Martinis and a Villa in Capri

 

to Dawn

Authoring novels is an extreme way of living; one could even call the production of written copy a form of anti-social behavior. If you don’t believe me, get off from your desk and take the dog out for a walk – he will like it, it’s his favorite thing – but first he will give you a strange look like: “Really? Now?”

A British writer of historical fiction once showed me his garden shack, a dim place, crammed with shelves, manuscripts and books. He pointed to the corner most distant to the entry; a little window was shedding light on a frayed chair, left and right completely ensconced by piles of books supporting an ashtray just at the right height. “Let me demonstrate” he said. The man sat down and reached for a loose plank leaning to his left. He put it across his knees on the chair’s armrests, picked up a manuscript and unscrewed his fountain pen. “Now I am safe,” he said. Safe, I wondered? From what? His wife? The cat? Attila the Hun? The satisfaction gained from writing and proofreading is a very solitary pleasure – “the anxious strain and joy” (Franz Kafka, Diaries 9/23/1912) – if you can call it that. The additional chore of finding an audience and dragging a living out of your keyboard depends on economical inertia only your agent knows – if you are lucky enough to have one. These days, books have the shelf life of a hunk of Stilton before been mercilessly banned to the bargain table. How is anybody to make a living from writing novels?

Well, part of the answer is of course that the real money is coming from film rights, merchandizing and theme parks. Harry Potter has earned the unassuming J.K. Rowling (*1965) the more than generous upkeep of a real life castle in Scotland. Possibilities Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) in 1789 couldn’t even dream of, when she decided to "write for profit, and to make stories her central effort."

    Of course things didn’t go as planned. So, when in December 1802, Jane received a stuttered proposal from a plain looking, but wealthy Mr. Harris Bigg-Wither, she accepted. The next morning she called off the engagement, the family remonstrated and she went with her people into an insane financial arrangement of paying for her board and lodging without being exactly sure where the money should be coming from.

When Jane Austen published her first novel, Giacomo Casanova (1725 – 1798) was still writing his memoirs and the institutionalized Marquise de Sade (1740 – 1814) writing plays to be performed by his fellow-inmates.

In Paris Dr. Guillotine reigned supreme. The aristocrats walked to the block with a snooty one-liner on their lips; it was the best show in town before the dispatches from Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt stole the show: “Soldiers, four millennia are looking down upon you.” It didn’t last. Cut off from supplies, the troops of Bonaparte slowly melted away. Their general pulled a stunt he was to repeat in 1812 on a much larger stage: he abandoned his army. He became head of state and crowned himself emperor. When during a soirée his most outspoken enemy, the very pregnant Madame de Staël (1766 – 1817) curtseyed before him, Bonaparte cast his imperial leer into an enormous cleavage. Her lactating tits could easily have smothered an emperor twice his size. Yet unlike the servile Goethe on a similar occasion, Madame de Staël refused to roll over.

Jane Austin’s novels remained oblivious to the great events. If it were for her, the Napoleonic wars only happened to propagate the easy flow of a high empire-line, tied up directly underneath the boobies. A perfect lure for lucrative marriages, and let’s be honest guys, it does improve the cleavage. 

My wife is a great admirer of Jane Austen; she wrote a thesis on her, before she moved on to P.G. Wodehouse (1881 – 1975). My father, on the other hand, never moved on; until his dying day he returned time and again to the Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester (1899 – 1966). I read them, too, but my favorite author is Raymond Chandler (1888 – 1959). He was born in Chicago, Illinois. His father abandoned the family and the Irish-born mother and Chandler moved to the United Kingdom where he attended a local school in Upper Norwood, and – how is that for a coincidence? – received a classical education at Dulwich College, London, the same public school that also educated P.G. Wodehouse and C.S. Forester. Chandler was naturalized as a British subject in 1907, took the Civil Service examinations and worked at the Admiralty for one year. He disliked the mentality of his colleagues in the service and resigned to become a reporter for the Daily Express and the Bristol Western Gazette. His first professional assignment as a writer!

He was not a successful journalist: "Of course in those days as now there were clever young men,” he said, “who made a decent living as freelances for the numerous literary weeklies" but "I was distinctly not a clever young man. Nor was I at all a happy young man."

In 1912 he borrowed money and returned to the United States. He settled in Los Angeles, stringing tennis rackets, picking fruit and enduring a lonely time of skimping and saving before he took a correspondence course in bookkeeping and found steady employment, reaching the heights of a vice-president of the Dabney Oil syndicate. One day he picked up a magazine, The Black Mask, and from now on it always accompanied him on the backseat of his car. He said, he liked the “honesty of the writing” and decided to try a hand at it. He had nothing to lose. The Oil syndicate had just fired him because of his drinking and sexually harasing the office secretaries. Entirely self-taught, Chandler managed to get his first story published in the Black Mask in 1933.

Chandler grew to become the writer of the finest prose in American literature and the best writer of dialogue I am aware of.

His lines continue to sparkle: “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.” Phillip Marlowe, the wisecracking protagonist, is a knowledgeable man: “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. His 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 and 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” (Raymond Chandler, Farewell, my Lovely).

As is to be expected, he knew everything there is to know about a dry martini:

“The barman 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” (Raymund Chandler, The High Window).

The strong attachment to a particular place, urban or rural, seems to be the hallmark of great fiction. The author doesn’t need to actually like this place, but without ambience and atmosphere something would be lacking – like good gravy to a Beef Wellington. Vladimir Nabokov wrote at his very best during his years in the hated Berlin. Charles Dickens invented London, Frank O’Hara (1926 – 1966) celebrated New York; Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924) is unthinkable without a rather blurred image of Prague. Raymond Chandler gave us his vision of Los Angeles: freeways crisscrossing the blocks of rundown condos and the high security mansions of the dapper denizens; the flicker of neon lights in the window of sweaty motels, wrecking the sleep, the quiet foliage of redwood trees nodding over parkways, and the film-sets up the hill producing screwball comedies, the downtown lingering under the smog of the forties and fifties. That’s how we will still remember Los Angeles after the Andreas Fault is going to bury “the real” Los Angeles under the Pacific plate.

 The stuff of the mind is not the facts we know, but the fiction we like or have been taught to believe. Even “love itself,” said William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939), “would be barely more than an animal hunger without Sappho having given it shape in her poetry before.” And this is true.

The fellow who spurred his horse against the giants of La Mancha was disappointed to see them transformed to windmills by some mischievous sorcerer. Religion continued to perceive the profanation of the mystery as a threat. The sorcerer waving his wand trivializes the transubstantiation. Yet the Don Quxote was merely the story of a harmless madman. In 1608, Don Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, the Archbishop of Toledo, Primate of Spain and President of the Supreme Council of the Inquisition granted the imprimatur for a second edition, while the autos-da-fés, gulags, Guantanamos, Ljubljankas, and extermination camps would continue business as usual.

In October 1918 the Red Guards swept through Russia; the Tsar and his family, still oblivious of the windowless basement waiting for them, were held in detention. In the Crimea, refugees from the former elite of aristocratic and bourgeois administrators established a regional government over a shrinking enclave of glamour and artistic talent, amorous frivolity and beach parties, a world as artificial as a film set. In fact it was a film set. In the surrounding mountain ranges they were shooting scenes to the film Haji Murat. One of these aristocratic refugees in the Crimea was Vladimir Nabokov (1899 – 1977), the scion to one of the larger estates in Russia, now waiting to expatriate with virtually nothing but what he could carry on his person. Many of the refugees still harbored illusions that this thing would soon be over and everybody go home. The young Nabokov engrossed himself in the sentiment and sensuality of an elegant littérateur. He and his girlfriend played a game of parodying the biography of the “Grand Écrevain” seen from a distant future.

“For instance she might say after dinner: ‘the great writer liked to go out on the terrace after supper.’ Or: ‘I shall always remember the remark V. V. made one warm night. It is, he remarked, a warm night.’ Or, still sillier: ‘He was in the habit of lighting his cigarette, before smoking it.’ All this seemed hilarious and harmless at the time; but now – now I catch myself wondering if we did not disturb unwittingly some perverse and spiteful demon” (Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory). After his expatriation from the Crimea and an education in Cambridge, Nabokov settled down in Berlin, a city Nabokov learned to dislike intensely.

He married and started his professional writing career under the pen name “Vladimir Sirin.” Nabokov’s first novel was Mashenka. It is the best novel “Antonin Chekhov (1861 – 1904)” has never written. More novels followed ­– all destined to reach only an exclusive audience of refugees, a small group on the fringes, never substantial enough in numbers to provide the author with a decent living; whatever income Nabokov earned from his novels in the twenties and thirties, it came from translations into German. It was a life in crammed apartments with the bathroom as the only place to write. In 1937, Nabokov, his wife and son left Germany for France and stayed in Paris where Nabokov finished his first novel written in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. In May 1940, the Nabokovs barely escaped the advancing German troops and finally acquired the necessary visas to immigrate to the United States. In 1947 Nabokov started his career as an American author with Bend Sinister. Later the publication of Lolita would change his life and earn him fame and celebrity.

According to his own testimony, Nabokov discovered Franz Kafka for himself only after he’d already had left Germany. There is this myth of Franz Kafka the closet writer who gained renown and fame only after his death, yet in the real world a prestigious publisher had accepted Kafka’s first submission of stories and sketches as early as 1912. In 1914 and 1915 two more collections of stories came out, and Kafka received for his work the Theodor Fontane Price – eight hundred Reichsmark, a considerable sum of money.

Much, if not all of Franz Kafka’s printed work, started with an entry in his diaries. He was still a boy when visitors had coffee with his parents. The adults talked while he 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,” he said, “the usual stuff” (Franz Kafka, Diaries 1/19/1911). For Kafka this was the first of a never-ending sequence of downers that culminated in 1919 in the father’s response to Kafka’s announcement of his engagement to Julie Whoryzek, the daughter of a synagogue beadle and shoemaker. The father had only words of scorn. He said he would sell the store and emigrate to escape this shame for the family name. “She probably put on a fancy blouse, something these Jewesses in Prague are good at, and right away, of course, you decide to marry her. And that as fast as possible, in a week, tomorrow, today. I can’t understand you: you're a grown man, you live in the city, and yet 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" (Franz Kafka, Letter to the Father).

Harsh words, but the father seemed to know his son.

The room of the young Kafka opened a window 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,” Kafka wrote to a friend, “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" (Franz Kafka, Letter to Max Brod). The first sortie into the sordid land of one night stands with barmaids, waitresses, and shop girls. They all left their traces in his fiction: in The Trial, the protagonist starts a fling with his attorney's maid on the very first consultation, right under the nose of her employer. At the same time ‘Joseph K.’ is hitting on a mysterious Ms ‘Bürstner.' The name is a derivative of the verb "bürsten," German for "brushing," a vulgar euphemism for sexual intercourse. In The Castle the protagonist is introduced to “a nondescript little blonde with sad features, thin cheeks, and a surprising gaze, a gaze of exceptional superiority. When this gaze descended on K., it seemed to him to be the gaze that had already decided matters concerning him, whose existence he himself still knew nothing about, but of whose existence that gaze now convinced him. K. kept watching Frieda – the steward’s mistress – from the side even while she spoke with Olga” (Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Haman). Only hours after his arrival, Frieda’s “small body was burning in K.’s hands; they rolled a few paces in an unconscious state from which K. repeatedly but in vain tried to rescue himself, bumped against the steward’s door, and then lay in the small puddles of beer and other rubbish which littered the floor. And as though Frieda had been fortified by K.’s consent, she clenched her fist, knocked on the door, and cried: “I’m with the surveyor. I’m with the surveyor.” This was not what ‘K.’ had intended. “K. knelt beside Frieda, and looked about in the dull early morning light. What had just happened? Where were his hopes? What could be expected from Frieda, now that all was betrayed” (Franz Kafka, The Castle)? The surveyor ‘K’ is a conman; he uses his involvement with women as steppingstones for his designs. Not surprising, once she has seen through him, Frieda will jilt ‘K.’ for one of his assistants.

The shadows thicken: “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” (Franz Kafka, The Trial, transl. Breon Mitchell). Very few authors have this knack of making us aware of the ordinary, as if seen by an alien from deep space.

© – 29/04/2010 – by michael sympson, 3,025 words, all rights reserved