There is a great deal to go on in Don DeLillo’s taut, contemplative new novel (or novella) Point Omega, only some of which I will comment on here.  I have no wish to review the book, or summarise its contents.  In the opening pages the author, always an accommodating if often misjudged, guide, teaches us how the book should be read, and how much can be gleaned from its apparently slim leavings.  A lone figure in the cool darkness of a gallery space is focusing on the art installation 24-Hour-Psycho: “It was only the closest watching that yielded this perception.  He found himself undistracted for some minutes by the coming and going of others and he was able to look at the film with the degree of intensity that was required.  The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it.  The film’s merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not betray what was demanded” (p5).  His stillness is contrasted with the other visitors “wandering … in a daze” (p3). 

In other words, take it slow.  And if we fall in with the deliberate, halting rhythms of these finely tuned sentences, there is no other way to proceed.  Details may emerge that we would otherwise miss.  The world, with its “shower of innumerable atoms” (to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase) will no longer pass us by, at least in part, and for a while.  We, like Whitman’s poet, become passers-by, our eyeballs peeled in Emerson’s great image.  America’s striving for transcendence is all over this book.  Yet, now it is not the continuing birth of a nation that is under consideration, but its “dwindling” (p35). 

Although the object of contemplation is a visual artwork it takes a writer’s sensibility, and verbal dexterity, to extrapolate so stirringly.  When DeLillo’s figure, (and this is contrary to his own expressed mistrust or lack of faith in words), sees Anthony Perkins’ eyes “in slow transit across his bony sockets” (p7), his experience, and our own as readers, is so vividly acute because he has the words to describe what is before him.  In the final part of the book, Norman Bates is succinctly captured in two perfect words: “scary bland” (p101, and p115).  Exactly. 

The figure worries that he might be “seeing too much” but soon accepts that “it was impossible to see too much.  The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw” (p5).  It is not the artist’s intention that is vital to the artwork but the work itself and its reception.  As with the world, the work is made and remade anew by each individual.  And to extend what Maurice Blanchot said of the literary text, this gives rise to the “wonder of its constant genesis”.  

There is, however, a warning within these pages.  What happens when the petulant man of words sides with the petulant men of action?  He implicates himself in their misdeeds, excuses their abuses, and sanctions the violence perpetrated now in his name.  We all need to appropriate the world, to make it our own, but this need can, to employ the cliché, get out of hand, as it did for the Bush administration. They felt entitled, as Paul Wolfowitz said, to make their own reality.  

Elster’s (DeLillo’s neo-con “tribal elder” in this novel) reference to “the reality we were trying to create” (p28) clearly echoes that statement.  We can see this tendency in his refusal, or inability to listen to or take heed of others, except insofar as they are mirrors in which he can see himself affirmed.  His “teeming ego forgets to attend to such details” (p25).  Like a toddler, everything depends “on the play of his mood, in his good time” (p25).  He is delighted at the idea that his daughter would mouth his every word: “When she was a child, she used to move her lips slightly, repeating inwardly what I was saying or what her mother was saying.  She’d look very closely.  I’d speak and she’d look, trying to anticipate my remarks word for word, nearly syllable for syllable.  Her lips would move in nearest synchronization with mine.”  This showed that she was “[s}omeone who truly listens” (p48).  In fact, she served as a sort of Lacanian mirror-stage mother confirming his existence, just as Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates does for the figure in the gallery: “Did he imagine himself seeing with the actor’s eyes? Or did the actor’s eyes seem to be searching him out?” (p7). 
 
Elster admits they went too far, but insists on the propriety of the project: “But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation.  Lying is necessary.  The state has to lie.  There is no lie in war that can’t be defended.  We went beyond this.  We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability.  These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional” (p28). 

We tell ourselves the story of the world: “To Elster sunset was a human invention, our perceptual arrangement of light and space into elements of wonder” (p18).  Not content to create a workable reality for himself, he has sought to remake the world or part of it.  “We can’t let others shape our world, our minds”, (p30) Elster says.  But he wants to shape the minds of others, and their world.  DeLillo’s novel offers a counterpoint to this desire.  It does not seek to control our response; it has no designs on us, yet compels quiet, considered attention.  It is not trying to rule the world, or part of the world, or even the solitary reader.  DeLillo suggests “new ways of thinking and seeing” (p29) without the intention to coerce.  He allows room for the reader, guides and leads, but never over-explains.  He gives just enough for the imagination to go on. 

Those reviewers who claim that DeLillo has said the same things before and said them better neglect the concise recontextualisation of previously drawn upon elements.  Among many echoes of earlier work, Elster’s thoughts on war recall End Zone’s war game: “Except their war is acronyms, projections, contingencies, methodologies” (Point Omega p27).  “Their war is abstract.  They think they’re sending an army into a place on the map.”  Which is precisely what Gary Harkness and “the major” do in the 1972 comic masterpiece – send armies to places on a map, imagining a Cold War come to the boil.  

But the fear and paranoia has moved from inside the mind of a young football player, and is now being played out “on the ground”, as the saying goes, in Iraq and Afghanistan.  DeLillo’s work traces these movements, the evolutions or revolutions of contemporary America, what is lost and what remains, whilst hinting at how one may attempt to counteract the ensuing confusion.  By taking your time, by remaining open to language in all its nuanced subtleties, and by resisting the urge to impose the products of your solitary ruminations on all and sundry.

Vietnam. A word that still to this day means many things to many different people. Travellers etch across its landscape throughout the year wandering its myriad paths and villages, soaking up its cultured cities. Its people are famous for their relaxed personalities and interesting take on life. But for several thousand Vietnam War veterans, this beautiful country remains a nightmare of ferocious memories, strange drug-addled flashbacks, and the emotions of fear and loss. Recently, I was picking through a history of America in the Twentieth Century and spent some time looking at this infamous war. One of the recommended readings, I was informed, was Michael Herr’s Dispatches. Herr wrote for Esquire Magazine during the late sixties and spent two years embedded with the US forces in Vietnam. A number of years following his return Herr wrote this book as a memoir of his time in the country and a scathing overview of the human catastrophe of the conflict. I was surprised, and deeply enlivened to the book before I even began reading, to find that Herr had co-wrote Full Metal Jacket – and indeed the crisp dialogue of that film is referenced significantly in the reality of his account of the war. He went further by writing much of the voiceover in Apocalypse Now – thus acquiring a central role in the two greatest Vietnam War movies.

Having finished the memoir, it is almost impossible to convey the savage intensity of Herr’s writing. Carefully examining the warfare from the point of view of the average “grunt” the book is a masterclass in exposing the utter depravity of the war. But much more than this the book finds a voice in the American soldier, a lonely dispirited, often courageous figure – mired halfway around the world in a green and brown sludge – drowning in death. Herr draws the colour from the country leaving only the forest and hills, the blood and rounds – the bright of napalm. Almost every single page (and I am not exaggerating here) reads like an image from the previously mentioned films – except Herr’s critical voice hangs dissonant echoing through the story, suffusing the theme. He examines the madness (absolutely staggering proportions), the fear and resignation, the burly anger and, scarily, the men who enjoy the unfolding drama. The killers. He weaves a narrative through some of the main conflicts of the latter section of the war – the Tet Offensive, the intensity of the military base at Khe Sanh. To my mind his journalist feels like Private Joker. Brash yet innocent, intelligent and conflicted. Herr mentions, quite loosely, that at times he crossed the line, his correspondent shedding viewer status and sitting behind an M-16 – gathering fire, shouting down the world.

Honestly, I have read very few books that truly – comprehensively – capture the very essence of a subject. Certainly, more so when that subject is the murderous hell of warfare. You sit with the marines for a period, wallowing in the endless rain of artillery (boarding the DMZ the forces effectively resided within bombing distance all of the time) the harsh shock of rifles and the buzz of choppers. Death exists permanently within inches, millimetres. And all of the time the NVA continued to pummel endlessly – never letting up, only dying, only to be replaced – inhuman in their courage. They fought viciously at night, armed to the teeth, almost no tracer rounds; just the startle of their AK47’s their AKMs, their shouts. It is serious reading when you look at the figures: Herr discusses this only in the broad sweep – 20% survival rate in some platoons, marine night-rotations often never returning, US napalm drops kill everything, period. It is serious reading any way you want to read it – but it is also reflective; it follows men into a war and explores their reactions, their humanity. Whether that humanity disappears into malevolence, or is shattered by madness and leaves an empty vessel where a grunt can exist on instinct, natural to the world around him, a marine, a Cav, whatever.

A World of Computers

Networking is a significant impediment on my life. I have been offline for what seems an age, in reality a shocking three and half weeks. Often the issue, when I am down and out from the interweb, is the catastrophic nastiness that is wireless networking devices. LAN is just so much more logical. Anyway, Happy New Year to one and all: may they be technologically flawless.

Before Christmas I was nattering on about the German soldier, which was jumping up all over my radar due to their involvement in Afghanistan. Similarly, there is a deal of talk these days about the return of the Russian to the forefront of international relations. Given this, I thought I might look at an aspect of Russian history that has always stood out to my mind.

The Fallen Man

The Russian consistently has it difficult. History is enamoured by the imaginative character; the sweeping independent figure that explodes out of the text, whether they be morally staunch or fractured. Often the narrative is militaristic: civilisations story is epic, but always deeply antagonistic. Pick up any history of a nation and the fountain of war will be buried in layers, appearing at constant intervals, shaping the scene, ending cycles, moulding the next age. There is a tremendous consistency. So too with the protagonists. The brilliant generals rise above the fold and capture a distinct position in the text. Frequently they are significantly divisive persons, usually ruthless, amoral, troubled; but yet personable, loyal (when they see fit), and often entertaining – in the humorous, intelligent way. They are also all extremely quick to action. If you were to require one particular skill, based on historical reference, to succeed as a general (baring luck, which is not a skill but you know what I mean) it would likely be the ability to react with alacrity. They were all shockingly fast: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, William of Normandy, Genghis Khan, Edward the Black Prince, Napoleon Bonaparte, Erwin Rommel, etc, etc.

You will note, having keen eyes, that no Russian is included in that list. I am probably being remiss avoiding the name of Georgy Zhukov who (to many historians) was the finest general of the Second World War. But so little is known of this individual that it is difficult to assess him in the same way as the aforementioned commanders. Indeed, my point is that Russian military figures throughout history are consistently shadowy and seem to conform to a different mould than their contemporaries. Peter the Great is romantic certainly but as a leader he was more brash and wilful than any of the above traits. He is remembered more for his westernising of Russian society and his landmark urbanisation. Militarily he was involved and had some successes in his Northern War – though not to any major degree. Across the history of Russia there are few figures that stand up as remarkable generals, with the Soviet Union an improvement but still weakly compared. It is interesting, this fact, given the military nature of the Soviets and size and capability of its former armed forces.

Though, however, Russia has lacked in dynamic generals they have displayed an extremely powerful common soldier. Unparalleled courage remains the essence of the Red soldier: very few combatants attacked as consistently as the Soviets during the war, though their lack of ingenuity damaged them frequently. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the armed forces fell into decline in Russia (as did much else) and it is – as mentioned – only lately that this decline has begun to halt. Russia was massively affected by the Global Financial Crisis of Sept. 2008; they have been significantly reliant on the sale of petroleum and gas for their GDP for a long and with the crisis came a massive decrease in the costs of energy. Coupled with the share loss every globalised country saw – bar China and India – Russia is in major difficulties. And yet, they have re-entered international relations with a jolt. It is not easy to see why they have done this, though most commentators with an understanding of the Russian mindset (with analysis I agree with) believe that it is because the average Russian citizen requires their nation to be sufficiently strong in the world, or deemed to be strong, and will accept nothing less. Regardless if that strength is fact or fiction. These same commentators believe that Putin and Medvedev are jostling for position to retain their mandates. Their may be the whiff of electoral fraud any time United Russia goes to the polls, but their will be no United Russia without a world-leading Russian nation.

The following section of  Gray’s diary comes under the subheading, in block capitals: WHY CAN’T WE MAKE SOMETHING LIKE THAT?  And how can the French do it?  How do they get the funds? he asks himself. Gray, being English, or British (he was, in his own words, part Scottie), is not referring to Ireland when he says us, but as with so much else, the same questions are as relevant here.   
 
If we take a look (an experience which is likely to entail great pain, boredom and high embarrassment) at recent Irish films which have, in part, been funded by the Irish Film Board and/or The Arts Council, it becomes apparent that very few seek to elucidate the drama of the “everyday”.  Directors not content to highlight problems related to poverty, race, immigration, sexual orientation, sexual abuse, extreme violence, drug and alcohol addiction, or any other category of criminal activity, either do not exist or are not given a chance.  As Philip Roth said of 1950s American fiction “provoked by some topical controversy”, those that get made “aren’t very good”, and that’s being kind. (Reading Myself and Others ) So much has been made of the camera’s democritizing powers, yet, in Irish films, only the outlandish is on view. 
 
The shabby adaptations of Roddy Doyle’s already slight novels The Commitments, The Van and The Snapper offer an alternative, but the caricatured dialogue, mostly crap acting, and crass “humour” render them unwatchable.  Elsewhere, in Adam and Paul, at least the two main characters happen to be heroin addicts, as opposed to representations or embodiments of drug addiction.  
 
Has Joyce not taught us, and shown us, the epic in the everyday man and woman.  Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway followed suit.  Neither of these writers attempted to move people en masse, to engender mass emotion, knowing that art is a private affair.  Even as part of an audience, where many sensations are shared, this remains true. 
Film is not devoid of such subtleties, such minute attentiveness as we find in the pages of Ulysses, although as a medium it has struggled to convey inwardness, or consciousness. 
 
Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, and Autumn Sonata are works of terrible, intense drama and resonance in which the face is all important in expressing and evoking inner life and emotion on screen.  Acting of an extremely rare ability is vital to the success of these films.  Bergman knew who was up to the task and he used them again and again.  Cassavetes comes close, at times, in a different, noisier manner, to achieving what Bergman mastered.  

The Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, in 1949’s Late Spring (and several other works), depicted, with great tenderness, patience and love, the emotional turmoil of everyday life.  Social mores and political issues are present only as background contributions to the constricted lives in which his characters strive for peace within themselves and their homes, to cope with the intricacies of an ever-changing world.  David Bordwell, in his study Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, comments on the films’ “contemplative resignation to mutability”. 

Late Spring tells the story of Professor Somiya, a widower, who lives with his unmarried daughter Noriko.  In her late twenties, she is, in the Japan of the time, getting on a bit.  He knows, or assumes she’ll outlive him so he and his sister trick Noriko into believing he’s going to remarry, freeing her from any obligation to take care of him.  She has no wish to marry or to leave her father.  Everyone acts with the best of intentions and two lives are devastated.  The final scene in which the father’s head slowly, agonisingly dips in resignation at the loss of his daughter, is as poignant, and as crushingly dramatic, as anything on film.  No scream could drown it out. 

I do not wish to imply that films about people in extremis should not be made, or that they never have any merit (and JG Ballard’s assertion that the quiet life is the exception is a convincing one), only that the utmost attention must be paid to the telling of the tale.  We “must act as our own critics,” Ingmar Bergman advised his fellow film directors, and approach their own work with the same “subtle detachment” an active viewer brings to the screen.  In this way, the emotional impact, when it hits, if it hits, is (to mix the metaphor) earned, and all the more lasting for it. 

Too many fictions, whether books or movies or whatever else besides, strive, with an air of earnest haughtiness, to teach us something, to tell us something other than a story, to make us agree, and not, as Joseph Conrad said, to make us see.  

True lessons are there to be learnt, provided we look in the right place, and with an active, alert eye.  Montaigne, explains his favouring of Catullus over Martial: “This is for the reason that Martial applied to himself; ‘He had little need to labour at his wits; his subject served instead.’”  Referring to the Second World War, which he lived through, the great Polish poet and prose writer Czeslaw Milosw offered the following warning to artists and would-be artists alike: “The reality of the war years is a great subject, but a great subject is not enough and it even makes inadequacies in workmanship all the more visible”.  To do a thing properly, or well, requires effort, and witless work is not worth so much as a giggle.

McGahern, in the essay ‘The Solitary Reader’, writes about how the nature of one’s reading changes, if one sticks with it, at a certain point. When young, we read for the escape, rather than the use of language or the ideas conveyed (even if it is the quality of these that allow, or facilitate the escape). All of us will identify with his description of ‘waking’ from being immersed in a book. One of the things that cause this immersion in a text is the evocation of place. Place is probably a little restrictive, by place I mean a place in time, as experienced or imagined by an author. This evocation of place is something that I certainly read for as a child – whether it was the rooms in 221b Baker Street (I’m terrified to see what Guy Ritchie has done to them) or Castle Rock or any of the other small Maine towns Stephen King depicted and then terrorised. While, as McGahern says, our reading experience changes as we develop intellectually, this evocation of place never ceases to be important – capturing the experience of poet and his environment in a fusion of time and place was William Carlos Williams’s poetic project. He believed the poem was a unique ‘thing’ birthed by the male and female elements of the poet interacting with the world, both natural and man –made.

McGahern’s great gift is certainly this evocation of place, evident obviously in his fiction and now, in his essays. The previously unpublished essay ‘Blake’s of the Hollow’ written about his favourite pub, is an absolute gem. Blake’s of the Hollow will undoubtedly experience a wave of strange, pale, socially awkward visitors (readers, that is) poking around, ordering a pint and mentally ticking off, from the remembered inventory, the lamps, “the ceiling and panelling” that are of “pitched pinewood” or the office that overlooks the bar and “could belong in a theatre or ship,” the snugs in the landing or the “patterned tilework of the floor,” not to mention the pint of Guinness or the “delicious sandwiches neatly cut into squares with generous measures of tea in the old aluminium tea pots”. The essay describes a pub but captures an atmosphere, a way of life, a moment in time, a time, for example, when one could arrange to collect one’s mail in the local pub. The essay is brief, but it may as well be a substantial short story, such is the cast of personalities and characters it conjures up (especially the man who comes, Thursday afternoons, to drink champagne and read the Financial Times, a short story all by himself), and the lives it suggests. Indeed, it is an essay, but if we were to visit Blake’s of the Hollow after reading this we would, no doubt, come away feeling slightly disappointed, or empty, no matter how little the pub has changed aesthetically (the kind of experience and slight disappointment McGahern actually describes in the next, also excellent essay ‘Dreaming at Julien’s’). It will not be as McGahern experienced and described, for that image was his and is now gone. Better, I think, not to go but to read the essay and reread it and enjoy the imaginative Blake’s and the lost world it suggests.

I am too full of turkey, and there are too many unopened bottles of Tyskie in the fridge, (not to mention the fact of a new baby demanding attention) for me to spend too much time typing this week. In fact, I just want to alert readers to some Christmas TV – the excellent Orson Welles season on BBC 4 continues this evening and ‘The Dead’, John Huston’s fabulous rendering of, arguably, the complete (perfect?) short story is on RTÉ tomorrow evening. As Fintan O’Toole wrote last week in the Irish Times, it is impossible now to read ‘The Dead’ and imagine Gabriel as anyone other than the magnificent Donal McCann.

Finally, some words from James Joyce to end 2009 – chosen, from ‘The Dead’, for absolutely no reason other than their simplicity and beauty:

The patting at once grew louder in encouragement and then ceased altogether. Gabriel leaned his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and smiled nervously at the company. Meeting a row of upturned faces he raised his eyes to the chandelier. The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing-room door. People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres. (Dubliners, Triad/Grafton p230)

What editors do for writers is mysterious, and does not, contrary to general belief, have much to do with titles and sentences and ‘changes’. …/ The relationship between an editor and a writer is much subtler and deeper than that, at once so elusive and so radical that it seems almost parental: the editor, if the editor was Henry Robbins, was the person who gave the writer the idea of himself, the idea of herself, the image of self that enabled the writer to sit down alone and do it. (Live and Learn, Harper Perennial, p.375)

We can see, then, how it might be difficult for a writer to insist strongly against something an editor is vehemently arguing for, if this editor is a parental figure, one who gives a writer the idea of himself. And Gordon Lish did have this kind of relationship with Carver. In his essay ‘Fires’ the two influences Carver identifies as having a positive, constructive influence on his writing are John Gardner and Gordon Lish (his own children are also listed, in fact as the main, if malign, influence). If as Ms Battersby says, Carver was not a rookie, when What We talk About was being published, nor was he an established writer, he was only a published writer at all because of Lish, and this publication offered him hope when he was struggling with his personal circumstances and struggling to see himself as a writer:

My life soon took another veering, a sharp turn, and then it came to a dead stop, off on a siding. I couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t back up or go forward. It was during this period that Lish collected some of my stories and gave them to McGraw-Hill, who published them (Call If You Need Me, Harvill, p.105).

The reason Lish had stories to collect is because he began accepting them and publishing them for Esquire magazine – Lish took Carver from being unpublished to publishing a collection, a young writer would inevitably trust an editor who had affected such a change in his life, the change, for an aspiring author. So if an editor who had succeeded in publishing one book, suggests or demands changes for the second, the author is gong to listen and he is going to trust, especially an author who is desperately trying to escape from a life that had “come to a dead stop”. A man who has tried for so long to become a writer is going to do what he has to do to remain a writer. We blame Lish for his insensitivity to the prose, or to his charge’s talent, but we can’t blame Carver for trusting his editor.

I also wrote, in that first post, that I was going to explain why I considered Carver the ‘biggest gun’. What I meant was that I was going to write about why I like Carver’s work so much. It is not for any particular technical reason, or as a result of any forensic reading, or comparative context – it is solely an emotional response, entirely subjective, to a style, to characters, to the stories. I mentioned that Carver deals with normality, and it is this that appeals to me – his understanding of our longing for normality, how tenuous, ephemeral, even absurd our conceptions of normality (of our normalities) are, and how quickly they can be undone and rendered irrelevant. This moment, from ‘A Small, Good Thing’ captures this beautifully:

She saw a big car stop in front of the hospital and someone, a woman in a long coat, got into the car. For a minute she wished she were that woman and somebody, anybody, was driving her away from here to somewhere else, a place where she would find Scotty waiting for her when she stepped out of the car, ready to say Mom and let her gather him in her arms. (Beginners, Jonathan Cape, p. 63)

What We Talk About/Beginners, is full of people whose normality has become destructive, unhealthy and even desperate. People find themselves doing things, behaving in ways that they can’t quite believe. The best example of this, the best example I’ve read of the ways in which we incorporate behaviour into our conception of normality and thereby render it permissable, no matter how strange or unlikely, is portrayed in the story ‘Careful’ from the collection Cathedral. In the story, one of Carver’s alcoholics is adrift in a fog of his own making, lost in a normality utterly personal and unique and divorced from the normality that once was his, in his married life. He is living in a bedsit and is pretty much oblivious to the fact that his normality is the normality of a man on the cusp of an abyss. I say pretty much oblivious because he does have a moment, not quite an epiphany but a moment of understanding, one that sums up this whole ‘normality’ thesis:

One morning he woke up and promptly fell to eating crumb doughnuts and drinking champagne. There’s been a time, some years back, when he would have laughed at having a breakfast like this. Now, there didn’t seem to be anything very unusual about it. In fact, he hadn’t thought anything about it until he was in bed and trying to recall the things he’d done that day, starting with when he’d gotten up that morning. At first he couldn’t remember anything noteworthy. Then he remembered eating those doughnuts and drinking champagne. Time was when he would have considered this a mildly crazy thing to do, something to tell friends about. Then, the more he thought about it, the more he could see it didn’t matter much one way or the other. He’d had doughnuts and champagne for breakfast. So what? (Cathedral, Harvill, p.104)

I’ve thought about this passage and this story regularly since I read it. It struck me as especially accurate, and insightful, it struck me as a truth, if I can be so old-fashioned. I have thought about the story and the characters and the situation portrayed in the same way I think about things from my life, the way I remember and think about people I’ve met, things I’ve done, I think about them as if they were a part of my lived experience. I also think about ‘Where I’m Calling From’, ‘A Small, Good Thing’, ‘Are These Actual Miles’ and many more stories from different collections. This is why I think he’s so good, I don’t think about other writer’s work in this way, except for Hemmingway a bit – I think sometimes about the waiters from the well-lighted café, I find myself sometimes absently repeating to myself “our nada who art in nada”, and a couple of other writers’ work and characters and this, for me, is as good a yardstick for measuring the quality of a writer as anything else. I was surprised, almost shocked actually, to read in the foreword to Where I’m Calling From that this is the yardstick that Carver uses to measure success:

V.S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing”. First the glimpse given life, turned into something that will illuminate the moment and just maybe lock it indelibly into the reader’s consciousness. Make it part of a reader’s consciousness. Make it part of a reader’s own experience, as Hemingway so nicely put it. Forever, the writer hopes. Forever. (Where I’m Calling From, Harvill p.xiii)

In my last Secular Sundays I selected a number of examples, from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Beginners, that complicates somewhat the assertion made by Ms Battersby, above. Instead, there are clearly instances where the cuts work, and Carver evidently agreed. These, however, are the exceptions. Beginners is a better book, the stories are better, not only because they are more consistent and, well, just more, but because they are different stories, for the most part. And it is in the difference that the quality lies.

In Lish’s edit, the characters are more brutal, harsher; they are denied their confused humanity just as Carver is denied his literary voice. (Eileen Battersby, ‘Raymond Carver in his Own Words’ Irish Times, Sat Oct 31 2009)

Humanity is the important word here – the vital difference between the versions of the stories in these books is empathy. Ms Battersby details the numerous small instances of crude and clumsy editing, but more than this and more than removing words, length, Lish effectively removes the empathy and thereby removes the impulse, the very meaning behind Carver’s stories. Empathy, for his characters, for the situations they find themselves in, empathy for these troubled often desperate lives is the reason why Carver wrote the stories.
Certainly, the stories are longer, but as I mentioned previously, they are not verbose, nor are they all that expansive. There is still the sense of most of the story happening off the page, the reader’s hand is not held, we are not given detailed psychological explanation of why, say, Ed/Carl in the title story of both books acted as he did. Sure, the guy loved Terri, but we are not told why this love manifested itself in such extreme ways. Ed/Carl’s behaviour is not excused nor condoned or even understood, it just is – the pressures of life and relationships, of working a lousy job or of having no money can break a person, can cause them to do crazy things. Most importantly for Carver (and I will return to this), there is a sense of the different normalities these pressures can create for people – Ed/Carl’s normality was to love someone so obsessively he found it necessary to drag her around a room by the heels, Mel et al’s normality was to sit around a table, a brief moment of respite in a nomadic existence (“We lived in Albuquerque, but we were all from someone else. Beginners, p.177), on a Saturday afternoon, packing away considerable quantities of gin. Carver doesn’t explain or judge, but what he does do, especially, and almost exclusively, in Beginners is to empathise. This is the characteristic feature of his stories in general, for me. His characters are people adrift in normalities that are full of violence and nastiness and drunkenness and full of characters struggling and failing to change these normalities – in fact, most take flight or are in the process of taking flight from one ‘normality,’ that they realise has become ‘abnormal’ to the promise of another more normal normality. If you follow.
This empathy and, therefore, the entirely different impulse and motivation behind these stories is clearly evident while moving from one version of a story to another. ‘A Small Good Thing’, I have mentioned briefly is one of the more obvious, ‘The Bath’ being almost unrecognisable from the restored version. The reader, moving through the collections concurrently, first notices the dramatic difference in the third story, ‘Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit’ in What We Talk About… ‘Where is Everyone’ in Beginners. None of the people in this story are particularly sympathetic, and the rather desperate normalities they have created for themselves are seemingly skewed – the alcoholism, failed/failing marriages, unemployement, tense, uneasy personal relationships:

But during those days, when my mother was putting out to men she’d just met, I was out of work, drinking and crazy. (Beginners, p.11)

The situations are similar in both versions but by dwelling on the tense relationships between these characters, and the moments of unexpected tenderness between them, they reveal the potential within these characters, the potential that has been all but squeezed from them by the pressures exerted on them. The following passage from ‘Where is Everyone’, which was not included in ‘Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit’ (which is, as a result, a harder, colder story), reveals not only one of these unexpected moments of tenderness but suggest the pressures these characters experience, pressures that are exerted, for the most part, off the page:

She bent and kissed me. Her lips seemed bruised and swollen. She drew the blanket over me. Then she went into her bedroom. She left the door open, and in a minute I could hear her snoring.
I lay there staring at the TV. There were images of uniformed men on the screen, a low murmur, then tanks and a man using a flamethrower. I couldn’t hear it, but I didn’t want to get up. I kept staring unitl I felt my eyes close. But I woke up with a start, the pajamas damp with sweat. A snowy light filled the room. There was a roaring coming at me. The room clamoured. I lay there. I didn’t move. (p21)

The empathy doesn’t disguise the lives that these people have developed – the lips seemed bruised and swollen because he knew his sixty five year old mother had been kissing a man earlier, but it does suggest the pressure and stress (the existential anguish represented by the roaring of the white noise) of these lives and the despair and anguish suffered by the characters.

‘Tell the Women We’re Going’ is an unusual story, atypical, almost, in both versions, of Carver’s work. While violence is important in Carver’s stories, it usually lurks off the page, it is threatened or implied, made manifest in the story as menace. When violence does erupt it is often the clumsy violence (examples of Ms Battersby’s ‘confused humanity’) of those who unexpectedy, almost unwittingly, find themselves lashing out, usually drunkenly. So a man puts too many logs on the fire in an apparent attempt to set his estranged family’s home alight, or he cuts the phone line, takes hold of the heavy ashtray, and merely retreats, each action independent and without premeditation, reacting to a normality that has developed apart from the characters’ wishes, as in the story ‘Pie/A Serious Talk’. The random, cold and cruel violence in ‘Tell the Women We’re Going’ has an almost Southern-gothic type of feel to it. It feels out of place in both versions, but the Lish cut is especially incongruous. The menace in the story quickly (too quickly) and almost absurdly becomes violence. The abrupt ending, with the almost dispassionate description of the murder, leaves us with a story driven only to deliver its overly dramatic, sensational ending:

He never knew what Jerry wanted. But it started and ended with a rock. Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon and then on the one that was supposed to be Bill’s. (p56)

In Beginners, the story dwells on the circumstances leading up to the killing. We get more of a sense of the pressures, the pressures of struggling wih lousy jobs and a large young family to support and too much booze and the violence, when it happens, is stupid and clumsy (as clumsy as the prose in the quotation above) and fits to the rest of the story and a little better with Carver’s confused humans.

These are two examples of endings, but throughout Beginners we discover extra sentences and extra paragraphs that add an essential depth of feeling and empathy to the stories, so essential as to constitute entirely different stories, born of a different impulse, written to different agenda, and potraying, therefore, a very different country, Carver country.

The above is an interesting line quoted by Hitler in the second or third year of the Second World War. Memorable for its brevity, yet comprehensively encapsulating the reality of the German fighting machine. Hitler threw it out during the planning stages for Operation Barbarossa, when clamped up spartanly in the forested fortress of the Wolfsschanze, the eponymous Wolfs Lair. In a way it is a throwaway line, consistent to the megalomaniac Furher’s distorted faith in German dominance. But the fact of the matter is the German soldier was considered the finest of the war. This is in almost every respect: courage, order, imagination, alacrity and probably most of all counter attacking initiative. This final one is sufficiently exemplified by the Battle of the Bulge, following several months of consistent allied pressure, and having clearly lost the war, they almost completed a rout, bizarrely; it said a great deal about the Wehrmacht. Of course, they did not complete this rout, nor win the war. It’s somewhat unsettling to consider but baring the tremendous over extension of Barbarossa it might have been a different war following the D Day landings of June ’44.

But Hitler refused to ignore the Soviet landscape and his burning ambition to both claim ‘unlimited living space’ and defeat the image of an unconquerable Russia. His multiple tactical errors, outside of the original decision to even begin the war, were devastating to the campaign. A refusal to plan for winter quarters (odd given the somewhat bleak Russian climate), indeed a refusal to even assign winter clothing; all based on the absurd view that once they ‘knocked in the door, the whole thing would come crashing down’. All of which led to the inevitable stall, followed by the grinding down of the Wehrmacht. Far too much was left by Hitler to the Lancer’s of his armed forces: thus ignoring major field requirements like contiguous supply lines and comprehensive artillery support. The Panzer brigades (tank units) were there of course, but not as effective as they had been for the first two years of war. Again the landscape was murderous to mechanised units, but also a major issue was the T-34, the Soviet’s finest tank, considered the best general purpose vehicle of the Second World War. Still, having begun to lose by the winter of ’41, having launched the offensive that summer, they held on for a savage period of time given the circumstances.

The story of the failure of Barbarossa is wide-spread, and the German capitulation at Stalingrad and ultimately the Soviet Union, was significant to their war effort. They were effectively pushed back from that point onwards. But yet, and this is clear from reading across many books dealing with the period, the German soldier remained consistently difficult to break down. There are savage critics of the allied contingent, which shines a positive militaristic light on the Wehrmacht, with the US forces in particular viewed as frequently impotent. There were consistent issues around getting soldiers to push forward in battles (as apposed to hanging back and waiting for artillery to pound defensive positions into submission) and it was well known throughout the war that the Allies often preferred not to fight at night. This allowed the German’s shocking freedom of movement knowing they had from sundown to organise positions. And movement in battle is about as important as you can get. Not dissimilar to today, the U.S. relied on technology and vastly outnumbered all belligerents with regard to the fertility of their assembly lines. Though often their vehicles were only moderate in capability. The Sherman tank was relatively weak, certainly when compared to the Tiger Mark II and T-34. The Hellcat and Mustang were solid fighter planes, though inferior to the Japanese Zero and German Messerschmitt. Of course, the U.S. B-29 Superfortress murdered everything, so that is an exception. The Allies were infuriated for much of the war by their infantry weaponry, in that they were poorly: the British PIAT and U.S. Bazooka, which were hugely inferior to the German Panzerfaust – a constant menace to allied tanking.

Bit of an aside there; my main point remains that the German soldier was a solid fighting machine. Today their armed forces are minimal. American bases are situated across Germany, with few major local military outposts. With the European Union’s movement to a standing army there is of course an expectation that the largest population centre of the Union would contain the largest assignment of man power. Time, even the short drift of decades, makes for significant change. However, the return of a German military is not new in that they have a prominent place in NATO’s campaigns across Afghanistan. Newsweek record the figure at several thousand. Not surprisingly they are understood to be very effective.

One hundred and fifty years, exactly yesterday, since the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and I finish off the final words to peer, literally awestruck, at the breadth of Darwin’s thesis: there really are no words to sufficiently define the extent to which this work captures the utter power of nature. There are many things you can say about Darwin’s argument, not least that it was controversial, but I don’t think that the controversy really explores the vision within the story he unwinds. And I do mean this; above all else this book is to my mind a story: one that encapsulates the entire planet, her life forms, and their coexistence together. I read around the work to ensure I understood the period in which the book was written (being a ludicrously involved history buff, this was straight-forward) which I would highly recommend, as it gives a comprehensive context. Many sciences were still newly burgeoning fields during this period, including biology, however, the understanding in the physical sciences was high – so much so that many believed Darwin’s ultimate theory was a century or so later than it should have been. I’m not converted to this view, I think that this theory is novel in every way imaginable; indeed, its consistent opposition (slight, but there) over the past 150 years is representative of its ingenuity.

Nothing displays this view more than the difficulties society today has with the fact of evolution. In the year 2009 there have been three books released showcasing the argument for evolution (timed for the anniversary) which is so broad that it would actually take some serious effort to oppose the reality. One of these books (the only one I have read) is very thorough and easily digestible: Richard Dawkin’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Though Darwin’s work is rightly construed as the firing salvo, his theory is an explanation for evolution, explaining how it works via natural selection. Having read through Origin it feels as though Darwin’s main endeavour is to deliver an opposing theory to the commonly understood origin of life from that period: namely, independent creation. This is of course part of its controversy – but it is clear when reading that Darwin is far more involved in dismissing the idea of independent creation than he is exposing faith. Independent creation is more or less the view that all individuals (human or otherwise) were created in the current form we see in this age: i.e. they could not have evolved. Darwin’s fundamental argument against this is evolution, which he shows is controlled by natural selection, but also pretty much proves that all animals could not have been created in the form they currently hold, and must have originated from broadly a single life form (he argues five or six life forms, but today it is known to be one).

His proof that independent creation is not possible is absolute. Evolution, by its nature of occurrence over millennia, is impossible to prove to the same degree. Having shown that independent creation was not possible, Darwin proposes the argument for evolution as an alternative and to the best level that he could, explains how it occurs through natural selection. At its most basic natural selection is the selection (by nature) of dominant characteristics in any grouping of animals which best enable that group to survive. As each selection is made to the group the improvement it makes is carried down through their line and thus the animals evolve. This is of course over many many years. The genius, as with every theory, is how well this argument fits into place – in this case in the natural world. Darwin spends some time showing how his theory works; which is the story of life I mentioned earlier.

All in all it’s a fabulous piece of work, and is rightly construed as one of the most important books of all time. I’ve always enjoyed the popular phrase of Darwin’s theory, which if you Google draws only one winner: the single greatest idea ever. This has the ring of truth.