And I remembered this odd fact I once read about Kawabata. How three months before his death he took one of his most loved novels, Snow Country, and turned it into a very short story – what he called, beautifully, a palm of the hand story.[1] “Gleanings from Snow Country” (published posthumously in the fall of 1972) consists entirely of scenes from the novel with everything else cut out. You could make an argument that this was a last ditch effort of a great writer with diminishing powers, that by returning to an old story, Kawabata was trying to recapture former glory. There is something about our own past words that is comforting. Did I actually think that? Write that? You know what I mean? When you don’t recognize the you in your own words? When the you who wrote them is long gone and you can only go back and be with that person on a flat, silent page?

But this morning I wonder if it wasn’t something else that was motivating Kawabata to return to Snow Country. I think he may have suspected there was more to be found there, at least one more wrenching layer. I can’t seem to find Snow Country on my shelves and so can’t re-read it, but what I remember of the novel is not what happened (I’m not a reader who needs much to happen, for me life is enough of a roller coaster as it is) but how it made me feel a little more present in the physical world. I spend so much time in my own head that I forget what it is like to stick my face in the snow and know the cold. And I think of that novel and I remember the scene on the train and Shimamura watching the reflection of a girl, a fellow passenger, superimposed in the window as the dark, snowy country rolls ceaselessly beyond her like a double-exposed motion picture. In turning an already aching novel into a story, Kawabata may have been trying to isolate only the most essential images. But “Gleanings” is not a greatest hits of Snow Country; if it was, it would fail. What story does, I believe, is capture not only the essence of the novel, but also, using the same characters and scenes, another, entirely new spirit.

Borges says somewhere that he was pretty good at beginnings and endings of stories. It was middles that always gave him a headache, and so he avoided them. Halleluiah. In so many cases, aren’t the middles the problem? In life? In art? Something similar is going on here except that Kawabata doesn’t simply condense the book by doing away with the middle, he chooses scenes that are mostly from early in the novel to create an independent story that is suggestive rather than conclusive.

In the story we know little about Shimamura. In the novel, if I remember, he’s got a wife and maybe a family back in Tokyo. In the story there is no context, no backstory. He’s a man taking a train to small village in the mountains. His heading for a hot-springs inn he’s apparently stayed before to see a woman he hasn’t seen in a long time. The story consists of the scene on the train followed by nine scenes of Shimamura with the unnamed woman who works as a geisha. The two of them seem to love each other, and this love, unlike in the novel (if I remember) is doomed less by external circumstances (the hideous class differences separating them, her work, his family) but because it is doomed, period. Kawabata, always a death-obsessed writer, may have felt Snow Country no longer needed backstory. What’s backstory – or even the rest of the story itself – to the ultimate story, the darkness that was closing on him?

To give one small example of what I’m trying to say, in Snow Country the two are haunted by Tokyo itself, by the fact that Shimamura must return there; in the story, they are haunted by the mere sound of the steam whistle of the midnight train to Tokyo as it drifts up to their room from the valley.

And sex – how could I leave this out? Because there isn’t any. This may be the majestic genius of the story, there isn’t any sex, and yet, “Gleamings from Snow Country” drips with it. It’s got more sex than stories with sex, which too often are less about sex than ego. In prose, for me anyway, not getting it is far more sweat inducing than getting it. And here, instead of flesh, Kawabata gives us something far more complicated and disturbing.

His hand was inside the neck of her kimono.

She did not respond to his request. The woman folded her arms to bar the way to what Shimamura sought, but, numb with drunkenness, she had no strength.

“What’s this? Damn you. Damn you. It won’t move this arm!” She suddenly put her head down on her own arm. Startled, he let go. There were deep tooth marks on her arm.

And, of course, in both the novel and the story, there is the snow and the mountains, all the dark mountains, mountains beyond mountains, bright with snow.

Was the sun about to rise? The brilliance of the snow in the mirror increased as if it were burning cold. And with it the purple-black luster of the woman’s hair in the mirror grew deeper.

Why is the snow that much more impenetrable in the story? Burning cold. With so fewer words, certain details, snow, tooth marks, gain a stranger power. The desolation connecting these two characters becomes – how is it possible? – more extreme.

***

[1] Allow me this brief opportunity to state my general opposition to calling a short story anything other than a short story no matter how short – this includes such unnecessary nicknames as short-short or flash or micro-fiction. Is the story of Jonah and the whale a micro-fiction? These terms diminish good stories and often elevate bad ones as if by being part of a sub-genre it is all right if they’re thin. Yet, I find Kawabata’s name for his own uniquely brief stories beautiful and apt. So what the hell do I know?

Related Posts:

• THE LONELY VOICE #5, The Rumpus Short Story Column: We Are All Lizzie Borden
• The Lonely Voice #22: RIP Richard Stern
• The Lonely Voice #21: So Long Adobe Books
• THE LONELY VOICE #20: WILLIAM MAXWELL IN THE DECEMBER RAIN
• “Boy, A History”

The book takes Mozingo, a Los Angeles Times reporter, on a great chase—from Los Angeles, to the American South, to Angola—as he traces the history of the first American Mozingo, Edward Mozingo, a former slave from West-Central Africa who eventually won his freedom by suing for it in a Virginia court. Some Mozingos fought for the Union; others for the Confederacy. Some were abolitionists; others were in the Ku Klux Klan. One thing they all have in common is Edward Mozingo, a man who—in spite of everything—held onto his royal name.

As somebody with very little knowledge of my own name (I’ve always been told we were trouble-making Hungarian Jews—or were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, anyway), the name “Orner” apparently means, I’m told, in French, “to decorate.” I’m sure, though, my own quest, should I ever decide to get to the bottom of my name, will be far less interesting than Mozingo’s. I was moved by the book and Mozingo’s thoughtful prose. He’s a humble narrator, not one of those voices that come at you with all the answers. This is a book about what we don’t know about ourselves. Mozingo’s cluelessness (I mean this in the best sense: we should all be as forthcoming about what we don’t know) is not only endearing and honest, it’s profound. What we don’t know about the names we lug around with us our whole lives might be a key to solving the racial divide we can never seem to get over. We know that deep down—somewhere deep in our roots—we’re all connected. The rare and great thing about Fiddler on Pantico Run is that Joe Mozingo is able to prove it.

***

The Rumpus: Your story is especially remarkable in that Mozingo is only one of two African names to survive slavery. Since you had no idea how significant your name actually was when you went into this, could you trace how the revelation came about?

Joe Mozingo: The understanding that I descended from this African man who kept his African name came in different waves. First there was puzzlement—how could this be?—then deep curiosity, then frustration, and eventually this exhilaration. The frustration was this: I needed to envision my ancestor, Edward, but subconsciously I harbored this white-black binary view that has been bestowed to us by American history. I was white. So it was hard to envision him as my ancestor at first. But that blockage gave way as I researched more, visited the places Edward lived, met more Mozingos—black, white, and in-between—and went to Africa. The exhilaration came then, when I felt that link to him, to this lineage spinning back to the beginning. In Angola, where he sailed off into the Atlantic for Jamestown, that connection to this eternal system just welled up inside. It was this great feeling of opening up.

Rumpus: I was struck by your bringing into the discussion of your own family history one of the great characters in our literature, Faulkner’s Joe Christmas from Light in August. How does the fictional Christmas figure into your story?

Mozingo: What little I heard as a child about my father’s family’s past always carried this scent of dysfunction, a sourness. Brothers didn’t get along, no land was passed down, no family lore existed. We didn’t know where our name came from. When I researched the book, I followed our lineage back to a man, Spencer Mozingo, who looks to have been the orphaned child of an unwed, mixed-race mother in the mid-1700s. He lived next to James Madison, but in poverty. As he grew older, he seemed to have fractious relationships with his children, and he died alone and poor in Kentucky. The more I learned about him, the more I saw this Joe Christmas-type character. Like Christmas, Spencer had one foot across the color line. Officially, he was white, on censuses and court records, but he had this weird name, and no standing in the white world, and he was undoubtedly darker-skinned.  Suspicion had to surround him. I couldn’t know everything about him that I wanted to understand; poor people’s lives were mostly undocumented. So Light in August gave me this oblique view that I couldn’t get through the records: of this rough-cut soul exiled from both worlds, white and black. Writing the book, I relied on Faulkner to flesh out my ancestor’s life because the author had this proximity to that Southern burden of ancestry and the past that I couldn’t truly know having grown up in Southern California, a place where the past was effectively erased.

Rumpus: The book is as much about our more troubled past as our distant past. At one point you evoke Faulkner when discussing a case involving one of your distant relatives (on the black Mozingo side), to explain what may have been in the mind of the judge who changed his mind after first not declaring him at fault in a car accident case. Upon finding out your relative was black, the judge reversed course. Why did you bring in Faulkner in this instance?

Mozingo: Another part of the reason I employed Faulkner was that I wanted readers to realize the story I was telling was not a freak occurrence in American history. The point was, Look here, one of our greatest novels revolved around the wrath that mixed lineage stirred in people. It threatened the construct of “whiteness,” as shown in that scene. If everyone thinks the guy in the car accident is white, and he obviously has lots of white ancestry, what exactly makes him not white? So many of these stories I was digging up in my reporting had parallel reverberations in Faulkner’s book, I just couldn’t resist using some of his dialogue in a few scenes to give them both blood and credence.

Rumpus: In addition to Faulkner, you quote another writer with an especially complicated and nuanced view of our history, the great historian John Hope Franklin. Why is Franklin’s work important to your own story?

Mozingo: John Hope Franklin did majestic research laying out how free people of color were seen as a threat to the whole system of white superiority in the South, and how they were savagely debased for it. A free black man coming into North Carolina from Virginia, for instance, had to place a huge bond with the local sheriff to guarantee his good behavior, or he’d be sold at auction. Children were stolen and sold into slavery, or forced into indentured servitude with white families. Black and white people who married—believe it or not, this did happen well into the 19th Century in the South—were fined, or their marriages were nullified. Mozingos went through all of this. One of the families I wrote about descended from a “colored” man named Christopher Mozingo who was married to a white woman in 1830, and then they seemed to have been driven apart. Franklin dug up incredible anecdotes to bring the brutal history of these mostly-forgotten people to life.

Rumpus: What’s the reaction of other Mozingos to what you’ve found? Especially the information you found in Angola?

Mozingo: Edward Mozingo’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren scattered and tried to reinvent themselves in new places where no one knew of their heritage. They created myths about their origins, and their descendants took these stories as truth. So Mozingos are scattered about the country now, with these myths ingrained in their identity. There is little sense that we are all came from one man, much less any collective acceptance that he was black. So it was strange sitting with some of them because we just had such different backgrounds. Some were very rural and poor, self-described “rednecks” whose families have struggled in America every generation for the last 370 years. Some grew up on the wrong side of Jim Crow, living in sharecropper shacks, tormented by white society. There were a lot of racists, but there were people who really embraced this news of our origins.

Rumpus: I was stuck by the reaction of one of your relatives, Shirlyn, who said she would have perferred that the name have come from Italy! Such an honest, human moment.

Mozingo: Yes, Shirlyn. She is wonderful. She grew up in a black family—at least that’s how society saw them—but she is very light-skinned, and one of her brothers is so light, I mistook him for a “good ol’ boy.” Shirlyn married the actor who played Kunta Kinte’s father in Roots. The presumptuous white guy in me thought she would be ecstatic for some reason when I told her the name is African—but she was disappointed because her family thought it came from Milan. She had her own stereotypes about Africa.

Rumpus: The book is able to merge history with a personal quest pretty seamlessly. Can you talk about the challenges here?

Mozingo: Everywhere I traveled I was looking for the past. So it actually never felt too tortured to let the passages of that past come out amid my quest. Not to say that I didn’t struggle with the structure to keep the narrative tension, particularly because the central mystery is solved pretty early in the book and there was no obvious conclusion. So that tension had to be internal, and it was.

Rumpus: The whole issue of white Mozingos, black Mozingos, and those who straddle both—what does this tell us, not only about your namesake, but about this country in general? This is absurdly broad, but it seems to me that there’s a great metaphor for why we are always confused about who we are right here in your name…

Mozingo: When I first wrote about this for The Los Angeles Times, the headline was, “In Search of the Meaning of Mozingo.” Because Mozingo was much more than a name. It was the story of what could have happened in America if they allowed black people the level of freedom Edward and others had at the very beginning of our country. It was the story of our messy, violent, mixed-race birth, as well as of the centuries of trying to sanitize it, and the tortured ironies that sprung from that (KKK members with Bantu last names, for instance). And it was the flipside of the American Dream, where families struggle for centuries, but are held down by the past as captured in a name.

***

Photograph of Joe Mozingo ©  2013 by Noaki Schwartz.

Related Posts:

• THE LONELY VOICE #23: It Doesn’t Fit, It Will Never Fit, It Fits
• Why the Civil War Is Still Worth Talking About
• The Lonely Voice #22: RIP Richard Stern
• The Reproductive Rights Stories You Haven’t Heard
• When Fiction Won’t Let You Lie to Yourself

This bus I’m in happens to be in Haiti. I’m out in the countryside, about fifty miles west of Port-au-Prince. What I’m doing here isn’t important to this column, which is supposed to be about the short story. I will say, though, that there are times when I wonder if I don’t go out of my way to find new places to be lonely. I wasn’t lonely enough at home? And not to toot my own horn, but someone who can feel alone on a packed bus in Haiti has a certain amount of talent in this area.

And I have to say also that there is something comforting about watching a movie on someone else’s computer while on a packed bus. My seatmate’s daughter is asleep, squeezed in the nook between the seats. Her name is Chantal. She’s four. Before she fell asleep, she and her mother talked to me. Chantal dozed off during an earlier shootout. But just now she woke up and tugged her mother’s arm because she’s hungry. Her mom has paused the movie and I’m taking this opportunity – Van Damme’s face frozen in fierce contemplation on the screen (he’s sad, as if he wishes he didn’t have to be so strong and fearless all the time) – to take down a few notes for a long, long over-due column. A half hour ago I was in the middle of a V.S Pritchett story called, “The Fall.”  My finger is still holding my place. I’ve read this story many times, and though it is brilliant, almost miraculous in my view, Van Damme totally walloped it.

***

It’s been the habit of this column to bring together disparate elements. Usually this has to do with where I am and what I happen to be doing at a particular time, and how it all connects to a given short story.[1] So it might be expected that I will now link the elements I’ve raised here, Van Damme, the Republic of Haiti, and the great English storywriter V.S. Pritchett. But this time I won’t. The fact is that but for all three things happening to me at this moment, on this bus, they have zero to do with each other. Why force it? I should also mention that while Haiti itself is fascinating and difficult and very welcoming (note Chantal and her mother’s kindness to a stranger), even Haiti’s green, often breathtaking, severely denuded countryside is no match for this goon, Van Damme.

General Dessalines

I could, of course, remark on the irony of a Haitian woman watching a Jean Claude Van Damme movie at all, and talk about how Haiti whooped Napoleon’s French ass in 1804.

(Is Van Damme French?) Anyway, you get my point. Or maybe not. Wait, that’s right, I’ve decided not to make a point here at all. What I’m trying to say, without making a case out of it, is that the world is full of these crazy crosscurrents. Let us now praise disconnection. It doesn’t fit. It will never fit. It fits. A Haitian woman and her daughter, a somewhat lost American, this idiotic movie, V.S. Pritchett on my lap – all here, all now.

***

This said, it is tempting to inject a bit more meaning by replacing the Pritchett book with the Lyonel Trouillot novel that’s in the backpack at my feet. There would be more symmetry if Van Damme, (the French?)[2] action hero, had distracted me from a profound and intense novel of Port-au-Prince called The Street of Lost Footsteps. I might then have been able to say colonialism remains alive and well via the entertainment industry.

But no, it won’t line up. What can I do? I’m blown away by the Trouillot book, but it’s Pritchett I’ve been reading, trying to read, this morning.

And traveling in a relatively unknown place with V.S. Pritchett is like having a busload of befuddled oddballs along with you on the bus of oddballs you are already on. Right then, onward with the column. Chantal will be done eating her oatmeal, potato chips, and string cheese soon.

***

“The Fall” is about an accountant. The scene is an industrial city in England, also a former colonial power but that is neither here nor there. The story opens with the accountant, Charles Peacock, in his hotel, getting ready for the annual accountants’ dinner.

At the Royal was Charles Peacock, slender in his shirt, balancing on one leg and gazing with frowns of affection in the wardrobe mirror at the other leg as he pulled his trousers on; and then with a smile of farewell as the second went in. Buttoned up, relieved if his nakedness, he visited other mirrors…

Frowns of affection! Saying goodbye to his legs as he puts his pants on! Relieved of his nakedness! See what I mean? This is the third sentence in the story, and you are already starting to know, intimately, a guy named Peacock. We are nothing more and nothing less than our idiosyncrasies. For example, I often carry on detailed conversations with my shoes. And like us all, Peacock is burdened by problems, family problems. In his case, it is his brother, Shelmerdine Peacock – the movie star – who plagues him. Everywhere Peacock goes he is only his brother’s brother. As soon as he enters the dinner, the president of the accountants’ association shouts, “I saw your brother this afternoon.”

Peacock’s drink jumped and splashed in his hand. The president winked at his friends.

“Hah!” said the President. “That gave our friend Peacock a scare!”

“At the Odean,” explained a kinder man.

“Is Shelmerdine Peacock your brother? The actor?” another said, astonished, looking at Peacock from head to foot.

There’s an upside though to being Shelmerdine Peacock’s brother, and Peacock vacillates between being horrified to basking. He’s a lonely neurotic. Even here among all his fellow accountants, Peacock is jittery and isolated. The man’s got no Van Damme. (His brother might, not him.) So being the brother of celebrity takes the edge off a little.

It was pleasing. There was always the praise; there were always the questions. He had seen the posters about Shel’s film during the week on his way to the office. They pleased, but they also troubled. Peacock stood at his place in the Great Hall and paused to look around, in case there was one more glance of vicarious fame to be collected.

And yet, something beyond his merely being Shelmerdine Peacock’s brother occurs and this is where the story takes a turn for what I will call: the ordinary strange. By this I mean that V.S. Pritchett has a way of immortalizing the plain weirdness of being alive on a daily basis. Charles Peacock hates the annual dinner, but at the same time he – desperately – doesn’t want it to end. (Who can’t relate to this? I dread going to parties, but once I get to one you got to pry me loose.) So Charles Peacock, a most average man, in order to try and convince his fellow men to stay a little while, is about to do something no reader will ever forget. Because Shelmerdine is not the only Peacock with talent. As the men begin to leave the Great Hall, Peacock drops to the floor.

‘Falling,’ said Peacock. ‘The stage fall.’ He looked at them with dignity, then let the expression die on his face. He fell quietly full length to the floor. Before they could speak he was up on his feet.

‘My brother weighs two hundred and twenty pounds,’ he said with condescension to the man opposite. ‘The ordinary person falls and breaks

an arm or a foot, because he doesn’t know. It’s an art.’

…

And down he went, thump, on the carpet again and lying at their feet he said: “Painless. Nothing broken. Not a bruise. I said “an art.” Really one might call it a science. Do you see how I’m lying?’

‘What’s happened to Peacock’ said two or three of the men joining the group.

And Peacock falls and falls again.

After a while, most of the accountants begin to lose interest. One of the few men who has bothered to stay finally tells Peacock all right already, that he gets it, that he appreciates the demonstration but that Peacock need not fall again, that he’s actually more interested in the theory behind the falling than the falling itself. This infuriates Peacock who insists that there is nothing theoretical about it. Once again, he hits the floor. Peacock’s falling is not unlike a Pritchett story itself. His stories never call attention to how good they are. They just do. They just are. Meaning is never handed. Connections are never forced. Now a man – a man we have come to know – is standing. Now he’s at our feet. Peacock stands, Peacock falls. A character is redeemed, and for me, enshrined in my memory for good. Who needs Shelmerdine and his movies (Waste, The Gun Runner, Zut)? I, for one, will always have his brother, Charles. At last the final indifferent accountant slowly wanders away.  It’s his brother who’s famous, not this hapless clown. Why should I watch him fall?

“The Fall” ends – hilariously, movingly – with Peacock alone in the Great Hall, showing off his skills to a portrait of Queen Victoria. And the queen might or might not have clapped her little hands.

***

There’s some Charles Peacock in us all. We fear other people while at the same time we have an insatiable craving for attention. Don’t look at me, don’t look at me. Look at me. By the way, our bus is now, in case it is of interest, stopped at a police roadblock. The guy in the seat behind has just handed me – an obviously lunchless person – half his turkey sandwich. “We’re going to be here a while,” he said. “As soon as they get bored terrorizing us, we’ll be on our way.” So on the bus we remain. Out the window, on the left is a small lake; on the right a steep cliff. In front, and behind us, a line of cars, buses, motorcycles, women and men and children on foot hauling merchandise. Money changers wave wads of bills. A woman selling hats wears, I count, eighteen of them on her head.

***

And, yet in my mind – even as Chantal has finished eating and the three of us are once again ensconced in the movie – I’m also still thinking about the story I didn’t re-read and how nice it might be to simply let go and fall on the floor. Any floor. Which is, in a way, comforting. As comforting as this turkey sandwich, as comforting as my seatmates and this movie.

***

Two last things: (and with my apologies for the whiff of connections): One, I no longer want this bus ride to end and am half hoping that the cops find some reason to detain us. Or maybe later we’ll break down. And two, I just remembered that a couple of days ago, in Port-au-Prince, I saw a man selling a peacock on John Brown Avenue.[3] He was selling the bird for 1600 U.S. dollars, cage included. I asked my friend Jean Pierre who he thought might buy it. Jean Pierre said someone with 1600 USD who also wants a peacock. Like that would not be unusual at all, and maybe it wouldn’t be.

___________________________________________________________________________

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Joe Mozingo
• The Lonely Voice #22: RIP Richard Stern
• When Fiction Won’t Let You Lie to Yourself
• The Lonely Voice #21: So Long Adobe Books
• THE LONELY VOICE #20: WILLIAM MAXWELL IN THE DECEMBER RAIN

In the case of Stern, I hadn’t heard of him up until just a few years ago. Here was this great Chicago writer and I’d never read a single word. I have Alana Newhouse, formally of The Jewish Daily Forward, to thank for bringing him to my attention. She thought I might connect with his work. But what if Newhouse hadn’t thought of me? What if that day she sent the book to someone else? You see what I’m getting at here, the crazy workings of fate our reading lives depend on? And I came across this particular writer in a pretty conventional way. It is almost dizzying to contemplate all the stories I will never read because, for whatever reason, a certain author’s work will never cross my path. Which is why I’m always searching for so-called neglected writers. What if what they have to tell is the essential thing I need to know?

In the case of Stern we are talking about a highly visible writer with a large and important body of work. Still, he was way under my radar. Maybe he’s under yours? Philip Roth says of his old friend that, in his day, he was known by writers but not by the general public. I wonder if Stern is, today, known by writers. I hope so. But again, it’s not the issue. The question is: how good is his work? What does it have to tell us about who we are as human beings? And – maybe more significantly – who we aren’t? (See: in addition to Stern’s short stories and novels, the essay collection, The Books in Fred Hampton’s Apartment. The title essay refers to Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader murdered by Chicago Police in 1969. Stern was somehow able to enter the apartment after the assassination. The essay is about the books he found on Hampton’s shelves and what these books have to teach us about a society that had just killed one of its own bright lights.)  Stern wrote brilliantly about the myriad ways we fail as human beings. I think of “Packages” today and I want to get down on my knees with guilt and sorrow – and laughter too.

***

Click here to read Peter Orner’s review of Stern’s Almonds to Zhoof over at The Jewish Daily Forward.

Related Posts:

• The Lonely Voice #21: So Long Adobe Books
• THE LONELY VOICE #20: WILLIAM MAXWELL IN THE DECEMBER RAIN
• THE LONELY VOICE #14: Isaac Babel, Every Grief Soaked Word
• THE LONELY VOICE #12: Cheever in Albania Or The Lonely Voice Hates Travel Writing
• THE LONELY VOICE #11: Eudora Welty, Total Bad Ass

How many nights, after wandering hours, have I landed in one of the broken down easy chairs at Adobe Books? All the conversations I have listened to. I’ll miss a place where people actually talk to each other.

When it closes for good, sometime next month, some will mourn but not nearly enough. And Adobe too will be replaced with another sleek, high end clothing store. I’m afraid there is nothing unique about this lament.

All the books are now 60% off, but Andrew McKinley, among the kindest and most generous bookstore owners on earth, will still try and make you pay even less.

Last night I bought The Collected Stories of Wolfgang Hildesheimer. The book was originally listed at 9.95. Then it went down to 6.50. 60% off of 6.50 is, what? I’m terrible at math. I tried to pay four dollars. Andrew wouldn’t take it. He’d only accept three bucks, his final offer.

Is there another place in the universe can you buy The Collected Stories of Wolfgang Hildesheimer at one o’clock in the morning?

Wolfgang Hildesheimer by the way is – was – a very good, and funny, German story writer. Among the stories in the book is one called, “I Am Not Writing A Book On Kafka.”

Evil tongues, or rather their owners, claim (and I can see them sneering) that I am writing a book on Kafka. This accusation is false, I repudiate it. For I am working on a book on Golch.

No, the narrator is not writing a book on Kafka. The narrator is writing a book on Golch! Of course, Golch. Golch, an unknown schoolteacher from the town of Altzmunzach, a town in which the express trains do not stop…

Golch taught English and German at the High School for Daughters (this institution actually existed then and still does today)….

Don’t you all see what we are losing? If this city still has a soul, it’s at Adobe.

So long books I will never find. So long Wolfgang Hildesheimer. So long, Adobe Books. 16^th Street will never be the same, and neither will we.

Related Posts:

• The Lonely Voice #22: RIP Richard Stern
• THE LONELY VOICE #20: WILLIAM MAXWELL IN THE DECEMBER RAIN
• SF’s Adobe Bookshop Lives!
• THE LONELY VOICE #14: Isaac Babel, Every Grief Soaked Word
• THE LONELY VOICE #12: Cheever in Albania Or The Lonely Voice Hates Travel Writing

I mean no disrespect, to my mother or to Barnes. And I’ve truly enjoyed his work in the past. I remember fondly the book about the parrot, as well as a number of his stories. There is no accounting for taste on a given day, or suicidal thoughts.

Dramatization: Not the actual book or intersection described in this column.

The lines that sent me over went something like this: “I wrote another message to Veronica and wrote in the subject line, Question. Then I wrote, “Do you think I was in love with you back then?”

Leaving aside the fact that I read to escape from email, there was something too cooked up about the narration in Sense of an Ending, something too obvious about the withholding nature of Tony’s guilt, a treading of water, before the revelation of something astonishing.

In the rear view, I watched a woman stop in the middle of the intersection. She was carrying a shopping bag in one hand and an umbrella in the other. The woman, deftly and, I thought, with a great deal of style, swung the umbrella up and lodged the shaft under her armpit so that canopy bloomed out behind her. Then she swooped down with her free hand and grabbed the book. I watched her shove it in one of the big pockets of her raincoat. I hope she enjoys it. When the mystery of Adrian’s suicide is explained, may she be deeply moved. (Personally, I hope it has something to do with Veronica’s mother. A good character, I liked the way she cracked the eggs early in the book.)

Is it just me or is the moment of finishing (rare) or abandoning (frequent) a book an especially exciting moment for you as well? I find it a thrill because I’m freed up once again to choose another story out of the infinite dark that constitutes all the unread books in the universe. All the possibilities. Maybe this time I will find the one book that will save me from myself. Sometimes, as a kind of temporary solace, and also to stave off the commitment issues I have with new books, I go for something I’ve already read and loved before I resume the search for the one book that will save me from myself. Today, despairing and feeling guilty about throwing my mother’s nice hardcover into the street, I reached for an old friend: William Maxwell. I say friend. I never knew him. And yet still, he speaks to me, as I know he does to so many legions of others. Even gone these past ten years or so, he speaks and I listen, as if for the first time.

It is raining in San Francisco. It has for four or five or six days straight. I’m losing track. There’s a leak in my bathroom, a rhythmic crashing, that provides a kind of beat to my reading. I pray that the sun never rises over Bernal Hill again. Let there be sog. Today, I read, and read again, Maxwell’s very short story, “With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge”. It’s such a brief story that some might relegate it to the status of anecdote. There is little action, little character development, just a voice really. Not all that different, in a way, from Sense of an Ending, which also relies so heavily on the voice of one character. Except, and this is crucial, William Maxwell never treads water. His sentences are as clear, as honest, and as potentially deadly – as water itself.

“Incident at a Bridge” is also about the weight of guilt. As a Boy Scout in Lincoln, Illinois in the early part of the last century, the narrator commits an act that haunts him for the rest of his life. He’s a twelve year-old goody-two-shoes, the kind of scout who, “went out of his way to help elderly people across the street who could have managed perfectly well on their own.” He and his fellow Boy Scouts organize a few boys younger themselves into a troop of Cub Scouts, ostensibly to teach them the ropes.

We taught the Cub Scouts how to tie a clove hitch and a running bowline and how (if you were lucky) to build a fire without any matches and other skills appropriate to the outdoor life. Somebody, after a few weeks, decided there ought to be an initiation. Into what I don’t think anybody bothered to figure out.

This power to initiate, as it so often does, goes temporarily to the heads of the older boys. The narrator and his fellow Boy Scouts end up blindfolding the group of young recruits, which includes a kid named Maxie Rabinowitz (the son of a broke Jewish shopkeeper from the wrong side of town) and marching them to the outskirts of Lincoln.
They stop at a bridge. The narrator then orders the Cub Scouts to run, at full speed, into a railing on the side of the bridge. All the boys got the wind knocked out of them.

Some readers conflate the first person narrator Maxwell often employs (an older man who recounts his boyhood in Lincoln, Illinois) with Maxwell himself. As if his work was mere autobiography. As if all he had to do was remember and transcribe. But few American writers have ever known better how to twist – and manipulate – real life into fiction than William Maxwell. So again, the incident at the bridge isn’t about Maxwell, and it isn’t true even if it’s true. Does this make any sense? I’m trying to say that turning true events into fiction is to carry them beyond memory. Great fiction writers contort the actual into something far greater: myth.

And so an incident on a bridge in a small Illinois town, in the 1920’s, becomes immortalized, burned into the souls of anybody who reads it. It isn’t so much about the improvised hazing ritual as it is about what we do with what can never be undone. Think of all the things you wish you could erase, forever, from the record. No matter how we airbrush our own histories, the hurt we have caused will, always, reach out for us out of the December rain.

This is why, for me, Maxwell’s story transcends anecdote. Here’s the second to last paragraph. The boys are on the ground, struggling to breathe.

I believe in the forgiveness of sins. Some sins. I also believe that what is done is done and cannot be undone. The reason I didn’t throw myself on my knees and beg them (and God) to forgive me is that I knew He wouldn’t, and that even if he did, I wouldn’t forgive myself. Sick with shame at the pain I had inflicted, I tore Max Rabinowitz’s blindfold off and held him by the shoulders until his gasping subsided.

There is something frighteningly counterintuitive about the narrator’s inability to forgive himself. God might have mercy on me, but I never will. This is so much darker than the easier redemption of some of the books I read, as well as the many others I put down.

Although the narrator of “Incident at a Bridge” is Presbyterian, and he recites the Apostle’s Creed on the opening page, I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the story reminds me of something my rabbi in Chicago said this past Yom Kippur. One may never achieve atonement unless one begs the forgiveness of everyone one has sinned against. In other words, you can’t go straight to God. You got to take care of things down here first. My gut sank at the work I have to do, and the work that is too late to do. Maxwell’s story seems an attempt on the part of the narrator to make amends though he knows damn well such a thing is useless. Yet, he’s not going through the motions. What the story does, ultimately, is instruct him on the dangerousness of his own heart. Here’s the final glorious paragraph in full:

Considering the multitude of things that happen in any one person’s life, it seems fairly unlikely that those little boys remembered the incident for very long. It was an introduction to what was to come. And cruelty could never again take them totally by surprise. But I have remembered it. I have remembered it because it was the moment I learned I was not to be trusted.

Related Posts:

• The Lonely Voice #22: RIP Richard Stern
• The Lonely Voice #21: So Long Adobe Books
• THE LONELY VOICE #14: Isaac Babel, Every Grief Soaked Word
• THE LONELY VOICE #12: Cheever in Albania Or The Lonely Voice Hates Travel Writing
• THE LONELY VOICE #11: Eudora Welty, Total Bad Ass

I am now about to undo all that progress.

My plan was to support my idea of not writing (so much) with a brief homage to Juan Rulfo. Rulfo wrote two books, a story collection called The Burning Plain (1953) and a novel, Pedro Páramo (1955). Mexico, and readers around the world waited for another book, a novel allegedly called, La Cordillera. People waited, and they waited. Rulfo died in 1986. No new work has ever appeared. The story of Rulfo is not the book he didn’t write – but rather the essential books he did. And when he was done, he was done.

When asked once why he stopped writing, Rulfo told an interviewer that most of his stories came from a favorite uncle. What happened, Rulfo explained, was that this beloved uncle died. Has anybody ever given a better answer?

In her introduction to the Grove edition of Pedro Páramo, Susan Sontag wrote:

Everyone asked Rulfo why he did not publish another book, as if the point of a writer’s life is to go on writing and publishing. In fact, the point of a writer’s life is to produce a great book – that is, a book which will last – and this is what Rulfo did. No book is worth reading once if it is not worth reading many times.

My un-written column was going to make a small but important correction to Sontag’s otherwise beautiful argument. Rulfo wrote two lasting books. I know of no novel that approaches the nearly overwhelming – call it orchestral – multi-voiced and sorrowful intensity of Pedro Páramo. All in 124 pages.

But I also return to The Burning Plain again and again. Though the brief stories have a far less web-like structure, you can find the seeds of the novel in the earlier stories. Yet I return, again and again, to Rulfo’s first book to re-experience something even more basic: how to listen.

I intended to focus on a story called “Luvina.” Two men, a drunk and a traveler, are in a bar in a small, unnamed town. Outside children are playing by the river. The drunk, in exchange for drinks, is telling the listener about the town where the listener is headed – a place called Luvina, a town where the wind blows so hard it “takes the roofs off houses as if they were hats” and the rain only falls for a few days a year and some years never falls at all. Luvina, a desperate place – dry as old leather, too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer – where the only hopeful thing is the inevitable peace of death itself. The drunk talks on – and on. It emerges that he’s a former schoolteacher who himself once went to Luvina with high hopes.

“In those days I was strong. I was full of ideas – you know how we’re all full of ideas. And one goes with the idea of making something of them everywhere. But it didn’t work out in Luvina. I made the experiment and it failed – ”

I thought about how the listener remains silent. Throughout the story he doesn’t say a single word in response to what the drunk is telling him. We never learn what he thinks about his own journey to Luvina. Is he afraid? Or does he believe his youth – for some reason I read the listener as young – will be stronger than the drunk’s? Does he think Luvina won’t defeat him as it did the teacher?

At one point, the drunk pauses and is quiet. The narrator, a voice hovering above the story breaks in at that moment to tell us what has been going in the bar as the drunk has been talking:

The flying ants entered and collided with the oil lamp, falling to the ground with scorched wings. And outside night kept on advancing.

I began to consider: what could I possibly say about “Luvina” that isn’t encompassed in this single line? And outside night kept on advancing. Doesn’t it? For us all? Always?

In the end, I took the listener’s cue and decided that the only honest way to pay tribute to this story – and to Rulfo – would be to keep my thoughts to myself. Maybe this is as it should be when it comes to that most intimate of relationships, the one between a writer and a reader. It need not be explained. It need not be trumpeted. I stopped promising to finish this column.

***

Today I am sitting at a picnic table in Butano State Park, not far from Pescadero, California. A family of what I take to be Russians are sitting a few feet away from me, and I’ve enjoyed listening to them bellow at each other for the past couple of hours. At first I thought they were having a heated argument and that soon they would start murdering each other with their plastic picnic cutlery (and in fact, at one point, one them did reach over the table and bop another one on the head with what looked like a large piece of ham) but it’s become clear that this is just the way this particular family converses over lunch. There are only five of them, what seems to be a mother and father, around 70 or so, and possibly their three adult children, two men and one woman, all in their late 30’s, early 40’s. Only five of them but they make the noise of twenty marauding Cossacks. They are all biggish people, yet it is their voices that are truly gargantuan – they yowl, they laugh, they bang on the table. My monolinguality shames me again. God damn, in another life, I will learn Russian if it kills me. I’ll read Chekhov and Babel, I’ll eavesdrop on an entire country’s most intimate conversations. I’ve come to this place for the peace of the Redwoods (and something called a fern canyon) and instead I’ve become mesmerized by the raucous. Screw the trees; it’s these crazy, wonderful people I will never understand. I’ve come for them. And for some reason I’m reminded of the column I’ve been not writing. What does Juan Rulfo, master of silence, have to do with the Dostoyevskian lunch booming at the next table? Not much, of course, at least on the surface, but sitting here the thought just lurched into my mind that Rulfo might enjoy this also. Am I alone? Or do you too sometimes commune with dead writers as with dead friends? It may be that I have this moment conjured Rulfo out of guilt because of what I had long promised and failed to deliver. Whatever it is, he’s here (a gleaming white shirt, a camera slung over his shoulder) and I think of his stories and how they are so often revolve around characters telling each other stories. And if I had to guess what my friends at the next table are talking about, I’d say they are telling each other stories, stories each of them has probably heard countless times already.

And so: not just telling, repeating. Rulfo’s work is at its core about people who do their best to unburden themselves of the stories they never stop telling.  It’s for this reason above all, I think, that Juan Rulfo is here with me at this out this obscure state park, at this dinky picnic area, listening to a language that I assume he can’t understand either.

I also believe – and so does the ghost of Juan Rulfo – that the stories our Slavic friends are telling each other, in their own inimitable way, have something to do with what happened to the hopes and dreams they all had when they were younger. Lately, I’ve begun to feel the faith I used to have in myself slowly slipping away. At what point in our lives do we fall so in love with our own failures that we can’t stop talking about them?

***

So “Luvina,” with apologies to Juan Rulfo for not being able to maintain the quiet reverence he and his work deserve. As I think of the story now (I don’t have the book with me), I recall the simple structure I recounted above in my notes for an aborted column. A local, a drunk is talking to a stranger. You want to know how it is Luvina? I’ll tell you how it is in Luvina…And yet, as I remember the story, what I remember most are the bats that aren’t really bats. There is something different, isn’t there, about remembering certain stories as opposed to actually re-reading them. “Luvina” has become a part of the chaos of my own memories.

And a story by a writer who never wasted a single word becomes even less like literature and more like it happened to me personally. I’m the guy in the bar who thinks I’m finally going to turn my life around in a place called Luvina. And I’m listening to the drunk tell me about his own first day in that town.

The drunk – then a young teacher – sends his wife to look for some food. The wife goes off. She leaves the teacher and their kids in the town square and, if I remember correctly, is gone for hours. Finally, the teacher goes searching for the missing wife who he finds kneeling and praying in an empty church. When the teacher asks what took her so long, the wife answers that she hasn’t finished praying. Because she, unlike the teacher, has realized where they’ve ended up, this literal, and metaphoric, dead-end, Luvina. That night the family sleeps huddled together in the freezing church. Just before dawn, the teacher wakes up to a strange sound. At first he thinks it is the beating of bat wings. In his groggy half-sleep, the teacher goes to the door of the church and sees a group of old women in black dresses moving slowly by, empty jugs on their shoulders. He asks them what they are doing this time of night. One of these women – who may or may not be ghosts – tells him that they are going for water.

Rulfo doesn’t need to tell us that it is the fabric of the women’s dresses that creates the bat-like noise. These old women are a kind of parade of the living dead. Remembering the scene makes me think of my own streets, of all the streets I’ve lived on, of all the people who used to walk up and down them who are gone now, including me.

In spite of all the omens, the teacher will stick it out in Luvina. He’ll try and make a go of it. Eventually, years later, he’ll flee. But for better or for worse, the place will become his story, the one he will tell and re-tell to anyone – you? – who will listen (and buy him a mescal, or five or six), the one about that time when he was young and full of expectations.

Chekhov once wrote, “The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living.”

This might be true of us all. Our failures are our stories. I’ve failed here too. (I’ve gone on too long in a column about not writing.) Sometimes we can’t help ourselves, we got to tell them. I say tell them good, tell them sparingly, but tell them. And when the telling is done, like my California Russians who have now retreated, utterly spent, to sagging lawn chairs, like Rulfo’s drunk who rests his worn out head on the bar, it will be time to sleep.

***

A rare recording of Juan Rulfo reading “Luvina” in Spanish:

***

Brazeros Colectivo Escénico will perform a rendition of four short stories by Juan Rulfo during Litquake tonight at the Consulate General of Mexico in San Francisco. Click here for more details.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Peter Orner remembers his friend, the late poet and novelist Victor Martinez.

***

This, not graveyard roses, is my gift;
And I won’t burn sticks of incense:
You died as unflinchingly as you lived,
With magnificent defiance.

- Anna Akhmatova,
“In Memory of Mikhail Bulgakov”

I am not a poet and this is not a gift. When you fell down in the parking lot in front of the free acupuncture place you no longer had the strength to be embarrassed, and it wouldn’t have been your style anyway. If it had been me who’d fallen, if it had been me who’d been too weak to take a single more step, if it had me on the ground on that bright, ordinary October day, you wouldn’t have blinked. You’d have shrugged off my apologies and my shame at being such an inconvenience, and pulled me right up. When you fell I hesitated. I looked at you on the ground as if you down there was something I needed to remember, as if you were already gone, and when I finally did yank you by the arm pits, you didn’t mention it. You asked how far the car was. You said, ‘Lets get hot dogs.’ It’s a lie when I say that I wish it had been me on the pavement, the sort of easy lie you detested. I wish it had been me on the pavement. At least you’ll know I’m thinking of you now, today, another October, which even you would concede isn’t nothing. Damnit it, Vic, at least give me this: I wish the car had been further and that we were still walking towards it.

Related Posts:

• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams
• Why I Chose Gregory Orr’s River Inside the River for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
• The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Looking for The Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco

Let’s say for the purpose of the Lonely Voice (Purpose? Wait, this column has a purpose?) that the rumor is true. Let’s say that the man who knew so much, so uncomfortably much about father love and father unlove (see “The Judgment,” See “The Metamorphosis”) was a father himself. But he doesn’t know it. At least he doesn’t know it factually – but somewhere inside his tattered soul he does feel that someone related to him is out there walking around in the world and he finds himself at the end of the first decade of the last century in a crowded, morning tram and he spots a boy, an ordinary boy. An ordinary little boy with something oddly familiar about him. A round head, thick eyebrows, the eyes, yes, something too wide about the boy’s eyes. He stares at the boy and the boy stares back. Or the boy seems too anyway. But really he’s only gazing at just another man in a suit, in a hat, on this crowded tram. And but for the giveaway eyes, he’s a fat cheeked healthy boy with not an ounce of curiosity and, most amazingly, no consecrated halo of loneliness. A miracle, farewell burden of inheritance, hasta luego sins of the father. He fights the urge to howl out loud. What’s your name, kid? I’m your dad. Call me Franz. You’ll never see me again. I’ll fade away from this morning like the ghost I’ve always been. He looks at the boy’s feet. They aren’t small, aren’t big. They are blessed average-sized feet and he thinks of them withdrawing from battered shoes at the end of a day like today and what it might be like to cradle them in his sweaty, alone hands.

Related Posts:

• LONELY VOICE #17: In Love Again and Doomed (Part Two of Five Stray Thoughts on Kafka)
• The Rumpus Interview with Joe Mozingo
• THE LONELY VOICE #23: It Doesn’t Fit, It Will Never Fit, It Fits
• The Lonely Voice #22: RIP Richard Stern
• When Fiction Won’t Let You Lie to Yourself

My lung was fair at least out there, here where I’ve been for the last fortnight. I’ve not been able to see the doctor. But it can’t be so bad considering for instance that I was able – holy vanity! – to chop for an hour and more without getting tired, and yet was happy, for moments.  – Letters to Milena (1917)

In the beginning his swing is wobbly, but gains a sort of clipped, if awkward, grace as he chops. It isn’t because he needs wood for any stove. He’s a guest at a spa. It’s only for the beauty of it. Only the desire to say later that he’s done it. And so he can write to Milena and say, well, I’ve been out chopping wood. Holy vanity. He who would later beg that every trace of him be obliterated. Even he can’t help wanting an image of himself as a man chopping wood to lodge in Milena’s imagination. For a moment? For a night? For good? He chops and he chops. A man with a good lungs. A hardy, hardy man.

Ali playing Kafka chopping wood.

He’ll be dead of TB in a few years. Milena, the daughter of a dentist. In her obituary of him she will write: “Few people here knew him, for he was a solitary, wise person terrified by life.” But now. Now he’s alive, in love again – doomed. Never more robust than when the end is in sight. He worries the ax from the log – its mouse-like shrieks. He raises the ax high, the wood waiting – then the sound – like a loud distant beautiful knock.

Related Posts:

• LONELY VOICE #18: Kafka the Dad (Part Three of Five Stray Thoughts on Kafka)
• THE LONELY VOICE #14: Isaac Babel, Every Grief Soaked Word
• THE LONELY VOICE #12: Cheever in Albania Or The Lonely Voice Hates Travel Writing
• The Rumpus Interview with Joe Mozingo
• THE LONELY VOICE #23: It Doesn’t Fit, It Will Never Fit, It Fits