Category Archives: Heartwood

Heartwood 3:3 – Apophenia in Blue

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speedboat  Bluets  Game of Boxes

apophenia - the perception of connections, patterns or meaningfulness in unrelated things.

As regular readers of Heartwood know (that’s right, all five of you), I am frequently stunned that whatever I happen to be reading seems to connect in surprising ways with other things I’ve read or recently lived through. I find this one of reading’s greatest pleasures.

A couple of years ago I was reading a book that briefly discussed Renata Adler’s Speedboat in glowing terms, especially appreciative of: its collage structure; its quick changes in subject; the aphorisms and miniature stories; the interweaving of ideas, emotions and experiences; and its thematic recurrences or reiterations. This made me think of another book I’d recently read and loved called Bluets, by Maggie Nelson – though clearly nothing in the above description would make one think that Speedboat would have anything to say about the color blue.

Anyway, when my interlibrary loan request for Speedboat came in (it’s recently been reprinted and is now in the EPL collection), I was pleased to find it did indeed share something of the structure and qualities I’d seen in Nelson’s book. Nevertheless, I was completely unprepared for this passage late in Speedboat, which looks like it could be an emblematic entry from Bluets:

We spoke of the quality of the blue in the stained-glass windows of Chartres, which modern science had not been able to reproduce, as though the medieval craftsman who had produced it were a colleague. He had, we knew, billed his diocese for the purchase of sapphires ground up to create that color. Modern science had, at least, established that sapphires played no part in its composition at all. It was our first, most scholarly appreciation of the padded expense account.

Adler’s Speedboat crosses continents in passages that relate the life and observations of a woman who works as a reporter. Nelson’s Bluets takes an obsessive interest in the color blue, which she pursues through philosophy, art, personal experience, and other channels of research. Nelson breaks up these passages with others in which the narrator grieves a broken relationship and assists a friend who has become quadriplegic. Here’s a sample entry from Bluets that also touches on stained glass:

For Plato, color was as dangerous a narcotic as poetry. He wanted both out of the republic. He called painters “mixers and grinders of multi-colored drugs,” and color itself a form of pharmakon. The religious zealots of the Reformation felt similarly: they smashed the stained-glass windows of churches, thinking them idolatrous, degenerate. For distinct reasons, which had to do with the fight to keep the cheap, slave-labor crop of indigo out of a Western market long dominated by woad, the blue-dye-producing plant native to Europe, indigo blue was called “the devil’s dye.” And before blue became a “holy” color – which had to do with the advent of ultramarine in the twelfth century, and its subsequent use in stained glass and religious paintings – it often symbolized the Antichrist.

OK, now for round three. Last week I was reading Catherine Barnett’s smart and sensual collection of poems, The Game of Boxes, and came upon “Which System Is Most Miraculous?” It opens with the poet discussing the subject of the poem’s title, presumably with her partner who has since left her. Some of the miraculous systems they identify are language, vision, conception, and birth. Among the things she doesn’t name, but suggests, are time, love, and – if I can read into it a bit – the significations we attach to important life events, such as in the giving of wedding gifts. But as our lives progress and/or change direction, these systems can also change, break down, become ambivalent, deteriorate – which leads her to question whether she should outgrow her attachments. When faced with it, however, it’s not so easy. She informs us that “A blue glass broke but I can’t throw it away. / There’s room for it on the shelf. / Or there’s no room.” Even though the glass has been destroyed, she notes the absurdity of feeling unable to part with it.

The poem ends in lines that are as awestruck by this particular blue as Maggie Nelson is by the various blues throughout Bluets. Where the interpersonal bond has proven fragile, and where even the power of language has its limits, the immediacy and intangibility of this blue stays vibrant, persists, almost succeeds in holding together what’s been broken:

Words still fortify me but the blue is better,
brighter, almost as bright as when it was first
removed from its tissue and passed
from hand to hand.

*          *          *

I love that Barnett’s poem and the passage in Adler cited above happen to unite with Nelson’s Bluets in these unique, though somehow stylistically similar and excellent books. Yet, astonished and pleased as I am by this, another of Adler’s observations causes me, at least momentarily, to check my enthusiasm:

when invention failed them, they used the fail-safe method for undergraduate work at any solid institution: take two utterly unrelated things or matters and show that they are, if not in fact identical, actually related in the most profound and subtle sense.

Heartwood 3:2 – Weldon Kees and Robinson Alone

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Robinson AloneRobinson Alone
by Kathleen Rooney

Weldon Kees was a mid-twentieth-century American poet, writer, painter, filmmaker and musician who disappeared one day in 1955, his car abandoned on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge. People who know of Kees at all today probably do so for his poetry (though his talent as a painter was real, and his pieces were once exhibited alongside those of Hans Hofmann and Willem de Kooning). But even among contemporary poets, many are unfamiliar with Kees’s stylish and often bleakly noir-ish work.

I’ve been captivated by Kees brooding, embittered poetry for a long time now, so it is a genuine pleasure to find Kathleen Rooney’s new novel in poems exploring all aspects of Kees and his alter-ego, Robinson – the anxious, shadowy, cipher featured in several of his poems.

Rooney adroitly follows the rough trajectory of Kees’s life as he goes from his Nebraska home to New York City, where he participates in but is never quite comfortable with its artistic milieu. He and his wife, Ann, decide to leave the city, driving cross-country on their way to eventually settling down in San Francisco. We learn of Kees/Robinson’s nightmares and insomnia, his anxiety regarding success, his fastidious nature and natty style. We also learn of Ann’s drinking and paranoia, and her ultimate institutionalization. Rooney has drawn heavily from Kees’s correspondence in fifteen fascinating entries all titled “Robinson Sends a Letter to Someone.”  And finally, we come to know that in his later life Kees had an interest in taking off to Mexico, which leaves the lingering possibility that he didn’t commit suicide but instead went there to start a new life.

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees in the Everett Public Library catalogI don’t think I’ve spoiled anything by revealing this general chronology: it is Rooney’s nimble, imaginative and attentive language that forms the heart of this book. Her dedication and skill in capturing the spirit of Kees as man and artist even frees the reader from needing to know his actual work – though her book will certainly spur some readers to explore his brief Collected Poems, his letters, or his striking paintings. Robinson Alone will introduce you to both a lively contemporary poet and to a terrific, neglected, and long-missing one.

Heartwood 3:1 – An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

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In order to write this little book that can be read in an hour, Georges Perec parked himself for three days behind café windows at Place Saint-Sulpice square in Paris to record all the routine, typical activity going on around him – to describe “that which is generally not taken note of … that which has no importance.”  

There’s an addictive, propelling rhythm to this catalog of passing buses, shoppers, churchgoers, deliverymen and schoolchildren. Perec categorizes certain things, such as types of two-wheeled vehicles and varieties of advertising signs, and otherwise notes the parade of objects people tote – from baguettes to attaché cases to pipes (this was written in the 1970s after all). He considers making an inventory of umbrella styles. He muses on the pigeons circling in synchronized flight.

These are largely objective observations, but Perec also recognizes and greets friends, notes personal associations regarding a particular breed of dog, and he wonders how his having had a coffee one day versus a mineral water the next might transform the impressions he has of the square.

This restless attempt to capture the banal minutiae of the city is not exactly the sexy, romanticized Paris of most fiction, but it teems with life and is tinged at times with Perec’s unique charm and humor. If Paris is your passion, this small book should offer a pleasant reading experience. It pairs nicely with another brief but striking book – Things Seen, Annie Ernaux’s crystalline observations of quotidian Paris and its suburbs.

_________

Georges Perec was a member of Oulipo and, as such, relished imposing constraints on his literary creations. He is perhaps best known for having written a full-length novel without ever using the letter e.

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Heartwood 2:12 – A Literature of Dislocation

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Central Europe has been sliced and diced with tremendous frequency over the past hundred years, and the two writers featured in today’s post reflect on the trauma of that destruction and dislocation.

Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal’s novel, I Served the King of England, is set largely in Prague in the years preceding and following WWII. The book is a vivid and humorous warts-and-all reflection of the life a Czech man, Ditie, who achieves much but still finds social respectability beyond his reach.

The tale begins with his early youth as a lusty hotel worker and follows him through a series of service industry jobs, marriage, hotel ownership, and the tumultuous war years that gave him unfair advantages before everything was upended under Communism. His failure to gain acceptance among the other hotel owners on the one hand or within his German wife’s military circle on the other, culminates in a loss of ambition toward external rewards. Ditie’s waning years are spent working hard-labor jobs, partly with an exiled professor who helps him discover the riches and happiness of the interior life. Ditie is an unforgettable character whose story is told with striking imagery and occasional surrealistic flourishes.

Some months after reading Hrabal’s book I happened upon In Praise of the Unfinished by Julia Hartwig, a Polish poet who also survived the war years (and is living to this day). Her poems show great compression and attention to detail while simultaneously opening out to encompass what is most universally human. Many of the poems address the work of other writers and artists, and they seem to have something of the same wide-eyed sadness and grounded joy I found in Hrabal’s book. Something of this expansiveness – her embrace of contradiction, resignation, continuance, and fullness – can be seen in her concise poem, “It Is Also This,” shown in its entirety below:

Art casts a spell summoning life
so it can continue
but its space extends to the invisible
It is also an intelligence reconciling
discordant elements and similarities
It is brave
because it seeks immortality
by being – just like everything else – mortal

The connection between Hartwig and Hrabal, and a shared sense of their cultural and geopolitical fragmentation, came much more directly to mind when I read her poem “How to Honor a Place.” Near the end of Hrabal’s novel, when Ditie is employed as a lone road worker living high in the mountains, he arouses both laughter and fear when he tells the local villagers that he would like to be buried on the crest of a ridge, so his remains would flow toward both the North Sea and the Black Sea – then he would be a true “world citizen.” Hartwig’s poem is set on our own continental divide, where she says a river “must think hard” about which ocean it should belong to, which mother it should acknowledge, and in “whose gullet it is to be lost forever / and become nameless.”

Now, when standing on the North American continental divide, it is common to think about the rain and snowmelt that will flow from that high ridge towards either the Atlantic or the Pacific. So Hartwig’s poem about a visit there, and Ditie’s sentiment at the end of the novel, may not be quite enough for you to buy my sense that the two writers share some vague affinity in style and outlook. But when I found Hartwig mentioning Hrabal by name later in her book, I felt confirmed that “How to Honor a Place” is also meant as a tribute to Hrabal, whose novel struggles so rewardingly with the same question the poem asks as it ends: “And I / where do I belong.”

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Heartwood 2:11 – The Map and the Territory

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Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory is a page-turning novel concerned with the making of art, the difficulty of forging meaningful relationships, the challenges of living within a globalized commercial economy, and the inevitability of individual decline.

Jed Martin is an artist who works and lives in resigned isolation. His enhanced photographs of Michelin road maps lead him into the arms of Russian beauty Olga (who works for Michelin) and unexpected success. But his indecisiveness at a crucial moment has serious consequences for both his love life and his art, plunging him into an aimless existence until a chance encounter prompts him to return to his childhood love of painting. This leads to his next big successful project: capturing on canvas the spirit of a wide range of professions, to which he gives titles such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology.

Jed does not believe in authentic friendship and is a borderline misanthrope, but nevertheless he finds a brief and quiet rapport with a writer (yes, named Michel Houellebecq) before the story turns grisly in the last part of the book. Another plot thread involves Jed’s father, who is dying of cancer, and the tentative attempts of son and father to mend their strained and distant relationship.

The thoughts of Houellebecq’s major characters reveal a great deal of cynicism, which can be a bit unnerving. His previous novels have stirred up some controversy in France, and from what I’ve heard I’m not sure I’d care for them. But reviews of The Map and the Territory indicate a shift in subject matter and a less severe tone, which convinced me to give the book a try. I am very glad that I did – this may be the best new book I’ve read this year – but readers should be prepared for some dark and unflinching observations.

The best parts of the book for me are the insights into art, culture, and society that pour from the pages in powerful though often understated ways; and characters who are realistic, flawed, but sympathetic in their forthrightness and vulnerability. There is some very fine writing here, and the book should especially appeal to those who’ve read and enjoyed any of the latest novels by Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides or the late David Foster Wallace. If this sounds like you, take a look at The Map and the Territory.

And while you’re at it, grab Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, another compelling though locally neglected novel (based on EPL circulation statistics) that also addresses the making of art, relationships, mortality, and the culture industry. 

__________

The Map and the Territory was awarded the 2010 Prix Goncourt

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Heartwood 2:10 – Wolf Song

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Wolf Song
by Harvey Fergusson (1890-1971)
206 pgs. Gregg Press, 1978. 
Orig. pub. 1927.

Sam Lash is a mountain man who is first encountered traveling with two companions – rough and rowdy Gullion, and the wizened crank Old Rube. Their various adventures are recounted in a punchy, rhythmic way that suits the rugged image of their demanding lifestyle, including the spinning of tall tales and drunken braggadocio. It’s a rough life, and inevitably deadly, but the draw of the wild outdoors is irresistible. The mountain men are known to complain – saying they’d better leave the mountains and settle down before they get “rubbed out” – but each new trapping season finds them back in the woods.

But Wolf Song doesn’t simply romanticize the individualism of the old west; it is equally concerned with what draws people together and how different cultures struggle to preserve their own values in changing times. Three cultural groups are in conflict here – Anglo (or gringo, to use Fergusson’s term), Native American and Mexican. Episodic chapters allow Fergusson to introduce characters in their cultural context, setting spirit quests and supernatural prophecy alongside high society and quasi-barbarism.

Lash falls in love with Lola Salazar the daughter of a wealthy and powerful Mexican family in Taos, New Mexico, but his wild, mountain man ways are incompatible with their Catholic standards. Though Lash is unlikely to win the favor of the family patriarch in the wooing of his daughter, he is dependent on Taos for trading his furs, so he cannot get too far on the wrong side of Don Salazar. Outside its economic importance, Taos also offers the returning mountain men much needed social interaction, loose women, and whiskey.

Lash is being split down the middle by his love for Lola and his competing need to be working a trapline. As he travels through a distant canyon, his distracted state of mind puts him in danger when Black Wolf, a Cheyenne Indian, sees an opportunity to improve his standing within his tribe and, particularly, to win the hand of the woman he loves. You’ll have to read it yourself to discover who gets rubbed out.

______________

William Pilkington, in the Introduction, says “Harvey Fergusson’s Wolf Song is, it seems to me, the most neglected “classic” in the canon of Western American fiction.” He puts it in the same class as A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky and Frederick Manfred’s Lord Grizzly.  If you like mountain man stories, you might want to give this one a try.

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Heartwood 2:9 – The Cyclist Conspiracy

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Svetislav Basara’s The Cyclist Conspiracy is a strange and imaginative collage-like “anthology” that draws on all kind of “historical documents” to tell the tale of select members of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross. The bicycle is shown to be symbolically linked to Christianity (it looks like a cross when viewed from above, for one thing) and the Little Brothers, as they’re called, meet in the space of dreams to influence events – even those that happened in the past, such as planning the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand fourteen years after the fact. 

The book is composed of greatly varied chapters that take the form of memoirs, letters, proclamations and more, and it includes such things as maps, illustrations, technical drawings, and photographs. There is even correspondence from historical figures such as Sigmund Freud and a lost Sherlock Holmes story. These are all ingeniously woven together by Basara to give the book cohesiveness despite the great diversity of subject matter, characters and styles.

Make no mistake, this is one whacked-out book – an unorthodox mix of theology, mysticism, politics, time-travel, the dream world, poetry, architecture, and an overarching concern with documentary evidence and the vicissitudes of cultural transmission – all of which brings to mind Borges, Pynchon and Calvino. There’s a clear sense that Serbian author Basara is writing from an Eastern European crossroads – a perspective that extends to the historic crucibles of Byzantium and Babylon, while also reflecting on the detritus of 20th century wars and Stalinist totalitarianism. 

It should be clear, if you’ve read this far, that this book won’t appeal to everyone. Far from it. As Damian Kelleher notes in his detailed review:

It was something of a risk for Geopoetika to choose Basara’s The Cyclist Conspiracy as one of their titles to translate into English. The risk lies in the inherent niche appeal of the title, for this is by no means a mass market book. It will scare away the faint of heart, and it will confuse and confound those looking for a ‘good read’ and nothing else. What it will do, however, is secure a small and loyal following, a group of readers who will read it again and again, pouring over its mysticisms and its esoteric connections in an attempt to unravel the mystery of the conspiracy. There is so much here, so many places, and times, and characters, and references, and the ties that binds them – bicycles and time – are both absurd and universal. One can imagine a twenty year old student, fascinated with literature and becoming aware of its possibilities, discovering The Cyclist Conspiracy and holding it deep within their heart for decades. It is a book that will appeal to few, but those who enjoy it, will love it greatly. It is a Serbian Gravity’s Rainbow, a Central European monument to history, to culture, to excess, and to the remarkable connections between everything and nothing.

That should help you decide if the book will fall within your appeal range – or maybe encourage you to stretch it.

As a librarian, I was, of course, instantly taken with the opening sentence: “Endless are the secrets of provincial libraries.” I also found it hard to resist the notion of an inseparable destiny that links a book, its author, and its reader – where manuscripts may remain hidden for ages until they “fall into the hands of the person for whom they were intended.” 

But the parts I loved best were those that focused on the mystical and symbolic world of the bicycle and bicycling (which are to bicycling what Michael Murphy’s Golf in the Kingdom is to golf). More of this would have been welcome, but Basara’s ambitious scope takes him far beyond mystical bicyclism. 

The image at the top of this post is my photo of Lyonel Feininger’s 1912 painting The Bicycle Race (somewhat cropped, unfortunately). And then there’s Open Letter’s beautifully minimalist book cover – maybe it’s just the cyclist conspirator in me, but to my eyes, this is cover of the year.

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Heartwood 2:8 – A Happy Man

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A Happy Man
by Hansjörg Schertenleib (1957 – )
93 pgs.  Melville House, 2009.
Trans. by David Dollenmayer.

A Happy Man is a gem of a book for those who like brief, tightly constructed stories with lyrical language and likeable characters engaging in snappy repartee.

At the center of the story is a jazz trumpeter named This Studer who goes to Amsterdam to perform in an old friend’s quintet. His wife Daniela accompanies him, but eventually she feels the need to return to work in her pottery studio. Staying at home is their teenage daughter Anna, who has recently entered a surly and difficult stage.

The book unfolds as a lively blend of family, friends, reminiscence, and art – what art is and how to make it, as well as the art of living. As the title indicates, the book is also interested in the question of happiness. Some of the most intimate scenes include This’s grandfather, who mentored him into the world of jazz. The narrative moves back and forth in time and includes a significant event in This’s youth which haunts him and becomes important later in the novella.

A Happy Man captivated me with its interesting characters and ideas, its sure-handed storytelling, and its poetic prose. As an example of the latter, we get this detail in a description of the grandfather’s trumpet: “the bell had a little dent that gathered the light the way low ground collects water.”

A Happy Man is such a fine, memorable, and completely satisfying read that you may want to read it twice.

 *

Bonus read-alike: for another fine piece of writing that addresses art and happiness take a look at the 8-page story “Notes from Underground” by Mu Xin in his excellent collection The Empty Room. 

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Heartwood 2:7 – Amsterdam Stories

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Amsterdam Stories
by Nescio (1882 – 1961)
161 pgs. New York Review Books, 2012
Trans. by Damion Searls

What a joy to discover the Dutch author known as Nescio and this little book of stories that has just been translated into English for the first time. Nescio wrote only sparsely between the years of 1909 and 1942, but the gems he left behind are darkly charming and richly sensuous accounts of artistically inclined young men who live among the canals of Amsterdam and explore the fields and byways of the Netherlands. The artistic idealism of these young narrators, however, is gradually tempered by the necessity of making a living and the fickle ministrations of the muse. And though Nescio’s characters favor reverie over activity, they know that time marches on, and that their youthful pleasures will be as fleeting as the seasons. Even their stronger passions rarely spur them to action but instead smolder in their imaginations with the allure of things unfulfilled. The stories also touch on poverty and small pleasures, friendship and remembrance, war and gratitude, desire and the beauty of the human form.

Nescio creates and sustains a curious tension in his writing. The keen, lyrical, and passionate sensibilities of his characters contrast with the rigid demands of social respectability, and are movingly highlighted against nature’s cyclical, elusive beauty in the blustery and watery Netherlands. Nescio’s writing is filled with longing and resignation, deliciously detailed and lustrously described. 

____________

Nescio (Latin for “I don’t know”) is the pseudonym of J. H. F. Grönloh, who as a young man was not unlike his idealistic characters. Later, he worked for the Holland-Bombay Trading Company, and eventually became its director. Though his work was slow to catch on, he is now much loved by the Dutch people.

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Heartwood 2:6 – Referential Reading: Romain Rolland

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Books lead to other books, as any avid reader knows. Some more so than others. In  EPL’s first “Everett Reads” program, back in 2004, we read Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Given that the title alludes to another writer, it might not surprise you to learn that a suitcase filled with Western classics plays a key part in this novel set in Mao’s China during the Cultural Revolution. I didn’t care for the book all that much, but I took note of one referenced author in particular who I was unfamiliar with at the time: Romain Rolland. I remember checking the library catalog and being pleased to see we had a few of his books, including the Jean-Christophe series, and I had always meant to take a look inside them, but eventually I kind of forgot about Romain Rolland.

So, recently, eight years later, I was reading another book by an author who’d been brought to my attention via a different novel (this referential path is described here). I have to say, I’m glad to have followed through this time because Roger Martin du Gard’s Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort is one of the most deeply satisfying novels I’ve read in the past few years. This book too is filled with literary references and the publisher’s blurb is not exaggerating when it draws a comparison between three of those mentioned: Tolstoy, Proust and Montaigne. I could rave on, but for the purpose of this blog post I want to limit my focus to a section of letters that appear near the back of the book.

These letters that Maumort is writing are inspired by his rereading of – you guessed it – Romain Rolland, whose words propel Maumort into an impassioned, eloquent description of France at the end of the Nazi occupation (and it strikes me as an accurate description of modern-day America as well). Maumort asks his friend:

…is it possible today to accept without protest the world that these last ten years have made for us? The general disarray, the disorder of minds are blatant; all judgments are skewed: those of men in the street and men of state alike… In every domain, spiritual virtues are in decline, weakened, unappreciated: and yet never have they been more indispensable for holding in check those evil forces – violence, money – which triumph openly and divert mankind not only from a considered effort to recover its balance, but also from a valid concept of the future.

Maumort – an unbeliever, it should be noted – goes on:

Just look at what is happening here. In our France, still smarting from its wounds, impoverished to the point of destitution, starving, looted, reeling with humiliations that are not washed away in a day, do you make out, anywhere, signs of that moral greatness, that strength of soul, that patient and courageous wish for salvation which we must have if we want to rise out of our present chaos? And how many countries in the world, how many ruined, terrorized, enslaved populations lie even lower than us?

In a time of madness and fanaticism, he sees a desperate need for guides, “prophets,” “great mediators;” figures such as Emerson, Erasmus – or Rolland. But Rolland has just recently died, and Maumort asks:

Who will arise in his place to defend and save the fundamental – and seriously endangered – values of that spiritual civilization for which, during half a century, he so steadfastly fought?

Alas, Maumort does not sees any forceful figure rising to defend human conscience and independent thought, and he is afraid that, for many people, these fragile values are “considered outdated and harmful.”

Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort explores in great detail, and with terrific dexterity, the multidimensional life of the protagonist, his surroundings and society. The passages quoted above are not meant to represent the novel as a whole, in which politics is treated as only one of the many factors in the narrator’s life. I focus on them here because Rolland’s words so profoundly trigger Maumort’s considerations of the political situation, of civilization in crisis.

These passages also caused me, in the midst of writing this post, to go to the stacks and pull Dai Sijie’s book in order to refresh my hazy memory of its references to Romain Rolland. Here is the narrator, having just discovered Jean-Christophe:

I had intended only a brief flirtation, a skim read, but once I had opened the book I couldn’t put it down… Jean-Christophe, with his fierce individualism utterly untainted by malice, was a salutary revelation. Without him I would never have understood the splendour of taking free and independent action as an individual. Up until this stolen encounter with Romain Rolland’s hero, my poor educated and re-educated brain had been incapable of grasping the notion of one man standing up against the whole world. The flirtation turned into a grand passion. Even the excessively emphatic style occasionally indulged in by the author did not detract from the beauty of this astonishing work of art. I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.

Extremely high praise – I see again why, after reading Balzac, I’d always meant to read Jean-Christophe. So these 1,500 pages are back on my radar.

But for now, being so recently wowed by Martin du Gard’s complex character, I am reading the book Maumort refers to in his letters: Rolland’s 1915 nonfiction collection, Above the Battle, written in the midst of the first World War. These are brave and discerning pieces that take on imperialism and despotism while calling for reason, moral truth, justice and fraternity. I will end this post with words from its Introduction which Maumort quotes in a letter:

A great nation beset by war has not only its frontiers to defend, but also its reason. It must be saved from the hallucinations, the injustices, the stupidities unleashed by the scourge. To each his duty: to the armies that of  guarding the soil of the homeland; to the intellectuals, that of defending thought… Someday, history will make a reckoning of each of the countries at war; it will weigh up the sum of their errors, lies, and hate-filled madness. Let us strive to make sure that in its eyes, ours will be slight.

________

It is perhaps unsurprising to find Martin du Gard emphasizing the writer Romain Rolland. Both were French authors who wrote epic, multi-volume, Nobel prize-winning roman fleuves. Rolland won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915, and Martin du Gard in 1937.

Heartwood 2:4 – on Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort is here. 

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