Unfinished and Unread Books

Lately all these arts and culture posts have been artsy in a visual way. That’s fine in itself, except it’s a symptom of a greater malady. And no, not being sick of hearing about the presidential election. It’s that I can’t dig my teeth into any new book. True, I could be to blame. I did try to read up on medieval history and found my enthusiasm waned quickly. There were no pictures. But I also took out a collection of short stories by Russian author Isaac Babel, whose style is excellent and subjects are humorous and folksy. He has a great short story, Guy de Maupassant, and it inspired me to go for the whole oeuvre at once. Sigh…bad idea.

I went to the New York Public library online. It’s hard to search their catalogs, and I ended up almost ordering a dozen old favorites. However, the point is that I want new contemporary fiction. After my Milan Kundera phase, I want a new pet author. And I do not want this to became a fall of Dostoevsky or a winter of Proust. Dear god, I want to get through the winter without committing suicide. Classics thought they may be, my mind doesn’t seem to be up for a challenge.

So I went to Borders looking for a cure. Tragic. The books they put on those shelves did not inspire me to read, but to finish my novel in a hurry, while the general reading public has no taste. Maybe then my project would survive on the turbulent waters of publishing.

What else has fallen beside the wayside? Poetry. I love the 17th century British poets, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent-Millay, and of course Lord Byron. Lately, nothing has moved me.

Any suggestions to stir me out of this apathy? Anything? I’m on the library website now…

Book Review: Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd

Death of Chatterton

Who was Chatterton? Thomas Chatterton, while a teenager in the 1760s, sold his poetry as that of a medieval monk. Despite his precocious talent, he was unable to make his way in London. He chose to die by arsenic rather than starvation in 1770, at the age of 18. Posthumously, his forgery was discovered. Chatterton became celebrated as a key Romantic figure, which is why in 1856 George Meredith posed as the young poet for the famous Death of Chatterton done by Henry Wallis, immediately before Mrs. Meredith left him for Wallis. These things are true.

Peter Ackroyd’s contemporary plot takes these stories in hand, and tells them in his own way, as they intertwine with the tale of idealistic poet Charles Wychwood, who ignores his sickness to his wife and young son in order to follow a “wild goose chase,” as his wife puts it. Charles believes that a painting he had found of a middle-aged man was of a middle-aged Chatterton, meaning that Chatterton had faked his own death and written most of the English canon of the mid-1700s. Soon he has his acquaintances believing it. With Chatterton as a lodestone for the plot and for Charles, the characters each digress into this diaspora of quirks and questions.

To anyone who delights in whim and eccentricity, these characters are a hoot, from the energy of the slightly mad, narcisstic bulldozer Harriet Scrope to the elderly bickering queers who originally owned the painting. Similarly, the gallery owners with their backhanded insults make for an enjoyable madness, and the uncanny air of the antique shop extends to its owners. The oddball characters are classically British.

To increase the madness, the theme of reality and fakeness comes up so often and in so many contexts it is dizzying. The incidents of the plot suggest that either nothing or everything is real. In a way, we are denied an answer when the portrait bubbles up without revealing its secrets, as if possessed qualities akin to that of Dorian Grey. Ackroyd does suggest that through art we continue to live beyond death. Reality, as we experience it in Chatterton, seems bound together by a series of coincidences that links people between time and place. Thus, the deaths of Chatterton and Charles run parallel, and the reader finds the two together as the books closes.

Ackroyd is such an accomplished, humorous post-Modern writer who displays each of his characters with fondness that the reader ends up sharing. Like screwball comedies that transcends their genre, Ackroyd’s intellect is an octopus that stretches the tentacles of a story to each corner to display the connectedness he finds in life. Ackroyd seems to be under read in America. Until I picked up this old book again, I had almost forgotten one of my favorite contemporary authors. His work includes The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, and, as you can imagine, I’ll read that soon.

Milan Kundera: Can betrayl of another amount to betrayl of self?

A recent Economist story has made me very sad, indeed. It did not involve the economy, but Czech author Milan Kundera (b. 4/1/29) who moved to France to escape the censorship of the Communist government. Kundera’s most popular book has been The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which deals with of identity and love and betrayal, also touches on his recurrent theme of lives clouded by totalitarianism. Ironically or logically enough, now similar charges are being brought against Kundera in his youth. Per the Economist:

“The story of Miroslav Dvoracek, a Czech spy for the West, would fit well into a Kundera novel. Caught by the secret police in 1950 while on an undercover mission to Prague, he was tortured and then served 14 years in a labour camp. He was lucky not to be executed. He has spent nearly six decades believing that a childhood friend called Iva Militka betrayed him; he had unwisely contacted her during his clandestine trip. Similarly, she has always blamed herself for talking too freely about her visitor to student friends. Now a police record found by Adam Hradilek, a historian at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, in Prague, suggests that it was one of those friends, the young Mr Kundera, who was the informer.”

Could this the face of a backstabber?

Kundera refutes the suggestion. While I might cheer to hear muck about a politician or the latest scandal of some pop star, this news really disappoints me. I find it quite likely that Kundera did betray Dvoracek. He was already in a bit of trouble with the political machine, and yet was allowed to continue his studies. Many in that time faced and made similar choices to the one he is purported to have made. If he did betray him, one could infer that he spent most of his life writing out the guilt from it. Perhaps that’s why he is a recluse now.

Kundera writes poignant characters with a keen sensitivity to time and identity that I haven’t found in other contemporary authors. I idolize his writing. But what if he had to make this choice to write the way he does? I think his writing is wonderful and valuable, while noting it sticks to much the same subjects, like a singer whose songs all sound alike. So what if this incident provided him with limited themes, a sort of stumbling block that he can’t move past mentally?

What if this betrayal of his youth, betrayed his ability to write better and deeper novels?