THE HARPER’S COLUMNS*
On Harlem, Hatred and Javier
A new book considers “Harlem.” Hopes that we’ll come to know this place with a degree of certainty are raised by the Flannery O’Connor epigraph (“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location”) and promptly crushed by the title: Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America. For the book’s author, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem is a notional place, an idea threatened by a reality, existing most concretely in the minds of those who have loved and defended it. Rhodes-Pitts is one such, and her account of this stretch of land that may or may not begin at 110th Street and end at 168th is fittingly idiosyncratic, as much meditation as history. We open with a personal anecdote: “I had already put the key into the door of my building on Lenox Avenue when the question came at my back. In one movement I withdrew my key and turned to face my inquisitor. He stood waiting for my reply and then asked again: Do you think you’ll ever go home?” It’s a local man who wants to know: the author is an interloper, a Texan, sole black student in her high-school class. She comes to Harlem seeking a place familiar to her imagination, admired from a distance. First stop: The Columbia-Lippincott Gazetteer of the World. Its entry on Harlem is, I think, full of interesting facts, but to the author they are sterile, useless: “At first it seems to give an all-encompassing view—complete with official borders, colonial heroics, and important urban planning highlights. Yet it manages to say nothing at all.” We move instead to scenes from novels Rhodes-Pitts read as a teenager, when she “plotted an itinerary through my library’s shelves, searching for the El Dorado of black literature.” Characters arrive in Harlem, hopeful, disappointed, angry, eager, created by Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and Nella Larsen. We realize how much the idea of Harlem has meant to Rhodes-Pitts, and what a romantic vision of a writer’s business she has: a magpie with a notebook, who collects everything, and always shows her workings—leading to many scenes set in the library. Although this technique of authorial transparency grows long in the tooth—a classic of the genre is A Room of One’s Own—it still has its intimate pleasures. Like Woolf, Rhodes-Pitts is bookish and devoted, interested in everyday matters: how people walk and talk, dress, go about their day. But where Woolf staged such “incidents” artfully, and fashioned from them forceful arguments, Rhodes-Pitts finds literary artifice lame: “As early as my high school lessons on Langston Hughes, I had absorbed the platitude that the task of the writer was to glean universal lessons from specific and personal experiences.” She detects (and disapproves of) James Baldwin’s habit of speaking to Harlem folk, having experiences, and deriving from these encounters “a metaphor about all of black existence,” as Woolf took from a single Cambridge dinner a metaphor for all of women’s. (She is so struck by this rhetorical move that she gives it a name, “The Jimmy,” where others might simply have called it “writing.”) She prefers to record random street conversations, information printed on flyers, messages chalked on pavements by a local eccentric. She is not at all—as Baldwin could be—a polemical writer. Here individual experience is honored, and judgment reserved. Occasionally this generosity misses the wood for the trees. Certain key historical facts, surely useful to the general reader, become afterthoughts (page 245 of 262: “It is something of an accepted idea among some historians that Harlem began with a parade”). But once you abandon wanting to know anything very precise about historical Harlem, this is a lovely book about the romance—and dangers—of bibliophily. The author is, by her own account, afflicted by “single-girl-doing-research fantasies,” and the inclusion of that word “single” is strange, being so unnecessary. It suggests a narrator in pursuit of a love object. This object turns out not to be Harlem itself as much as the library within it: the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Harlem may be nowhere, but the Schomburg is definitely on the corner of 136th and Lenox, and within it Rhodes-Pitts pursues Black madonnas, Haiti, Liberia, Black Communism, the African Nationalist Pioneers, and much more besides. Upon finding the same individual mentioned in two entirely unrelated portions of her research, she reflects upon the classic researcher’s dilemma: “One book held the key to another, though it solved a riddle I had not been trying to answer, and provided information I did not know how to use. What other mysteries might be unraveled the more often I came and the longer I stayed?” Regularly she emerges from this beachcombing to display a substantial haul: the beautiful pebbles need no polish to shine. Take James Van Der Zee, famous for his portraits of Harlem dandies, here rediscovered as a photographer of the bereaved and the deceased, in the same frame: a mourning couple, formally posed, with their dead child in their arms. Or the impresario Raven Chanticleer (1928–2002), inventor and creator of the African American Wax and History Museum (first statue: himself), and son of “a Haitian-born school principal and a Barbados-born concert pianist”—at least it seemed that way until, in death, he was revealed to have invented his parentage, too (mother, sharecropper; father, sharecropper). And here, most memorably, is Alexander Gumby, who dedicated his life to making “Negroana” scrapbooks—photographs, playbills, news clippings. In 1934, a cellar flood ruined much of this great collection. What remains Rhodes-Pitts uncovers and describes, with obvious fellow feeling. In a sense, her book, too, is a scrapbook, and a beguiling one. I am so glad to have met Van Der Zee, Chanticleer, Gumby, and the many other curious figures featured: a more tightly organized approach might have passed over them entirely as flotsam. As it stands, her dreamlike style takes its sweet time reaching its central argument, that Harlem is “nowhere” in a practical, non-metaphorical sense: “It all comes down to a point that is as simple as it is terrible: . . . this is our land that we don’t own.” But this tragedy—of high rents and absentee landlords, of the construction of luxury high-rise condominiums—only ever pulsates in the background, as if the author felt too strongly her own pangs of illegitimacy. (“There is that man who asked me how long one had to live in Harlem before being allowed to write a book about it—implying, of course, that I had not lived in Harlem long enough to write a book about it.”) It’s a misplaced fear: no geographic or racial qualification guarantees a writer her subject. Baldwin’s Harlem pedigree didn’t gift him “The Jimmy.” Only interest, knowledge and love will do that—all of which this book displays in abundance.
• • •
Some writers fear opinions; others are famous for ’em. In My Prizes Thomas Bernhard opines himself into absurdity. This short work of memoir surveys the many Austrian literary prizes Bernhard hated yet accepted, using the money to buy things he wanted, while complaining of the indignities of the ceremonies. All of that is very funny. Those who love him for his misanthropy will find their cup runneth over. Example: when Bernhard is awarded the (despised) Anton Wildgans Prize, the ceremony is canceled because a minister declines to share the stage with him (see previous ceremonies for reasons). Yet they send Bernhard the money anyway. Still he is enraged(?), and demands that his friend Gerhard Fritsch resign from the jury. But Gerhard has children and alimony and asks Bernhard “to show him consideration in a tone that was repellent. The poor man, the malleable, pitiable, wretched man. Not long after this conversation Fritsch hanged himself from the hook on his apartment door, his life, which he’d bungled with no help from anybody, had closed over his head and extinguished him.”
Americans think of this aspect of Bernhard as the art of exaggeration. Europeans, who know him better, think of it as being an incredible bastard. The gap between what actually happened and how Bernhard writes of it can be interpreted variously as postmodern playfulness or deceitful paranoia. (Video footage reveals he was not deprived of a seat at the Grillparzer Prize but led to the front; Austrians of a certain age will tell you his work was not ignored by the state but taught regularly in schools. Nor did he ignore the state, at one point attempting to become head of the Austrian Burgth
eater, the most heavily funded in the world!) It’s the same difference: we all enjoy an intemperate paragraph of syntactically inspired bile. My quibble with Bernhard’s reputation is the idea that it rests on his philosophical contribution. Take that line so beloved of Bernhardians: “It is all absurd, when one thinks about death.” In My Prizes we can read the speech from which it came. It continues:
We go through life impressed, unimpressed, we cross the scene, everything is interchangeable, we have been schooled more or less effectively in a state where everything is mere props: but it is all an error! We understand: a clueless people, a beautiful country—there are dead fathers or fathers conscientiously without conscience, straightforwardly despicable in the raw basics of their needs . . . it all makes for a past history that is philosophically significant and unendurable.
Hmmm. “Everything is interchangeable” is about right.
All the acceptance speeches read the same: sonorous, apocalyptic, pop-philosophical bullshit. This has a retrospective effect on the Bernhard we have loved. Maybe the vital line is interchangeable, too? Couldn’t it just as easily be: “In the face of death, nothing is absurd”? Doesn’t he confuse permanence with value? If we lived forever would life be meaningful? This hollowness is amusing in the novels. (The Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann tells of a PhD candidate who dutifully tracked all Bernhard’s mentions of Goethe, Kant, Wittgenstein, et al. before coming to the conclusion that nothing—beyond their names—is ever said of them.) In the speeches, it begins to look endemic: “We say we have a right to what’s right and just, but we only have a right to what’s not right and what’s unjust”; “The question is: to go on, heedless of the consequences, to go on, or to stop, to call it a day . . . it is the question of doubt, of mistrust and impatience. I thank the Academy, and I thank you for your attention.” Though maybe My Prizes is totally ironic? Does that help? Is it ironic to rail against state prizes and then spend two decades collecting more state money than any other Austrian writer? “I hated the prize-givers but I took their money. Today I can no longer do it. Until you’re forty, I think, but after that?” Like an Internet troll, never in the wrong, constantly changing the parameters to suit his own sense of virtue. Depressing. And not in the usual, good, way. For the best (worst?) of Bernhard, look in the usual places (Woodcutters, Concrete, The Loser).
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Mix a boyhood of Conan Doyle, Dumas and Stevenson with a fabulist heritage of Borges and García Márquez and an early career spent translating Nabokov, Updike, Faulkner, James and Shakespeare. Result: the stories of Javier Marías. In While the Women Are Sleeping (New Directions, $22), doppelgängers meet, ghosts hand in resignation letters, a poet-tramp is king of Redonda, and a boy writes a story from the point of view of a dead man. That last is both fiction and reality: the boy author was Marías himself. It tells you something about the childlike pleasures of his style that “The Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga,” composed when the author was fourteen, is the equal of anything else in the book. Childlike, but not childish. In “A Kind of Nostalgia Perhaps,” a maid, who happens to be reading aloud to the ghost of Emiliano Zapata, chooses Sherlock Holmes, “for she put more faith in Conan Doyle’s narrative skills than in any other scientific or literary bait.” Marías, too. He plays Borgesian games without the obscurity. Sometimes the Anglophile echoes are overpowering, producing penny-dreadful imitations (“Lawson could stand it no longer”; “She would stare at the empty armchair and curse the silence . . . hurl reproaches into the invisible air”). And perhaps the doppelgänger theme belongs to Nabokov. But Marías has the loveliest inversions (“It is quite possible that the main aim of ghosts, if they still exist, is to thwart the desires of mortal tenants, appearing if their presence is unwelcome and hiding away if it is expected or demanded”), the most startling domestic insights (“There’s nothing worse than being someone’s sole source of distraction”). You don’t get that in Conan Doyle.
Marías’s literalism is especially striking. Characters tell their tall tales awkwardly, stating the obvious, describing the same detail multiple times. The implicit becomes explicit. A butler who practices black magic on the boss’s wife describes her fetish for precision a little too precisely: “She likes me to wear my silk gloves all the time, in the belief that a butler should be constantly running his finger over every surface, over the furniture and along the banisters, to check for dust, because if there is any dust, the gloves will pick it up immediately.” Why not put a full stop after that first “dust”? Elsewhere—in a story about a man obsessively filming the perfect wife he means to kill—this technique is obliquely revealed, mere “looking” contrasted with “the capacity to see, which is what we almost never do because it is so at odds with the purely temporal. For it is then that one sees everything, the figures and the background, the light, the composition and the shadows, the three-dimensional and the flat, the pigment and the line, as well as each brushstroke.” The fantastic is made credible by its banal clarity, its lack of shade.
Of Death and Duchesses
John Gray’s The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death offers two portraits of human hubris. The first depicts a circle of “psychical researchers” in nineteenth-century England; the second, a ragbag of Bolshevik “God-builders” intent on remodeling life on earth. What unites these movements, in Gray’s view, is the attempt to “conquer death.” It was science, in the form of Darwinism, that had revealed to the British and the Russians the intolerable truth of human extinction, yet in the absence of credible religious belief, both “turned to science for escape from the world that science had revealed.” It’s Gray’s subtle idea that when science is used against itself in this way it becomes “a channel for magic.” Sometimes this magic is benign, prompting otherwise sensible Victorians and Edwardians to believe they are receiving messages from the dead; at other times it is the kind of lethal black magic capable of “vanishing” all of Moscow’s Boy Scouts on a single day in 1919. As you’ll gather from the previous sentence, Gray’s case studies are so different in nature it is difficult to fit them together in summary—actually it’s difficult, full stop. Despite a bit of bullying parallelism in the introduction (“The Russian God-builders believed death could be defeated using the power of science. The English psychical researchers believed science could show death was a passage into another life. In both cases the boundaries between science, religion and magic were blurred or non-existent”), this begins as a book of two halves, and remains so. The attempted synthesis is bold—it is also essentially metaphorical. Readers may find metaphor insufficient to establish a profound connection between the paranormal practice of “automatic writing” and the murderous rampages of the Cheka. It’s certainly a difficult tonal exercise, moving from bleak comedy to purest tragedy in two hundred pages.
The British section opens at a seance in 1874 in the London house of Erasmus Darwin. Among the invited guests are brother Charles and George Eliot. Seance of the season, surely. It didn’t go very well: Charles found it “hot and tiring” and left early; Eliot had only her skepticism confirmed. But one man present that night was a believer, and an influential one: Frederic Myers, inventor of the word “telepathy” and future president of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). In this role, he was in surprisingly good company: William James was another president, as were the philosophers Henry Sidgwick and Henri Bergson. Members included John Ruskin, Prime Minister Gladstone and Prime Minister Balfour. If in life Myers was a key player in this world, in death he became its main object of study, having instructed surviving friends to be on the alert for his posthumous communications. James tried hard to receive a message but came up empty; more successful were the wives and widows of various SPR members, who became “automatists,” transcribing beyond-the-grave messages from Myers, Sidgwick and others for more than thirty years. “The people involved in the cross-correspondences,” Gray explains, “belonged in the topmost stratu
m of Edwardian society. Many of those involved had suffered agonizing bereavements; some had long-hidden personal relationships. The scripts became a vehicle for unresolved personal loss, and for secret love.” Incredible what the British won’t do (talk frankly about their feelings). Incredible what they will do (transpose painful feelings into mediated communications from the dead). It’s a really crazy scene Gray exhumes: half a dozen genteel ladies channeling a stream-of-consciousness, cross-referenced, fantastical fiction network, peppered with “stories and phrases from ancient Greece and Rome, the King James Bible and Shakespeare . . . Wordsworth, Browning and Tennyson.” But Gray, a philosopher, is less interested in the literary and subconscious motivations than in the overt rationale, expressed by Sidgwick: “Unless human personality survived bodily death [. . .] morality is pointless.” That is, if humans have no special destiny, if their existence is not eternal but contingent, then the belief in morality as a system of duties is unsustainable. The same dilemma presented itself to Kant and Nietzsche, whose respective responses to the problem (defense, abandonment) mark the poles of ethical debate through the twentieth century. Sidgwick was in the defense camp, in a style typical of his time: he meant to fight contingency with science. Darwinian science being the revelation of extreme contingency, Sidgwick could continue thinking of himself as a man of science only by willfully misinterpreting Darwin’s message. Death was just a stage of the evolutionary process: “Rather than the end of life, death was a phase in cosmic progress.” The idea that evolution necessarily describes the progress from lower to higher forms of life was—is—a misapprehension as common as the idea that “survival of the fittest” means the “strongest” animal wins. Darwin himself was conflicted on the issue, sometimes arguing there is no more design in natural selection “than in the course in which the wind blows”; sometimes speaking of the tendency “toward perfection.” Gray is not conflicted: “There is nothing in the theory of natural selection to support [the latter] notion.” But the notion has always had its own momentum, morphing easily into eugenics. A famous adherent, H. G. Wells, serves as a bridge here between London and Moscow. An early enthusiast of the Soviet project, in Anticipations (1901) he wrote passionately, prophetically, about an oligarchy led by the genetically “evolved”: “And for the rest, those swarms of black and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go . . . It is their portion to die out and disappear.” Wells’s 1920 trip to Moscow frames Gray’s interpretation of Bolshevism as a “materialist version of gnosticism” in which salvation is “collective and physical” and the idea is to deliver man from nature: “Aiming to create a new type of human no longer subject to mortality, the Soviet state propagated death on a vast scale. Unnumbered humans had to die, so that a new humanity could be free of death.” Bye-bye, Boy Scouts.