Why Scott—you poor miserable bastard, it was damn handsome of you to write me. Had just heard about your shoulder and was on the edge of writing when I got your letter. Must be damned painful and annoying. Let us know how you are. Katy sends love and condolences. We often talk about you and wish we could get to see you.
I’ve been wanting to see you, naturally, to argue about your Esquire articles [The Crack-Up]—Christ, man, how do you find time in the middle of the general conflagration to worry about all that stuff? If you don’t want to do stuff on your own, why not get a reporting job somewhere. After all not many people write as well as you do. Here you’ve gone and spent forty years in perfecting an elegant and complicated piece of machinery (tool I was going to say) and the next forty years is the time to use it—or as long as the murderous forces of history will let you. God damn it, I feel frightful myself—I have that false Etruscan feeling of sitting on my tail at home while etcetera etcetera is on the march to Rome —but I have two things laid out I want to finish up and I’m trying to take a course in American history and most of the time the course of world events seems so frightful that I feel absolutely paralysed—and the feeling that I’ve got to hurry to get stuff out before the big boys close down on us. We’re living in one of the damnedest tragic moments in history—if you want to go to pieces I think it’s absolutely O. K. but I think you ought to write a first rate novel about it (and you probably will) instead of spilling it in little pieces for Arnold Gingrich—and anyway, in pieces or not, I wish I could get an hour’s talk with you now and then, Scott, and damn sorry about the shoulder. Forgive the locker room peptalk.
Yrs, Dos.
(1936; republished in New Directions’ edition of The Crack-Up).
Got into this a bit the other day. Last year, a reader sent me a copy of Ehrlich’s The Future of Ice, which was nice, but I could never really get into it. Anyway, like the cover on this one. Blurb from publisher Pantheon (you can also read an excerpt here):
From one of the preeminent and most admired observers of the natural world, a heartrending and inspirational portrait of Japan after the 2011 tsunami, when survivors found their world utterly transformed by loss, grief, destruction, and the urgent need to reconstruct their homes, their towns, and their lives.
A passionate student of Japanese poetry, theater, and art for much of her life, Gretel Ehrlich felt compelled to return to the earthquake-and-tsunami-devastated Tohoku coast to bear witness, listen to survivors, and experience their terror and exhilaration in villages and towns where all shelter and hope seemed lost. In an eloquent narrative that blends strong reportage, poetic observation, and deeply felt reflection, she takes us into the upside-down world of northeastern Japan, where nothing is certain and where the boundaries between living and dying have been erased by water.
The stories of rice farmers, monks, and wanderers; of fishermen who drove their boats up the steep wall of the wave; and of an eighty-four-year-old geisha who survived the tsunami to hand down a song that only she still remembered are both harrowing and inspirational. Facing death, facing life, and coming to terms with impermanence are equally compelling in a landscape of surreal desolation, as the ghostly specter of Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear power complex, spews radiation into the ocean and air. Facing the Wave is a testament to the buoyancy, spirit, humor, and strong-mindedness of those who must find their way in a suddenly shattered world.
“Bed-Books and Night-Lights” — H.M. Tomlinson
The rain flashed across the midnight window with a myriad feet. There was a groan in outer darkness, the voice of all nameless dreads. The nervous candle-flame shuddered by my bedside. The groaning rose to a shriek, and the little flame jumped in a panic, and nearly left its white column. Out of the corners of the room swarmed the released shadows. Black specters danced in ecstasy over my bed. I love fresh air, but I cannot allow it to slay the shining and delicate body of my little friend the candle-flame, the comrade who ventures with me into the solitudes beyond midnight. I shut the window.
They talk of the candle-power of an electric bulb. What do they mean? It cannot have the faintest glimmer of the real power of my candle. It would be as right to express, in the same inverted and foolish comparison, the worth of “those delicate sisters, the Pleiades.” That pinch of star dust, the Pleiades, exquisitely remote in deepest night, in the profound where light all but fails, has not the power of a sulphur match; yet, still apprehensive to the mind though tremulous on the limit of vision, and sometimes even vanishing, it brings into distinction those distant and difficult hints—hidden far behind all our verified thoughts—which we rarely properly view. I should like to know of any great arc-lamp which could do that. So the star-like candle for me. No other light follows so intimately an author’s most ghostly suggestion. We sit, the candle and I, in the midst of the shades we are conquering, and sometimes look up from the lucent page to contemplate the dark hosts of the enemy with a smile before they overwhelm us; as they will, of course. Like me, the candle is mortal; it will burn out.
As the bed-book itself should be a sort of night-light, to assist its illumination, coarse lamps are useless. They would douse the book. The light for such a book must accord with it. It must be, like the book, a limited, personal, mellow, and companionable glow; the solitary taper beside the only worshiper in a sanctuary. That is why nothing can compare with the intimacy of candle-light for a bed-book. It is a living heart, bright and warm in central night, burning for us alone, holding the gaunt and towering shadows at bay. There the monstrous specters stand in our midnight room, the advance guard of the darkness of the world, held off by our valiant little glim, but ready to flood instantly and founder us in original gloom.
The wind moans without; ancient evils are at large and wandering in torment. The rain shrieks across the window. For a moment, for just a moment, the sentinel candle is shaken, and burns blue with terror. The shadows leap out instantly. The little flame recovers, and merely looks at its foe the darkness, and back to its own place goes the old enemy of light and man. The candle for me, tiny, mortal, warm, and brave, a golden lily on a silver stem!
“Almost any book does for a bed-book,” a woman once said to me. I nearly replied in a hurry that almost any woman would do for a wife; but that is not the way to bring people to conviction of sin. Her idea was that the bed-book is soporific, and for that reason she even advocated the reading of political speeches. That would be a dissolute act. Certainly you would go to sleep; but in what a frame of mind! You would enter into sleep with your eyes shut. It would be like dying, not only unshriven, but in the act of guilt. Continue reading ““Bed-Books and Night-Lights” — H.M. Tomlinson”
When David Malouf’s little hardback essay The Happy Life showed up late last year to Biblioklept World Headquarters, I’ll admit to grimacing a bit. I judge books by their covers, their appearance, their size, and frankly Malouf’s little book, with its smallish dimensions and hokey subtitle seemed to scream “self-help/gift book.” And oh the emoticon!
But before I do these “Books Acquired” I always take the time to sample the prose a bit. Here’s what happened with Malouf: I kept reading. Malouf snagged me into doing a thought experiment on the first page (“Think of a medieval farmer as he struggled to keep body and soul together”), an exercise that quickly led to citations from Solzhenitsyn, Montaigne, and Sir Henry Wotton—before posing the book’s central questions:
The question that arises is not so much ‘How should we live if we want to be happy?’ but how is it, when the chief sources of human unhappiness, of misery and wretchedness, have largely been removed from our lives—large-scale social injustice, famine, plague and other diseases, the near-certainty of an early death—that happiness still eludes so many of us? What have we succumbed to or failed to do that might have helped us? What is it in us, or in the world we have created, that continues to hold us back?
First World Problems! Seriously though, Malouf seems aware of the simple answer to these questions—it’s impossible and likely dangerous to be happy all the time; what he really seems concerned about are the paradigms and ideologies and systems—government, media, corpocracy, pick your poison—that create impositions of happiness as a kind of ideal. As such, Malouf returns again and again to Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” along with Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He ends his long essay with a discussion of Solzhenisyn’s Shukov, “an unlikely example of the happy man.” And through this storytelling, we can find a moment of stabilizing happiness too:
Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.
Shukhov is not happy because he has solved the problem of ‘how to live’ —the live he lives is too provisional, too makeshift for that. Or because, as the classical schools would have put it, he has achieved quite self-containment, self-sufficiency. Quite the opposite.
What he achieves, briefly, intermittently, is moments of self-fulfillment, something different and more accessible, more democratic we might call it, than self-containment. But he achieves it only at moments.
He is happynow—who can know what tomorrow or the day after will do to him? He is happy within limits—and this may be a clue to what makes happiness possible for him, or for any of us.
There’s nothing really radical about this thesis—that we can claim agency to our own happiness by choosing to measure it in small units—but the way that Malouf reaches it is pleasurable to follow and intellectually engaging. I hope that some suckers judge this book by its cover, pick it up in the hopes of buying a map to contentment, and then stick around for Malouf’s journey through literature, philosophy, art, and history. Good stuff.
The Happy Life is new in hardback from Pantheon.
Infidelity, a screenplay by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Waldorf Roof after the theatre on a gala night: A well-dressed crowd, two bands, a floor show.
Camera picks up two men in tailcoats at a table near the door. One of them is trim and elderly. The other has wild, rumpled hair. They have dropped in for a quick drink and their top hats sit on the table before them. Both hold opera glasses to their eyes, through which they rather unsteadily observe the crowd.
Camera shoots between them at the crowd.
GREY HAIR: Table beside the bass drum.
RUMPLED HAIR (moving his opera glasses): I’ve got it.
GREY HAIR: What do you say?
RUMPLED HAIR: Let me concentrate.
A blurred dose shot of a table across the room seen through a frame shaped like this [sign] OO to suggest open glasses. The blur dears to show two young people leaning ecstatically over: the table toward each other.
The observers’table.
RUMPLED HAIR: I say, engaged.
GREY HAIR: Sure. Now the couple on their right.
Camera, acting as opera glasses, pans to a dull couple of thirty, utterly bored, staring for amusement anywhere bur at each other. Accidently, their eyes meet with a glazed expression and, as if startled, hastily seek other focuses.
GREY HAIR’S VOICE: Married.
RUMPLED HAIR’S VOICE: That’s too easy.
Camera, as opera-glasses, pans gain to the right, picking up a devoted couple of thirty-five, happy; at ease with each other, interested in what’s outside because they are seeing it together.
RUMPLED HAIR’S VOICE: Married?
GREY HAIR’S VOICE: Yes. (Pause.) Lucky devils.
Camera, as opera glasses, pans left, picking up another couple. The girl is talking earnestly, passionately to the man. The man is listening, his mouth moving uneasily. Once his eyes wander quickly from side to side, then back to her. Her eyes have swayed slightly with his.
GREY HAIR’S VOICE: Cheating.
The observers’table: Both men lower their opera-glasses, laughing. Continue reading “Infidelity, A Screenplay by F. Scott Fitgerald”
Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:—through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
From “The Glider,” Chapter 114 of Melville’s Moby-Dick.
Conjure up some last-minute romance. In the appendix to her collection of Florida folktales, Mules and Men, author Zora Neale Hurston offers up a host of Hoodoo, including the following love spells:
TO MAKE A MAN COME HOME
Take nine deep red or pink candles. Write his name three times on each candle. Wash the candles with Van-Van. Put the name three times on paper and place under the candles, and call the name of the party three times as the candle is placed at the hours of seven, nine or eleven.
TO MAKE PEOPLE LOVE YOU
Take nine lumps of starch, nine of sugar, nine teaspoons of steel dust. Wet it all with Jockey Club cologne. Take nine pieces of ribbon, blue, red or yellow. Take a dessertspoonful and put it on a piece of ribbon and tie it in a bag. As each fold is gathered together call his name. As you wrap it with yellow thread call his name till you finish. Make nine bags and place them under a rug, behind an armoire, under a step or over a door. They will love you and give you everything they can get. Distance makes no difference. Your mind is talking to his mind and nothing beats that.
TO BREAK UP A LOVE AFFAIR
Take nine needles, break each needle in three pieces. Write each person’s name three times on paper. Write one name backwards and one forwards and lay the broken needles on the paper. Take five black candles, four red and three green.
Tie a string across the door from it, suspend a large candle upside down, It will hang low on the door; bum one each day for one hour. If you burn your first in the daytime, keep on in the day; if at night, continue at night. A tin plate with paper and needles in it must be placed to catch wax in.
When the ninth day is finished, go out into the street and get some white or black dog dung. A dog only drops his dung in the street when he is running and barking, and whoever you curse will run and bark likewise. Put it in a bag with the paper and carry it to running water, and one of the parties will leave town.
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