Golden Fragments

1. Some authors complete significant literary works or appear to have completed them shortly before they take their own lives. How this all plays out case by case is invariably far from a simple matter, tending no doubt also to vary from instance to instance. David Foster Wallace seems to have left the manuscript for The Pale King intending for it to be published. I happen to think it’s the best work he ever did, but it is all about the demoralization and spiritual atrophy poisoning the 21st century. At any rate, all relevant intelligence would seem to indicate that as far as Wallace was concerned the work was for all intents and purposes complete. The case with Yasunari Kawabata’s Dandelions, published posthumously in 1972, seems a little thornier. There appear to remain some who surmise that Kawabata’s death was accident rather than suicide, that he did not intend to gas himself. Others point to his depression, his tendency to privately ruminate on his own death, and the profound affect upon him of his friend Mishima’s suicide two years before Kawabata would himself die. The novel left unfinished on account of suicide invites us to go hunting for clues, shimmering fragments of a nest of defeats. I think we want to find them and that we don’t. Perhaps we hope both to be comforted and shook-by-the-collar upset. Dandelions doesn't seem to present the ideal vehicle for such grim and morbid pursuits. There was already Kawabata’s tendency to tinker protractedly, revising his own work over and over on an ongoing basis. His novels tended to take shape over time as he found ways to unify disparate stories that had been published hither and thither. At the heart of the human condition lies for Kawabata teleological perplexity, and this perplexity about reality and aberrations of reality, distortions and torsions, correlates with what some commentators perceive as his final novel’s supposed incompleteness, a crime and indignity more properly placed upon the shoulders of God than upon any given gaggle of novelists. With a situation akin to that of Dandelions, what we have, to my mind, is a novel that has its ending plotted-out a piori and then lands it like one fierce competitor indeed, flawlessly and precisely and ever so very, very nicely, right where it was intended to go off from the get-go. General misrule may often prove the house of charms. Behold: the alarming but ever-so-easy coming and going of an only-sometimes-grounded self, identity there and then not there, elastic and pried open and mortified. That the one you love may be there and not meaningfully see you anymore or that you may yourself clumsily misplace your capacity to know or identify or not be horrified at the physical presence of the now-menacing one you ever-so-recently adored more than any other. Dandelions is philosophically and emotionally congruent with the depiction and literary circumlocution of ‘Capgras syndrome’ in the 2006 novel Echo Maker by Richard Powers. Often directly preceded by a physical brain injury, somebody suffering from ‘Capgras syndrome’ will typically believe that one particular person very close to them is now a fake or an imposter. 

2. Fernando Pessoa was five years younger than his contemporary Franz Kafka and lived just over a decade longer. It is perhaps to my discredit that I have long thought of each man as an awkward and solitary bachelor with an office job who practiced his craft as a writer in something like a kind of total isolation. Pessoa, in fact, published and translated quite widely, existing in fertile dialogue with a great many of his contemporaries. I think the primary reason we think of Pessoa as a writer discovered after his death is simply because of the fact that the bulk of his most important work, his magnum opus The Book of Disquiet included, was indeed discovered in a trunk or trunks following his demise from what were likely complications related to alcoholism. Pessoa wrote both prose and poetry under a wide-ranging array of pen names. He referred to these adopted names as heteronyms rather than pseudonyms because these names did not merely serve as covers or buffers but rather belonged to comprehensively-envisioned virtual personages. In Pessoa, a deep and genuine belief in actually existing fairies goes so far as to demonstrate that said green fairies have in fact written a large part of the ailing author’s body of work...which you now hold open on your lap. Pessoa even worked out astrological charts for some of his heteronyms. "Each of us is more than one person, many people," The Book of Disquiet has it, "a proliferation of our one self.” If there is any precedent for Pessoa's creation of multiple and extremely diverse heteronyms, it is probably to be found in the lives and writing of Stendhal and Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard literally wrote books whose authorship was attributed to fictional persons. It would appear that Stendhal for the most part just liked to fuck with people.

3. “Round Naumburg pressed the black Thüringer Wald, the Thuringian forest,” writes Sue Prideaux in I am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche, “Germany’s ur-forest with its tombs of ancient heroes, dragon caves, dolmens and dark abysses that from the earliest days of German myths symbolized the irrationality and uncontrollability of the German subconscious. Wagner would appropriate it for Wotan’s mental journey toward embracing chaos, resulting in the destruction of the old order through the death of the gods and the cancelation of all the old contracts.” For the brief time they were close and amicable, Nietzsche saw Wagner both as a surrogate father and as a Dionysus, a demon, and a destroyer of worlds. In his introduction to the 2019 New Directions edition of Clarice Lispector’s 1949 novel The Besieged City, Benjamin Moser allots ample space to the consideration of unhorsing, or "obyezloshadenie," a term borrowed from Isaac Babel, who had employed it originally with reference to the replacement of horses by motors within both rural and urban contexts during the process of industrial modernization. If one stops to consider the matter, it quickly becomes clear that the theme of unhorsing is a prevalent one in the art and culture of the early 20th century. My tendency is to immediately think of both the 1918 Booth Tarkington novel The Magnificent Ambersons and the absolutely divine, even if irreparably studio-butchered, 1942 Orson Welles film adaptation of same, his second feature and a passion project. Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin consciously borrows an image I think from former Italian fascist Curzio Malaparte and his book Kaputt. Malaparte saw much more of the Second World War than he would have liked, assuredly. The critical image in question from 2007’s My Winnipeg and its marketing: the heads of dead horses, macabre tableau, their visages twisted and agonized, frozen, jutting out of the ice.

4. It was a long time ago now for sure, but I am confident that I can go ahead and make the definitive claim that I fell in heedless and wholly unavailing love with star for the ages, occasional movie actress, and beaming ball of bouncy energy Lillian Roth, who is long dead and who I shall therefore almost certainly never meet, the first time I watched 1929 Ernst Lubitsch musical and early talkie The Love Parade. When I looked her up I realized I had also seen her in 1930’s Animal Crackers, the second film by and featuring the Marx Brothers, vaudeville’s greatest anarchist geniuses. When I found out that Roth had written a famous and highly-successful-in-it’s-day autobiography entitled I’ll Cry Tomorrow, I tracked an old hardcover down on eBay. It’s a lovely and intimate book but it gets extremely dark. Lillian Roth was at one time a very famous child star on Broadway… and then a all-too-famous recovering alcoholic. From approximately 1930 to 1946 Roth lived through again and again in a spiral the devastating indignities of active alcoholism, a progressive and ultimately fatal disease concerning which I have all too intimate a working knowledge. Roth’s nightmare lasted about sixteen years. Published in 1954, I’ll Cry Tomorrow became a bestseller worldwide and sold more than seven million copies in twenty languages. In 1955 it was adapted into a glitzy Hollywood movie and Susan Hayward was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the role of Lillian Roth. In 1953, Roth, who was then eking out a modest living doing club and lounge dates here and there, living with Burt, her sixth husband, in Florida, was invited to do an episode of the popular television show This is Your Life. It played extremely well with home audiences. All the while little Lillian wanted to be a good Jewish girl and to please her parents, though adulation wouldn’t make her any less crushed and crumpled up and she knew it better than anybody else around her ever did or appeared to. At the heart of it all, and in spite of her meteoric rise, Lillian is beset by a constant sense of deep personal inadequacy. This is the crux of alcoholic grandiosity: I am worthless, defective, but I need top billing, my name in lights. Not long after I read I’ll Cry Tomorrow, I happened to catch 1933’s Ladies They Talk About over on the Criterion Channel as part of a pre-code Barbara Stanwyck bundle. Young Lillian is in it. She has the only musical number. My God. What an extraordinary young woman. Damn it, that kid should be proud of herself.

5. The writer Italo Svevo lived and worked in Trieste, at one time a major Austro-Hungarian port city placed smack dab along the coast of Italy, and he studied widely in both German and Italian, apparently demonstrating noteworthy capabilities in the process. Italo grew up loving the theatre. He published his first article in 1880, its title “Shylock,” a fact notable in that the author is a Jew living in what is basically Italy. He had some success in business, especially after having married well, his in-laws overseeing an international firm specializing in submarine paints (!). Svevo wrote and self-published two novels in the 1890s to no fanfare, this apparently dissuading him from continuing to serve his literary métier with anything like gusto for a considerable period thereafter. No longer a young man, Svevo would go on to employ an English tutor to help him flourish in international business. The impecunious Irishman, temporarily living in Trieste with his wife Nora, was a fella by the name of James Joyce. Mr. Joyce would come in time to change everything for Svevo, ultimately helping to turn the third novel of his pal from Trieste, self-published and ignored in Italy just as the previous two had been, into a great overnight sensation in Paris.