Aloysius Nachreiner, First Baby Boomer

admin — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 02:42:29 +0000

ALOYSIUS NACHREINER
By George Leonard

My name is Aloysius Nachreiner.
America’s oldest Baby Boomer, though I wasn’t one.
I spent my whole life in snowy Buffalo, where,
Half-blinded by a snowball at 5, I made boxes in the box factory,
Like some character in that Edgar Lee Masters poem we were forced to read in the Fifties.
While you went to Woodstock I made boxes.
While you, nude, screwed Erica Jong’s readers on Black’s Beach in San Diego,
I made boxes.
While you others fought overseas, created the Internet,
Became the First Woman to do whatever–
Boxes.
But also while you had one child, and divorced,
I married a widow with seven children, had two of our own, raised them all,
Saw her through a crib death and her Alzheimers. Dozens of people call me “Grandfather” and a dozen, “Great-Grandfather.”
Why wasn’t I born at five before midnight, December 31st,
To honor me as the last of my kind?
Five minutes too late and I unwillingly became
The first American born a Baby Boomer
And the last to be named Aloysius.

Author’s Note: Aloysius Nachreiner, born January 1, 1946, 13 days my senior, has become famous as the first Baby Boomer born in America — that is, the first baby born in 1946. He seems a fine, responsible man, but, to judge by his life, hardly the first Baby Boomer — more like the last American born before the Baby Boom changed everything, a life straight out of the Spoon River Anthology. G. Leonard

Charles Calitri and his novel, Father

admin — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:49:29 +0000

Mr. Ernesto L’Arab has asked me to introduce this novel to Italian readers, and to “contribute personal memories of Charles” which illuminate Father.

When Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Angela’s Ashes, died in 2009, it was no surprise that former President Bill Clinton attended his funeral, representing the American nation, as it were. McCourt, a novelist of the Irish American experience, had become a “Living National Treasure,” as the Japanese call their most eminent artists. Yet there is no doubt that the other guest of honor, had he lived, would have been Charles Calitri, a novelist of the Italian American experience. In his sequel to Angela’s Ashes, the memoir Tis, McCourt describes himself writing the first attempts at Angela’s Ashes for “Mr. Calitri,” as the aged McCourt still reverently calls him.

Sadly, Calitri died before seeing the fruits of his teaching in Frank McCourt, and McCourt died just before Calitri’s work was reissued in this volume, or McCourt would surely have been writing this preface. I, as editor of a standard work, The Italian American Heritage: a Companion to Literature and Arts, am here to fill in for Calitri’s better-known student. Calitri was my teacher too.

The book the reader holds seems to have been read carefully by the author of Angela’s Ashes. Father is not simply about Antonio Calitri. In Father, an ethnic American seeking to understand himself, returns in his mind to the very different circumstances of the Old Country. In Angela’s Ashes an ethnic American seeking to understand himself returns in his mind to the very different circumstances of the Old Country. The book could simply have been titled Mother. Both books find an answer in the impact of a long-vanished form of Old World Roman Catholicism on their parents’ lives.

“Il poeta italiano,” Giuseppe Prezzolini wrote of Charles Calitri’s father, Antonio, in his preface to Antonio Calitri’s Canti del Nord-America (1925) “e rimasto in America poeta ed italiano.” (p. 8) Italian readers will discover in the first pages of Father that this is true also of his son, Charles Calitri – even when Charles did not desire it. Raised by a man who had remained both poet and Italian, Charles grew up listening to the cadences of the Italian language, inhaling the fragrances of De Nobili and Parodi cigars, watching his poet father religiously read a page from Dante’s Commedia every night before sleep. “He kept a volume next to his bed,” Charles told me, shaking his head in awe. “Each year he finished it, and returned to the beginning again.”

When I – his student, finishing my own novel downstairs in his home, on his typewriter – asked him once why he had written Father, Charles Calitri looked at me in surprise. “Don’t you feel the need to know where you came from, and what your relationship with it is? How it defines you?”

I did not. I’ll rephrase that: Hell, no. My inheritance from my Russian Jewish mother barely filled out Fiddler on the Roof. My Polish Jewish side led straight back to Auschwitz. To hell with Europe.

Charles Calitri, however, like intellectual Italians and Italian Americans before and since, felt differently. Calitri both loved and felt burdened by a rich inheritance that stretched back through the Renaissance to Dante and to Rome itself. In Father’s opening pages, the narrator’s wife remarks on him gloating over Rome during this, his first trip to Italy. One must remember how new this dramatic subject was. The Italian American creative explosion did not come until the 1970s. In Father, Calitri is one of the very first Italian Americans writing in English to describe an Italian American artist wrestling with the gigantic, inspiring, sometimes suffocating Italian heritage.

Charles Calitri, moreover, was in the odd situation of being a son not only of Italy, but also of the Roman Catholic church. The title Father is a play on words. His father was also a Father. His father had been both an Italian poet and a priest.

For an Italian audience to appreciate Father, then, one must know how early it comes in Italian American literary history. A second point to keep in mind is how educated this novelist is. Any reference or allusion you think you have noticed is certainly there, and very much on purpose.

Calitri estimated once that each page of Father took him fifteen drafts. He slept little, and frequently wrote all night. He had the time and the freedom to do it right. Charles had just written a bestseller, and – on top of his book royalties – had sold the movie rights to Darryl F. Zanuck for a quarter of a million 1950s dollars. (My own father, a Columbia University lawyer, supported our family handsomely on seven thousand dollars a year.) Calitri, to support his family, had let his publisher sensationalize the original version of Strike Heaven on the Face – and he laughed about it all his life. “I cried all the way to the bank!” With two children and a wife to support, it was the only moral decision to make.

But as he sat down to write Father, Calitri was famous, owned a house and a cabin cruiser, and was willing to cut no corners. “I’m told there are a million copies of Strike Heaven in print,” he remarked once, “but when I see a student at Hofstra [his university] walking with a remaindered copy of Father, it pleases me more.”

Father, then, aims high. I saw the materials myself. When I was a young man, paralyzed by writer’s block and unable to finish my first novel, Mr. Calitri waved his hand and said, “Never mind! You will go downstairs to my study, and finish it on the typewriter, on which I wrote Father.” That almost killed me. Sitting there in a windowless cubic room, walled in from floor to ceiling on every side by well-thumbed copies of terrifyingly serious literature and books of continental philosophy, I was crushed. Father has in it all the books in that room, though it wears its learning lightly, thank God. In the years he wrote Father, Mr. Calitri spoke continually of two things, one of them a form of postwar Continental philosophy called “phenomenology” in which Calitri read deeply – particularly the works of Merleau-Ponty. His novel The Goliath Head, about the painter Caravaggio, is the most phenomenological, so – thank god – Merleau Ponty need not concern us here. But he’s in there. Everything is.

Above all, Dante is. The Italian reader will soon catch on that this book is no realistic Bicycle Thief but a Dantesque journey into the self. On the first page of Father, the pilgrim back to Italy arrives on a train ‘nel mezzo del cammin’ of its journey to Foggia. The words are left in Italian to call one’s attention to them. They are, of course, the famous opening lines of the Commedia, and the pilgrim to “Montefumo” (Panni) is, like Dante, in the middle of the journey of his life. His father Antonio, in Fanciullezza a Montefumo, (Milano e Roma: Gastaldi Editore, 1949) had rechristened Panni “Montefumo,” and Charles follows suit, linking their works together.

So the Italian reader, understanding that the work is cast as a kind of epic poem, should not be surprised by the formal, indeed poetic way that the citizens of Montefumo speak. In an epic poem which includes every philosophic argument that drove Antonio out of the Church, the speech, fittingly, is a kind of prose poetry. I remember Charles’s son, Robin, and I sitting in the kitchen one day, naively badgering him about this. I had made my own pilgrimage to Panni by then, and I protested, “Your cousin Bonaventura [with whom I had stayed] doesn’t talk like that! Everybody cuts off the end of everything. Bonaventura doesn’t even call himself that. He calls himself ‘Ventu’!” Charles just laughed at us. Did we really think he didn’t know that?

For, in addition to phenomenology, the other thing Calitri always spoke of was the possibilities of the novel as prose poetry. Father is his attempt. For him the epic poem was the most deeply Italian form. Calitri’s father, Antonio, ex-priest, but still poeta ed italiano, had abandoned the Bible but still read Dante every night, so that his Italian American son grew up seeing the Commedia as the ultimate artwork, the true gesamkunstwerk, the form that united poetry, character, drama, everything.

But Calitri is equally an American artist. Dante is not the strongest influence on him. Father should be understood as the last important work in what had been the 1930s American novel’s effort to write a novel as if it were poetry. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy had interlaced prose chapters with prose poems. Hemingway’s Italians, Spaniards and Cubans always spoke poetically. Poetry, for these novelists, and for Charles Calitri, is not decoration but revelation: it serves to uncover the godlike in an ordinary life, the spiritual in the everyday world, the mystical “Montefumo” in the real-life Panni.

Above all of them, there stood Thomas Wolfe, whose fame outshone everyone’s but Hemingway’s. Like Hemingway, not only the critics but the American public adulated Thomas Wolfe. Pulitzer Prize winner Herman Wouk fictionalized Wolfe’s life in the best-selling Youngblood Hawke. Sci fi master Ray Bradbury wrote a fawning story in which men from the future, lacking any writers equal to the epic poetry of space travel, come back in time– to kidnap Thomas Wolfe! Antonio’s love for Dante and for the epic poem, predisposed Charles to admire Wolfe’s poetic effort. When I asked Mr. Calitri what college I should go to, he said, “The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wolfe went there.” Once Charles showed me how Wolfe’s prose, printed out with line breaks like poetry, scanned as well as a poem.

So much for Calitri as novelist. Any full estimation of Charles Calitri as an American cultural figure, however, must include his career as charismatic teacher. His conviction of Italy’s importance to American letters led me, many years later, to edit, with Pellegrino d’Acierno, the standard text, The Italian American Heritage: a Companion to Literature and Arts. I dedicated the book to Charles. Frank McCourt provides us with the fullest written account of Charles Calitri’s uncanny ability to inspire writers around him. Were McCourt alive, he would be telling the story himself here, so it seems right to quote his book at length. Combine my account and McCourt’s testimony as evidence of how many other writers Calitri transformed, who have not had a chance to publish their debt. Since ‘Mr. Calitri,” (like McCourt, I always respectfully, and nervously, called Charles Calitri, by that name) also gave me the power to write, Tis was particularly piercing to me. (In fact, I leaped straight up from my seat when I saw the name, “Mr. Calitri.”)

McCourt, the impoverished Irish immigrant, had discovered at prestigious New York University that “it’s dangerous, to raise your hand in any class,” because “the professor will look at you with a pitying little smile and the class will see that and the pitying little smile will travel around the room till you feel so foolish the face turns red….” Unsurprisingly, he became a poor student. “With all my latenesses and absences and falling asleep in class I know I deserve a C and I’d like to tell the professor how guilty I feel….” (Tis, New York City: Scribner, 1999, p 181) McCourt was losing strength.

Then Charles Calitri, his writing professor, asked the class to write “an essay on a single object from our childhood.” McCourt, frightened of American professors, already felt “safe” with “Mr. Calitri.” Charles had that rare quality. I can vouch for that. Writers say, “Tell it to one man.” Since “Mr. Calitri will be the only one reading it and I’ll feel safe,” McCourt, the C student, produced “The Bed,” which, forty years later, became one of the famous set pieces in Angela’s Ashes.

Then the turning point: “The next week Mr. Calitri sits on the edge of his desk on the platform,” and says to the class, “there’s one I’d like to read to you…. Mr. Calitri is up there talking about it now, telling the class why he gave it an A, that my style is direct, my subject matter rich. He laughs when he says rich… He tells me I should continue to explore my rich past.” McCourt had the same amazed reaction I had when Mr. Calitri read my first novel and told that to me: “I don’t know what he’s talking about.” (172-174)

But Mr. Calitri, with his enormous confidence – which his son Robin inherited – gave one confidence in oneself. Mr. Calitri’s verdict that McCourt’s life was worth writing about showed him for the first time not only that he could write, but even what he should write. So says McCourt. I’m not interpreting here. “Because of Mr. Calitri I scribble memories of Limerick in notebooks, I make lists of streets, schoolmasters, priests, neighbors, friends, shops.” Charles Calitri next assigned McCourt “a family essay, where there’s adversity, a dark moment, a setback, and even though I don’t want to go into the past there’s something that happened to my mother that demands to be written.” Another chapter of Angela’s Ashes appears, in embryo. McCourt’s at work on the book that will make him a national figure. In its sequel, three years later, he’s careful to include this tribute to “Mr. Calitri.”

Certainly there are great differences between Calitri and McCourt, between Father and Angela’s Ashes. McCourt could write himself in as an eyewitness and Calitri could not. Calitri was a Italian American poet; McCourt an Irish American raconteur. Otherwise, the moment you place Father next to Angela’s Ashes, the parallels simply flood over one. It is, after all, Frank McCourt who tried to call our attention to “Mr. Calitri” and his influence; McCourt, who, by adopting “Mr. Calitri” to be his artistic Father, had replaced the absent cad that Angela’s Ashes so bitterly described, and thereby gained the power to create.

Charles Calitri lived to see none of this. In the film, It’s a Wonderful Life, an angel comes down to reveal to Jimmy Stewart the impact he has had on the world. In real life there are no angels, so one must have faith. He died quite young, without seeing his son Robin rise to become a renowned educator, a New York State Highschool Principal of the Year,; without seeing the entire Italian American Heritage dedicated to himself, and a newspaper cartoon of Antonio Calitri in its foreword; without seeing his student McCourt’s enormous fame, or his act of public gratitude; without seeing this translation of his masterwork into Italian, which would have moved him to the core. There is a moral here for all of us who write and teach. No angel will come to tell us what we have done, but it is happening. We must have faith.

Which leads me, finally, to marvel at what has happened to Father today – for novels, like people, change with time. I had not read Father in some years when I picked it up to write this introduction. I was startled to find how contemporary it has become. America’s taste for Father’s heroic genre declined abruptly during the Vietnam War years, when anti-heroes captured the Zeitgeist. Salinger-style neurotic adolescents, Joseph Heller’s madman Yossarian in Catch 22, Philip Roth’s onanistic Portnoy, these caught the spirit of that embittered age. Heroism was passe. In that atmosphere, Steinbeck was sneered at, Dos Passos forgotten, even Thomas Wolfe’s reputation evaporated. When the museum dedicated to him burned down in 1998, newspapers had to explain who Wolfe used to be.

Yet Time kept passing. In the half century that now stands between us and the Vietnamese War, and the cynical anti-heroes the Vietnam era spawned, a form emerged in Latin America which captivated American audiences: “magical realism.” Father isn’t yesterday anymore. It has become, stylistically, Magical Realism, like Isabel Allende’s similarly poetic chronicles of her ancestors. In the second decade of the Twenty First Century, the Italian or American reader, opening Mr. Calitri’s magnum opus for the first time without the mental baggage of the Thirties novelists, can finally enjoy Father for the magical time-shifting philosophic prose poem that it is.

Dr. George J. Leonard created a rock group, Sha Na Na, which played the Woodstock Festival, the Woodstock Movie, and Grease. He went on to teach at Yale, and publish novels which have been translated into Spanish and Chinese, and purchased by director Ron Howard for Universal Pictures, Hollywood. A Columbia PhD with Distinction, Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at San Francisco State University, Leonard’s critical books have twice won “One of the Outstanding Books of the Year” from the American Library Association. His website is www.georgeleonard.com.

The Rienner Anthology of African Literature

admin — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 03:12:01 +0000

The Rienner Anthology of African Literature
Edited by Anthonia C. Kalu. Lynne Rienner, Publishers Boulder, London 2007. pp. i-xiii,1-976 $125. ISBN: 9781588264916

Reviewed by Saul Steier, San Francisco State University.

You know a field has “arrived” when its rich content is such that it is no longer possible to represent it adequately with random selected individual works. The publishing sign of that moment of arrival is the “Anthology.”

It makes me very happy to see that African Literature, a field in which I have been teaching for twenty years, has finally been elevated to Anthology status. To be sure, it is not a Norton or a Longman’s with an array of famous scholars, each of which is given editorial responsibility over a single area within the entire field. Rather, the Rienner Anthology Of African Literature is a Herculean labor of dedication and love by a single individual, Professor Anthonia C. Kalu of the University of Northern Colorado.

Professor Kalu has organized her Anthology of African Literature chronologically, from what is assumed to be a pre-contact period of “Oral Tradition” through the periods of chattel slavery and colonialism up to the post-colonial present. For each of these “periods” selections are included from the continent on a geographical basis: North, West, Central, East and Southern. The Anthology‘s selections are from countries with different colonial heritages and histories, so many of the works have been translated.

In order to maximize authorial representation, Professor Kalu has chosen to use excerpts from longer works– a decision which will not please all potential users. And, as is inevitable in such an endeavor, there are significant omissions of authors who, had the task of choosing been this reviewer’s, would have had to be included. There is nothing by Sony Labou Tansi, Kodjo Liang, Ben Okri, Mongo Beti and Ahmadou Korouma.

But the Anthology‘s range is broad in a variety of genres; all the “classics” are there; and works written originally in the indigenous languages also have their place. There is a useful introduction, short biographical sketches on each of the authors, and a list of suggested readings. Here too I was struck by some of the omissions: Simon Gikandi, Achille Mbembe, Ato Quayson,Tejumola Olaniyan, Olakunle George, Karen Barber, Stephanie Newell. In spite of its problems, however, the incontestable value of this anthology is in its gathering together of, and making available, materials which show the range, richness and variety of the corpus.

Professor Kalu is to be thanked and congratulated for having recognized and responded to the need for such a work and to Lynne Rienner for publishing it. The book is expensive ($125) so I wouldn’t be likely to require it for a course, but every undergraduate library in the country should have a copy of it on its shelves. I am profoundly pleased the field has finally “arrived.”

(Saul Steier chairs the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at San Francisco State University.)

Revolutionary Spirits, by Gary Kowalski

admin — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 03:06:30 +0000

Revolutionary Spirits: The Enlightened Faith of America’s Revolutionary Fathers by Gary Kowalski. BlueBridge, 2008. 215 pages. $22.00. ISBN: 1 933346094

Reviewed by Harriet Rafter, San Francisco State University.

What were the religious beliefs of the men we consider this country’s Founding Fathers: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Paine, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison? Did they intend the country they helped to create to be Christian? Were they observant Christians themselves? Would their religious beliefs and practices pass muster with those self-styled “values voters” whom American politicians now feel and fear they must court? These are the questions that Gary Kowalski asks in this short and informative book. Formerly this topic would have been an academic exercise, of scholarly interest only. Now that we are reminded daily of the enormous role that religion plays in world politics and events, the faith of these men assumes weightier importance.

Kowalski’s witty title actually introduces a story more complex-and to my mind, far more interesting-than the faith of these men, for the revolutions in which they participated were scientific, industrial, philosophical, as well as political. They knew the inventors and scientists who made this new world; they belonged and contributed scholarly papers to the same clubs and societies. Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, and George Washington (along with Ethan Allen, Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock, John Marshall, and Paul Revere) were even Freemasons, which makes them brothers in the Craft to Mozart and Kipling and, by extension, to their fictional brethren, the wise Sarastro and Tamino, as well as those over-reachers, Peachy Carnahan and Daniel Dravot.

Kowalski guides readers painlessly and sometimes humorously through 18th century history and thought. In the introduction, he shows how many religions were practiced in the American colonies and, Puritans aside, how varied were the reasons for leaving Europe and the ways of thinking and living in the New World. Chapters two and three are particularly helpful. Chapter two investigates the philosophical basis of the Enlightenment and the concept of separation of church and state. And it introduces Deism, the form of religion which most of Kowalski’s subjects (and a good many of their philosophical descendants) espoused:

The cosmos presented a folio of order and regularity signed in the Creator’s own hand, a testament prior to any written scripture (literally old as the hills). . . . America’s founders sensed the sacred in the laws and harmonies of nature, rather than in the miraculous suspension of those laws. [. . .] when they referred to a deity it was most often under the rubric of Chief Architect or Grand Designer-the God revealed in the workings of earth and sky rather than the tradition God of Abraham and Isaac. [. . .] They worshiped in the cathedral of Creation (21).

Chapter three graphically describes how the European worldview was affected by the Enlightenment-and here, I feel, Kowalski’s book takes off, as he illustrates the before-and-after treatment of the mentally ill, or people accused of sorcery. Having set the stage, he then devotes a chapter to each of these six men and the role religion played in his life.

Now, liberal and tolerant Christians or ardent Deists the Founding Fathers may have been; it does not matter to me. Far more interesting is how they actively participated in the Enlightenment: they were soldiers, farmers, architects, astronomers, inventors, scientists, theorists and practitioners of war and government and education, and sometimes even pranksters (that naughty Ben Franklin). They lived during many and simultaneous revolutions when the world which so dazzled them was being conceived anew, and they were fortunate to be personally involved.

In his last chapter, Kowalski describes how their broadminded and intellectual approach to the world changed with the next generations to prejudice–Freemasonry became the object of suspicion and disrepute–and Romanticism: “religion exerted an ongoing literary influence . . . but its epistemology was romanticized from a faith grounded in observation and experiment to one based on feeling and intuition” (191). If we agree to consider these men fathers of the newborn republic cradled along the Atlantic shore, their heirs include such ebullient and, yes, romantic, American spirits as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Stegner and De Voto, Abbey, and Edison, among many American writers, scientists, inventors. John Muir, for instance, combined the scientific and the ecstatic in writing the Founding Fathers certainly would have understood:

“The radiance in some places is so great as to be fairly dazzling, keen lance rays of every color flashing sparkling in glorious abundance, joining the plants in their fine, brave beauty-work-every crystal, every flower a window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the Creator”.(fn.1)

While Kowalski’s contribution to our knowledge of the faith of our Founding Fathers is no doubt valuable, I feel that his greater achievement is to briefly but vividly set the scene of the intellectually thrilling era in which they lived, and show how each responded with awe and a hunger to address the issues of the day. To paraphrase two other thinkers at critical historic moments, it was, not wholly or in full measure but very substantially, a brave new world indeed to have such people in it.(fn.2) If these are our fathers, we had best make some effort to recapture the intellectual and ethical standards they have bequeathed us.

1 My First Summer in the Sierras. 1911. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1997. 153.
2 Despite his admiration for Thomas Jefferson, Kowalski describes Jefferson’s role as a slave owner pretty bluntly. And he points out-lest we rationalize Jefferson’s refusal to free his slaves as a response to his own times-that his neighbor, Edward Coles, freed his, and later was elected governor of Illinois.

Reasonable Doubts, by Gianrico Carofiglio

admin — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 03:02:26 +0000

Reasonable Doubts, by Gianrico Carofiglio. Bitter Lemon Press, October 2007. 249 pp. $14.95 ISBN 1904738249

Reviewed by George J. Leonard, San Francisco State University.

Since the SFHR is usually appealed to when works of merit can’t find appropriate reviews, we were slightly mystified to be sent the new legal thriller by Gianrico Carofiglio, which comes adorned with blurbs from the New Yorker and the London Times. “Carofiglio writes crisp, ironical novels,” the New Yorker’s reviewer tells us, “that are as much love stories and philosophical treatises as they are legal thrillers.” Reasonable Doubts is his third novel featuring a Guido Guerrieri, a public defender.

Carofiglio knows his subject the way John le Carre knows spies-from the inside. Carofiglio (b. 1961), before retiring to write full-time, was — his publisher informs us — “an anti-Mafia prosecutor in the city of Bari in Southern Italy… responsible for some of the most important indictments in Puglia involving corruption and the traffic in human beings.” But, like the early le Carre, he’s rather a stylist too. He was won the Bancarella Prize and is translated into more than ten languages.

So, I reflected, one would imagine that Reasonable Doubts would be appearing from a major New York publishing house on its way to join Jeffrey Deaver, Michael Connelly, John Grisham, and John Lescroart on the best-seller list. Instead, the volume I unwrapped came from the Bitter Lemon Press in London, which had published two other Carofiglio novels before this. And it had been sent to the SFHR, a scholarly reviewer.

Like a character in a Carofiglio novel, one holds the book in one’s hand and says, “What’s going on? This doesn’t add up.” Trying to find the answer to this mystery turned into an interesting lesson in what keeps a book popular in Europe from popularity in America.

But since reviews are not articles and should tell the reader quickly whether he or she wants to read this book, the answer is yes, the educated readers of the SFHR certainly do. But the reason that they want to is precisely the reason that Carofiglio isn’t a bestseller in the USA, the reason that the average reader would be displeased with Carofiglio. By the middle of this enjoyable book, I was radically updating my idea of Southern Italy.

The first suspect in such a matter — one always suspects the family first — is Carofiglio’s translator, Howard Curtiss. Has Mr. Curtiss, working in London for Bitter Lemon, translated the book into English or into British? That’s often part of the answer. On page 13, the American reader, puzzling over a hero who remembers defiantly “I didn’t take off my anorak, you fucking Fascists, and I remember your faces. One day I’ll get my own back on you,” has to do a second mental translation: “one day I’ll get even.”

Someone has prevented Mr. Curtiss from translating freely; or from providing editorial help. The author’s thought remains stuck back over on the Italian side, unable to cross over to us. On page 12, the hero, Guido Guerrieri, meeting his defendant for the first time, recognizes him as “Fabio Rayban… a Fascist thug.” “We called him that because he always wore sunglasses at night. Rayban had been part of the military squad that had stabbed to death an 18-year-old Communist who suffered from polio.” Given Guerrieri’s age, we’re not talking about Mussolini’s Fascists, as I first assumed. I soon realized that during the nearly forgotten European Culture Wars of the late 60s and early 70s, the right wing was popularly called “fascist.”

Guerrieri himself had had a long-ago run-in with Fabio. He had wandered into an area which the Fascists controlled wearing “a green anorak that I was very proud of.”

–But now the reader may wish to interrupt me, “Anorak?” Actually, I had to look it up. It is not, as I thought, a parka. It is a kind of tight hooded sweatshirt, apparently, usually worn with the hood up (my son might call it a “hoodie”) though a lot warmer than a sweatshirt.

None of which explained why the Fascists “approached me and told me I was a Red bastard, and I should take off that fucking anorak immediately.” When he won’t, they tell him, “Take it off, Comrade,” and beat him up. But in spite of everything, Guerrieri never does. And swears vengeance. What in the world?

It took considerable researching on Wikipedia’s Italian version to discover that during the riot era, the “anorak” became the trademark garb of Leftist youths, somewhat the way the pea coat was for the hippies in 1967 and 1968. If you didn’t know that Guerrieri had been part of that youthful scene, you’d never understand him quite right, or understand why he hated Rayban so much.

Was the publisher was unwilling either to provide a helpful footnote or to free the translator to add a sentence explaining the significance of the anorak to the Fascists. Certainly a practical man of the world like Carofiglio would have permitted it, though James Joyce might not have. If they ever translate my book on Italian American culture into Italian, I have decided, I am going to demand it.

Could Bitter Lemon not at least have run the book past an American translator, who might have read-flagged the rare phrases that were stiff in one culture though not in England?

But neither Britishisms nor incomprehensible pop cultural references were the biggest problem that Reasonable Doubts faced finding a popular audience in America.

As you may have guessed, Guerrieri (who is something like a public defender, but grander) has just recognized that the defendant he has been assigned under Italy’s legal system to defend is Fabio Rayban, now married and in middle age. Rayban doesn’t recognize his old victim. Guerrieri is ready to recuse himself until Rayban’s wife comes in—- but let me set this up.

A few doors down the hall from me here at SF State was Frances Mayes, Professor of Creative Writing. Frances was a good academic poet who almost accidentally made millions of dollars a few years ago writing up her real-life retirement adventure in Tuscany. She bought a farmhouse, and remodeled it: Under the Tuscan Sun. It stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for over a year. The glamorous Diane Lane (35?) played Frances (70) in the movie version. Frances has spun off sequels since, including a popular cookbook. She had captured an American fantasy about Italy.

Carofiglio has not. He’s too Italian to write well about Italy for Americans.

When I saw that this book would take place in Bari, I smiled nostalgically. In the 1960s, I had taken a train out into that area to stay with the relatives of my teacher, Charles Calitri (lionized by another student, Frank McCourt in his memoire, ‘Tis’)

I knew I was getting close to Mr. Calitri’s village when I saw women washing clothes in a stream and beating them on rocks. There were no cars in the village, only burros. Staring out of the rattling train’s open windows, I half-expected to see Sophia Loren walking up the cobblestone streets of Mr. Calitri’s Panni, barefoot and wearing a scowl and a torn dress, like in Two Women. Bari, where the book takes place, is just another few hours ride on that train.

But that was before the Italian Economic Miracle. Bari has changed.

In Carofiglio’s novel, Fabio Rayban’s wife isn’t Sophia Loren in a torn dress, but a beautiful Japanese woman named Natsu Kawabata. Natsu works as a sushi chef. In Bari! “Three evenings a week, she worked at a restaurant. She mentioned the name of a fashionable spot — but she also made sushi, sashimi, and tempura for private parties thrown by people who could afford it.”

A “fashionable sushi spot” in Bari? Private tempura parties? An afternoon’s drive from where Bonaventura Calitri taught me to go to his hen house, and eat a raw egg with a shot of grappa for breakfast? Infamia! And on the next page, when Guerrieri sits down to consider his options, does he pour himself an Orvieto Classico Bigi and listen to an aria? No! The son of a bitch listens to “the latest Leonard Cohen album, Dear Heather, on the CD player.”

I was completely bummed out. This is not tourist Italy, and that after all is what the mass market would be looking for; and me too. Taking an armchair trip to Italy to watch them eating sushi and listening to Leonard Cohen wasn’t what I had in mind when I sat down on the couch with the book. When Guerrieri, mad with love for Natsu, walks through the midnight streets, he says, “I was in a strange place, an unknown area of my consciousness, a black and white film with a dramatic, melancholic soundtrack, in which Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day stood out. I often listen to that song, and it echoed almost obsessively in my head during my nocturnal walks.”

The first rock concert I took my son to was a Green Day concert. I have to go all the way to Italy to listen to Green Day?

But by the middle of this fast-paced book, I was hooked, and couldn’t put it down. I had to find out if Guerrieri would send the bastard Fabio Rayban up the river by blowing his defense, to get the enchanting Natsu. There’s a powerful complication. Guerrieri, a childless man just dumped by his fiancÃ©, doesn’t want Natsu as much as he wants her adorable daughter, who is so young she would forget her birth father, Fabio Rayban, and accept Guerreri. It’s not often you get the chance to take not only your enemy’s wife, but his child. And in this case, it would be a rescue.

No wonder these books have been bestsellers in Europe, where the readers aren’t surprised or disappointed to read about an Italy more modern than 1961 Sophia Loren flicks.

And the SFSU reader will similarly come to enjoy, as I did, learning about an Italy so different from one’s tourist memories.

And yet. Is it really so wrong to want to revisit, in fictional form, those memories, that Italy? Given a choice between this book and Roman Holiday — set in a tourist Italy, but also an Italy before the Italians got globalized into Green Day fans-which would you choose?

Yesterday morning, I went to the Apple store in Palo Alto to buy a Firewire cable. In the parking lot, a man in a late-model black SUV accosted me and asked me, in Italian, if I was an Italian. I realized he was wearing an Armani suit with tailor’s marks on it and the label on the outside. Interesting. I said yes. He then explained to me that he was in a complicated legal situation, which meant he had to get rid of these Armani suits in the van at a greatly reduced price. I declined. He asked me where in Italy I was from, and this time I said here.

He said, irked at having wasted his time, “But you looked Italian!” I told him thank you, but I’m not. Believe me, I’m not. Just a tourist.

“Elegy for an Age,” by John D. Rosenberg

George Leonard — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:54:58 +0000

Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature, by John D. Rosenberg. Anthem Press, July 2005. 288 pp. $26.95 ISBN 1843311542

Reviewed by George J. Leonard, San Francisco State University

If I had to rest the case for the immortality of John D. Rosenberg’s prose on one paragraph, I could choose the paragraph in “Mr. Darwin Collects Himself”– unknown to me before I read Elegy for an Age– in which Rosenberg caps a series of perfect hammered sentences with the image of Darwin, the enthusiastic entomologist, “at the center of a worldwide network of researchers in a multitude of fields, all touching antennae at local scientific societies or through the penny post . . .” It takes a second for one to register the creepy appropriateness of that image for entomologists, and by then one has pictured them, tete-a-tete, feelers waving. Anyone interested in Darwin who reads that description will never willingly let it be forgotten.

Rosenberg is, of course, author of standard volumes on Carlyle (Carlyle and the Burden of History) and Tennyson (The Fall of Camelot) and of the classic biography of John Ruskin, The Darkening Glass and its companion anthology, The Genius of John Ruskin, both of which have been read continually for fifty years. Just as Rosenberg’s hero, Ruskin, made the point that even Milton’s wildest-seeming metaphors are never casual, so in Rosenberg’s prose too, every word, no matter how witty– or lovely– adds meaning. He was always one of the prose talents of the 20th Century (the sentence above about Darwin is only a hint. See below.)

It was a wonderful idea to assemble these brilliant, long-influential essays in one place. Each has changed the course of study in its field. “Classics of prose criticism,” Elizabeth Helsinger rightly calls them, in a blurb; Rosenberg’s “magnum opus,” Garry Wills adds. I can imagine the overwhelming effect on readers new to Victorian studies. The Swinburne, for instance, “Swinburne and the Ravages of Time,” the Modern Library made into its standard introduction to Swinburne for decades. “At times he is nearly a blind poet, all tongue and ear and touch.” It went completely against the critical grain, revising and reviving Swinburne’s work. “Edmund Wilson condemns Swinburne for his ‘generalizing visageless monosyllables’; I would praise him as the supreme master in English of the bleak beauty of little words.” Always a show-stopper on its own, the essay only gains in impressiveness when it simply seems to be just one of the chapters. The reader has scarcely recovered before being rushed on to another high moment in Rosenberg’s prose.

Yet– and this is extremely unfortunate– the very fame and familiarity of these essays has led most reviewers to mistake the book for an anthology. Not that it isn’t a fine one. Indeed, I’ve assigned it as my undergraduate textbook twice now. As the selections above suggest, Elegy for an Age’s eleven essays cover every major figure and intellectual current– poetically, succinctly, wittily, and always without jargon.

Those Victorianists who have taught Rosenberg’s essays for decades, however, will discover the many changes, revisions, new insights. Most important, the order itself will tip them off. Some of the first works written, appear last. Works one never saw before are pulled into prominent places. Rosenberg has been his own Redactor. And just as the Torah’s Redactor by combining J, E, P, and D created a new work through the resulting cinematic montage, so these works, in this new order, create a new truth. Rosenberg knows the power of montage very well, since he used it so masterfully in The Genius of John Ruskin, creating a new meaning (indeed, creating John Ruskin) from the montage of great pieces. He used to claim that the anthology was as important, for that reason, as his critical work on Ruskin.

Rosenberg has arranged this montage to uncover, in the nineteenth century, a central genre: the elegy. His title, “Elegy for an Age,” refers to his own book, but more importantly to the ceaseless elegy woven like an overall organizing pattern into the endlessly branching figures which cover the ornate carpet of Victorian literature. It isn’t as if he has been coy about what he is doing. The book’s first chapter, “The Age of Elegy,” makes the claim. Criticism has dropped the ball, inexplicably.

This new montage of his works then, aided by strategic changes, is designed to make a new assertion. It is an important one. Seventy years ago Jerome Buckley titled his influential work, The Victorian Temper; and Walter Houghton titled another famous work, The Victorian Frame of Mind. Yes, but the Victorian temper, the frame of mind– what was it? The titles intuited a unity, but what that unity was, has always remained unanswered.

Rosenberg’s career has been as long as Tennyson’s, and after fifty years of work, Rosenberg hazards an answer: consider the elegy as the Age’s “temper,” “frame of mind,” Weltanschauung, if the term “elegy” can be expanded to mean a complex response to their unprecedented experience of Time.

The elegy is the genre most concerned with time, and the Victorians, because of the unprecedented change in human life that was the Industrial Revolution, were the first society to experience time in a new way. The Industrial Revolution, it is often said, was the greatest change in human life since we stopped being hunter-gathers and settled down to grow things.

Rosenberg writes,

Waking daily to newness in all its forms– new sciences and intellectual disciplines, new and vastly more rapid modes of transportation, new political and social institutions, vast new acquisitions to the Empire, new relations between the classes and the sexes, sprawling new cities in which machines were housed with far more care than the ‘hands’ that worked them– the Victorians felt, in Matthew Arnold’s phrases, like wanderers “between two worlds, one dead/ the other powerless to be born.”

Faced by such a dizzying present, connecting with their past became for the Victorians a sort of survival strategy. For the present was both exhilarating and menacing, like the vertiginous landscapes that rushed past them at unprecedented speed outside their railway carriage windows.

Rosenberg’s opening meditation on elegy is too nuanced and subtle to reproduce fully here. Cut any part and it tips out of balance. It contains so many of his distilled sentences that I have to read very slowly, like those moments when my computer struggles to download too large an email file. “Elegy requires a fine equipoise between remembered joy and present regret. If the pleasure implicit in the recollection of loss becomes too predominant, elegy slips into the sentimentality of unresisted regret; if present pain wholly occludes recollected pleasure, elegy aborts itself in tears or breaks down into Lear’s thrice repeated ‘howl’ of pain over Cordelia’s corpse.”

Please re-read that sentence slowly, savoring with me the choices of ‘equipoise’ . . . ‘thrice,’ ‘occludes’ . . . ‘aborts’ . . ..” Not only les mots justes, but each time the perfect sound. One will turn over the thought in one’s mind for years; but already one can savor the sound. “If present pain wholly occludes recollected pleasure, elegy aborts itself in tears . . ..” Yet, tap that sentence anywhere you will with your hammer, and the meaning is rock-solid.

Later Rosenberg writes, “Grief is a ventriloquist who speaks in many voices.” Including John Rosenberg’s.

Rosenberg mentions Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain (“who awakens one day to the realization that he has been speaking prose all his life,”) to comment that he himself has awakened to the knowledge that he has “written, all my adult life, without realizing it, elegies in the guise of literary criticism.” The statement is a veiled reference to his brother, Martin, an heroic American flier in World War Two, who– when John Rosenberg was just a boy– was shot down over Germany, and died. He was twenty years old. (That explains, after thirty-four years, the dedication to The Fall of Camelot: “To M.J.R 1924-1944 Frater ave Atque Vale”) Rosenberg couples his new awareness with another observation, that his personal affinity with the elegy as a genre, has given him “perhaps, a natural affinity,” with the Victorians.

It is not that Rosenberg projected his life upon the Victorians. Rather, the unexpected, accidental “natural affinity” between himself and them, equipped him to penetrate unusually into those kindred minds. Not just in the way that Martin’s loss obviously helped him penetrate into what Hallam’s sudden shocking absence meant to Tennyson, or how Tennyson translated Hallam into Arthur. (Rosenberg’s essay on In Memoriam, “Stopping for Death,” has a terrifying immediacy.) I noticed in a book some years ago that– of all the people I had studied the Victorians with– in conversation Steven Marcus, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun always said, “The Victorians thought . . ..” While John Rosenberg always said, “The Victorians think . . ..” They were living presences to him, and now I can guess it was because he was emotionally their kin.

Kin not only to the writers. The whole culture, as Time accelerated around it, turned elegiac. “The Gothic Revival embodied this nostalgia in stone.” The Houses of Parliament, burnt in 1832 and rebuilt in English Gothic, were stone elegies. On the book’s cover Rosenberg has placed Turner’s elegy to the Fighting Temeraire, the gorgeous ghost of the heroic past, being dragged by a smoky little steamboat “to her last berth to be broken up,” as Turner inserted in the title, to be sure everybody got the picture.

So, fifty years after he began, rising to personal consciousness of one source of his identification with so many great Victorians, Rosenberg has tried in this new book to bring us to consciousness of the elegy’s centrality to Victorian culture as a whole. This was the Victorian Temper. This was the Victorian Frame of Mind. (Again, his nuanced explanation of “elegy” in the first essay is crucial to the claim, and already compressed so tight I cannot further synopsize it here.)

It will take scholars a long time, of course, to test out so large a claim against our readings of the works, our experiences of the pictures and monuments. Yet after thirty-six years of teaching the Victorians, when I tap the idea with my own hammer, something rings true. As one thinks it over– here comes Moliere again– one realizes that it is elegies one has been reading from the Victorians all one’s life. Even from that most positivistic character, Mill. What is the essay on the great English Utilitarian Bentham but a great English elegy? “He was a boy to the last.” And so, Mill continues under his breath, were we all, to believe that stuff? Is it really Bentham, or is it Margaret Mill mourns for? I never thought of it that way before. As with Rosenberg’s previous books, Victorianists will be scribbling notes in the margins of these dense, suggestive, musical paragraphs for years.

Trying out Rosenberg’s insight in another place, I find that a line that he doesn’t care for, “Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all,” reveals itself more fully, considered in relation to the elegy. Love and loss were the great Victorian themes, as Time, down the ringing grooves of Change, shoved the Victorians inexorably forward– but always looking backwards, ave atque vale, at all they loved vanishing into mist. “All that is solid melts into air,” two awed observers of Victorian London wrote– Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Graduate students to the contrary, Derrida did not invent the idea that there was no place solid left on which to stand. Tennyson’s great elegy is an ode on the death of human certainty– in memoriam. Tennyson’s great line, staled to dullest commonplace by generations of assent, makes a final judgment about human life even when all certainty is gone: Life is worth it. So, even with the retreating tides sucking every kind of solid ground from beneath his feet, Tennyson stayed sane. Ruskin didn’t. Carlyle drifted into rage; Hopkins and Newman, into the Church. Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites turned and fled back to the Past itself, and when it wouldn’t let them in, they sat at the door and made up dreams about it.

The book’s epigraph (“but now the whole Round Table is dissolved,”)– how apt it is for anyone who knew Columbia in the 1960s; or indeed, for anyone who knew the profession of teaching English then. George Stade asked me 15 years ago if he was just getting old by thinking that the glory had departed. I thought not. By now, it’s obvious, and being spoken of openly. “And I, the last, go forth companionless,” Rosenberg’s epigraph continues.

So it is a pleasure to receive one last book from Camelot. But– if only to point out parallels with Rosenberg’s earlier work, and to make the titles of his books more uniform– shouldn’t they have called this new work, The Genius of John Rosenberg?

“Gloryland” and “Ruin,” two reviewed works

George Leonard — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 22:26:08 +0000

Gloryland, by Anne Marie Macari. Alice James Books (September 30, 2005). 75pp. paperback $14.95 ISBN 1882295501

Ruin, by Cynthia Cruz. Alice James Books (September 1, 2006). 80pp. paperback $14.95 ISBN 1882295587

Reviews by George Leonard

From that strange house, Alice James Press, which consistently offers remarkable works that defy poetic fashion, come almost in the same mail, two books which reflect upon each other, and a central problem in poetry– and in the criticism of it: Gloryland by Anne Marie Macari and Ruin, by Cynthia Cruz. If I hadn’t read Macari’s work back to back with Cruz’s, I might have liked the Cruz better. The two titles offer an illuminating contrast: gloryland versus ruin.

Of the pair, Cruz is the power hitter. The dust jacket proudly informs me that she is “the recipient of several residencies to Yaddo and the Mac Dowell Colony. She lives in New York City.” Macari, though her first book, Ivory Cradle, “won the APR/Honickman first book prize in 2000,” is less well known, though she has been in TriQuarterly and The Iowa Review. Cruz, by contrast (BA Mills College, Sarah Lawrence MFA), has appeared in Paris Review, Boston Review, GRAND STREET and so forth, and made it into two anthologies.

I underline that Cruz is no tyro because my comments otherwise might sound harsh. The reader, who is also probably a writer (does any grownup but another poet still read poetry in 2007?) knows the situation. In the writer’s workshop, a woman begins reading a work, which the other members realize with discomfort is a kind of elegy.

The elegy is certainly a central poetic genre. John D. Rosenberg, in his magisterial summing up of the Victorians, “Elegy for an Age,” said that the elegy had even been their central genre, as all that was solid melted into air. Yet what a strange genre it is. Tennyson included stanzas in In Memoriam in which he pictured people criticizing him for parading his grief. His reply simply was, “I only sing because I must,” the way even a bird sings at the death of its mate. “Short swallow flights of song, that dip/ Their wings in tears, and skim away.”

The workshop, listening, wants to extend its human sympathy, but the very act of being presented with the grief as poetry demands a response to it as poetry. The grief must have permutated into poetry, before we can criticize it as such. Not enough time has gone by here, apparently.

“You say there are no words in the English language/ For the dark flocking of your sadness.” (Microscopic Winter II) The dark flocking of what? I want to like the poems. The narrative thread that holds them together is her brother’s suicide. One would think that this is powerful material to work with, but the fact that we’ve been presented with poems forces us to ask, where’s the poetry? “Murderous, bloody-nosed brother, it was you/ Who made me. I don’t blame you.” (January 5, 1973) “His hands were moving like twin engines/ But his lips unzipped my pants” (Traveling Gospel).

These lines alternate with laments about Cruz’s own condition, comments, alas, so familiar they could be taken from an Avril Lavigne song. “As a girl, I was razored/ Into the world. I was never close to anyone./ World of wingless, world of hands, I killed off everything I loved./Do not talk to me about the stars.” (Prelude to 220, or 110). Cruz needs more time to work the grief through. She is still stuck in the very human stage where the whole world is seen through one’s loss. “Someone’s mother’s pick-up’s parked/ With a glue-sniffing family/ Of kids inside. And everyone is dead/ In my America.” (Toby II) In her America, perhaps. But even a professional reviewer feels inhuman, saying of a woman’s grief over her brother, “Your comments are familiar.” As Tennyson admitted, “Never morning wore to evening but some heart did break.” The elegy then, poses the tremendous challenge of making grief new.

–Yeah, well, I still feel like a louse telling Cruz my opinion of these poems, but I won’t insult a well-known poet by praising her work as “sincere,” as if she were a sophomore with black fingernail polish reading to a class. Cruz is a pro. She can take it. In time, the grief may diminish to a point where poetry about her brother is possible for her. As a John Cage partisan, I cannot accept or even condone her attack on life.

By contrast to Cruz’s versifications of familiar arguments, there is the sharp vision in Macari’s poem “Horseshoe Crabs,” “Their bodies float to shore and he dashes/ to collect them, upending them to dry,/ all their feet walking the wind.” I had seen those crabs do that a thousand times, growing up in Long Island, yet the image was entirely fresh to me. Even her word “wind” is precise. Those crabs are animals of the bay, a place where enormous winds always blow.

In Book One, she makes Eve new again: “Light was being, held by her own hands or/ touched like water burning bare skin./ In the beginning meant learning to see: a thousand/ kinds of green, the vine-crawl along rocks,/ the groping mouths of flowers. In the beginning/ all they knew was yes, so when the first no/ settled quietly around the tree/ they though it was birdsong . . .” These are thoughts and emotions I cannot find by turning on Live105 and listening along with my son while I drive him to school.

Macari has a great range, too. I enjoyed “Madame Sherri’s House.” “If it was really a bordello, as the locals say,/ why build in the woods, miles from nowhere?/ And what’s the crime in wearing feathers/ or going naked under a fur coat?” And then the final irony in the poem called “Gloryland,” (“I’ve got a home in Gloryland that outshines the sun”– African-American spiritual). “And what of my brother, dead, who clowning/ held a gun to his head and blew himself/ into the nebula sac while someone cried/ come back . . .” So Macari has been in exactly the same place that Cruz (or her narrator) has been. But she took her time. She is back in the light, and her joy wasn’t earned cheaply; it is the joy of someone who has come out the other side.

Two African works reviewed by George Leonard

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 03:04:43 +0000

Sleepwalking Land, by Mia Couto. Translated by David Brookshaw. Serpent’s Tail (April 2006). 213pp. paperback $14.95 ISBN 185242897X

Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, by D. T. Niane. Pearson Longman; 2nd edition (August 7, 2006). 120pp. paperback $16.00 ISBN 1405849428

Reviews by George Leonard

I’ve been supposed to find someone to write a review of Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto. I could write the thing myself, but the whole point of The San Francisco Humanities Review, with its ferocious Rolodex of five hundred nationally known scholars, is getting authors a hearing by an expert in their field, then letting that expert write at length. This is no one-man book blog.

But this one’s unexpectedly tough to place. I can’t even learn enough about him to figure out who would do him justice. Mia Couto isn’t even on Google! My local hardware store and bike shop are, but not an award winning African novelist. There is a “stub” on Wikipedia, the editor’s last resort, but it seems to be quoting the same PR material the publisher enclosed with the book.

The best-read Modern African lit scholar in my College only replied, “Can’t help you much. He’s important. Is along with Henri Lopes one of the two most important Lusophone [Portugese language] African Writers. Heinemann’s did publish some of his stuff before it went out of business. But he’s been slow getting a reputation in the Anglophone world.”

I asked my Africanist, quoting the material the publisher sends with the book, “This book was apparently voted ‘one of the 12 best African books of the 20th century’ by Zimbabwe Intl Book Fair. Is that a major organization?”

“Not in terms of historical precedent but this was a very important poll,” was his reply. “Took and gave great status to the winners.” “He is,” my source added, “along with Ben Okri(Nigeria), Kodjo Liang(Ghana), and Sony Labou Tansi(Zaire), a major example of African Post Modernism.”

Mia Couto, then, shouldn’t be passed over. If the SFHR had such trouble pairing him with a reviewer, the mass-market media certainly won’t bother.

I asked my source about a blurb the publishing firm’s publicist, the energetic Meryl Zegarek, had enclosed. “A white man with an African soul.” I found that kind of praise problematic after my experiences in American ethnic studies. Americans used to praise Stephen Foster that way. But my expert challenged me on it. Apparently my unconscious equation of “African” and “black” was very much out of line.

“Is this a problem for you?” he asked, plainly annoyed. “He’s native-born, raised and educated. Fought with the rebels against the Portuguese. And against the South African/US proxy army.”

So Mia Couto had earned the right to call himself African in every way a human being could — by birth, education and blood. I ended the correspondence before I had to admit I had no idea which wars my source was talking about. One can’t know everything without turning into a jack-of-all-trades, and frankly, I don’t know Mozambique history, or Portugese literature, let alone African literature written in Portugese. I’m just not a member of the “Lusophone” world.

But how many are, in America? Why, without my source, is everything useful I know about Mia Couto coming from a xerox folded into the book by its publicist? The publisher includes a scant two paragraphs printed at the front of the novel, which adds to my store of information that Couto was born in 1955, has been an important journalist — important in Mozambique, at least — and a poet.

Two paragraphs at the front, the way Penguin does for Flaubert, say. That’s fine for Flaubert. But Mia Couto isn’t Flaubert and, frankly, his country isn’t as familiar as France is to the American reader (who would probably bail out on this puzzle of a book before a dutiful book reviewer will). Even the most assigned book in English, George Orwell’s 1984, includes in the cheap Signet edition an “Afterword” by Erich Fromm, positioning Orwell for the reader.

By contrast, consider another African book that has just arrived for review: Pearson Longman’s new edition for the Longman African Writers of Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali by D.T. Niane. It says proudly — and to my mind, significantly — in a golden starburst on the cover, “New Information Added” Before we get to Chapter 1, a helpful table of contents directs us to: “Introduction to the Revised Edition,” “Background Information,” “Who’s who of characters — glossary of places,” “Oral Tradition, Pronounciation, and Spelling,” and finally, “Preface” — fully twenty-four pages of information before we confront what would have been the intimidating first sentence “I am a griot.”

D.T. Niane has already informed us that this book is “primarily the work of an obscure griot from the village of Djeliba Koro,” and given us a two-century history of how griots evolved from “the counselors of kings” into their present African decadence: “Nowadays when we say ‘griot’ we think of those numerous guitarists who people our towns and go to sell their ‘music’ in the recording studios of Dakar or Abidjan. If today the griot is reduced to turning his musical art to account or even to working with his hands in order to live, it was not always so in ancient Africa. Formerly ‘griots’ were the counsellors of kings, they conserved the constitutions of kingdoms by memory work alone; each princely family had its griot appointed to preserve tradition; it was from among the griots that kings used to choose the tutors for young princes.” (xviii)

How exciting, for the middle-aged reader knows the word “griot” from the famous 1970s television series “Roots” and the novel it grew out of. Alex Haley claimed that the essence of it had been communicated to him by a griot before he novelized it. Reading Sundiata gives us something with which to judge the famous African-American work, which has often been accused of inauthenticity.

The translation, by David Brookshore, is graceful. The griot narrator says of his craft, “The art of eloquence has no secrets for us; without us the names of kings would vanish into oblivion, we are the memory of mankind; by the spoken word we bring to life the deeds and exploits of kings for younger generations.” (1) There are homeric catalogs: “Sundiata pronounced all the prohibitions which still obtain in relations between the tribes. To each he assigned its land, he established the rights of each people and ratified their friendships. The KondÃ©s of the land of Do became henceforth the uncles of the imperial family of Keita, for the latter, in memory of the fruitful marriage between NarÃ© Maghan and Sogolon, had to take a wife in Do. The Tounkaras and the CissÃ©s became ‘banter-brothers’ of the Keitas. While the CissÃ©s, BÃ©rÃ©tÃ©s and TourÃ©s were proclaimed great divines of the empire. No kin group was forgotten at Kouroukan Fougan; each had its share in the division.” (78) The book ends with another eleven pages of helpful footnotes.

Sundiata, its text only eighty-four pages long, is a painless and poetic introduction to the art of the griot and to this body of African literature in general. It not only excites one’s interest, it satisfies one’s interest. This should be the model.

Memo to Mia Couto’s publisher then: in cases like Mia Couto’s, we would like to see the kind of reference help that Pearson Longman has given us for the Sundiata.

For instance, Mia Couto is advertised as a novelist of his country’s war experience, so I’d like to know more about that. He’s billed as a “magical realist” — but how will I know what is “magic” when I don’t even know when he’s being a “realist?” Perhaps Mozambique, during wartime, really was littered with busses filled with charred bodies, like the one in which the protagonists take refuge, in Chapter One. “Look how small they ended up,” the old man remarks to the boy. “It seems fire likes to turn us into children.” (3)

In this Rashomon-like setting (that movie also springing emotionally as well as physically from post-war ruins) they find notebooks on a nearby corpse, so recent “this fellow doesn’t smell.” To say that is to have become a conoisseur of death. The old man and boy entertain themselves by reading their find. The notebooks turn out to be a kind of magical autobiography written by the dead poet they have just pulled into a mass grave, “his teeth ploughing the soil.”

Brookshore’s translation is smooth and terrifying, but I could use more editorial help evaluating it. Is Mozambique African speech so formal that a boy would really say, “It’s just that I’m aching with a sadness.” Or has Couto poeticized the speech to suit the “magical” action? When the dead poet, Kindzu, writes, “War is a snake that bites us with our own teeth,” I sense he is speaking poetry, or was in the original.

In English, however, Kindzu’s prose poetry sounds like the self-consciously poetic novels of Tom Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel): “O Lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost come back again.” For us, it was a period style. People often talk like that in John Steinbeck, too, even in the Grapes of Wrath, at occasions like Grandpa Joad’s funeral. “Won’t be so lonely, an old man under the ground, having his name there with him.”

In Kindzu’s narrative, funerals are far more magical than that. When his drunkard father’s corpse is tossed into the waves, all the water “disappeared within an instant.” “Where there once was an expanse of blue, there was now a plain covered with palm trees. Each one was brimming with plump, shiny, tasty-looking fruit.” But does a tree “brim” with fruit? You need an object that has a brim to do that, like a cup. And how evocative, or even just euphonious, an adjective is “tasty-looking”? One feels for the translator, remembering the proverb about translating poetry, “The poetry is the part that doesn’t translate.”

Later (67) an equally magical old man passes away, declaring, “My name is in the blood of this tree now.” The “blood” of the tree? Don’t ask questions, it’s poetry. He commits suicide by putting “his finger in his ear, inserting it deeper and deeper until they hear the muffled sound of something bursting.” How deep can a finger go in an ear? It seems almost an unintentionally silly Groucho Marx kind of death. “I can’t hear you, there’s a banana in my ear.” The old man extracts his finger and his ear spurts a fountain of blood. Gradually, he wastes away until he is no more than the size of seed.” [No typos -- "size of seed" not "size of a seed."] I had pictured the shrinking puddle of blood until that metaphor changed it to a completely inappropriate image. “Seed?” Singular. But that’s not a small expanse of liquidâ€¦ unless he means, and I hope he doesn’t, human seed? But then the blood has to change color, too.

Can this really be the author who, my source told me, “is along with Ben Okri (Nigeria), Kodjo Liang (Ghana), and Sony Labou Tansi (Zaire), a major example of African Post Modernism.” Not from what I’ve read. I am ready to believe that I am missing a lot here.

Let the editors and authors learn from this contrast: the Longman Sundiata should be the model, not this nearly impenetrable edition of Mia Couto. Better to risk looking scholarly but being accessible than to try to brave it through without critical apparatus.

“While Europe Slept,” by Bruce Bawer

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 17:17:08 +0000

While Europe Slept, by Bruce Bawer. DoubleDay, 2006. 256pp. hardcover $16.29 ISBN 0385514727

Bewildering Complexities of Integrating Muslims into Europe
Review by Manfred Wolf

A recent book, “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within,” dwells on the habitual looking away of liberal European elites from the problems posed by Muslim immigrants — a blindness and silence it regards as continuing to this day. The author Bruce Bawer claims that if Europe does not defend against its “Weimar Moment,” it will be destroyed from within. The Weimar Republic, it should be recalled, failed to take a stand against Hitler before he came to power.

But, as Bawer also notes, not only will the European Establishments have to come down hard on extremist behavior and even thought, they will also have to guarantee full equality to their newly minted citizens. For the one thing all European countries have in common is that they never really conceived of the immigrants and their descendants as being truly, really, genuinely Dutch or French or Danish or Swedish. That is a major difference with the US.

Immigrants will have to accept the reigning norms — but European host countries need to offer true acceptance and equality. If, in fact, both sides don’t change, all will indeed be lost.

Some have looked at Bawer as anti-Muslim, but this is not so: he simply makes the point that a viable country must have a dominant culture. In that regard, the US could serve as a model for European countries, and certainly the debate about immigration here, whatever its complications, is relatively straightforward compared to that raging in Europe, where complexities of policy, attitude toward outsiders and the nature of immigrants’ backgrounds dominate all discussions. During the last twenty years, I’ve lived in Europe for years at a time — and I continue to read the Dutch papers daily. I’m fascinated by the complexities of this new Europe.

During a teaching stint at the University of Helsinki in the early Nineties, I was at a dinner party where the inevitable subject of immigration came up. Finland had recently taken in two thousand Somalis and resisted admitting more. It discouraged immigration and has remained homogeneous to this day.

Sweden, on the other hand, was much easier about giving political asylum and had hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants already. Now it has more.

The academics around the table wished Finland would be more like Sweden in this regard. My comment that some day Finland might be spared many problems was treated with polite silence — as was a remark from the other extreme by another guest, that he wouldn’t mind a million or two Russians “who’d liven things up in Finland” (at that time, it was widely rumored that hungry Russians would soon swarm across Finnish borders).

Finland vs. Sweden is only one of many contrasts in the way European countries have handled immigration. These days, the usual contrast is between Sweden and Denmark. Denmark has taken a hard line with its Muslims, restricting further immigration in part by clamping down on marriage between resident Muslims and the spouse they might send for in the home country. Sweden, on the other hand, remains almost aggressively lenient.

Sharp differences about integration and assimilation of immigrant and minority populations into Europe continue to exist.

There is the French model of integration — dented somewhat by last year’s immigrant riots in the notorious ghetto-like suburbs — that everybody living in France should be French, period, while the British multicultural model attempts to avoid segregated suburban high-rises and encourages immigrants to retain their own culture. Of course, in practice the two models frequently overlap.

In fact, within France, many variations exist: Paris favors the “be French” model, while Marseilles — a Mediterranean city with vast experience of non-French residents — has gone in for a more multicultural system, less segregation, and greater flexibility in having Muslims play a significant role in the civic life of the city.

The Netherlands has tried both models, especially in housing. At certain times, urban planning produced ghettoization, at other times greater mingling. Despite many pronouncements neither has worked well. The last five years — after the rise and fall of populist politician Pim Fortuyn and the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh — have ended the silence and quieted politically correct platitudes, and the country has almost swung the other way, towards overt anger, pessimism and despair. Moderate native and Muslim Dutch voices are now often going unheard.

As if these complications weren’t enough, let it be noted that there are major differences between Muslim immigrant groups. Algerians in France, Moroccans in the Netherlands, Turks in Germany, Iraqis in Scandinavia may all be Muslim, but their cultural backgrounds differ. Add to that the hostility between minorities within minorities: recently the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported on a group of Syrian Christians in the Dutch town of Enschede who were collectively accused of hooliganism. As it turned out, an unsympathetic Turkish Dutch Muslim city councilman was the main complainant about what most townspeople saw as an exemplary subgroup.

Any number of Muslim immigrants function well as Dutch citizens, but the country’s attention appears focused on criminal Moroccan youth, especially in the big cities, and the potential for terrorism among seemingly assimilated but radicalized youngsters, often of school age.

In a country of sixteen million, over a million Muslims, mainly of Turkish and Moroccan descent, now dominate the debate. How best to integrate them? Do they even want to integrate? Can a large minority refuse to integrate?

In his meteoric career, the populist Pim Fortuyn proposed that no country could be truly multicultural without fragmenting. Pluralist, yes, multiculturalist, not really.

This may well contain the key to the present dilemma. Muslim groups, which see their culture as entirely the equal of the prevailing Dutch culture, may be on a collision course with the host country. Norms of free speech and the equality of women, the Dutch now say, are not negotiable. The dominant culture has to be respected and in some fashion submitted to by all the citizens. The fabled Dutch tolerance cannot yield to those who are intolerant of its major values.

Manfred Wolf is the editor of “Amsterdam: A Traveler’s Literary Companion.” He teaches literature and the history of ideas at the Fromm Institute, University of San Francisco.

“Here, Bullet,” poems by Brian Turner

George Leonard — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 19:19:35 +0000

Here, Bullet, poems by Brian Turner. Alice James Books, 2005. 71pp $14.95 paperback ISBN 1882295552

A review by George Leonard.

From the time of the Iliad until World War I, war was one of poetry’s central topics, yet now the subject seems taboo; as if all other artists were allowed to address this large and persistent area of human life except the poet. Even to write poetry involving war is suspect. Why? Why must the poet be excluded from the debate?

So I was surprised but pleased to read that Alice James Books was not only publishing Brian Turner’s poems, but that they had presented him with the Beatrice Hawley Award. I think of Alice James Books as a ferocious feminist press. I remember its founding, named for the neurasthenic sister of two famous brothers, soon after an excellent biography had resurrected her. They had published my friend, the Marin poet Laurel Trivelpiece, in the 1980s. I connected them with our poetry workshop, which frequently met in the women’s Marin homes. It was a stretch to picture them publishing war poems until I read the poems. Brian Turner is a “real poet” and Laurel– a holy terror who loved nothing as much as real poetry– would have loved them. (Matter of fact, Alice James was a holy terror too.)

Of course, these poems aren’t “political.” They bring no news that would affect one’s opinion of the Iraq War either way. What they do is use poetry’s power (they’re poems, it isn’t just the content that makes them interesting) to bring deeper knowledge of how any modern war feels, and how it is experienced by the people caught up in it. They bring knowledge that a news story or a film camera cannot bring. But do I really have to defend poetry’s superior powers to the San Francisco Humanities Review’s sophisticated readers?

Last night, I saw the Oliver Stone movie, “World Trade Center,” which used every device of the giant screen, of digital magic and THX sound, to make you feel how it felt to be there when the building collapsed. Yet the movie theater concussions affected me less than these lines in Brian Turner’s poem, “2000 lbs.” The subtitle, “Ashur Square, Mosul,” makes it clear that this actually happened. Mosul was a place where, as in this poem, Shia suicide bombers detonated trucks full of improvised explosives. Turner starts with a close-up of the terrified bomber’s sweating hand, waiting:

It begins simply with a fist, white-knuckled
And tight, glossy with sweat.

–And then Turner cut around the square at the moment of detonation, showing up the Iraqis (Sunni, I take it?) in the last second of life:

Rasheed passes the bridal shop
on a bicycle with Sefa beside him
and just before the air ruckles and breaks
he glimpses the sidewalk reflections
in the storefront glass, men and women,
walking and talking, or not, an instant
of clarity, just before each of them shatters,
under the detonation’s wave,
as if even the idea of them were being
destroyed, stripped of form
(p.43)

As if “even the idea of them were being destroyed!” I see it in my mind’s eye, to echo Coleridge, better than Stone could ever blue-screen FX it. The film director has the power to replace the audience’s imagination with his own; but a real poet, like Brian Turner, has the power to enlist your own imagination; and, as the saying goes, “what the audience can imagine is always stronger than anything you can show them.”

Turner has, even more than Robert Frost, taken the road less traveled by, at least for a poet. After his MFA at the University of Oregon, he served for seven years in the United States Army. It was the Clinton era, and his first job was defending Muslims from Serb atrocities in Boznia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division (1999-2000). I trust nobody will object to that, whatever their antipathy to the current Iraq war. “He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division,” the book’s publicity also tells me. As the epigraph for one poem in Here, Bullet says, “The wrong is not in the religion; the wrong is in us.” Not “American us” but “any of us, us.”

If Turner’s current assignment somehow disqualifies Turner as a poet all by itself, well, that’s quite an aesthetic. The Left does maintain a stance that it hates the conflict but does not blame the soldiers. I for one am relieved to picture an M.F.A. and a working poet in a position where he can exert influence over his men.

Iraq, then. It is a world which plainly awes Turner, a world where

At dusk, bats fly out by the hundreds
Water snakes glide in the ponding basins,
Behind the rubbled palaces.
(Curfew, page 47)

He has seen terrible things and has a compulsion to make us see them too. After the suicide bomb, he imagines the spirits of the newly dead,

As they wander confused amongst one another,
Learning each other’s names, trying to comfort
The living in their grief….
That it might not be forgotten.

I think that here the poet speaks of himself, as the speaking spirit of these muted dead, talking to us that “it might not be forgotten.” He has the power to re-present them to us, the power to make us see them; and– far more than a film director can– the power to make us feel what we are seeing.

When he jumped from the balcony, Hassan swam
In the air over the Aschur Street market,
Arms and legs suspended in a blur,
Above palm hearts and crates of lemons,
Not realizing how hard life fights
Sometimes, how an American soldier
Would run to his aid there on the sidewalk,
Trying to make sense of Hassan’s broken legs,
His screaming, trying to comfort him with words in an awkward music of stress and care….

I thought of the jihadi, who “swam in the air,” tonight, when the news showed a row of buildings in Baghdad brought down by “improvised” explosive devices. People must have swum in air, leaving them.

The poem isn’t over. The American, making his “awkward music of stress and care” is trying to comfort him when Hassan pulls the soldier’s knife out of its sheath and tries to kill him. The soldier who had been comforting Hassan, wrestles with him, finally kills the weakened jihadi, who says, dying,

Hassan whispered to him,
“Shukran, saddiq, shukran.”
“Thank you, friend, thank you.”

One has a sick feeling that there is no way Brian Turner could have made something like that up. I’ll remember Hassan, and the soldier, in their complex bond. I’ll remember too, that nowhere in the poem does the soldier hate Hassan, or, it seems, Hassan the soldier.

In fact, no place in the whole ambitious poetic cycle of Here, Bullet, does Turner unconsciously display any animosity to the “enemy,” any triumphing, gloating– none of that. It is war as a miserable and ugly duty which one does not shirk, but certainly cannot enjoy. There are people who do enjoy it, I believe; and plenty who hate. But they aren’t in these poems. Even the jihadis are just doing what they believe must be done. Turner’s vision of war is a vision of tragic necessity. I don’t share it.

These poems are arranged, as I said, in an ambitious poetic cycle which, like all poetic cycles, has better moments and worse moments. I don’t like the title poem, “Here, Bullet,” the only poem in the group with even a trace of soldierly bravado to it. (Though who am I to deny him a moment of that? Or to deny him pride in his ability to go through scenes like those above and still be able to write real poetry?)

As craftsman, Brian Turner is better when he describes than when he ventures into the abstract:

Rockets often fall,
In the night sky of the skull,
Down long avenues of the brain myelin sheathing over synapses
And the rough structures of thought
(Katyusha rockets, page 32)

Those are lines which any working poet could have written without having to be there. In fact, they read a bit like lost lyrics to a Doors song. By contrast, read this imagist vision:

Ankle-dash in the white-ocre salt flats
North of Babylon, women harvest salt
With buckets and bare hands,
In stands of water the color
Or rust, or a blue, dark as oil
Come up from the Earth
As if they walk on the water’s surface
Ablaze with sunlight, dressed in black, the color of crows, the color of shadows….

It burns your eyes. We talk a lot, in writing, about Make it New! But we also value, Make it Real! After reading Turner’s poems, how people suffer in a war, all wars, was realer to me. That’s knowledge any of us need to have, whatever our politics.