The Blank Page

When I saw that the next story up at A Curious Singularity was by Isak Dinesan, otherwise known as Karen Blixen, I was very intrigued to read it. I’d heard people enthuse about Dinesan’s writing, and much as I’m not a great film watcher, even I have seen Out of Africa with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, whose extraordinary Danish accent and gorgeous safari skirts made a big impression on me. The film tells the famous part of the author’s life story; her marriage in 1914 to a fellow Danish nobleman and their emigration to Kenya to start a coffee plantation, his infidelities, followed by her great love affair with English big game hunter, Denys Finch-Hatton. Karen Blixen eventually divorced her husband, although not without contracting syphilis from him that compromised her health until her early death. Finch-Hatton died when his light airplane crashed in 1931, and the coffee plantation failed due mostly to the Depression in America. Blixen was obliged to return home to Denmark, and once there she began writing in earnest.

I haven’t read Out of Africa, and so I have no way of knowing whether it is of a piece with her other writings, but the story that’s up for discussion, ‘The Blank Page‘, came as a bit of a surprise. I was expecting finely-wrought traveller’s tales, a slice of sensually evoked transcontinental realism, and yes, maybe a giraffe or two. I really wasn’t anticipating a fairy tale that dragged its own meta-narrative along with it. It’s a strange story, split into two parts, the first introducing the legendary old crone who will be our narrator, and who will be giving us an enticing taster of the art of story-telling. ‘I am most highly honoured because I have told stories for two hundred years,’ she declares to us in the opening paragraphs, thus killing off any last traces of suspicion that this might be a tale that relates to a ‘real’ world we know, and suggesting instead that if this story has animals, they are more likely to be unicorns than rhinoceroses. Instead the world that the narrator wants to introduce us to is the world of the story itself. Setting the reader up for what is about to come next, the old woman brings us into the intimate heart of storytelling, the golden rule for all would-be raconteurs. What is the point of this ancient art? ‘Where the story teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak.’ Ah, and there is the perfect hook, for we, the loyal readers, earnestly believing we are about to be told something we can make use of, have been offered instead a fine enigma to carry with us as we head off into the next part of the story. It’s a beautiful moment because the last thing we are generally thinking of when we read is silence, and this statement, presented as a great secret, a fundamental truth, is startingly counterintuitive. We might refer to this technically as the ‘You what?’ moment, that obliges us to keep reading in search of further explanation.

So, the story we are finally told is picture book perfect. From seeds gathered by a courageous Crusader grow the most glorious flax plants that are transformed by talented nuns into sheets of such perfection and purity that they grace only the finest, royal beds. Those sheets then serve a special purpose. When a Princess marries, they are hung out of the windows of the palace the morning after the wedding night to reassure the populace that she was indeed a virgin. And then the sheets return to the nunnery whence they came and a square from each is framed and hung in a particular gallery. These unusual pictures offer suggestive symbols to those who come and visit: ‘Within the faded marking of the canvases people of some imagination and sensibility may read all the signs of the zodiac: the Scales, the Scorpion, the Lion, the Twins. Or they may there find pictures from their own world of ideas: a rose, a sword… or even a heart pierced through with a sword.’ And, most notable of all, the picture in front of which people pause for the longest time, is the one in which the sheet is resolutely and unmistakably blank.

All the rich and vibrant detail we are given of the growing and weaving of the flax, all the evocative images we are offered of visitors making their pilgrimage to the nunnery, and all of this is a smokescreen for the hidden, secret, silent part of the story. Hiding behind the lovely words of the story we have, on the one hand, the innate violence and humiliation (that is neither beautiful nor noble) of those bloodstained sheets being hung out of the window. It’s notable that the story never once uses the word ‘blood’, never refers to anything distasteful at all, although the ‘framed canvases’ the spectators gaze upon must be nothing more than these old and faded stains, and the roses and swords they evoke are symbolic euphemisms for sexual possession. And then we have the one sheet that is blank and unsoiled. What could possibly have happened here? Did the Princess refuse to give herself to her husband, or was she not a virgin? Is there some other tale we have not yet guessed at that could account for this empty sheet? In this way the cunning old crone guides the reader towards the recognition that all stories arise out of surprisingly pregnant silences, from blank pages that beg for explanation and fire the imagination to provide it. What we cannot understand, we feel compelled to talk about until we find some story that will fill the emptiness. But just as this story does, so they all end with speaking silences too. At some conclusive point, so all the words of the story gesture beyond the events and the people they describe to that strange place somewhere between the tale and its readers where meaning is created. Good stories don’t tell us everything; instead they provide us with the clues to work it out for ourselves, to guide us towards the limit of what words can do and to point us in the direction of the mysteries of life and narrative, neither of which can ever be fully expressed. And thus, as the old crone promises us in this parable of the mechanics of narrative, loyalty to the story means we are rewarded with the ‘Ah ha!’ moment, where it’s difficult to say what we know, but the story has shown us that somewhere deep inside, we know it.

A Mini Guide to Surrealism

The Surrealist movement is a really complicated one to write about because it spread far and wide over Europe and America, was bound up in other big artistic movements like modernism and comprised artists who painted, wrote, created the first kinds of installation art, produced music and photography and sometimes just horsed about playing stupid games in the name of original creativity. I’m going to write about some of the bits I know, and the well-informed can fill in the gaps I leave.

Surrealism grew out of the Dada movement that began in Switzerland during the First World War. Dadaism was all about anarchy – it was this huge big rebellion against the reason and logic and bourgeois repression that the group considered was the cause of the war in the first place, and it declared itself anti-art. Well, it was anti-everything really. When you boil it down it was a bunch of complete nutters, headed by the manic chump Tristan Tzara, who would take over some unsuspecting location, read aloud solemn manifestos, then take turns in yelling out nonsense poetry to the beat of a drum etc., until someone leaped into the crowd and started throwing punches and the whole thing would end in a big brawl. As evenings out go, it’s not so unfamiliar to the modern age, but it was considered pretty unusual then, particularly when labeled performance art. In the early 1920s a young Frenchman called André Breton joined the Dada group but fairly quickly formed his own breakaway movement, known as the Surrealists. Breton had been working as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital helping to care for the shell shock victims of the war, and during this time he had become interested in the then new work of Sigmund Freud. He was fascinated by the concept of the unconscious as the hidden and unexplored part of the subject, and his idea was to form a revolutionary artistic movement that concentrated on drawing out this huge untapped reservoir of creativity. So with his buddies Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Phillipe Soupault and Paul Eluard, he set about mining the unconscious by means of techniques like automatic writing – a fancy name for writing down without censorship just whatever comes into your head (this is not as easy as it sounds – you’ll find your mind continually intervenes to tidy up) and word games. These latter were things like consequences, crazy question and answer sessions and time traveler’s potlatch, in which a couple of people decide what gift they would most like to bestow on a historical figure. When it was recreated with a group of players in Chicago in 1999, the Marquis de Sade was chosen as a recipient and it’s entertaining how many people suggested he might like an internet connection.

Anyway. Despite the fact that copious quantities of drink and drugs gave the Surrealists that delightful sensation of being the funniest, most inventive group of people on the earth, a lot of work survived the cold light of day. Breton was thrilled with his own success and wrote to Freud, telling him to what good use they were putting his theories. Now the whole point of the unconscious for Freud was that you could never reach it. When you reach the doors of the unconscious, it is always closing time; it certainly wasn’t something you could harness and put on display in a syntactically-challenged poem. And so he replied somewhat perplexed to Breton’s enthusiastic description of Surrealist writing practices that he had no idea what it all had to do with him. Undeterred, Breton pressed on, the group expanded and sucked in artists from different disciplines, and they published two manifestos in which they outlined ideas that became progressively more political. Well, I say political. The bit everyone remembers (because it’s memorable) is the bit where Breton suggests the most useful political act the average member of society can commit is to grab hold of a gun, run out with it into the street, and shoot someone. Any old someone. This is clearly not going to cohere into the kind of policy that wins democratic votes, but the group at this time was fixated with the idea of being radical, totally head over heels in love with the possibilities of a kind of childish anarchy that at its best produced genuinely original art, and at its worst was responsible for just that kind of silly statement.

Some of the very best Surrealist work was to be found in art where the possibilities of play, of imagination, of shock, could be explored with wit and invention. Man Ray’s photographs of a woman’s back turned into the body of a cello, Magritte’s faceless men with bowler hats, Roland Penrose’s face of a woman with butterflies for her eyes and mouth, Salvadore Dali’s melting watches have all become part of a cultural inheritance that stretches to the present day. Much of the point of Surrealist art is to block an intellectual response to what you are looking at or reading. Its intention is to make the question ‘why?’ unanswerable. One of the other famous art exhibits of this era was Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, which has become one of the great landmarks of modern art. It was such a Surrealist concept (although Duchamp is more of a Dadaist, but let’s not mess about with these distinctions here) to question what was an appropriate subject for artistic treatment. Montage was one of the favoured practices, and often bus tickets and café menus were part of the materials used, in order to suggest that the flotsom and jetsom of modern life could equally be view with an aesthetic eye. In many ways, modern art has never moved on from the impact of Surrealism; art is far keener still to disorient and to disturb than to provide the spectator with a consoling image, and performance and installation art find their roots back here. Art still seeks to have an effect on the spectator that is more visceral than it is intellectual.

Just as there is no neat start date for Surrealism, so there is no definitive end point either. Some people suggest that the death of Breton in 1966 marked the beginning of the end, others that the death of Dali in 1989 marked its conclusion. In any case artists carried on making and exhibiting and publishing surreal work right through the middle of the century. For my own part, though, the first great literary wave of Surrealism was over by the mid-1930s in France, Breton’s qualities as a zealot for the cause were only equaled by his ability to get up people’s noses and before the twenties were out he had quarreled with a significant portion of his friends who had subsequently formed a splinter group. He was an odd, flat-faced man with a strangely pious look, the errant schoolboy most likely to squeal on his friends, with a thatch of wiry corrugated hair that resembled nothing so much as a pan scourer. And my goodness me, did he have an ego! They were such a group of characters, those early Surrealists, from the stoned romantic, Robert Desnos, to Salvadore Dali who declared ‘the only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.’ I’d love to write a book about them one day, not a serious one, but just the anecdotes and the fighting and the wife-swapping and the art. It would be a lot of fun. But in any case, Surrealism is alive and well these days in both alternative comedy and advertising publicity. What was the basis for revolutionary politics almost a century ago is now viewed as the quirkily hilarious disorientation that is part and parcel of everyday life.

On Love and Politics

I’ve been enjoying writing about artistic couples, but it’s been troubling me that these love affairs all end so tragically. So today I’m going to tell a different kind of story about a deeply happy marriage and a profoundly intriguing literary collaboration. The marriage in question is between the two writers, Simone and André Schwarz-Bart, neither of whom may be familiar to audiences today although they were both very well-known writers back in the 60s and 70s. Everything was extraordinary about their relationship, starting with its interracial dimension. André Schwarz-Bart began life as Abraham Szwarcbart in Metz in eastern France in 1928 among working class Jews who spoke Yiddish. In 1939 when he was 12, his family was evacuated to the interior of France and two years later the Nazis arrested and deported his parents, his older brother, his little sister and his great aunt. André became head of the family, taking on farm jobs to keep his younger brothers fed. He made contact with the Resistance movement, who helped to save his siblings from deportation, and he joined them, fighting for France both in clandestine activities and in the regular army. He never saw his parents again. André Schwarz-Bart was one of those amazing people who transform intolerable hardship into courage, persistence and resilience. After the war he worked as a manual laborer, teaching himself French until he could pass the difficult Baccalauréat exams, enroll in the University of Sorbonne, and begin to write.

The novel he produced, The Last of the Just, (Le Dernier des justes), was a huge success and won the Prix Goncourt in 1959. It traces a family of Jews from 1185 up until the death of its main protagonist, Ernie Lévy at Auschwitz. The title comes from the Jewish tradition that in every generation there are 36 righteous people on the earth who cause God to keep the world going: “According to [tradition], the world reposes upon thirty-six Just Men, the Lamed-Vov, indistinguishable from simple mortals; often they are unaware of their station. But if just one of them were lacking, the sufferings of mankind would poison even the souls of the newborn, and humanity would suffocate with a single cry. For the Lamed-Vov are the hearts of the world multiplied, and into them, as into one receptacle, pour all our griefs.” Schwarz-Bart wanted to be clear that it was not a novel about the Shoah, but it is, undeniably, a novel that seeks to witness oppression and unbearable heartbreak, to triumph over loss and the aggressive forces that cause it, and to find dignity within suffering without glorifying or transcending it. André Schwarz-Bart was that most unusual person – a man whose personal loss had made him deeply ethical, irrevocably engaged, and determined to do the best he could to preserve the kind of cultural memory that the twentieth century in its violence was equally determined to destroy.

These preoccupations led him to find friendship within another persecuted minority in Paris: the French West Indians. In 1946 the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique were given full departmental status, and this act provoked a huge cultural exodus of the young to France, in search of education and a better life. Among these was Simone Brumant from Guadeloupe whom he met and married. She was the daughter of a school teacher mother who moved frequently around rural communities, teaching children in one-room schoolhouses in classes of up to 130. Simone Schwartz-Bart was later to credit her mother with the inspiration for the strong female protagonists she created, saying that she had given her ‘the highest idea of the courage of the black woman and her dignity.’ For the Creole-speaking Simone, French was also a second language, but rather than André’s painstakingly researched, endlessly rewritten narratives, she would be influenced by the orality of her own culture, and its celebration of the ‘conte’, the spoken tale handed down from generation to generation. She brought to the partnership a tradition of laid-back toughness, and André was to praise her compatriots for ‘their gaiety, for their gentleness, their wisdom, their art of living, for this kind of verbal lyricism such that, in the mouth of a West Indian, of a true West Indian, all becomes poetry’. What interested him also was the common bond with a slave past, and when he got stuck in his second novel, the story of one lonely Caribbean woman in an old-age home trying to reconnect with her past, he turned to his wife for help in providing the right atmospheric detail. You have to understand that André was an ethical worrier. Before ever beginning the book he had contacted an African publishing house in Paris asking them to check over his manuscript, as he was unsure of his right, as a white man, to appropriate a colonial history not his own. Simone had never written before, but it seems that she was naturally brilliant, and after this start she co-authored another novel with her husband and went on to tackle a series of her own. Probably the best known is The Bridge of Beyond (Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle), which is a pretty special book, part magical realism, part family saga of strong Caribbean women overcoming hardships with grace and dignity. She became the equal of her husband in terms of commercial and critical literary success.

And yet for all that both The Last of the Just and The Bridge of Beyond were widely acclaimed, they were also heavily criticized. Writing for oppressed minorities, which you would expect on the face of it to be an undeniably valuable and laudable venture, is fraught with difficulties. André Schwarz-Bart was accused of deforming history because his novel contained a mythical dimension, and of betraying Jewish persecution by portraying his non-heroic characters as redeemed in what was thought to be a Christian fashion. Simone Schwarz-Bart was equally criticized by the Caribbean intellectual elite for creating a work they considered insufficiently political, and insufficiently aggressive and revolutionary. Not so long ago, The Last of the Just came back into the literary conscious when a prize-winning work by Yambo Ouologuem was discovered to contain ‘plagiarised’ passages from it concerning the Arab slave trade. This plagiarism is still disputed, as some claim that the orality that informed Simone’s work is also active in Ouologuem’s, leading him to repeat tales that seem part of a cultural inheritance. The author claimed that he had left the quotation marks in and his publisher had taken them out. And this post puts forward the view that these passages are ‘used ironically, to send up European misrepresentations of Africa’. Now all of this criticism heaped upon the couple gets me to one of my favourite bugbears, which is the tendency both of political commentators to think they have a right to dictate art, and of later generations to look back dismissively on the work of earlier authors for lacking the ideological or political acuity of the current age. I suppose it’s a question for me of authorial intention where the exception proves the rule. As you know, I don’t think an author’s intentions are really relevant to a critical appreciation of a novel, but I really don’t think that authors can be blamed for representing race, gender or cultural issues as they appeared to the author in a different historical reality. No literary couple was more ethically aware than the Schwarz-Barts, nor better placed with the right kind of political credentials to write the kind of novels they did. Simone’s powerful, healing, matrilinear culture was as much a part of Guadeloupian life as its angry, revolutionary counterpart, André’s final redemptive vision in his novel as valid a response to unimaginable suffering as any other.

While I’m on a mission here, and for the same reasons, I think it entirely unjust to condemn the representation of slavery in Huckleberry Finn, for instance. Mark Twain was a great writer, not a clairvoyant, and if he offends our delicate modern sensibilities then we should understand he wrote about the times he was living in, accurately, as best he could. Who’s to say that a few different rolls of the dice in the universe and our cultural situation wouldn’t have turned out completely differently, and there’d be a whole set of other books condemned for not saying the right things? No writer can comfortably predict the outcome of any society’s ideological development fifty or a hundred years hence. The same goes for books that portray women in submissive and oppressed conditions. This was the reality of how things were, and rather than be appalled we ought to acknowledge the historical reality involved. For both Simone and André Schwarz-Bart, what mattered was the power of the indomitable human spirit to transcend the appalling conditions that man has forced man to undergo. Their work has fallen out of print and out of literary favour, but that doesn’t alter the fact that they wrote utterly compelling, eloquent and often celebratory narratives that were steeped in the spirit of their times and in the desire they both shared to give hope, to preserve cultural memory and to move people with their writing. And yet it seems that this is never good enough for our stupidly demanding PC culture. When Simone’s play opened in New York in 1987 a member of the audience asked in the subsequent discussion why she hadn’t written a play about race and sexual relations, given that she was married to someone who ‘wasn’t exactly black’. It’s an outrageous personal question; I think there are some areas that politics has no right to go, and where it should wait to be invited, but Simone was sharp and good at answering this kind of criticism. She said: ‘I wanted to write a story about love. It seems to me that in the Antilles, with all the problems, one doesn’t speak enough about love… As for my husband, when I look at him, I just see someone I love. For me, he isn’t any colour at all.’

André Schwarz-Bart died in 2006, aged 78, after a heart operation.

Miscellany and ME

A couple of miscellaneous items to start with: I’ve been approached by a translator who is looking for an unpublished short story to translate, ideally written by a women. It’s for a competition, although there is no money prize involved. If any of you out there has such a story and is interested in contributing, either leave me a note in the comments or email me at the address in the sidebar and I will effect the introductions. The other thing I wanted to mention in passing was that I’ve started to use bloglines and my blogging life has been transformed! What a marvelous invention the feed reader is! I will never again miss a post or fall behind, and for the first time since my blogroll grew helplessly out of hand, I feel in control.

It’s nice to have played one trump against the forces of chaos as, over the course of last week, I’ve had the worst relapse of my ME since I stopped work 18 months ago. When I began this blog it was supposed to be about ME (or chronic fatigue syndrome as some call it) as much as it was about books, but, you know, writing about books was always so much more fun. In this post I’ll do a little of both as I have been saved, in part, by David Sedaris, but I’ll come to that later on. A relapse of any chronic illness is appalling as you have to watch months of painstaking work crumble to nothing. I felt like a climber, scaling the sheer rock face by means of finger and toe holds, who slips and sees the crampons designed to halt the progress of her fall pinging free of the rock like stitches bursting. There’s a terrible moment of jerky freefall spent wondering whether anything will hold, whether you will ever reach that haven of broken ribs and dangling in space, or whether you will just plummet down to oblivion. By Saturday I was devastated, but my husband and my mother did a magnificent job of keeping despair at bay, and I’m much more philosophical now. ME is nothing if not a series of reversals of fortune, because you often only find the limits of your energy by exceeding them (and they are always closer than you think). May I just say, though, that if you happen to have friends or loved ones who are sick and you are wondering what to do for them, then one of the very best things is to really listen to them talk. At my worst I am overwhelmed by my illness and need to find my sense of self again, and then come up with a new game plan. I can almost guarantee that you won’t want to listen – it’s not easy to listen to people who feel ill; it’s a natural human reaction to think that it can’t really be that bad, and they are making a fuss and ought to be more stoic and courageous, or else to feel helpless in the face of suffering (although that listening is really something, let me tell you), and for all these reasons it will tire you out. But afterwards you can treat yourself to that double chocolate fudge sundae you’ve been lusting after, safe in the knowledge that you thoroughly deserve it.

So for the time being I’ll be putting other projects on hold and sticking to my most fundamental specialism, reading books and blogging about them, both of which are therapeutic activities. And this is the point where I give David Sedaris a standing ovation. I had trouble finding the right thing to read; I’m hugely enjoying the Chabon, but it deserved a more attentive mind than mine, and I’m also loving the biography of Allen Lane, but was not in the mood for its endless representations of amazingly energetic publishers and writers. For instance, when Lane asked Harold Nicholson if he would write a 50,000 word Penguin Special entitled Why Britain is at War, he took delivery of the typescript a fortnight later (I felt weary just reading that). But the joy of Sedaris is that he starts from the engaging position of human frailty and fallibility, that he knows we cannot be the people we long to be, and often wonder whenever we will become accustomed to the people that we are. And then he makes it all so, so funny. Like the time (and I’m reading Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim) when he visits his aged, wealthy relative and falls in love with her room of stuffed animals, ‘a virtual ark of taxidermy.’

‘I first entered the room during one of Aunt Monie’s baths, taking a seat on a zebra-skin ottoman and experiencing the dual sensations of envy and paranoia: a thousand eyes watching, and I wanted every one of them. If forced to choose, I’d have taken the gorilla, but according to my mother, the entire collection had been willed to a small natural history museum somewhere in Canada. I asked what Canada needed with another moose, but she just shrugged and told me I was morbid.’

Or the time when he’s been hit by one of the in-crowd at school and his father thinks he should retaliate:

‘ “Clock him on the snot locker and he’ll go down like a ton of bricks.”

“Are you talking to me?” I asked. The archaic slang aside, who did my father think I was? Boys who spend their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.’

That’s what I love so much about David Sedaris; he shows you that however bad things get, whatever humiliations and reversals and downright failures you are forced to endure, you can turn them into the most entertaining anecdotes. And knowing that makes me start to feel better already.