Tag: Thomas Pynchon

Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, by Richard Holmes

I was recommended Richard Holmes’s Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by my friend James, who was so impressed by it that his recommendation came to me all in caps. I don’t know what exactly the book is – Holmes himself calls it a “mongrel book” – but it’s awfully good. It is both a work of biography and a work of autobiography, and because of the approach to biography that Holmes takes, it is also a book of travel too. For the “footsteps” of the title are no measly metaphor, but real tracks in the ground. Holmes sees biography not merely as the result of months and years spent absorbed in dusty tomes, but as the fruit of reliving the life of a dead, retracing their steps through the places that had once charmed them so much.

It is this approach that makes Footsteps so special. For what the book really shows is a different way of reading to the usual, casual, one of reading and moving on. Holmes’s approach is marked by a passionate relationship with the author and his or her works. It somehow turns reading from a passive activity into an active one, a tussle with the past. Reading Footsteps, I thought back to the times when I myself had felt great passion for authors – for Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Conrad, Foster Wallace and Pynchon and many others – and I found myself wanting. I had not fanned the flame of my own desire, not dug deep into either the books or their authors, but rather been content to glide upon their surfaces. Most importantly, I had not slowed down. Following an artist’s footsteps forces us to stop, to breathe, to focus and enjoy.

Reading Footsteps, I saw how I should be reading. In some sense, the book and its approach are an antidote to the pressures of our time and our relentless rushing about. That’s why it’s so worth reading.

The Structure of Footsteps

Footsteps is divided into four parts, each taken from a different part of Holmes’s life and detailing his encounter with a different writer. These are: Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and finally the French poet Gérard de Nerval. I can’t describe myself as “knowing” any of them well. I had read a story by Stevenson, a few poems by Shelley, and nothing by either Wollstonecraft or Nerval (the latter I’d not even heard of). But a familiarity with the writers is not a prerequisite to enjoying Footsteps, not at all. For Holmes is not offering an appraisal of their works so much as their lives. He uses their works, letters, journals, to emphasise the connection between the writers and the places they’ve been. He anchors each writer in their experience of a moment and place, rather than trying to grab hold of all of them at once.

Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the heroes of Footsteps. Holmes does an excellent job in making us interested in people we’d never been interested in before.

In each section of Footsteps there is a different question obsessing Holmes which he hopes to find the answer to. In Stevenson’s case, for example, Holmes soon discovers that some apparently simple travel writing about a journey in France is much more complex than it first appears. Instead of simply following Stevenson around, Holmes is forced to follow him into his heart, as the writer faces down his doubts about his love for a married American, Fanny Osbourne. In Percy Shelley’s case, Holmes wants to understand the nature of the relationship between the poet and Claire Clairmont, a woman who accompanied him and his wife, Mary, during much of their stay in Italy. In the case of Nerval, by contrast, who went mad and committed suicide, Holmes wants to try to salvage some kind of fact from the mass of fabrication and incoherence left in the poet’s wake.

These questions and focuses keep Footsteps from getting out of hand, as is perfectly possible with biography. (Holmes’s full biography of Percy Shelley is over 800 pages). Even in these comparatively short pieces we are introduced to a bewildering array of characters, and each of them seems deserving of detailed investigation. Holmes, who absolutely has done his research, is always able to approach his problems from multiple angles, through multiple voices. Alongside his physical tramplings, this polyphonic approach makes the past come alive not just as a single reanimated authorial figure, but as a vibrant crowd. It makes us aware of just how interesting even a minor figure is, and how we all fit together into a whole.

Mr Holmes

Holmes is a wonderful guide, though not just because he knows his stuff, is passionate, and writes well. He’s also a great guide because of his own almost confessional tone. Just as in Footsteps he draws us near to the dead men and women, so too does he draw us near to himself. It is this that makes the text feel so alive. When he cracks a puzzle, like why Wollstonecraft describes herself as seeing something from her rooms in Paris that ought to have been geographically impossible (it turned out her rooms were on the roof, not the fashionable front rooms biographers expected her to have been given), we share his joy. Likewise, when he is struck with grief – for example, when finding the bridge that Stevenson had crossed “broken, crumbling, and covered with ivy” and being forced to accept that he cannot follow him forever – we share that too.

His openness about the process of biography is part of this. Before Footsteps I had read very little biography, and never thought seriously about the form, especially in respect to other genres. Holmes readily describes the challenges of producing “the living effect, while remaining true to the dead fact”, and the way that unlike a novelist, “ordinariness… family intimacy, is the very thing that the biography… cannot share or re-create”. He made me aware of the genre’s limitations – for example, a happy couple will be mostly together, and less likely to write journal entries because each member will have each other, leaving a blank space where the biographer was hoping to find material. Then there is “the fatal past subjunctive” (would have), when the biographer is forced to claim what evidence cannot provide. All things I’d never considered.

Past and Present

Holmes’s active role in Footsteps is also important for another reason. It draws together the past and present (or at least, the latter 20th century). Holmes, who was in his twenties during the May 1968 protests in France, uses the experience of Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley in and after the French Revolution to illustrate his own generation’s ambiguous feelings towards the protests and what they achieved and failed to. Like any historian, Holmes naturally finds connections, and because of his focus on the personal over the general, these connections seem much more fresh and relevant, even to the modern reader, whose hopes for revolution may long have turned to ashes. They make the past immediate, and remind us that reading history is more than a school exercise, but rather gives us a new lens through which to view our own time.

In seeing how writers responded to their times, Holmes also gives us a new way of looking at more modern writers. How does Pynchon’s treatment of the 1960s and disillusionment compare to Shelley’s or Wordsworth’s once the French Revolution was done and dusted? Without biography, it can be hard to ask such questions – we don’t know where to begin.

A photograph of the poet Nerval, one of the subjects of Footsteps
Gérard de Nerval, a French poet whose madness alas was more permanent and fatal than that of Holmes’s. While I found the lack of translations frustrating, Holmes’s own increasingly deranged quest to understand Nerval more than made up for it.

Nerval – journey into madness

The treatment of the character of Gérard de Nerval – for where does the man Gérard Labrunie end and Nerval begin? – was for me the unexpected highlight of Footsteps. The poet himself I can’t say I encountered in any serious way, thanks to Holmes’s unwillingness to translate French quotes. What was interesting, however, was the way that as Holmes pursued Nerval through masses of confusing and often contradictory evidence, he himself began to feel that a normal biography would not be able to make sense of Nerval. Instead, there was an “overflowing of the irrational into the normal forms of biography”, in which Holmes began to believe that it was Tarot cards which held the key to the mystery, rather than books or facts.

In his search to “save” Nerval, Holmes finds himself “slipping further and further into a peculiar and perilous identification with my lunatic subject, as if somehow I could diagnose Nerval by becoming him”. When he finally finishes, he has seven different notebooks in seven different colours, like a kind of talisman. But he has found no answers. He has only succeeded, thankfully only temporarily, in losing himself. It is a final warning for us, that biography, like everything else, must be enjoyed in moderation. We should not seek to become our quarries, only to draw level with them. Otherwise we risk losing our very selves.

Conclusion – Following in Holmes’s Footsteps

I was recently at the museum-house of the poet and painter Max Voloshin, on the coast of the Black Sea. I had not heard of him, but at the museum we were given a detailed tour. He had built the house himself, and it is an insane mass of staircases and doors and secret passageways. One detail I loved was that the windows in Voloshin’s study were arranged so that the sunlight would get in his eyes at exactly midday, as a warning to the artist that it was time to take a break. I left that evening, determined to read him when I had the chance.

The next morning my girlfriend and I decided to visit Voloshin’s grave, which lies above the town at the top of a hill. The tradition is to bring a stone from the seashore up to him, and we both did. The walk took two hours as we fought sweltering heat and tumbling rocks to get to the top. But in the end we made it, and were met with his grave, covered with stones and pebbles, many of them signed with messages for the poet. We both added our own, then we went a little further, and sat down to enjoy the view.

The grave of Max Voloshin
The grave of Max Voloshin, covered with pebbles from the beach below. I was glad to make my own small literary pilgrimage, following in Holmes’s own footsteps.

I was glad, so soon after finishing Footsteps, to put into practice, in a small way, the ideas implicit in Holmes’s book. In climbing that hill I had made my relationship with an author, even one whose works I have not read, personal and active rather than simply passive. As I sat on the hill, looking out over the sea, I stopped, I thought, I breathed. And I felt grateful that I still have plenty of authors to love and plenty of time to love them. Read Footsteps, and then read everything else in the world!

Imagination’s Paradise? – Gerald Murnane’s Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

I read the Australian author Gerald Murnane’s novel The Plains last year, after coming across him in a long feature from the New York Times. The article paints him as an eccentric connoisseur of the imagination; a man who, though he has never left his small home region in Australia, nevertheless creates vast worlds within us, stretching our imagination in ways we hadn’t thought possible. I loved The Plains, though I wasn’t quite sure how to write about it. Although on a basic level it is the story of a man, come to the central plains of Australia to make a film about the place, the novel was really about the way that the simple idea of “the plains”, a central, apparently empty space, can actually contain a complex network of hidden meanings. How it’s much more than meets the eye.

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs is a collection of essays by Murnane, but even to call them that has its problems. Murnane’s fiction and non-fiction form a continuum, much as do the works of Borges, who Murnane cites as one of his inspirations. But where Borges makes his fictions essay-like and academic, Murnane makes his non-fiction oddly fictional. There is little concrete information here, and what we do read that might be factual never feels very reliable. Instead, what we get out of each of the essays collected in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs is an invitation into a kind of fugue state in which images melt into other images and our imagination is made child-like and free again.

The Cover of Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs shows a man riding a horse against a background showing a map of Hungary
The cover of Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs shows two of Murnane’s main obsessions – Horse Racing and Hungary. Both of them are discussed within the essays

Murnane has a poet’s sense for the magical potential of everyday objects to open up a world of associations, and the highest praise I can give the collection is to say that having finished it you go out into the world with fresh eyes, with the world itself equally fresh and made newly beautiful. But Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs isn’t without its problems, and a recommendation comes with certain caveats. For the book’s strengths, and its weaknesses, read on.

Spaces and Imagination

The essays in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs are chronologically ordered, and certain themes and ideas repeat throughout, although in each instance with a slightly different shade. One of the first major themes of the book is that of space, of empty space, and its potential. Murnane recounts in “On the Road to Bendigo: Kerouac’s Australian Life” how, as a child, he used to watch American films. He didn’t get much out of them – the action went too fast for him. Instead, he focused on the things which seemed unchangeable, stable. “The places where nothing seemed to happen.” The great brown vistas that lie behind the horse rider in a Western, for example. And over time Murnane began to fill the scenery, if not with action, then at least with his own ideas. He realised that “the way to understand a place” is “to turn your back on it”. To imagine.

And so Murnane reads Kerouac, and he reads Kerouac’s biographies, but he never boards a plane. Instead, in his head, he creates his own America, pieced together from Kerouac’s writings and those who write about him. If there is something that ties together the various essays of Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, it is this idea of the way that everything can be a tool for the creation of an inner, imaginary world within us. This has its dangers. Murnane’s infatuation with the imagination comes across almost solipsistic at times. He himself, in “The Breathing Author”, says that he acknowledges other people’s inner existences, but that he can only see other minds and their contents within the space of his own imagination, as a “landscape” his own mind’s “landscape”. While this may be true to how we understand each other, the way he emphasises it rather devalues individual human dignity…

“Stream System” and Associations of Images

Murnane is a mathematical writer. He likes his fictions to conform to shapes, like circles or triangles or whatever. Perhaps his most famous short story, which is also included among the essays here (another example of genre bending), is called “Stream System”. The narrator of the essay/story goes to a place which is marked on the map as “stream system”. This then sets off a chain of memories, thoughts, and associations, which eventually leads him to face repressed memories about his failure to be kind to his own brother, who died young and unloved. It is well done. We circle around the idea of this location on the map, but with each loop (as it were) the meaning of the water system changes, and new images are heaped on top of the old.

And meaning, the metonymic shifting of meaning, is key to Murnane’s whole project. As he writes, “my writing was not an attempt to produce something called “literature” but an attempt to discover meaning”. “Meaning” he later defines as what exists when he can see in his mind a thing “being connected to some other thing or things.” His whole fictional world concerns the creation of connections and meanings. In this, he stands awkwardly alongside postmodern writers like Don Delillo and Thomas Pynchon. Where they see conspiratorial connections in everything, Murnane seeks to connect apparently unrelated things together, finding in this act of connecting the very purpose of his work. It is, perhaps, an altogether more positive idea. Even though it is one that is very much divorced from the world itself.

Writing and its purpose

Murnane wanted to be a poet when he was young. And his writing, even in these essays, has a poetical quality to it. Not in the sense of a rhyme that creeps into the text. Rather, there is a hypnotic quality to Murnane’s rhythm and repetitions that borders the same world of free and childlike imagination that the best poetry does. It is, in a way, incantatory at times. And in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs there are a lot of details for one who wants to understand how he works. Not only is there the business of the stream system that I’ve mentioned above, but Murnane also quotes approvingly, on the subject of rhythm, the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson – “Each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself”.

For Murnane, writing is a way of creating meaning between images. But it also has the exorcism-like purpose that it does for other writers – he writes to remove things from himself. “My sentences arise out of images and feelings that haunt me – not always painfully; sometimes quite pleasantly. These images and feelings haunt me until I find the sentences to bring them into this world”. In the same way as Murnane turns other people into imaginations contained within his own imagination, his view of the purpose of literature is similarly unambitious. For him, it never explains anything, rather it simply serves to show “how stupendously complicated everything is”. He isn’t interested in creating living, breathing characters, so much as reflecting a real mind. What that means in practice is that his stories simply aim to make us believe that only his narrators are real. Believing the rest is unimportant.

Hungary, Horse Riding, Idiosyncrasies

Murnane is weird. He loves horse races, imagining decades of races and writing down their details over the course of his life. For him the best literature aspires to the condition of horse racing, and when he reads a good book he imagines it as a rider, approaching the finish on the field. He has never worn sunglasses, has never learned to swim. He has never gone voluntarily into an art gallery. He comes across, on multiple occasions in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, as a kind of aesthetic hermit. His influences – Borges, Calvino, Proust, and others – are all idiosyncratic, but with them I have never felt such a conscious retreat from the real world into the imagined one. Murnane often doesn’t seem interested in… well… anything.

Even books seem not to interest him in a serious way – he reads the same old ones over and over. And ultimately, the impression I had at times while I read Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs was not a positive one. We are taken from the world so brutally, so completely, that it’s hard not to miss it. His style itself becomes grating.

One of the biggest disappoints of the book for me was the final essay, “The Angel’s Son: Why I learned Hungarian Late in Life”. It is an exciting premise, but instead of answering it Murnane goes on another walk among past images, reaching the actual subject – Hungarian – very late in the essay. Of course, there are some beautiful turns of phrase – “if an English word or phrase is a pane of clear glass with something called a meaning on its far side, a Hungarian word is a pane of coloured glass. The meaning on the other side of that glass is apparent to me, but I can never be unaware of the rich tints of the glass.” – but that’s what Murnane’s good at. It’s not a surprise.

Even though the essay is in keeping with Murnane’s general style within Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed at the end. When I actually wanted to know something, the whole essay revealed itself to be akin to a construct of smoke and mirrors, and wholly unsatisfactory.

Conclusion

If you want to read Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs my recommendation comes with these warnings. There is almost nothing here, even though the nothingness is beautiful. Murnane’s style is unique, and the experience of being led into a world of the imagination is not without its charms. It’s also certainly true that his appreciation – ironically enough – of the objects of our world as sources of images is capable of leading us into the world, rather than away from it. But Murnane, it is fair to say, is one of those writers who is best sampled a few pages at a time. Reading Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs through within the space of a week, I felt especially keenly the problems of the work. Perhaps it has made me be unfair. Murnane is a unique writer, and certainly worth one’s time, but The Plains is a much more exciting book, and that’s the one I’d start with. If you’ve come across Murnane yourself and have a different view, why not leave a comment? He’s not the most accessible writer, and it may be that I just don’t know how to approach him.

An Aging Stoner’s Advice: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice

To have something by Thomas Pynchon recommended in any kind of studenty or similar context will likely elicit a groan from anyone who has already encountered him. What is the point, it’s well worth asking, in reading an author who fills his works with arcane knowledge, history, philosophy, poetry, and so on, when we are already steeping ourselves in such information at almost every moment of our waking lives, and at least for all that we might get a few positive words from a teacher at the end of it? Pynchon is known for his big stuff, monsters of novels like Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, often set in a meticulously crafted version of the past but dealing with the concerns of the present in ways both direct and more subtle. More than anyone else this side of 1900, Pynchon’s novels are novels of ideas.

So then, it is something of a surprise to come across Inherent Vice, a book which at 369 pages seems positively anaemic from Pynchon. The setting, California in 1970, is no grand historical gesture but rather straight out his own youth too – Tom was born in 1937. Regular Pynchon tomes aren’t devoid of drugs and danger, but here the cloud of weed smoke and cop-show crime-fighting violence that accompanies private eye hero Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello fits right in as just a sign of the times. The plot – and there is, more or less, a plot – is not too complicated either, at least compared with Gravity’s Rainbow’s. Doc is visited by an old girlfriend, Shasta Fey Hepworth, who tells him her current boyfriend, real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann, may be about to be kidnapped and brainwashed by his wife and her boyfriend on account of his, Mickey’s, decision that it was time to start giving back to the poor, instead of buying their houses for development. Only, Wolfmann gets kidnapped by someone else early on, dead men turn up alive, Shasta disappears, and Doc goes on a chase that may or may not be of the wild-goose variety, all while discovering clues about a shadowy group/business/drug cartel/boat called the Golden Fang. It is confusing, and I know I could have understood it more, but with Pynchon you know you’ve gone wrong when things start making sense, so it’s best just to focus on the ride.

And what a ride it is. Pynchon mashes genres – this is no stuffy academic prose you’ve got here. Cop shows, Raymond Chandler’s crime novels, the movies and books of the sixties are all at times parodied or played straight, giving the book an easy accessibility and light tone. “She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to” – the book’s opening sentence – drops it in a crime novel mood you just can’t tell whether to take seriously or not right from the get-go. “She” instead of a name suggests a femme fatale, adds mystery; “alley” and “back steps” are all standard locales for your crime scenes; and “always used to” adds history, flavour and colour to a relationship that means our detective won’t only have difficulties on the job. While the book is occasionally serious, at other times it’s more than happy to satirise its own world: one of my favourite descriptions was of a street looking “like a crime scene waiting on its next crime.”

Parody of genres isn’t the only way this book is funny. Pynchon’s humour is refreshingly moronic. One conversation between a black gangster and Doc ends with the former saying: “Sledge was right, you are one crazy white motherfucker.” Doc: “How can you tell?” Him: “I counted”. The characters all have idiotic names, packed with puns and other meanings. Even the pretentious presumption on the part of novels to tell us what to think is mocked by such advice as “Can’t say it often enough – change your hair, change your life” from Doc’s friend Sortilège. After one person is encased in concrete underneath a bridge a character says that it brings new meaning to the phrase “pillar of the community.” Pynchon’s humour is one of the main ways in which the novel consciously tries to avoid being a stuffy highbrow tome, and instead be a part of a relaxed cultural environment where the pleasure of the text doesn’t have to be mingled with the pain of trying to understand.

There is some meaning and thematic heaviness here, though, if that’s your cup of tea. Dealing with California at the beginning of the 70s is to deal with a community that is breaking up, a paradise that is rapidly being lost. The trials of Charles Manson and his followers are constantly referenced with fear and trepidation. Here was someone who had turned the hippie lifestyle and dreams of world peace on their head, with catastrophic results. Inherent Vice follows the music makers and dopers whose community Manson was just on the edge of. Growing police corruption is hinted at, and though Pynchon is more than happy to complain about his usual bogeyman – capitalism and its effect on humankind – he doesn’t just blame money and Henry Kissinger for destroying the dream of weed and wacky hair-dos. At one point Doc walks past a new music shop and sees a bunch of children listening to music, all using different headphones. “Doc was used to outdoor concerts where thousands of people congregated to listen to music for free, and where it all got sort of blended together into a single public self, because everybody was having the same experience. But here, each person was listening in solitude, confinement and mutual silence.” Technology and our relationship to it is as much to blame for the destruction of our community as is money. An “inherent vice”, a fault inside this seeming perfection, is the root of its eventual collapse. At another point, Doc watches a whole load of people sitting and watching TV, and all he feels for it is loneliness. That is the feeling that pervades the book, once the veneer of light humour and mad antics is brushed aside. The fear that the good days are ending, and things are only going to get worse if we’re not careful.

And all of these fears and worries, once we scrape away the satire and the humour, are delivered in a prose that is without a doubt among the most lyrical and beautiful being produced today. Because jokes aren’t serious enough for the honest concern that underlies the work. Listen to this sentence about Shasta, looking out to sea: “It wasn’t headlights – before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety”. The connections between people are what Doc, as a private eye, is all about. And it is these connections that are under threat by forces and human error, dragging people away from each other. In another moment of beauty and poignancy Pynchon writes of Doc and Shasta again: “Later they went outside, where a light rain was blowing in, mixed with salt spray feathering off the surf. Shasta wandered slowly down to the beach and through the wet sand, her nape in a curve she had learned, from times when back-turning came into it, the charm of. Doc followed the points of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool’s attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did. The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not. Shasta had nailed it. Forget who – what was he working for anymore?” The book doesn’t just tell us about the problems that face society, or rail against their causes. For perhaps the first time, Pynchon truly shows the human side of things, the effect of all this chaos and isolation on you and me.

The power of the work lies in the way that its themes – and there are far more than the ones I just mentioned – creep up on us when we least expect it. But that’s not to say the work is perfect – far from it: in fact, it’s one of the weaker novels Pynchon has produced. The jokes do occasionally fall flat, the whole thing is still confusing as ever; but more than anything else the smaller scale of the work means that these little foibles are not coated in the grandeur that a hefty tome rightly or wrongly usually manages to inspire. The writing is beautiful, but it’s hard here to forgive Pynchon’s reluctance to clarify what is going on – not in the sense of explaining the conspiracy, but rather just in reminding us, every so often who is doing what, and why. What makes this book accessible, and a good introduction to his work – its short length; its fewer, relatively well-made characters; and comparative closure at the end – are also the things that hurt it. The short length brings with it a different set of expectations on the part of the reader, and these it struggles to meet.

With all that said, Pynchon and Inherent Vice are still important for us as students and others who have to deal with swathes of knowledge on a day to day basis, and not only because even in Inherent Vice we find a book that is complex and filled with interesting and thought-provoking questions and themes. No, the importance is not in the themes, but in Pynchon’s attitude towards them. Most of the things we are forced to read at Cambridge or other universities are thematically dense by design, and when we write essays we go off with magnifying glasses, searching for key ideas and perfect little quoticles. In a world where every moment has to be useful and every article has to have import upon our next piece of work, Pynchon’s stoner’s voice telling us just to chill out and enjoy the ride could never be more timely. Of course there are things to be found, hidden themes and connections, but the book teaches us that they don’t need to matter, that our own enjoyment, and our own choices, always come first. Enjoy yourselves, smoke some weed if that’s your thing, and relax.