REVIEW: Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

Zorba the Greek reminded me of nothing as much as Huysman's À rebours, the 1884 homage to the pursuit of pleasure and aesthetic sublimity, and which, if I recall a long-ago undergraduate seminar correctly, served as the inspiration for the misdeeds of Dorian Gray. I couldn't resist spending a while in thought on the similarities - and differences - between the two novels. À rebours tells the story of a French aristocrat who retreats to the country to experience art and pleasure; Zorba the Greek is narrated by a young intellectual who sets books aside and immerses himself in the culture of a Cretan mining village, with the eponymous Zorba as his guide.

Pleasure is a sublime experience in both and Des Esseintes and Zorba are devoted to the enjoyable, passionate encounters and moments of life. Both respect pleasure; both novels are devoted to its discovery. In common they have good, simple food, which is cherished in each - although Des Esseintes spends much of the novel with a delicate appetite. Compare:

The only ones eating were unescorted women in pairs, robust English women with boyish faces, large teeth, ruddy apple cheeks, long hands and legs. They attacked, with genuine ardor, a rumpsteak pie, a warm meat dish cooked in mushroom sauce and covered with a crust, like a pie.

After having lacked appetite for such a long time, he remained amazed in the presence of these hearty eaters whose voracity whetted his hunger. He ordered oxtail soup and enjoyed it heartily. Then he glanced at the menu for the fish, ordered a haddock and, seized with a sudden pang of hunger at the sight of so many people relishing their food, he ate some roast beef and drank two pints of ale, stimulated by the flavor of a cow-shed which this fine, pale beer exhaled.

His hunger persisted. He lingered over a piece of blue Stilton cheese, made quick work of a rhubarb tart, and to vary his drinking, quenched his thirst with porter, that dark beer which smells of Spanish licorice but which does not have its sugary taste.

He breathed deeply. Not for years had he eaten and drunk so much. This change of habit, this choice of unexpected and solid food had awakened his stomach from its long sleep. He leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette and prepared to sip his coffee into which gin had been poured. (AR 75)

and:

I looked at him and was very happy. I felt these minutes on that deserted shore to be simple but rich in deep human value. And our meal every evening was like the stews that sailors make when they land on some deserted beach - with fish, oysters, onions and plenty of pepper; they are more tasty than any other dish and have no equal for nourishing a man's spirit. (ZtG 277)

The latter is but one of many descriptions of a meal in Zorba the Greek; in each description (but perhaps this one especially), Kazantzakis emphasises the simplicity of such rustic meals. Zorba's educated narrator and the aristocratic Des Esseintes both experience a similar rediscovery of food among the people - the Eat, Pray, Love of the 1880s and 1940s, perhaps.

Yet unlike À rebours, which makes the pleasurable experience tedious and hallowed, Kazantzakis realises its underlying human purpose. It seems appropriate here to misquote a scriptural phrase; that Kazantzakis paints pleasure as made for man, not man for pleasure. It is perhaps no coincidence that Des Esseintes' aesthetic ideals are books, art, and perfume while Zorba's are sex, music, and dancing - the active rather than reflective pleasures.

Crucially, Zorba is not an intellectual; he is not bent to consider why some experiences are superior to others; he knows only that they are. Moreover, he realises, as does the narrator of Zorba the Greek, that the best pleasures are frequently the simplest and heartiest. Dame Hortense's world populated with past lovers and champagne is one of dreams; the book's narrator is so caught up with books and Buddhism that he has to relearn the appreciation of simplicity. He initially marks Zorba as "a sensualist...a connoisseur," (12) but this is wrong; sensualism is far too deliberate a philosophy for Zorba.

"Man is a brute!" (57) And indeed, Zorba's words aren't empty: rape and violent death are both hard truths of his world, the price that must be paid for living in it. Des Esseintes suffers for his lifestyle, too, discovering that it is detrimental to his health and that he must return to Parisian society. But his suffering is of a fading variety. If the world of Zorba the Greek is a game of chance, the world of À rebours provides nothing but a fixed, prolonged decay.

Which is the more successful novel? It has been some years since I read À rebours, which I disliked, so perhaps my judgment is at fault, but I feel that Zorba the Greek projects a burning transience, a humanist lust for life that makes the other book seem weaker by comparison. Des Esseintes' journey through the senses seems too artificial, too fractured to be real. Zorba's narrator, by contrast, is thrust into a world of combined physical pleasures, of which even after some resistance, he can't help but take full advantage - and which, unlike, those of Des Esseintes, are common, thriving activities. Is the world of Zorba the Greek à rebours? No - thank God!

Losing my way

Perhaps the most taxing part of writing this first chapter is trying to remember to stay on topic. It ought to be easy, but I keep finding myself writing about poetry, or Interregnum duelling laws, or even just plays that aren't comedies.

Yet from the earliest days, my supervisor has always had to remind me to stick to the topic at hand. She suggested sticking a picture of two men duelling next to my computer.

It's not as though I don't find the topic of my PhD interesting; I do. I want to talk about Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, Sedley's Bellamira, and Vanbrugh's The Relapse. I think they're funny, interesting plays that are minefields of discussion-points about masculinity. The difficulty is the process of getting there; I feel the need to explain the basic situation, and why, the response to it, and why, what this meant, and why...And why is the core of my PhD at the moment! I feel as though I'm going the long way round to get to the core of my argument, and when I finally get there, it doesn't stand out as the central notion I'm putting forward.

Blogger doesn't have the option to share my mood, the way I could in my teenage LiveJournal, but if I could, it would be "exasperated".

REVIEW: Guys and Dolls and Other Stories by Damon Runyon

When I began reading Guys and Dolls and Other Stories, Damon Runyon was an author I was previously entirely unfamiliar with, outside of the musical Guys and Dolls, based on his story "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown". What struck me most - as I'm sure strikes most people - is the style of writing during these stories: the vernacular Broadwayese of the 1920s and '30s, and the near-absence of the past tense and contractions. For example, a description of a female character reads:

"One night I am passing the corner of Fiftieth Street and Broadway, and what do I see but Dave the Dude standing in a doorway talking to a busted-down old Spanish doll by the name of Madame La Gimp…Madame La Gimp is not such an old doll as anybody will wish to listen to…In fact, she is nothing but an old haybag, and generally somewhat ginned up. For fifteen years, or maybe sixteen, I see Madame La Gimp up and down Broadway, or sliding through the Forties, sometimes selling newspapers, and sometimes selling flowers, and in all these years I seldom see her but what she seems to have about half a head on from drinking gin." ("Madame La Gimp", 166)

This is a distinctive piece of Runyon prose, with all the characteristics that typify his writing. Particularly striking is his use of certain slang words which always replace the standard noun: most obviously, "women" are usually "dolls".

Yet aside from the writing style - I am by no means any sort of authority on American dialects - what drew me into the stories was Runyon's ability to make comically ridiculous his characters and his stories engaging and witty. I couldn't think of any respectable American male author before the sixties who writes in this way - O. Henry, perhaps, or Patrick Dennis, but nothing that really equals the slapdash, ironic, masculine cheerfulness that characterises Runyon's writing. Runyon's characters are clowns, and casting my mind around for a writer who also writes clowns, I came up with Wodehouse. Indeed, Wodehouse and Runyon are also similar in that they both use a stylised form of writing Runyon's writing style leaves room only for pure comedy.

Or is it pure comedy? There is an underlying conservatism that runs throughout the stories, in spite of the seedy speakeasies, the gambling, and the cavorting with starlets. Marriage remains a consistent, central preoccupation; marriage is something that women can expect, even if, as in "Romance in the Roaring Forties", the groom is switched halfway through the wedding. The subjects of homosexuality and the career woman get scarcely a mention in any of Runyon's writing here - unlike other literature of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s - and one could be forgiven for thinking that they don't really exist in the world he created.

Moreover, there is an ongoing need to restore order that makes it a conservative text. The typical Runyon story follows the pattern of SITUATION > EPISODE > SURPRISE > CRISIS > RESOLUTION > SITUATION. Thus in "Lonely Heart", the main character, Nicely-Nicely is a Broadway gambler (SITUATION) until he leaves to marry a widow in New Jersey (EPISODE). A farm-hand reveals that his new wife is something of a black widow (SURPRISE) which gives him some concern (CRISIS), until he convinces her that the ghost of an old husband is haunting her, and she commits suicide (RESOLUTION). Finally, Nicely-Nicely returns to Broadway and resumes his gambling lifestyle (SITUATION). We see this same basic plot in the majority of Runyon's stories: the denouement takes the characters back to where they were at the start, with little opportunity for growth. Again, this is a very Wodehousian mode of plotting: the restoration of order to a seemingly-impossible chaos is the bread-and-butter of the Jeeves stories.

There is no sense of life-death cycle in Runyon; his characters get engaged and married but there is an absence of birth and death in all but a small few of the stories; an absence of any world-altering event. In spite of the undercurrent of violence - Runyon's characters risk murder, kidnap, and assault on a near-daily basis - but there is only one actual death that I can recall, in the story "The Brain Goes Home". I was reminded of Orwell's essay on Dickens: "Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but sees them always in private life, as 'characters', not as functional members of society; that is to say, he sees them statically."

Of course, Orwell's complaint of Dickens was that his plots were outlandish and rigid; Wodehouse and Runyon, by contrast, excel at making believable the intricacies of elaborate plots, and in Runyon's case this is frequently at the expense of individual characterisation. Harry the Horse? Dave the Dude? Regret? Nicely-Nicely Jones? These are all the same person, bar some superficial differences. Even the nameless narrator of the stories blends into the background, a passive character who observes and concurs with what is before him; he has poor blood pressure in the story "Blood Pressure" but otherwise I couldn't come up with a single fact about him.

During August, I read books that were better-written (The Day of the Locust, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Miracles of Life) and books that brought me more enjoyment (The Thin Man, The Magnificent Ambersons). Yet none of them made me think about them to the same extent as Guys and Dolls and Other Stories did. Colourful isn't quite the word for these stories - for, as I said, the characters are not so clearly defined. Yet it's a fascinating collection; an excellent example of what a talented storyteller is capable of.

Conference

I spoke at the conference yesterday - and now that it's past, what a weight off my mind! I think my paper went fairly well; I tried to be engaging and informative, not going into too much unnecessary detail as almost everyone there was a classicist rather than a historian of modernity. I was filled with a strange, nervous sensation - I was speaking in the same hall where I had my very first lecture when I was an undergraduate. To look up at an audience, to be from the opposite angle for the first time, felt oddly surreal, as though I wasn't meant to be there.

There were questions at the end, which relieved me - one of my worries was boring everyone into silence - and after the conference was over, a nice postgraduate came over to me to talk about both of our papers. I wasn't expecting that at all, so I was thrilled.

I don't think I'd realised quite how much my thesis work had been put on hold by preparing for the conference; looking at what I've written so far for my first chapter, I feel quite rusty. I think one of the most awkward things about holding down a job while doing a thesis isn't so much the lack of time to write as the lack of continuous time. I have to snatch hours here and there most days - such as on my lunch break or when I wake up in the morning. It would be far better if I were able to gather up all these loose hours and use them properly at the end of the week.

Oh, well, time to get back to my thesis now that the conference is over. No excuses!

Conference

This past month has mostly been spent preparing for a conference I am speaking at next weekend. Unfortunately this means that once more the thesis writing process is delayed. I can only hope that this is the slowest part of my PhD - I had planned to have finished chapter two by Christmas this year. Will it happen? Only I can be responsible for that.

The conference itself is exciting - I never have a problem with the idea of speaking to an audience - up until the last minute, at any rate! I'm taking it rather easy and basing my presentation on the one I had to give in June in order to be upgraded to PhD status. The conference is actually a classics conference, but the involvement of antiquity  in my research means that I'm able to contribute something on the subject. I feel as though I ought to have a big disclaimer at the beginning of my slideshow, saying, "THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT!" because I'm sure I'd get a great deal wrong if I were talking about classical Greece and Rome independently.

What I'm finding the most difficult - and this is really very good practice - is the difficulty of keeping on topic while still making the subject accessible. The fact that most of the conference attendees will have a background in classics rather than seventeenth-century literature will be both an advantage and a disadvantage to me. I can make some mistakes which may go unnoticed, but how can I talk about gentlemanly violence in the Restoration without going into some detail about the history and significance of duelling? It's a delicate balance.

Review: The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford (and others)

I had a productive month's reading in July - the only low point being The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. This book tells the joint stories of HH Holmes, a serial killer active during the Chicago World's Fair at the end of the nineteenth century, and Daniel Burnham, the man who was a key player in the fair's creation. In the same tradition as In Cold Blood and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the book tries to provide a semi-fictional narrative of true events, but the facts of the case worked to its detriment. An early chapter recounts an incident from Holmes' own autobiography but suggests that it played out differently, and far more sinisterly, than Holmes' description. There is no evidence for Larson's version; no reason why his version should be the case as it has no bearing on later events. The reader feels frustration rather than intrigue.

HH Holmes

I think that the book also suffered from its subject matter. True, there are interesting parallels between the lives of Holmes and Burnham. Unfortunately, there is no literary or dramatic tension in a business deal, even an important one regarding a large event like the Chicago Fair - particularly as the reader knows that it went through. Of course, the reader knows from the early chapters that Holmes will have committed murders by the end of the book and Larson still manages to retain some suspense - but conventional taste finds stories about murder interesting and exciting - it works as a narrative device in a way that a business deal does not.

This was, as I say, a lone example this month. I read two other books which had a connection to true crime: Jaycee Duggard's A Stolen Life, which shocked me in how much more candid it was than Natascha Kampusch's biography of her similar experience - and Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test. This latter book was an entertaining look at the way that Ameri-English culture treats madness. It rather reminded me of Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap, in his discussion of the idea that there is a checklist of symptoms that can be used to judge a person abnormal, and the subsequent dangers of such a list existing. This is no great surprise, as Ronson and Curtis are friends - Curtis is even interviewed in part of the book. Entertaining and thought-provoking, The Psychopath Test extends its discussion to many people people who don't fit with usual ideas of normal behaviour.

A particularly interesting chapter is written on the awful case of Colin Stagg, the original suspect in the Rachel Nickell murder case. Stagg was notoriously the target of a sting operation by the police over a period of several months, who used a female police officer to attract his attention and try to draw out his violent fantasies, in the hope that he would confess to her that he killed Nickell. He was eventually arrested - although he hadn't confessed - and the case reached the Old Bailey, upon which the judge threw the case out on the grounds that the police had used "deceptive conduct of the grossest kind" to entrap Stagg. It was a horrible case, perhaps loosely reminiscent of the Stefan Kiszko fiasco in the 1970s - for both Stagg and Kiszko were both arrested on loose evidence, chiefly because they fit the image of a murderer: Stagg was a pagan, interested in BDSM; Kiszko was an overweight recluse. A study on the case wasn't really what I was expecting when I picked the book up, but Ronson retold the story well, interviewing some of the key players in the investigation - and it certainly was an enlightening way of looking at the dangers of being too critical of people who appear to behave abnormally.

More journalism. More Awkward Situations for Men by Danny Wallace was a quick, comic read. Steinbeck's Travels With Charley took longer but was correspondingly far more brilliant: Steinbeck goes on the road, travelling across America in the 1960s and taking his French poodle, Charley, with him - following "the American tendency in travel. One goes, not to much to see but to tell afterward." My experience of Steinbeck had been limited to Of Mice and Men and East of Eden, and so this was an unexpected delight. It struck me as reading a book by a new and talented friend - rather shy in some places, deflecting attention onto Charley, but with many interesting stories to tell, and an earnest desire to be liked, without being sugary.

Steinbeck with Charley

The Bill Bryson style of travel-writing is still very fashionable these days and, as entertaining as it is, I came away from Travels With Charley feeling deeply acquainted with Steinbeck. And the book is funny: there's an excellent part where Steinbeck stays at a motel and acts as detective in trying to glean information about his room's previous occupant. He christens him Lonesome Harry, recreating his evening in a passage that is funny and insightful: Harry's letter to his wife, his evening with a date, his troublesome stomach, his loneliness. The final paragraph is particularly wonderful:

Three things haunted me about Lonesome Harry. First, I don’t think he had any fun; second I think he was really lonesome, maybe in a chronic state; and third, he didn’t do a single thing that couldn’t be predicted - didn’t break a glass or a mirror, committed no outrages, left no physical evidence of joy. I had been hobbling around with one boot off finding out about Harry. I even looked under the bed and in the closet. He hadn’t even forgotten a tie. I felt sad about Harry.

What a book.

Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway by Alyn Shipton was well- researched and for the most part interesting. I thought that it was rather top-heavy - a great deal is written on his life up until the mid-1940s, with the final fifty years being relegated to two chapters at the end. This struck me as rather odd - for if there was any 1930s personality who still had a thriving career in the second half of the twentieth century, it was Calloway - but perhaps Shipton had less of an interest in his later life. Certainly Calloway's great period of creativity was in the '30s. At any rate, Shipton's book is a far better example of a well-written biography than Stefan Kanfer's biography of Bogart, which I found so abhorrent a few months ago.

So I read several good books - some of them very good - throughout July. The best one, however, was one that I didn't like at all, initially: Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. It's a simple story, of a man who discovers that his wife and his friend were having a long affair - written in a way that goes backwards and forwards over the story. And for the first twenty pages I found it very slow-going - I didn't like that it wasn't clear what had happened; I didn't like John Dowell's impressionistic version of events. Then something happened - I'm not sure what - but something clicked. Everything that I had disliked up until that point made sense, and The Good Soldier became one of the most realistic books I've read. Every time Dowell revisited an event, each time with a slightly different perspective on the subject - I understood it the better, for isn't that how all events are filtered through our memories, changing with each mood and with each new bit of information? Although Dowell admits that he's biased and that it's hard to give a complete version of the truth - isn't that the point of the book?

Beyond that, I can't offer much more - other than to say that Dowell's wife, Florence, must be one of the most unlikeable characters in English literature. But it was a book I loved, was sad to finish, and cannot imagine improving. I can't think of anything constructive to say about it - nothing that isn't immediately obvious, anyway. Not that I wouldn't enjoy reading an essay on The Good Soldier - but it's a book upon which impressed me so thoroughly that my only response can be applause.

Technical update

Blogging is on hold for a little while as I need a new adapter for my laptop. Should be back to normal by next week. In the mean time, enjoy this picture of a Spanish don from 1688 from a collection of drawings known as The Cryes of the City of London - note his swagger, his fashionable clothes, his long hair, and particularly his enormous sword(!).

(Source.)