The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim

 

Late in life Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924) has recorded a memory from his boyhood. Visitors had coffee with his parents while the boy sat in a corner, chewing on his pen and writing something into a notebook. Somebody asked: “What is he writing?” His father took away the notebook from under the boy’s hand and looked: “Oh nothing, the usual stuff,” he said (Diaries 1/19/1911).

The moment twisted a dagger in Kafka’s heart; it was his point of departure into literature and helped him keeping his momentum because he felt rejected. He had three sisters – Elli, Valli and the youngest, Ottilie or “Ottla.” She was Kafka’s staunchest supporter and ally against the father. Unlike her brother she knew how to hold her own and took nonsense from nobody. “You simply can't talk to her at all, she flies straight in your face," said the father, and it was she who between 1915 and 1917 rented for Franz a studio in 22 Alchemist Lane in Prague’s Castle District, the locality of The Golem by Gustav Meyrink (1868 – 1932). It was the first place he had for himself and Kafka could write undisturbed well into the grey hours of the morning.

Up until then he had lodged with the family in No. 3, Celetna Street, where the window of his room opened to a small lane “across from a dress shop, where a shop girl always used to stand in the door. There I was in my room, just a little past my twentieth birthday, incessantly passing back and forth, busy cramming for the bar exam, trying to memorize material that made no sense to me whatsoever. It was summer, very hot at the time, altogether unbearable. I kept stopping at the window, the disgusting Roman law clenched between my teeth, and finally we managed to communicate by sign language" (Letters, to Max Brod). The sordid beginning for many more sordid one night stands with barmaids, waitresses, and shop girls. They all left their traces in his novels and the diary: “He seduced a girl in a small place in the Iser mountains. After a brief effort to persuade her, he threw the girl – his landlord’s daughter who liked to walk with him in the evening after work – down in the grass on the riverbank and took her, as she lay there unconscious with fright. Later he had to carry water from the river in his cupped hands to pour it over the girl’s face to restore her. The simple girl who lay before him, now breathing regularly again, her eyes still closed because of fear and embarrassment, could make no difficulty for him; with the tip of his toe, he, the great, strong person, could push the girl aside. She was weak and plain, could what happened to her have any significance that would last even until tomorrow? Would not anyone who compared the two of them come to this conclusion?” (Diraries 3/12/1012). Subsequently the women in Kafka’s work are depicted as sluts and easy prey. When Kafka in 1919 announced his engagement to Julie Whoryzek (1891 – 1939), the daughter of a synagogue janitor and shoemaker, his father said he would have to sell the store and emigrate to escape this shame for the family name.

“She probably put on a fancy blouse, something these Prague Jewesses are good at, and right away, of course, you decided to marry her. And that as fast as possible, in a week, tomorrow, today. I can’t understand you: after all, you're a grown man, you live in the city, and you don't know what to do but marry the first girl who comes along. Isn't there anything else you can do? If you're frightened, I'll go with you" (Letter to the Father).

It was the final insult in a long history of downers, and Kafka’s creative response was The Metamorphosis, The Verdict, and The Penal Colony.

Translating Kafka can be tricky. The closing sentence to "The Verdict" (or "The Judgment") where Georg Bendemann jumps off the bridge should read like: "At this moment an unending intercourse surged across the bridge." Or less literal, but still true to the allusion: "At this moment the bridge was alive with unending intercourse." Neugroschel and the Muirs, translating it as “a stream of traffic” are as faithful as a Victorian nanny to her charge.

‘Joseph K.’ is starting an affair with his attorney's maid on the very first consultation, right under her employer's nose. Shabbily dressed judges carry away women to their chambers; in the painter’s studio, a king-sized bed fills all the available space.

In Kafka's Trial the protagonist is a haughty character, not untypical for a senior manager on the climb. A sharp dresser, who moves with ease in the company of chief administrators and CEOs, but in his dealings with people of the lower classes he behaves like a real asshole. ‘Joseph K.’ works in the head office of a bank. He has competitors in the hierarchy and the trial is slowly sapping his strength. There was a time when he commanded the time of his clients; now, at the sight of him, they pull up the brief case under their arm a little tighter, and their shoes point in an angle towards the exit; the bank’s vice president quite literally is pitching camp on the tabletop of ‘Joseph K’s desk:

“Uneasy he looked around; the light of the candle fell far short of the opposite wall. And indeed something began to stir in the corner. His uncle lifted the candle higher, and in the light, an older gentleman could be seen sitting by a little table.” He “arose laboriously, apparently displeased that he had been brought to their attention. It seemed as if he wanted to wave off all greetings and introductions with his hands, which he flapped like little wings, as if he wished by no means to disturb the others by his presence, imploring them to return him once more to darkness, to forget his presence” (The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell).

This apparition in chiaroscuro is supposed to be the clerk of the court – but one wonders. What kind of court allows a capital verdict to be announced by proxy? In the mystifying twilight of the Cathedral ‘Joseph K.’ receives the final verdict. He is the only visitor, lured to the church under the pretense of a business appointment. The priest steps down from the pulpit and discusses the parable Before the Law, the story of someone who badly wishes to gain access to the law and never succeeds. Yet before we speculate on the meaning of this, it helps to keep an eye on the novel’s running subtext of illicit sex. In 1912 the Viennese critic Karl Kraus (1874 – 1936) had published a series of essays under the title The Chinese Wall. Kraus was attacking Austria's legal system and spoke up against the harassment of prostitutes by the authorities. Kafka used to attend Karl Kraus’ public readings, so he certainly recalled the concluding phrase – I heard it on an old gramophone recording – when from the top of his voice Karl Kraus screamed at his audience that “justice is a whore" (which no doubt it is).

In the era of Stalin and McCarthy it had became fashionable to read into Kafka's novels a brooding indictment against oppression and persecution. In the book ‘Joseph K,’ like a victim of the Inquisition, is never told the charges, yet, in keeping with his character, something quite reasonable seems to be expected, a change of heart perhaps, or a sign for redeeming humility. ‘Joseph K’ is bound to lose his trial, because he is guilty in the full sense of the word. The protagonist’s shenanigans impress nobody, except for the subservient women. Yet Max Brod edited the novels as a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress, playing the existentialist card of Sartre’s bogus-philosophy; the scene must have put a smile on the face of Sigmund Freud:

“‘Karl,’ called one of the angels. Karl looked up, and was so pleasantly surprised he started to laugh. It was Fanny. ‘Fanny,’ he cried and waved up to her. ‘Come here!’ called Fanny, and she parted her robes, revealing her pedestal and a narrow flight of steps leading up. ‘Am I allowed to go up?’ asked Karl. Only now did Karl begin to grasp the size of America” (America, trans. Michael Hofmann).

Apparently neither of the critics following Max Brod cares that in the Castle ‘K’ the surveyor, is a conman, a trickster, who tries to wheedle his way into a community that has no actual need for a surveyor. “Surveyor, I see now that you will have to give up many fantasies before you can become a decent janitor” (The Castle), says the beadle of the local parish.

Kafka met the love of his life in Milena Jesenska (1896 – 1944): “Milena: what a rich, heavy name, almost too full to be lifted and in the beginning I didn’t like it much, it seemed to me a Greek or Roman gone astray in Bohemia, violated by Czech, cheated of its accent, and yet in color and form it is marvelously a woman, a woman you take into your arms and away from the world, away from the fire, and she presses herself willingly and trusting into your arms; only the strong accent on the ‘i’ is bad, doesn’t the name keep leaping away from you? Or is it perhaps only the leap into luck you make yourself under your burden” (Letters to Milena).

Asked to explain his novels, Samuel Becket (1906 – 1989) once said: “If it could be paraphrased, then I wouldn’t need writing it,” yet in Kafka’s case the interpretation is easy. His published work became a lifelong libel against his father, a long missive of what he couldn’t say to his father’s face:

“The aversion you naturally and immediately took to my writing was, for once, welcome to me. My vanity, my ambition did suffer under your soon proverbial way of hailing the arrival of my books: "Put it on my bedside table!" My writing was all about you; it was an intentionally long and drawn-out leave-taking from you. But how little all this amounted to! In the place where I lived I was spurned, condemned, fought to a standstill; and to escape to some other place was an enormous exertion, something that was, with small exceptions, unattainable for me” (Letter to the Father).

On his deathbed Kafka corrected the galley proofs for a new collection of stories: A Hunger Artist. The title story allegorizes the writer’s predicament:

“During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different world now” (The Hunger Artist, trans. Muir).

Yes, we do indeed. Kafka himself never lost the feeling that his work was a jerk-off end to end: “Childish games, I deliberately cultivated a facial tic, or would walk across the ditch with arms crossed behind my head. My writing began the same way” (Diaries 1/24/1922).

By 1915 this grimacing and strutting had earned Kafka the Theodor Fontane Award – 800 Reichsmark, a considerable sum. He was as eager as every author to get published, but he constantly doubted himself. He didn’t feel he had the mandate of Heaven – the Hollywood cliché of the journalist chasing his story is just risible. It is the story that is chasing you, or you shouldn’t be writing at all. Much, if not all of his printed work had begun as an entry in his diaries and for Kafka writing in a state of trance was the only way to go about it. “This story, ‘The Verdict,’ I wrote in one sitting during the night of the 22/23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk; they had got so stiff from sitting. The anxious strain and joy; how the story developed before me, as if I were walking on water. Several times in this night I carried my own weight on my back. How everything can be expressed, how for everything, the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire to perish and rise again. It turned blue outside the window. Two men walked across the bridge” (Diaries, 9/23/1912).

Every writer, when asked to speak about his favorite author, is expected to have an off pat answer – at least a name. Yet for the longest time this sort of question has caught me wrong-footed. In my youth the obvious answer would have been Franz Kafka whom I had read end to end, every paragraph, and every single letter, but especially his surreal stuff, like in A Country Doctor:

“I was in great perplexity; I had to start on an urgent journey; a seriously ill patient was waiting for me in a village ten miles off; a thick blizzard of snow filled all the wide spaces between him and me; I had a gig, a light gig with big wheels, exactly right for our country roads; muffled up in furs, my bag of instruments in my hand, I was in the courtyard all ready for the journey; but there was no horse to be had, no horse” (The Country Doctor, trans. Muir). I used to have nightmares over the apple festering in the side of that unhappy beetle.

According to his own testimony, Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) too had looked to Kafka for inspiration, after he had turned his back on Carlyle, the hero of his early years. However, like me he discovered in the end, that Kafka had his dry spells, a tendency to lose himself in circular rants and long-winded reflections, and this was against the inner nature of the precise Borges, arguably the most lucid of essayists, but what got me hooked on Borges was a short story of his – The Zahir.

What is a “zahir?”

“In Buenos Aires the Zahir is a common twenty-centavo coin into which a razor or letter opener has scratched the letter ‘N T’ and the number 2; the date stamped on the face is 1929. (In Gujarat, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Zahir was a tiger; in Java it was a blind man in the Surakarta mosque, whom the faithful have stoned to death; in Persia it was an astrolabe thrown into the sea by orders of Nadir Shah; in 1892, in the prisons of the Mahdi, it was a small compass a sailor kept wrapped in a torn shred of cloth from the same turban Rudolf Karl von Slatin had touched; in the synagogue in Cordoba, according to Zotenberg, it was a vein of marble on one of the twelve hundred pillars; in the Age of Ignorance it was the face of al-Moqanna, the Veiled Prophet)” (The Zahier, trans. Andrew Hurley).

Notice the numerous “references” Borges has worked in into the story, each a red herring: “Philip Meadows Taylor – in ‘Confessions of a Thug’” – the “monographs of Barlach, and Zotenberg.” We are told that there can be only one “zahir” at any given time. Could it be all this erudition of the story’s protagonist is just a figment, the obsession of a deranged archivist that makes him ransack the libraries for “evidence?” We are reminded of another character with a ludicrous fixation, a gentleman wearing a barber’s basin as his helmet and fighting the windmills of La Mancha.

It is a little known fact. The best mother of all modern novels and the father of literary escapism was published under the patronage of the Spanish Inquisition Inquisition. In 1608, Don Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas (1546 – 1618) was the Archbishop of Toledo, Primate of Spain and President of the Supreme Council of the Inquisition. He granted the imprimatur for a second edition of the Don Quixote and he also granted the author a pension, the only regular income Cervantes was to receive in his final years.

The Grand Inquisitor did not lend his support out of human kindness alone. It was the final push in a truly quixotic campaign against the novels of knight-errantry. For the highbrows these productions offered easy opportunities to strike a hoity-toity attitude; the mystics wagged a warning finger from the vacuum above Mount Carmel, and the country curates crossed themselves over the pickled souls kept in glass bottles on the Moon. There was definitely a smell of sulfur in those books. The profanation of the mystery is a threat to religion. Where a sorcerer waves his wand, he trivializes the transubstantiation; the miracle is losing its luster. In 1553, the emperor with the jaw of an ass was sitting for his painter, the very expensive Titian in Venice. Between the sessions he issued a ban on the export of chivalrous romances to the West Indies. Yet for Charles V this was not about the code of chivalry and silly stories about damsels in distress, this was about hard cash. His financial advisor had whispered into his ear that the cargo space was better employed for crates of gilded mass-books and papal bulls. The bulls, two million and seventy thousand in number, for the dead and the living, were sent to Yucatan, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Philippines. The monarch’s investment was 300,000 florins, but he sold for a tidy five millions.

For us the Don Quixote has of course become this great paradigm of escapism. And how could it not? All fiction is escapist – no, I retract that – all good fiction is escapist. “Love itself,” says William Butler Yeats, “would be barely more than an animal hunger without Sappho having given it shape in her poetry before.”

Life, however, the real thing, this roving corsair under the Jolly Roger of a shitty diaper, has a way of catching up. In 1727, Jonathan Swift published Samuel Gulliver's account of his visit to the University of Lagado: “They spend the greatest part of their lives in observing the celestial bodies, which they do by the assistance of glasses far excelling ours in goodness. This advantage has enabled them to discover two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of the diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty one and an half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the centre of Mars, which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies” (Gulliver’s Travels).

It took life 151 years, before it succeeded to imitate fiction. In 1877, the American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered the two moons of Mars, pretty much to the specifications in Swift’s narrative.

In 1992, I read Borges’ review of The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim:

“The editio orinceps of the Approach yo Al-Mu’tasim appeared in Bombay toward the end of 1932.The paper used was almost the quality of newsprint; the cover proclaimed to the buyer that the book was the first detective novel written by a native of Bombay City. Within a few months the public bought up four printings of a thousand copies each. The Bombay Quarterly Review, the Bombay Gazette, the Calcutta Review, the Hindustan Review (of Allahabad), and the Calcutta Englishman distributed their eulogies. Thereupon Bahadur issued an illustrated edition of the book, which he now titled The Conversations with the Man Called Al-Mu’tasim and handsomely subtitled A Game with Shifting Mirrors. I have it in front of me. The first edition, which I suspect is far superior, I have never succeeded in finding.

“Its visible protagonist – we never learn his name – is a law student in Bombay. He disbelieves, blasphemously so, in the Islamic faith of his fathers. But at nightfall on the tenth night of the lunar month of Muharram, he finds himself in the center of a civil tumult between Moslems and Hindus. The Sirkar police – mounted, deafening-hooved, half asleep – intervene with their impartial lashes. Almost beneath the hooves of the horses, the student takes flight. He crosses two sets of railway tracks, and scales the wall of an entangled garden, at the back of which rises a circular tower.

“It is impossible to trace the vicissitudes of the nineteen remaining chapters. The story which begins in Bombay continues in the lowlands of Palanpur, lingers an afternoon and a night at the stone gates of Bikanar, narrates the death of a blind astrologer in a Benares sewer, conspires in the multiform palace of Katmandu, prays and fornicates – amid the pestilential stench of Calcutta – in the Machua Bazaar, watches the days be born in the sea from an office in Madras, watches the afternoons die in the sea from a balcony in the state of Travancore, hesitates and kills at Indapur and closes its orbit of leagues and years in Bombay itself, a few paces away from the garden of the moon-colored hounds. The student arrives at a gallery ‘at the rear of which there is a door hung with a cheap and copiously beaded mat-curtain; from behind it emanates a great radiance.’ The student claps his hands, once, twice, and asks for Al-Mu’tasim. A man’s voice – the incredible voice of Al-Mu’tasim – urges him to come in” (The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim).

I had to have this book and in order to find a copy I perused every publisher's and every antiquarian’s catalog and even took the bus to the British Library. I went to the central catalog, searching back and forth; first under the letter “A,” then under “M,” in desperation even under “T.” Nothing! I asked the lady at the front desk. She had no idea. I just couldn’t believe it. So, after I came home, I absentmindedly began brewing myself an espresso – my first and last defense against Alzheimer. What had I been missing? I reached for Borges own memoir: Borges about Borges. I should have done this before.

Apparently I was not the first falling for the hoax. Borges speaks of “borrowings from Kipling,” and explains the references worked in into the text of The Approach, which include “a genuine Iranian mystic: Farid ud-Din Attar (1145 – 1221).” What we read is supposed to be the “second edition” to which Borges introduces a real life publisher – Victor Gollancz – and attributes “the foreword” to a real life author – Dorothy L. Sayers. A neat touch! With glee, Borges noted, that in 1942, when the U-boots were raiding the Atlantic, a friend of his had contacted London from Buenos Aires, trying to place a telegraphic order of the book. It is really quite clever. Vladimir Nabokov once criticized the art of Borges for being "all porch and no house behind." That may be so, yet by merely summing up the highlights, The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim is not only a better story; it is the best novel Borges has never written. The author of Mashenka should have known: Mashenka, as well, is an excellent piece of ghostwriting, the best thing Chekhov has never written.

Well, as much as I liked Borges, or Kafka for that matter, I would no longer mention either as my favorite author. Borges is good; he is very good, although a teensy bit anemic and cerebral, but over the years the quest for my absolute favorite was becoming a bit like my dog’s daily chores: “8:00 am – Dog food! My favorite thing! 9:30 am – A car ride! My favorite thing! 9:40 am – A walk in the park! My favorite thing! 10:30 am – Got rubbed and petted! My favorite thing! 12:00 pm – Lunch! My favorite thing! 1:00 pm – Played in the yard! My favorite thing! 3:00 pm – Wagged my tail! My favorite thing! 5:00 pm – Milk bones! My favorite thing! 7:00 pm – Got to play ball! My favorite thing!  8:00 pm – Wow! Watched TV with the people! My favorite thing! 11:00 pm – Sleeping on the bed! My favorite thing!” (Yes Johnny, I love you too; now stop lapping water from the toilet bowl; it’s really not cool buddy.) So Updike, Salinger, Tolstoy, Sterne, Oscar Wilde, Zinoviev, Kipling, Heinrich Heine, Montaigne, Mailer, Nabokov, and, and, and – they all had their moment and became my favorite thing, but after I found Raymond Chandler (1888 – 1959), all doubts have vanished.

This is it! My favorite thing! A little later I even discovered that Chandler and P.G. Woodhouse had been friends. What a pleasant coincidence. At some point Jane Austen and Jeeves happened to be my wife’s favorite thing.

Jane Austen was a writer from the Post Rococo, when the highbrows were beginning to look for a Golden Age of reason and beauty. They thought they’d found it in ancient Greece. Lord Elgin filched marbled reliefs from the Acropolis; Lord Byron lost his life offering his unasked assistance to the Greek’s in their struggle of liberation from the Turks. In Paris Dr. Guillotine reined supreme, the French aristocrats kept sneezing their heads into the basket – with a memorable last line on the dying lips. The art of the epigram experienced a renaissance. Bonaparte headed a most romantic expedition to the pyramids of Egypt – “soldiers, four millennia are looking down on you” – while at Abukir Admiral Nelson with coldblooded efficiency sunk the entire fleet that had carried the French to the shore.

Ms Austin’s novels seem to be oblivious of the great events. Her writing has the charm of dainty brushwork on old china, yet if it were for her, neither the Napoleonic wars nor the liberation of Greece may ever have happened. (I still recall the peculiar smell when I walked up the hill to the Acropolis – somewhat like a hefty ejaculation.) ­Jane Austen was a smart woman. She knew that the easy flow of a high empire-line tied directly underneath the tits, is infinitely more appealing than the butchest marbles in the British Museum. A perfect lure for lucrative marriages, and let’s be honest guys, it does improve the cleavage. When Ms Austen published her first novel, Casanova was still writing his memoirs, and Napoleon about to cast an imperial leer into the cleavage of the very pregnant Madame de Staël – her lactating tits could have smothered an emperor of twice his size into oblivion. Bonaparte also had the Marquise de Sade locked up in a public institution and threw away the keys, before he went on his visit to Moscow. That should have been the other way around.

In her letters Jane Austen confesses her fascination with Lord Byron and Mozart’s Don Juan. She was no prude and knew all about “breeding” – one butler for the needs of two chambermaids, “but offspring is strictly out of the question.”

“Every author,” Borges has noted, “is creating his own pedigree.” For the moment at least, it seems I have fallen for Raymond Chandler, and that’s not just because of his admiration for Capablanca:

“It was night. I went home and put my old house clothes on and set the chessmen out and mixed a drink and played another Capablanca. It went fifty-nine moves. Beautiful cold remorseless chess, almost creepy in its silent implacability. When it was done I listened at the open window for a while and smelled the night. Then I carried my glass out to the kitchen and rinsed it and filled it with ice water and stood at the sink sipping it and looking at my face in the mirror. ‘You and Capablanca, I said’” (The High Window). 

I’ve fallen for the sparkle in his lines, now often imitated, like “It was a nice walk if you like grunting.” Or: “Her mouth opened wide and her teeth had the nice shiny look that comes from standing all night in a glass of solution.” A knowledgeable man this wisecracking Phillip Marlowe:

“They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plates. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o’-shanter which wasn’t any too clean either. Is other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment. His face was aging, saggy, full of the disgust of life and the thickening effects of liquor. But it had a hard cheerfulness that I liked, and the eyes were bright as drops of dew” (Farewell, my Lovely).

OK, Chandler didn’t write the great American novel and yes, he doesn’t have all the answers, but who is asking anyway? At least he knows everything there is to know about a dry martini:

“A tall fine-looking man in a gray suit cut by an angel suddenly stood up from a small table by the wall and walked over to the bar and started to curse the barman. He cursed him in a loud and clear voice for a long minute, calling him about nine names that are not usually mentioned by tall fine-looking men in well cut gray suits. Everybody stopped talking and looked at him quietly. His voice cut through the muted rhumba music like a shovel through snow.

“The barman stood perfectly still, looking at the man. The barman had curly hair and a clear warm skin and wide-set careful eyes. He didn’t move or speak. The tall man stopped talking and stalked out of the bar. Everybody watched him out except the barman.

“The barman moved slowly along the bar to the end where I sat and stood looking away from me, with nothing on his face but pallor. Then he turned to me and said: “Yes sir?” – “I want to talk to a fellow named Eddie Prue.” – “So?” – “He works here,” I said. “Works here doing what?” – His voice was perfectly level and as dry as dry sand. “I understand he’s the guy that walks behind the boss. If you know what I mean.” – “Oh. Eddie Prue.” He moved one lip slowly over the other and made small tight circles on the bar with his bar cloth. “Your name?” – “Marlowe.” – “Marlowe. Drink while waiting?” – “A dry martini will do” – “A martini. Dry. Veddy, veddy dry.” – “Okay.” – “Will you eat it with a spoon or a knife and fork?” – “Cut it in strips,” I said. “I’ll just nibble it.” – “On your way to school,” he said. “Should I put the olive in a bag for you?” – “Sock me on the nose with it,” I said. “If it will make you feel any better.” – “Thank you sir,” he said. “A dry martini.” – He took three steps away from me and then came back and leaned across the bar and said: “I made a mistake in a drink. The gentleman was telling me about it.” – “I heard him.” – “He was telling me about as gentlemen tell you about these things like that. As big shot directors like to point to you your little errors. And you heard him.” – “Yeah,” I said, wondering how long this was going to go on.” – “He made himself heard – the gentleman did. So I come over here and practically insult you.” – “I got the idea,” I said. – He held up one of his fingers and looked at it thoughtfully. “Just like that,” he said. “A perfect stranger.” – “It’s my big brown eyes, “I said. “They have that gentle look” (The High Window).

A film-buff may recognize the lines, Chandler did also write film scripts. Over the years I have become something of a film-buff myself, but my generation is still attached to the book, to the printed cipher and the often-subliminal effect of the written word. Words can be as contagious as viruses; yet the way they take possession of our minds and give direction to our thoughts would be unthinkable without the abstract image of then cipher on the page. The shape of a typeface can create a mood. I once studied typography and I still remember my professor’s design of a typeface used to set a hymn of the German poet Hölderlin (1770 – 1843), who has become surprisingly popular with the French – well, as far as a German can be popular in France.

“The Northeastern blows, to me the dearest of the winds, promising the mariner Godspeed and high spirits. So let us go now and greet the lovely Garonne and the gardens of Bordeaux, and follow the paths along the clipped embankment towards a noble pair of oak and white poplar surveying the land, from where a brook is falling deep into the river. This memory still pleases me – an elm-grove extending its canopy over the mill and the fig tree growing in the courtyard.

“It is the time of March. Tanned women tread softly on the silky ground, and soothing air is drifting across the slow walkways, laden with golden dreams. All wealth comes from the sea and some are far away for gain and splendor, consuming a lonely life beneath the leafless masthead. And yet they, too, strain their eyes for the onset of love. But the eternal is a gift of poets” (Remembrance, trans. michael sympson).

Not two of the letters in this poem had the same direction and size, the lines were uneven, veering off up and down, and yet when put together on the same page it became a unity, an image that in a mysterious way summarized the poetry. The impression was unforgettable; the guys designing advertisements know exactly what I am talking about.

In other words, the medium is more than a mere conveyance – it manipulates the mood of the recipient. Yet I am afraid, for the printed medium, this, too, is the end of an era. In the age of blue-ray-DVDs and home computing, books are distributed like cheese in the supermarkets, as a product of limited shelf life, and if it occupies the space for too long, it will be marked down and end on the bargain table. And in the wings is already waiting the electronic reader. The design still leaves much to be desired; yet we are already able to carry an entire library on us in the shape of a slim and elegant touch screen. More than ever writing as a profession is tied in to market forces and consumer habits. Many know how to write, but there are fewer who should write, and only the fewest who must write.

© – 3/04/2010 – by michael sympson, 5,800 words, all rights reserved