Rolf Hochhuth: The Representative

     Hochhuth was certainly a controversialist: in Soldiers he suggested that the Polish wartime leader Sikorski’s death in a helicopter crash in 1943 was no accident, but sabotage designed to rid Churchill of a troublesome ally, and the fact that various related documents continue to remain secret for far longer than the normal period has not entirely dispelled this accusation. Here Hochhuth’s target is the Catholic Church, the papacy, and specifically Pius XII for doing nothing to openly protest about the extermination of the Jews, of which he was fully aware, and indeed he could see the deportations of the Jews of Rome from his rooms in the Vatican…

We see the Pope as a businessman first of all, keen to protect the Vatican’s investments and income streams. We see how his obsessive fear of communism and its perceived threat to the Church leads him to see Hitler as an ally, even while priests are murdered by the thousand in Poland. Hitler may be committing sins, but first and foremost, Nazi Germany is a bulwark against a threat to the Church, which has, to a certain extent, become trapped by its earlier stances towards Hitler’s regime. It is very hard to suppress one’s outrage faced with the wilful and deliberate blindness shown by Pius XII, and the astonishing moral and mental gymnastics of all those who defend and justify his inaction and weasel words, partly on political and partly on theological grounds. The stain – by no means the only one – on the Catholic Church has not faded sixty years later.

It’s a flawed play, in the sense that it’s laden with very dense and interpretive stage directions, the full import of which would never be conveyed to an audience in production; equally, fully to understand Hochhuth’s accusations, one needs many pages of supporting documentation, found at the end of the text. At times, the feel is very melodramatic, perhaps to emphasise the moral horrors and the dilemmas of the participants. But in 1963, ugly truths needed airing and exposing, and he certainly managed to do this. It is a very Sixties style of drama, wordy, cinematic, didactic even; politics and religion do not often sit well together, particularly on stage. The final act, set in Auschwitz, is bizarre. The contradictions between the moral teachings and the actions of the Church have been exposed. The end result is, of course, the 1984 effect: the play, its damning accusations and moral minefields, have vanished into the memory-hole of history. Who reads, who puts on this play now?

 

Josef Skvorecky: The Engineer of Human Souls (concluded)

     I’ve yet to detect or unpick any real significance to the fact that the chapters are labelled with the names of various English and American authors, which happen to be the subject of the professor’s classes; Skvorecky certainly has an encyclopaedic knowledge of literature.

I still wonder about whether this is a boys’ book: the war, resistance, and endless attempts of young men to get women into bed with them. I’d be genuinely interested to hear if any of my women readers have read this, or any of Skvorecky’s work. In the end, as a man, I let him off the hook because I don’t find any of these elements exploitative or gratuitous: they form a genuine part of his experience of life, and we can make our judgements without denying the magnificence of the book itself.

Milan Kundera – one of Skvorecky’s exiled compatriots – describes the book as a masterpiece. I think he’s right. The story of the affair with Nadia, the girl with TB, I find genuinely moving; the letters from the simple peasant who finds his place and modest success on his terms in the workers’ and peasants’ paradise are unsettling of everyone’s prejudices, and the worker Malina’s magnificent swearing I have always admired…

I agree with Kundera because the novel presents something so difficult for us – relatively or differently privileged Westerners – to have any comprehension of. So many times I thought I understood some of my father’s experience, and often argued with him about it. Living under Nazism or communism (though it wasn’t really that) gives one a totally different perspective on so many things, and a different kind of wisdom, a distance from the inanities of the West, too; the contrast and relative “freedom” here allows us to take so many things for granted. If I were to try and describe Skvorecky’s message (as it appears to me this time around, I stress) then it’s probably about the urge to survive at all costs and live your life, because you only get the one go, and so many people don’t, and also about the futility of revolution as a way of making a better world. But, at the moment, what makes it a masterpiece for me is its portrayal of the experience of exile.

I have just looked at my ‘best’ lists; this book isn’t in there; I can’t work out which one to drop in order to include it…

Josef Skvorecky: The Engineer of Human Souls (part 1)

     Here is a book to which I return regularly, and each time it rises in my estimation. This time, I’ve re-read it perhaps rather earlier than I might otherwise have done, but since I chose it as a read for our book group, I needed to remind myself of the detail before leading a discussion.

What I’ve realised is that it’s a very close, full and painful presentation of the life of an exile, and, as such, it has led me belatedly to a much clearer appreciation of my late father’s experiences, although they were very different from those of Josef Skvorecky. You can read my previous thoughts on the novel here, if you’re interested.

I say novel, despite the major autobiographical content, which has been disguised and fictionalised in many ways, and not just to protect people who might otherwise suffer consequences. The hero is Danny Smiricky/ a thinly veiled Skvorecky, who features in many of the author’s works. Here, he is in his forties, a professor of English Literature at a fictitious college in a Toronto suburb. The novel, however, was written in Czech, in 1984, and translated. Canada offers the exile a sense of freedom of a kind, but it’s a country with no past, and not all the Czech exile community can stand the separation; some of the characters agonise about the risks of return; some do.

He is weary of the world; his students alternate between boredom with literature and incomprehension of his take on the texts and the world in general. They plagiarise their essays. Nevertheless he is interesting enough for one of his women students to have an affair with him. Their affability, affluence and lazy freedom silently contrast Smiricky’s experiences at their age.

The novel ranges widely from Smiricky’s youth in the Reichsprotektorat Böhmen und Mähren, with naive attempts by him and his friends at resistance and sabotage, through the chaos of the gradual communist takeover and transformation of Czechoslovakia, and the necessary rewriting of history, to the gradual realisation that you cannot give a human face to Stalinism, Alexander Dubcek’s brave attempt and failure in the Prague Spring of 1968, and finally of the need to leave an oppressive homeland which offers no future. There is then the emptiness of exile, and for many, aimless wandering in search of home.

In many ways, the book is the nostalgia and heimweh of a middle-aged man who is realising that his life will never be the one he hoped for. Pitilessly Skvorecky exposes the moral complexities all his characters are faced with, either in the oppressive homeland or the supposedly free West; all are found wanting in various ways. Nothing can ever be simple. Time shifts between the professor’s literature classes, life under Nazi or communist oppression, and the Czech exile community in Canada, and the text is regularly punctuated by letters from his past friends now scattered to various different places. These letters need no commentary: they speak painfully for themselves. The picture is one of the increasing insanity of our world, through a character who has lived through so many contradictions. (to be continued)

Olga Tokarczuk: Flights

     I’ve lately grown rather despondent about fiction written in English; either I’m not encountering interesting and innovative approaches, or there aren’t any. Certainly I find much greater satisfaction reading novels from other lands, normally in translation. For my money, Olga Tokarczuk really deserved the Nobel Prize: she pushes the boundaries. I returned to Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead recently, and now I’ve just re-read Flights. That’s not a particularly good translation of the title: the Polish title translates as ‘Extremes’ in the sense of from one place to another, and the French version is called ‘The Pilgrims’, which doesn’t really cut it either…

It’s about travel, movement, in place and time, physical and metaphysical. Much of it is fiction, some is digression, philosophical musing, if you like, some is historical documentary, almost. There’s no clear line from A-Z through the book; the sections are feel associative, if anything. And it’s fascinating! There is a goodly selection of weird maps illustrating or intervening in the text; I was astonished to discover that they came from the Agile Rabbit collection, which I was given for Christmas many years ago.

It takes a bit of work, because you don’t really have a framework or pattern to slot the book into from the start. It’s a challenge; it’s not compulsive, page-turning reading, yet you’re intrigued enough to carry on, rewarded enough mentally, curious enough to find out where Olga’s going with this one. Do the digressions intervene in the story-telling, or is it the other way around? The psychology of the fictional characters is certainly compelling enough. Where does the stuff about the plastination of bodies, or about dissection in the eighteenth century, actually fit in?

So, Olga Tokarczuk has done something new with the ‘novel’ here, with fiction, with writing itself, I think. This is welcome in the days when, as I said earlier, the form feels rather tired and hackneyed, and there seems to be a dearth of writers prepared to experiment and take risks with doing new things. Here is originality of form and approach, here is mental stimulus and thought-provoking, here is good writing, well-translated, demanding the reader’s input, engagement and attention.

Flights is enigmatic, indefinable, marvellous… definitely worth your eyeball time!

Men don’t read books by women (?)

I’ve written about and around the issue of books by men and women, and which I choose to read, before; an article in The Guardian last weekend prompted me to do some more thinking. The premise of the article was that men did not read books by women writers… roughly speaking.

I turned to my shelves and noticed just how large a proportion of the books, of all genres, were by male writers. I cannot deny this, so why is this the case? As someone who spent several years researching into feminism and science fiction as a postgraduate student, it was a sobering realisation. And what women writers have I allowed into my library, and why?

When I consider the classics of fiction, then women writers figure very strongly on the list: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte are right there are the very top and if I were pushed to choose between them and Conrad, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, for example, I’d be hard pressed. And I note that that there are no English males in my list, for the simple reason (pace some of my readers) Dickens and Hardy and the like just aren’t up there for me.

With more recent and contemporary fiction, males do dominate, without a doubt. But then I thought, actually it’s not the gender of a writer that attracts me, it’s the subject-matter, the themes and ideas. So Margaret Atwood is there for her speculative fiction and her feminism, Pat Barker for her brilliant imaginings and psychological insights about the Great War, Ursula Le Guin for her speculative fiction and feminism just like Atwood. And similar reasons for reading Angela Carter, Marge Piercy. Olga Tokarczuk and Agota Kristov are there because I explore Eastern European fiction. And although there are clearly traits that draw me to writers, both male and female, I do also appreciate the qualities of their writing, and what they bring to the human conditions they illuminate.

I looked at the non-fiction section of my library, and found Mary Beard, whose take on the classical period I like very much and have found a most interesting counterbalance to the picture of the ancient world I imbibed as a school student many years ago. And there was Karen Armstrong, whose histories of religion and theology I have found very thought-provoking over the years. I read those authors not because of their gender but because of the subject-matter: theology, religion and history have always interested me deeply.

Somehow I feel as though I’m offering excuses here, as much as explanations or reasons: are there really fewer women writing in the subjects I’ve come to find interesting over the years? I don’t know.

Then I thought about travel-writing, my major more recent area of exploration, and realised how much I have appreciated the women travellers of the last century of so. There’s Ella Maillart, the intrepid Victorian Isabella Bird, Mildred Cable and Francesca French, Edith Durham, Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell, Jan Morris… certainly men still dominate the shelves, but the women writers are the ones I’ve enjoyed the most. Here, I suppose, it’s because there’s not the macho posing and posturing a good many of the male travellers have gone in for at times. Instead there is the close observation, detailed description, sharing of the lives of those among whom they travelled, a sense of intimacy and belonging and appreciation of differences. Not that men travelling aren’t capable of those things, but that women do them better and more consistently and have left me with a fuller appreciation of their travelling…

I’m as confused as before. I don’t think any of my choices are gender-driven, though, and I’d be interested to hear what any of my readers think on this question.

Amin Maalouf: Leo the African

     I’d no idea it was so long since I last read this novel, which never ceases to amaze me, because it is a (fictionalised) account of a real life, and I really don’t believe you could make it up.

Jews, Muslims and Christians live reasonably peaceably alongside one another in pre-Reconquista Granada; there is a recap of events leading to the fall of Granada to the Spanish in 1492, and the mayhem which follows for those who are not of the Catholic faith. There is the full vileness of the Inquisition, persecution and the inability of Christians to accept that anyone might be different. Our hero, and narrator, is a Muslim. And though it’s technically a novel, it’s also an autobiography: we cannot have the same expectations of plot as we might have of a completely fictional text; the narrative is linear, but we do grow inevitably attached to people and places.

The narrator and his family leave Granada and settle in Fez; we learn of schooling and lifelong friendships. Eventually he becomes a rich and successful businessman, close to those in power, travels widely and is used on various diplomatic missions by the authorities. His weirdest adventure is his kidnapping by Christians and presentation as a gift to the Pope! Here, his knowledge and skills are put to the service of the incredibly corrupt Church at the time of the Reformation; he is baptised against his will, but escapes being ordained priest before one of his missions. In the end, after years of wanderings, he is able to return to his home and family and live out the remainder of his life in peace as a devout Muslim. I had mis-remembered the plot from my earlier readings, and forgotten how small a section of the novel is his life in Rome at the service of the Pope.

I realised that the narrator’s famous book The Description of Africa is based on his travels all over the north of that continent; when I last read the novel, I had yet to track down that book. Leo travels in the footsteps of his earlier Muslim forbear Ibn Battutah, whose journeys a couple of centuries earlier rivalled those of Marco Polo.

I found the first person narrative effective and convincing. In the back of my mind was always the thought, this stuff is true; the narrative style is that of a devout Muslim, whose faith is at the forefront of his life and deeds (most of the time), and the adventures are almost non-stop. Towards the end of the book, the narrator is at the centre of world-changing events, with the Reformation, the attempts of an incredibly corrupt papacy to consolidate its power and build alliances to secure its future, even if this means joining forces with the Ottomans, and also the various rivalries weakening the Muslim world in those tumultuous years.

Over the years I have come to realise how good a writer Amin Maalouf is. Not only has he written some very good novels, but also a number of very interesting historical and social texts in which he presents thoughtful and powerful analysis of the current state of the world. He has received recognition by being elected to the Académie Française, but that’s all, as far as I’m aware. At the moment, I’m reflecting on what is different about Arabic fiction, thinking of Maalouf, and also Naguib Mahfouz in particular. Maybe it’s my position as an ‘outsider’ to their world, but I’m conscious of a different feel to their novels, one which cannot just be explained by the Muslim background that is omnipresent in a way that Christianity isn’t in Western fiction, for instance. Does anyone out there have any pointers?

Hans Kung: The Catholic Church

     Here is another attempt, rather in the manner of some of the writings of Geza Vermes, to lay out the reality of what happened as Christianity developed right from its very beginnings; the difference is that the book is written by a committed – and controversial – Catholic priest and theologian rather than a Jewish sceptic. Küng is happy to stand accepted ideas on their head and ask awkward questions, though at times I also felt he moved on leaving some of them unanswered. I suppose you would have to call him a critical friend of the church.

Along with other recent church historians, Küng is clear that without Paul there would be no Catholic (or Christian) church. He outlines the early centuries with broad brush-strokes; a key moment is the religion becoming the official one of the Roman Empire, and the next key figure after Paul is Augustine of Hippo, to whom we owe the notion of original sin, and the linked vilification of sex and sexuality.

I had not clearly understood the notion of the gradual creation of the Holy Roman Empire in the west as a rival to the Byzantine Empire in the east, nor realised the widespread use of deliberately forged documents to embed the development of the hierarchy of the Western church, with its emphasis on the authoritarian power of the pope, which went against the practices of the early Church.

Kung also clarified for me the differences at the heart of the split which finally came to a head and hardened permanently in the eleventh century: the pope is an absolutist monarch, the Eastern churches retain autonomy and a collegiate relationship among themselves, which again is closer to the time of the early church. So from relatively early on, the powers and abuse of them by the papacy has been at the heart of what divided first the whole church, and more recently the Western church. Küng is scathing about the appalling papal vice and corruption which led to the Reformation, and recognises the general coherence and validity of Luther’s arguments and criticisms.

The failure of the Roman Catholic Church properly to reform itself, and the consequent religious wars, Küng sees as a major factor contributing to the development of secularism, with an age of reason replacing an era of faith, and being faced by a papacy demonstrating lengthy and long-lasting resistance to anything even vaguely modern or democratic, permanently turned in on itself and attempting to perpetuate the attitudes and behaviours of the late Middle Ages.

Küng offers a very strongly worded criticism of the Church, headed by Pius XII, for its failure to condemn the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and notes that despite its original hopes, the reformers of the Second Vatican Council ultimately have failed to shake or curb the immense power of the papacy and Roman Curia.

As a brief, clear and comprehensive introduction to the Catholic Church, this is excellent.

Hermann Hesse: Narziss and Goldmund

     Well, there’s still The Glass Bead Game (if I can face it) which many reckon is the magnum opus, but I think for me Narziss and Goldmund has always been Hermann Hesse’s very best novel. I’ve just re-read it for the fourth time, I think, and with a considerable reluctance, because of the powerful responses it has always awakened in me. Here, Hesse addresses fully and openly the duality of human nature, those urges which can draw us subconsciously or consciously in widely different directions, and which lead the thoughtful on to reflection about the nature of their own personality and psyche…

Hesse does well, I think, to set this novel back in mediaeval times rather than in his own era; this distance suggests a permanence to those traits he is exploring, ie they do not just belong to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century when psychology was in its infancy, yet making great strides in understanding what makes us tick, and how we work. True, we are back in a more religious era, but then, I suppose we are talking about the soul, for want of a better word. And there is clearly some biographical significance to the cloister of Mariabronn, which has featured in several earlier novels.

At one level it’s a straightforward story of two men, who become lifelong friends, the one initially a novice teacher at the monastery, the other a student. Very different in character – opposites or complementary depending on how you choose to view them – the bond is very deep, survives separations and challenges; the teacher, a monk, remains forever in the cloister, the student realises that this is not to be his place, and he must engage with the world. The teacher is a man of ideas, thought, the intellect, the pupil is in tune with the beauty and variety and diversity of the world. From this summary it may appear superficially rather trite, a roman à thèse perhaps, yet there is a quality to the friendship, and the two men’s perceptions of the world as presented by Hesse which I have always found very powerful and gripping, and the canvas of lived life and vanishing time, with eternity at the end, never fails to move me.

Narziss (the teacher, whose name intrigues me, and whose realisations and admissions at the very end of the story are powerful and sobering) recognises Goldmund as the other part of himself, in Jungian terms. The teacher looks inward, an intellectual, a thinker; he never leaves the monastery to which he commits his life, eventually becoming its abbot. Goldmund’s memories of his mother are missing: who is she, and why has he blotted her out? Narziss starts his friend on the road to self-discovery; Goldmund leaves the school and friend behind – it’s almost as if he has moved past him – and becomes a vagabond, revelling in the external pleasures of life, and his attractiveness to women. Despite their great closeness, the parting of the friends’ ways is both sad and inevitable, as they have exhausted the possibilities of this stage of their lives.

The sensualist Goldmund follows his whims, travelling freely: he is a true wanderer, like the heroes of some of Hesse’s earlier novels. Eventually, following another call, having seen a carved statue which moves him greatly, he apprentices himself to a woodcarver and produces a couple of masterworks before the call of freedom sets him back on the road. But there is a great artist in him, and throughout the book a heightened attuned-ness to the world around him and its inherent beauty – even in the world of the plague and death, through which he passes. And he ages, learns, becomes wiser, in a different way and a different world from that of his cloistered friend. The fixed and the wanderer become clearly two sides of a personality.

I found an irony in that it was often the call of solitude that drew Goldmund away from periods of fixedness, as a lover, a road-companion, a woodcarver’s apprentice: just like his friend. Throughout, there is a strong distaste for the ordinary, the bourgeois, the comfortable, just as there was in the Harry Haller character in Steppenwolf.

Goldmund is haunted by the apparent futility of life and existence: where is the meaning? What survives of us? He yearns to leave something of permanence behind – which he will, his carvings – and yet, in working to create, he must leave what he sees as living behind.

There are two reunions of the friends, when Goldmund is changed, older and wiser, and when he is dying. I find it very hard reading these encounters. The two men, mentally and spiritually inseparable despite years apart and the great difference between their lives, nevertheless fully understand each other. I found myself wondering why so much of the story was Goldmund’s: he is he one who must travel and explore and change. And yet, it is his friend who learns something incredibly powerful as Goldmund dies: he understands what it means to love…

As I re-read Hesse at this later stage in life, I’m in awe of his wisdom at the same time as I perceive the hidden simplicity of his message (if that makes sense). Hesse’s style here is so much slower, more lyrical, more reflective. I can see him reaching the height of his creativity, approaching to the end of a journey of a kind, which began with his earliest writings.