Stephan Müller‘s website for Czech writer Milan Kundera has a truly excellent interview with the author, conducted about the time his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in English in 1980. The interviewer is American author Philip Roth (I interviewed him here). The interview carries its years well – in fact, it’s not only timely, but prophetic.  At the time, Roth was the general editor of a superb series of Penguin Books, “Writers from the Other Europe,” which included Heinrich Böll, Bruno Schultz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and others. He had read a manuscript of the English translation; the interview in Czech and French was translated by Kundera’s wife Vera.

Two excerpts:

Roth: Do you think the destruction of the world is coming soon?.

Kundera: That depends on what you mean by the word “soon.”

Roth: Tomorrow or the day after.

Kundera: The feeling that the world is rushing to ruin is an ancient one.

Roth: So then we have nothing to worry about.

Kundera: On the contrary. If a fear has been present in the human mind for ages, there must be something to it.

Roth: In any event, it seems to me that this concern is the background against which all the stories in your latest book take place, even those that are of a decidedly humorous nature.

Kundera: If someone had told me as a boy: One day you will see your nation vanish from the world, I would have considered it nonsense, something I couldn’t possibly imagine. A man knows he is mortal, but he takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life. But after the Russian invasion of 1968, every Czech was confronted with the thought that his nation could be quietly erased from Europe, just as over the past five decades 40 million Ukrainians have been quietly vanishing from the world without the world paying any heed. Or Lithuanians. Do you know that in the 17th century, Lithuania was a powerful European nation? Today the Russians keep Lithuanians on their reservation like a half-extinct tribe; they are sealed off from the visitors to prevent knowledge about their existence from reaching the outside. I don’t know what the future holds for my nation. It is certain that the Russians will do everything they can to dissolve it gradually into their own civilization. Nobody knows whether they will succeed. But the possibility is here. And the sudden realization that such a possibility exists is enough to change one’s whole sense of life. Nowadays I even see Europe as fragile, mortal.

***

Kundera’s smart interlocutor.

Roth: What you now call the laughter of angels is a new term for the “lyrical attitude to life” of your previous novels. In one of your books you characterize the era of Stalinist terror as the reign of the hangman and the poet.

Kundera: Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise–the age old drama of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. André Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets ever smaller and poorer.

Roth: In your book, the great French poet Éluard soars over paradise and gulag, singing. Is this bit of history which you mention in the book authentic?

Kundera: After the war, Paul Éluard abandoned surrealism and became the greatest exponent of what I might call the “poesy of totalitarianism.” He sang for brotherhood, peace, justice, better tomorrows, he sang for comradeship and against isolation, for joy and against gloom, for innocence and against cynicism. When in 1950 the rulers of paradise sentenced Éluard’s Prague friend, the surrealist Zalvis Kalandra, to death by hanging, Éluard suppressed his personal feelings of friendship for the sake of supra-personal ideals, and publicly declared his approval of his comrade’s execution. The hangman killed while the poet sang.

He sang for brotherhood.

And not just the poet. The whole period of Stalinist terror was a period of collective lyrical delirium. This has by now been completely forgotten but it is the crux of the matter. People like to say: Revolution is beautiful, it is only the terror arising from it which is evil. But this is not true. The evil is already present in the beautiful, hell is already contained in the dream of paradise and if we wish to understand the essence of hell we must examine the essence of the paradise from which it originated. It is extremely easy to condemn gulags, but to reject the totalitarianism poesy which leads to the gulag, by way of paradise is as difficult as ever. Nowadays, people all over the world unequivocally reject the idea of gulags, yet they are still willing to let themselves be hypnotized by totalitarian poesy and to march to new gulags to the tune of the same lyrical song piped by Éluard when he soared over Prague like the great archangel of the lyre, while the smoke of Kalandra’s body rose to the sky from the crematory chimney.

Read the whole thing here. It’s well worth it. 

He’s still here, 25 years after the fatwa. Rushdie and Garton Ash chat. (Photo: Zygmunt Malinowski)

“If we all had a right not to be offended by anything that offended us, no one could say anything,” said Salman Rushdie at the P.E.N. World Voices Festival in New York City, in an onstage conversation with Timothy Garton Ash.  The man who has lived under a fatwa since Valentine’s Day, 1989 hasn’t given an inch: “I would not allow one of my books to be published with passages missing,” he said.

Zygmunt Malinowski recorded the event yesterday afternoon with scribbled notes and photos – alas, that appears to be the only recording of the event. However, Garton Ash’s “Basic Principles of Free Speech” are here. The Guardian columnist discussed how our idea of privacy has changed because of the internet and “that’s the side effect that we created ourselves.” Rushdie was amused at the modern “obsession with selfies.”

For its 10th anniversary, the P.E.N. Festival celebrates those who have dared to stand “on the edge,” risking their careers, and sometimes their lives, to speak out for their art and beliefs – the website is here.

Since we couldn’t attend in person, we’ll settle for Zygmunt’s account: “As I approached the stately Public Theatre downtown on Lafayette Street, I was pleasantly surprised to see a large colorful billboard advertising P.E.N. World Voices Festival. The photo on the placard, taken by the innovative photographer Sylvia Plachy, who lives near my neighborhood, is unusual. It depicts a mountain climber’s feet dangling over a precipice. It reminded me when, a few years ago, I was in an open-door vintage helicopter with my feet over the floor edge, photographing Colca Canyon in Peru, considered deepest canyon in the world. ‘On the Edge’ was the subtitle of the placard and it seemed such an appropriate image for this afternoon’s event. Weren’t writers such as Salman Rushdie, Vaclav Havel, Czeslaw Milosz or Joseph Brodsky pushing the boundaries of literature, courageously ‘offering a vantage point from which to develop a deeper understanding of the intellectual landscape around the world’?”

We’re gearing up for the next “Another Look” event a week from tomorrow – that’s Monday, May 12, at 7:30 p.m. at the Stanford Humanities Center. The Book Haven wrote about the upcoming event here.  It’s going to be a lot of fun – fans of The Lover are coming out of the woodwork and writing to me. Anyway, Blakey Vermeule will lead the discussion, with Paula Moya and Stephen Seligman, who is a psychiatrist and professor from UC-San Francisco. After doing a little digging to answer the eternal question – “but did it really happen?” – I think a shrink might be just the ticket. But hey, that’s just my opinion. Here’s what I found out from my digging:

“I swear it. I swear all of it. I have never lied in a book. Or even in my life. Except to men. Never.”

With these words, Marguerite Duras penned a categorical denial of any fanciful invention in her many autobiographical novels and films. One ponders the odd qualification: admitting she “only” lied to men implies she was willing to deceive half the human race.

The denial invites the question: Did she ever tell the truth? She says she was ostracized for her reckless teenage affair with an older Chinese millionaire – yet one classmate remembers Marguerite as secretive and well-behaved, though she boasted mysteriously of leading a double life. The former student clearly recalls Duras appearing at school, flaunting a diamond ring, saying she knew a rich man. This incident represents one contact point between her fiction and the truth. Yet another lycée classmate said, “I just don’t understand this story about a Chinese lover. It wasn’t like today. There were no lovers, especially not Chinese lovers.”

One boarder at the Duras domicile described the mother as a strict teacher able to keep order among her unruly charges; she took him to mass every Sunday. A school counselor described her mother as a great teacher:

The mad queen of desperate poverty? With kids in 1906

“They worship her in Indochina because she’s so dedicated to her profession. She has educated thousands of children … They say she has never given up on a child, not until he could read and write. She would hold classes late into the evening for children she knew would someday be workers … when students lived too far away to go home in the evening, she had them sleep at her house on mats in the living room, or in the school’s playroom…”

The mad queen of desperate poverty? Not quite. And yet the counselor’s account comes from Duras herself, documented in a later memoir. Duras herself is telling the other side of the story, the side that undermines and argues with her own earlier versions.

She didn’t always reverse herself. Duras portrays her mother as crazy and desperate, frozen in time and literature as the tenacious colonial mother struggling to save a disastrous investment in 1950′s The Sea Wall, or the seriously depressed and abusive mother in 1984′s The Lover. But the mother wasn’t only a naïve victim of the French bureaucrats in the Land Registry of Cambodia. Far from languishing in her misfortune, she had become a wealthy woman by the time she returned to France in 1950, sending lots of money to her children. She had launched an upper-crust Saigon boarding school and purchased five houses which had proven to be a lucrative investment. She also trafficked in the Indochina piastres that all whites in the colony went in for, according to Duras’s biographer Laure Adler. She was a resilient self-made woman, more than able to get on her feet again after an economic disaster.

Did the Chinese lover exist? It appears so, but the story changed greatly over the years. InThe Sea Wall, Duras told the story of the teenage Suzanne courted by “Monsieur Jo,” the unattractive, depraved son of a wealthy planter. In this version he is white, not Chinese, and courts his prey in a seedy nightclub. By 1984, he would morph into the more alluring, nameless Chinese millionaire in The Lover.

Is he the “real” lover?

The lover has been identified as Huynh Thuy Le. The mansion with the blue tiles exists: his family home, 140 kilometers southwest of Saigon in Sadec, is now a tourist attraction and welcomes 1,000 visitors a month. The photo shows the gentle, wispy man she describes in the lover, a little wan and eager to please. By the time of her next book on the subject in 1991, The North China Lover, the hero has changed again, and Duras insists that this version is the once-and-for-all “truth”:

The man who gets out of the black limousine is other than the one in the book, but still Manchurian. He is a little different from the one in the book: he’s a little more solid than the other, less frightened than the other, bolder. He is better-looking, more robust. He is more ‘cinematic’ than the one in the book. And he’s also less timid facing the child.

Her trademark gold lamé down-at-the-heel party shoes had turned to black with rhinestones. Overall, the second book is a longer, weaker effort – the result of Duras’s quarrel with film director Jean-Jacques Annaud as they collaborated on the 1992 film of the book. Duras retaliated with The North China Lover as a way of reclaiming her story, she said.

In The North China Lover, the reader hears the sound of coins clinking in the background. The girl admits to her lover:

“On the ferry I saw you covered in gold, in a black car made of gold, with shoes made of gold. I think that’s why I wanted you so badly, right away, on the ferry – but it wasn’t just for that, I’m sure of it. Or maybe it was the gold I wanted, all the same, without knowing it.”

When the lover’s father insists that the affair is finito and that the son negotiate the payment of the family’s debts, the mother and lover talk money in a congenial tête-à-tête. She is not selling her daughter’s sexual services, but bargaining the payment for her departure.

The Mekong ferry boat existed, anyway.

The discovery of an undated notebook after Duras’s death in 1996 sheds new light on the affair. The notebook, most likely written during the war and not intended for publication, discloses a very different version of what happened. The lover, Léo, is no longer Chinese, but Annamese – native Vietnamese, socially a cut below the Chinese, who were a cut below the French. If the affair created a scandal, this greater social distance would have exacerbated it. In this telling, the lover is ugly – Duras is blunt about that. His face is badly scarred by smallpox. “He was much uglier than your average Annamese,” she wrote, “but his taste in clothes was impeccable.” She came to like him, but resisted his sexual overtures. After two years, they had sex, once, and she was revolted.

The hints of prostitution in the other books become even more open here. The mother is waiting for her after her sexless assignations, to see how much money she had been given. The girl learns to ask for more. Léo is on to the game and finds it squalid and distasteful

The lover’s house with blue tiles … now a tourist attraction.

It’s hard to square the elegant Chinese wastrel who described in The Lover with the ugly, pockmarked Vietnamese Léo she describes in these private writings. While some have doubted that the lover existed, perhaps no one so far has asked if there might have been two, entwined into one character in her fiction. After all, in The Lover, the Chinese man prophesies that the girl will never be faithful to one man. In The Sea Wall, the patient Monsieur Jo is juggled with another lover, Jean Agnosti. Could there have been another lover? Perhaps one before and after the trip to France in 1931? Duras died in 1996; we may never know the truth, and we don’t need to.

With her books, the adult looks back on the skinny teenager who was little more than an economic bargaining chip. She creates instead a powerful alter ego and heroine – one who, at 15, could take control over a much older and more sexually experienced lover, determining when the relationship would begin, and how it would proceed, touch by touch, kiss by kiss. Duras turns a sordid affair, with the smell of money in the background, into a tale of timeless eroticism.

Biographer Adler writes, “The lover fails to separate mother and daughter, or to make the girl exist apart from her brothers. But he does offer her another life: that of writing. For the lover is the first to hear and believe that the child wants to become a writer. The affair with the lover disconnected Marguerite from the family group. While she was living the experience, she was thinking it, already selecting words so that she could write about it later. All her life, in one form or another, Marguerite never stopped telling the story of the lover.”

In the end, The Lover is a work of art more than it is a memoir. And the bigger creation is the one in Duras’s head: the invention of a deathless love that reverberates through a lifetime.

Book Haven friend Philip Fried of the Manhattan Review has just published a new collection, Interrogating Water and Other Poems, published by Salmon Poetry in Ireland. What could be more fitting, given the publisher, than a poem about water? The title poem has been generating some buzz – it was featured in Verse Daily already here.  Philip’s poetry is intense – not something to hit before you’ve had your morning coffee – and is often based in political events of the day. So is this one. You’ll get a hint of it in the comments he wrote to me about it:

I like to engage with the intractable language that surrounds us: ad-talk, military jargon, scientific lingo—all of which can be found on the Internet. As in plate tectonics, the resulting collisions—if you are skillful enough—will result in a tremor, and the tremor itself is the poetry. Or, to shift the metaphor in this case, the poetry is in the current that leaps the gap between two apparently opposite poles.

The two poles of language in this poem, of course, are the dry but suggestive text of a home electrolysis experiment and a contrasting, “sublime,” and politically colored description of water as a “non-state actor.” The reader, one hopes, will be prompted to jump the gap, providing the electricity.

The poem is—and I hope this is evident—a meditation on torture, with allusions to the “interrogation” of nature conducted by science and the theme of control. (A kind of water-boarding of water; or, as one reader put it, Art meets Science meets CIA.) As to its origin, I seem to remember being intrigued by the language of the electrolysis experiment, which seemed to call out for a contrasting sublimity. An appealing formal solution was to “package” the sublimity in short lines and brief stanzas.

The Literary Review declared, “In realms between and including the Almighty and actuarial tables, Fried speaks every language faithfully and eloquently. Rejoice! Read!”  The poet A.R. Ammons has said of Philip’s poems: “Here in a major new testament the great questions are considered, represented – how the large and small inhabit each other, how indifferences allow differences, how the palpable can be the residence of the widest spirit. The graphic and the philosophical, the human and the godly interplay in a quiet attentiveness, explosive with realization and recognition.”

See what you think:

Interrogating Water

Imagine you are interrogating water,
coercing the hydrogen and oxygen
to violate their bonds, give up each other.

Water, a non-state actor,
flows secretly over borders,
precipitates, infiltrates,
gathers in pools, conspires
with bacteria and mosquitoes

You can perform this at home with simple materials.
All you need is a battery, two no. 2 pencils,
salt, thin cardboard, electrical wire, a glass …

Foe of stability,
it erodes in drizzles,
revolts in tsunamis, riots
in floods, and from covert puddles
takes part in uprisings

… of water. Sharpen the pencils at both ends.
Cut the cardboard to fit over the glass.
Insert the pencils in cardboard, an inch apart.

Claims transparency
but under every skin
is another, while fluid rib
over rib will hide the atomic
truth in a wavering cage

Using the wires, connect the tips of each pencil
to opposite poles of the battery, then place
the other ends of the pencils into the water.

Excitable even in teacups
its sloshing shifting mass
can menace levees and dams
heave at the ocean’s crust
subverting the Earth’s rotation

The molecules will confess in tiny bubbles
of hydrogen and chlorine gas, at the pencil
tips, chlorine masking the fugitive oxygen.

The English Pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Wallis (1830-1916) painted “The Room in Which Shakespeare Was Born” in 1853. It now hangs at London’s Tate Gallery.  The Shakespeare home on Henley Street was described in an 1843 biography by Charles Knight (1842), who commented on “the mean room, with its massive joists and plastered walls, firm with ribs of oak.” Wallis also took to heart Knight’s passage describing “hundreds amongst the hundreds of thousands by whom that name is honoured have inscribed their names on the walls of the room.”  Apparently, however, the bard must have been born on the floor. Motherhood was hard in those days.

Tribalist monkey?

Why does everyone hate poor Ian Morris, all of a sudden? They did nothing but crow and give awards to the Stanford archaeologist and historian’s last book, Why The West Rules – for Now. His newest book, War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots, seems to be making all sorts of unpleasant hoopla.

He wrote a short explanation of his thesis in the Washington Post over the weekend, in an article titled “In the Long Run, Wars Make Us Safer and Richer.” An excerpt:

“Take the long view. The world of the Stone Age, for instance, was a rough place; 10,000 years ago, if someone used force to settle an argument, he or she faced few constraints. Killing was normally on a small scale, in homicides, vendettas and raids, but because populations were tiny, the steady drip of low-level killing took an appalling toll. By many estimates, 10 to 20 percent of all Stone Age humans died at the hands of other people.

“This puts the past 100 years in perspective. Since 1914, we have endured world wars, genocides and government-sponsored famines, not to mention civil strife, riots and murders. Altogether, we have killed a staggering 100 million to 200 million of our own kind. But over the century, about 10 billion lives were lived — which means that just 1 to 2 percent of the world’s population died violently. Those lucky enough to be born in the 20th century were on average 10 times less likely to come to a grisly end than those born in the Stone Age. And since 2000, the United Nations tells us, the risk of violent death has fallen even further, to 0.7 percent.

“As this process unfolded, humanity prospered. Ten thousand years ago, when the planet’s population was 6 million or so, people lived about 30 years on average and supported themselves on the equivalent income of about $2 per day. Now, more than 7 billion people are on Earth, living more than twice as long (an average of 67 years), and with an average income of $25 per day.

His new book.

“This happened because about 10,000 years ago, the winners of wars began incorporating the losers into larger societies. The victors found that the only way to make these larger societies work was by developing stronger governments; and one of the first things these governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence among their subjects.

“The men who ran these governments were no saints. They cracked down on killing not out of the goodness of their hearts but because well-behaved subjects were easier to govern and tax than angry, murderous ones. The unintended consequence, though, was that they kick-started the process through which rates of violent death plummeted between the Stone Age and the 20th century.

“This process was brutal. Whether it was the Romans in Britain or the British in India, pacification could be just as bloody as the savagery it stamped out. Yet despite the Hitlers, Stalins and Maos, over 10,000 years, war made states, and states made peace.”

Now, on Tuesday, the article is still the Number #1 Heavy-Hitter at the Washington Post. Typical of the comments:  Jose Benitez writes:  “No doubt, you are Republican and love to watch Patriot Games with Harrison Ford. You also probably supported George W. Bush when cheating the Americans about the weapons of mass destruction supposedly had Iraq and sent thousand young fellows to die. You are an Iceman.”  I very much doubt Ian knows Harrison Ford at all, let alone watches DVDs with him.  Cheryl Ann writes: “what is that? joke of the day for societal disconnects? Ian Morris, you are an unevolved, tribalist monkey.”  Joel R. Stegner wrote: “This is undoubtedly the most insane idea I have ever seen in any newspaper, ever. Only a person who doesn’t value life can advocate this perspective. What next? A column from a serial killer on how to achieve notoriety? Let us hope that no aspiring Hitler buys into this quality of thinking.”

Reussere obviously thought a moment, and wrote:

The old book.

I am one of those that hate war in every possible way. War in my mind is the epitome of evil.

To say I was put off by the title is putting it mildly. In fact, the first time I saw it, I refused to even read it.

Having read it however, and having the overall facts presented in the proper historical light, it is clear that the author has a very valid point. No matter how evil wars and their brutal aftermath is, the truth is that what emerges afterword are often larger, more cohesive and peaceful societies with lower homicide rates. This is certainly not always true, but it is the growth of large societies and the protections that afford their citizens has grown inexorably since the stone ages and the result has been a reasonably steady decline in one on one or few on few homicides.

Please read the article and analyze what the author is actually saying instead of reacting childishly and walk away with an entirely false distortion of what is being said.