A Different Stripe

Mutimedia Tuesday: Edwin Frank on Thoreau's Journal

Today is the official publication date for the NYRB Classics edition of Henry David Thoreau's Journal. Last month, while in town to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the series at the Harvard Bookstore, in  Cambridge, MA, Edwin Frank sat down with Jenny Attiyeh of Thoughtcast to discuss the book.

We also recommend reading Geoff Wisner's review of the Journal at The Quarterly Conversation. Geoff has a passion for Thoreau, and for the Journal in particular. So we held our breath knowing he was working on an assessment. Well, what does he have to say?

Damion Searls’ new edition is meant to showcase the Journal as a unified work of literature. More than any previous version, it allows a direct encounter with this great work and approximates the experience of reading the whole. In fact, by clearing away some of the underbrush in the fourteen volumes, it highlights the better-known passages and uncovers hidden gems and significant connections.

A letter from the editor on Sylvia Townsend Warner

Summer Will Show is the third novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner to appear as an NYRB Classic, having been preceded by Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune's Maggot. Warner is one of the most inventive, intelligent, and plain astonishing British writers of the twentieth century, fully the equal of such contemporaries of hers as Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, not to mention the slightly older Virginia Woolf. She is an unmistakably modern writer who, however, worked outside the conventions of literary modernism. That should make her particularly attractive to readers and writers of today, and adventurous younger novelists like Ali Smith and Sarah Waters have in fact praised her very highly in recent years.

Summer Will Show is a historical novel set in 1848, that famous disastrous year of revolutionary uprisings throughout Europe. It is the story of Sophia Willoughby, a headstrong and stubborn young aristocrat of—at least to begin with—ironclad Tory conviction. Having made an early marriage to a classic cad, Sophia has hastily borne two children before packing her cheating husband off to Paris and into the arms of his mistress. Now in rural English retreat, she has decided to devote herself to bringing up her children precisely as she was brought up—the only proper way, after all. But then the children die.

What to do? Grief-stricken, Sophia eventually makes her way to Paris, driven by the thought that her husband, whatever his failings, can at least supply her with more children. Paris, however, is in the throes of revolution. Sophia unexpectedly encounters Minna, the despised mistress, and the two women fall in love.

I'm not going to give away more of the plot of this exciting and surprising book, in which nothing is ever quite as it seems. It is an increasingly bloody carnival, a tale of modern metamorphosis to set beside Ovid's ancient ones, and a book about the ways love remakes and unmakes people, one in which the politics of the heart exist in competition and confusion with politics as usual. It is a disconcerting, even radical book, and its central subject, as in much of Warner's work, is the inherent strangeness of the self, resistant to control, insusceptible to coercion, demanding one way or another to be discovered and demanding more after that. How to come to terms with this insistent stranger within?

Throughout much of the last century, the historical novel was in very low critical repute; it was daring for Warner to take up this déclassé genre. Recently, however, the genre has had a surprising revival: think of Ragtime, J.G. Farrell's Siege of Krishnapur, or Beloved; of Hilary Mantel's great novel of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. What the best of these new historical novels have in common is that they function not as period pieces but as a form of inquiry into history, an inquiry that implicates the present just as much as the past. Summer Will Show looks forward to these books—or they allow us to look back at it and read it with renewed appreciation for Warner's achievement. In a year of revolution, Warner's characters are all under the pressure of historical forces they can barely imagine. They feel themselves becoming ever stranger to themselves, ever more weirdly historical, with every step and quarrel and kiss. In 1936, when Summer Will Show was first published, history was of course very much in the air—but then it always is. Warner's novel awakens us to the ways in which our lives are, as another great writer puts it, "historical, flowing and flown."

Those words are Elizabeth Bishop's, and it strikes me now that Warner's work may remain underestimated for much same the reason that Bishop's was throughout much of her life. Warner doesn't wear her heart on her sleeve. She doesn't make a point of writing about big important subjects in a big important way. (To write a historical novel like Summer Will Show in the 30s was, among other things, very much not to write something like The Waves or For Whom the Bell Tolls.) Though utterly individual, she never cultivated a trademark style or subject—each of her novels is different from the last—and though she writes beautifully she is careful never to draw attention to her art.

Her books, however, leave indelible marks. Lolly Willowes, published in 1926, was Warner's first book and an improbable bestseller. It is the story of a spinster who cuts herself loose from the constraints of respectable family life by becoming a witch and entering into a pact with the Devil. It appears to be a straightforward, though in its day still provocative, feminist parable (call it A Broom of One's Own), and yet the book takes a mysterious and troubling turn at the end, as the heroine renounces her witchcraft and takes to the road, sleeping out in the open and moving ever farther away from society—as if true freedom could only be had at the cost of a separation from humanity and even life.

Mr. Fortune's Maggot may be the most perfect (even if perfection doesn't admit of degrees) book in the NYRB Classics series—an immaculate work, the story of a missionary on a tiny island in the South Seas who falls in love with a young man (again a daring subject for its day) and loses his faith. Timothy Fortune isn't your stereotypic fictional missionary, all dead dogma and dammed-up desire, but a genuinely good man for whom the discovery of love and the discovery of his utter aloneness come with a shock any of us can share. And yet nothing in Warner's telling of his tale is melodramatic or sentimental. The "maggot" that sticks out of the book's title means foible—Warner alluding almost ironically both to Fortune's falling in love and falling from grace—but it also echoes the names of lute and keyboard fantasies by early English composers like Byrd and Dowland and Gibbons. These dance-inspired pieces, with titles such as "Lord Salisbury's Pavan" and "Hugh Aston's Ground," are both stately and melancholy, brooding and quirky, light and dark—precisely the qualities of the book itself.

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a woman of extraordinary achievement—not only a marvelous novelist and writer of stories but a very fine poet and a notable musicologist to boot. Summer Will Show is perhaps her most out-and-out exciting book, but Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune's Maggot are equally good places to start exploring the work of a wonderful writer who seems all the more central because she stands so beautifully apart.

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

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Sylvia Townsend Warner is featured in the Gay Icons exhibit at the National Portrait Galley in London, have a look here and here.

A Letter from the Editor on Andrey Platonov (and a sale)

T.J. Clark and Michael Ondaatje discuss the work of Andrey Platonov as part of the 2009 PEN World Voices Festival. See more photos from the event here.

There are certain writers who feature in a large way in the NYRB Classics series—some, like Simenon and Victor Serge, I've written about in the past; others, like Sylvia Townsend Warner, perhaps the most purely original of modern English storytellers, I mean to. Here I want to say a little bit about Andrey Platonov, whose Soul and Other Stories we published last year and whose great and harrowing novel The Foundation Pit we have just put out in a striking new translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, the first translation of the book in English to be based on the recently established definitive Russian text.

As a plaudit, "recently established definitive Russian text" may sound like a pedantic mouthful, but Platonov is anything but a writer of merely academic interest. He is the twentieth century Russian novelist who, more than any other (more than Pasternak, more than Solzhenitsyn, more even than Bulgakov), Russians will tell you has added to and transformed the great tradition of Russian literature. Russians may also tell you that if you are one of those unfortunates who doesn't read Russian, just how great Platonov is you'll never know. I'm one of those unfortunates, I confess, but then I'm confident that, as a rule—a rule to which Platonov is no exception—great literature translates. I first encountered this extraordinary writer's work in an old and uncertain translation based on a censored text, a book given to me by a friend of my father's who I later learned was an agent for the CIA. Even so, I knew I was hearing a voice as distinct and powerful as any to emerge in the twentieth century, a writer who not only reflected the unimaginable realities of modern history, but actively shifted reality, staggering us, making us see the world in a strange and disorienting new light. At last, with this new translation, the greatness of Platonov, the difference that he makes, become unmistakable for readers of English.

Platonov was born into a working-class family in 1899 and grew up with the Russian Revolution, which he initially embraced with enthusiasm and never disavowed. For better or for worse, Platonov's world is the world after the Revolution, with which a new reality begins. Platonov, however, is hardly a conventionally realistic writer, since the nature of the post-Revolutionary world is that history has ended and reality has been upended, replaced by a heady brew of utopian anticipations and nightmarish premonitions. This is the paradoxical regime of progress—appearing no doubt in an extreme form under Communism, but common to all modern societies—under which everything is understood to exist on the condition that it is to be replaced by something better, and so may be judged as already obsolescent; a bipolar world in which exterior and internal realities become weirdly intermixed and people seesaw between irrational exuberance (it wasn't a Communist who coined that phrase) and boundless melancholy. In The Foundation Pit a character feels himself "hurtling forwards into the distance of history, towards the summit of universal and unprecedented times." Another remarks dolefully, "Everybody dies of life. In the end there's just bones."

Written in the early thirties, The Foundation Pit is Platonov's most direct reckoning with Revolutionary terror. The novel describes the devastation caused in the late 1920s by Stalin's twin policies of crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture—a Revolution from Above that was no less important and traumatic than the Revolution of 1917. The story begins when Voshchev, a classic Chekhovian luftmensch, is fired from his job for excessive "thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor." Voshchev wanders out into the country where he happens upon a group of workers engaged in constructing a grand new All-Proletarian Home, a title which is meant entirely literally. Among them is Zhachev, a bitter, irascible, scabrous, mutilated veteran, who hauls himself around on a little cart, a freak, in his own words. Also there is Chiklin, the hardworking single-minded earnest proletarian, determined to get things right, though not entirely sure what that means. Voshchev joins this oddly assorted group which soon adopts an orphan girl in whom they place all their hopes for the future. Nastya is a strange waif:

"Now who might you be, my little girl?" asked Safronov [a Revolutionary zealot]. "What did your dear mama and papa do?"

"I'm nobody," said the little girl.

"How can you be nobody? Some kind of principle of the female sex must have been pleased to oblige you, if you got yourself born under Soviet power?"

"But I didn't want to get myself born—I was afraid my mother would be a bourgeois.... When only bourgeoisie lived, I couldn't be born, because I didn't want to be born. But now that Stalin's become, I've become too!"

Soon it becomes clear that the task of digging the pit is unending—almost by definition, since it must accommodate the whole (no pun intended) of the future: the pit is a inverted tower of Babel or, as it eventually turns out, an immense grave. Because after the mysterious death of the zealot Safronov, digging the pit takes second place to making sure that construction will not be sabotaged by "counter-revolutionary elements." The peasantry in particular must be purified. But purification also turns out to be an unending task, and in an extraordinary scene, at once savagely satirical and disconcertingly moving, in the midst of a simultaneous blizzard of snow and flies, pro-revolutionary workers and condemned peasants, doomed to die, gather in the yard of a collective farm as in a church to kiss and forgive each other:

"All right now, comrades?" asked Chiklin.

"Yes," came the word from the whole of the OrgYard. "Now we feel nothing at all—only dust and ashes remain in us."

Voshchev was lying a little way apart and he was quite unable to fall asleep without the peace of truth inside his own life—he got up from the snow and entered into the midst of people.

"Greetings!" he said, rejoicing, to the collective farm. Now you've become like me. I'm nothing too."

"Greetings!" The entire collective farm rejoiced at this one man....

All that could be heard was a dog barking in some alien village—just as in olden times, as if it existed in a constant eternity.

I mentioned the Tower of Babel above, and as even these brief excerpts from The Foundation Pit must suggest, there is no discussing the book without considering its strange language, a mixture of political groupspeak, biblical allusion, slapstick, and bereft lyricism, a kind of language of unlikeness. It is a made-up language and a traumatized one—made dead, you could say. It is at once the babble of infancy, the lying cant of corruption, an outcry of desperation, and the voice, against all odds, of hope. Part of the fascination of the work is that the reader is perpetually unsure which register it is pitched in.

Platonov, as much as Beckett and Kafka, is a major writer of the twentieth century and, like them, he is a writer in extremis. Kafka's statement that "hope is infinite, but not for us" might come from Platonov. These are all writers who in different ways recognize the terror, tedium, and sheer contingency of the modern world. And yet in the later stories collected in Soul, Platonov shows us something else, something more in tune with Chekhov: people trying to rescue from the flux of life and the disaster of history some memorable and sustaining moment of true feeling. In "The Return," a story beloved by the wonderful Penelope Fitzgerald, a man returns from World War II to wife and family and—and almost leaves. The art of the story is to capture in that prolonged moment of hesitation the entirety of life. And in the nightmarish world of The Foundation Pit, too, a similar tenderness, however bare-knuckled, can be discerned. As Zhachev remarks, "It's best to love something small and living and do yourselves in with labor! Exist, you bastards, for now!"

Edwin Frank, Editor
NYRB Classics

Listen to T.J. Clark read from The Foundation Pit
The Foundation Pit is currently on sale for 30% off the cover price.
Read why Elise Blackwell thinks that Platonov "will soon take his place on the shortest list of Russian-language literary giants."

"The reader is the ghost": The Rider on the White Horse by Theodor Storm

 

A letter from the editor of NYRB Classics
The Rider on the White Horse is currently available from www.nyrb.com at 30% off the cover price.

Everything's up in the air at the start of Theodor Storm's novella The Rider on the White Horse, written in 1888 when Storm, who was not only a celebrated author but also a distinguished jurist, was on his deathbed. The story begins—begins almost reluctantly—with a strange confusion of voices. First we hear what we take to be the author—only he disclaims authorship. He tells us that we are about to read a story that he read maybe a half century ago in a magazine, a magazine that in the years since he has never been able to track down, a story, he somewhat puzzlingly adds, of which "nothing external" has ever reminded him. The story follows: its narrator, traveling along the coast of the North Sea, is caught in a terrible storm; battered by wind and waves, he repeatedly glimpses a spectral horseman galloping furiously and soundlessly past him. Taking shelter at an inn, the traveler mentions the apparition, and now the local schoolmaster steps in. It is he who tells what you might call the story proper—a ghost story, yes, but also, as these overlapping voices might suggest, a story that has a ghostly life of its own.

At first, however, there is nothing uncanny about the story the schoolmaster tells, about a young man making his way in the world sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century. Hauke Heien is a boy from a modest farming background who, with a talent for numbers and a fascination with the ways of water, apprentices himself to the local dikemaster and soon makes himself indispensable. When the dikemaster dies, his mantle falls upon Hauke, who also marries, very happily, his daughter. It is a success story.

Hauke's story is set, as I mentioned, on the edge of the North Sea, in Frisia, where the proper construction and maintenance of dikes is crucial not only to the safety but also to the well-being of the community: as the network of dikes expands, so does the availability of land for grazing or cultivation. To open new fields, Hauke orders the construction of a new dike, built on new principles. Content with things as they are, the villagers grumble about the project. The dikemaster, however, is not lightly disobeyed, and they undertake it. They are—and this is where the story begins to grow unsettling—truly horrified when, after two years, the work approaches conclusion, and the dikemaster intervenes to prevent a step without which it will all have been in vain. "Something living has got to go into it," one man tells Hauke, "Even our grandfathers knew that much...."

Hauke ordains that no sacrifice will take place. The dike is built and holds. The new land is cleared. Reason trumps superstition. Progress is made. So it appears, and yet Hauke remains a lonely figure, with only wife and child for company, distrusted by the larger community. He has done his job, neglecting nothing, except perhaps something about the human. He rides on his white horse along his dike and feels himself to be "at the center of all the Frisians alive and dead....[towering] above them all."

There is an extraordinary moment in The Rider on the White Horse when Hauke's wife is sick, and Hauke, unusually, prays:

O God, don't take her away from me! I can't do without her and You know it!... I know You can't always do just what You want to do—not even You.... Speak to me! Just a breath!

Silence. A silence that is at the heart of Storm's story, where the natural world is prowled by supernatural apparitions, while the supernatural itself, the divine—even the poignantly limited God, able only to help a bit, that Hauke addresses—never appears. A world in which you cannot trust your eyes or anything, much less—Hauke will discover—know yourself.

I'm not going to reveal the end—you'll want to find it out yourself, I hope—and ruin the suspense, which mounts powerfully as the story proceeds. I will say that by the end we have been returned, in richer and stranger ways than we might have ever imagined, to the beginning: we are up in the air again. I began by noting the author's odd disclaimer about "nothing external" having ever reminded him of the story he happened upon long ago and now intends to tell again, and one thing that becomes clear in the course of that telling is that the landscape of the story is an interior landscape—the landscape of conscience, say, where the real and the unreal exist under continual threat of confusion, kept apart by only the most fragile and provisional barriers—though Storm's mud slicks, icy marshes, fog banks, crashing waves, and vulnerable dikes, not to mention Hauke and the villagers, never strike us as anything but unforgettably real.

And as to what I also mentioned to begin with, the strangely layered voices by which the story is relayed, by the end it is clear, I think, that the story we have heard is essentially choral: the story of any community and the sacrifices by which it ensures its survival; the story of the isolated souls that constitute all communities and of their deaths. Storm, as I said, was unsure he would live to complete it, and in the background of the story you can hear something like the dead saying to the living (as the living suppose), You are who we were and will be who we are. One of the mysterious effects of this extraordinary work is that at some point the modern reader realizes with a shock that he too is included—included already—in this ghostly chorus. It is ghost story in which, you could say, the reader is brought up short by his own apparition. The reader is the ghost.

The Rider on the White Horse is the title story and masterpiece in a selection of Storm's novellas and stories translated by the very fine American poet James Wright for the Signet Classics series, when it was edited by E.L. Doctorow. If I see a book from that series that I haven't read, I always pick it up, and in this case I was especially interested because of Wright's involvement. I'd always meant to read Storm, though more as a matter of duty, I suppose, than anticipated delight. It's not often that one starts a long story, finds oneself pulled irresistibly along through it, and finishes it both astonished and convinced that it is, in the strongest sense of the word, great—a work that will deepen with rereading, that matters. That was my experience with The Rider on the White Horse.