Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  The quiet fervor of this contemplation has elements in it of Le Guin’s adherence to Taoism, of her anarchism, which she derives from Shelley, Kropotkin, and Paul Goodman, and most of all her lifelong meditation upon the meaning of marriage. As The Dispossessed approaches its end, Takver has a second baby, again a girl, and Shevek, against the opposition of his estranged mother, Rulag, helps organize a Syndicate of Initiative, which will force the free publication of scientific and aesthetic works on all the known worlds.

  On returning from Urras, Shevek is joined by a Terran first mate of the spaceship who decides to go through the wall with him:

  “It is your own wish, then—your own initiative?”

  “Entirely.”

  “And you understand that it might be dangerous?”

  “Yes.”

  “Things are…a little broken loose, on Anarres. That’s what my friends on the radio have been telling me about. It was our purpose all along—our Syndicate, this journey of mine—to shake up things, to stir up, to break some habits, to make people ask questions. To behave like anarchists! All this has been going on while I was gone. So, you see, nobody is quite sure what happens next. And if you land with me, even more gets broken loose. I cannot push too far. I cannot take you as an official representative of some foreign government. That will not do, on Anarres.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Once you are there, once you walk through the wall with me, then as I see it you are one of us. We are responsible to you and you to us; you become an Anarresti, with the same options as all the others. But they are not safe options. Freedom is never very safe.” He looked around the tranquil, orderly room, with its simple consoles and delicate instruments, its high ceiling and windowless walls, and back at Ketho. “You would find yourself very much alone,” he said.

  “My race is very old,” Ketho said. “We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under the sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?”

  “We are the children of time,” Shevek said, in Pravic. The younger man looked at him a moment, and then repeated the words in Iotic: “We are the children of time.”

  There is a quality of the luminous in Le Guin’s style at its best, as it is here. As I told her once in our exchange of letters, she is capable of the lucidity urged upon Arjuna by Krishna in the Gita. To be the children of time is to be Titanic, to descend from Saturn or Cronos.

  “You’re sure you want to walk through this wall with me, Ketho? You know, for me, it’s easy. Whatever happens, I am coming home. But you are leaving home. ‘True journey is return…’ ”

  “I hope to return,” Ketho said in his quiet voice. “In time.”

  “When are we to enter the landing craft?”

  “In about twenty minutes.”

  “I’m ready. I have nothing to pack.” Shevek laughed, a laugh of clear, unmixed happiness. The other man looked at him gravely, as if he was not sure what happiness was, and yet recognized or perhaps remembered it from afar. He stood beside Shevek as if there was something he wanted to ask him. But he did not ask it. “It will be early morning at Anarres Port,” he said at last, and took his leave, to get his things and meet Shevek at the launch port.

  Alone, Shevek turned back to the observation port, and saw the blinding curve of sunrise over the Temae, just coming into sight.

  “I will lie down to sleep on Anarres tonight,” he thought. “I will lie down beside Takver. I wish I’d brought the picture, the baby sheep, to give Pilun.”

  But he had not brought anything. His hands were empty, as they had always been.

  “True journey is return” is an adage of Odo, the woman who brought anarcho-syndicalism into Urras and thus ultimately founded Anarres. The perpetual emptiness of Shevek’s hands is paradoxically their fullness. Le Guin’s Taoism is her foundation, and her work was augmentation of the foundations. What moves me most in her books is the voice of authentic authority, at once aesthetic and moral:

  Words are my matter. I have chipped one stone

  for thirty years and still it is not done,

  that image of the thing I cannot see.

  I cannot finish it and set it free,

  transformed to energy.

  CHAPTER 45

  The Loser (1983)

  THOMAS BERNHARD

  I HAVE READ MOST OF Thomas Bernhard in German. That may have augmented how disconcerting I found him. Now, at the age of eighty-eight, I have started to reread him in translation. That takes less effort but gives me more leisure to be upset by him. It is accurate to observe that Bernhard delighted in rattling even his most sympathetic readers. Jack Dawson’s version of The Loser seems faithful to me, though I have not compared it to the German text. At my age, climbing up the steps to my third-floor study and library is something I can manage only once a day. I gather that Mark Anderson, an admirable scholar of modern German literature, took the name of Jack Dawson for his own translation of The Loser. There is something Bernhardian about that.

  There was everything (or almost everything) about the life of the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932–82) that was Bernhardian, though the two men never met. Probably Bernhard heard Gould play twice in Salzburg, in 1958 and 1959. The least Bernhardian aspect of Glenn Gould’s life was his five-year love affair with Cornelia Foss, wife of the conductor and composer Lukas Foss. When Gould began to show signs of paranoia and of weird overdosings with unnecessary medications, Cornelia Foss and her two children returned to Lukas Foss, doubtless to Gould’s sorrow.

  Bernhard could have known nothing about that, which is just as well, since it would have crippled his novel. He was free to indulge his bizarre inventiveness. Thus, Vladimir Horowitz never taught, and particularly could not have taught Glenn Gould, who loathed Horowitz. In The Loser, Horowitz supposedly teaches the narrator, Gould, and Wertheimer, whom Glenn Gould first labels “the loser” in the agon between Gould, the obsessive narrator, and the unfortunate Wertheimer, who commits suicide at the age of fifty-one. Glenn Gould died at fifty, but Bernhard adds a year to Gould’s life to abet the fearful symmetry of his novel. Bernhard himself was an assisted suicide at the age of fifty-eight.

  Bernhard was born in Holland, the son of an unmarried mother. After living with his grandparents, he was taken to Bavaria, where he was required to serve in the Hitler Youth, not at all congenial to him. His father, whom he never met, was a crooked carpenter who seems to have committed suicide in 1940. Fortunately for Bernhard, one of his grandfathers arranged for him a musical and artistic education, in Austria. Again fortunately, Bernhard became attached to a much older woman, in a filial rather than sexual way. She became an emotional support or true mother to him. After she died, he was essentially alone, and always lived as an ascetic. Because he had tuberculosis, he could not become a singer, turned to journalism, and then to composing novels and plays.

  Bernhard tends to write an endless paragraph of his narrator’s dialogue with himself. When I try to read him out loud, in German or English, I quickly become breathless. He is a kind of interior orator on the verge of dying. One cannot call him a satirist, a parodist, or an ironist. Ambivalent about everything, Austria most of all, he wants us to believe that the inevitability of dying makes all of us ridiculous. I suppose that is in him an aesthetic stance, but I am unhappy with it. Sigmund Freud, the greatest of all Austrian exiles, urged us to make friends with the necessity of dying. That is somber, mature, and a tonic: it enlarges life. Bernhard’s artistry is compelling. His views have their own dignity. But I cannot believe that my own dying, which cannot be far away, makes any of us ridiculous. That of course does not vitiate Bernhard’s achievement.

  How can one define what
is new and valuable in Bernhard? He does give a strangeness allied to Kafka and Canetti, but swerving from them into an actual celebration of ambivalence, as though it were the true form of love:

  And I myself wasn’t free of Glenn hatred, I thought, I hated Glenn every moment, loved him at the same time with the utmost consistency. For there’s nothing more terrible than to see a person so magnificent that his magnificence destroys us and we must observe this process and put up with it and finally and ultimately also accept it, whereas we actually don’t believe such a process is happening, far from it, until it becomes an irrefutable fact, I thought, when it’s too late. Wertheimer and I had been necessary for Glenn’s development, like everything else in his life, Glenn misused us, I thought in the inn. The arrogance with which Glenn set about everything, Wertheimer’s fearful hesitation on the other hand, my reservations about everything and anything, I thought. Suddenly Glenn was Glenn Gould, everybody overlooked at the moment of the Glenn Gould transformation, as I have to call it, even Wertheimer and I.

  To be destroyed by magnificence is the destiny of weak artists. To accept both magnificence and destruction is to move toward incipient strength. Mark M. Anderson, in his admirable afterword to The Loser, suggests that what saves the novel from its own self-mockery is the narrator’s love of Glenn Gould and Wertheimer. “Love” is beyond definition: it means everything and nothing. The worship of Johann Sebastian Bach is an all-but-universal form of love. Whenever I become too depressed, I listen to Neville Marriner’s recording of The Musical Offering (Academy of St Martin in the Fields). To my uneducated ear it is the ultimate music, more than I deserve to hear.

  The actual Glenn Gould and Bernhard disdained what they considered to be narcissistic aesthetic forms, like sonatas by Haydn or Mozart, novels by Stendhal, Balzac, and Victor Hugo. These achieved turning points or recognitions leading to resolution. Gould and Bernhard worshipped Bach, admired Webern and Schoenberg, and distilled Bach through the twelve-tone serialism of Schoenberg and his school: Webern, Alban Berg, Ernst Krenek, and others.

  I think the best preparation for reading Bernhard’s novels is to absorb first Gathering Evidence: A Memoir (1973–82), translated by David McLintock. The five German volumes seem at least as much fiction as autobiography. Gathering Evidence concludes with a section on “My Prizes.” The accounts of the prizes, three speeches on receiving awards, and Bernhard’s resignation from the Darmstadt Academy for Language and Poetry, also mix fierce fiction and truth telling, though Bernhard felt that only lies could be uttered and believed. For him the National Socialism of Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church alike were nothing but lies.

  Near the close of Gathering Evidence, Bernhard gives us an extraordinary passage:

  All contact with home had ceased. I got no news from my family, and as far as I remember I had no interest whatever in how things were at home. They did not write to me, though there was nothing to stop them; they no longer had any excuse after they had buried their dead. They had their reasons. I got no mail and I expected none. I immersed myself in Verlaine and Trakl, and I also read Dostoyevsky’s novel The Demons. Never in my whole life have I read a more engrossing and elemental work, and at the time I had never read such a long one. It had the effect of a powerful drug, and for a time I was totally absorbed by it. For some time after my return home I refused to read another book, fearing that I might be plunged headlong into the deepest disappointment. For weeks I refused to read anything at all. The monstrous quality of The Demons had made me strong; it had shown me a path that I could follow and told me that I was on the right one, the one that led out. I had felt the impact of a work that was both wild and great, and I emerged from the experience like a hero. Seldom has literature produced such an overwhelming effect on me. Using slips of paper which I had bought in the village, I tried to keep a record of certain dates which seemed important to me, certain crucial points in my existence, fearing that what was now so clear might blur and suddenly be lost on me, that it might suddenly vanish, and that I might no longer have the strength to save all these decisive occurrences, enormities, and absurdities from the obscurity of oblivion. On these slips of paper I tried to preserve everything that could be preserved, everything without exception which seemed to me to be worth preserving. I had now discovered my method of working, my own brand of infamy, my particular form of brutality, my own idiosyncratic taste, which had virtually nothing in common with anyone else’s method of working, anyone else’s infamy, anyone else’s brutality, or anyone else’s taste. What is important? What is significant? I believed that I must save everything from oblivion by transferring it from my brain onto these slips of paper, of which in the end there were hundreds, for I did not trust my brain. I had lost faith in my brain—I had lost faith in everything, hence even in my brain. The shame I felt at writing poetry was greater than I expected, and so I did not write a single poem. I tried to read my grandfather’s books, but found it impossible: I had experienced too much in the meantime, I had seen too much, and so I put them aside. What I needed I had found in The Demons. I searched the sanatorium library for other such elemental works, but there were none. It would be superfluous to enumerate the authors whose books I opened and immediately shut again, repelled by their cheapness and triviality. Apart from The Demons I had no time for literature, but I felt sure that there must be other books like it. But there was no point in looking for them in the sanatorium library, which was chock-full of tastelessness and banality, of Catholicism and National Socialism.

  Dostoevsky’s The Demons (1871–72) is his wildest work, and rereading it frightens me. It is an assault on Russian nihilism, incarnated in Nikolai Stavrogin, a figure who exceeds Arkady Svidrigailov of Crime and Punishment (1866) in veiled savagery and malevolence. Stavrogin rapes and brings about the suicide of an eleven-year-old girl. He does not bother to save his own incapacitated wife from being murdered. Svidrigailov, in contrast, finally shows some compassion and behaves benignly, and then commits suicide with the splendid remark: “Going to America.”

  Thomas Bernhard’s debt to The Demons is extensive, as he says. I find it interesting that, in his greatest extremity, Bernhard could read Paul Verlaine and Georg Trakl, major lyric poets. Verlaine (1844–96) died at fifty-one from alcoholism and drug addiction. Though his notoriety stems from his relationship with Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91)—a poet comparable in eminence to Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry—Verlaine nevertheless was a permanent poet. Georg Trakl (1887–1914) seems to me the major German-language poet of the twentieth century, surpassing even Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan George, Rilke, Gottfried Benn, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Else Lasker-Schüler, Bertolt Brecht, and others. Trakl died at twenty-seven of a cocaine overdose, after having suffered the horrors of being a medical officer on the Austro-Hungarian Eastern Front against Russia. He had been sustained, as had Rilke, by the generosity of the great Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was summoned to the hospital but arrived too late to save Trakl.

  There is something Dostoevskian about Trakl’s tormented consciousness. He has affinities with Rimbaud, though the major passion of his life was an incestuous relationship with his own sister, a remarkable musician. Bernhard must have found in Trakl something of his own fatalism, and reverence for a silence that Trakl could achieve in language but that was beyond Bernhard’s gift.

  I find it very difficult to clarify my own troubled esteem for Bernhard’s novels. They hurt me more than I think they should. I grew up, like so many Yiddish-speaking children, with the inescapable yet unmerited guilt of a survivor. I tend to shun literature of the Shoah. Bernhard and Sebald are ineluctable writers, and I yield to that.

  CHAPTER 46

  Blood Meridian (1985)

  CORMAC MCCARTHY

  IT SEEMS STRANGE TO ME to be writing about Blood Meridian on July 17, 2018. I speak to Cormac McCarthy on the phone; we have exchanged
a few letters and sent each other books. In three days McCarthy will turn eighty-five, just a few days after I touched eighty-eight. I know little about his personal life, except that three marriages ended in divorce and he has two sons, born thirty-six years apart. He does his writing at the Santa Fe Institute, surrounded by scientists, whom he finds more congenial than literary folk.

  I last wrote about Blood Meridian in 2000, about a decade after I first got to the end of it. Robert Penn Warren and Ralph Ellison had recommended it to me, but my early attempts to read it found me flinching at its incredible and incessant violence. It took a while, but I learned to read it by rereading. McCarthy accurately says, “Books are made out of books,” and Blood Meridian is quarried from many masterpieces in the Western tradition: the King James Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, in particular. There are many others, including the mystics Jacob Boehme and Meister Eckhart.

  Blood Meridian still seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, even in 2018, a third of a century since its publication. Cormac McCarthy is the disciple of Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner. In what follows, I will try to be faithful to him except for my own addiction to semicolons, and in using capital letters for the Kid and Judge Holden.

  There are three epigraphs to Blood Meridian, a strange medley of Jacob Boehme, Paul Valéry, and The Yuma Daily Sun for June 13, 1982:

  Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.