Return to Park Hall (Part Four): "Rituals"

One year when I was an undergrad at UGA, I looked through the English Department’s course offerings and asked, “Where’s the Kafka?”   I remembered reading “A Hunger Artist” in high school and being absolutely tickled and I looked forward to reading more of his work in college.  What I learned, however, was that for the UGA English Department literature did not include translated literature.  For a text to come under the aegis of the English Department, it had to have been composed in English.   If I wanted more Kafka I would have to sign up for courses in an entirely different department, Comparative Literature, also in Park Hall, but its own little domain.  In the basement.  That’s where Kafka and Goethe and Cervantes and Flaubert lived.  

So I took the two sophomore surveys in Comparative Literature.   The second one, the “19th Century  to the present” segment, was taught by a visiting professor from Belgium.  I honestly cannot remember his name and don’t know how I would find out today what it was.  Let’s call him Dr.  Wouters.  The most generic Belgian name I can think of.    He was a nice enough fellow.  He took the whole class to O’Malley’s on a spring day near the end of the term.  In my mind’s eye I can see us on the deck over the river in that old mill repurposed for student boozing.  I vaguely recollect making an observation to him about something we had read.  We were probably on our second pitcher.   What I said was one of those observations that is so obvious that you might kid yourself that you’re saying something insightful but you’re really just trying to make an impression on the professor.  "Dr. Wouters" saw right through my pathetic attempt to play scholar and gave me an eye-rolling “Well, duh” sort of response.  A look that said, “They’d eat you alive in Ghent, Bubba.”   My recollection is that he probably found us a disappointing bunch as a whole.  I could imagine the pitch that had been made to him to lure him to Athens, some UGA Comp Lit honcho on a transatlantic call saying, “Oh yes, you’ll have our cream of the crop, hand-picked students”, with his fingers firmly crossed.

One of the books “Dr. Wouters” assigned us was a fairly new novel, Rituals, by the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom.   It had been published to much acclaim in 1980 and translated into English in 1983.  When I embarked on this re-read project it was one of the first books I selected.  I still have my original copy of Rituals from that class, but there’s more to my choice.  I know a great deal more about Nooteboom’s country than I used to, thanks mostly to the Dutch roots of my wife and my in-laws.  In recent years I’ve read: Simon Schama’s incredible The Embarrassment of Riches, a survey of the many complexities of the Dutch Golden Age;  sportswriter Simon Kuper’s Ajax, the Dutch, the War, a demythologizing of the Dutch resistance during World War II; and Thrifty Years, the biography of Dutch immigrant retail giant Henrik Meijer.  Also I’ve been to Amsterdam and Haarlem and Utrecht.  I root for the Oranje.  I’ve had a frisbee confiscated in the Rijksmuseum.  I’ve got a picture of Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer on my classroom wall.  In short, I’m a little more invested in the Netherlands today than I was in 1985.  I was really anticipating something geweldig out of this particular rereading experience. 

To my disappointment but not to my surprise, what I discovered as I took up Rituals, is that I would not be rereading it.  I would be reading it.   I didn’t actually do the job the first time.  

Now “not doing the assigned reading and trying to get away with it” is a common experience in American schools and frequently a source of comedy.  At the memorial service of Athens musician Todd McBride one of his friends built his eulogy around the two of them bonding over faking book reports in high school, employing the classic method of watching the movie instead of reading the book.  They were ultimately busted when they identified “Jack Nicholson” as the narrative voice of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  

As anyone who has read Todd’s lyrics knows, he did OK as a writer - to say the least - without writing genuine book reports.  My case is different.  Moreover, I suppose not doing the reading becomes less funny if you’ve voluntarily enrolled in a class devoted to the study of literature and still try to get away with it.  But in those times my academic slovenliness was such that even in literature classes there were many times when necessity made me a most vigilant avoider of eye contact with the professor.   

I’m embarrassed to admit that, and what makes it even more embarrassing is that in my earliest classes at UGA I experienced a powerful rebuke to my laziness.  I took a couple of night courses.  They were taught in those bland, functional, fluorescently-lit classrooms in the journalism building.  One of the courses was U.S. History.   Night classes met less frequently, so they ran longer, a real challenge to the attention span of the typical undergraduate.  That’s what most of us were, enrolled not due to intellectual passion but because we were 18 or 19 and this was where we were supposed to be.  That was the apathetic vibe we gave off.  There were also two or three middle-aged women in that class.  I don’t know why they weren’t going to college until now – maybe they had started families young or they hadn’t had the money or they’d been hindered by old-fashioned gender expectations – but whatever the reason, it seemed to me that they were finally getting a chance to pursue something that had been denied them 20 years ago, they knew what they had been missing, and they were going after it the way a starving lion goes after an antelope.  They were relentlessly attentive.  They asked penetrating questions.  They got visibly annoyed when the professor ended class early.  Those ladies had waited a long time for this and they were going to get their by-god moneysworth!   

When you’ve been exposed to that kind of energy and you still don’t read the brand new novel assigned by a visiting professor, well, there’s not much to say for you.   But, as I say, it is not at all surprising to discover that I never really read Rituals.   That’s how I rolled in 1985.

This isn’t to say I was completely unengaged.  I played along a little.  I’ve got the receipts.  Or a couple of receipts, balled up in my pocket.  On page 30 of Rituals, 1985 me scribbled an annotation, a scraggly line from the word “madeleine” in the phrase “In this way the whiskey had become his madeleine” to a marginal note: “pg 75 anthology.”   The anthology must have featured an excerpt from Proust.  I probably didn’t read that, either.  I present this detail just to indicate that "Dr. Wouters" was doing his job even if I wasn’t doing mine.  I also had a vague recollection of a sex scene involving our hero, Inigo “Inni” Wintrop, with an adventurous young woman.  It was kind of reassuring to come across that scene and realize I hadn’t just imagined it.  It turns out that Inni meets a few willing young women and he has a lot of throwaway sex that he nevertheless ascribes meaning to.  Maybe “Nooteboom” is Dutch for “Updike.”  

Rituals is in three parts, arranged non-chronologically.   The first part is set in Amsterdam in 1963.  Inni is married to Zita, a native of Namibia.  Inni has a small independent income, but he also trades in art, writes a horoscope for an Amsterdam newspaper, and follows the markets.  Inni broods on his directionless life and aimless pursuit of pleasure: “Under all this outward ignorance brewed the soft ferment of unrest, despair, and malice” (much of Inni’s thinking I hear in the voice of Mike Myers playing Dieter Sprocket).  Inni and Zita are cheating on each other.  She leaves him for her photographer lover.  Inni attempts to kill himself, unsuccessfully.   Kennedy gets shot and Inni’s investments prosper.

Then we go back to 1953.   Inni is an orphaned teenager.  A day spent with the eccentric aunt who is responsible for him brings him into contact with Arnold Taads, “the loneliest man in the Netherlands”, a Sartre-reading, one-eyed, schedule-obsessed, misanthropic crank who regards his time spent with his dog Athos as a solitary fire warden in a remote part of Canada as the highlight of his life.  “I have never cared much for people," Arnold Taads tells Inni.  “Most of them are cowards, conformists, muddleheads, moneygrubbers, and they infect each other.”  Arnold nearly ruins a luncheon put on by Inni’s aunt by smugly arguing theology with a priest, but he does Inni a solid by shaming the aunt into granting him the small income he’s got coming to him.  Inni’s experience of Arnold Taads is brief – he hasn’t known him long when he learns that he froze to death in the Alps, probably on purpose.   

Then it is 1973.  We’re back in Amsterdam.  Inni is 40.  He has gotten over Zita and he’s on his way to sell some art to his friend Roozenboom.   On the way there he and a young woman witness the death of a dove.  They dispose of it.  Then they go to her place and have sex.  Why? Because Amsterdam.  Because 1973.  Because Updikean male novelist.  For an appraisal of one of the art pieces Roozenboom refers Inni to another dealer, one who specializes in Asian art.  There Inni encounters a peculiar man, another art enthusiast, who turns out to be (drum roll, please) Philip Taads, the son of old Arnold Taads!  Philip is half-Indonesian – Arnold had brought his mother back from the Dutch colony and then left them.  Inni learns that the two Taadses never met afterward.   Despite the brevity of his association with Arnold Taads, Inni has remained fascinated by him, so of course he is curious about the son.  Philip is definitely a chip off the old block, especially in his intellectualized, supremely alienated worldview.  When Philip says of his own death that it will merely be “an end to the bundle of circumstances that bore my name”, you can imagine old Arnold saying, “That’s my boy!”  Arnold’s great preoccupation, Inni learns, is the Japanese tea ceremony and its ritualistic formality.  He’s in search of a particular Raku bowl, a bowl of such transcendent perfection that it somehow seemed to have “created itself and ruled over itself and over anyone who looked at it.”   When Phillip finally obtains the bowl of his desires, at considerable expense, he invites Inni and their mutual art dealer friend to participate in the tea ceremony at the “homemade monastery” that is his apartment, afterwhich he destroys the bowl – the ritual demands it – and with nothing left to do, he drowns himself.   

Although I regret not having actually read Rituals the first time around, finally having read it leaves me wondering whether it would have been wasted on me the first time.  It is not that I could not have figured out everything I needed to for it to make sense, if I tried.  The world of the midcentury Netherlands would not have been too remote from my experience.  Reading it today it was nice to have first hand visual memories to connect to references to the Prinsengracht and other Amsterdam locations, but their absence in 1985 would not have been a real obstacle. The philosophical parts would have been hard, but not impossible.   I think I would have understood the troubled relationship of Taads Sr. and Jr. as an evocation of the Dutch colonial legacy.   Some of the religious references would have escaped me, such as Inni’s insertion of the eucharistic “Do this in remembrance of me” into his account of the tea ceremony, but even in my decidedly secular experience I would have understood something of what Nooteboom was up to in his merging of Christian and Japanese rituals (especially with Dr. Wouters’ help).   Around the same time I figured out all by myself that the broken pipe drama in Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet was an extended allusion to the Great Flood in Genesis.   Why should reading Rituals have been any different, other than that it would have required me to pay attention to something I didn’t much feel like paying attention to?

What I could not have really understood back then, I think, are the aspects of Inni’s life that that are especially resonant in the lives of people who have some age and experience on them.  In many ways this book is about the passage of time and how we experience it.  The most famous line in the book – maybe the most famous line of Nooteboom’s oeuvre – is from the first page of Rituals:  “Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases” (see above).  When you’ve lived long enough for that dog to have 5000 couches to lie down on, a book like this one will hit differently.  One section in particular spoke to my older self.  During the time when Inni is indulging his fascination with Phillip Taads, he has a realization about the extent to which total immersion is essential for one to deeply understand a sphere of life, the experiential demands that must be met if one is to get beyond mere dilettantism, and that the capacity to meet those demands might run out before you even know it is gone:

There were things one had to renounce, even if they were possible.  Now that he had reached the age of forty, he would never become a pianist or learn Japanese, he was sure of it.   And at the same time this certainty made him feel sad, as if life was at last beginning to makes its limitations clear, and death was in sight.   It was not true that all things were possible.  Perhaps all things had been possible, but they were no longer . . . You did not have a thousand lives.  You had only one.  

Good thing to know.  Those middle aged women in night school U.S. History knew it.  

 Next: Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes

 

"Lonesome Dove" is all the Westerns

 A few times I’ve taught a long term course called “Literature of the American West." The idea came from a comment I once read that something like 90% of the texts high school students study in a typical American Literature course come from east of the Mississippi River.  Based on my recollection of the textbooks I had taught from that imbalance rang true to me, so when we changed the arrangement of our overall literature curriculum and realized we needed to offer different flavors – so to speak – of American Literature, I began to offer Literature of the American West.   It's one of my favorite courses to teach, but I always feel a little insecure about it, as though it has to be legitimized – I assume people will think it is kid stuff pretending to gravitas, Hoss Cartwright displacing Hester Prynne.  Perhaps because of that course content insecurity, in Lit of the West I take care to deliver premium substance and approach it in a serious way:  All the Pretty Horses, True Grit, My Antonia, Little Big Man, True West, High Noon, and lots of talk about the Olympian cowboy and sacralization of gun violence and the national urge to self reinvention and the racist subtexts of Manifest Destiny.  Louise Erdrich and Joan Didion and Bass Reeves get time in the spotlight.  The Western itself is right up there with rock and roll as our most influential pop culture export (the "Bedouin Western" Theeb is a wonderful example).  It also provides a great case study in the evolution of a genre, from its most primitive Buffalo Bill manifestations to the classic to the adult to the revisionist.  

Of course Larry McMurtry is one of the indispensable names in that course.   I’ve read some of his work over the years, starting with a beautiful short essay on faith and mortality that ran in New Republic after the 1993 Waco disaster.  I’ve also read Horseman Pass By (the source material of the film Hud), The Last Picture Show, and his short biography of Crazy Horse.  In the early days of Lit of the West my students read McMurtry’s essay “Inventing the West”, partially because it is so brilliantly written but also because what he says about the role of media in creating our conception of the West becomes a kind of Rosetta Stone for our interpretation of Western American literature.   He writes, “In my view the main reason the Old West became so popular as entertainment was that the great engines of the media were well stoked before the actual settling was even half completed.”  To illustrate this point he shares a reputedly true story about Kit Carson. Late in life the famous tracker was engaged to locate some Apache raiders who had kidnapped a settler family.  Carson and the posse came too late – the family had been massacred by their desperate captors – but amid the debris of the murder scene Carson discovered something amazing: a dime novel about himself!  That moment is an almost-too-perfect encapsulation of the twisted partnership between the actual West and the created West, one of the core concepts I emphasize in our study of Western narratives.  

McMurtry was prolific, but of course the book his reputation will always rest on is Lonesome Dove, the epic that won him the 1985 Pulitzer Prize.   I have always avoided it and I am not ashamed to say why:  900 page books are not for me, I don’t care how good they are.  But for a few years now a voice in my head (with a Texas accent) has chided “Don’t be so such a tenderfoot, Pardner, you know it’s probably as great as everyone says it is."  Last month I finally saddled up and started Lonesome Dove.

It is as great as everyone says it is.  I won’t go into all the “whys” of its greatness, but I’m glad I didn’t try to read it until a couple of things happened to make me more open to what makes it special.  One is my reading last spring of Eliot West’s prize-winning history of the American West in the age of expansion, Continental Reckoning.  The proud Texan McMurtry knew ranches and horses and cowboys from extensive first-hand experience, but he was also a voracious critical reader of Western history.  That extensive knowledge, and the consciousness of the region's complexity that it fostered, is one of the strengths of all his fiction, including Lonesome Dove.  Continental Reckoning took my appreciation of that quality to another level.  Particularly illuminating in this case was West’s rich account of the utter craziness of the boom in the cattle business in the West after the Civil War.  Like a tech boom but with livestock.   

I’m also glad that I had taught “Literature of the American West” a few times before I read Lonesome Dove.  I needed that background or I might not have been able to really get what I think McMurtry is up to in this novel.  Lonesome Dove is not 900 pages because he’s long-winded or overcomplicated or trying to be the Charles Dickens of Texas.  It’s 900 pages because in Lonesome Dove Larry McMurtry tries to do all the Westerns.    

This view cannot be original with me.  I imagine the first reviewers noticed it.   I’m just saying that as I got further into the Hat Creek Outfit's mother-of-all cattle drives it gradually dawned on me that Lonesome Dove is so expansive and lush that it's kind of a Bruegel Western, a banquet of narratives in just about every sub-genre of the form, going all the way out to the edge of the canvas. It's the whole warehouseful of Western materials, in all their glory and perniciousness, deployed by someone who knew them all by heart and had reached a point where he could do something ambitious and brilliant with them.  

Among the familiar kinds of storylines from other Western novels and films that I recognized in Lonesome Dove:

The Homesteading Woman – McMurtry’s Clara Allen, out there under the big sky in the endless Nebraska loneliness, building a life for herself and her loved ones, a nascent feminist who has run out of patience with pigheaded men, doing hard things that don’t show up in any of the stories about comfortable East Coast ladies she reads in magazines.  A formidable woman.  It seems to me that McMurtry is in love with Clara, just as Willa Cather was in love with her own pioneer heroine, Antonia Shimerda, on the same Nebraska prairie in those same rough times.  Cather calls the spirited Antonia “a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”  That’s Clara, too. She's even got two squabbling young daughters - Ingalls girls for a revisionist Western.

The Motley Crew on a Manhunt - The hapless July Johnson and his deputy Roscoe Brown (from Fort Smith, Arkansas no less!), in the company of a preternaturally bold girl in pursuit of a fairly-unimpressive killer through a wild country – it’s True Grit!  In this storyline McMurtry even features dialogue that could have been written by Charles Portis himself:   “The name Roscoe don’t inspire confidence.  People named Roscoe ought to stick to clerking.”   Rooster Cogburn wishes he had said that.   

Twilight of the Wilderness – Lonesome Dove is set as the mass slaughter of the great buffalo herds reaches its end and during the post-Little Big Horn final subjugation and removal of the Plains Indians.  Like Jack Crabbe in Little Big Man, McMurtry’s characters (the sensitive ones, anyway) do a lot of melancholy musing about what greed and lust for power have cost the world.  Augustus McCrae’s surreal passage through a land of buffalo bones and the violent death of Josh Deets as he tries to protect a blind Indian child - these moments are especially bleak in their evocation of the idea that whenever you talk about "the winning of the West" you're talking about somebody else's loss.  

The Border Story – This one disrupts my timeline a little bit because Lonesome Dove (1985) predates the best example I have of another manifestation of that storyline, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992).  I can’t really say that McMurtry’s cowboys crossing the Rio Grande to raid South of the Border are an echo of McCarthy’s John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins doing the same – it’s really the other way around.  But the drama of that dangerous back-and-forth, the historically hostile yet intimate relationship between the United States and Mexico has always been there for Western novelists who dare to engage with its complications of power and politics and culture.  McMurtry does it well.  

The Meta Story - Some of the most memorable Westerns make a point of providing caustic commentary on the role of the media in creating the West of legend.  They give you some version of Kit Carson finding a Kit Carson book at the scene of a massacre.  In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Ford shows us starstruck newspaper reporters interviewing Ransom Stoddard about his famous gunfight (and preferring the legend to the disillusioning truth he tells them).  At the end of Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood shows us Beauchamp the dime novelist grilling William Munny for the sensational details of a shootout so he can get the story to the printers while it's still hot.  McMurtry does it, too.  He waits to the very end of Lonesome Dove to do it, but he does it.  In a moving coda (or an appallingly misguided one in Clara's view), Woodrow Call travels across a continent to bring the body of his partner Augustus McRae back to Texas.  Word gets out about this quixotic journey, and in Santa Rosa an eager young journalist accosts Call to get his story:  “Captain, they say you were the most famous Ranger. They say you’ve carried Captain McCrae three thousand miles just to bury him. They say you started the first ranch in Montana. My boss will fire me if I don’t talk to you. They say you’re a man of vision.” Now tormented with doubts about the purpose of his life, Call turns down the invitation to participate in his own mythologizing.  This scene is about as redolent as redolent gets of Westerns commenting on their own artifice.     

That’s just five.  There are a lot more I could identify and explain, storylines that in their hearkening back range from Shane to the Man With No Name.  Lonesome Dove features epic fistfights in saloons and do-or-die confrontations with outlaws and haunted boys in search of their distant fathers and terrifying captivity narratives and stark meditations on the violent roots of civilization and complex human relationships with oddly named horses and vulnerable women navigating a vicious world and hallucinatory accounts of extreme endurance in the desert and charming but pathetic barroom gamblers destined for a bad end and many, many more kinds of Western stories you already know the template for.  Like I said – it's got all the Westerns.  It is most fitting that an insanely ambitious cattle drive is at the center of this insanely ambitious novel.   

My Iron Curtain Tour

My school offers a generous program in which faculty may apply for grants for travel and study around special interests.   Last fall I made a pitch to visit Berlin and Prague, with a particular emphasis on sites related to the lives of Germans and Czechs behind the Iron Curtain.  I’ve taught a few short term courses on film and literature that depicts life in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Castro’s Cuba, the People’s Republic of China, and the premise of my pitch was that it was a shame I had never set foot in any of those places.  Now, thanks to the generosity of my benefactors, I've been there.  In June Becki and I found ourselves strolling peacefully along Alexanderplatz in Berlin and in Wenceslas Square in Prague, places that were essentially off limits when we were young.

We saw some astonishing things I’d love to tell you about.  In Berlin we watched gray-haired metalheads congregate around Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s church.  In Prague we watched a kid feed a huge swimming rodent on the banks of the Vitava, against all the rules on the signs.  Wherever we were we noticed that Europeans walking their dogs don’t appear to enjoy having dogs and would prefer that you don't enjoy them, either.  But if I started going in to all that kind of stuff, I’d ask too much of your attention spans, even the ones of you who are especially polite and attentive.  So less is more.  Here are four things I think are worth telling you about, each of them in keeping with the essential purpose of our trip:  to see relics of life behind the Iron Curtain.   

Berlin

Bornholmer Straße

One of the inspirations for the Berlin trip was Australian writer Anna Funder’s 2003 book Stasiland, an account of her effort to uncover the stories of the experiences of East Germans under the GDR regime.  She combines a memoir of her daily life in barely-liberated former East Berlin in 1994 with the stories of erstwhile GDR citizens who consent to be interviewed.  Even though Becki and I were under Stasiland's influence, we had no particular intention of staying in what used to be East Berlin.  But that’s where our search parameters landed us, in a walkable neighborhood of the Mitte district, close to Weinsbergpark.  It used to be behind the Wall - as one building in the neighborhood announced in letters that covered its front from top to bottom (in German), “This house previously stood in another country.”  We had brought along our copy of Stasiland, and as we wandered the streets and thumbed through the book we realized that we were essentially lodging exactly where Funder had lived during her time in scruffy, retooling used-to-be East Berlin.  The final evidence was a statue of Heinrich Heine at one entrance to the park.   

Funder's first subject as a former GDR citizen, the center of the most detailed and most memorable testimony in Stasiland, is Miriam Weber.  As a teenager in Leipzig in 1968, Miriam got in trouble with the state for posting leaflets mildly objecting to the state’s treatment of protestors.  By “got in trouble” I mean “arrested and put on trial.”  Rather than expose herself further to what she had already experienced of the GDR’s harsh treatment of dissenters, 16-year-old Miriam resolved to take the desperate step of going over the wall.   Miriam’s account (as narrated by Funder) of her inches-away-from-success effort to make it across the border into the West is riveting.  She recalls navigating the fences and tool sheds and private gardens near her chosen crossing point, the Bornholmer Bridge, trying to elude the search lights and police dogs and barbed wire.  As Miriam tells Funder the harrowing story of her failed escape decades after it happened, it almost seems to be far enough in the past to be spoken of lightly.  But not far enough:   

I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a stepladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.


She says suddenly, “I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.”

That line makes me think of Alfonsa and her mangled hand in All the Pretty Horses:  "Our scars have a way of reminding us that our past is real."  For Miriam it is a bitter past: her arrest near Bornholmer Bridge initiated half a lifetime of dreadful experiences with the GDR state, including sleep-deprivation torture and the suspicious death of her husband while he was in state custody.  

Becki and I hazarded a train ride to Bornholmer Bridge to see if we could find the specific place where Miriam tried to breach the Berlin Wall.  That bridge is historical now – it was the first place where GDR border guards said “what the hell” and opened the way to West Berlin in 1989.  There are memorial displays there to commemorate that event, plus graffitied remnants of the wall.  And yes, we found we could walk right to the tracks and paths and private gardens where Miriam Weber took her chance and got her scars.     

Normannenstraße

One of the must-sees of our trip was the gigantic headquarters of the Stasi, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the legendarily pervasive East German secret police.  According to Funder, in the GDR there was one Stasi officer or informer for every 63 people, the highest percentage in the world.  Why so many spooks and snitches?  As historian Katja Hoyer writes in her marvelous Beyond the Wall, the GDR’s founders had spent the 1930s as exiles in Moscow during Stalin’s terror and learned the lessons of his brand of totalitarianism a little too well – they were always trying to surpass their Soviet counterparts in the field of paranoid mass surveillance and brutal suppression of dissent.  You can see that "Nobody's gonna out-Big Brother us!" spirit at the old Stasi complex on Normannenstraße, the 50 building control center of this massive effort.  It is preserved today as a museum.   It would be hard to find a more impressive example of the predilection of East Bloc states to try to intimidate through scale.  The buildings are not only monotonous but Death Star colossal.  Can you not see, little Dissident?  Resistance is futile. 

But many resisted, when and how they could.  In Funder’s retelling of the end of East Germany, one of the most inspiring stories is how in January of 1990, ordinary East Germans saw towers of smoke coming from the Stasi complex and began to gather en masse outside.  What ensued was not a lynch mob, as one might imagine, but prevention of destruction of 40 years of surveillance records.  If there was going to be a cover up of all the spying, it would be on terms determined by the spied upon.  Similar interventions happened at Stasi offices all across the country.  As Funder tells it, the former GDR on the cusp of reunification struggled as a polity with what to do with all those millions of files and the recriminations their opening could lead to.   In the end, the files that remained were preserved and made available to those who had been surveilled.   If you’ve seen The Lives of Others, you’ll remember the electric moment when the formerly wiretapped playwright Georg Dreyman goes to Normannenstraße to review his files and realizes that a Stasi mole had risked all to try to protect him.   

When Becki and I visited Normannenstraße there was a moment when I had a flash of realization –  as we approached House 7, home of the records, to see the exhibits there, we were walking in Dreyman’s footsteps.

As Funder toured the former East in the nineties, the effort was well underway to preserve Stasi HQ in amber, and the place we visited in June is the fruit of the effort.  The term “banality of evil” is overused, and perhaps misused, too, but in this case the sheer mundanity and everyday seventiesness of the offices and décor is impossible to miss, and it makes an impression.  Becki said the desks and chairs made her feel as though she should have been asking for a late pass in 7th grade.   That’s exactly how it looks – except, as we were well aware, the effort these bland bureaucrats were engaged in was to stifle free thinking and limit freedom of movement and to infiltrate private life.  Our tour guide observed that part of the insidiousness of the Stasi’s organizational structure was to disaggregate every shameful task of surveillance and control so that no single functionary might think of himself as definitively tyrannical:  I’m not the oppressive secret police! I’m just a guy who makes sure the files are alphabetized.      

Prague

Švejk 

We came to believe that the sound of Prague is suit-case wheels on cobblestones.  The heavy tourism in that well-preserved old city makes it feel a bit like a fairy tale metropolis under a cloud of Myrtle Beach vibe.  As we meandered through Prague's older streets and back and forth across the legendary Charles Bridge, we noticed a couple of locations of what appeared to be a franchised sit-down restaurant, maybe a kind of Applebee’s of the Czech Republic, called “Švejk.”   The signage featured a cartoon mascot, a cheerfully smiling tubby soldier who reminded Becki of Beetle Bailey.  We were intrigued.  A Google search revealed that this “Švejk” fellow is a character from a famous novel by the Czech author Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Švejk (1923) about the misadventures of a draftee in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War 1.  We tried out a Švejk restaurant near our hotel.  The food was nothing to write home about, but the existence of the Švejk chain prompted me to acquire a copy of Hasek’s novel when we got back to the States.  

The first chapter is called "Švejk Intervenes in the Great War".  That's an accurate enough title if by "intervenes" you mean "pinballs farcically through the malfunctioning gears of a great power's military machine."  Švejk turns out to be such a hilariously duty-shirking, officer-maddening, subversive doofus of a character that you could transplant his restaurant to the U.S. and rename it “Yossarian’s”.   In fact, it was unsurprising to learn that Joseph Heller said he could not have written Catch-22 if it weren’t for Hasek.  The influence is unmistakable.  Whether Švejk is forging dog pedigrees to con buyers or feigning half-wittedness to avoid military service or trying haplessly to manage his commanding officer's unruly mistress, you can practically see Captain Yossarian in the corner taking notes.  The Good Soldier Švejk is very funny, but it is comedy underscored with the distinctive bitterness common to war literature composed by veterans (it shares that quality with Catch-22 as well).  Even as Hasek makes us laugh at Švejk’s endless supply of vulgar, screwball anecdotes for any predicament he's in, there’s no mistaking his rage at the architects of the Great War and all the suffering it caused, in this case the Austro-Hungarian military and aristocracy.  Hasek died before he could complete the novel to his satisfaction, but even in the state he left it it became an iconic text of Czech literature.  

The Soviet-satellite regime in Czechoslovakia backed two film versions of The Good Soldier Švejk, I presume because some of the primary targets of Hasek’s satire are the very targets any conscientious Marxist would have chosen, such as greedy capitalists and corruption in the church (for a time Švejk serves a military chaplain who makes Baby Billy Freeman look like Saint Francis).  But learning that the CSSR supported filming The Good Soldier Švejk made me think of Swift’s maxim that satire is a kind of magic mirror where people can see everybody’s face but their own. The regime that sanctified Švejk's misadventures with a film adaptation was notorious for the kind of institutional hypocrisy and cruelty and incompetence those misadventures ridicule. If an anti-authoritarian satire like The Good Soldier Švejk is a treasured piece of your national literature, then you’re probably wired never to tolerate the kind of despotic rule that prevailed in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989.  

Whether it really honors Švejk to feature his image on a menu that looks like it ought to offer deluxe loaded nachos  - that’s a question for another discussion, one about the return of capitalism to Eastern Europe.  

Stalin Letná

At the Museum of Communism in Prague I was particularly attracted to the displays on the Prague Spring (the ill-fated, largely student-led effort at liberalization in 1968 that ended with a Soviet invasion) and the Velvet Revolution (the huge non-violent demonstrations in 1989 that meant an end to the totalitarian regime).  I mostly knew what to anticipate from these displays, but I was unprepared for how moved I would be by a particular photograph, one of two men of different ages, taken in 1989.  The younger man was immediately recognizable as Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright whose eloquence and courage made him the international face of the drive to liberate Czechoslovakia from authoritarian rule in 1989.  The older man was Alexander Dubček, the Slovak statesman who had been the primary leader of the Prague Spring in 1968 and fell from power when the crackdown happened.  For some reason it stunned me to see them together - I had just assumed that Dubček hadn’t survived the Prague Spring, that the KGB had disappeared him into a Gulag, or that he had died pitifully like one of those self-immolating protesters in the aftermath of the Soviet tanks.  But the truth was that he had just lived on in obscurity, and it was moving to see him in his old age, embracing Havel, having lived long enough to celebrate the success of a cause that must have seemed doomed 20 years before. 

Some of those big demonstrations in 1989 happened in Letná Park, on a ridge above the city.  At Letná I saw something else that will stay in my memory, in a heartening way.   

At the Museum of Communism we also learned the story of a  gargantuan statue of Stalin, the world’s largest, that was erected at the edge of Letná in 1955.  The sculptor, Otakar Svec, killed himself a few days before the unveiling, apparently guilt-ridden over his own part in glorifying an autocratic monster.  For seven years a 50 foot Uncle Joe stared down dominatingly at anyone crossing the Czech Bridge over the Vitava River, before de-Stalinizing communist authorities had the statue dynamited in 1962.  In 1991 Prague placed a large metronome, kind of a pop art installation, where Enormo-Stalin used to stand.  Skateboarders like to go there.  The Metronome is listed as an attraction in Prague, but way down the list.  Tourist, you'd definitely rather go to the Castle or Old Town or the Charles Bridge.  The Metronome?  Give it a miss.  That's how I felt, too, until we learned the story of the Stalin statue.  Now I wanted to hike up that ridge.   

At the Metronome we found that everything that had been set up long ago to accommodate the world's largest Stalin statue is still essentially there, notably a pair of grand staircases and an enormous concrete pad to support the pedestal.  

Prague is one of those fortunate continental European cities that has never been the target of a full scale bombing campaign, so it has an abundance of fascinating architecture, both old and new, for tourists to gaze upon.  There are all kinds of memorable structures to see and wonder at – the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn, the rotating head of Franz Kafka, the Astronomical Clock, the Dancing House, the Pinkas Synagogue, the Powder Tower – but for this tourist no place in Prague speaks more inspiringly to our times than something that isn’t there - the vast empty space at Letná, an Ozymandian absence, where a monument to human cruelty and egotism no longer stands.   

Recommendations

Books

Stasiland – Anna Funder

Beyond the Wall – Katja Hoyer

Audience – Vaclav Havel

The Good Soldier Svejk – Jaroslav Hasek

Prague Spring – Simon Mawer

 

Films

The Lives of Others

Goodbye, Lenin

The Rabbit is Me

Bormholmer Straße

Return to Park Hall (Part Three): "Cane"

I decided to reread some books I read as an undergraduate English major at the University of Georgia in the mid-eighties and haven’t read since.  I’ll write about what I remember from 40 years ago and what I noticed this time around.

To the apparent shock of my academic advisor, when it came time for me to select my first upper division English course at UGa I chose Afro-American Literature.  He was sure I was going to choose the other option, Fantasy Literature.  I believe he had me profiled as a hard-core fantasy lit guy, a nerd who knew his Orcs from his Hobbits.  Who could blame him?  In those days I looked the part.  But he didn’t know who he was dealing with.  Sometime in high school I had made up my mind that I wouldn’t be caught dead reading any books about wizards and magic swords and secret kingdoms and all that malarkey.  This was not a choice I had really deliberated upon – it was rooted in straight-up teenage cussedness.  There was no way I was going to take Fantasy Literature, no matter how much I looked like someone destined for a Lordship in the SCA.  Perhaps it was because I looked that way.  So my presence in Afro-American literature cannot, sadly, be attributed to proto-wokeness.   It was more of a case of anti-Tolkienness.  But however impure my motives were for taking that class, I’ve never been sorry that I decided I’d rather read about Harlem than Narnia.   It was a great experience.  

The class was small, composed of me, four young black women, and the professor, Coleman Barks.   In those days he was the department’s poet in residence and tenured hippie.  After I was long gone from Athens he became kind of famous as a translator and popularizer of the Persian mystic poet Rumi.  But I was his student long before he did interviews with Bill Moyers.  I took two courses from him in Park Hall, the other being 20th Century American Poetry, and my recollection is that there was a lot of overlap between them, not his poetry but his pet interests, like vision pits and the Puer aeternus.  I gathered that no matter the ostensible topic of the class of his you signed up for, there was going to be a quality of Coleman 101 to it.  That was fine.   In a discipline sometimes seemingly committed to taking all the fun out of the subject, his approach to literary study was undeniably fun.  He openly took pleasure in the texts we were studying.  I also remember that he was really encouraging to me personally, one time even reading aloud in that poetry class something silly but creative I had written.  He introduced it with, “Jim Veal has written a great paper.”  I hadn’t, but for me that was a well-timed and thrilling minor shoutout.  I was sorry to read of Barks' passing away earlier this year.  

On the first day of class Barks felt compelled to explain to us why a white man such as himself happened to be teaching Afro-American literature.   His story was that years earlier, when the all-white English department finally committed to the long overdue implementation of an Afro-American literature course, it was decided that he was the one with the youth and the flower child bona fides to do the job.   He had agreed to do it on the condition that the department would make fast work of hiring a scholar of color to replace him.  And here we were, more than a decade later, and he was still doing it.  He said it with a shrug, indicating that the length of his tenure was not something to boast of but a source of embarrassment.  He was going to do his best, of course, but he clearly regarded it as an institutional fail that he was still in the role.  

I still have several of the books we studied in that course:  Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, Langston Hughes’ The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, Richard Wright's Native Son, James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man, Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and The Slave, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.   The one I decided to revisit is Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) a classic of the Harlem Renaissance.   Part of the appeal was geographical:  the book grew out of Toomer’s brief 1921 experience as a transplanted Northerner teaching at a manual school for black youngsters in Sparta, Georgia, less than an hour from the homeplaces of state literary giants Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and Joel Chandler Harris.  Cane, the only book the wandering Toomer ever wrote, is small and experimental:  It alternates between modernist short fiction (heavy on psychology and inventively abstruse narration) and poetry.   There is no completely unifying setting or narrative arc – the places and points of view vary - but we’re mostly in the rural South and we’re frequently in the consciousness of a perceptive but alienated young man, struggling with desire and isolation and an oppressive milieu, racism not the least of the challenges in his life.  As was the case in 1985, this time around I found that reading Cane meant that I would have to be attentive and patient and open to the unconventional.  

In the years since I studied Cane in Barks’ class I’d never been tempted to reread it, but it was never completely out of my mind because “Reapers”, one of Toomer’s Cane poems, sometimes showed up in high school American literature textbooks I taught from:  

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones  
In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,  
And start their silent swinging, one by one.  
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,  
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds.  
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,  

Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.

That poem inevitably makes me think of Larkin’s “The Mower", each of them finding in the violent death of a small critter an evocation of the casualness with which we bring about death in our everyday modern lives.  It is interesting to see where Toomer has placed the poem in his collage of written portraits of the lives of rural Southern black people. It immediately follows an impressionistic account of a young woman’s life ruined by the ravenous lusts of the men around her (“Karintha”), and immediately precedes a poem about the untimely blooming of a cotton flower and its superstitious resonances and the surreal story of a pariah white woman who mothered two multi-racial sons and was ultimately crushed by her own falling chimney (“Becky”).  Toomer has an empathetic eye for the plights of women, and his rural South is a believably cruel place for them.   The placement of those four texts side by side is indicative of how the book is arranged – a collage of different texts connected thematically.  They call it a pastiche.  

The validation that comes from “Reapers” appearing in a high school textbook is not the only measure I’ve found of Cane’s influence.  Here’s an example from the world of music.  Among the short stories in the book is “Bona and Paul”, about a troubled interracial couple at a Chicago teacher’s college.   Although I cannot find any explanation of the title, common sense tells me that Wynton Marsalis’ 1990 instrumental jazz composition “Bona and Paul” is named after the story.  How could it not be?  That an icon of Black American culture took care to name-check a Toomer text in this way says something of how much Cane has mattered.

Of all the experiences I’ve had since 1985 that affected this rereading experience, among the most significant must be having read Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, her extraordinary history of the Great Migration.   When I first read Adam Serwer’s assertion that excellent books of history make better anti-racist texts than do explicitly anti-racist texts, The Warmth of Other Suns was the first book that came to mind: Wilkerson’s granular narratives of the “whys” that led to the slow-motion evacuation of the black South cannot be read without feeling “everything has to change” outrage.  Beyond her depiction of why the trains from Memphis to Chicago were crowded with refugees in Toomer’s time, Wilkerson also made me more attuned to the cultural divides the migration created between northern and southern blacks.   In Cane this dynamic is especially evident in the book’s final story. Toomer’s fictional alter-ego, the relieved-of-his-duties schoolteacher Ralph Kabnis, is a man who has done the Great Migration in reverse, and now he's lurching through the final days of his displacement.  Down home has been too much for him - too much old-time religion to play along with, too many Jim Crow rules to adhere to (with a threat of violence behind missteps), too many black social hierarchies to navigate, and the chickens make too much noise.  

Most of all, history has been too close.  Since losing his teaching job, Kabnis has been working in the shop of a local wagon-maker, Halsey, his best ally in the community.  The boss throws him a booze-soaked going away party in the shop, with a guest list including an itinerant gadfly named Lewis, a couple of lively girls, and a nearly mute, older-than-God former slave who lives in the basement and makes an occasional appearance:  “He is like a bust in black walnut.  Gray-bearded.  Gray-haired.   Prophetic.   Immobile.”  The presence of the old man, Father John, turns the party into an exchange of bitter, impressionistic reflections on human struggle and death.  Half-drunk and seething with frustration, Kabnis lets his bitterness culminate in a full-page rant directed at the nearly catatonic old slave, seeming to scold him – most unfairly - for his own decrepitude: “You’re dead already . . . You ain’t got no sight.”   I don’t think I can infer a coherent message to this tirade except that this entire encounter seems a literal reckoning with the burden of enslavement’s legacy for people like Kabnis - young and Northern and eager to look exclusively forward.  But here in the South, in this dark basement, that wretched past is right up in his face. And it overwhelms him.

I'll confess that although I admire what Toomer aspires to in that scene, I'm not a fan of how he narrates it.  To me there is something irksomely mannered about it (a lot of modernist writing strikes me that way).  It seemed that way to me in 1985, too, though I didn't have the words back then to name what I thought the trouble was.  As I embarked on rereading Cane I wondered if I would think of it today as deprecatingly as I had back then: as a book we were reading more as an outstanding specimen of a particular literary movement than as a classic for the ages.  Not everybody slights it in this way.  In an essay accompanying a 2018 reissue of Cane, a commentator called it “oracular, delirious and American — rich with the intensities of Melville, the expansiveness of Whitman.”  But was it? In Barks’ class it was obvious to me that Invisible Man was an all-timer, and The Color Purple, as new as it was, already showed signs that it would one day occupy the canonical status it has since secured.   But how enduringly great was some of the rest of what we were reading?  Reexamining the content of that course, I believe much of what we read in a mid-1980s single semester survey course devoted to America’s greatest black literature has been surpassed by what has been published since.   Just off the top of my head:  Beloved, A Lesson Before Dying, The Known World, The Sellout, Sing Unburied Sing, The Underground Railroad, and the better part of the oeuvre of August Wilson.  There’s much more I haven’t named.  There's also the astonishing resurrection of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1933 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, an initiative that was already gathering steam when I took that Barks class in 1985 and has swept the world in the time that I’ve been teaching high school English.  That book, dead to the world for decades, has made 20 appearances on the AP English exam since 1988.  That’s one numerical measure of its stature – there’s no estimating how many thousands of hearts the story of Janie Crawford has touched. With the iconicizing of that novel and all the brilliant new black literature that has reached the bookstores and the book clubs and the classrooms and the awards lists in the last 40 years, do Jean Toomer and Charles Chesnutt and Frank Yerby still make the cut?   A Harlem Renaissance course or a Black Literature Before World War II course would be incomplete without Cane, but in 2026 I don’t think it has a place any longer in a survey of the best of the best.  That’s not meant to disparage Cane but to applaud what Toomer’s literary descendants have accomplished.  

One of those descendants is Atlanta’s Tayari Jones, author of the acclaimed new novel Kin. Part of rereading Cane is wondering what Toomer might have pulled off had he continued to write and publish into the 1930s and 40s.  “Yeah, Cane is amazing but it’s no _____________________” – What unwritten Toomer novels, works he might have composed once he gained greater control of his gifts, could have filled in the blank in that sentence?  Jones is her own author, of course, but I would put the name of Kin there as one of those texts that has surpassed Cane.  It is historical fiction, the story of two motherless daughters raised as devoted friends in rural Louisiana and sent out into the world in the Civil Rights era, one to the posh world of the black elite at Spelman College in Atlanta, the other to gritty rhythm-and-blues Memphis.  The chapters alternate voices between Vernice in Atlanta and Annie in Memphis, each of the young women experiencing the many inequalities and changes of that era – and her personal struggles with absent mothers and with love and sex – in her own complicated and dramatic way.   And the different milieus of two different important cities of the black South make Kin lush with history.  It’s amazing, and it doesn’t always go where your expectations based on previous experience tell you it might.   That’s part of the wonder of it.  

Of course reading at my age has really changed from what it was when I was reading in 1985 (that's the whole premise of this little project!).  There’s a kind of fresh excitement to reading a great novel for the first time when you’re young, an excitement I haven’t felt in a long time and I sometimes miss that feeling.  But the breadth of experience that comes with age brings its own pleasures to reading.  Extensive life experience - including extensive reading experience -  makes some things both more intelligible to your mind and more able to reach your heart.   The list of authors I’ve read who got me ready to read and appreciate Kin is long, including Isabel Wilkerson and the ones I studied in Coleman Barks’ class, but also Jane Austen, Julia Alvarez, Hilary Mantel, and Colm Toibin.  As I read Kin I also kept thinking of Andrew Young’s wonderful memoir An Easy Burden for what I learned from his account of what it was to be young, black, well-educated, and sophisticated in Atlanta during the Civil Rights era and its ambiance of possibility.  Andy Young would have been right at home as a character in Kin, advocating for the Movement in somebody’s Collier Heights parlor while Vernice and her smart young friends listen raptly and wonder whether to trust him.

And Jean Toomer’s rural black Georgians of the 1920s would have known how to get around in Tayari Jones’ Honeysuckle, Louisiana, would have known something of what was haunting and motivating the people they passed on the road.  I’m glad I reread Cane before I read Kin.  The experience made me think that if Toomer had the chance to read about the adventures and heartbreaks of Annie and Vernice in that momentous time, he would have been mighty impressed, and maybe, hopefully given himself a little credit for his part in making their story possible.  

Next:  Cees Nooteboom's Rituals