I’ve been struggling to read Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, despite wanting to read it very much. So, let’s go back to the beginning. Why did I want to read this novel? Two reasons readily present themselves. Quite early in my career as a high school English teacher I taught for two years in Istanbul. During that time I was able to visit the Black Sea coast up close to the border with Georgia, Northern Cyprus, and travel as far east as Kurdish Diyarbakir and the border with Syria. The city itself, Istanbul, was at times, a difficult place to live, particularly in the winters. In the early 1990s the heating furnaces in the basements of most of the buildings were still fuelled by burning unprocessed lignite, so that the famous vistas across the Bosphorus disappeared beneath an impenetrable blanket of dirty, gritty smoke. But Istanbul was, for me, the City, an extraordinary palimpsest of civilisations bisected by one of the greatest waterways of the world and adorned with the flowers of Ottoman architecture, particularly the imperial mosques and minarets.
Towards the ends of my two winters, Istanbul celebrated its annual international film festival. I remember very fondly now the frustration of attending a screening of one of my then favourite Australian films, Paul Cox’s Man of Flowers (1983). The volume was deliberately turned down very low, the subtitles were in French and a man with a microphone was delivering a live translation into Turkish. But the light was there on the screen, the southern light and the colour of the sky on a clear Melbourne day. The publication of an Orhan Pamuk novel was also celebrated in the bookshop windows up and down İstiklal Caddesi in a variety of Lego-like displays.
Since then, I’ve read the novels of Orhan Pamuk as they’ve become available in English and I’ve recently been given one or two by Elif Shafak. I know that Batuman is not a Turkish resident, that she is the American child of Turkish migrants, but I was still interested in what she might be writing. I was also drawn to her by listening to a conversation that was recorded in Australia during one of our writers’ festivals in 2022. Reflecting on Selin and her young-adult female peers in The Idiot and its sequel, Either/Or, Batuman explained that these were intelligent, educated, even privileged young women whose lives were going fine until they embarked on their relationships with young men. These relationships brought tension and unease into their lives. I loved Batuman’s turn of phrase in the interview, her confidence and wit, and, as the father of three young adult daughters, how could I not be interested in Selin and her friends’ experiences?
This next detail is an irrelevance because I never buy books based on what the blurbs say. However, on the paperback edition The Idiot is described as ‘masterfully funny’ and ‘frequently hilarious’. Whilst comic writing is not high on my list of literary preferences, I thought it might be possible to really enjoy reading this novel. I’m sorry, indeed, I’m embarrassed to say that I’m something like 350 pages in and real laughter has separated my lips precisely once. Selin is teaching English in a small Hungarian village on a summer exchange program. One of the local trainee English teachers is unimpressed with her pedagogy:
“This is your plan?” Rózsa asked afterward in a voice full of outrage. “Candies and games?”
“That’s basically the American way.”
“I think you are very…” She consulted her dictionary. “Inexperienced.”
“We have different systems.”
“Yes – I am serious, and you are not!” (357)
Batuman’s swipe at the American system of education which has produced her protagonist is genuinely ironically witty. Much earlier in the novel I had pretty much given up hope for that system myself as Selin and her fellow-students described their studies and their lecturers at Harvard. If this is what elite education looks like in the twenty-first century, I found myself thinking time and again, then America really is fucked.
But what about the humour? Can someone who repeatedly reveals to us that she does not understand why people behave, speak, feel, think or write the way they do make us laugh? Can a character who appears to have almost no connection with her body, her gender, her sexuality, even – and I know this sounds incredibly cruel – no real connection with her own mind or emotions, can a character like this make us laugh? You bet they can. Think of all those stand-up comedians, those masters of self-deprecation who have had us rolling in the aisles at their expense. But, clearly, Batuman doesn’t want to sacrifice her protagonist in this way. Selin, I will be asserting a little later, is far too important a literary experiment or symbol to allow the reader to laugh at her in this manner. But seriously, her dialogue, her interior monologue, her affectless disconnection from just about everything, make of her – unfortunately – not just an idiot but a character who struggles to command our attention, let alone our sympathy. This is beyond naivety, beyond innocence. Selin appears to be an example of what a tram driver once described to me as ‘an educated idiot’. If it wasn’t for that moment in the shower in Hungary when she acknowledges sexual desire for the first time (349), I was beginning to wonder if she was some kind of an android dropped in from an Ishiguro novel, a Klara or a Kathy H who had accidentally migrated from one imaginative universe to another.
Like someone bamboozled by a piece of modern art, I knew I needed backup: the didactic panel, the ideological statement. At this point I have a further confession to make. My Google search term was this: is there such a thing as a negative review of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot? Happily though, this led me to the discovery of her September 2010 essay in the London Review of Books called ‘Get a Real Degree’. Ostensibly a review of Mark McGurl’s study of the rise and impact of creative writing programs on American writing, Batuman uses the opportunity for a longform examination in which she establishes some markers in terms of her own views on the function and value of literature. Interestingly, the essay was also published midway between her writing of the first draft of The Idiot in 2001 and its eventual publication in 2018.
Reading this essay, I was in the presence of a writer who not only had something to discuss, something to consider, something to say, I was reading something I truly wanted to read. Neither completely dismissive or utterly sceptical of the contribution of tertiary creative writing programs to the condition of contemporary American literature, she does find both the programs and the literature questionable. Batuman points out, for example, that the two primary exhortations of the programs – ‘write what you know’ and ‘show don’t tell’ – are actually contradictory. Batuman also performs some incisive surgery on the claims to originality and newness inherent in so many of the tenets and practices of postmodernism, tracing them back not just to Henry James but to Don Quixote. Both Batuman and McGurl locate the emergence of the programs in the immediate post-war Cold War era, Batuman interpreting this in the context of the contest of ideas and values between the US and the Soviet Union. Batuman goes on to consider the kind of managerialist ideology underpinning the courses, their commodification of writing, of the novel and of the novelists graduating from them. Without challenging the value and importance of diversity, Batuman highlights the dialectical process which abandons the study of canonical works in favour of the new, especially if the new arises from a diversity of formerly marginalised voices. In her analysis, the new diversity becomes its own compulsory orthodoxy, ‘an unhappiness-entitlement contest’ through which outsiders become insiders whilst continuing to claim their outsider credentials.
Batuman is so concerned about this commodification of writing that she draws a distinction between much of the writing now being published in the US and what she still bravely, aesthetically and dialectically describes as ‘literature’. The proliferation of ‘mediocre’ novels with ‘about three genuinely beautiful sentences… one convincing, well-observed character’ and ‘a story that you can’t bring yourself to care about’ comes down, as Batuman admits, to a matter of taste. However, her critique is clear: the creative writing programs have led to a significant increase in productivity, in quantity, not quality. Indeed, Batuman claims that ‘the real work of the novel (the juxtaposition of personal narrative with the facts of the world and the facts of literature) is taking place today largely in memoirs and essays.’ I cannot tell you how alive I felt as a reader and as a writer reading this essay.
But did it help me understand and appreciate, will it help me enjoy The Idiot? Reading ‘Get a Real Degree’ makes me wonder if The Idiot, in particular Batuman’s disarming(?) / infuriating(?) characterisation of Selin, is a kind of literary experiment? A response, for instance, to the damaging impact of cultural theory on creative practice? Or, is it an attempt at literary reclamation of the mainstream from all those voices simultaneously challenging the mainstream and demanding admittance to it? Perhaps Selin is a kind of tabula rasa intended to get us looking at the world again without the obligatory demands of diversity and cultural theory? What would happen if you wrote about a person living in the world who knows she does not know how the world works, who knows she wants to know by learning through her own experience and – more importantly as it turns out – through her own observation? For more than three-quarters of the novel, Selin does not seem to be able to answer the simplest questions about herself: what does she want, what does she feel, what does she intend to do? Then, all of a sudden – significantly, I think, after the self- and sexual realisation of the shower scene – she can tell her most difficult Hungarian interlocutor, Rózsa: “Truth is okay… But civilization is based on lies.” (360-361) A bombshell dropped by a character from whom we can at the very least learn this: not knowing is no excuse for not observing, not thinking or not learning. What matters in the remaining seventy or so pages of the novel is Selin’s shift from self-abnegation to self-awareness, culminating in her realisation that a year’s study of linguistics and the philosophy and psychology of language has taught her nothing she wanted to know ‘about how language worked’ (423) and her decision to change her major. Cultural theory and postmodernism down, aesthetics and literature up.
And by a curious diversion, something like three-quarters of my way through this curious river of a novel, I had learned to appreciate Selin’s company and Batuman’s style. Selin is a cypher through which we come to learn that the task of the artist is not to accumulate experience but to practise observation.
Rarely have I slapped myself so comprehensively in the face with the simplest of truisms as I have over Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul. For goodness’ sake, don’t judge a book by its cover! After all, we don’t appraise a play based on the first exchange of dialogue or a painting by the first inch of canvas. There I was, thinking that I was wading into the wallpaper of what Jeanette Winterson recently described as ‘wimmin’s fiction of the worst kind’: the relentless monotony of a family drama driven by a reality TV show obsession with the final reveal; the singularity of the characterisation of each female character into the particular peculiarity of a certain thinginess: the batty aunty, the occult auntie, the ideological auntie, the wayward auntie, the authoritarian grandmother and the seriously unfunny pancake batter wielding obese mother.
Why did I want to be here? What was I doing here? What was I looking for? The Istanbul I lived in briefly almost thirty years ago; the brutal Turkish landscape of Yashar Kemal; the obsessive compulsive oddity, the sameness-as-difference of Orhan Pamuk? Whatever it was, it was unfair and misguided. Between the walls of these women’s lives Shafak weaves a fabric sufficiently robust to sustain the sharpest and the heaviest of observations. Within the family we witness the perversion of patriarchal power as it is handed on from father to son. Within the city we witness the agony of the essentially Westernised intelligentsia clinging to the lifeboat of their values in a society swamped by football fanaticism and religious superstition. Midway on our journey towards the two great revelations about the family histories of Asya and Armanoush we witness an act of audacious and dangerous courage: at the risk of being arrested, tried and imprisoned a Turkish author, Elif Shafak, writes about the Armenian genocide of 1915 as a given historical reality. She writes about it as a series of acts and facts retained in intergenerational trauma from the Syrian desert to the chatrooms of the early twenty-first century and in the exquisite metafiction of an aging Armenian intellectual trying to complete his first and only children’s story on the eve of the outbreak of the atrocities. She writes about the shared amnesia of denialism and at the same time she doesn’t shy away from addressing the danger of prolonged and inherited victimhood. The deceptive lightness of her touch is, perhaps, Elif Shafak’s strongest weapon as a novelist.
Just as I was beginning to think disappointedly that Elif Shafak’s writing reminded me of nothing more than wallpaper, I came across this stunning narration from one of her characters who is addressing his friends in the Café Kundera where they meet every evening in central Istanbul. Attempting to explain why their regular café is named after the Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist actually manages to explain much more about the quality of life, the sense of displacement, experienced by an educated and cosmopolitan elite living in a regressive and authoritarian society:
“Boredom is the summary of our lives. Day after day we wallow in ennui. Why? Because we cannot abandon this rabbit hole for fear of a traumatic encounter with our own culture. Western politicians presume there is a cultural gap between Eastern Civilization and Western Civilization. If it were that simple! The real civilization gap is between the Turks and the Turks. We are a bunch of cultured urbanites surrounded by hillbillies and bumpkins on all sides. They have conquered the whole city… The streets belong to them, the plazas belong to them, the ferries belong to them. Every open area is theirs. Perhaps in a few years this café will be the only place left for us. Our last liberated zone. We rush here every day to seek refuge from them. Oh yes, them! God save me from my own people!… We are stuck. We are stuck between the East and the West. Between the past and the future. On the one hand there are the secular modernists, so proud of the regime they constructed, you cannot breathe a critical word. They’ve got the army and half of the state on their side. On the other hand there are the conventional traditionalists, so infatuated with the Ottoman past, you cannot breathe a critical word. They’ve got the general public and the remaining half of the state on their side. What is left for us? … The Modernists tell us to move forward, but we have no faith in their idea of progress. The Traditionalists tell us to move backward, but we do not want to return to their ideal order either. Sandwiched between the two sides, we march two steps forward and one step backward… You know what we are? The scum of this country. A sorry soggy pulp, nothing more than that… Our existence is kitsch, a beautiful lie, which helps us to defy the reality of death and mortality…”
Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul, Penguin Books, 2008, pp. 81-82
The mental geography of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and Revolt of Aphrodite is a Panhellenic vision of the eastern Mediterranean in which Alexandria – despite the Egyptians – is a Judeo-Christian outpost, and Istanbul – despite the Turks – is the capital of a sensibility which is mapped racially and culturally if not historically and cartographically. How fortunate his readers are that he discovered Provence and was there able to free himself from the limitations of this worldview and write what may still yet come to be seen as his masterwork: The Avignon Quintet.
What comes between the Quartet and the Quintet is a double-decker novel made up of Tunc and Nunquam which features the preoccupations of the other two works – most notably, the provisional nature of character and experience – without the artistry. All of the bombast of the Quartet is there without the youthful exuberance. All of the orientalism of both the Quartet and the Quintet is there but stripped of its exoticism and beauty to reveal Durrell’s unmediated imperial racism and patriarchal sexism. All of Durrell’s reactionary political and social values are on display in The Revolt of Aphrodite without the wit, humour or self-deprecation of the other two texts. The two novels, Tunc and Nunquam, can be stripped down to a series of aphorisms. Unfortunately, the pleasure of finding them does not sufficiently reward the reading of an otherwise underwhelming book. By his own suggestion, Durrell seems to have realised that he did not achieve the total vision that would provide The Revolt of Aphrodite with the significance of his other sequences of novels. Were his novels ever subjected to judicious editorial oversight at Faber? It is hard to believe they were and Durrell’s reputation as a writer may very well be much the worse for it.
From Tunc (1968):
Reality is what is most conspicuous by its absence.
Causality is an attempt to mesmerise the world into some sort of significance. We cannot bear its indifference.
At what point does a man decide that life must be lived unhesitatingly? Presumably after exhausting every other field.
People deprived of a properly constituted childhood will always find something hollow in their responses to the world, something unfruitful.
Art is the real science.
What space is to matter, soul is to mind.
“There is no difference between truth and reality – ask any poet.”
To fulfil is to fill full.
CARADOC’S ACROPOLIS LECTURE: “Who were they, first of all, these ancestors of ours? Who? And how did they manage to actualise the potential in man’s notion of beauty, sidestep history, abbreviate eternity? . . . In our age the problem has not changed, only our responses are different. We have tried to purify insight with the aid of reason and its fruit in technics: and failed – our buildings show it. . . . But in an age of fragments, an age without a true cosmological notion of affect and its powers, what can we do but flounder, improvise, hesitate? . . . How to forbid oneself to elucidate reality – that is the problem, the difficulty. How to restore the wonder to human geometry – that is the crux of the matter.”
COUNT BANUBULA: “Haven’t you noticed Charlock that most things in life happen just outside one’s range of vision? One has to see them out of the corner of one’s eye. And any one thing could be the effect of any number of others? I mean there seem to be always a dozen perfectly appropriate explanations to every phenomenon. That is what makes our reasoning minds so unsatisfactory; and yet, they are all we’ve got, this shabby piece of equipment.”
. . . all this for me was mere pleasure which never exploded into insight, couldn’t disturb the egocentric flow of my hugged imaginings.
But then one can’t start loving retroactively – or can one?
. . . perhaps we are forced to choose as lovemates, shipmates, playmates those that best match our inward ugliness – the sum of our own shortcomings. No, I did not know that as yet. Not then.
The soul of modern man is made of galvanised iron.
The hero of the New Comedy will be the scientist in love, grappling with the androgynous shapes of his own desire.
Time is the only thing that doesn’t wear out.
Gentlemen of the jury, we should tackle reality in a slightly joky way, otherwise we miss its point. It isn’t solemn at all, it’s playing!
I realised that any explanation would do, and that all would forever remain merely provisional. Was this perhaps true for all of us, for all our actions? Yes, yes.
Try as you will, there is no explanation for madness, happiness or death.
We always think that we are thinking one thought at a time because we have to put them down one under the other, in a linguistic order; this is an illusion I suppose.
“The body dries up, the mind becomes toneless, the soul reverts to chrysalis; the only providing power lives on and on, independent of a dogmatic theology. The only thing that does not wear out is time.” Thus Koepgen.
IOLANTHE: “It’s a terrible thing to feel that one has come to the end of one’s life-experience – that there is nothing fundamentally new to look forward to: one must expect more and more combinations of the same sort of thing – the thing which has proven one a sort of failure. So then you start on the declining path, living a kind of posthumous life, your blood cool, your pulse steady.”
Human attention is fragile and finite; won’t be mastered; can’t be bribed; is always changing.
Ah, for one moment of that total vision which might reorder the whole field and make it significant.
From Nunquam (1970):
Is it imperative that the tragic sense should reside after all somewhere in laughter?
The more we know about knowing the less we feel about feeling.
Nature is an organism not a system, and will always punish those who try to strap her into a system. . . . Nature improvises out of pure joy, always with a miracle in hand; why can’t man?
MARCHANT: “While society is happily creating a slave-class of analphabetics, ‘les visuels’, who have forgotten how to read and who depend on a set of Pavlovian signals for their daily bread and other psychic needs – surely we have the right to build a model which will be at least as ‘human’ as these so-called human beings? . . . The old weakness is peeping out. You want to intrude metaphysical considerations into empirical science. It’s no go. You are tapping on a door which does not exist. The wall is solid.”
But I was thinking to myself about memory – is everything recorded in it from the first birth-cry to the death-rattle? Why not? Or does it simply wear out like an old disc?
Since earliest times a change of consciousness has been accredited with great healing power; this was recognised since the Eleusinian Mysteries and long before them.
ARIADNE: “No; it is just that we have all changed places, haven’t we? The pack has been shuffled. Everyone will be going round counter-clockwise now. I expect the good to get badder and the bad to get gooder; except in the exceptional cases – where one or other have got up enough momentum to stop the pendulum. . . .”
It is retrospectively that one marks up and weighs the value of experiences.
for Ellen, whose love since then makes sense of what comes after this . . .
PART ONE
Sunday October 2, 2016
This is going to be a long story with a lot of interruptions. I’m not even sure how long or how many sittings it is going to take for me to write it out. Never let anyone tell you differently: high school teaching is completely incompatible with any form of aesthetic, artistic or intellectual pursuit other than the teaching itself. We aspire to make a difference in young people’s lives when the real differences that need to be made are in the society that produces them and we hope to help them shape their minds when one of the primary functions of the job is to distort our own minds with anxiety and guilt. This is the alienation experienced by committed teachers: educators experience education as anti-education. In a long career I have seen my life reduced from a set of parameters that once allowed me to teach, to write and to maintain a prodigious correspondence with fellow writers and editors. Almost thirty years later, the nature of work itself has changed so much in the neoliberal nightmare to which we have all succumbed that we do not possess the right to claim a single minute as our own. I love teaching, I love the fact that I have the privilege of working with young people who trust me and – despite the fact that it is constantly being reprocessed, shrink-wrapped and reduced to the proverbial head of a pin – I still love subject English. But, I do not know from one day or week or term to the next whether I will have a moment to think, reflect and create on my own terms. This is going to be a long story with a lot of interruptions. This paragraph about the spiritual and artistic death of wage slavery has been the first digression inserted before the text currently known as ‘P76’ has even begun.
Sunday October 9, 2016
In the first half of 1993 I was teaching the final semester of a two-year posting in Istanbul. Late in 1990 I had responded to an advertisement in the Melbourne morning daily ‘Sun’ for teachers to come and work in Turkey for a group of private schools that was offering an extended English-language program within an otherwise Turkish national curriculum on their secondary campuses. Every year a recruitment officer would come across from Turkey to Melbourne to interview prospective teachers in the Centrelink offices in Sunshine. She was a young Turkish-Cypriot woman with relatives here whom she took the opportunity to visit every year. Once I was living over there I learned that the schools were built on parcels of land throughout Istanbul that belonged to a former lord mayor of the city who was a very wealthy businessman. Rumours occasionally surfaced about how he came to be so wealthy and how he came to own these properties but nothing ever eventuated from them. The foreign teachers were housed in apartment buildings that presumably also belonged to him. I lived in the Ulus-Etiler district on the European side of the city, a few kilometres above Besiktas on the Bosphorus and I worked at the Balmumcu campus of the ISTEK Vakfi. As well as teaching a range of younger classes, I was employed as a ‘yabanci’ or foreign teacher of an ‘edebiyat’ or literature-streamed class of senior year students. The ‘edebiyat’ students felt that they were intellectually inferior to the others who were ‘fen’ or science-streamed and who were apparently on their way to becoming engineers and technocrats. If they did not feel academically inferior themselves, they certainly felt that their intellectual interests were not as highly valued as those of the maths and science students. Some of the senior students I taught, though, did have a genuine love of literature and their pride in the modern Turkish poetry of such diverse writers as Orhan Veli and Nazim Hikmet was impressive. They would furtively yet proudly share with me their translations of ‘The Chestnut Tree in Gulhane Park’ and ‘I am Listening to Istanbul’. I knew that this was going to be my final semester in Turkey because I had accepted a posting to the Amman Baccalaureate School in Jordan commencing in the second half of 1993. The offer had been made to me at the European Council of International Schools annual teacher recruitment fair in London where I had also been offered a job in Colombia. I was in transit and one of the features of that life that I remember with the most affection is the sense of provisionality about it, the feeling that if things didn’t work out in one place I could relocate to another, a frame of mind that I have never been able to cultivate in my everyday life at home in Australia. This outlook is, of course, a world away from the disenabling precarity that has become the norm today. There had also been some short-lived doubt as to whether my annual contract in Istanbul would be renewed for my second year due to some dissatisfaction amongst the ISTEK people with an article I had published in a Victorian Department of Education magazine about teaching abroad in which I made the point that you only needed to travel light. I was also in a state of transition regarding my writing. In the first half of 1993 I was 36 years old and I had been identifying myself as a poet for the better part of two decades, apart from an overly ambitious attempt to write an experimental multi-layered novel which was mostly written whilst I was sequestered away in the town of Lodeve in Languedoc, France, some time in my mid-twenties. The structures, conceits and sentiments of ‘Dark Angels’ were greatly influenced by Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Alexandria Quartet’ but without its stylistic fluency and beauty. So far as I know, it no longer exists even in typescript. When it did, it ran to several hundred pages. I did once have two copies of the typescript hardbound in black with gold lettering on the spine. Since my arrival in Turkey I had continued my hand at freelance travel journalism, a mode of writing that I had started during some of my earlier travels, and I was placing pieces in Turkey, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. I was also writing a few pieces of short fiction.
Which brings me to a short story submission I made to an Australian literary journal called ‘P76’. ‘Antithesis, a Letter from the Dead’ was accepted for publication in Number 6 of the journal, Summer, 1993. I have just ascertained that I have a typescript of the original manuscript but it does not exist in electronic file format. Until recently it may as well have never existed at all. My dear friend Javant Biarujia phoned me some time in the first half of 2015 to tell me that he had been contacted by one of the editors of the 1993 Number 6 edition of ‘P76’ who had explained to him why it was that the journal had not been published when intended and that decades later in July 2012 it had eventually been produced. Javant mentioned that there was a piece of mine in it but I remained disinterested for fear of being embarrassed by the publication of an inferior piece of writing with my name on it. That reticence has now continued well after Javant kindly posted my contributor’s copy to me on August 24, 2015. His covering letter begins:
Dear Adrian,
I apologise that I haven’t sent this “lost” issue of P76 before this! I remember I phoned you when I got it, and said I’d send it along. It contains a work of yours, “Antithesis, a Letter from the Dead”, which among other things discusses selling out and the blight known as creative writing. The line “Now the unused machinery is employed for its post modernist sculptural effect alone” reminds me of the visit Ian and I made some years ago to the Powerhouse Museum, in Brisbane, where Ian’s father used to work when it was the power station for Brisbane’s tram network. We took George there for old times’ sake and he was able to point out that their “sculpture” in the middle of the museum was in fact a turbine. Mark Robert’s [sic] article about small presses and little magazines at the back made for interesting reading, if only to bolster my belief that any organ dependent on government funding, whether in the “free” world or not, is subject to (self-)censorship and the fear that any largesse may be withdrawn at any time. That’s why Nosukumo eschewed government grants from the Australia Council. (I spoke about this many years ago at The Writers’ Centre, where the other panellists were toadying up to the officials responsible for doling out arts’ money in Victoria. When the evening was over, Carmel Bird, the organiser, came up to me and said, “I had no idea you were such a dangerous man!” I remember bookshops actually got money from the Australia Council so that they would put Australian literature in their windows. So much for commitment, I thought, let alone capitalism. But then I remembered: subsidising the rich at the expense of the poor is capitalism. Gore Vidal put it this way: socialism is for the rich, while capitalism is for the poor.) . . .
Javant is also one of the only people ever to have read any significant portion of ‘Dark Angels’. He has told me more than once – but only if I’ve asked him – that he didn’t think that it was a successful novel.
Monday October 10, 2016
In the July 2012 Editorial at the beginning of the publication Linda Adair explains that the lost edition of ‘P76’ had been laid out in 1993 on what was then a state-of-the-art Macintosh LCIII and then put aside while the editors sought something special for the cover artwork. That process of putting aside became ever-more protracted as her home study was converted into a nursery for the arrival of her first child and a box of computer disks was archived in a rented storage space. The floppy disks then essentially went missing for about 18 years until they were rediscovered during a recent renovation. The material on them had to be re-accessed and translated to a contemporary digital format.
‘Issue No 6 is a labour of love, for writing and each other. We apologise for the delay but hope you enjoy.’
What I have thus far been unable or unwilling to explain is why I have not yet re-read ‘Antithesis, a Letter from the Dead’. It has been sitting on my desk since it arrived with Javant’s letter, fourteen months ago.
Tuesday October 11, 2016
The very attractive cover art by Narelle Adair features what I think are a pair of screen prints with arabesque designs – geometric florets, a large new moon, hibiscus flowers, pointed arches and a spired tower. Adair’s front cover image suggests an evening or nighttime scene with the buildings and surrounding landscape illuminated by moonlight, reminding me of summer nights spent on a flat apartment building rooftop overlooking the suburbs of west Amman in the mid-1990s. My colleague and friend Richard Sheridan and I would sit smoking Mehari mini cigars, talking and just staring into the immense sky, sharing the cool evening air at 900 metres above sea level with Connie and with Richard’s two elfin, blonde-on-blonde daughters. How old must the girls have been then, eight and ten, ten and twelve? On the back cover of ‘P76’ a flower-like sun burns down on an endless field of orange desert sand stretching out beyond the buildings. I am reminded of the Umayyad Desert Castles to the east of Amman and of the sandy expanses surrounding the oasis town and ancient buildings of Queen Zenobia’s Palmyra in Syria which the five of us visited – together or in two separate parties, I no longer remember – in a time before war. How I weep now for that country and those people and the unimaginable suffering to which they have been subjected. Connie and I walked around the black basalt town of Daraa in southern Syria just across the border from Jordanian Ramtha. We visited Deir ez-Zur on the Euphrates and the nearby remains of an ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform library. Did we ever stay at that hotel in Aleppo which displayed a volume of T.E. Lawrence’s letters opened at the page where he refers to it? . . . More than anything, though, the daylight image reminds me of an afternoon I shared with my Irish sculptor friend Robbie Maguire on the Levantine coast at least a decade earlier at the medieval sea fortress of Acre. Robbie spent our time there sketching while I wrote in my diary, smoking the cheapest available Israeli cigarettes. In fact, I have a poem in two parts about that day. The first part of the poem is the text of a letter Robbie sent to me, the words and lines of which filled the empty sky above one of his Acre drawings, whilst the second part is an elegiac evocation of my friend:
voice poems
i: letter from an Irish sculptor friend in Israel
Adrian
thanks for your letter
it’s good to hear from fellow misfits
once in a while.
Any place you love is the world to you
but love is no longer fashionable.
The poets wrote so much about it
that no one believes them anymore.
I like it here, believe it or not.
Some of the older members are really good to speak to.
I realise now that there is no way
I could live on kibbutz.
It will do me for a while
until I can find a place in some village or mountain
somewhere.
One of my friends just left for Canada a few days ago.
A few hours before she left we had a picnic
and screwed in the kibbutz graveyard.
In a place of death, love and lust reborn.
I am getting drunk only twice a week now
and that is because I met two Australian volunteers.
I fucking hate Australians.
The only reason I befriend them
is to give them a bit of culture
a thing that is sadly lacking . . .
ii: Robbie
One of the letters he sent me was a scroll
of coarse-grained art paper.
We’d been down a few weeks before to Acre
an old Arab town renowned from crusader times
and we’d had a few beers
before going out onto the waterfront
where he did this sepia wash sketch
of the minarets and domes as seen from the jetty.
That was horizontal, in landscape format.
The text of his letter was in portrait/vertical
so you had to turn the mosque on its side
to read what he’d written.
Inside the scroll was another sketch
on the same rough paper
but much smaller than the first.
It was a walking drawing or a drawing walking
and he’d done it by following a nude model
as she moved around a room
his eyes on her, his pen on the paper.
For a backpacker his luggage was exceptional.
Besides sketch pads there were mallets and chisels
an artists’ anatomical book
a copy of Van Gogh’s letters
and even a few pieces of stone.
Some of the latter we’d had to leave behind
in an Athens dormitory on the Plaka
and the rest we shared
going down to the docks at Piraeus
and embarking for Haifa.
A hungry three days on deck
befriending people with food
and winding up somehow on the settlement.
In the first week he’d started a new sculpture.
He was working on a pair of hands in wood.
A couple of weeks later he was in trouble
and on the move.
That’s when the letters came
the postcard from Oscar Wilde
the nude sketch
and the painting of the mosque at Acre
with a palm tree and a cypress
and a sky that rained in words.
I have still not read ‘Antithesis, a Letter from the Dead’. I want to tell a story about a man who will not read a story. That is what I am doing.
Wednesday October 12, 2016
I actually remember writing ‘Antithesis, a Letter from the Dead’ during my first winter in Istanbul, probably some time early in the new year of 1992. We – my late wife, Consiglia née Zammit, who died in November 2000, and myself – had come by car ferry across the Marmara Sea from Istanbul to Yalova to stay at the Termal Otel. I remember disembarking at the ferry terminal late on this winter morning, a pale, thin sunlight breaking through the fog like something out of Eliot’s ‘Marina’. We bought some orange palm-sized terracotta vases and a wooden cigarette pipe almost a metre long which still rests along a book shelf in the study.
Thursday October 13, 2016
The taxi drive from the harbour to the hotel was unusual for us. Connie and I travelled long and often but we always travelled hard, stretching time and money to the thinnest possible margin to go further and to take longer. Our fondest food memories on the road were of restaurants that we had walked past without stopping. In particular, a harbourside establishment in Sicily serving spaghetti alle vongole which we walked past on empty stomachs and in a state of exhaustion after an all-night train ride from the north. Those days we lived on bread and cheese both sliced with my wooden-handled Opinel clasp knife, sitting and eating in our often cheerless and comfortless rooms. Of course it was better when we were travelling abroad because I was working in Turkey and then in Jordan but, nonetheless, the Yalova taxi was an unusual option for us. Every guidebook and person we consulted assured us that there was no other way of getting to the hotel.
As my fingers peck their way across the keyboard – something akin to the reverse order of bird divination – I find myself hesitating. Did we take a taxi or was there a public bus after all, or some kind of transit vehicle running between the port and the hotel? And I have to be honest and say that the words I have written here about the taxi ride may very well be the product of a conceit rather than of a memory. The spaghetti alle vongole is not.
Saturday October 15, 2016
What is very clear to me, though, is my memory of the hotel where we stayed. Built as a thermal springs resort, the low domed buildings in the style of Ottoman hamams with their lead-covered pitch-dark domes and brickwork of alternating red and yellow were deployed around a central outdoor pool. The complex was surrounded by a forest and everything was overlaid with snow. This last detail – the snow – is the strongest in my memory; snow flakes falling gently on my face and into the water of the pool where I bathed in the middle of winter after emerging from the scalding water of the thermal baths, and white flurries settling like soft white plaster around the bases of the domed rooves and on the autumn-red ground between the pine tree trunks. The crisp clear air and the slightest scent of pine; that indeterminate condition between the softest of showers and snow flakes falling.
And that was it. The hamams, the stunted pines and especially the snow. Looking through all these things towards the main hotel building, I heard the voices of these two as yet unknown characters in my imagination and I saw them meeting and talking in this place, except that it was no longer a holiday destination built around a thermal spa in Turkey but a Soviet sanatorium for the imprisonment of dissidents. For whatever it is worth, and given my resistance to rereading it perhaps it isn’t worth very much, the story, the characters and their voices came to me fully formed. An unexpected inspiration had been found, my imagination had shaped itself. The hard part would be writing it out, transcribing what had been given to me without any effort on my part, getting it right when it had already gotten itself right before my intervention . . . ‘Antithesis, a Letter from the Dead’ is also very much a product not of my time but of its time, written so consciously as it was in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event about which I then harboured a degree of ambivalence. If it has a soundtrack it would have to be the title song from Leonard Cohen’s 1992 album ‘The Future’. Readers in Melbourne might recognise the Malthouse Theatre, one time location of the annual Melbourne Writers’ Festival, as the basis for one of the New York settings. Finally, an orphan story it most certainly is, but if it were seeking out its parentage it may well have been conceived between Milan Kundera’s ‘Life is Elsewhere’ (1969/1973) and Mikhail Bulgakov’s ‘The Master and Margarita’ (1967).
PART TWO
Antithesis, a Letter from the Dead
by Adrian D’Ambra (1992/2012)
Greetings from Siberia. I have read your letter little Comrade. How pleased you are with the turn of events. Remember, Andrei, if the history of our people teaches nothing more, it warns us of the dividing line between care and excess. Don’t be overly confident, my friend. Optimism is alien to the Russian soul.
Have you come down with fever? Has Moscow’s winter eaten so far into your soul? So much enthusiasm! Perhaps you are simply hungry. People cannot be free if they cannot eat, Andrei, and their enthusiasm, your enthusiasm, I fear, will pass as quickly and as pleasantly as a bout of influenza. Historians will measure it in pretty much the same way as a market vendor measures sausage. Heroism is another alien. After all, these new rights and freedoms have implicit in them the right to despise one’s neighbour.
Zealous friend, my little Saint Paul with the hot head’s tight black beard and the enthusiasm of the flagellant, I was also distressed by your words about words. We wrote together, my friend, we believed in poetry in secret together, through the darkest days when Hell was on Earth. It is the memory of these youthful follies that I draw upon for sustenance, for the strength I require to make my denunciation against you.
You are writing fiction now. Short stories for those organs of the truth we used to wipe our arses with. Tell me, Andrei, been reading ‘Time’ lately, bought yourself a Big Mac yet?
As I understand it (and who am I but an old man who used to write forbidden poetry) your fiction writing is a rubbish bin. You take a dream, a memory, a member of your family, an enemy; you throw them all in together; mix them up; rinse them out; hang them up to dry on the page. And there you are. Short fiction piece number one.
Concerning your politics, I warned you before against enthusiasm. In reference to our art, I suppose you will take what I now have to say as hypocrisy. What happened to the fervour of your youth, your poetry, your belief in the moment, the spontaneous combustion, the collision of images and meaning, of experience and revelation? Your experiments were based upon the secret doctrine that literature should be volatile or not at all. If we had been anything but Russians, I would have described your theories on the explosion of art as saintly anarchism. What you are doing now is the very antithesis of what you once believed. In America, my friend, it is possible to go to colleges where there are classes for people such as you. Creative writing.
The next time I cook a pot of cabbage soup and I stir it with a wooden spoon, I will imagine that I am you and that I am writing.
In answer to your first question, no I do not wish to read what you have written.
Your second question amazed me only a little less. It’s too late for me, Andrei, on both counts. I suppose that explains my pessimism. What do I think of the current political climate, the new liberalism? Like you, I’ve had to put my trolley in the supermarket of world beliefs to find an answer. Class consciousness? The state? The individual?
How shall we prepare ourselves for the world to come? Lucky were those who lived in previous ages when they only had to ask that question at the hour of their death. Now the ground is always shifting, the answer is always elusive. I want to draw you back, back into the underground, back into an earlier consciousness from which I have never departed, back to the days when your soul was always on fire and always on guard, looking over your shoulder.
It is late. My wife is in bed with influenza. Her breath smells of vomit and vodka. We have eaten today. We have kerosene enough for the heater for tomorrow. I shall not go to work in the morning. One less bureaucrat equals a lot more efficiency. So, Andrei, I would like to present you with a pantomime, a little extempore drama for your edification and your entertainment.
***
Imagine, we are on a Greyhound Bus arriving in New York. We have been for three months in New Orleans where we were called to the bedside of a black man addicted to the blues. We diagnosed his melancholia. I am a monkey. I am wearing a red cap, a white vest and a pair of blue shorts. My name is Edward and I smoke a big cigar. I have been awarded a doctorate in philosophy from the school of the blues.
You are awaited in the poly-technicolour college of the arts. You are an eligible bachelor with an eminent qualification in the cuisine of short stories. Your recipes for literary success are renowned the world over. New York awaits us. The faculty of automatic writing at the poly-tech throws open its arms.
Why am I with you? My ambition was to be an astronaut, a space monkey for the fatherland of socialism. Like a jockey, though, I couldn’t keep the weight down. I was weaned from cabbage to caviar too quickly. Since my dismissal from the launching pad I have devoted myself to the exploration of inner-space instead. I won’t be sitting on your shoulder, Sonny Jim. My job is to spike your drinks and brainwash your students. I’m the water boy, awaiting the birth of an imaginary Soviet baseball team. To the game!
We are greeted by the professor who leads us amiably into the auditorium. She turns upon her faculty and speaks.
‘Friends and colleagues, my message is plain. I dream of the novel of the New Age, the novel that proceeds by non-confrontation, the novel that does not seek to state and does not serve to strengthen the divisions of the Old Order – rich and poor, man and woman, black and white.
‘Before this work can be written, we must dare to imagine it. We must dare to invoke a notion of words that do not divide us, that do not engender the cruelties, the bestialities, the excesses of the past. More importantly, we must dare to imagine a novel going nowhere, a work of art that does not displace time, space, matter. An invisible novel.
‘It is our duty to renounce violence, to renounce reality in so far as it persists in division, to renounce our very identity as authors so long as we still have hidden within us any agenda or intent. If our spears are to be reverted to ploughshares our words must be returned to the ploughman.
‘I dream of a novel in which there is a fluid freedom of thought and expression, free of value and free of aggression.’
Fanfare. It’s our turn. I have induced a collective hallucination. The seated jury and the sainted prof are mesmerised. They have just observed a huge black cat lumbering down a dark alleyway. There is an acrid smell. As they awaken, I take to the table.
‘My partner and I intend to play pass the microphone.’
You are beside me at the lectern. When I hold the microphone up for you, you have to lean down awkwardly to speak. I push it into your face. You are about to introduce yourself as confidently as you can when your consciousness changes. What you say is from elsewhere. I am your interpreter.
ANDREI: I am a monkey.
MONKEY: His name is Andrei.
ANDREI: I am a poet and I live in the service of art.
MONKEY: He started out by spelling literature with a capital ‘L’. Now he retails sad misnomers to lethargic organs of the applied mistruth.
ANDREI: My passion resides between bananas and breasts.
MONKEY: His forebrain is a sewer soup of chemical imbalances.
ANDREI: I am a Russian . . .
MONKEY: With a green-card.
ANDREI: . . . and I want to learn . . .
MONKEY: His idle dream was his finest hour. A hermetically sealed continuum through which the servants of the book would pass in mute but profound acknowledgement.
ANDREI: . . . to understand the suffering of the scribe and the silence of the word . . .
MONKEY: His rhythm was the footstep of language flowing out, his metre was the down and the in and the up and the out of the breath.
ANDREI: I have become a slave to Mammon.
We are being led to your next performance. Our first tutorial takes place in an arts complex that has been refurbished from the ruins of an old brewery. Draught-horses, eminent Clydesdales, used to clatter their barrel-laden drays over these paving stones. On winter mornings this foyer steamed with their excrement. Their drivers were found asleep, half-dead on the wooden bench-seats, icicles hanging from their nostrils, their lips blue, their cheeks exploding in red nebulae. In those days this building produced something. Now the unused machinery is employed for its post-modernist sculptural effect alone.
We go in. The lighting is subdued, the seating comfortable. Later this evening a one act play is to be performed here. The stage is set, the props are ready. High above the centre-stage is a crucifix of dark wood from which an ivory Christ is hanging. Stage-right is an altar, covered to the floor by a starched white sheet. The microphone is beside a bare gold cross. It is at an awkward angle.
You don’t know where to stand. Then you realise that the altar’s only a prop. It’s really a kitchen table. There’s a chair behind it. You sit down. From the pocket of a demobilised sports jacket you remove an envelope with a fake seal on it, just like those ones with winners’ names in them. You take out the typescript and begin to speak. Your voice is smooth. Your hair is thin on top. Your scalp shines through in the spotlight’s glare.
‘I was employed by this faculty because of my outspoken originality. I have measured my identity by the endurance of the words I write.’
You have your glasses on. The papers are in front of you. You continue.
Cough.
‘I was employed because of my originality. This, however, is my first lesson in creative writing. It has been prepared for me by the prof and I have been instructed to read it.
‘”The basic premise of the course on which you are about to embark is that it does not matter what you write. Neither does it matter what you have to say or if, indeed, you have anything to say at all. It is not literature that we are concerned with here. Theme and content, purpose and audience, art and artifice; all of that comes later and can be dealt with elsewhere. All that matters now is writing . . .”‘
You set the papers aside. You take your glasses off. You begin to chant.
‘I am a monkey. I am wearing a red cap, a white vest and a pair of blue shorts . . .’
***
In this village, in this season, there is no dawn, Andrei. But I have whiled away some hours that I would not otherwise have known how to live through. It was late when I began this cruel parody. Too late for me, too late for you. These have been the words of a bitter man, an old man, a man who remembers what it was like to be young and to believe and to fear the impulse to write. What has happened to the night on which I embarked with this vicious slander designed to sabotage your future? It has simply grown darker, it has simply grown deeper. Having now vented my spleen at your expense, having now completed this dialogue of the soul, I extend to you friendship and I beg your forgiveness. As an act of contrition and a gesture of goodwill I will end this letter from the dead with a poem I have written for you.
***
If our years of solitude have taught us anything
then let it be this –
that a writer has two prerequisites:
something to say
and the liberty to say it.
Our spirit is as free as the troika in the snow
our spirit is in chains like the brakeman in a blizzard.
The ties that bind, grind us into men
and when our masters and our mistresses demand
to what extent do we condemn them
we will say
to the extent that you have offended this spirit
and lavished on our liberty your contempt.
We have heaped our praise and poetry on heroisms
at the moment when we quivered in our cowardice
infuriated but fearful, turning away from our tormentors.
Is the writer now a civil servant
his conscience controlled and condemned by secret police?
The better craftsman as you are
I would dedicate this poem to you.
To forget is to desecrate the memory
and the memory of our suffering is the wellspring of our freedom.
Do not turn against the sacred icon of your body’s odour
do not turn against the peasant labouring in a field of mud
or those condemned in cities to the treadmill of machines.
But most of all, do not forget
that when you dreamed of art
like love, you dreamed of something that would endure
born perhaps of little things, minor observations, details
conversations underheard, the smell of cabbage leaves
but destined to outlast them.
I charge you.
It is these that you must charge with meaning.
Having now offended you, I beg forgiveness
but I am a monkey
and you are reading me! Adieu sweet friend
and may we exit from this page in history
with laughter ringing in our ears!
***
PART THREE
And there you have it, the central irony of my life as I am living it now, a man who once aspired to write novels and who proudly wrote poetry, reduced to addressing the world at 140 characters per communication.
Sunday October 16, 2016
A Permissions Request
Dear Javant,
I am currently composing a piece about the strange stories behind the publication of ‘P76’, Number 6, the ‘lost’ edition and the writing of ‘Antithesis, a Letter from the Dead’, which I would like to publish in a blog on my website.
My reason for writing to you so formally is that I would like to request your permission to include the following extract from a letter you wrote to me . . .
If you don’t object in principle to me using this fragment but you do object to my including a particular part of it such as . . . please let me know what you would be willing to let pass and what not.
The rest of the piece deals with the details of where I was when I wrote ‘Antithesis, a Letter from the Dead’, the various influences that inspired it and why it has taken me so long to get around to rereading it after all these years . . .
On Friendship
Dear Richard,
. . . Like you, I weep for Syria, I weep for those people and that country and the unmitigated suffering that they are going through. The images of Aleppo and Palmyra are beyond disturbing.
On a lighter note, I’m sure you know about this but just in case you don’t:
She tracked me down a year or two ago on social media, I can’t remember if it was through Gmail or Twitter, but I follow her on Twitter now. Every now and then there’s a nice link to something that she’s done in an acoustic version. You won’t believe this but on the evening before the Bob Dylan Nobel announcement and my email to you I read a tweet about an upcoming gig that Ayah is doing at some bar in Amman which I decided to look up on Google Maps. And there I was, on my computer, looking at the downtown area between the Nymphaeum and the Roman Theatre, and I was thinking of you and the girls. I’ve also been writing something this week, a kind of autobiographical fragment, in which I mentioned the summer evenings on our apartment building rooftop in Amman. We shared some good times my friend and I have never forgotten you.
Before I get all teary, the image of you shifting from cafe to cafe and cake to cake . . . whilst your darling beloved is dieting after a gastronomic holiday in Cyprus is just so hilarious and so you! Just to make you feel absolutely terrible, the jackets that you gave me 20 years ago still fit me. Indeed, I wore one to work on Friday! . . .
Wednesday October 19, 2016
For the first time in twenty years I am pleased to have kept a typescript of ‘Antithesis, a Letter from the Dead’. Self-doubt settled on my shoulders the moment I opened ‘P76’ and began reading. The significant number of typographical errors confirmed my initial expectation that this was going to be an embarrassing encounter with a mediocre piece of amateur writing from my past. How could I have submitted something with this many mistakes? The typescript, however, tells another story, a better story. Translation always brings about change – it corrupts the original – and I quickly realised that this orphan story had probably been damaged in the translation from one already ancient form of binary language to another one that is current now but similarly doomed to digital decrepitude.
Friday October 21, 2016
About twenty years ago during a Melbourne Writers’ Festival event at the Malthouse in Southbank, Australian novelist Peter Goldsworthy quoted another writer who had said to him that literary theory was to writers what aerodynamics is to a bird . . . Addressed to an unidentified friend, William Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Tables Turned’, could equally be read as an internal dialogue between two competing parts of the same psyche, a conceit similar to Dylan’s dialogues of the divided self in his ‘mirror’ and other lyrics. The internal dialogue of ‘The Tables Turned’ contrasts two forms of knowledge and learning: book study and immersion in what Wordsworth describes in his preface to ‘Lyrical Ballads’ as ‘the fairest and most interesting properties of nature’. A concise statement of the Romantic imagination, Wordsworth’s poem reassures the reader that Nature has its own hierarchy of knowledge and – more importantly – values. Allowing the senses to observe, experience and attune themselves to the flora, fauna, light, dark, colour, sounds, weather, time and landscape forms of the undamaged world is source enough for wisdom, faith, morality and knowledge. This beautiful yet chilling stanza from ‘The Tables Turned’ challenges the Western tendency towards the Aristotelian hierarchical division and categorisation of knowledge:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: –
We murder to dissect.
I do not know the poem well but I have loved that line about murdering to dissect since my university days. I have always thought it an excellent countervailing sentiment to literary criticism, especially theory. Whilst I cannot imagine my life as a reader without having been able to read literature in translation, I have to wonder – despondently, I admit – to what extent we murder in order to translate? . . .
This month the Swedish Academy conferred the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature on Bob Dylan, ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American songbook’. Four days later Carmel Bird was announced as the 2016 recipient of the Patrick White Award. A towering monolith of the modernist novel, Australian author Patrick White, used the proceeds of his 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature to establish an annual award for an accomplished Australian writer who has not ‘received due recognition’ for their contribution to Australian literature. Despite aspiring to write mainstream popular fiction, Bird’s short stories and novels have been critically well-received but remain modestly read. Bird said in an interview about winning the award that she has, ‘been conscious that my writing stood and stands outside the mainstream. But that is how I write; my writing is my writing. I love it and own it and will continue to do it.’ In the 1980s and ‘90s Bird taught creative writing courses in Melbourne in which her students were advised to ‘write-what-you-know’ and ‘show-not-tell’, and she published a handbook for creative writing called ‘Dear Reader’ in 1988. One of her favourite analogies for the craft of writing is the following story from the Arabian Nights which – part platitude, part wisdom – retains its own place in the firmament of my lifetime attraction to the Arabian world:
A merchant of Baghdad lived in a house with a grey marble courtyard in a cobbled street lined with palm trees.
At the far end of the courtyard of the house, beneath a flowering vine, was a fountain of white marble. One night the merchant had a dream in which he was instructed to go to Cairo to seek his fortune. So he set off. In Cairo he fell asleep in the courtyard of a mosque and was accused of breaking into the house next door to rob it. He was put into prison where he explained to the chief of police that he had done nothing wrong but was following his dream.
‘Fool,’ said the chief of police, ‘where has your dream got you but into prison? I had a dream. I had it three times. But I would not be so foolish as to obey it.’
‘What did your dream tell you?’
‘My dream told me to go to Baghdad where I would find a house with a grey marble courtyard in a cobbled street lined with palm trees. At the far end of the courtyard, beneath a flowering vine, is a fountain of white marble. Beneath the fountain there lies buried a great fortune.’
Saying nothing the merchant returned to his home, dug beneath the fountain and discovered the treasure.
Sunday October 23, 2016
Closer now to the age of sixty than to fifty, I have come to the realisation that I will never have the time in my life to learn Arabic. For the sixteen years since her death I have kept Connie’s ‘Al-Mawrid’ and Hans Wehr hardback Arabic-English dictionaries and other sundry textbooks on my shelves, hoping against hope to be able to free up the time from my teaching commitments to actually do this. ‘It’s not going to happen,’ I said to Ellen at the beginning of this month, just before the first of these ‘P76’ entries. I packed the books away and began making enquiries online about how I might sell them. But, let’s face it, what do you leave behind if you buy books? A couple of metres of waste paper plus – in my case – a few inches of unpublished manuscript. And, who buys books anymore anyhow? ‘P76’ sat on my desk for more than a year before I opened it; these dictionaries are going to remain neatly packed in a grocery bag indefinitely.
As he lay dying, Pushkin addressed his library as his friends. I look around myself and see so much that the constraints of language would have kept from me as strangers without the benefits of translation. Behind me there is Homer and my half-read Herodotus, the as-yet unread Dante by Clive James, Seamus Heaney’s ‘Beowulf’, Apollinaire and Rimbaud, my moral and literary father Tolstoy and newly-found literary mother Elena Ferrante. Akmatova and Pasternak, Turgenev and Chekhov, Camus and Genet are there. Beside me is that extraordinary triptych of German-language writers and their novels: Hans Fallada’s ‘Alone in Berlin’, Stefan Zweig’s ‘Beware of Pity’, Joseph Roth’s ‘The Radetzky March’. Sappho, Tsvetaeva and Christa Wolf are waiting on my Book Depository wish list.
these books . . . these shores . . . these ruins . . .
english literature teacher 