The English Are So Nice

Has it really been that long since I've posted anything?  I've been reading some D. H. Lawrence lately and stumbled across this poem...it's quite a nice one really.

The English Are So Nice - D.H. Lawrence 

The English are so nice
so awfully nice
they are the nicest people in the world.

And what's more, they're very nice about being nice
about your being nice as well!
If you're not nice they soon make you feel it.

Americans and French and Germans and so on
they're all very well
but they're not really nice, you know.
They're not nice in our sense of the word, are they now?

That's why one doesn't have to take them seriously.
We must be nice to them, of course,
of course, naturally.
But it doesn't really matter what you say to them,
they don't really understand
you can just say anything to them:
be nice, you know, just nice
but you must never take them seriously, they wouldn't understand,
just be nice, you know! Oh, fairly nice,
not too nice of course, they take advantage
but nice enough, just nice enough
to let them feel they're not quite as nice as they might be.

2666 and all that

I just started reading Chilean author Roberto Bolano's final novel (published 2004).  A quote prior to the start of the novel reads:

"An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom"  - Charles Baudelaire

followed by:

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR'S HEIRS

Realizing that death might be near, Roberto left instructions for his novel 2666 to be published divided into five books corresponding to the five parts of the novel, specifying the order in which they should appear, at what intervals (one per year), and even the price to be negotiated with the publisher.  With this decision, communicated days before his death by Roberto himself to Jorge Herralde, Roberto thought he was providing for his children's future.

After his death, and following the reading and study of his work and notes by Ignacio Echevarria (a friend Roberto designated as his literary executor), another consideration of a less practical nature arose: respect for the literary value of the work, which caused us, together with Jorge Herralde, to reverse Roberto's decision and publish 2666 first in full, in a single volume, as he would have done had his illness not taken the gravest course.

I was completely swept into the story reading the first section, The Part About The Critics, about four literary critics devoted to the point of obsession to the works of a German author named Archimboldi.  While we never know what kind of novels Archimboldi writes, the four critics discuss him constantly, although he seems to have disappeared.  The four critics, three males and a female meet a conference meet at a conference on contemporary German Literature in 1994 and most of the action (or non action) takes place during that decade, as the four of them continue to meet and bond at future conferences.  The three males are an Italian, a Frenchman, and a Spaniard, and the woman is English.  Two of the men are also translators. 

All kinds of characters appear during the story for a few pages and we don't encounter them again, and sometimes entire dreams are described in detail.  Other characters ramble for a few pages and then confess they don't have any idea what they are talking about.

"...The intellectuals retire for the night.  The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.  Songs can be heard in some bars, the notes reaching the street.  Sometimes an intellectual wanders off course and goes into one of these places and drinks mezcal.  Then he thinks whart would happen if one day he.  But no.  He doesn't think anything.  He just drinks and sings.  Sometimes he thinks he sees a legendary German writer.  But all he's really seen is a shadow, sometimes all he's seen is his own shadow, which comes home every night so that the intellectual won't burst or hang himself from the lintel.  But he swears he's seen a German writer and his own happiness, his sense of order his bustle, his spitit of revelry rest on that conviction.  The next morning it's nice out.  The sun shoots sparks but doesn't burn.  A person can go out reasonably relaxed, with his shadow on his heels, and stop in a park and read a few pages of Valery.  and so on until the end."

"I don't understand a word you've said," said Norton.

"Really I've just been talking nonsense," said Amalfitano.

But it seems that someone has seen Archimboldi in Mexico and our critics go to Mexico in search of him...

The plot thickens...

The Blue Hour

Ok, let's just say that this biography of Jean Rhys (1890-1979) by Lillian Pizzichini was hard for me to put down.  Having read one of her novels already (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie), I read this in conjunction with some of her early short stories and I've quickly become a fan of Ms Rhys.  Her art definitely mirrored her life.  As a young woman she had the good fortune to be in Paris in the 1920's and became a part of that literary scene.  Ford Maddox Ford helped by encouraging her writing style and their relationship provided fodder for at least one novel and several short stories and Hemingway helped her on with her coat one night, we are told.  But that was as far as that went. 

Jean Rhys led a troubled life.  She had a fondness for men and for alcohol and she learned very early to rely on men for financial reasons, and on the alcohol to help her get through the rough patches.  There was something needful in her that appealed to certain men who made if their business to look after her and whenever she was in desperate straights these men would appear.   And she certainly had no compunction about asking men, even ex-lovers, for money if need be.  

If you like the writing of Jean Rhys then you will be interested in this book, not to learn more about her troubled life, but her ability to create stories of these incidents.  And it's not that these stories are so clever in themselves, but it is in their telling and Ms. Rhys' use of language that makes them magical.

  

An Unlikely Couple...Tiger Woods and Jean Rhys

I don't know what would possess someone to combine these two unlikely personalities  into an animated video.  But I can't help finding this amusing...

Peter Warlock and D.H. Lawrence

Peter Warlock was a composer and music critic whose real name was Philip Hesltine,.  He had changed his name because he had alienatated the musical community that had initially greeted him as a prodigy.

From THE BLUE HOUR, by Lilian Pizzichini 

Ok, I have to admit I had never heard of Peter Warlock until I read about him in The Blue Hour, Lilian Pizzichini's fascinating autobiography of Jean Rhys, but it seems Ms. Rhys wasn't the only one to base a fictional character on this charismatic personality.  According to Lilian Pizzichini:

In Women In Love D.H. Lawrence described Warlock as a "heavy, broken beauty'...As well as appearing as Halliday in Women In Love and in Jean's short story, Peter would feature in other friends' novels.  He is Coleman in Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, and Giles Revelstoke in Roberson Davies' A Mixture of Frailties.  Osbert Sitwell gave him a walk-on part in one of his novels.

An example of his unique behavior, according to Lilian Pizzichini:

Peter liked to shock people.  Adrian [Allinson] told a story about him spotting a Salvation Army officer walking up the street with a begging cup.  She was knocking on his neighbours' doors.  He swiftly undressed and answered her knock at the door naked.  He was holding a chamber pot with the same supplicatory gesture.  He enlivened his guests stay in the countryside by taking a motorbike ride at great speed around the village in the middle of the night, naked.  

Me and Ms. Rhys

After ignoring her for a year, I am back with her again.  Poor Jean, but that seems to be the way men have treated her.  They take up with her and then when the time is ripe (at least for them) they drop her.  And I am proving no exception.  But I am glad to be back in her life again.  Her biography The Blue Hour provides an insight into where she gets the material for her stories from and I am thoroughly enjoying it.

The Spider's House

Thoughts and impressions after reading THE SPIDER HOUSE by Paul Bowles...

You tell me you are going to Fez.

Now, if you say you are going to Fez,

That means you are not going.

But I happen to know that you are going to Fez.

Why have you lied to me, you who are my friend?

                                                                            Moroccan saying

The saying above is quoted from the beginning of Part Two of The Spider's House and reveals how some of the Moroccans think and act in Paul Bowles' 1955 novel.  At first we are introduced to 15 year old Amar, living in Fez, Morocco with his family.  This was in the early 1950s, during the time of the French occupation.  Revolution is in the air and Amar's naive view of the world is slowly starting to change as he comes of age.

He would offer no information except that explicitly demanded by Benani, and then he would confuse him by telling the truth.  Nothing could be more upsetting, because one always judiciously mixed false statements in with the true, the game being to tell which were which.  It was axiomatic that a certain percentage of what everyone said had to be disbelieved.  If he made nothing but strictly true statements, Amar told himself, Benani would necessarily be at a disadvantage, for he would be bound to doubt some of them.

 Also living in Fez are two Englishmen and an expatriate American writer, John Stenham.  Into this mix comes  Lee Veyron, a spirited and adventurous young woman, separated from her husband and traveling on her own.  A relationship of sorts develops between Stenham and Veyron, and the young Amar, set against a backdrop of a changing society.

Stenham and the Englishman, Alain Moss, have some engaging conversations from which I pluck this "jewel."

"The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment.  And perhaps even more than that, it's having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels." 

 Stenham and Veyron have opposing opinions on what is best for Morocco, while Amar believes it all is in the hands of Allah.  Stenham regrets to see any change in the Morocco he knows and Veyron is eager to see the Moroccans get their country back.  If this makes the book sound a little overly political, it doesn't read that way, although the political situation in Morocco does set the backdrop for the story.  It also provides valuable insight into the thinking of the Muslim mind, making it relevant for today.

For a while the banter between Stenham and Veyron plays like a Bogart/Bacall movie.  Stenham is, if nothing else, opinionated, while at the same time regrets that Veyron should have any opinions, or at least not express them:

It was too bad she had to have opinions; she had been so agreeable to be with before she had started to express them.  And then, the terrible truth was that neither she nor he was right.  It would not help the Moslems or the Hindus or anyone else to go ahead, nor, even if it were possible, would it do them any good to stay as they were.  It did not really matter whether they worshipped Allah or carburetors--they were lost in any case.  In the end, it was his own preferences which concerned him.  He would have liked to prolong the status quo because the decor that went with it suited his personal taste.

Paul Bowles knows whereof he writes, an American expatriate writer himself, he lived in Morocco for more than 50 years, from 1947 until his death in 1999.  Having previously read Bowles' THE SHELTERING SKY, I was a little worried that this story was not going to end well for the characters and that they had their fates mapped out for them.  But the story kind of fades away in the end...like real life.

The smells and tastes and culture of Morocco come alive in this book.  Bowles was a musician and a translator as well as a prolific writer of short stories.  I have a couple of his short story collections on my bookshelf waiting for me and I am willing to follow Mr. Bowles on whatever distant journey he may take me.