That fall, as one of my experiments with the writer’s life and duties, I went to an Irish bar, one of the few then remaining in Harlem, on my way to a morning class at City College. A long dark bar, a bowl of hard-boiled eggs, no TV, no radio, no music, as Hemingway would have wanted it. Just me and the purity of the bar and the bartender dozing by the window on the street, and the early morning still fresh with hope. I looked at myself in the mirror and, quoting from Hemingway’s story, said, sotto voce, “Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before the bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours.” At nine, I ordered a double shot of rye with a beer chaser. Then another.
I left for class feeling pleasantly woozy and glowing with dignity but, then, halfway there, I turned back for another round at the bar to secure the dignity. I missed my classes that day, and the days following when I renewed the experiments, but they too failed, like the raft that had sunk in the Bronx River.
It took me many years beyond my adolescence and adulthood to write my shopping list straight and to cease those and other such drinking experiments.
A NEW LOVE
Years ago, a noted writer asked: Who over the age of forty still reads novels? I did, and always with the hope of finding the innocent joy and impress of my early reading. For a while I took a vacation from fiction and turned mostly to biographies and memoirs and letters, to books on history and art. But enriching as they were, none had power over me or lived as deeply in my imagination.
Some few years ago I found for almost nothing all four volumes of André Gide’s Journals at a library book sale. I had wanted them forever, for the physical beauty of the books alone and because of their echo from my youth, when Gide was a demigod of literature and whose novel, radical for its time, The Counterfeiters, I had loved. Gide’s reading was wide and profound, and I came to value and trust his taste, a trust that grew volume by volume, and I wanted to read the books he so much cared about. I admired and felt kinship with him because he was not afraid to dislike what the world claims it reveres. He demolishes, for example, King Lear: “The entire play from one end to another is absurd” (The Journals of André Gide, volume 4). It was reassuring to know that someone else on this planet felt as I had. His praise for Steinbeck’s masterpiece strike novel, In Dubious Battle, made me value his judgment even more.
So it surprised me to find his 1944 entry, “Have just devoured one after another eight books by Simenon at the rate of one a day.” And then in 1948, the line: “New plunge into Simenon; I have just read six in a row.” I had always thought of Simenon as a lightweight crime writer, but once I began reading Simenon it was curtains for me. I thought: This is why I still read, because without novels like this, life is just breathing.
Sometimes after a serious Simenon binge I feel sated, saturated, sick of myself, even, for being so addicted. My reward, as with drugs, is to receive less and less pleasure. I have been chasing the original high to no success, but like a true addict, I always relapse. I ask for little—a great opening, a dazzling seventy-five pages. I expect the letdown. But there is always another of his books to find the high.
Simenon wrote many novels, finishing them sometimes as quickly as in two or three weeks. You can feel the moment when he just had had enough. He speeds through the last third to get over with it and move on to write yet another. Classic seduction: charm, conquer, and flee. He jilts you but it’s worth the ride and the disappointment. Better the inconstant but exciting lover than a faithful but predictable one.
No writer—not even Hemingway—opens his books with such economy and unadorned ease as Simenon does. No one draws you in as quickly on the first paragraph and holds you. No one creates or reveals a character in a phrase or line like him. In a 1955 Paris Review interview, Simenon says, “An apple by Cézanne has weight. And it has juice, everything, with just three strokes. I tried to give to my words just the weight that a stroke of Cézanne’s gave to an apple.”
In the novel Madame Maigret’s Own Case, we see a woman turn down to the lowest flame a pot of stew she is cooking. She puts on her coat and hat and, before leaving, she quickly checks herself in the mirror and “seeing that everything is all right, rushes out.” That little moment illuminates her pride, her vanity, her bourgeois correctness. Simenon makes no mention of her age, height, weight, no description of her hat, coat, shoes, her nose, her hair—all the ponderous, belabored detail that we are told is supposed to make a character vivid, real, and that we immediately forget. But in just a phrase, three strokes, voilà, Simenon’s character has volume and personality.
What Simenon does so simply and brilliantly for character he also does in his creation of atmosphere or the mood of his novels. In that same Paris Review interview, he says that his sense of atmosphere comes from looking at Impressionist paintings when he was a young boy. I can’t imagine how he transposed the sunny dispositions of those paintings into the musty hallways and the half-lit, creaking, dingy tenements, the smells of cooking wafting through a window in summer, the yellowish fog over the Seine in the wet fall, the evocation of Paris of another time before Malraux washed the grand buildings and sent their patina down to the gutters and sewers. Paris before the tearing down of the ancient market at Les Halles and its vans packed with produce and the little bistros serving onion soup at four in the morning. It almost makes you forget that Simenon is from Belgium or that Paris has changed. His atmospherics envelop his novels but never impede the velocity of the narrative.
When asked about Proust, Isaac Singer said, “Does he make you want to turn the page?” Of course, Proust does, but to turn it slowly. I’m not suggesting that velocity is the foremost quality that matters in a novel but the velocity of Simenon’s prose sweeps away all the dross, clutter, and manicured verisimilitude of much contemporary fiction. And Simenon pushes aside the idea of writing only “likable” and “relatable” protagonists, the expected staples of standard-issue fiction.
Dirty Snow (published in English in 1951) is set in a small, grisly town in an indeterminate place and time—but clearly during the Nazi occupation of France and Belgium. The master image is of blackened snow, stinking alleyways, dens of steam, smoke, drink, and menace, where a teenager, Frankie, spends his nights. His mother keeps a brothel of two or three girls in her small apartment, where he sleeps and sometimes shares his bed with them. The boy commits murder and robbery and for no apparent reason, and tricks a young woman who loves him into sleeping with an older, slimy man. There are murderers in fiction that one can feel for, who indicate they are a recognizable part of the human tribe—Camus’s Meursault, Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov—but Frankie is not one of them. There is nothing redeemable about him, not a shred of decency or feeling or devilish charm that even the most tenderhearted social worker can detect with a microscope.
There is no lovable Maigret, Simenon’s famous detective, no welcoming cafés and domestic comforts, no Paris of quaint streets and interesting criminals. This town of dirty snow and gray cold is not even a hell crowded with tortured sinners. Here there is crime for which there is punishment, but there is no justice. Simenon’s town lives outside of sin, of good and bad, and, like most life, has no boundaries but power. This is the grimmest novel I have ever read. And perhaps the most moral in its truth.
CODA
All my life I wanted to be near books, to have them close to me, by me when I eat, beside me in bed, and on the little shelf I built in the toilet—a trick I learned from Henry Miller’s touching The Books in My Life. When a boy, I hated parting with books from the library and was always fined for late return. In my teens, I haunted Book Row on Fourth Avenue in Manhattan and could find the most important, beautiful books in the world for pennies. I did not need fancy bindings and hand-tooled covers; in any case, they do not enrich the literature they harbor. I would carry my newfound treasures in a brown-paper shopping bag on the subway, all the way to the upper Bronx, and
imagine them piled up alongside my cot and in an already packed, unpainted pine bookcase. I read on the subway, on the bus, on lunch and coffee breaks from work after I dropped out of high school. I read when I got home and when my mother went to bed with one of her romances, usually a novel of pirates and the women they seized as booty and for ransom but whom they ended up loving instead. I read three or four books at a time, going from one to another like a Casanova on the prowl. I wanted to have friends but had few and none had a passion for reading. I wanted to have a girlfriend and go steady, as that was the height of sophistication for teenagers in the early fifties. I had a beautiful girlfriend but she was always busy. Busy with others.
No one was as sure, as steady, as magical, as mysterious, as sexy, as comforting, as life-giving as anything or anyone I found in the novels I took home. All my life there were disasters in the street, sadness on the subway, heartbreak and betrayals in and out of bed, the world was a disaster, but once I walked into my apartment and saw about me my books on their shelves, I was, I am, safe and maybe even brave.
Among my books I still have some I bought or that were given to me when I was fifteen or sixteen. On those, I made a little drawing of my profile on the flyleaf, and wrote the date of purchase and in careful print the words: “Pelham Parkway, the Bronx.” One was The Magic Mountain; another, Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky. These and the others from the past I took wherever I moved or stored them for my return. As long as they were with me I had a history, one more vivid and palpable than a photograph could give me. The books brought with them the damp smells of my Bronx apartment and the spring breezes in the botanical garden where I had read them, the cigarette burns where the ashes fell, the coffee stains on the pages where they were read on the kitchen table, the echoes of the operas broadcast on radio WQXR directly from the Metropolitan every Saturday afternoon. I took The Sheltering Sky for Bowles to sign when we were teaching together in Tangiers in 1981. The book had traveled a long way from the fifties. Bowles asked, “Did someone pound this with a baseball bat?”
Suppose there is an afterlife and there are no books there, just waves of words with nothing to hold, no pages to turn, no aroma of paper and ink and dust. Even though there is an eternity of time to read, it would not be the same without the physical entity, the book and its earthly cycle from birth to decay, the once sunny, expectant pages moldering into dust along with the owner. I thought of the history of the burials of the great and the ordinary, and the goods taken by the dead for their future life, whole households of pots and pans and furniture for some, spears and axes for others. I want my books with me, the treasures I have loved and amassed along the way.
No simple coffin will do. I need a mausoleum, like that of the robber baron Jay Gould’s mansion-size white pile facing Melville’s headstone, up in Woodlawn Cemetery, the last subway stop in the Bronx. Mine would have floor-to-ceiling bookcases, carpeted floors, three or four comfortable leather club chairs, and reading lamps with rose silk shades beside them, and a skylight high above my marble sarcophagus. This is a library that I do not and never shall have in life but that I enjoy imagining will be built after my death. Open to the public, of course, twenty-four hours every day.
—For Jenny Diski
Bride
Julia Elliott
Wilda whips herself with a clump of blackberry brambles. She can feel cold from the stone floor pulsing up into her cowl, chastising her animal body. She smiles. Each morning she thinks of a new penance. Yesterday, she slipped off her woolen stockings and stood outside in the freezing air. The morning before that, she rolled naked in dried thistle. Subsisting on watery soup and stale bread, she has almost subdued her body. Each month when the moon swells, her woman’s bleeding is a dribble of burgundy so scant she does not need a rag.
Women are by nature carnal, the Abbot said last night after administering the sacred blood and flesh. A woman’s body has a door, an opening that the Devil may slip through, unless she fiercely barricade against such entry.
Wilda’s body is a bundle of polluted flesh. Her body is a stinking goat. She lashes her shoulders and back. She scourges her arms, her legs, her shrunken breasts, and jutting rib cage. She thrashes the small mound of her belly. She gives her feet a good working over, flagellating her toes and soles. She reaches back to torture the two, poor sinews of her buttocks. And then she repeats the process, doubling the force. She chastises the filthy maggot of her carnality until she feels fire crackling up her backbone. Her head explodes with light. Her soul rejoices like a bird flitting from a dark hut, out into summer air.
Sister Elgaruth is always in the scriptorium before Wilda, just after Prime Service, making her rounds among the lecterns, checking the manuscripts for errors, her hawk nose hovering an inch above each parchment. Wilda sits down at her desk just as the sun rises over the dark wood. She sharpens her quill. She opens her ink pot and takes a deep sniff—pomegranate juice and wine tempered with sulfur—a rich, red ink that reminds her of Christ’s blood, the same stuff that stains her fingertips. This is always the happiest time of day—ink perfume in her nostrils, windows blazing with light, her body weightless from the morning’s scourge. But then the other nuns come bumbling in, filling the hall with grunts and coughs, fermented breath, smells of winter bodies bundled in dirty wool. Wilda sighs and turns back to Beastes of God’s Worlde, the manuscript she has been copying for a year, over and over, encountering the creatures of God’s Menagerie in different moods and seasons, finding them boring on some days and thrilling on others.
Today she is halfway through the entry on bees, the smallest of God’s birds, created on the fifth day. She imagines the creatures spewing from the void, the air hazy and buzzing. In these fallen times, bees hatch from the bodies of oxen and the rotted flesh of dead cows. They begin as worms, squirming in putrid meat, and “transform into bees.” Wilda wonders why the manuscript provides no satisfactory information on the nature of this transformation, while going on for paragraphs about the lessons we may learn from creatures that hatch from corpses to become ethereal flying nectar eaters and industrious builders of hives.
How do they get their wings? Do they sleep in their hives all winter or freeze to death? Do fresh swarms hatch from ox flesh each spring?
Wilda is about to scrawl these questions in the margins when she feels a tug on her sleeve. She turns, regards the blunt, sallow face of Sister Elgaruth, which nips all speculation in the bud.
“Sister,” croaks Elgaruth, “you stray from God’s task.”
Wilda turns back to her copying, shaping letters with her crimped right hand.
At lunch in the dining hall, the Abbess sits in her bejeweled chair, rubies representing Christ’s blood gleaming in the dark mahogany. Though the Abbess is stringy and yellow as a dried parsnip, everybody knows she has a sweet tooth, that she dotes on white flour, pheasants roasted in honey, wine from the Canary Islands. Her Holiness wears ermine collars and anoints her withered neck with myrrh. Two prioresses hunch on each side of her, Sister Ethelburh and Sister Willa, slurping up cabbage soup with pious frowns. They cast cold glances at the table of new girls.
The new girls have no Latin. They bark the English language, lacing familiar words with the darkness of their mother tongue. One of them, Aoife, works in the kitchen with Wilda on Saturdays and Sundays. Aoife works hard, chopping a hundred onions, tears streaming down her cheeks. She sleeps in a cell six doors down from Wilda’s. Sometimes, when Wilda roams the night hall to calm her soul after matins, she sees Aoife blustering through, red hair streaming. And Wilda feels the tug of curiosity. She wants to follow the girl into her room, hear her speak the language of wolves and foxes.
Now, as Wilda’s tablemates spout platitudes about the heavy snows God keeps dumping upon the convent in March, the new girls erupt into rich laughter. They bray and howl, snigger and snort. Dark vapors hover over them. A turbulence. A hullabaloo. The Abbess slams her
goblet down on the table. And the wild girls stifle their mirth. But Wilda can see that Aoife’s strange amber eyes are still laughing, even though her mouth is pinched into a frown.
At vespers, the gouty Abbot is drunk again. His enormous head gleams like a broiled ham. He says that the world, drenched in sin, is freezing into a solid block of ice. He says that women are ripe for the Devil’s attentions. He says their tainted flesh lures the Devil like a spicy, rancid bait. The Abbot describes the Evil One scrambling through a woman’s window in the darkness of night. Knuckles upon pulpit, he mimics the sound of Satan’s dung-caked hooves clomping over cobblestones. He asks the nuns to picture the naked beast: face of a handsome man of thirty, swarthy skinned, raven haired, goat horns poking from his brow, the muscular chest of a lusty layman, but below the waist he’s all goat.
It has been snowing since November and the nuns are pale, anemic, scrawny. They are afflicted with scurvy, night blindness, nervous spasms, and melancholy. Unlike the monks across the meadow, they don’t tend a vineyard at their convent. And when the Abbot describes the powerful thighs of Satan, the stinking flurry of hair and goat flesh, a young nun screams. A small, mousy thing who never says a word. She opens her mouth and yowls like a cat. And then she blinks. She stands. She scurries from the chapel.
After the Abbot’s sermon, Wilda tosses on her pallet, unable to banish the image from her mind: the vileness of two polluted animal bodies twisting together in a lather of poisonous sweat. She jumps out of bed and snatches her clump of blackberry brambles. She gives her ruttish beast of a body a good thrashing, chastising every square inch of stinking meat from chin to toes. She whips herself until she floats. God’s love is an ocean sparkling in the sun, and Wilda’s soul is a droplet, a molecule of moisture lifted into the air. When she opens her eyes, she does not see her humble stone cell with its straw pallet and hemp quilt; she sees heavenly skies in pink tumult, angels slithering through clouds. She sees the Virgin held aloft by a throng of naked cherubs, doves nesting in her golden hair.
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