A time for toasts

To mix the proper spirit to carry us into New Year's, I turn first to the old standby, Anthony Powell. Every year around this time I find the opening sentence of this passage from The Acceptance World running through my head:

It was that prolonged, flat, cheerless week that follows Christmas. My own existence seemed infinitely stagnant, relieved only by work on another book. Those interminable latter days of the dying year create an interval, as it were, of moral suspension: one form of life already passed away before another has had time to assert some new, endemic characteristic. Imminent change of direction is for some reason often foreshadowed by such colourless patches of time.

E. B. White, late in life, was even more bleak about the winding down of the year. In a letter sent to friends in early January 1984, White called Christmas and New Year's "the two long loneliest holiday weekends of the year." But he had a way to get past their air of, in Powell's terms, "moral suspension":

The year is only a few days old but I am already in my thoughts careening toward summer and fall, awaiting the day when I can boost my canoe on top of the car and set out for the lake.

Anyone viewing straight-on the snowbanks of a New England January is likely to look to spring, and then on to summer, but it takes a special temperament to already be thinking, mere days into January, of the gentle, wistful wane into autumn.

Ah, but if you're going out tonight, let Amor Towles remind you that that the martini is the only drink, and should be treated as such:

Casper placed a napkin on top of a silver shaker and rattled it good. Then he carefully began to pour. First, he filled my glass to the brim. The liquor was so cold and pure it gave the impression of being more translucent than water. Next he filled Eve's glass. When he began filling Tinker's, the flow of alcohol from the shaker slowed noticeably. And then trickled. For a moment it seemed as if there wasn't going to be enough. But the gin kept trickling and the surface kept rising until with the very last drop Tinker's martini reached the brim. It was the sort of precision that gave one confidence.

And, should you down too many martinis, I'll supply you, from Dawn Powell's diary entry of October 28, 1939, with this unimpeachable defense:

Coby, drunk, tie awry, coat half wrong-side out, hair tousled, inspires a "Good God!" from group. Why? he wants to know. "Go to a mirror," they suggest. "Just take a look at yourself." He shakes his head complacently. "I look alright," he says. "My genitals are covered, aren't they?"

Happy New Year, folks.

Christmas Eve

Reading Steerforth over at The Age of Uncertainty on the unpleasures of bookselling as the holiday sand drips through the hourglass of advent is sufficient to remind me to be grateful that I'm not working today, my days of shooing customers out the door just as the reindeer are touching down long over.

But before I turn out the lights on this little shop for the holidays, I've got a couple of modest gifts to distribute. First, this account of holiday skulduggery, from Anthony Powell's journal for Christmas Eve of 1987:

My tenant Adrian Andrews recently reported theft of a black ewe (only one in his flock), saying sheep-lifting by no means uncommon in this neighborhood. Today he arrived on doorstep (having grown beard so that I did not recognize him). . . . I remarked the black ewe had reappeared. He said police found her dumped in garden over Cranmore way. Like living in Wild West.

I don't think rocketlass and I are likely to get up to any sheep-lifting over Christmas, but if we do, we'll surely have the sense to stick to the white sheep, rendering our crime less likely to be detected. Good god, have these crooks never read any Holmes?

The party Dawn Powell (no relation to Anthony) attended on Christmas Day, 1932, and recorded in her journal may have been more civilized than sheep-lifting, but it was perhaps in some ways just as unbuttoned:

To a party at Cheryl's. Decided to do a rowdy modernist version of Aristophanes' "The Knights," which Cheryl was eager about--have hecklers, stooges, big placards through the house, "The Theater is Propaganda" across the curtain. Have the senate in back of house, sausages rushed through audience, passed-out Cleon and Sausage-Seller have fight of swear words across audience. Dress in stylized Greek costume, shirts, etc Have scenes described in play actually take place either by marionettes or by movies, have music, have people sell things between acts like a burlesque show.

As entertaining as that sounds, knowing my temperament I'd more often than not instead plump for a day like Thoreau's Christmas eve of 1856:

To Walden and Baker Farm with Ricketson, it still snowing a little.

It was very pleasant walking thus before the storm was over, in the soft, subdued light.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Enjoy the "soft, subdued light" of the ebbing of the year.

"However wise we are, we are only worldly wise for others."

Though he wrote extensively and astutely on novelists major and minor throughout his life, Cyril Connolly himself produced only one novel, The Rock Pool (1936), a brief satire of life among a community of expatriate bohemians and ne'er-do-wells on the Mediterranean coast. As he was wont to do in all aspects of life, Connolly made some effort at preempting the criticism he anticipated of the novel, explaining in his introductory letter to the book, addressed to his friend Peter Quennell,

If one has criticized novels for several years one is supposed to have profited from them. Actually one finds one's mind irremediably silted up with every trick and cliche, every still-born phrase and facile and second-hand expression that one has deplored in others. The easy trade of reviewing is found to have carried banality with it to the point of an occupational disease.

Connolly's worry is misguided: the language of The Rock Pool is far too careful to fall into cliche, though at the same time it is less animated than that of his critical writing. A more accurate, if too harsh, critical account is given by Jeremy Lewis in his biography of Connolly:

None of the characters comes alive; the dialogue is as stiff and awkward and unconvincing as that of a group of incompatible strangers, reluctantly introduced to one another and unlikely to take things any further; there is no sense of drama or involvement or interaction between its wooden-seeming puppets, and its ostensibly shocking subject-matter--bohemian life in the South of France, with its obligatory dashes of sex, drugs, drink and general dissipation--seems irremediably tame, lacking even the faintest whiff of brimstone or depravity.

At its best, The Rock Pool's jaded, brutal humor rivals that of the early comic novels of Anthony Powell or Evelyn Waugh, who ruthlessly stripped those books of any hint of sentiment or lyricism, leaving only terse, Hemingway-esque prose and a slashing, cynical wit. Connolly, however, never seems fully comfortable in that mode, alternating awkwardly between that sort of genuinely funny passage and the more lyrical, sentimental, melancholy, and self-lacerating effusions that make The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise so intimate and compelling. Those interludes do deliver the occasional gem--

I shall cultivate obscurity and practise failure, so repulsive in others, in oneself of course the only dignified thing.

[T]he habit and profession of cynicism can often exist without the requisite gold reserves of emotion to back them.

--but they draw attention to the fact that the book is neither emotionally involving enough to be a straight novel nor spare and biting enough to be a first-rate satire. It's a tough no-man's-land to attempt to hold--Dawn Powell did it, but Connolly can't quite pull it off. You can sense the difficulty he had in the writing, can instantly apprehend why, in Quennell's words, this "aesthetic idealist and . . . literary perfectionist" never wrote another novel.

Despite that, The Rock Pool is often a pleasure to read, offering some wonderfully deadpan dialogue. I particularly liked the fresh strangeness of this exchange:

At the main road Toni turned round. "You must walk back with me to my room, Rascasse--because--because--"

"Because what?"

"Because I am afraid of a ghost there."

"What kind of ghost?"

"Oh, well--she is a woman with very red hair, very cold, sometimes she is thin and sometimes she is fat. She comes very close and goes away at the same time like a pendule. She is the ghost of a mountain in Finland and she wants me to go back because I promised never to leave her."

The midnight bus from Nice could not have arrived more opportunely.

Later, Naylor chats up a drunk German blonde named Sonia:

"Ich bin so mude, so mude," she sighed and went on in labored English. "It is terrible. I get so easily drunk. Let us talk philosophy. What is your philosophy?"

"Opportunism."

"What is that?

"Making the most of my chances."

"Pah--how material."

"Well, why not?"

"But you are young. Later you can be material--now is the time to believe."

"But I do believe--I believe in opportunism."

"How silly--what about life--what is life--what is progress--what is growth?"

"But I do believe in growth and progress. I believe that one is young, then not so young, then old, then very old, then dead; timid, then bold, then cautious, then crusty, then feeble; fresh, then stale; innocent, then guilty, then totally indifferent; first generous and then mean; thin then fat; thoughtless then selfish; hairy then bald--what more can you want?"

Later, Naylor learns more about Sonia from Rascasse, a painter friend, who explains:

"I'm just a little bit in love with her."

"Is she in love with you?"

"No, but she's sorry for me, because she's a virgin and so she tries to make it up to me."

"Well, that's something."

"Yes, but she's sorry for the colonial too, because he takes her everywhere in his car."

"He finds her a virgin as well?"

Connolly also presents a couple of splendid descriptions of hangovers:

Naylor woke late, with a hang-over. It was relatively a new sensation for him, for he was proud of a certain donnish temperance. He would take two whiskies at night and suddenly round on those of his friends who had a third one. Not that he minded, only it seemed rather childish; remember the law of diminishing returns? And why make yourself sick the next day? But strangely enough he was not sick--instead he seemed to be spun up in a kind of voluptuous cocoon. The sun streamed in over the purple bougainvillea. He tottered down to the sea. Lying on his back, the curious sensation was stronger, his stomach seemed made of wool, his throat felt some rich sensual craving, his mind floated among a multitude of sensations, all his senses were slowed up to an unusual delicacy. He masticated a line of Eliot: "The notion of some infinitely tender, infinitely suffering thing." Opening his eyes, the sky and sand were grey as a photograph, his antennae played over the tiny crystals, women's brown legs passed him on the board-walk, but he could not look up. "You see in me a creature in the most refined state of intoxication," he thought, and waves of sensual and lotophagous reminiscence swept over him.

That time, one gets the sense that Naylor had the good fortune to still have some alcohol in his system when he woke, thus avoiding the worst of drink's punishment; on another day, he's not so lucky:

This time he woke up with the real thing. Somebody was tapping his skull as if it were a breakfast egg. When he moved loose flints rattled inside it. His mouth seemed full of corrosive sublimate. He had a breath like an old tyre on a smoking dump. . . . Naylor closed his eyes, opened them, and was sick. For some time after he lay like a crushed snail on a garden path.

Connolly was probably right to decide that his gifts lay in criticism rather than in fiction, but anyone whose writing on hangovers deserves to be mentioned in the same boozy breath as Kingsley Amis's has accomplished something to be proud of; if Connolly were still with us, I'd gladly stand him drink after drink on the strength of those paragraphs alone.

You never know when you'll stumble into a gun show.

{Photo by santheo from the 2005 Polar Bear Swim at North Avenue Beach, Chicago. Used under a Creative Commons license.}

From Dawn Powell's The Wicked Pavilion (1954)

[H]e went on his way down the stairs to the men's room.
He was slightly bewildered to find there a tall bushy-browed beagle-nosed man, coatless in a fancy mauve shirt and scarlet suspenders, his pinstriped gray jacket dangling from the doorknob, solemnly flexing his right arm with a regular rhythm before the mirror.

"Feel those muscles," commanded this gentleman, without taking his eye from the mirror, apparently not at all perturbed by an audience.

"Like iron," said Dalzell obediently.

"Of course they're like iron, because I keep them that way. Golf. Tennis. Sixty years old. I just put my arm through the door. Take a look at the other side. Right through. Wanted to see if I could still do it."

"You must be a professional athlete," Dalzell said, properly awed by the jagged hole in the door.

"Think so?" beamed the man. "Believe it or not, I'm in the advertising business."

"No!"

"I'm telling you. Here's my card. Hastings Hardy of Hardy, Long, and Love. I just don't let myself get soft, that's all."

Ah, but brains can be of value sometimes, too--or at least the appearance of brains:

"You look to me like a mighty intelligent fellow," he said. "I like a man who looks intelligent. What do you do?"

The beard again, Dalzell thought.

But that's all the time I can spend blogging tonight--being beardless, what choice do I have but to spend the hours between now and bedtime engaged in push-ups and shadow-boxing and a serious workout with the old medicine ball?

The Bar of Perspicacity

{Photos by rocketlass}

A passing phrase from my Trollope post led me into a few thoughts on the Bar of Perspicacity.

The Bar of Perspicacity is open only between three a.m. and dawn, and even in those hours it's never open to anyone who could otherwise be asleep. No, the only ones allowed into its dingy precincts are those who have lain awake, the low ebb of their circadian rhythm amplifying and feeding an uncertainty that has been gnawing at them for days. It's for the smokers in bed, the late-night beach walkers, the ones who turned on that solitary light in the dark-windowed high-rise sky.

The room is shadowy, lit only by a battery of aged, low-wattage bulbs in tarnished sconces behind the bar. A murmur of indistinguishable conversation rumbles at the edge of your hearing, and half-glimpsed movements in the murky corners suggest the presence of unseen, secretive patrons. The bartender could be James Salter, but no, I think he is instead James Jones, leaning there in a worn jacket, tie knotted loosely around a rumpled collar.

You take your stool--there's always one open--and James Jones listens to your order. Then he nods and brings you, not necessarily what you ordered, but what you needed. He doesn't say much, mostly just smokes and keeps a weather eye on your glass as he aimlessly wipes down the thickly varnished oak bar, cleaning the same section again and again. Occasionally, though, he leans in close to you and speaks terse suggestions--commands, really--his voice quiet but forceful.

The barback is Marcel Proust, extravagantly overdressed in his striped waistcoat and evening jacket. He, too, says little most nights, just shifts bottles, arranges glasses, and mixes the simplest of drinks. But once in a while, upon seeing particular customers, Proust will sparkle into life, leaning forward on the bar next to Jones and telling long, detailed, and quite funny stories. Once he gets started talking, he's unlikely to stop much before closing, and Jones, knowing that, slips behind him and silently takes over the barback's duties. Proust's stories are always about him and people he knows, but at the same time they're always for you.

Once in a while Anton Chekhov is there, too, but he's a customer rather than an employee, at least so far as anyone can tell. He sits on a stool writing letters. On certain nights, sitting next to certain customers, he makes frequent trips to the bathroom, pointedly leaving a sheaf of half-finished letters on the bar. The letters, unguarded, are seductive; the customer can't be blamed for reading bits of them. Sometimes he reads this:

Everything I have is crumpled, dirty, torn! I look like a pickpocket.

Or this:

As for me, I have a cough too, but I am alive and I believe I’m well.

While other times he reads this:

It seems to me it is not for writers of fiction to solve such questions as that of God, of pessimism, etc. The writer’s business is simply to describe who has been speaking about God or about pessimism, how, and in what circumstances. The artist must be not the judge of his characters and of their conversations, but merely an impartial witness. I have heard a desultory conversation of two Russians about pessimism—a conversation which settles nothing—and I must report that conversation as I heard it; it is for the jury, that is, for the readers, to decide on the value of it. My business is merely to be talented—i.e., to know how to distinguish important statements from unimportant, how to throw light on the characters, and to speak their language.

When the first wisps of dawn begin to pierce the dimness of the Bar of Perspicacity, James Jones steps around the bar, takes you--not quite gently--by the arm and leads you toward the door. You may not think you're not ready to go yet, and, looking around at the suddenly silent bar, you may not see any reason that it has to close just now. But then you find yourself on the sidewalk, the morning papers thumping to the concrete down the street, the city's millions slowly forcing themselves into wakefulness, and you realize that James Jones was right: it's time to go home. As you turn away, some mornings you might see that behind you, where the bar had been, is a dusty shop window offering wedding cake figurines forever wearing long-outmoded dresses and tuxes.

It's possible that you'll end up back at the bar the next night, and the one after that, and that's fine. But six in a row is the limit. Oh, you'll get in a seventh time. The staff, after all they've seen, are anything but hard-hearted. But at the end of the seventh night, when you turn over the tab James Jones has handed you, you'll find not numbers, but a hand-written note from Dawn Powell. Get over yourself, it says. Or: you think we haven't seen worse? This may not sit well with you at the time, or even later, but it will serve; it will make you reconsider your presence on that stool.

And the eighth night, stare at the ceiling above your bed as you might, you'll not find the bar. There will be other bars open, but they will be lesser bars, and you'll come out of them less, too. Best, instead, to get it taken care of within that first week.