Jane Leavy | The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood / 2010

peter pan

by Douglas Messerli

Jane Leavy The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood (New York: HarperCollins, 2010)

My friends and even those who know me only slightly would all be surprised, I think, to know that I read Jane Leavy’s fascinating biography of Mickey Mantle, The Last Boy. I am quite obviously disinterested in most sports, and when I do watch such events, it is usually the three s’s, swimming, skating, and skiing. The only group sport I can endure is another sport that begins with an “s”, soccer! In fact, much to the amusement and, perhaps the embarrassment of my three nephews, I do not even know the names of most American football, basketball, and baseball teams. I often visit sports bars to write, since I can completely tune out the several televisions broadcasting events, one of those bars being Mickey Mantle's Restaurant and Sports Bar on Central Park South in New York City, where I sat reading and writing before a meeting with author Richard Kalich one afternoon.

      It is rather odd, therefore—or completely predictable—that I grew up in a family utterly immersed in just to what I am oblivious of. My father began his career as a womens’ basketball coach, and early on coached football as well. My brother David, his second son, went on to become the football and golf coach for the school district for which my father served as superintendent and where I grew up. His three sons were all players of football and basketball there, and my youngest nephew has gone on to study sport’s therapy, after finishing a B.A. in business.

     I was steeped in sports, made to participate in Little League baseball each summer—where I bleakly cowered in right field, terrified a ball might come my way. I was also strongly encouraged to, and obediently did play on the second string football team. I dreaded each practice session. During the games I sat on the bench, playing, to my recollection, only in one game.

     By my Junior year of high school, I was freed from that indenturement, as I was taken on as the “mascot,” which meant I had to attend all sports events—basketball, baseball, football, wrestling, even field and track—cleaning up the locker room and, mostly, ogling the beautiful boy’s bodies. Herewith I reveal a long-kept secret: at the end of the year, I, the most disinterested of sports enthusiasts in the city, received a letter sweater! The irony of it haunts me still today, and I saved that sweater for years after it ceased to fit my expanding body until my companion Howard insisted we remove it from our closet.

     Growing up in the 1950s, accordingly, there was no way that I could not have heard of Mickey Mantle, and for one glorious summer, even I was in sync with my peers, collecting baseball cards, with the especial hope to open a pack of gum—a substance I did not enjoy and seldom chewed—to find a Mickey Mantle card—or, at least, to be able to trade one. My failure to acquire was thoroughly explained in Leavy's book. I believe my brother succeeded where I did not, but, then, he was the greatest sports lover I knew, and his sons continue in that tradition, announcing in Facebook message after message: “Go Hawks!”,  “Go Pirates!”, “Go”—whatever their favorite team is of the week.

     It must of have been as early as the summer of 1955 or 1956, the glorious years of the Mick’s pinnacle that I dropped the baseball cards for the Burns-Mantle Theater books, listing the names of plays, authors, dates, directors, and choreographers with the same intensity sports lovers did homeruns, runs batted in, and other such trivia. A year later I had added an addiction to film through seeing my second Hitchcock movie. I had no more time for sports, despite my father’s insistence that I persevere in playing them.

     For all that, I found Jane Leavy’s personally sympathetic and yet substantially critical perspective of Mantle—no relationship to Burns—and his personal life a truly joyful read, for which I was happy to put away old grievances to regain a vision of what those golden days meant to the culture as a whole.

     And as Leavy makes clear, they were days of cultural innocence. It was, as she puts it, the "cusp of a radical change":

 

          Babe Ruth was three years dead; DiMaggio was taking his curtain call. His

          successor, Mickey Mantle, the first telegenic star of the new broadcast age,

          was installed in right field. Mantle's charismatic foil, Willie Mays, was playing

          center field for baseball's first all-black outfield.

              Born the same year to fathers who rolled baseballs across the floor to baby

         boys who could not yet walk, they were in their major league infancy. What the

         65,000 paying customers at Yankee Stadium saw that afternoon were two works

         in progress whose unlimited potential would fuel unending debate. They would

         improve each other and everyone who played with them and against them.

 

     Added to Mantle's all-American grinning face, topped by blond locks, a personality that generally was friendly to his fans, and you had a hero in the making. And for many, as Leavy recounts, Mantle was like no other. No matter who you might think is the best all-time ballplayer, Mantle has always to be in the running, and Leavy, employing encyclopedic data, convinces that it has to be Mantle!

     First of all, there was his amazing ability not just to hit the ball out the park, but way out of the park, as if the ball had been launched into space rather than merely "hit" by some bat. Early in the book the author describes, in intense detail, the happenings of "One Big Day," April 17, 1953, when Mantle hit the ball out of Washington, D.C.'s Griffith Stadium, nicking the Bohemian Beer sign at the stadium's top:

 

           The ball left his bat traveling at an estimated speed of 110 miles per hour. Clark

           Griffith, the namesake and grandson of the Senators' owner, was sitting in the

           family box behind the third base dugout, having cut class at Sidwell Friends 

           School for an afternoon of baseball. "It went up and got caught in the jet 

           stream," he said, "It took on a life of its own."

                The thwack of contact resounded through the empty stands. The sound 

           would stay in the memory of Roy Clark, the musical son of the Washington 

           square dance bandleader, sitting with his father along the first base line. "It just 

           echoed in that ballpark," Clark said. "Even before it was halfway to its 

           destination, you knew that it was gone. Looked like it was in the air for five 

           minutes."

 

    The Yankee's director of public relations, Arthur E. Patterson, immediately declared "That one's got to be measured," dashing from the stadium to discover the ball had been found by a young Black boy, Donald Dunaway. Leavy clearly reveals that much of the rest of the story of how far the ball had traveled was fiction. Yet, for years it stood in baseball history as Patterson had recounted it.         

     For months Leavy attempted, even with the help of a detective, to track down Dunaway, unable to find him in any source in Washington, D.C. until she went back to the neighborhood, querying people house by house. Miraculously, she found him, and sets the record straight: instead of falling to the backyard of 434 Oakdale Place, as Patterson reported Dunaway to have told him where he found it, Dunaway pointed to a window of a house twenty-five feet closer to the stadium.

     Alan Nathan, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana reasonably estimates that the ball left the bat traveling at 113 miles per hour at an angle of 30 to 31 degrees. Given a wind of 20 miles per hour, less than the highest gusts, it fell from the roof of a nearby house about 512 to 540 feet from home plate, about where Dunaway reported to have found the ball.

     But, of course, that was not the only Mantle home-run hit. Mickey Charles Mantle put 6,392 balls into play, according to Leavy, 536 of them home runs!

     Secondly, there was his ability to hustle, even though for most of his baseball life Mantle was in almost unendurable pain. He could run, and raced round the bases throughout most of his playable career. Leavy charts his numerous injuries which left him, for months and entire seasons, on the bench or in bed.

     Thirdly there was the simple likability of the man. His smile seemed to say it all. "It was a smile, Leavy quotes Tim McCarver, "quite unlike any other, almost a measure of the man." In the club house he was looked up to by one and all, but while DiMaggio presumed he was God, Mantle was shy and affable about it. He was nearly everyone's best friend.

     What Leavy also shows us, however, was Mantle's darker sides, particularly his dissociation with his own family, returning home only on occasions, while he lived most of his life in the locker room or boozing it up in bars, eateries and hotels with teammates like Whitey Ford and, almost always, women. Social diseases were a natural consequence.

     Mantle was obsessed by death, and he presumed that he would never have a long life. And, apparently, he was often as broad-humored and coarsely-spoken as a small-town conventioneer. Hostile to the press, at times in his career he could equally tune out his fans. Generous to a fault, Mantle could also be so caught up in himself that he seemed to have no room for others.

     The author of The Last Boy explains much of these "good boy/bad boy" extremes as having roots in his hardscrabble Oklahoma upbringing and through sexual abuse as a child by both women and men in his family.

     But perhaps the best explanation is one based on a phenomenon that I have written about numerous times in the pages of these cultural memoirs: like so many young and middle-aged men I encounter in the sports bars, Mantle was never truly able to grow up—"He never grew up, and it ruined him," Leavy quotes Mantle's teammate Jerry Coleman.

     Leavy's own enjoyable and painful encounter with the Mick at a time when he was forced to leave baseball for taking on the promotion of an Atlantic City casino, exemplifies nearly everything good and bad about the man, a story she tells in pieces throughout the book so that its revelations become even more powerful as we read. As she stands in the cold of a golf field waiting to interview him, Mantle screams out for someone to give her a coat, rewarding it to her almost as a gallant. Yet later he tries to grope her thigh before collapsing drunkenly into sleep, his head falling upon her lap. The next morning a question she asks about his son's cancer brings tears to Mantle's eyes.

     By book's end we have little choice but to love while   being equally disgusted by this great baseball hero. I don't know if Mantle was "The Last Boy"—although we all know baseball changed again after his generation's passing, I fear many Americans' desires to return to childhood may never disappear—but he was a significantly lost boy in a long string of American Peter Pan's, and the terrible "hook" finally caught him. As an alcoholic whose body had been eaten up by both his vocation and personal behavior, Mantle's death serves as a awful testament to the heroic failure of men unable to face their adult lives. And yet, he was genius behind the bat, and how he could fly around those bases!

 

Los Angeles, February 13/16, 2011

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2011).

 

Charles Bernstein | Recalculating / 2013

the poetics of bewilderment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Bernstein Recalculating (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013)

 

Given the wide range of his publishing, teaching, and performative activities, it is hard to imagine that this year’s collection of poems, Recalculating, is Charles Bernstein’s first full-length collection of new poetry in seven years. Of course, that does not include the wonderful selected poems published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in All the Whiskey in Heaven (2011). Nonetheless, there is something different, almost groundbreaking, about a work which, through its title, admits of a “change of direction” resulting from a wrong or mistaken turn.

 

     The “turn” for Bernstein is nearly everything: the tragic death of his daughter, Emma, old age (or, at least, the recognition that one is growing older), and the not-so-simple vicissitudes that define themselves in maturity. And this is, accordingly, a darker, mature work—not that anyone could possibly describe Bernstein’s work to be without seriousness of purpose before this. Some might argue that Bernstein has, from the very start, written in a mature voice, as if he had almost been born as an older man. But there was a kind of brightness—despite the darkness sometimes of the subject matter—in early works such as “Sentences My Father Used” or “Controlling Interests,” a lightness of method in his “clumsy, clumpsy” approach to language. As Bernstein admits, time and again, in this new work—something I don’t think he would have claimed in his other works—he seeks “not to remember,” (“I write to forget”) and, as he brilliantly expresses it through a variation of Baudelaire’s “Enivrez-vous,” a desire to remain drunk (even if one may also be drunk on poetry or virtue), or as he expresses it in the little poem “Later”:

 

                           Wake me when the movie’s over

                           Let me sleep till then

                           Wake me when I care no longer

                           To ever get sober again

 

This kind of darkened vision appears over and over in Recalculating, as, in often heart-breaking admissions, this professor of poetry (and Bernstein, more than anyone I know might be described throughout his life as one who professed his passion for poetry) questions his own limitations, his own knowledge:

 

                           Each day I know less than the day before. People say that you

                           learn something from such experiences [presumably Emma’s death];

                           but I don’t want that knowledge and for me there are no

                           fruits to these experiences, only ashes. I can’t and don’t want

                           to “heal”; perhaps, though, go on in the full force of my dys-

                           abilities, coexisting with a brokenness that cannot be accom-

                           modated, in the dark. (“Recalculating”)

 

Or, as he quotes Wilde in “The Truth in Pudding”:

 

                           But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul

                           in its progress from darkness to darkness.

 

     It is not that Bernstein has abandoned his older ideas; indeed, this poet has always sought out what he describes as a “poetics of bewilderment” (“How Empty Is My Bread Pudding”). And his push toward fragmentation in the form of “disjunction, ellipsis, constellation” (“The Truth In Pudding”) would have been equally at home in his early book of poetics Content’s Dream, where he argued for a language that moves toward denseness and opacity in order to “actually map the fullness of thought and its movement.”

       Yet, we also recognize that something stylistically different in occurring in this most recent work. Bernstein has often in the past combined what might call “poetics” with “poetry,” refusing to distinguish between the two, the one being what the poet creates in writing his “poems,” but the major works of Recalculating take that even further, combining in five larger works—“The Truth in Pudding,” “How Empty Is My Bread Pudding,” “Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums, & Implausibly Deniable Links,” “Unready, Unwilling, Unable,” and “Recalculating,” what might be described as a combination of diary-like comments, aphorisms in the manner of Stein and Wilde, poetic quotations, and personal revelations. Strangely, these multi-genre works seem to be the most representative in this volume of Bernstein’s thinking, as he winds his car of the mind through the twisted streets of his thinking, braking, even stopping momentarily to move forward again with gusto. The result not only defines what the poet means by “recalculating,” but represents what he clearly perceives as his winding journey through life, moving on through “disjunction, ellipsis, constellation,” and, perhaps, most importantly, a now flawed memory.

      If Bernstein argues that he wants to forget, he is also desperate to remember, to bring all the assimilated (and even his unassimilated) past into a new future. This poet has often “recreated” the works of other poets, but in this volume we note that Bernstein is, at times, almost repeating the structure of one of my earlier books, After, rewriting, reinterpreting, and remaking poems by figures as various as Baudelaire, Pessoa, Leevi Lehto, Osip Mandelstam, Sylvia Plath, Frost, Régis Bonvicino, Wallace Stevens, Cole Porter (via Chaucer), Walt Whitman, Paul Celan, Velimir Khlebnikov, Paolo Leminski, Juão Cabral de Melo Neto, Victor Hugo, Guillaume Apollinaire, William Wordsworth, Nerval, and even me (a work that certainly captures the sense of the poem on which it was based). Some of these are among the strongest works in this volume, particularly the Baudelaire, Hugo, and Apollinaire imitations; but all are interesting in that they reveal a great postmodern poet (Bernstein’s definition of “Postmodernism”: modernism with a deep sense of guilt) exploring international poets of the past and present.

       In “The Jew,” dedicated to Jerome Rothenberg, and certainly among the best of works of this volume, Bernstein takes on voices of legendary rabbis, using the often convoluted and sometimes inverted logic of the Talmud to make another “turn” in the voyage, often toppling many seemingly logical propositions. Even more tellingly, the poet, at points, returns to his own past poetry, toting up the most frequent word choices in his earlier poetry collection Girly Man, with its satiric title-poem that points to then-California governor and movie-actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and creating a poem through the last words of his early masterwork “Sentences My Father Used.” Along with homages to fellow friends and poets, this collection can be seen—although certainly not exclusively—as a kind of self-reflective, meditative map of Bernstein’s life, a true “recalculating” of what the voyage to date has meant, and where he might be going in the future. And, in that sense, despite the usual humor and high-jinx of all of Bernstein’s wonderful poetic explorations, it is a “darker” book.

     I say that, obviously, with some distress; it is always a bit startling when the total optimism of one’s youth meets up with “Charon’s Boat” (the title of one of Bernstein’s poems).  Or as he expresses the difference in “Today Is the Last Day of Your Life 'til Now”: “I was the luckiest father in the world / until I turned unluckiest.”

     If things take a turn into a darker road, more frightening for both poet and his readers—I say this as a long-optimistic poet whose most recent book itself is titled Dark—these poems also continue a long trip begun as early as the poem “Long Trails of Cars Returning from the Beach,” of 1978, in which the traveling poet also gets ensnarled in traffic, unable to move forward. And its first Whitman-cum-Ginsberg inspired lines “I saw the power / of the word in / legend,” almost mirrors Bernstein’s somewhat darker position today: “The poem is a constant transformation of itself.”

      The works of Recalculating brilliantly reveal just that realization as they turn in on themselves and the sources behind the originals from which these works have risen like phoenixes to express a possible new present. Like a naughty schoolboy, Bernstein scrawls across one of his pages “I will not write imitative poetry” 16 times, and despite his use of numerous pre-existent sources, he lives up to his promise.

 

Los Angeles, August 28, 2013

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (August 2013).

César Aira | The Literary Conference / 2010

appropriations

by Douglas Messerli

 

César Aira The Literary Conference, trans. from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New York: New Directions / Pearls, 2010

 

Argentinian writer César Aira’s The Literary Conference is a tale about writing, about the forms a writer uses and the way he borrows from the world around him in order to create. And in that sense this short fiction is also a vast metaphor for the process that Aira himself employs in order to create the more than sixty books he has published over the past decades.

 

    On the surface, at least, Aira’s work is a literary disaster: in a mish-mash of genres including the book’s early adventure, rags-to-riches tale, and legend of the “The Marcuto Line”—a vast cable that inexplicably connects to a pirate treasure buried deep in the ocean, Aira spins an out-of-control tale of pop-fiction with postmodern literary aspirations.

     Seemingly by accident, the “hero” of our tale, also named César, discovers the secret of the “line,” retrieving the treasure and reaping a huge fortune. Although he promises to reveal how he had accomplished later in his story, he never does so—at least in any direct method of story-telling. The remainder of the tale blends science fiction, a kind of vampire story, a thoroughly hackneyed piece of drama, and a satire on the literary establishment, while employing the narrative jumps, leaps of logic, and sometimes absurdly romanticized language of South American television soap operas. In short, The Literary Conference, as the author admits, has little coherence, moving forward at breakneck pace with little logic of plot or character. Figures—such as César’s former lover, Amelina—are mentioned, dropped, and reappear briefly again before disappearing totally from the narrative. The great Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes—whom our now wealthy hero hopes to clone in order to create an army of literary thinkers through which he can control the world—makes only a brief appearance, speaking words of congratulations to César that even he does appear to hear or recall:

 

                      The hall had a bad echo. Everybody was shouting and nobody could

                      hear anybody else. I accepted the congratulations with the gracious-

                      ness of a perfect idiot. I watched lips move and smiles appear,

                      sometimes I moved my lips, too, and drank, and smiled again; my

                      face was hurting from holding that grimace for so long. That was

                      even how I received Carlos Fuentes’s words.

 

The only time Fuentes again appears is as a blur in the back of his Mercedes Benz as he rushes to the airport to escape the Venezuelan city of Mérida where the conference has been held.

     The only character who is given any dimension, is a beautiful young scholar Nelly, a friend of Amelina, who dances with our aging hero for a night and helps him save the city from a force of gigantic blue worms through a coup de théâtre worthy of comic-book storytelling. It seems that César’s plot to steal, through a tiny wasp-like drone, a pinch of Fuentes’s DNA has gone awry, scooping up instead a miniscule dot of the author’s bright-blue tie, which the cloning machine has reproduced into the endless army of silk worms (worms literally made of silk). Instead of obtaining world domination, César saves the day by positing a huge exoscope (inexplicably a prop in his play performed at the conference) between the worms and the sun in order to burn his own creation, as if burning his own book.

     The clue to this concatenation of literary methodologies—precisely the kinds subjects that are at the heart of most academic literary conferences—is what the author admits in the mid-point of his book: he is a kind of literary vampire:

 

                     Vampirism is the key to my relationships with others, the only

                     mechanism that allows me to interact. Of course, this is a metaphor.

                     Vampires, as such, do not exist, they are merely a hook on which to

                     hang all manner of shameful parasitism that need metaphor to come

                     to terms with themselves. The shape that metaphor takes in me is

                     special, as I said. What I need—which I suck from the other—is

                     neither money, nor security, nor admiration, nor, in professional

                     terms, subject matter or stories. It is style.

 

     By style, Avila clearly does not me their linguistic style, but rather the essence of his victim’s being, the thing that makes each of us special. The writer, at least this writer so he claims sucks that “essence” from each figure he meets before his “victim” dries up, wilts and becomes vacant, whereupon he moves on the next individual and the next.

     Of course, since he is speaking of style and metaphor, so too does César derive his plots and characters in this fiction from others, creating a cacophony of only slightly interconnected texts that openly reveal his desperate need—any fiction writer’s need—to keep moving forward as his thoughts rush on and on through his creation, without turning back.

     Aira, in other words, uses a mad appropriation of nearly discontinuous narrative to reveal both how a fiction writer creates and the dangers that lie within such an unreflective mode. In a sense, he has put his own fiction into a kind of bi-polar state of mind, with dramatic highs and depths of mediocrity (such as his self-admittedly dramatic farce concerning a three-way affair between Adam and Eve) which stand in as metaphors of the process of fiction writing.

     As Aira portrays himself and others like such as Fuentes—who in some of his own works has combined politics, science fiction, surrealist passages and other genres—the very thing which often delights readers sometimes empties the world for its creator, who, a bit like an ouroboros, eats away his own existence in attending to his tale. Fiction, for Aira, appears to be an appropriation of life itself which can bring real life into focus or send it off into frightening fantasy which threatens our actual existence. His The Literary Conference does both, sometimes in the very same instant.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2010

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (June 2010).

Alain Robbe-Grillet | The Erasers / 1964

murderer in the dark

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alain Robbe-Grillet Les Gommes, translated from the French by Richard Howard as The Erasers (New York: Grove Press, 1964)

 

If Robbe-Grillet’s 1953 fiction, The Erasers, is a kind of metaphysical novel posing as a detective tale, it is also a dark comedy about the absurdity of trying to comprehend and intercede in the forces of human destiny.

     As the novel opens a professor of economics, Daniel Dupont, has been shot by an intruder in his home. But the would-be murderer, Garinati, has failed in his attempt to murder Dupont, and the wound is superficial, producing only a few drops of blood.

     Dupont, however, is certain that if it is discovered that he has survived the murder-attempt the murderer may return to kill him, and accordingly, he arranges with a local doctor, Juard, to be declared dead. Dupont, meanwhile, hides in the Doctor’s clinic until he can retrieve an important document he has left behind before he escapes into anonymity.

      A new detective Wallas, on temporary assignment while he proves his prowess, is assigned to the case, but from almost the moment he enters the strange neighborhood where the murder has supposedly occurred, he discovers not only a confusing landscape in which he finds himself constantly lost, but begins to uncover details so absurdly intertwined and labyrinthine that he is thwarted at nearly every turn.

      He feels, moreover, a certain strange recognition of the place, and senses that he visited the location as a child with his mother. That vague feeling of recognition, despite his inability to easily find his way about, leads, in turn, to a feeling of lethargy. As he goes about his job, beginning with an interview with Dupont’s strange housekeeper, to be followed by numerous failures to meet up with Doctor Juard (each time he returns to the clinic, he is told that Juard has just left, and when Juard is found to be in his office, he as quickly escapes the premises), leads to other strange encounters at a stationery store—where he uncovers a postcard picturing Dupont’s house—and at the local post office, where he is mistaken for the man he believes may have murdered Dupont.

      Wallas also perceives that the murder (attempt) may be related to a series of murders that may or may not be the acts of a mysterious group of business men who have determined to murder men at the same hour, night after night.

      Laurent, his superior, moreover, refuses to find any of Wallas’s theories to be creditable. When another man, Marchant, reports to Laurent that he has seen Dupont at the clinic shortly before his death, and has been asked to return to Dupont’s home to retrieve a document—something he refuses to do, fearing for his life—Laurent declares him a mad man.

     Later, when a neighbor suggests that Dupont has been visited by a young man who may be his son, who argued with him about money, Wallas suggests the possibility that Dupont has been murdered by this boy and another man accompanying him. Laurent dismisses both these and other theories, arguing again and again for the simplest of solutions: Dupont has been murdered by a thief.

     By this time, as in Robbe-Grillet’s subsequent fiction, The Voyeur, the reader has grown so confused that he suspects Wallas himself. And when Wallas suddenly remembers that the home his mother visited with him in tow years before was Dupont’s house, we can only wonder if the son is not Wallas.

      Strangely enough, when the reader has lost all confidence in Laurent’s ability as a chief of police, he perceives the truth: that Dupont has not been murdered at all, but remains alive in Juard’s clinic! His attempts to notify Wallas fail.

      For by this time, Wallas has returned to the scene of the crime to await in the dark for the possible return of the murderer. Since Marchant has refused to retrieve the manuscript, Dupont has been forced to return to the house himself, and suddenly we foresee the inevitable ending: Wallas does shoot and kill Dupont.

      Meanwhile, another murder has occurred nearby, the murder of a certain Antoine Dupont…. Perhaps Wallas has been correct, after all, in his speculations, but it now no longer matters. He has used up his future life, erasing his and Dupont’s life.

       In short, although Robbe-Grillet has created a profound conundrum of sorts, he also presented us with a kind of boulevard farce played out in a world so confounding that the poor flat-footed detective hasn’t a chance of discovering truth.

       

Los Angeles, July 9, 2008

Reprinted from Reading with My Lips (June 2024).

 

Thomas Bernhard | Woodcutters / 1987

falling trees

by Douglas Messerlli

 

Thomas Bernhard Holzfällen, translated from the German by David McLintock as Woodcutters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987)

 

American writers (and artists), particularly poets, often complain that their communities are viciously divided, and decry the fact that at the center of their art is great deal of vicious commentary, particularly between different literary sensibilities. My reaction to the various attacks from one front or another has always been a simple acceptance of the fact—although I have seldom willfully contributed to these assaults. Why shouldn’t a poet or fiction writer, if she or he is truly committed to art and his perception of what art consists of, feel a sense of affront by those who do not have that same commitment? If art matters, so does the territory; all writing (or art) is necessarily not equal, unless one doesn’t truly care about that art.

 

    In Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 fiction, Holzfällen, moreover, we perceive that the feeling of disgust by some writers for others is not just an US phenomenon, but if we are to take the voice of Bernhard’s narrator as an example, perhaps even more virulently experienced in Austria. And, unless we are somehow involved in that scene, the petty hatreds and disgust (amounting almost to nausea) felt by the central character makes for great fun, as he cattily attacks his fellow dinner partners gathered together in Vienna’s Gentgasse for what the hosts, the detested Auersbergers, have described as “an artistic dinner.” For Bernhard’s Viennese counterparts, some of whom recognized themselves in his satiric attacks, the presentation of their failures, however, was not at all “fun,” one going so far to sue the author and preventing his book from sale.

     There is certainly no question that Bernhard, bearing a close relationship to the narrator, presents a devastating portrait of his fellow artists—writers, musicians, tapestry weavers, dancers, actors, and just plain hangers-on. The drubbing they receive and the recounting of the narrator’s intimate relationships with many of these figures is almost maniacal as he recounts over and over how he came to know each figure, what role they played in his life, and how they ultimately came to be the truly “hated” figures he regurgitates up before us. Bernhard’s book, in short, is precisely as its title suggests—at least in the German—a wood-cutting exercise, Holzfällen suggesting in the original not just the noun “woodcutters,” but the verbal construction of a critical denunciation.

     Bernhard’s narrator, having himself suffered an emotional breakdown and, consequently, spending a period in a mental hospital, has a great deal in common with the author, and the major event of the day of the “artistic dinner” is a graveside ceremony for the narrator’s friend, Joana, upon her having committed suicide at her childhood home in Kilb, is similar in some ways to Bernhard’s own reported suicide in Upper Austria only five years after publishing this fiction. The reader, accordingly, recognizes the narrator’s attacks as highly personal and, at times, nearly hysterical, as the character admits that for years he has gone out of his way to steer clear of his old friends from the 1950s and early 1960s upon his return to Vienna from years abroad. But even if the narrator did not admit to these personal vendettas—which, in fact, lay at the heart of this fiction—the reader would be forced to recognize the subjectivity of the narrator simply by the grammatical structures and intense repetition of his sentences. Each attack on his hosts and their guests, particularly the Austrian Virginia Woolf, Jeannie Billroth, and the Austrian Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein (in my mind, two diametrically opposed figures), Anna Schreker, is repeated over and again in detail, with each foray the narrator adding a bit of new information, that we soon recognize the separated figure sitting, as he tells us dozens and dozens of times in the narrative, in a wing-tip chair, is clearly obsessed with these beings.

     As well he might be, given the fact that as a young man he was pulled into artistic and sexual relationships with nearly all the central players, including his hostess—a woman from a wealthy bourgeois family who uses her money to help buy her and her husband’s way into the cultural scene—he, a composer “in the Webern tradition”—along with the Austrian Virginia Woolf, the Austrian Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein, and the talentless Joana who spent her life transforming her tapestry-maker husband into a world-renown artist who bolts to Mexico just as he reaches the pinnacle of his profession.

     While the narrator may seem utterly ruthless in his attacks, quite viciously recounting the demise of each of these figures, now unable to even tolerate them for their abandonment of whatever they might have had of any talent, he somewhat redeems himself by being as brutally honest about himself, admitting how they each helped mold him into the artist he is today while also attempting, in a Tennessee Williams-like metaphor, to emotionally and spiritually “devour” him, equating it to the way all of Austrian culture grinds down its most talented young artists. The Auersbergers have used him sexually to “help save their marriage,” Jeannie has taken him in as a kind of devotee of her artistic endeavors, Joana has created a relationship with him to help her develop her failed career as a dancer/actress. In order to survive, he proclaims, he has had to abandon them, while they have vilified him to all their acquaintances for that very abandonment, Joana perhaps even through her death expressing her sorrow in her loss of her once dear friend. So while the narrator may seem to be selfishly satisfied with his tale of his friend’s immense failings, he is equally brutal about his own hypocrisies, and praises the talents they once possessed—including Herr Auersberger’s musical abilities, his wife’s singing talents, and even Jeannie’s early devotion to literature before she sold out to the State officials who award stipends and literary prizes, one of which the Austrian Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein has just been recipient.

     At the center of the “artistic dinner” is a third-rate actor playing Eckdal in the Burgtheater’s production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck., who, when he finally arrives well after midnight, shifts the narrative to a comic realization of just the boorish “artistic” conversations against which the narrator has been railing. Most of his commentaries are ridiculous statements of the difficulty of the actor’s life, criticizing nearly everyone—directors, writers, fellow actors and the theater itself, while exalting his own innumerable talents. When Jeannie Billbroth attempts to turn the conversation upon herself, however, at first vaguely, but, as the actor himself puts it, later “tastelessly” posing provocative questions, the actor turns from performing as a simple ham, endlessly recounting tales he has told dozens of times, to a kind of outraged philosopher, lambasting “the Austrian Virginia Woolf” for rude impertinence, lashing out against her obvious attempts to put down anything of value. In short, he voices just the criticisms that the narrator has privately held yet, hypocritically, failed to publicly express. For the aging actor, his desires are for a kind of return to nature—what anyone who has read Austrian fiction realizes is at the very center of that country’s romantic ties to a kind of peasant simplicity—a world of “the forest, the virgin forest, the life of a woodcutter,” perhaps Bernhard’s ironic condemnation of the culture’s (as well as the narrator’s) own self-destructive desires.

     Indeed, Bernhard’s narrator, ultimately, does not come off much better than the devouring dead folk of his memories, as he waits until everyone has left, kissing the forehead of his hostess, and murmuring wishes that he might have heard her sing, while promising another visit—all of his actions and words representing more hypocritical mendacity. Or perhaps they do represent a kind of truth, as he goes racing down the stairs like he were still in his 20s, running away from his current home toward the city, determined to write down everything he has just suffered “at once…now—at once, at once, before it’s too late,” while at the same time admitting that as much as he hates these people and Vienna, he, just like the Burgtheater actor, loves them and the city:

 

                      This is my city and always will be my city, these are my people and

                      Always will be my people….,

 

an admission that almost instructively contradicts his deep hatred of all he has just recounted to us.

     In this sense, finally, Bernhard’s Woodcutters is not just a critical attack; while it is that, it is also an intense dialogue with the narrator’s self over his and his society’s failures, a public airing of his and his compatriot’s laundry, so to speak. And so the fiction is transformed into a kind of loving portrait of a failed world, the world which, in the end, all artists are forced to encounter, endure, and write about: never an easy task.

 

New York City, May 4, 2012

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (May 2012).