José Eustasio Rivera | José Eustasio Rivera / 2018

the brief jubilation of living

by Douglas Messerli

 

José Eustasio Rivera The Vortex, translated from the Spanish by John Charles Chasteen (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2018)

 

José Eustasio Rivera’s unforgettable fiction from 1924 (La vorágine), now published by Duke University Press as The Vortex translated by John Charles Chasteen, begins rather amorphously as a tale of a young poet, Arturo Cora, who with his lover, Alicia, are lured out of the Columbian capitol of Bogotá, almost on a kind of romantic whim, into Columbia’s wild backland, where the gauchos roam, much as in a myth out of the American West.

      Events in the early pages of Rivera’s significant fiction begin vaguely when he meets up with an apparently charming con-artist, Casanare, and, almost like something out of a surrealist dream, he soon discovers that most of the gauchos have left their lands and the cattle they previously brought to market, lured to go to work for Casanare and others in the Amazonian wilds in the new industry of collecting rubber from the trees.

     Cora, with the confidence of an outsider, notes:

 

             The hair-raising stories about Casanare did not frighten me. My instincts

             impelled me to defy the dangers of the wild frontier. I was certain that I

             would survive to tell the tale and later, amid the civilized comforts of some

             city as yet unknown to me, look back on the dangers of Casanare with

             nostalgia.

 

     Even when his girl-friend suddenly disappears from the ramble shack house in which they are staying, evidently lured by Casanare’s men with the promise of great sums of money, he seems almost dreamily to follow after her, quite strangely, since he has already admitted that he is now “bored of Alicia” and is ready to return to Bogotá.

      His decision to follow her down the Amazon into the dark forests wherein rubber has now become king, begins to shift everything from the dream-like world in which the fiction begins into a horrific nightmare of great specificity. If he previously suffers from insomnia, the “hero” if he might be called that, now falls into a deep “moodiness”:

 

            My moodiness has subjected me to various nervous crises, in which logic and

            my brain sue for divorce. In spite of my physical exuberance, my over-active

            imagination constantly saps my strength, a chronic problem, because the

            visions are unremitting, even during sleep.

 

      Somewhat like Marlow’s voyage down the Congo river in search of Kurz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the further Cora travels into the Amazon jungle the more horror he encounters, a world where the formerly dreamy gauchos and their families have now become slaves, not only to Casanare but to numerous other businessmen and their shills, drawing in anyone who enters their net, the vortex of a hellish voyage into death that the work’s title invokes.

      Beatings, gambling, drugs, fevers, and even imprisonment follow, between brief escapes, strange messages left on the trees that produce the rubber, and the continued perception of the ecological desolation of a once pristine world all follow. Mad visions are not uncommon in this totally hellish world:

 

           The voyager’s visions were bizarre, indeed. He saw processions of alligators and

           turtles, flowers that shouted, swamps full of people. He reported that the trees

           of the forest were paralyzed giants that talked and gestured to each other in the

           dark. The trees wanted to fly away with clouds, but the earth held them firmly

           by the ankles, so that we could never go anywhere.

 

     Roll over Baudelaire, Breton, Ginsburg, Bowles—so many others! Rivera does it better, and with an ecological twist:

 

            Pipa had heard the trees’ appeal to occupy pastures and follow fields and

            vacant lots until a single, great canopy of interwoven tree limbs could cover

            the surface of the entire earth. One day, all would be, again, as it was in

            the beginning—the age of Genesis, when God floated like a mist over the

            endless sea of green.

                A dire prophecy, indeed.

 

You might almost think that Rivera was predicting the earth after all mankind had died from the changes in climate we are now beginning to suffer!

     The more the poet-hero encounters the terrors of the jungle, the greater becomes his sense of nature left alone to make itself over: after describing the “trillions of devastating bachaquero ants,” the “termites that sicken and kill the trees like some kind of galloping syphilis.”

    

            And yet, each death renovates the earth. The decay from fallen giant

            the newly open canopy combine to encourage germination and sprout-

            ing. Pollen swirls in the miasmas of decomposing organic matter. The

            smell of ferment is in the breath of both purification and procreation.

 

     Our now more obvious hero sends letters off to leaders in both Columbia and Brazil, demanding that something be done to save the interior, with little response. Even today, the new Brazilian leader just elected would probably side with the rubber barons. And Cora’s attempt to return to “civilization” is a disastrous one, ending in the fiction’s final lines “God help us!”

     Yet, Rivera’s passionate plea to save that world is as powerful as any fiction I have read: as opposed to “enraptured nightingales,” the poetic flowers and babbling brooks of the romantic world, the author’s central character argues for another kind of beauty:

 

            Here, in the night: unknown voices, phantasmagoric lights, funeral silences.

            Hear the thump of fallen fruit that bursts open to fulfill the promise of its

            seed; the whisper of tumbling leaves that offer themselves as fertilizer

            to the roots of the tree that bore them; the sound of jaws that eat hurriedly

            to avoid being eaten; the echoing belch of the satiated predator; the call of

            danger and alert; the noisy agony of prey that did not escape; the echoing

            belch of the satiated predator. And when dawn finally sprinkles the leaves

            with its tragic glory, the clamor of the survivors, the keening of the birds,

            the chatter of the monkeys, the thrashing of the wild pig—all for the brief

            jubilation of a few more hours to live.

 

     I am so excited to have read this writer, working in the tradition of the great German naturalist, Alexander van Humboldt, and the important French naturalist writer Jules Michelet, and I admire Duke University Press for publishing it—although I must admit I am shocked by their exorbitant prices of $95 for the hardback version and $25 for the paperback for 218 pages, all in a time when printing costs have gone down significantly. Better that they might have printed it on-demand only.

 

Los Angeles, November 25, 2018

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Volume 24, no. 1, Spring 2019).

Vasily Kandinsky | Klänge (Sounds) / 2018

writing in colors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vasily Kandinsky Klänge (Sounds), translated by Tony Frazer (Bristol, England: Shearsman Books, 2018)

 

 Vasily Kandinsky’s only published book of poetry, prose poems titled Klänge (Sounds) (ca. 1912-13), is available for the first time with its original art in color (a previous Yale University edition only presented the black-and-white prints), courtesy of Shearsman Books and translated by Tony Frazer.

       

    In addition to his significant contributions to modern art and important theoretical works such as Über des Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), Kandinsky was clearly a talented poet, with other poetic attempts that appear in his papers, but remain unpublished in book form. These compositions reveal his interest in language, in relation to the visual image.

     A certain narrative pattern is apparent throughout these works. For example, this volume’s first poem, “Hills,” begins almost in a mode of story-telling:

 

              A mass of hills in all the colours one can imagine or would even wish

              to imagine. All varying sizes, but shapes always the same, i.e. just one:

              Fat at the bottom, bulging at the sides, flat-round on top. Simple

              everyday hills, then, just as one always imagines but never sees.

 

     One might expect from Kandinsky that color that is dominant in nearly all of these written works:

 

               Blue, blue rose up, rose up, and fell.

               Spiky, Thin whistled and tried to barge its way in, but

               didn’t get through.

               On every corner there was a din.

               Fat Brown got caught, apparently for all eternity.

                              Apparently. Apparently.  (“Seeing”)

 

     A dark sense of humor also emerges in several of them that recalls folklore or even of children’s stories:

 

               Great big houses suddenly collapsed. Small houses

               remained standing, unaffected.

               A think hard egg-shaped orange-cloud hung suddenly

               over the town. It seemed to hang from the steep

               steeple of the Town Hall tower, tall, all angles, and

               radiated violet.  (“Bassoon”)

 

     The very best of them play with language in a way that surely must have attracted his Dadaist friends, who came together to read these works:

 

                                          Open

 

                 Now slowly disappearing in the green grass.

                 Now stuck in the grey muck.

                 Now slowly disappearing in the white snow.

                 Now stuck in the grey muck.

                 Lay long: long fat black tubes.

                 Lay long.

                 Long tubes.

                Tubes.

                Tubes.

 

     Here is a poem that is anything but “open,” as everything and everyone is trapped in beautiful repetition—the long lay of the grey muck that becomes almost a celebration of nature, while also referencing the artist’s paint “tubes” which abstractly “capture” the very figures the painting creates. In its semi-nonsense repetitions this poem might almost remind one of works by Gertrude Stein.

     Similarly, the repetitions of “Not,” fill the page with a kind of “Jack-in-the-box” character, who “jumped from one side of the hollow to the others with an effort that would be enough / For a hole three meters side. And back again right away.” The poem humorously continues:

 

                And back again right away. And back right away. Back,

                back. Oh! back again, back again! Again, again. Oh

                again, again, again. Ba-ack…Ba-a-ack…

                One shouldn’t have to witness something like that.

 

     The poem ends: “Don’t go there! Don’t look at him!!.....Never!!......,” before the observer, like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland declares that he’s going “over there. Otherwise I’ll be too late.”

 

     There is often a kind of Beckettian quality to his poems, as well, expressed in “Water”:

 

                 In the yellow sand walked a small thin red man. He kept

                 slipping all the time. It looked as if he were walking

                 on black ice. It was however yellow sand of the never-

                 ending plain.

                 From time to time he said: “Water…Blue water.” And

                 I didn’t understand why he said it.

 

      Finally, some of these works, convey an odd sense of tenderness. In the volume’s final poem of, “Softness,” Kandinsky writes:

                

                  Each lay on his own horse, which was unbecoming and

                  improper. It’s better anyway if a fat bird sits on this not

                  on his then branch, with the little trembling quivering

                  living leaf. Everyone can kneel down (anyone who can’t

                  learns how). Can everyone see the spires? Open the

                  door! Or the fold will tear the roof off!

 

      Here we truly see Kandinsky represent the spiritual in art, a theme that runs through his visual and written oeuvres. Drawing from the Old and New Testaments simultaneously he tells us: see the spires or God might tear off your roof.

 

Los Angeles, January 19, 2019

Reprinted from Hyerallergic Weekend (February 3, 2019).

Wendy Walker | The Secret Service / 1992

the forgotten dream

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wendy Walker The Secret Service (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1992); reprinted (Tough Poets Press, 2021).

 

In 1982 Wendy Walker, at the suggestion of Charles Bernstein, sent me the manuscript of The Secret Service. In retracing the long history of that book, I’ve discovered that it wasn’t quite yet finished at the time; the author completed it later that year. While I quickly accepted it, given my perpetual financial difficulties and the size of the text, I was slow to publish. The following year Wendy finished a new collection of stories, The Sea-Rabbit, Or the Artist of Life, also sent to me, which I immediately recognized as a work that might be more easily assimilated by the public, arguing that it should appear first. The Sea-Rabbit was published—with some very good review attention—in 1988 (after only a three year wait!). Meanwhile, Wendy continued to revise The Secret Service, finishing her revisions in 1990. I published that book finally in 1992—ten years after its original acceptance!

 

    This year (2006), I decided to revisit or to “review” the work—in the true meaning of that word. What I discovered is what I had known all along, that the work is a true masterpiece. But I think, perhaps, it has taken me these 23 some years to truly appreciate its multiple themes and its overall significance. The critics of 1992 certainly did not fully comprehend the fiction, and sadly, it long remained out of print—but was fortunately recently reissued in 2021 by Tough Poets Press.

 

 

*

 

 

The story of The Secret Service—and Walker’s works, unlike so many other books I have published, can truly be described as having a plots—is a knotted tale of intrigue. Agents of the British government Secret Service have discovered, based on an anonymous message, that the King—as a result of a series of perfidious acts the author describes as “an enormous vengeance,” involving a switch of babies by the French Marchioness of Tralee—has married his own sister. Not only is the future of the royal house, accordingly, based on an incestuous relationship, but, as it becomes apparent, other French and German figures are plotting to publicly reveal this information, and so bring down the Church of England and destroy the monarchy, replacing the Queen with a French pretender.

     In order to discern the machinations of that transformation and ascertain the timeframe of the plot, the Secret Service springs into action. Rutherford, his young new inductee Polly, and Rutherford’s aging mentor, the Corporal, along with a local agent, posing as a keeper of a flower shop, have perfected a system, combining various theories of the transference of time with the power of opals to produce visions, in which human beings can be changed into objects. Knowing of the three villains’ passions—Baron Schelling’s devotion to glass and porcelain, Cardinal Ammanati’s love of sculpture, and the Duc D’Elsir’s admiration of roses—they transform themselves into appropriate objects: Polly into a perfect Baccarat wine goblet, the Corporal into a bronze statue of Thisbe, and Rutherford into a salmon-blossomed Albertine rosebush—all awarded the three foreigners by their supposed friend and ally, the King of England.

     Things go swimmingly along until the three, admiring each other’s treasures, accidentally break the goblet—potentially destroying Polly, who has been kept in the dark by Rutherford and the Corporal about the pernicious plots the enemies are hatching. Rutherford must seek out the broken object, revealing himself to a young woman the Baron holds in a tower. That woman, we later discover, is actually the stolen princess (believed dead, but saved, it is later revealed in a wry Dickensian-like tale, by another exchange of infants by the late-Marchioness’s nanny), and it is her young lover, Ganymede, himself a sort of changeling, who ultimately retrieves Polly/the broken goblet from the Baron’s locked chambers.

      Brought back to England, Polly undergoes recuperation, recounted in the longest chapter of the fiction, Chapter Nine, as a series of adventures Polly imaginatively experiences, filled with dozens of different dream images and structures from Freud and Jung to literary fantasies suggested by writers as various as Poe, Borges, Nabokov, Barnes, Calvino and García Marquez.

     Meanwhile, the plot thickens as the malefactors, now aware of the nature of their gifts, speed up their machinations. Agents foil and ultimately destroy the Duc and Cardinal, but the Baron, who has also covered his own body in a porcelain sheen (polished with the bones of infants) which protects him and proffers him eternal life, plans to embalm his young charge. She resists, offering up only one arm for experimentation, before Rutherford and his men arrive on the scene. Meanwhile, in a paranoid delusion that all objects about him may be inhabited by his enemies, and suffering from horrible side-effects from the application of his porcelain coating, the Baron goes mad, tearing up his mansion and, eventually, destroying his own body in an attempt to break through his new “skin” to the blood and bones behind it.

     While Walker’s story is certainly engaging, it is her writing that utterly captivates the reader. Unlike so many works of contemporary fantasy and folktale that seem to be only half-committed to the reality of their creations—the writers appearing to have one eye on the constraints of the story and other on the enchantment they are busy weaving for the child-like reader—Walker is completely convincing; without sacrificing irony, she apparently believes in the transformative acts she is describing and is utterly committed to the adult art with which she is engaged. I can think of few other contemporary works with such authoritative stylistic flourishes as The Secret Service. A single quotation must serve as evidence in a near-encyclopedic work of astonishing writing. The following, a dreamscape of the wonderful city of thieves, is as compelling as a De Chirico landscape:

 

“As she neared [the domed building], …[it] gave the impression of a basilica. Its walls were sheer and high, like the walls of all the houses in the city, and marked only by the thinnest and longest of windows, like slots in a box prepared for the trick insertion of knives. The dome rested on a square base, from which a varying number of apses ex- truded, tall semicylinders on each face. All around the houses of the city clustered up almost to touch the building, but as its main entrance lay right in the line of the street, she had little difficulty finding her way to the threshold.

    Passing under the deep archway she entered a radiant grey half-light. Hundreds of people were quietly milling about in the great circular space, while the hemisphere, its circumference pierced by many windows, floated above them. The floor was inlaid with a pattern that sprung from the center in beams fragmented into lozenges. The crowd massed in irregular groups on top of this pinwheel grid, punctuating it as trees do a flat landscape. Polly stood just inside the door a few minutes, accustoming her eyes to the light, watching the crowd shift, and wondering where to go. Then, as though it were the sea parting, the crowd, with no evident purpose, moved away to either side, leaving a clear path to the heart of the pinwheel; and there, Polly beheld three men of astonishing height in long red robes, the middle one with his back turned toward her, the other two facing away to the left and the right.”

 

   Walker’s world is a world of mystery, castles, architectural wonders, secrets, changelings, doubles, madness, terrorism, and death—in short, as she herself prefers to characterize this work, she is writing in the tradition of Gothic fiction, horrible and terrifying in its revelations. If her writing style outshines even her inventiveness of story, these two work in tandem to create themes that for some may be even more overwhelming. For Walker’s world is also one of eternal change, constant alteration where humans and landscape morph into one another and, in so doing, transform experience into a series of encounters dangerous for those who prefer tranquil stasis. Just as the characters change into goblets, roses, and sculptures, so too do her sentences arch each over the next, reforming the text as it moves forward until we can no longer recognize a single “truth,” which is, obviously, the very nature of all great art.

     After her multitude of adventures, real and imagined, Polly discovers that fact once again as she attends a play in Paris, a melodrama clearly intended for popular audiences. The plot of the story and the dramatic flourishes of its actors—the drama parallels what Polly knows to be the “true” story of the imprisoned princess who has now disappeared—convince her that she is observing the princess and her lover Ganymede themselves. She rushes backstage only to discover a forty-year-old tragédienne, sponging “a grimy veil of moisture from her ripe cleavage.” Yes, we suddenly realize, art is a terrorist act!

       It is fascinating to read this great text of transformation, as I did, in late 2006-early 2007, in a time when we are asked by our government to be on the lookout for possible terrorists and their activities, when a large city like Boston can come to near standstill on account of a few light boards strategically placed to advertise a television cartoon series. Walker’s 19th century British Secret Agents ultimately destroyed their enemies only to realize their enemies had themselves been deluded; neither side knew the “truth.” As The Secret Service reveals, perhaps, that truth, in the minute foreignness of our memories, can only exist as a forgotten dream. 

 

Los Angeles, February 3, 2007

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 8 (March-May 2007).

Reprinted in My Year 2006: Serving (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009).

J. D. Salinger | The Catcher in the Rye / 1951 || J. D. Salinger | Nine Stories / 1953 || Vladimir Nabokov | Lolita / 1955 || James Purdy | Malcolm / 1959

three children of the fifties: holden, lolita, malcolm

by Douglas Messerli

 

J. D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Little Brown, 1951)

J. D. Salinger Nine Stories (Boston: Little Brown, 1953)

Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1955)

James Purdy Malcolm (New York: Farrar, Straus & Company, 1959)

 

It’s notable, I believe, that the three major characters of some of the most interesting 1950s American fictions are all children, and that their names, indeed, represent significant signposts—The Catcher in the Rye appearing in 1951, Lolita appearing in 1955 and Malcolm published in 1959—of American writing in general. Although these three have many characteristics that separate them from each other, it is the similarities which ultimately define them. These three adolescents are, in most respects, still innocents. Although Holden Caulfield, for example, certainly talks a tough line, claiming complete knowledge on all sorts of subjects sexual and sociological, his major failure is that he is and will continue to be an eternal child. Because of his childlike disappointment with both society and individuals he sees everyone and everything as a “crumby” and “phony,” and accordingly feels completely alienated from the world at large. He may wish to protect other young people from the disillusionment he has undergone—to become a “catcher in the rye”—but he will clearly never complete school or even help to change the society which has so disenchanted him because he cannot participate in it sufficiently to affect his own maturation and transformation into an adult. Like so many American adolescent men, he is doomed to feel a romanticized separation; and we can imagine him, if he survives, years later, as he sits spinning his tales of frustration to other such child-men in some dimly lit bar with all eyes glued to the television presentation of their favorite childhood sports.

     Lolita, we discover, is more sexually experienced than she pretends. But one has to recognize her encounter with young Charlie in Camp Q as the sexual grappling of a young teenage girl as opposed to the perverted if comical “flutters and probes” of Humbert Humbert, the sexed-starved adult. Lolita is precocious and even appears to have significant sexual awareness, but as many parents know, that is the self-recognized power of girls on the verge of becoming women. I recall my friend Charles Bernstein bemoaning the fact that his teenage daughter, Emma, dressed daily in outfits that at one time our ancestors might have described as undergarments. “We fear for her as she travels the various subways on her way to school. She doesn’t understand that what she sees as provocative in a good sense, might provoke behavior in others that she would find undesirable—and dangerous.” Performer and poet Fiona Templeton, responded that she too, at the same age, had dressed quite outrageously. “It’s the existence of their innocence that allows the young to take outrageous chances.” So too, I suggest, must we comprehend Lolita’s seeming sexual advances. She may look like an experienced seducer to Humbert, but her mind is still trapped in the world of comic books and “lurid movie magazines.”

 

    Malcolm, of James Purdy’s lesser-known novel, has so little sense of self and awareness that it is almost pointless to describe him as an innocent. Like a cocoon enveloped in its protective silkiness, Malcolm is in a state of waiting, the “boy on the bench,” whose sexual force lies outside, in the presence of Mr. Cox (pun intended). And it is only when Cox sends the boy on his way through the maze of psycho-sexual adult encounters that he discovers anything outside himself. Of all three characters, Malcolm is the most extreme, beyond innocence because there is so little awareness of anything else. Unlike Holden, Malcolm can feel little disappointment, only a vague sense of loss from his father’s disappearance. Nearly narcoleptic, he attends to new “friends,” Estel Blanc, Kermit, Laureen, Mr. and Madame Girard, Eliosa and George Leeds, and others with a kind a vague comprehension, often falling to sleep in the midst of their “lessons.”

     Innocence, accordingly, is the driving force that binds these three, and which makes them so attractive to adults. And it is, of course, that very quality, along with the beauty of their youth, that makes them so appealing to the predators they encounter along their paths. We can almost forgive Holden’s grandiose sense of being betrayed when he recounts, as he does late in the novel (in an admission I had forgotten from reading the book as a young man, at almost the same age as Holden) that the sexual advances of his former school teacher Mr. Antolini are not the first he has encountered. “When something perverty like that happens, I start sweating like a bastard. That kind of stuff’s happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid. I can’t stand it.”

    Although we know that Holden is given to some exaggeration, the fact that he has encountered such sexual advances several times before is more than shocking. The world these three novels present of the 1950s is far from the presentation of the mythical clean-cut and tightly-knit nuclear family so often represented as the generational image. We need hardly even speak of Lolita, for her story is infamous. Even if we see her, as Nabokov has himself, tongue-in-cheekly suggested, as a picture of a young American debauching old Europe,” it is obvious that Lolita is an abused child. Humbert Humbert himself admits his guilt for having stolen Lolita’s youth and—through her counter-reactions against him—perhaps even her life. As Humbert recalls from standing on a hill and hearing transparent sounds from a small village:

 

        What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and

        so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and

        minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could

        hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter,

        or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too

        far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood

        listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of

        separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I

        knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side,

        but the absence of her voice from that concord.

 

     As Fiona Templeton suggested, perhaps the truly innocent are sometimes protected by their own lack of recognition of evil. That is certainly what protects Malcolm from the various abuses he undergoes. Madame Girard wants Malcolm, not so much as a sexual object, but as a social one, a member of her traveling entourage of self-congratulators. Mr. Girard wants him as a son. Recognizing that such a total innocent can offer him, in his world of “fag décor,” very little, the undertaker Estel Blanc demands that the boy visit him when he becomes older. Although Malcolm shares beds with various black jazz performers in George and Eliosa’s house, no overt sexual action seems to take place. No, Malcolm’s predator is of his own age, “a contemporary” as James Purdy puts it, a kind praying mantis who through her intense demand of sex and the never-ending quantities of alcohol she provides sucks the very life from him. Malcolm is most certainly abused, but not by those of an older generation, simply by one more experienced.

     All three of these books of the 1950s, accordingly, are very much centered on issues of innocence and experience. But they also reveal something much deeper: the inherently destructive forces behind our collective desire for that innocence. These three children, all products of the baby boom of the heady postwar years, are destroyed by the very forces from which their parents sought to protect them—or at least sought through their children to protect American culture from: disillusionment, debauchery, violent death—you know, all those things which “The Greatest Generation” (as Tom Brokow has dubbed them) saw themselves as fighting against. Ironically, of course, the very isolation in which they enwrapped their families, the very lies and myths they told their children and themselves in order to protect, and the very material objects they heaped upon themselves and families to better their world created the situations of children such as these three, who are unable to grow, to act, to think, even to experience things in the world around. Americans love the idea of being innocent, but as Blake and numerous authors have made clear, innocence is often the most dangerous of forces. As early as 1850, a century before Lolita, Charles Dickens was amused and a bit disgusted by the American riposte: “Well, we’re still a young nation.” There comes a time when one has to recognize that childhood is over, Dickens suggests. I think Graham Greene expressed it best in connection with his novel The Quiet American: “You can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.” If innocence has, in part, protected these children, it has also done them in, destroyed them in the end. 

      If one can see Holden as an aged child-man, one can just as easily imagine him, like another Salinger figure, Seymour Glass, on the seashore with a young girl who reminds him of his beloved sister, before going indoors to shoot a bullet through his head. Mrs. Richard Schiller, nee Dolores Haze—better known to readers as Lolita—escapes the clutches of Humbert only to face what promises be a dreary marriage with a beer-guzzling inarticulate “lamb”: “arctic blue eyes, black hair, ruddy cheeks, unshaven chin.” Nabokov, perhaps out of pity, kills her off. She dies in childbirth, it is reported, long before the supposed publication of Humbert’s recounting of their life, published purportedly in “the first years of 2000 A.D.”  Of Malcolm—a figure at the end of this decade, who, as I have pointed out, has been so encapsulated in the protective shell of childhood that he has nothing about which to be disillusioned and so little sense of existence that he literally sleepwalks through his life—one can question whether or not he really existed; both coroner and undertaker claim no one was buried in his casket. Purdy seems to suggest that innocence so severe actually consumes the individual. Whatever the case, what these three children represented of their generation’s American dreams evaporated before they had a chance to take root.

 

Los Angeles, August-September 2004

Reprinted from The New Review of Literature, II, no. 2 (April 2005).