Dr. Seuss was not a “Dr.” at all – his father had wanted Theodor Geisel to pursue a medical career, and the title was a way of acknowledging the dad’s thwarted ambition. When Stephen King became successful, he had to kill off his pseudonymous alter ego, Richard Bachmann, via “cancer of the pseudonym, a rare form of schizonomia.” William Sydney Porter, imprisoned for embezzlement at Ohio State Penitentiary, named himself after his prison guard, and became O. Henry. Joanna Rowlings – like so many women before her – was encouraged to assume a sexually ambiguous name. What does the “K.” in J.K. Rowlings stand for? Why, nothing at all.
One that didn’t make the list: Anna Akhamatova, born Anna Gorenko. Another commonplace situation: her father objected to his teenage daughter befouling the family name with poetry. What followed was not so commonplace.
As Joseph Brodsky explains in his essay, “The Keening Muse”:
"I am a Jenghizite."
As for the pseudonym itself, its choice had to do with the maternal ancestry of Anna Gorenko, which could be traced back to the last khan of the Golden Horde: to Achmat Khan, descendent of Jenghiz Khan. “I am a Jenghizite,” she used to remark not without a touch of pride; and for a Russian ear “Akhmatova” has a distinct Oriental, Tatar to be precise, flavor. She didn’t mean to be exotic, though, if only because in Russia a name with a Tatar overtone meets not curiosity but prejudice.
All the same, the five open a‘s of Anna Akhmatova had a hypnotic effect and put this name’s carrier firmly at the top of the alphabet of Russian poetry. In a sense, it was her first successful line; memorable in its acoustic inevitability, with its Ah sponsored less by sentiment than by history. This tells you a lot about the intuition and quality of the ear of this seventeen-year-old girl who soon after her first publication began to sign her letters and legal papers as Anna Akhmatova. In its suggestion of identity derived from the fusion of sound and time, the choice of the pseudonym turned out to be prophetic.
Show me a guy like this, and I’ll show you a first-class drag:
“I present a young person gifted with deep, pure feeling and true penetration, who loses himself in rapturous dreams, buries himself in speculation, until at last, ruined by unhappy passions that supervene, in particular an unfulfilled love, puts a bullet in his head.”
Leave it to J.M. Coetzee, writing in this week’s New York Review of Books, to explain how Goethe‘s early book, The Sufferings of Young Werther (new Norton translation by Stanley Corngold) is “extraordinary, trail-blazing.”
“Goethe claimed that he wrote the first draft of Werther in four weeks, in a somnambulistic trance,” writes Coetzee. That explains it. The book is a testament to bottomless self-pity – am I missing something? I haven’t the patience. Oh, the joys of middle-age … one has survived so many thing worse than a lost love.
"Ossian on the banks of the Lora, Invoking the Gods to the Strains of the Harp"
But the most interesting passages discuss James Macpherson‘s putatative Ossian, that Scottish bard from misty, mystic early centuries who flavors Goethe’s novella. What a lot of hooey!
The taste for Ossian is a feature of early Romantic sensibility easy to mock. The fact is, however, that until well into the nineteenth century the poems were widely accepted as a great epic of northern European civilization. “The Homer of the North,” Madame de Staël called Ossian. The recovery of the Ossian epic in Scotland became a spur to the recovery—or invention—of other founding national epics: Beowulf in England, the Kalevala in Finland, the Nibelungenlied in Germany, the Chanson de Roland in France, the Song of the Host of Igorin Russia.
Macpherson was not a great poet (pace William Hazlitt, who set him alongside Dante and Shakespeare) nor even a dedicated one: his Ossian project concluded, Macpherson quit the Highlands for London, where he was fêted, then took ship to Pensacola in the new British colony of West Florida, where he spent two years on the staff of the governor. Returning to England, he entered politics; he died a wealthy man. …
Taken in ... in a big way.
In Britain the Ossian poems were tainted by controversy over their authenticity. Were there indeed Highlanders who could recall and recite these ancient lays, or had Macpherson made them up? Macpherson did not help his case by seeming reluctant to produce his Gaelic originals.
In Europe the question of authenticity had no purchase. Translated into German in 1767, Ossian had a huge impact, inspiring an outpouring of bardic imitations. The young Goethe was so smitten that he taught himself Gaelic in order to translate directly into German the specimens of Scots Gaelic he found in The Works of Ossian. The early Schiller is full of Ossianic echoes; Hölderlin committed pages of Ossian to memory.
Well, I had thought better of Hölderlin. Sensible Samuel Johnson concluded that Macpherson was “a mountebank, a liar, and a fraud, and that the poems were forgeries.” Gives a historical perspective to James Frey, Greg Mortenson, & co., don’t it?
With her characteristic esprit,Elif Batuman has leapt into the twitterdom – but not without a little trauma, first.
Gregory Cowles wrote this in The New York Times Book Review a week ago:
There was a time, three or four years ago, when it seemed every novelist had a blog, and why not? Blogging gave writers another way to reach readers, to promote their work or air their grievances or test their ideas in mini-essays that played to their strengths. But technology evolves, and despite some notable holdouts (Elif Batuman is one) Twitter has killed the blogging star. Now writers connect with their publics in 140 characters or fewer.
The new Elif
“It’s hard for me to convey how seriously my world was shaken by these lines,” she writes. “I had NO IDEA until I read it in the Times that writers had stopped keeping blogs!! Three or four years ago—that’s just when I started blogging! And now I’m one of the last ones left?? How did this happen?? When?? I became obsessed by the phrase ‘notable holdout.’ ‘Notable holdout,’ I kept thinking to myself. ‘Notable holdout.’ Sometimes it sounded good; other times, not so good. I went through a long period of fruitless thinking. I looked up ‘holdout” in multiple dictionaries.”
Then she turned over a new leaf. “OK human history – I can take a hint. You can find me on Twitter.” Look for her at @BananaKerenina. Among her first tweets: “I can’t believe @BananaKarenina wasn’t taken!” ” I HEART GREG COWLES” and “Did I mention that hat took me a REALLY LONG TIME?”
She’s leaving her blog up for the occasional post that takes more than 140 characters to explain.
We think she has another reason for throwing her blog on ice: “I swear every day I get +100 comments from some crooked robot trying to sell me used term papers.”
I chatted with Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master’s Son, on March 25 at his home in the tiny, charming San Francisco neighborhood of Cole Valley – at that time, North Korea’s plans to put a satellite in orbit this month were already much in the news. (It wasn’t my first get-together with the author: I wrote about him earlier here.) A few days later, on a very soggy weekday in San Francisco, he spoke more about North Korea at a Litquake event in the North Beach bar, Tosca – a surprising number of people came for the event, despite the downpour. (Publishers Weekly wrote about that gathering here.)
Here’s the article that came out of our most recent rendezvous:
In a nation of lies, sometimes only fiction tells the truth.
So Adam Johnson‘s new novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, already a New York Times bestseller, may offer new insights about North Korea, the country he says is too often dismissed as a mélange of “buffoonery, madness or evil.”
With the launch of a long-range rocket scheduled around April 15, the world is turning its eyes again on North Korea. An outraged world clamors to know what can be done to contain a dangerous pariah state.
Johnson’s prediction? “They’re going to send up a big-ass rocket and whatever happens, the North Koreans will call it a startling success.”
“It’s not about science,” the Stanford associate professor of English explained. “It’s about the consolidation of power so Kim Jong Un doesn’t get murdered in the night.” Johnson suggests we look to the country’s new leader, the third generation in a totalitarian dynasty, to explain the newest flare-up of celestial ambitions.
“In North Korea, everything is a message. Often, it’s a message about survival. Even if it appears malicious, it’s just a message.”
A young soldier eyes the tourists near the DMZ (Photo: Adam Johnson)
Johnson’s novel, published by Random House, traces the career of Pak Jun Do, a homonym for “John Doe,” the son of a kidnapped singer and a man who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. He becomes a soldier patrolling the dark tunnels beneath the DMZ, the “demilitarized” zone between North and South Korea. He’s a professional kidnapper, a surveillance officer and eventually a player in the circles closest to the nation’s leader. The book is part romance, part adventure story, part spy novel and mostly the dark, absurdist drama for which Johnson is celebrated – though the parts that sound like comic-book excess often hew closest to the truth.
But is it over the top? Vindication came from award-winning author and Korea expert Barbara Demick, who read a published excerpt from the book last year and wrote in The Guardian: “I assumed it had to be part of a memoir by a North Korean, so accurate were the details . . . Johnson has made just one trip in his life to North Korea, but he’s managed to capture the atmosphere of this hermit kingdom better than any writer I’ve read.”
The Orphan Master’s Son was published a month after the December death of the longtime dictator, Kim Jong Il, an event that heightened interest in the book.
“With the passing of Kim Jong Il, we’ve had the first serious discussion of the place in a long time,” said Johnson.
“North Korea is the most extensive national psychological experiment ever created. What is this place? Is it really this crazy? What’s its future?”
The April 15 event provides a clue: Johnson said the date will be “the biggest party ever” in the lives of most North Koreans. Not because of the satellite that will purportedly be put into orbit, but rather because it’s the centennial of the birth of Kim Il Sung, the founder of the current dynasty.
“He’s the eternal president of the nation,” Johnson said, but insisted that the title is not just a flowery Asiatic honorific. “Seriously, seriously. It sounds absurd to us. If you were in North Korea and said he was not the eternal president, you would be sent away.”
“You always know that a country has gone off the rails when they invent their own calendar,” said Johnson. The Juche calendar, introduced in 1997, resets the calendar to 1912 – just like Pol Pot’s “Year Zero” recalibration in Cambodia, or the French Revolutionary Calendar two centuries ago.
Daughters of the Pyongyang elite (Photo: Adam Johnson)
Satellite maps and propaganda
The Orphan Master’s Son is the fruit of nearly six years of research – a research carried out with a stunning absence of reliable data.
“There are great books about the economy of North Korea, its military dimensions, its geopolitics, and its nuclear issues. But the human dimension? About that there’s little,” said Johnson. “We have satellite images, propaganda, and the stories of people who have escaped.”
For example, we don’t know when or how Kim Jong Il died. We’ve heard rumors of four or five coup attempts, Johnson said – but who knows what the truth is?
The truths that wash up on foreign shores are scary: North Korea’s economy apparently depends on state-sponsored organized crime, a mafia class that runs counterfeiting operations for international currency (the United States purportedly had to change its $100 notes for that reason) and which has run a global international insurance scam, involving hundreds of millions of dollars. It reportedly also deals in heroin, opium, methamphetamines and munitions.
The nation has had a long tradition of international kidnappings – including one South Korean film director who was imprisoned until he agreed to make a series of bad movies for Kim Jong Il, who acted as executive producer.
Such accounts invite parody. In his research, however, Johnson focused on devastating accounts of those who have escaped: “Every story is gripping, heart-rending, and utterly unverifiable,” said Johnson. Every citizen makes some variation of Sophie’s Choice just to survive in North Korea. Those are the stories he’s reinvented for his book.
War, war and occupation
The bizarre enigma of North Korea is less incomprehensible in view of its history. “What they remember is war, and war and occupation,” said Johnson.
Bronze busts at the national martyrs' cemetery (Photo: Adam Johnson)
These historical traumas are so deeply engrained that Pyongyang streets are 100 meters wide to allow quick evacuation in the event of another, always-feared American attack.
But for a while the postwar dream worked. In the 1960s, North Korea was even more prosperous than the South.
The dream worked, that is, if you ignored the nation’s massive gulag system that was born with it. It incarcerates perhaps 200,000 people, including entire families. Starvation, forced abortions, execution and infanticide are routine, said Johnson.
The fall of the Soviet Union meant that North Korea lost both a market and a source of foreign aid. The 1990s brought a famine that killed about 10 percent of the population, as well as floods of biblical proportion. In a grimly comic note, the loss of Soviet fertilizer meant “the whole nation now has to save feces for fertilizer,” said Johnson.
Johnson’s previous books include a collection of short stories, Emporium, which featured a bomb-defusing robot and a teenage sniper – in that, he explored “autobiographical” material, he said. His first novel about an apocalyptic plague, Parasites Like Us, took on “my family issues for three generations.”
This time, he decided, “I’m going to write fiction, instead of writing about my own life.” The research he did filled him with a sense of obligation.
“My first duty is to the novel,” he said. “We have a duty to tell the stories of others. Even if we have to invent them.”
War on Poverty. War on Drugs. War on Terror. War on Christmas. Now there’s even a War on Women.
End the war!
Remember when “war” was a screaming horror that involved blood and grief and violent death? Human beings destroyed others like themselves with machine guns and tanks and mines and missiles. Real blood was spilled, real limbs were blown off bodies, and real wounds needed bandaging. Always it has been accompanied by atrocities. War is an awful thing, leaving a scar in a national history.
No more. Now war seems to have descended on the irrevocable downward path towards metaphor and then cliché. The use of the term is dishonest in intent. Often, it is a marketing tool for pre-packaged, manufactured outrage, and deserves an Orwell mention for its falsification of emotion for political ends. For the marketers who invent these buzzwords (or buzzphrases, in this case) it is a manipulative way to herd people into mobs, so that they will stampede to the ballot box, or tweet an avalanche of angry messages, or fill comment sections with group thinking and group emotions, or send emails to their congressmen and congresswomen, or call television advertisers and cancel subscriptions.
Oddly, we’ve come to use other words for real wars. I’m old enough to remember when the Vietnam War wasn’t a war but a “police action.” We called it a war in retrospect – kind of like an economic depression, we’re only willing to look at it truthfully in a rear-view mirror.
Here’s my point: I think war is so terrible that the word should be reserved for the real thing. Maybe by keeping the word to take a snapshot of the unspeakable, we can help bring war itself to an end. At the very least we can reserve one, single word to accurately describe our greatest inhumanity. It’s a small step towards truth.
From Orwell:
“I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought … one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end … Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
You don’t have to be very old to remember that Susan Sontag launched a firestorm of attack when she suggested that young Islamic men, no matter how misguided, who drove airplanes into buildings could not reasonably be called “cowards,” as was the media fashion in the days following the terrible events of 9/11.
“By all means, let us grieve together, but let us not be stupid together,” she wrote. Her self-evident observation on the misuse of language was buried in a tsunami of denunciation.
I remember a book she wrote long before that, Illness as Metaphor – apparently, it’s considered an “angry” book, but I did not read it with an angry voice in my head, and so it did not strike me so. She explored the use of the word “cancer,” and before it “consumption,” as a metaphor (isn’t there a “War on Cancer” somewhere, too?). A cancer victim herself, she wrote:
“I want to describe not what it’s really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and to live there, but the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation; not real geography but stereotypes of national character. My subject is not physical illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. It is toward an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them, that I dedicate this inquiry.”
So it’s in her spirit I declare war on the word war. (We’ll take on “rape” as metaphor next.) And in case you somehow missed George Orwell‘s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” it’s here for free. A useful guidebook this election year.
I’ll declare a ban on this one, too (Dare I say it? Dare I make the final step into political incorrectness?): The epithet “haters” is itself an expression of hatred by those who use it. Again: to call someone a “hater” is itself an act of hate. It is usually spat at someone or some group with contempt and a sense of one’s own superiority – it is never oneself who is a hater, only the “Other.” The use of the word is usually a political attempt to marginalize and enrage the target – with luck, bully him or her into shame and silence. However, I suspect I’m already a little behind the curve on this one – this insult has already passed its apex, perhaps having fulfilled its political usefulness.
My peregrinations around the internet led me to this charming footage of Mark Twain, filmed by Thomas Edison at the author’s estate in Stormfield, Conn., in 1909 – one of the many wonders of youtube. Twain is shown walking around his home and playing cards with his daughters Clara and Jean. The flickering is caused by film deterioration. This is the only known footage of the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is, of course, a “silent.”
A long day and a late night – more later. I’d be curious, however, to hear what Twain expert and friend Shelley Fisher Fishkin thinks of this short film, 1 minute and 48 seconds long.
