When it comes to baseball, the mind is unreliable and selective in what it remembers. Games and seasons blend into to one another and most second basemen or relief pitchers fade from view forever soon after they leave the diamond for good. Old teams and players live on only as lines of statistics in massive baseball encyclopedias or deep historical databases. Lost, too, are the millions of moments that make up every game. But Roger Angell has been quite good, over the years, at capturing those moments and preserving them as though in amber. And so, in reading his collection of baseball pieces that span more than forty years, one feels a bit like the lucky archeologist who has stumbled upon magnificent specimens so exquisitely preserved as to seem positively lifelike. Angell writes with almost scientific precision: “With the strange insect gaze of his shining eyeglasses, with his ominous Boche-like helmet pulled low… Reggie Jackson makes a frightening figure at bat.” Angell is not just an observer; he is also the ultimate fan, rooting for childhood favorites or for a team whose story has caught his fancy that particular year. Game Time
Game Time by Roger Angell
Literature’s Inherited Trauma: On Jesmyn Ward’s ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’
Review: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
The Known World feels like a book that took a long time to write. The writing proceeds at a slow but churning pace. Jones meticulously ties each character to one another, to the land, to the curious circumstances of the “peculiar institution” of slavery. We are taught in school that slavery was a black and white affair, but Jones takes great pains to describe a human landscape where such distinctions are blurry: the most powerful man in Manchester County, William Robbins, dotes upon the two children he has fathered with his slave, Philomena; Oden, the Indian, exaggerates his cruelty towards blacks to maintain his tenuous superiority; and Henry Townsend, the gifted young black man at the center of this novel, acquires a plantation full of slaves from which discord flows, imperceptibly at first. The lesson is the messiness of slavery made real by the vivid lives of each character. Over the course of the novel, Jones sketches out each character, from birth to death, using deft flashbacks and flash-forwards that are scattered throughout like crumbs and give the book a marvelous depth. In this sense, the book reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book ends before the Civil War begins, and so the triumph of good over evil is not allowed to mitigate the brutal picture of slavery that Jones paints. Perhaps because it was so assiduously researched, this novel feels like history and it feels like life. Here’s hoping that Jones’ next one doesn’t take ten years to write.
The Restless Dead: On Hadrien Laroche’s Orphans
The central characters of the first season of The Returned, an addictive and deeply unnerving French television drama available on Netflix, are identical twins, Camille and Léna. When we first meet Camille, she walks briskly up the road to her parents’ house in a polished town in the high Alps. Léna, meanwhile, is doing shots at the town’s rather youthful bar, the Lake Pub, named for the massive hydroelectric dam down below.
Léna drinks and drinks some more, apparently chasing a demon. Ravenous, Camille devours a sandwich. What’s to account for the intensity of their behavior? Four years earlier, at the end of a school field trip that Léna should also have attended, Camille was killed when the tour bus went over a cliff as it returned to town.
Soon, we are to realize, Camille isn’t alone among the confused and hungry dead who have just returned to walk among the living. A retired schoolteacher, Mr. Costa, has hidden his wife, who died in 1978, in the kitchen. She stuffs herself with spaghetti. Simon, who died on his wedding day, desperately searches for Adèle, his fiancée. Victor, a seven-year-old boy, lurks near a bus stop. He attaches himself to a woman with distant eyes. Indeed, the living here are as lonely as the orphan dead. And the dead feel their betrayal and exile as powerfully as do the living. “I lost my sister too,” insists Camille, when their father reminds her of Léna’s emotional wounds. Compounding the viewer’s discomfort: the script suggests that to execute the lie that allowed Léna to stay home on the day of the accident, the sisters had switched identities. Who exactly is living and who is dead?
The question seems gaudy, but it isn’t just a throwaway logline for a zombie show. Not at least to the French writer Hadrien Larouche, Derrida disciple, Sebaldian investigator, playful and meticulous prober of contemporary life, whose first novel, the 2005 Orphans has just been brought out in the English translation by Jan Steyn and Caite Dolan-Leach. In this season of Patrick Modiano, Larouche is another French writer of intense and insistent vision — in one place in this novel, he gives us Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, in another a man plugging his nostrils with cigarettes to keep off the stench of Serbian war dead. He is hot after the sense of personal spiritual identity in contemporary Europe, where the scars of the Second World War still bleed. He wants to know, in this meeting ground of living and dead, can anyone find comfort? “Death,” he writes, “held the living between its fingers. The dead finger kept the others prisoner.” In Orphans, the living likewise can’t let the dead be.
The narrator of Orphans, a man named Hadrien, lives in self-made exile, writing, collecting fragments of others’ lives. “I, someone who was determined to never become a collector have seen the most troubling, obscure, and subtle of collections,” he writes, in a voice that seems determined to beckon W.G. Sebald, the novelist of collected memory and material who died in a tragic accident in 2001. Hadrien’s specialty is “living apparitions,” women, mostly, “a vision of the living body from birth to death,” but, of course, who here, among the observer and the observed, is really alive? Larouche, a writer of precise and palpable sensation, wants the reader to feel the writer’s characteristic isolation, a kind of solitary death, even as he tries to immerse himself in the real lives of others. This tension frames his approach to Jean Genet in The Last Genet: A Writer in Revolt, his only other book to be published in English. “I’ve always felt well-placed in a room equipped with a bed, a table, and a stool, in someone else’s home,” observes Hadrien. “Of course, I am no longer living in my own home in any permanent fashion.”
Cut loose and yet not quite trying to connect intimately with others, Hadrien finds himself in the different houses of three people, each of them an orphan of sorts. Two of the orphans he visits in the real time of the narration itself; the third is a recollection from childhood. Larouche employs various devices to move us from one place to the next, but these are transparent — he isn’t concerned with narrative. Rather Orphans is a work of observation and inquiry.
Hadrien’s second visit — we’ll return to the first momentarily — is to the home of a friend, Helianthe née Bouttetruie, who has recently married and along with her husband purchased an old farmhouse they have to renovate. The house is located in the Swiss Alps, in a village that at first seems appealing and bright. “In truth,” says Hadrien, “it slowly worked on the bodies of its inhabitants, gently annihilating them, rendering them unrecognizable, and, finally, plunging them into despair.” This doesn’t seem far from zombie television, after all.
Helianthe’s house is a mess. Her father, an architect, has drawn up an impossible plan. Her husband, Hector — every name here starts with H, as if to reinforce the author’s own sense of exile — keeps getting injured. Worse still, she suffers from a degenerative disease, an orphan disease, according to Larouche for the way its pathology isn’t connected to any other syndrome. “One day, out of the blue, the orphan disease takes shelter under a man’s or woman’s roof, and suddenly, his or her body harbors a new creature,” he says. Helianthe is short of breath, often off balance, and prone to falling down. Her left leg is three and half centimeters shorter than the right.
In spite of the disease, Helianthe wants a child. The not yet born, Larouche would say, perhaps like the dead, have a handle on the living. But what of this prospective child? Helianthe’s doctor warns her that pregnancy and birth will kill her or the baby or both. She desires an orphan.
Larouche is a post-modern writer of considerable feeling; Helianthe, essentially a subject of exploration, stands up — crookedly, for sure — for her sense of humanity. He’s best in this space, close up to the living — here where contemporary people struggle, sometimes with the dead, for identity. At times, this puts him in conversation with Zadie Smith and Elena Ferrante, two quite different European writers. Helianthe, for example, speaks at least 14 languages and regional dialects. “Arriving in a foreign country meant at once a new life and a new language,” says Hadrien, of Helianthe’s global exile. “She experienced the joy of feeling foreign to herself.”
After Hector’s latest accident, Hadrien, walking in the mountains, sees an old man that must be his cousin, Henry né Berg. This jars his memory. As a child, Hadrien had once visited Henry’s family. Henry’s father, a sadistic banker, forced Henry to use the servant’s entrance to the house. The exiled boy rejects his father’s world until at some point the desire for his own power consumes him. Now, “becoming a man exactly like his father,” he embodies the old man, who lives on inside him. In this story, the least interesting of the three for Hadrien’s lack of personal connection, Larouche echoes the tone of Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares, whose novels often explore themes of father-son domination and revenge.
Those themes play out differently in the book’s first chapter, which takes place in the uncomfortable city apartment of Hannah née Bloch, a middle aged woman whose family was put in a Nazi camp in German-occupied Poland and was later exiled to France.
Hannah’s story, of a Jew in the diaspora, is the most familiar here. By type, from birth, she lives in exile. Hannah suffers. She pinches pennies; she rarely leaves her run-down apartment. She is a kind of walking dead. But certain tactile things trigger her heart to swell, if only momentarily. In these moments, she touches her childhood, before the war — the last time she saw her father. She cleanses herself according to Jewish custom, she prepares a Sabbath meal, she lights candles and the light filters through the fingers she holds in front of her face. Once, she traveled to Israel, and in the Old City of Jerusalem allowed herself to become intoxicated by the bazaar. The sensations, smells, and visions carried her to Poland, which she couldn’t otherwise remember, and she fainted. She tells this to Hadrien while they travel on a city bus.
When they return to the apartment, they eat pistachios and Hannah recalls her childhood. Her father died in the work camp, but her mother, who she argues with every day on the phone, endlessly, wouldn’t ever admit he was dead. “Everyone in this family lived on the back of the disappeared man,” she tells Hadrien, “on the ruins of his death and, finally, on the spot occupied by a living person we couldn’t bury.” She’d never forgiven the betrayal. Her mother, she says, failed to teach her how to “face up to death, to affirm life.”
At some point, as an adult, she forced herself to stop believing her father would return. This was her only revenge against her mother. Hadrien watches her pray in the light of the candle, “an infinite grievance between her teeth.” She tells herself to gaze forward, there’s more to live. But, Larouche reminds us, our thoughts, like the dead, are restless. They badger us into isolation and then they never let us alone.
Panache to Burn: Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch-22
1.
The word is out – Christopher Eric Hitchens, 61, lifelong litterateur, pamphleteer, bon-vivant, journalist, polemicist, iconoclast, “anti-theist,” author of over a dozen celebrated, debated, loathed and admired works of non-fiction, including a freshly published memoir, is dying. The news has traveled pretty widely and quickly, which is perhaps a sign of something encouraging: we are often told that literary culture is eroding from indifference. Indifference, thankfully, isn’t something to worry about when Hitchens is concerned. I am struck by how many of the reviewers of his memoir begin by “declaring an interest” – sort of a “before we get started, here’s my tale of the Hitch” type thing – and, as a devoted fan, it’s very heartening to find that they are often stories which are gracious and agreeable. It takes a certain kind of person who can be interviewed about his chemotherapy, looking about as good as could be expected, and still have his colleague and interviewer describe the hours spent together as “delightful.”
Hitchens is and has always been the kind of writer who, when considered, seems to demand that one take sides – pro, con, either way works fine, provided there’s no squeamishness or side-shuffling, moral or otherwise. This could be just as fairly said for any polemicist from the sublime (say, Cornel West) to the squalid (Glenn Beck), were it not for the fact that even his enemies would admit that at least he knows whereof he speaks. And then there’s the fact that this love it, hate it, dialectical standard (the Hitch-22 of the title) has pretty much been his modus operandi for a little over sixty years. Hitch himself has written about being annoyed with the boredom and anomie of his demise – you’ve got to admire that kind of stoic panache.
Well, for one thing, Hitch has certainly always had panache to burn. Delving into his memoir as a fan and admirer many things are apparent, not the least of which the fact that the man has done some living. Even a cursory glance registers a life about as examined as it gets: the traveling (several dozen countries and not a few war zones), the friends (Amis, Rushdie, MacEwan, and that’s just the inner circle), the output (two biographies, pamphlets, several large collections of decades of material). If anyone has the right to consider his time not wasted, it’s Hitch. What of his memoirs, then, his own recollections and ruminations on his years of travel, disputation, omnivorous reading and relentless writing? As a devoted fan, I have to say that the usual standard of writing is there, as is the wit and the incisive participation within the roil of history, but I regret to say that some of what might make his memoir truly outstanding is somehow obscured.
I come to praise Hitchens and not to bury him, so I’ll start with the strong points. First of all, Hitchens is an annotated man. Naturally, none of us are without our orbiting texts, especially in a postmodern world, endlessly obsessed with referents and signs and coded histories. Hitchens, however, has the unique ability to accomplish what some philosopher claim is the greatest accomplishment of all: to make one’s life, by living, into a work of art. His annotations come alive. At certain points, Hitchens denies any real talent for fiction writing. He’s too modest – the portraits he draws of his stern, repressed father and his vivacious yet gradually desperate mother are done in loving, honest, moving detail. And as he begins to take you through the various episodes of his life, his introduction to Orwellian thought-crime in English boarding schools, watching and participating in glorious, sordid hackery in the pubs of Fleet Street, first seeing America through the eyes of a coast-to-coast bus trip, literally standing side by side with Salman Rushdie through the ordeal of the fatwa, you begin to feel like you are in the grasp of a fine novel. There is more than a little resemblance to Bellow’s Augie March, for whose 50th anniversary edition he provided an introduction and who remained a favorite writer.
Hitchens’ Bellovian ability to not only remember the many people he meets but to give them back stories and tasteful daubs of prosaic color are intriguing, even when one isn’t necessarily up on his 20th Century labor history. A friend of mine has been reading it on his iPad, with automatic Wikipedia at his fingertips for every proper noun, the better to get instant précis on the large and detailed ensemble cast. The footnotes are rich with anecdotes with a snap and shine all their own. In one chapter on his time in Argentina he not only describes the horror and sheer brutality of its fascist regime but also sees fit to include a lovely, illuminating account of a visit paid to none other than Jorge Luis Borges himself, the master of the Aleph. What a novelist he might have made!
2.
One thing which is unavoidable when talking about Hitch is the fact that for him, the political is personal. Not in the way people generally mean it – in fact, Hitch pours scorn on the kind of thinking which leads people to say “Speaking as a _____, I feel that…” and assume this is a kind of argument, or moral position, since it is after all merely a recitation of external properties: skin pigmentation, ethnic heritage, sexual identity, whatever. It might sound a bit grizzled or cranky to make the counter sally about how it’s not what you think, but how you think that matters. For Hitchens, what he does on the world stage, the causes he supports and the principles he holds, are a part of not only participating in the perpetual movement of history but also of being fully engaged in the world – honestly, critically, challengingly. It’s his way of taking things to task. After he attends to the burial of his mother, in Greece, during a coup against the U.S. backed government, he throws himself into covering the chaos and miasma for his newspaper. After he buries her, he makes sure to put flowers on the grave of George Seferis, the poet and national hero of independent Greece. One personal tragedy is a small parallel to a larger, national loss. For all his bravura and outspokenness, his opinions are not made of idle boasting.
A very pointed and revelatory moment in Hitch-22 is when he remembers what thrill it was, as a Socialist of a very specific kind (with a term for it all its own – the noble name of soixante-huitard, or 68’er) to see that the newspaper he reads along with everyone else is revealing what his own dialectical education and critique has been arguing all along: revolutions in Europe, the miasma of Vietnam, assassinations, civil rights, Cuba, torture by an ostensibly Labor government, yes, the times, they sure are a’changin’. It seems almost quaint these days, when we no longer seem to believe in grand narratives or in revolutionary change, but Hitch is very comfortable in laying down the line:
I began, along with many, many of my contemporaries, to experience a furious disillusionment with “conventional” politics. A bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should fucking well have been there and seen it for yourself. Had the study of life and literature and history merely domesticated me to waste and betray my youth, and to gape at a spectacle of undisguised atrocity and aggression as if it should be calmly received? I hope never to lose the access to outrage that I felt then.
He never has.
3.
Many reviewers seem to have given a bit of the game away by offering too much of his- and the book’s- biographical heft. I’d rather not do so, if you’ll excuse me – it’s well worth referring you straight to the source. Hitchens is quoted often enough in the world of politics and letters but it’s usually he who is best suited to telling his own story – surprisingly not always the standard for writers. He was born into a somewhat frustrated lower-middle-class British military family, left to deal with the remnants of an England which had suffered and survived the Second World War with honor and fortitude, only to find that there wasn’t much to celebrate within the rubble. As an American, I was heartened to see how the country he discovered, traveling through it as a young man in the 60’s and 70’s, still seems, after the syrupy nostalgia of a boomer generation’s endless and self-congratulatory revisiting of it, exciting and fresh and endlessly innovative.
Ironically, what Hitch-22 lacks is what one would think a memoir might really consist of: what Carl Jung referred to as “memories, dreams, reflections.” So much of his writing is of world-historical importance; everything political he’s done because it was something he knew he could not keep silent about. I find this admirable in many ways. The problem for a long time reader is that Hitch-22 re-evaluates the issues (Iraq, the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, the Vietnam War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall) which have engaged him (and us) for a long time. But when the issue at hand is still pretty fresh, as in the war on terror, it becomes a little redundant. I sort of understand why he had to explain- again – how he made such a dramatic turn in leaving his decades-long post at The Nation, to find new allies to more fully give his support to the Iraq War. As a person who happened to oppose the war and is also an abiding Hitchens fan, I salute and respect his gutsy moral fervor. What I didn’t need from his memoirs is yet another explanation of his relationship with the likes of Ahmed Chalabi and Paul Wolfowitz. The case could easily be made that to hear his memoir is to hear the story of his intellectual development, thus, all the pages about the war are just as important as everything else. Fair enough. But it stands to reason that any interested reader might be fully capable of pursuing Hitchens’ voluminous writings on the matter (The Long Short War, roughly a third of the collection Love, Poverty and War, innumerable pieces in Slate as well as many other places) pretty easily. A reader of a memoir might be more inclined to want to know a bit more about what makes the man himself tick. I don’t want to sound like the over-bearing, ugly American in insisting on this but it’s a lot of pages on something which is, in Hitch’s moral universe, very much a covered topic.
What we don’t get too much of is some of the more universal human events: very little on his children, for example, or the experience of falling in love. He’s been married twice, both times in very long and apparently complex relationships. It’s not a craving for gossip which makes one feel a bit let down that we can’t have Hitchens writing with his usual scholastic aplomb about these kinds of moments. We do get some very enjoyable tales of word games with his friends: having Martin Amis and Rushdie coming up with dirty limericks or substituting words in song titles for playfully obscene lingo is great and all, but there have to have been more interesting conversations to recount than just that. One gets the feeling that Hitch is holding back a bit too much. When we are privy to some of his private reflections, the effect is devastating. A section of the Iraq chapter, previously published in Vanity Fair, contains a very true and profoundly tragic story of a soldier who was inspired to go to Baghdad in part because of reading Hitchens. He attends the burial at the invitation of the family and reads Shakespeare over the grave. This is Hitchens at his best – politics is never just an abstract concept or a trend, it is a way of life and – sadly all too often, of death. If there were any doubts about his commitment to the former in the face of the latter, this book can dispel them. It’s very much to be hoped that he can continue to keep his, however much of it he has left. We need more of him. Here’s hoping that he can manage to stick around long enough to continue to give as much as he can.
The Hope of a Suggestion: On Mary Oliver’s Latest
This summer, a commercial was lauded for skewering a common bad habit. The ad, which promoted IKEA, opens on the drawing room of a lord apparently living around the time of King George III. As servants lay out a dinner of fruits, vegetables, and game birds, the bewigged gentleman calls in a painter and demands a still life on the spot. When the painting is done, footmen hustle it out of the manor and around town, showing it off to upper-class fops who flash thumbs-ups in response. They return home, triumphant, and, finally happy at his success, the man lets his poor family eat. Flash-forward to the present and footage of a dad delaying a family meal to snap pictures of the food on his cell phone. The closing tagline: “It’s a meal. Not a competition. Let’s relax.”
Indeed, let’s. In fact, we might go one better and forget the image entirely — nobody really needs their image on any screen, silver or TV or phone. No one really needs a relationship with corporate capitalism, conspicuous consumption, or cyberspace, either. All that is fungible, forgettable; it’s been replaced many times before.
What to do with the spare time left over by ceasing to engage? Consider reading Mary Oliver’s latest book, Upstream, and its meditations on inescapable, physical life and the world beyond any screen.
Mary Oliver is the country’s “far and away, the country’s best-selling poet,” according to a ten-year-old article in The New York Times. Famous for winning the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, she’s published over 30 books since 1965. Many feature famous poems or lines — and by dint of that notoriety, Oliver is easy to find in a certain kind of middle-class, left-wing American life. I’ve seen her words everywhere from Buddhist meditation sessions to Mac McClelland’s memoir Irritable Hearts (which quotes a poem about “letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves”) to the co-op where I lived in college, which bore a version of her line, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” hand-painted in a girlish curlicue over a dining room doorway.
To her vaunted curriculum vitae and relative ubiquity, Oliver, aged 81, now adds Upstream. But despite Oliver’s well-demonstrated power, one of the book’s first sentiments is a disclaimer about its smallness in comparison to the world it describes: “And whoever thinks these are worthy, breathy words I am writing down is kind… Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.”
That might be unnecessarily self-deprecating, but it’s true enough. Oliver’s power lies in words, but even more so in her power of observation. Until recently, she spent her life spent trekking through woodlands (“I walk, all day, across the heaven-verging field,” she writes) and half on the cusp of the sea, in formerly sleepy Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Despite being a thin volume, Upstream is a cognitively weighty book. It’s her rare volume of essays rather than pure poetry, although 16 of the 19 essays are reprints from earlier books. It offers no obvious order, and it sticks to no one particular subject. It is neither chronological nor purely topical, and it jumps from the natural world to famous literary lives (Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe) to a beloved pet dog. It discusses the life and thoughts of Oliver’s deceased lover, Molly Malone Cook, without explaining who she is (indeed, without ever including more than an initial, M). More than a book meant to make a single point, this is a book meant to allow Mary Oliver’s vivid thoughts out into the world.
The book’s finest moments are when Oliver dwells on the nature she has spent a lifetime loving. Thankfully, these are frequent. She writes of seeing caught Bluefin tuna unloaded from fishing boats, “their bodies are as big as horses;” of the live fishes she once returned to the cold sea after unexpectedly cutting them from the body of a fish who’d just ate them (“for an instant they throbbed in place, too dazed to understand that they could swim back to life — and then they uncurled, like silver leaves, and flashed away”); of the injured bird she let slowly die in a luxurious nest of towels she’d constructed near a sliding door in her home.
Among the observations of natural beauty come slow, gentle, ponderous thoughts about the nature of love, death, and life in a changing place. Oliver avoids anything self-pitying, apocalyptic, or morbid — and in fact she doesn’t even overtly mourn her partner, whose 2005 death she grieved in the 2007 photo book Our World. Nonetheless, these philosophical musings are the point of writing. “You need empathy with it rather than just reporting,” Oliver explained to Krista Tippett of On Being in 2015. “Reporting is for field guides. And they’re great. They’re helpful. That’s what they are. But they’re not thought provokers. And they don’t go anywhere.”
This book is thought-provoking, and it does go somewhere. Where it goes is ultimately up to the reader — whose mind, after all, is the soil in which Oliver’s contemplative turns of phrase will bloom. Oliver expresses clearly that nature is our equal, if not our better, and that the nonhuman world offers a wellspring of insight to those who pay careful attention to it.
As for any IKEA commercials one might miss while out in the woods or at the shore: well, that last one went viral, I guess. But if you’ve seen it — or if you haven’t — forget it. Whatever insight it offers, remember that Mary Oliver got there first, and better, with words like these: “Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion…Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive — that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.”
Putting all my money on the hope of a suggestion now, I’ll say that this, and all the rest of Upstream, comes highly recommended.