« Any fool can write a novel. It takes real genius to sell it. »
With le Plouc de Paris finished, I spent a few months looking at the system writers must infiltrate to get their work into public consciousness, flogging stories on various sites, getting I’m not sure really where – my head above water at least. The system is stacked against the independent, the far flung, the dissident. We know what kind of literature they want, they practically scream it from every agent’s and publisher’s page. Engaged in one of America’s regularly occurring paroxyms of virtue, the writing they flog is accessible, first person, aimed at revealing the petite cruelties of society, the badness of fill in the blank. How the new Joyce, Lezama Lima, Erica Jong, the new Pynchon or Baudelaire, Rikki Ducornet, Poe or Nin are going to make their way through these thickets is anybody’s guess but they’re out there on the horizon, not willfully out of touch, a travesty waiting to happen. All great writers are scandals of one sort or another.
(The righteousness of the administrators is performative only. The Black Lives Matter sticker at the top of their webpage dares you to doubt their sincerity. In fact, the whole effort seems to be a way of deflecting criticism, of keeping questions such as, Who appointed you ? off the table. The Inquisition continues and this being America, we can expect well-paid memoirs by our dear Executioners a few years down the road.)
Some might recognize the quote at the head. Who said it ? J.G. Ballard among others, and the J.G. stands for James Graham, so you could say my seat in the Great Meeting Hall is already taken. (A madly successful English playwright, a regular on TV and in the Guardian, goes by the name, too.) Should I change mine to Graham James for publishing purposes ?
Empire of the Sun is Ballard’s best known work in the States, Spielburg having sealed the deal with his film. It’s an account of Ballard’s youth in Shanghai in the years before World War Two, when American troops were stationed in mainland China in one of our endless military adventures aimed to keep the peace – or at least keep our spoon in the soup, stirring with patriotic fervor. In a curious historico-personal anomaly, I grew up on stories about the same city in the same epoch long before I’d ever heard of JGB. My mother’s family was stationed there. They were marines, a family that enjoyed gracious living (riding clubs and Chinese servants) in a country in the run-up to revolution. They got on the last train out before the Japanese took over. My mother was incurably nostalgic about the period, although the stories she told were always fragments, lost instants, photos on the wall that proved she had in fact once really lived. Unlike Ballard, she left no memoir behind. Crazy ladies tend not to, high-strung Southern ladies especially. The figure of the four star General-father loomed, enforcing silence. He ran an orderly household, except for his many transgressions, which he demanded no one ever mention. I inherited his taste for transgression but can’t abide the silence.
Let’s not leave it there. The figure conjured by the word mother is so rich, inspiring, overwhelming and yes, appalling that one ends up on a memory binge, face to face with a stoic figure who will never reveal her secrets. Too personal a tale, she says. Your choice, we reply. We don’t have to adopt her attitude. If we did, we end up in the literary terrain where the unspoken rears its head : comedy. Tragedy is public, encountered and acknowledged in the great square we cross seven times a day. The tragedy that is not revealed, not worked out publicly but because of middle-class shame, is hidden away, becomes, eventually and inevitably, comedy. A masterpiece if you’re lucky, a joke between friends if not. The Lotus-Eaters who inhabit America’s suburbs find their head in a yoke and get out, if they can. To know how to free yourself is nothing, the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom. André Gide. Well put. Those who can’t figure out what to do with their freedom become comedic relief on the Variety Show of Life.
Let’s not leave it exactly there either.
Back in the day, in the early day or in the long gone by if you prefer, two serious Czech jokers were living on the Lower East Side. They too had escaped on the last train, this one out of Prague after ’68 when the Soviet tanks rolled in. They arrived in New York, where they set about reinventing themselves, sharing a Lower East Side flat and going out to CB’s, where we occasionally rubbed elbows or in my case, stares. I was a kid out on a lark, they’d already been through several lifetimes of experience before age 40. Sharp readers have already sussed that I’m talking about Havel and Forman, who both went on to glory in their professions. They were poor, I was poor, too poor to speak Czech poorly, we was all poor together. Beer was cheap. They shared a flat with just enough extra flour for one of them to afford a therapist. Why tell this story here ? Hang on. Forman went to therapy while Havel suffered in silence. Finally, he broke. Look, Havel said, I can’t take it anymore. I haven’t heard from my mother in months. I’m very worried. Our relationship was very complex and… Forman interjected, What can I do about it ? Well, Havel replied, you go to a therapist. Is he any good ? Excellent, Forman said. I’m really making progress. OK, then, help me. I need to talk to somebody about my mother but can’t afford a shrink. You can. Why don’t you tell him about my mother ? You know, halfway through your session. See what he says. He’s a professional. I’ll tell you everything and you pass it along. Forman thought it was a crazy idea but too quixotic to pass up. The two men discussed Havel’s mother for the first time and halfway through his next session, Forman pivoted, mid-phrase, to a discussion of his – Havel’s – mother. The therapist was completely bolloxed. Forman had never mentioned his mother before. He came, from all appearances, from a sane, bourgeois family. This went on for weeks, the therapist becoming more and more distraught, unable, both professionally and personally, to juggle these two simultaneous portraits of a man, unable to conquer the suspicion of a riddle impossible to solve. The therapist decided he couldn’t take it any more, that these two parallel but widely divergent accounts, in which Havel tore the cover off Forman’s modest, efficient homemaker, to reveal a woman devoured by her upbringing and the jealousies unleashed by her marriage, was completely insane and likely fictive. Forman was making it all up, wasn’t he ? What sort of sadist was he ? the doctor wanted to know. Was he toying with the shrink or was it a vicious experiment to prove that psychological opposites attract and can even coalesce in a single human being ? Forman persisted. He wanted to help his friend, who suffered greatly from being out of touch with his distraught mother. Was this a sign of stunted development, of some sort of latent, now-exploding neurosis or was he simply suffering as a human being suffers ? Finally, halfway through what turned out to be their last session, the therapist jumped up and pointing at the door, ordered Forman out. It’s all a sham ! he yelled. You’re lieing to me ! and he was half correct. Even so, Forman was able to pass on some of what the therapist had said as he tried to make sense of the Mystery Mother. Inevitably, we know a lot more about Vaclav Havel and Milos Forman than we do about her.
In fact, the story encapsulates one of the quandaries a writer faces, one crazy enough to imagine he can triumph over Zeno’s paradox and get to the finish line of a novel. The question is not the story but the material, the underlying tension, the gravitas or duende. What makes a book move ? Is it what the writer tells you or what he doesn’t ? Human beings in complex societies are such performative animals, that a reader wades through pages for a chance to pull back the screen of our virtues. In this case, the therapist is the dupe, he who must make sense. He has been presented with one sort of material, one direction, only to discover that there was a wholly different story, one that had little to do with everything his patient had been telling him for months. In fact, a mature-for-his-years adult coping with the anxieties of exile was being driven mad by his relation to a far away mother, one he’d never mentioned before. No wonder the poor pysch stormed out of the room.
Can we bring charges of artistic negligence against a novel that has no mother, no generative figure, even if it has to kill her off à la Lolita ? Plouc has no wise mothers, no wise-cracking, preggar ladies, by choice or by chance, in either case bearers of tidings that, despite man’s innate pessimism, life goes on. It instead tells a Paris tale of patriots and expats, contemporary loners each on their own ledge. It too is headed for the silver screen, someday, after I croak.
That seems tangent enough to start, a decent way to say that Riffs is back to tearing off your ear on an almost regular basis. We’re getting closer to next year’s elections so expect pieces covering France’s current state of mind, as I read it, plus the writer’s life and freelance criticism of just about anything at all.
°
We close in on some big numbers in the subscription division of this mega-journo , so I’d like to just-short-of-grovel readers to spread the word. Keep your wallets in a safe place, unless you can’t control yourselves but tell others he’s over there and they can sign up for free. 30 a year gets you the main courses and the special sauce, too.
Some recent stories elsewhere :
Counterpunch : https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/22/a-slow-motion-striptease-in-france/ Fiction : https://thebaffler.com/stories/magus-of-the-ariege-graham
https://www.lafolia.com/bad-reputation/
And a long essay whose germinative notes were right here on Riffs https://kgbbarlit.com/ (june issue)
Performance Anxiety
One of the main editors at Random House objected to me bringing up a few early "brushes with fame." I told him they weren't famous when we had our brushes. That was the last I heard from him. I also talked about plenty of brushes with nobodies. In fact the whole book was about brushes with nobodies, but I guess he thought I was trying to capitalize on having known famous people before they were famous. I wasn't. I don't know what the hell he thought. And frankly, my dear.
A great article with some good points. Graham James it’s a fine name for you to write your novel under.