Rian Malan and the Black Man’s Burden

Anywhere south of Rome horrifies me, frankly. 

– Bruce Robinson

2006 

3 June, Saturday 

In the afternoon, in Listowel, J. M. Coetzee brought the pain. It was hot enough in the hotel function room that overlooks the river and racecourse but his story about agri-tourism in an arid region of South Africa eroded the will to live. Then he read from his work in progress (“Diary 2005”). It was hardly accidental, the applause that had filled a gap between sheets in the first reading, but, given the title of the second, was it any wonder that J. said, “I think this guy is paranoid from writer’s block.” Queuing up for the signing of J’s books afterwards, I thought Coetzee looked very seventeenth-century Dutch, which does have an association with total humourlessness. To try and humour him, I said that, being Irish, I was interested in countries like South Africa and Australia that also had a history of settlement. He looked at me blankly before giving the barest nod.

2007

Dungarvan

14 September, Friday  

One of two Afrikaner doctors watching their team whitewash England (36-0) on TV in the Anchor was giving a running commentary and he came out with this gem in response to a close-up on Jason Robinson’s bloody face. 

Efrika is a taff cantry, boys. No place for cissies.

2023 

14 November, Tuesday 

The first arresting part of My Traitor’s Heart (1990) begins on p. 86 with Malan’s adventures (as a young reporter) at the Blue Hotel, the police HQ in Witwatersrand. A special padded lift went from the basement garage straight to the tenth floor and the Security Police. Up there he takes tea with Colonels Coetzee and Swanepoel, the former writing a thesis on Trotsky, the latter being a torturer of international renown.  

On p. 99 he is kneeling outside beside a broken black man newly arrived from the fifth floor “in a spray of glass” when he spots a shiny black boot and looks up at the top cop himself, Brigadier Visser, who explains the background. 

Ja… this is the Bantu who was hitting people with an axe. He just dived out the window. 

Malan spilt his tea in his lap when faced with the ranting of Col. Swanepoel but he feels ashamed of the sense of dread he feels whenever in Soweto, or any township, like it was a racist feeling, when it seems merely instinctive cop-on. See p. 96. 

In my imagination, Soweto [was] a place where humble people barricaded their doors at darkness and trembled through the night while werewolves howled outside. It was not an entirely fanciful vision. Soweto was a charnel house. Its murder rate was four or five times higher than New York’s… On Friday nights… wolf packs of gangsters lay in wait for incoming trains, and picked off breadwinners on their way home… There was a drastic shortage of houses and schools… There were no cinemas, no bars, no hotels, no modern shopping centres… and no electricity. The place was a giant labour barracks, grimly utilitarian, and intentionally so. 

18 November, Saturday 

A Malan passage on p. 186 reminds me of the Palestinians and their righteous rage, e.g. 

Somewhere out there, insanely brave black boys and men were ferrying guns from place to place, manufacturing petrol bombs, building barricades of tyres in the streets or setting fire to government buildings. They were no longer willing to settle for vokol, for ‘fuck-all’… 

[In The Spectator in 2010, Malan contrasted the apartheid regime’s post-Cold-War handover of the reins, for better or worse, with the refusal of the Israelis to think ahead in a similar fashion: “They too were presented with a fleeting chance to make peace from a position of power, but… they dug in their heels, refusing to make the painful concessions necessary… Now they’re… totally reliant on the protection of a declining America…”] 

19 November, Sunday 

The “Hammerman” murders in Natal lead Malan into a long discussion of witchcraft and I haven’t quite got to the end of that yet but I imagine he’d have said something by now if he’d thought to link it in any way at all to the absence of electricity where the blacks lived.  

He doesn’t reflect either on the mention of the Eighties explosion of witch-doctoring in Soweto on p. 274, even though, for reasons very much based in this world, he has described the place in horror-film terms on p. 96. How odd it is that he doesn’t connect the mumbo jumbo rise to the advent of the mayhem.

Anyway, as my father used to say about the rural superstitions and hallucinations over here, 

Those things went out when the electric light came. 

21 November, Tuesday 

I’m two-thirds of the way through Malan. Anecdotally it’s sensational stuff but amidst all the mental wrangling, one unspoken question increasingly begs to be asked.  

Has the white man really any business in Africa, apart from gawking at animals?  

23 November, Thursday 

At times Malan fails to join the dots or even forgets whole passages and points made earlier. I closed the book at p. 392 last night, on a page that contains the following passage, with emphasis added here. 

It was there… the day it all started, back in September 1984, in the township of Sebokeng. The very first casualty of the great uprising was a black community councillor… hacked and burned to death by a black mob. After that, it grew and grew, until it equalled and ultimately eclipsed the white horror. 

At worst here, he had some brass neck in pulling those two apart for comparison. Given so much of which he has already eloquently explored, in terms of both (a) (same page) “every martyr cut down by apartheid’s riot police” and (b) the living death inflicted in Gaza-like townships and scorched Bantustans for the sake of white Lebensraum, the “white horror” is the permanent context, the prime mover, the original sinfully bad idea. 

Raymond Chandler

Ten blocks of that, winding down curved rainswept streets, under the steady drip of trees, past lighted windows in big houses in ghostly enormous grounds… windows high on the hillside… I came out at a service station glaring with wasted light, where a bored attendant in a white cap and a dark blue windbreaker sat hunched on a stool, inside the steamed glass, reading a paper. I started in, then kept going. I was as wet as I could get already. And on a night like that you can grow a beard waiting for a taxi. And taxi drivers remember. 

Early in The Big Sleep, that passage about Marlowe slipping away from a murder scene is not from my favourite of his books. I’m very fond of the tongue-in-cheek feel of The High Window but The Long Goodbye is too long, The Little Sister is too full of Hollywood and perhaps the most famous one of all, Farewell, My Lovely, is a case of some parts being greater than the whole. For example, Marlowe’s conversation with the black hotel porter is magic conjured from nothing. With its cluttered plot, though, the novel has the feel, at the end, of a rushed tiling job.  

Chandler’s California is not just composed of sun-baked streets and smog but also contains unexpected features like dusty pines and coastal fogs and mists. Offering a panorama not seen in his other novels, The Lady in the Lake is so well paced, it’s a real trip, and so very quotable from various angles, from Marlowe feeling typically sore and perplexed one evening in his office: 

An elegant handwriting, like the elegant hand that wrote it. I pushed it to one side and had another drink. I began to feel a little less savage. I pushed things around on the desk. My hands felt thick and hot and awkward. I ran a finger across the corner of the desk and looked at the streak made by the wiping off of the dust. I look at the dust on my finger and wiped that off. I looked at my watch. I looked at the wall. I looked at nothing.  

I put the liquor bottle away and went over to the washbowl to rinse the glass out. When I had done that I washed my hands and bathed my face in cold water and looked at it. The flush was gone from the left cheek, but it looked a little swollen. Not very much, but enough to make me tighten up again. (…)  

I sat very still and listened to the evening grow quiet outside the open windows. And very slowly I grew quiet with it. 

… to Mr Grayson’s explanation of the logistics of blackmail;  

I have come across traces of them in my work. Unsecured loans, long outstanding. Investments on the face of them worthless, made by men who would not be likely to make worthless investments. Bad debts that should obviously be charged off and have not been, for fear of inviting scrutiny from the income tax people. Oh yes, those things can easily be arranged. 

… to the police captain’s comparison of his game to politics;  

“Police business,” he said almost gently, “is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get – and we get things like this.” 

… to the tableau of the Indian Head hotel; 

At the cash desk a pale-haired man was fighting to get the war news on a small radio that was as full of static as the mashed potatoes were full of water. 

… to the atmosphere of the final, climactic drive into the country;  

This is the ultimate end of the fog belt, and the beginning of that semi-desert region where the sun is as light and dry as old sherry in the morning, as hot as a blast furnace at noon, and drops like an angry brick at nightfall.  

Lastly, it should be noted that in The Lady in the Lake, the most attractive female character is not a baddie.

Chandler’s letters, published after his death, are also extraordinary but for some reason the most heartfelt one that I’ve seen was not included in the best-known collection, Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962). I found it instead in a memoir by John Houseman. 

It is a struggle of all fundamentally honest men to make a decent living in a corrupt society. It is an impossible struggle; he can’t win. He can be poor and bitter and take it out in wisecracks and casual amours, or he can be corrupt and amiable and rude like a Hollywood producer. Because the bitter fact is that outside of two or three technical professions, there is absolutely no way for a man of this age to acquire a decent affluence in life without to some degree corrupting himself, without accepting the cold, clear fact that success is always and everywhere a racket. (…) I didn’t create him [Marlowe] at all; I’ve seen dozens like him in all essentials except the few colourful qualities he needed to be in a book. (A few even had those.) They were all poor; they will always be poor. How could they be anything else? When you have answered that question you can call him a zombie. 

Houseman’s Chandler references have otherwise always struck me as odd, especially but not only because they come from someone who claimed to be his friend. They are also odd because, by their stuffy and superior insolence, they seem so out of tune with the views of most others who knew the subject and his charm, despite Chandler’s honest description of himself as a “contentious fellow” and his even greater thirst for whiskey when he took the studio buck to work on poppycock.  

At least Alfred Hitchcock’s biographer Patrick Gilligan’s account of the disastrous last meeting of the two men is plausible in the context of a film project (Strangers on a Train) on which they had strongly opposing views as to its merit and preparation. Their personal chemistry had gone up in smoke by the time of Hitchcock’s last visit to Chandler’s home in La Jolla in 1950. 

Chandler, in his cups that day, began a scathing rant about why Hitchcock should stick to the book and forget all his devious plot and camera tricks. The director let him go on and on. (…) At the peak of Chandler’s oration, the director simply stood up, opened the door, and left the house. (…) An amazed Chandler followed, shouting… The director paused to let [his assistant] plunge into the car first… Chandler called the director a fat bastard, and worse, as they drove off. (…) Hitchcock… gazed out the window for a long time… Halfway back to the studio he finally… said simply, “He’s through.” 

In 1958, in a happier meeting of minds, Ian Fleming interviewed Chandler in London for the BBC. On Fleming’s request, Chandler explained in great detail the mechanics and logistics of a typical Mob (“Syndicate”) assassination, which, for the sake of illustration, was carried out by a putative pair of hit men flown in from a hardware store in Minneapolis. Chandler in turn asked Fleming why he always included a torture scene in the James Bond books. 

“He’s got to suffer something in return for all this success and, I mean, what do you do? Dock him something on his income tax? I’m very tired of the fact that the hero in these, in other people’s thrillers, gets a bang on the head with a revolver butt and he’s perfectly happy afterwards. Just a bump on his head.” 

“That’s one of my faults, I recover too quickly. I know what it is to be banged on the head with a revolver butt. The first thing you do is vomit.”  

The Good Soldier Musil

Dr. John Flynn

Robert Musil (1880-1942) is best known for Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (‘The Man Without Qualities’), an unending, unfinished novel, of which the first volume appeared in 1930. I tried to read it once but found it too essayistic (Musil’s diaries agree) and boring and thus gave up. The first funny thing reminiscent of Jaroslav Hašek that I came across in the diaries was the farcical account of the seduction of a seventeen-year-old pal of his. Let us call the story The Cougar of Brno, as narrated by the pal and recorded by the teenage Musil.

I had an intuition that something was closing in around me… I was vaguely aware that something was going on and in my youthful anxiety I asked my friend to accompany me. I stationed him in some bushes… we found a quiet bench and read the letter. My friend… explained to me I had to…

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The Low Life Highs of Jeffrey Bernard

Dr. John Flynn

I was walking along Cleveland Street the other day in a cold drizzle when I suddenly came across an amazing collage on the pavement which just about summed up the human condition to perfection. It comprised a pool of vomit, an empty beer can, some dog shit and a sprinkling of confetti.

– 3 January 1987

My favourite English writer finally got his name in lights in 1989 with the hit play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. It was largely based on his long-running column for the Spectator magazine. That column was also published in three collections – Low Life (1986), More Low Life (1989) and Reach for the Ground (1996) – though some notable omissions mean these are not the collected pieces.

In these books the style changes over time in one important respect. The earliest is perhaps the most uneven. Presumably written in more of a hurry, it…

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The Intellectual and the Shovel

Photo: André Malraux

Some objected and received the first blows of their careers from the Kapos… others became despondent; others yet (I among them)… perceived that there wasn’t a way out… Nevertheless, unlike Améry and others, my feeling of humiliation due to manual work was moderate: evidently I was still not ‘intellectual’ enough… I had a degree, true enough, but mine was an undeserved piece of luck. My family had been rich enough to send me to school: many contemporaries of mine had shovelled dirt since adolescence.

– Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

Of all the definitions of an intellectual, though, it is the one by André Malraux that seems the most sensible. This is the same Malraux who told Bruce Chatwin that most of his intellectual compatriots were incapable of opening an umbrella. At any rate he defined the category as anyone who tries to live by the use of reason but, then again, experience relentlessly demonstrates the surrealism of life i.e. how so often it resembles a bad or weird dream.

Most of the writers I admire have an underlying, unwritten thread in common. I cannot believe this is really happening. It is a mix of horror and amusement that enables some detachment in the face of the fact that everything, as Mario Puzo pointed out, is personal.

Long ago, an uncle of mine took part in an amateur play, after which a celebration dinner was held in a farmer’s house, where, before they all sat down for the grub, the seating arrangement began to look a bit tight. It was then that he noticed that a subtle, yet, to any reasonable man, unbelievable attempt was being made to shunt one cast member, a woman from a mere cottage, down to the kitchen, to eat on her own.

He discreetly protested, indicating that he’d leave if that happened, and give the lady his seat. It did not happen. A place at the table was found after all, with just a minor bit of shoving up this way or down that way, but these pathetic provincial snobberies, these notions, at all levels, and the insolent slights they inspire, will never stop providing fodder for writing and storytelling that try to make sense of a world “full of the most outrageous nonsense” (Gogol, The Nose).

The Morals of Writers

Photo (c) The Guardian

What Alice Sebold did to Anthony Broadwater at eighteen seems just a little bit more understandable or even forgivable (in the circumstances) than what she did at thirty-six, when she creatively rewrote the facts of his trial to flog a book.

When the truth emerged, it took this woman by her own account EIGHT DAYS to try to “comprehend how this could have happened” [sic] but at least we all now know the truth of how it went down.

A new low in writers exploiting other people’s lives, it’s sadly emblematic of the depravity tolerated in the arts world.

PS … Raymond Chandler on writers, 23 June 1950

PPS … https://johnflynn64travel.wordpress.com/2020/07/20/the-prefect/

Dawson and Dickens

She would never know the anguish of that smut-faced child, as kiddie after kiddie was chosen by the adults living in the evacuation area, leaving him alone on the pavement with a shabby holdall… Eventually a policeman and a grim-faced official almost bullied a couple into taking him…

It may be another piece of Freud apocrypha that no one ever lost money on a different kind of smut. Still, even on the strength of mime and mimicry, Les Dawson’s art was far more than double entendres and fossil gags, although the “policeman’s boots type of joke” (Orwell, The Art of Donald McGill) turns up in his autobiography A Clown Too Many in the form of a tanked-up Les getting sick on a policeman’s trousers.

Yes, the book is sometimes a bit flowery and now and then the descriptions are padded with mother-in-law material. It’s a life that’s dog rough in places. But it’s never dull. It’s also epigrammatic, surreal, macabre, hilarious and moving.

For Raymond Chandler there was no complete man without at least a touch of vulgarity and Orwell thought the smutty postcards of his essay gave necessary expression to the “Sancho Panza” or “worm’s eye” view of life, which he saw as a mood that had been suppressed in English literature early in the nineteenth century.

His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with ‘voluptuous’ figures.

Though each of these itself is paradise, when taken in a moderate amount of moderation, this remains a rather tame understanding on Orwell’s part. Of turning a spiritual and professional corner onstage one night in the Sixties in Blackpool, Dawson writes

I glared at the unfeeling audience, and I went on glaring at them with something akin to hatred. After what seemed an aeon, somebody chuckled, and then somebody else. I made as if to see who was at the back of me… “Who the hell’s come on?” The laughter began to grow … “Dawson’s the name, I’m about as famous as Lord Godiva.” … “Do you think I care?” … It was my night… I was one of them. Fed up, sick of society, I belonged to them… I don’t recall driving home at all, but I do remember stopping once on the moorland road… urinating into a bush and shouting, “I bloody did it.”

Les Dawson was born into grime, an only child in the Manchester of the early Thirties. As for the seemingly effortless reproduction of comical Yorkshire speech on the page, the Mancunian Les must have enjoyed that, when giving ink to his stories about their nightclubs. On his mother’s side the family was entirely Irish and, whenever his grandmother had “me tipple” of drink taken, she would end up singing, They’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.

In early adulthood he had a string of perversely inspiring Dickensian day jobs. One story sees him trudging through snow to a smelly hovel in order to fix a rusty washing machine but then finding a lost Christmas pay packet that’s stuck in a knackered vacuum cleaner. These jobs he combines with years of night slogging on the northern club circuit, with the attendant awful digs thrown in for any man who cannot get home.

Yes, yes, there I am on the bill at just about the height where dogs find it easy to urinate…

The swirling fag fug…

… the nights when club audiences had booed me off; I remembered the time bottles were thrown at me; the times when I’d stood… with sweat dripping down my suit as I battled to be heard…

Several other thespians were sitting glooming over their fate in what passed for a living room, and when the landlady introduced me, they merely grunted and turned back into statues.

The curious fact that Orwell never stresses the comedy in his long essay on Dickens, nor all that is allied in the macabre and grotesque, is typified when he mentions Krook’s spontaneous combustion in Bleak House. This is made without any reference to the obvious conclusion that the relevant chapter is played for laughs.

“‘Why, I have noticed myself that there is a queer kind of flavour in the place tonight,’ Mr Weevle rejoins. ‘I suppose it’s the chops at the Sol’s Arms.’ (…) Mr Snagsby sniffs and tastes again, and then spits and wipes his mouth; ‘I don’t think… they were quite fresh, when they were shown the gridiron.’”

Les himself ends several portraits with a coda about how a person died, usually unnaturally. He makes much mention too of his own “cowardice” yet, like many an unwillingly tough man, he imposes himself only after extreme provocation. Comedy meets desperation, as in when the grown Les is forced into gallantly tackling a pair of burglars on behalf of a female neighbour.

… we grappled in silence with only fear as the referee.

Having subdued one, he uses a foot to trap the other, who is hiding in a closet. The most significant fight has, however, come at the age of eleven but, like the account of the school fight in Camus’ The First Man, it leaves him more than anything disgusted by this awful world.

Again and again the fists rained upon my face and chest, and I did not retaliate… I tried to back away, only to be pushed by the crowd into the path of my adversary. Then I hit Dunn with one punch and it was over… Nobody said a word to me, the crowd about-turned and left the scene. Dunn staggered to his feet and shook my hand; he, too, remained silent, and at last alone, I sat and cried.

Some people have presumed a lot of the book’s material (e.g. the Paris job, tinkling on a piano downstairs in a brothel) had to be at the very least embellished but one should note the style and tone never vary between incident and reflection. His extraordinary German experiences alone, thirty years apart, would make a fine play or film. His first stint there, as an army conscript in 1950, makes life in Germany then seem almost as dodgy as it was in wartime. For his second, in West Berlin, the only notable addition was the presence of TV cameras.

The audience was in an uproar; they… thought it was part of the act; little did they know it was a fight to a flour and water death. (…) Kenny Ball staggered on in a cloud of alcohol and wailed into a jazz number…

Les fared better at the other end of the Axis while in Hong Kong. In response to the appearance of his character Cosmo Smallpiece, a crowd of silent Japanese tourists exploded, then rose to their feet en masse to copy his gestures and facial expressions.

As for triumph and disaster, the hard-drinking Les had his own characteristic take on both of Kipling’s impostors.

… if disaster was inevitable, why not meet it with a tum full of the blender’s art?

Triumph in its turn meant all those years on TV when somehow he could hardly put a foot wrong, while attracting audiences of nine or ten million.

The following week I hired a penguin from a zoo, and all it did was waddle on to the stage and stand next to me. I ignored it completely and the audience fell about.

PS

Though generous with his time, his encouragement and his share of the limelight, Les gives an honest Dickensian nod to his meanness with money (outside his family) when recounting a list of his crimes and bungles as an apprentice electrician.

That he did cheat his workmates of two pence per person by buying meat pies cheaper from another shop.

Hrabal’s Trains

The screen version of Bohumil Hrabal’s Ostře sledované vlaky (1965) won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1968. The book is a short, melodramatic and ultimately unconvincing mishmash of half-baked plot lurches, between which the morbidly self-absorbed young narrator somehow speaks like a cynical old hand to the cartoon characters that are his railway superiors. Then again, he does have a mean streak and likes to prank passengers by luring them out of the waiting room on cold nights, when they form the sadly mistaken view that their train is due.

Nevertheless, there are flashes of what this story might have been, given the setting. Regarding the Germans passing through the snows of Bohemia in early 1945, the usual English title, Closely Observed Trains, is just the railway jargon for military transports.

In praising it in parts, I’m thinking of elements like the plane wing waltzing down over the town square at the start before it crashes into the deanery garden. There is also the underdeveloped side theme that the nearby nobility remains untouched.

The telegraph table stood beneath a window from which you could see five kilometres of a long field road bordered with old apple trees, and at the end of the road glittered Prince Kinský’s castle, which I’d seen this morning at sunrise standing one storey deep in the mist…

Noteworthy too is the one long, controlled passage of dramatic tension. Jittery about any delay on the line, given the risk of partisan attacks, the SS take the narrator aboard at gunpoint.

In a ditch lay three dead horses, just as the Germans had thrown them out of the wagons in the night. They simply opened the doors and threw out the corpses. Now they lay in the ditch… legs stretched stiffly towards the sky like columns…

Thanks to a chance occurrence, though, an SS officer lets him get off the still slowly moving locomotive.

‘Go,’ said the captain.

‘Thank you,’ I whispered.

And all the time I didn’t know whether this was a joke or not.

Finding his feet again, he stands by the track counting the open wagons of Tiger tanks and soldiers passing his shoulder and naturally wondering if any of the unpredictable Germans will just shoot him in the back.

To illustrate the point that “nobody can ever be sure what they will do” the narrator tells us about a woman neighbour who was imprisoned in 1940 and spent four years mopping up the blood after Gestapo executions. The butcher in charge was otherwise unfailingly kind and polite to her and, after her sudden release, she got a letter of apology. The very black comedy works, the cartoon stuff is neither here nor there.

Whatever about any deep concern for the woes of strangers, Hrabal does seem to have had a particular morbid fixation on the trials of animals. I wouldn’t fault anyone for recording what he sees of their misery on some of the trains that pass through but the inclusion of hearsay of extra suffering is gratuitous and dilutes the effect. Anyhow, as the plot gets carried away, I underlined very little in the final third.

Hrabal reminds us that of all the definitions of an intellectual, it is the one by André Malraux that seems the most sensible. This is the same Malraux who told Bruce Chatwin that most of his intellectual compatriots were incapable of opening an umbrella. At any rate he defined the category as anyone who tries to live by the use of reason but, then again, experience relentlessly demonstrates the surrealism of life, i.e. how so often it resembles a bad or weird dream. Most of the writers I admire have an underlying, unwritten thread in common. I cannot believe this is really happening. It is a mix of horror and amusement that enables some detachment in the face of the fact that everything, as Mario Puzo pointed out, is personal. 

Hrabal had a hard life in which he survived many mundane, ‘un-intellectual’ jobs, including (spending the war on) the railways, selling insurance, becoming a travelling salesman, labouring in a steelworks, and getting badly hurt in an accident while a paper packer. He didn’t become a professional writer until he was nearly fifty but even that didn’t last long, as he was out on his ear in 1968. A Seventies partial rehabilitation by the regime didn’t work out too well as it was dissidents who burned his books, leading Hrabal to conclude he was condemned for speaking up and condemned for staying silent. Nevertheless, 1989 came eventually and his status by then was secure. He spent much of his latter years in the Golden Tiger pub and died in February 1997 after falling or jumping from a window on the fifth floor of a hospital in Prague. 

P.S. there are sloppy mistakes in this 1968 translation for which one doesn’t need a word of Czech in order to spot them.

Krleža … A Stoppage in Zagreb

Miroslav Krleža (1893-1981) may be the first writer I’ve found to stress, really stress, the idea that taste is a form of morality; that vulgarity and immorality are often the same thing.

Set in Zagreb, his 1938 novel Na rubu pameti (‘On the Edge of Reason’) is a fantasy about a legal pillar of society who, of a pleasant September evening, listens to a rich client bragging on and on about the time in 1918 he defended his wine cellar by shooting, in the back, four trespassing peasants.

Something finally snaps as the listener turns the stem of his wine glass. The unfulfilled and unnamed narrator, in an almost out-of-body experience, suddenly decides to

(a) stop playing the game;

(b) speak his mind on the sordid and even murderous crooks who are his peers;

(c) smack the face off some of the agenda-riddled pests who will stick an oar in.

Nevertheless, he is not quite suicidal. This first expression of dissent (“it was all a crime, a bloody thing, moral insanity”) does not go down well at all with his host, the one he already knows has form, on home ground.

As soon as I noticed a revolver glittering in his hand, I overturned the table, jumped over all the bowls, lamps and glassware, and disappeared into the night.

The scandal then becomes a matter for the courts. Here the narrator uses the opportunity to turn over more rocks. He ridicules a prosecutor by unveiling further early gems from the plaintiff’s real CV (“a common embezzler” and “a Sarajevo police informer”). He also exposes a biased judge as a failed, despised suitor to one of the defendant’s daughters.

The occasional poetic flights over the interior tend not to go on too long and the story and dialogue are usually tight but the novel pulls up with the narrator twiddling a radio knob after hearing unwelcome news of Jadviga (a tragic, Alma Schindler-like figure) from Vienna.

Jadviga and the narrator hook up when he moves out of his home to the hotel where she lives. This liaison lasts until he first gets locked up. In that time, they have a mob of respectable rubber necks following them around Zagreb cafes and bars like paparazzi. Long an expert in the receipt of anonymous letters, she tells him the ones he is getting are from his wife and her pals.

Jadviga is an outcast from respectability, like his cellmate Valent Polenta, a poor man who defended himself by winging a forester while poaching. Polenta is kind to him and in return is grateful to learn that an individual may be a human being despite being a man of learning.

By the end we know that the hero – expelled from Italy after smacking another malevolent bore, in the Sistine Chapel – will face many more court cases but it’s clear too that he’s never been short of money. Maybe that helps explain the touches of nineteenth-century melodrama, like the reminiscence of his lost wartime romance.

Loved up or not, Krleža’s own military CV in the Austro-Hungarian Empire reads more as bloody farce than romance. Having attended two officer cadet schools in Hungary, he kindly offered his services to the Kingdom of Serbia (twice) but was rejected by the Serbs as a possible spy. On his return to Croatia, his original army took him back but demoted him to a grunt for going missing, twice. When the Great War kicked off, they packed him off, like Švejk, to Galicia on the Eastern Front. Poor health limited his time in the trenches and he spent most of the war in hospitals and spas.

In the late Thirties he was expelled from the Communist Party for unorthodox views on a range of matters. Krleža himself seems to have rarely backed down from a political or artistic row. During the second war he remained in Zagreb. Though he turned down the jobs and honours offered by the fascist regime, his refusal to join the Partisans still left him in grave danger in 1945. Only his pre-war friendship with Tito saved him but he was fully rehabilitated once Yugoslavia left the Soviet embrace. The building where he lived is home to a well-known Zagreb pub called MK Krolo, in his honour.

PS

Hitting the Right Pitch

Zero Added

2021

22 June, Tuesday

It’s late and there’s been a light rain for hours and I suspect after seventy pages of Less Than Zero that I won’t have anything to add to what I wrote on the second reading twenty years ago.

2001

19 August, Sunday

Finished Less Than Zero (again) tonight, fifteen years on (almost exactly). Some of the products have vanished (e.g. Betamax, Tab), some are absent because their time had yet to come (e.g. CDs, mobile phones). I remembered the name of the girl (Blair), the suntan lotion, the snuff film, the twelve-year-old girl tied to the bed, the turning on of MTV (with the sound turned down), the elusive ‘friend’ and the dead body in the alley with a cigarette left in its mouth. Certain phrases and lines came back to me too as I read and it was funnier* than I remembered, deadpan funny, but I don’t think there really was anywhere to go (for Ellis) after that. I’d forgotten that he goes back to his old elementary school near the end. It [i.e. the cumulative effect] remains numbing; an extreme on a spectrum against which one can measure other ways of life.** Serial killing isn’t a way of life, no matter if the protagonist is a yuppie.

*Two examples are the photographer and the psychiatrist.

** One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and everything in between. I wouldn’t include Auschwitz, where, as Primo Levi observed, “mental illnesses were healed” (The Drowned and the Saved, p. 65).