then Don began changing it, fixing up parts. When Kerouac heard about this, he wrote us, ‘Do it the way I wrote it or forget it.’

“I wrote him back, ‘We’ll take it the way you wrote it.’ Kerouac was not as learned or educated as Don Allen, but the way he wrote erupted from the inner self. Quite wonderful.”

The conversation moved to another writer who was strongly associated with the Lower East Side, Alexander Trocchi. This writer was not Jewish, but rather a Scottish expatriate who wrote his powerful novel Cain’s Book in and about the LES. Still, Rosset’s comments on Trocchi had broad relevance to the existence of literary subcultures in New York City and particularly the LES. Here let me note that while much of this anthology, along with its companion volumes Captured and Resistance, celebrates the openness, tolerance for experimentation and sociability of the bohemian life on the Lower East Side, Rosset focuses on the fact that this milieu could not only make but also break a writer.

When Trocchi came to the Lower East Side, Rosset said, “he changed more in a short period of time than anyone I ever knew. When he was at Merlin [the Parisian publisher], he was very creative, but dominating, tough. He came to New York and it took something out of him. He was destroyed by living here.

“And,” he went on, “he was not the only one. Other Grove authors I knew, such as Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas, were crushed by New York. Those two were incipient alcoholics for sure when they arrived in New York, and were destroyed in a matter of weeks.”

I think his point – having talked with him on similar themes over the past few years – was that those accustomed to the respect with which serious writers were treated in Europe were shocked, elated, frightened and very nearly disabled soon after arriving in the U.S., finding themselves surrounded by the circus atmosphere of literary celebrity. As outsiders, though very special, they could not easily penetrate the bohemian subcultures, which, as other entries in this anthology testify, could provide a nurturing ground and a small, appreciative audience of peers. In fact, it was the kind of bohemia Rosset started out among in the days of the Abstract Expressionists.

So, being saturated with Chicago’s second city-ness, and as half Jew, half Irish, and half in the Lower East Side, Rosset brings the same renegade and provocative view to his opinions on LES writers and artistic community that led him, in the 1950s through the 1980s, to uncover, and publish or distribute novels, nonfiction, theater works and films that opened and recast American culture.

└ Tags: ,
Comments Off on Barney Rosset: Outsider on the Inside by Jim Feast

Dante and the Lobster, Samuel Beckett

Posted In: Barney’s Picks, Fiction

Dante and the Lobster

by Samuel Beckett

Originally published in Evergreen Review vol.1 , No.1,  1957

 

It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti in the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward. Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained the spots on the moon to him. She shewed him in the first place where he was at fault, then she put up her own explanation. She had it from God, therefore he could rely on its being accurate in every particular. All he had to do was to follow her step by step. Part one, the refutation, was plain sailing. She made her point clearly, she said what she had to say without fuss or loss of time. But part two, the demonstration, was so dense that Belacqua could not make head or tail of it. The disproof, the reproof, that was patent. But then came the proof, a rapid shorthand of the real facts, and Belacqua was bogged indeed. Bored also, impatient to get on to Piccarda. Still he pored over the enigma, he would not concede himself conquered, he would understand at least the meanings of the words, the order in which they were spoken and the nature of the satisfaction that they conferred on the misinformed poet, so that when they were ended he was refreshed and could raise his heavy head, intending to return thanks and make formal retraction of his old opinion.

He was still running his brain against this impenetrable passage when he heard midday strike. At once he switched his mind off its task. He scooped his fingers under the book and shoveled it back till it lay wholly on his palms. The Divine Comedy face upward on the lectern of his palms. Thus disposed he raised it under his nose and there he slammed it shut. He held it aloft for a time, squinting at it angrily, pressing the boards inwards with the heels of his hands. Then he laid it aside.

He leaned back in his chair to feel his mind subside and the itch of this mean quodlibet die down. Nothing could be done until his mind got better and was still, which gradually it did and was. Then he ventured to consider what he had to do next. There was always something that one had to do next. Three large obligations presented themselves. First lunch, then the lobster, then the Italian lesson. That would do to be going on with. After the Italian lesson he had no very clear idea. No doubt some niggling curriculum had been drawn up by someone for the late afternoon and evening, but he did not know what. In any case it did not matter. What did matter was: one, lunch; two, the lobster; three, the Italian lesson. That was more than enough to be going on with.

Lunch, to come off at all, was a very nice affair. If his lunch was to be enjoyable, and it could be very enjoyable indeed, he must be left in absolute tranquility to prepare it. But if he were disturbed now, if some brisk tattler were to come bouncing in now big with a big idea or a petition, he might just as well not eat at all, for the food would turn to bitterness on his palate, or, worse again, taste of nothing. He must be left strictly alone, he must have complete quiet and privacy, to prepare the food for his lunch.

The first thing to do was to lock the door. Now nobody could come at him. He deployed an old Herald and smoothed it out on the table. The rather handsome face of McCabe the assassin stared up at him. Then he lit the gas-ring and unhooked the square flat toaster, asbestos grill, from its nail and set it precisely on the flame. He found he had to lower the flame. Toast must not on any account be done too rapidly. For bread to be toasted as it ought, through and through, it must be done on a mild steady flame. Otherwise you only charred the outside and left the pith as sodden as before. If there was one thing he abominated more than another it was to feel his teeth meet in a bathos of pith and dough. And it was so easy to do the thing properly. So, he thought, having regulated the flow and adjusted the grill, by the time I have the bread cut that will be just right. Now the long barrel-loaf came out of its biscuit-tin and had its end evened off on the face of McCabe. Two inexorable drives with the breadsaw and a pair of neat rounds of raw bread, the main elements of his meal, lay before him, awaiting his pleasure. The stump of the loaf went back into prison, the crumbs, as though there were no such thing as a sparrow in the wide world, were swept in a fever away, and the slices snatched up and carried to the grill. All these preliminaries were very hasty and impersonal.

It was now that real skill began to be required, it was at this point that the average person began to make a hash of the entire proceedings. He laid his cheek against the soft of the bread, it was spongy and warm, alive. But he would very soon take that plush feel off it, by God but he would very quickly take that fat white look off its face. He lowered the gas a suspicion and plaqued one flabby slab plump down on the glowing fabric, but very pat and precise, so that the whole resembled the Japanese flag. Then on top, there not being room for the two to do evenly side by side, and if you did not do them evenly you might just as well save yourself the trouble of doing them at all, the other round was set to warm. When the first candidate was done, which was only when it was black through and through, it changed places with its comrade, so that now it in its turn lay on top, done to a dead end, black and smoking, waiting till as much could be said of the other.

For the tiller of the field the thing was simple, he had it from his mother. The spots were Cain with his truss of thorns, dispossessed, cursed from the earth, fugitive and vagabond. The moon was that countenance fallen and branded, seared with the first stigma of God’s pity, that an outcast might not die quickly. It was a mix-up in the mind of the tiller, but that did not matter. It had been good enough for his mother, it was good enough for him.

Belacqua on his knees before the flame, poring over the grill, controlled every phase of the broiling. It took time, but if a thing was worth doing at all it was worth doing well, that was a true saying. Long before the end the room was full of smoke and the reek of burning. He switched off the gas, when all that human care and skill could do had been done, and restored the toaster to its nail. This was an act of dilapidation, for it seared a great weal in the paper. This was hooliganism pure and simple. What the hell did he care? Was it his wall? The same hopeless paper had been there fifty years. It was livid with age. It could not be disimproved.

Next a thick paste of Savora, salt and Cayenne on each round, well worked in while the pores were still open with the heat. No butter, God forbid, just a good foment of mustard and salt and pepper on each round. Butter was a blunder, it made the toast soggy. Buttered toast was all right for Senior Fellows and Salvationists, for such as had nothing but false teeth in their heads. It was no good at all to a fairly strong young rose like Belacqua. This meal that he was at such pains to make ready, he would devour it with a sense of rapture and victory, it would be like smiting the sledded Polacks on the ice. He would snap at it with closed eyes, he would gnash it into a pulp, he would vanquish it utterly with his fangs. Then the anguish of pungency, the pang of the spices, as each mouthful died, scorching his palate, bringing tears.

But he was not yet all set, there was yet much to be done. He had burnt his offering, he had not fully dressed it. Yes, he had put the horse behind the tumbrel.

He clapped the toasted rounds together, he brought them smartly together like cymbals, they clave the one to the other on the viscid salve of Savora. Then he wrapped them up for the time being in any old sheet of paper. Then he made himself ready for the road.

Now the great thing was to avoid being accosted. To be stopped at this stage and have conversational nuisance committed all over him would be a disaster. His whole being was straining forward towards the joy in store. If he were accosted now he might just as well fling his lunch into the gutter and walk straight back home. Sometimes his hunger, more of mind, I need scarcely say, than of body, for this meal amounted to such a frenzy that he would not have hesitated to strike any man rash enough to buttonhole and baulk him, he would have shouldered him out of his path without ceremony. Woe betide the meddler who crossed him when his mind was really set on this meal.

He threaded his way rapidly, his head bowed, through a familiar labyrinth of lanes and suddenly dived into a little family grocery. In the shop they were not surprised. Most days, about this hour, he shot in off the street in this way.

The slab of cheese was prepared. Separated since morning from the piece, it was only waiting for Belacqua to call and take it. Gorgonzola cheese. He knew a man who came from Gorgonzola, his name was Angelo. He had been born in Nice but all his youth had been spent in Gorgonzola. He knew where to look for it. Every day it was there, in the same corner, waiting to be called for. They were very decent obliging people.

He looked sceptically at the cut of cheese. He turned it over on its back to see was the other side any better. The other side was worse. They had laid it better side up, they had practised that little deception. Who shall blame them? He rubbed it. It was sweating. That was something. He stooped and smelt it. A faint fragrance of corruption. What good was that? He didn’t want fragrance, he wasn’t a bloody gourmet, he wanted a good stench. What he wanted was a good green stenching rotten lump of Gorgonzola cheese, alive, and by God he would have it.

He looked fiercely at the grocer.

“What’s that?” he demanded.

The grocer writhed.

“Well?” demanded Belacqua, he was without fear when roused, “is that the best you can do?”

“In the length and breadth of Dublin” said the grocer “you won’t find a rottener bit this minute.”

Belacqua was furious. The impudent dogsbody, for two pins he would assault him.

“It won’t do” he cried “do you hear me, it won’t do at all. I won’t have it.” He ground his teeth.

The grocer, instead of simply washing his hands like Pilate, flung out his arms in a wild crucified gesture of supplication. Sullenly Belacqua undid his packet and slipped the cadaverous tablet of cheese between the hard cold black boards of the toast. He stumped to the door where he whirled round however.

“You heard me?” he cried.

“Sir” said the grocer. This was not a question, nor yet an expression of acquiescence. The tone in which it was let fall made it quite impossible to know what was in the man’s mind. It was a most ingenious riposte.

“I tell you” said Belacqua with great heat “this won’t do at all. If you can’t do better than this” he raised the hand that held the packet “I shall be obliged to go for my cheese elsewhere. Do you mark me?”

“Sir” said the grocer.

He came to the threshold of his store and watched the indignant customer hobble away. Belacqua had a spavined gait, his feet were in ruins, he suffered with them almost continuously. Even in the night they took no rest, or next to none. For then the cramps took over from the corns and hammer-toes, and carried on. So that he would press the fringes of his feet desperately against the end-rail of the bed or, better again, reach down with his hand and drag them up and back towards the instep. Skill and patience could disperse the pain, but there it was, complicating his night’s rest.

The grocer, without closing his eyes or taking them off the receding figure, blew his nose in the skirt of his apron. Being a warm-hearted human man he felt sympathy and pity for this queer customer who always looked ill and dejected. But at the same time he was a small tradesman, don’t forget that, with a small tradesman’s sense of personal dignity and what was what. Thruppence, he cast it up, thruppence worth of cheese per day, one and a tanner per week. No, he would fawn on no man for that, no, not on the best in the land. He had his pride.

Stumbling along by devious ways towards the lowly public where he was expected, in the sense that the entry of his grotesque person would provoke no comment or laughter, Belacqua gradually got the upper hand of his choler. Now that lunch was as good as a fait accompli, because the incontinent bosthoons of his own class, itching to pass on a big idea or inflict an appointment, were seldom at large in this shabby quarter of the city, he was free to consider items two and three, the lobster and the lesson, in closer detail.

At a quarter to three he was due at the school. Say five to three. The public closed, the fishmonger reopened, at half-past two. Assuming then that his lousy old bitch of an aunt had given her order in good time that morning, with strict injunctions that it should be ready and waiting so that her blackguard boy should on no account be delayed when he called for it first thing in the afternoon, it would be time enough if he left the public as it closed, he could remain on till the last moment. Benissimo. He had half-a-crown. That was two pints of draught anyway and perhaps a bottle to wind up with. Their bottled stout was particularly excellent and well up. And he would still be left with enough coppers to buy a Herald and take a tram if he felt tired or was pinched for time. Always assuming, of course, that the lobster was all ready to be handed over. God damn these tradesmen, he thought, you can never rely on them. He had not done an exercise but that did not matter. His Professoressa was so charming and remarkable. Signorina Adriana Ottolenghi! He did not believe it possible for a woman to be more intelligent or better informed than the little Ottolenghi. So he had set her on a pedestal in his mind, apart from other women. She had said last day that they would read Il Cinque Maggio together. But she would not mind if he told her, as he proposed to, in Italian, he would frame a shining phrase on his way from the public, that he would prefer to postpone the Cinque Maggio to another occasion. Manzoni was an old woman, Napoleon was another. Napoleone di mezza calzetta, fa l’amore a Giacominetta. Why did he think of Manzoni as an old woman? Why did he do him that injustice? Pellico was another. They were all old maids, suffragettes. He must ask his Signorina where he could have received that impression, that the 19th century in Italy was full of old hens trying to cluck like Pindar. Carducci was another. Also about the spots on the moon. If she could not tell him there and then she would make it up, only too gladly, against the next time. Everything was all set now and in order. Bating, of course, the lobster, which had to remain an incalculable factor. He must just hope for the best. And expect the worst, he thought gaily, diving into the public, as usual.

Belacqua drew near to the school, quite happy, for all had gone swimmingly. The lunch had been a notable success, it would abide as a standard in his mind. Indeed he could not imagine its ever being superseded. And such a pale soapy piece of cheese to prove so strong! He must only conclude that he had been abusing himself all these years in relating the strength of cheese directly to its greenness. We live and learn, that was a true saying. Also his teeth and jaws had been in heaven, splinters of vanquished toast spraying forth at each gnash. It was like eating glass. His mouth burned and ached with the exploit. Then the food had been further spiced by the intelligence, transmitted in a low tragic voice across the counter by Oliver the improver, that the Malahide murderer’s petition for mercy, signed by half the land, having been rejected, the man must swing at dawn in Mountjoy and nothing could save him. Ellis the hangman was even now on his way. Belacqua, tearing at the sandwich and swilling the precious stout, pondered on McCabe in his cell.

The lobster was ready after all, the man handed it over instanter, and with such a pleasant smile. Really a little bit of courtesy and goodwill went a long way in this world. A smile and a cheerful word from a common working-man and the face of the world was brightened. And it was so easy, a mere question of muscular control.

“Lepping” he said cheerfully, handing it over.

“Lepping?” said Belacqua. “What on earth was that?

“Lepping fresh, sir” said the man, “fresh in this morning.”

Now Belacqua, on the analogy of mackerel and other fish that he had heard described as lepping fresh when they had been taken but an hour or two previously, supposed the man to mean that the lobster had very recently been killed.

Signorina Adriana Ottolenghi was waiting in the little front room off the hall, which Belacqua was naturally inclined to think of rather as the vestibule. That was her room, the Italian room. On the same side, but at the back, was the French room. God knows where the German room was. Who cared about the German room anyway?

He hung up his coat and hat, laid the long knobby brown-paper parcel on the hall-table, and went presently in to the Ottolenghi.

After about half-an-hour of this and that obiter, she complimented him on his grasp of the language.

“You make rapid progress” she said in her ruined voice.

There subsisted as much of the Ottolenghi as might be expected to of the person of a lady of a certain age who had found being young and beautiful and pure more of a bore than anything else.

Belacqua, dissembling his great pleasure, laid open the moon enigma.

“Yes” she said “I know the passage. It is a famous teaser. Off-hand I cannot tell you, but I will look it up when I get home.”

The sweet creature! She would look it up in her big Dante when she got home. What a woman!

“It occurred to me” she said “apropos of I don’t know what, that you might do worse than make up Dante’s rare movements of compassion in Hell. That used to be” — her past tenses were always sorrowful — “a favourite question.”

He assumed an expression of profundity.

“In that connexion” he said “I recall one superb pun anyway:

‘qui vive la pietà quando è ben morta. . .’ ”

She said nothing.

“Is it not a great phrase?” he gushed.

She said nothing.

“Now” he said like a fool “I wonder how you could translate that?”

Still she said nothing. Then:

“Do you think” she murmured “it is absolutely necessary to translate it?”

Sounds as of conflict were borne in from the hall. Then silence. A knuckle tambourined on the door, it flew open and lo it was Mlle Glain, the French instructress, clutching her cat, her eyes out on stalks, in a state of the greatest agitation.

“Oh” she gasped “forgive me. I intrude, but what was in the bag?”

“The bag?” said the Ottolenghi.

Mlle Glain took a French step forward.

“The parcel” she buried her face in the cat “the parcel in the hall.”

Belacqua spoke up composedly.

“Mine” he said, “a fish.”

He did not know the French for lobster. Fish would do very well. Fish had been good enough for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. It was good enough for Mlle Glain.

“Oh” said Mlle Glain, inexpressibly relieved, “I caught him in the nick of time.” She administered a tap to the cat. “He would have tore it to flitters.”

Belacqua began to feel a little anxious.

“Did he actually get at it?” he said.

“No no” said Mlle Glain “I caught him just in time. But I did not know” with a blue-stocking snigger “what it might be, so I thought I had better come and ask.”

Base prying bitch.

The Ottolenghi was faintly amused.

“Puisqu’il n’y a pas de mal . . .” she said with great fatigue and elegance.

“Heureusement” it was clear at once that Mlle Glain was devout “heureusement.”

Chastening the cat with little skelps she took herself off. The grey hairs of her maidenhead screamed at Belacqua. A devout, virginal blue-stocking, honing after a penny’s worth of scandal.

“Where were we?” said Belacqua.

But Neapolitan patience has its limits.

“Where are we ever?” cried the Ottolenghi “where we were, as we were.”

Belacqua drew near to the house of his aunt. Let us call it winter, that dusk may fall now and a moon rise. At the corner of the street a horse was down and a man sat on its head. I know, thought Belacqua, that that is considered the right thing to do. But why? A lamplighter flew by on his bike, tilting with his pole at the standards, jousting a little yellow light into the evening. A poorly dressed couple stood in the bay of a pretentious gateway, she sagging against the railings, her head lowered, he standing facing her. He stood up close to her, his hands dangled by his sides. Where we were, thought Belacqua, as we were. He walked on gripping his parcel. Why not piety and pity both, even down below? Why not mercy and Godliness together? A little mercy in the stress of sacrifice, a little mercy to rejoice against judgment. He thought of Jonah and the gourd and the pity of a jealous God on Nineveh. And poor McCabe, he would get it in the neck at dawn. What was he doing now, how was he feeling? He would relish one more meal, one more night.

His aunt was in the garden, tending whatever flowers die at that time of year. She embraced him and together they went down into the bowels of the earth, into the kitchen in the basement. She took the parcel and undid it and abruptly the lobster was on the table, on the oilcloth, discovered.

“They assured me it was fresh” said Belacqua.

Suddenly he saw the creature move, this neuter creature. Definitely it changed its position. His hand flew to his mouth.

“Christ!” he said “it’s alive.”

His aunt looked at the lobster. It moved again. It made a faint nervous act of life on the oilcloth. They stood above it, looking down on it, exposed cruciform on the oilcloth. It shuddered again. Belacqua felt he would be sick.

“My God” he whined “it’s alive, what’ll we do?” The aunt simply had to laugh. She bustled off to the pantry to fetch her smart apron, leaving him goggling down at the lobster, and came back with it on and her sleeves rolled up, all business.

“Well” she said “it is to be hoped so, indeed.”

“All this time” muttered Belacqua. Then, suddenly aware of her hideous equipment: “What are you going to do?” he cried.

“Boil the beast” she said, “what else?”

“But it’s not dead” protested Belacqua “you can’t boil it like that.”

She looked at him in astonishment. Had he taken leave of his senses?

“Have sense” she said sharply, “lobsters are always boiled alive. They must be.” She caught up the lobster and laid it on its back. It trembled. “They feel nothing” she said.

In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. It had survived the Frenchwoman’s cat and his witless clutch. Now it was going alive into scalding water. It had to. Take into the air my quiet breath.

Belacqua looked at the old parchment of her face, grey in the dim kitchen.

“You make a fuss” she said angrily “and upset me and then lash into it for your dinner.”

She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about thirty seconds to live.

Well, thought Belacqua, it’s a quick death, God help us all.

It is not.

 

END

 

 

Comments Off on Dante and the Lobster, Samuel Beckett