The Birthplace

The Birthplace

By Henry James 

Foreword by Mark Rylance

Hesperus Press, February 2012

ISBN 13: 9781843912071

It is always an exhilarating moment when you finish a piece of prose by Henry James and find that you have followed it right to the end.

Man, what Louis Auchincloss wrote in Reflections of a Jacobite is true, you think.  When he chooses to be, this Henry James guy can be understandable and accessible and even entertaining.  Rather fine, actually, his way of going about things: the rambling prose veering always it seems towards incoherence, though never quite losing the thread completely, has an incisive bite.  He is a labyrinthine teller of tales.

This volume collects together two short works: The Birthplace (1903) and The Private Life (1892), each touching on the theme of the presentation of the self in everyday life.

An early and excoriating take on the heritage industry, the title tale is about a couple, the Gedges, who are employed to take care of a house where a great poet (Mark Rylance alludes to Shakespeare in the foreword) was born and grew up.  Their position requires that they show literary pilgrims around, spouting a potted spiel and parroting ‘false facts’ (or at any rate things they don’t believe).  There’s no way that they – and the male Gedge especially – can honestly speak their mind and keep the job.  Political machinations whirr and buzz.  Ultimately, it’s about power and manipulation.

Let the following sentence act as a coda for The Private Life, which is set at a social gathering in Switzerland:

The world was vulgar and stupid, and the real man would have been a fool to come out for it when he could gossip and dine by deputy.  (117)

Never expose yourself completely to others, that way lies confusion and folly, instead see social life as akin to acting on stage – artifice not authenticity is the order of the day.  Maybe it’s intelligent advice, maybe not.  The doppelganger scene, calling to mind the denouement of  The Jolly Corner, gives the tale a weird, uncanny aspect; but the main register is one of playful intrigue and pleasant dalliance.  Violence and melodramatic gesture are absent but the sense of life present and time passing (a low-key, under-emphasised melancholy) is palpable.  Nothing much happens here yet one is moved at the close.

The publisher’s description of the book can be read here.

A Romance with Cocaine

A Romance with Cocaine

By M. Ageyev 

Translated by Hugh Aplin

Hesperus Press, 2009

ISBN: 9781843914327 

A good novel should open up at least one wound in memory.

This enigmatic effort, first fully published in Paris in 1936, does the job perfectly.

It is enigmatic in several respects.  For one thing, the identity of the author – it had long been known that M. Ageyev was a pseudonym – was only established in 1997.  Mark Levi (1898-1973) wrote it and, his evident accomplishments as a writer notwithstanding, he apparently wrote little else.  Then again, cocaine makes its entrance only two thirds of the way in; it is a prominent aspect of the novel, but by no means central to it.

 A Romance with Cocaine is a novel that’s all about the pitiful life of a certain Vadim Maslennikov, sixteen years old when we meet him, perhaps a decade older when we take our leave.  He is ashamed of his mother and will go out of his way to disown her.  When hooked on cocaine, he’ll steal from her to feed his habit.

What is remarkable about the novel overall is Vadim’s honesty with regard to his unpleasant, vacuous character and behaviour.  His self-awareness and analysis of his weaknesses is evident.  But he is unable to make that change.  Somehow he’s willing to just limp along, playing the poor relation to his richer, more powerful ex-school friends.

As a portrait of adolescence there’s a grit of authenticity such as you find also in The Devil in the Flesh and The Bold Saboteurs.  Here’s one nugget I like, which I’d adjudge worthy of Radiguet:

That morning I involuntarily and for the first time came up against that amazing and invincible certainty that I could not possibly be liked by, or attractive to the person that I loved the way that I actually am.  (75)

Man, Vadim makes some wrong choices here, neglecting what’s most important.  We’ve all done that, mind: those wounds in memory start to open up again…

The publisher’s description of the book can be read here.

Captains Courageous

Captains Courageous
By Rudyard Kipling
Foreword by Max Hastings
Hesperus Press, September 2008
ISBN-13: 9781843914426

Apparently, Rudyard Kipling didn’t have any great opinion of America.

In his foreword, Max Hastings quotes him as saying – I paraphrase slightly – that it was a preachy, sanctimonious nation whose wealth was built on slavery and on the displacement and near-genocide of its native population.  Not quite the standard, ‘special relationship’, ‘two nations with shared values’ line at any rate.

This novel, originally published in 1897, was written when Kipling lived in America and it is mainly set at sea – he seems to have been loath to come ashore, poor dear.  The protagonist is Harvey, a spoilt teenage boy with more money than sense.  On a liner bound for Europe (where perhaps some Old World manners are to be drilled into the lad), he falls overboard and is picked up by a crew of fishermen.  There is no chance of the skipper bringing his schooner into dry dock anytime soon – he has a livelihood to earn, money doesn’t grow on trees – so Harvey has to pull his weight and earn his keep, along with the rest of the ‘salt of the ocean waves’ fellows.  It does Harvey the world of good in the end, and you might even say that it makes a man of him.

On one level, Kipling’s sea-faring yarn is simply a boy’s adventure story; yet on another it is maybe his diagnosis of what is (or was) wrong with America (i.e. spoilt, arrogant, overly rich and also somewhat overweight) and a suggested remedy (i.e. discipline, hard work, plain talking and the lash; OK, I made that last one up).

Best thing about Captains Courageous is the fishermen’s banter and the authentic nautical atmosphere.  Kipling knew much regarding fishing at sea and the men who did this often risky work.  Or at least he could write the talk  to convince you that he did.  Worst thing about the book is the casual racism, albeit this is infrequent because there is but one black character.  Would Kipling have sympathy, or indeed a baseline understanding, for the boy whose experience is recounted in Countee Cullen’s great poem ‘Incident’?  One doubts it, somehow.  He just wouldn’t get it.

Don’t get me wrong, Captains Courageous is an enjoyable novel; and it is even Oprah-worthy, being a positive tale of personal growth…  But certain attitudes within the novel have dated.

The Tales of Belkin by Alexander Pushkin

The Tales of Belkin
By Alexander Pushkin
Translated by Hugh Aplin
Foreword by Adam Thirlwell
Hesperus Press, September 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1843911852

For this volume, Pushkin invented an author (a certain Ivan Petrovich Belkin) who has apparently written the five stories herein.

It is not the case that Belkin is an alter ego or heteronym of Pushkin, as say a reader or student of Fernando Pessoa would understand the matter.  At least, that is not my take on it.

Belkin is simply a persona that allows Pushkin to parody and wryly explore the conventions of storytelling.  He is playing something of the same game that Italo Calvino played in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and there is also a kinship to Daniil Kharms’ absurdist prose works.

Originally published in 1831, these ludic (yet insidiously compelling) yarns touch on honour, vengeance, love, duels, elopement; and in one story myriad macabre happenings that turn out in the end to be a dream…  Fairy-tale tropes are in evidence and so too is the storyteller’s familiar, Coincidence.

Another of Belkin’s efforts, a history of a village, is included along with the stories.  In this important work, the great writer as well gives an account of his literary development from epic poet to middling local historian.

‘A Fragment’ ends the book.  This very short piece (and for once ‘piece’ does not mean ‘work’, that is to say ‘whole’) describes a fictional poet, a literary figure of Pushkin’s imagination, a brother of Belkin perhaps.

One crucial thing this volume achieves is to make you realise how close Kharms is to Pushkin; a proper son of Pushkin was he.  There are some clues as to this relationship.  Kharms wrote an amusing riff called ‘Anegdotes from the Life of Pushkin’, as well as a weird little play where Pushkin and Gogol take turns falling over each other.

Both of these are well worth a read, but after you’ve read this excellent book, of course.  It has been excellently translated by Hugh Aplin and Adam Thirlwell’s foreword is chockful of insights about the writing of fiction – and about the author of the author of these tales.

The Turn by Luigi Pirandello

The Turn
By Luigi Pirandello
Translated by Howard Curtis
Hesperus Press, Oct 2007
ISBN-13: 978-1843914396

Pirandello’s second novel, originally published in 1902, is an engaging comedy that turns out sad and serious at the end.

It is set in a Sicilian village where the key event is the marriage of the young and beautiful Stellina to the very old and very rich Don Diego. Her family are pleased that he is so well advanced in years, for she won’t have too much to put up with (nudge, nudge) or too long to wait until he kicks the bucket and passes along all that lovely dosh. This is, in fact, how her father sells the proposition to her. Quite a USP.

There is an outlandish train of events involving rivalry and intrigue, extreme Catholic piety, parochialism and pettiness, slights and challenges, and even a honest to goodness duel, with sabres no less. The characters are writ and drawn large; they are grand caricatures, one might say. We have Stellina herself, a spoilt Sicilian princess; Pepe, a vain dandy as pretty as a primrose, who pretends a passion for her; Coppa, a man wracked by pathological jealousy, whose constant refrain is, ‘No one bullies me, not even God!’ And there are a slue of others.

On a critical level, one can say that the novel explores a range of male (Sicilian) attitudes toward women: bullying, cajoling, jealousy, possessiveness and the like. As a reader, one becomes immersed in the farce and the melodrama and curious to discover how it all turns out.

Pirandello is adept at creating situations where everyone has an interest, a motive to act (and more often than not, it is Stellina’s fair hand as a prize); little wonder then that he became such a great dramatist. In Howard Curtis’s fine translation, the prose is fresh and flowing and pours off the page like honey (to ransack Eddie Colman’s famous phrase).

An enjoyable novel.