I had looked forward to meeting Judy Stone, The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic. She wasn’t solely a film buff. The passionate advocate for world cinema also published a number of stunning interviews with leading figures in literature and culture.

While going through old boxes of papers, I stumbled across a xerox I’d made of her excellent and insightful interview with Nobel poet laureate Czesław Miłosz, which was included in her 2006 Not Quite a Memoir: Of Films, Books, the World. I googled her, and learned she was still alive and living in the Bay Area … but not for long. The celebrated critic died in San Francisco on Friday, Oct. 6, of natural causes.

An excerpt from the interview:

In his Nobel address, Miłosz referred to the number of published books that have denied that the Holocaust ever took place, suggesting that it was invented by Jewish propagandists. “If such an insanity is possible,” he asked, “is a complete loss of memory as a permanent state of mind improbable? And would it not present a danger more grave than genetic engineering and/or poisoning of the natural environment?”

Such a loss of memory is probable, he reasons. Referring to the television miniseries Holocaust, he asks with a sense of horror: “Do people really have to see reality changed into melodrama to come a little closer to visualizing how it really was?”

Are we losing memory?

Miłosz has played a role in stimulating different levels of consciousness in Poland – for instance, through his 1958 translation into Polish of the writing of Simone Weil. …

“I have been influenced by Weil in a profound way,” Miłosz says. “Primarily because of her very deep concern with evil. That was her main preoccupation: suffering, pain, the evil of the world. This goes back to my preconceptions when I was a schoolboy. I was interested in heresies which were concerned with evil and with suffering, and Simone Weil is a slightly heretical writer.”

Miłosz’s preoccupation with Weil and Dostoevsky is linked to his meditations on the figure of Job, who dared to question God but whose faith withstood the test of all calamities.

“Job is at the center of Weil’s attention, and I quote at length from her in my introduction to the Book of Job. We are again close to the Book of Job with Dostoevsky. It plays a crucial part in the structure of The Brothers Karamazov. I have never taught other Russian writers. Only Dostoevsky. I laughingly tell my students that Dostoevsky, who hated Poles and Catholics, is taught by a man who is very far from Dostoevsky’s Russian Orthodox views. But I’m fascinated by those deeply felt contradictions in Dostoevsky and his sensitivity to the question of evil. So you see, we are always turning around the same problem.”

“Only Dostoevsky.”

I ask if he sees the world in terms of good and evil.

“Unfortunately, I guess I do,” Miłosz replies. “I have a very clear, very strong feeling of opposed forces of good or evil. It’s something which you acquire only through experience and very elemental. That’s precisely the gist of what Nadezhda Mandelstam says in her memoir. This is characteristic of her and of Solzhenitsyn and all who went through misfortune, affliction. In those extreme situations, good and evil acquire elemental force. Western civilization is losing that clear distinction: Everything can be explained away; everything is relative. In dramatic circumstances, you feel clearly the good forces and the demonic forces in action.”

***

I ask if his wartime experiences in Poland had influenced his decision to translate the Bible.

“To some extent, my memories elude my consciousness,” Miłosz replies. “I suspect it’s been operating on a much deeper level of horror, so translating the Bible is a quite logical way of coping with some subconscious things … like dreams.”

When I was commissioned to write a story for the Poetry Foundation recently, I had the pleasure of working with Ellen Umansky, its features editor. She was terrific – but my pleasure is to be short-lived. She’s already left the foundation to pursue her own writing. So I googled, and found her first book, The Fortunate Ones, was favorably reviewed a few months ago in The New York Times. 

From Sana Krasikov’s “A Painting Stolen First by the Nazis, Then by Persons Unknown”:

On the book:

Ellen Umansky’s first novel, The Fortunate Ones, borrows the architecture of the art mystery, but leaves aside the obligatory magic in favor of a quieter and more earthly examination of how art serves us in the here and now. The lost painting at the heart of the book is “The Bellhop,” a fictional amalgam of Chaim Soutine’s bellboys and hotel porters. In the eyes of 11-year-old Rose Zimmer, the boy in the painting “was too skinny in his red uniform, his face pasty and elongated. The paint was thick, thrown on . . . as if the painter couldn’t be bothered to slow down and pay attention. Rose didn’t understand why her mother loved it so.” (You can read more about Soutine on Ellen’s website here.)

The story:

A winner. (Photo: Sam Zalutsky)

The canvas disappears when the Nazis plunder the Zimmers’ apartment in Vienna after the Anschluss. Rose and her older brother are spared their parents’ brutal fate, escaping to England on the Kindertransport. Sixty-six years later we encounter Rose in Los Angeles, now a chic, no-nonsense woman attending the wake of a friend, Joseph, who acquired her family’s lost Soutine after it mysteriously turned up in New York. But the painting no longer hangs on Joseph’s walls, having disappeared years ago on the night his rebellious daughter Lizzie threw a wild party in his absence. Lizzie, now 37 and at a crossroads in life, meets Rose at Joseph’s funeral, and feels a powerful affinity. As the two grow closer, Rose permits Lizzie to reopen the case of the lost painting. …

The takeaway:

On occasion, the novel falls into its own aesthetic traps. The dialogue sometimes feels too cinematically coy, and there is a veneer of politeness to the prose even in moments of conflict. But the ideas at its core are deceptively deep. The Fortunate Ones is a subtle, emotionally layered novel about the ways art and other objects of beauty can make tangible the invisible, undocumented moments in our lives, the portion of experience that exists without an audience but must be preserved if we are to remain whole.

Read the whole thing here.

Praise for the opuscule! An adapted chapter of my forthcoming Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard has been published separately by the fine-press publisher Wiseblood as Everything Came to Me at Once: The Intellectual Vision of René Girard. Well, we wrote about that already here. Here’s the news: Trevor Cribben Merrill has some kind words about it in Education & Culture, the new website launched by John Wilson, formerly the mastermind behind the now defunct Books & Culture.

An excerpt:

If I took one thing away from Haven’s little book, it was the likeness between Girard’s own creative conversion and that of the novelists he studied in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, which despite his later shift to religious anthropology may still be his most compelling and characteristic work. Deceit is at once a brilliant take on five classic writers—Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoevsky—and a history of desire in the modern west, tracing how pathological competition sprang up on the ruins of the Old Regime’s feudal hierarchies. But it is also, if more discreetly, a book about artistic creation. Great writers, Girard argues, come to grasp that our desires are less personal than we like to believe, and that others often wield a decisive influence over us just when we think we are free. Don Quixote is aware of imitating. Much as the Christian asks “What would Jesus do?”, at every moment Quixote wonders: “What would Amadis of Gaul do?” But Dostoevsky, writing as rapidly urbanizing Russia played catch up with the West, portrays an alienated self-love that feeds on others yet can only survive by denying this. Anticipating Seinfeld by more than a century, his “underground men” get worked up over tiny slights, and rush out to give their enemies the cold shoulder.

Unconscious “triangular desire” (the metaphor accounts for the way our desires draw strength from a model or “mediator” instead of going straight from subject to object) lives or dies on our tendency to buy the “romantic lies” we feed others. We tell ourselves—and our friends—that we are going to the beach to soak up the sunshine and feel the soft caress of a sea breeze. Or that we take an interest in literature out of a detached scholarly curiosity. But it may be that the beach is so tempting because an ex-girlfriend often goes windsurfing there, and that our heavily-footnoted study of Chinua Achebe masks a craving to write prize-winning novels. Our friends see right through us, of course—but they have their own obsessions, which we treat with a condescending indulgence to equal theirs toward us.

In short, triangular desire is something one complacently or indignantly observes in others, but it must be discovered in one’s own life. This is obvious on one level, but on another it can be difficult to grasp. Maybe that’s why a persistent misunderstanding surrounds Girard’s reading of literature. Some take the mere presence of triangular desire in a work as sufficient reason to declare its author a world-class genius, on par with Proust or Dostoevsky. Articles and dissertations trumpet the triangularity of this or that writer’s fiction, as if the ability to spot envy and jealousy in the modern world, which often encourages those vices, were especially noteworthy in itself.

Read the rest here.

Postscript on Oct. 5: Looks like we got pickup from The Weekly Standard here.

Little-known Hungarian author

Sándor Márai‘s taut and mesmerizing Embers, published in 1942, opens in a secluded Hungarian castle, where an old general awaits a reunion with a friend. It is 1940, and he has not appeared in public for decades. The long-estranged companions talk all night – or rather, the general talks, as the evasive visitor listens to the general discuss love, intimacy, honor, betrayal, and a beautiful, long-dead wife. “We are our secrets,” he says.

The autumn “Another Look” event at Stanford will discuss Márai’s superb novel. The discussion will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 18, at the Bechtel Conference Center.

The novel is set against the backdrop of the disintegrated Austro-Hungarian empire, and shares the melancholy wisdom of its narrator: “We not only act, talk, think, dream, we also hold our silence about something. All our lives we are silent about who we are, which only we know, and about which we can speak to no one. Yet we know that who we are and what we cannot speak about constitutes the ‘truth.’ We are that about which we hold our silence.”

Acclaimed author Robert Pogue Harrison will moderate the discussion. The Stanford professor who is Another Look’s director writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and hosts the popular talk show, Entitled Opinions. He will be joined by renowned author and National Medal of Arts winner Tobias Wolff, professor emeritus of English at Stanford, and Jane Shaw, Stanford’s Dean for Religious Life at Stanford. Wolff is founding director of Another Look, and of course many of you will remember Jane Shaw from our discussion of J.L. Carr‘s  A Month in the Country.

The Another Look book club takes on books that have been forgotten, neglected, or simply haven’t received the attention we think they merit. Here’s another draw: all books are short, so they can be read in a few sittings.

All our events are free and open to the public – and please bring your friends! Come early for best seating.

“I don’t want to be a visiting celebrity. I want to be a catalyst,” says California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia. The Book Haven has already discussed his efforts as poet laureate here and here, but it’s nice to see his work getting international recognition. He’ll be on the BBC tomorrow, Oct. 1, at 10 a.m. California Time (PST). The program, called “a radio road movie,” will be available shortly after broadcast.

From the BBC website:

When Dana Gioia was appointed Poet Laureate of California in 2015 he was invited to read in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento. But Gioia believes the role is to encourage poetry throughout the state. He has a mission: to visit every county in the state of California.

There are 58, stretching from Del Norte 1,000 miles south to Imperial, bordering Mexico; from the Sierra mountains and redwood forests to the desert; densely populated Los Angeles (almost 10 million) to almost empty Modoc (fewer than 10,000); with established communities from Mexico and Europe joined recently by people from the Far East.

Everywhere Gioia is joined by other poets and young people participating in Poetry Out Loud. For nine years Gioia was Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. One of his initiatives was this nationwide competition for young people to memorise and recite poems. It is astonishingly popular.

40-odd counties in, producer Julian May joins Gioia to create a radio road movie for Radio 3. Gioia reads in a pub yard in Mariposa, an old gold-mining town, while humming birds dart and hover. A few days later Gioia hears of a huge wildfire coming within a mile of the wooden town. In a library in Madera, roasting in California’s central valley, a woman from Peru recites a love poem in Spanish. In marches a squad of lads – military boots, buzzcuts. They are from the juvenile hall youth correctional facility. Each, says Officer Martinez, can recite a poem by heart. There is an event in Turlock, settled by Assyrians, another in San Diego near Mexico and, in his home county, Sonoma, Gioia appears at poetry event in a vineyard.

All this, and more, in ‘Every County in the State of California’, a radio road movie.

It airs tomorrow morning, October 1, at 10 a.m., California Time (PST). You can read the press release, too, here.

The majestic monument at Wenceslas Square in Prague. The king is the one on the horse.

Not every country’s capital is graced with the kind of public art that inspires silence, awe, and a sense of majesty. Prague is. I remember, walking downtown for the first time in 2008, and seeing the impressive Wenceslas Square, with its dark, massive monument: King Wenceslas on horseback, flanked by the Czech patron saints:  Ludmila, Agnes of Bohemia, Prokop, and Adalbert of Prague. On the base, the inscription: “Svatý Václave, vévodo české země, kníže náš, nedej zahynouti nám ni budoucím.” In English: “Saint Wenceslas, duke of the Czech land, prince of ours, do not let perish us nor our descendants.”

So far he hasn’t. But today is his feast day, and I thought I would honor him with a post. For my curiosity about King Wenceslas (a saint as well as a king) deepened when I visited the austere and spiky St. Vitus Church, built in the 14th century, which includes Wenceslas’ chapel and his relics, after the 28-year-old monarch was murdered by his brother Boleslav in 935 A.D.

I don’t remember how my curiosity resulted in Jan Rejzl sending me his Good King Wenceslas: The Real Story from the U.K. the following year: “In the English-speaking world, the Christmas carol ‘Good King Wenceslas’ is well known. Every year it touches us with the warmth and generosity that is felt at this special time of year – Christmas,” he writes.

“When I came to Great Britain in 1968, I was pleasantly surprised to hear the carol as I knew a little more about Good King Wenceslas. I was able to tell my friends that Good King Wenceslas really existed and that I come from the country he once ruled. Indeed, I was born and raised in the town where his brother Boleslav had his castle. the town is called Stara Boleslav, and is situated where Boleslav’s castle once stood…”

In the carol, the king sees a poor man gathering kindling for warmth on a very cold night. He tells his page:

“Bring me flesh and bring me wine
Bring me pine logs hither
Thou and I will see him dine
When we bear him thither.”
Page and monarch forth they went
Forth they went together
Through the rude wind’s wild lament
And the bitter weather.”

Romanesque door knocker at St. Vitus’s Wenceslas Chapel.

Not bloody likely. According to Rejzl, “As Wenceslas wanted his people to be freed from barbarian and pagan practices, he himself lived very modestly. He avoided banquets and overindulgence in food.” So much for the flesh and wine, then. “One legend says that if he indulged in eating and drinking, the next day he went to the church and begged the priests for forgiveness…”

Here’s the rest of the carol:

“Sire, the night is darker now
And the wind blows stronger
Fails my heart, I know not how,
I can go no longer.”
“Mark my footsteps, my good page
Tread thou in them boldly
Thou shalt find the winter’s rage
Freeze thy blood less coldly.”

In his master’s steps he trod
Where the snow lay dinted
Heat was in the very sod
Which the Saint had printed
Therefore, Christian men, be sure
Wealth or rank possessing
Ye who now will bless the poor
Shall yourselves find blessing.”

The footsteps may have been heating pads for the page, but for the king? Not so much, for “it is said in the Kristian’s Legend that Duke Wenceslas went barefoot in winter from castle to castle, visiting churches many times, leaving traces of blood in his footsteps on icy paths.”

The Book Haven makes no claims to saintliness, but certainly in one way we find him a kindred spirit: “I have already reported that he was well educated and indeed he frequently carried a book under his coat, so he could read it in his spare moments.” So do we, Wenceslas, so do we.

Happy St. Wenceslas Day! Find a Czech and celebrate with some Becherovka. In fact, I have some sitting in the fridge from my last trip to Prague. I may indulge in a nip tonight.