Reading and enjoying French literature

I really enjoyed studying French literature at university, and the year in France that was part of my course enabled me to begin to understand the country, its culture and literature, as well as firming up my knowledge of and fluency in the language. Because I was studying two literatures (three, if I count American separately) I began to see links between the histories, cultures and literatures of nations and their influences on each other, and this has stood me in good stead all through my reading life, as I’ve branched out further.

French Renaissance literature, apart from the joys of Rabelais (in the original, I might add), was unremittingly tedious, and after the free-flow of Elizabethan and Jacobean blank verse, the rhymed alexandrine of French drama palled very quickly. Moliere I really liked, and I began to be clearer about how coded messages and criticism might be concealed in an author’s work when open criticism was more than frowned on, but actually punishable, and I rate my introduction to Voltaire as a major life-changing moment: French literature seemed more challenging, more revolutionary, at a time when this teenage student was susceptible to, if not yearning for, such influences.

Their nineteenth century novels spoke more to me that the English ones: Stendhal, Flaubert and above all Zola were real discoveries; the freshness of the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud was welcome. And the twentieth century had even more to offer: the political novels of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism, surrealism, so much more. I think my major discoveries during my year abroad were firstly, their school philosophy textbooks (why couldn’t we do this in England? I asked myself. Answer came there none.) and secondly the surreal writings of Boris Vian, which I still love today. Surrealism and the absurd…turning the world upside down. I’d met one of Ionesco‘s plays at A level, and found myself reading most of the rest. Here were writers I could see playing with, and doing experimental things with their language; I admired them in the same ways as I admired English writers who did such things.

Some of the magic of French literature is obviously the being able to read it in the original. This was an absolute eye-opener; it sounds like a statement of the obvious, but there was something special about realising I could speak the language, be taken for a local in the country, I could read its newspapers and books as if it were my own language. And in a sense it was, because I had mastered it, and if you, dear reader, have reached this stage in your knowledge of another tongue than your native one, you will understand the epiphany, perhaps. Then you realise at the same time, just how different France is, with its own history, regions, Paris-centredness, wars, conquests and revolutions, and also how the language gives you access to a wider world of literature from the entire Francophone world…

German literature and me

I’ve always been fascinated by Germany, its history and its past. I first read Günter Grass in the sixth form at school, the short Cat and Mouse first, a little thrown by the nature and development of the narrative and the authorial interaction with his reader, but drawn in by his yearning for and love of his home city Danzig which I’d visited the year previously in its Polish incarnation as Gdansk. For me, The Tin Drum, his first novel, remains his best (and Volker Schlondorff‘s film is a wonderful version, but only of the first half of the book); some of the later ones are a little self-indulgent. His memoirs, the cause of much controversy, are fascinating.

Grass, and his contemporary Heinrich Böll, were two German writers who made the attempt to come to terms in some way – if that is possible – with their country’s Nazi past; Siegfried Lenz also does this in two novels little-known in this country, The German Lesson and The Heritage. On my travels in Germany I’ve noticed that nation’s recent attempts to be honest with itself, and to ensure that the past is not forgotten (though it was not always thus). However, I have found the occasional slight hint in some quarters ‘don’t forget, we were victims too’ à propos of the damage inflicted by bombing on the country, or the expulsion of Germans from former territories, to stick quite heavily in my craw.

My reading of German literature has been mostly twentieth century novels, though I have read some Goethe (Elective Affinities) and loved Fontane‘s Effi Briest. I have been unable to get anywhere with Thomas Mann, I’m afraid. My favourite read of all remains Ernst Wiechert‘s The Simple Life, a haunting tale of a sea captain’s response to the horrors of the Great War: he flees everything and buries himself in the depths of the East Prussian countryside, to live the life of a hermit. It’s a beautiful book, which I’m sure appeals to the ex-hippy in me; I have to go back and re-read it every few years and it never palls.

Hermann Hesse was the big discovery at university – another writer briefly popular in the sixties and seventies but who has now slipped back into obscurity. Siddhartha was the most widely-read novel (there’s an excellent Librivox recording, too) although it was Narziss and Goldmund, a tale of two young men and their relationship in mediaeval times, that really spoke to me. Again there was a really clear sense of time and place, and of the longing for something sought for and lost.

This seems to me, on my limited acquaintance with German literature, to be one of its markers or strengths: the past as somewhere beautiful and hearkened back to, along with the need to know and find oneself. Perhaps it’s something about the landscape and territory the further east one goes? The plains and the forests stretch on for miles and miles and it’s possible to get really in touch with one’s relative insignificance. Being reasonably familiar with Gdansk, and what was East Prussia (most of it is now part of Poland) I think I can understand the feelings of Wiechert, Lenz and Grass.

What I know of Germany, and what I have seen of it, I love. For me, as a half-Pole, its recent past does render it ultimately incomprehensible, though.

 

American literature and me

American literature was part of my study syllabus at university, and I remember enjoying it very much, at times more than the Eng Lit I was also reading, but I cannot now remember why, apart from the lifelong love of Mark Twain it gave me. I liked his adventurous and pioneering life, his wide-roaming travels, and the ways in which he brought his own childhood to life in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. One got a sense of the relative innocence of the times, and the incredible freedom available then, too. I taught Tom Sawyer whenever I could at school, and I think my pupils enjoyed it mostly, identifying with the adventures, the rebellion, the dangers and the finding of a fortune.

It’s the American Dream, par excellence, of course, in the days when perhaps it still was available to everyone; Huck’s decision to light out for the territory is an astonishing breath of freedom and escape from a stifling world. Twain also conveys his love for the physical landscape and the vastness of the United States: Life on the Mississippi is his tribute, and I can thoroughly recommend the excellent Librivox recording of it.

I read Moby Dick and was suitably awed by it at the time, but have felt no call to re-read it. On the other hand, Walden bored me to tears as an undergraduate, and I only came to appreciate it in later years. Its magic was a little dimmed by the discovery that the cabin in the woods, though isolated, was not that far from civilisation, and Thoreau was able to take his washing home for his mother to do… Emerson and the transcendentalists left me cold; I loved Poe and his macabre tales. In the twentieth century, I could not get into Faulkner, and though I tackled a lot of Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby left me, and still leaves me, utterly unmoved.

More recent writings I have warmed to include those of Garrison Keillor; again, his tales capture some of the original innocence of bygone days and the back of beyond. In my hippy days I loved the vague and lyrical weirdness of Richard Brautigan, but have not gone back to him despite the books still lying on my bookshelf. You can keep Don de Lillo.

If I had to nominate a single twentieth century American classic, it would undoubtedly be Joseph Heller’s masterpiece, Catch-22, which will stand up to any number of re-readings; satire, history and gut-churning realism, it destroys the illusion of a ‘good’ war and forces the reader to engage with the complexity of the issues.

Science fiction has been an enormous part of American literature in the past fifty or sixty years and the US contribution to the development and flourishing of the genre should not be overlooked or underestimated: let’s mention Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Philip Dick and Ursula LeGuin just for the record… and then there’s detective fiction and Raymond Chandler…

For me, American literature epitomises freedom and independence; the proclaims a sense of space and freedom to experiment, to be able to rewind or go back to start in so many ways, if one’s original ideas don’t work, and this is not the way we tend to think or to view life here, I feel. There’s a sense of power, too, which comes from living in a country which is also a continent: there are no enemies bigger than you, no possibility of invasion and conquest – again, how unlike Europe – ironically the US thereby actually becomes more isolated, more insular, and that’s something we know about here in England too.

The profound differences between the dynamism, violence and openness of the US continue to astonish me; perhaps I am naive, but I sometimes feel the almost-shared language has hidden these differences from this Brit…

English Literature and me

A friend has reminded me of the tricky territory which is the distinction between English and British. We don’t (often/usually) talk about ‘British’ literature, but when we speak of ‘English’ literature, what do we mean, exactly? Not literature written in English, but sometimes it seems to include writers from other areas of the British Isles than England. So, for instance, James Joyce was on my ‘English’ Literature syllabus at A level, and at university. It gets more complicated the more I look at it, so I will try and be as careful as I can with terminology…

English is my language, and I love it, and always have, its weirdnesses and idiosyncrasies, its vastness and its splendours, the ways it sings in the writings of Shakespeare and Milton, to name a couple of my favourites. And yet I can only claim to have scratched the surface, as far as our literature is concerned: yes, I met all the usual greats at school and university, and taught a fair few of them during my time as a teacher. But there’s so much that no-one can now claim really to know it all: the broad sweep, perhaps, but no more. Because I did a joint degree, I never had to go further back in time than Mediaeval English, so the joys of Anglo-Saxon are unknown to me, other than through translations of Beowulf.

How brilliant is Shakespeare? How does one get beyond centuries of hagiography, and academia? I found myself wondering this summer, when I saw a Marlowe play (The Jew of Malta) and two Shakespeare plays (Othello and The Merchant of Venice) at the RSC: there’s some wonderful language in Marlowe, but the play was let down by wooden characterisation and unsubtlety of plot in comparison with Shakespeare. Shakespeare is pretty consistently powerful across his entire career, and there’s clear and evident change, development and experimentation over time. And yet, though I enjoy his sonnets, as a lyric poet I find him somewhat limited in comparison with his contemporary John Donne, who is much more experimental and bold, as well as more wide-ranging in style and subject-matter.

My love of Milton is a minority taste nowadays, I find, when I wax lyrical about Paradise Lost to anyone. The language flows beautifully, he experiments and invents words as much as Shakespeare does, he tells a marvellous story, bringing his characters to life in a way that the book of Genesis does not.

I have grown to love Jane Austen‘s novels as time has passed, despite being faced with the most demanding one for close study at university (Mansfield Park, since you ask, and it’s still my favourite); her style and command of the nuances of the English language is masterly, particularly given the narrow focus of the world of her characters. Somehow she is quintessentially English (and what do I mean by that?). I have developed avoidance strategies for a great deal of nineteenth century English fiction over the years – Dickens really does (over)-write by the yard (though I make an exception for Hard Times) and Hardy is just too laden with heavy symbolism which gets in the way. I can cope with Charlotte Bronte, and love Villette even more than Jane Eyre. At the turn of the century I have plenty of time for Joseph Conrad, perhaps partly because he was Polish, and certainly out of admiration for the fact that he was writing in his third language. The characters and atmosphere of Nostromo are wonderful, and seem to lay the foundations for the worlds of Gabriel Garcia Marquez several generations later.

I haven’t found a lot to admire in the twentieth century. Joyce I’ve mentioned earlier: Ulysses is a masterpiece, though some of it has to be endured rather than enjoyed or marvelled at; I find his skills with our language astonishing, on a par with Milton’s, though very different. Lawrence we had to study at university and I now find him absolutely toe-curling in his approach to sexuality – almost unreadable, and I do wonder how much longer he will be widely read, if at all. Graham Greene I admire for the moral dilemmas he explores with such nicety, and keep meaning to go back and re-read his oeuvre but haven’t so far; I like what I’ve read of Anthony Burgess, and I really enjoyed Anthony Powell‘s Dance to the Music of Time, but other than those, I haven’t really read that much…

For me, the golden days of English Literature are past: we developed the drama and more or less invented the novel, but have passed the baton on to other writers and nations, at least at the moment; my perception is that currently we are very uncertain of ourselves and our place in the family of nations, and this shows in many ways, including our literature…

Literatures of different countries

Something has prompted me to think about countries and their literatures, continents and their literatures and the differences between them in ways which I hadn’t deliberately focused on with any care or in any real depth; as I grow older I am realising how English I am, in my ways and my thinking, and that despite a lifetime being very conscious of the fact that actually I’m only fifty per cent English: back to the nature and nurture trope, I guess…

This led me to realise how many different literatures I have made the acquaintance of, or explored in some detail. I can read English and French fluently; although I have a reasonable knowledge of spoken German, I cannot read literary texts, and although the other fifty per cent of me is Polish, I can neither speak nor read the language with any fluency: it’s horrendously difficult for an English-speaker to learn (I’m talking about the grammar – the pronunciation is easy).

So when I read literature of other lands, I’m dependent on translations, and, as I’ve bemoaned in previous posts, we don’t get very many of those into English. When I visit bookshops in France or Germany, I’m astonished by the wealth of world literature translated into those two languages that we never see here. English – and American – are imperialist languages, self-contained in their own boxes, rarely seeing anything of significance outside, and this is of course reflected in the falling rates of students learning foreign languages in this country. This lack of engagement with other languages and cultures on so many levels is more than a shame, it’s short-sighted in so many ways…

I used to ask my students to list all the aspects of this country that were particular to us, that other countries didn’t have; history, geography, royalty, weather, institutions, currency… once you start exploring your own country along those lines it becomes easier to see what English-ness specifically is; then you can realise that such clusters of special-ness exist for every nation and people and make up a large part of their identity.

This process of self-understanding ought not to stop there, with self-satisfied patriotism, but rather to open one up to the many possibilities available in other countries, either through travel or through other kinds of engagement with cultures. I have to say that such exploration – particularly through reading, as I hope to explore in my next series of posts – has given me both much pleasure and much to contemplate and reflect on, but though I may feel more knowledgeable, and (sometimes) wiser for it, I can see no over-arching scheme, nor any answers to the pressing problems of our day.

G R Evans: A Brief History of Heresy

I found this a very useful little book, of the kind I’ve been looking for for ages; it pulled a lot of disparate details into place in my understanding and offered a clear taxonomy of heresies. I’m interested in the way various belief systems have developed and evolved, and the way changes to a system can either be accepted and authorised, or regarded as evils to be extirpated. Such approaches are visible in other religions such as Islam, and also in the various so-called communist creeds of the last century. The Orthodox Church, for example, regards itself as unchanged since apostolic times, and the Roman Catholic Church as the one that’s changed…

Initially, unity is important: how is consensus to be achieved and maintained as an organisation or church grows in size? Is the Pope to be head of the entire church, or should there be autocephalous patriarchs of various provinces? As I read further, it became clearer how it took a long time for certain aspects of dogma to be formalised and codified, often in response to new thinking and questioning; such beliefs we nowadays imagine have always been truths. Thus it was only from the eleventh century that the popes began to claim to be the heads of all Christianity, only from the nineteenth that they claimed to be infallible in matters of doctrine. Scripture was only regarded as the prime source of everything by the precursors of the sixteenth century reformers; it took several centuries to define the nature of Christ (!) and clarify what the Trinity was, and transubstantiation… to my mind, all huge changes and developments of the original events of two millennia ago, whatever they actually may have been.

Unity was definitively lost at the Reformation: although Rome may have regarded them as heretics, the reformers created new churches, and now there are thousands of them.

Once beliefs are codified and become part of the state apparatus, then there develops repression to enforce compliance, and we are in the territory of the various inquisitions, because so-called heresies (and power can decide anything is a heresy) are social challenges and attacks on authority. And because the victors write history, many heresies – the Cathar one in particular – lack any clear account of their belief system and ritual practices.

And then, at least in the West, as we like to think, eventually there develops a spirit of toleration, the idea that anyone shall be free to believe what they like or not, although in fact such tolerance only develops because it becomes impossible to enforce conformity any longer…

And I was also glad that this book sent me back to one of my heroes, Isidore of Seville, who wrote a whole chapter on heresies in his Etymologies in the seventh century. He’s the patron saint of the internet, by the way, and author of what’s generally believed to be the first encyclopaedia…

On censorship and the freedom to write (concluded)

If we consider writers’ tactics faced with control and censorship – and Eastern Europe, the Soviet empire for half a century provides copious examples – then we can see them taking risks by writing, and having their books published in the West since they would not be published at home, or as samizdats (typed manuscripts circulated clandestinely), or writing allegorically and hoping perhaps to outwit the censors. Writers in totalitarian societies wrote, impelled by the same muses and motivations as writers in the ‘free’ world. Ismail Kadare produced a wonderful allegory about the Kafkaesque control within the social structures of Albania in a novel allegedly about ancient Egypt, The Pyramid.

What particularly interests me – and I’ll admit that this is personal opinion – is the way that writers without freedom seem to produce sharper and more interesting novels, more perceptive literature, which I find more powerful and more moving; somehow they are compelled, it appears, to address broader issues about their (imperfect) society and an imperfect world, to ask existential questions; for them the collective is still relevant, if not paramount. I come back to the example I cited earlier, Vassily Grossman‘s epic about the siege of Stalingrad and its consequences. I will admit that Joseph Heller‘s Catch-22 is another astonishingly powerful novel about the Second World War, but Grossman’s works on an altogether different level, packing power that I cannot think of a parallel to in Western literature. Anatoly Rybakov‘s Arbat trilogy is my second example: he follows the fortunes of a group of classmates through the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s to the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. It’s harrowing: the purges are insane and one finds it hard to believe that people could and did behave in such a warped way; Rybakov pulls no punches as far as this episode in Soviet history is concerned. And then, he sets the heroism and self-sacrifice of those young people who have endured the purges as they fight for the liberation of the Motherland: the tension between the cruel tyranny and the love of country is live, sharp, electric…

In freer, Western societies I feel writers have become more introspective, self-indulgent at times, self-interested and self-obsessed, part of an increasingly fragmented literary culture; there is too much navel-gazing. Yes, at one level that’s an almost farcical dismissal of half a century of writing during which voices have been given to, or been seized by many cultural and political subgroups. But this does also represent a fragmentation of any challenge to the dominant cultural and economic hegemony, which remains largely unseen but which dominates every aspect of the way we live.

I’m not advocating that novels and literature should always be political, but I do feel that good literature makes us think about the human condition, about our world and ourselves. I’ve read many good and challenging novels by Western writers who have the freedom to write and say what they like. And I have found that writers who have had to struggle to be heard have written more profound and moving stories. I don’t know where this leaves us, because I’m neither advocating repression of writers in order to stimulate better literature nor didactic literature. But it has made me think a lot…

On censorship and the freedom to write

I’ve been thinking about censorship, and the control of ideas and writers, which has gone on in all societies almost as long as writing and thinking, as rulers quickly became aware of the subversive power of words. The basic idea is to prevent, or if that is not possible, to control publication, thus restricting access. For instance, until relatively recently, the Catholic Church maintained an Index Librorum Prohibitorum (index of prohibited books) which the faithful were not allowed to read; all kinds of political, religious, philosophical and social writings were not supposed to be read by good Catholics. Books on doctrine were carefully vetted: you can still see nowadays the Nihil Obstat (nothing against doctrine) and Imprimatur (let it be printed) granted by a highly-placed cleric often labelled as Censor…

In Britain, until 1964, all plays performed in the UK had to be licensed by the Lord Chancellor, and there were many reasons why a license might not be granted. The British have always been very wary of any overt sexual content in literature, and the Obscene Publications Act was used to prevent the publication in this country of such books as James Joyce‘s Ulysses, DH Lawrence‘s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Hubert Selby‘s Last Exit to Brooklyn. The trouble was, that what couldn’t be printed here could be printed abroad and brought back, in exactly the same way as religious tracts were smuggled around Europe during the Reformation.

We tend to associate censorship with totalitarian regimes rather than our own country, and it’s true, dictatorships can deal with the issues of control of ideas rather more directly and effectively. The Nazis banned books, and publicly burned them (there’s a monument in Berlin’s Bebelplatz commemorating just such actions); given the severity of punishments meted out for small infringements, not much more was required. Writers went into exile – Bertolt Brecht, for instance, knowing that his life was at risk if her remained in Germany. And writers were killed; Irene Nemirovsky, French writer of Jewish origin, author of the astonishing Suite Francaise, was killed in Auschwitz.

The Soviet Union had longer to get ideas under control. Writers perished in Stalin’s purges – the poet Osip Mandelstam, for example – and others had narrow escapes. Some went into exile voluntarily, others were forced out of the country: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had one novella published in the country during a brief thaw, eventually ended up in the USA, a twisted and embittered man cut off from his roots, losing his creative powers. This, one suspects, was exactly what the Soviet authorities desired: he couldn’t be openly tried and jailed or executed, and he couldn’t be kept under control at home; exiled, he was emasculated.

Book production was controlled by censorship and also by paper rationing. Many writers wrote ‘for the bottom drawer’, a euphemism for accepting that, whilst they could write relatively freely, they could not disseminate their manuscripts, and would certainly not be published. As long as they remained quiet, they would be left alone. So a masterpiece such as Vassily Grossman‘s Life and Fate, which has rightly been called a twentieth century War and Peace, sat neglected for years; a KGB officer who read the manuscript was reported to have told Grossman that there was no way the book could be published for at least two centuries…

And every now and then there surfaces from the USA some bizarre story of a school board somewhere wanting to ban a book and prevent students from reading it because they don’t like the ideas in it – To Kill A Mockingbird is one of those books, but any book with vaguely left-wing ideas or hints of sexual freedom is fair game for the book-burners in some places.

The situation is rather more sinister in the West, in some ways. Yes, we can read anything we like as long as we know it exists and we can get hold of it: we have that freedom. But, books which challenge the accepted social, political or religious order are tolerated because of their basically relative irrelevance in the greater scheme of things; literary culture is a very minority interest in the days of modern bread and circuses, The Sun newspaper, Sky TV and Netflix being what most people accept that they want, having been told that and been sold them.

(to be concluded)

 

Patrick Leigh Fermor: The Broken Road

The final volume of the trilogy is rather a mish-mash compared with the first two; it was incomplete at the time of Leigh Fermor‘s death, and peters out before he reaches Constantinople, which we never hear about. What there was seems to have been tidied up by his editors, who have appended a sizeable section of his diary extracts from his visits to the monasteries of Mount Athos… and these I found the most interesting part of the book.

The production of the book is clearly a tribute and a labour of love by Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron; the map they include needed Leigh Fermor’s route and all the towns he visited marked on it, as in the previous volumes.

The descriptions of Bulgaria were interesting, although there was too much history; since I knew almost nothing about the country, I learnt a good deal. In the 1930s ‘yaourt’, as he calls it, was a foodstuff confined to that country…and I enjoyed its description as an utter novelty. One gets the sense of Romania and Greece casting their spell over him, and there are clues, in his portrayals of the local Jewish communities and relations between them and the locals, of how the exterminations ten years in the future would unfold. Writing as he did forty years after his travels, his comments on homosexuality among Bulgars and Romanians were enlightened, but in the unedited Athos diaries from the 1930s, it’s called an ‘abnormality…’

This is a more personal volume than the previous two: there is detail about his parents, family and childhood background, which helps enlighten some of his life and some aspects of his personality.

In the end, although I really enjoyed the three books, I felt the author too highly rated: he writes well, though his prose is rather overblown in places, and the raw material of the Athos diary at the end of this volume was actually far more convincing a travelogue; certainly to describe him as probably the greatest travel writer during his lifetime, as the wikipedia entry does, is to overstate the case: Robert Byron does Mount Athos better, and one could make a more convincing case for the greatness of, say, Wilfred Thesiger or Ella Maillart. However, I think I shall come back to these books in the future.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: Between the Woods and the Water

It’s good to read an educated and intelligent traveller reflecting on his journey, experiences and encounters. Patrick Leigh Fermor continues his journey towards Constantinople, passing through Hungary and Rumania (the pre-WW2 versions of these countries). I particularly enjoyed his fascination with the Hungarian language, and its differences from other European ones, only having affinities with Estonian and Finnish. I learned more about the pronunciation from him than I have from other sources; again, it seems to have little in common with the rules of other central European languages.

In this second volume, Leigh Fermor seems more detailed and more focused than in the first book; we get a detailed picture of a totally vanished world. He spends a good deal of time as the guest of a whole raft of minor aristocrats and ex-aristocrats of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire who, in the sociable and helpful ways of the area, are often happy to recommend him to someone further on the way… and so it goes. Only a decade or so after the dismantling and refashioning of Europe after the Great War, many traces of the old order still linger.

And, even though the next catastrophe is only six years off, there are very few real hints or inklings of what is to come, although, as he wrote many years after the experiences and travels, he can and sometimes does recall the consequences for those he met on his way. The Jewish communities of Hungary and Rumania, soon to be wiped out, are portrayed with both fascination and poignancy.

Sometimes Leigh Fermor comes across as over-fascinated with the details and complexities of central European history – there are too many obscure names even for me, with my interest in it all, to deal with – and he seems to have lost sight of his original intent (to walk to Constantinople) at times in this book. However, the redeeming feature is his genuine affection for the places, the peoples and their lives, which he always manages to convey effectively.

I’m planning on reading the final volume pretty soon…