Further (Largely Uncomfortable) Meandering

 

Wednesday morning

 

The national memory of any people is a mixture of truth and myth. 

 

-      Madeline Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948

 

Not what I expected, this book, but in retrospect not surprising. The author, after all, was only born in 1937, and it was only in the following year, ten days after Nazis marched into Prague, that her parents were able to secure necessary papers to exit the country. The papers were necessary for leaving, and leaving was also necessary. A bare two weeks after Czechoslovakia’s future existence had been signed away at Munich, a newly formed Czecho-Slovak [note the difference in name] Defense Ministry asked for the dismissal of Madeline’s father, Joseph Körbel, from the diplomatic service. He had become a political undesirable. Besides his views and public positions, the Defense Ministry noted, “Dr. Körbel and his wife are Jews.” In that ten-day interim, the family slept in friends’ apartments and spent their days on the streets and cafes, to avoid the Nazi dragnet.

 

The author was a tiny child in the Prague of that time and spirited to safety in England as quickly as her parents could arrange it. She would, however, grow up to earn a doctorate in history, and a visit years later to the place of her birth (Prague: May 15, 1927) would not be complete for her without seeing it in historical context. Thus “Part I: Before March 15, 1939” of the book is not memoir but the product of research and delivers a blow-by-blow account of the history of Czechoslovakia and Prague leading up to March 25, 1939. 

 

This book is obviously not comfort reading or escape literature. Seeing Germany gobble up more and more of Europe, page by page, is all the more painful since a reader knows what will follow, while at the same time seeing a series of decisions made by leaders and diplomats who did not have a vision of what was to come. 

 

…The war in Europe was still months away. When it did come, it was expected to be over quickly. Nazi prison camps, such as Dachau, housed dissidents regardless of race.

 

It was an anxiety-ridden, confusing, depressing, hostile, and saber-rattling “calm” before the storm of the Second World War, a long, drawn-out horror that appeasement did nothing to prevent.

 

I am also still reading Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, by Mari Sandoz. About two-thirds of the way through the book, knowing what lies ahead for the principals, I am living vicariously alongside them with a heavy heart.

Wednesday evening

 

What can be said of a bookstore customer who orders books and then brings them back to loan to the bookseller to read? That’s a reading friend! “I’m just glad you’re interested,” she told me. So this afternoon at the bookstore I started reading Having and Being Had, by Eula Biss. After that I’ll read the same author’s Notes from No Man’s Land, but my reading friend recommended that I start with Having and Being Had, “because it won’t break your heart like the other one.” Forewarned. Although history has been breaking my heart over and over for years, as has politics.

 

(Notice that I have set aside Crazy Horse and Madeline Albright for a Eula Biss session. This is typical of my reading life.)

 

Having and Being Had is a book of nonfiction. It is a collection of very short personal essays, often anecdotal in nature, that take us with the author as she explores the role of economics in our everyday lives. You think you know about the game of Monopoly™? Well, I certainly found the story surprising! 

 

When Biss gets into the question of class, I recall my brother-in-law telling us on Monday, as four of us in masks rode in the Artist’s big Chevrolet station wagon to Traverse City, Empire, Glen Arbor, and back home, “This is the way two lower-class couples ride together: men in front, women in the back.” Middle-class couples, he told us, would sit with their spouses, while an upper-class foursome would mix mates for the length of the drive. Really? I have always just thought that (1) most men have longer legs, so (2) when one man is driving, it makes sense for the other man to be the front-seat passenger. Also, (3) that older people divide up riders this way. I’d never thought of it as a class thing. But author Eula Biss says that her husband can identify from a distance people who grew up in his boyhood neighborhood, not because he knows or ever knew the particular people, but because the fact that you grew up on the South Side is “written on your body.”

 

Although the foregoing paragraph contains random thoughts, I am not writing down every thought from every short chapter’s essay, because almost every sentence I read generates associations and ideas and speculations that would run into whole paragraphs. 

Thursday morning

 

Bicycles have the same rights and duties as motor vehicles. But being governed by the same laws doesn’t produce equality.

 

-Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

 

Stop and think about that a moment. Then read on. 

 

A bicycle doesn’t occupy a full lane, is rarely granted the three-foot passing margin required by law, and must use signals not everyone understands. Bicycles belong to a different class and they can’t expect to be treated like cars. And so, bicycles break the rules, riding through stop signs and red lights. Like the people who occupy neighborhoods that are overpoliced and underpoliced, bicycles know that what keeps them safe on the street is not the law, but their own vigilance, quickness, and wit.

 

I admire the way the writer has personified the modes of transportation, having them stand in for the riders and drivers the law actually covers. I think it makes her point more effectively and facilitates the neighborhood analogy she brings at the end.

 

The value of art, the artist’s life, the ‘precariat’ as a class – all this I read this morning in the dark. But then, “The Hug”! What a horrible little story that is! I am so sorry she acquiesced! …And yet, in the scale of the world’s horrors, I realize one this small barely registers at all.

 

Friday morning

 

I picked up Madeline Albright again last night, joining the family in London:

 

…As refugees in London that summer, we had plenty of company. Jews and other antifascists arrived from Germany, Austria, Poland and our own Czechoslovakia. The British had quotas that limited the number of adults, but an exception was made for unaccompanied children under seventeen years of age. 

 

A humanitarian program, the Kindertransport, had begun rescuing Jewish children from Germany and Austria….

 

Is there a word that jumps out at you in that first quoted paragraph? Maybe more than one, but how about antifascists? The word appears again in subsequent pages, and every time I see it I think of a president of the United States who thinks that being antifascist is a bad thing, and I ask myself how this can be possible in my country. Does he imagine we should support fascism? Remain neutral? Would he have American citizens fleeing for their lives to other, safer countries?

 

“So long as grass shall grow and water flow,” the treaties with the Native American tribes read. “All men are created equal,” reads the Declaration of Independence. And yet -- a history of broken promises and cruel exceptions, offset by periods of self-conscious and fumbling attempts to do better and to make amends.

 

Sunday morning

 

I picked up and brought home last night an old novel from 1909, The Making of Bobby Burnit, by George Randolph Chester. It looked to be a Horatio Alger-type story of the period, but riches-to-riches rather than rags-to-riches. That is, the son of a wealthy merchant inherits the retail business and has to prove himself under strange terms set in his father’s will. 

 

The story proceeds slowly in the beginning – nice young man, spoiled by life, keeps proposing to nice young woman who won’t give him an answer, etc. Then gradually begins a cascade of bad business decisions and money lost. But the book only really got interesting to me (and I wasn’t looking so much for interest as for relaxation) when Bobby bought a newspaper and resolved to launch a campaign against corruption in his town. (There is a surprising amount of detail on investments and municipal utilities.) The newspaper, too, was a money-losing proposition at first (advertising revenue plummets), but this is a novel, the young man has more of his inheritance in reserve, and all comes right in the end. 

 

In books from this era, it’s interesting to examine the publisher’s lists of other titles at the end of the story. How many of the listed authors, so popular in 1909, are still read today? Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle stand out from the crowd. Ellen Glasgow’s name, too, I hope rings a bell. Literary fame in general, however, is a fleeting thing for most. We remember many more politicians and fighters, even those who fall into the evil category, than the writers of yesterday. Is there a lesson in that fact?

 

Coming Back to Tell You More

My Bohemian Neighborhood

On Monday evening, out in the shade of a basswood tree, I finished Karel Capek's War With the Newts. When I first picked it up and began reading, I skipped the introduction to go straight to the story, and so I was expecting something other than what I found in the book's pages. Finally, about halfway through the book, I turned back to read the introduction. What I'd expected, you see, was some kind of roman à clef, a fictionalized account of political events of the post-WWI period in Czechoslovakia, and I wondered how much, if anything, I would understand of the story. Well, it isn't that at all.

Capek's scope is broader, his vision wider, and both plot and characters are much more original (I'm guessing) than any thinly disguised series of events between the two world wars would exhibit. I mean, a colony of surviving prehistoric newt-like creatures bred as cheap labor that eventually become "civilized" enough to overtake the world? Really?

Given that Capek was of the same generation as Kafka, it is astonishing how well the warnings of this very innovative novel speak to our twenty-first century world. Suspicion and fear of the Other, of course, are nothing new in human life. Today's unblinking focus on globalization, however -- the insatiable hunger for global markets, ruthless competition for faster, higher profits and ever-cheaper labor, the resulting instability and upheaval and terror in one part of the world after another -- all these facets of our world today can be found in The War with the Newts.

The story begins with a Dutch ship's captain who encounters the "creatures" off a South Seas island. Natives are afraid of them and call them "devils," but the captain sees possibilities in their ability to dive for pearl-bearing oysters, and especially in the little value the creatures place on the pearls. He trades them knives for pearls, after a while other tools for pearls, and the newts (not yet called 'newts' in the story) quickly gain an advantage over their one natural enemy, sharks.

It is the sea captain's meeting with a "captain of industry" that unleashes the eventual Newt Age upon the world. At first all is positive, everyone seeing nothing but an enlargement of prosperity -- for humans, anyway, if not for enslaved newts:

Real self-respecting men of the Newt Age will no longer waste their time pondering about the substance of things [questions of religion and philosophy]; they will only be concerned with their quantity and mass production. The whole future of the world lies in the continuous increase in production and consumption; therefore there must be still more Newts to produce and to devour still more.

Shallow-water, ocean-living creatures, the newts' special skill is in constructing dams offshore, and so they are shipped around the world and set to work building land, so that countries with ocean shoreline might increase their territory. Worldwide trade in newts is big money, uncomfortably like slave trade. Although of course those trading in newts and buying them as laborers insist that the newts are very well treated, groups form to agitate for newts' education (they quickly acquire languages) and rights. International conferences are held, international agreements hammered out by nation-states, but the newts are citizens of no state, and so no state feels obliged to negotiate with them directly. The newts, however, multiply much more quickly than the humans....

When Captain Van Toch first comes to the door of G. H. Bondy to discuss the opportunity awaiting anyone with the foresight to exploit the clever newts, Bondy's doorman, or porter, Mr. Povondra, might have turned him away. Van Toch was not known to Mr. Povondra and had no appointment. But for some reason he sees the visitor in, a very small decision that has very large consequences for the entire world and the future of the human race. And so, for several years, Mr. Povondra is an avid reader of newspapers and collector of clippings about the newts.

Mr. Povondra received day by day whole bales of documents in all the languages of the world, of which especially the papers printed in Cyrillic or in the Greek alphabet, in the Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Bengali, Tamil, Javanese, Burmese or Taalik script filled him with pious respect. "When I only realize," he used to murmur over them, "that all this would not have been without me!"

He is proud to have had, though a person very modestly placed, nowhere near centers of political power, a pivotal role in world history. With later events, his pride becomes regret, but there is no going back.

Capek's manner of telling his story borrows generously from nonfiction. He uses the format of newspaper articles in some sections, quotes from propaganda, scientific papers and presentation, and he makes extensive and occasionally hilarious use of footnotes. Some footnotes go on for several pages and take on the feel of short pieces of fiction in themselves.

Why is Capek's novel (he also wrote plays) nowhere near as famous as the works of Kafka? In the final chapter of The War with the Newts, the author argues with himself:

"...Listen, do you really want to let the whole of mankind perish?" 

The author frowned. "Don't ask me what I want. Do you think that through my will human continents are falling to bits, do you think that I wanted this to happen? It is simply the logic of events; as if I could intervene. I did what I could; I warned them in time.... I preached, don't let the Newts have arms and explosives, stop that hideous trade in Salamanders, well--you know what happened. They all had a thousand absolutely sound economical and political reasons why it's impossible. I'm not a politician or an economist; I can't change their opinions, can I? What is one to do? The earth will probably sink and drown; but at least it will be the result of generally acknowledged political and economic ideas, at least it will be accomplished with the help of the science, industry, and public opinion, with the application of all human ingenuity! No cosmic catastrophe, nothing but state, official, economic, and other causes. Nothing can be done to prevent it."

In Capek's novel the humans, by using newts to enlarge land for nations, diminished the shallow seas necessary for the newts' survival. It was only a matter of time before the exploding newt population demanded their seas back. The humans had dug their own grave.

Science fiction, political satire, dark humor, fanciful dystopia, innovative literature. War With the Newts is all that and deserves to be better known and widely read. If you don't believe me, here is someone else's pitch for the book.

*  *  *  *  *

In a much happier frame of mind, we will visit freshwater shoreline on Thursday evening, beginning at 7 o’clock, when photographer Ken Scott and painter Kaye Krapohl come to Dog Ears Books to share their stories behind the beautiful book featuring their work, Leelanau Trek: One Shoreline, Two Visions. Please join us!

Recently: Eastern Europe and Me

Kathleen Stocking’s essay about her Peace Corps teaching experience in Romania probably kicked it off. “Something Else Week” is the title of one of the essays in Kathleen’s new book, The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale.  Then, can Russia be considered Eastern Europe in some sense? Letters from Russia, by a Frenchman who traveled to Russia in 1839, surprised me by how much 19^th-century czarist Russia sounded like things I’d read and heard about life in the U.S.S.R. in the 20^th century.

The late Tony Judt wrote of past and present all over the world, but one of his special areas of interest and expertise was Eastern Europe, a geographic area he felt had been sorely neglected by Western historians. While I may never make my war entirely through Postwar, many of Judt’s essays posthumously edited by his widow and published under the title When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010 either focus on or somehow make reference to Eastern Europe.

Halfway through my reading of the Judt collection, I plucked from my bookstore shelves Cafe Europa: Life After Communism, by Slavenka Dakulic, and took it home to read. Cafe Europa is a book that’s been in the shop for a while now, without anyone buying it and carrying it off – luckily for me, or I might have missed reading it. The author, born in Croatia in 1949, writes of the changes her native land has seen in her lifetime and the difficulty of shaking habits, mental and social, that may be holding back the arrival of truly responsible democratic citizens. Again and again in Drakulic’s essays comes the theme of the rewriting of history, still going on in Eastern Europe although Communism is gone.

Tony Judt was concerned with rewritten history, also, as was the Marquis de Custine when trying to understand Russia under the czars and where it might go from there. You might say that an interest in Eastern Europe leads naturally to a concern for honest history, given the way the subject has been mistreated in that part of the world. Not only there, of course, but to an important and serious extent, beginning in the past and continuing in the present. Another feature common to Judt’s and Drakulic’s essays is the idea that “Europe,” as a unitary place, the salvation of smaller countries from Russia to the Atlantic and the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean, is itself a myth, a vague article of faith with little correspondence to reality.

Time for a switch to fiction – and what jumped out at me? War with the Newts, by Karel Capek, with a little upside-down caret over the ‘C’ that I can’t find in my “insert symbol” menu. This novel, “considered by many to be Capek’s greatest book,” is in the “satiric tradition of Wells, Orwell, and Vonnegut,” according to the blurb on the back. I also find there this account of the author:

Karel Capek (1890-1928) earned recognition as a journalist, playwright, and novelist in Prague before and just after the First World War. In the Czech Republic of the 1920s, his reputation was broadened by the international acclaim that greeted his play R.U.R. as well as subsequent novels and stories....

What did I expect? Whatever it was, it wasn’t what I found inside the covers of this paperback novel. This “Eastern European” novel, at least as far as I’ve read so far, is set mainly in the South Seas, where the captain of a freight-carrying and pearl-fishing expedition boat encounters a colony of – well, we are not sure yet what they are. Newts? Lizards? Tritons? They live in the ocean but are very dexterous and quick verbal learners. Preyed upon by sharks, the tapas (as the narrator calls them, following local native practice) bring up pearl-bearing oysters to the captain subsequently trade him pearls for knives, and eventually learn not only how to open oysters with the knives but how to use them to kill sharks. The plot has thickened considerably! What next? I’ll let you know how it goes. The real question will be how much of the political satire I am able to decode from the story.

And in my Bohemian country neighborhood, as you can see, the farms are doing well.