Yeah, I’m slightly obsessed, but it’s nice to see one of my favourite writers getting a bit of attention.

Michael Hofmann writes in the Guardian about his first encounter with Roth’s work:

Roth somehow resists the tendency of literature to update, to promote, to miscegenate: that conversation between the centuries envisaged by Kundera in Life Is Elsewhere, or by Jan Kott in Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, and so forth. Roth is just so resolutely and specifically gone. He reached into our modern world of newspapers, telephones, cars, advertising – and of Amazon and Franz Ferdinand, ultimately – but disdained it, fled it, went backwards. (Nitroglycerine, was his comment on it.) It would be like meeting someone in sepia, a daguerreotype.

There is not, as far as I know, any film footage of him, or any sound recordings – even though he lived until 1939. I don’t really know, and can’t quite imagine what he looked like, or sounded like (his accent?), or behaved like. The photographs are averted, or they are masks. An eager brylcreemed sylph of a boy-journalist, later seedy with avoirdupois and Sitzfleisch. Courtly; ugly; natty; short. Attractive to women. First, poor beautiful schizophrenic Friedl, then Andrea Manga Bell, a Haitian princess from Hamburg, then the very good 30s German writer, Irmgard Keun. His hair blond-ish, supposedly, then a dark smear of wax trained across the wide, wide forehead; a cavalry moustache – bristly, or soft? – later; bulbous eyes, said to have been blue, then alcoholically watery and of a bottomless sadness.

I wonder how much older he would have seemed than he was – he who claimed to have started drinking before his 10th birthday; whose experiences in the first world war – whatever they were – constituted his first taste of travel abroad; who came back in 1919 to a truncated fatherland; whose wife went mad; whose friends killed themselves or died early; who in just two decades wrote thousands of pages of fiction and thousands more of journalism. I can’t read a line of his small script, not even his signature, and have never directly seen anything that was his. “Even parrots outlive us,” he wrote once – in his case, comfortably: he died at 44. A further source of guilt for me is that I am older than he ever got to be.

Stefany Anne Goldberg at the Smart Set on Roth’s historical position, poised between the end of the Habsburg Empire and the modern world:

The tightrope Roth balanced between formality and informality was also a delicate balancing of past and present. Born in 1894 in the Galicia of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Roth was witness to the collapse of an entire world, the world of European empire that gave way to the world of modern European nation states. He was a monarchist who couldn’t believe in the promises of nationalism; a Jew in an anti-Semitic society (who later considered himself a Catholic); an Austrian whose post-war home was in Germany, a country he lived in only periodically; a German writer who worshipped France, whose city of birth turned Polish and then Ukrainian, who had no father, whose wife was insane, who lived out of three suitcases, who didn’t even own a copy of any of his books; a man of the East and the West, the past and present, but never the future. “I am never at home,” he wrote in 1933 to Félix Bertaux, “just wander around randomly, I can’t stand to be in a room.”

Michael Hofmann again at the Millions, listing all the mentions of Roth’s masterpiece Radetzkymarsch in Roth’s letters:

JR to Stefan Zweig:
“If I am to finish the novel this year, then I can’t go to Vienna. It would set me back weeks. I’ve been stuck of late anyway. Maybe it will flower again next week.”

JR to Blanche Gidon (French translator):
“I have always been grateful to you for going to such trouble over my book. I never doubted that you took on the translation for no selfish motive. However, I cannot avoid saying to you that your translation is a bad translation, and — in spite of my debt to you for going to so much trouble over the book, and in spite of the friendship I feel for you — it remains a bad translation. Do you want me to tell you it is good, against my own convictions, when I am convinced of the opposite? — Maybe I am a boche. But, be it out of politeness or friendship or anything else, you can’t expect me to say something that doesn’t accord with my convictions.”

JR to Carl Seelig:
“My book, which I finished in Rapperswil, I no longer have any feeling for. I am writing a new one.”

I thought this interview with Le Monde, (via the Bookslut blog) in which Kertész speaks about the current political situation in Hungary, was tremendously interesting, so I thought I’d translate it into English (it’s quite a rough and ready translation). Pdf here.

I don’t agree with his ideas about the polarity between the East and West, tribal and Christian cultures in Hungary, but what I think is especially interesting is what he says about Hungary’s history:

The question I ask myself is: why has Hungary always taken the wrong path? Remember. When revolution was roaring through Europe, Hungary supported Marie-Thérèse! From the 16th century onwards, the country was first part of the Ottoman empire, then the Habsburg, then the Soviet bloc. Every time, it tried to play the game of the country which had absorbed it. That appeared to work quite well. But only in appearance. Under Kadar the country seemed like the most enthusiastic part of the Soviet camp, but that was at the price of the suppression of the 1956 revolution and a political indebtedness which cost them dearly. The current situation is just another example of this tendency to take the wrong path. The Hungarian state chooses today to be in opposition to Europe in the name of the defence of its national interest, which gives the impression of a return to sovereignty. But once more it’s in error. Nothing new, no problem, and therefore no solution because there is no problem.

…

Can we see a parallel with the 1930s?

In Hungary, yes. There are pages on that in my Diaries. Images. The walls of the metro escalators in Budapest covered in posters in the same green that the Arrow Cross Party used (Hungarian fascists of the 1930s): “Neither left nor right, Christian and Hungarian” and underneath, the sign of the far-right party. These visions remind me of my childhood. In 1938 we collected the electoral flyers of the Arrow Cross Party: Jews in top hat and tails, bouncing like fleas in the passage of a steamroller…

…

How do you see the future?

Some days, I tell myself that secretly the Hungarians know that we’re going in the wrong direction. And that Orban will fail–after all, in the 1940s, the situation in Southern Tyrol seemed equally intractable. And that was resolved. But I don’t think we can rule out any hypothesis. It’s also possible that Hungary will descend into utter chaos. That would be a tragedy, but when the people are alienated from politics and the economy is in an impasse, the danger is serious. The question of the gypsies is as important as that of the Jews. If the systematic persecution of the gypsies continues, they will eventually lose patience. They will be driven to violence.

I love this song, and this particular video is lovely for the faces he makes when he sings (it’s NOT Somewhere over the rainbow, by the way). Harold Arlen, 15th February 1905-23rd February 1986.

I, having loved ever since I was a child a few things, never having wavered
In these affections; never through shyness in the houses of the rich or in the presence of clergymen having denied these loves;
Never when worked upon by cynics like chiropractors having grunted or clicked a vertebra to the discredit of those loves;
Never when anxious to land a job having diminished them by a conniving smile; or when befuddled by drink
Jeered at them through heartache or lazily fondled the fingers of  their alert enemies; declare

That I shall love you always.
No matter what party is in power;
No matter what temporarily expedient combination of allied interests wins the war;
Shall love you always.

–Edna St Vincent Millay

And for more love poems for Valentine’s day, see here and here.

It is sometimes difficult, enjoying the sophisticated, detached gaze of the best of the novels, to remember the extraordinarily difficult circumstances in which most of them were written. Roth saw immediately the threat of Hitler — he is mentioned by name in his very first novel, The Spider’s Web in 1923, before the Beer Hall putsch took place. Roth, as a Jew and a congenitally critical spirit, would always have a career of awkwardness and dissent. In the years of his active writing, 1923 to his death in 1939, his life was wrecked by the lack of support from newspapers, principally the Frankfurter Zeitung, political oppression —The Radetzky March was finished, as Michael Hofmann observes, just in time to be burnt in the Bebelplatz — and personal difficulties.

And on Stefan Zweig:

The relationship with Zweig is summed up by a brutal anecdote that Hofmann brings to our attention. Zweig ordered a pair of trousers for Roth, since he only had one pair, unfit for the sort of restaurants Zweig liked. Roth insisted that they be cut in an Austrian cavalry style, making them immensely expensive. The next day, Roth, sitting in a bar in Ostend with his cronies, ordered a vividly coloured liqueur, which he proceeded to pour all over his jacket. He was ‘punishing Stefan Zweig’, he explained, and he was going to embarrass him by turning up for dinner in a stained and stinking jacket: ‘Millionaires are like that! They take us to the tailor and buy us a new pair of trousers, but they forget to buy us a jacket to go with them.’

(Incidentally if you haven’t read Michael Hofmann’s somewhat robust views on Zweig in the LRB you really should.)

Roth’s letters are the first book for ages I’m actually going to buy new and in hardback.

Another death I mean to write about: that of Christa Wolf, the German novelist who died last December aged 82 (Guardian obituary; Spiegel obituary). Born in 1929, Wolf grew up under the Nazis; the town she grew up in was then called Landsberg an der Warthe and was in Brandenburg in Germany; after the German-Polish border was moved westward after the Second World War to the Oder-Neiße line, it became Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland. As an adult she became East Germany’s most famous writer.

My favourite book of Wolf’s–and one of the great European novels on the Second World War and its aftermath–is Kindheitsmuster (A model childhood--although it also seems to be translated as Patterns of childhood), written in 1976, which examines the way that the Germans remembered and dealt with their Nazi history. Divided between Nelly Jordan’s childhood and adolescence in and East Prussian town during the Nazi period, and the adult Nelly’s visit to the town–now in Poland–with her brother and daughter, the novel plays with the dislocations of time and space which Wolf herself experienced: their hometown is now a foreign country; the places of their childhood have been almost completely obliterated by war; even the language spoken is no longer the same.

“What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves from it; we pretend to be strangers.” Kindheitsmuster starts with an echo of William Faulkner; it continues, unsettlingly, in the second person: the narrator writes about ‘your brother’ when she means ‘my brother’, says ‘you do this’ when she means ‘I do this’. Wolf is universalising, addressing every German, forcing them all to confront their shared past–a past which was often, in the GDR, officially described as something which had been inflicted on the East Germans and not something they were complicit in. While the Communist leadership of the DDR did suffer terribly under the Nazis–Walter Ulbricht was exiled to Moscow, Erich Honecker spent eight years in a concentration camp–and the close relationship between the GDR and the USSR meant that the Red Army were usually described as liberators rather than conquerors of East Germany, the culpability of individuals within the GDR was more problematic than this might suggest.

Christa Wolf is constantly worrying around the impossiblity of making a fresh start, of being able to distance oneself from the horrors of the past. Kindheitsmuster speaks to the reader in the second person, but the narrator describes herself as a child in the third person, not as ‘I’ but as ‘she’ or ‘Nelly’. The adult Nelly is revisiting her childhood, partly literally, in visiting the town of her birth, but partly also in long discussions of the nature and meaning of memory. She recalls the innocence of the child Nelly, but also the myriad ways in which as a child she learned to ignore the realities of life under fascism–persecution of the Jews, Ukrainian slave labourers in the fields–until it’s clear that the idea of the innocence of the child is so flawed as to be non-existent. To function, fascism must make everyone complicit: there comes a point at which everyone chooses not to ask awkward questions or to look too closely at the fate of their Jewish neighbours.

Postscript: When Stasi files were opened after German reunification it was discovered that Christa Wolf had, for a short time, been a Stasi informant. Following an outcry from the newspapers and other writers, Wolf made public her Stasi file, which showed that she hadn’t supplied any information that  could be used to hurt any of her friends and acquaintances. She was, in fact, under surveillance by the Stasi for over 30 years herself. The outrage, however, overwhelmed rational asessment of her writing for many. After her death, her friend Günter Grass spoke about the controversy in his eulogy for her:

What had caused so much malicious will to destroy? A text written in the summer of 1979 whose themes were doubt, self-doubt, and the eavesdropping and overt surveillance of Christa Wolf and her husband by the State Security Service of theGDR. From the security of their own desks and intoxicated by the sort of gratuitous courage that seems to flourish in editorial offices like a potted plant, these critics accused her of having been too cowardly to publish her story as soon as she had written it. To do so, claimed Ulrich Greiner, “would surely have been the end of Christa Wolf as a state poet and probably have resulted in exile.” From his safe corner he asserted magnanimously that “she could easily have found shelter in the West.” And Frank Schirrmacher went so far as to accuse her in the plural: “Everyone recognizes that these are sentences from 1989, not 1979.” Neither acknowledged that it also took a decade for Sommerstück (“Summer Piece”), the novel she wrote after “What Remains,” to be published in the GDR.

What a prodigious amount of hypocritical outrage from the pens of journalists who had never been subject to state censorship, but who officiously and opportunistically served the zeitgeist.

Led by powerful and influential newspapers, the press campaign of 1990 continued on, again and again springing back to life. Echoes of it can even be heard in some of her obituaries. It was especially the term Gesinnungsästhetik [an aesthetics based on policial convictions], coined to describe the work of Wolf and many other post-war German authors, that to this day inspires the petty minds that want to lock up literature and its creators in a piece of real estate known as the Ivory Tower. Hard on its heels, the personalized neologism Gutmensch [do-gooder, politically correct person], an expression of the prevailing cheap cynicism, came into circulation and was posthumously applied to Heinrich Böll. At this late date, after Christa Wolf’s death, we should probably not expect that the spokesmen of that bygone campaign might apologize in print, if only to acknowledge the pain their odious behavior caused. They obviously lack the self-doubt that Christa Wolf evinced all her life—in excess, in my opinion.

It’s true, I won.
What I said would happen
hit the sky with a fiery glow.
Only prophets whom no one believes
witness such things,
only those who do their job badly.
And everything happens so quickly,
as if they had not spoken.

Now I remember clearly
how people, seeing me, broke off in mid-sentence.
Their laughter stopped.
They moved away from each other.
Children ran towards their mothers.
I didn’t even know their vague names.
And that song about a green leaf–
nobody ever finished singing it in front of me.

I loved them.
But I loved them from a height.
From above life.
From the future. Where it’s always empty
and where it’s easy to see death.
I am sorry my voice was harsh.
Look at yourselves from a distance, I cried,
look at yourselves from a distance of stars.
They heard and lowered their eyes.

They just lived.
Not very brave.
Doomed.
In their departing bodies, from the moment of birth.
But they had this watery hope,
a flame feeding on its own glittering.
They knew what a moment was.
How I wish for one moment, any,
before–
I was proved right.
So what. Nothing comes of it.
And this is my robe scorched by flames.
And these are the odds and ends of a prophet.
And this is my distorted face.
The face that did not know its own beauty.

Wislawa Szymborska

trans. Grazyna Drabik and Sharon Olds

Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska died last Thursday aged 88 (Guardian obituary). I came across her poetry first in Daniel Weissbort’s anthology The poetry of survival and loved it for her matter-of-fact, rather serious, but conversational voice. Her writing is like overhearing the private conversation of a teacher you’ve always admired.

You can read her speech on receiving the Nobel prize here:

This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriotMarie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating “I don’t know.” Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that’s absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their “oeuvre” …

She carries on with the theme of ‘not knowing’ in this Guardian interview from 2000, found via the roundup of tributes to her on the Poetry Foundation blog. Also on the Poetry foundation blog, an old post translating Szymborska’s advice to would-be poets in a Polish literary journal:

To Marek, also of Warsaw: “We have a principle that all poems about spring are automatically disqualified. This topic no longer exists in poetry. It continues to thrive in life itself, of course. But these are two separate matters.” 

To Ula from Sopot: “A definition of poetry in one sentence—well. We know at least five hundred definitions, but none of them strikes us as both precise and capacious enough. Each expresses the taste of its own age. Inborn skepticism keeps us from trying our hand at our own. But we remember Carl Sandburg’s lovely aphorism: ‘Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly.’ Maybe he’ll actually make it one of these days?” 

I posted her poem In praise of my sister on my old blog; tomorrow I will post another favourite poem, Monologue for Cassandra.

Josephine: Yes – the music has to do a lot in opera. And it often succeeds amazingly well. The final act of Tristan and Isolde, for example, is practically devoid of action. Tristan and his friend Kurwenal basically just sit around staring at the sea waiting for Isolde to arrive. Without the music you’d just be thinking ‘for Pete’s sake will someone please DO something now!’ but when you see and hear it performed it seems totally gripping, full of longing and tension. Although with Wagner, you know, opinions differ…

Actually Wagner’s quite an interesting person to mention with reference to your point about music, plot, acting & visuals all forming a coherent whole. His idea about opera was that it ought to be a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ – a total or universal work of art – which would unite opera, drama and visual arts into something which had universal relevance and was a peak of culture. I’m not sure he succeeded in that! but I do find that opera generally and Wagner in particular is much more understandable and gripping when you see it live than when you just listen on the radio.

Lissy: ‘for Pete’s sake will someone please DO something now!’ was very much my internal monologue whilst watching the recent-ish Waiting for Godot revival at the Haymarket Theatre Royal.  The whole thing would have been enlivened no end with a bit of singing.

I’m not sure I’m ready for Wagner!  Maybe another couple of entry level operas before going on to the hard stuff…  Did/do Wagner’s operas have fixed set designs and costumes then?  Or did he want them to & to have a hand in that?  OR did the just think that the greatest visual artists of the day should be designing them?  I love the big-headedness of thinking you can make ultimate art.

I really enjoyed the process of writing as a dialogue – it all seemed to come much easier than working on something alone.

[Philip] Martin and [Abi] Morgan have spoken about their intention to get away from highly politicised interpretations of the First World War such as Richard Attenborough’s film of Joan Littlewood’s revue Oh! What a Lovely War. Setting aside the question of whether it’s even possible to ‘depoliticise’ a historical disaster in which over 35 million people died, there’s certainly space for a more nuanced take on the conflict than Oh! What a Lovely War – which is, let us not forget, a Brechtian musical satire rather than a realistic depiction of war – but Morgan and Martin’s Birdsong is not it. In depoliticising the war, in trying to avoid the clichés of beautiful and doomed youth, lions led by donkeys, Birdsong adopts other clichés: the one about the Edenic pre-1914 world, lost forever in the horror of the trenches; another of the highly strung officer, muscle twitching in his jaw, unable to bear the horrors that rougher men take for granted. Even the relationship between Isabelle and René is crashingly unsubtle: he is the strike-breaking capitalist whose impotence makes him beat his wife; she’s the angelic innocent who secretly takes bread to his striking workers.