Blending the familiar and the fantastic
Many months have passed since we sat down here and chatted about Blaise Cendrars and Donald Harington. Harington, I suggested at the time, is a long-unacknowledged major American novelist. And Cendrars's "La Prose du Transsibrien et de la petite Jeanne de France" from 1913 was, I insisted, the first great modern poem. Recent books give me a chance to renew our conversation.
Cendrars was never one to do what he was supposed to. In its tale of a young man and his prostitute companion returning to Paris through war-torn Europe, "Prose du Transsibrien" forged a new poetry that telescoped time, compacted the personal and historical, and caught the desperate, chaotic voice of the new century. Yet the restless Cendrars -- beekeeper, art critic, businessman, filmmaker, raconteur -- could not be contained in a poet's shoes. By 1925, he had ceased to write poetry, having begun with "L'Or" a series of novels as multivalent as the man himself.
Peter Owen Publishers, which reissued "Dan Yack" and "Confessions of Dan Yack," more recently offered us "Gold" ("L'Or") in new clothes. Translated by Nina Rootes, this short novel tells in a clipped, cinematic style the story of John Augustus Sutter, whose discovery of gold on his California estate triggered the Gold Rush and led him to personal ruin.
"The sun is like a molten peach.
"Panama to 'Frisco aboard a sailing-ship. The crew are frightful-looking Kanakas. . . . They are hideously maltreated. The skipper, an Englishman, cuts off the thumb of one of them to tamp down the tobacco in his pipe. As they draw near to the land of gold . . . quarrels flare up over nothing and knives are quickly drawn."
Peter Owen now follows up with "The Astonished Man" ("L'Homme foudroy"), the first of four volumes of memoirs Cendrars was to publish in 1945-49; again the translation is by Nina Rootes. Moving from tales of comrades in the Foreign Legion to experiences among Brazilian bandits or with Gypsies in a traveling theater, to meditations on death and the pleasures of village living, page after page is seasoned with flights of fantasy and perhaps equally fanciful tales of personal adventure -- with Cendrars one can never be sure.
"His prose," Jeff Bursey writes in the preface, "accommodates the lyrical, the demotic, the psychological, the scatological, the humorous, the philosophical and the realistic with ease and an assuredness and a fine sense of rhythm that may exhaust the reader." Mundane and transcendent, familiar and fantastic locked into a swirling, somewhat gaudy pas de deux. It is, with Cendrars, always, a rich and robust conversation.
Another such conversation is soon forthcoming: New York Review Books will reissue, with an introduction by Paul LaFarge, my favorite of Cendrars's novels, the splendid, the awful "Moravagine."
Like Cendrars, Harington is a novelist who simply will not behave, insisting upon writing about fictional small towns in forsaken corners of the Ozarks and relating stories from the viewpoints of roaches, dogs, and ghosts. He pretty much does all that in his latest novel, "With," published by Toby Press. It joins "The Choiring of the Trees," "Some Other Place. The Right Place," and "The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks" as among the best of many fine novels produced by Harington, and may be, for all its expansive humanity, his finest yet.
Spinning great webs of narrative, yielding not a stitch to tenets of modernism or to commercial concerns, Harington is at once a novelist of the grand tradition and a novelist out of his time, a tale teller who might have appeared more seemly in, say, a late-Victorian drawing room.
I have great fun imagining the editorial meeting on this one when the manuscript came into a prospective publisher's office. "OK, it's about this child molester who kidnaps an 8-year-old girl. So he takes her to a remote cabin. The dog, who, as it happens, speaks, but only its name, comes along. I have this right so far? Then this guy Sugrue gets sick and she winds up shooting him dead while he's in the outhouse? So she grows up with the dog, a raccoon, a snake, and a bobcat. . . .They all talk, too, I guess? Yeah, sure they do. So, anyway, she grows up there, with all these animals, and she spends a lot of time with Adam Madewell too, who isn't exactly a ghost, but a . . . well, what exactly is he?"
Like all Harington's novels, "With" moves at its end into future tense. And it's here that the tale teller, one voice among many voices we have carried in our head for almost 500 pages now, leans in close to speak most directly to us.
The principal knot of this whole narrative will not of necessity have been our love story, but the more intricate knot of a girl's passage into womanhood in a condition of isolation and seclusion from the mundane milieux of society. The untying of that knot, consequently, will be a matter of that woman's decision either to remain in seclusion or to allow herself to accept and to receive certain satisfactions from the outside world.
"With," in short, is a novel about everything that matters.
To my fictive editor's query regarding Adam Madewell, "What exactly is he?," I would reply: a great character. As are they all, man and beast alike. As "With" is a great novel. If any more life-affirming, more surprising, more beautifully written novel has been published in recent years, I've missed it.
Don't you, fellow readers, miss this one.
A trade paperback of James Sallis's "Cypress Grove" is just out from Walker. A new collection of stories is scheduled this fall.
