Gonzalo Barr

Librosfera, a Spanish literary blog, today published two good quotes about literature and reading.  Spanish (not Colombian, as I had previously reported) writer, Arturo Pérez Reverte, author of La reina del sur (The Queen of the South) said [translation to English mine] –

La literatura es el único consuelo y el único analgésico posible.  No elimina la causa del dolor pero ayuda a soportarlo.

***

Literature is the only possible solace and the only possible analgesic.  It does not eliminate pain, but it helps to bear it.

And from a reader, claurus, who commented on the post, this quote from Argentine writer, Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading –

La lectura es como el sexo, no se puede recomendar, hay que experimentarlo.

***

Reading is like sex.  You can’t recommend it.  You have to try it for yourself.

The November/December issue of Columbia College Today reprinted the speech given by Paul Auster last year when he accepted the Premio Príncipe de Asturias, one of Spain’s highest honors for achievement in several fields, including literature.  Here is an excerpt –

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life — sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head.  Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is this:  because you have to, because you have no choice. …

For years, in every country of the Western world, article after article has been published bemoaning the fact that fewer and fewer people are reading books, that we have entered what some have called the ‘post-literate age.’  That may well be true, but at the same time, this has not diminished the universal craving for stories. …

Still, when it comes to the state of the novel, to the future of the novel, I feel rather optimistic.  Numbers don’t count where books are concerned, for there is only one reader, each and every time only one reader.  That explains the particular power of the novel and why, in my opinion, it will never die as a form.

Source: Paul Auster, speech reprinted in Columbia College Today (Nov./Dec. 2007)

Earlier, I dedicated a post to collecting books and to the sensory experience of reading them.  Capitalizing on the success of electronic media to store documents, images, and music, among others, manufacturers have developed palm-sized devices capable of storing and displaying entire libraries.  In each case, though, they have failed to convince the public that these reading devices are worth the expense.

I have my own reasons why such e-readers have failed and it has to do with the market — people who are avid readers enjoy the experience of holding a book in their hands.  It is what is familiar to them.  Will a subsequent generation accept e-readers as naturally as children today accept email?  Probably.  But until we get there, don’t bet any real money on it.   And keep this in mind, email is immediate.  Snail mail takes, by today’s standards, the equivalent of a geologic age.  Plus they keep raising the postage.  The storage and playing of music has improved in both senses — you can store a closet-full of CDs in a device that is smaller than your palm and sounds a lot better than those hissy cassettes of 30 years ago.  Books are different because the experience of reading is essentially different than that of listening or communicating.

The Wall Street Journal today published an article about Amazon’s Kindle.  The author of the article argues that the latest incarnation of the e-reader is difficult to use and he details the faults of the device.

For me, it isn’t the device.  It is the experience.  No matter how bright they make the screen, I will always prefer a good book to the sterile, eye-squinting experience of looking at a screen that is little larger than a Post-It note.

Give me a book, even a heavy, hard to handle book, like the copy of DeLillo’s Underworld that I am reading now.  It’s hardcover and 827 pages long.  It easily weighs more than a pound, maybe two.  And yet there is something special about holding it, turning the pages, flexing the covers back, and reading.

She turned a page.  She used a book pillow to read when she was in bed.  I ordered it for her out of a catalog, jewel-toned jacquard, a wedge-shaped cushion that nestles in the lap and holds your book or magazine at the proper angle, with tassled bookmarks built in and a slot for your reading glasses.  DeLillo, Underworld, p. 128.

In any case, the argument will likely be moot in less than a hundred years. That’s when neuroscientists will have found a way to link our brains directly to a processor, a wireless modem, and who-knows-what-else. No more cell phones. Just think of the number and you will be connected. A wire 1,000 times thinner than a human hair will link the device to your auditory nerve, creating the sensation that you are hearing the other person. GPS too. You’ll never get lost again. And as you walk near a store (assuming stores still exist), you’ll get instant messaging — Sale Now! 50% off men’s suits! Come Inside!) — directly into your brain. There will be a jack too, a plug, or whatever you want to call it. It’ll be somewhere inconspicuous, like the back of your neck. You’ll be able to download and store terrabytes of data, including books. No more schools and subjects. Just downloads. A few nanoseconds and you’ll be done. Think of all the information you’ll be able to carry. How about polishing off War and Peace in the time that it takes you to answer that incoming call?

Source:  Walter S. Mossberg, “Amazon’s Kindle Makes Buying E-Books Easy, Reading Them Hard,” Wall Street Journal (Nov. 29, 2007)

Recently, the New Yorker interviewed Philip Roth about Exit Ghost, his latest novel and possibly the last installment of the Nathan Zuckerman books.

Throughout nine novels, beginning with The Ghost Writer in 1979, Roth has written about the protagonist and writer, Nathan Zuckerman.  In the first novel, Zuckerman is in his twenties, full of sexual energy and expectation.  Exit Ghost concludes (we think) the cycle with the septuagenarian suffering from incontinence and impotence.  He has exiled himself from New York city after a lifetime of being inmersed in the “real” — no television, no newspapers — just writing and long, solitary walks.  But beware of easy conclusions.  Zuckerman is not rejecting the world or making any statements.  “I’m not out to make fiction into a political statement,” Roth said –

It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that he goes into “solitary confinement,” he’s gone off to live and write in a comfortable rural retreat … His solitary way of living becomes a not unpleasant habit that satisfies his desire for a quiet, contemplative life devoted to literature. … But Zuckerman is no longer quite the man he once was, with the capacities and the stamina and the interests of the man he once was.  In his own words, he is “a no longer.”  He is over seventy, and age makes a difference — and the difference that it makes is a central subject of the novel.

Thanks to Turner Davies for the link.

Image:  Front cover of the American edition of Exit Ghost; Source:  Hermione Lee,”Age Makes a Difference: Hermione Lee talks with Philip Roth about his new novel, Exit Ghost,” The New Yorker (Oct. 1, 2007)

Hemingway left behind 10,000 books at Finca Vigía.  Vargas Llosa recently told an interviewer that he owned more than 18,000.  Umberto Eco claimed that he had 50,000, two thirds of which he kept in his apartment in Milan.

In the age of the Internet, where facts can be harvested with a few strokes of the keyboard and a click of the mouse, why would anyone keep books?  They take up space, collect dust, fungi, and mites.  They fade.  They fall apart.  They are a nuisance to unshelf, pack in carefully labeled boxes, load on a truck, unload off a truck, unbox, and re-shelf in something like the order you had them in.  And that’s when you pay people to do it for you.

Writing as a means of recording commercial transactions may have existed as early as 4000 BC in Mesopotamia and 1500 BC in China.  Yet it wasn’t until the fifth century that the book was invented.  And it was almost another thousand years before Gutenberg built the first printing press with movable type, transforming the book into one of the most powerful instruments of mass media the world had seen, at least until the spread of commercial radio and television in the twentieth century.

For those who see books as merely another way to package information, as exciting as a flash drive and a lot more cumbersome, it is only a matter of time before they become curios for the nostalgic collector, like old milk cans.

But for the bibliophile the experience of reading a book is more than merely “interfacing” with a paper medium to “download” information.

From the appearance of the cover, to the way the book feels in your hands, its heft, how it opens, the color and texture of the pages, the shape of the type face, the contrast of ink to paper, the book is foremost a sensory experience.

I estimate that I have accumulated about 3,000, maybe 5,000 books, that I keep in three different places in Miami.  Lately, I’ve been reading more and buying more, a lot more.  So how many books is enough?

Petrarch knew the answer.  In 1346, still in the age of incunabula, he wrote to a relative –

I am possessed by one insatiable passion, which I cannot restrain, nor would I if I could… I cannot get enough books.

Image:  Petrarch, Justus van Gent, circa 1400s, Wikipedia; Sources:  Emily Parker, “Storyteller: The famous novelist on politics, and how writing can change the course of history.” Wall Street Journal (June 23, 2007), Alberto Sinigaglia, “Umberto Eco:  vivere fra cinquantamila libri,” La stampa (May 5, 2007)

For twenty years, I thought John Fowles was dead.  His last novel, A Maggot, appeared in 1985.  There were books of essays and photography published between 1985 and 2005, but I assumed that his heirs were managing his literary estate.  Then, I read the news that Fowles had died.

The choice not to write or publish is so rare that I can think of only a few writers who have made it.  J.D.Salinger has famously remained silent for 40 years, though it is rumored that he continues to write and that he keeps his manuscripts locked in a vault in New Hampshire.  Kurt Vonnegut and Gabriel García Márquez announced their retirement, a state of life I associate more with civil servants than artists.  Both said that they had no more stories to tell.

That’s unthinkable.  How do you run out of stories?  Harper Lee published nothing else after one novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, which earned her the Pulitzer Prize.  I don’t know whether she still writes and has simply chosen not to publish.  But that kind of early success has a way of making a person retreat from the world.

In 1985, John Fowles chose not to write any more fiction.  Instead, he kept a diary.  By the time of his death, he had written two million words in 5,000 pages.  The reason he withdrew from fiction, according to Hal Jensen, whose article, “All Endevour Useless,” appeared in the March 31, 2006 of the Times Literary Supplement was not just an artistic move –

away from the false endings and overt shaping of novels… he saw his novels as dead objects, pored over, mangled and, as it were, bodysnatched by students and critics.  The name ‘John Fowles’ became strange to him, as if he were reading it off a headstone.  To avoid being thus read and buried, he had to keep writing but avoid publishing.  The unreadability of the Journals is the measure of Fowles’s success.  The notebooks lie in the archives of the Harry Ransom Institute, Austin, Texas, unstudied, uncomprehended, unencompassed.  As long as this remains the case, Fowles keeps a kind of literary immortality, a freedom from our desire to ‘finish’ him.

Fowles was born March 31, 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea, England to a prosperous cigar trader. After attending the University of Edinburgh, he began compulsory military service.  World War II ended and he returned to his studies, this time at Oxford, where he became enamored with the French existentialists, especially Camus and Sartre.  After graduating, he taught English in Poitiers, on the Greek isle of Spetsai, and in London.  Between 1952 and 1960, he wrote several novels, none of which he offered for publication.  In 1960, however, he wrote The Collector in four weeks.  It was published to great critical acclaim and commercial success.  After that, Fowles was able financially to write fulltime.  Other novels followed.  If The Collector took a month to write, The Magus took a decade.  Fowles would return to it years later and revise it once again for a second edition.  It is perhaps the novel that devoted readers of the author enjoy the most, igniting something like a cult following –

With parallels to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Homer’s The Odyssey, The Magus is a traditional quest story made complex by the incorporation of dilemmas involving freedom, hazard, and a variety of existential uncertainties.  Fowles compared it to a detective story because of the way it teases the reader:  ‘You mislead them ideally to lead them into a greater truth…it’s a trap which I hope will hook the reader,’ he says.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is still his best known work, having been adapted into a successful film with two famous actors playing the leading roles.

Sources:  Hal Jensen,  “All Endevour Useless,” Times Literary Supplement (Mar. 31, 2006), “Biography of John Fowles,” John Fowles The Website, see also article on John Fowles in Books and Writers website

Earlier this year, Harcourt published the US edition of Günter Grass’s memoirs, Peeling The Onion.  In the book, Grass admitted that he had been part of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the Schutzstaffel.  He has always maintained, though, that he did not volunteer, but was recruited and that his service was compulsory.

The distinction is important.  At the Nuremburg trials, the entire Waffen-SS was ruled to be guilty of war crimes, regardless of the actions of any particular member.  An exception was carved out for members who had been recruited, especially late in the war, and who had not volunteered.

In Grass’s memoirs, excerpts of which appeared earlier this year in The New Yorker, he denied that he knew he was being assigned to the Waffen-SS until his orders arrived –

As soon as the all-clear sounded, I took a tram to another station.  The train for Dresden waited for departure in the gray light of morning.

It was not until here, in a Dresden as yet untouched by the war, that I understood what division I had been attached to.  My new marching orders made it clear where the recruit with my name was to undergo basic training:  on a drill ground of the Waffen S.S., as a panzer gunner, somewhere far off in the Bohemian Woods.

The question is:  Was I frightened by what was obvious then in the recruitment office, as I am terrified now by the double “S,” even as I write this more than sixty years later?

There is nothing carved into the onion skin of my memory that can be read as a sign of shock, let alone horror.  I most likely viewed the Waffen S.S. as an élite unit that was sent into action whenever a breach in the front line had to be stopped up.

(Translated from the German by Michael Henry Heim)

This admission sent shockwaves through the literary world.  Grass was known as a vocal critic of Germans who would not come to terms with the nation’s Nazi past.  In 1985, a visit by then-chancellor Helmut Kohl and president Ronald Reagan to the cemetery at Bitburg infuriated Grass, who thought that their presence honored the Waffen-SS men buried there.

Journalist, Michael Jürgs, first published a biography of Grass in 2002, four years before the Nobel laureate’s memoirs and therefore his confession.  That edition did not mention his involvement in the Waffen-SS.  A revised edition of the biography was published last month and stated that Grass had “volunteered” to serve.  Grass then sued the publisher, Goldmann Verlag, in a German court.

It is all about the language.  The Guardian translated and quoted the passage from Jürgs’s book that is at the center of the suit –

He admitted … that as a 17-year-old he volunteered to join the Waffen-SS.

In an affidavit submitted to the court, Grass wrote –

…as a 15-year-old I volunteered in Gotenhafen to join the Wehrmacht.  In fact I wanted to serve on a submarine or alternatively a tank unit…This has nothing to do, directly or indirectly, with volunteering for the Waffen-SS.  I was enlisted with the Waffen-SS without my active cooperation only when I received the notification of the draft in autumn 1944.

Perhaps offering us a preview of the publisher’s defense, The Guardian quoted a lawyer for Goldmann Verlag as saying, “What is missing is a clear and simple statement:  I did not volunteer to join the Waffen-SS.”

If Goldmann Verlag intents to defend itself by claiming that Grass has never been clear about the circumstances that led him to become a part of the Waffen-SS, it would not be the first time that the author was accused of muddling the facts.  This June, William Grimes reviewed Grass’s memoir for The New York Times and noted that –

Peeling the Onion is a verbally dazzling but often infuriating piece of work, bristling with harsh self-criticism, murky evasions and coy revisions of a past that, Mr. Grass steadfastly insists, presents itself to his novelist’s imagination as a parade of images and stories asking to be manipulated….The constant muddling of fact and fiction grows wearisome.

Since his confession, some critics have called for Grass to return the Nobel prize.  Others have been more understanding and forgiving.  When fellow Nobel laureate Dario Fo was asked what he thought about Grass’s past, he quoted Brecht and said “Pity the land that needs heroes.”  Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, offered this explanation for Grass’s silence (my translation into English follows the Spanish original) –

¿Por qué calló?  Simplemente porque tenía vergüenza y acaso remordimientos de haber vestido aquel uniforme y, también, porque semejante credencial hubiera sido aprovechada por sus adversarios políticos y literarios para descalificarlo en la batalla cívica y política que, desde los comienzos de su vida de escritor, Günter Grass identificó con su vocación literaria.
¿Por qué decidió hablar ahora?  Seguramente para limpiar su conciencia de algo que debía atormentarlo y también, sin duda, porque sabía que tarde o temprano aquel remoto episodio de su juventud llegaría a conocerse y su silencio echaría alguna sombra sobre su nombre y su reputación de escritor comprometido, y, como suele llamársele, de conciencia moral y cívica de Alemania.  En todo esto no hay ni grandeza ni pequeñez, sino, me atrevo a decir, una conducta impregnada de humanidad, es decir, de las debilidades connaturales a cualquier persona común y corriente que no es, ni pretende ser, un héroe ni un santo.

***

Why was he silent?  Simply because he felt shame and maybe remorse for having worn that uniform and because such credentials would have been exploited by his literary and political adversaries to disqualify him from the civic and political battle that Günter Grass has identified as his literary vocation since the beginning of his life as a writer.  Why did he decide to speak now?  Surely to cleanse his conscience of something that had to torment him and, without a doubt, because he knew that sooner or later that remote episode of his youth would become known and his silence would cast a shadow over his name and his reputation as a committed writer and the moral and civic conscience of Germany, as he is often called.  In all this there is neither greatness nor pettiness but, I dare say, conduct that is soaked with humanity, which is to say, with the weaknesses that are natural in any common person who is not, nor does he pretend to be, a hero or a saint.

So what importance does a literary biography have, coming after the author’s own words, whether fiction or memoir? John Updike, in a piece from Due Considerations, a compilation of his essays and reviews, wrote –

When an author has devoted his life to expressing himself, and if a poet or a writer of fiction has used the sensational and critical events of his life as his basic material, what of significance can a biographer add to the record?

Who knows? As a reader, I have indulged myself with facts about writers’ lives, thick books about Joyce and Hemingway and even books about writers whose work I don’t admire. It is a natural tendency to look behind the curtain and see what the operator of that wonderful machine known as the novel or story looks like. Moreover, writers read books about writers to see how others do it. The literary biography has its place and purposes, but always within the context of the author’s own words, I think.

Why did Grass wait all these years to admit that he had once been a member of the notorious SS? His own words, from his memoirs, provide an answer –

Enough excuses.  Still I refused for decades to utter the word SS and admit that I wore that double symbol.  After the war, with growing shame, I wanted to keep silent about what I accepted in the stupid pride of my younger years.  The burden remains, and no one can lighten it for me.
True, during my training as an anti-tank gunner, which stupified me in the fall and winter, I heard nothing of those crimes of war which later came to light.  However, insisting on ignorance cannot veil my awareness that I was made part of a system which planned, organized and carried out the destruction of millions of human beings.  Even absolved of active guilt, there remains something that doesn’t go away, that all too commonly is called shared responsibility.  I will have to live with that for the rest of my years.

Unless the parties reach a settlement, these questions are now a legal matter to be decided by a German court.

See also the article in Der Spiegel (in German).

Sources:  Günter Grass, “How I Spent the War:  A Recruit in the Waffen SS,” The New Yorker (June 4, 2007), Norman Birnbaum, “The Strange Silence of Günter Grass,” The Nation (Aug. 18, 2006), Alexandra Topping, “Grass Sues Publisher Over Claims that He Chose to Enlist With Waffen-SS,” The Guardian (Nov. 24, 2007), William Grimes, “Grass’s Fact and Fiction, Fighting to a Draw,” New York Times (June 27, 2007), Samuel Loewenberg, “Storm grows over Grass’s belated SS confessions,” The Guardian (Aug. 16, 2006), Mario Vargas Llosa, “Günter Grass, en la picota,” El país (Aug. 27, 2006), John Keenan, “Can Biographers Avoid Cheapening Their Subjects?” The Guardian (Nov. 27, 2007)

On one of my visits to London, I went to the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand and sat through the opening statements in a libel case.  The plaintiff claimed that the defendant newspaper had libeled him when they reported that he was a professional “deprogramer” of cult members.  The paper had described the plaintiff’s methods in terms that sounded like abduction.

Libel and defamation suits in the US against a newspaper rarely prosper.  Courts have interpreted the First Amendment broadly to protect all forms of speech, including publication, except in limited exceptions.  A private person must show that the allegedly libelous words were published with malice or reckless disregard for the truth before he can recover.

In the UK, libel laws are more liberal.  No showing of malice or reckless disregard is required. Consequently, there are many more libel suits.  It is easier to recover damages, even against a newspaper.  It was more than a simple coincidence that I should walk into the Royal Courts of Justice and find a trial for libel about to begin.

For years, the difference in libel laws between the US and the UK did not matter much.  More recently, with the advent of the Internet and the nearly simultaneous publication of books on both sides of the English-speaking Atlantic, that is no longer the case.

In 2005, Rachel Ehrenfeld published Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How To Stop It, in which she wrote that Saudi businessman, Khalid Salim bin Mahfouz, had financed al-Qaida through the family’s National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia and Islamic charities.  Mahfouz sued Ehrenfeld for libel in the UK.  When Ehrenfeld did not appear, the British court entered a default judgment against her, awarded Mahfouz substantial money damages, and enjoined the publisher from making the book available in the UK.  (For example, Amazon (UK) does not list the book.)

Ehrenfeld then filed an action in US federal district court, arguing that Mahfouz would not have been able to prevail had he sued in the US and, therefore, the British judgment is unenforceable here because it violates the First Amendment.  She also argued that Mahfouz should have sued her in US courts, as she is American and lives here.  And that Mahfouz engaged in forum shopping by bringing the suit in the UK, where the libel laws are more liberal.

Several procedural questions must be answered before the court can consider Ehrenfeld’s case.  The first is whether the US federal district court has jurisdiction over Mahfouz.  To answer that, the court must decide whether New York’s “long arm” law is applicable.  The court has jurisdiction over someone outside the state if he “in person or through an agent” transacts any business within the state, as long as the legal action arose from those New York transactions.  Federal courts sitting as courts of diversity jurisdiction (meaning that the plaintiff is from one place — Ehrenfeld is in New York — and the defendant is from another — Mahfouz is in Saudi Arabia) apply the law of the state where they sit.  That is why the federal court is looking at New York law to make its ruling.  In cases where the decision may have a significant impact on the fundamental rights of many others, such as protecting First Amendment rights, a federal court can request the highest court in the state to inform them on what the law is.  The rationale is that the highest state court is best suited to interpret state law.

The highest court in New York, the Court of Appeals, has received the case.  The question before it is a limited one — does the state’s ”long arm” law apply to Mahfouz such that the federal court can hear the case against him.

If Mahfouz prevails, US writers are effectively stripped of First Amendment protections, especially as the Internet has all but erased national boundaries, at least in countries where the public has unfettered access to the Web.  Publish something that someone anywhere in the world deems libelous and the offended person may sue you in a friendly court, like the UK, get an award for damages, then ask a US court to enforce the award here.

According to the Associated Press, Ehrenfeld, in her court papers, stated that Mahfouz has sued or threatened to sue for libel and defamation in the UK at least 29 times for statements concerning his role in the financing of terrorism.  The Guardian reports that every major media group in the UK, including The Guardian, signed a consolidated amicus curiae brief and filed it with the New York Court of Appeals.  The brief cites the “growing and dangerous threat of ‘libel tourism’ — the cynical and aggressive use of claimant-friendly libel laws in foreign jurisdictions…” which “has chilled and will continue to chill Dr Ehrenfeld’s exercise of her free speech.”

Every writer needs to watch this case carefully.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on C. Ben Bosah, an environmental engineer, who self-published his wife’s book on women’s health.  Bosah had no experience publishing.  The article details several of his mistakes — choosing a clumsy title, ordering over 15,000 copies when 5,000 copies made more sense, failing to secure a distributor, failing to send galleys to Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and getting no blurbs.  As a result, he has 330 boxes of unsold books cluttering the garage.

There is something of an up side to this story, but I’ll let you read the original article to find out what that is.

Source:  Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, “Writing the Book on Self-Help:  A Publisher’s Cautionary Tale,” Wall Street Journal (Nov. 13, 2007)

Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, recently posted a piece quoting Robert Harris.  More specifically, the post quoted a passage from The Ghost, Harris’s novel about a ghostwriter who is charged with writing the memoirs of a former prime minister of the UK.

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities.  Set down one word, however, and immediately it becomes earthbound.  Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.  But the best must never be allowed to drive out the good. In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship.

Image: The Aberdeen Bestiary, Aberdeen University Library