The Scream

I

Such a twilight
has no history,
nor would this nobody
rigid in the clutch
of his own two hands
in front of a sky
no longer his sky.
Two men walking away
are too nonchalant
to have seen his face
and stopped; therefore,
it must have looked
different than now.
Did he see fear
in their faces
or the fear
they saw in his?
The bridge rail
and the black river
connect all three
like testimony
and conspire
to convince them.

II

A red dusk
is sunlit pollution,
so it is not sick
churning colors
and nauseous chaos
of sand and sky
writhing in the same
two dimensions
that move,
because these
are all too real.
Not like that mouth,
that woeful oval.
As the vanishing point
is absent
from the painting,
from that mouth
no word flies,
nor any sound at all.

The Undone Thing

My body's naked decay
illuminates a room of mirrors,

themselves reflections, years
compressed into a backward look.

That was flat bone, that, my eye,
that, hard skin, sharp spine.

As number shapes itself,
a man gradually freezes

into the markless prism
of each day: One. Attention!

Two. Prayer! Three. Reach out!
Thus, the count approximates me.

The caliper and the scale
exact a shade of difference

between mole and carcinoma-
sensations bought and sold:

a faceless, Ernstian torso,
odalisque sans ottoman,

beckons like blue oblivion;
afloat in a dusty tearpool

with feathers, stone, and pigment
peeled from unsized canvas,

she is the life of reclining truth,
with plump breasts pointing up.

The seductions of flounder
stall when fins touch glass;

untentacled jellyfish loom
out of the clouds of sand

the moment our quotidian fate,
the miracle of food, descends.

Rodin's Beaudelaire

In the late 80's, I visited the wonderful I. M. Pei-designed museum of art at Indiana University in Bloomington and wrote this poem a few days later.



Rodin's Baudelaire

The walls are bone white,
corners obtuse angles
leading the curious visitor
from the heart of the room.

Depicted atrocities hang
by wires on golden hooks.
A noseless black face
dreams its perfect teeth.

Metal faces bent
to bulge bone and eye
exaggerate anatomy
to misshape outworn words.

From the ceiling, red
thread-wound slinkies
suspend, sprung by a man's
time spent winding.

Naked plaster Venus
starts from her washstand
confusing me for a puzzled
god in her angled mirror.

Rubber-tube-pierced
acrylic globes float
in blood-flecked oil
slowly filling each tube.

A mounted knight droops
in despair counseled
by a thick-lipped goat
skittering on the butt of his lance.

Numbers and dismembered
limbs flung across
a rectangular blank answers
faith with intimation.

At the center of all this,
the upturned face of a man
seen, from the right side,
earnestly seeking

what he hasn't made up
his mind about already,
upper lip a smooth
half-smile of vision,

from the left side, a sinner's
mask, dimpled where
two lips meet
tenderly in half-kiss,

then, face on, its
conflicts less resolved
than invisible, its mouth
a poem of pursed silence.

Thus confronted, I
place cold hands
upon that cold upturned
seeker's ghost made

black metal, my
thumbs on its pitted irises,
fingers in its ears, press
our foreheads together.

You, Rodin, read
the gallery thoughts of one
who is also the imprint
of thumbs in clay warm

with vigorous kneading; is
this the last exhaustion,
chapel of tortured beauty
prefiguring death?

I look, the guard
still gone, rap
the skull with my knuckles.
Rap again that ringing.

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Most of us have read or been obliged to read, by a high school English teacher or college professor, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Many have read the indelible story collection Dubliners. Hardly any of us have got past the first few chapters of Ulysses, let alone the entire book (even if it was crowned No. 1 in Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Novels back in 2003). But who among us has the intellectual fortitude (or masochistic compulsion) to get through all 628 pages of Joyce’s nearly impenetrable, nay, opaque final work, Finnegans Wake?

Don’t worry, I have no intention of suggesting you read a book I’ve never read myself, but there is a case to be made for everyone reading just the first chapter (the first 29 pages) of this work of fiction like no other.

I won’t try to tell you what it’s about because I couldn’t. I’ll let the scholars synopsize the unsynopsizable. The “story” seems utterly beside the point, at least to me. Finnegans Wake is an attempt to replicate dream in the form of language. To squeeze between two covers every trick, technique, and figure of speech in the English language — synecdoche, euphemism, metonymy, synesthesia, and the pun (especially!) to name only a few — into the creation of a linguistic equivalent of the hypnagogic state we all drift through on the verge of sleep. The portmanteau word is the coin of its realm, and the double (triple, quadruple, sextuple!) entendre is what it purchases for the reader. For example:

He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur. Wither hayre in honds tuck up your part inher. Oftwhile balbulous, mithre ahead, with goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularly fondseed, like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth he would caligulate by multiplicables the altitude and malltitude until he seesaw by neatlight of the liquor wheretwin ‘twas born, his roundhead staple of other days to rise in undress maisonry upstanded (joygrantit!), a waalworth of a skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly, erigenating from next to nothing and celescalating the himals and all, heirarchitectitiptitoploftical, with a burning bush abob off its baubletop and with larrons o’toolers clittering up and tumbles a’buckets clottering down.

Over the years I’ve read this passage dozens of times and still have only a vague notion of what it’s “about,” but it never fails to make me smile (in no small part because of its bawdy nature, I confess). Or this:

What then agentlike brought about that tragoady thundersday this municipal sin business? Our cubehouse still rocks as earwitness to the thunder of his arafatas but we hear also through successive ages that shabby choruysh of unkalified muzzlenimiissilehims that would blackguardise the whitestone ever hurtleturtled out of heaven. Stay us wherefore in our search for tighteousness, O Sustainer, what time we rise and when we take up to toothmick and before we lump down upown our leatherbed and in the night at the fading of the stars! For a nod to the nabir is better than wink to the wabsanti.

Wink, indeed. (If you have small children, try to get them to say “muzzlenimissilehims” or “heirarchitectitiptitoploftical” from the first example. My grown daughters still remember them!)

Probably the most descriptive word for this language is “poetry.” It’s certainly closer to poetry than prose, and its pleasures are more in the language than any narrative we could chisel out from beneath the words. And, here, I go out on a limb. It seems to me that the poetry in the first chapter is more compelling than in later chapters (at least those I’ve read), except perhaps for the famous (relatively) Anna Livia Plurabelle section. Here are a few lines quoted at random from later in the book:

But now, talking of hayastdanars and wolkingology and how our seaborn isle came into exestuance, (the explutor, his three adesiters and the two pantellarias) that reminds me about the manausteriums of the poor Marcus of Lyons and poor Johnny, the patrician, and what do you think of the four of us and there they were now, listening right enough, the four saltwater widowers, and all they could remembore, long long ago in the olden times Momonian, throw darker hour sorrows, the princest day, when Fair Gargrate waited Swede Villem, and Lally in the rain, with the plank prints, now extincts, after the wreak of Wormans’ Noe, the barmaisigheds, when my heart knew no care,…

Maybe it’s just me, but where the first two passages seem prism-like, the latter just seems cloudy — Joyce muttering to himself. I offer the comparison simply as further rationale (my own and only mine, for sure) why it’s okay to read just the first chapter, instead of the whole book.

While just a little of Finnegans Wake goes a long way, you shouldn’t deprive yourself of the experience. Because that’s what it is, an experience sui generis.



Other recommended works: Stephen Hero (an early draft of the Portrait), Exiles (a play), and "The Dead" (the long concluding story in Dubliners).

Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

It’s always puzzled me that, at least in some forums, Joseph Conrad is seen as an adventure story writer, as though he wrote for teenage boys. Admittedly, some of his long stories like Youth, Nigger of the Narcissus, and Typhoon have incredible scenes of high adventure and action, but even these are great works of literature. His The Secret Agent, too, with a title that suggests all the elements that go with the spy genre, will surprise, but hardly disappoint, anyone picking it up for an enjoyable read.

Joseph Conrad was born in Poland in 1857 and didn’t learn to speak English fluently until in his twenties. Like Vladimir Nabokov, for whom English was a second language as well, Conrad became one of the great master stylists in our language. Most of his novels take place on or near the high seas, with The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes being more political and European in nature.

It’s full title being The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, the book is hardly simple in either plot or character. It is set in London, 1886, at a time of great political upheaval, when anarchists and revolutionaries were a daily presence in the newspapers. The secret agent of the title is Adolf Verloc, a shop owner who sells pornography and bric a brac, and who is secretly employed as an agent provocateur by a foreign country, probably Russia. He is evidently not the most adept in the techniques of anarchy and, at a meeting with his handler, a Mr. Vladimir, he is given one last chance to prove himself worth his fee by bombing the Greenwich Observatory.

The features of Mr. Vladimir, so well known in the best society by their humorous urbanity, beamed with cynical self-satifaction, which would have astonished the intelligent women his wit entertained so exquisitely. “Yes,” he continued, with a contemptuous smile, “The blowing up of the first meridian is bound to raise a howl of execration.”

“A difficult business,” Mr. Verloc mumbled, feeling that this was the only safe thing to say.

“What is the matter? Haven’t you the whole gang under your hand, the very pick of the basket? That old terrorist Yundt is here. I see him walking about Piccadilly in his green havelock almost every day.”

—-

“It will cost money,” Mr. Verloc said, by a sort of instinct.

“That cock won’t fight,” Mr. Vladimir retorted, with an amazingly genuine English accent. “You’ll get your screw every month, and no more, until something happens. And if nothing happens very soon, you won’t get even that . . . . A dynamite outrage must be provoked. I give you a month.”

Verloc’s pathetic life revolves around a group of ineffectual anarchists (just referred to) who publish and distribute pamphlets called “The Future of the Proletariat”, and his family, including his wife and, most importantly, his brother-in-law Stevie who suffers from a mental disease characterized by extreme excitability.

After his meeting with Mr. Vladimir, Verloc meets with his anarchist friends, who include The Professor, who is always in possession of a powerful bomb the mere pushing of a button on which would blow him and his surroundings up. Stevie overhears their sinister conversation and is deeply disturbed. As the bomb plot progresses Verloc is unable to keep his family uninvolved in his dangerous activities.

In addition to being compelling, even thrilling at times, The Secret Agent also has a unique structure. It’s written like a linked chain, with each scene linked to the next by a single character’s perceptions, with the person changing from scene to scene. In this way, the author suggests the tenuous nature of a world in which murder and deception can infect every other aspect of life, destroying not only the intended victim, but damaging or destroying everyone else who has come into contact with both murderer and the murdered.

To reveal any more of the plot would deprive the reader, since one of the great accomplishments of the book is the manner in which each scene builds from the previous one. But, it gives nothing away to say that a bomb does go off and the consequences are devastating for all involved.

Though published in 1907, The Secret Agent reads like it was written yesterday. It’s not surprising that it is one of the novels most mentioned in connection with 9/11 and its aftermath, and the war in Iraq. As great novels always do, it takes a specific place and time, great characters and a deeply important theme, and makes of them timeless art.

Other recommended works: Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, “The Secret Sharer” (one of the most anthologized short stories ever written), Victory, and Chance.

Thomas Mann’s "Death in Venice"

Evidence of its being possibly the finest novella of the 20th century, Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice has inspired more than a few offshoots: the gorgeous, haunting Visconti movie (with music of Gustav Mahler), the Benjamin Britten opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2007 presentation of the ballet by John Neumeier, Robert Coover’s fantastical Pinocchio in Venice, most recently Geoff Dyer’s novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varansari, plus various graphic novels and even murder mystery spin-offs.

Within the first few pages, you know you’re reading something special. Gustave von Aschenbach is a famous author, well into middle age, whose nerves are beginning to fray from overwork. On an afternoon walk near a cemetery in Munich, he encounters a stranger.

(Aschenbach) was brought back to reality by the sight of a man standing in the portico, above the two apocalyptic beasts that guarded the staircase, and something not quite usual in this man’s appearance gave his thoughts a fresh turn . . . . He was of medium height, thin, beardless, and strikingly snub-nosed; he belonged to the red-haired type and possessed its milky, freckled skin . . . and the broad, straight-brimmed hat he had on made him look distinctly exotic . . . . In his right hand, slantwise to the ground, he held an iron-shod stick, and braced himself against its crook, with his legs crossed. His chin was up. So that the Adam’s apple looked very bald in the lean neck rising from the loose shirt: and he stood there sharply peering up into space out of colourless, red-lashed eyes, while two pronounced perpendicular furrows showed on his forehead in curious contrast to his little turned-up nose . . . . the man had a bold and domineering, even a ruthless, air, and his lips completed the picture by seeming to curl back, either by reason of some deformity or else because he grimaced, being blinded by the sun in his face; they laid bare the long, white, glistening teeth to the gums.

Leaving his gaze a bit too long on the face of the stranger — an apparition of Death, or the Devil? — Aschenbach receives a hostile gaze in return. He blinks first and walks away, feeling strangely “a widening of inward barriers, a kind of vaulting unrest, a youthfully ardent thirst for distant scenes,” and this singular moment inspires Aschenbach soon to take a vacation to the perennially romantic city of Venice.

From the moment of his arrival there, he encounters images to warn him of what is to come — an old man, made up to look younger, trying pathetically to fit in with a group of young men, and another red-haired stranger, an unlicensed gondolier, who would steer him astray.

The fate he is being drawn into he encounters at his hotel, the famous Lido. He is immediately smitten by the young son of a Polish family, dressed in a sailor suit.

Aschenbach noticed with astonishment the lad’s perfect beauty. His face recalled the noblest moment of Greek sculpture — pale, with a sweet reserve, with clustering honey-coloured ringlets, the brow and nose descending in one line, the winning mouth, the expression of pure and godlike serenity. Yet with all this chaste perfection of form it was of such unique personal charm that the observer thought he had never seen, either in nature or art, anything so utterly happy and consummate.

The consummate artist has encountered the perfect beauty. Unfortunately, for the aging widower, the beauty is both too young, and male.

The boy’s name is Tadzio and Aschenbach quickly rationalizes his interest in the boy in aesthetic and artistic terms.

The damp Venice air is hardly conducive to Aschenbach’s health and he decides to leave for healthier climes. A mix-up with his luggage finds him back at his hotel, resigned to staying — another rationalization. What begins as an artistic appreciation of the boy has turned into an obsession.

The novel follows the artist’s emotional and physical disintegration, leading him to increasingly depraved behavior, and eventually to his death, in the claustral atmosphere of a growing cholera epidemic.

Death in Venice is as perfect as a lovely, sad and disturbing dream, with multiple layers of meaning that cause it to resonate in the mind long after you’ve finished reading it — a book to read and reread with ever-increasing reward.

Other recommended works: The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years, Doctor Faustus, and the great short works, including Tonio Kruger, Mario and the Magician, Disorder and Early Sorrow, The Blood of the Walsungs, Tristan, and The Black Swan.

Nabokov's Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is more fun to read than just about any book I know. By “fun” I mean that it’s a lot more than funny, but, being a poem, plus a critical appraisal of a book (with copious footnotes), and a novel, all combined, it engages the reader — as one flips back and forth through its pages — in the same way a really great puzzle or a game does.

Pale Fire begins with a 999 line poem in four cantos written by John Shade, a famous American poet. It’s one of the most beautiful long poems in our language and begins with an unforgettable image:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff–and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate

Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass

Hang all the furniture above the grass,

And how delightful when a fall of snow

Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so

As to make chair and bed exactly stand

Upon that snow, out in that crystal land.

The striking description here of the tricks of perception a mirroring window can inflict on the eye and the mind will mirror many of the literary deceptions contained in the novel.

The poem is autobiographical and centers on the apparent suicide of Shade’s daughter Hazel, and includes discussions of death and the afterlife, glimpses of his family and writing life, and culminates with a rumination on the power of poetry to help us comprehend life and the miracle of our universe.

This beautiful, touching, and somewhat serious poem is followed by a supposed “Foreward” and “Commentary” written by Charles Kinbote, the poet’s neighbor and, Kinbote would have us believe, Shade’s closest confidant and literary executor. The Commentary is in the form of notes to lines in the poem, though each note will take us absurdly beyond the poem itself into the funhouse of Kinbote’s mind. Here’s the entry on the unexceptional word “often” in line 62:

Often, almost nightly, throughout the spring of 1959, I had feared for my life. Solitude is the playfield of Satan. I cannot describe the depths of my loneliness and distress. There was naturally my famous neighbor just across the lane, and at one time I took in a dissipated young roomer (who generally came home after midnight). Yet I wish to stress that cold hard core of loneliness which is not good for a displaced soul . . . . I kept moving from window to window, my silk nightcap drenched with sweat, my bared breast a thawing pond, and sometimes, armed with the judge’s shotgun, I dared beard the terrors of the terrace.

What the hell, the reader will ask, does any of that have to do with John Shade’s poem?

Is Kinbote mad? He may well have been Shade’s friend, but that’s drawn into question with his implicit confession that he is also Charles Xavier Vseslav, or Charles II, the deposed King of Zembla (think “semblance”), a “distant northern land”, and the target of Soviet-styled revolutionaries who may have mistakenly murdered Shade in an assassination attempt on Kinbote.

Kinbote would also have us believe that most of the credit due for Shade’s poem should go to Kinbote himself, for the inspiration he provided during long walks the two took at the time of its composition. The evidence he points to in the poem however is slim, even tortured.

Ultimately, Kinbote suggests that the poem is really entirely about himself. His note to lines 939 and 940 — ”Man’s life is a commentary to abstruse/ unfinished poem. Note for further use.” — reads, “If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.” In reality, according to Kinbote, it’s not Shade’s poem, but Kinbote’s commentary, that is important. This is Pale Fire in a nutshell, and one of Nabokov’s biggest winks in the book.

Among other things, Pale Fire is a riotous satirical commentary on literary criticism, particularly the kind that focuses overmuch on the author’s life and not sufficiently on the work — the text — itself. The book also includes extensive footnotes at the end, which provide their own funhouse moments as you follow the breadcrumb trail they leave throughout the book.

Pale Fire may not be as scintillating or sexy as Lolita or Ada: or Ardor, nor as outright funny as some of Nabokov’s earlier novels written in Russian and set in Germany, but, if you’re willing to have your assumptions about what is entertaining, funny, and beautifully written turned upside down, and to enjoy a novel unlike anything else you’ve ever read, you’ll fall in love with Pale Fire.

Other recommended works: Ada: or Ardor, The Defense, Lolita (of course), Despair, Laughter in the Dark, and The Collected Short Stories.