Nudity Explains the Darkness

Paul Swenson reading at Ken Sanders Rare Books

He loved women, Bel Cluff told me as we left the memorial service for Paul Swenson.


You have a wonderful family, I told Fae Ellsworth, a radiant woman—one of Paul's numerous sisters, I presumed— who had read her funny and intimate poem "How to Be Paul Swenson"early in the service.


I'm not Paul's sister, she said. I've been his lover for the past decade.


Barbara Bernstein, also not Paul's sister, read a eulogy that began with a statement about how since Paul's death she had had a single focused repeated set of thoughts: about the plan of salvation.


No, not that plan of salvation, she said. 


The Mormon Bishop would, somewhat awkwardly but with blessed concision, after remarking he had never witnessed an event like this one, lay out that plan at the end of the service.


A line from one of Paul's poems remarks on the Bishop's remark, something like this: "I baptized her and washed away all her sins—plot line thins at this point." 


I mean Paul's plan of salvation, Bernstein continued. Every time he saw you he would do or say something to make your life better.


Eulogies abounded, as did poems by Paul and this one by his  sister May (of Beat Generation fame), read by their sister Beth Swenson Hall:

“Feel me to do right,” our father said on his deathbed.
We did not quite know—in fact, not at all—what he meant.
His last whisper was spent as through a slot in a wall.
He left us a key, but how did it fit? 
. . .
“Lie down with me, and hold me, tight. Touch me. Be
with me. Feel with me. Feel me to do right.”

At once familial and sexy, May's poem could have been written by Paul. They both loved women.


Paul, weeks before his death, wrote "Nudity Explains the Darkness" (thank you Bel for the signed copy) in which, in the context of dipping chocolates and dipping bodies in the dark in a hot tub, Paul remembers the AP reporter denied entrance to a Priesthood meeting in the Mormon Tabernacle because she was a woman wearing pants. She returned, Paul writes: "in low-cut dress, / and there, associated press of male / attention pondered golden crucifix / that burned between her breasts."


Paul even loved his phlebotomist (December 2011):


"My phlebotomist / finds my tiny vein / first prick. Even though / I'm a 'hard stick,' / as she calls it (as if I didn't know). . . . Not her looks that haunt me, / but that she wants / my fluid, and reads my EKG."


Doesn't surprise me at all that they want his fluid and to read his heart.


Nor does it surprise me that Paul's absence is powerful as the day wears on.


It does surprise me how little grief was in the air at the service. Raw grief, I mean. There were plenty of deep feelings, well expressed.


But where were the sobs, the tears, the distraught faces? Did we celebrate too well?

Creating chaos out of anarchy for a better tomorrow

I have often claimed that Ken and his store are the cultural center of Utah. For a recent gallery stroll, Ken featured the powerful paintings of his friend "El Pastor," attempting to raise money for the asylum Mr. Galvan runs in Ciudad Juarez for drug addicts who have lost their minds.


They're still on display and still for sale and the cause is still worthy.

B. Traven, The Death Ship, Das Totenschiff

I've finished reading The Death Ship and The Bridge in the Jungle,  novels by the mysterious B. Traven.

Ken Sanders (proprietor of Salt Lake's artistic and intellectual center -- Ken Sanders Rare Books) recommended The Death Ship the last time I was in his store. Editions of Traven are one of his specialties, along with books by Ed Abbey and any number of other pricey books.

Ken said that he and Charles Bowden (see my review of Bowden's Dreamland in an earlier post) have an ongoing argument about which is Traven's best book. Ken thinks it is The Death Ship. Chuck thinks it is The Bridge in the Jungle.

Before reading these two books, I had only read The Treasure of the Sierre Madre.

After reading The Death Ship, I'm thoroughly enamored of B. Traven and his sarcastic narrator, a man without a state, without a passport, without sailor's papers, who has to work as a coal drag on a death ship, the only kind of ship that will take on a sailor without papers.

His work is perilous, exhausting, poorly paid. His sarcasm is aimed at exploitative capitalism.  His sympathies are with immigrants and working people:

"Why passports? Why immigration restriction? Why not let human beings go where they wish to go. . . .? Human beings must be kept under control. . . . For what reason? . . . Expanding markets and making large profits are a religion. It is the oldest religion perhaps, for it has the best-trained priests, and it has the most beautiful churches; yes, sir."

The descriptions of pride in work well done, even in the context of danger and exploitation, resonate in my memory of work on drilling rigs. The smart mouth and disrespect of authority echo in my mind as well.

There's also the mystery of the book, of the actual paperback copy Ken found for me after I rejected the fine $50 edition he first showed me. I paid $6 for a book marked $5 after it originally sold for $1.25 (click on the image to the right to expand it). It's well worn. It had been read before I got it. The pages are coming unglued. The back and covers are stained by dirty hands. Feels just right for a coal shoveler in a death ship.

Who read it before I did?

Who held it?

What did they think? Feel?

As for The Bridge in the Jungle, its wry narrator is a gringo who works in the Mexican jungle. He happens on a village next to an oil-field bridge over a river. During the couple of days he stays there, he attends a dance, or what would be a dance if the musicians would show up. In the dark, waiting for the musicians, a boy falls from the bridge (at fault are the shoes his brother has just brought him from Texas, where he works in an oil field; they keep him from feeling the bridge with his bare feet) and dies. The drawing of the cover shows the boy's head with a paper crown made for him as they are dressing him for burial.

Almost the entire novel takes place during that one night. The narrator's descriptions of people and their customs are detailed and rooted in contrasts between civilized and native cultures. In scope, focusing on that single event, it feels more like a novella than a novel.

I like it very much. And although I admire Chuck Bowden's taste in books (I recently readBaxter's amazing Paris Trout on his recommendation), I'm siding with Ken on this one. The Death Ship, at least for me, is the more powerful work.

And who was this enigma B. Traven? The Wikepedia article on him and his work starts this way:

B. Traven (February, 1882? – March 26, 1969?) was the pen name of a German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. A rare certainty is that B. Traven lived much of his life in Mexico, where the majority of his fiction is also set—including his best-known work, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927), which was adapted as the Academy Award nominated film of the same name in 1948.

Virtually every detail of Traven's life has been disputed and hotly debated. There were many hypotheses on the true identity of B. Traven, some of them wildly fantastic. Most agree, that Traven was Ret Marut, a German stage actor and anarchist, who supposedly left Europe for Mexico around 1924. There are also reasons to believe that Marut/Traven's real name was Otto Feige and that he was born in Schwiebus in Brandenburg, modern day Świebodzin in Poland. B. Traven in Mexico is also connected with Berick Traven Torsvan and Hal Croves, both of whom appeared and acted in different periods of the writer's life. Both, however, denied being Traven and claimed that they were his literary agents only, representing him in contacts with his publishers.

B. Traven is the author of twelve novels, one book of reportage and several short stories, in which the sensational and adventure subjects combine with a critical attitude towards capitalism, betraying the socialist and even anarchist sympathies of the writer. B. Traven's best known works include the novels The Death Shipfrom 1926 and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre from 1927, in 1948 filmed by John Huston, and the so-called Jungle Novels, also known as the Caoba cyclus (from the Spanish word caoba, meaning mahogany), a group of six novels (including The Carreta, Government), published in the years 1930-1939, set among Mexican Indians just before and during the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century. B. Traven's novels and short stories became very popular as early as the interwar period and retained this popularity after the war; they were also translated into many languages. Most of B. Traven's books were published in German first and their English editions appeared later; nevertheless the author always claimed that the English versions were the original ones and that the German versions were only their translations. This claim is not taken seriously.

BIOGRAPHIES: PETER HANDKE AND ALEX CALDIERO

I've been thinking about biography lately, thoughts occasioned by Travis Low's and Torben Bernhard's film about the life and work of my friend Alex Caldiero and by a new biography of Austrian writer Peter Handke written by Malte Herwig. 


They're very different works, and not just because one is a film and one a book. Still, they both purport to present a life. I exchanged e-mails with Malte Herwig and, at his request, sent him a copy of my "A Reasonable Dictionary," the account of traveling up the Drina River with Handke and Zarko Radakovic between the wars in Yugoslavia. And for the DVD of the film, available through Ken Sanders Rare Books, Travis and Torben asked me to write an essay, which begins as follows:

Fixing the Sonosopher

by Scott Abbott

About three years ago I was bathing with a young man whose development at that time had a wonderful grace about it. . . . As it happened we had just seen, in Paris, the youth pulling a thorn out of his foot. . . . Resting his foot on a stool, to dry it, and glancing at himself as he did so in a large mirror, he was reminded of the statue; he smiled and told me what he had seen. . . . He raised his foot a second time, to show me; but the attempt, very predictably, failed. In confusion he raised his foot a third time, a fourth, again and again, a dozen times: in vain. He was incapable of reproducing the movement. . . . From that day, or from that very moment, forth the young man underwent an unbelievable transformation. He began spending days in front of the mirror; and one after the other all his charms deserted him. (From Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Puppet Theatre,” translation by David Constantine)

            About three weeks ago I had lunch with a man of my age whose performances as a “Sonosopher” have a wonderful, if sometimes terrible, grace about them. We spoke about a film he had recently collaborated on. After seeing himself through the camera’s eye, Alex said, he has been unable to reproduce the movements, the gestures, the sounds the camera recorded. At least he can no longer do so naturally. His charms, he fears, have deserted him.

            I mentioned the young man in Kleist’s essay.

            Exactly, he said. I’ve been robbed of the grace of un-self-conscious movement. I’ve been pinned to a specimen board for observation.

            You feel like you’ve been fixed? I asked.

Yes, he answered. The film has fixed me, neutered me. How do I continue? My work is process, my media are temporal, sonorous, fleeting.

To what extent is that true? I wondered later. Has this film, in fact, fixed the Sonosopher?

As with all works of art, from one version to the next there’s a sense of panic brought on by the knowledge that the composer or writer or painter or filmmaker will have to settle on the final, fixed version, knowing all the time that it is just one of an infinite number of versions. Documentary films of a certain kind work to make their audiences forget that fact, constructing a seamless and supposedly truthful narrative. This, I take it, is what Alex most feared.

Because theirs too is a documentary film, Travis Low and Torben Bernhard are generically bound to reach for a truthful or even Platonic portrayal of their subject. But because the person casting most of the shadows is Alex Caldiero, a self-described “recovering Platonist,” and because Low and Bernard have made their film after Nietzsche’s assertion that “truth is a mobile army of metaphors,” this film approaches fixed forms with trepidation. Like Caldiero’s lifework, the film longs for the transcendental signifier while anchoring itself in epistemological humility.

The film begins with a blurred image of a belltower seen from below; indistinct lights flicker to the wavering tone of a guitar; the sound of breathing precedes the poet’s voice: “I want to go where the sound goes after the bell stops ringing.” “I’ve always been blessed with visions,” Alex asserts later. And yet the most revealing statement of what the silent sound is or what the vision reveals is the performance for Park City television of “This is not it.” As long as the transcendent remains articulate, the words must insist that “this is not it.” And when the words break under the load of meaning, when they reach beyond themselves, they cannot articulately state what “it” is and must eventually return to “this is not it.”

The film performs this double dance as exquisitely as does Caldiero. . . .
The essay continues with examples of scenes that call themselves into question and thus reinforce their truthfulness; and it ends with these thoughts:
In the context of the entire documentary film, the set of black-and-white discussions Alex has with the camera, the last of which shows Alex shutting his eyes tight and then saying “I close my eyes. Please, now close yours,” introduces a self-consciousness about the whole idea of film that asserts and questions simultaneously. These brilliant scenes, shot by the filmmakers but constructed by the Sonosopher himself, make clear that this is not Low’s and Bernhard’s film about Caldiero. This is performance from beginning to end, joint performance, collaborative performance, the work of a trio of artists working in various media.

Finally, for this essay too must come to an inevitable end, I’ll end with the scene in which Alex stands in Salt Lake’s Gilgal Sculpture Garden and explains the “Joseph Smith Sphinx.” “Joseph Smith,” Alex, says “was a seer and a revelator. A prophet and a charlatan of God. He was a coyote figure, you know, the dark/light figure, that told the greatest truths in the greatest lies. . . . What a sweetheart.” A sweetheart, of course, just like Alex himself.

And, it turns out, just like the makers of this sonosphistic film. A fantastic marriage of filmart and sonosophy raises the film from documentary to performance, exhibiting charms that will desert neither the Sonosopher nor the filmmakers because they are temporal charms, fluid charms, seriously ironic charms.

In contrast, Malte Herwig's biography of Peter Handke, called "Master of Twilight," is a study in frustration. 
I should state here that although the book frustrates me, it also held my attention from beginning to end. After reading I have a fuller sense for parts of Handke's life I had seen only peripherally. At best the book lays out a basic chronological set of events, tying together events of Handke's life in an interesting account. It emphasizes throughout the almost autistic nature of Handke's response to the world (although this grows old quickly). I realize that no biography can bring the whole life, choices have to be made, and there are many possible biographies. Still, the book seems to have missed something critical for any life of Peter Handke.
 The tension begins already in the foreword: "Thus the biographer cannot be led by what might be pleasant, advantageous, or desirable for the story. Rather he must read and research without prejudice. As a result, what follows is nothing but the truth." 
How can a Harvard-trained Germanist let slip such a sentence? As Gadamer argued in his "Truth and Method," our only hope to understand difficult things begins with our pre-judgments. The Enlightenment's prejudice against prejudice was itself a prejudice. Prejudices must be used and lifted off simultaneously, Gadamer wrote. More importantly, Peter Handke's life work has undermined so-called truth in favor of story and myth and the poetic creation of "truth." How, then, can a reader of Handke's works claim that what follows is nothing but the truth? How can this biographer write his supposed truth while completely ignoring the supple dialectic Handke's sentences might have taught him?
For example, these sentences from Handke's "A Journey to the Rivers," his attempt to give admittedly personal words to the land of the Serbs in the face of almost unanimous media distortion (and this too is a kind of biography):
But I was also drawn simply to see the country that of all the countries of Yugoslavia was least known to me and that, perhaps because of the news reports and opinions about it, had come to attract me most strongly, the so-to-speak most interesting (along with the alienating rumors about it).  Nearly all the photographs and reports of the last four years . . . seemed to me, over time even more so, to be simple mirrorings of the usual coordinated perspectives. . . .  I felt the need to go behind the mirror; I felt the need to travel into the Serbia that became, with every article, every commentary, every analysis, less recognizable and more worthy of study, more worthy simply of being seen.
 Handke wants to see well, he wants to describe without ideological distortion, he wants "justice for Serbia" in the media; but he never claims truth outside the conflicts of dialectic. We make our truths, some better than others, and the better ones come, at least for my taste, when we're aware of their constructed nature.
Herwig finds his biographical truth in letters and notebooks and interviews, many of which haven't been available before. These are the highlights of the book. Michael Roloff, Handke's first American translator, wrote recently that a 1000-page biography of Handke consisting of nothing but such documents would be the best of all biographies (see his wonderfully wild and wooly take on Herwig's biography at his Handke-Discussion blog). There are pages in the biography that are themselves worth the entire price of the book. The end papers, for instance, reproduce two pages from one of Handke's notebooks, complete with the leaves he has tucked into the notebook. Reproductions from another notebook show three drawings Handke did of his friend Nicolas Born while Born was dying. They are agonizing approximations, three brutal because loving perspectives.
In addition to these archival gems, Herwig also gathers his "truth" from Handke's works of fiction, reading the novel Long Letter, Short Farewell, for example, as an accurate description of the trip Handke and Kolleritsch and Libgart Schwarz took in America. Handke's novels are rich with his own experiences; but surely a biographer must take into account the fact that those experiences are subsequently shaped by the contexts of the fiction. In a biography, bald-faced quotations from novels raise more questions than they answer. At least for this reader, they can't be trusted

Handke once claimed in an  interview with André Müller that “No one will find anything really personal about me, and what I have published is a total disguise.” Herwig ignores this, except when he is contradicting it. Describing an exchange of letters between Handke and his high-school German teacher Reinhard Musar, Herwig writes that Musar felt bad about a depiction of the main character's German teacher in the novel Repetition. Handke reassured his mentor, Herwig claims, "with the oldest excuse of literary history, with reference to poetic freedom: 'That is not your portrait in the book, the teacher from Villach has become independent and is a recurring friendly figure in the narrative frieze.'" Handke states the obvious. Herwig dismisses it as an excuse. And for me, there's no excuse for that.

I could say more about the book, about the unfortunate design that squeezes tiny photos into awkward inner margins, about awkward and even naive psychologizing; but it's really the idea of the possibility of biography that I'm interested in. 

Zarko Radakovic and I once thought about a possible biography of Peter Handke, and wrote about our travels from southern Austria into what is now Slovenia in the footsteps of Repetition's main character. Ultimately, however, it came to seem a ridiculous undertaking. We weren't competent to write about the life of another person (is anyone?). Rather, we loved the work Peter Handke has produced; and we were fascinated by how that work might help us as we constructed our own lives.

Here a few lines from Zarko's and my book Repetitions: Travel into the Landscape of a Novel: 


In the opening scene of William Golding’s The Paper Men, an aging, alchoholic writer nearly shoots a young would-be biographer who is rooting through his rubbish.  The novel ends as the would-be biographer, repeatedly frustrated by the uncooperative novelist, shoots him. . . .

The Stift, a former monastery, is in disrepair.  Crumbling bricks disfigure what was once a smooth plaster coat.  Beer and sausage booths, part of Griffen’s pentacostal celebration, are being dismantled by workmen in the rain.  By some of the workmen.  The others lift glasses in the pub that now occupies the southeast corner of the huge building.

Surrounded by a high, crumbling, brick-and-wood wall, the graveyard lies on the west side of the building.  With little trouble we locate Maria Handke’s well-tended grave.  No longer an outsider.

“Maria Handke / 8.10.1920 - 20.11.1971” it says on the smooth front of the otherwise uncut stone.  A wooden cross fronts the stone: “Bruno Handke, died 21.3.88.”  I photograph Zarko as he stands in front of the grave, umbrella at a slant, his hands busy with pen and notebook.  He photographs me in a similar stance.  Assiduous scholars.  Pious pilgrims.

Over the church’s massive front door hangs a statue of Mary, her foot balanced delicately on the neck of a fine green dragon.  We swing open the heavy worm-eaten door and enter a working church housed in a partial ruin.  Rich altar rugs lie on platforms of unpainted pine.  Oak pews shine with woodwax and use.  The scent of mildew.  Pyramidal piles of drifted plaster gather at the base of disintegrating walls.

Inside the entrance, German and Slovenian signs give directions to the confessional.  German-language pamphlets are stacked in ragged piles on a table to the left and a table to the right displays similar pamphlets in Slovenian.  The naive paintings of fourteen naive stations of the cross circling the church have Slovenian captions: “1. Statio  Jesus je k’smerti obsojen.”

Fat little red prayer and song books (Gotteslob).  Woven from red, gold, and purple threads, three attached bookmarks dangle from each volume.  Leafing through one I find the stations of the cross.  The book’s subtitle is “Eigentum der Kirche” (Property of the Church).  I decide that is a misnomer and slip the book into my pocket (actually, Zarko’s pocket; he has loaned me a good wool jacket for the trip).

“Monastery Church Maria Ascension (Haslach): The church has its origins in the 13th century, but was much altered in the following centuries.  It received its west facade (Baroque) in the 18th century.  Inside romanesque style dominates.  The stone Madonna from 1520 is late gothic.  Left and right from her, next to the high altar from the eighteenth century, are Saint Augustinus and Saint Norbert.  In addition numerous gravestones and coats-of-arms from the 15th through the 18th century deserve attention. . . . notable stuccos . . . scholars, however, do not agree whether these stuccos can be attributed to the artist Kilian Pittner (1700).”

Is this the kind of thing I will be doing to Handke?  “Peter Handke has his origins in the decade of the Third Reich, was, however, much altered in the following decades. . . .  Within, postmodern style dominates.  The book published in 1986, however, is postpostmodern. . . .  Also deserving attention . . . scholars, however, do not agree, whether. . . .”

However, however, however.  It makes me want to throw up.

[A longer version of this part of Repetitions can be found HERE.]


In the end, it's not fair to judge Herwig's book against the experimental film and in light of the more personal work I did with Zarko. They are different forms; and Herwig has chosen the form that fits his own abilities and interests. It's a matter of taste. Even though Herwig has dished up a meal I would never have ordered, there are still plenty of tasty bits.