I am on a great big modernism kick. I don’t need to tell anyone to read all the Virginia Woolf or T.S. Eliot they possibly can manage, but I may need to tell some people that
1) Wyndham Lewis’s The Revenge For Love is a wholly remarkable novel—the story of a Communist agitator and a would-be painter (just talented enough to know he sucks—buddy, I feel your pain!) who are drawn into political/criminal machinations surrounding the Spanish Revolution;
2) Wyndham Lewis other than that seems like something of a dangerous nutcase, and his fiction is too often motivated by irritation to really sink in (Revenge for Love is saved by the undeniable and probably unintended pathos of Margot Stamp, the painter’s wife), but if you want to understand how so many not-completely-psychotic people were able to delude themselves about Hitler for so long, his 1930 pamphlet Hitler is an interesting and horrifying document (for which he sort-of makes up in 1936 by writing the philo-semitic The Jews, Are They Human, which is not as equivocal as its title);
3) Ford Madox Ford should be better remembered;
4) Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era is one of the greatest books anyone has ever written about anything, even if you think Pound is creepy as hell, which I do, but
5) Kenner totally whitewashes his subject, who on being discharged from his fourteen-year confinement to a mental hospital (to keep him from being executed for treason) gave the fascist salute to a bunch of journalists and waltzed off to Italy, which strongly suggests that a) he really was as crazy as a shithouse rat and b) World War II taught him nothing, which brings me to
7) I actually kind of get where pro-Israel fanatics are coming from now. I don’t agree with them, of course, because I believe Arabs are human, and it seems to me that some conservatives have totally lost sight of that fact. But. The more I learn about the modernists and their world, the more shocked I am by these peoples’ absolutely routine anti-Semitism. I mean they just didn’t even think about it. My favorite example is in Social Credit, the economics text that really turned Ezra Pound’s head and made him obsessed with usury for the next gazillion years of his life. I actually think the book is worth reading (if nothing else, it’s short), and I think a lot of C.H. Douglas’s ideas ought to be entertained. But every so often he has a racist-uncle moment that chills your whole relationship to him. At one point, he blames certain Jewish banking families for a) impoverishing nations through usury and b) getting rich off of wars. He comments that if many people unfairly lump all Jews in with the Rothschilds this is just what we should expect, is not really a big deal, is the Rothschilds’ fault, etc. (Hating a whole ethnic group because of the actions of a few=reasonable, unavoidable, the fault of that few.) And then literally on the next page he comments that Germany’s terrible war debt is a moral crime, because you shouldn’t blame all Germans for the acts of the German army in World War I. (Non-Jews blaming all Jews for the Rothschilds=whaddya gonna do; non-Germans blaming all Germans for the actions of their government and army=Whythat’scompletelyunfair.) The f***er doesn’t even notice.
Moreover, the arguments that allow Wyndham Lewis to view Hitler, 1930, as something other than a villain sound exactly like what I say when someone mentions the anti-Semitism of some Arab leaders : “Well, see, he’s just saying that to arouse popular sentiment, but it’s really all political, and if the Arab nations and the Palestinians just get treated a little more fairly by the US, the Jew-baiting will die down.” I think this is a reasonable assumption to make in the case of racist Arabs now. The trouble is, in 1930, with Germany facing a war-debt that no country could ever pay, it probably sounded like a reasonable thing to say about Nazis. That scares the hell out of me.
So, that’s what I’ve been reading, and also Harry Mathews’s My Life in CIA, which is just the sort of awesome you should expect from the only American member of Oulipo since ever. (It’s 1972. He’s an American artist living in Paris on a seemingly inexhaustible, unexplained income. Everybody thinks he’s a spy. He decides to play along. If you’re not yet sold on this book, I’m not sure we should be friends.)
I have also been writing. Here is a brief, rough excerpt; I’ll try to post a few more between now and the end of July, which is my cutoff date for futzing with (i.e., rewriting from scratch) Novel No. 1. From the first chapter:
My mother, God bless her, was a fundamentalist, and, with any leftover energy, a make-up saleswoman, and a health-food crank. I was, for lack of a babysitter, her companion. She would wake me sometimes at five-thirty, or earlier, announcing: “Up! Today’s for spreading the gospel! Up!” By spreading the gospel she meant, almost invariably, that we would drive up and down M-46 leaving little illustrated tracts in all the bathrooms. These tracts all concerned a little boy, his features nondescript and underdrawn as mine seemed (since I looked through them, not at them) to be, who through one mistake after another always ended up in Hell, where his fat little frame would be stretched on a rack, or his stubby fingernails penetrated underneath by needles. The demons eyed him lasciviously. These tracts are now, I should mention, in demand among collectors of folk art. Their author-artist, a man named Terry Seaton, is in prison now—the state of Kansas maintains that he molested a five-year-old. I know what they mean.
On other days, days that limped along the ground like a cheap kite, we inched from house to house delivering Avon—the car pausing every few driveways with an exhausted, relieved grunt.
So passed my childhood, in cars and other temporary structures.
