Like a Visit with an Old Friend

This is the phrase that leaped to mind, unbidden, as I read the first few pages of the “Preface” to Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf.

The familiarity of the words (for I have read them at least thrice), their poetical presentation (even in translation from the German!), the warmth and clarity in the characterizations of the first people we see in this story… these are the paltry words I conjure for a picture much richer in my mind and soul.

I am reminded, even as I begin, how different today’s published novels are from the writing then.

“Then” was merely ninety-four years ago; it was first published ten years before I was born. This forms my perspective. That is, I have read many stories, as a child and youth, which were published beginning the mid-19^th Century. In my youth and teen years, I devoured the novels and short stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Mark Twain, “Saki” (H. H. Munro), Victor Hugo. Later, in my twenties, I was enthralled with the writing of Henry James, then later still, Joseph Conrad. Beginning my college years, I learned to love the soliloquies in Shakespeare’s fictional biographies of kings and princes.

Many others could be cited, but these are stored in deep memory, having moved from current memory to make room for the avalanche of information and impressions one is relentlessly confronted with in current times.

One reads these books not only for the story but for the way the words were presented by the author, sometimes author/translator. I look back and thank my father for having such books available to me, despite our otherwise, and temporarily impoverished living conditions. We had wealth beyond what is considered wealth today.

So now you have an idea of my perspective when I read a contemporary fiction such as “Stay with me, by Ayobami Adebayo,” which was recommended to me.

I found the writing immature and uninspiring,  even if the author was skilled in depicting, sympathetically, the emotional state of the main character who suffered a series of great tragedies throughout her life.

And this is where I become perplexed–the author and her novel are highly regarded:

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION; LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 INTERNATIONAL DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE; LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE; NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2017 (Source)

Ayobami Adebayo‘s stories have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, and one was highly commended in the 2009 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She holds BA and MA degrees in Literature in English from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife. She also has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia where she was awarded an international bursary for creative writing. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from Ledig House, Hedgebrook, Sinthian Cultural Institute, Ebedi Hills, Ox-Bow School of Arts and Siena Art Institute. She was born in Lagos, Nigeria. In 2017, her debut novel Stay With Me was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. (Source)

The above is all to the credit of an author who is thirty years old, and whose celebrated novel was written, I assume, through her late twenties in that it was first published when she was 29.

But…

Its appeal is to the emotions, exclusively, in my opinion. There is little depth in the characters, even some equivocal characterization. The words are simple, which is all right indeed, but they are not put together in a way that makes want to slow down to savor their progress.

Why does her writing receive such accolades?

I suppose I am out of touch, being an old, “white,” male.

Back to “Steppenwolf.”

The Unalloyed Grit of James Ellroy

Perfidia

I bought Perfidia by James Ellroy. My copy is 787 pages. I read it in two days.

The novel is copyrighted 2014 and is, according to the author, the first book of “The Second L.A. Quartet.” So, naturally, I had to get the first “L.A. Quartet.” I ordered this quartet, and also the “Underworld USA Trilogy,” which appeared after the “First L.A. Quartet” and before Perfidia. Upon receiving them all, I indulged in an orgy of reading over two weeks. In that I rarely keep fiction in my bookcases, you may correctly interpret my having retained all these volumes as the highest praise. I count them, collectively, as a vital piece of USA history.

Residing in my narrow bookshelf, at 90° in the clockwise direction

Every volume has as major characters, in addition to fictional ones, real life politicians at all levels, real criminals and police (hard to tell ‘em apart sometimes), real FBI and CIA officials, real Hollywood stars and producers (be prepared for some shockers), J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes and Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.; also, JFK, MLK, RFK and their killers; the Ku Klux Klan and the general suppression of the civil rights of Black Americans.

More: the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the internment of people with Japanese names living in the USA; riots in the L.A. ghetto; the introduction of heroin as the drug of choice, condoned, even abetted, by elements of the the FBI and CIA; the conflict in Vietnam and events leading up to it — and yet even more which you will discover for yourself..

But wait! This is not told as if in a history book. The language is at ground level, even gutter level. One gets to know the characters from the inside out. Even stone killers can fall in love. Allegiances shift and change, dangerously, constantly.  A wrong move, a wrong interpretation can mean torture and death, or at the minimum a ruined life. Verisimilitude reigns.

There are countless reviews of these works on the Internet (i.e., I didn’t count them), so I won’t expand beyond what I’ve already written. My purpose here is to bring these stories to your attention and recommend you start at the beginning.

The L.A. Quartet

The Black Dahlia (1987)
The Big Nowhere (1988)
L.A. Confidential (1990)
White Jazz (1992)

Underworld USA Trilogy
American Tabloid (1995)
The Cold Six Thousand (2001)
Blood’s a Rover (2009)

The Second L.A. Quartet
Perfidia (2014)
This Storm (2019) (On order, not yet read)

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Wikipedia Biography of James Ellroy

Ellroy was born in Los Angeles, California. His mother, Geneva Odelia (née Hilliker), was a nurse, and his father, Armand, was an accountant and a onetime business manager of Rita Hayworth. After his parents’ divorce, Ellroy relocated to El Monte, California with his mother. When Ellroy was ten years old, his mother was murdered. The police never found the perpetrator, and the case remains unsolved. The murder, along with reading The Badge by Jack Webb (a book composed of sensational cases from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department, a birthday gift from his father), was an important event of Ellroy’s youth.

Ellroy’s inability to come to terms with the emotions surrounding his mother’s murder led him to transfer them onto another murder victim, Elizabeth Short, the “Black Dahlia.” Throughout his youth, Ellroy used Short as a surrogate for his conflicting emotions and desires. His confusion and trauma led to a period of intense clinical depression, from which he recovered only gradually.

Ellroy dropped out of school and joined the army for a short while. During his teens and twenties, he drank heavily and abused Benzedrex inhalers. He was engaged in minor crimes (especially shoplifting, house-breaking, and burglary) and was often homeless. After serving some time in jail and suffering from pneumonia, during which he developed an abscess on his lung “the size of a large man’s fist,” Ellroy stopped drinking and began working as a golf caddy while pursuing writing. He later said, “Caddying was good tax-free cash and allowed me to get home by 2 p.m. and write books…. I caddied right up to the sale of my fifth book.”

After a second marriage in the mid-1990s to Helen Knode (author of the 2003 novel The Ticket Out), the couple moved from California to Kansas City in 1995. In 2006, after their divorce, Ellroy returned to Los Angeles. He is a self-described hermit who possesses very few technological amenities, including television, and claims never to read contemporary books by other authors, aside from Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field, for fear that they might influence his own. However, this does not mean that Ellroy does not read at all, as he claims in My Dark Places to have read at least two books a week growing up, eventually shoplifting more to satisfy his love of reading. He then goes on to say that he read works by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

The Outsider

Starting one’s journey toward self-realization

This is one of those rare books by a contemporary author, or author of any era, which helps one understand the works of celebrated writers, philosophers, and a few artists, in this case, by putting them into perspective with each other and within a conceptual framework that gives the reader an overall comprehension of their respective contributions to man’s understanding of himself.

Another book which I found to be similarly helpful, although different in tone and approach, is one by philosopher and academic Philip H. Rhinelander.

I have long admired the written work of Colin Wilson and have also listened to him on taped radio interviews which, unfortunately, I have lost through being so peripatetic.

I believe the first book of Wilson’s I read is The Mind Parasites, around thirty-five years ago. Since then I have read many more of his books, having lent some out indefinitely, it seems. The ones I have managed to retain, in addition to The Mind Parasites, are:

• Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast
• G.I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep
• Nikos Kazantzakis
• Lord of the Underworld: Jung and the Twentieth Century
• The Philosopher’s Stone
• The Strange Life of P.D. Ouspensky

The Outsider, first published in 1956 when Wilson was 24, rocketed him to fame, yet I hadn’t read his most widely known book until recently. Here is a synopsis:

…an insightful work of literary and philosophical criticism—a timeless preoccupation which perhaps garners more mainstream attention than his subsequent writings on the occult and crime. The book is structured in such a way as to mirror the outsider’s experience: a sense of dislocation, or of being at odds with society. These are figures like Dostoevsky’s “Insect-Man” who seem to be lost to despair and non-transcendence with no way out.

More successful—or at least hopeful—characters are then brought to the fore. These include Steppenwolf and even the hero of Hesse’s book of the same name—and these are presented as examples of those who have insightful moments of lucidity in which they feel as though things are worthwhile/meaningful amidst their shared, usual, experience of nihilism and gloom. Sartre’s Nausea is herein the key text—and the moment when the hero listens to a song in a cafe which momentarily lifts his spirits is the outlook on life to be normalized. Wilson then engages in some detailed case studies of artists who failed in this task and tries to understand their weakness—which is either intellectual, of the body or of the emotions. The final chapter is Wilson’s attempt at a “great synthesis” in which he justifies his belief that western philosophy is afflicted with a needless “pessimistic fallacy”—a narrative he continues throughout his oeuvre under various names… [Source].

Colin Wilson (1931 – 2013)

The Outsider has been and will continue to be, especially valuable to me because in it Wilson discusses many of the authors and their works I have read, some mentioned in the pages of this journal, including:

• Hermann Hesse
• Thomas Mann
• G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky
• William James
• Aldous Huxley

In no way have I given you the essence of The Outsider in this brief discussion. It is a very important book to start one on one’s journey to self-realization or to help the older of us to make course corrections toward realizing our fullest possible potential.

I can say that engaging in armchair philosophy might be helpful, but insufficient. One must act.