Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

The Hunters



How many men start out as an F-86 pilot during the Korean War and then become a writer over the next 50 years?  James Salter wasn’t prolific, but great nonetheless.  I had already read what has been considered his best works, Light Years,  All That Is and A Sport and a Pastime

I’m generally not “into” war novels (although will never forget reading Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, tears streaming down my face reading the concentration camp chapters), so to this point I had avoided Salter’s first novel, The Hunters.  Perhaps this is also because I had seen the movie version on Turner Classic Movies, staring my favorite film noir actor, Robert Mitchum (also with Robert Wagner and May Britt).  The novel is very different from the film, hardly bearing any resemblance, other than a story of F-86 fighter pilots during the Korean War.  Salter’s novel is so superior, but of course it’s literature, not Hollywood.  Salter must have agonized over the changes that were made to his novel for the screen version.

Cleve Connell arrives at Kimpo air base at the height of the Korean War.  There, the F-86 pilots do a dance of death with their MIG-15 enemies.  Connell learns this dance means to hunt or be hunted, kill or be killed, a path to fame or ignominy.

The wonder of flying, only decades after flight itself was pioneered by the Wright Brothers, is encapsulated by Salter, an experienced F-86 pilot.  This novel could not have been written without that credential or by a person indifferent to the joys of flying.  Cleve is ready for one of his early missions, congregating with the other pilots while waiting to go out to his “ship” as they referred to their F-86’s:  He was not fully at ease. It was still like being a guest at a family reunion, with all the unfamiliar references. He felt relieved when finally they rode out to their ships. Then it was intoxicating. The smooth takeoff, and the free feeling of having the world drop away. Soon after leaving the ground, they were crossing patches of stratus that lay in the valleys as heavy and white as glaciers. North for the fifth time. It was still all adventure, as exciting as love, as frightening. Cleve rejoiced in it.

Cleve fantasizes about turning his flying skills into a sport, becoming an ace (5 kills).  He romanticizes to his wingman, while being aware that it’s not necessarily the best prepared pilots who become aces:  Odd. Everything about this ought to be perfect for you and me. Here we are, by sheer accident, in the most natural of worlds, and of course that means the most artificial, because we're very civilized. We're in a child's dream and a man's heaven, living a medieval life under sanitary conditions, flying the last shreds of something irreplaceable, I don't know what, in a sport too kingly even for kings. Nothing is missing, and yet it's the men who don't understand it at all that become its heroes.

By then, though, he is already transitioning into some self doubt, even after a brief burst of confidence after his first kill.  Soon he sinks into an even larger sinkhole of remorse, and finally finding an acceptance of his self worth in the end.  He is tormented, directly or indirectly by his arch rival, Pell, a man he learns would claim unsubstantiated kills or even put his wing-man in harm’s way to get a kill….he hated Pell. He hated him in a way that allowed no other emotion. It seemed he was born to, and that he had done it from the earliest days of his life, before he ever knew him, before he even existed. Of all the absolutes, Pell was the archetype, confronting him with the unreality and diabolical force of a medieval play, the deathlike, grinning angel risen to claim the very souls of men. When he dwelt upon that, Cleve felt the cool touch of fear. There was no way out. He knew that if Pell were to win, he himself could not survive.

But these opportunities for wins frequently were the consequence of just sheer luck.  The squadron flew three or four missions a day and pilots are not assigned to all.  Some came back their noses blackened, the fuel tanks dropped, indicating a dog fight while others do not see MIGs during the entire mission.  Cleve’s pick of the litter tended to be in the latter category while Pell’s were in the former, so no wonder.

The Hunters is a well developed novel, gathering momentum to the end, becoming so compelling one can’t put the book down the deeper you get into it.  Although a war novel, it is written by a then young writer whose prose, you can tell, would lead him to greatness, not in the air, but on the page.




Tuesday, November 22, 2016

William Trevor, a Writer for the Ages



William Trevor has died at the age of 88. I came to William Trevor’s masterful short stories late in life as American fiction has been my literary bailiwick.  Trevor was an Irishman who lived mostly in England as an adult.  My loss not having followed him all that time, but I made up for it reading his two massive collections of short stories. I was astounded by his genius.  In his passing, I feel as if a close friend has died, intimately knowing him by his love of, and his sadness for, his characters.  Nonetheless, he was but an observer… By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

The Guardian obituary says it all about his life and fiction, justifiably declaring he was “one of the greatest short story writers of the last century.”  He also wrote 20 novels, an incredible output for a writer who mostly flew under the literary world’s radar screen, which suited him just fine. As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

While in my entries on Trevor I mentioned a few of his short stories, to describe them in detail is to retell his tales, so I tried to simply sum them up as follows:

“Here are widows and widowers, miscreants and innocents, the travails of the elderly juxtaposed to the innocence of youth, the dilemmas of the middle aged and the divorced, so often lonely people trying to connect with someone who is inappropriate, and people from all economic stations of life. His characters are victims of their own actions, sometimes ‘imagining’ (the number of times Trevor says, ‘he [or] she imagined’ is countless) different outcomes and different realities.  There is a Pinteresque quality to many of the stories, showing humanity, some humor, and a hint of the absurd.

We identify with his characters, perhaps their taking the wrong fork in the road as we might be prone to do, and the consequences of their actions.  He spotlights that inherent loneliness we sometimes feel at social gatherings, or in our everyday relationships.  The mistakes of our lives add up but so do our little victories, our justifications of our actions making things seem alright.” 

With the passing of Trevor, along with Updike and Cheever, our best short story writers have been silenced, but their literature lives.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Jim Harrison, a Singular Writer



Jim Harrison produced an extensive number of novels, novellas, poetry, and screenplays, yet I had never read his work (other than seeing his screenplay version of Legends of the Fall, perhaps his most famous novella).  When I saw his obituary earlier this year I made a mental note to remedy this.  Just this short eulogy by his best friend,Thomas McGuane (whose recently published short story collection Crow Fair is a treasure) says it all about the kind of writer and person Harrison was.

I chose to read one of his more recent works, The River Swimmer, which is the title of one of the two novellas therein, the other being The Land of Unlikeness.  I forgot what a joy it is to read a novella, which can be read in one sitting (but in my case taking my time, savoring the language, the perfect literature to read at bedtime, being able to expunge the real world and take in the rural north of Harrison’s world).  These two works are about two men, one young, one old, each on a journey to find his true self. 

The Land of Unlikeness especially resonates as it is about a man much closer to my age who is going through a late life identity crisis.  Clive was an artist who became a renowned art appraiser and as such traveled throughout Europe on behalf of his clients, leaving far, far behind the farm on which he was raised in Michigan.  There, his mother lives with his sister.  Suddenly he finds himself obligated to return home for a summer, when his sister wants to see Europe for the first time and expects her brother to step into a caretaking role for the mother.  He does so reluctantly, finding himself back in his boyhood room.  And then things change.

His first love, Laurette, now owns the old stone farmhouse of her parents, visits there on weekends, her “housesitter” or “whatever” Lydia living there as well.  It brings back memories of Clive’s nearly consummated sexual encounter with her as a teenager.  But it also brought to surface the truth about his life: “He was suddenly quite tired of the mythology he had constructed for his life.  The idea of having quit painting was far too neat.  He had lost heart, run out his string, or the homely idea he had painted himself into a small dark corner.”

Meanwhile, he had his mother to care for and all she wants to do is to be taken out for bird-watching expeditions early in the morning.  “The dawn was loud with the admittedly pleasant chatter of birds.”  These expeditions, although obligatory, become pleasurable.  More things change.  Laurette and Lydia come to visit the mother as they have been neighbors for a long time.  Clive awakens from a nap and observes the women on the patio and goes downstairs to join them and have a martini.  “Even more prepossessing was a casserole of lasagna she had brought over which was on a table beside an empty wine bottle.  The smell of garlic and tomato sauce, Lydia’s thighs, and the sunlight dappling through the willow tree overwhelmed him and he drank deeply.”

He and Laurette wander to the back of the garage nearby.  “He found himself pressing her against the hood of his mother’s car, trying to kiss her but she averted her face.  His hands kneaded her buttocks and he was becoming hard at an amazing speed.  ‘Jesus Christ, I have to think about this.  I can’t fuck you in a garage with people outside.’  She slipped away laughing.  ‘Why’ he said glumly.  He stood there waiting for his penis to slump.  It seemed comic at best that this woman could still bowl him over after forty years.  How wonderful it would be to find a ’47 Plymouth and paint her slouched in the corner with her pleated skirt up.”

Just superb erotic imagery as Clive works towards that wishful goal of finally consummating their teenage relationship while still caring for his mother.  Then he finds himself painting once again.  In fact, “on a warmhearted whim he did a small portrait of a bluebird for his mother and then was embarrassed when she was overwhelmed.”  It is at this point that I totally identified with Clive, his love of painting is akin to my love of writing, but to say I’m a writer, or that I’m a pianist, my other great interest, is to endow an obligation and subjects the passion to categorization: “Now he was speculating whether or not Laurette would pose half-nude on the car seat.  The whole idea was preposterously silly but why not?  It was not more cheeky than the idea of his resuming painting.  Part of the grace of losing self-importance was the simple question ‘Who cares?’  More importantly, he didn’t want to be a painter, he only wanted to paint, two utterly different impulses.  He had known many writers and painters who apparently disliked writing and painting but just wanted to be writers and painters.  They were what Buckminster Fuller might have called ‘low-energy constructs.’  Clive didn’t want to be anything any longer that called for a title.  He knew he wanted to paint so why not paint.  Everybody had to do something while awake.”  A priceless paragraph of writing and wisdom.

A subplot in the novella is his being estranged from his daughter Sabrina and their eventual reconciliation, all part of his becoming himself, they sharing a camping trip to Marquette on Lake Superior.  But it was stormy and that first night they had to take a hotel room on the lake.  Finally, they were able to camp.  “Behind Sabrina there was a shade of green on a moss-colored log he had never seen before.  And on that first afternoon in Marquette there had been a splotch of sunlight far out on the dark stormy lake, golden light and furling white wave crests.”  In nature Harrison finds his halcyon home and his most beautiful writing is centered there.

Nature figures even more prominently in The River Swimmer, the second story in the book.  Here Harrison moves into the realm of magical realism.  Thad is a young man who wants to swim all the rivers of the world.  Cheever’s The Swimmer merely swims the suburban sins of Westchester.  Thad wants to take in all of nature and in fact has a mystical relationship with “water babies” which his American Indian mentor, Tooth, called them.  She was born on the same land as Thad and was allowed to stay there when Thad’s father bought the land.  Tooth says they may be the souls of lost children who became aquatic infants.  These apparitions frequently accompany Thad on his journeys but the demands of two young women conflict him, Laurie and Emily.  “Thad felt a slight wave of nausea over money and power, including Laurie and Emily.  Nothing ever seemed to be denied to rich girls….What kind of preparation for life can wealth be except to make it easy?  Thad preferred Tooth’s niece, Dove, in many ways….They had such a good time his heart broke apart when they split up and she said, ‘You like those rich pretty cunts not a big-nosed Chip girl.’

As in any piece of magical realism, one has to suspend belief to get the most out of the tale.  Thad endures criticism, even violence, in his pursuit of his aquatic life.  “In periods of extreme loneliness we don’t know a thing about life and death and the reality of water consoles us.  In school he had long thought that history, the study of it, was an instrument of terror.  Reading about either the American Indians or slaves can make you physically ill.  He wanted a life as free as possible from other people, thus simply staying on the island was tempting.  The possibility of stopping people from doing what they do to other people seemed out of the question.”

He makes compromises towards the end, but one in keeping with “the idea that he was a whore for swimming, the only activity that gave him total pleasure and a sense of absolutely belonging on Earth, especially swimming in rivers with the current carrying your water-enveloped body along at its own speed.  It was bliss to him so why shouldn’t he be obsessed?”

As painting was an obsession to his older version, Clive. They both found solace in nature, doing what they were born to do.

Jim Harrison, a unique writer, who died while writing long handed at his desk.



Tuesday, April 5, 2016

The Son – There IS Blood



When I wrote about a similarly entitled novel & Sons by David Gilbert, I asked the rhetorical question of who might replace our great contemporary writers, such as John Updike, John Cheever, and Philip Roth among others.  I had suggested we might look at the work of Jonathan Franzan, Jonathan Tropper, Brady Udall, Eric Puchner, Jonathan Lethem, Chad Harbach, Dave King, Jess Walker, as well as David Gilbert, all mentioned in this blog. 

Based on his second novel, The Son, here is another name for this list, Philipp Meyer.  I recently read his first novel, American Rust, to see whether I wanted to invest the time in the nearly 600 page The Son.  It was a sound investment!

As in the case of American Rust, it is a story told by different characters, but unlike American Rust, this is a multigenerational novel, skipping back and forth in time, and on a much, much larger scale.  If American Rust is a microcosm of the contemporary economy, this is a macrocosm of the dark side of the American soul, with overtones of Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos and Herman Melville.  It is also historical fiction, well researched, particularly in the ways of the Comanche. 

Expansive in scale, it takes place mostly in Texas over more than a century.  I kept thinking of the movie Giant which I remember seeing as a kid, a sprawling film about a Texas family and oil, James Dean’s last film.  At some point in the novel the movie is actually mentioned so Meyer too was acutely aware of the same in envisioning location.  One could also think of the recent movie There Will Be Blood, based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil.

At the heart of The Son are violence and racism, man’s plundering nature, and the Darwinian reality of the weak being devoured by the strong and them, in turn, becoming victims themselves, if not with their very lives, their souls.

The “story” is begun by the patriarch of the McCullough family, Eli, who as a thirteen year old is abducted by the Comanche, having to witness the brutal murder of his mother and sister.  This is only the beginning of scores of brutalities in the novel; one needs a thick skin to wade into the evil of man portrayed in these pages. Be prepared to metaphorically drink turtle and buffalo blood.  

Eli tells his story in chapters spread throughout the novel, in the first person, sometimes in retrospect, sometimes in real time.  He and his brother are taken by the Comanche as slaves and Eli is given the name “Tiehteti” which he explains “meant pathetic little white man.”  This is the one thing he vows not to be as he grows up in the tribe, finally rising through his own barbarism to a position of respect, at which point he is “traded” back to white society as there was a premium paid for the return for white captives.  Eli becomes a mercenary with the Texas Rangers and ultimately sets out on his own to build an empire, first in cattle and horses and finally in oil.  Along the way, the skills and savagery learned as a Comanche serve “Colonel McCullough” (as he is known from his Texas Ranger days) well as an empire builder.

The conscience in the novel is his son, Peter, who is overwhelmed by the Texans’ treatment of the Mexican natives of Texas, Mexicans who predated the whites before the Civil War. Once the Civil War ended, there was a steady influx of whites and finally when oil was discovered there, their arrival was as fast as they could dispatch Indians and Mexicans to their graves.  Peter is horrified and seeks redemption by falling in love with the sole survivor of a Mexican family destroyed by his father and his henchmen.  Peter’s story is detailed from the pages of his diary which has survived due to a development that only a spoiler could explain, so enough said.

The other main character is Jeanne Anne, grandchild of Peter and great-grandchild of Eli, into whose veins all this bloodletting and empire building ultimately flows.  She must make her way in the world of men, ruthless ones at times.  J. A. McCullough’s chapters are also intermingled, out of chronological order, Meyer writing her tale in the third person.

She grows into this world of men who perhaps thought that she was a slut or a dyke or a whore. A man trapped in a woman's body; look up her skirt and you'll see a cock. A liar, a schemer, a cold heart with a cunt to match, ridden hard and put up wet. Though she shouldn't take it personally. No one meant anything by it. To be a man meant not living by any rules at all. You could say one thing in church and another at the bar and somehow both were true. You could be a good husband and father and Christian and bed every secretary, waitress, and prostitute that caught your eye. They all had their winks and nods, code for “I fucked that cheerleader or nanny or Pan Am stewardess, that maid or riding instructor.” Meanwhile, the slightest hint she was anything but a virgin (excepting [her] three children), would get her banned for life, a scarlet letter.

She’s the one who has to manage the empire during the time of burgeoning oil prices and shady land grabs.  Behind every great wealth is a great sin and behind it all is the sense of a Godless universe of natural selection.

Peter watches his father burn down the hacienda of his long-time Mexican neighbors, an old established family, the Garcia’s: …he is not of our time; he is like some fossil come out of a stream bank or a trench in the ocean, from a point in history when you took what you wanted and did not see any reason to justify.  I realize he is not any worse than our neighbors: they are simply more modern in their thinking. They require some racial explanation to justify their theft and murder. My brother Phineas is truly the most advanced among them, has nothing against the Mexican or any other race, he sees it simply as a matter of economics. Science rather than emotion. The strong must be encouraged, the weak allowed to perish. Though what none of them see, or want to see, is that we have a choice.

Jeanne has her own view on the topic: Even if God existed, to say he loved the human race was preposterous. It was just as likely the opposite; it was just as likely he was systematically deceiving us. To think that an all-powerful being would make a world for anyone but himself, that he might spend all his time looking out for the interests of lesser creatures, it went against all common sense. The strong took from the weak, only the weak believed otherwise, and if God was out there, he was just as the Greeks and Romans had suspected; a trickster, an older brother who spent all his time inventing ways to punish you.

The overarching philosophical view of Meyer is expressed by Jeanne as well (helpful to be doing Google lookups to get the full scope of Meyer’s research): As for JFK, it had not surprised her. The year he died, there were still living Texans who had seen their parents scalped by Indians. The land was thirsty. Something primitive still in it. On the ranch they had found points from both the Clovis and the Folsom, and while Jesus was walking to Calvary the Mogollon people were bashing each other with stone axes. When the Spanish came there were the Suma, Jumano, Manso, La Junta, Concho and Chisos and Toboso, Ocana and Cacaxtle, the Coahuiltecans, Comecrudos ... but whether they had wiped out the Mogollons or were descended from them, no one knew. They were all wiped out by the Apaches. Who were in turn wiped out, in Texas anyway, by the Comanches. Who were finally wiped out by the Americans.

A man, a life - it was barely worth mentioning. The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and had themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story. And yet here she was. Breathing, having these thoughts. The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean, but despite all the butchery, here you were.

The writing is prodigiously powerful, the research exhaustive.  One could say this is a Western novel, but it is so much more: it is the promise of great things to come from Philipp Meyer.