Pico Iyer Journeys

Pico Iyer Journeys

Pico Iyer Journeys

Author: admin

The Fan in Japan

The Japan we imagine from afar is placid, tidy and seamlessly efficient, correct to the last place. The trains arrive on the dot, and when the crowds pour out of them, in streamlined rows of look-alike Chanel and grey suits, not a bead of sweat is visible even in the heat of summer rush-hour. Japan has taken the Confucian model of old China and refined it to the digital nth degree; the sense of loyalty to the group is so advanced–and so perfected here–that the country can seem at times like a cult writ large, a capitalist version of Kim Jong Il’s earthly paradise, in which everyone is playing from the same score and everyone knows her part.

There’s truth, without question, to all of this. But what it ignores are the immovable Newtonian rules of engagement. The more rigorously a group mentality is enforced, the wilder the explosions of individual eccentricity. And even a group is made up, often, of separate sects and tribes, each eager at once to enjoy the comforts of being part of a massed force, and the pleasure of imagining themselves individual (original, after a fashion). Japan, in other words, is the spiritual home of fandom. Not just the collective fanaticism we associate with kamikaze pilots and teams of men, company pins on their lapels, tumbling out of buses to buy up our companies (or snap them up on digi-cams at least); but also an individual fandom that–I surprise myself by saying–is more rabid, more passionate and visceral, than anything I have seen in thirty years of visiting Brazilian soccer stadiums and hotels mobbed by Backstreet Boys aficianados.

When you walk around a Japanese town, even a city of privacies like the ancient capital of Kyoto (near which I’ve lived now for sixteen years), you pass through what is essentially a series of dream-chambers, custom-made homes for individual fantasies (the love hotel, with its beds made to look like Cadillacs, cavemen’s dens and rocket ships, is not just a product, but a reflection of contemporary Japan). This coffee shop on Sanjo Dori plays only Mozart music, around the clock, for twenty years or more. That honky-tonk in the hills features locals in ten-gallon hats crooning Hank Williams, Jr. standards. This Zen monk I know in Nagoya furnishes his temple with a complete set of CHiPs tapes from American TV, though California Highway Patrolmen have not always been regarded as intrinsic to the dissolution of self. That woman runs an elegant gift shop, near the Temple of Pure Water, in which every item is an owl.

Japan is a culture of hobbyists, you soon see, of connoisseurs who make their tics acceptable by turning themselves into fanatics. It is a place where you soon grow unsurprised to hear that that old man has given his life to following salsa dancing, and that one has got every King Crimson C.D. every released. I sometimes feel, living near Kyoto, as if I am lost in a circuitboard of mad enthusiasms. Four books on Hugh Grant come out before most of us have heard of him in California (and the long-forgotten movie, Bengal Nights, in which Hugh plods around Calcutta speaking with a Romanian accent, acting as the University of Chicago mythographer Mircea Eliade, is featured this month at the local video store). Sobbing middle-aged women devote their lives to following a single actress from the campy, all-female Takarazuka troupe, which puts on unisex, Vegas-worthy productions of Gone with the Wind and other musicals. Over and over people question me earnestly about the popularity and meaning of such American icons (almost unheard-of in America) as Brad Renfro, or Germany’s national goalkeeper, Oliver Kahn..

This rampant fanaticism–the Platonic essence of fandom, it can sometimes seem, in a culture that trafficks in Platonic ideals–comes to a roaring culmination, inevitably, in the stadium. Living in Boston, I came to see that sports could be a religion to put the Catholic Church to shame; the fanaticism attending the Red Sox and Celtics is a danger to public and private health. Growing up in England, I came to learn never to go out on a Saturday afternoon because marauding bands of soccer hooligans would be tromping through the streets, taking out their frustrations on any passerby (and when the game was tied, two different groups of enraged thugs would be on the prowl). In England, as much as in South and Central America, soccer is war by other means. Yet all these forms of fury look pale compared with what I witness in mild-mannered, squeaky-clean Japan.

The center of worship near Kyoto is the Hanshin Tigers of Osaka, a baseball team owned by the Hanshin company and roughly equivalent, as a lovable emblem of enduring failure, to the Chicago Cubs (with one championship in 68 years, they can put even the Red Sox to shame). Fans go en masse on Hanshin trains from the Hanshin department-store in central Osaka to the team’s weathered old stadium, Koshien, and there spend four hours serenading their heroes from within a swelling mass of Tiger flags and Tiger jackets, Tiger bullhorns and Tiger drums. They have, as the fans of all Japanese baseball teams do, an individual cheer–and song and dance–for every Tiger who comes up to the plate, and they roar it out for every moment of his every appearance, stopping to let off multi-colored, condom-shaped ballons in the “Lucky Seven” inning. At the end of the game, they often stand in place for long moments, singing the Tiger fight song, “When the Wind Blows Down from Mount Rokko,” as the players line up along the foul lines and bow, en masse, in every direction.

Pages: 1 2
Posted in JapanPosted on

Travel Writing in America

American travel writing is about looking for the light. Or so, at least, I told myself, rather loftily, as I landed in Atlanta on my first trip to the city, got into a new Aspire and proceeded to drive around the “Phoenix of the South.” I passed Perimeter Point and Perimeter Mall, drove through a web of office parks and shopping malls, passed a couple more Perimeter sites and then arrived at my fancy hotel, in the midst of an area of jockey clubs and faux-European mansions. Afternoon tea was served in the lobby, I was told (with sterling silver strainers, no less), and a notice about “Guest Attire” in my room reminded me that I should be formally attired for breakfast or even when passing through the lobby. Another sign in my room advised me that “for security reasons” I should call the Housekeeping Department if ever I considered leaving my shoes in the corridor for a complimentary shining.

I was taken aback to see shoes linked to security: could tennies stage a presidential assault ? Or a pair of brown oxfords represent outlaw values ? Yet undeterred, I decided, my last night in the place, to take my courage in my hands, so to speak, and place my $16 Payless Shoe Source loafers outside in order to be polished to a Buckhead sheen. I called the Housekeeping department to advise it of my intended maneuver, and was told, since it was close to midnight, to leave the shoes outside the door.

“But it says, for security reasons…”

“That’s okay. It’s close to midnight.”

The next morning, as I got ready to check out and fly back to California, I looked out into the perilous corridor and saw…nothing. I have to check out soon, I said, calling Housekeeping, and I was wondering…”We’ll get right onto it, sir,” a voice replied, with something of the firmness of Mission Control (and I was reassured just to be called “sir,” as I’d almost never been before). Minutes passed, then close to an hour. I placed a call or two down to the desk; it placed a call up to me. Living up to every fear of security violations, my shoes had apparently fled the hotel and might, even now,

be hotfooting it to Mexico.

An expert was put on the case, but she was no use at all. The Concierge desk summoned a woman called “Ellen” (or “Helen” or “Yellin’ “) to go out into the city to purchase for me the finest shoes that money can buy. But shopping for someone else’s feet is notoriously difficult, and soon Yellin’ was sending an agent to my door with shoes perfectly sized for Shaquille O’Neal. The whole process was complicated, of course, by the fact that walking shoeless through the lobby would be to violate every last item of the hotel’s unbending dress code.

Finally–my flight was leaving very soon, and whatever APB had been put out on my loafers had yielded no results–the hotel decided to take things firmly in its hands, so to speak: I would be permitted to walk through the lobby in my socks, indeed to check out without my shoes, so as to accompany a bellboy (the only dark face I’d seen in the place) to a Benny’s shoe store in the nearest mall. Outside, as I hopped and hobbled through the lobby with my suitcase, was a stretch limo.

And so the day went on and on, and as the time of my check-in drew closer and closer, I and the poor bellboy plodded glumly around a shoe-shop in a mall, looking for something other than the light. Finally, in order to bring the ordeal to an end, I alighted on a pair of $100 leather boots to replace the $16 shoes that had disappeared, hardly caring that they were several sizes too large (and inelegant besides).

Travel, as they say, profits not just the soul.

This is a trivial incident, of course, and one that could happen almost anywhere. And yet it bears out to me how travel writing can arise out of the least dramatic places and episodes, and how it is quickened, often, when things go wrong; when one falls between the cracks of one’s itinerary and tumbles out of the guidebook altogether. It also can be a form of sneaking up on truth through the back entrance: while I was traveling around Atlanta (to write about it), I visited the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-violent Social Change, the World of Coca-Cola, the CNN center and Fulton County Stadium. Yet what seemed most characteristic, both about the city and about my experience of it, was that moment that wouldn’t be found in any travel guides: the lone black worker in a place that prides itself on propriety, the collapse of simple services in a hotel that stands on highest ceremony, the elaborate atonement for what had only been a regular mistake. Besides, I’d never been in a stretch limo before.

Pages: 1 2
Posted in Why We TravelPosted on

Move On

Four years ago on New Year’s Day, while contemplating the intricate battle of good and evil depicted on the walls of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, I saw two of the Khmer Rouge’s chief killers—Pol Pot’s lieutenants, in effect—walking, unprotected, through the country they had devastated. Having turned themselves in to Cambodian authorities under an amnesty agreement, they were now free to enjoy a sight-seeing trip to their national monument, heedless of the people all around whom they had orphaned and whose lives they had reduced to zero. One of those victims, spotting the murderers strolling in the sunshine, turned white. But another, next to me, said: “Let it go. If we harm them, the cycle of violence will only continue.”

It is a sentiment you hear often in Asia, and one that humbles many of us who visit from the West. In Vietnam, people who lost daughters and brothers to the American war now embrace returning American veterans, if only because they sense that the patriotic thing to do is to embrace the (U.S.-dominated) future. Japan, a country reduced to ashes by America’s bombs, responded to defeat by throwing its arms around its conquerors, having decided that if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them—and do what they do even better. Whether out of pragmatism or real moral clarity, the old cultures of Asia, famous for their worship of ancestors, have often shown themselves ready to learn from their descendants.

To many on this side of the world, therefore, America’s dwelling—and dwelling—on its losses of two years ago appears unseemly. The firemen who gave their lives in the World Trade Center are heroes to inspire the world. And most Muslims regard the assault of a few fanatics as a blot on their religion, not a triumph. Yet America, determined not to look up from the event and to keep brandishing its wounds before the world, looks at times like an angry child who lacks the perspective of his elders. When a troublemaker tries to provoke you, even schoolboys know that you get the best of him by turning away and going about your business. Each time the U.S. revisits its sorrow, it provides Osama bin Laden with another victory and lives down to the terrorists’ caricatures of it.

The very tragedy that should have propelled America closer to the rest of the world, and made it more sympathetic to cultures that have suffered catastrophes of their own, has only pushed America deeper into itself. And at precisely the moment when it should be thinking about a global future—if nothing else, the attacks reminded us that the grievance of one place is the sorrow of every place—the U.S. is retreating into the past and a vision of “us” against “them.” America has acted in recent years as if to be on the receiving end of evil is, in itself, to be good. That being opposed to wrong is not the same thing as being right, that being a victim is not the same as being an innocent are ideas not warmly entertained of late in the land of the free.

Everyone who suffers a terrible loss grieves over it and remembers its anniversary; not to do so would seem scarcely human. And in the case of America, which has been shielded for so long from terrorism at home, the 9/11 attacks possessed a force that more weathered cultures have forgotten. But the older cultures, having extended a hand toward America at its time of need, can reasonably feel now that the U.S., in its rage, has swatted them away. And the imbalance of the world—whereby so much power and money lie with one of its youngest nations—is compounded by that deeper imbalance whereby almost every nation knows more about America than America knows about every other nation. Each reiteration of the 9/11 tragedy can make it seem as if the U.S. is stressing its losses to the exclusion of those in Bali or Bombay or East Africa; when more than 120,000 people died in a flood in Bangladesh in 1991—40 times as many casualties as on 9/11—I do not remember my neighbors in California showing much concern.

It is said that the Buddha, walking through a park one day, came upon some picnickers who were furious at a woman who had made off with their goodies. “What is more important?” he asked them. “To look for the woman, or to look for yourself?” We are the shapers of our own destiny, he was saying, and it is up to us to reflect upon what we may have done to invite calamity, and how we can prevent it from happening again. Whether Buddhist or not, that spirit is still visible in Asia today. The older cultures on this continent learn daily from the enterprise, dynamism and evergreen hopefulness of the world’s youngest power. But they can be forgiven some wistfulness if the U.S., in return, shows no signs of wanting to learn anything from them.

Posted in The Promise Of AmericaPosted on

The End of The Road

In all the stories, California is the point of arrival, the place to which everyone aspires: the end of the line, as more sardonic souls might put it, or at the very least, in Don Henley’s agile pun, the “last resort.” It is the place where dreams and dreamers culminate (which is another way of saying that it is the place where reality kicks in); nearly always, in our inner topography, it’s an endpoint of sorts, where some kind of hope or expectation washes up.

One of the disarming graces of Tony Cohan’s limpid and beautifully elegiac memoir, clear and sad as an old song playing on a radio down the street, is that it takes that hoary myth and sees it from the other side, for one whose native legacy was living inside those California dreams. Cohan grew up in Hollywood in its glory days, Bing Crosby and Johnny Mercer singing around the family piano downstairs (15), various Sinatras and Mitchums his schoolmates (55), and his father summoned from back East to produce and direct Jimmy Durante’s weekly radio show; and so, in a sense, Sunset Boulevard and Dotty Lamour’s house (in which he grew up), the Garden of Allah and Schwab’s drugstore down the street, were what he longed to put behind him.

L.A. was the place where his father suddenly lost his job and his glamorous lifestyle as radio was eclipsed by television, and then by life; where a call one night said that his his mother had crashed the family station wagon, under the influence, and was now in Hollywood jail (44); where a grandfather, aged 82, turned up on the family doorstep without a dime (64). It was, in a sense, the place of country clubs and bourgeois rites that the young Cohan sought to escape. Every day one summer, he notes, in his characteristic tone of unsentimental lyricism (228), he hitched the twelve miles from Coldwater Canyon to Santa Monica Pier to look at all the places he longed to get to (Tangiers and Paris and Kyoto and now Mexico, as it turned out). California was where he dreamed of somewhere else.

Cohan is best known to most readers, perhaps, as the author of the recent best-selling memoir, On Mexican Time, about his flight from Los Angeles in the Eighties to the more spacious and grounding rhythms of San Miguel de Allende. Earlier, he wrote two tough, rigorously researched thrillers, Opium and Canary, that take in the corruptions of the drug and the music industries respectively, and show him to be a fierce opponent of the American corporate madness. Yet what is most important to know for anyone approaching Native State is that Cohan began his professional life as a drummer–and a drummer who backed Dexter Gordon, Bud Powell, Janis Joplin (briefly) and many of the defining musicians of the period, right up to Ry Cooder and a sitar master from Bengal. And drumming is the electric heart of his memoir, the instrument, in every sense, of his escape into travel and eros and hope. Drumming is the way Jimmy Durante got replaced by the Gnaoua musicians of Morocco, the way Cohan supplanted the tinkles of his high-school classmates Jan and Dean (30) with the sudden transports of Bud Powell’s ecstatic flights, the way, in effect, he redeemed life with art.

Cohan’s descriptions of drumming in Native State are indelible: “I’d keep a whispery brush beat for cheek-to-cheek couples at dances, slam rock and roll backbeats for kids doing the `bop.’ I’d drum for cool-voiced thrushes and rockabilly shouters, suave crooners and blues honkers in little demo studios off Vine Street with egg-crate walls and four-track consoles. I’d enact lightning ceremonies of bepop virtuosos in smoky dives.” (26-7)

Pages: 1 2
Posted in TravelersPosted on

Where are All the Futures?

America, in all the myths, is the place where the future begins, first settled by pilgrims who wished to leave the past far behind them. That sense of broad horizons is what has always drawn people from the Old World (myself included) to its shores–the sense that in America you can live in the optative mood, not as you are but as you would wish to be. “America is a country of young men,” said Emerson, who celebrates his 200th birthday this week, and seems as fresh as ever (to which his sometime disciple Oscar Wilde added, more drily, “The `youth of America’ is their oldest tradition”). In the world’s imagination, what happens in America today will next week–or next month–be around the world.

To those caught up in the realities of the moment, in Detroit’s inner city or in an old person’s home in Mississippi, that future can seem like an empty promise, and in its extremest form–what we call California–it can seem no more useful than a lazy daydream on a summer’s afternoon. But everyone needs to believe that there is somewhere where we can repose our hopes, and with the old cultures having used up their credit rating long ago, thanks to centuries of oligarchy or war, America has fit the bill even (or especially) for those who’ve never been here.

And yet, just recently, a suspicion has begun to arise that, as Yogi Berra immortally put it, the future ain’t what it used to be. The space program, a perfect metaphor for America’s conquest of the future–high technology married to high idealism–plunged to earth with the Columbia. The computer industry, hailed overnight as the solution to all the problems of mankind, proved, inevitably, to be a product of mankind. The once soaring stock market made “futures” a dirty word from which people recoiled, thanks in part to the stabs of terrorism (terrorism’s diabolical logic, of course, being that the future can be undone if the present is unsettled). Even the buildings that once symbolized Manhattan’s forward thrust towards the heavens are gone.

More profoundly, people in the Old World have begun to mutter that the dark side of an abolition of the past is that it leaves one with a hazy understanding of the future; America, they say, is mired in the moment that its pop-culture celebrates. Meanwhile, the European Union, the very bastion of the old, is surging towards a trans-national future, with as many as ten new applications for membership on the horizon. Canada, home of the global village, is fashioning new ideas of community, through its government and its artists, and the biggest surprise for a visitor to Toronto or Vancouver is that they make New York and Los Angeles seem positively old-fashioned. Even the grand old powers of Asia, famous for their conservatism, while not showing much taste for theorizing about the future, show every sign of wishing to claim it and make it happen tonight.

Is it possible that America, so long an anthology of the world’s dreams, is actually losing the one asset it has enjoyed since its founding ? That its fixation on the urgencies of technology and politics have got in the way of the higher necessities of vision ? Could it be, in fact, that America is less able to offer a blueprint for the future than in the days of Tocqueville (who noted of the “land of wonders” that in it “every change seems an improvement”), or even George Marshall ? Certainly the son of the president who so famously lacked the “vision thing” seems to have a much clearer sense of how he would like the world to be than of how it really might be. Even his triumphs in Afghanistan or Iraq do not seem predicated on a clear sense of where Kabul or Baghdad will be two years from now.

No one, I would guess, is going to start projecting her hopes onto Germany or Canada or Japan, even if Berlin is serving up cutting-edge culture and Japan is making the niftiest gizmos around. America’s visions of the future (in The Matrix or even The X-Files) may be shot in Sydney or Vancouver, but the imagination still conceives them to be American. Indeed, the self-perpetuating nature of dreams means that America will continue to be an emblem of the future, and so attract the best and most forward-looking minds from everywhere who will make that notion come true. The future can always be imported.

But unless the country works on expanding its attention span, or crafting a vision that lasts longer than a special effect, it may find that the future stretches no farther than next week.

One of the unsettling things about the war on terrorism is that those striving to keep the peace seem to be thinking in terms of months, while those seeking to wreak havoc are thinking in terms of eternities. And even though more people than ever may believe that America is the future and owns the future, as the world’s lone superpower and policeman, that does not seem to inspire the optimism it once did. In most parts of the world, the future remains a luxury; in America, as Emerson continues to suggest, it’s a necessity, on which the rest of the world depends. See the future as a season, and you leave the present permanently on edge. Which is, in fact, exactly what the terrorists want.

Posted in The Promise Of AmericaPosted on

The Unquiet Englishman

Graham Greene is treacherously easy to film, not least because, as a film critic for four years in the Thirties, he was one of the first serious novelists to grow up with the cinema, in all senses, and to see how the camera had changed the way we tell stories and think about perspective. Though a compulsive reader himself, he was typically unscornful of the cinema’s mass appeal, as of anything’s mass appeal–the aim (in books, or in films), he felt, was to excite the audience first and then draw it into ever deeper considerations of right and wrong–and much of the power of his novels comes from their ingenious structuring: The Quiet American, for example, starts at the end and shuffles backwards and forwards, mixing prolepsis and retrospection, till we don’t know whether to laugh or cry. More than anything, he had, instinctively, the charged compression that all film longs for (when the Englishman Fowler, in The Quiet American, tells a French friend he’s “going back,” the Frenchman says, “You’re going home ?” “No,” says Fowler, “England”).

It’s no surprise, then, that Greene has been in demand in Hollywood since long before it first stumbled into Henry James and Jane Austen; his Stamboul Train was bought by the movies in 1932 and in 1947, before he had even reached his prime, three of his books were translated to the screen. Though deeply internal and never driven by action or visuals, his greatest books are all cinema-ready in their plots, and, especially, in their sense of how circuitous plots can intensify our emotional and moral involvement in a story; even his slight novella, Loser Takes All, was turned into a tolerable film not long ago, thanks to its premise–a religious notion, some would say–that the person who wins everything at roulette may lose even more deeper down. More recently, in 1999, Neil Jordan, himself a writer of distinction, made a film of The End of the Affair, that had all of Greene’s lean intelligence and clouded elegance; in Ralph Fiennes it found a restless anguish worthy of a Greene protagonist, in a hangdog detective and his son it located pathos and humanity, inseparable, and in its mists and lamplit walks it caught all the uncertainty of post-war London. The director even, by shuffling time-frames, captured something of Greene’s furious paradoxes.

Yet what Jordan’s savory and agile film lacked was tenderness. It gave us Vera Lynn and Churchill, constant rain and train stations; it suggested. in its language, that it knew that Greene was making a kind of Brief Encounter for the fallen. It even caught Greene’s guarded, and therefore moving, sense that miracles are as much a part of life, as he wrote, as dreams and breakfast and the lavatory. But somewhere the writer’s passion, never more naked and raw than in this book, got lost. Part of the characteristic poignancy of the story comes from Greene’s abiding sense that an adulterer might start to feel for the man he’s cuckolding; yet that is agitated by his corresponding rage that both of them are being cuckolded by God. Man is fallen, the novelist might be saying, and yet he is never, infuriatingly, incapable of rising again, and even of acting better than he should.

Of all the twenty films that he saw made, in one form or another, out of his novels, Greene disliked none so much as The Quiet American, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz in 1958. The writer’s distrust of America had never been stronger than during the McCarthyite times when he wrote the book, when Charlie Chaplin, for one, was told that he was not welcome back in this country unless he answered questions about his past and his political beliefs, and when Greene himself was banned (in 1952) from coming to America to receive the Catholic Literary Award, because he had joined the Communist Party as an undergraduate at Oxford. (The perfect Greenian irony: a Catholic writer is banned from the Land of the Free on grounds of being godless). Greene’s Third Man had already suggested that, in the wake of war, he would be most suspicious of the country that seemed strongest; and when Mankiewicz actually inverted his entire story, making the English Fowler a dupe of the Communists, and the American Pyle innocent of bombings in Vietnam, it’s not entirely surprising that Greene suggested that “the film was made deliberately to attack the book and its author.” To compound the violation, Mankiewicz cast the war hero Audie Murphy in the title role, the same Murphy who had once confessed to a director, “I’m working with a handicap. I have no talent.”

Pages: 1 2 3
Posted in Graham GreenePosted on

An Anti-Sermon on the Mount

Leonard Cohen’s songs, a friend said recently, offer “music to die by,” and as soon as I heard that, I realized one source of their Buddhist radiance. Death, loss, renunciation toll through every stanza of the benign hymns of passage on his latest record, Ten New Songs, and yet they’re accepted, even embraced, as warmly as the love and life that have preceded them. When a poet of sixty-seven releases a new set of songs, it’s a safe bet that they won’t be about the classic pop themes of “Love, love me do,” or “Baby, we were born to run,” and indeed these new songs are all about the need for letting go. Cohen sings with the sober wisdom of one who’s been living with death for quite a while now.

When the record begins–as is more and more the case as Cohen gets on–one’s first response is, likely, shock. His voice sounds as if it’s emerging from the far side of the grave: a distant, muffled growl, as of a door slowly opening (or, in this case, more likely, a door creaking shut). The sound is spare, to the point of minimalism; the beat, even more than in early Cohen, is funereal. His croaks issue forth over a basic, leaden drone that sounds as if it were recorded (as it was) in a friend’s back yard late at night; much of the time, the singer’s bass profundities are almost drowned out by the sweeter sounds of his colleague Sharon Robinson (her husband, Bob Metzger, is the only musician on the record, playing a faraway guitar). Whatever rock ‘n’ roll was intended to convey, I think, it was never meant to carry a sound as worn and old and rough as this.

Yet as you begin to settle into the very particular mood that develops–that of a cabin, high up on a chill mountaintop, in the dark, a single light on inside–you see that it is in the raggedness that the radiance can be found. There is a crack, as Cohen sings on a recent album (following Emerson) in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. The opening song here, “My Secret Life,” tells us, in effect, what to expect–for the secret life this singer confesses to is not one of venality and deceit and ambition, but the opposite. His secret, at this point in his life, is not that he’s fallen, but that he occasionally manages to rise above it all. The mystic’s way in every tradition is to invert the world by remaking the very terms with which it presents itself (turning its words upside down as a way to turn its values inside out); Cohen’s secret life (since he’s as impatient with the dogmas of the monastery as with those of the world) is the place where he makes love in his mind and refuses to see things in black and white.

As the songs go on, you see that, at some level, that’s what they’re all about. Babylon and Bethlehem–his favorite themes, his favorite places–but seen in a new light because Babylon looks different once you’ve been to Bethlehem. Cohen first met Joshu Sasaki-roshi roughly thirty years ago, and since then they’ve been drinking buddies, friends and, in their maverick way, student and teacher. For much of the Nineties Cohen actually went to live near Sasaki at his Rinzai Zen monastery in the high, dark, spartan hills behind Los Angeles, cleaning up, doing odd jobs and cooking for the Zen master. He says (almost with pride) that he’s come down from the mountaintop now–“I am what I am,” announces one song, and another speaks of how certain “gifts” can’t be exchanged (his gift, one assumes, being for worldliness)–and yet one feels that he would only leave the monastery once he was sure that the monastery would not entirely leave him. For much of the record it feels as if Mount Baldy Zen Center itself–or the meditation hall–is growling over the music.

The result is that we, too, have to let go, of all our easy assumptions and pieties. The second song, “A Thousand Kisses Deep” tells us again how the whole parade of human endeavor looks different if you see it in the light of death (or eternity: the terms hardly matter). We claim a small victory here and there, we think we’ve taken a step forward, and yet it all means very little in the face of our “invincible defeat.” And yet, even as we move towards oblivion, we go back to “Boogie Street” (or Samsara, as it’s usually called), and when we fall, we “slip into the Masterpiece.” You can’t renounce a desire until you’ve lived fully through it, and Cohen, who sometimes has the air of having entertained as many desires as a whole community of monks, has always been a believer is embracing everything fallen, the better to let go of it. As the opening line of the next song announces, “I fought against the bottle / But I had to do it drunk.”

Cohen has long been one of the great realists among the romantics, never afraid to look at truth, however much it hurts. Indeed, part of his strength comes from the fact that he’s always written so openly about his losing battles with women and intoxicants and the less exalted parts of himself. Here he brings that same merciless clarity to the very platitudes of the pop song. “I know that I’m forgiven,” he sings later in the third song, “But I don’t know how I know / I don’t trust my inner feelings–/ Inner feelings come and go.” The next one opines, beatifically, “May everyone live,” and then goes on to add, “And may everyone die. Hello, my love, / And my love, Goodbye.” In a sense, these are anti-pop songs, not least because they nearly all seem to end in emptiness, the void. And yet it is a nothingness that the singer manages to accept with calm.

The sound, as always, is sepulchral, and Cohen has always had an after-midnight quality to him (one reason why the reality of suffering pulses through them); and yet in the earlier songs, one always felt that he was delivering his ragged intimate confessions to someone else (a young woman, most likely, with a bottle nearby). Here it feels as if he is thoroughly alone, talking only to the dark. Lovers of the renegade adventurer will still find him kneeling at the feet of women, and talking of “getting fixed,” and yet there’s less of a sense here that these pleasures will lead to anything, or solve anything. Writing of death, he presents us with the least unsettled (the most composed) songs you could imagine; there’s scarcely a trace of wistfulness or self-pity on the whole recording.

Pages: 1 2
Posted in Leonard CohenPosted on

Rohinton Mistry

Rohinton Mistry writes what could be called Neo-Realist novels, in honor of the simple, rending tales of struggle and affliction that distinguished the Italian films of the early Fifties (and continue to this day in, say, the films coming out of Iran). Though Mistry has lived in Toronto since 1975, when he emigrated at the age of 23 to work in a bank, his four books are all set in a Bombay that he recreates and agonizes over with the rapt attention of a homesick exile. Unlike many of the writers of the South Asian diaspora, he doesn’t engage in manic pirouettes, or god-filled flights of fancy; instead, with patience and meticulous compassion, he gives us deeply human stories of people trying to find the right answer in a world that seldom offers such. Reading him, you are less in the company of Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy than in that of Victor Hugo, perhaps, or Thomas Hardy.

It is typical of Mistry that he has steadily expanded his range, with each of his books, to the point where now he seems essential. His first work, Tales from Firozsha Barg, in 1987 (released in this country with the more or less generic title, Swimming Lessons), laid out his territory, in a way, by giving us small, everyday vignettes from an apartment complex in Bombay peopled by Mistry’s own group, the Parsis, or minority Zoroastrians, who, pushed out of Persia in the 7th century when Islam took over, have long lived and flourished around Bombay. His first novel, in 1991, Such a Long Journey, took one such story and extended it to the length of a medium-sized book, giving us a tale of two Parsi friends and the larger corruption they’re drawn into during the upside-down days of Indira Gandhi’s dictatorship in the Seventies. His next novel, A Fine Balance, in 1995, was a 600-page masterpiece that took us so deeply into the lives of four residents of Bombay, especially a pair of tailors, struggling to make a living on the city’s streets, that few readers who put it down will forget it. To my mind the strongest novel to come out of India in English, the book was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as one of the final selections of her Book Club, and, like its predecessor, shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

In Family Matters–the title, typically, is at once defiantly plain and quietly punning–Mistry returns to a much smaller canvas in a story that turns upon he travails of a Parsi family in the Bombay of the Nineties (though it could, in almost every respect, be the Bombay of the Seventies in which his other books are set). Nariman Vakeel, a 79 year-old retired professor of English Literature, suffering from Parkinson’s, is staying with his impatient stepdaughter Coomy, and a dithering stepson Jal, when they decide that they can no longer put up with the difficulty of tending to an incontinent old man. Devising a plan to foist him upon their endlessly patient stepsister Roxana, they transport their victim, a wry and gracious presence throughout, to the tiny two-room flat that Roxana shares with her husband Yezad and her two children Murad and Jehangir. Nariman, given to quoting from Shakespeare and Jonson, is not the only one who detects a comparison, very quickly, with King Lear.

To some extent, that is the thrust of the whole 439-page story. There are flashbacks, here and there, to Nariman’s thwarted love for a non-Parsi girl in his youth, and unravelings of other secrets from the past, but with Mistry one always feels that his interest lies less in the secrets than in the past itself: nostalgia plays a strong part in this novel, not least because the fast-dwindling Parsi community, thanks to intermarriage and small families, now numbers fewer than 100,000 people worldwide) There are assorted neighbors and bosses, many of them blessed with such colorful (but typically Parsi) names as Dolly Ichhaporia, and there is a man who, as a sideline, sits outside a bookshop and writes or reads letters for illiterate laborers who have come to Bombay from the countryside: as he shares with us stories of 16 year-old girls married off to 60 year-old widowers, or teenagers hanged for loving across caste lines, he offers Mistry a chance to suggest what he thinks the writer’s function is. For the most part, though, the pages are filled with the bawdy jokes and earnest homilies of groups of people sharing a very small space in a city where life tomorrow is no certainty.

Mistry never evinces any interest in playing up the exotic aspects of his India, or Parsi setting–rather, the opposite; and yet his evocation of the streets and sounds of overcrowded Bombay are almost painfully alive. We smell the spices burning in the kitchen, we hear the shouts of tradesmen from the street and we come upon an English that has almost never been caught, except by Salman Rushie (“They laughed again, and Roxana said that was enough gayla-gaanda for one morning”). Characters whistle the theme from the Laurel and Hardy movies, makes puns on Paganini, and pass stores where Santa’s reindeer are done up in cricketers’ whites. As much as India itself, Mistry works to bring affection and humor and philosophizing together:

“What a pleasure to meet Professor Vakeel’s youngest,” said Mr. Rangarajan, shaking hands with Roxana. “And are you following in your esteemed father’s footsteps, as educater and broadener of minds ?”

She shook her head. “I’m just a housewife.”

“Just ?” Mr Rangarajan was aghast. “What are you saying, dear lady ? Housewifery is a most important calling, requiring umpteen talents, Without housewife there is no home; without home, no family. And without family, nothing else matters, everything from top to bottom falls apart or descends into chaos. Which is basically the malady of the West. Would you not agree, Professor Vakeel ?”

“I don’t think they have a monopoly,” said Nariman. “We do quite well too when it comes to creating miserable families.”

Readers who recall Mistry’s first collection of stories, fifteen years ago, will note that his settings (Chowpatty Beach and Firozsha Barg), his props (dentures and bedpans), and even his settings–Parkinson’s disease and innocents being humiliated by hoodlums in the streets and by infirmities at home–have not changed at all. The first page of his first book introduces us to a man emerging from a W.C. and shouting at the long-suffering wife who was married off to him when she was 16 (Mistry has a keen sense of the lures and indiscretions of the body, and of all the ways it lets us down); in Family Matters the action is updated to 1996, when the city is still on edge after the Hindu-Moslem riots of three years before, and Shiv Sena nationalists threaten to beat up everyone who doesn’t change his store’s name from “Bombay” to “Mumbai.” Yet beyond the surface, nothing has changed. Mistry is one of those fortunate writers who found his setting in his earliest work, and has managed, in its small compass, to find a universe.

At the same time, he has mastered the art of weaving those early sketches into a full narrative that is compelling and well-constructed, and where his first book flickered with italicized words for all the particular rites and goods of the Parsi world, now he leaves the same words in roman type, as if to make clear that their strangeness to Western readers is not his point; always, in his fiction, he is trying to stress not how different these people are from their readers in the West, but how close. In some respects, indeed, he is among the most impressive of the Indian writers currently so visible partly because he does not try to make India his subject or his selling point.

His real territory is the divided heart. Like Graham Greene in a way, Mistry is a moral ironist–a humanist, that is, supple enough to see that happy endings are rarely possible when right is generally up against right (or up against wrong in a world in which wrong has all the power). People rue their acts of compassion in his books, and half-wish to be as wily as the crooked world around them. And though corruption in his books (as in Greene’s) is always located in some larger body–the government, the bureaucracy, or even just the circumstances of life –it is alarming precisely because it can so easily steal into the lives of the well-intentioned.

When Roxana agrees to take her ailing father into her overcrowded apartment, therefore, she strains her relations with her husband (himself a fond and generally good-natured sort), and strains, even more, the family’s already overstretched finances. (Housing prices are indeed a crippling concern in a Bombay where rents are often as high as those of Tokyo or New York, even as 5 million people live on the streets). In desperation, Roxana’s husband is driven to trying his hand at an illegal lottery, helped by a flirtatious woman next door, and sometimes to cursing the very wife he loves. And watching his parents squabble, their youngest son, Jehangir, decides he will do anything to try to assuage their problems, even if it means taking bribes in his capacity as a “Homework Monitor.” Roxana’s act of kindness, then, sets about the trail of circumstances that brings her soft-hearted 9 year-old son to the very corruption that is destroying the city around them.

Pages: 1 2
Posted in IndiaPosted on

Morning in America

Were an alien, in a happy state of ignorance, to drop out of the skies today and pick up a piece of the large, and daily increasing, oeuvre of William F. Buckley Jr., he would, I think, come to some interesting conclusions. Freed of preconceptions, knowing nothing of the face that has hosted Firing Line or the political convictions that lie behind the National Review, he might come up with a very different image from the one that sometimes confounds the rest of us. He would see, I suspect, an earnest, largely cloudless man, not anxious to tax himself too strenuously, and yet eager, in a rather old-fashioned way, to pass on what he knows of recent history to as many readers as possible, together with his sense of fun.

The man’s interests (the alien would soon notice) are rooted in the issues of the Cold War, and of the war that led up to it, even in the age of globalism and the Pacific Rim; France, Germany and Russia are his principal concerns abroad, and the people by whom he seems fascinated (James Jesus Angleton, say, the center of his novel Spytime) are hardly at the forefront of most people’s thoughts today. Where such contemporaries as Mailer and Vidal and Updike chafe and prod at the state of things, investing even the lightest of their books with their driving concerns and a sense of exploration, Buckley’s work is distinguished mostly by its sense of ease. He seems content, in fact, to present himself as little more than a host of sorts, guiding visitors around the stately home of history.

The alien might know nothing of the two long columns of previous works listed at the beginning of every new book (their titles Cruising Speed and Racing through Paradise and WindFall); he might be unaware of the 1429 episodes of what the author’s biography always calls “television’s longest-running program,” the 227 obituaries (of everyone from E.E. Cummings and John Dos Passos to Jerry Garcia and John Lennon), even of the 39 years of twice-weekly columns that take up 162 double-columned pages of his 310-page bibliography. What he would be struck by, in fact, would be not the sense of ambition, but rather its absence; the books he picked up randomly might baffle him in part through their seeming lack of interest in making, or scoring a point. Most writers are anxious to insist on how much lies behind their work and how much the books into which they’ve thrown themselves aim to change a reader’s life; with Buckley, the impression is very much the opposite. At the beginning of his collection of speeches, Let us Talk of Many Things, he tells us how little he puts into each oration and confesses that, during the 70 or more speeches he gives each year, he sometimes hardly knows whom he’s addressing or where he is; he seems to sit outside even himself (the author of See You Later Alligator) with a smile.

This happy insouciance raises the question, inevitably, of why this most easy-going of souls, as he seems to be, turns out books at such a furious rate. Of all authors, Buckley seems among the ones least in need of ready cash; and the celebrity the books have brought him (or, more likely, consolidated) is of the kind that has removed him from serious consideration in many quarters. He has been the writer that populists regard as an intellectual and intellectuals regard as a populist, tossing off books that few of his friends would read or respond to, even as he does not seem too bothered about closely reading their more exacting works.

The easy answer to all this would be to say that he is a professional amateur of the old school, still more often found in Britain than here, akin to those men who throw off gardening books in their free hours, or write detective stories when not running for public office; Buckley gives the impression of being eager to put every moment to use, though not being unduly concerned about what that use might be (not every writer, after all, would preserve for posterity his speech before the Girls Club of New York, his introductory remarks to the Sales Executives Club of New York or a “valentine” offered to the society columnist Suzy). Read through several of his books in one go and you come away with a grand, and infectious, sense of diversion and amusement; you also enter a universe that seems to have no place for pain.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5
Posted in The Promise Of AmericaPosted on

The Mystery of Influence

“I opened my eyes, in no hurry to wake up. The memory that started off my Sunday was Dona Maura’s fingers on the table. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. It didn’t work. It was after eleven and I’d slept enough. The light that worked its way through the venetian blinds was weak, almost nonexistent, and was accompanied by the sound of rain, which I wasn’t sure if I really heard or just imagined…The vision that greeted me in the mirror was of a man whose hair and general demeanor recalled one of the Marx Brothers.”

You read this opening to a section of the Brazilian novel, The Silence of the Rain, by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, just translated into English, and you’re haunted by a strange sense of deja vu. Something is being conjured up out of the collective memory–the rain, the loneliness, the restless man alone–that feels as familiar (as the worldly-wise narrator would no doubt put it) as a hangover on a Sunday morning. Inspector Espinosa uses a Parker pen that “dated back to the war–the second, naturally,” and envies the “cops in American movies”; for breakfast he munches on leftover cheese and admits, “It wasn’t brunch at the Plaza, but it would do.” When the narrative switches to the third person, and we see the inspector from outside, wandering, as often as not, from a local McDonald’s to the Forensic Institute, it is to find that he “walked across the weight room like a priest walking through a nudist colony.”

That simile is the tip-off: here is none other than Philip Marlowe, the iconic gumshoe patented by Raymond Chandler, translated into modern-day Rio and outfitted with a few local mannerisms and a new name. It’s not entirely surprising to see Marlowe walking the sun-bleached, crime-riddled streets of Rio; of all the great figures of the American Century, he seems one of the most durable in part because he travels so widely and so well. Haruki Murakami, who has begun to revolutionize Japanese literature with his everyday mysteries of identity and disappearance (who am I, and what happened to that memory–that girl–who was here a moment ago?), began his career by translating Chandler, among others, into kanji and katakana script. Fay Weldon, in her recent autobiography, confesses to growing up at her Scottish-inflected school in New Zealand on Chandler. It’s commonplace to hear that Ross McDonald, Walter Mosely, Kem Nunn, even Bret Easton Ellis (with his coyotes howling in the distance) could never have written without Chandler’s shadow by their side; but his list of admirers extends to far more unexpected places–V.S. Pritchett, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Strout. “I opened a beer and waited for the three beeps of the microwave,” says Espinosa, and we’re on familiar ground again.

Influence is a curious thing, as the Everyman’s Library release of a complete collection of Chandler’s short stories (and its simultaneous release of two omnibus editions of his novels) underlines; there’s no anniversary to celebrate, and no ostensible reason why Chandler should be brought before the public eye again (none of his seven novels has ever been out of print). Yet he seems as much in fashion today as the Nobel Prize-winning poet who was born in the same year as he was, and likewise commuted between the English and the American ways of seeing things to suggest a modern fracture, T.S. Eliot. Dreiser, Lewis, Upton Sinclair are all more warmly received into the canon, and yet none of them gave us a voice, a presence–a moral stance, really–as easy to recognize and as hard to forget as Raymond Chandler did. And even fewer American writers of the century just past gave us a location (in Chandler’s case, Los Angeles) that worked not just as a femme fatale, but as a shorthand for illusion, which came to seem an almost allegorical zone in which nobody is what he seems to be (not even the straight-talking detective), and morality itself is in turnaround (while the self is in its ninth rewrite, being worked on by other hands). Even those who’ve never heard of Chandler or Marlowe seem to recognize, almost instinctively, their classic props: the dangerous blonde, the rain-washed streets (broken neon flickering above the empty hotel), and, above all, the loner hiding his soft heart behind quick quips and a hopeful bravado.

One way to explain Chandler’s hold on us still would be to point out that he was one of the first writers lucky enough to begin writing novels just as the movies were asserting their force as the mass-art form of the American moment; like Graham Greene in his way (and, more recently, Elmore Leonard), Chandler wrote with the movies and sometimes for them, even when he was only writing novels. Where the writers of a slightly earlier generation–Faulkner and Fitzgerald, famously–were novelists who lost their way in trying to become screenwriters, Chandler wrote for both media at once, it seemed, allowing the movie’s sense of story to affect his prose even as his feel for atmosphere affected the films around him. Six of his works were made into motion pictures, and twice he was nominated for an Academy Award (for the Double Indemnity he wrote with Billy Wilder, and the Blue Dahlia he adapted from someone else’s work-in-progress). At some level, Humphrey Bogart, and all that he represents for us even now, could not have existed if Chandler had not invented him.

To this day Chandler’s stamp is most evident in movies, from Chinatown to L.A. Confidential; when Christopher Nolan, the director of Memento, made his first movie, Following, on a tiny budget in contemporary London, he based his story (of, as it happens, a burglar’s ruthlessness) around a two-timing blonde who wore her hair like a ’40s heroine, and a lonely dupe in a small room with a typewriter and a picture of Marilyn Monroe on his wall. Yet James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, and especially Chandler’s immediate inspiration, Dashiell Hammett, all gave us the noir voice too; what is it about Chandler that moved Evelyn Waugh, of all people, to refer to him, in the late Forties, as “the greatest living American novelist ?”

Pages: 1 2 3
Posted in Los AngelesPosted on
Scroll to top