Writing For Readers, Reading for Writers
Douglas Winspear

April 2007

Now, it turns out that the little paperback that I’d picked up had an introduction written by Lawrence Clark Powell, who was the head librarian at UCLA. In this introduction, he talked about his literary friendship with Henry Miller and their collaboration on putting together The Books in My Life. So, it seems only fitting that having been asked by a librarian friend to write about books in my personal life, that I should include a few excerpts from Lawrence Clark Powell’s introduction:

Perhaps, I would start by recommending Miller’s book, “Books in My Life.” And I’d like to mention that through reading Miller, I’d come across the books of Knut Hamsun- Pan, Hunger and Mysteries. Hamsun was considered the innovator of the modern novel. He’d once said that he’d developed his style during a voyage in the U.S. where he’d been influenced by the straight-forward, and simple style of American journalism. However, I must add that Hamsun was no proponent of the American immigrant dream. I particularly liked Mysteries, the translation by McFarland. I’ll quote from the synopsis of the film version, directed by Paul de Lussanet-

“A strange young man arrives to spend the summer in a small Norwegian coastal town and from that moment on he acts as a catalyst that brings to the surface all the hidden impulses, thoughts and darker feelings of the local people. He is an intriguing mixture of arrogance and humility, virtue and depravity, sanity and madness, cursed with the merciless gift of insight into the human soul, especially his own. He can foresee, but cannot prevent, his own self-destruction.”

I have to add that this is just a plot synopsis, and doesn’t do justice to Hamsun’s book, which, as the title implies, deals with unexplored regions of the human psyche, and the fate of a psychically gifted man born in the age of the tyranny of Reason.

Miller had been a great admirer of Dostoyevsky, and I’ve read most of his novels. Dostoyevsky developed quite a following over the years. "To Dostoyevsky’s Christianity," predicted historian Oswald Spengler, "the next thousand years will belong." Even Frederick Nietzsche had quipped that “Dostoyevsky is the only writer that has ever taught me anything worth a damn about psychology”. The Possessed, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov were among my favorites. Lately I’ve been reading The Gambler. I’d like to mention that one of my two favorite short stories was White Nights, a truly funny, and sad story, about a lonely young man and a young woman who meet during midsummer in Saint Petersburg.

The other short story which I recommend reading is The Icicle by the author from the Soviet era, Andre Siniavsky, who’d written under the pseudonym of Abram Tertz. He was later to spend time in a Soviet gulag as a reward for this little comic masterpiece, which had elements of the psychic, reincarnation, and karma, subjects taboo under the Soviet Regime, where the official religion was dialectic materialism.

Now, that we’re in Russia, I must mention Bulgakov, and his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, along with The White Guard and Heart of a Dog. I suggest reading Shalom Aleichem, who was called the Yiddish Mark Twain. Old Country Tales and The Adventures of Menahem-Mendl, I found particularly entertaining, full of humor and humanity, written in a style of Russian/Jewish storytelling akin to the Sufi tales about Mullah Nasruden, Aesop's fables, mixed with a dash of Slavic peasant tales, told by a sympathetic sophisticate.

Among the Polish writers that I’d suggest reading, I should start with Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, based on his experiences at Auschwitz. He was a promising young poet when the Nazis invaded Poland, and Borowski and his lover were swept up in a Gestapo dragnet. For those people who naturally recoil at the thought of reading “another holocaust tale”, I suggest that you read this book by a young writer who was capable of capturing this human calamity with a style that was both ironic, yet absolutely honest, detached yet completely empathetic, written with a precocious wisdom and a deceptively simple style. From the beginning, you come to realize that the death camps were embedded in the history of the twentieth century, that they were a laboratory of our “New World Order” as the father of the American president once proclaimed. It’s not a despairing book, and in some ways, one can find more humanity in those camps than in our present world, which is presently suffering from the effects of the same social Darwinism that led to the extermination camps.

I’ll quote from the first-rate introduction from Jan Kott,

“Borowski’s Auschwitz stories are written in the first person. The narrator of three of the stories is a deputy Kapo, Vorarbeiter Tadeusz. The identification of the author with the narrator was the moral decision of a prisoner who had lived through Auschwitz - an acceptance of mutual responsibility, mutual participation and mutual guilt for the concentration camp.” ‘It is impossible to write about Auschwitz impersonally,’ Borowski wrote in a review of one of the hagiographic books about the camp. ‘The first duty of Auschwitzers is to make clear just what a camp is…But let them not forget that the reader will unfailingly ask: But how did it happen that You survived?...Tell, then , how you bought places in the hospital, easy posts, how you shoved the “Muslims’(camp slang for prisoners who had lost the will to live) into the oven, how you bought women, men, what you did in the barracks, unloading the transports, at the gypsy camp; tell about the daily life of the camp, about the hierarchy of fear, about the loneliness of every man. But write that you, you were the one who did this. That a sad fame of Auschwitz belongs to you as well.”

Another Polish writer that I recommend reading is Stanislaw Lem, starting with his classic, Solaris, and secondly The Futurological Congress. Although considered a science fiction writer, Lem’s novels are critiques of the very technocracy and the eroticization of technology which are characteristic of most American science fiction. Like, Borowski, whose book is much more than another holocaust novel, but an allegory of de-humanization, where the industrialized world can be seen as one big concentration camp, Lem’s books deal with deeper questions of reality and consciousness.

I’d like to also suggest the works of Tadeusz Konwicki, particularly his Minor Apocalypse. A Minor Apocalypse was published in the eighties before the fall of the Soviet Empire and yet, it has a contemporary resonance. Konwicki’s style, like that of Borowski, is innovative, well-crafted, deceptively simple and very funny, if your taste runs toward black humor. I have to mention the books of Witold Gombrowicz, author of Ferdydurke, a twentieth century classic of black humor, in the style that would be later described as magic realism by his Latin American imitators.

Returning to Henry Miller, it was through his writings that I was introduced to the books of the Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti. He had this to say in The Books in My Life-

“What distinguishes Krishnamurti, even from the great teachers of the past, the masters and the exemplars, is his absolute nakedness. ... If he had a mission, it is to strip men of their illusions and delusions, to knock away the false supports of ideals, beliefs, fetishes, every kind of crutch, and thus render back to man the full majesty, the full potency of his humanity. He has often been referred to as "The World Teacher." If any man living merits the title, he does.”

The first of his books that I’d read was, Think on These Things. I would also recommend The Awakening of Intelligence. Not only did Miller quote J. Krishnamurti, but he had had this to say after returning from Europe to America:

“This world which is in the making fills me with dread… It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress - but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams, or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.”

But, it seems that Mark Twain had said something similar, back at the end of the nineteenth century:

"Our civilization is wonderful in certain spectacular and meretricious ways; wonderful in scientific marvels and inventive miracles; wonderful in material inflation, which it calls advancement, progress, and other pet names; wonderful in spying out the deep secrets of Nature and its vanquishment of her stubborn laws; wonderful in its financial and commercial achievements; wonderful in its hunger for money, and its indifference as to how it is acquired;..........."
     "It is a civilization that has destroyed the repose and simplicity of life; replaced its contentment, its poetry, its soft romance dreams and visions with the money-fever, sordid ideals, vulgar visions and the sleep which does not refresh; it has invented a thousand useless luxuries, and turned them into necessities; it has created a thousand vicious appetites and satisfies none of them; it has dethroned God and set up a shekel in His place." (Letters from the Earth.)

In Sexus, Henry wrote:

“We (Americans) take to dope, the dope which is worse by far than opium or hashish - I mean the newspapers, the radio, the movies. Real dope gives you the freedom to dream your own dreams; the American kind forces you to swallow the perverted dreams of men whose only ambition is to hold their job regardless of what they are bidden to do.”

Of course, one could find similar sentiments expressed in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and even of Walt Whitman, Henry Miller’s favorite American poet. In the case of these writers, that disillusion had set in after American military adventures. For Whitman and Thoreau, it had been the Civil War, and for Twain the Spanish-American War. Somehow, most of the American writers that I’ve enjoyed reading had been in opposition to America’s military/industrial complex. I should add to the list, writers like Charles Bukowski, who’d been jailed briefly during WWII, for draft evasion, (or being a fan of Hitler, or because they’d mistaken him for his uncle, depending on the historical account), along with the Beats, like Jack Kerouac, author of The Dharma Bums and On the Road. Kerouac was popular for the Vietnam War generation, along with Terry Southern, who wrote the screenplay for the film, Dr. Stangelove, directed by Kubrick.

Lately I’ve been reading a book of short stories by the writer Terry Southern, called Red Dirt Marijuana. The title story, taking place in the countryside of East Texas was quite moving, contrasting with his New York hipster stories, of which the story Blood Of a Wig is a great little example of Southern’s macabre sense of humor. Another book that had been written during the sixties, Going to Meet the General, by Warren Miller seems to be out of print, although I’d recommend reading it.

The master of this genre, a type of American Magic Realism, was Thomas Pynchon, who’d written the book Vineland, an extraordinary novel taking place on the west coast during the Nixon era, dealing, in an entertaining, amusing, yet serious way with the encroaching technocratic police state and the destruction of the left and counterculture during the Nixon era.

Now that we’re on the subject of the corporate takeover of America which culminated with the election of the b movie actor twenty-five years ago, I’d like to suggest a couple of books which were published around 1970 and based upon interesting developments in the world of so-called alternative science. These two books are, The Secret Life of Plants, and Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, which, after the curtain dropped, has been re-published as Psychic Discoveries. These two books point to a deeper understanding of nature and the universe, which will be explored in the future when the present ruling corporate technocracy has run its self-destructive course. These books explore developments in the science of post-quantum physics and particularly in the case of Secret Life of Plants, the re-examination of our relationship to nature after the demise of the materialist scientific models from the so-called Age of Enlightenment, from Descartes to Darwin.

Returning to writers such as Dostoyevsky and Hamsun, I’d like to mention other books from that corner of Europe that I particularly appreciated. First I’d like to mention the person that had inspired Henry Miller to break with the rat race and have the courage to express his creative gift. And that was Emma Goldman, the anarchist. I’ve read her two volume autobiography, Living My Life, and recommend it, not only for its artistic merit, but as the personal testimony of an extraordinary individual, a free thinker in every sense of the word. Lately, I’d taken to reading the second volume, dealing with the period around the time of the First World War, when pacifists and anarchists were jailed, killed and deported. Her observations about Bolshevik Russia are incisive, since she’d been personally involved with many of the key players in that drama. Her description of going to the Kremlin to meet with the new Czar of Bolshevism, Lenin, was priceless.

And finally, I’d like to recommend a book which I am presently re-reading, The Satyricon, by Petronius. I’m reading the translation by William Wordsworth, “the brilliant classical scholar”, as the dust jacket blurb proclaims; and I am inclined to agree. He’s rendered this classic from the days of Nero’s Rome into American vernacular, and has captured the wit and humor of the great satirist, or satyrist, to complete the pun. I’ll give you this little description, from the introduction, by the historian Tacitus:

“The case of Gaius Petronius deserves further brief mention. He spent his day in sleeping, his nights in work and the enjoyment of life. That success which most men achieve by dint of hard work, he won by laziness. Yet unlike those prodigals who waste themselves and their substance alike, he was not regarded as either a spendthrift or a debauchee, but rather as a refined voluptuary. Indeed, his words and actions displayed such apparent casualness and unconventional freshness that people found them all the more charming. Nonetheless, as governor of Bithynia and soon afterwards as consul, he proved himself a capable and energetic administrator.    Upon later reverting to a life of vie (or of apparent vice), he was admitted as effective arbiter of taste into the select circle of Nero’s intimates. No imperial pastime or entertainment which lacked Petronius’ approval could be regarded as either elegant or luxurious. And so Tigellinus, jealous of a rival whose expertise in the science of pleasure far surpassed his own, appealed to the emperor’s cruelty (Nero’s dominant passion) and accused Petronius of friendship with the conspirator Scaevinus. A slave was bribed to incriminate Petronius; no defense was permitted and most of the prisoner’s household was placed under arrest.”
     “At the time the emperor was in Campania. Petronius had gone as far as Cumae when he was apprehended. The prospect of temporizing, with its attendant hopes and fears, seemed intolerable; equally he had no desire to dispatch himself hastily. So he severed his veins and then bound them up as the fancy took him, meanwhile conversing with his friends, not seriously or sadly or with ostentatious courage. And he listened while they talked and recited, not maxims on the immortality of the soul and philosophical reflections, but light and frivolous poetry. He then rewarded some of his slaves and assigned beatings to others. He dined and then dozed so that his death, even though compulsory, might still look natural. Nor did he adopt the conventional deathbed routine of flattering Nero, Tigellinus, and the other worthies. Instead, he wrote out a list of the emperor’s debaucheries, citing by name each of his sexual partners, male and female, with a catalogue of his sexual experiments, and sent it off to Nero under seal. He then destroyed his signet ring so that it could not be used later for the purpose of incriminating others.”

I admit that I found myself often laughing out loud as Petronius followed the misadventures of a couple of hustler/academics through the orgy circuit in Rome. It’s a pity that we’re only left with fragments of the original, and the book leaves the readers literally hanging. But, as far as lampooning the decadence and pretensions of Rome, Petronius is a master wordsmith. And, upon reading this book, one realizes that decadence isn’t only found within the banquet halls of the nouveau riche. One can see the parallels with the end of the Roman Empire and the present Anglo-American Empire. And for those readers who’ve already seen Fellini’s version, I would suggest that you read the book. Fellini’s Satyricon, like Tarkovsky’s Solaris, are only loosely based upon the originals, which in many ways are impossible to transform to the screen. Particularly in the case of Satyricon, for Petronius mixes a variety of styles brilliantly, while maintaining the thin thread of narrative. I’d like to end this little book review with quotes from the character of Eumolpus, who is introduced as a shabbily dressed poet, given to spouting verse and being stoned by an unappreciative mob. As it turns out, even the poet isn’t what he seems, but is another hustler and opportunist. At one point he launches into a poetic screed on the decline of Rome, in the epic style of Homer, the cherished poet of Greco-Roman antiquity. And as one reads this offering from the character Eumolpus, one can’t help but see the similarity with our contemporary empire, which like Rome, had once been a republic. I will end with a few snippets from the poet’s lament.

In closing, I would like to reassure any potential readers of Petronius, that most of his book is light and breezy, much like Tacitus’description of his death. The book jacket called him “Rome’s most cultured cynic.” I didn’t find his tone cynical in the sense that we often employ the term. Petronius had a healthy tolerance for human foibles which one doesn’t associate with the label of “cynic.” When reading Satyricon, we get a better understanding of decadence than is dished out in textbook Roman histories. For most of us, Roman decadence conjures up images of endless orgies, vomitoriums, and blood sports in the Circus Maximus- gladiatorial combats, Christian being thrown to the lions, etc. Bread and circuses has been the cornerstone of empire throughout history. We tend to overlook, particularly in our own desperately escapist culture of celebrity worship and consumerist nihilism, the corruption of the intellectuals, who’ve become the fawning sycophants to power, the obfuscators, and defenders of the indefensible. Much of that can be attributed to the coarsening effect that militarism has on an empire that spreads destruction and chaos in the name of democracy and security. In Satyricon, Petronius cleverly conveys how ideas and philosophies can become coin of the realm. I’d like to wrap up this little foray into decadence and its discontents by returning to the original topic of this paper, which is books. And, in the interest of fairness and balance, as our contemporary media hacks would say, I’ll leave you with a quote from the Sung Dynasty poet, Yang Yang Wan-li: