when you’re young a pair of female high-heeled shoes just sitting alone in the closet can fire your bones; when you’re old it’s just a pair of shoes without anybody in them and just as well. – Charles Bukowski

Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman, some type of supernatural creature. My mother would tell you, if she could,
About her life with my father, a strange and sometimes cruel gentleman. – Cornelius Eady

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? – Allen Ginsberg

My uncle, the general, never came out of the closet because he could not find his beach ball. – Charles Simic

I hang the window inside out like a shirt drying in a breeze and the arms that are missing come to me. Yes, it’s a song, one I don’t quite comprehend although I do understand the laundry. – Luisa Villani

I think it was either Ralph Waldo Emerson or H.H. Price who once announced that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. I cannot believe the author intended to denounce consistency as a foolish thing. My guess is that he meant an obsessive worry about avoiding inconsistencies to the point of a slavish devotion to “getting it right” is a good way to block imaginative thinking. Or something of that sort.

When it comes to one’s own writings, I believe Emerson or Price was quite right; however, there is nothing wrong with being bothered when one notices inconsistencies in the writings of others. We call that careful reading.

Right now, I am reading Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, the book that put Levi deservedly on the literary map. But first, I read his Moments of Reprieve, A Memoir of Auschwitz, a short book he wrote years later. However, my obsession with consistency caused me a problem almost immediately.

In the preface to the latter, Levi writes, “It has been observed by psychologists that the survivors of traumatic events are divided into two well-defined groups: those who repress their past en bloc and those whose memory of the offense persists as though carved in stone……Now, not by choice but my nature, I belong to the second group….I have not forgotten a single thing. Without any deliberate effort, memory continues to restore to me faces, words, sensations, as if at that time my mind had gone through a period of exalted receptivity, during which not a detail was lost.” He goes on to elaborate on this gift for several more sentences.

However, in his 4th reminiscence, only 28 pages later, in a story titled “A Disciple,”, Levi writes, “I learned many interesting things about Bandi. I wouldn’t be able to repeat them all today; every memory fades.”

Now this bothers me perhaps more than it should. Still, what explains this lapse? I have been thinking about it on and off for almost two days. I am very sorry this error occurred but it won’t destroy my conviction that Levi was wrongly deprived of a Nobel Prize for literature.

At last, I am done. I promised I would read it all within two weeks but I raced through Wilson’s essay on Proust’s novel with a keen avidity very unusual for me. Not that it was easy going. Reading Axel’s Castle is not a whole lot easier than reading A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, itself. To summarize Wilson’s essay is beyond my abilities but a little biography at the end of Part II of this this 3-part essay is worth presenting. (To my delighted surprise, the whole of Axel’s Castle is online, and you can read it by giving a little CLICK right here.) Now to the biographical bit. [Some editing on my part.]

Proust’s novel kept him up till he had finished it; but when he had finished it, he died. Proust had written the whole of a first version of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” by 1913; and thereafter, though his illness grew worse, though he
seemed on the point of succumbing at last to that death which since his early twenties when he had written “La
Mort de Baldassare Silvande” he had indulged himself continually in anticipating, he survived long enough to re-
vise and supervise the publication of almost the whole. But he did not quite see it through. The last sections
which he sent to the press were the volumes called “La Prisonniere” the climax of the narrator’s story, his strug-
gle and failure with Albertine. After that, in the novel itself, there is nothing but demoralization and decay until
the end, when the narrator makes a stand, in the only way which now seems possible, against the universal disinte-
gration: by setting himself to reintegrate experience in a work of literature the point, therefore, at which Proust
himself had sixteen years earlier begun. He did not live to finish correcting the proofs of “La Prisonniere.” Who will
wonder that so neurotic a man was unable to remain alive to put in order the final chapters of so dispiriting a story ?
Early in the October of 1922 he caught a chill and ran up a high fever, but stubbornly refused to see a doctor. He
worked at his novel harder than ever, as if he had been racing with the death which at the same time he was frankly inviting. As his fever grew continually worse, he ceased to take any nourishment. When his brother, a doctor, came to see him, Proust, fearing to be dislodged from his apartment, threatened to jump out of the window if he were not let alone, but promised to allow medical treatment as soon as he had finished his work. The day of his death, in mid-November, he summoned his maid at three in the morning and dictated to her some supplementary notes on the death of the novelist, Bergotte, remarking when he had finished that he thought what he had added was good. It is at the death of Bergotte that Proust’s narrator, in what is perhaps the noblest passage of the book, affirms the reality of those ob-
ligations, culminating in the obligation of the writer to do his work as it ought to be done.

But at about this time, and perhaps as a result of the effort of dictating these revisions, an abscess burst in Proust’s lung
and the next day he was dead.

At 2 A.M. this morning I awoke, thinking about Primo Levi. In particular, I wondered in what year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. To my shock and dismay, I discovered he never won the prize. How could this be? The internet carries about one million entries referring to him and surely there must be at least 1000 articles and many books written about him. Since 1970 there about 15 writers I never heard of who have been honored with the Nobel. They cannot all have had his significance. It is too late now to give him the honor he deserves because the award is given only to living writers.

Of his many books, two stand out: (1) If this is a man, Levi’s account of his time in Auschwitz; (2) The Periodic Table. London’s Royal Institution selected the latter as the best scientific book ever written.* The first has been widely hailed as the finest account of the horrors of Auschwitz ever written.

Songs have been written about him and the German rock band Heaven Shall Burn named their song “If this is a man” in his honor. The magician David Blaine has Levi’s concentration camp number tattooed on his arm and Christopher Hitchens dedicated his book, The Portable Atheist, to his memory with very stirring words. Leonard Cohen’s book of poetry, Flowers for Hitler, has quotations from Levi. There is so much more but I will stop. Consult Wikipedia for more.

For me, the important message of Levi’s omission is that it calls the Nobel selection process into question, perhaps into disrepute. Unfortunately, the selection committee never gives its reasons but the names of some of the winners makes pretty clear that politics is involved.

Officially, authorities ruled Levi’s death a suicide but for several reasons this seems preposterous, not least of which is that a man who survived the awfulness of Auschwitz seems such an unlikely candidate to give up on life. [Of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of only twenty who left the camp alive. The average life expectancy of a new entrant was three months.] More likely, his fall down a flight of steps was an accident. Levi was 67 when he died and still very productive. What a loss to the world.

***********************************
The four finalists for the honor of being the best science book ever written are:

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
King Solomon’s Ring by Konrad Lorenz
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Other nominees include:

The Double Helix by James Watson
The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht
Pluto’s Republic by Peter Medawar
Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
A Mathematician’s Apology by G.H. Hardy
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
The Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif – a book that deeply impressed me when I read it as a teenager.

Here’s one by Polish Nobel-prize winning poet Wislawa Szymborska. Why am I printing it here? Well, why not.

“In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself” – by Madame Szymborska. I was first introduced to her poetry in about 2001.

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.
A jackal doesn’t understand remorse.
Lions and lice don’t waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they’re right?
Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
In every other way they’re light.
On this third planet of the sun,
among the signs of bestiality
A clear conscience is Number One..

It seems to be almost a lifetime since I read Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, a collection of essays on Yeats, Valéry, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Rimbaud. If these writers are not your cup of tea, you can bet Wilson won’t be, either.

I hated Eliot and Stein on principle so I never gave them a fair shot, and I won’t do differently this time around. But Proust and Joyce are another matter. For no good reason, I have always assumed that Proust was the literary genius of 20th century geniuses but two tries to read A la Recherche du Temps Perdu [in English, of course] at an interval I would guess of 20 years availed me nothing. To coin a phrase, it was all French to me (though, as I said, I read it in English). But Proust, although a daunting task, is a challenge I am determined to meet.

Even the title has always defeated me. At one time, I saw it translated as Remembrance of Things Past and at another time, I saw it as In Search of Lost Time. I suspect something or other depends on choosing a title for guidance in reading, and maybe when I complete Wilson’s essay, I’ll know. Proust took a mere 13 years of constant writing to complete his masterpiece – a period of time in which James Patterson can knock out twenty-six #1 NY Times best sellers (and he has).

The great thing about this novel is that nothing happens. I really like that. It is a bit like my own life. The novel makes a break with orthodoxy in that it is not driven by a plot. The entire work is a actually seven novels in one and you can pretty much begin anywhere you wish. The first volume, Swann’s Way, was made into a movie once upon a time starring Jeremy Irons. Of course, I didn’t see it, and I won’t. In movies, things happen, and that strikes me as contrary to Proust’s vision.

Wilson’s essay is quite long – about 58 pages – and I’ll need two weeks to read it through. What will I get from this study? Who can say? At best, I expect to get some grasp of the various themes in Proust’s book. If I am very lucky, some understanding of what a great novel’s structure and style should be. That will encourage me to give the book a third try. If I do re-read and finish it this time, surely something good will come of that.

As a 16 year old teenager, I read, with all the self-adoration of a smug, would-be intellectual, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, The Dubliners, and Ulysses. I did not understand a word. Perhaps two decades later, under the guidance of the great literary critic, Edmund (Bunny) Wilson, I read them again. I never cease my astonishment and admiration for the insights and all-round acumen of the best literary critics, among whom Bunny stands tallest. Only from him did I come to see the parallels of the hero of the Odyssey of Homer and the hero of James Joyce’s greatest novel. It made all the difference for my second reading.

“The Dead,” although written first, is the last story in the Dubliners collection. In this story, the main character and his wife are attending a party given by his two aunts. There is no action whatsoever and, for me, that makes it very appealing. It is an intriguing psychological study of all those attending the party and when it is over, the hero, Gabriel Conroy and his wife go home and have a dialogue. The wife tells Gabriel about a relationship she had as a young girl with a youth whom she loved passionately and he, her. This leads to a long soliloquy in which Gabriel ruminates about death. It says more about death and love than any philosopher has ever said. The wife’s own emotional outpouring of her youthful love brings Gabriel to a spiritual awareness of the meaning of life. It is too magnificent for a patzer like me to try to summarize.

In 1987, John Huston made a movie of the story. I believe it was the last movie he made before he died. It was his greatest artistic triumph (and that says quite a lot since John was one of the all-time best directors). It starred Angelica Huston as the wife and Donal McCann as Gabriel Conroy. The movie may be the most authentic transcription of a literary work to film ever produced and, by my lights, is probably one of the two dozen best movies ever made. However high it is or isn’t, it is a masterpiece, even if not the equal to the Joyce story. For, as I learned from Bunny, great fiction cannot be perfectly reproduced on the screen. A fine literary work is not just plot and dialogue but speaks to our inner eye and ear and leaves most of what is great to our imagination. The rhythms of a paragraph are sui generis. Just consider the opening lines of Nabokov’s greatest novel, Lolita: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” [Nabokov and Bunny Wilson were the best of friends for many years until they had a silly disagreement and parting of the ways]

When you read this novel for the first time, you have to repeat that line a dozen times before you can move on to the rest of the book. Would I have ever been able to appreciate Lolita and its sonorities without the mentoring of Wilson? Probably not. When I first read the novel, (I was 21), I was looking for the erotic because the idea of a grown man having a love affair with a 12 year old girl excited me out of my mind. But when I re-read it some 20 years later, after reading Wilson”s Axel’s Castle, which, by the way, has not a single word about Lolita, I finally grasped what great literature was all about and even had a glimmering of what Nabokov meant when he once said that plots mean nothing to him.

So, thank you, Bunny Wilson, for the education you gave me. You are now gone about 40 years but still alive for me.

In the fall of 2007, Carolina Alvarado, a freshman at Brooklyn College, was reading William Faulkner’s notoriously dense and difficult Light in August. Her professor, Josep Entin says he was bowled over by a paper Miss Alvarado wote that illuminated the book for him as no other essay had ever done. Since then, he has become her cheerleader as she continues to read other Faulkner novels. Next fall, she will attend Princeton’s graduate school on a full scholarship and will continue her studies of Faulkner. Carolina arrived in the Unites States as a 9-year old child from the Dominican Republic and has put herself through college working a late night shift as a waitress. Her parents do not speak English. They don’t understand the full significance of a Princeton scholarship and Carolina’s mother was impressed ony because she knows Michelle Obama is an alumna of Princeton.

How did Carolina develop a love of literature and how did she find it in, of all people, through a reading of America’s most celebrated hard-to-read novelist? I won’t speculate about this but interviews of the young woman have made clear that she does not read these books because “one ought to read them” but reads them for pleasure. She says, “Faulkner asks all the right questions about memory and self-definition.” His characters illuminate her studies of religion, her second major. She has just begun reading Absalom, Absalom! and says, whatever else, she reads, she will always read Faulkner for his work “resonates” for her. She considers Absalom, Absalom! the densest of all Faulkner’s works and, in that very quality, he is the supreme pleasure-giver.

No one has ever praised James Patterson, the King of best sellers, for writing novels that “resonate,” and those who read only Patterson novels because they prefer “light reads” after a hard day’s work (probably not as hard as Carolina’s) are making a big mistake if they think they are having more fun than Miss Carolina Alvarado has been having with Faulkner.

I grew up on Sinclair Lewis novels and by age 16 had read Babbitt, Main Street, Dodsworth, Elmer Gantry, Arrowsmith, Kingsblood Royal, Cass Timberlake and It Can’t Happen Here. They shaped my views about middle America and I think, that if anything, they are more accurate today than they were in Lewis’s time. His becoming the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature (1930) was well deserved. It came as an unsettling surprise to me when only a few years later, I learned that more “serious” men of letters despised his work. Hemingway and others considered him a lightweight and more interested in trite ideas than in well-turned sentences. 55 years have elapsed since I last opened a Lewis book, I can’t speak to the issue of whether he was a wordsmith, and I don’t have a recollection what I thought at the time. But those ideas of his were anything but lightweight.

From Lewis I learned that evangelists were cynics, driven by a lust for power and money. Elmer Gantry was no caricature of the profession; he foreshadowed the coming of the late 20th century televangelists whose hypocrisy made Elmer seem the paradigm of modesty and sincerity. Each of us, whether we have read Gantry or not, has felt his influence when we turned our attention to Tammy and Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert, Peter Popoff and 20 more frauds. We knew in our hearts they were crooks even before the evidence made it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt, and I think this is because of an aura of distrust that took its impetus from the book, Elmer Gantry.

It can’t happen here warned us of the dangers of fascism and is the precursor of Philip Roth’s more acclaimed but not better book, The Plot against America. Lewis’s cynicism toward American politics is in my bones.

Lewis grew up in a prairie town in the heart of Minnesota and was well positioned to see how pathetically small-minded people from such a background were likely to be. Babbitt and Main Street were biting satires which massaged my prejudices well but I have not disowned them.

If anything, Dodsworth was better than those two because it treated of the phony and inane efforts of a wealthy hausfrau to rise to a level of presumption in which she made a fool of herself and lost her husband in the process. A classic of the collapse of a marriage that should never have been.

Lewis attacked sacred and preposterous American ideals and his only equals were non-novelists like H.L. Mencken, the great essayist who penned this marvelous sentiment: “Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.” (from ‘The Libido for the Ugly’, 1927).

But Lewis was not guilty of this crime and Mencken promoted and celebrated his work. There came a time in my life when I was devoted to pseudo-intellectualism (without recognizing it as such, of course) and did the expected – heaped contempt on Lewis and even had the temerity, without knowing what I was talking about, to call William Faulkner a genius. Egads, what snobbery. For all I know, Faulkner is a genius but I have to take that on faith and the opinions of others. As for Lewis, I can see that for myself. A wonderful writer and it is never too late to dip into his insights. I think I’ll try some next week.

Three days ago, as a comment to my post on what it is like to be a mouse, that master of transistors and much else, Al, wrote a few memorable lines from the poet Robert Burns, with a small alteration that referred to me. It is an honor to be bundled with a Burnsian mouse and I thought now would be a good time to present the whole of Bobby’s masterpiece along with a gloss that I regret I did not write.

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
[The poet assure the little mouse he will do it no harm.]

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
[Burns apologizes to the mouse for the behaviour of mankind.]

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave ‘S a sma’ request:
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss’t!
[Burns says he knows the mouse needs to steal the odd ear of corn, and he does not really mind. He’ll get by with the remainder and never miss it.]

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!
[Burns regrets the problems he has brought on the mouse, destroyed her home at a time when it is impossible to rebuild. There is no grass to build a new home and the December winds are cold and sharp.]

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ wast,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.
[Where the mouse had thought that she was prepared for winter in her comfortable little nest in the ground, now she is faced with trying to survive in a most unfriendly climate, with little or no hope in sight.]

[SG: I now skip a stanza I have no use for - Burns feels sorry for himself.]

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
[In the above, we find that most famous of poetic lines concerning schemes that often go astray.]

Lastly comes the ultimate stanza, which like the antepenultimate stanza, I also choose to omit since it is only Burns’ lamentation on his own life.