The World Moves on a Woman's Ship

It is a commonplace of dissing the Middle Ages to state that we moderns would be more at home with a citizen of ancient Rome than with a European of the twelfth or thirteenth century. We’d have more to talk about, we’d be more alike. We could relate. In a landmark work of scholarship, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his Autumn of the Middle Ages (a 1924 book called The Waning of the Middle Ages on its American publication in 1949) argued that medieval man was, indeed, different from us, given at any moment to unbidden accesses of tears, sudden cruelties, childlike enthusiasms and the like. And God wasn’t his co-pilot; He was alongside before and after the journey, too. Always.

That may be true. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I know it to be true.

Why? Because I have actually seen the Middle Ages.

This requires explanation, no?

I’m not talking here about seeing people living in pre-industrial conditions (which I have seen in subSaharan Africa) or enjoying out-of-time sacred hospitality to the stranger who must be honored (accorded to me by farmers on the border of Turkey and Iran), I’m talking about glimpsing the Middle Ages… the European Middle Ages. Okay, perhaps the Reformation era, or the Early Modern, but let’s not quibble.

So let us tell this correctly: For one of my summer trips back from my freelance home in France to my childhood home in Canada, I found out about a Polish ocean liner, the Stefan Batory, that went from Gdynia to London to Rotterdam to Montreal. This was shortly before the walls of Cold War came down. I boarded at Tilbury Docks in London.

The 250 or so passengers were a diverse lot. About half were Poles emigrating to North America. Then there was a large contingent of aimless curiosity-seekers like myself. Just as large was the group of people who dared not speak its name: the fear-of-flying crew. It took only a few conversations to suss this out: “When we dock in Montreal, we’ll jump right on the Amtrak to New York, then take the train the next day to LA. Best way to travel.” Or: “From Montreal we take the train to Windsor, get a cab across to Detroit, then a Greyhound to Cincinnati.” Other passengers were unclassifiable, like my berth mate, Albert, an Englishman somewhere between 55 and 90 years old. In the morning he looked the latter, but by night as he was rejuvenated, pommaded to the max, cutting the rug with any available lady.

But this isn’t about middle age, it’s about the Middle Ages.

The most striking contingent of passengers were about 80 or so Amish women. Ten matronly chaperones and the rest very young women from about 16 to 20 years of age. They wore the bonnets and the long dresses. They traveled in packs. They were inscrutable. Passing a score of so of them on the deck, I said lamely, “I hope we don’t hit an iceberg,” and then they looked at each other, paused, then burst into delighted applause.

Try as I might I couldn’t connect. I tried to detach the prettiest one from the pack (I know, I know… ), but no luck, no way. At last I learned from a chaperone, in stilted English, that they were from Pennsylvania and had just toured the ancestral places of their faith, as a sort of Anabaptist Grand Tour before settling down for good. It was pretty obvious… they were the future of their community. To put it more harshly and more medievally, the ovaries.

That anachronistic thought crossed my mind, but I didn’t get the impression of having bumped into anything that unusual, or having time-travelled. The Amish girls faded into the background as other events occurred: whales putting on a show mid-Atlantic; smelling the pines of Newfoundland before seeing land on the horizon; a Polish tall ship (on its return from a regatta at Quebec City) emerging majestically from the fog in the Gulf of St. Lawrence as the Batory’s Polish crew and passengers went berserk; and upstream from Rivière du Loup on the St. Lawrence, the south shore lighting up in fireworks and music to salute the homecoming of a tearful young Québécoise widow on board (her mother, her traveling companion, had secretly alerted us all to the surprise in store for her daughter).

At last we got to Montreal. As tugboats fussed and lines were played out, I saw them on the dock, just beyond the customs shed. The Amish men.

Let’s stop here for a second. I have seen reunions. As a boy, it was an early summer ritual to go to Montreal’s Dorval (now Pierre Trudeau) Airport to welcome visiting aunties and uncles off the plane from Shannon. These reunions were always warm, witty and talkative to the point of over-Irishness. But I remember seeing crowds of other people greeting their relatives (this was when airports were human) arriving on planes from Lisbon, Rome, Athens and Tel Aviv: the drama, the big-fat-Greek-wedding, the mezzogiorno, the is-that-you-Esther-or-am-I-dead? theatrics and shouting and squealing and tears. I was embarrassed by it all, but a little bit jealous, too.

But at least it was something I understood, that I could identify, the gestures, the hugging…

The Amish men barrelled straight out of time. They were tearing the beards. Literally tearing at them, removing clumps of hair with two hands. Their horses reared. Some of the men were stomping the ground. Not hillbilly stomping, but jumping up in the air and landing with a two-footed stomp, again and again and again and again. I think one may have been eating his hat.

The girls lined the rails. They were crying. No, they were weeping. For joy. Unadulterated, unmediated, unmodern. Not only that, there was a weird trilling sound emanating from them. Not like the ululations of Arab women, but more like a panicked group of starlings. It was as unmissable as the antics of their menfolk were compelling.

The curiosity-seekers, the fear-of-flying crowd, the Polish immigrants, we all looked at each other. We were, at last, all in the same boat: nobody had ever seen anything like it. Because we had, up until that moment, all lived in the twentieth century.

And now, for a brief, far too brief, quarter-hour, we were living in Huizinga country.

I try to remember that moment when writing about the Middle Ages.

Shocked, shocked!

There is much talk on the internet about the police in Toronto deliberately letting vandals go to work, then going out and stomping on legitimate protesters the next day. It is called, I've learned, the Miami Model of policing.

Actually, from my experience, it should be called the Paris Model. In the 1980s, there were several big student protests in Paris, and the policing technique was always the same. They let the handful of vandals go nuts one evening, then the next evening the riot police went batshit insane. In one instance, in December, 1986, shopkeepers literally yanked young people (including me) off the streets and into their stores and cafés to protect them from marauding bands of motorcycle police. Given the green light, the cops did not discriminate between protesters and passers-by. That evening a young French Arab, Malik Oussekine, was beaten to death by the police in an apartment lobby of the Latin Quarter.

Now, nothing that dramatic happened in Toronto. But what we, far away, first got was a picture of a torched police cruiser beamed around the world. Then, the next day, as the world had got the story line straight, came a series of unpublicized (the world already had the story line, see?), truly inexplicable, meaningless police attacks on peaceful protestors. Check out the youtubes, they’re ridiculous: see what happened at Queen’s Park, Queen & Spadina… It's just mindless aggression against people holding cameras, singing "Oh Canada", hanging out.

And the mayor of Toronto wringing his hands, shocked, shocked that there is gambling going in this establishment. Right.

I’ve got absolutely no sympathy for the vandals – I’ve seen what jerks they are. And I won't call them "anarchists" as that demeans the respectable political position of Anarchism (it's called Libertarianism in the US). I also don't want to be knee-jerk anti-daddy, but it looks to me like the police played the thugs like a violin, all in the cause of intimidating everybody else.

I’m sorry I can’t hyperlink yet, but below is an eyewitness account. Copy and paste. When I saw that burnt cop car (20,000 policemen cannot protect compact, downtown Toronto?!), it smelled very bad:

http://crooksandliars.com/ian-welsh/police-allow-vandals-run-amok-2-hours-g2

Our Man in Manhattan

Recently, I came across a passage in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana that reminded me of – something. The book deals with an English vacuum-cleaner salesman in Havana who is contracted by a British spy network to be their contact in Cuba in the turbulent late 1950s there. Strapped for cash, the salesman invents and gets salaries and expenses for non-existent agents he is supposed to have hired (such as the imaginary Engineer Cirfuentes in the passage below). The novel’s most beloved hoax has the salesman/secret agent passing off sketches he has made of vacuum-cleaner parts as clandestine renderings of a new weapons system being built in the jungle of Cuba’s Oriente province.

Back in London, the drawings cause considerable excitement. We pick up the action as the head of intelligence, the Chief, examines the drawings with Hawthorne, the agent who hired the vacuum-cleaner salesman in the first place:

Hawthorne stared at the drawings. They reminded him of – something. He was touched, he didn’t know why, by an odd uneasiness.

‘You remember the reports that came with them,’ the Chief said. ‘The source was stroke three. Who is he?’

‘I think that would be Engineer Cirfuentes, sir.’

‘Well, even he was mystified. With all his technical knowledge. These machines were being transported by lorry from the army-headquarters at Bayamo to the edge of the forest. Then mules took over. General direction those unexplained concrete platforms.’

‘What does Air Ministry say, sir?’

‘They are worried, very worried. Interested too, of course.’

‘What about the atomic research people?’

‘We haven’t shown them the drawings yet. You know what those fellows are like. They’ll criticize points of detail, say the whole thing is unreliable, that the tube is out of proportion or points the wrong way. You can’t expect an agent working from memory to get every detail right. I want photographs, Hawthorne.’

‘That’s asking a lot, sir.’

‘We have got to have them. At any risk. Do you know what Savage said to me? I can tell you, it gave me a very nasty nightmare. He said that one of the drawings reminded him of a giant vacuum cleaner.’

‘A vacuum cleaner!’ Hawthorne bent down and examined the drawings again, and the cold struck him once more.

‘Makes you shiver, doesn’t it?’

‘But that’s impossible, sir.’ He felt as though he were pleading for his own career. ‘It couldn’t be a vacuum cleaner, sir. Not a vacuum cleaner.’

‘Fiendish, isn’t it?’ the Chief said. ‘The ingenuity, the simplicity, the devilish imagination of the thing.’ He removed his black monocle and his baby-blue eye caught the light and made it jig on the wall over the radiator. ‘See this one here six times the height of a man. Like a gigantic spray. And this – what does this remind you of?’

Hawthorne said unhappily. “A two-way nozzle.’

‘What’s a two-way nozzle?’

‘You sometimes find them with a vacuum cleaner.’

‘Vacuum cleaner again. Hawthorne, I believe we may be on to something so big that the H-bomb will become a conventional weapon.’

‘Is that desirable, sir?’

‘Of course it’s desirable. Nobody worries about conventional weapons.’

‘What have you in mind, sir?’

‘I’m no scientist,’ the Chief said, ‘but look at this great tank. It must stand nearly as high as the forest trees. A huge gaping mouth at the top, and this pipe-line – the man’s only indicated it. For all we know, it may extend for mile – from the mountain to the sea perhaps. You know the Russians are said to be working on some idea – something to do with the power of the sun, sea-evaporation. I don’t know what it’s all about, but I do know this thing is Big…’

Funny, no? My goodness, the things those novelists dream up….

But it reminded me of – something.

Then I remembered. So I looked it up.

From a speech given on February 6, 2003 by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations Security Council:

We know, we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq. Most of the launchers and warheads have been hidden in large groves of palm trees and were to be moved every one to four weeks to escape detection…

Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb.

He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries, even after inspections resumed.

These tubes are controlled by the Nuclear Suppliers Group precisely because they can be used as centrifuges for enriching uranium. By now, just about everyone has heard of these tubes, and we all know that there are differences of opinion. There is controversy about what these tubes are for.

Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium...

Let me tell you what is not controversial about these tubes.

First, all the experts who have analyzed the tubes in our possession agree that they can be adapted for centrifuge use. Second, Iraq had no business buying them for any purpose. They are banned for Iraq.

I am no expert on centrifuge tubes, but just as an old Army trooper, I can tell you a couple of things: First, it strikes me as quite odd that these tubes are manufactured to a tolerance that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets.

Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do, but I don't think so.

Second, we actually have examined tubes from several different batches that were seized clandestinely before they reached Baghdad. What we notice in these different batches is a progression to higher and higher levels of specification, including, in the latest batch, an anodized coating on extremely smooth inner and outer surfaces. Why would they continue refining the specifications, go to all that trouble for something that, if it was a rocket, would soon be blown into shrapnel when it went off?

The high tolerance aluminum tubes are only part of the story. We also have intelligence from multiple sources that Iraq is attempting to acquire magnets and high-speed balancing machines; both items can be used in a gas centrifuge program to enrich uranium…

The Chief says, “I’m no scientist.”

Powell says, “I am no expert… just… an old Army trooper.”

At least the Chief was fictional.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned...

A friend recently asked me to come clean about my World Cup sentiments. Since I’m living in a fishbowl, why hide them?

Ghana is my team. Has been since Day One of the tournament. Aside from feeling the attraction of its African underdog status, I am enamored of the country. I spent a couple of months there a while back and have never laughed so much in my life. Ghanaians rock.

Then I like Spain. Because I truly like Spain.

With France, it’s too personal, a family thing. One day love, the other hate. I’m relieved they’re out of there now. For me, it’s as if an ex-girlfriend finally moved out of town.

For crybaby grandstanding antics, I like Italy, followed closely by England.

For dirty play, I adore Italy.

And the baby elephant in the room?… The same friend accused me of dissing the US.

Not true.

I think the US, by virtue of getting such lousy calls (3 goals disallowed!) in the past two games, has made up for its lamentable fluke goal against England. I don't really have anything against the US, but it's all so familiar, the fans, the chants, the navel-gazing articles about "soccer in the US". It's Olympics déjà vu all over again.

In fact, I enjoy seeing other countries' weird pathologies when it comes to sports. On the whole, I'd say there are far more imaginative fans than Americans out there, especially when it comes to singing and wretched excess. (Though the Americans are the champs at tailgating). I like the way countries come to a standstill for a match -- which of course doesn't happen here. So I don’t dislike the US squad, I’m just indifferent to them (whereas I loathe Germany and its style of play). The US could be Malta, to my mind. I’m glad they’ve advanced, because it adds to the ambient buzz here, and I wish them well.

As for pure aesthetics, Brazil, Argentina, and Spain are a joy to watch.

Can I go now?

Eat your heart out, Marco Polo.

I’m trying pull out of my usual pit stop at Saranac Lake, NY. A tank of Mobil for the Passat, a Subway flat-bread BLT for me. But it’s a busy road, the ten-mile two-laner connecting Saranac Lake to Lake Placid, and I can’t find an opening.

Off to my left a car screeches to a halt on the shoulder. A pea-green Chevy with New Jersey plates. A middle-aged woman emerges and frantically gestures for the traffic on the Adirondack autobahn to stop in both directions.

But it’s not just any woman. Ever see a fertility goddess statuette from prehistoric times? Lots of rolls and bulges and foothills and zeppelins, all flesh and roundness and life? Well, that’s her. With bottle-blonde hair. And she is wearing ballooning sweat pants with some sort of shocking pink top that traces her contours like a geological survey of Appalachia.

Faced with her waggling arms, the traffic stops. Most of the idling vehicles are big pick-up trucks, the sort of stretch black contractors’ trucks with names like Ram or Shove or Rustler and a weakness for large decals of Old Glory and bald eagles. There is a lot of grizzle under the peaked caps, a lot of pinched, hard eyes. Lunch is over, damn it, time to go build something.

The woman is in the center of the road, her back to the lake. She is bent over (or, rather, inclined forward), her arms hanging down, the palms of her hands turned outward, making repetitive shooing motions about six inches from the blacktop. She takes panicked, staccato baby steps, causing Appalachia to quake, but slowly she progresses.

A foot in front of her is a turtle. About six inches long, from stem to stern. It was trying to cross the highway.

A few strains of country waft through the silence from one of the cabs.

At last turtle and goddess reach the far shoulder. She smiles, at no one in particular. Engines are gunned and the traffic rumbles forward.

The motto of Saranac Lake is “An All-American City.”

Ireland Avenged

France is out. Humiliated. One lousy goal scored in three games. Against second- and third-tier teams.

Payback. Last fall, they qualified for the tournament by an outrageous hand-ball goal, that everyone in the world except the ref spotted, in overtime against the Irish. Disgraceful.

First, la tête de Zidane, then la main d’Henry.

What goes around…

Jumping Le Shark

One of life’s small pleasures can be had by spending time in a good French-language bookstore. Banished are the scented candles, the tchotchkes, the tables groaning with self-help manuals, the blurb-spattered covers, the weird gothic-romance lettering, the garish, the loud, the overeager.

In their place, a certain quiet sobriety. Francophone booksellers often stock their shelves by collections. Not very user-friendly, but pleasing to the eye. Thus there are books identical in format, often in subdued colors and graphically austere, grouped together on floor-to-ceiling shelving, and the visitor passes chromatically from Flon to Flammarion, Actes Sud to Balland, 10/18 to Hachette.

One of the most familiar sights is Gallimard’s Folio collection (If you ever took a French lit course in college, you have at least one of these). Simple white paperbacks, with a reproduced artwork on the front, and a short paragraph excerpt from the book on the back, the Folio collection covers the last two hundred years of fiction, in a reassuring, no-nonsense, canonical way. There is no Oprah book club endorsement, no log-rolling blurb by a friend of the author, no breathless suggestion about perfect beach reading or ideal Christmas gifts. Just the text.

Recently I was drawn to the Folio wall in Ottawa’s excellent Librairie du Soleil. A fine expanse of white, with hundreds of titles and authors running from bottom to top (French publishing convention holds, illogically, that the words on a book spine have to be read from the bottom up). In the wall of white, a few books were turned, cover out, to attract attention.

One such was Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; in French, Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent.

And then one of life’s small pleasures just got smaller.

The cover showed the name and title above a Romantic painting. But the art had been obliterated half-way down by a garish yellow rectangle – not a paper banner wrapped around the book, but printed directly over the illustration. And what did it say?

Le roman préféré de Bella et d’Edward.

That is: “Bella’s and Edward’s favorite novel."

Twilight, indeed.

Borders Without Borders

Today I drove to Ottawa from Lake George, NY. The dormitory building behind my motel in Lake George housed about one hundred seasonal cocktail waitresses from Kazakhstan. The owner told me the Czechs and Poles of yesteryear now go to London.

Just prior to crossing the St. Lawrence River and leaving the U.S.A., I stopped to buy tax-free cigarettes for a friend at the Akwesasne Reservation trading post owned and run by the resident Mohawks.

When I got over the bridge and entered Canada, one of the uniformed officials at the border checkpoint was wearing a turban, as he was a Sikh.

On the way into Ottawa I stopped in a suburb where I knew there was a Middle-Eastern food superstore, Njaim. A Syrian salesclerk directed me to the type of blanched almonds I sought for Moroccan friends back in Rhode Island.

I reached my father’s retirement home. Most of the elderly residents speak French; the wait staff is Somali; and his doctor is Egyptian.

The world is an airport.

Repeat. After. Who?

Let’s say you’re writing a story of the seventeenth century, in which, say, Lord Horace Throgbottom loses his right pinkie finger in a Maltese bordello.

If you’re a fiction writer, you might first describe the incident then come back to it later: on your second go round you describe milord’s surprise (or delight), then later the thoughts going through the lovely Lucinda’s mind as she sinks her pearly whites into the soft knuckle, then, even later, the opinion of the guttering candle to witness the scene. Or any other variant of the event, repeated and reinforced.

If you’re a writer in academe, you first question the authenticity of the anecdote, then, having established its plausibility – though not its actual occurrence – through exhaustive cross-checking of the archival material, you might trace instances of digital severance back to… say, the Assyrians, or whoever supplied the first recorded example, according to your graduate students’ research, of such a punishment (or reward), then go on to question the cultural matrix in which Lucinda grew up, its relation to the power structure obtaining in the early modern sex trade, and then perhaps the possible subtextual meaning of this proto-castration in light of Maltese powerlessness in the face of English imperialism. And, for heaven’s and tenure’s sake, what about that old Sardinian gypsy folk song, recovered in the 1920s, with its use of the archaic word for cuticle?

Which is all very fine. Both approaches, that is.

If, however, you are a writer of non-fiction for a general educated audience, you are allowed to tell the story once. You can place it wherever you want and frame it however you want – how this mutilation foiled Lord Horace’s and his twin brother’s shared career as confidence men, for example – but the important thing to retain here is purely formal. You can tell it only once.

The academic can digress, the fiction writer can repeat, but the non-fiction writer can do neither. Writing non-fiction is somewhat like being in a decaying relationship, where one partner says to another, “But you’ve told me that already!” (This, or a variant of this, has been the most frequent editor’s irruption on any book-length manuscript I have handed in). There is impatience with repetition in non-fiction. More accurately, abhorrence.

Why?

Because the compact between reader and writer is contracted over a point of view. If the reader has been told something in a certain narrative way, he or she does not want it to be retold in a different way. What the reader wants is security, not the suspicion that the tale he or she is investing so much time in reading is something that the writer has doubts about. It is non-fiction. Now, the writer may not have doubts about the tale being told (which, I believe, is the sign of a bad writer, and bad thinker), but in no case must the creator of the narrative back out of the project. Yes, there is Creative Non-Fiction, Fiction Posing as Non-Fiction (I’m smiling at you, James Frey), Non-Fiction Posing as Fiction, but what I’m talking about here is the meat-and-potatoes of historical non-fiction narratives for trade publishing.

The challenge, then, for this kind of writer, is to make the story memorable, so that the reader, who might spend weeks intermittently reading the book, recalls Throgbottom’s forlorn finger when the volume is picked up again. By all means, refer or allude to the story (“Like the famous pinkie spat into a Valletta brazier, the Ottoman sultan had lost control, etc. etc.”), but never repeat it. Make sure on your first, and only chance, that you do not blow it. Overdramatization – “like an artery torn from the Sacred Heart of Jesus” – and understatement – “still, he was left with nine others” – are both traps to be avoided, but that is the joy and torment of getting it right.

Fiction is altogether different. As a genre, it is even more concerned with point of view, but I would say that it also addresses the sub- or irrational parts of the mind – the soul, to borrow an archaic cuticle. Non-fiction is basically Apollonian, with a few jazzy sensory things thrown in to captivate. Its success, or failure, resides in the skill and the honesty and the integrity of the writer. But fiction aims to penetrate, or envelop; at its best, it leads us to believe that it is reproducing the way we apprehend, with all the sloppiness and repetitiveness that that implies. I think, in fact, that no good fiction can be produced without the judicious use of redundacy – somewhat like music. I think the hardest thing for a novelist and short-story writer (we’re talking about good ones, of course) is to figure out when and where to repeat, and how. But they have to.

With non-fiction, you are spared that choice. Or should I say that option? Or that decision?

Or something else?

The Etruscan Babe-a-licious

About twenty-five years ago, while wasting time at the booksellers’ stalls by the Seine, I came across a thin volume, published in the 1840s, which was entitled Ces femmes qui ont dit non à Napoléon. The title is hard to translate: the ces… qui [those… who] construction in nuance-rich French automatically implies something unusual (a faithful rendering would be: Those Brave/Headstrong/Plucky Ladies Who Turned Down Napoleon). But the subject is universally understandable: young women who, despite the bragging rights earned by sleeping with the powerful, refused to disrobe and deliver – in this case for the randy Corscian bunny of the Revolution. I don’t know if it was a true history, or just a squib dashed off by a disgruntled royalist, but I spent a dreamy quarter-hour perusing the brief biographies of a few long-forgotten beauties.

The book was selling for 120 francs. At the time that was a monstrous sum for me – the equivalent of 30 meal tickets to the all-the-slop-you-can-eat feasts at the university canteen. So I passed on it.

I have always regretted not buying that book. In my unpublished novel, The Notary’s Necktie, I re-imagined it, composing fanciful chapters of “The Ladies Who Said No to Napoleon” to spur the plot. But the sting remains… I wish I had it in my library.

What put me in mind of it was an art opening held last month in Newport, Rhode Island. An artist, and an acquaintance, Esther Solondz, had found a motherlode of unidentified portraiture photography from the Thirties and Forties, sketched the likenesses, then covered the images with a rust finish. The result was an arresting, orangey, mildly unsettling portrait gallery.

One of the portraits was of a young woman, a beautiful young woman, slightly Semitic and ever so tragic. She looked to be a figure from Antiquity. I told Esther’s art dealer that she was Helen of Troy. I told the curator she was Queen Dido of Carthage. I told myself she was The Etruscan Babe-a-licious.

I returned the next week and took pictures of her. Then I kept staring at her on my iPhone.

I decided I had to have her. She was looking right through me.

Yet I couldn’t really afford her. It was the Napoleon's Ladies Syndrome all over again. An Argentine friend, in whom I confided, admonished me that life was too short, and that if you really love something, you should grab it. And it was a mystery: how could I, too broke to be an art collector and too diffident to actually look at and like something unmediated by scholarly monograph and unsanctioned by official approval, become so deeply infatuated with an image? Was I losing it? Showing my inner Pygmalion? And if I hung her on the wall, would I miss the regret of not having her?

Let me explain that last question: My favorite moment in Citizen Kane has a certain Mr. Bernstein, Charles Foster’s right-hand man, reminiscing in old age about the Great Man and then breaking off, distractedly, to say: “One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it, there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on – and she was carrying a white parasol – and I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since I haven’t thought of that girl.”

I first saw the movie as a teen, but what struck me even then was how Bernstein took such evident relish in his loss. It was as if the memory, and the habitual revival of the memory, mattered most. If he had accosted the girl, married her perhaps, he would have been robbed of that delicious moment of melancholy, to be summoned and enjoyed at will. I didn’t know it then, but such sentiment is a mainstay of Arab culture.

So it was fitting that my inevitable Bernstein moment (every man has one, I think) should involve an Arab, or perhaps a Tunisian Jew. It happened about the time I said no to Napoleon’s nay-saying women.

I had been with friends out to the Bois de Vincennes to watch a play at a converted ammunition factory. The troupe, given to very athletic, samurai-like productions of Shakespeare, was all the rage in Paris then. As we boarded the metro for the long ride back into the center of town, my friends sat across from me, and on the other side of the aisle, facing me, a young woman took a seat, unaccompanied. I had noticed her during intermission at the play: she had sipped a glass of wine, alone. We had exchanged a look. Now here she was: a kind of ringlet thing going on with her long hair, smooth olive skin, a long and beautiful nose, dark eyes. Lovely, in short. Semitic.

I kept stealing glances over at her during the ride into town, feeling not desire but a certain sort of elation in the presence of beauty. Had she glanced back? I couldn’t tell. And, in any event, my two friends prattled on and on, a nauseatingly happy French couple. Half-a-dozen stops came and went; I was summoning up the courage to go over to her. But when the train pulled into the Bastille station, she got up, opened the door, and alighted.

Now here’s the thing. Once the doors had closed and the train was set to get underway, she turned around on the platform and looked back. She looked directly at me. Through me. Then the train pulled away and she was gone.

I think I’m going to make an offer for that portrait.

In Praise of the Untrustworthy

I drive up to Canada every month to visit my father. Every now and then, my daughters (one a tween, the other a teen) come along for the ride. So the deal is that part of the way I endure, or secretly get into, Taylor Swift, Avril Lavigne and Ke$ha, and then they listen to a book or two on tape (it’s a loooong drive). Fortunately, we are well past the throw-away-your-talents-and-live-like-a-martyr books of early childhood (eg., The Rainbow Fish, The Giving Tree and so many others), so we can listen to something murderous – that is, decent.

They loved Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express on an earlier trip, so I found a copy of her Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Now for those who don’t know the latter, Ackroyd basically launched Agatha’s career through its stunning use of a literary device known as the unreliable narrator. The tale’s narrator, we learn at the very end (spoiler alert), a heretofore genteel, urbane doctor, is in fact the murderer.

Upon that revelation, the car fell silent for a long moment. The girls were dumbfounded. Not by the surprise – they consume lots of books and movies with rabbit-out-of-the-hat twists – but by the whole concept of not being able to trust the person telling the tale. “But, Daddy, he can’t be the one!” “What about when he said this?”, etc. etc. I sometimes wish readers of non-fiction would realize that the voice behind the story cannot, by definition (ie, as a human being), be entirely reliable, but I always assumed that adult readers of fiction would realize that unreliability was a narrative device in good standing.

Until, that is, a very good friend, Eli Gottlieb, published a very good novel recently, Now You See Him. I won’t do a spoiler here, but his story of a murder-suicide is an unreliable narrator tale par excellence. Yet in all the reviews he e-mailed me (yes, we do that), no mention was made of this, as if the reviewers were almost as innocent as my daughters. They talked blandly of the protagonist’s relationship with women, his marriage, his male friendships, the surprise ending… but no one seemed to pick up on the central pivot of the book’s plot, and outlook. Its essence.

It was a curious omission, for the unreliable narrator is no mere literary parlor trick – it’s much more than that. It is something we all understand, or we all have to understand, if ever we want to grow up. To return to my car ride: it is only when we understand that our parents are unreliable narrators, that their version of reality is not ours, or no longer suffices to explain and order things… it is only then that we become adults. It is such a fundamental realization in everyone’s personal itinerary, as fundamental as realizing that there is sexual differentiation, that I, for one, am hard-pressed to explain why so many reviewers of my friend’s novel failed to note his unreliable narrator even in passing. I haven’t googled Ackroyd’s reviews, but I would bet that in the 1920s there would have been a greater realization of this.

Is America infantile? I don’t think so. And yet…

Treason, Anyone?

Ten minutes till kick-off.

Despite BP and my last name, I want England to win.

The longer they're in, the more obnoxious they get. And bad boys are always more fun to watch.

Pee or Get Off the Pot

I believe that writing is about decisions. It’s a lot of other things, too, but if you don’t have a killer instinct, a willingness to close, you’re stuck in marshmallow-land. Think of those hilariously profane scenes in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, when the salesmen are all talking about the importance of closing, willing it, wanting it, needing it. In a more demure way (and, it must be admitted, in a more private, violent way), writing is the same thing.

Of all the accomplished writers I have met in my days as a journalist or as a shiftless hanger-on at the literary buffet table, none has exhibited a tendency to waffle. You knew that a Marguerite Duras or a Margaret Atwood, for example, did not put up with indecision when it comes to her craft. At a talk recently here in Providence, Michael Ondaatje admitted, wistfully, that he had to off a character beloved by him in writing Divisadero, because, as he said, the character “got in the way of the story.” There is another word for this – murder.

With non-fiction, you cannot, unfortunately, kill off people who get in the way of the story. Yet it, too, is a minefield of decisions to be made. Writers are often thought to be fey onanistic types, arty or scholarly, when in fact they have to be fairly cold-blooded if they want a text to be able to stand on its own. At least if they want that text to be good.

I write a particular form of non-fiction – that is, for the general educated public (who need hardly any prompting to toss a book across the room in disgust), as opposed to that produced by academic research writers, whose readers – fellow researchers and their graduate students – form a sort of captive audience. In my field, Tom Holland and Tim Mackintosh-Smith are, to my mind, the gold standard. There is plenty of dreck out there (William Manchester’s dreadful, error-riddled A World Lit Only By Fire, for example, was the most mystifying non-fiction bestseller of the past thirty years), but what the two cited above show, both Brits (sigh), is a willingness to be decisive – plus a great felicity in style.

Consider the hybrid: a trade book written by an academic. One of the better in recent years was John Demos’ The Unredeemed Captive [sorry about the weird line break below, can't get it to go away]. It's about Iroquois stealing down into 18^th-century western Massachusetts, kidnapping the daughters of Puritan worthies, then hauling them up to the horrors of papist Montreal (what’s not to like?). Demos wanted to write for the general reader, and on the whole he succeeded. But his opening is unintentionally comic: “Where does the story begin? Perhaps it is in the old university town of Cambridge, England. In the summer of 1629.” Two pages later: “Perhaps it begins in the village of the Iroquois heartland (what is today upstate New York). In the decade of the 1660s.” Two pages later: “Perhaps it begins in the Massachusetts town of Dedham. On May 22, 1670.” Two pages later: “Perhaps it begins in the “borning room” of a particular house at Deerfield. In September 1696.” Three pages later: “Perhaps it begins in the royal palace, in Madrid, center of the sprawling Spanish Empire. In the autumn of the year 1700.” Three paras later: “To recapitulate: Cambridge (England), Iroquoia, Dedham, Madrid. In short, multiple beginnings, none of them truly ‘first,’ each of them contributing, in one way or another, to the story that follows.”

Well, John, every story is like that, and that’s what the non-fiction writer is for: to make decisions, to relate his or her version of a narrative about the past with a strong voice and point of view (excuse me while I polish my pince-nez), and to perform assault and battery on reality (as opposed to fiction’s Ondaatje perpetrating outright murder). The tale doesn’t have to be freight-train linear, but it also shouldn’t be “watch-me-at-my-craft” cute. Who cares about what writers go through? I don’t want my doctor, scalpel in hand, telling me about his or her bum residency in the south Bronx; he or she, I imagine, doesn’t want me to spoil their leisure reading time with a ten-page opening about my problems in composition.

So, although Demos succeeds admirably in creating his story without the ostenatious self-consciousness of his beginning, I think that his beginning verged on throw-the-book-across-the-room variety.

Others will disagree, or misunderstand my point (isn’t that what language is for?). To state it plainly: it is difficult for academics (whom I admire, truly) to grasp what is needed when writing for the general educated public. Too often they think that, once out of the constraints of the Academy, they are writing for the teen slouched in front of South Park. Don’t kid yourself, that teen is never going to pick up your book, at least not yet. You are writing for educated people who just happen not to be specialists in your field, and who want to be held, informed and edified. And, above all, they do not want be kept abreast of the latest metacontortions of the tale-telling trade (e.g., “none of them truly ‘first,’ each of them contributing, in one way or another, to the story that follows.”)

I could go on, and probably will, but right now I can’t decide….

Against Nature. Again.

Last night I downed pints of plain on a celebratory bar crawl with the woman who designed my new website and set me up with this blog. As is not uncommon these days, she is much younger and in much better shape than I... so under the table was I drunk. When I awoke this morning, feeling like an omelette (note: I did not say “feeling like eating an omelette”— there is a distinction), I washed down a banana and ibuprofen with black coffee then got on my bike for a 30-mile ride.

There are two reasons I reached for the bike: one, physical; the other, moral. The first is fairly obvious. Just as you can pray your way through a hurricane, you can pedal your way out of a hangover. The second is more complex. When you are feeling omelettesque, you have to find a way to feel better about yourself. As one who can never really suppress his Eurosnot tendencies, I believe the greatest advantage to living in Rhode Island, perhaps even the entire USA (with the exception of lean freak shows like Boulder and the like), is that no matter how overweight you are, there is always someone around the next corner who is… how should I put this?… more portly than you. So you can be a volcano of pudge and still feel fit and trim, even attractive to the opposite sex. It’s quite salutary. Packing a 40-pound paunch, buddy? You’re still a Providence Adonis. Got a booty the size of the Hindenburg? You’re a Newport Aphrodite.

Unfortunately, the lowering clouds and the chill threat of rain had left the bike path devoid of my fellow Rhode Islanders. I was the only sorry human around, and the fauna had come out of the closet. Now, I am no naturalist (see an earlier post: “Of Beeps and Cheeps”), but I enjoyed seeing the seabirds, robins, sparrows, pterodactyls, whatever… I even passed two bunnies. At about the ten-mile mark, I came across a gathering of exuberantly incontinent geese and goslings (The French, incidentally, say caca d’oie [geese poop] for yellowish-green). More remarkable still, out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a coyote, seated in a position of repose. I knew coyotes dined on suburban cats in this state, but didn’t know they breakfasted on geese.

As I haven’t even the courage to watch wildlife snuff documentaries on television, I sped up. And there, not twenty yards directly in front of me, stood a deer.

I should say at this point that my bike, sweatshirt, sweatpants, helmet and hair are grey. And my face is red. So the initial impression the deer might have had was of a vertical ashtray containing one burning cigarette butt hurtling toward it. It appeared hopelessly confused. I, fearing a homicidal coyote nipping at my heels, accelerated. At the last possible moment, the deer reacted, and boing-boing-boing, off went its rear end down the path. The problem was that this stretch of the path is bordered by a single line of trees and then back yards: the deer thus had nowhere to go to get out of my way. So we raced on, me fearing a possibly rabid canine death squad; it, fearing me. I felt bad, guilty of Bambi harassment.

Mercifully, the deer finally found a track off to one side and I made it, unscathed, to the end of the path at Bristol, Rhode Island. The sun came out. Other, bigger bikers appeared. The omelette had been put back in the shell, restored, and I was eager to return to my desk and the Middle Ages.

On the ride back, there was no deer. No bunnies. When I reached where the geese had gathered, they were gone. And there was no blood anywhere, just caca d’oie.

But the coyote was still there. In exactly the same seated position.

I slowed. It wasn’t a coyote.

It was a wolf.

And it wasn’t even a real wolf – it was a life-sized photograph of a wolf, stuck onto a carboard backing and placed on a lawn to scare the geese from doing their thing on the green perfection.

Beep. Cheep.

Oh, the Irish...

"How many wedding days have ended with the tipsy and dyspeptic groom gazing miserably down on his brand-new bride bouncing under him on the king-size bed of the honeymoon suite and seeing her best friend's face, or the face of her prettier sister or even, heaven help us, of her sportive mother?"

John Banville, The Sea

Damon and Saladin

I know from experience that when you are writing a book, that is, when you are in the throes of composition and problem-solving, there comes a weird, extended period of time when everything else in life seems to reflect the subject of your labors. When Johnny Damon hit a grand slam off the Yankees in the seventh game of the American League Championship Series in 2004, I naturally thought that this was reminiscent of Saladin’s skill in reconquering Jerusalem. It was obvious: how could anyone think otherwise?

Similarly, that waitress in Toulouse who helpfully leaned forward an extra couple of inches – proof, back in 1999, of the Cathar belief in dualism. A traffic jam? Supplies struggling to be delivered to the Western Front. Burnt toast? Montségur. Ant infestation? The Reconquista.

I’m both happy and sad to say that this level of monomania has not yet taken hold of me with my current project. The tale to be told is one of inquisition, riot and torture, so perhaps the summery weather is not conducive to such projection.

Nah. I’m just kidding myself. It will come, and I will be helpless to stop it. The Grand Inquisitor will no doubt show up at Starbucks any day now…