Early September 2020 Log: H. D., Norm Macdonald, and W. Somerset Maugham

Suffering from a cascade of fashionable, undiagnosed and unfalsifiable maladies ranging from writer's block and stage fright to social media fatigue and carpal tunnel syndrome, the MPorcius staff throughout August abstained from tweeting, blogging, and reading fiction.  During this period I read first hand accounts of service in the British Army and RAF during World War II and read the poetry of T. E. Hulme, Richard Aldington, and H. D.; I also, in biographies of T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound and collections of their letters, investigated the relationships of Hulme, Aldington and H. D. with Eliot, Lewis and Pound. 

I was favorably impressed by Hulme's lamentably small body of poetical work, which I felt combined striking images with human feeling and human drama and also exhibited an admirable economy.  We love economy at MPorcius Fiction Log.  I have to confess to being less impressed by the verses of Aldington and H. D.; their poems are competent, but page after page of rehashing topics that have been picked over for two thousand years or longer, like Helen of Troy and Circe, and gushing about the beauty of flowers and trees, gets a little tiresome.  Still, I enjoyed Aldington and H. D.'s poetry more than most of Pound's, which I continue to find difficult and boring.  (Eliot's poetry, seeing as it addresses topics of interest to me, like alienation, deracination, sexual dysfunction, and the search for meaning in our urbanized, globalized world, I find difficult but very rewarding.)

Bid Me to Live by H. D.  

Aldington and H. D. were novelists as well as poets, however, and this brings us to the first subject of this blog post, the blog post that proves that MPorcius Fiction Log is not really most sincerely dead, but merely in a coma--H. D.'s 1960 novel Bid Me to Live.  In the first week of September I finished reading a 1983 edition of the novel published by Black Swan and available at the internet archive; it has a cover photo of H. D. by Man Ray and includes useful afterwords  by Perdita Schaeffer and John Walsh, as well as a drawing of flowers by H. D. herself.

H. D., as you probably already know if you are still reading this, is an American woman born Hilda Doolittle who in her youth dated Ezra Pound and who later, in England, was one of the pioneering Imagist poets that gathered around Pound; it was Pound who conferred on her the distinctive pen name "H. D."  Between 1913 and 1938 H. D. was married to Aldington, though early on the marriage faced such disasters as the miscarriage of their child, Aldington's World War I service and his infidelities, and the two poets were separated for most of the period they were married, though they remained friends (we can see in the correspondence between Aldington and Eliot how Aldington continued to vigorously promote his wife's poetry.)  Bid Me to Live is an autobiographical roman a clef,  an impressionistic account of the collapse of H.D. and Aldington's marriage during World War I, and the beginning of a new phase in H. D.'s life, as she leaves London for the countryside (one theme of H. D.'s and Aldington's poetry is the superiority of the countryside to the city) and is influenced by other men, particularly D. H. Lawrence and composer Cecil Gray.

Bid Me to Live is a very literary novel, full of ambiguity, flashbacks and classical references.  The first line of the novel is a paraphrase of Cicero's "o tempora o mores," and H. D. doesn't mention Cicero by name--as a reader you are expected to be familiar with this famous, practically cliched, phrase.  The first paragraph also name checks Jocasta and Philoctetes.  I got the Cicero allusion, but no doubt the book is full of stealthy classical references I didn't get.

My favorite classical allusion from Bid Me to Live is when Julia (the H. D. character) watches her husband Rafe Ashton (Aldington), on leave from the battlefields of France, walk about the apartment naked, and thinks that in peacetime his body had been a sort of "Greek image," but now, hardened by his war service, he appears to be a "bronze late-Roman image [that] had got out of the wrong department of the Louvre or the British Museum...."  Of course, all the novel's references aren't classical; the title of the novel is from a poem by 17th-century poet Robert Herrick, and the Ashton marriage is compared to that of Punch and Judy (ouch!), while one wonders if Jocasta there in that first para isn't an allusion to psychoanalysis--H. D. was both a friend and patient of Sigmund Freud's.

I think we can break the novel into three main parts.  In the first part Julia is in an apartment in London, and we witness scenes of her there with the various other characters, mostly importantly her husband Rafe while he is on leave from France--during his leaves he brazenly has sex with a woman who is living upstairs, Elsa.  Elsa is a member of their circle of friends of artists, musicians and writers, and these bohemian types spend a lot of time plotting who should sleep with who, including lining up men to have affairs with Julia.  One of the interesting themes of the novel is the idea that people feed each other energy; Elsa is in a relationship with Frederick, AKA Frederico AKA Rico (one of the novels odd little elements is how several characters have multiple, apparently interchangeable names) and even as Elsa sleeps with Rafe, she (Elsa) is seen as the bedrock that anchors Rico so he can go on his various erotic and intellectual expeditions.  Elsa tries to set up Rico and Julia, because she sees Julia as a woman perhaps capable of inspiring Rico to some new sort of writing, and in fact it is Rico who, via letters full of literary critique and life advice, who inspires Julia to write new things and to make a change in her life.  Rico/Frederico/Frederick, incidentally, represents D. H. Lawrence.

In the second phase of the book Julia and another man proposed as a suitable mate for Julia, the composer Vane or Vanio (modeled on Cecil Gray), go out at night in blacked out London to the cinema.  In the third and final phase of the novel Julia moves to the countryside, into an old ramshackle house with Vanio, and spends lots of time wandering around, examining plants and old walls and so on.

In outline this novel sounds pretty good, but reading it it felt long and tedious.  For one thing, it is emotionally flat--our viewpoint character, Julia, seems to be in a kind of daze, stunned and depressed.  This makes sense--Julia recently suffered a miscarriage, she lives in a city subject to German air raids, and her marriage is collapsing and all her clever (and I guess well-meaning?) friends are manipulating her--but it doesn't make for a thrilling narrative.  Julia doesn't seem to have many strong emotions or drive, and doesn't really take initiative--H. D. doesn't portray her as passionately in love with any other characters, or as animated by anger at them or hate for them, or making big decisions; Julia just seems to drift along, a victim of circumstance, fate, and other people.  This is believable, but it is not page-turning stuff.

Much of the word count of Bid Me To Live is taken up with static descriptions of rooms, furniture, items, and plants, lots and lots of plants.  Julia and Rico love plants.  (Maybe these descriptions are supposed to trigger emotions in the reader, and my reception equipment is just too insensitive to read H. D.'s subtle transmissions.)  In the brief middle phase of the book, when Julia and Vanio go to the cinema, H. D. describes the film they watch in great detail.  In some ways this middle section is the most striking part of the novel, as it relates to the war--first comes the walk in the blacked out city, and then, at the theatre and at a restaurant, Julia sees scores of fighting men on leave, and thinks of how so many of them are doomed to death or maiming on the battlefield--from a balcony in the cinema she looks down and sees the legions of khaki-clad men and thinks of the cinema as a sort of charnel house.

It is hard to recommend this novel to a general audience as it is kind of slow and boring, though of course it is worthwhile for people interested in the literary world of which D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound are among the most prominent members.  There is also good stuff for scholars of gender here--for example, an epistolary discussion between Julia and Rico over the ability of women to write from a male point of view.  (This is one of the few times Julia seems to be taking a stand instead of just passively going with the flow.)  I'll definitely read more of H. D.'s poetry and I am interested in her memoirs of Ezra Pound and Sigmund Freud, but as for H. D.'s novels, well, I don't think I'll be cracking another one open anytime soon.     

Based on a True Story: A Memoir by Norm Macdonald

Like a lot of people, I think Norm Macdonald is the best comedian/stand-up comic.  When his novel, Based on a True Story: A Memoir, came out in 2016 it got lots of positive notice, and not just from comedians--I got the impression people were treating it like a real literary novel.  So in the first week of September I finally borrowed a hardcover copy of Based on a True Story: A Memoir from a Maryland public library via contactless pickup--it is OK for people who work at grocery stores and department stores be exposed to coronavirus, but we have to make sure our aristocratic priestly class of oh-so-precious government employees is safe!--and read it.

I can't deny that I was somewhat disappointed in Norm's book, after all the hype it received.  It is not bad, and I did laugh a few times, but some of the jokes are obvious, some are very familiar (e. g., the famous moth joke) and some are tedious.  The interesting thing about the novel is Norm's efforts to achieve literary value, to instill in the book the kind of ambiguity, unreliable narration, foreshadowing and sudden surprise you might find in a book by Nabokov or Proust or somebody like that.  The novel has a main narrative, a sort of adventure/crime story in which Norm and assistant Adam Eget travel cross country, trying to win money via gambling, a perilous which venture that leads to a dangerous expedient--the borrowing of money from a dangerous loan shark.  This caper story is regularly interrupted by flashbacks to Norm's earlier life, as Norm reminisces or relates to Adam Eget stories from his youth and early career.  These accounts of Norm's childhood in rural Canada and of famous episodes in his life--e.g., working at Saturday Night Live or on the film Dirty Work--seem to be based on a kernel of truth, but include outlandish and absurd elements, including horror elements that are sometimes played for laughs (one example: imprisoned after being convicted of a terrible crime, Norm tries to win status in the big house by raping a fellow inmate, only to have this man turns the tables on our hapless hero.)  These things obviously did not happen in real life, but are we expected to believe they happen in the context of the novel?  It soon becomes clear that this novel was (partly at least) written by a ghostwriter who was hired to listen to Norm tell stories of his life and work them into a salable manuscript.  The ghostwriter is a failed literary writer, and he hates Norm, so we have reason to suspect the many episodes of Norm suffering grievously and demonstrating his own incompetence do not reflect "the truth" of the world depicted in the novel, but have been made up out of whole cloth by the bitter and ultimately suicidal ghostwriter. 

Followers of the comedy scene will no doubt find mentions of Sam Kinnison, Dennis Miller, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, and other comedy luminaries of interest.  In fact, I suspect that readers will require some familiarity with the work of Don Rickles and Rodney Dangerfield to "get" the humor behind extended sequences featuring those comedians.  I'm 49, and I assume people my age are pretty familiar with Rickles and Dangerfield, but maybe younger people are not--I recently met a young woman, the manager of a book store, no less, who, when Robinson Crusoe came up, had to admit she had never even heard of Robinson Crusoe.  Oy! 

"Rain," "The Fall of Edward Barnard" and "Mackintosh" by W. Somerset Maugham

On September 9, I reread the first three stories from my copy of The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, Volume 1: East and West, which I first read years before this blog rose from the depths.  The thirty stories in this 900-page book were all written between 1919 and 1931, Maugham tells us in the introduction.  I find Maugham's well-crafted stories very comfortable and smooth and entertaining, and on a reread I found "Rain," "The Fall of Edward Barnard" and "Mackintosh" all enjoyable.  All three concern Westerners (Americans or Britons) in the South Pacific, and all deal with literal or figurative suicide.  Suicide is a favorite topic here at MPorcius Fiction Log!   

"Rain:"  A devout and energetic missionary is stuck in quarantine with an American prostitute, and he tries to reform her.  Who will win this test of wills? 

"The Fall of Edward Barnard:"  An upper-middle class Chicagoan heads to Tahiti to find out what happened to his best friend, who went to Tahiti two years ago to learn the business with the idea he would return to Chi-town to marry his sweetheart--our dude finds his buddy has gone native!

"Mackintosh:"  Two British guys are administering an island in Samoa.  The second-in-command, a young, skinny, smart sophisticate, hates the old, fat, brutish and ignorant head administrator, but which of them is the better man and the man better suited to the task of maintaining order among the natives and promoting peace and prosperity on the primitive island?   

**********  

For a few weeks there, I really thought MPorcius Fiction Log was kaput, but I find value in keeping a record of my reading and this blog is as convenient a means of keeping such a record as any.  So I guess MPorcius Fiction Log is not licked yet, though I doubt I will be putting as much energy into it as I did during what may come to be seen as MPorcius Fiction Log's "Golden Age."