When the weight comes down
January 5, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
The Weight. Andrew Vachss; $17.00 paper 978-0-307-74131-8, 264 pp., Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Andrew Vachss specializes in noir thrillers about honourable criminals who mete out what is colloquially known as “rough justice.” His most famous series character is Burke, an ex-con turned private investigator who, along with a motley crew of associates, tracked and punished rapists and child molesters. Vachss retired Burke in 2008, perhaps because the author himself grew weary of trafficking so close to the abyss. “I needed a guide to Hell,” Vachss is quoted as saying, “and an angel wouldn’t do.” Since closing out the Burke series, he has written a standalone novel called Haiku (2009) and a graphic novel called Heart Transplant (2010).
His latest standalone, The Weight, features Tim “Sugar” Caine, a 255-pound behemoth who returns home from a jewellery heist to find the cops waiting for him. Thinking they are onto the recent score, he accompanies them to the police station, where he is told that the victim of a violent rape has picked him out of a photo array. His only problem: to beat the rap, he’d have to admit to what he was really doing. The cops know the score, so they offer him a deal: give up his partners in the jewellery heist and walk, or face prison time for a rape he didn’t commit.
Sugar, like most Vachss anti-heroes, lives by a fairly rigid code of honour, so instead of rolling over on his crew, he takes the weight and is sent to jail on a five-year bit.
The early descriptions of prison life and the politics that go on behind bars are riveting, in particular because of the dispassion with which Sugar narrates them:
That’s why I never showed anyone my new shank. I know – I know now, I mean – that you never show a guy who might be a problem for you that you’ve got something for him. If he’s not bluffing, that won’t back him off, just make him bring something for himself next time. And if he was bluffing, showing him steel might just turn him serious. You can buy anything Inside. Even guys to do your work for you.
And Vachss has always been a dab hand at hard-boiled dialogue, especially between his criminal characters:
The first test was always Population. This time, it happened real quick. Some greasy little punk half my size says, “What they call you on the street, esé? In here, you got to pay to stay. Otherwise, what they be calling you is the other white meat, comprende?”
“Azúcar,” I said, smiling at him.
“What?”
“You asked me what people call me on the street, right? So I just told you … esé.”
Unfortunately, the phony rape beef and the scenes inside Rikers and Dannemora (known as “Little Siberia” due to its proximity to the Canadian border) only account for the novel’s set-up. Before long, Sugar is back on the street, where he tracks down Solly, the elderly crime boss who masterminded the jewellery heist. Solly sets Sugar up with a new identity and his cut from the robbery. However, one of the thieves from five years ago has vanished, and although the statute of limitations ran out for Sugar while he was in jail, the fact that other members of the crew switched states in the interim means they could still face prosecution should the missing man decide to roll over on them. Solly asks Sugar to travel to Florida, track down the missing crew member, and make sure he doesn’t squeal.
From there, the plot becomes increasingly convoluted, involving Albie, one of Solly’s deceased associates; Albie’s widow, Rena (with whom Sugar becomes romantically entangled); a Lincoln that has to be moved back and forth between locations for reasons that remain utterly obscure; and a partners desk that conceals a little blue book Solly wants in his possession. Why does Solly want the book and what precisely was the relationship between him and Rena’s late husband? Even Sugar and Rena (who changes her name to Lynda over the course of the story) appear confused about the details and the reasons for doing the things they do.
Moreover, Sugar remains adamant in his desire to find the man who committed the rape he was sent up for and make him pay, but this aspect of the plot, so fascinating in the early going, appears more and more like a pallid MacGuffin, an inciting incident that was tantalizing at the outset, but becomes almost incidental over the long haul.
Review of Edem Awumey’s novel Dirty Feet
January 4, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
My review of Edem Awumey’s second novel, Dirty Feet, translated by Lazer Lederhendler, is now available online.
Awumey employs a spare, elliptical storytelling style that heightens the reader’s sense of Askia’s displacement: the villages through which he roams as a child are not described in any detail, and Olia’s portraits of the turbaned man who may be Askia’s father remain frustratingly elusive. The loft in which the man lived, and where he sat for Olia, is festooned with frescoes detailing the history of the Songhai Empire’s king Askia Mohammed. (The name is not a coincidence.) “No one knows who the artist was,” the turbaned man told Olia about the mural. “But the main thing is that it exists.”
The same could be said of Askia, a point that is reflected in the repeated question – “Who are you?” – he imagines reading in the photographer’s expression.
“Before he was here, I had a chair”
January 3, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Dissident writer and publisher Josef Skvorecky, 87, dies of cancer
January 3, 2012 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Dissident Czech writer Josef Skvorecky, who came to Canada to escape the 1968 Soviet invasion in his home country, has died from cancer. He was eighty-seven years old.
Despite winning the Governor General’s Literary Award for his 1984 novel The Engineer of Human Souls, Skvorecky was not as well-known in his adopted country as he (arguably) deserved to be. Fans of the Glen Hansard/Marketa Irglova band The Swell Season might be surprised to discover that duo took their name from the title of one of Skvorecky’s novels.
In addition to his own writing, Skvorecky was the founder, along with his wife, Zdena Salivarova, of 68 Publishers, a Toronto-based house dedicated to publishing the work of Czech and Slovak writers who had been banned in their own countries. (The name of the house was a reference to the Prague Spring of 1968.) Among the writers whose work Skvorecky published were Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president who himself died just over two weeks ago.
In 1990, Josef and his wife were awarded the Czech Republic’s highest distinction, the Order of the White Lion, by Havel.
The independence of the Czech Republic allowed writers to be published freely in that country, sparking a surge in new publishing houses. Four years later, the Skvoreckys shut down 68 Publishers after having published at least 200 books, including novels, poetry and books on history, philosophy and autobiographies.
In a tribute to the couple’s work prior to the country’s independence, Havel wrote: “By publishing in our own language books that cannot be published in our motherland, you are in fact helping to preserve the spiritual identity and continuity of our nation. The long term effect of your work, which is simultaneously humble, but at the same time absolutely essential for our nation’s future, is almost impossible to fully appreciate.”
The National Post quotes novelist Ivan Klima as saying, “It was nice that the books were published in Czech, beautifully done, then smuggled here for thousands of people to read.” Skvorecky, whose own early novels were banned in his home country, was named to the Order of Canada in 1992.
In addition to his novels, Skvorecky also published poetry, autobiography, and non-fiction on jazz and cinema. His novel The Republic of Whores was adapted for the screen (as The Tank Battalion), and three other works – Sins for Father Knox, The Swell Season, and Murders for Luck – were adapted for television.
E-publisher Joyland goes retro with paper-and-ink books
December 30, 2011 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Joyland, the “hub” for short fiction spearheaded by writers Brian Joseph Davis and Emily Schultz, is branching out into the realm of print books. Joyland Retro, a biannual print-on-demand journal that includes material from the site, is being produced in conjunction with the self-publishing service Create Space, a subsidiary of Amazon. The first volume of Joyland Retro, which features stories by Zoe Whittall, Andrew Hood, Jim Hanas, Nathan Sellyn, and others, is available now via Joyland and Amazon, and retails for $10.95.
“We spent six months researching the most ethical way to print and distribute two issues a year for really cheap,” Davis wrote in an e-mail to TSR, “… and this is the best for now.” Because Create Space employs local printers in different markets, Davis says, the service is “a lot more ‘locavore’ than you would think.”
Bookstores can order Joyland Retro through Create Space or directly through the Joyland website, and Davis says that he will ship bookstore orders wholesale. He points out, however, that Joyland Retro is “technically” a magazine, “so we’re going to concentrate on reaching our readers directly, as you have to with a subscription-based operation.”
The new print-on-demand venture is being run entirely through the Joyland website, and is not affiliated with Joyland eBooks, which are produced in partnership with Toronto publishers ECW Press. The e-book series has slowed down a bit in the past six months, because husband-and-wife team Davis and Schultz have been concentrating on their new baby. But Davis says there is a new collection from Toronto journalist David Balzer due for release in spring 2012. Davis describes the e-book program as a success, “in that we’ve kept alive the tradition of breaking new authors with short-story collections.”
So, is the retreat into “analog” book production the beginning of a digital apostasy on Davis’s part? “Just the opposite,” he says, calling the combination of digital and traditional publishing “the hybrid future.” Davis goes on:
We’re just being ecumenical now. One thing I thought about while putting the collection together is that digital reading and print reading are developing into discrete operations in our minds, in the same way that listening to music and making music are controlled by different parts of the brain. On the one hand, the world needs less “stuff,” and I’m glad the website is this temporal, weekly, ecstatic experience. On the other hand, authors really like being on paper and that can’t be reduced to “nostalgia.” If anything, it adduces something about how the brain works in processing text, truth, and its own consciousness. This might be the only publishing interview that ends with the statement: Digital is Dionysian. Print is Apollonian.
The Three Stooges or Voltaire: Ray Robertson on culture, CanLit, and fifteen reasons to live
December 22, 2011 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Don’t try telling Ray Robertson that his latest book, the essay collection Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live, is uplifting. “Hopefully you’re joking,” he says caustically.
To be fair, there is a certain irony in characterizing Why Not, which has recently been longlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize (it was also shortlisted for the inaugural Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-fiction this past fall), as a kind of sunny, self-help guide in the vein of The Book of Awesome or the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Although each of its short chapters is devoted to a different aspect that makes life worth living – subjects include love, art, work, solitude, and intoxication – the book is informed by the clear-eyed assessments of an unrepentant devotee of philosophers from the stoics to the transcendentalists. Robertson is a student of philosophy, and has always been more comfortable in the company of Emerson and Seneca than with the New Age platitudes of Deepak Chopra or Robin Sharma.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the author’s work that his book on the meaning of life concludes with a meditation on death. What might be surprising, however, is to hear Robertson state that, for him, the final chapter is one of the most affirmative in the entire book. “With the other chapters,” he says, “there’s always the downside. So when I talk about intoxication, I talk about how you can go the other way [i.e. become an addict]. Or how you’ve got friends, yes, but they’ll let you down. Or love, but it doesn’t last. But with death, there is always the fact that you’re going to die and I thought that, across the ages, it’s the fragility or ephemerality [of life] that provides the intensity and the supposed longed-for purpose that we often lose track of.”
Robertson himself wondered about the inclusion of a chapter on death in what was putatively a life-affirming book, but ultimately decided the subject was unavoidable. “The whole book was based on the idea that you’re going to confront unsavoury truths and affirm life in spite of them,” he says. “It became apparent after a while that there was this spectre hanging over all the other reasons, no matter how affirmative you are or how you try to wring meaning out of this stuff, and I found that it was something that had to be confronted.”
The author of six novels and a collection of literary criticism, Robertson is no stranger to confronting unsavoury truths. In this case, the confrontation was initiated in response to emotional turmoil in his own life. After finishing the first draft of his most recent novel, 2009′s David, Robertson went through a period of malaise that culminated in thoughts of suicide. “It wasn’t despair or a kind of ‘woe is me,’” he says. “It was just a kind of nothingness. What I was frustrated with was this period where nothing could have gone better in a worldly sense. It wasn’t as if I had anything to be depressed about, but I was incapable of appreciating all the wonderful things life had to offer.”
Afflicted with chronic obsessive-compulsive disorder, Robertson found that simple but radical changes in diet helped him recover from his dis-ease. Deleterious products such as processed food, white sugar, and caffeine were out; healthy alternatives like bananas, almonds, turkey, and whole grain breads were in. “I got better essentially through detoxifying,” he says. “I thought that part of my personality was panic attacks and stuff, and that was part of my edgy, intense nature. After forty-three years of that your body kind of tenses for it. Then, after six or seven weeks or so there was a situation where they didn’t come. I thought, ‘Why?’ Then I was like, ‘Oh, it’s chemistry.’”
Although Robertson is adamant that the resulting collection is not intended as a memoir of his illness and recovery, he nonetheless admits to the personal nature of the project: “It’s the closest I’ll come to autobiography.” Consequently, the essays are replete with the author’s thoughts on the things that are closest to him, including abiding concerns such as music and the nature of good art.
And what constitutes good art? In Why Not, Robertson answers the question first by defining what art isn’t: it is not entertainment; it is not an obligation; and above all, it is not culture. The author quotes Simone Weil: “Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes will manufacture professors.” Or, as he suggests to me when I bring up the subject of CanLit and the institutional instruments – Canada Council grants, Canada Reads, the Scotiabank Giller Prize – that provide it with oxygen: “When something becomes so aligned with the culture that it becomes simultaneous with it, most likely it’s no longer art.”
For Robertson, culture is often equated with professionalism and competence, which he acknowledges are necessary to create art, but are not nearly sufficient to sustain it. When I suggest that competence is the curse of CanLit, his eyes light up. “Competence is the enemy of excellence,” he says. “Of course you aspire to make it. And you’ve got a pretty nice lifestyle where you get a grant, you’ve got this and you’ve got this, and you’re perfectly set now, but you’re forty-five and you’ve written seven books, you’ve written out your childhood, you don’t have to worry about being published, and there’s this retreat into competence as opposed to that blazing.”
It’s the blazing – or to use Robertson’s preferred term in Why Not, the danger – that separates merely competent work from great art. The writers he admires – he names Barry Hannah, Jack Kerouac, and Thomas McGuane – were all devoted to crafting sentences capable of making a reader sit up an take notice, a quality that often goes missing in a culture that prizes books that are good for you over books that are just plain good. “McGuane and Hannah much more than Kerouac,” says Robertson, “and one book by Carson McCullers, not her whole oeuvre, but The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: that book just blew my mind. That book felt dangerous. How is she able to talk about this sixty-year-old black doctor who’s disappointed in his children? How does she know this? It’s unnerving. As opposed to, here’s a book about how racism is wrong.”
Too often, our culture promotes the latter over the former, in Robertson’s view, leading to a kind of tyranny of mediocrity. “You should stay away from the mediocre. You should have good art or bad art. It should be the Three Stooges or Voltaire.”
And how to counteract the forces of mediocrity? For Robertson, the answer is simple: ignore them. “It’s like every year with the Grammys,” he says, “there are probably a couple of good things, but for the most part, people who care about good music don’t sit around saying, ‘Oh, geez, did Jay-Z win?’ And then, of course, when Steve Earle does win one, it’s twenty years after he was dangerous and making good art, so it’s irrelevant.” But if literary tastemakers were to refuse to pay attention, it might serve to change people’s ideas about what is good and bad. “If there’s this indifference from the intelligentsia, people with taste, I think it would be cathartic,” he suggests. “It’s like trying to change capitalism. To me, I think it’s best to stand outside it and just live your life.”
Living his life, these days, means coming to grips with the fact that many of the things he values – solitude, for example – are not things that the current zeitgeist tends to promote. But Robertson is sanguine about maintaining a somewhat adversarial relationship with the modern world. “Bertrand Russell lived so long that he actually saw some of the things he had argued for as a contrarian by nature come to pass, and he said it’s a very curious thing to see your enemies embracing your arguments. It’s oddly deflating.”
Instead of being deflated, the experience of writing and promoting Why Not seems to have rejuvenated Robertson and given him the drive to return to what he loves most: writing. “I feel like you have to have the right attitude,” he says, “where you get up in the morning and you think, ‘I want to write about that‘ as opposed to, ‘I want to write.’” And if he’s mellowed a bit in the process, he considers that, too, all for the best. “I think I’m fairly clear about what my agenda is, and that is to make good art as best I can and everything else is secondary. When I was younger, that included my health. And I was mean as a snake, especially when I was trying to get situated [as a writer]. But it doesn’t happen like that anymore and so I feel a bit more human and I think that’s enriched my art a bit.”
You could do worse, I say. “You could do worse,” Robertson laughs. “That’s what you should use as the title for your piece.”
No mercy
December 20, 2011 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Fatale. Jean-Patrick Manchette, Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans.; $14.95 paper 978-1-59017-381-7, 98 pp., New York Review Books
The working title of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s 1977 roman noir was La Belle Dame Sans Merci. The invocation of Keats’s melancholy ballad is wholly appropriate for this story of a homicidal drifter who earns her keep by ingratiating herself with the wealthy denizens of whatever town she happens to alight in, then betraying and (frequently) murdering them. “I saw pale kings and princes too,” says Keats’s bereft and shivering knight, recalling a vision that came to him in a dream on the cold sedge where he has been abandoned. “Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; / They cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci / Thee hath in thrall!’” The deathly pallor of the poem’s warriors anticipates the mood and tenor of Manchette’s book, as does the merciless woman’s apparently preternatural ability to enthrall her victims. It would certainly appear that Roucart, the “potbellied and rubicund” hunter in Fatale‘s opening scene, is in thrall to the thirty- or thirty-five-year-old woman with “dark brown eyes and delicate features,” a “vague smile,” and teeth “which were small and even” – right up to the point at which she unloads a sixteen-gauge shotgun into his stomach.
The woman, who adopts the alias Aimée Joubert (we never learn her real name), flees the scene of the crime by train and takes up residence in the small town of Bléville, where she begins to work her way into the circle of élite citizenry, which includes a doctor, a realtor, and a pair of businessmen. We begin to understand that Aimée is repeating a cycle, the bloody end of which we witnessed in the scene with the hunter. Should there remain any doubt, Manchette allows us to spy on Aimée, alone in her rented room, musing to herself about the pattern of repetition her life entails: “Well, it’s the same as ever, isn’t it? It seems slow, but actually it is quite fast. Sex always comes first. Then money questions. And then, last, come the old crimes. You have seen other towns, my sweet, and you’ll see others, knock on wood.”
Manchette plays with the convention of the venal, hyper-sexualized, noirish femme fatale; in the train on the way to Bléville, Aimée is pictured eating a choucroute, the juices of which “dripped from the edge of her mouth.” She proceeds to rub the banknotes she has secreted in her luggage over her naked body: “her nostrils were assailed at once by the luxurious scent of the champagne and the foul odor of the filthy banknotes and the foul odor of the choucroute, which smelt like piss and sperm.” This is only the first of many times sex and money will be conflated over the course of the novella. Aimée, we are told, is “almost exclusively interested” in the wealthy part of Bléville, the “dwelling place of the local bourgeoisie on the left bank of the river and well away from the port with its cafés overflowing with mussels and fries, with whores and seamen.” The pun in the final word is certainly not unintentional.
Even the name of the town is itself a reference to consumerist venality. The French word blé literally means “wheat,” but it is also a slang term for money. Thus, a translator’s note informs us, the name of the town could reasonably be rendered as “Doughville.”
Aimée’s plans to fleece the wealthy citizens of Bléville hinge on information provided by a slovenly outcast known as Baron Jules, an eccentric who is despised by the town’s upper crust and who stores a Weatherby Regency shotgun on a rack in his front hallway (Chekhov’s dramatic principle should be kept in mind here). The baron is a key character with regards to Manchette’s political agenda in the novel. The author, who considered crime fiction “the great moral literature of our time,” expressed an intention to dramatize the ways in which Marxism had been corrupted in French society. To that end, Bléville is depicted having two local newspapers, one of which “championed a left-capitalist ideology; the other championed a left-capitalist ideology.” The baron, by contrast, is referred to as “a sort of nihilist” by the real estate agent Lindquist: “He votes for that Trotskyite Krivine, you know.” One of Aimée’s first encounters with the baron involves him urinating on the walls of a well-appointed mansion during a high-class cocktail party.
The baron’s hatred for Bléville’s élite, and Aimée’s developing affection for him, form whatever moral undercurrent Manchette’s short book has. The fact that Aimée is a thief and a murderer might seem to undercut this moral strain, but the conflict she suffers at the prospect of harming the baron (a conflict she faces with none of her other victims) helps mitigate this, and highlights the way Manchette employs and extends the Situationist notion of dérive, defined by Guy Debord as a scenario in which “one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.”
If this manipulation of a stock Situationist aesthetic helps to explicate what would otherwise appear to be a psychological inconsistency on the part of Aimée, the same cannot be said of the book’s climax, in which the icy femme fatale transforms into something more closely resembling Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider (or, perhaps more appropriate to Aimée’s Gallic origins, Milla Jovovich in Resident Evil). The blood-soaked finale features Aimée cutting a violent swath through the men of the town – shooting, stabbing, and strangling them in an extended set-piece that feels completely out of place with the muted tone of everything that has gone before. Manchette’s novella (at fewer than 100 pages, it can hardly be called a novel) has to this point been a clever and subversive examination of small-town corruption and greed, the plaque bearing the slogan “KEEP YOUR TOWN CLEAN!” becoming increasingly ironic the longer the story goes on. By turning Aimée into a kind of avenging angel, Manchette brings his themes out of the shadows and into the light, in the process exposing them as thinner than they might otherwise have appeared.
Seeing the human world as it really is: Vaclav Havel 1936–2011
December 18, 2011 by Steven W. Beattie · 1 Comment
Vaclav Havel, a man Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt calls “[o]ne of modern Europe’s most important, strongest and bravest voices,” has died in his sleep at the age of 75. Havel, a playwright and dissident, was the driving force behind the so-called “Velvet Revolution” that saw the downfall of Communism in Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s. He became increasingly politicized after the Prague Spring of 1968, and was one of the men responsible for drafting Charter 77, a declaration decrying human rights abuses on the part of the Communist Czech government.
Havel’s plays were banned in his own country, and he was imprisoned for his dissident views and statements. He nevertheless became – along with Polish leader Lech Walesa – one of the symbols of the downfall of European Communism associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Havel served as president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until the country split in 1992. Despite opposing the breakup, Havel stood for election as president of the Czech Republic in 1993 and won; he held the position until 2003.
Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, described Havel as “a great European.” Guido Westerwelle, Germany’s foreign minister, went even further, calling Havel “a trailblazer for European reunification,” a somewhat ironic characterization given the Euro zone’s current uncertain future.
Havel was a persistent humanist and employed the rhetorical skills he honed as a playwright and essayist to win broad support for his reforms. In one of his most famous essays, “The Power of the Powerless,” written in 1978, Havel muses over the philosophical nature of existence in what he termed a “post-totalitarian” society, and anticipates some of the challenges our current postmodern world faces:
The essential aims of life are present naturally in every person. In everyone there is some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his inherent humanity, and to utilitarianism. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.
Havel goes on to identify society’s “willingness to surrender higher values when faced with the trivializing temptations of modern civilization” and its soporific “vulnerability to the attractions of mass indifference” in terms that eerily presage our existential dilemma in the second decade of the 21st century.
As an intellectual, essayist, and playwright, Havel was highly attuned to the nature and power of words – in particular, the power of words to twist and obscure meaning. When the German Booksellers Association presented him with their Peace Prize in 1989, Havel took the opportunity to muse about the slippery nature of language and the various ways it can be corrupted by those seeking to gain and hold the reins of power:
No word – at least not in the rather metaphorical sense I am employing the word “word” here – comprises only the meaning assigned to it by an etymological dictionary. Every word also reflects the person who utters it, the situation in which it is uttered, and the reason for its utterance. The same word can, at one moment, radiate great hope; at another, it can emit lethal rays. The same word can be true at one moment and false the next, at one moment illuminating, at another, deceptive. On one occasion it can open up glorious horizons, on another, it can lay down the tracks to an entire archipelago of concentration camps. The same word can at one time be the cornerstone of peace, while at another, machine-gun fire resounds in its every syllable.
…
I can rightly say that as far as we Czechs are concerned, the age-old animosities, prejudices, and passions, fueled and fanned in so many ways over the centuries, have evaporated in recent decades. And it is no coincidence that this has happened when we have been saddled with a totalitarian regime. This regime has cultivated in us such a profound distrust of all generalizations, ideological platitudes, clichés, slogans, intellectual stereotypes, and insidious appeals to various levels of our emotions, from the baser to the loftier, that we are now largely immune to all hypnotic enticements, even of the traditionally persuasive national or nationalistic variety. The stifling pall of hollow words that has smothered us for so long has cultivated in us such a deep mistrust of the world of deceptive words that we are now better equipped than ever before to see the human world as it really is: a complex community of thousands and millions of unique, individual human beings in whom hundreds of wonderful qualities are matched by hundreds of faults and negative tendencies. They must never be lumped together into homogeneous masses beneath a welter of hollow clichés and sterile words and then en bloc – as “classes,” “nations,” or “political forces” – extolled or denounced, loved or hated, maligned or glorified.
THIS POST CONTAINS MATERIAL THAT HAS BEEN UPDATED. The original post misidentified the title “The Power of the Powerless.” TSR regrets the error.
“A long and brave struggle with mortality”: RIP Christopher Hitchens
December 16, 2011 by Steven W. Beattie · Leave a Comment
Even when a person’s death is expected, if that person meant something to you or had some measurable effect on your life, it is never easy to be confronted with the news that it has occurred. No one, least of all the author himself, had any illusions about the fate that awaited Christopher Hitchens following his diagnosis with esophageal cancer in 2010. Nevertheless, a certain measure of shocked sadness attended booting up my computer this morning to find that the author had succumbed to the disease at the age of sixty-two.
Although he engaged in the round of “bargaining” that accompanies aggressive chemotherapy treatments, Hitchens remained decisively unsentimental and clear-eyed about the experience of living with, and dying from, a terminal illness:
The oncology bargain is that, in return for at least the chance of a few more useful years, you agree to submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with that, to radiation or even surgery. So here’s the wager: you stick around for a bit, but in return we are going to need some things from you. These things may include your taste buds, your ability to concentrate, your ability to digest, and the hair on your head. This certainly appears to be a reasonable trade. Unfortunately, it also involves confronting one of the most appealing clichés in our language. You’ve heard it all right. People don’t have cancer: they are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the combative image: You can beat this. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality.
The comments come from one in a remarkable series of essays Hitchens penned for Vanity Fair magazine, where he served as contributing editor, and where a good number of his recent pieces (many of them collected in this year’s 788-page doorstop, Arguably) appeared over the last decade. It is hard to imagine anyone who has been touched by cancer – which, effectively, means most readers of a certain age – coming away from an encounter with these essays unmoved. They display the qualities that were best in Hitchens: his humour, his directness, and his boundless appetite for life.
Indeed, Hitchens was a man of boundless appetites, period. From Vanity Fair–editor Graydon Carter’s obituary:
He was a man of insatiable appetites – for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote often – constantly, in fact, and right up to the end – and he wrote fast; frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections.
Indeed, Hitchens’ own greatest fear was the loss of the two things that meant the most to him: his voice, and his ability to write. In one of his last published pieces, he addresses Nietzsche’s notion that what does not kill one makes one stronger, in language that is sure to impress itself upon anyone who spends a significant amount of time and energy in the manipulation of words:
I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.
There are those who take issue with Hitchens, and for good reason. His support of the Iraq war was distressing, and his knee-jerk retreat into arguments against “Islamofascism” (which in fact predate 9/11) is reductivist and often ham-fisted. His Vanity Fair essay “Why Women Aren’t Funny” has been justifiably critiqued for its misogyny.
I have no interest in rehearsing the various complaints about Hitchens and his increasingly retrograde political attitudes here.
What I will miss most now that his voice has been silenced for good is the quality that made him such a bracing and vital writer, whether you were in agreement with him or otherwise. Love him or loathe him (to his credit, he left little room for indifference), he upheld the cardinal virtue of all good writing: he was never boring. He was an outsized, opinionated personality, who could frequently err on the side of bullying, and often appeared deliberately provocative, but those qualities were part of what made him such a compelling polemicist. (Who, after all, wants to read a polemicist who pulls his punches or couches his arguments in passive-voiced banalities?) One of my favourite reactions to Hitchens’ passing comes from the Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne, who took to Twitter to implore, “Can we all just vow to write with less indirection, less throat-clearing, less of the exquisite, and more blood, meat, wine, astringents?” The very things, that is, that Hitchens excelled at.
The other reaction that struck me also appeared on Twitter. Comedian Patton Oswalt wrote, “‘Oh, FUCK me.’ – Hitchens, being presented with a double Balvenie & water by Jesus, Voltaire & Orwell at the Pearly Gates.” I like to think that if Hitchens, that obstinate atheist, was wrong, and he is currently looking down at all of us from some afterlife somewhere, he had a good laugh at that one.
Steven Heighton’s memos on writing and reading
December 13, 2011 by Steven W. Beattie · 4 Comments
Workbook: Memos & Dispatches on Writing. Steven Heighton; $18.95 paper 978-1-55022-937-0, 80 pp., ECW Press
“We make of the quarrels with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” So said W.B. Yeats, whose tidy observation provides the springboard for Steven Heighton’s little book of musings, or “memos,” as he prefers to call this collection of thoughts on writing, reading, and criticism. The epigrammatic structure of Heighton’s book, reminiscent of Marcus Aurelius, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, results from the author’s sense that fully formed essays are inevitably incomplete; the Hegelian cycle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis will necessarily only lead to the discovery of a second thesis that will begin the process over again, and again, and again ad infinitum. “I grow impatient with the enterprise,” Heighton writes in his foreword, “and yet the alternative would seem to be mendacity through omission, which is akin to propaganda.”
Heighton is not a propagandist; he is a careful and thoughtful writer who uses the short, sharp shots in this book to sketch out an artistic manifesto of sorts, a fractured and meditative riff on Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (the young poet, in this case, being a youthful version of Heighton himself). His numbered lists of memos address subjects – insecurity, jealousy, fear, failure – that occupy all writers’ thoughts, whether or not they admit to them. Thus, number eight under the heading “On Criticism”: “The writing life’s cruellest irony: while failure can make you miserable, success won’t make you happy.” In “A Devil’s Dictionary for Writers,” failure is defined as a “phenomenon that allows writers to retain their friends,” and a “writer’s writer” is “one who lives at or below the poverty line.”
These observations are refreshing in their honesty, directness, and humour. Also refreshing is Heighton’s refusal to compromise on the discipline required to write and read well, at one point excoriating lazy readers who are “unwilling or unable to empathize with characters different from themselves.”
Throughout, Heighton is concerned with emphasizing the importance of complexity and nuance, whether he is addressing writers, readers, or critics. Of the last, he quite accurately recognizes that the “bad reviewer’s art involves universalizing, in authoritative, pseudo-objective language, a totally subjective response to a book,” and notes that “you can always criticize at a higher level than you can compose; you can always spot flaws in a classic novel that you could never hope to write yourself.”
Heighton is especially hard on writers who abandon fidelity to an artistic vision in favour of mainstream acceptance and recognition: “Careerist writers don’t confront and relish challenges, they crash into obstacles, which they naturally resent and fear.” He rejects the careerist writer’s definition of success, which is inevitably caught up more in the pursuit of awards and accolades than a focus on artistic purity. He urges readers who are interested in truly significant art to bypass recent award winners and buzz books and turn their attention to those volumes that have stood the test of time, although he also recognizes the “small masterpieces, initially neglected” that “still languish unread.”
If there is a contradiction here, it is one that Heighton would likely embrace. Despite his book’s formal affinity with Kierkegaard’s epigrams, Heighton is not a fan of either/or propositions. He is aware of complexity, and confident enough to allow it free rein.