Tag: The New York Review of Books

There are many Christmas stories…

this one from Vladimir Nabakov. A mail from The New York Review of Books today offers a free read (for the moment anyway), and I quote:

Rul’ 25.12.1928

“In the Review’s November 16, 1995, issue, we featured a new translation, by Dmitri Nabokov, of a 1928 short story by his father, Vladimir. “The Christmas Story,” originally published on December 25, 1928, in the Berlin Russian-language journal Rul’, tells the tale of a preeminent writer in the new USSR, a once-great master now despairing of finding a new subject in a changed world and unable to shake from his mind the image of a Christmas tree. Nabokov’s story may be read for free [here].”

The New York Review of Books, December 26, 2021.

(Update: January 12th 2022 - Unfortunately, the above link now appears to go only so far, and a subscription is required to read the complete story.)
Cover of Bezbozhnik in 1931 against the felling of Christmas trees

Reading this, and with the Soviet now relegated to the annals of history, and Russia in the steely grip of an autocrat and an oligarchy that accommodates (and flirts with to various degrees) the Orthodox church, Nabokov’s story is ostensibly one particular to its time. But, the symbolism of a Christmas tree, with a red star atop in jest, for instance, or as a representation of the fusion of the Church with Western capitalism, retains its resonance for the contemporary reader; for a virulent and state-mandated nationalism and anti-West (if not anti-capitalist!) tenor flourishes still in post-Soviet Russia, as it did in those post-revolutionary days at its beginnings in the midst of which the Nabakov family’s fate was mired.

And, in any era, in this time, there are countless who know and as many who can imagine, the totality of the immigrant experience – what you take with you and what you leave behind. And, the baggage is most heavy with the customs and beliefs of all those formative years preceding departure; often treasured more in the chosen land than ever done in the old country. Nabakov’s short story beautifully conveys the dichotomy of experience with which many peoples of the Soviet countries had to grapple – at home and abroad – and imagined in the person of an older, eminent writer looking for literary inspiration in an increasingly uniform and sterile society while remaining true to the system of collective will. Just as the nostalgic Novodvortsev could not escape the vision of his country folk gathered about the light and riches of a Christmas tree, nor could the comrade Novodvortsev that of the poverty and injustice lurking in its shadow. Comrade N. wins out in the end – reason, as he sees it, trumping emotional flights of fancy that would herald only trouble.

With triumphal agitation, sensing that he had found the necessary, one-and-only key, that he would write something exquisite, depict as no one had before the collision of two classes, of two worlds, he commenced writing. He wrote about the opulent tree in the shamelessly illuminated window and about the hungry worker, victim of a lockout, peering at that tree with a severe and somber gaze.

1928, Translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov

The Russian émigré newspaper Rul’ was founded by Nabakov’s father in 1922 by the way, and a copy of the story as originally published – under the pen-name of Vladimir Sirin (Владимир Сирин) – is accessible here at the Berlin library (page 2 and 3). Nabakov lived in Berlin from 1922 until 1937 – a long time and an eventful time in the history of the world. His father was assassinated there, he was married and his son was born there, Berlin was the setting for his early writing and novels. But Nabakov remained ambivalent, even distrustful, of the city and its people, had few German friends, spoke the language not well and remained firmly entrenched in the Russian émigré community. Presumably, he was so lacking in knowledge of German politics and the affairs of state that the events of 1933 came as a surprise for him! We are talking about the twenties in Berlin! Party or poverty and not much in-between – well, so the common narrative. But for Nabakov, seemingly, an uninspiring time. Or is something missing in this version? I am not totally convinced. As a matter of interest, this very informative piece about the Berlin of those years is on the still active website of Dieter E. Zimmer (✝2020) – and lots of other stuff about Nabakov is also there to be explored.

Janet Malcolm

There are names in journalism that everyone knows – Janet Malcolm, who died on June 16 in New York City at 86 years of age, is one such. During her almost sixty years at The New Yorker, she wrote a multitude of pieces over an extraordinary range; some I have read but most I of course I have not – being (funnily enough!) once too young, and later, before the digital revolution, while the said esteemed publication came my way only sporadically.

Interesting, are the controversies commented on in The New York Times obituary – serving to remind of just how radically the print media and journalism has changed in the last decades – how trite Malcolm’s transgressions now appear and how prescient her ideas about what good journalism is and what it could and could not do.

Also, in the NYT obit, and as one forever on the watch for lurking wolves – hunting in pack for easy prey, with family in tow or home in the den – I note with delight the link to her great 1995 essay in The New Yorker; entitled “A House of One’s Own” and inspired by the Stephen/Woolf/Bell family house-hopping, correspondence and biographical works, including Quentin Bell’s famous Woolf biography, and culminating with conversations with Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell during a visit of her own to Vanessa’s Charleston home. Malcolm brilliantly explores the Stephen sisters’ coming of age and complicated relationship; with others and with each other and brings Vanessa out of the shadow of her more famous sister. She surprises with details of the familial animosities and inconsistencies that the protagonists left in their wake for the next generation to grapple with. But, in considering Angelica Bell’s bitter recriminations, what Malcolm also does in this essay is articulate her own personal theory of biography; one in which choices have to be made, circumstances rarely prevail and moral certitude anything but.

In what I have written, […]I have, like every other biographer, conveniently forgotten that I am not writing a novel, and that it really isn’t for me to say who is good and who is bad, who is noble and who is faintly ridiculous. Life is infinitely less orderly and more bafflingly ambiguous than any novel, […]and if we pause to remember that [they] were actual, multidimensional individuals, whose parents loved them and whose lives were of inestimable preciousness to themselves, we have to face the problem that every biographer faces and none can solve; namely, that he is standing in quicksand as he writes. There is no floor under his enterprise, no basis for moral certainty. Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image. The finding of a new cache of letters, the stepping forward of a new witness, the coming into fashion of a new ideology—all these events, and particularly the last one, can destabilize any biographical configuration, overturn any biographical consensus, transform any good character into a bad one, and vice versa. […] Another biographer might have made—as a subsequent biographer may well make—a different choice. The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their actions and characters assume in the books written about them.

Janet Malcolm in The New Yorker A Critic at Large – June 5, 1995 Issue

Finally, The New York Review of Books, to whom Janet Malcolm also often contributed over very many years, kindly provide a peep into their archives (probably for a limited time) to celebrate a great journalist’s life. From their mail of June 17, 2021:

Free from the Archives:

Janet Malcolm, a longtime contributor to The New York Review, died yesterday at the age of eighty-six. Between 1981 and 2020, Malcolm published thirty-eight pieces in our pages, including the essay below, part of her career-long meditation on the hazards of writing about other people. “Almost from the start,” she writes, “I was struck by the unhealthiness of the journalist-subject relationship, and every piece I wrote only deepened my consciousness of the canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism.”

The Morality of Journalism
There is no such thing as a work of pure factuality, any more than there is one of pure fictitiousness. As every work of fiction draws on life, so every work of nonfiction draws on art.

25 June 2021: There have been numerous tributes to Janet Malcolm in the last days, but I would just like to mention one last one; an antipodean perspective that unites her with another that I have long, long, admired. Should one have read any of Helen Garner’s non-fiction works, it would surely not surprise that she would have been influenced by Malcolm, in style, in sensibility and in methodology. (It also should be said, both writers shared a talent for attracting controversy, and not shying from it, and that Malcolm was not uncritical of Garner on a book and its repercussions that received intense scrutiny in the Australian literary scene and beyond, and that this appears not to have affected Garner’s admiration.) Here in a Guardian tribute adapted from her introduction to the Australian publication of an essay collection entitled “Forty-One False Starts“, Garner says:

To open any one of her books at random is to find myself drawn back into that unmistakable sensibility, that unique tissue of mind, and to grasp how deeply I am indebted to her. […]

[…]I saw manifest [in her Plath biography,The Silent Woman] what I was at the time painfully trying to learn: the fact that beneath the thick layers of a writer’s self-censorship, of her fear of being boring or wrong, lies a whole humming, seething world waiting to be released. I learned from watching Malcolm in full flight that I could go much further than timidly nibbling at the edges of people’s peculiar behaviour. I saw that I could get a grip on it and dare to interpret it, to coax meaning from it. The tools were already in my possession. […] that in journalism, as well as in fiction, I could call upon the imagery, the spontaneous associations and the emblematic objects that I had learned to trust when I myself was groaning on the therapist’s couch.

Helen Garner on Janet Malcolm: ‘Her writing turns us into better readers’, The Guardian, June 24th 2021.

Sympathy for … “Jack”

Did I not say I wasn’t going to read any more reviews on Jack? But, when it is from Hermione Lee in the New York Review of Books and is titled: “Sympathy for the Devil”, what can I say? Must be read. Lee, wonderfully I think, fixes this new novel in the midst of the greater oeuvre of Marilynne Robinson’s work, foremostly the other “Gilead” books (which she revisits) but not only, and encapsulates, what for me is the essence of Robinson’s writing: her singular way of grasping the ephemeral in the every day, loading them with grace and kindness, then giving them permanence in the greater human narrative.

Elaine Showalter’s review in The New York Times (as pleaded for, I did get another, a better, review from NYT!) is not as extensive nor does it assiduously reference Robinson’s past works or comments, but obviously she read the same book as Hermione Lee; right down to Prince of Darkness metaphors.

Finally, a couple of general points: Lee and Showalter do seem to agree that this new novel would be difficult to appreciate outside of the context of the previous three in the series, and both remain unconvinced as to why Della is prepared to forsake so much for Jack’s sake. In respect to the latter, Showalter makes a plea for the another instalment – and for it to be called “Della”!