Untitled, 2014 by Enzo Cucchi (b. 1949)
“Burke and Hare, Assassins”
by
Marcel Schwob
from Imaginary Lives
translated by Lorimer Hammond
Mr. William Burke rose from the meanest obscurity to eternal renown. Born in Ireland, he started life as a shoemaker, later practicing his trade for several years in Edinburgh where he made the acquaintance of Mr. Hare, on whom he had the greatest influence. In the collaboration of Messrs. Burke and Hare the inventive and analytic powers belonged, no doubt, to Mr. Burke, but their two names remain inseparable in art, as inseparable as the names of Beaumont and Fletcher. Together they lived, together they worked, and they were finally taken together. Mr. Hare never protested against the popular favour particularly attached to the person of Mr. Burke. Disinterestedness so complete seldom has its recompense. It was Mr. Burke who bequeathed his name to the special process that brought the two collaborators into fame. The monosyllable “Burke” will live long on the lips of men, while even now Hare’s personality seems to have disappeared into that oblivion which spreads unjustly over obscure labours.
Into his work Mr. Burke brought the faerie fancy of the green island where he was born. His soul was evidently steeped in old tales and folklore, and there was something like a far away, musty odour of the Arabian Nights in all he did. Like a caliph pacing a nocturnal garden in Baghdad, he desired mysterious adventures, curious for the glamour of strange people and unknown things.
Like a huge black slave armed with a heavy scimitar, he found for his voluptuousness no more fitting conclusion than the death of others, but his Anglo-Saxon originality led him to succeed in drawing the most practical ends from his fanciful Celtic prowlings. When his artistic joy is sated what does the black slave do with his headless carcasses? With barbarity entirely Arab, he slices them into quarters and salts them down in the cellar. What good does he get from that? Nothing. Mr. Burke was infinitely superior.
Somehow Mr. Hare served him as a sort of Dinarzade. It seemed as if the inventive powers of Mr. Burke were especially excited by the presence of his friend. The broad illusion of their dream permitted them to lodge their most pompous visions in a garret. Mr. Hare had a small chamber on the sixth floor of a tall house filled very full of Edinburghers. A sofa, a large desk and several toilet utensils were undoubtedly all the furnishings, including a bottle of whisky with three glasses on a little table. It was Mr. Burke’s rule to invite some passerby at nightfall, but he never received more than one at a time and never twice the same. He would walk through the streets examining all faces that piqued his curiosity. Frequently he chose at random, addressing the stranger with as much politeness as one could ask of a Haroun al Raschid.
The stranger would then stumble up six flights of stairs to Mr. Hare’s garret where they gave him the sofa and offered him Scotch whisky to drink. Then Mr. Burke would ask him about the most surprising incidents of his life. He was an insatiable listener, was Mr. Burke. The stranger’s recital was always interrupted before daybreak by Mr. Hare, whose manner of interrupting was invariably the same and very impressive. He had a habit of passing behind the sofa and putting his hands over the speaker’s mouth while Mr. Burke would suddenly sit down on the gentleman’s chest at the same moment. The two of them would remain thus, motionless, imagining the conclusion they never heard. In this manner Messrs. Burke and Hare terminated a large number of histories the world has never learned. When the tale was definitely stopped with the suffocation of the teller, they would explore the mystery, stripping the unknown man, admiring his jewelry, counting his money, reading his letters. Certain items of correspondence were often not without interest. Then they would lay the corpse away to cool in Mr. Hare’s big desk.
And now Mr. Burke would demonstrate the practical force of his genius. To waste none of the adventure’s pleasure, he held that the body should be fresh but not warm.
In the first years of the nineteenth century medical students had a passion for anatomy, though religious prejudices made it difficult for them to secure subjects for dissection. Mr. Burke’s clear mind had taken note of this scientific dilemma. No one knows how he first established an alliance with that venerable and learned practitioner, Dr. Knox, of the faculty of Edinburgh. Perhaps Mr. Burke had followed his public lectures in spite of the fact that his imagination inclined rather to artistic things. It is certain, however, that he promised to aid Dr. Knox as best he could, and that Dr. Knox agreed to pay him for his pains. The scale of prices varied, declining from the choice corpses of young men to the less desirable remains of the aged. The latter interested Dr. Knox only moderately and Mr. Burke held the same opinion, for old men, he claimed, always had less imagination. Dr. Knox came to be known among his colleagues for his splendid knowledge of anatomy. This dilettante life, led so enjoyably by Messrs. Burke and Hare, brought them to what was certainly the classic period of their career.
For the power of Mr. Burke’s genius soon led him beyond rules and regulations of a tragedy in which he had always a story to listen to and a confidence to keep. Alone he progressed (it is useless to consider the influence of Mr. Hare) towards a sort of romanticism. No longer satisfied with the setting provided by Mr. Hare’s garret, he invented a procedure to make use of the nocturnal fogs.
Numerous imitators have somewhat sullied the originality of his manner, but here is the veritable tradition of the master.
Mr. Burke’s fertile imagination had grown weary of tales eternally reverting to human experiences. The result never equaled his expectation. So he came at last to value only the actual aspect of death… for him unfailingly varied.
He concentrated his drama in the dénouement. The quality of the actors no longer mattered; he trained them at random, and his only property of the theatre was a canvas mask filled with pitch. Mask in hand, he would walk out on foggy nights accompanied by Mr. Hare. Approaching the first individual who chanced to pass, he would walk a few steps in front, then turn and place the mask quickly and firmly over the subject’s face. Immediately Messrs. Burke and Hare would grasp the arms of their actor, one on each side. The mask full of pitch presented simply a genial instrument for stifling cries and strangling. It was tragic. The fog muffled the gestures of the rôle and softened them. Some of the actors seemed to mimic drunken men. This short scene over, Messrs. Burke and Hare would take a cab in which they would disrobe their guest, Mr. Hare caring for the costumes while Mr. Burke delivered the cadaver fresh and clean to Dr. Knox.
Unlike most biographers it is here I leave Messrs. Burke and Hare, at the peak of their glory.
Why destroy such an artistic effect by requiring them to languish along to the end of their lives, revealing their defects and their deceptions? We need only remember them, mask in hand, walking abroad on foggy nights. For their end was sordid like so many others. One of them, it appears, was hanged and Dr. Knox was forced to quit Edinburgh.
Mr. Burke left no other works.
The Disappeared, 1988 by Ken Unsworth (b. 1931)
The Night Heron, 1935 by Lionel Lindsay (1874-1961)
Reputed Fair, 2023 by Jesse Mockrin (b. 1981)
From New Mutants #25, 1985 by Bill Sienkiewicz and Chris Claremont
I kinda sorta lost a big chunk of May this year, and some of the books that arrived at Biblioklept World Headquarters slipped through the cracks. Here, the cliche slipped through the cracks means got piled up in the wrong pile. Ainsley Morse’s and Geoff Cebula’s translation of Konstantin Vaginov’s Goat Song was one of these slipped-crack-wrong-pile titles. The volume actually collects two short novels by Vaginov: Goat Song, and Works and Days of Whistlin. Publisher NYRB’s blurb:
Konstantin Vaginov was an early and exemplary figure of Soviet modernist writing in all its agonized and glorious contradictions. Born into an educated middle-class family, Vaginov came of age with the Revolution. His novels of the late 1920s and early ’30s are daringly experimental and tragically nostalgic, using mercilessly ironic prose to mourn the loss of prerevolutionary intellectual culture. Adrift in the brave new Soviet world, Vaginov’s protagonists attempt to conjure the recent and distant past by stockpiling old books and songs, vulgar baubles and bad jokes, newspaper clippings, coins, and graffiti.
This volume contains two novels: Goat Song features thinly veiled portraits of Vaginov’s contemporaries as they flounder and self-destruct in their new bracingly materialist circumstances. Echoing Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Bely, Goat Song is both a classic Petersburg city text and its swan song: “Now there is no Petersburg . . . the author is a coffin-maker by trade, not a cradle expert.”
Works and Days of Whistlin follows the novelist Whistlin as he unscrupulously mines the lives of his friends and fellow citizens for literary material. His exploitation of human material is a wry commentary on the concurrent efforts to industrialize and collectivize the Soviet economy, at a horrific human cost.
The Cake Woman, 2004 by Paula Rego (1935–2022)
The Essential James Joyce, 1948, ed. Harry Levin. Penguin Books (1969). Cover art by Jacques Emile Blanche; photographed by John Freeman. 550 pages.
I found this book on the street in Shin-Kōenji, the neighborhood I lived in in Tokyo twenty-five years ago. It was, if I recall, stacked on top of a pile of pornographic manga. I may have taken those as well. Happy Bloomsday!
“Fathers”
by
Grace Paley
Fathers are
more fathering
these days they have
accomplished this by
being more mothering
what luck for them that
women’s lib happened then
the dream of new fathering
began to shine in the eyes
of free women and was irresistible
on the New York subways
and the mass transits
of other cities one may
see fatherings of many colors
with their round babies on
their laps this may also
happen in the countryside
these scenes were brand new
exciting for an old woman who
had watched the old fathers
gathering once again in
familiar army camps and com-
fortable war rooms to consider
the necessary eradication of
the new fathering fathers
(who are their sons) as well
as the women and children who
will surely be in the way.
From Moebius’s illustrations for Robert Bloch’s Contes de Terreur, 1975; reprinted in Metallic Memories, 1992.
Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 1613 by Cristofano Allori (1577–1621)
NYRB is publishing new English language translations of works by Henrik Pontoppidan. The big boy is Pontoppidan’s opus A Fortunate Man; the much-slimmer The White Bear actually collects two novellas, The White Bear and The Rearguard. All three translations are the effort of Paul Larkin.
NYRB’s copy for The White Bear
The White Bear follows the fate of the odd, gangly, red-bearded Thorkild Müller. Born in rural Jutland and destined for the ministry, Thorkild proves to be a poor student and is assigned to a remote Inuit tribe in Greenland. There, with his mythic-looking staff and dogskin skullcap, he becomes known as the White Bear—a beloved legend among the locals and a freewheeling embarrassment to his fellow priests. Grown old, he returns to Denmark, where again his flock adores him while his fellow men of cloth try to tame the “whirling dervish in their midst.” In the end Thorkild mysteriously disappears, presumably back to the snow wilderness of Greenland.
And The Rearguard:
The Rearguard, on the other hand, is a marriage story. Newlyweds Jørgen Hallager and Ursula Branth are as different as night and day. The brash son of a poor village teacher, Jørgen is an avowed socialist whose revolutionary beliefs translate into his work as a painter of social realism; Ursula comes from a conservative, upper-middle-class family. At first, as they start their married life in Rome, they each try to change the other’s worldview with arguments and threats, but as time wears on and they wear each other down, it becomes clear there can be no reconciliation. It is a tragic tale of art and idealism, individuality and love.
And the big guy:
A Fortunate Man tells the story of Per Sidenius, a Lutheran pastor’s son who revolts against his family and flees the backwaters of Jutland for Copenhagen. Per is handsome, ambitious, and hungry for the technological future of the twentieth century. He studies engineering and draws up plans for a new port and new canals, for harnessing wind and wave energy to transform Denmark into a commercial giant. Fully persuaded of his own genius, Per first repels and then attracts Jakobe Salomon, a young Jewish woman whose family is eager to underwrite his plans. They fall in love and get engaged; gradually Jakobe opens Per’s eyes to the wider world. Meanwhile, he also falls under the spell of Dr. Nathan, a popular philosopher who rails against the conservative powers that be. But ultimately these powers win out, Per’s relationship with Jakobe founders, and he goes home to Jutland and marries a pastor’s daughter. Though fortunate, he is never happy.One of the last great nineteenth-century novels and Henrik Pontoppidan’s masterpiece, A Fortunate Man anatomizes and skewers Danish society, from the small towns to the metropolis. Paul Larkin’s dazzing translation brings out the wide range and full force of a novel admired by Georg Lukács and praised by Ernst Bloch as “one of the foundational texts of world literature.”
But in the white culture outside, in that creepy world full of precardiac Mustang drivers who scream insults at one another only when the windows are up; of large corporations where Niceguymanship is the standing order regardless of whose executive back one may be endeavoring to stab; of an enormous priest caste of shrinks who counsel moderation and compromise as the answer to all forms of hassle; among so much well-behaved unreality, it is next to impossible to understand how Watts may truly feel about violence. In terms of strict reality, violence may be a means to getting money, for example, no more dishonest than collecting exorbitant carrying charges from a customer on relief, as white merchants here still do. Far from a sickness, violence may be an attempt to communicate, or to be who you really are.
From “A Journey Into The Mind of Watts,” 1966 by Thomas Pynchon.
(Click to enlarge.)
“Togetherness,” by Thomas Pynchon was published in the vol. 16, no. 12 issue of Aerospace Safety in December 1960. The byline reads “Thomas H. Pynchon” (for Huggles, presumably).
Full text of the article here (for completists only, of course).
Biblioklept 