Skywriting

My models for blogging are: the Polish genius/disruptor Witold Gombrowicz and the French philosopher/guru Emile-August Chernier, who wrote under the ungooglable pen name Alain.

News of Gombrowicz first reached me while I was living in Prague, a city riddled with both expatriates (which Gombro was) and shitty writers (which he was not). In such a city, it is easier than you'd think for an American to get a library card, and to check out, using said card, the British edition of Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, and then to read in this small, tattered, but ridiculously-well-argued book that the Joyce-Mann-Proust triumvirate that he has worshipped for so long is in fact a distant second string to the real giants of the period, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Witold Gombrowicz. The American, of course, has never heard of any of these writers before. But Americans being Americans and shitty writers being shitty writers, he of course believes every word of it.

Ten years and numerous investigations later, Gombrowicz's thought has utterly infected me. Viruses, like most great organisms, do their work in the dark; but the success of Gombro's prose has less to do with outright force than with its unique combination of speed and sharpness. This is especially true in the Diaries, which, were I a real writer, I would mention in an interview as "my War and Peace" (causing the same puzzled excitement in Shitty Young America that, say, Philip Roth did in me, when he called Celine "my Proust"). Written during his impromptu exile in Argentine, they are among the great blogging ur-texts: a rancid epic of inflation, mutilation, and change (which, despite his desires to, Gombro really does not: this is simultaneously the work's great victory and its tragedy). And it all plays out in that wonderful, hiding-under-the-sofa level of mundanity that blogs are so fascinated with. Comparing the book with Tolstoy may seem flippant: it is. It is ludicrously irresponsible. But put a page of the Diaries next to the last chapter of Anna Karenina, and then stare at them with all the intensity you'd give to the Magic Eye poster in a TGIFridays's bathroom. After five minutes, you will start to get very bored - but then, after fifteen or twenty minutes the candy-colored waters will part, and the Unicorn of Meaning leap from the wall to gouge your eye out.


Gombro's genius was to be so vituperously witty about himself and the world that he eventually broke them both. In pictures he looks like what he was: a grouchy and effete old perv. But this is also not what he was - for the real Gombrowicz is not in these pictures at all, at least not visibly. The real Gombrowicz is sitting in a tiny cockpit at the top of the picture-Gombrowicz's head, moving his arms and legs via an elaborate system of levers when he has to, but mostly just sitting there in disgusted awe. Yes, there is awe in Gombrowicz, that most romantic of romantic Polish intellectuals. But he will not settle. So, like a particular strain of idealist that can be found everywhere (even in America), he spends most of his time telling the world and himself how incredibly much they fail to measure up.

Going from Gombrowicz to Alain is like deciding to switch parents with your best friend. There is the fear, the flush of encounter, the relief at feeling valued, hopeful, optimistic... and then, of course, the mysterious realization that these new parents are actually a lot like your old ones. A populist, a Marxist (though seen through his eyes Marx resembles the Brothers Grimm much more than Goethe or Schiller), Alain wrote almost exclusively in a single form, which he called the propos. As Richard Pevear explains it in his introduction to The Gods:

The word basically means a conversation, a talk. These miniature essays make up a large part of [Alain's] work; between 1903 and 1936 he wrote over five thousand of them, an average of one every two and a half days...The nature of the propos grew out of the unusual working conditions Alain set himself: to fill two pages, at one sitting, with no revisions. In fact, he would not erase a sentence once it was put down; he would make his thought follow the words. In a note written in 1908, he compared the propos to the stretto in a fugue, the abbreviated repetition of subjects, which come together 'as if they were passing through a ring. The material crowds in, and it has to line up, and pass through, and be quick. That is my acrobatic stunt, as well as i can describe it; I have succeeded perhaps one time in six, which is a lot...'

The state of concentration that he describes here as being necessary for the writing of the propos links Alain's writing to more physical and improvisational modes of creation: dance, for example, or the guitar solo, or drawing. The mad British sculptor/painter/novelist Michael Ayrton describes the last of these beautifully: "The process of drawing is before all else the process of putting the visual intelligence into action, the very mechanics of taking visual thought." In a similar way, Alain's propos seem less written to me than sky-written, performed. Despite their density I read them quickly, before they dissolve, and then mull over them for hours.


This conception of writing as a physical, improvisational, and above all risky act is what makes Alain so important for me. Most of the fiction I've tried to write over the last decade has been the result of enormous effort - not concentration, necessarily, but effort. But as anyone who's ever been a long-distance athlete can tell you, time spent at a task does not immediately translate into time well spent (and then just there, I had to rewrite that sentence). Too often while writing fiction - while writing any prose, really, except those pieces that I can somehow convince myself are "not important" - I put my head down and push, with the same blinkered tenacity that I used to show when I volunteered for the most difficult events during a high school swim meet. Why did I do this? Why especially when my thighs at fourteen were things of beauty, and my breaststroke (the most delicate, dance-like and furious of the competitive strokes) an unbeatable knife-stab into perfectly-parting waters? But breaststroke was also the slowest stroke and therefore a notorious haven for malingerers. Even the name was pansified. So I gave it up, exchanging what I still hold would have been a meteoric career for four years of a frustrated attempt to succeed at something that I just - wasn't - good at.

Fear. But one of the great ironies (or necessities) of Alain's writing is that, effortless though it may seem, it is obsessed with work. The Gods - still my favorite blog, even more so than the Diaries - is a hymn to disillusion: a reverse and antidote to Gombrowicz's Polish escapism. For Alain, the point is not to escape, since anywhere we escape to will just be the same thing. We carry our problem - our "soul error" as Alain's great predecessor Montaigne put it - inside us. It is a misunderstanding (shades again of Tolstoy and that secret Tolstoyan, Ludwig Wittgenstein), which means that we can correct it. There are no paradises, no edens since Eden. As soon as we accept that nothing comes into being without work, we can begin to remedy our situation ourselves, in the world. Putting it this way unfortunately makes Alain sound like an Australian trying to sell blenders - but this is not philosophy. Or rather, it is philosophy in the same way that Alain's propos are writing: philosophy as action.

Alain's legacy, for me, is intensity: of style, of voice, of ambition. His famous students included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone Weil. His first sentences are impossible composites of equation and fairy tale: "A child is first carried or wheeled around." "Violence is everywhere under the peacefulness of the fields." "The Gods are moments of man." "Ulysses, on Calypso's beach, thinks of the smoke above his roof in Ithaca, and wants to die." "We always have to eat." Impossible not to read the sentences that follow them - which is, I realize, one of the things he has in common with Witold Gombrowicz.

Fantstic and Wild, Part 1: Escaping Safely

(this is part one of a four-part discussion of adaptation, movies, kids books, and Generation X, among other things. It uses the recent movies The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Where the Wild Things Are as a starting point. Part 1 is on the various book versions of TFMF. Part 2, which looks at the opera- and stage versions, as well as Wes Anderson movie and cinema in general, should go up by Wednesday. Part 3, on Maurice Sendak, should be ready by Friday, and then (fingers crossed), I'll round it out with part IV this weekend. Please feel free to post responses along the way, and enjoy!)


The Fantastic Mr. Fox is a story about doing: a hymn to action whose main character succeeds, like Tom Sawyer, no matter what obstacles are put in front of him. In part, this is what makes his book so wonderful to kids - for as the French philosopher Alain writes, "Courage is the king of fairy tales and the god of childhood". Children, who are terrified all the time, and who therefore have a very good idea of what "being brave" means, want bravery to be a skeleton key that opens any lock; so, as soon as Mr. Fox is menaced, he sits and thinks. Then he has an idea. Then the idea is translated from his head out into the world of action. The transition between each of these stages is smooth, even flawless, leading us to assume that the two languages - thought, and action - are less separate languages than dialects, or even accents, like British and American English, whose occasional differences of pronunciation are cause more for gentle awkwardness (or at worst a misunderstood street name) than any real disaster.

Donald Chaffin's illustrations in the original Alfred P. Knopf publication (1970) of TFMF only emphasize the essential harmlessness of Mr. Fox and the world he lives in. With his soft, inexpressive eyes, frozen smile and teapot-shaped head, this version of our hero is less like a drawing of an actual beast and more like an icon: a sticker peeled off its sheet and placed against a series of autumnal landscapes. His double-breasted waistcoat is always impeccably clean, even after an afternoon of hard digging - but then this is exactly the point, since dirt in this fox's world is not a dense element that must be dealt with in order to succeed, but a sort of second atmosphere, as civilized and malleable as butter.

Such heightened domesticity is of course a staple of children's literature, which works to transform the hard world that children experience into a sort of gigantic rumpus room. In Dahl's book this impulse is most obvious in the plot itself, which summons Boggis, Bunce and Bean like a trio of evil clowns and then knocks them over without once making us feel that they might actually manage to harm our hero or his family. Throughout this, Chaffin's cozily undramatic pictures (the foxes appear to be smiling even as they "frantically" try to escape from an approaching bulldozer) form a perfect accompaniment: a sort of light jazz for the hospital waiting room of the story.

It is interesting to note, however, that on his way to this placidity Chaffin glosses over those moments of nose-picking grotesquerie that are the calling card of Dahl's prose. The book's descriptions linger over the three farmers like a schoolboy picking through entrails: Bean's smile is "sickly", showing "more gums than teeth"; he pulls "something black and hard out of his ear" and tosses it in the grass. Bunce eats donuts filled with goose liver paste. The trio are physically disgusting - and then, though this atmosphere is missing entirely from the pictures, it creates an interesting tension in the book as a whole: as if what we were reading was not one, but two stories, which agree in places and disagree in others, like a pair of old men squabbling over a single story.

Such stereoptic storytelling may seem strange in what is supposed to be a straightforward story - but as master illustrator and children's book writer Maurice Sendak says, it is actually normal - exemplary even. For Sendak, the "picture book" (as he calls it) is by its very nature a hybrid, in which text and image dance around one another with a freedom that is, perhaps, the most childlike part of it. The task of the author/illustrator is therefore not to downplay this interaction, but to encourage it. As Sendak says in an interview with Walter Lorraine:

"You must not ever be doing the same thing, must not ever be illustrating exactly what is written...You have worked out a text so that it stops and goes and stops and goes, and the pictures become so subtle, too, that quite independent of the words they tell their own side of the story. The illustrator is doing a tremendous job of expansion, collaboration, of illumination." (Sendak, Caldecott & Co., p. 186)


Given this potential for interplay, one of the most interesting things about rereading (or watching, or listening to) TFMF in its various interpretations is the chance that it gives us to see how illustrators over the years have changed the work, emphasizing or downplaying certain elements depending on their own visions and temperaments. In Quentin Blake's translation, for example, Dahl's fox sprouts pan legs and stiff, wing-like coat-tails, not to mention a coat of fur that looks like it was scratched onto him by a particularly dreamy fifth-grader. The paint-box water-coloring gleefully overrun its outlines, giving each picture a happy, anarchic feeling, like a doodle whose energy and wildness have been rendered harmless by the controlling figuration of the characters. In turn, the Mr. Fox we read about in this book is wilder, freer: less the super-effective aristocrat of fate and more the cockney jobber. His success is the fool's success and therefore lovable, though perhaps less parentally endorsable.

Comparing these two characters raises the inevitable question: who is the real Mr. Fox? Is it Chaffin's wall-hanging, or Blake's sculpted snot-chunk? Sophisticates may scoff - but anyone with children will understand the importance of this point, which unfortunately only gets more complicated the more we look into it. Puffin will publish two more versions: a Chaffinesque saga with a beautiful, moonlit cover by Jill Bennett, and the more Blakean "young reader" version by Tony Ross, in which Mr. Fox looks like a cross between Elmo and Bart Simpson. The drawings are excellent; but in each of these cases, the illustrators, like their predecessors, conceive of their protagonist through one of two personas: the mischievous trickster, or the Victorian gentleman. Confusingly enough, the text supports and contradicts both - which is important, since it in turn illustrates for us the way that Dahl's writing is itself already syncopated (to use one of Sendak's terms): not a pure stream at all, but a muddy river of twigs and branches and seeds, which flows, sure, but also eddies, to the delight of its readers and profit of its interpreters.

Counter-intuitive though it might seem, this narrative syncopation is one of the real reason why kids like Dahl so much - for no matter what strain its illustrators choose to pick up on, TFMF retains two basic tools: the reassuring and protectively regular plot (Dad), and a giggling, distractible, body-obsessed description (Dad's boozing, lazy, no-good brother Tom). The reader gets to have her cake and eat it too, laughing at the descriptions of the triumphant Mr. Fox launching belch after celebratory belch without having to worry that his joy de vivre might cause him to do something excessively vigorous, and so overflow the conventional outline of his cage/house.